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Chapter One
A weeping angel shattered in a crack of gray dust, sending its
wings flying off in two directions. It took a second for the lack
of death to register, then I dove for the side of a nearby
obelisk. I pressed flat against the ground, feeling the mud
seeping into my already drenched clothes, while a barrage of shots struck sparks off the
granite overhead. I was starting to suspect that this tomb raider
thing might not be as much fun as I’d hoped.
Of course, that was pretty much
the story of my life lately. A chain of events that might very
charitably be classified as disasters, had left me with the position
of Pythia, the supernatural community’s chief seer. The
Silver Circle, a group of light magic users, had expected one of their
tame acolytes to inherit the office since it had happened that way for
a few thousand years now. They’d been less than thrilled
when the power went to me instead: Cassie Palmer, untrained
clairvoyant, protégée of a vampire crime boss and known
cohort of a renegade war mage.
Some people have no sense of irony.
The mages had expressed their
displeasure by trying to send me off to explore the great mystery of
what lies in store for us after death. Since I wasn’t that
curious, I’d been attempting to stay under their radar. It
didn’t look like I was doing so hot.
I decided to try for better
cover beside a crypt, and was halfway there when something that
felt like a sledgehammer knocked me to the ground. A bolt of
lightning exploded against a nearby tree, causing the air to tingle and
writhe with electricity and sending blue-white, hissing snakes
scurrying over a tangle of exposed roots. It left the tree split
in half, blackened along the center like old firewood, the air flooded
with ozone and my skull hammering from the near miss.
Above me, thunder rolled ominously across the sky, an appropriate
bit of sound effects that I would have appreciated a lot more during a
movie.
Speaking of irony, it would be
really amusing if Mother Nature managed to kill me before the Circle
got the chance. I crawled in the general direction of the crypt,
temporarily night-blind and helpless, blinking away afterimages.
At least I discovered why gun grips are ribbed: so when your palm is
sweating with abject terror, you can still manage to clutch the
thing.
My new 9 mm
didn’t fit my hand as well as my old one, but it was rapidly
becoming a familiar weight. At first I’d decided it was
okay to wear as long as I shot only at supernatural bad guys who were
already shooting at me. Lately, I’d had to broaden that
definition to anytime my life was in danger. I was currently
leaning toward a slightly more comprehensive rule somewhere between
proactive self-defense and the-bastards-had-it-coming, which, if I
survived long enough, I intended to blame on my deranged partner
rubbing off on me.
I found the crypt by running into
it face-first, scraping a cheek on the pitted limestone exterior.
I strained my ears, but there was no sign of my attackers. A hail
of shots rattled against a nearby path, ricocheting off the
cobblestones to fly away in all directions. Okay, no sign other
than the fact that someone kept shooting at me.
I hugged the wall and told myself
not to overreact and waste bullets. I’d already lobotomized a
cupid after a gust of wind blew a few leaves across it, giving it a
fleeting sense of movement--and that had been with the glow of an
almost
full moon to see by. It was worse now that the wind had blown
dark clouds in, and the spatter of rain made it impossible to hear
quiet
footsteps.
The firing finally stopped, but
my whole body continued to shake, to the point that I dropped the
reserve clip I’d fumbled out of my pocket. The old one
still had several rounds left, but I didn’t want to run out at a
crucial moment. Another shot hit the cupid I’d decapitated,
shaving off one of its little butt cheeks. I flinched and my foot
kicked something that splashed into a nearby puddle. I got to my
knees, searching around in the grass for it and trying to curse
quietly.
“A little to the
left.” I whirled, gun up, heart pounding. But the
dark-haired man leaning against a moss-stained fountain didn’t
look concerned. Maybe because he no longer had a body to worry
about.
I relaxed slightly. Ghosts
I could deal with; I’d even been expecting them. Pere Lachaise
isn’t Paris’ oldest cemetery, but it’s huge.
I’d had to reinforce my shields to be able to see anything past
the green glow of thousands of ghost trails, crisscrossing the
landscape like a crazy spiderweb. It was the main reason
I’d left my own ghostly helper behind. Billy Joe could be a
pain, but I really didn’t want him serving as a midnight snack for
a bunch of hungry ghosts.
“Thanks.”
“You’re American.”
“Uh, yeah.” A bullet
pinged against an iron railing nearby and I flinched.
“How’d you know?”
“My dear.” He
looked pointedly at my mud-spattered jeans, once-white tennis shoes and
soaked gray T-shirt. The last had been an impulse buy a few
days ago, something to wear to target practice to remind my exacting
coach that I was still a beginner at this. Its quip, "I
don't have a license to kill: I have a learner's permit," was
starting to look really ironic now.
Lara Croft would have worn
something a lot less mud-covered, and she would have had her hair in a sexy style that
still kept it out of her face. My own curly mop was at the stage
where it was too long to stay out of the way and too short to keep in a
ponytail. As a result, I had wet blond strands falling into my
eyes and clinging to my cheeks, adding to the overall lack of
cool.
“When good Americans die,
they go to Paris,” the ghost said, after taking a drag on a small
cigarette. “But you’re not dead. I suppose the
question must be, are you good?”
My hand finally closed over the
clip, and I slammed it into place. I surreptitiously looked him
over, wondering what answer was likely to get me some help. I
took in the long velvet jacket, the silk cravat and the lazy smile.
“Depends who you ask.”
“Prevarication, how divine! I always did get along better with sinners.”
“Then maybe you can tell me how many people are out there?”
Another ghost drifted up, wearing
only a pair of low-rise blue jeans. He looked vaguely familiar,
with shoulder-length brown hair, classic features and a slightly
petulant pout. “About a dozen. They just shot up my
ugly-ass memorial.”
The older ghost sniffed.
“Your legions of fans will doubtless have you another inside a
week--”
“Can I help it if I’m popular?”
“--and will then proceed to
vandalize it and everything in the vicinity.”
“Hey, be cool.”
The older ghost bristled.
“Don’t talk to me about cool, you preposterous
pretender! I was cool! I was the epitome of cool! For
all intents and purposes, I invented cool!”
“Can you two keep it
down?” I asked a little shrilly. Sweat trickled down one
side of my temple and into my eye, burning. I blinked it away and
watched a few shadows slink closer. They existed only at the
edge
of my vision, and seemed to disappear whenever I looked directly at
them. Then a spell exploded overhead, lighting up the area like a
flare and giving me a clear view. Unfortunately, it did the
same for my attackers. The Gothic arch above my head
immediately rang
with shots, causing bits of stonework to crumble on top of me as I
ducked inside.
“This is ridiculous!
