Embrace the Night

Chapter 25

Dante's was as quiet as it ever got when I returned to my time after dropping Mircea at his. So nobody saw me collapse against a wall. Goddamn, I really needed to stop shifting for a while. It felt like my head was about to explode. The throbbing affected even my vision: for a few moments, the whole corridor looked like the inside of a heart—red and pulsating.

But I'd ended up where I needed to be, in the hallway leading to the research room. And Nick was there, his nose stuck in a book as usual, looking as scholarly as I really hoped he was. "Cassie!" He stood up abruptly, looking alarmed, and it occurred to me that maybe I should have gone for a quick shower first. But that could wait; the Codex couldn't.

Limestone dust sifted out of my hair onto the table as I spread out the parchment sheets, pushing books off everywhere in the process. "Can you read this?" I demanded, ignoring Nick's squawks. "It's important!"

He settled down after a moment, scholarly curiosity taking over, and quickly scanned a few lines. "Welsh," he mused, "an especially antiquated, if not to say peculiar, variety."

"But can you read it?"

"Oh, yes, I think so. In time. It isn't one of my chief languages, you know, but I have had some—"

"I need it now, Nick." I gestured at the scattered sheets. "Somewhere in there is the spell to lift the geis, and it would be extra nice to get it before Mircea goes completely around the bend." Or before it managed to disappear.

Nick suddenly stilled, not moving, not even breathing, and for a second it was creepily like what a vamp could do. "This" — he stopped and swallowed—“this is the Codex, isn't it? You found it."

"Yeah, only it doesn't do me much good since I can't read it." He just sat there, so I nudged him with a toe. "Now, Nick."

"Right, right." He came back to life with a vengeance, sifting through the pages rapidly, looking for the right spell. "This may take a while," he muttered. "There are hundreds of spells here and I don't see an index…oh, wait."

"You found one?"

"Better." His bangs flopped in his eyes and he pushed them impatiently back. "I may have found the spell."

"You're serious?" I stared at him, scarcely daring to hope. The damn geis had thwarted me at every turn for weeks; it was almost impossible to believe that I might be free of it in a few minutes.

"This may take some time, Cassie. You can, uh, go get changed if you want."

Yes, I definitely needed to freshen up. My hands were covered in small bruises, my nails were cracked and there was dirt pressed into the grooves of my palms. My hair was a frazzled mess and I was covered in dust from the brief spelunking trip. But Nick was just going to have to deal with me in all my witchy glory, because no way was the Codex leaving my sight. No freaking way.

He got a good look at my expression and gave up, going back to translating duty. I sat down opposite him and peered into the ubiquitous little china pot. But only a vague floral scent remained. I put a call in to the kitchens for some coffee, figuring both of us could use it, and concentrated on not falling asleep until it got there.

"How much do you know about the Circle, Cassie?" Nick asked suddenly.

I yawned. "Other than that they want to kill me? Not a lot."

"Yes, I am aware that you have had your differences in the past."

"And present. Is there a point, Nick?" I wanted translation, not conversation.

"Well, yes, actually. It's just that, I thought you should know—you're not alone. There are many of us who have been growing dissatisfied with the Circle for some time. Only we don't all agree about the remedy. Some of us see the whole system as the problem, not simply the group in power at the moment. We view the war as a chance to change old ideas, to remake it, in fact, into something closer to the type of government the vampires have. Then there wouldn't be little groups of megalomaniacs making crucial mistakes for everyone."

Actually I thought that pretty much summed up the Senate. "You mean, with one person in charge?"

"Not necessarily. Just a more centralized authority, with better oversight of everyone's activities and more checks and balances on their behavior."

"There aren't a lot of checks and balances on the Senate," I pointed out. "None, in fact."

"Yet it works! Instead of elections turning into popularity contests, you have the best people appointed for each position by a concerned, capable leader."

"I don't think I'd describe the Consul quite that way," I said dryly. "She got her position by being the strongest and the craftiest, full stop."

"But she rules well. People respect her."

"People fear her!"

"All strong leaders are feared by the ignorant," Nick commented, patently not listening to a word I said. "We could learn a great deal from the vampires, if prejudice did not stand in the way."

I laughed; I just couldn't help it. The mages seemed to have a seriously warped view of the vamps. Pritkin saw them as evil incarnate, while Nick was determined to set them on a pedestal. He didn't look too pleased at my amusement, though, so I tried to explain while he looked up a particularly obscure word.

"The vamp system works because of the bonds that force subordinate vampires to do the will of their masters and require masters to answer for the infractions of their followers. The mages don't have that kind of setup. And you can't expect people to—"

"Perhaps if we did, we could coordinate our efforts and stamp out the dark once and for all!" he interrupted. "As it is, they stay one step ahead of us merely by crossing into another coven's territory, and by the time we get through all the debates and favors and bribes and finally get the needed permission to go after them, they're gone again!"

He was looking pretty annoyed, with flushed cheeks under all those freckles. I'd have changed the subject, but something was bugging me. "I thought the Circle was the central authority. Isn't it in charge of the whole magical community?"

