Karen Chance - [Cassandra Palmer 03] Read online

  After a minute, I felt around for the flashlight and my hand closed over a cool plastic cylinder. I clicked it on, relieved to find that it still worked, and saw Pritkin lying on his side. He wasn’t moving, and he had blood smeared through the stubble on his chin, bright and frightening. Murphy and his little law can go to hell, I thought furiously, shaking him frantically.

  “Would you kindly stop doing that?” he asked politely.

  I stared. I wasn’t entirely sure, but a polite John Pritkin might be a sign of the apocalypse. “Did you hit your head?” I tried to move closer to get a better look, and my knee accidentally knocked a shower of stone pebbles onto the oozing gash on his forehead.

  “If I tell you I’m all right, will you stop trying to help me?” Every muscle in my body relaxed at the familiar tone, all ruffled feathers and crisp impatience. That was better; that was solid ground.

  “So, still alive?” I croaked.

  “Damn right.”

  He just lay there, though, so I shone the beam around, giving him a minute. It took a few seconds to realize exactly what I was seeing. Pritkin had apparently gotten his shields back up, because they glowed blue and waterlike, rippling slowly in the yellow beam. But the cave ceiling wasn’t above them anymore. Or, to be more accurate, it was there—it was just no longer attached to anything.

  Huge, half-quarried blocks, some still bearing ancient chisel marks, lay on top of the suddenly very thin-looking shields. Every time they flexed, small showers of rubble and grit slid along the top and trickled down the sides, making soft shushing sounds in the quiet. The larger pieces had nowhere to go, but they moved enough to make it obvious that they weren’t anchored to anything. Even the smaller, cobblestone-sized chunks would hurt like hell if they fell on us, and I didn’t have to wonder what the larger ones would do. Two mages were giving gory proof of that barely a yard away.

  I could have reached out and touched them, where they lay caught between the shield and the cave-in. Their bodies were oddly contorted, trapped in the stone and rubble like ancient fossils, their open eyes shining in the reflected light. Except that fossils don’t usually come complete with evidence of how they got that way, at least not in Technicolor brilliance.

  The red-streaked white of newly shattered bone stood out starkly against the mellow gold of the older specimens. One hand rested against the blue of the shield, caught in a gesture of defense, as if human strength could stand against the weight of a mountain. It made me wonder for an insane moment if it would leave a red outline, if the next time Pritkin raised his shields, it would manifest, too.

  The air suddenly felt a lot heavier in my lungs. Despite the large number of impossible things that had happened to me lately, my brain couldn’t quite seem to deal. It was loudly insisting that huge slabs of rock that weighed maybe a ton each didn’t just hover in the air and that we were both going to die any second now.

  I made a small, choked sound, but managed to swallow the bubble of hysteria before it could tear loose. If Pritkin had been a second later getting his protection back up, there would be four new bodies entombed down here instead of two. But there weren’t. We were safe. Sort of.

  Pritkin had rolled onto his back and was staring at me, hard and intent. “This is exactly why I told you to go home.”

  “I have a devastating comeback for that,” I informed him with dignity. “Just not right now.”

  “Do you want to give up?” I blinked. I could count on zero fingers the number of times he had asked my opinion. “Because there are almost certainly more of them back there.”

  I remembered the ghost saying that there were twelve mages all together. Which meant that behind the rockfall, ten more were still hanging around, unless they were caught somewhere I couldn’t see. Or unless they’d left, assuming that the cave-in had killed us. But no, I wasn’t that lucky.

  “You know what’s at stake,” I reminded him.

  “I thought you’d say that.” Pritkin levered himself to his knees with a grunt. The rubble shifted along with him, enough to bring another large slab crashing down. The jagged underside landed only a few feet away from my face.

  Pritkin’s voice, laced with its usual impatience, cut through my panic. “Let’s go.”