You people are worse than the madmen Kardec
attracts.” The ghosts had followed me in. Of
course. “Mystic, ha! The man never even rose yet
there’s always someone praying or chanting or draping him with
flowers--”
“He believed in
reincarnation, man. Maybe he came back.”
I fought my way out of a large
cobweb, and managed not to slip on the stone tiles, which were slick
with rain and decaying leaves. “Shut up!” I
whispered viciously.
The older ghost sniffed.
“At least the mystics aren’t rude.”
I squinted down at
the vague squiggles that were supposed to be a map and tried to
ignore him. It might have been easier if I wasn't soaking
wet and filthy with a pounding headache. I
really, really wanted to get out of here. But, thanks to a
certain devious master vampire, that wasn't an option.
I
was prowling around a cemetery in the middle of the night, dodging
guard dogs, lightning bolts and crazed war mages, because of
a spell known as a geis.
The vamp in question, Mircea, had had it placed on me years
ago, without bothering to get my permission or even remembering
to mention that he'd done it. Master vamps are like that, but
in this case, there might have been more than the usual arrogance
behind his forgetfulness.
On the one hand, the spell provided me protection growing up--it
marked me as his, meaning that no sane vampire would touch me with a
ten-foot pole. On the other, it was designed to ensure loyalty to
a single person: exclusive, complete and utter loyalty. Now that we were both adults, the spell wanted to bind Mircea and
me together forever, and it didn’t appreciate my
noncooperation. That was a problem, since people have been known to go mad
from this thing, even committing suicide rather than live with the
constant, gnawing ache that was just one of the spell’s tricks
when thwarted. But sitting back and enjoying the ride
wasn’t an option, either.
If the bond ever fully formed,
our lives would be run by the dominant partner--which I had no doubt
would be Mircea--leaving me stuck as his eager little slave. And
since he was a member in good standing of the Vampire Senate, the
governing body of all North American vampires, I would doubtless end
up running their errands, too. The thought of what some of those
requests might be was enough to put me in a cold sweat. It was what the Circle feared--the Pythia under the control of the vamps. And while I wasn’t
in favor of their method of preventing it, I could grudgingly concede
the point: it would be a disaster.
Becoming pythia had made me a
target for anybody in the supernatural community who was attracted to
power--in other words, pretty much everyone--but it had bought me some
time as far as the spell was concerned. How much, I didn’t
know. Meaning that I really needed that
counterspell. And rumor was, the only grimoire that contained a
copy was buried somewhere around here.
Of course, it would help if I
could read the damn map. I squinted at it, but the only
illumination was moonlight filtered through the remains of once
beautiful stained-glass windows. Half of a seated Madonna looked
out onto a charcoal gray sky, with the occasional flash of lightning
outlining layered clouds. I had a flashlight, but turning it on
would only make me that much better of a--
Something lunged at me out of the
night. “Don’t shoot!” a man whispered.
He smelled of sweat, metal and
dirt, plus a static crackle of nervous energy that was practically his
signature. I turned on the flashlight and saw what I’d
expected: a shock of pale hair, which as usual was making taunting
gestures in the face of gravity, a square jaw, a slightly overlarge nose and furious
green eyes. The Circle’s most famous renegade and my
reluctant partner, John Pritkin.
I breathed a sigh of relief and
clicked my gun’s safety on. To know Pritkin was to
want to kill him, but so far I’d resisted temptation.
“You shouldn’t sneak up on me like that!” I
whispered.
“Why didn’t you shoot me?” he demanded.
“You told me not to.”
“I--that’s--”
Pritkin seemed momentarily incoherent, so I shoved the gun's
barrel lightly against his stomach. At least I’d
thought it was
his stomach. I’d only intended to show that I wasn’t
defenseless, but in a flash, I was slammed against the side of the
crypt, my gun arm pinned to the wall, my body stuck between the hard
surface and a very angry war mage. I reluctantly admitted that
there may have been a fantasy or two that began with this scenario, but
I doubted the evening was going to end the same way.
“I knew it was you,”
I told him before his ability to vocalize returned. “You
smell like gunpowder and magic.” That was truer than usual
because his coat, a thick leather duster that hid his weapon
collection, had a large spot where the leather was crisped and curled
up. Like maybe a spell hadn’t missed him by much.
"Those are mages out there!” he
whispered savagely. “So do they! And what the hell
are you still doing here?!”
“I have the map,” I reminded him.
“Give it to me and go!”
“And leave you here
alone? There’s a dozen of them!”
“If you don’t leave right now…”
I raised my chin, even though
I’d turned off the flashlight so he probably couldn’t see
it. “What? You’ll shoot me?”
His hand clenched my shoulder,
almost painfully. Don’t tempt the crazy war mage, I
reminded myself, just as a bullet sliced through the open
doorway. It ricocheted several times around the crypt’s
inner walls before crashing through what remained of the Madonna.
“If you’re here much longer, I won’t have to!”
he whispered furiously.
“Let’s just get the
damn thing and we can both leave,” I said reasonably.
“In case it has somehow
slipped your notice, this was a trap!”
“Damn it, you can’t
trust anybody anymore!” The elderly French mage we’d
visited in his sweet little country cottage had seemed so reliable,
with his old world charm and his kind eyes--and his lousy map that had
sent us on the treasure hunt from hell. It wasn’t fair; the
bad guys weren’t supposed to look like someone’s grandfather. “And Manassier seemed so--”
“If the next
word out of your mouth is ‘nice,’ I will make your life
hell when we get back. Pure hell.”
I didn’t bother to dignify
that with a response. Pritkin was just . . . Pritkin. At some
point I’d learned to mostly roll with it. I’d often
wondered if he gave the Circle half as much trouble before he broke
with them over his decision to support me. If so, you'd
think they’d have thanked me for taking him off their
hands. Maybe they planned to send a nice bouquet to the
funeral.
“Look, all we know for sure
is that some mages got here ahead of us. Maybe we all decided to
burgle the place on the same night.” I
didn’t really believe it--they’d attacked us almost as soon
as we'd arrived and we hadn’t even found anything. But I
hated to give up on our best lead yet. And leaving
Pritkin to pursue it alone wasn’t an option. He had all the
self-preservation instincts of a bug near a shiny windshield.
A strong hand clenched my
arm. “Ow,” I pointed out.
“Give me the damn map!”
“Not a chance.”
“Hey!” I looked
up to see the younger ghost staring at us.
“In case you missed it, people are trying to kill
you.”
“People are always trying to kill me,” I said irritably.
“The only way you’re
dying tonight is if I kill you,” Pritkin informed me.
