Hunt the Moon

Chapter Thirty-seven

I’d like to say that I planned what happened next, but I’d be lying. All I could think about was getting the hell out of there, but the Spartoi went for me at the same time. I started to turn back in the direction of the train, and he leapt in my path and grabbed the suitcase.

Although, in retrospect, that turned out to be okay, because the spell was a strong one and I was leaning forward with everything I had. And instead of stopping me, he was dragged along underneath, his feet making rhythmic bump, bump, bump sounds on the crossties.

At least, they did until a very alive-feeling hand gripped my thigh right over the bullet wound and I almost whitedout in pain. My body jerked and the scarred piece of luggage went shooting into the floor, hitting down hard and then scraping the Spartoi’s entire body across gravel.

I hadn’t planned that, either, but I damn sure kept the pressure on once it happened, knowing from personal experience exactly how sharp that gravel was. The chunks were big and there had never been any rain down here to wear off the knifelike edges. They were also coated with a layer of black grit or dirt or dust or whatever the hell—anyway, it was finer than sand, as it proved by flying up in a choking cloud all around us, leaving me gasping for air and the demigod cursing inventively beneath me.

But he still didn’t let go. Instead, he pushed off the ground, trying to use his extra weight to flip us, I guess to give me a taste of my own medicine. Which might have worked if we hadn’t hit a bend in the tunnel, which neither of us saw coming, thanks to the Underground’s idea of adequate illumination. I might not have seen it, but I felt it when we hit, and heard it when something of his went crunch.

It was alarmingly satisfying.

It was also useless, because the next moment, he flipped us anyway, using the wall for leverage, fighting and scratching and kicking as best as possible from two different sides of the case.

“Just fucking die,” he snarled, and I actually saw the expression through the diffuse light sifting in from somewhere up ahead.

I tilted my head back and saw the body of the train, which had either slowed to a crawl or was stationary. And either way would do.

“You first,” I snarled back, and flipped us one last time. Last, because a second later we slammed into the back of the train.

Or, to be more precise, he did.

Being on top, I sailed through the missing back window to experience the joys of rug burn on a whole new level. Which, all things considered, was better than smashing into a hunk of steel face-first. Although it wasn’t feeling so much that way at the moment.

I rolled to my knees after I rolled to a stop, almost to the door at the far end of the compartment. My body was crying out for rest, for oblivion, but my brain was telling it sternly to shut up. But it kind of looked like the body might win, because when I tried to stand, I staggered and wobbled and went back down. And not just because of pain and dizziness and a distinct desire to throw up.

There was something wrong with my feet.

I managed to focus bleary eyes on my filthy, bloody soles, and the glass, gravel and God knew what sticking out of them. Clearly, the Underground was not the place to go barefoot. I doubted I could walk, much less run, in this state.

And then the Spartoi’s head poked up over the serrated edge of the window. He would have looked like he was doing some kind of old vaudeville act, the kind that makes people wince these days at its deliberate racism. Except that blackface didn’t usually involve a ton of blood, a halfmissing scalp or a bunch of gravel embedded in the raw flesh all along one side of the face.

I screamed, and he grinned and flopped another arm over the ledge. And this one held a gun. And I discovered that—surprise—I could run after all, a scrambling, hobbling gait that got me through to the next compartment just before bullets started strafing this one. I stared at the back of the seat in front of me as it was quickly shredded and tried to think, only that wasn’t going so well. My brain was frozen in horror and seemed to be stuck on a loop screaming no, no, no, no over and over, which was less than useful.

I told it to get a grip, and it told me no, no, no, no, and I screamed again, because it was do that or lose my mind.

And for some reason, it seemed to help.

For one, the barrage stopped, maybe because the Spartoi thought he’d got me. And for another, I could sort of think again, only all that came to mind was that my knives weren’t likely to be a big help against a guy who could walk out of a burning inferno. Among other things.

But I couldn’t let him get past me. I couldn’t let him get to my mother. And there was only one way to ensure that he didn’t. I was going to have to grab him and shift him out of here, and then try to shift back before he could kill me. Which was not sounding like fun for so very, very many reasons, including the fact that I would have to touch him, and I thought that that might just send me the rest of the way to Crazytown and—

And then Mircea walked through the far door. He strolled down the aisle like a guy looking for a good seat, despite the fact that the barrage had started up again. Half a dozen bullets hit him in quick succession, blooming bright against the white of his shirt. But he didn’t seem to notice any more than the demigod had, just held out a hand like that would stop the hail of bullets.

And then it stopped the hail of bullets, or something did. I peered around the corner in time to see the Spartoi slump over the window ledge, the gun falling from his limp hand. “You killed him,” I said in disbelief. I’d started to think that wasn’t possible.

