Embrace the Night

Chapter 12

"Billy! I can't get it!" I looked at him desperately. "You have to do it."

He shook his head. "I'm too drained. It took everything I had just to roll it over to you!"

I made another grab and trapped the ball under my hands, but it was too slippery. I had the impression that its surface wouldn't provide much in the way of traction even if I wasn't bleeding all over it. "Damn it! If I had more time—"

Billy looked at me like I was crazy. "You're Pythia! You have all the time you want!"

"I can't shift! I've tried." It was probably the pain, but I couldn't see past it. Maybe that was one of the things training taught, how to concentrate when your brain was fuzzy from blood loss and your hand felt like it was going to fall off and you had absolutely no time to get it wrong. I would have really, really liked to have had that lesson.

But I hadn't, so I had to go with what I knew. I stopped plucking uselessly at the sphere and looked at Billy. "Take a draw."

"Now?!"

"Damn it, Billy. Yes, now! Get your strength back and throw this thing!"

Billy didn't waste any time. He slipped inside my skin before I'd finished talking, and I felt the energy drain immediately. Unlike normal, it hurt. Maybe because I didn't have much left to give, maybe because Billy had to speed up the process, maybe because everything already hurt anyway. But whatever the reason, within seconds my heart was hammering, my hands were shaking and I could actually sense my life flowing out of me. My brain was stuck on a hamster wheel, bad idea bad idea bad idea bad idea, but there was nothing I could do; I didn't have the strength to stop it. I heard someone sigh, a long whistling release of breath, and then I was falling a very long way.

I landed on the asphalt in time to see Billy scoop up the ball. He almost lost it once, it almost slipped right through his still mostly transparent hand, but he caught it at the last second. The throw looked a lot like something I'd have done, a wobbly underhand that didn't land even close to dead center. It exploded a yard or so in front of the mages with a barely audible poof and a small cloud of hazy pink, as if a powder-filled balloon had been dropped onto concrete. The air seemed to ripple slightly, but the mages showed no discernible effects.

"It's a damn dud!" Billy cursed just as the first of the newcomers reached Mircea. He turned, his elbow connecting with the mage's face, and I had time to wonder why the man's shields weren't up, why they hadn't stopped the attack. Then it was as if his head just exploded, like instead of a man, Mircea had hit a face made of nothing more than colored sand.

"Lot's Wife," Billy said, sounding impressed. "Bad stuff, dark magic." I wondered if I should worry that his tone was approving.

The other mages had stopped, frozen in various stages of movement. One had been running, caught with a single leg raised, and his own momentum toppled him over. He exploded against the asphalt and Mircea gave a purely vicious smile. He walked to the next human statue, a young man with sandy blond hair, and gave him the barest push with the flat of his hand. The mage toppled backwards into another, and they both hit the ground with a bang, dissolving into a cloud of multicolored dust. It so mixed them up that it was impossible to tell where one body started and the other ended.

Mircea went on to the last while I stared at the flesh-colored sand pouring out of a scuffed leather tennis shoe. A gust of wind blew across the lot, pushing little grains of the substance against the cheek I couldn't seem to lift off the asphalt. They didn't feel like sand; they didn't feel like much of anything at all.

I heard the thud as another body hit the ground, felt the billow of wind as it broke into crumbly pieces, but I couldn't focus on it. Shock, I thought vaguely. I knew what I technically should be feeling, but I wasn't sure I was actually feeling it. My whole body hurt, but the pain seemed to reach me only through a buzzing, staticky distance.

I stared at the pile of human remains and wondered what the spell did. Billy was saying something. Maybe he was trying to tell me, only I couldn't understand him. Maybe it sucked all the water out, I thought vaguely. Was that what was left of a person with the moisture mostly gone? A pile of crumbly, chemical-smelling stuff that looked like a human, but couldn't be because people didn't turn into powder when you touched them? That was just wrong, not possible.

Like me shooting a man through the heart.

Someone knelt beside me and cut off the plastic bracelet. I could see flashes of white through the bloody meat of my wrist, but it didn't look like a vein had been hit. It felt bad, though. I was hauled into someone's arms, my back against a warm chest that was breathing too quickly, or maybe that was me. I tried to slow it down but nothing happened, so I decided it wasn't me after all.