“I’ve been in
relationships like that,” the ghost sympathized.
“We’re not in a relationship,” I muttered.
“Sheer bloody-minded--what?” Pritkin broke off his rant, which I
hadn’t been listening to anyway, to look around wildly.
“What’s happening?”
“You mean you let him talk
to you like that and you aren’t even getting any? Man, what a rip-off.”
“Nothing. Just a
couple of spirits,” I said, shooting ghost #2 a look.
“Hey, standing right here.”
“And,” his
counterpart chimed in, “I resent that ‘just’
comment. We’re the two most active spirits in this
entire--”
“Active?” A
hand moved down my arm, the touch both gentle and rough, calloused from
holding guns and doing pushups and snapping peoples’ necks.
“Don’t even think about it,” I told Pritkin, then turned my attention back to the ghost.
“How active?”
The older ghost preened
slightly. “We see everything that goes on around
here. The things I could tell--”
“So, if there
were hidden passageways, you’d know?” I asked, as
Pritkin found my
wrist. A moment later, the map was snatched out of my hand.
“Still not leaving,” I told
him.
“Oh. You're after
the thing, aren't you?" the younger ghost asked.
I decided not to wrestle Pritkin
for the map, which wouldn’t be dignified. It also
wouldn’t work. “What thing?”
“The thing with the
thing.” He waved a negligent hand. I
was starting to suspect that if you died stoned, your ghost stayed
that way.
“Could you be a little more
specific?” Before he could answer, there was a strange
sound from outside, a dim, high-pitched whine. I felt a hand
on my back, viciously shoving me to the ground. Then Pritkin was
on
top of me, crushing me into a fetal position while things
exploded and rained fire all around us.
Red and violet spots danced
behind my tightly clenched lids for several long moments. There
were minute tremors in the ground, like the aftershocks of an
earthquake, and my skin prickled with leftover energy. When I
cautiously opened my eyes, I saw starlight seeping in from a gaping
hole in the roof and clouds of disintegrated stone in the air.
Pritkin was on his feet again,
firing at the mages, who fired back, gunshots echoing off the high,
close-packed monuments like firecrackers. Most of the time I
thought he was a little too quick to opt for the
shoot-it-and-hope-it-dies solution. Other times, like when
someone was trying to make a colander out of my head, it seemed okay.
“Over there,” the
younger ghost offered, pointing to the right.
“Come on.” He slouched off, ignoring a nearby snaky
pathway in favor of a shortcut across the tombstone -littered grounds.
“One of the ghosts knows
where the passage is!” I told Pritkin. He looked surprised
and I scowled. Just because I didn’t know seven ways to
kill a guy with my elbow didn’t make me completely useless.
He looked like he was about to argue about the wisdom of trusting random spirits, or
possibly my sanity. But the mages accidentally did me a favor by
sending a spell that exploded with a massive crack against a nearby chestnut tree. The burning trunk fell
over, taking half the crypt with it. Luckily, it wasn’t our
half.
“Come on,
then!” Pritkin yelled, grabbing me by the hand and starting
off, as if this had been his idea all along.
“This way!” I
dragged him after the ghost as a fresh haze of bullets rattled
off the rubble behind us.
I found it hard going: the soggy
soil sucked at my shoes with every step and the rain made it almost
impossible to keep the flickering, pale image of our guide in
sight. But Pritkin, damn him, slipped through the granite
obstacle course like he’d laid it out himself. “How
are you doing that?” I demanded the fourth time I knocked
a knee into a very hard tombstone.
“Doing what?”
“You can see!” I accused.
“Here.” I felt
a hand against my cheek for a split second, and Pritkin mumbled
something. I blinked, and suddenly everything had a weird, flat,
grainy look to it, like bad TV reception. Leaf shadows moved over
his face as a gust of wind shook a tree, spattering drops of
rain on us, and I could just make out the edges of that familiar
scowl.
“Why didn’t you do that before?” I demanded.
“I thought you were leaving before!”
“Do you two want this or
not?” the ghost asked, hands on insubstantial hips. He’d stopped in front of the
image of a bored-looking woman leaning on a tombstone. Enough moss
had grown over her granite gown that it was practically green.
Green and slimy, I discovered, after the ghost directed me to tap her
knee three times. Nothing happened.
“Now what?”
“You have to say the magic word.”
“Please!”
He laughed. “No, I
mean a real magic word. To get the statue to move out of the
way.”
A spell exploded in the branches
of an overhanging oak and a bunch of burning leaves dropped around me,
threatening to set my hair alight. “What is
it?!”
“Don’t know.”
The ghost shrugged negligently. “It’s not like I need
it.”
“What’s the
problem?” Pritkin demanded, sending his whole arsenal of
animated weapons at the advancing line of dark shapes. His knives
swooped and danced, striking sparks off their shields with every pass,
but it didn’t look like they were slowing our pursuers down
much.
“The ghost doesn’t know the password!”
Pritkin shot me his best
edge-of-murder glare and muttered one of his weird British swear
words. I don’t think it was the open sesame, but the
spell he cast with his next breath worked almost as well. The
statue split straight down the middle to reveal a gaping cavern.
Inside was as dark as a well,
just a black hole silhouetted against the electric sky. I pulled
out my flashlight and clicked it on, but it barely dented the
darkness. Even worse, there were no stairs, only an iron-rung
ladder descending into a claustrophobic tunnel carved into solid
rock.
"I've
seen many treasure hunters go in," the older ghost commented, having
floated up beside me, "but few come out again. And those who
do are empty handed."
"That won't happen to us."
"That's what they all say," he murmured, just as a spell burst overhead. I
shoved the gun and flashlight in my belt, grabbed the first rusty rung and
half climbed, half slid to the bottom. Pritkin followed
practically on top of me, and as soon as we were both down, he
sent a spell back up the tunnel that caused a cave-in.
It
blocked our pursuers, but it also cut off what little light there
was. Once the rumble from the falling rock stopped, we were in
dead silence and utter darkness. Apparently, even enhanced vision
needs something to work with, because I couldn’t see a thing.
I clicked the flashlight back
on. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, and when they did, I
yelped and stumbled back a step. The thin beam didn’t show
much--it was like the dark down here was hungry, eating the light almost
as soon as it left the bulb. But I wouldn’t have minded
seeing even less. Along every side of a long corridor were bones
arranged in patterns all the way to the low ceiling. Water had
seeped in from somewhere, and a lot of the skulls were crying green
tears and growing fuzzy green beards. It didn’t make them
look less creepy.
“The catacombs,” Pritkin said, before I could ask.
“The what?”
