“But . . . Alphonse is fifty years younger than you!” I protested. “And he’s been able to ignore Tony’s orders for years! You don’t have to—”
She cut me off with a laugh. “Yeah. And he’s an idiot, you know? I taught him everything—how to talk, how to act, what to do to impress the boss. He’d be nothing without me. But power doesn’t care how smart you are. Doesn’t even care how old you are. Some people never reach master status, and others do it in a matter of decades! And I’ve never been strong. Why do you think I put up with Alphonse? He was the only way I had any position at all.”
“That’s why we couldn’t catch you,” Marco said, lighting a cigarette. “It was pretty clever. Everyone was looking for the traitor among the old masters, the guys close enough to a Senate member for Myra to have wasted her time trying to turn them.”
“Which is why Tony decided to use me.”
“The Consuls aren’t here, as you can see,” Pritkin said, watching her narrowly. “Whatever your master ordered you to do, you’ve failed. Mircea can still break your bond. You have no reason to—”
He broke off at the identical expressions of disgust Sal and Marco were sending him. “Why the hell do you hang around this guy?” Marco asked me.
Pritkin looked at me, and I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way,” I told him numbly.
“Why not? If she is truly under a compulsion—”
“Vampire law doesn’t care about the why. It only cares about the result. Or in this case, the intended result. And Sal came back here intending to kill the leaders of the six vampire senates. It doesn’t get any worse than that.”
“Close, but no cigar,” Sal told me, sounding awfully unconcerned for someone facing certain death. “I’m just the doorman, you might say.” She held out her hand, and a shaft of light through the balcony doors lit up something on her open palm.
“My pentagram,” I said, recognizing it even from this distance. “You said you’d get it fixed.”
“Yeah. Only it’s a lot more useful broken.”
“I don’t get it.”
She laughed.“You know, I used to think it was ludicrous—you with Lord Mircea. I figured he was just using you, like everyone said. But lately, I’ve begun to think you two deserve each other. You’re just as clueless as he is!”
Marco tensed. “Give it to me,” he told her.
“Or what? You’ll kill me?” she asked incredulously. “You don’t have a lot of threats left, Marco.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Mircea didn’t specify how the traitor was to die, just told me to take care of it if anybody showed up. I got a lot of leeway here, Sal. Give me a reason to make it quick.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s tempting. Or I could follow Tony’s orders, and when his side wins, I not only don’t die, I get the position I always deserved. How about that instead?”
“Your side isn’t going to win,” Pritkin told her.
Sal ignored him. It looked like she was having fun. I was beginning to wonder how hard she had tried to resist Tony.
“Remember MAGIC?” she asked me. “Because this is gonna make that look like a sideshow.”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “It’s just a ward. It can’t—”
“A ward that channels your power—or used to,” she corrected. “Lately, it’s been channeling something else instead. You know, that damn wardsmith gave me a fright. I thought for sure one of you would figure it out. You survived direct contact with the ley line even though you couldn’t access your power. Yet even when he told you your ward was feeding off the Circle, you still didn’t get it!”
“Get what?”
Pritkin drew in air, and Sal grinned at him. “Dumb as a rock, isn’t she?” Her gaze returned to me. “Let me spell it out. Tony and company figured out a way around Artemis’ spell. It acts like a lock on a door, but a door isn’t much help when the wall of the house is split open. To get Apollo back, they needed to rip apart the space between worlds. They needed to crack open a ley line.”
“But nobody on Earth has that kind of power,” I protested. “That was the problem all along, trying to figure out who . . .” I stopped, a really horrible idea surfacing.
Sal saw my expression and grinned. “Yeah, that was the best part, hearing everybody say, over and over, that no one had that kind of power. When it was right under their noses, all the time. You had it. Apollo gave part of his power to the Pythias. All we had to figure out was how to access it.”
And suddenly, I caught up. I looked at Pritkin. “You said the Circle wouldn’t give you one of their tattoos, because power drains work both ways. They’ve been draining me, haven’t they?”
He nodded slowly. “It’s possible.”
Sal snorted. “Hell, it was easy. Richardson—our guy on the inside—just opened the conduit to your ward again. The Circle had closed it off, thinking you might try to drain power from them. Instead, we opened it up to do the same thing to you. Then Richardson got it to our allies by bundling it with the percentage Saunders was selling to fund his early retirement.”
“You used my power to weaken the ley line,” I said, still not quite believing it.
“Yeah. We almost had it porous enough to get Apollo and his army through, but Richardson just had to pull his little stunt with you. He hated you so much, he was afraid someone else would get to kill you. And then the battle broke out and ripped a huge-ass gash in the ley line, screwing everything up!”
“But why didn’t Apollo come through then?” I asked, confused.
Sal just stared at me. “Don’t you get it yet? He’s been here since MAGIC fell! But it wasn’t supposed to happen then, and it took everyone by surprise. The breach was supposed to take place over Vegas and to have to run all the way to the ley line sink at MAGIC before it was sealed. That would have given him time to get his whole army through.”
“But it hit MAGIC and sealed almost instantly,” I said, remembering that awesome funnel of power disappearing over the hill. I suddenly remembered something else, too.
