Claimed By Shadow (40 page)

Pritkin looked at me for a long minute. “One of the functions of the war mages is to protect the Pythia at all costs,” he finally said. “Mac believed in you, or he wouldn’t have died for you. But you were brought up by a vampire, by a creature with no moral compass at all, and have received no training. Why should I fight for you? What kind of Pythia will you be?”

It was the big question, the same one I’d been asking myself. I’d taken the power hoping to break the
geis
, or at least give me an edge over Myra. So far, it had done neither. The truth was, I didn’t know what kind of Pythia I’d be. But I did know one thing without any doubt at all. “A better one than Myra.”

“So I am being given the choice of the lesser of two evils? You do not make much of a case for yourself.”

“Maybe I’m not trying too hard,” I said truthfully. I needed Pritkin. I knew next to nothing about magic on the grand scale, and had no idea where to even start looking for the book. But I didn’t think I could stand another Mac on my conscience. “If you’re smart, you’ll lay low until this is over. Let me fight my own battles. You might get lucky and Myra and I will kill each other off.”

“And why should I not kill both of you myself, and hope the next in line will be better?”

Billy’s eyes got big, and I realized that while I was relatively safe in Augusta’s body, he was still vulnerable in mine. I stepped in front of him. “There is no next in line,” I told Pritkin flatly. “If there were another contender who could do a decent job, I’d have given her the damn power already! But the initiates are all under the control of your Circle, who I don’t trust any more than the Black. I’m not going to hand world-shattering power to someone who can be manipulated, controlled or corrupted!”

Pritkin regarded me narrowly. “You expect me to believe you would give up the power, just like that, if there was a fit receptacle to receive it? You dragged us into Faerie to complete the ritual. Of course you want it.”

“I didn’t drag you anywhere! You
volunteered
to go.”

“To find the rogue!”

I took a deep breath. Augusta didn’t need it, but I did. “I went into Faerie to get Myra before she could get me. Picking up Tomas was a fluke, and completing the ritual was a bid to stay alive.”

“You told Mac you went after your father.”

“I did. Tony has him, or what’s left of him, and I want him back. But the main goal was always Myra. I had reason to believe that she was with Tony.” It had seemed like killing two birds with one stone, but I should have known better. When was my life ever that simple? “But now she’s here, trying to kill Mircea. If she succeeds, he won’t be around to protect me while I grow up, and I doubt I’ll make it long enough to be a pain in your side, or anyone else’s. If you want to get rid of me, here’s your big chance.”

“Why are you telling me this? I could help Myra destroy you, and your vampire.”

“I know.” And, frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me. I was gambling a lot on Mac’s faith in his buddy, a faith that could very well have been misplaced. But then, is it a gamble if you don’t have a choice? I had Myra and half the European Senate against me. And the only one on my side was a very stressed-out ghost in an all-too-vulnerable body. What was one more enemy?

Pritkin was giving me another of his patented glares. “What do you think you can do alone, against Myra and the Senate?”

So he had overheard my little chat with Myra. I shrugged. “Possibly nothing. In which case, your problem is solved.” I looked down at Billy. “Will you be all right on your own for a while?”

He shrugged. “Sure. Hell, if I die a few more times, I might even get used to it.”

“I am going with you,” Pritkin announced.

“So you’re what? Opting for the lesser of two evils, after all?”

“For the moment.”

It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, but it was good enough. “You’re hired.”

Chapter 14

The street was still dark, even to Augusta’s eyes, but I discovered other ways to see. All along the road were people, hidden in the night—in tenements, scurrying along the street or congregating in pubs. Many of them were amorphous, dark-clothed shapes against the night, but all of them had heartbeats, and it was those thousands of living, beating organs that called out to me like a siren song. Beyond the human river were darker spots, just a few streets back, but my skin prickled with awareness of their power. Vampires.

I pulled away so I wouldn’t see Augusta’s features reflected in the dark glass. “There’s a lot of vamps in the area,” I told Pritkin, “maybe a couple dozen.” I had managed the sentence without my voice cracking, but my palms had started to sweat. Even in Augusta’s body, there was no way I could fight those odds, and for all his toys, Pritkin wasn’t likely to do much better.

