Reap the Wind (7 page)

“Your custody?” The trembling was worse now. “Your
custody
? The Circle was trying to kill me for most of the last three months!”

“Under my predecessor. One of many lapses in judgment on his part, which is why he was removed. And afterward, I felt some . . . consideration . . . was due you, in light of your initial introduction to us. That you should be given time to understand that there are reasons why we are the traditional defenders of the Pythian—”

“The Pythian Court is defended by the Pythia!” Rhea said, rushing into the kitchen with a child in her arms. She looked at me wildly. “Lady—”

“What’s going on?”

“They’re coming in!”

“Who’s coming in?” Marco asked, face darkening.

And then one of the vamps cursed, and suddenly, Rhea and I were alone in the kitchen.

“The Circle,” she breathed. “They wanted to take us before. I should have told you, but you were so tired, but I should have told you—”

“And I should have expected it,” I said, and ran to the living room.

The door to the foyer was open, and the doorway was full of men in leather dusters that made them look like action movie heroes. Which wasn’t that far from the truth. The coats, ridiculous as they were in August, were needed to conceal the metric ton of weaponry that the Circle’s powerhouses carried around. None of which could be used tonight, because there were children in this damned apartment.

I pushed my way into the crowd of vampires, half of whom had guns out. “Put them away,” I said harshly. Rico, one of Mircea’s Italian masters, hesitated, then holstered his weapon so fast it looked like it had simply disappeared. It was a subtle indication to our guests of how fast it could be back in his hand.

Not that it mattered; war mages weren’t big on subtlety. And anyway, the rest of the vamps were ignoring me and still had theirs out. And then Marco decided to make it worse.

“Looks like you boys found backup,” he told them, from in front of the line of vamps. “At least that’ll make this interesting.”

“It isn’t going to be interesting!” I said, coming up beside him. “It isn’t going to be anything. They’re leaving.”

The mages didn’t reply, didn’t move. Neither did the vampires. But what the Circle’s men—and Jonas, damn him—didn’t understand, was that the vamps
couldn’t.

Vamps might have started out human, but they weren’t anymore. They hadn’t been for hundreds of years in some cases. And their society never was.

Okay, yes, sometimes they acted like it; sometimes they ate and drank and laughed right along with the little human they’d been ordered to guard.
But they weren’t human.
The war mages might act crazy by most people’s standards, might take insane risks, might even be a little touched in the head—I’d certainly thought so often enough. But given a bad enough situation, they would back down. They would wait for a better opportunity. They would live to fight another day.

The vamps wouldn’t.

Even if I was willing to go along with Jonas’ plan, they couldn’t. Because they couldn’t protect me if I was out of their sight. And that was what their master, the font of their wealth and position and strength and
life
, had ordered them to do. So they would stand their ground, would die to a man if they had to. Or more likely would kill every single war mage here and start a possibly irreparable breech with the Circle, and Jonas
didn’t get that
.

I just hoped someone else did.

“Marco—” I said tightly.

“Tried,” he told me, without turning around. “Master’s phone don’t work.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged slightly, and it looked like massive boulders shifting under the thin cotton of his shirt. I saw one of the war mages in front, a dark-haired guy with a cleft chin, notice.

He had no idea. Marco didn’t need his size. Marco could rip the man’s blood out of him through the air, in particles too small to see, without even breaking the skin. He could drain him from across the room until the idiot turned ghost white and fell off the steps, a shriveled husk who’d never had time to realize that these were not the low-level vampires he was used to. These were senior masters, and of Mircea’s family line.

Which meant they could also do it in seconds.

But then, the mages had their tricks, too, and these weren’t the doddering old pensioners the Circle had left to guard my court. Not if the amount of power prickling over my arms was anything to go by. Jonas might have expected my cooperation, but he hadn’t been sure of Marco’s. He would have sent men he could trust.

So this . . . could be very bad.

And then Fred came up beside me. “Mircea’s probably at the consul’s,” he told me.

“The consul’s?” I looked upward briefly, in the direction of my old suite, hoping that what Mircea had wanted to talk to me about was a quick trip to Vegas.

But of course not. “No, no,” Fred said. “Her place in upstate New York. She’s got a house. . . . Anyway, they’re doing a thing out there this week, choosing some new senators.”

