Reap the Wind (38 page)

“Not the same,” he argued. “The same idea maybe, but the fey can’t feed from our world at all. The covens can ’cause they’re from here, but the fey aren’t. Their bodies generate some magic, and they bring talismans and shit with them to extend it. But when their power starts to run low, they hightail it back to faerie. They have to, or become sitting ducks!”

I blinked at him, because that had sounded . . . kind of vicious.

He saw my expression and grimaced. “We’ve been having some problems with the fey lately. It’s one of the things the master’s doing in New York.”

I nodded.

“But none of this explains why the ‘gods’ were so damned powerful here,” he persisted. “Shouldn’t they have run dry eventually, like the fey?”

“They’re not fey.”

“But they’re magical beings and all magic gives out eventually; why didn’t theirs?”

I shrugged. “They cycled out, went home sometimes. That’s why the old legends say they lived in places like Asgard or Olympus, not earth.”

“But the legends also say that they fought wars
here
,” Fred persisted. “Including some with each other. So, what did they do when their power ran low? Say time out and go home?”

“No,” I said, and tossed a ruby on the pile. “They fed on demons.”

“Demons?”

“That’s what they wanted with earth in the first place: as a staging ground for their hunt. Humans don’t have enough energy to bother with, but the demons had more, sometimes millennia of accumulated power, and it . . . fattened the gods back up.”

“Ah. I didn’t know that.”

“It’s why the demons hate them. The gods were using us as bait to lure them in. The demons came to feed off us, and then the gods fed off them.” Like lions hanging out at the watering hole, as Pritkin had phrased it.

Hungry lions.

Fred frowned. It didn’t look like he enjoyed learning that he was low man on the food chain. “Are the gods like us in other ways? Can they pull from family? Share power?”

“Not that I know of.” I kind of got the impression that the gods didn’t share much of anything.

“But then, how did they fight? Each other, I mean?”

“I told you. Maybe they fed off any demons that happened to be around, if they got low.”

“Maybe.” He didn’t look convinced.

“Vamps do that,” I pointed out. “Tony’s boys did, in a scuffle. They used to drain their opponents to heal themselves.”

“A scuffle is not a war,” he argued. “And while that’s technically possible, it takes concentration. And losing concentration, even for a split second, with one of us . . .”

I nodded. The best way to survive a vamp fight was not to get in one. Sort of like with the gods, I thought grimly.

“Here, put these in your pockets,” I told him, scooping up the jewels. I’d decided against the amulets. The creep factor was high, and I didn’t need anyone else poisoned. But some of the raw stones might be pretty all polished up. Maybe the girls could get rings made or something.

“You can tell me, you know,” he said as I was stuffing his jacket pockets.

“Tell you what?”

“Why you’ve been running around like a headless chicken for two weeks—”

“I have not.”

“You have. You stumble back in, dirty and beat up and wearing seriously weird clothes. You throw back some dinner, grab some sleep, and then you’re off again. Everybody’s curious.”

“Then tell them to be less curious.”

“Some of the guys think Mage Pritkin has gone and got himself in trouble, and that you’re trying to help him—”

“They can think whatever they want.”

“—but I told ’em that you were probably doing something about the war. Trying to find us some advantage maybe.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So which is it?” he persisted. “War or war mage? I got a bet riding on it.”

“Can’t it be both?” I asked, distracted by the sight of one of the cups, which had ended up under the coffee table. I picked it up. They were really beautiful, some of them. This one had been carved entirely out of amethyst, like a single great jewel.

But it hadn’t saved her. None of them had. I was beginning to think that those sorts of precautions never did. Hunker down, play it safe, take precautions . . . and die anyway.

Because Mircea was right about one thing: how did you win a war playing defense? The answer was you didn’t. Not usually, anyway, and not this one.

But what other choice did we have?

What did we have that could kill a god?

“Cassie?”

I looked up to find Fred leaning back on the couch, watching me. And maybe it was a trick of the light, or my overactive imagination. But for a second, the too-round face was grim, and the big gray eyes were narrowed and shrewd.

And then he smiled again, and he was just Fred.

“Both?”

And shit.

I was just putting my foot in my mouth every time I opened it tonight, wasn’t I?

But this time I got a reprieve when Rico decided to rejoin us.

