Embrace the Night

Chapter 27

I screamed, too exhausted to even pretend I wasn't terrified. The damn knights remained inert, incapable of detecting the creatures who were about to kill me. But a plume of fire, the strength of maybe a couple dozen flamethrowers, shot out of the other end of the corridor.

Maybe Casanova had installed some new security measure; I didn't know. But whatever it was, it was effective. The cloud screamed with the sound of a hundred voices, and writhed madly in the air, a twisting, burning black mass that reminded me of the maggots working on Saleh's headless body.

The glare of the flames glinting off the armor shed more light on the scene, although I might have been happier in the dark. Rosier dropped from the ceiling to land in the middle of the corridor with a faint plopping sound. Then something jumped me from behind, sinking what felt like a rack of small knives into my back.

I shrieked and staggered back, hitting the wall and driving the claws in that much farther. I lurched back into the room and let my gaseous knives loose, but they took one look at the larger fight going on a few yards away and deserted me. I looked around frantically, but although there were about a hundred weapons of various kinds in the knights' hands I didn't see any that would help dislodge something that high on my back that I couldn't even see.

Another of the things latched on to my left arm, piercing deep enough to hit bone, while another attached itself to my right thigh. I went down to my knees, blinded by pain and shock, only to realize that the things weren't continuing the attack. Instead, they forced me onto my back, pinning me down, waiting. I raised my head a little to look between my feet, and saw why.

Rosier was crawling my way, dragging himself forward with those spindly arms, his rudimentary legs trailing behind. His face turned unerringly toward me, despite the empty eye sockets, and over the screeching of the burning demons I could hear the soft sound of scales whispering over the floor. He looked harmless, a vague, unfinished creature with a toothless mouth and small, barely formed claws. But I so didn't want him touching me.

He flowed bonelessly over my feet and onto my legs, long, too flexible fingers curling around my calves, my knees, my thighs as he pulled himself along the length of my body. And already I could feel a faint echo of that horrible, draining sensation. He was beginning to feed.

Despite my every muscle singing with tension, I couldn't even turn over to try to dislodge him. My arms were pinned by the weight of his servants and my strength was steadily flowing out, what little remained of it. Curled on the floor at my sides, my hands lay still and useless.

He settled heavily onto my stomach, his little claws ripping at the seams of my skirt, pulling it apart to expose the unprotected flesh of my belly. That obscene mouth opened and I could see right inside it, right into the corpse-like hue of his gullet. He licked a clammy line across my skin. "You taste sweet."

"Get off," I said thickly.

He couldn't have grinned. But he gave that impression anyway as he pinned me with that blind gaze. "Oh, I intend to."

I felt a claw bite into my side, sinking deep. And without words, without him opening that obscene mouth again, I knew what he planned to do. He was going to slit me like he had the skirt, opening me up so he could feed on something more substantial than mere power. He planned to eat me alive.

A feeling—not quite pain, more like raw nerve endings firing on automatic—crackled upward from my stomach to my mouth. I swallowed it down, refusing to scream again. But my eyes rolled up into my head as I felt that claw start to move through my flesh.

He withdrew it for a moment, to lick daintily at his red-stained skin, letting me watch as drops of my blood ran down his arm. One fell off his elbow onto my lower stomach, and he paused to lick it up, his tongue slick and cold against my skin. Then he inserted the claw again, and ripped me open a little wider.

He was deliberately going slowly, splitting flesh and skin a centimeter at a time, pausing every few seconds to lick the jagged edges of the wound, sending violent, sickened shudders through me. He wanted me to know that this was going to be a very long process. And I suddenly understood: he'd wanted the others to go after the kids so he could afford to take his time.

And he would have, except for the crazed djinn with the machete. "Saleh!" I was so happy to see him I cried.

"Hey, sweetheart." He did a double take. "You look rough." The machete swung, slicing off a rudimentary arm and knocking Rosier into the side wall, where he landed with a sickening crunch.