“What does that have to do with Mircea’s phone not working? He told me to call him—”

“That was before.”

“Before
what
?”

“Before they shut the place down,” Fred said, sounding way too calm. Maybe too inexperienced to read the atmosphere that had Marco’s hand flexing against his thigh. “There’s a bunch of bigwigs on hand, consuls and such, and you know how many enemies they have. So our consul ordered the main wards brought online for the duration. And phones don’t work through them.”

“Then contact him mentally!”

“We already did. But it’s hard to send complex stuff across that kind of distance. I mean, maybe not for senators, but for the rest of us—”

“Fred,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Did you get through?”

“Yeah, well, sort of. I think the idea that you’re in trouble was understood okay, but some of the details might have gotten muddled.”

“Meaning?”

“That.” Fred nodded at the door. Where another mass of master vamps had just appeared behind the group of mages. Half of whom suddenly whirled to face them.

“The Circle isn’t the only one who has backup,” Marco told them gently.

The mages still didn’t reply. They didn’t have to. Because their boss had just appeared like a reflection in the windows leading to the balcony.

They were the same ones where the magical news feed had been projected last night, showing the destruction of Agnes’ court. The same ones where I’d seen a dozen tiny body bags being lined up on a rain-drenched street. The same ones Jonas had been facing when he forbade me to go back and try to save them.

My vision started to pulse at the edges.

“I wanted to give you time,” he told me now. “But we are out of it. The war has seen to that. And recent developments have clearly shown that you need guidance—”

“Guidance like you offered Agnes?” I asked hoarsely. It was below the belt—the two of them had been lovers, and her death had hit him hard. But right then, I didn’t care.

No way would he have tried this with her.

No way.

“Agnes was an experienced Pythia,” he told me crisply. “You are not—”

“I seem to be gaining it quickly.”

“Agnes had years of training; you do not—”

“You don’t get to decide when I’m ready for an office you have nothing to do with.”

“And Agnes would have been in our care in the first place, instead of in the clutches of—”

“Agnes would be ashamed of you!”

That last hadn’t come from me. Rhea pushed through the crowd, eyes wild, face flooding with a dark stain. And still carrying a little girl who couldn’t have been more than two.

“You left them to die. You left her!” Rhea thrust out the child in her arms. What the hell someone that young had been doing at court, I had no idea. But right at the moment, she was staring at Jonas out of big brown eyes, confused and afraid, because loud noises had just woken her up, and big people were shouting, and she wasn’t at her home, in her bed.

Because those of us who were supposed to protect her had failed.

“Look at her!” Rhea demanded. “Look at who you would have condemned! Look at who you would have left—”

“That’s enough,” Jonas said sharply.

But Rhea apparently didn’t think so. In the past twenty-four hours, she’d seen her home destroyed, had been almost killed herself, and had been trying to project some sense of normalcy for a probably panicked group of girls. All while surrounded by creatures most people viewed as monsters.

I suddenly thought I understood that chicken better.

But it didn’t look like it had been enough, and now Jonas was being told.

“Look at them all!” Rhea yelled. “You’re sworn to protect us, but you didn’t. You didn’t! You left us to die, and now you dare to come and say we must go with you? For what? The only one to care about us is here!”

“Yes, she cared,” Jonas said, low and vicious, his eyes glittering into mine. “She cared enough to violate the whole purpose of her office, to go back in time, to risk her life—and thereby to endanger all of ours!”

“It was
fifteen minutes
,” I told him, jolted out of some of my anger by the rising tide of his. Rhea’s little speech seemed to have shaken something loose, and he was looking . . . I didn’t know for sure how he was looking, but I didn’t like it.

“I didn’t change much of anything,” I told him, more quietly. “I got the girls out of the building before it exploded, that’s all. It still went up on schedule; everything else stayed the same. The time line couldn’t have been that—”

“I don’t care about the damned time line!”

“Then what are we talking about?” I asked, honestly confused.

“We are talking about
you
!”

He looked from me to Rhea to the girls spread out on the cots, some clutching pillows and, in a few cases, stuffed animals for comfort. And staring at Jonas with wide eyes. He met them unflinchingly.

“I would have saved you had I known ahead of time,” he told them. “Would have sent an entire battalion to your aid had I had any inkling. But once you were dead, I would have left you so. For I could not have saved you then without risking that which I valued more.”