  “Go?” It came out as more of a squeak than I’d intended. “How? Because I can shift us back home but I can’t shift us beyond this. I don’t know what’s on the other side or even where the other side is—”

  “Just stay close.” Before he’d even finished speaking, his shields had changed from fluid waves to hard crystal, reflecting the cave-in through a hundred sharp facets. A few more rocks fell off, allowing more to rain down from above, striking off the new, rigid surface with dull thuds. Pritkin started crawling forward, and his shields went with him, almost scooping me off my feet before I got with the program and moved up close behind him.

  It wasn’t until I saw the body of one of the mages slide down the side and roll behind us that I completely realized what was happening. Our small bubble was plowing through the rocks and dirt like a crystal mole intent on making a new burrow. We hit a wall once, looking for an entrance that wasn’t there, but we found it a few feet to the left and burst through, the cave collapsing in on itself behind us.

  Pritkin dropped his shields with an audible sigh, and the dust we’d dislodged in our escape flooded in, almost blinding me. We forged ahead to get away from the choking cloud, which had no way to disperse in an area without wind or open air. But before we’d gone ten yards, we ran into what felt like another cave-in.

  Once I blinked the dirt out of my eyes, I realized what I was seeing. A narrow tunnel stretched out in front of us, filled halfway to the ceiling with what looked like a mile of bones. Pritkin climbed on top of the broken human mass, flashing the light around. “There’s a hole in the wall up ahead. It probably leads to another tunnel.”

  I eyed the pile of bones uneasily. Anything kept in close proximity to a person’s aura eventually imprints with a psychic skin. I’d experienced more horror stories from inadvertently brushing up against a strong trigger than I could count. And I couldn’t think of a stronger trigger than an actual body part.

  “Hurry, damn it!” Pritkin thrust a hand down to me as the sound of voices echoed dimly from the corridor behind us. Somebody had heard our exit.

  I hefted myself up gingerly, before I could think about it too much. The bones were old and dry, and crunched sickeningly under my weight. Many splintered, sending little knives into my palms and tearing my jeans, but there were no psychic flashes. Moving them must have ruptured any imprints that had formed.

  When Pritkin said a hole in the wall, he wasn’t kidding. I could barely squeeze through the thing, and it sounded from his language like he’d scraped off more than a little skin himself. “Move!” he whispered, giving me a push in the small of my back. I scrambled inside the small rock-hewn cavern on the other side of the hole, and almost tumbled down a set of stairs that started after only a few feet.

  The claustrophobically low stairwell was extremely uninviting; mostly I just saw the darkness that pooled in every niche and corner. I really didn’t want to go down there. Then a spell hit the ceiling behind me with a crack like cannon fire and I reconsidered, scrambling down the stairs ahead of Pritkin.

  A second spell hit while we were still on the steps. It went on and on, like a slow-motion bomb blast, causing gravel to pepper the back of my hands and neck like hail. It sent me sliding down the stairs, but the vibrations rode up through my legs, making it almost impossible to find a foothold. And then it didn’t matter because there was no foothold to find. The rock disintegrated beneath my feet, and I tumbled through darkness and empty air before slamming into freezing water.

  It took me a moment to realize I wasn’t drowning. The water came only up to my waist, but it was like ice and the cold shot right up my spine. Worse was the by-now-familiar billowing cloud of dust, trapping me in a choking haze. Instinctively, I sloshed farther away fr
om the rockfall, trying to breathe, and found myself treading water. I grabbed a moss-covered skull that jutted out from the wall, my fingers finding purchase in the eye sockets. I held on, too grateful to be repulsed, gasping in great lungfuls of air.

  “Pritkin!” It was barely a croak, but a moment later the flashlight beam hit my eyes, blinding me.

  “Still alive?”

  I tried to answer, but my lungs decided this would be a good moment to expel all the foreign matter I’d breathed in, and I ended up heaving and choking. I lost my grip on the slimy bone and slid under the frigid water. For a long, terrifying moment, I was lost in an endless sea of black that immediately chilled me to the core. Then two broad hands were fumbling for a grip on my shoulders, pulling me back to the surface, reminding me where up and down were.

