Of course, that might have had something to do with the half dozen hungry ghosts still clinging to him, like leeches, as he shoved me off. And staggered to his feet, slinging spells and stumbling into things, because some of the ghosts didn’t seem interested in leaving. And with the energy they’d stolen from us, they could afford to press the point.
I blinked and Agnes was there, looking years older than when I’d seen her in Wales, with a few more pounds and some crow’s-feet around her sharp blue eyes. But younger than when she and I went adventuring in the sixteenth century, and caught a time-traveling weirdo mucking about in a cellar. Because that hadn’t happened yet.
Billy had pulled us out too soon.
Her eyes focused on me, but there was no spark of recognition in them. Maybe because she hadn’t gotten a good look at me while on that damn wagon. Or because that whole thing had been decades ago from her perspective. Or because my hair was plastered to my skull and covered in dirt, like my face and my still-damp slave wear.
For once, looking like hell came in handy, I thought.
And then someone screamed.
“You!”
I looked up to find Roger back on his feet, and pointing a shaking finger at me. “Every time,” he gasped. “Every time!”
“What?”
“Every time I meet you, you ruin my life. This is your fault. This is all your fault!”
“What exactly is going on here?” Agnes asked, voice cold. She looked at me.
“He’s . . . a madman,” I told her, swallowing, and feeling like I’d just been kicked in the gut. “A Guild member and a . . . a necromancer. He was in prison in the Badlands, but he escaped—”
“No thanks to you!” he yelled, and lunged for me.
Only to find himself suspended in midair, probably courtesy of the house wards. Which only seemed to make him madder. He thrashed around, cursing, as ghosts fled the scene and Billy disappeared into my necklace.
“She’s a necromancer, too,” Roger yelled as a bunch of Circle guards joined the party, rushing in from all directions. “And a sorceress! She’s got a demon with her now!”
Agnes’ eyes returned to me, but Rosier was nowhere to be seen. And that was despite the fact that something small and heavy was clinging to my leg, like a limpet. It looked like my chameleon could hide him, after all.
“He was just here!” Roger shouted, furious. “They were both locked up together!”
“It’s a lie,” I said quickly. “I’m a Pythian heir, training in the Badlands. I was leaving when this man attacked me, having somehow escaped his cell—”
“Liar!”
“—and threw my, uh, my spell off,” I said, hoping there wasn’t a specific name for the portal. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”
“And the clothes?” Agnes asked, with a raised brow.
“I was sent on a mission immediately after returning from one,” I said, smiling weakly. “You know how that is.”
She didn’t smile back.
She did turn around, however. “Elizabeth.”
Someone came out from behind her, from among the white-robed acolytes. For a moment, I just stared upward, at a very young version of my mother, her dark copper hair in a loose chignon, her white gown pristine. And looking down demurely.
“You’ve heard them,” Agnes said. “What would you do?”
“Me, Lady?” The voice was soft.
“What would you do with the girl? Lock her up, or set her free?”
Mother looked up, and for the first time, our eyes met. Her expression didn’t change, not wavering from polite interest. But she never so much as glanced at anyone else.
“She possesses the Pythian power,” she said, after a moment. “Therefore either she is telling the truth or she’s a rogue. If the former, we should send her back to her own time, for she is too weak to continue her mission. If the latter, the same is true, so that her Pythia can deal with her.”
“Very good,” Agnes said, looking at her with pride. “So be it.”
And the next thing I knew, I was bouncing on my bed in Vegas.
Chapter Thirty-one
I woke up to a soft bed, a spill of light from an open door, and a familiar, velvety darkness. But not a familiar room. I sat up abruptly.
And immediately regretted it.
Pain ripped through my body, radiating outward from a hundred points. Old pain, from strains and sprains and bruises weeks old. Newer pain, from my side, from my feet, from the battle on the drag. Brand-spanking-new pain, clear and bright and soul deep, from ghost bites, from channeling too much power, from everything, all at once, forcing a sound out of me.
It was surprise.
I guess nothing else fit, I thought, and put out a hand to steady myself.
And found warm flesh, not cool sheets.
“Easy,” someone said, and fingers closed gently around mine.
I looked up, struggling to see anything with the light from the next room blazing in my eyes. Until a dark head blotted out most of it. A very familiar dark head.
Mircea.
For a minute, I wasn’t sure if my brain had conjured him up or not, and the view didn’t help. Because he looked just like always: fall of smooth mahogany hair just brushing his shoulders; dark blue suit, the rich wool glimmering slightly in the low light; lashes too long and thick for a man, like the lips that appeared wine reddened without any wine. He should have looked feminine, except the strong features and broad shoulders never could.
“If I conjured you up, I did a good job,” I told him blearily.
“I’m real enough,” he said, and held a glass to my lips.
I finished the whole thing. It was only water, but it seemed to help. I lay back against the pillows again, feeling stronger.
“You sure?” I asked, glancing around. I’d been right: I didn’t recognize this room. Not that I could see much of it, but the furniture wasn’t in the right place, and there was no broad sweep of windows. Or any at all.
