Tempt the Stars (34 page)

“I don’t want to rule!” I choked. “I didn’t even want to be Pythia.”

“And you never should have been!”

“We were talking about the information Ms. Silvanus has brought us,” Jonas said, looking at Rhea over his glasses.

“What information?” I asked, trying to force my attention back to the here and now, when all it wanted to do was go back. To find a solution. To make it right.

But some things don’t have a solution.

“The incubus has been regressed,” Adra told me. “It is an old method of execution that sends the soul back through his or her lifetime, into previous versions of himself. When his soul reaches the beginning of its life journey, it will wink out of existence, and the body will die.”

“That’s a bunch of bullsh—” Caleb began.

“It isn’t,” I said, thinking of Jules. And for a second, my heart sped up as I wondered if I could do the same thing for Pritkin. But there was a difference. Jules’ body had been changed, but his soul hadn’t. It had been in there, encased in a fleshy tomb, but present. Pritkin’s wasn’t. And it was his soul that had been cursed.

Adra had chosen his weapon perfectly.

Rhea was looking at me, her eyes huge and pained. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t need to. I knew that expression. I’d seen it in the mirror once or twice. “You had a vision,” I said.

Huge brown eyes met mine. “I never have visions,” she whispered. “Well, almost never, and never about anything important. It’s why I’m still a senior initiate and not an acolyte. I help—I helped—to train the children, the new initiates.”

“But this time you saw something.”

“I saw Ares,” she said, looking off into the distance. “Towering over a field in front of a storm-racked sky. He was here, in this world, fighting our forces. And we were losing . . . badly.”

“Was anyone else with him?” Jonas asked sharply.

“What?”

“Any other gods?”

She shook her head. “I only saw him. But it was so quick—just a flash. I was going upstairs with some cold medicine. One of the children had arrived with the sniffles and had given a nasty head cold to half the dorm, and it just . . . hit me. All of a sudden, I was somewhere else and seeing these terrible things, and there was lightning and thunder, and people were screaming and trees were crashing to the ground and the sky flooded red and . . . and I dropped the tray.”

“I probably would have, too,” I told her, because she was white and shaking again, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Yes, but the stairs are marble; everyone heard,” she said, looking at me with so much pain in her eyes that I finally got it; I wasn’t the only one feeling responsible for tonight. “And I was so upset . . . the adepts made me tell them, and at the time I didn’t realize . . . I couldn’t see any reason not to . . . until I saw. They were happy. They were
pleased
about it. Then they saw me looking at them, and changed their expressions. But I knew, I’d
seen
—”

“And so you came to tell me.”

She swallowed. “No. I should have done, but there were such rumors about you, they were saying . . . It wasn’t until the coronation that I realized—you couldn’t be what they said. The power had gone to you, the Circle had accepted you, and then at the coronation, you killed the Spartoi. You killed him!”

And suddenly, I knew why she looked familiar. “You were there.”

She nodded again. “I saw you, but I—it was obvious you were trying to be inconspicuous and I didn’t—”

“But you knew who I was.”

She looked surprised. “Of course.”

“Even though someone else was pretending to be me?”

She blinked again, like I wasn’t making much sense. “Yes, but I knew that wasn’t you. There was no power, no aura, no—” She waved it away. “It was obvious.”

So much for my great disguise.

“But the others didn’t see you, and by the time I got away from them, you had disappeared. And then when I saw you again—” She gave another graceful little hand flutter, maybe because she didn’t know a polite way of saying “you were battling a Spartoi in your birthday suit and almost getting fried.” “But then the vampires took you away, and I didn’t know how to reach you—”

“So you went to the covens.”

“Yes. My cousin—”

“And the covens brought you to me.”

“Yes.”

“So you could tell me what? What are they planning?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know, I don’t know! I tried following the adepts around, to let them think I agreed with them, hoping to find out more. . . . But I’m not an actress, and they’d seen my face that night. They didn’t believe me!”

I didn’t tell her it was okay, because it wouldn’t have helped. She didn’t look like a girl who needed platitudes. She looked like a girl who needed something to do.