"It's been one of those days," I gasped, trying to strain my neck to see how much damage Rosier had done. It felt like a lot. It felt like too much.

"Tell me about it," Saleh said. "You wouldn't believe the trouble I had tracking this guy down." He made another swing but missed. "Stand still, damn you!" he ordered, slashing at the demon. But the creature moved unbelievably fast, even without those skeletal legs, and dodged enough blows to keep himself in one piece.

Saleh might have found his prey, but it looked like he lacked the power to take his revenge. Even though Rosier didn't seem nearly as interested in preserving his life as he did in ending mine. And Billy was right: there was no way the cavalry was going to get here in time.

Saleh did manage to hack the thing off my left arm in passing, although I would have preferred him to free the right, given the choice. But I wasn't about to argue. I got a grip on one of the nearby window shards, one that looked a lot like a claw itself, red and glittering, tapering from a wedge base to a needle-fine spike. Pritkin had said that Rosier had to lower his defenses to feed. It looked like I was going to get a chance to test the theory.

Rosier jumped for me, a misshapen white blur against the dark, landing with enough force to knock the wind out of me. I couldn't breathe, couldn't see, but I could feel. Before the lethargy started again, before he could render me completely helpless, I reached out for the slick surface of his skin and drove the shard as deep as I could into his side.

He screamed, but there was little blood, little bodily fluid of any kind. And the spongy flesh closed up around the wound almost immediately. So I plunged the shard in again and this time I left it, while feeling around for others. Some were too blunt to use, but here was a nice blue one with a jagged edge; there a deep green with a fissure making it into a double blade; and over there, almost at the end of my reach, was a pearly white, so cracked and splintered along the edge that it was almost serrated—and cut about as well, too.

One of the black things was trying to grab my free arm, while its master screamed and thrashed about and tried to eject multiple knives all at once. "You will pay for that," he told me, blood dripping from his mouth onto my stomach, mingling with my own.

"Maybe, but not today," I gasped, as Saleh rose up behind him. I didn't even have time to flinch before the wide blade took off Rosier's head.

Blood spurted out then, a river of it, as if something much larger than the tiny body slumped across me had been killed. I lay in a pool of it as the whirlwind started up again, its sound almost immediately overshadowed by the familiar scream of air that signaled a ley-line fissure. Or, in this case, a portal.

"You better run," Saleh told me, as the stream of fire holding off the demon cloud halted abruptly. But I couldn't run, could barely crawl, and there was no time in any case. The cloud dove for me, a screaming mass of hysterical hate, only to be hit by a hail of bullets from the stairwell as a dozen vamps flowed into the room.

"Is this a private party?" Alphonse asked, crushing the black thing hanging off my thigh under a heavy motorcycle boot. "Or can anyone join?"

Sal pried the creature off my back and stomped heavily on its center. It screeched and writhed and melted away, leaving only what looked like a scorch mark on the stones below.

"You do know how to throw a party," she said as she pulled the last creature from my right arm and slung it against the wall. She looked me over. "But you were right. Elegance isn't your thing."

I lay back against the fake stone of the floor, listening as the demons and vamps fought it out all around us. It didn't sound like the demons liked automatic gunfire any more than they did fire. I watched the last of them being pounded into nothingness by Alphonse's size twelve boots while Sal examined my various wounds. What was left of Rosier's body was nearby, a wasted scrap of bloody white flesh. I thought seriously about throwing up, but decided it was too much trouble.

Sal checked out my thigh and shoulders and pronounced them only flesh wounds. The stomach was worse, wide enough to need stitches, but I borrowed her belt and bunched enough of the skirt under it to serve as a makeshift bandage and to keep me decent, all at the same time. Multitasking, that's how you get things done, I thought, and burst into giggles.

"None of that," Sal said reprovingly. "Have hysterics later. The Consul's on her way and she's gonna want to know—did you get it?"

