Curse the Dawn

Chapter One

Stalking a time traveler is hard work, even if you are one. Especially when said traveler totally has you made. "Can we talk?" I screamed as I dodged behind a column to avoid a spray of bullets.

The woman hunting me through the cellar slung her flashlight beam in my direction. "Sure," she said amiably. "Hold still for a second."

Yeah, right.

My name is Cassie Palmer and a lot of people think I'm not the sharpest pencil in the box. My strawberry blond hair, which usually resembles Shirley Temple's in a windstorm, is part of the reason. My blue eyes, slightly pudgy cheeks and tip-tilted nose might be another, except that most men's gazes never make it up that far. But dumb blonde or not, even I wasn't buying that one.

My own weapon—a new 9 mm Beretta—was crowding the waistband of my jeans and poking me insistently in the hipbone. I ignored it. Years from now, the woman with the gun would leave a little message that would save my life. I kind of wanted her to be around to write it. Not to mention that shooting people is a good way to ensure that they don't want to talk to you, and we really needed to have a chat.

"When did the Guild start employing women?" she demanded, getting warmer.

I stayed utterly still, pressed against the back of one of the wooden columns holding up the roof. As hiding places go, it pretty much sucked, but there weren't a lot of alternatives. The cellar's walls were stone, except for areas that had been patched with brick. The ceiling was wood and flat, I guess because it served as the floor of the building above. And that was it, except for a few old barrels, some mildew and a lot of dark.

Even empty, the place was big enough that she'd have trouble finding me if I stayed silent. On the other hand, it was going to be tough for us to have a conversation if I never said anything. "Look, you've obviously mistaken me for—" I began, only to have the wall behind me peppered with bullets.

Stinging particles of brick and old mortar exploded out at me, and a few must have grazed my cheek because I felt a trickle of blood start to slide down my neck. The stillness after the gunfire made my ears ring and my nerves jump, and my hand instinctively closed over my gun. I dragged it back. I wasn't here to shoot her, I reminded myself sternly.

Although the idea was growing on me.

"I thought you guys were a bunch of misogynistic assholes with delusions of grandeur," she taunted.

I stayed stubbornly silent, which seemed to piss her off. A couple bullets thwacked into the wood at my back, shaking the column. I bit my lip to stay quiet until I felt something like a firm pinch on my left butt cheek. A second later, the pinch blossomed into white-hot pain.

My searching hand came back damp and sticky with streaks that looked black in the almost nonexistent light. I stared at it incredulously. I hadn't been here ten minutes yet, and I'd already been shot in the ass.

"You shot me!"

"Come out and I'll make the pain stop."

Yeah—permanently.

She paused to reload and I scurried behind a nearby barrel. As cover went, it wasn't much of an improvement, forcing me to hunker down against the cold, filthy floor to stay out of sight. But at least vulnerable bits of my anatomy weren't poking out past the sides.

I explored the gash in the back of my jeans. The bullet had only grazed me—what Pritkin, my war mage partner, would call a flesh wound. He'd probably slap a Band-Aid on it and tell me to stop whinging—whatever that meant—after he finished shouting at me for getting shot in the first place. But it hurt.

Of course, it would hurt a lot more if she shot me again. I peered over the top of the barrel, hoping to talk some sense into her while she was temporarily unable to kill me. Instead, my attention was caught by movement near the stairs. The dim glow of her flashlight gleamed off the barrel of a semiautomatic that had reached out of the dark. That was a problem since we were currently in 1605 and that type of gun hadn't been invented yet.

Even worse, it was aimed at her head.

"Behind you!"

She didn't hesitate. The flashlight went skittering across the stones, distracting the shooter, who blasted the hell out of it while she disappeared into shadow. One of the bullets went astray and hit a small wooden cask. It looked harmless, but it must have contained the equivalent of a few sticks of TNT. Because a deafening explosion was followed by a ball of orange flame smashing against the ceiling.

Fire rained down everywhere, including onto the shooter's hand and arm. The gun hit the floor and a man danced out of the stairwell, beating at the flames with his bare hands and shrieking. He also dropped a lantern that spun across the stones in lazy parabolas, lighting him up intermittently, like a strobe.

He was a tall, lanky blond, with horsey features half hidden by a floppy hat. He wore a long dark vest, knee pants and a puffy shirt that was quickly going up in smoke. He managed to get the flames out by flinging off the vest and ripping open the shirt, revealing a pale torso and some singed chest hair. He bent to retrieve his fallen gun, and a bullet sheared off more hair, this time from the top of his head.