I knew the feeling.

“I’ll go back,” I told Rosier. “I’ll stop the spell from being laid—”

“You will be prevented,” Adra said gently. “That is why it was done here, to preclude such a possibility.”

“Then give me the counterspell! I’ll go back in time, I’ll find his soul—” He just looked at me. “Pritkin did nothing wrong! If you have to hurt someone, hurt me!”

“They won’t hurt you. They need you,” Rosier choked. “But my son . . ”

Adra didn’t agree, but he didn’t refute it, either. And the worst part was, there was no hate in his eyes, no malice. This had been a policy decision to him, nothing more. A threat had been identified; a threat had been removed. But to me . . . 

It felt like the end of the world.

“How many acolytes are there at present?” Jonas asked.

“It varies,” Rhea said, looking at me. “Most of the court is composed of junior initiates, who have just been brought in—young girls who have been identified with unusual promise. And senior initiates, that’s most of us, who have training but carry none of the power. The adepts are only a small group, chosen from the most gifted of the senior initiates. After Myra’s death, there were only five.”

I just looked at her for a moment, sure the state of my head right now was messing with me. But no. I must be hearing things. “Come again?”

“Did I—was something not clear?” she asked, starting to look worried.

“I really hope so,” I said tightly. “You said the senior initiates don’t carry the Pythian power. So by implication . . . the adepts do?”

She nodded. “They have to, for training purposes. They all receive basic instruction in the Pythian arts, and the one who masters them the best is often selected as the heir. It also allows for circumstances when an heir dies or is deposed. There has to be someone else who can take over, who has been trained. They are also available to help the Pythia, in times of need.”

“In times of need?” I looked at Jonas.

He didn’t say anything, but he took off his glasses and polished them, despite the fact that he’d just done that thirty seconds ago.

“If a mission is more hazardous than she feels would be prudent to handle alone,” Rhea explained.

I continued to look at Jonas.

“Yes, well,” he said briskly. “We already knew there was a problem with the court, thanks to Ms. Silvanus’ testimony—”

“Jonas.”

“You had enough on your plate as it was, Cassie! There was no reason to add more—”

“There was no reason to tell me
there’s a whole group of Myras running around
?”

“It is hardly that,” he argued. “The acolytes only have a small fraction of the heir’s power, barely enough for training—”

“Jonas.”

“And Myra was a traitor. Until now, there has been no reason to believe the rest of the court was the same, much less that they would attack their own coven—”

“Jonas!” He stopped, and looked at me. And something on my face must have registered, because he stopped whatever it was he’d been about to say. “Never keep something like this from me again. Never.”

I got up and shoved through the French doors, out onto the balcony. Jonas didn’t follow me, which was fortunate. I honestly don’t know what I’d have done if he had.

It had been this way my whole life: people keeping things from me. Sometimes for what they thought were good reasons, sometimes, most times, because knowledge was power, and the less I had of the former, the less I’d be able to challenge them for the latter. Tony, the Circle, the senate, Mircea . . . someone was always working to keep me in the dark.

But there were things in the dark that could bite you if you didn’t know they were there. If you couldn’t avoid them because you didn’t even know they existed. Knowledge wasn’t just about power; it was about survival, mine and that of everyone who depended on me.

And I was heartily sick of the dark.

Evelyn came out onto the balcony. She didn’t say anything. But her wrist was resting on the railing, not far from where my hand was clenching on it convulsively. And in hers . . 

It
had
been a wand, I thought, watching her twirl it expertly, back and forth, between her fingers.

Our eyes met.

“I think it’s time the girls and I were going,” she said. And then she just looked at me, gray eyes into blue.

I licked my lips. “I’ll walk you out,” I said hoarsely.

The mansion was dark and quiet when we shifted in to the front hall of the Pythian Court. London is seven hours ahead of Vegas, which would make it somewhere around midnight, and I had jumped us back as far as I could. Which wasn’t very damned far, because carrying five has a cost, and it is high.