"Hell, yes, I got it. And if she's coming, maybe she can get off her ass and help with some of the dirty work for a change!"

All the blood drained from Sal's face, and her eyes fixed on a point just over my left shoulder. "And with what ‘dirty work' precisely do you require aid?" a husky voice asked from behind me.

God knows what I would have said, but before I could even turn around, Jesse ran out of the dark and jumped in front of me. "I got it!" he yelled, and sent a plume of flame straight at the Consul.

She met it with the blinding wall of sand, dry as a desert, hot as hell, that I had once seen eat a couple of vampires alive. Only she wasn't throwing it outward at us, I realized after a moment, when my flesh stayed on my bones; she was using it as a shield. I got Jesse around the middle and screamed in his ear. "Cut it out! She's a friend!"

The fire abruptly vanished, and he stood there looking a little sheepish. "Uh. Sorry?"

"Not strong at all?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Well, maybe a little strong." I guess now I knew who had taken on a cluster of angry demons.

"Why weren't you with the others?" I demanded.

"I was on my way down here when two of those things attacked me. I fried 'em," he told me happily.

"Then you could have gotten into the kitchen! You could have gone with Radella and the others!"

"And leave you like this?" He sounded insulted.

The Consul dropped the sandstorm and Jesse did a double take, then just stared, trying to prove that "eyes as big as saucers" wasn't an exaggeration. I guess he hadn't gotten a good look at her before. She arched one eyebrow in a way that reminded me eerily of Mircea. "Friend?"

I smiled weakly. "Well, you know. Not an enemy."

"That remains to be seen," she said, holding out a jeweled hand.

I blinked at it for a moment until I realized what she wanted. She expected me to hand over the Codex. And I'd already admitted that I had it. I figured I had maybe a minute to fork it over before she had me strip-searched.

"Uh," I said wittily. My brain was exhausted, my body was in serious pain, and I had nothing left. I couldn't let her take it, not when Pritkin had been willing to go to such lengths to see it destroyed. I still didn't understand exactly what it did, but I knew enough to think that maybe he'd had a point. Because no way was the geis the only reason she wanted it. Ming-de and Parindra hadn't had a sick vampire, and they'd seemed pretty keen.

The Consul didn't say anything, but she didn't lower her arm, either. "Give me the Codex, Cassandra."

"That wasn't the deal," I reminded her. "I agreed to save Mircea. That was all."

"We will attend to our own." She pulled someone forward who had been standing behind her. Tami. "Give me the book and I will give you your friend."

"You'll give her to me anyway. As soon as Mircea is healed, she is free. You've sworn it."

Those sloe eyes narrowed. "But he isn't healed. Not yet."

It took me a second, but I got it. "And you have him." I had the counterspell, but I couldn't heal Mircea if I didn't know where he was. And that left Tami under the Consul's manicured thumb until she chose to release her. Or until she gave her back to the Circle.

"So you've decided what? That you want the Codex more than you want to save Mircea?"

"Once I have the Codex, our mages can cast the spell."

How inconveniently true. "And if I refuse to give it to you?"

The Consul's grip on Tami's arm tightened slightly. "I do not think you will refuse."

"And I think she will," a ringing voice said behind me. The corridor was suddenly flooded with a blinding golden light. "Well done, Herophile. You have fulfilled your quest!"

I didn't need to turn around to know who was standing there. The Consul's expression, one of mild surprise, was enough. For her, that was practically a goggle.

I shifted my eyes, while moving Jesse and me back a few feet, toward the shattered window. "What do I get, a gold star?"

The ten-foot golden god in the too short tunic laughed, and it echoed off the walls. "Give me the Codex and you may have anything you like. It's our world now, Herophile!"

Behind him, I could see a whole row of dark-coated figures, and the rotting fruit smell that accompanied them told me what they were. Dark mages. I guess they were there for bad little Pythias who didn't do what they were told.