“The Parisians started
using old limestone quarries as underground cemeteries a few hundred
years ago.” He took the flashlight and pointed it at the
map, frowning. “I didn’t think they extended
out this far.”
“How far?”
“If these tunnels connect
to those in the city, then hundreds of kilometers.” He
started shining the light here and there. I wished he’d
stop; it lit puddles of water in the empty eye sockets, making the faces seem to move.
“There have been stories of catacombs under Pere Lachaise for
years, but I thought they were merely rumors.”
I stared at a nearby skull.
It was bodiless, sitting atop a stack of what looked like femurs,
and was missing the jawbone. But somehow it still seemed to be
grinning. “They look pretty real to me.”
The flashlight picked out a glint
of gold, half buried in the mortar keeping a line of bones in
place. I scraped at the cement with my finger, and
it was so old that pieces of it just flaked off. The golden
circle I revealed wouldn't budge, but I did get a better look at it. It appeared to be formed out of a
snake that was chowing down on its own tail. “The ouroboros,”
Pritkin
said, coming up behind me.
“The what?”
“An ancient symbol for regeneration and eternity.”
“Like a cross?”
“Older.” He
shone the light around some more. “The Paris coven must
have created their own catacombs, possibly during the
Inquisition. Witches and wizards were sometimes disinterred
and their bodies mutilated or burnt. This would have
been one way of preventing that.”
“You mean, this is a mages' graveyard?”
“Possibly. The
limestone pits were dug by the Romans. They were there for centuries
before the Parisian authorities decided to make use of them.
Perhaps the magical community had the idea first.” From up
the ladder came a sudden rain of stone and rubble. It sounded
like our pursuers weren’t giving up. “Can
you shift us here?” he asked, pointing to a vague
squiggle on the map.
My new job had more downsides
than I could count, but there were a few perks, too. Well, one,
anyway. The power that came with the office of Pythia allowed me to move
myself and one or two others around in space and time. It was a
damn useful weapon, and so far my only one. But it had its
limitations. “I can’t shift unless I know where
I’m going.”
“You’ve time-shifted
before to places you’ve never been!”
“That’s different.”
There was a sudden avalanche, and
a spell crashed into the floor behind us, igniting a storm of violent
white light. It hit the skulls, causing them to crack and
splinter, then bounced off the opposite wall, slinging stone fragments
everywhere like flying daggers. Pritkin shielded me from the
worst of the blast, then grabbed my hand and towed me down the
corridor.
Since I didn’t go bouncing
off any walls, I assumed he could still see something, but to me it was
a headlong plunge into nothingness. He’d clicked off the
flashlight, I suppose to make it harder for our pursuers to track us,
but without it the tunnels were so dark I couldn't tell whether my eyes
were open or closed. “How different?” he demanded.
“The power lets me see
other times, past places. Not the present,” I explained,
flinching. Afterimages from the blast were making reddish
shapes leap in front of my vision, and I kept thinking I was
about to plow into something. “If I want to do spatial
shifts in the here and now, I have to be able to visualize where I want
to go.” And a shaky line on a bad map wasn’t even
close to good enough.
The corridor abruptly narrowed, to
the point that it was impossible to continue side by side.
Pritkin went first, pulling me along at something approaching a
run. It was hot, the air was close, and the ground underneath our
feet wasn’t anything like level. It was soon obvious why
someone would put a treasury here; without clear directions, you could
wander around for months and never find anything.
Pritkin stopped, so suddenly that
I ran into him. He spread the map out on the wall and handed me
the flashlight. I clicked it on and saw a much-less-organized
scene than before: bones had tumbled out of the walls and littered the
floor, and in some cases they were mounded up in piles with no effort
at arrangement at all. Unlike the ones in the main corridor,
these looked like they’d just been thrown around any old
way. I’m not usually sentimental about the dead--I meet too
many of them--but it still seemed wrong. Friends and enemies,
parents and children, all jumbled up, with nothing to give a history, a
date of death, even a name.
“It would help if you shone
the torch on the map,” Pritkin commented caustically.
I obliged, and the beam
lit up his face, too. Its expression wasn’t
reassuring. “Are your ghosts here?” he
demanded.
“No. They
wouldn’t follow us beyond the cemetery limits.” And
it felt like we’d left those behind a while ago.
“What about others?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because this map is less
than adequate! Some directions would be helpful.”
I shook my head.
“These bodies were disturbed. I think they were brought here from
their original resting places.”
“Meaning?”
“That their ghosts would have
stayed behind.” Not to mention that if it was mages buried
here, they wouldn’t have left ghosts anyway. Supernatural creatures
just didn’t, as far as I knew.
“But their bones are here.”
“Doesn’t
matter. Spirits can haunt a house, even when their bodies
aren’t there. It’s all about what was important to
them in life, the place where they felt a connection.” I
looked around and repressed a shiver. “I don’t think
I’d feel real connected to this place, either.”
Pritkin finally settled on a
direction and we took off again, sliding through gaps in the rock that,
at times, were barely big enough for me. I don’t know how
he got through, but based on the amount of muttered comments that
drifted back, it wasn’t without the loss of some
flesh. Finally we came to a slightly wider corridor,
meaning that we still had to go single file but could pick up
speed. For a minute, I thought we’d succeeded in losing our
pursuers, but as usual, Murphy’s Law caught up with us.
We came barreling around a corner
only to run almost directly into a party of dark shapes. There
were yells and bullets and spells, with one of the last exploding
against Pritkin’s shields, popping them like heat on a soap
bubble. “Run!” he snarled in my face. I heard rumbling, like distant thunder,
and then the ceiling came down with a roar that consumed the world.
Chapter Two
It
took me a few seconds to realize that I still wasn’t dead.
I was in a crouch, my hands protecting my head, expecting an attack, but
the corridor was as silent as the tomb it was. The only people
besides us were cemented into the walls or buried under the pile of rubble
that their own spell had brought down on their heads. I collapsed back
against the floor, breathing raggedly, and tried not to scream.
After a minute, I felt around for
the flashlight and my hand closed over a cool plastic cylinder. I
clicked it on, relieved to find that it still worked, and saw Pritkin
lying on his side. He wasn’t moving, and he had blood smeared
through the stubble on his chin, bright and frightening. Murphy and his
little law can go to hell, I thought furiously, shaking him
frantically.
“Would you kindly stop doing that?” he asked politely.
I stared. I wasn’t
entirely sure, but a polite John Pritkin might be a sign of the
apocalypse. “Did you hit your head?” I tried to
move closer to get a better look, and my knee accidentally knocked a shower of
stone pebbles onto the oozing gash on his forehead.