I dropped to my knees, staggered at the power drain.

“Lady—”

“I’m fine,” I told Rhea, harshly enough that she jerked back her hand.

I stayed down for a moment, watching the marble tile of Agnes’ front hall pulse in and out, wondering if my eyeballs were about to pop. And cursing inwardly, because my time sense had kicked in to tell me what I’d already suspected. I’d had to drop the time shift earlier than I’d wanted or risk rupturing something.

At most, we had fifteen minutes.

Which meant I didn’t have time for this, I told myself severely, and got up.

The place looked about the same as the last time I’d been here. Shafts of what were probably streetlights, but which looked like silver moonbeams, slanted through high, neoclassical windows. There was lots of marble, some paneling that looked like it might be genuine mahogany, and a couple statues of Grecian-looking women holding jugs. A staircase, the one where Rhea had had her vision I assumed, ran up to a landing.

A chandelier tinkled softly overhead, blown about by the freshening wind through a transom. It sounded impossibly loud to my straining ears, like the world’s most expensive wind chime. Nothing else moved.

I found that less than reassuring.

Rhea seemed to think the same. “There should be guards,” she said worriedly. “The Circle—it keeps people here, all the time.”

“They’re here,” Evelyn said grimly, from behind me. I turned around to see her over near the main doors, where a figure in a leather trench coat lay slumped behind a potted plant.

I’d been about to ask how he’d died, but then she rolled him over. And I didn’t have to. The skin was gray and papery, and crumpled into unrecognizability, since the flesh underneath had mostly withered away. It pulled back the mouth into a silent scream, left the eyes sunken into the head and the bones brittle enough that several cracked just from the gentle movement.

A ring dropped off a wasted finger, to clatter against the floor, and Rhea made a small sound. “McClaren,” she whispered. “One of his granddaughters . . . She’s a new initiate. . . ”

“Adepts,” Evelyn cursed. “I was hoping Marsden was wrong.”

“Question is, are they still here?” Beatrice asked.

“They shouldn’t be.” That was Jasmine. “A bomb destroyed the building, not an attack. If the adepts had any sense, they fled after setting it.”

I swallowed. Maybe cutting things close hadn’t been such a bad idea. But Beatrice didn’t seem convinced.

A streetlight was shining through a window, glinting off her chains and turning her Afro faintly blue. And highlighting the frown on her face. “Then why attack the Circle’s men? The adepts were already inside and free to move about. Why involve the patrols?”

“If they were messing about with the wards, they might have been nervous,” Jasmine offered. “Wanted them out of the way—”

“And speaking of wards, why didn’t we set any off when we came in just now?”

“You’re with me,” Rhea said, but she sounded doubtful. “But that should only have kept the general alarm from sounding. There should still have been somebody here by now, to check. . . ”

“Hence the attacks on the corpsmen,” Jasmine said.

“All of them?” Beatrice demanded. “And how did a group of untrained girls manage that, Pythian power or no?”

“Took ’em by surprise,” Evelyn said, fingering her wand. “Must have.”

“And again I say, all of them? You know what they’re like: suspicious, jumpy buggers, every one. And yet—”

“Let’s just get the kids out,” I said, glancing around. My skin was crawling. “Where are they?”

I didn’t have to ask twice. Rhea had been vibrating, just standing there, and now she took off for the stairs. “Wait!” Evelyn called, and put a hand on my arm.

“We have less than fifteen minutes,” I told her.

But she didn’t answer. “Beatrice.”

The little witch already had her staff up. One of the little indentations that I’d mistaken for hollows in the wood was glowing with a pale blue light, like a flashlight. Which I didn’t understand the point of, since we could already see—

Nothing, compared to when she brought it down on the floor, hard. And a pulse came out of the bottom, like a wave heading to the beach. Or maybe like a stone thrown into a pond, because this one was moving outward in all directions, highlighting mop marks on the floor, dust in the corners, cracks here and there in the grout between tiles. Like a black light at a crime scene, it showed everything hidden.