“How long until they get here?” He sounded far too matter-of-fact for my frazzled nerves.

“What difference does it make?” I fought to keep from screaming it at him. “We need to find Mircea and hide— fast. It’s the only sensible plan.”

Pritkin walked out the stage door and down the steps. I followed him, all the way to the front of the building, where he stopped, looking up and down the frost-covered road. “Humor me,” he said.

“In case you’ve forgotten, the Senate isn’t the only problem, ” I told him, low enough that I hoped no passing vamps would take notice. “I can’t let Myra run loose—”

“Then don’t. Deal with the rogue. I will handle this.”

“You’ll handle this?” I’d rested my hand on a lamppost and didn’t realize until I tried to pull away that I’d sunk my fingers almost completely through the cast iron. I pulled them out cautiously and leaned the listing post against a building so it didn’t fall over. Getting angry in a vampire body was obviously not a good idea. “A corpse isn’t much of an ally!” I told Pritkin frankly. “Some of these are Senate members. I doubt you could even slow them down. We need to hide.”

“They could track us by scent alone. Hiding isn’t an option.”

“And suicide is?”

I would have said more, but someone grabbed me from behind. Again. For a half second I thought it was a vamp, but then I felt the heartbeat against my back and smelled the stink of unwashed man and stale beer. I pulled away, but the man came with me. I gave what felt like a gentle push, hardly expending any energy at all, and he went sailing across the street to crash into the heavy glass window of a pub. I could see the frozen shock on his face, the half dozen glass slivers that pierced his skin, even trace the arc of blood on the air.

His friend, whom I hadn’t even noticed, gave a bellow of rage and ran at me, fist pulled back. I ducked and managed to subdue him by slipping an arm around his throat, cutting off his air supply. It was absurdly easy—the bones in his muscular workman’s neck felt brittle, like a baby bird’s, and instead of it being difficult to hold him, the challenge lay in not accidentally breaking anything.

I had never really thought about how delicate humans are, especially not human men, most of whom tower over me. It was suddenly all too apparent how careful vamps had to be not to leave a trail of bodies behind them. The man was making what he probably thought of as a violent attempt to break free, but to me, it was like holding a fragile butterfly by the wings and trying not to tear it. Just a little pressure to cut off the air, but carefully, gently, or the windpipe would collapse and this brawny creature would crumple like paper in my hands.

He finally went limp and I laid him down to check for a pulse. I found one and breathed a sigh of relief. “You seem to be doing well enough on your own,” Pritkin commented.

“Against humans! It isn’t humans hunting us.”

“No, but the principle is the same. When they looked at you, the two men saw only a weak woman, where they should have seen a predator.” He gave me a brief, mirthless grin. “I often have that same advantage.”

“You can’t take them all, predator or not!”

“The principle is the same,” he repeated, wrenching the heavy lamppost I’d ruined out of the ground, then shoving it back into the hole, hard. The gas main underneath the street ruptured and caught fire with a whoosh, sending a bright plume skyward. I jumped back, Augusta’s instinctive terror running through me. But a vamp I hadn’t even noticed caught fire and ran screaming into another. Pritkin grinned viciously. “Never be what they expect.”

He ran down the street after the fleeing vampires, whooping and generally making as much noise as possible, and the dark wells of power in my vision began to turn the same way. The vamps didn’t know what was going on, but they’d been looking for a fight, and Pritkin seemed ready to give them one. And he called me insane.

I ran back into the theatre and found Billy cowering behind the ticket booth. I nodded approval. There was no safe place at the moment, but it beat having him with me or the maniac outside.

I turned my attention to finding Myra. There were three people in the building, and only one was human. I could hear the strong, steady heartbeat, could feel it at the back of my throat as something thick and sweet. The vamps weren’t bothering with trivialities like having a pulse, but I could smell them. And even at this distance Augusta’s keen nose could pick out the crisp scent of pine.