“If I tell you I’m
all right, will you stop trying to help me?” Every muscle
in my body relaxed at the familiar tone, all ruffled
feathers and crisp impatience. That was better; that was solid ground.
“So, still alive?” I croaked.
“Damn right.”
He just lay there, though, so I
shone the beam around, giving him a minute. It took a few seconds
to realize exactly what I was seeing. Pritkin had apparently
gotten his shields back up, because they glowed blue and waterlike,
rippling slowly in the yellow beam. But the cave ceiling wasn't
above them anymore. Or, to be more accurate, it was there, it was just
no longer
attached to anything.
Huge, half-quarried blocks, some
still bearing ancient chisel marks, lay on top of the suddenly very
thin-looking shields. Every time they flexed, small showers of
rubble and grit slid along the top and trickled down the sides, making
soft shushing sounds in the quiet. The larger pieces had nowhere
to go, but they moved enough to make it obvious that they weren't
anchored to anything. Even the smaller, cobblestone-sized chunks
would
hurt like hell if they fell on us, and I didn’t have to wonder
what the larger ones would do. Two mages were giving gory proof
of that barely a yard away.
I could have reached out and
touched them, where they lay caught between the shield and the
cave-in. Their bodies were oddly contorted, trapped in the stone
and rubble like ancient fossils, their open eyes shining in the
reflected light. Except that fossils don’t usually come complete
with evidence of how they got that way, at least not in Technicolor
brilliance.
The red-streaked white of newly
shattered bone stood out starkly against the mellow gold of the older
specimens. One hand rested against the blue of the shield, caught
in a gesture of defense, as if human strength could stand against the
weight of a mountain. It made me wonder for an insane moment if
it would leave a red outline, if the next time Pritkin raised his
shields, it would manifest, too.
The air suddenly felt a lot
heavier in my lungs. Despite the large number of impossible
things that had happened to me lately, my brain couldn’t
quite seem to deal. It was loudly insisting that huge slabs of
rock that weighed maybe a ton each didn’t just hover in the air
and that we were both going to die any second now.
I made a small, choked sound, but
managed to swallow the bubble of hysteria before it could tear
loose. If Pritkin had been a second later getting his protection
back up, there would be four new bodies entombed down here instead of
two. But there weren’t. We were safe. Sort
of.
Pritkin had rolled onto his back
and was staring at me, hard and intent. “This is exactly
why I told you to go home.”
“I have a devastating
comeback for that,” I informed him with dignity.
“Just not right now.”
“Do you want to give
up?” I blinked. I could count on zero fingers the
number of times he had asked my opinion. “Because there are
almost certainly more of them back there.”
I remembered the ghost saying
that there were twelve mages all together. Which meant that behind the rockfall, ten more were still hanging around,
unless they were caught somewhere I couldn’t see. Or unless
they’d left, assuming that the cave-in had killed us. But
no, I wasn’t that lucky.
“You know what’s at
stake,” I reminded him.
“I thought you’d say
that.” Pritkin levered himself to his knees with a
grunt. The rubble shifted along with him, enough to bring another
large slab crashing down. The jagged underside landed only a few
feet away from my face.
Pritkin’s voice, laced with
its usual impatience, cut through my panic. “Let’s
go.”
“Go?” It came
out as more of a squeak than I’d intended.
“How? Because I can shift us back home, but I can’t
shift us beyond this. I don’t know what’s on the
other side or even where the other side is--”
“Just stay
close.” Before he’d even finished speaking, his
shields had changed from fluid waves to hard crystal, reflecting the
cave-in through a hundred sharp facets. A few more rocks fell
off, allowing more to rain down from above, striking off
the new, rigid surface with dull thuds. Pritkin started crawling forward, and his shields
went with him, almost scooping me off my feet before I got with the
program and moved up close behind him.
It wasn’t until I saw the
body of one of the mages slide down the side and roll behind us that I
completely realized what was happening. Our small bubble was plowing
through the rocks and dirt like a crystal mole intent on making a new
burrow. We hit a wall once, looking for an entrance that
wasn’t there, but we found it a few feet to the left and burst
through, the cave collapsing in on itself behind us.
Pritkin dropped his shields with
an audible sigh, and the dust we’d dislodged in our escape
flooded in, almost blinding me. We forged ahead to get away from
the choking cloud, which had no way to disperse in an area without wind
or open air. But before we’d gone ten yards, we ran into
what felt like another cave-in.
Once I blinked the dirt out of my
eyes, I realized what I was seeing. A narrow tunnel stretched out in
front of us, filled halfway to the ceiling with what looked like a mile
of bones. Pritkin climbed on top of the broken, human mass,
flashing the light around. “There’s a hole in the
wall up ahead. It probably leads to another tunnel.”
I eyed the pile of bones
uneasily. Anything kept in close proximity to a person’s
aura eventually imprints with a psychic skin. I’d
experienced more horror stories from inadvertently brushing up against
a strong trigger than I could count. And I couldn’t think
of a stronger trigger than an actual body part.
“Hurry, damn it!” Pritkin thrust a hand down to me as the
sound of voices echoed dimly from the corridor behind us.
Somebody had heard our exit.
I hefted myself up gingerly,
before I could think about it too much. The bones were old and
dry, and crunched sickeningly under my weight. Many splintered, sending little knives into my palms and tearing
my jeans, but there were no psychic flashes. Moving them must
have ruptured any imprints that had formed.
When Pritkin said a hole in the
wall, he wasn’t kidding. I could barely squeeze through the
thing, and it sounded from his language like he’d scraped off
more than a little skin himself. “Move!” he
whispered, giving me a push in the small of my back. I scrambled
inside the small rock-hewn cavern on the other side of the hole, and
almost tumbled down a set of stairs that started after only a few
feet.
The claustrophobically low
stairwell was extremely uninviting; mostly I just saw the
darkness that pooled in every niche and corner. I really
didn’t want to go down there. Then a spell hit the ceiling
behind me with a crack like cannon fire and I reconsidered, scrambling down the stairs ahead of Pritkin.
A second spell hit while we were
still on the steps. It went on and on, like a slow-motion bomb
blast, causing gravel to pepper the back of my hands and neck like
hail. It sent me sliding down the stairs, but the vibrations rode up
through my legs, making it almost impossible to find a foothold.
And then it didn’t matter because there was no foothold to
find. The rock disintegrated beneath my feet, and I tumbled
through darkness and empty air before slamming into freezing
water.
