Karen Chance - [Cassandra Palmer 03] Read online

  He smelled of sweat, metal and dirt, plus a static crackle of nervous energy that was practically his signature. I turned on the flashlight and saw what I’d expected: a shock of pale hair, which as usual was making taunting gestures in the face of gravity, a square jaw, a slightly overlarge nose and furious green eyes. The Circle’s most famous renegade and my reluctant partner, John Pritkin.

  I breathed a sigh of relief and clicked my gun’s safety on. To know Pritkin was to want to kill him, but so far I’d resisted temptation. “You shouldn’t sneak up on me like that!” I whispered.

  “Why didn’t you shoot me?” he demanded.

  “You told me not to.”

  “I—that’s—” Pritkin seemed momentarily incoherent, so I shoved the gun’s barrel lightly against his stomach. At least I’d thought it was his stomach. I’d only intended to show that I wasn’t defenseless, but in a flash, I was slammed against the side of the crypt, my gun arm pinned to the wall, my body stuck between the hard surface and a very angry war mage. I reluctantly admitted that there may have been a fantasy or two that began with this scenario, but I doubted the evening was going to end the same way.

  “I knew it was you,” I told him before his ability to vocalize returned. “You smell like gunpowder and magic.” That was truer than usual because his coat, a thick leather duster that hid his weapon collection, had a large spot where the leather was crisped and curled up. Like maybe a spell hadn’t missed him by much.

  “Those are mages out there!” he whispered savagely. “So do they! And what the hell are you still doing here?!”

  “I have the map,” I reminded him.

  “Give it to me and go!”

  “And leave you here alone? There’s a dozen of them!”

  “If you don’t leave right now…”

  I raised my chin, even though I’d turned off the flashlight so he probably couldn’t see it. “What? You’ll shoot me?”

  His hand clenched my shoulder, almost painfully. Don’t tempt the crazy war mage, I reminded myself, just as a bullet sliced through the open doorway. It ricocheted several times around the crypt’s inner walls before crashing through what remained of the Madonna. “If you’re here much longer, I won’t have to!” he whispered furiously.

  “Let’s just get the damn thing and we can both leave,” I said reasonably.

  “In case it has somehow slipped your notice, this was a trap!”

  “Damn it, you can’t trust anybody anymore!” The elderly French mage we’d visited in his sweet little country cottage had seemed so reliable, with his Old World charm and his kind eyes—and his lousy map that had sent us on the treasure hunt from hell. It wasn’t fair; the bad guys weren’t supposed to look like someone’s grandfather. “And Manassier seemed so—”

  “If the next word out of your mouth is ‘nice,’ I will make your life hell when we get back. Pure hell.”

  I didn’t bother to dignify that with a response. Pritkin was just…Pritkin. At some point I’d learned to mostly roll with it. I’d often wondered if he gave the Circle half as much trouble before he broke with them over his decision to support me. If so, you’d think they’d have thanked me for taking him off their hands. Maybe they planned to send a nice bouquet to the funeral.

  “Look, all we know for sure is that some mages got here ahead of us. Maybe we all decided to burgle the place on the same night.” I didn’t really believe it—they’d attacked us almost as soon as we’d arrived and we hadn’t even found anything. But I hated to give up on our best lead yet. And leaving Pritkin to pursue it alone wasn’t an option. He had all the self-preservation instincts of a bug near a shiny windshield.

  A strong hand clenched my arm. “Ow!” I pointed out.

  “Give me the damn map!”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Hey!” I looked up to see the younger ghost staring at us. “In case you missed it, people are trying to kill you.”

  “People are always trying to kill me,” I said irritably.

  “The only way you’re dying tonight is if I kill you,” Pritkin informed me.

  “I’ve been in relationships like that,” the ghost sympathized.

  “We’re not in a relationship,” I muttered.

  “Sheer bloody-minded—what?” Pritkin broke off his rant, which I hadn’t been listening to anyway, to look around wildly. “What’s happening?”

