Curse the Dawn (5 page)

“A hint about what?”

“What did you come here to ask?”

“I need a little more than that!”

“Tough.”

We glared at each other for a few seconds, until I sighed and gave in. A hint wasn’t what I was after, but it was better than I had now. And it didn’t look like I was going to get anything else. “Fine.”

We stared into the doorway together but didn’t see much. The lamp appeared to have gone out, and the sounds of fighting had stopped. That probably wasn’t a good thing.

Without warning, Agnes took off across the darkened room. I followed the best I could, but running through pitch blackness with bound arms and a sore butt is even harder than it sounds, and there were obstacles everywhere. Agnes somehow managed to avoid them, but I tripped over some firewood and plowed into a support column, scraping my cheek and stubbing my toe in the process.

I lost sight of her while trying to right myself and then almost ran right past her. A hand reached out from behind another column and dragged me over. “I think I lost a toe,” I gasped, waves of pain radiating up my leg.

“Shut up! They’re in a small room over there!” She gestured in the direction of the slightly-less-dark pouring out of an open doorway. “The mage doesn’t have a gun, but Fawkes might, so no heroics.” She paused for a minute. “Sorry. I forgot who I was talking to.”

I glared, but she didn’t see it, having already started moving. I caught up with her and we burst into the small room together. The mage was sitting on a barrel holding an old-fashioned matchlock gun.
His
cuffs had come off nicely, I noticed jealously. They were on the floor, along with a sword and the lantern. Fawkes was standing alongside the wall and showed no surprise at seeing us; in fact, he didn’t appear to notice that we were there. Spelled.

I saw all that in the split second before Agnes shot the mage. The bullets would have taken him right between the eyes if he hadn’t been using shields. As it was, they just seemed to piss him off.

“I’d prefer you didn’t do that,” he said testily when she stopped.

“You can’t remain shielded forever,” she shot back. “And that gun only has one bullet.”

“But which of you gets it?” he sneered.

Agnes changed tactics. “What’s the plan, genius? Because you can blow this place up, but it won’t do any good. Parliament doesn’t meet until tomorrow morning. And at midnight, a party of the king’s men are going to show up and spoil your fun. That’s why Fawkes failed, remember?”

“But when they show up this time, they’ll be met with a few surprises.” He nodded at a line of little vials laid out on another barrel. They were the kind mages used in combat, and most of the spells they contained were lethal.

“I thought you people were against war,” I said, mainly to give Agnes time to figure something out. I had nothing.

“There’s going to be a civil war in about fifty years in any case. We’re merely speeding up the timetable—and building a better world in the process.”

“A better world that may not have you in it! If you start a war now, it could kill off your ancestors or alter the world in ways that guarantee they never meet. You could be committing suicide!”

“Not if I stay in this time.”

“You’d stay here?” I asked incredulously.

“Unlike you, I risked my life to get here!” he snapped, suddenly angry. “Of course I’m staying!”

Agnes glanced at me. “Stop trying to reason with this joker. Go ahead and do it.”

“Do what?”

“Stop time. I’d take care of it, but I can’t pull that trick twice in a row. It takes too much energy.”

I fidgeted. “Uh, Agnes?”

“Your bad luck to get the mission with
two
Pythias!” she said with a smirk. The mage began to look a little worried.

I felt the muscles knot around my spine again. Of course, that may have been from the cuffs. “Um, there’s . . . sort of a problem.”

“What problem? You’ve done it before, right?” she demanded.

“Well, yeah. But it all happened sort of fast, and I’m not sure exactly—”

“Don’t tell me you don’t know how!”

She was glaring at me, so I glared right back. “Hello! No training, remember? That’s why I’m here!”

“That’s why you’re useless!” she yelled, poking me in the shoulder with the gun. Her expression was pretty fierce, but her head was doing some weird wobbly thing, like her neck was broken. I stared at her for a heartbeat before realizing that she was nodding at the mage’s little vial collection. Oh, great.

She poked me again, this time in the stomach, and it hurt. I stumbled away from her, moving a few steps farther into the room. “Oh, so what? I can’t perform on cue so you’re going to shoot me? Is that how this works?”