It took me a moment to realize I
wasn’t drowning. The water came only up to my waist, but it
was like ice and the cold shot right up my spine. Worse was the
by-now-familiar billowing cloud of dust, trapping me in a choking
haze. Instinctively, I sloshed farther away from the rockfall,
trying to breathe, and found myself treading water. I
grabbed a moss-covered skull that jutted out from the wall, my fingers finding purchase in the eye sockets. I held on,
too grateful to be repulsed, gasping in great lungfuls of air.
“Pritkin!” It
was barely a croak, but a moment later the flashlight beam hit my
eyes, blinding me.
“Still alive?”
I tried to answer, but my lungs
decided this would be a good moment to expel all the foreign matter
I’d breathed in, and I ended up heaving and choking. I lost
my grip on the slimy bone and slid under the frigid water. For a
long, terrifying moment, I was lost in an endless sea of
black that immediately chilled me to the core. Then two
broad hands were fumbling for a grip on my shoulders, pulling me
back to the
surface, reminding me where up and down were.
“Miss Palmer!”
I spat out a mouthful of
limestone paste, the result of oily water mixed with dust, and gasped
in some air. “Damn right.”
Pritkin nodded and flashed the light around,
giving glimpses of a corridor where the floor rippled oddly and
everything was suddenly shades of gray and pale, unearthly green.
It looked like the entire lower levels had flooded. I can swim,
but I wasn’t in love with the idea of navigating a dark
underground stream with barely enough headroom to breathe.
“I’ll deal with
this,” Pritkin said grimly. “Shift out of
here.”
“And if they keep coming?”
“I’ll manage.”
And he called me
bloody-minded. I took another breath to inform my lungs that asphyxiation would have to wait, and pushed back off into the
flood. “Just swim.”
Pritkin didn’t answer,
unless you count a curse, although that could have been due to the
spell that hit the water behind us, instantly raising the temperature from
chilled to boiling. I screamed, and coherent thought fled.
I didn’t think, just grabbed his hand and shifted.
A second later, we landed in the
same corridor, but with no dust cloud, no mages and no
flood. I’d been treading water in the other time, so I was
only a few feet off the ground. Pritkin, unfortunately, had been
floating, and he fell from a little farther. Like about six
feet.
He hit the rocky floor with a
thud, a curse and a crack, the last from the demise of the
flashlight. I tried to ask how he was, but a stitch was biting
deep into my side and, for a long moment it was impossible to draw
oxygen into my lungs. I slid down the wall to a seated position because
my knees suddenly felt too rubbery to be reliable.
“What
happened?” Pritkin gasped after a moment. With no
flashlight and no deadly spells zipping around, it was pitch-dark, but
from the direction of his voice, it sounded like he was still on the
floor.
“I shifted us back in time,” I managed to croak.
I decided that it probably
wasn’t good that I was still feeling shaky and nauseated despite
being this close to the floor and completely motionless. I
couldn't figure out what was wrong. I'd shifted only twice
today,
once to get us to Paris from Manassier's cottage and once just now, yet
I was exhausted. It
looked like bringing another person along for the ride took a lot out of
me. Too bad no one had bothered to give me the
manual.
“A little warning next time!”
“You’re welcome.”
“When are we?”
I spit out more chalky-tasting
dust. Now I knew why Lara Croft always carried a canteen.
My body was dripping, but my throat was parched. I
swallowed dry, while running through the mental Rolodex my power gives
me. “Seventeen ninety-three.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I didn’t
feel like being boiled alive?”
“You could have shifted us
back a day, a week! This is no bloody use at all!”
Of course, I thought sourly,
Lara Croft would also have some nice convenient techie thing to get
her out of this. And a partner who wasn’t a complete
ass. I cautiously stood up and found to my surprise that I was
only faintly dizzy. I strained my ears, but all I heard was my own harsh breathing and a faint drip, drip of water
from somewhere.
“Let’s go,” I
said, fumbling around until I found Pritkin’s hand. His
skin was cold from the water, and his pulse was fast but not
bad. Not, for example, like mine, which felt like it could burst
a vein. I needed to make sure I didn’t have to shift
again anytime soon. Like for the rest of the week.
Pritkin stayed where he
was. “Go? Where?”
“To find the
Codex! I thought it might be nice to look for it without
somebody shooting at us for a change.”
“An excellent
sentiment. Except for the small matter of the Paris coven being
one of the oldest in Europe. They may have abandoned this
facility in our time, but in this era there are doubtless mages all
over the place. Not to mention snares and traps. If we
haven’t already tripped a protection ward, we soon will!”
“Do you have another suggestion?”
“Yes. Shift us
out!” Even in complete darkness I was positive I could see
his glare.
I sucked in a breath, more
annoyed than I could remember--well, more annoyed than before John
Pritkin, anyway. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“You have shifted multiple times in a day before--”
“And it wiped me out before.”
“You never mentioned that.”
“You never asked.”
There was a brief pause.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah, peachy.”
I really hated his suggestion, but I couldn’t think of a better
one. “Let’s at least clear the corridor first,”
I compromised. “Then I’ll try to set us back a little
early, before the fireworks start.”
It took forever to get down that
corridor, not because of the darkness, but because Pritkin was certain someone or something was about to
jump us. But the only problems were the usual--heat, bad air and
the fun of trying not to fall on the uneven floor or scrape off a
little more skin on the wall. We finally came to a branch in the
path and Pritkin stopped. “Are you certain you’re up
to this?”
“What’s your plan if I say no?”
“Wait here until you say yes.”
“Then I guess I’m up
to it.” I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but I was
getting really tired of those tunnels. I gripped his hand
tighter, focused on our era and shifted.
This time the world melted
around us slowly, like paint dissolving in water, bleeding away in slow
drips. I normally don’t feel the passing of years, just a
weightless free fall that ends with me whenever I planned to be. I
felt it this time. Reality rippled around us in a nauseating,
frictionless, gravity-free waver. I was suddenly grateful I
couldn’t see, because what I could feel was terrifying: for a
long moment, I was a tearing stream of dislocated atoms, consciousness
ripped apart, with a body that was so elongated it neither began nor
ended.
Then I snapped back into myself,
only to have the whole process start again. There were snatches
of conversation, a few notes of music and what sounded like another
explosion or cave-in, all in quick succession, like someone flipping a
radio too fast. And I finally realized what was happening. This
trip wasn’t one long jump, but a series of smaller hops, with us
flashing in and out of other times as we slowly made our way back to
our own.
I could feel time, and it was
heavy, like swimming through molasses. Pushing through the
centuries was like running a marathon. In the dark. With
weights tied to my legs.
When we finally broke through, it
felt like oxygen when drowning--shocking, unexpected, miraculous.