"No," he snapped. "That's the problem. What we have now is sort of an umbrella organization. Not every coven worldwide belongs to it—we're especially spotty in Asia—and even those who are members joined at different times and with different agreements."

"I didn't know that." The vamps always talked about the Circle like it was synonymous with mages in general. Of course, in this country it might be. I'd never thought about it being different anywhere else.

"It's a total hodgepodge!" Nick said heatedly. "Some covens don't allow searches of their territory at all and others only after receiving definite proof that questionable activity is going on. And, of course, sometimes we don't have proof, just a gut feeling or a tip from someone they don't recognize as a legitimate source. And explaining that our sources wouldn't know the dark well enough to have information if they were legit gets us nowhere nine times out of ten. It would be so much easier if we all answered to one authority."

"A dictatorship, in other words." Pritkin had come into the room without my hearing him. I jumped, trying to stand up and whirl around at the same time, and almost ended up on the floor. He caught me, and I tore away as soon as I could find my feet, panting a little, glaring a lot. "I see you made it back safely."

"It doesn't have to be anything of the kind," Nick argued, apparently not realizing that no one was listening to him anymore.

Pritkin looked like he'd just come from a bath; his hair—short and pale blond again—was plastered down in wet strands that disturbed me for some reason I couldn't quite define. Maybe because it drew attention to his face, like the older, longer version had. Maybe because it made me remember the last time I'd seen it wet, slick with sweat and glistening.

God, I hated him!

"You!" I couldn't even talk, I had so many things I wanted to say. "You knew!" It was the only thing I could get out, the only words that didn't threaten to choke me.

"No, I didn't. At the time, I merely thought you were a competent witch who was attempting to rob me."

"Don't lie! You saw me shift!"

"I thought you'd clouded my mind, you or the vampire. My defenses were down, my shields almost exhausted. It seemed a reasonable conclusion."

"And when we met again? You didn't recognize me?"

"After so long, no. Not immediately. I had wondered a few times, but I didn't know. Not until I saw the dress." He looked over the tattered remains. "It was memorable."

"More than me, it would seem," I said tightly.

"Nick, if you could give us a moment?"

"But I'm right in the middle of…" He saw the looks we turned on him and gulped. "Or—or I could go see what's keeping that coffee," he squeaked, and headed out the door. He tried to take the page he was working on with him, but I held out a hand and he reluctantly handed it over.

"You found it, then." Pritkin's voice held no emotion whatsoever. He'd learned a lot in two hundred years.

"And I'm keeping it."

"I'm afraid I can't allow that, Cassie."

I laughed, and even to me, it sounded bitter. "Oh, it's Cassie, now, is it? So, let me make sure I have it straight. It's Ms. Palmer when you're pretending to be loyal, and Cassie when you're stabbing me in the back. Good to know."

Pritkin flinched slightly, but he never dropped his gaze. "You don't understand what's at stake."

"And that would be why, I wonder? Because nobody ever tells me anything?" That last was pretty much a scream, but I didn't care. I'd known that seeing him again would be hard, I just hadn't known how hard. I'd been right before. Burying emotions was a hell of a lot better than experiencing them, especially when they felt like this.

"I will tell you what you want to know, if you will promise to hear me out before shifting. If you thought you were a target before, it is nothing to what you will be with that thing in your possession. It must be destroyed!"

I couldn't have shifted to save my life; I was having a hard time even standing up. But Pritkin didn't know that. It gave me an advantage, a lever to finally pry some answers out of him. But for the life of me, I couldn't work up much enthusiasm about it.

"I've spent my whole life playing games," I told him quietly. "It's the vamp's favorite pastime. A whisper here, a wink there, a clue that may or may not go anywhere and may or may not have been dropped on purpose. I'm tired of games. I just want someone to tell me the truth. Haven't I earned that much yet?"

Pritkin closed his eyes briefly, and swallowed, a brief bob of his Adam's apple up and down. I searched his still-youthful face, trying to peer behind the mask. To see a thousand years of experience. But there was nothing.

I'd grown up around creatures who never showed their age, at least not physically. But you could always tell the older ones, and not just by the aura of power they gave off. There was a gravity to them, like air took on extra weight when they entered a room. As if everything about them was somehow more: deeper, brighter, richer.

He opened his eyes, but I didn't look away. I scrutinized him, trying to keep the Consul in mind, the way she felt, the way she drew all eyes without seemingly doing a thing. I watched a faint blush spread across his cheekbones as I continued to inspect him, and mentally shook my head. No. No way was he that old.

Which left the sojourn in Hell. He'd said that much of his younger years had been spent there, but also that he'd just got back in 1793. Which was crazy. If he'd disappeared from history because he had, in fact, disappeared from earth, then he'd left in the early Middle Ages. And if he'd only just returned…a thousand years on earth would scar a person; what would a millennium in the demon realms do?

How would it be, I wondered, to be snatched into a world you knew nothing about, where your only use was as a trophy? Some kind of freakish experiment for your father to show off? And what had Pritkin done to get thrown out anyway? How exactly did someone get tossed out of Hell?

"Rosier tried to kill you so that you couldn't do what you have just done—retrieve the Codex and with it a spell known as the Ephesian Letters," he finally said.