My vision at MAGIC had shown me a ruined Dante’s. I finally understood why. If I had gone back and changed time, ensuring that MAGIC never fell, I would have handed Apollo everything he wanted. In that case, the original plan would have been carried out and he and his whole army would be here. And by now, the magical community would be well on its way to extinction.
My other visions were starting to make sense, too. The second had shown me the route the ley line’s destruction was meant to take on its way from Vegas to MAGIC. It was trying to do more than warn me about Rafe; it was telling me that the danger was still there. The third vision had reinforced that once again and showed me at the center of it all.
Because it was my power that would give our enemies a victory.
Chapter Twenty-eight
“Apollo got through,” Sal told me, “but the rest of his forces didn’t. He was back, but he’d been severely weakened when the line exploded around him, and he was stuck in a world with a quarter million war mages, any fraction of whom could banish him again. He realized that he needed to bring through his army before he threw down with the Circle.”
“But contact with the ley line fried my ward. You can’t get any more power!” I pointed out.
She shook her head. “As long as the ward was on your body, it continued to pull from you, but instead of transmitting the power to us, it stored it. It’s been building up the amount we need ever since the breach.”
So that was what Dee had sensed. Not Apollo, but my pentagram. And Sal, waiting for her master.
“Now we have enough,” Sal said cheerfully.
“Because the line is still weak,” I murmured. Mircea had said that it would take a couple of days to calm back down.
“Yeah, that’s why we have to do it now, before the line starts to strengthen again. Of course, Apollo thought it was a bonus that the consuls were also meeting here tonight. Destroy the leaders and everyone else would fall that
much easier.” She grinned at me. “But you know, I really think he’ll settle for you.”
The sky flared red beyond the balcony doors. Crimson streaks that were nothing like a sunrise crackled across the heavens, shedding a killing radiance that made the hotel’s electric lights look feeble by comparison. Something was coming.
The whole time she talked, Sal had been slowly backing up, edging closer to the balcony. No one had tried to stop her. After all, even a vampire was unlikely to survive a fall like that. But now she could toss the pentagram over the edge anytime she chose, and we’d never find it. Not before her master did.
“Give me the pentagram, Sal,” Marco said again. He suddenly sounded deadly serious.
“Are you still trying that? When you have nothing to offer me but a quick death?” She sneered. “Don’t expect me to be so generous with you!”
The wind picked up as the light grew brighter. It looked like dawn was coming early. Or the sun anyway, I thought dizzily.
And then, faster than my eyes could track, Marco moved. I blinked and Sal was still standing there, but the hand clutching my ward was flying through the air—straight at me. She twisted, a snarl overtaking her face, and the next second Marco was staggering back, a sliver of the ruined couch frame sticking out of his chest.
I didn’t get a chance to see if it got his heart. Because Sal’s severed hand hit me and the impact jarred my ward loose. It went flying, I dove after it and Sal dove after me.
And then, just as suddenly, she was gone.
I felt a breath of wind pass me and looked up in time to see Nicu come out of nowhere and tackle Sal by the waist. I don’t know if he didn’t realize that she was as close to the edge as she was, or if he thought the railing would catch them. But it had taken as much abuse as the rest of the apartment and gave way under their combined weight. I saw bright gold eyes staring at me for an instant before they fell, and then they were gone.
Something bit into my palm. I looked down to see that I’d clutched my ward so tight, it was digging into my flesh. I pried it loose and looked up, only to realize that I wasn’t likely to keep it long.
Light spilled over the balcony, bright as the noonday sun. I couldn’t make out what I was looking at, at first. Until it came closer, and then it was nothing like I’d expected.
I’d met Apollo, at least in a metaphysical sense, a number of times before. But he hadn’t been in this world then and couldn’t reveal himself in anything other than mental impressions. And since my brain had interpreted them, he had always been in a form I could understand. This wasn’t.
A glowing tangle of light hovered in the sky, every color and no color, transparent like water, huge and abstract. If anything, it looked like a fractal on a computer screen, constantly changing into new patterns. None of them were particularly menacing, but the power radiating off the creature was enough to scorch my skin even this far away.
Apollo had once told me that I wouldn’t be able to withstand him in person, but I hadn’t known what he meant. I did now. Frozen in place, I stared into the fiery center of a creature my mind couldn’t even comprehend, pitifully aware of my own insignificance, and wondered how I could ever have thought I could fight something like this.
The bands of light thickened, swirling around a central point, and formed themselves into a monstrous head rising clear and fluid against the heavens. Faint points of light glittered in the huge skull, like savage eyes cold and measuring. My breath stuttered in my chest, out of rhythm with the sudden mad pace of my heart. Swaying on my feet, I clasped my hands together so the shaking wouldn’t show.
“Cassandra Palmer.” The voice was surprisingly soft, like a breath of wind. “We finally meet in the flesh. So to speak.”
“Apollo.”
“If you like. This world once had many names for me. Ra, Sol, Surya, Marduk, Inti . . . It has forgotten them all. It will be reminded.” The god’s intense gaze was fixed on me with almost affectionate mockery. I didn’t know if his anger had burnt itself out, or if he was merely savoring the moment now that I was finally trapped.