“I’m sure.” Mircea leaned over and smoothed back my hair. “I tried to contact you through Seidr earlier, but it didn’t work.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“Lord Mircea,” someone said, from the doorway. Mircea didn’t even turn around, but I looked past his shoulder to see a tall, thin shadow blocking out some of the light. A shadow with a shock of unruly dark hair and glasses he shouldn’t need, because he was a vampire.
“In a moment,” Mircea said, his eyes still on mine. “It hasn’t worked since that incident at Dante’s this morning.”
I frowned, trying to jump-start my brain. “You think Ares did something?”
“I don’t know,” he said again, fingers combing through my hair, causing the pain in my head to recede slightly. Until I caught his wrist, because he couldn’t spare the energy right now. He just smiled and switched hands.
“I thought at first that you were simply asleep, something I verified with Marco,” he told me. “But it didn’t work later, either. Although, in fairness, the fault could be mine. After yesterday . . .”
I nodded. Mircea had been the target of an assassin, a traitor in the vampire ranks working for the other side, who had attacked him mentally. The plot had failed, but he’d been badly injured, only not badly enough from their perspective. The idea had been to finish the job during the attack on the consul’s home, but Lizzie had spilled the beans under questioning, and I’d pulled him out before they could reach him. And half a day later, he’d returned the favor, saving both my life and Rhea’s.
But neither of us had exactly emerged unscathed.
“Stop.” I captured his hands, which had moved to my temples. “You need your strength.”
“When you lead a family as large as ours, you recover quickly,” he told me. “Assassins would do wel
l to remember that.”
I grinned, in spite of everything. “When you come at the king, you’d best not miss?”
He laughed. “Isn’t that what I just said?” He tapped my shoulder. “Turn over.”
I did, because it was easier than arguing. And because Mircea wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t drain himself too low at a time like this. And because it felt—
Oh God.
The tension of the last few weeks rolled out of me in waves, following the strokes of his hands. I lay there, groaning out loud after a while, because I couldn’t seem to stop, as he erased pain and stiffness from my back and arms and thighs and legs. And then he reached my feet, and I almost wept.
“Oh God.”
“What have you been doing?” he asked, sounding slightly horrified, probably at the collection of cuts and bruises I’d managed to amass on hard Welsh stones.
I didn’t answer, but not just because of the pain. But because moments like this were rare. Moments when it was just us, just Mircea and Cassie, without the rest of the world intruding. Without something—usually our jobs—getting in the way, screwing up our time together, and causing trouble.
Well, that and the thousand things we couldn’t say to each other.
Like about the woman I’d seen in his chambers, when I went to rescue him. He’d been sleeping, exhausted from the strain of fighting off the attack, but she’d been awake. And predatory, with nails that had dented the skin of his chest, and small fangs just visible over bloodred lips as she snarled at me. She’d looked exactly like a feral animal, guarding its prey.
If she hadn’t been naked, I might have thought she was there to eat him.
As it was, it was pretty obvious what she was there to do, and it had given me great satisfaction to send her and the sheet she was wearing to a particularly odorous cow pasture on Long Island. Tony had lent me out to one of his associates for a week there once, who had needed my Sight, but it had been my nose that had suffered. I could only hope the place had retained its charm.
But other than for a few seconds’ amusement, watching her and her sheet flounder around in the muck, it hadn’t solved anything. Except for getting her out of a war zone. Because I’d had to go back a few hours in time to rescue Mircea, so she’d gotten a free pass out of the hellhole the consul’s home was about to become.
In other words, I’d saved the life of my boyfriend’s lover, and I couldn’t even tell him about it.
Because I was afraid he’d ask me about mine.
Not that Pritkin and I were lovers in any normal sense of the word. Today was absolutely further than we’d ever gone, and it hadn’t exactly been by choice. Not once, in all the times I’d known him, had we touched when it wasn’t an emergency. But when your partner is a half-incubus war mage, who only heals from one thing, and you’re in the middle of a war . . . emergencies happen.
But I hadn’t talked to Mircea about them, because how could I? To explain how Pritkin healed was to explain what he was, and I couldn’t explain what he was. There had only been one half human, half incubus in recorded history, and Mircea had already shown way too much interest in Pritkin’s background as it was. It would take that lightning-fast brain maybe a second to put two and two together and end up with Merlin, and that was a name that could never be said.
Not when the magical community practically worshipped the guy, almost as much as Pritkin worshipped his privacy.
I couldn’t get him back only to ruin his life, so I couldn’t say anything. But that meant no absolution when anything happened, no chance to talk things out, no opportunity to explain. Or to ask about any of the women mentioned in connection with Mircea, who he said he had nothing to do with anymore, but then I find her in his room.
I watched my fingers clench in the sheets, and knew I had to say something this time. Had to find a way to talk about at least some of it, because I couldn’t do this anymore. It felt like I’d explode sometimes, with all the evasions, and secrets, and half-truths. I wanted things on the table for once, before this silence killed us.