Strong hands stroked through my hair, gently separating the tangled strands for a moment. Then a whisper of breath was at my ear. "Dulceata? I can heal this, but it would be better if we went to MAGIC. There are healers there with more skill than I possess."

Mircea, I thought. He was the one smelling like smoke and blood and sweat. That seemed odd; I always associated him with expensive cologne. I looked down and there were black smears and fingerprints on my skin where he had touched me. That seemed odd, too, although I couldn't think why.

"Cass, we gotta get out of here. He can't take you back to MAGIC." Billy hovered in front of my face, and that was all right. Because he looked the same as always.

"I can't go back to MAGIC," I said, parroting Billy's words, and my voice sounded almost normal. Weird.

"It is a bad break, dulceata? and there are many bones in the wrist. I may not be able to repair all of them perfectly."

I looked up into his face. It was dirty and sweat-soaked, and there was a fading pattern of diamond shapes all over his left cheek. But new skin was already pushing the crisped away as I watched, leaving it to blow off like so much ash in the wind. And his eyes were the same, bright with intelligence, soft with concern, full of understanding, beautiful. He was okay. Mircea was going to be okay. Relief was so sharp that, for a second, it hurt more than my wrist.

I wanted to say something, but there was too much raw emotion burning too close to the surface. I didn't think you were supposed to say what I was thinking, anyway: that, even if my endgame was short, I liked the idea that his wasn't. It was sort of a future by proxy, and while it wasn't quite what I'd hoped for, it was good enough. It felt good enough. So I just looked at him instead, unblinking, until I couldn't see more than a blur of pallor and darkness, the colors all bleeding into each other for some reason.

"I will heal it here," Mircea said harshly, cradling my wrist in one large hand.

He looked strange, feral and too tightly controlled, with something brimming right under the surface, rage or frustration or both. The others could see it too, because the vamps were all trying to act submissive and the pixie was gazing at him with big worried eyes. Françoise was sitting on the ground next to us, but she looked hesitant, like she had no idea what to say. It occurred to me to wonder what they were all doing here, but then Mircea did something that made warmth spread up my arm, and the sudden lack of pain made me catch my breath in wonder.

I looked down to see my wound closing and odd little shiftings taking place under the skin. Bones realigning, I thought vaguely, and that part wasn't so pleasant, but it still didn't hurt and suddenly I could even think a little better. I could feel my blood shoving roughly through my veins, and my skin felt tight and flushed, but there was no lethargy, no pain.

Mircea was biting his lip as he followed the lines of tendon and muscle in my hand, reshaping them with his finger as if it were a scalpel. It was a light sensation. He barely brushed my hand, but I shuddered. A touch that simple shouldn't be so powerful.

Mircea didn't notice. His eyes were wide open and brighter than I'd ever seen them, the rush from combat still humming behind them like electricity. He was utterly concentrated and strangely young-looking, and when he finally raised his head to tell me he was through, I grabbed him by the shirt and kissed him, hard.

It wasn't a great effort. I got the angle a little off and our teeth clicked together and we both tasted like adrenaline. I didn't care. My fists clenched in his shirt, crushing the heavy silk, and I couldn't seem to make them let go. And I needed them to because I couldn't hit him until they did and I really, really wanted to hit him. I was furious suddenly, completely livid. Because he'd almost died, damn it, and I hadn't been able to do anything, and he'd almost died.

Mircea didn't object, didn't try to pull away; instead he drew me closer, close enough to hear his heart beat, close enough to feel him breathe. He took charge of the kiss, slowing it down, until it was all warmth and sweetness and inevitability. His hands glided up my back and into my hair, combing through my curls and making me shiver. I'd never known that anyone could kiss in English, kiss in apologies, but apparently he could. I wasn't sure what he was apologizing for, but it felt right. Like he should be sorry for scaring me like that.