Including the feet of a bunch of men arrayed along the walls.

“I hate when I’m right,” Evelyn muttered, and then shoved me at the door. “Go!”

I hit the floor instead as the paneling bulged outward in the shape of bodies, dozens of them. And then melted away entirely as the spell ran up their legs, stripping off the camouflage as it went. War mages, and not ours, I realized, as they peeled off the walls and started slinging spells that sparked off the shield Jasmine had thrown up, barely in time.

But one had gotten through, a split second before the shield snapped closed, strobing the room in poisonous green. It missed, thanks to a curse I hadn’t even seen Evelyn hurl, which hit the thrower at almost the same moment he moved. But it took out the transom and most of the front door with it, showering us with glass.

And finally sent wards screaming through the house.

“Well, the kids are up,” Beatrice said as Evelyn turned on me.

“Damn it, are you deaf?” she demanded.

“If I leave, and the adepts show up, you die,” I said, fumbling with the dead war mage’s coat. And trying not to breathe because it was covered in flaky white dust that flew up everywhere as I pushed and pulled and broke him to pieces trying to get it off. But I had to have it. The coats were spelled to resist assaults, and I was about to get assaulted unless I was way luckier than usual.

“You heard Zara,” Evelyn said. “They’re probably already gone!”

It took me a second to realize she meant the witch I’d been calling Jasmine. “And if they’re not? You may be good—”

“We’re better than good.”

“But you can’t fight someone who can manipulate time!”

She started to answer, but the shield shattered as a dozen spells hit it all at once. And then Beatrice brought up her staff again. A different hollow glowed this time, a dark, bloody red. And all the lights around the room suddenly shattered, showering the floor with sparks and sending flames running up the walls.

“Nice parlor trick, old woman,” a mage said, grabbing her.

The staff came down again.

And lines of flame tore out of every light, carving a pentagram of fire in the air and spearing half a dozen mages through with flame.

“Glad you liked it,” she told him as the man collapsed at her feet.

But while it cleared our general area, it didn’t do much else. Because mages were running at us from all sides now, rushing into the room from where I guess they’d been hiding, not knowing where we’d come in. But they knew it now, and we had to—

Hit the floor again.

Zara muttered something low and vicious, and the witches jerked me down beside them just as the windows all blew out. The curtains billowed inward and then broke off to fly across the room, and what felt and sounded a lot like a hurricane roared through the house. Mirrors shattered, the chandelier whipped about like a crazed thing, statues toppled over. And half a dozen mages who hadn’t gotten shields up in time went flying. But others just hunkered down, shield bubbles dotting the room, waiting it out.

Because yeah.

I didn’t think she was going to be able to keep that up for long, either.

“If they planted the bombs, they’re not here,” Evelyn yelled, to be heard over the roar of the storm. “This was likely a trap. The old man was right—they’re after you!”

“You were right, too,” I panted, still struggling to free the coat. “They’re willing to kill a few dozen children to get to me.”

Evelyn swore. “I can’t protect you and help the girls, and they can’t take this many on their own!”

“Then don’t protect me,” I said as the wind died and the coat came free with a sickening crunch, both at the same moment.

Shields popped everywhere as mages surged back to their feet. We were about to get overrun, and the witches couldn’t cast and shield at the same time, and letting a bunch of mages get to point-blank range wasn’t smart. Of course, neither was this, I thought, grabbing them and shifting all four of us to where Rhea was flattened against the stairs, halfway up, the thin bubble of her shield rippling in the still-strong winds.

And then collapsing entirely as a bolt of purple flame hit it.

I threw myself on top of her, the coat covering both of us, but it wasn’t enough. Another curse hit, and spelled or no, the coat had aged along with its occupant. I felt something lash my back, a thin line of fire along the weakened back seam, and screamed even as I shifted.

And landed in the middle of a bunch of mages at the top of the stairs, who were heading down now that the hurricane had tapered off to a tropical storm.

And then tripping and falling as we shifted into the middle of them.