He tore off his hat and stared at the hole in the crown as if wondering how it got there. The woman demonstrated by firing again, but he must have been a mage, because he'd managed to get his shields up. Her bullets hit them and hung there, a few feet away from his body, starfishing out from the impact points. He stared at one that would have taken him straight between the eyes and gave a little shriek.

It didn't look like he was all that accustomed to gunfights, because his concentration wobbled. His shields went with it, and the suspended bullets dropped to the floor, rattling against the stones like beads. He snatched up his gun with adrenaline-clumsy fingers and got off a few random shots in our direction before stumbling through a doorway near the stairs. He never stopped screaming.

The woman kicked a few burning scraps of wood aside and emerged into the dim puddle of light given off by the lantern. She retrieved her flashlight and clicked it a few times, but nothing happened so she sighed and stuffed it into a pocket of the coat she wore. It was camel-colored wool and looked warm, I noticed enviously. Underneath she was wearing a lavender silk dress with a wrapped top and calf-length flared skirt. She looked like June Cleaver out for a night on the town, if June had accessorized with firearms.

This was the first time I'd seen her clearly, and I took a second to adjust my mental image. Our last meeting had also been on a time shift, but she'd been traveling in spirit instead of in body and had chosen to appear as a young woman. She didn't look that different in the flesh. Her brown hair was streaked with silver now and there were fine lines around her eyes and mouth. But her body was as slim as ever and her current expression—exasperated amusement—was eerily familiar.

"Come out. I won't hurt you," she promised.

"You mean again?" I asked nervously.

"You're hiding behind a barrel filled with gunpowder. If I wanted you dead, I'd just shoot it," she told me with a deep under-note of duh.

She was tapping her foot impatiently and had lowered the weapon. That might not mean anything, but the fact was, I hadn't come here to cower in the dark. No matter how good that sounded. Besides, I didn't think she was kidding about the gunpowder.

I slowly emerged. "Where did I shoot you?" she demanded.

"In the butt." Her lips quirked. "It's not funny!"

"If you say so." She looked me over. My outfit was more appropriate than hers for crawling around a damp cellar, except for not including a coat. I was wearing jeans, sneakers and a T-shirt that said "I Took the Road Less Traveled. Now Where the Heck Am I?" Yet for some reason, she looked perfect while I'd ripped the knee out of my jeans and had black stuff all over my arms. I held my wrist up to my nose and smelled it.

She hadn't been kidding.

"You're playing hide-and-seek in a cellar full of gunpowder?" I demanded incredulously, desperately brushing at myself.

"A cellar full of gunpowder that an idiot is trying to blow up," she corrected. "So I'm a little tense right now. Who are you and why are you here?"

Now that the moment had arrived, I didn't quite know where to start. "It's complicated," I finally said.

"It always is." She headed for the door where the mage had disappeared, gun in hand. "You aren't Guild."

"I don't even know what that is," I said, jogging to keep up. "Is that who we're hunting?"

"That's who I'm hunting. I don't know who—or what—you are." She snagged the abandoned lantern and shoved it at me.

I took it gingerly, worried about powder residue near an open flame. It was a weird little thing, shaped like a large beer stein, with a black metal body and a door that could be opened or closed to control the light. I opened it all the way, but it didn't help much. "I'm Cassie. And, uh. . I'm sort of Pythia."

That stopped her. Her sharp blue gaze swept over me again. "Don't think so," she said curtly.

The Pythia was the supernatural community's chief Seer and, as a bonus, also the person charged with maintaining the integrity of the time line. It would have been a crappy job even if I'd had the faintest idea what I was doing. Since I didn't, it was also really dangerous.

My assailant was named Agnes, AKA Lady Phemonoe, the former Pythia. She was the one who had stuck me with this mess and then died before she could give me any training. As a result, I'd spent the first half of my first month in office trying to get out of the deal and the rest of it running for my life. So it had taken me a while to realize the obvious: I was a time traveler now, whether I liked it or not. Agnes' death didn't necessarily mean she couldn't train me. She just had to do it in the past.

I hadn't intended for it to be quite this far in the past, but she was always surrounded by people in her own time. And most of them were the types who might recognize and resent another time traveler. Getting her alone had been tough.

Probably not as tough as talking her into this though.

"Then how did I get here?" I demanded.

"My best guess is that you're some Pythia's newly appointed heir on a joyride, testing out the power," she said, stopping beside the black hole of the doorway. "Ooh, look. I can travel through time. Isn't that cool?" she mimicked.

"I'm not joyriding! And I don't find being shot at and almost blown up cool!"

"I did the same thing myself a few times when young and stupid," she said, ignoring me. "And almost got killed. Take some advice: go home."