I followed Augusta’s hunger through the backstage areas, trying to zero in on Myra’s exact location, but the place was a rabbit warren of tiny rooms and dead-end corridors, with props stuck here and there haphazardly. I fumbled out of a forest of painted trees to find myself in the wings of the stage. The theatre was dark, enough so that to a human’s eyes little would have been visible. I could make out a few props—a chest, a couple of flags and some blunted lances— waiting for the next performance. There was no sign of activity, however, and the human’s heartbeat was still a good way off.

I finally located my target in a room behind the stage, down a stairway filled with dust and old suits of armor. I kept a wary eye on the battered knights as I slipped by, but none so much as twitched. The first room I reached was set up like a dining room, with a large shiny wood table that practically reeked of beeswax. It was oak to match the paneling on the walls and the beams on the ceiling. There were a bunch of portraits scattered around and a big stone fireplace. It had a gothic feel to it that would have served as a good backdrop for a couple of vamps, only there weren’t any.

The still-glowing embers in the fireplace and the decanter and two used glasses on the table told me that they hadn’t been gone long. I peered into the next room, drawn by an odd smell, and found the human. It wasn’t Myra.

A tall, portly guy with dark hair and, oddly enough, a red beard, stood by a counter with his shirt open over a pale, hairy belly. He had a candle in his hand and I identified the odor: cooked human flesh. He appeared to be trying to melt the skin on his chest and stomach, patches of which were already a flaming, lobster red. A few that had received extra attention were starting to bubble. He was crying silently, tears coursing down his cheeks to soak his beard, but he didn’t stop.

I ran forward and knocked the candle away. It rolled across the floor and went out, and he looked after it blankly. Then he reached to the shelf behind him, got another one and was in the process of lighting it when I jerked it away, too. I looked into his eyes, but there was no one home. Somebody had hit him with a suggestion, a strong one. I slapped him, but it didn’t seem to help. I tried to catch his eyes with mine, but it was hard to get him to focus enough to get a hold. Vampires have a hard time influencing people who are really drunk, high or crazy, because their minds don’t work right. Apparently that goes for those who’ve been hit with a prior suggestion as well.

In the end, I got his attention by throwing his candles and matches into a garbage pail and refusing to let him retrieve them. He woke up enough to notice I was there and along with the recognition went a wince of pain. That was going to get a whole lot worse as his brain unfogged, but for the moment he was just uncomfortable.

“Where’s Myra?” I asked. He stared at me as if he was having a hard time remembering English. “Have you seen a girl, shorter than me, weird eyes—”

“The master and Lord Mircea are dueling,” he said sadly. I tried repeating the question, but he just stared at me. There was only one thought in his head, and it wasn’t about Myra.

“Where is this duel?” I didn’t need to find Myra if I located Mircea—she’d find me.

“Onstage.”

“I was just there—it’s empty.”

“They have gone to Lord Dracula’s rooms for weapons.” His face twisted in pain, but I think it was less from his wounds than from the thought of his master in jeopardy. I had never met Mircea’s infamous younger brother and wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea. But what really concerned me was the fight. Half the Senate was after them, and they were taking time out to duel?

“Why are they fighting?”

“If my lord wins, he goes free—his brother has sworn it. But if Lord Mircea wins, he must go back into captivity, possibly forever!” The big man started sobbing as if his heart would break. I sighed. I should have known. Of course Dracula wouldn’t want to go back into jail or whatever asylum the Senate had fixed up for crazy vamps. But while he and Mircea battled it out, Myra and her new buddies would end the dispute by killing them both.

I turned the large man’s face towards me. “Why were you burning yourself?”

“Lord Dracula commanded it, for my failure to keep Lord Mircea from learning his whereabouts. He came here an hour ago, and I meant to tell him nothing, but then everything I knew poured out of me.”

“Mircea can be very persuasive.”

“My lord was very generous not to end my life for such incompetence.”

His eyes held the light of a true believer. I didn’t even try to convince him that his god was really a monster. “What’s your name?”

“Abraham Stoker, lady. I manage the theatre.”