I’d half expected to materialize underwater, but apparently
we’d passed the flooded area, because I stumbled into a mostly
dry wall. I sat down abruptly, tilting my head back, swallowing a
relief so sharp it made me light-headed.
Pritkin crawled over to lean
against the wall next to me. “Are you all
right?”
“Stop asking me
that,” I said, then had to go very still to deal with the
nausea. It
felt like my stomach had
been a couple seconds behind the rest of me, and when it caught up it
wasn’t happy to be there.
“I take it that’s a yes.”
I swallowed, still tasting dust,
and told myself that throwing up would be very unprofessional.
“Yeah. It’s just . . . the learning curve can be a
little rough.”
After a few minutes of sitting
quietly with my eyes closed, I managed to relax and start breathing
evenly. “You don’t have to do this,” Pritkin
said. “I could--”
“I couldn’t shift out
of here right now if my life depended on it,” I said
truthfully.
“Your power shouldn’t fluctuate this greatly,” he told me, and I could hear the
puzzled frown in his voice.
“The power doesn’t
fluctuate. My ability to
channel it does. The more tired I am, the harder it gets.”
“But it shouldn’t be this
difficult,” Pritkin repeated stubbornly. “My power
doesn’t--”
“Because it’s
yours!” Damn it, I didn’t have
the breath for one of our long, drawn-out arguments right now.
“This isn’t mine. I wasn’t born with it.
It’s on loan, remember?”
The power hadn’t originated
with the Pythias, who had once been the priestesses of an ancient being
calling himself Apollo. I’d met him exactly once, when
he’d promised to train me. So far, he’d paid that
promise the same amount of attention he had my objections over
receiving the office in the first place: none. Unfortunately, I didn't have anywhere else to turn.
Unlike most pythias, who had been
trained for a decade or two on the ins and outs of their position, my
intro to the office had lasted about thirty seconds--just long enough
for the last incumbent to shove the power off on me before she died.
And everyone else who might have given me a few pointers was under the control of
the Circle.
We sat there for a while in
silence. I eventually summoned the strength to pull off my shoes
and toss
my waterlogged socks against the far wall, where they landed with
little splats. It didn’t help much because I just had to
put the wet shoes back on.
“Before you completed the
ritual to become Pythia, your power controlled how and when it manifested,”
Pritkin said, as I dragged myself to my feet. I’d almost
fallen asleep for the second time against his shoulder, wet clothes,
hard floor and all. “Is that correct?”
“Yeah. I was only
allowed in the driver’s seat after I bought the car, so to
speak.” Which was better than getting thrown back to
another century every time I turned around, to fix whatever was about
to get messed up--usually without having a clue what it might
be.
“Then you must start
monitoring your endurance. Otherwise, you could become trapped
in another time or overtax your system, possibly resulting in serious
injury.”
“You don’t
say?” I started down the corridor, my feet
feeling like they were encased in cement. “I’d have never
figured that out on my own.”
“I am serious.”
Pritkin grabbed my arm, in his favorite spot, right over the
bicep. I was probably going to have the permanent indentation of
his fingers there someday. “You must begin
experimentation, to discover your limits. How many times can you
shift before you reach exhaustion? Does going farther
back in time cause more of a drain than more recent shifts?
What other powers over time do you possess?”
“If I'm not letting someone piggyback along, three or four, depending on
how tired I am to start with; hell, yes; and I don’t really want
to know,” I answered him, in order. “Now, can we deal
with the current crisis, please, and leave the twenty questions
for later?”
Pritkin shut up, but with a
meaningful silence that said this wasn’t over. I let him
brood while I concentrated on not falling on my face. We felt our way
down another dark, dusty corridor.
We finally found the storeroom by
the simple method of running into it. Or, to be more accurate,
into the rusty ironwork gate that blocked the entrance. I backed up a
few steps while Pritkin scuffled around. I heard a match strike
and suddenly I could see. Watery yellow light filtered outward
from a small lantern set in a niche, allowing him to check the area for
booby traps. He didn’t find any, which seemed to worry him
more than the reverse.
“What’s wrong?
Manassier said this place was abandoned.”
Pritkin ran a hand over his hair,
which despite the water and the sweat and the limestone dust was still
acting like an independent entity. “Can you shift
yet?”
“Maybe.”
“If anything goes wrong,
you are to shift away immediately. Do you understand?”
“Sure.”
Pritkin shot me a suspicious look, and I gave him my best bland expression right back. He'd asked if I
understood, and said yes. I hadn't agreed to anything.
He smeared his finger across
the door mechanism, cutting through an inch of dust and grime.
Something clicked and he pulled back before cautiously nudging the door
with his toe. It swung inward obligingly, but he hesitated on
the threshold. “I don’t like it. This is too easy.”
I personally thought easy was
just fine. In fact, it was about damn time easy showed up.
“Maybe our luck is chang-”
Pritkin stepped into the room and
disappeared with a strangled sort of sound.
“Pritkin!” There was no answer. I knelt by the
threshold, but there was nothing to see: only a small, empty cave, with
no exit, and no mage.
I got a death grip on the iron
bars of the door and reached out. My hand encountered nothing but dusty
limestone for about two feet, then disappeared into the floor. I
snatched my arm back, but there didn’t appear to be any
damage. An illusion, then.
I stretched out on the floor, closed
my eyes and leaned over, to the point that my forehead would have hit
stone if there really had been a floor there. When it
didn’t, I opened my eyes in blackness. After a moment, my
sight adjusted to show me dirty fingers, white with strain, clinging to
a shard of limestone three or four yards down. They were human,
and below them, almost out of sight, was a familiar, spiky
head.
“Grab my hand and
I’ll shift us out,” I called, hoping I could actually do
it. The head snapped up.
“What did I just tell you?!” Pritkin demanded.
"Hi, I'm Cassie Palmer. Have we met?"
Steel entered the suddenly soft
tones. “Miss Palmer. Move away from the edge.
Now.”
“I’m not going to fall in,” I told him irritably.
“Neither did I!
There’s something down here.” I couldn't see
Pritkin’s face very well, just a pale blur against the shadows,
but he didn’t sound happy. Some people thought he had
only one mode--pissed off. In reality, he had plenty of them.
Over the last few weeks, I’d learned to tell the difference
between real pissed off, impatient pissed off and scared pissed
off. I suspected that this was the last kind. If so, that made
two of us.
That feeling amped up a few
notches when he cursed and fired several rounds at something out in the darkness. The faint, acrid
smell of gunpowder floated up to me as I wiggled forward, keeping my
legs spread, hoping that if I distributed my weight over a larger surface I wouldn’t cause a rock slide. I stretched
until I heard something pop in my shoulder, but I wasn’t
even close. And if I couldn’t touch him, I couldn’t
shift him.