He didn't kiss fair, and he didn't kiss all at once; he kept giving it up and taking it away until I thought I'd die of frustration. I felt like screaming, but didn't have the breath to waste, and when I thought I would go completely insane he finally made a quiet, hungry sound and met me in the middle. And it was suddenly all panting, groaning need rising between us like steam.

I could feel the geis react, faint tremors humming just beneath the skin, symptoms of an imminent explosion. And I didn't care. I had somehow never noticed the tensile strength of his body, of those hands, lean and strong and achingly gentle. A flash of what it would feel like, pressed down beneath his weight, sent heat spiraling through me. I wanted that. Wanted everything.

And then he broke away, looking shocked and a little wild, like he hadn't during the fight, when it would have made sense. I looked at him, with the rumpled hair and the dirty face, and wanted to kiss him again. Not because of a compulsion, but because he already tasted familiar, because I wanted more of the warmth that seemed to bubble up through my skin whenever we touched.

But I couldn't. This Mircea was two weeks behind the times, so to speak. For him, the geis had just woken up. But the more contact we had, the faster it was going to grow. Putting my Mircea through even more hell.

I jerked away, and he let me go. But his puzzled gaze shifted from me to Françoise and Radella. "Is there something you wish to tell me, dulceata??"

I glanced at Françoise, but she gave me one of those French shrugs that I've never been able to interpret. Great. I looked back at Mircea and swallowed. "I don't feel well," I told him honestly. "Can we talk a little later?"

After an almost imperceptible pause, Mircea nodded. He stood up, still staring at me while issuing orders, sending the vamps who had shown up far too late scurrying around like frightened ants. I sat on the ground and watched them, wondering what they were doing until I saw that one of them had some kind of industrial vacuum. He started sucking up the remains of the mages who'd been hit by the Lot's Wife spell. Another followed him, tossing shoes and other non-sand-like bits into a large-size garbage bag.

I no longer hurt anywhere, but I still felt exhausted and slightly removed from everything. Mircea must have hit me with a suggestion, the vamp equivalent of an all-night bender. I didn't think it would be a good idea to try to shift again just yet.

Another vamp had started breaking apart the two withered corpses. They were so old that their bones snapped easily, brittle like dried sticks. They made a crunching sound as he shoved them into a garbage bag. I watched them, the shiny gloss of the suggestion dulling my reaction. I knew they must have been killed by a spell meant for me, but at the moment it didn't seem all that important. The vamp managed to get both of them into one bag. It looked like he'd brought the good kind, because it stretched but didn't break.

Another vamp suddenly ran screaming across the parking lot. He'd managed to set himself on fire trying to extinguish the Pinto. Mircea looked disgusted, but he moved off to help. He'd have probably done as much even if the guy hadn't belonged to him. He was a senator, and had to uphold the Senate's unofficial motto: always clean up your mess.

I felt a slight twitch of pain in my wrist, the kind that said the suggestion might be weakening and maybe I should think about finding some aspirin. But I didn't move. I slumped there watching the stuff that never makes it into movies because it's not exciting. It's just people doing a job. After the action comes the fire extinguishing and the street sweeping and the explaining to families that somebody isn't coming home. Only that last wouldn't happen here. No one knew who the dark mages were or where to find them. If the man I'd killed had a family, they wouldn't know anything was wrong until he just never came back.

The thought hit like a narrow, very sharp knife, slid right between the ribs. All the pieces of myself that I didn't talk about, didn't think about, came rushing back. And for a minute, I saw another scene.

Mac, a friend of Pritkin's and briefly mine, had followed me into Faerie and died there to protect me. I still had nightmares about it, my mind showing me surreal images of his hands pressed to the trunk of a tree, the bark growing liquid and pushing up between his fingers. It flowed over his wrists, paralyzing him as it surged up his body until skin, hair, everything, was covered with the same monotonous, uniform gray. Like a shroud. I usually woke up in a sweat, my heart pounding, when it covered his face.

When there was nothing human left.

It hadn't happened quite like that, but I couldn't complain about my brain's editing process; the reality had been worse. I was sick of being the person who got people killed. I'd sworn it wasn't going to happen anymore, and yet here I was, not just the reason for it but the actual instrument. A man was dead tonight, and I'd done it. I'd killed him.