"Not until we talk," I said flatly. "And we can't do that here. The explosion was loud enough to wake the dead. Someone is probably on their way to investigate right now!"

"I wouldn't worry too much about that," she said, slipping off little champagne-colored heels. "These cellars date back to the eleventh century. And when they built something back then, they intended it to last. The walls are seven feet thick."

I felt the muscles along my spine start to relax just as a barrel came bouncing at us out of the dark. Agnes slammed the door and scrambled back while I ducked behind another support column. I'd barely made it when a second explosion deafened me and a hail of former door parts exploded through the room, impaling everything in sight.

A jagged piece of iron from one of the hinges hit the floor beside me, burying itself into the stone an inch from my right foot. I jerked back and stared at it wide-eyed. "Why is it that everywhere I go, someone is shooting at me?" I demanded hysterically.

"Your winning personality?" Agnes offered. "And if you don't like it, you could always, oh, I don't know, leave?"

"I'm not going anywhere!"

Agnes didn't respond. I looked around the column to see her cautiously approaching what had been the door. Burning shards framed the opening in fire, and streamers of noxious fumes were swirling slowly outward. It looked like a portal to hell, but she nonetheless squatted to one side, peering into the darkness within.

"Who is the Guild?" I whispered, joining her despite my better judgment.

"An order of mages who play around with very dangerous spells. Unfortunately for us, once in a while they don't manage to blow themselves up."

"And that's a problem because. .?"

"Because they're time travelers."

She started forward, and I grabbed her arm. "Wait. You're going in there?"

"That's the job."

"The job sucks!"

"You're telling me." She threw off my hand and slipped echo across the threshold, her stocking-clad feet silent on the old stones.

"Agnes!" I hissed it after her, but there was no response. I stared into the dark for half a second, cursing softly, and then followed.

I'd closed the lantern's little door, but it must have gotten dented in the fall, and the sides didn't meet all the way. Thin beams of sepia light leaked out, gilding the stones around us and turning our shadows into hulking monsters. I stared into the darkness crowding the rest of the room and tried not to think about sharpshooters and easy targets.

When the attack came, the only warning was a flicker of red in the gloom. Agnes aimed for it, but before she could pull the trigger, a bloody snake of lightning flashed across the room and struck her shoulder. She spun around and collapsed against me with a choked cry.

I dropped the lantern and grabbed her and my gun. But I only managed to get a couple of shots off before her fingers closed over my wrist. "Not in here."

I didn't argue since I didn't have anything to use as a target anyway. I dragged her out of the puddle of light into the shadow of a nearby support column. She peered around the side, but unless her eyesight was a hell of a lot better than mine, she didn't see anything. I listened, but there was no sound except her ragged breathing.

"Maybe I hit him," I whispered.

"I'm not that lucky."

Her voice sounded strained, and something gleamed wetly on the shoulder of her dress. "You're hurt."

"My own damn fault." She peeled violet-printed chiffon away from a nasty-looking burn. "I loaned my ward to my heir for a training exercise right before she eloped with some loser. Naturally, she didn't bother to give it back first."

I bit my lip and didn't reply. The ward in question was a pentagram-shaped tattoo the size of a saucer that currently sat between my shoulder blades. It didn't guard against human weapons, but was pretty amazing when fending off magical assaults. My mother, who had been Agnes' heir before wisely running for the hills, had passed it on to me. But somehow I didn't think this was a great time to bring that up.

"Do you usually wear high heels to chase armed men around?" I asked instead.

She wiggled the toes of her now bare foot, making the ladder in one silk stocking creep up a little higher. "I was called away in the middle of a dinner party."

"You could have brought a bodyguard with you."

"Yes, that's all this fiasco needs! Another mage. Probably go off half cocked and blow up the whole complex, saving the Guild the trouble!"

"And maybe saving your life!"

She leaned her head wearily back against the column. "I can do that for myself."

I crossed my arms but said nothing. Her breathing was still heavy and her color wasn't good, but I was in no position to give a lecture. She wasn't the only one who had left a partner behind.

Pritkin hated my trips through time for the same reason I did—the conviction that, sooner or later, I was going to screw up something we couldn't fix. I'd decided to save myself some grief and just not mention this to him, but it was a decision I was starting to regret. He carried enough firepower for three people, if those people happened to be Rambo. He'd have come in pretty handy right about now.

After a minute, Agnes struggled back to her feet. She stood with one hand braced against the column, her head bowed, her forehead knotted in pain. "Can you make it back to your time?" I asked. "Because if not, I can—"

"I have a job to do," she repeated, straightening. Her slight shoulders squared. "We need more light."

"We need to get out of here!"

