Curse the Dawn (2 page)

“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.”