“Maybe I will,” she said furiously. “A Pythia who can’t do anything is no help to anyone. The people in your time would probably
thank
me.”

She had no idea. I retreated a few more steps, almost within arm’s reach of the vials. “You can’t kill a Pythia or her designated heir, or the power won’t go to you,” I reminded her. “Even I know that much!”

“News flash, kiddo,” she said, aiming for my head. “I already have it!”

Agnes let off a round and I screamed and ducked, only half acting the terror thing. I lurched into the barrel, tipping it over and scattering vials everywhere. The mage cursed and leveled his gun at me, but Agnes picked up Fawkes’ fallen sword and chucked it at him. He instinctively ducked and fell backward off his seat.

I dropped to the floor, trying to feel around behind me with tightly bound hands. My fingers touched two small vials and I grabbed them. I couldn’t see them, but it didn’t matter; I wouldn’t have known what they were anyway. I stared over my shoulder and, as soon as the mage popped his head up, I flipped them at him.

The first burst against his shields in a scattering of dry orange powder and didn’t appear to have any effect. But the second, a blue liquid, bit a chunk out of his shields. I started looking for more of those while Agnes kept alternating gunfire with throwing things: a wooden footstool, a burnt-out torch and a dead rat all sailed past my face to go splat against the mage’s shields.

I flinched back from the rat, and then I saw it—another blue vial, nestled up against the bottom of a barrel. I crouched awkwardly, scrabbling around on the grimy floor, and at last my fingers closed over it. I didn’t wait for the mage to pop back up this time, just chucked it over the pile of casks.

For once, my aim must have been pretty good. He screamed and shot out of the hedge of barrels like he was on fire. He sprinted past me, shedding sparks in his wake and—Oh, crap. “He’s on fire!” I screamed.

Agnes tripped him up and he went sprawling just outside the door. She sat on his butt and clocked him upside the head with her gun. He collapsed like a sack of sand.

“You wanted a hint,” she panted, batting out the flames on his back. “Here it is. You’re clairvoyant. Use your gift.”

I waited a few seconds, but she didn’t say anything else. “That’s it?
That’s
your big hint?”

“What did you expect?”

“Something else! Something more! There has to be . . . I don’t know, some kind of trick to it!”

“
You’re
the trick,” she told me, retrieving his cuffs. “Why do you think clairvoyants are chosen as Pythias? If anyone could do it, these morons wouldn’t screw things up every time they try to ‘improve’ things. They can’t see what effect their actions will have; they have to guess. We can
know
.”

A headache started to pound behind my eyes. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been counting on Agnes to help me until this minute, when she refused. “Maybe you can know,” I told her. “My gift doesn’t work like that. Some days, it doesn’t work at all!”

“Maybe you need to exercise it a little more. And to answer your earlier question, fiddling with the time stream usually causes more problems than it solves. Trust me on that one.”

“So that’s it?” I asked furiously. “That’s what you have for me? Don’t mess with time and trust my gift?”

“That’s all you really need.” Agnes dragged the mage’s hands behind his back and clicked the cuffs on. Once he was secure, she looked up at me, and for the first time, her gaze held a flicker of compassion. “Your power will work with your natural ability, training it—and you—over time. Eventually, you
will
learn what you need to know.”

“If it was that easy, you wouldn’t spend decades training a successor!” I said quickly before she could shift out on me.

“I never said it was easy. Nothing about this job is. I said you will learn.”

“And what if I don’t last that long?!” I screamed, but Agnes was already gone.

I arrived back at Dante’s, Vegas’ hell-themed casino and my current hideout, exhausted, filthy and steaming. The worst part was, I’d gotten exactly zip out of it. I might be the world’s chief clairvoyant, but my power didn’t seem to know that. It came and went, ebbing and flowing like the tide, but never on such a precise schedule. And that meant I couldn’t do visions on demand. I couldn’t choose what I saw and what I didn’t. I wasn’t that strong and I never had been.