He was closing the little leather fold of tools he’d brought with him, and putting it back inside his jacket. The jacket was another leather one, which went with his bad-boy image better than the suits I’d never seen him wear. It also went with his somewhat checkered past as a “troubleshooter” for the family, which must have included a little safe breaking since he’d volunteered.

Only a glance at the safe showed that he hadn’t broken this one.

“No?” I said, because of course not. When was anything ever that easy?

“I can break it open or rip it out of the wall for you,” he confirmed. “But I can’t do it while those wards are up. We need a mage.”

“And where are we supposed to find one?” Fred asked. “We can’t just call up the Circle and ask ’em to send one over, or it’ll change time. And we can’t go back to our own time and snag one, because she’s already exhausted. And all the ones around here are—”

He cut off when the door suddenly hit the floor, sliding halfway across the room, while the opening erupted into one giant fireball.

“Dark,” I finished for him, as all hell broke loose.

The mages weren’t the problem.

I threw a time freeze at them at almost the second they cleared the door. It wasn’t quite strong enough to do the job, because I was tired and they were scattered, forcing me to spread the spell over a bigger area than I’d planned. But that actually ended up being okay. Because instead of stopping them in place, it encased them in a large blob of slow time, which left fire spells boiling out ahead of them and coats wafting out behind them and the mages themselves on what looked like might be a ten-minute journey to the other side of the room.

No, they weren’t the problem.

The acolytes were.

“Shit!” I heard someone say, and a spell tore through the room at the same time that I tried to shift my group out of it. But shifting without being able to touch someone is a new skill for me, and exponentially harder. And that’s without having to throw two spells within seconds of each other.

Fred winked out of existence, still clutching his hideous souvenir, but Rico knocked me back, trying to shield me. And in the process put himself out of reach. And Rhea wasn’t even back yet, and shifting people without even being able to
see
them wasn’t happening.

Especially not when you’re already shifting yourself.

I never knew exactly what happened. But either the acolyte’s spell or Rico’s elbow must have thrown me off, because instead of the suite, I ended back at the top of the hidden staircase. That was good, since I hadn’t wanted to leave with two of my people stuck here anyway. That was bad, because whatever had hit me hadn’t just frozen my power, it had frozen
me
.

Annnnd now I was falling.

I tottered against the wall, which wasn’t so bad. And then bounced off and hit the stairs, sliding all the way back down to the secret panel, which was worse. And which obligingly opened, spilling me halfway out into the room, because of course it did.

God
damn
it.

The awkward way I’d fallen had left my feet sticking out into the ballroom and my head inside the passage. And the pitch-dark stairs behind me and the wall of paneling in front of me ensured that I couldn’t see shit. I could hear, though, and a few seconds later my ears were being treated to the sound of boot heels hitting marble.

My breath froze as still as the rest of me as I stared at the dim outline of the gothic arch. The room outside was lit only by a little moonlight, but it looked bright as day compared to the gloom of the stairs. And my jean-covered legs and the gaping maw of the staircase were going to be hard for anyone to miss.

If the boots were coming this way, that is.

They echoed loudly on all that marble, making it hard to tell, but it sort of sounded like it.

Of course, I thought desperately, and stuck out my tongue.

It was the only thing I could currently move, along with my lips slightly. It wasn’t much, not even enough to keep me from drooling. More like the feeling a couple hours after visiting the dentist, when the Novocain begins to wear off and you start looking for your pain pills.

I didn’t have pain pills. But I did have a pain. In the form of a guy who crashed in my necklace when he wasn’t off ogling the casino’s hoochie-coochie dancers. Which with my luck was where he was tonight, because he was
never
around when I—

There.

My tongue finally managed to find something other than the fuzzies off my shirt. Namely the chain of the necklace I wore, which had slid onto my shoulder next to my chin when I fell. I grabbed it with my lips and tongue and started trying to pull the main cluster of ugly, consisting of a ruby red stone surrounded by a lot of tacky gold filigree, toward me.

But the damned thing kept sliding on its chain, and the footsteps were definitely coming closer, and when I tried to shift a little farther back into the stairwell, nothing happened.

Except that Bootheels finally came into view.

He was a war mage, all right, in black commando gear paired with steel-toed boots, and an incongruous floor-length cape. Like a soldier of fortune crossed with a medieval monk. The boots were familiar from Pritkin’s workaday wardrobe. Something else he had was familiar, too.