"Then go. Nobody's stopping you." I stared at her for a moment, really tempted, before cursing and scurrying back for the lantern. For a wonder, nobody shot at me.

It had a ring welded into the top, so I grabbed a long stick from one of the piles of firewood that crunched underfoot and hooked the light on the end of it. After opening the door as wide as it would go, I poked the contraption out into the room while remaining behind the column with Agnes. I'd been hoping to illuminate a crumpled body on the floor. Instead, the warm golden glow fell across dozens of casks and barrels.

Some of them were almost buried under the mounds of wood and coal that nearly filled the room. But a few were stacked nearby, as if the camouflage attempt had gotten to be too much work. Or maybe the problem was that these barrels were leaking.

The nearest one had a crack as large as my finger in the side. The floor around it was covered in tiny grains that sparkled in the light like black diamond dust. My hand shook as I realized what they were, and a couple sparks spilled from the open side of the lantern. I had time to think, Oh, shit, before flames leapt up from the floor and ran straight toward the heap of barrels.

I dove for Agnes and we hit the floor together as a wave of force swept over us. A roar of sound deafened me, fire bloomed behind me and a wash of heat flooded the air. Dead, I thought in a rush of nausea.

And then nothing.

After a stunned moment, I opened my eyes to see a room filled with what looked like red and gold glitter. It took me a second to recognize it as flaming bits of wood and powder thrown off by the explosion, frozen in the air like confetti on the Fourth of July. A small piece was resting beside my cheek and it was hot. I knocked it away, and it moved a few inches before stopping, hanging suspended and molten as a tiny sun.

"You know, you're a real pain in the ass," Agnes mumbled. I belatedly realized that I'd squashed her face against the floor.

"Sorry. I—"

"Get off me."

I rolled to the side and stopped, blinking. A couple feet away was a freeze-frame out of hell. A ball of fire hung in space, surrounded by burning bits of wood that had once formed the sides of a barrel. Sparks were everywhere, turning the dull old stones around us bloodred and highlighting the pissy look on Agnes' face.

"What happened?"

"What does it look like?" she snapped. "You almost blew us up!"

"You didn't tell me there was gunpowder in here!"

"There was gunpowder out there!" She waved an arm wildly in the direction of the other room. "And someone threw a barrel at us from in here! What the hell do you want, a diagram?"

"I want to know what's going on," I said heatedly. "All I know is that I followed you into a cellar—"

"Which you had no business doing."

"— and now some crazy man is trying to kill us!"

"At the rate we're going, he won't have to," Agnes said, staggering back to her feet. Her hair had come loose from its once neat chignon and floated down over her temples and cheeks. It moved delicately with her breath, giving away how fast her heart beat. She put a hand to her head. "I'm going to feel like hell tomorrow."

"You stopped time." I'd seen her do it once before; I'd even done it myself on one memorable occasion. Of course, in my case, it had been an accident.

She eyed the suspended fireball. "What gave it away?"

I decided to ignore that and retrieved my stick. I used it to push at the burning splinters. They were radiating outward from the blast in a concentric ring, like spores off hell's dandelion. They bent at my touch but didn't go out or fall to the floor. I stared at them for a moment, a strange echoing vertigo in my mind when I thought about the distance between this new life and everything I'd ever known.

"Look," Agnes said, pointing at the far wall. The mage stood pressed against the stones, caught midscream. "I told you we didn't get him."

As she spoke, she was starting to gather the wooden shards and bits of lit powder from the air. She looked pretty steady on her feet, but I knew from experience how much strain even a small hiccup in time could cause. "How long can you hold it?"

"Long enough if you help. And be careful—if we miss even one. ." She didn't have to finish the sentence.

I swatted the stray sparks like fireflies, knocking them to the ground and stomping on them before I realized that it wasn't doing any good. Time had stopped, meaning that I could jump up and down on the damn things all I wanted, but they weren't going to go out. I settled for gathering them into the tail of my T-shirt while Agnes dug into the barrels closest to the explosion. Flaming shards of wood had penetrated their sides, causing fire to boil up around their edges as the powder caught.

The embers I held were uncomfortably warm. I finally resorted to stripping off my T-shirt and using it as a net to trap them without burning myself. I made a dozen glowing piles in the empty outer room before I had them all. By then Agnes had dealt with the barrels, and we turned our attention to the big boy.

She poked the fireball with a stick, but it remained frozen in place, like the shadows on the ceiling and the clouds of smoke in the air. "I can handle that," I told her, taking the stick. To my surprise, she gave in without a fight. From the little I knew of her, I guessed that meant we were running out of time. "If you want something to do, you could tell me what's going on."