Despite the lurid theme of the casino, the penthouse was sleek, Scandinavian and contemporary, with a soft blue and gray color scheme that I usually found soothing. It wasn’t working so well today. That was doubly true when I walked into the living room and was immediately accosted by a couple of half-crazed thugs. I’d have been worried, except that they were mine. Sort of.

Marco, the one weaving a quarter through his fingers as he surveyed me, was six foot six with a twenty-inch neck. The guy made dump trucks look petite. The fact that he was a vampire was almost irrelevant.

I didn’t know the other guy, but that wasn’t unusual. Marco’s partners constantly changed, but they were always vamps armed to the teeth. This one was no exception and looked enough like Marco—slicked-back dark hair, barrel chest and tree trunk legs—that they might have been related. Of course, they just as easily might not. That description fit almost every babysitter I’d had in the last three days.

“What’s the deal here?” Marco asked, his voice thick with muscle. “You
said
you was going for a fitting. That you had to get naked for this designer guy, so we might as well stay here since you wasn’t letting us in the room anyway. You
said
you was just going downstairs. That you’d be
right back
.”

“I don’t have time for this,” I told him. I ached pretty much everywhere, except for my shoulders, which had stopped screaming and started going numb. It was making me think about lack of blood flow and gangrene. “Can you get me out of these cuffs?”

“Yeah, I’ll get right on that.” He made a savage gesture, and the quarter sailed through the open balcony doors and took out a window on the next building. It made me jump, since Marco had so far shown no emotion whatsoever. “As soon as you tell me what’s going on. Because I’m thinking we got a communication problem, you and me.”

“You took advantage of our trust,” his partner added in a high-pitched squeak.

“What’s going on is that I need to get out of these cuffs and into a bath!” I snapped, my temper hanging by a thread. “Mircea is coming—”

“Yeah. I know,” Marco said tightly. “The front desk called to say he’s on his way up.”

“He’s on his way
now
? Why?”

“You have a date.”

“Appointment. And that’s not until two a.m.!” I whirled, looking for a clock, but of course I didn’t find one. Clocks made you think about bedtime and bath time and dinner-time instead of gambling the night away in blissful ignorance. The casino didn’t like clocks.

“It’s five to two,” Marco informed me, shoving his hairy wrist in my face. “You’ve been gone
all night
.”

Shit.

“You want to get me killed, is that it?” he demanded. “I piss you off somehow I don’t remember? You working out some kinda grudge?”

“No! I . . . just lost track of time. I was busy.” In fact, I wasn’t all that great at timing my shifts yet. I’d planned to come back a few minutes after I left, in which case I wouldn’t have had to worry about explaining things to the deadly duo. Not that I should have had to do so in the first place.

Marco scraped something gray and hairy that was absolutely not smashed rat off my shoulder. “Doing what? Dumpster diving?”

I counted to ten and reminded myself not to overreact. The muscle twins were only doing what they’d been told. Getting rid of them was going to require talking with the one who’d sent them, and even that wasn’t likely to work. Because their master also considered himself mine, and he liked to keep an eye on his property.

Mircea Basarab had been born a nobleman in fifteenth-century Romania, when one’s woman was almost as prized a possession as one’s horse. They were also treated about the same: dressed up and shown off on important occasions, and petted and pampered and kept under careful watch the rest of the time. And although he had since modernized his wardrobe, his vocabulary and his job description, his attitude toward women was remarkably constant.

Not that I
was
his woman, as I’d mentioned several times. By coincidence, it was the same number he hadn’t been listening. I somehow had the feeling that something similar would happen if I brought up getting rid of Marco and friend. For someone who could hear a pin drop three rooms away, Mircea could be amazingly deaf.

It wasn’t that I objected to the idea of protection—quite the opposite, in fact. Far too many people had my name on their to-do-nasty-things-to list. But while vampires are formidable opponents—especially the masters, which judging by the power he was leaking all over the place, Marco definitely was—they tend not to perform so well against certain kinds of opponents. Like revenge-minded ancient deities. For what I was facing, I needed something a little more subtle with a lot more punch. Not that I had any idea what that was yet.