  “Miss Palmer!”

  I spat out a mouthful of limestone paste, the result of oily water mixed with dust, and gasped in some air. “Damn right.”

  Pritkin nodded and flashed the light around, giving glimpses of a corridor where the floor rippled oddly and everything was suddenly shades of gray and pale, unearthly green. It looked like the entire lower levels had flooded. I can swim, but I wasn’t in love with the idea of navigating a dark underground stream with barely enough headroom to breathe.

  “I’ll deal with this,” Pritkin said grimly. “Shift out of here.”

  “And if they keep coming?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  And he called me bloody-minded. I took another breath to inform my lungs that asphyxiation would have to wait, and pushed back off into the flood. “Just swim.”

  Pritkin didn’t answer, unless you count a curse, although that could have been due to the spell that hit the water behind us, instantly raising the temperature from chilled to boiling. I screamed, and coherent thought fled. I didn’t think, just grabbed his hand and shifted.

  A second later, we landed in the same corridor, but with no dust cloud, no mages and no flood. I’d been treading water in the other time, so I was only a few feet off the ground. Pritkin, unfortunately, had been floating, and he fell from a little farther. Like about six feet.

  He hit the rocky floor with a thud, a curse and a crack, the last from the demise of the flashlight. I tried to ask how he was, but a stitch was biting deep into my side and, for a long moment it was impossible to draw oxygen into my lungs. I slid down the wall to a seated position because my knees suddenly felt too rubbery to be reliable.

  “What happened?” Pritkin gasped after a moment. With no flashlight and no deadly spells zipping around, it was pitch-dark, but from the direction of his voice, it sounded like he was still on the floor.

  “I shifted us back in time,” I managed to croak.

  I decided that it probably wasn’t good that I was still feeling shaky and nauseated despite being this close to the floor and completely motionless. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I’d shifted only twice today, once to get us to Paris from Manassier’s cottage and once just now, yet I was exhausted. It looked like bringing another person along for the ride took a lot out of me. Too bad no one had bothered to give me the manual.

  “A little warning next time!”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “When are we?”

  I spit out more chalky-tasting dust. Now I knew why Lara Croft always carried a canteen. My body was dripping, but my throat was parched. I swallowed dry, while running through the mental Rolodex my power gives me. “Seventeen ninety-three.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I didn’t feel like being boiled alive?”

  “You could have shifted us back a day, a week! This is no bloody use at all!”

  Of course, I thought sourly, Lara Croft would also have some nice convenient techie thing to get her out of this. And a partner who wasn’t a complete ass. I cautiously stood up and found to my surprise that I was only faintly dizzy. I strained my ears, but all I heard was my own harsh breathing and a faint drip, drip of water from somewhere.

  “Let’s go,” I said, fumbling around until I found Pritkin’s hand. His skin was cold from the water, and his pulse was fast but not bad. Not, for example, like mine, which felt like it could burst a vein. I needed to make sure I didn’t have to shift again anytime soon. Like for the rest of the week.

  Pritkin stayed where he was. “Go? Where?”

  “To find the Codex! I thought it might be nice to look for it without somebody shooting at us for a change.”

  “An excellent sentiment. Except for the small matter of the Paris coven being one of the oldest in Europe. They may have abandoned this facility in our time, but in this era there are doubtless mages all over the place. Not to mention snares and traps. If we haven’t already tripped a protection ward, we soon will!”

  “Do you have another suggestion?”

  “Yes. Shift us out!” Even in complete darkness I was positive I could see his glare.

  I sucked in a breath, more annoyed than I could remember—well, more annoyed than before John Pritkin, anyway. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “You have shifted multiple times in a day before—”

  “And it wiped me out before.”

  “You never mentioned that.”

  “You never asked.”

  There was a brief pause. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, peachy.” I really hated his suggestion, but I couldn’t think of a better one. “Let’s at least clear the corridor first,” I said in compromise. “Then I’ll try to set us back a little early, before the fireworks start.”

