Embrace the Night

  “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 iron-work 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 I’d 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 past 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 to 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 nongreedy 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.

  Chapter 3

  Pritkin and I had landed at Dante’s, Vegas’ cross between a haunted house and a casino. It was currently what he referred to as our base of operations and I called our hideout. And, as hiding places went, it ranked pretty high. Not only was it a well-warded, vampire-run property, but we’d recently helped to trash a large piece of it. It seemed unlikely that many of our enemies would think to look for us there. At least, that was the plan.

  I was sitting in Purgatory, the lobby bar, the next afternoon, trying to scalp a shrunken head, when a vampire walked in. He was swathed in a dark cloak and hood that would have looked theatrical anywhere else, but the prickle at the base of my spine told me what he was. It looked like the plan pretty much sucked.

  I watched him out of the corner of my eye while I finished dissecting the head. The clump of matted black hair finally came off more or less intact. I put down the piece of molded plastic I’d been working on and picked up the real deal, which was perched on an overturned ashtray nearby. It glared at me balefully out of one shriveled, raisinlike eye. “I can’t believe it’s come to this,” it complained. “Somebody kill me now.”

  “Somebody already did.”

  “That’s cold, blondie.”

  I put the long ponytail onto its wrinkled skin and adjusted it. The head, rumored to have belonged to a gambler who had welshed on the wrong bet, usually took orders at the zombie bar upstairs. It was currently unemployed, courtesy of a fire that had raged out of control for almost an hour. The head had somehow survived, except for its hair.

  I felt kind of responsible—the Circle’s war mages had set the blaze while attempting to barbecue me—so I had been trying to replace its singed locks with some taken from one of the fakes sold as souvenirs at the gift shop. Dante’s isn’t known for the high quality of its merchandise, ensuring that I’d spent an hour sorting through about a hundred heads, trying to find a good match. Not that my help seemed to be appreciated.

  “I can’t go around looking like this!” it said sourly as I reached for the superglue. “I’m the main attraction here. I’m the star!”

  “It’s either this or I scalp Barbie,” I threatened. “They don’t make wigs in your size.”

  “Sweetheart, they don’t make anything in my size. And it’s never stopped me before.”

  “I don’t even want to know what that means,” I said honestly.

  The vampire was now scanning the crowded tables. Maybe he was here for a drink or a quick game of craps, but I doubted it. I’d recently turned down an offer of employment from the Vampire Senate, something that isn’t generally considered healthy. The surprise wasn’t that they’d sent someone to restate their offer in more emphatic terms, but that it had taken them this long.

  I watched a harried-looking waitress, dressed in a few black straps and thigh-high boots, move forward to greet the new arrival. She walked like her arches hurt, which was probably the case. Bondage chic was Purgatory’s shtick, chosen to match the name, but it wasn’t made for eight-hour shifts on your feet. I could testify to that personally, having spent several days literally in her shoes.

  The idea was to hide in plain sight. At least that’s what Casanova, the casino’s manager, had claimed. I suspected he just wanted the free help.

  Casanova’s master was Antonio, a Philadelphia crime boss better known as Tony, although his name these days was mud for crossing his own master—who happened to be Mircea. Among other things, Tony’d tried to have me killed, which would have seriously interfered in Mircea’s plans. Not being the forgiving type, Mircea had confiscated everything Tony owned, including the casino and its manager. Before being sidelined by the geis, he’d ordered Casanova to assist me, but hadn’t given specifics. As a result, Casanova’
s “assistance” had taken the form of a lot of fill-in jobs for which I’d yet to see a paycheck.

  But until Pritkin found us an actual, honest-to-God lead, I didn’t have much else to do. Except to stare obsessively at the clock, wondering how many seconds of freedom I had left. Staying busy helped with that. A little. And Casanova had a point about the outfit. My shiny PVC shorts and bustier combo didn’t hide much, but with elaborate eye makeup and a long black wig, I barely recognized my strawberry-blond, blue-eyed self. I fiddled with the head and tried to look nonchalant, hoping the disguise would hold up.

  The man sitting beside me started complaining. “A thumbscrew?” He slapped the drinks list down on the bar. “What the hell is that?”

  “You’re not in Hell,” the bartender corrected him. “And no souls eat or drink in Purgatory.”

  “Then what do they do?” the guy asked sarcastically.

  “They suffer.” I thought the bartender’s dungeon master garb, consisting of a bare chest, hangman’s hood and studded cuffs, should have already made that clear. If not, the couple dozen torture devices serving as wall art might have clued the guy in.

  “I am suffering—from thirst!” the tourist insisted.

  “A thumbscrew is a screwdriver,” I explained helpfully.

  “Gee, thanks, Elvira. So what I gotta do? Solve a riddle before I can order a drink?”

  “It’s not that hard,” the bartender said patiently, placing a flaming cocktail in front of another guest. “A Lynching is a Lynchburg lemonade, an Iron Maiden is an old-fashioned, a—”

  “All I want is a Bloody Mary! You got one of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “A Bloody Mary.”

  The vampire had paused beside me. “It won’t work,” I told him. No way was I changing my mind. Vampires in general aren’t to be trusted, but the Senate makes the average vamp look like a paragon of virtue.