"You really don't know about the Guild?" she asked, watching me whack at the ball like an oversized piñata. It wasn't elegant, but it seemed to work. The exploded cask and its attached flames slowly began to move through the air.

"I don't know anything. That's my problem!"

"They're a bunch of utopians out to create a better world through time travel. Stop plagues, wars and famines before they start—that kind of thing."

"Doesn't sound so bad," I panted as the explosion moved in fits and starts into the outer room.

"Maybe you should sign up. Except they don't like women much. Might have something to do with the Pythias thwarting their plans for the last five hundred years. Send it up the stairs," she added as I stopped to get my breath.

I eyed the staircase without enthusiasm. "Why? The other one exploded in here and nothing happened."

"The other one was a lot smaller. This could bring down the ceiling on our heads."

I sighed and started thumping the fiery thing again. "And you might want to check out their manifesto," she continued as I battled my way upward. "Not all of us like the idea of living in a Stepford world where if we do anything the Guild doesn't like, they go back in time and change it. Repeat offenders are to be snuffed out of existence. Couples are to be denied the right to reproduce if their child is seen as a future threat to the Guild."

"Okay. That sounds a little less enticing," I admitted.

"And it goes on and on. They aren't big on free will. They don't care that one person's utopia is another person's hell," she said as we emerged into a long room.

It was covered wall to ceiling in biblical-themed murals. The light of the explosion brought the colors to life, glinting off gilt paint and causing the jewel-colored glass in the high, arched windows to shimmer. I blinked, staring around like a tourist until Agnes poked me in the back.

"That way." She pointed at a door I hadn't noticed. "And hurry. I can't hold things much longer."

I gave up hitting the cask and started pushing it instead. It had a weird, spongy feel in the center, I guess from the ignited but not-yet-burned gunpowder, which didn't make for great leverage. But I nonetheless managed to maneuver my bomb-on-a-stick through the long, narrow room and outside. Three- and four-story buildings of stone and wood hemmed in a courtyard. Frozen smoke belched from their chimney pots, reaching pale fingers toward a leaden sky.

It was bitterly cold and the air hit my face like a wet rag. It took me a moment to realize it was raining. Sheets of water hung suspended in the air like a beaded curtain, gleaming in the light we threw off. Heavy drops dangled like cabochon diamonds from the edge of rooftops, spangled low-hanging limbs and congealed half-in, half-out of puddles. It was strangely beautiful.

"The river," Agnes gasped, from cold or exhaustion. "That way." She pointed toward the right, where a line of scattered trees blocked the view.

Mud squelched under my feet as I started forward. I kept my head down, but it didn't help. Soon water ran down my forehead and dripped into my eyes, its movement the result of my own forward momentum. The rain wasn't falling on us; we were running into it as we hurried forward, leaving a path of clear air behind us like the wake of a ship.

To make the going even tougher, there was very little light. Only a few stars were visible in the cloud-covered sky, and while we shed a glow, it didn't extend far in any direction. Everything beyond our immediate vicinity was lost in shadow.

That was a problem because the place was a minefield of carts, wheelbarrows and junky lean-tos. I kept running into things and slipping on slick paving stones, which became worse after we left them behind for dirt. But Agnes turned to glare at me every time I slowed down, so I hurried after her.

We navigated across a more or less open area, around a rickety-looking fence and down a path to an iron railing. Below us was undoubtedly a river. I couldn't see much, but the smell was unmistakable: a mixture of rotting fish, sewage, mold and damp.

Agnes gave me a shove. "Get rid of it!"

I looked around. A mass of dark buildings clustered along the water's edge in either direction, just waiting to be firebombed. The only safe place for an explosion was over the water. But the stick was too short to push the fireball far enough to do any good, and climbing over the railing wouldn't help. A stone retaining wall started immediately on the other side, flowing straight down to the water's edge.

But I had to do something. The explosion had begun expanding again in super slow motion. Agnes was losing her grip on time.

I pulled off my T-shirt again and draped it around the fiery mass. "What are you doing?" she demanded.

"Improvising!"

The glowing mass lit up the thin cotton, and a few brown spots appeared. The shirt was on fire, but with time still in slow mo, I thought I might have a minute before it disintegrated. I grabbed both ends, creating a big slingshot, and spun around in a wide circle until I got up some momentum. Then I let go, sending the entire burning mass spinning away into the night.

It made it almost to mid-river, a bright ruby ball of fire against the black of the water, before splashing down. It went under, lighting up a school of fish as it slowly began to sink. Then Agnes gave a small sigh, time sped back up to normal and the underwater explosion threw a column of water twenty feet into the air.