  “You mean you let him talk to you like that and you aren’t even getting any? Man, what a rip-off.”

  “Nothing. Just a couple of spirits,” I said, shooting ghost #2 a look.

  “Hey, standing right here.”

  “And,” his counterpart chimed in, “I resent that ‘just’ comment. We’re the two most active spirits in this entire—”

  “Active?” A hand moved down my arm, the touch both gentle and rough, calloused from holding guns and doing push-ups and snapping people’s necks. “Don’t even think about it,” I told Pritkin, then turned my attention back to the ghost. “How active?”

  The older ghost preened slightly. “We see everything that goes on around here. The things I could tell—”

  “So, if there were hidden passageways, you’d know?” I asked, as Pritkin found my wrist. A moment later, the map was snatched out of my hand. “Still not leaving,” I told him.

  “Oh. You’re after the thing, aren’t you?” the younger ghost asked.

  I decided not to wrestle Pritkin for the map, which wouldn’t be dignified. It also wouldn’t work. “What thing?”

  “The thing with the thing.” He waved a negligent hand. I was starting to suspect that if you died stoned, your ghost stayed that way.

  “Could you be a little more specific?” Before he could answer, there was a strange sound from outside, a dim, high-pitched whine. I felt a hand on my back, viciously shoving me to the ground. Then Pritkin was on top of me, crushing me into a fetal position while things exploded and rained fire all around us.

  Red and violet spots danced behind my tightly clenched lids for several long moments. There were minute tremors in the ground, like the aftershocks of an earthquake, and my skin prickled with leftover energy. When I cautiously opened my eyes, I saw starlight seeping in from a gaping hole in the roof and clouds of disintegrated stone in the air.

  Pritkin was on his feet again, firing at the mages, who fired back, gunshots echoing off the high, close-packed monuments like firecrackers. Most of the time I thought he was a little too quick to opt for the shoot-it-and-hope-it-dies solution. Other times, like when someone was trying to make a colander out of my head, it seemed okay.

  “Over there,” the younger ghost offered, pointing to the right. “Come on.” He slouched off, ignoring a nearby snaky pathway in favor of a shortcut across the tombstone-littered grounds.

  “One of the ghosts knows where the passage is!” I told Pritkin. He looked surprised and I scowled. Just because I didn’t know seven ways to kill a guy with my elbow didn’t make me completely useless.

  He looked like he was about to argue about the wisdom of trusting random spirits, or possibly my sanity. But the mages accidentally did me a favor by sending a spell that exploded with a massive crack against a nearby chestnut tree. The burning trunk fell over, taking half the crypt with it. Luckily, it wasn’t our half.

  “Come on, then!” Pritkin yelled, grabbing me by the hand and starting off, as if this had been his idea all along.

  “This way!” I dragged him after the ghost as a fresh haze of bullets rattled off the rubble behind us.

  I found it hard going: the soggy soil sucked at my shoes with every step and the rain made it almost impossible to keep the flickering, pale image of our guide in sight. But Pritkin, damn him, slipped through the granite obstacle course like he’d laid it out himself. “How are you doing that?” I demanded the fourth time I knocked a knee into a very hard tombstone.

  “Doing what?”

  “You can see!” I accused.

  “Here.” I felt a hand against my cheek
for a split second, and Pritkin mumbled something. I blinked, and suddenly everything had a weird, flat, grainy look to it, like bad TV reception. Leaf shadows moved over his face as a gust of wind shook a tree, spattering drops of rain on us, and I could just make out the edges of that familiar scowl.

  “Why didn’t you do that before?” I demanded.

  “I thought you were leaving before!”

  “Do you two want this or not?” the ghost asked, hands on insubstantial hips. He’d stopped in front of the image of a bored-looking woman leaning on a tombstone. Enough moss had grown over her granite gown that it was practically green. Green and slimy, I discovered, after the ghost directed me to tap her knee three times. Nothing happened.

  “Now what?”

  “You have to say the magic word.”

  “Please!”

  He laughed. “No, I mean a real magic word. To get the statue to move out of the way.”