"Because I already have a gold circle," I continued. "The Codex was hidden behind one. I should have thought of you when I saw it."

"Gold is the alchemical sign for the sun, yes," he said, still approving.

"I did wonder. Because the Circle's symbol is silver."

"Like the moon. Artemis' emblem, that damn traitor," he said casually.

The Consul's beautiful face found an expression, and it wasn't one I liked. "You're working with our enemies," she hissed, and Tami gave a sudden cry as her arm was squeezed tight.

"She gave her priests the spell, didn't she?" I continued, ignoring it. The Consul hadn't gotten to be two thousand years old by being stupid. If I gave her enough, she'd figure it out for herself.

"She was always ridiculously sentimental," he agreed. "She thought we were being too hard on mankind, that your people were in danger of disappearing altogether."

"Were we?

"Don't be ridiculous," he said carelessly. "You breed like rabbits."

"Lucky us." My tired brain was having trouble piecing things together. Since he was in a good mood, I decided to let him help. "So the ouroboros is the spell to block your kind from our world."

He laughed. He was happy, even jocular. Of course he was. I hadn't told him no, yet. "It was the symbol for Solomon's protection spell, the one that trapped me here, the one I undid when I defeated that bitch at Delphi. The Pythoness, they called her—the last of a line of powerful witches who maintained the spell he had cast. I killed one of them and made her home my chief temple and her daughters my servants: Phemonoe and Herophile. I even kept the name: ‘pythia' means python, you know."

No, I hadn't. But I was learning all kinds of things lately. "With her death, the original spell lapsed, because there was no one to maintain it," I reasoned. "And the paths between worlds were opened again. Until Artemis decided to give the spell back to mankind." He nodded. "But her priests are dead. Who maintained it after the destruction of her temple?"

"The Silver Circle, of course." He looked surprised that I hadn't known that. "But they forgot. I had given the Pythias part of my power. And when my people were barred—"

"The power remained."

"And allowed me to communicate, albeit with great difficulty, with my priestesses," he acknowledged. "But the damn Circle corrupted them, turned them against me, blocked the only link I still had with this world. I couldn't get anywhere with any of them!"

"Until I came along." I was suddenly feeling really queasy.

"Yes. I thought I had a good candidate in Myra, but she fizzled out." He dismissed the former heir with a wave. "She was more interested consolidating her own position than in following my lead. I was quite pleased when you disposed of her."

"I didn't."

He shrugged. "You helped. Thus winning you many friends, young Herophile. Artemis never bothered to consider that the spell barring us from earth would close those worlds linked with yours as well. Faerie, for example, which depended on our magic and has been in decline since we left. They will be glad to see our return."

"That would explain why some of the Fey are so eager to get their hands on the Codex," I said.

He beamed approval. "They understand that the old ways were best, for your people as well as for us. Think of all we have to teach you."

"Yeah, you keep promising to tell me what's going on."

"As I have done. Give me the Codex, Herophile, and take your rightful place as the chief of my servants."

"You keep calling me that, when I've already told you." I took a deep breath and moved a little closer to the Consul. "My name is Cassandra."

Apollo's face immediately changed. "Yes," he hissed, "the name your mother gave you. Do you know why, little seer?"

"No."

"Because she had a vision. Saw that her daughter would be the one to free me. Saw that, if you became Pythia, the spell would be unraveled and I and my kind would return. She knew your destiny, but she couldn't bring herself to kill you—her only real chance. Instead, she ran, and named you after another rebellious servant of mine, in an act of defiance. It was a decision that cost her her life." He held out a hand. "Don't make the same mistake. Give me what is mine!"

I glanced at the Consul. She didn't nod or blink or anything so obvious, but something shifted behind her eyes. I really hoped I was reading her right, because if not, I was toast.

I pulled the Codex out of my bodice, and Apollo's eyes immediately focused on it. One last gamble; one last chance. Because I didn't need it, after all; I knew the author. And he really, really owed me one. "Jesse," I said briefly, "do your thing."