Literally, in Rhea’s case. She’d ended up welded to a mage through the skirt of her dress, which was now bisected by a heavy leather coat—and the leg behind it. She jerked away, and he screamed, which only made her jerk harder. And then she was grabbed by another mage and slung to the side—

And the man’s leg came off at the thigh.

Because flesh and bone don’t react well to being split by a swath of embroidered linen.

Blood spewed everywhere, coating surrounding mages and splattering me. And sending Rhea, who had obviously not had this as part of her training, into a frenzy. She tore away from her attacker, kicked another into the railing and fled up the remaining stairs, none of the mages trying to stop her since she already appeared mortally wounded.

Or maybe because they were lunging at me.

And there was nothing I could do, because I couldn’t shift again, not right now, maybe not ever. But it didn’t matter because triple bolts of something red and lethal tore past me, one bolt close enough to singe my hair. And ripped holes through the mages left above me.

And then I was being pulled up the stairs by three maniacs, who were cursing everything in sight. And getting cursed right back as the mages in the hall figured out we weren’t there anymore, maybe because a bunch of their fellows had just fallen on their heads. But they were behind us, and the landing and a hallway were ahead, the one Rhea had just disappeared into.

Something hit the wall beside me, leaving a heavy scorched mark, and something else lashed my back, turning my arm numb even through the coat’s protection. But then we were in the hall, and Jasmine—Zara— was throwing a shield over the end of it, like a plug.

Which sent three mages staggering back when they ran straight into it.

We pelted down the hall, where small people in white nightgowns were already spilling out of several rooms. Or maybe it was their day-wear, since who could tell the difference? But it looked like Rhea hadn’t lost it as much as I’d thought, because she appeared at the door to a room down the hall, breathing a little funny, but with a child in each hand.

And screamed, “Behind you!”

Damn, that hadn’t lasted long, I thought, and hit the floor, just as something blew out a light on the wall beside me. Glass scattered and children screamed, but to my amazement, they didn’t run amok. Not when Rhea snapped out a command and started them moving in orderly lines down the hall, even as the witches cursed the shit out of everything behind them.

But the odds were ridiculous, and we were getting tired. The next time Zara tried a shield, it was popped almost immediately, under a barrage of spells so thick it looked like a miniature sun had gone off in the hallway. The only thing that saved us was the fact that this wasn’t one of those made-to-look-old kinds of places, but the real deal. And the hall was narrow, not allowing us to be rushed by everyone at once.

But it let through enough, more than enough. Zara took a hit to the arm, screaming half in pain and half in fury. And something hit me, catching one side of my coat on fire that didn’t go out. I had to shed my only protection or go up in flames with it, throwing it down the hall at the mages.

They batted it away, but it distracted the ones in front for half a second, which was long enough for Evelyn to throw a spell—not at them, but at the ceiling. And there was enough power behind it to bring half the hallway down, cracking it along the center and spilling a load of billowing plaster and falling debris on our pursuers. Along with a bunch of water pipes, dripping and then spewing on their heads, which didn’t seem to bother them much.

Until Beatrice sent a plume of flame down the hall, and turned the water to blistering-hot steam.

And it seems that even dark mages have an aversion to being boiled to death. Some got up shields, but more panicked and tried to turn around, crashing into those behind them. Creating enough of a temporary bottleneck that we were able to get the last of the kids out of the dorm rooms, pushing them down the hall as fast as small legs could move.

I didn’t know where we were going, but everyone else seemed to, with the older kids helping the younger. Down the hall and around a bend, to a back stairway. Which would have been great, except that it was as narrow as the hall that fed into it.

I stared at it, not even needing to do any mental math. And the looks on the faces of the witches would have told me the truth, even if it hadn’t been obvious. I didn’t know how long it was going to take all those kids to get down all those stairs, but it worked out to more than we had.

A lot more.

And then the dark mages were coming again, around the bend, with shields initially, and then dropping them to fire when they realized the truth. A mass of spells like the one they’d done before, that had shattered Zara’s shield, only this time, we didn’t have a shield. But the spells stopped anyway.