  A spell exploded in the branches of an overhanging oak and a bunch of burning leaves dropped around me, threatening to set my hair alight. “What is it?!”

  “Don’t know.” The ghost shrugged negligently. “It’s not like I need it.”

  “What’s the problem?” Pritkin demanded, sending his whole arsenal of animated weapons at the advancing line of dark shapes. His knives swooped and danced, striking sparks off their shields with every pass, but it didn’t look like they were slowing our pursuers down much.

  “The ghost doesn’t know the password!”

  Pritkin shot me his best edge-of-murder glare and muttered one of his weird British swear words. I don’t think it was the open sesame, but the spell he cast with his next breath worked almost as well. The statue split straight down the middle to reveal a gaping cavern.

  Inside was as dark as a well, just a black hole silhouetted against the electric sky. I pulled out my flashlight and clicked it on, but it barely dented the darkness. Even worse, there were no stairs, only an iron-rung ladder descending into a claustrophobic tunnel carved into solid rock.

  “I’ve seen many treasure hunters go in,” the older ghost commented, having floated up beside me, “but few come out again. And those who do are empty-handed.”

  “That won’t happen to us.”

  “That’s what they all say,” he murmured, just as a spell burst overhead. I shoved the gun and flashlight in my belt, grabbed the first rusty rung and half climbed, half slid to the bottom. Pritkin followed practically on top of me, and as soon as we were both down, he sent a spell back up the tunnel that caused a cave-in.

  It blocked our pursuers, but it also cut off what little light there was. Once the rumble from the falling rock stopped, we were in dead silence and utter darkness. Apparently even enhanced vision needs something to work with, because I couldn’t see a thing.

  I clicked the flashlight back on. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, and when they did, I yelped and stumbled back a step. The thin beam didn’t show much—it was like the dark down here was hungry, eating the light almost as soon as it left the bulb. But I wouldn’t have minded seeing even less. Along every side of a long corridor were bones arranged in patterns all the way to the low ceiling. Water had seeped in from somewhere, and a lot of the skulls were crying green tears and growing fuzzy green beards. It didn’t make them look less creepy.

  “The catacombs,” Pritkin said, before I could ask.

  “The what?”

  “The Parisians started using old limestone quarries as underground cemeteries a few hundred years ago.” He took the flashlight and pointed it at the map, frowning. “I didn’t think they extended out this far.”

  “How far?”

  “If these tunnels connect to those in the city, then hundreds of kilometers.” He started shining the light here and there. I wished he’d stop; it lit puddles of water in the empty eye sockets, making the faces seem to move. “There have been stories of catacombs under Père Lachaise for years, but I thought they were merely rumors.”

  I stared at a nearby skull. It was bodiless, sitting atop a stack of what looked like femurs, and was missing the jawbone. But somehow it still seemed to be grinning. “They look pretty real to me.”

  The flashlight picked out a glint of gold, half buried in the mortar keeping a line of bones in place. I scraped at the cement with my finger, and it was so old that pieces of it just flaked off. The golden circle I revealed wouldn’t budge, but I did get a better look at it. It appeared to be formed out of a snake that was chowing down on its own tail. “The ouroboros,” Pritkin said, coming up behind me.

  “The what?”

  “An ancient symbol for regeneration and eternity.”

  “Like a cross?”

  “Older.” He shone the light around some more. “The Paris coven must have created their own catacombs, possibly during the Inquisition. Witches and wizards were sometimes disinterred and their bodies mutilated or burnt. This would have been one way of preventing that.”

  “You mean this is a mages’ graveyard?”

  “Possibly. The limestone pits were dug by the Romans. They were there for centuries before the Parisian authorities decided to make use of them. Perhaps the magical community had the idea first.” From up the ladder came a sudden rain of stone and rubble. It sounded like our pursuers weren’t giving up. “Can you shift us here?” he asked, pointing to a vague squiggle on the map.