Maybe it was because I was tired, or under the strain of being near Pritkin and not being able to touch him, to hit him, to run my hands through his hair and make it stand up, damn it, but I was having a hard time following. "What?"

"They were words carved into the ancient Temple of Artemis at Ephesus—"

"Nick told me what the Ephesian Letters are," I said impatiently. "Why does anyone care about an old spell?"

"Because of what it can do. What, in fact, it did do, thousands of years ago." Pritkin sat on the edge of the table. "What it will continue to do, if no one ever casts the counterspell that I foolishly wrote down. Merlin the wise, indeed."

"Then I was right. You are Merlin." I found it hard to take in, despite all the evidence. Pritkin was just…Pritkin. Not some legend out of another time.

"Myrddin, in fact, not that I used the name for long. A French poet thought it sounded obscene and changed it. Fair enough; he changed everything else."

"Then the stories aren't true? There was no Camelot, or Lancelot or Arthur—"

"Oh, there was an Arthur, after a fashion. And I can see his face, if he read half the things written about him! That rumor about his sister alone—he'd have cut out someone's heart for that one." He thought for a moment. "Or she would. Frightening woman."

"So you're what, like a thousand years old?" I still didn't believe it.

"Not…precisely. I was born in the sixth century, but did not manage to live even one normal life span before Rosier came to claim me. And time in the demon realms runs differently from here, much like in Faerie. Only more so. I was there, as far as I can tell, barely a human decade. But when I returned" — he shook his head, and there was still wonder on his face—“the world had changed."

"When I met you in Paris, you told me that you'd only just come back. Was that when you returned?"

"More or less. I had been back a few years by then, enough to learn my way around to some degree, but not enough to keep from being pickpocketed by a spell that hadn't even been invented in my day but was old hat in the eighteenth century."

"By Manassier's grandfather."

"Yes. He and an associate were living in that nebulous world betwixt and between. The Circle had rejected them for unbecoming conduct—and, I suspect, gross incompetence—but they didn't have any skills wanted by the dark. They made a precarious living relieving naive country bumpkins of their worldly possessions and, whenever possible, draining them of their magic. They couldn't get past my shields to make the latter possible, but they did manage to make off with the Codex."

"And that mysterious spell you were going to tell me about."

Pritkin propped his head on one hand, a tired gesture I could never remember seeing before. "I have made many mistakes in life, but the worst of all had to be writing down that blasted spell."

"But Nick said it was never written down. That it was lost after the temple burned and the priests all died."

"One survived and, in extreme old age, left exactly one copy. I don't know whether he was senile, or merely unwilling to let his most precious secret die with him. Perhaps he'd forgotten what it does; maybe he never knew. I only know that I found his scribbled ramblings in an old temple in Angelsey. How they got there." He shrugged. "Possibly a Roman legionary picked them up as a curiosity in the East before being reassigned. I never knew."

"How did you find it?"

"Because I was searching for it. Not that spell specifically but anything old that might have survived. I didn't have high hopes—the place had been burnt by the Romans during their Druid-killing sprees, and what was left was plundered by the Saxons a few centuries later. But no one had thought an old scroll to be of much use, especially one in a language none of them could read, and it somehow survived. Languages have always been a specialty of mine. And I pounced on it."

"For what?"

"For curiosity partly. For the rest…I was so proud of myself, thought I'd found my life's work, before I understood how long that life might be. It seemed an utter good—cataloging and preserving the old knowledge at a time in which the whole world seemed to be coming down around our ears. I had no way of knowing that what I recorded might well bring that to pass much more efficiently than the damn Saxons ever could!"

"But what does it do?" I thought I was going to go crazy if he didn't just tell me.

"The Ephesian Letters is a spell and a counterspell in one, depending on voice, inflection and which way it is read. One way closes a door; the other opens it."

"What door?"

"The door between worlds. Rosier fears that if the spell is found, someone might reverse it, opening a gateway to rivals his kind have not had to face in—" He had been sorting through the pile of pages at his elbow and had picked one out of the group. It must have been the translation Nick was working on, unless ancient Ephesian priests used lined notebook paper. His breath caught. "What is this?"

I glanced at it. "Nick was translating the counterspell for me, for the geis."

"This isn't the counterspell," Pritkin said, his face draining of color as I watched. I glanced down at the paper, but it didn't make much sense.

ASKION: Shadowless ones. Where gods once ruled,

KATASKION: Shadowy. Humans now do.

LIX: Earth. Earth is blocked

TETRAX: Time. To Time's Guardian.

DAMNAMENEUS: Sun overpowered. With this, the sun is overpowered.

AISION: True Voice. And the oracle speaks with a true voice.

Pritkin grabbed me by the arms. "Take us back, quickly!"

"Back where?"

"To the moment Nick got up to leave! I have to catch him!"

"Why, what did he—"

"There's no time to explain. Just do it!"

I pushed a limp strand of hair out of my eyes and tried to focus. God, I was so tired. "I can't shift right now. Maybe tomorrow—"

Pritkin swore. "If I don't find him, there won't be a tomorrow!" And he was gone. I didn't even see him leave, just the door slamming shut behind him.