  It took forever to get down that corridor, not because of the darkness but because Pritkin was certain someone or something was about to jump us. But the only problems were the usual—heat, bad air and the fun of trying not to fall on the uneven floor or scrape off a little more skin on the wall. We finally came to a branch in the path and Pritkin stopped. “Are you certain you’re up to this?”

  “What’s your plan if I say no?”

  “Wait here until you say yes.”

  “Then I guess I’m up to it.” I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but I was getting really tired of those tunnels. I gripped his hand tighter, focused on our era and shifted.

  This time the world melted around us slowly, like paint dissolving in water, bleeding away in slow drips. I normally don’t feel the passing of years, just a weightless free fall that ends with me whenever I planned to be. I felt it this time. Reality rippled around us in a nauseating, frictionless, gravity-free waver. I was suddenly grateful I couldn’t see, because what I could feel was terrifying: For a long moment, I was a tearing stream of dislocated atoms, consciousness ripped apart, with a body that was so elongated it neither began nor ended.

  Then I snapped back into myself, only to have the whole process start again. There were snatches of conversation, a few notes of music and what sounded like another explosion or cave-in, all in quick succession, like someone flipping a radio too fast. And I finally realized what was happening. This trip wasn’t one long jump, but a series of smaller hops, with us flashing in and out of other times as we slowly made our way back to our own.

  I could feel time, and it was heavy, like swimming through molasses. Pushing through the centuries was like running a marathon. In the dark. With weights tied to my legs.

  When we finally broke through, it felt like oxygen when drowning—shocking, unexpected, miraculous. I’d half expected to materialize underwater, but apparently we’d passed the flooded area, because I stumbled into a mostly dry wall. I sat down abruptly, tilting my head back, swallowing a relief so sharp it made me light-headed.

  Pritkin crawled over to lean against the wall next to me. “Are you all right?”

  “Stop asking me that,” I said, then had to go very still to deal with the nausea. It felt like my stomach had been a couple seconds behind the rest of me, and when it caught up it wasn’t happy to be there.

  “I take it that’s a yes.”

  I swallowe
d, still tasting dust, and told myself that throwing up would be very unprofessional. “Yeah. It’s just…the learning curve can be a little rough.”

  After a few minutes of sitting quietly with my eyes closed, I managed to relax and start breathing evenly. “You don’t have to do this,” Pritkin said. “I could—”

  “I couldn’t shift out of here right now if my life depended on it,” I said truthfully.

  “Your power shouldn’t fluctuate this greatly,” he told me, and I could hear the puzzled frown in his voice.

  “The power doesn’t fluctuate. My ability to channel it does. The more tired I am, the harder it gets.”

  “But it shouldn’t be this difficult,” Pritkin repeated stubbornly. “My power doesn’t—”

  “Because it’s yours!” Damn it, I didn’t have the breath for one of our long, drawn-out arguments right now. “This isn’t mine. I wasn’t born with it. It’s on loan, remember?”

  The power hadn’t originated with the Pythias, who had once been the priestesses of an ancient being calling himself Apollo. I’d met him exactly once, when he’d promised to train me. So far, he’d paid that promise the same amount of attention he had my objections over receiving the office in the first place: none. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anywhere else to turn.

  Unlike most Pythias, who had been trained for a decade or two on the ins and outs of their position, my intro to the office had lasted about thirty seconds—just long enough for the last incumbent to shove the power off on me before she died. And everyone else who might have given me a few pointers was under the control of the Circle.

  We sat there for a while in silence. I eventually summoned the strength to pull off my shoes and toss my waterlogged socks against the far wall, where they landed with little splats. It didn’t help much because I just had to put the wet shoes back on.

  “Before you completed the ritual to become Pythia, your power controlled how and when it manifested,” Pritkin said, as I dragged myself to my feet. I’d almost fallen asleep for the second time against his shoulder, wet clothes, hard floor and all. “Is that correct?”