“I’ve seen it,” I said dully. “The city in ruins . . .”
“I’ve decided to leave it as a monument to your failure. The former seat of the blind Pythia.” He laughed. “You know, even your namesake did better. She understood what was coming but could not convince others. You, on the other hand, have been wandering about as foolishly as everyone else. It has been most entertaining.”
The wind picked up, stinging my eyes. “And I put the power to bring your army here into Sal’s hand. I gave it to you.”
The great face didn’t change, but the air around me shimmered with laughter. “Yes, that is the very best part. I won’t destroy your friends, your world, Cassandra. You will. I wanted to be sure you knew that, before the end.”
The voice remained soft, but the light patterns suddenly changed. The huge face had been almost clear, but now dense blue-black boiled up from the bottom, filling the form like ink in water. No, I thought, staring up in blank terror. It didn’t look like his anger had faded, at all.
I heard the sound of a car engine start behind me. Before I could turn around, an arm reached out of nowhere, grabbed the front of my shirt and dragged me into the seat of Marsden’s roadster. My legs were hanging over the side, my butt still in the air, as we drove straight off the balcony.
“You’re wasting your time, Cassandra!” Apollo thundered. “Where do you think you can hide?”
I was too busy screaming to reply. I grabbed the seat belt in both fists as my legs floated up behind me. I looked down at the concrete speeding up at us and saw no bubble of protection, no jumping blue fire. And then the air tore open around us and we were swept into the middle of the line.
I slammed back down, my legs landing painfully on the trunk as we suddenly leveled off. Pritkin was in the driver’s seat, frantically shifting gears, as I began to slide off the side. He hauled me into the seat with one hand while steering around a very surprised war mage with the other. The ley line was alive with activity. Ships and men were everywhere, still fighting a battle that no longer mattered.
“You do know how to drive one of these, right?” I asked nervously. The car had a lot of weird buttons and gears I hadn’t noticed before. And none were labeled.
“In theory.”
“In theory?”
“I’ve been with Jonas a few times.”
“How many is a few?”
“Counting today?”
“Yes!”
“Er, that would be . . . twice then.”
I bit my lip on a retort and instead twisted around to stare behind us. Apollo wasn’t there. He was right—in a world he controlled, there would be nowhere to hide. I might be able to stay ahead of him for a little while, but he’d find me eventually. I doubted I’d care very much at that point, after he finished destroying everything I loved.
“Turn around,” I told Pritkin.
“What?”
I grabbed the wheel and swerved. A war mage shot by us and out of the line, as we banked at an angle that almost had us both plummeting along with him. Pritkin cursed and wrestled the car back into the middle of the stream. “Don’t touch that! And why the hell do you want to go back?”
“Apollo isn’t following us. I’m not sure he realizes I have the ward. I never had a chance to tell him.”
“You want him to follow us?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t get a chance to explain. The wind pushed my hair out of my face, allowing me to see a cloud of pure energy barreling right for us. “I think he knows,” Pritkin said, swerving violently and sending us careening toward the outer edge of the line.
“Back! Back!” I screamed as my half of the car was pushed completely out of the line. I could see Pritkin silhouetted inside all that jumping energy, while on the other side of me the parking lot was racing up at us at breathtaking speed. “No, pull up, pull up!” I screeched as we headed straight for a group of t
ourists who had just come out of the casino doors.
“Would you make up your mind?” he demanded, fighting with the car. I just stared at the tourists, who were now pointing at us with awed expressions, watching them get nearer and nearer, and—Pritkin suddenly swerved upward, maybe two feet above their heads.
“Building!” I yelled as one of Dante’s towers loomed straight in front of us. Pritkin could sail right on through in the non-space of the line. But I was about to be vertical roadkill if he didn’t—
Pritkin swerved sharply and the building slid by, close enough that I could have reached out and touched it. A couple in bed stared out at us from a third-floor window, openmouthed, and then Pritkin jerked the wheel again. Suddenly I was back inside the line, lying against the seat, panting.
Apollo was right on our tail. The energy lines ran slower at the outer edges of the line, and we’d lost most of our lead. I reached over and jerked the steering wheel hard to the left. “Do not touch the wheel!” Pritkin snarled.
“We have to stay in the center, or he’ll catch us for sure!”
“And if you keep attempting to drive, we’re both going to be—” He stopped, staring behind us.
I twisted around, but other than an angry god, I didn’t see anything. “What now?”
“Rakshasas. They’re following us.”
“How many?”
“Many.”
I was thrown back against my seat as Pritkin floored it. “We need to get him as far away from populated regions as possible,” he told me. “Jonas can rally the Circle. However that creature got in, we can banish him again—”
“You told me that spell takes thousands of mages! There’s no time for that.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“I have an idea,” I hedged. I wasn’t taking any bets on how good it was. “Just get us some distance ahead.”
We left the city behind, speeding into an area of high rounded hills and smooth, empty valleys. The ley line twisted and turned among them, and sometimes through them, and that seemed to give Pritkin an idea. “Hold on,” he told me, and raced straight for the very top of the line.