  My new job had more downsides than I could count, but there were a few perks, too. Well, one, anyway. The power that came with the office of Pythia allowed me to move myself and one or two others around in space and time. It was a damn useful weapon, and so far my only one. But it had its limitations. “I can’t shift unless I know where I’m going.”

  “You’ve time-shifted before to places you’ve never been!”

  “That’s different.”

  There was a sudden avalanche, and a spell crashed into the floor behind us, igniting a storm of violent white light. It hit the skulls, causing them to crack and splinter, then bounced off the opposite wall, slinging stone fragments everywhere like flying daggers. Pritkin shielded me from the worst of the blast, then grabbed my hand and towed me down the corridor.

  Since I didn’t go bouncing off any walls, I assumed he could still see something, but to me it was a headlong plunge into nothingness. He’d clicked off the flashlight, I suppose to make it harder for our pursuers to track us, but without it the tunnels were so dark I couldn’t tell whether my eyes were open or closed. “How different?” he demanded.

  “The power lets me see other times, past places. Not the present,” I explained, flinching. Afterimages from the blast were making reddish shapes leap in front of my vision, and I kept thinking I was about to plow into something. “If I want to do spatial shifts in the here and now, I have to be able to visualize where I want to go.” And a shaky line on a bad map wasn’t even close to good enough.

  The corridor abruptly narrowed, to the point that it was impossible to continue side by side. Pritkin went first, pulling me along at something approaching a run. It was hot, the air was close, and the ground underneath our feet wasn’t anything like level. It was soon obvious why someone would put a treasury here; without clear directions, you could wander around for months and never find anything.

  Pritkin stopped, so suddenly that I ran into him. He spread the map out on the wall and handed me the flashlight. I clicked it on and saw a much less organized scene than before: bones had tumbled out of the walls and littered the floor, and in some cases they were mounded up in piles with no effort at arrangement at all. Unlike the ones in the main corridor, these looked like they’d just been thrown around any old way. I’m not usually sentimental about the dead—I meet too many of them—but it still seemed wrong. Friends and enemies, parents and children, all jumbled up, with nothing to give a history, a date of death, even a name.

  “It would help if you shone the torch on the map,” Pritkin commented caustically. I obliged, and the beam lit up his face, too. Its expression wasn�
�t reassuring. “Are your ghosts here?” he demanded.

  “No. They wouldn’t follow us beyond the cemetery limits.” And it felt like we’d left those behind a while ago.

  “What about others?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because this map is less than adequate! Some directions would be helpful.”

  I shook my head. “These bodies were disturbed. I think they were brought here from their original resting places.”

  “Meaning?”

  “That their ghosts would have stayed behind.” Not to mention that if it was mages buried here, they wouldn’t have left ghosts anyway. Supernatural creatures just didn’t, as far as I knew.

  “But their bones are here.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Spirits can haunt a house, even when their bodies aren’t there. It’s all about what was important to them in life, the place where they felt a connection.” I looked around and repressed a shiver. “I don’t think I’d feel real connected to this place, either.”

  Pritkin finally settled on a direction and we took off again, sliding through gaps in the rock that, at times, were barely big enough for me. I don’t know how he got through, but based on the muttered comments that drifted back, it wasn’t without the loss of some flesh. Finally we came to a slightly wider corridor, meaning that we still had to go single file but could pick up speed. For a minute, I thought we’d succeeded in losing our pursuers, but as usual, Murphy’s Law caught up with us.

  We came barreling around a corner only to run almost directly into a party of dark shapes. There were yells and bullets and spells, with one of the last exploding against Pritkin’s shields, popping them like heat on a soap bubble. “Run!” he snarled in my face. I heard rumbling, like distant thunder, and then the ceiling came down with a roar that consumed the world.

  Chapter 2

  It took me a few seconds to realize that I still wasn’t dead. I was in a crouch, my hands protecting my head, expecting an attack, but the corridor was as silent as the tomb it was. The only people besides us were cemented into the walls or buried under the pile of rubble that their own spell had brought down on their heads. I collapsed back against the floor, breathing raggedly, and tried not to scream.