My mind was horrified, sickened, disbelieving. But my emotions appeared to be taking a break. I wasn't trembling, wasn't ill, wasn't, seemingly, anything. The most I felt was kind of numb. Just numb. Despite the fact that the mage hadn't been my only casualty.

Billy might have thrown the Lot's Wife, but I'd donated the energy that made it possible. At the very least, that made part of the responsibility mine. But those deaths didn't seem as real, somehow. I'd seen magic all my life, but it wasn't the same. Vampires were magical creatures, but the ones at Tony's had mostly used speed, strength and a lot of human weapons to kill. Some of what they did could be pretty spectacular, not to mention gruesome, but at least it made sense. Unlike an innocuous little ball that could drain five people of life in a matter of seconds. The gunshot, though, was something else. I'd seen the expression on the man's face, watched the blood well up between his fingers from a wound I had caused. No. There was no denying that one.

And beyond the guilt and the pain and who knew what else I was going to feel when Mircea's comforting numbness faded, I'd also probably completely screwed up the timeline. A lot of people were dead who weren't supposed to be. Or were they?

It was really hard to think, and, ironically enough, time-travel paradoxes aren't my best thing. But there were a few oddities I was starting to notice. Like, if this wasn't how things were meant to play out, why hadn't I met Mircea the last time I was here? And why had I seen only two dark mages that night instead of the dozen or so who'd apparently been hanging around? If Mircea and I hadn't fought them off before, who had? Because I hadn't seen anyone else volunteering.

"Cassie. We should go," Françoise said gently.

I looked at her blearily. She appeared to be bouncing up and down without actually lifting off the ground, and all her edges were blurry. I decided that was probably me. "How did it go?"

She grimaced. "Don't you remember?"

I thought back for a minute, to my experiences here two weeks ago. "You were captured. I remember freeing you, but that's about it." I hadn't really wanted to know what a bunch of witches and a pixie were doing locked up in one of Dante's lower levels. I'd run across them while here on other business and helped them get away, but I hadn't asked a lot of questions. "I'm a little fuzzy on details," I admitted.

"Zee mages, zey thought I was one of zee slaves, who 'ad escaped," Françoise explained. "Zey locked me up, and when Radella tried to 'elp me, zey captured her as well."

"Did you get it?"

She nodded gravely. "I was in the second group. I over'eard the spell when the others were sent. I was to go next, but zen ze news came that you were 'ere—ze other you," she explained helpfully. I nodded. "Zey closed ze portal and left us, because everyone was told to drop what zey were doing and find you."

Yeah, I bet. Tony had wanted me pretty bad. I suppose his goons thought they could finish the slave run later. I was suddenly viciously glad that they'd been denied that much, at least.

"I should never 'ave left you," Françoise said mournfully.

"I want to see the damn rune before I go anywhere else with you people," the pixie put in, crossing her tiny arms.

"Why?"

"Because you're all completely insane!" Radella snapped. Her eyes were on the vamps, who were kneeling beside the diamond pattern on the asphalt, debating whether it was worth trying to scrape anything out of the cracks, or if a new paving job would be easier.

"Because I could 'ave 'elped you," Françoise said, looking at me like she wondered if maybe I'd gotten hit in the head. Which I had, as my throbbing jaw was busy reminding me. I'd forgotten about that until just now. Oh, yeah. That suggestion was going south pretty fast.

"It wouldn't have mattered," I told her. "And you might have gotten killed."

"Better zan you!"

I shook my head, but stopped because it made it ache worse. "Since when is my life worth more than yours?"

"Since you became Pythia!"

From halfway across the lot, Mircea's head whipped around. I repressed a sigh. Damn vampire hearing.

"Yeah. That's kind of the point," I said, grabbing her hand. Françoise looked confused, but I didn't stop to explain that the Pythia is supposed to be the one protecting other people, not needing it herself. Mircea was striding toward us, looking determined, and I was not up to a verbal fencing match with him tonight. Hell, I lost those even when my brain didn't feel like it was about to throb out of my skull. "Hold on," I said, really hoping I could manage one more shift before I passed out.