“Mircea—”
“My lord, I do apologize.” That was the vamp who hadn’t budged from the doorway. “But they’re starting. We really must—”
The man cut off abruptly, with a slightly choked sound.
Because, yeah. You didn’t make a master tell you something twice. He must be new.
“I have to go,” Mircea murmured against my shoulder. “But I wanted to be the one to tell you, before you heard it from someone else.”
I rolled over. “Heard what?”
“The Circle fought off a dark mage assault this afternoon, at their main headquarters in Stratford.”
“Stratford?” I sat up, a little too abruptly.
Mircea steadied me. “There was a battle, but the Circle prevailed. Attacking the creators of the most vicious spells on earth at their home base is not the act of sane men.”
“The Black Circle isn’t sane.”
“No, but they aren’t usually this reckless, either. They wanted something—badly.”
“Lizzie.” It wasn’t even a question. “That’s why they attacked Dante’s. And if she was at Stratford—”
“She was, from what I understand. But they didn’t get her,” he said, holding me as I started to get off the bed. “They didn’t get her, Cassie. I was told that most definitely.”
I swallowed and stopped struggling. “Can I use your phone? I have—I might have a friend there.”
He handed me a sleek black rectangle, but the screen was dark. “The focal wards are up,” he explained. “It may be a while before you get a signal.”
I should have expected that, after everything. And after watching the light from the next room dance off the side of his face, because it wasn’t coming from electricity. The big boys were up, the kind of wards most places only brought online in emergencies because of the power drain, and because they really messed up any modern tech they came in contact with—phones included.
“I can try to find out about your friend,” Mircea offered.
“Caleb. Caleb Carter.”
He nodded, and started to get up. “Wait.” I caught his arm. “You haven’t told me . . . what’s going on. How are they doing this?”
“Doing . . . ?”
“This! All of this.” I gestured around at an amorphous enemy, because that’s what the Black Circle and their allies were starting to feel like—something that was always around, an unseen menace crouched in the dark, ready to strike. “How do they stay one step ahead? We fight off one attack, and there’s another, almost before we can draw a breath. They’re almost constant anymore—”
“You already know that.”
“I don’t!” I shook my head, trying to clear it. I still felt half-asleep, but I didn’t need much thought for this. “The whole reason for attacking Dante’s was Lizzie being there. But she wasn’t captured until the night before they showed up—”
“Cassie.”
“—so overnight they got hundreds of men to Vegas, verified that my guards were down for the count, calculated exactly how much time they had before the Circle could react, located and brought down the wards, figured out a way to grab Rhea . . .” I looked at him in bewilderment. “It’s impossible.”
“Not if the people planning this are in Faerie.” Mircea sat back down on the bed, the firelight making his eyes gleam. “The fey timeline runs differently than ours—you know that.”
I nodded.
“But what you may not know is that the rate of the difference isn’t constant. It is often explained as if our two timelines are two rivers that generally parallel each other. But sometimes one or the other will divert, bulging out in an arc before coming back into rough synchronicity. When that happens, the difference between time here and time there can be . . . extreme. We appear to be in one of those cycles
now.”
“So time in Faerie is running differently than here?”
“Faster—much faster. It won’t last—it never does. But for a short span, they are essentially on fast forward. And they knew this was coming. The fey have the ability to chart the difference in our time streams with far more accuracy than we do. They’ve learned to predict it.”
“Yes, but—”
“Think about it, Cassie. They plan an attack on one of our strongholds. Perhaps it takes weeks from their perspective. But from ours, it has been mere days, possibly only hours. They have the leisure to debate, to decide, to rest. If something doesn’t work, such as the attack on the casino, they have time to recalibrate. While we are constantly running, on the defensive, getting hit here, there, everywhere—with, as you say, scarce time to draw a breath in between.”
“And now they have a god planning their attacks for them.”
“So it would seem.” It was grim.
The last time we discussed this, Mircea hadn’t wanted to believe that Ares was back. He’d wanted to keep this as a fight between the kinds of things he might know how to kill. But it looked like this morning had convinced him.
Or convinced him that he’d been right all along, I thought, watching his face change.
“That is why we must take the war to them,” he told me earnestly. “We cannot remain on the defensive forever. They will attack again, and soon, before their advantage fades, and there is no way to tell what they will hit next. We must give them something else to think about.”
I didn’t say anything. He was right—I knew he was. But the method the senate had selected was . . . less than optimal. Way less.
They wanted me to use the Pythian power to age up a vampire, while his master fed him power—a lot of it. More than he could possibly absorb all at once without my help. It was similar to something they’d done for years called the Push, when—usually in times of war—a new master was needed pronto. But all that power all at once was a big gamble, one that usually resulted in a dead vamp.
You know, permanently.
But with the years speeding by like seconds, the hope was that the power would simply be absorbed, as if he’d actually lived and fed through all those years, gaining strength with each one. And that out of the other side of my time bubble would leap a brand-new master vamp. Who would need to quickly move aside, to get out of the way, because another would be coming through right behind him.