“For the moment,” Mircea said grimly.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that these things don’t stay dead,” he said, giving the Spartoi’s body a vicious kick. “I killed the creature I chased in here, but within thirty seconds he was alive again.”

“Alive. . . You mean he was a zombie?”

“No, I mean he was alive. I just now drained him for the second time. It is virtually the only thing that works with these things—and it doesn’t work for long.”

“Then . . . then however many times we kill them, they’re just going to continue chasing her?”

“Unless you can help.” The quiet voice came from behind me. I turned to find my mother in the doorway, the mage behind her.

“This is crazy,” he told her urgently. “I told you—”

“And I told you, did I not? We can use tricks to elude them, as we did before. But they’ll keep coming. Or we can end this, now, once and for all.”

“But you weren’t there! You don’t know—”

She took his hand. “Hush now.”

He stared at her, obviously frustrated. And then he transferred that stare to me. And if looks could kill—

“Right back at you,” I said dizzily.

My mother had turned to look at him, but now those lapis eyes swung back to me. “There is little time,” she said simply. “Will you help?”

“I . . . there’s . . .” I had about a million questions, but looking into her face, I couldn’t seem to remember a single one. And a glance at the dead demigod showed that he was already stirring, flesh flowing along his body like water, jagged wounds pulling together, raw red flesh retreating, the whole turning into a seamless garment of pale olive skin. Any minute now, his heart was going to start to beat and his eyelids were going to open and . . . and I really didn’t want to be here when that happened.

I looked back at her. “What do you want me to do?”

Thirty seconds later, we were still on the Underground, still rocketing through a dark tunnel, but things looked a little different. There were plush bench seats of padded leather, posh lights overhead and shiny wood panels on the walls. And the passengers all looked like they were going to the same fancy dress party as the people in the cab.

Or they would have, if they hadn’t been shrieking in shock at seeing a group of people pop out of thin air in front of them. Or maybe it was more the fact that one of those people was mostly naked and completely dead. Again. Mircea pried his hand away from the creature’s throat, and he hit the floor like a sack of rocks.

I stared down at the man’s sightless, staring eyes, shimmering in the gaslight. They were blue. I swallowed. “What the hell is he?”

“Spartoi,” my mother confirmed. “Ares mated with one of the dragon kin long ago, and they were the result.”

“That’s why they can transform into one?”

She nodded. “Yes, but not here. The tunnel is too small; it would trap them. And without that ability, much of their power is lost.”

“That’s why you came down here, isn’t it? You knew—”

“Yes.”

“How?”

Those beautiful eyes met mine. “They have been hunting me for a long time.”

I didn’t get a chance to ask anything else, because screams and gunshots came from ahead of us. I looked up in time to see another red lightning bolt take out a connecting door a couple of cars away. I couldn’t see what was going on next door because of all the smoke, but there were more screams and more terrified people bursting through into our car. And then, over their shoulders, I got a glimpse of two more Spartoi tearing down the length of the train.

And then we were shifting again, sort of.

This time, it wasn’t so much like we went anywhere than as if the scene shifted around us. The train stayed pretty solid, except for the ads on the walls, which bloomed and faded in bright spots of color. But mostly the people changed, morphed, flowed into each other and then into new people, like they were liquid, along with the time stream barreling us along. Days, weeks, months of passengers spilled around us, flickering in and out as we were probably doing in their view as we ran forward, through space and time and back through the compartments.

My feet hurt, my body ached and I was half-convinced I had a damn concussion. And I barely noticed. I had a vague impression that I was staring around with my mouth hanging open, but I didn’t care about that, either. I’d never seen anything remotely like it.

Of course, that went for most of the stuff that had happened lately. I wondered if this was what training was like, real training, the kind I was never going to get. I thought Agnes would have liked setting me some crazy obstacle course, making me run after her, challenging me to keep up or have my ass left behind in some other place, some other time.

Only this wasn’t training; it was real. And getting left behind here wouldn’t mean an inconvenience or an embarrassing return; it would mean never returning at all.

From what I understood after all of a half minute of explanation, the Spartoi had managed to get some kind of spell on my mother that caused their state to mirror hers. That meant that they piggybacked along whenever and wherever she shifted. It also prevented her from using any of the tricks I’d seen at the party—stopping time or slowing it down—where they were concerned. She could still slow down time, but if she was immune to it, they would be, as well.

Until, presumably, she ran out of gas and they killed her.

I had no idea why they wanted to kill her, or where the kidnapper fit into all this, or much of anything else. But I knew the main thing. I knew how she planned to break their spell.