The elegant ballroom with its crystal chandeliers, velvet curtains, and highly polished marble floor was an incongruous backdrop for the crude creature standing beside the mage. Naked, taller than a man, and made out of dull orange earth, it looked like a piece of bad claymation that an artist needed to spend a little more time on.

It wasn’t.

When I first met him, Pritkin had had one of the creatures called golems by the medieval rabbis, who had been the first to make them. And who hadn’t bothered overmuch with looks, because that wasn’t the point. The point was to create a mobile prison for the malevolent creature inside it, one of the nastier demon species that were trapped by the crazier mages to be used as servants.

Pritkin had used his mainly as a decoy and an added layer of shielding. The clay body absorbed spells and bullets equally well, keeping them from landing on him, and was also useful as a pack mule for carrying extra hardware. But they could attack, too, with a liquid speed that I’d rarely seen outside of a vamp.

And they were virtually unstoppable, since, unlike us flesh-and-blood types, they didn’t feel pain.

I was so screwed.

Master and slave had their backs to me at the moment, staring out of the French windows. Because the only thing supposed to be over here was wall. But they’d see me as soon as they turned around, which meant that I didn’t have—

Any time.

A faint sound, like that of a door panel sliding back, drifted down to my ears from the top of the stairs. And then heavy, measured footsteps started coming this way. I couldn’t see who it was, but it didn’t matter since a determined five-year-old could kill me in my current state and—

And then a flashlight beam hit me in the face.

“What the hell?”

The voice came from behind, but the mage in front of me heard it and spun. Leaving me sandwiched between two dark magic workers with the only question being which one would curse me first. And I guess it was Flashlight, because Bootheels’ hand didn’t even twitch before the area erupted in light.

But not in the shape of a spell.

Not unless the mages had crafted one that looked a lot like a genie rising from a lamp, if the lamp was an ugly ruby necklace and the genie was a pissed-off, transparent cowboy whose evening slumber had just been ruined by two thoughtless mages. Who were now no longer staring at me, I realized. But at my ghost buddy Billy Joe, who was glowing like the Aurora Borealis, with the sickly, neon green ghost light few humans ever get a chance to see.

And then with a whiter, brighter sheen, as the long, jeans-and-ruffled-shirt-clad body collapsed into a ball of pulsing ghost energy, throwing crazy shadows on the walls. And letting off a sound that felt like a knife in the brain.

If they ever wanted a sound effect for a scary movie, I had one for them, I thought, wishing that my hands worked so I could cover my ears. Or shut my eyes, which were starting to seriously dry out, but not so much that I couldn’t see Billy Joe swoop up the stairs, with a psychic scream that sounded like a thousand nails on a thousand chalkboards and sent horrible shivers running over my skin.

The mage didn’t seem fond of it, either, because he cursed and stumbled back, falling into the stairwell.

But it didn’t stop him from drawing a weapon, and when Billy swooped around him and came barreling back down the stairs, a hail of bullets followed.

That would have been very bad, except for the fact that I was lying down. So they flew over my head and hit the other mage, who had been standing there with his mouth hanging open. And his shields down, judging by the fact that he shuddered and fell over just as the other mage tore down the stairs.

And straight into Bootheels’ last spell.

It looked like the dying mage had had a split second to get off a final curse, which caught his counterpart halfway down the short flight and sent him tumbling the rest of the way. Until he kicked me in the head, tripped, and sprawled out on the shiny ballroom floor, lying still. Leaving me with two dead mages, and a golem that suddenly lost interest in the attack in favor of nudging his old master with a clay-like toe.

And a ball of pissed-off energy that stopped just above my drooling face, resolving itself into a disembodied head wearing a Stetson and a scowl.

“You rang?” Billy demanded dryly.

“Nngghnh,” I said, which was the best I could do with frozen vocal cords and a lolling tongue.

“Would you mind repeating that?”

“Nngghnh, nngghnh!”

“Very funny,” Billy said.

“NNGGHNH!”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” he said, disgusted, and merged with me so we could actually have a conversation. “Now, you want to tell me why you can’t move?”

“I got hit with a spell.”

“And why those guys wanted to kill you?”

“It’s Thursday.”

“And what the hell ‘nngghnh’ means?”