"What?" His eyes had hardly left his mother the whole time. I didn't know how much he had understood, but I didn't need him to understand. I just needed him to do what he did best.

"Fry it," I said.

"You cannot circumvent fate, Herophile!" Apollo snarled. "The Circle is weakening, fracturing from within. And when it falls, the spell falls with it! Don't choose the losing side!"

"I'm not." I tossed the Codex into the air. Time seemed to slow down as it flipped once, twice—then a plume of fire thicker than my leg caught it before it even approached the top of its arc. When the flames cleared, there wasn't enough left to make ashes. "And my name is Cassandra."

"You might have done well to remember your namesake's fate, Cassandra," he spit, as two dark mages started toward me.

And the vampires just stood there. I desperately tried to shift out with Jesse, but I was too tired, and nothing happened. At least, nothing normal.

A bubble formed out of nothing and bobbed around just out of reach, heavy and strangely thick, distorting the room in its reflective surface. And then there was another one, smaller than the first, and for a moment the two were bouncing around like helium balloons, colliding and rising and drifting with no particular direction. Until the larger one drifted against the taller mage.

Instead of bouncing off, it clung to his outstretched arm, flowing over the leather of his coat like molasses. And despite my panic, I couldn't seem to look away. Because the sleeve under the bubble was changing.

The leather grew dark and hard and started to crack, and the mage began to scream as the sleeve dusted away like the cover on one of Pritkin's old books. It flaked and crumbled until I could see the arm underneath. Only it wasn't an arm anymore, I realized, as the mage tore away from me. He left behind the tattered remains of the sleeve and the hand clutching my wrist, which was now nothing more than a collection of bones under brown, papery skin.

I flinched and the bones collapsed, hitting the ground with a dry rattle. I looked up to see the mage staring at me, a look of horror on his face as it aged decades in a few short seconds. I gasped, realization slamming into me even before a clear, almost transparent substance peeled away from him. It reformed itself into a bubble that floated off a few feet before popping out of existence. What was left of his body collapsed like a deflated balloon.

I stared at him, remembering the dead mages in the fight with Mircea two weeks ago. I thought they'd been hit by friendly fire, by a spell gone awry. Looked like it hadn't been so friendly after all.

"I see you have had lessons from someone." Apollo was seething. "The traitor Agnes must have had more time with you than I thought. No matter—you cannot defeat them all." And the entire line of mages surged toward me.

I watched them come out of blurry, exhausted eyes. What had that been, anyway, some way of speeding up time within a small area? I didn't know, but one thing was sure: I couldn't do it again. If I hadn't been holding on to Jesse, I'd have been on the floor already.

But the mages didn't reach me this time. The ones on the front row, six in all, were met by a stinging desert storm that blew up out of nowhere and concentrated only on their bodies. They were shrouded in whirling, dancing sand for maybe twenty seconds, and when it dissipated, the only things left to fall to the floor were bones and metal weapons. The rest of the mages were met by angry vampires, half of them Senate members, and the fight was on.

I clutched Jesse and stared at the Consul. "You took your time!"

"If we are to be allies, I had to be certain that you are strong enough to be an asset," she replied serenely. "I assume you have the spell to break the geis memorized?"

"I know who does," I replied.

"And that would be?"

"The mage Pritkin. I…told it to him."

She raised an eyebrow, but didn't call me on the obvious lie. "You had best hurry, then. He was battling another mage in the lobby earlier. I do not think he was winning."

I started for the stairs but was called back by Jesse's cry. "What about Mom?"

I looked at the Consul. "If we're to be allies, I'd think you could trust me."

She looked at me for a long minute, then released her hold on Tami. "Do not disappoint me, Pythia."

The tone was menacing, but it was the first time she'd ever used my title. On balance, I decided it was a positive step. I picked up my skirts and ran.