I bit my lip and stared up at the
floor that wasn’t there. It was kind of odd seeing it from
this angle, as if the ocean’s surface had been smeared with dirt
and pebbles. It didn’t help my concentration, so I pulled
back up to a sitting position and stared at the top of it instead.
Once upon a time, my reaction to
scary things had been to run and hide. It was an effective strategy
for staying alive in the good old days when all I had to worry about
was a homicidal vampire. The difference between then and now was
that once upon a time I'd had problems I really could outrun. Now I had
duties and responsibilities, the kind of things that are always with
you. There were about a dozen nightmares vying for the top spot
every day, each of them spectacularly horrible in its own way.
And right at the top of the list was the fear that I’d have to stand by
and watch another friend die trying to help me.
I was suddenly really glad I couldn’t see the bottom.
The rock felt crumbly under my
fingers as I slithered over the side. Or maybe that was my hands
shaking. A cascade of small rocks disappeared beyond the illusion
and some of them must have hit Pritkin, because I heard him swear
again.
“What the hell are you-”
“Sheer bloody-mindedness,
remember? And can you see my leg?”
I was holding on to the edge of
the chasm by my arms and elbows, and still felt unbelievably
unsteady. I carefully did not look down, but for a few seconds, I
strained to hear the rocks hit bottom. I never did.
I tried to feel around with my
toe without falling off, but met only air. Damn it, what if I
needed to be touching bare skin? Why hadn’t I thought
remove my shoes first? I tried toeing one off, but the water
had made the sneaker shrink around my foot. “Grab my
ankle.”
A lot of less than genteel
language echoed off the walls. “I can’t grab anything
without letting go!”
“You have two arms!”
“Listen to me.”
Pritkin’s voice was low and controlled, the tone he used when he
was pretending to be reasonable. “I can’t let go of
the gun. There’s something down here. It pulled me
in. It could get bored with me at any moment and come after
you. You have to--” He broke off at the sound of shouts and
explosions and booted feet echoing down the corridor.
“Shift goddamn it!”
“Grab my leg!”
I lowered myself down to the
point that my head was barely over the top of the chasm, but still
touched nothing. The damn rock was falling apart under my fingers
and nervous sweat was making my palms slippery. My arms were
sending sharp little pains up to my shoulders and there was no purchase
on the side of the chasm for my feet. How the hell far down was
he?
And then it didn’t matter,
because a pair of booted feet stopped right in front of my eyes.
I craned my neck enough to see an older man with salt-and-pepper hair
and pale gray eyes smiling down at me. Manassier. Well,
didn’t that just explain a lot.
“I didn’t think you
would get this far,” he told me in his thick accent. And to
think, only that afternoon, I’d found it attractive.
Somewhere along the line
I’d bitten my tongue hard enough to taste copper. I
swallowed blood. “Surprise.”
He shrugged. “No
matter. I still collect the bounty.”
“There’s a bounty?”
“Half a million
euros.” His smile grew. “You are about to make
me rich.”
“Half a million? Are you
kidding me? I’m the Pythia. I’m worth way more
than that.”
He took out a gun, a Sig Sauer
P210, which I recognized because of the shooting lessons Pritkin had
been giving me. My aim wasn’t any better, but I could
identify all kinds of guns now. Even the one about to kill me.
“I’m a simple
man,” Manassier said, “with simple needs. Half a
million will do nicely.”
It figured that I’d get the
non-greedy crook. I swallowed a crazy urge to laugh.
“You don’t have to shoot me,” I gasped.
“I can’t hold on much longer anyway.”
“Yes, but if you slip, the
Circle may say you died of natural causes and not pay the bounty.
And then all this was for nothing.”
“Yeah. That’d be a shame.”
He clicked the safety off.
“Now hold still and this won’t hurt.”
“That would be a nice
change.” My body felt like it weighed a ton, my arms were
liquid with fatigue and my shoulders were aching in their
sockets. It would be such a relief to just let go.
So I did.
I heard him yell something in
French and felt a bullet whiz by my head, but it was unimportant
because I was falling, and there was nothing to hold on to, just
sliding dirt and limestone rocks crumbling beneath my hands. My arms flailed wildly, grasping for the one thing I had to
find, but for a long second I felt only air. Then my fingers
collided with something warm and alive and I grabbed it and we were
both falling. There was a dizzying rush of air and my power
wouldn’t come and all I could think was that I’d killed us
both--then my brain whited out and my heart tried to stop and reality
twisted and bent around us.
And we tumbled into a casino lobby half a world away.
I hadn’t judged things
perfectly because of the whole abject terror thing, and we fell from
about four feet above the ground. Pritkin hit the floor first,
with a pained grunt, with me clinging to his back. And then
everything got incredibly still for a minute, as it always did whenever
I survived something insanely dangerous and really stupid. The
fact that I recognized the phenomenon probably meant it had happened a
few too many times. I lay there quivering, hearing an upsurge in
the polite babble of the guests and not caring. All I could think
was, oh thank God, I didn’t kill us.
After a stunned moment, I coughed
hard and rolled off. My face was dusty, my palms were scraped raw
and I was panting and limp. Various muscle groups were twitching
at random, seizing up with tight bursts of pain and then
releasing. I felt like bursting into tears and screaming in
triumph all at the same time.
Pritkin finally groaned and sat
up. He was pale and sweating profusely, with damp hair plastered
to his forehead. He had cuts on his face and hands and
burns on his forearm.
I wanted to touch him, to
reassure myself that we’d both actually survived, but I
didn’t dare. A gal could lose a hand that way. So I
just stared at him instead, so glad to be alive that my aching back and
trembling arms and ferocious headache hardly registered at all.
“That was fun,” I croaked. “Only, not.”
Pritkin hauled me into a sitting
position, one dirty, scarred hand cupping the back of my neck.
“Are you all right?” His voice was sharp and biting, with a
slightly panicked edge.
“I told you to stop asking--”
He shook me, and despite it being
one-handed, it made my teeth rattle. “If anything like that
ever happens again. You. Leave. Me. Behind. Do you
understand?”
I would have argued, but I was
feeling a little shocky for some reason. “I’m not
good at abandoning people,” I finally said.
A front-desk person scurried
over, first-aid kit in hand, but Pritkin snarled at the poor guy and he
quickly backed up a step. “Then get good at it!”
He stomped off, limping, one
shoulder hanging at an odd angle. “You’re
welcome,” I murmured.
Look for Embrace the Night on April 1, 2008!
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