“It means we’re running out of time!” I said, and cursed. Because nothing worked. And damn the acolytes! And damn the dark mages! And damn everybody who had magic but me! I was supposed to have more magic than everyone else, to be able to do things other people couldn’t, not to get caught in a—

My thoughts screeched to a halt as my eyes fell on the golem. Which had just collapsed, probably because spells don’t outlive the caster, including containment spells, and the mage had just departed for the other side. I hadn’t been paying much attention to it before, but I was now.

And maybe I did have some magic that would work, after all.

•   •   •

“This isn’t going to work,” Billy told me a couple minutes later.

“It
is
working,” I said, twitching a finger.

It was fat and orange, without a nail or a hair or the freckles common to a human. It looked more like an uncooked hot dog than a finger, but it was moving. Which was more than I could say for my broken doll of a body still sprawled in the stairway.

Billy remained in house, so to speak, because my body would die without a soul in residence. Which is why I was currently getting a death glare out of my own blue eyes. He could blink them now, and had managed to mostly pull my tongue back where it belonged, although my voice slurred like an old drunk’s.

But it was an improvement. And hopefully an indication that the mage’s spell was weakening. But not fast enough.

“I wish you could help me up,” I told Billy.

“I wish you’d stop using that voice,” he told me back. “It’s . . . disturbing.”

“Sorry.”

I kind of liked it. Deep and powerful and scary, it matched the body—and the body’s former occupant, whom I could still smell as a pervasive stench. As if evil had permeated the very pores this thing didn’t have.

Or maybe ancient demons just didn’t wear deodorant.

“Isn’t that freaking you out?” Billy demanded as I settled more comfortably into my temporary skin.

“Yes,” I said, but it didn’t sound convincing even to me.

But I
was
freaking out; of course I was. I was a disembodied soul trying to wear the shed skin of an evil demon, which I was controlling through the very illegal magic known as necromancy. Or was trying to, I amended, as I started to get up.

And had a ghostly-looking girl leg poke awkwardly out of the golem’s massive shin.

“Told you,” Billy said as I frowned at it.

I drew it back in, but when I tried to move the leg again, the same thing happened. I moved mine, instead. Or, you know, what would have been mine, if I’d still had one, and damn it!

Okay. Okay. This wasn’t my first time at the possession rodeo. I should be able to figure this out.

Technically, my father had been the necromancer in the family, although he hadn’t made zombies. He’d made something like this. Not golems; he wasn’t a warlock. He couldn’t summon a demon if his life had depended on it, which was just as well because it would have kicked his ass. So he certainly couldn’t trap one.

But then, he didn’t have to. Because he already had plenty of spirits around. Dad, it turned out, had been a ghost magnet.

It was something he’d passed on to me, along with his blond hair and blue eyes and tendency to fall over his own two feet. I’d grown up with the ability to see and talk to ghosts, which I’d assumed was just a clairvoyant thing. But apparently not.

Because ghosts didn’t just like to talk to me, they hung around. And I guessed they liked to hang around Dad, too, because he’d amassed his own little group. Which he’d eventually realized would be more useful if they had bodies like the golems some of his warlock buddies made.

Crazy, right?

But then, so was Dad, or he gave a good impression of it sometimes. Like in this case, because nobody dealt with ghosts. Necromancers made zombies because they did as they were told. Ghosts would give you the finger before mugging you for energy and going off to the strip club. At least, they would if they were Billy Joe. Ghosts did what they damned well pleased.

But Dad had preferred them anyway, and so he’d decided to make prosthetic bodies for his ghosts. And yes, he was a weirdo, but that didn’t mean he was wrong, because it had worked. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the spell he’d used.

He’d told me that he’d managed to infuse the spell for making golems with his own necromancy, but he hadn’t mentioned how. At the time, it hadn’t seemed important. It was kind of feeling important now.

“Cass—”

“In a minute.”

The whole point of it had been to mesh a spirit with a body. That was what necromancy did—use a little of the necromancer’s soul to animate a body that wasn’t his. It was why they could only make a handful of zombies at a time; there was only so much soul energy one person could spare.

So Dad had taken some of his soul, merged it with a ghost’s, and then just . . . stuffed the resulting combo into a premade body. And Dad’s bit o’ soul had acted like glue to keep it there.

But if that was the case, then why did I need a spell?