She and I weren’t using our own power to shift; we were borrowing it from the same source—the enormous well of energy left to the Pythias by Apollo. That put our magic on the same wavelength, for lack of a better term, and was how I was able to track her. My magic “felt” it whenever she used hers, and could follow it to the source.

The idea was to use that similarity to confuse the Spartoi’s spell. I was to keep up as she shifted, to stay right alongside her, until our spells merged, overlapping to the point that the piggyback spell got confused and latched on to both of them. Then we were to shift in opposite directions, ripping our spells apart in the process and hopefully destroying theirs, as well.

If we timed it right, if we did it in the middle of a shift, that should leave them in the same position I’d accidentally almost ended up in a few days ago—scattered on the winds of time, never to be reassembled anywhere or anywhen. It wasn’t death, because these things couldn’t be killed. But it was damn close, and I’d take it.

Assuming I didn’t pass out first.

This was hard. This was really, really, goddamned hard. The shifts were so close together that it wasn’t like a series of them at all, but more like one long, continual slide back into time, one that was taking everything I had just to keep up.

It wasn’t helped by the fact that the maniacs behind us kept firing, even while we were in the middle of the shift. It didn’t look like it was doing much good—most of the spells and bullets vanished into the weird liquid time we were passing through, seemingly without connecting to anything. But not all of them.

Every so often, we were solid a split second too long and some of the barrage got through. Mostly, it hit the kidnapper’s shields, because he and Mircea were behind us at the moment. But they couldn’t shield us completely, and that left Mom and me in the line of fire more than once.

I felt a couple of bullets whiz by me, one of which took out a window somewhen and probably scared a bunch of passengers to death. Another must have been fired just as we shifted, because it raced right alongside my head as time sorted itself out, before vanishing like smoke. I didn’t care.

I didn’t care about anything, except—please, God—not falling over. But my hands were shaking and sweat was coursing down my face and I couldn’t hear anything anymore but my heart hammering in my ears. I think the only thing that kept me upright was Mircea’s hand on my arm and a healthy dose of pure rage.

Goddamnit, I was supposed to be good at this! The one thing, the only thing, that had ever come naturally to me in this whole, crazy job. Yet here I was, panting and swearing and falling through time, nothing like Mother’s elegant, effortless shifting, power boiling around her as she calmly walked ahead, as though this were nothing, just an afternoon’s stroll through the park.

And that is a Pythia, I thought, staring in awe and pride and pain and more than a little disbelief. Agnes had boasted of mother’s abilities, but I’d never understood what she meant until now. Until I saw how she made it seem so easy. How she made it seem like breathing. Commanding time, not being thrown around by it, not tripping and stumbling and almost falling as the room blurred around us.

A smooth white hand cupped my face, cool to the touch, unlike my overheated skin. Concerned lapis eyes stared into mine, and I cringed at the thought of what she must be seeing. Frazzled hair sticking to my sweaty face, filthy clothes and panicked eyes, as I fought what was rapidly becoming clear would be a losing battle.

“Almost there,” she told me softly, and I nodded, no breath to talk, nothing to say anyway, nothing that would help, at least.

Then the pace picked up, and what had been torment became impossible. I didn’t know how I was keeping up, or even if I was. I couldn’t think, couldn’t see, couldn’t even be sure that my feet were moving forward anymore because I couldn’t feel them. Days became months became years became decades, time flipping by like pages in a book, a book that was smearing and fluttering and shredding before my eyes, and I screamed in pain and fury. Because I wasn’t strong enough, because I couldn’t keep up, because I was about to fail at the thing I was supposed to be good at, and I couldn’t—

Suddenly, there was a horrible wrenching, like my body was coming apart at the seams. Only it wasn’t me. It was our magic pulling and tearing and ripping as she veered one way and I fought the current of her power to go the other. But she was so strong, so unbelievably strong, and I didn’t have anything left, and I felt myself stalling and flailing and starting to turn—

And the damn Spartoi saved me. They had started firing more wildly, sending panicked people scrambling away from them—and straight at us. It didn’t help that the crazed crowds usually disappeared before they reached us. I kept flinching back, expecting a collision, and the near panic made it impossible for me to concentrate well enough to keep shifting.

I felt myself falter, my grip on time shaking along with my concentration. And I suddenly—belatedly—realized that I didn’t have to shift away from her. All I had to do was remain stationary somewhere, and she’d shift away from me.

And then a big guy in an old-fashioned suit and a bowler hat barreled right into me, sending me sprawling. We went down in a pile of tweed and leather and outraged pink skin, and there was an umbrella in there somewhere, too, because it was stabbing me in the backside. And then Mircea pulled me up and I realized that something wonderful had happened.

We’d stopped.