It was an unbelievable speech. Even more so, several of the older girls were nodding, as if they agreed with him. What kind of brainwashing bullshit had Agnes been teaching them?

“My life is not worth more than theirs!” I snapped. “I am not—”

“You are
Pythia
!” he shouted, rounding on me with blue eyes blazing. “You are the only one we have left! And we are facing a possibly world-ending war! So, yes, I would have left them to their fate. I would leave ten thousand more lying dead on the ground before I would risk you. For if we lose you, we lose the war. We lose
everything
.”

He wasn’t pink anymore; he was white, almost as much as his hair. I’d never seen him like this. Never seen him remotely close.

But I finally understood what all this was about.

I finally understood that Jonas was afraid.

It seemed incredible. He’d been a daredevil in his youth, racing insane flying cars through the ley line system, the massive rivers of metaphysical power that flowed over and around our world and which the more lunatic mages used for transport. It was a game that left competitors dead even more often than NASCAR, but Jonas had seemed to revel in it. And then in old age, he’d engineered a dangerous coup that had ousted his much younger counterpart and returned him to preeminent power in the Circle. To say that he was not a man who rattled easily was the understatement of the century.

But he was sure looking like it now.

And that I
didn’t
understand.

Yes, we were facing a possible invasion. Yes, it was by creatures out of legend, creatures who should have stayed there, because they were far too much for humanity to handle. And yes, it was scary as hell, because our main defense, a wall of energy once erected around our world by one of the gods themselves, had recently been proven to be less than the perfect barrier we’d always thought it was.

Which was even more of a problem than it normally would have been, because the being battering at the gates right now was the worst possible scenario for a world already torn by war: the god who personified it.

I got that.

I got all of that.

What I didn’t get was what Jonas thought I could do about it.

“Do you expect me to fight Ares for you?” I asked, bewildered. It sounded incredible just saying it.

But Jonas apparently didn’t think so. “You defeated a god once before—”

“I
helped
defeat
Apollo
. And he was mostly dead already.”

He’d been the first one to breach the barrier, and had ended up the godly version of crispy fried for his trouble. He might still have been okay, if he’d taken time to heal, but of course he hadn’t. Godly pride had made him assume that he was still more than a match for us pathetic humans. And that plus some really amazing good luck on our part had left us alive and him . . . well, we all hoped he was dead.

Nobody had heard from him since, anyway.

But that was Apollo. Known for lyre strumming and nymph chasing, if the old legends were to be believed. This was
Ares
. I’d recently fought his half-human kids and barely survived, and that was with help I wouldn’t have again. But the god of war himself?

“You are a demigod,” Jonas pointed out, causing several of the war mages to flick me quick glances, as if they didn’t believe it.

Of course, sometimes neither did I. And with my hair hanging limp and dripping around my face, my body wrapped in an old gray bathrobe, and my feet in fuzzy pink slippers, I didn’t look like someone whose mother had been a goddess. But then, I didn’t look like it all dressed up, either. I was a five-foot-four blonde with skinny legs, out-of-control curls, and freckles.

Imposing I was not.

Mom had been more so, and had been the one, in fact, to erect the wall that was still keeping out her kind, thousands of years later. But Mom was dead, and I was what we were stuck with. And I was not going to be enough.

“You have abilities even the gods do not possess,” Jonas argued, as if he was trying to convince himself.

I hoped he was succeeding, because he wasn’t doing a damned thing for me.

“Like what?”

“You can stop our time stream—”

“Which helps us how?” I asked, bewildered. “You know how long that lasts, and that’s against
humans
. I don’t even know if it would work on a god. But even if did, it would give you what? A few minutes? What kind of damage can you do in a few minutes?”

“More than you think.” It was grim.

“Not enough,” Rhea said hollowly, because she’d been the one to receive the vision of Ares’ return, not me. And even in memory, it was enough to blanch her skin, to flood her eyes. Because she hadn’t just seen Ares return.

She’d seen us fail.

More specifically, she’d seen the Circle fail, seen Ares mopping the floor with them, news that had apparently hit Jonas harder than I’d realized at the time. So, okay, if ever a man had reason to panic, he did. But I still didn’t see what he expected me to do.