Karen Chance - [Cassandra Palmer 03] Read online

  “It wasn’t meant for you,” the vampire said, throwing back the hood.

  A pair of rich brown eyes met mine, the color as soft and familiar as well-worn suede. Only their agonized expression was new. I started in shock. “Rafe?”

  He collapsed against the bar, holding his stomach as if he’d been punched. I slid off my stool and helped him onto it, feeling him shiver despite the thick, fuzzy wool cloak he clutched around himself. The streets outside were shimmering in the late June heat, yet he was bundled up like we were scheduled for a blizzard. I’d known him all my life, and I’d never seen him look this bad.

  We’d met at the court of the vampire who turned him, the aforementioned Tony, who had ordered Rafe to paint my bedroom when I was a child. I doubt that Tony had done it to please his resident clairvoyant. It just fit his warped sense of humor to give the greatest artist of the Renaissance the most menial jobs he could find. But Raphael had actually enjoyed it, and in the months it took to litter my ceiling with angels, stars and clouds, we’d become fast friends. He’d been one of the few things that had made growing up at Tony’s bearable.

  Rafe’s lips were cold when he kissed me briefly, and his hands were like ice. I warmed them in mine, worry gnawing at my insides. He wasn’t supposed to be cold. Vampires are as warm as humans unless they’re famished, but that couldn’t be it. Like all masters, Rafe could feed from blood molecules drawn at a distance. If he felt like it, he could drain half the bar without anyone noticing until the bodies started hitting the floor.

  “I’m all right, Cassie.” Rafe squeezed my hands and I immediately felt more centered. He always had that effect on me, maybe because he comforted me so often as a child. I’d grown up believing that, if he said something was okay, it must be true, and old habits die hard.

  “Then what is it? Something’s wrong.” He swallowed, but instead of answering, he just looked at me pleadingly, his face dancing with neon shadows from the glass “flames” that surrounded the bar. My short-lived calm fled right out the window. “Rafe! You’re scaring me!”

  “That wasn’t my intention, mia stella.” His voice, usually a lightly accented tenor, was a harsh croak. He swallowed, but when he tried to speak again, he only strangled. He let go of my hands to claw at his throat, his face contorted in a rictus, and I stumbled back a step, colliding with the cool column of mist that was Billy Joe.

  Some people have spirit guides, wise, serene types who give them help from the great beyond. I have a smart-aleck ex–card shark who spends more time rigging the casino games than he does advising me. Of course, considering that his mortal existence ended with him taking a header into the Mississippi, courtesy of a couple of cowboys he’d been cheating, that might not be such a bad thing.

  “He’s fighting a command,” Billy said unnecessarily.

  I shot him an impatient glance. Billy’s status as the life-challenged segment of our partnership often means he knows more about the supernatural world than I do, but of the two of us, I know more about vamps. Growing up at Tony’s had seen to that.

  Even vampires who become masters are still bound by their own master’s control—unless they reach first-level status, which most never do. But older vamps have more flexibility in interpreting commands than a newborn. A lot more, if they’re smart and willing to risk punishment. And Rafe had stretched a point for me before, informing Mircea of Tony’s plan to kill me even at great risk to himself. If he hadn’t helped me, I’d have never lived long enough to become the Pythia.

  “Tony isn’t around to give any orders,” I said slowly, and some of the terrible tension left Rafe’s face. The bane of both our existences was literally out of this world, hiding somewhere in Faerie. “He couldn’t have forbidden you to see me—unless it’s an old command.”

  For a long moment Rafe held himself unnaturally still, the flickering lights of the bar the only movement on his face. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, his head moved side to side. I glanced at Billy Joe, who had drifted off a few feet. The flames filtered through him eerily, gold and red and translucent umber. He pushed his Stetson up with an insubstantial finger. “Well, that sorta narrows it down.”

  I nodded. With Tony gone, there was only one person left whose commands could make Rafe choke at the mere thought of contradicting them: Tony’s master.

  The bar was hot and humid with too many bodies, but chills shivered down my arms anyway. Unfulfilled longing swept through me, blood and bone and skin stretched paper thin as part of me yearned, reaching out for someone who wasn’t there. I glanced up at the sign over the bar: LEAD ME NOT INTO TEMPTATION; THAT WOULD MEAN BACKING UP. No freaking kidding.

  Rafe was looking at me with big, concerned eyes. I could only think of one reason for him to be here: to ask me to see Mircea. And wasn’t that just all I needed. I bit back the urge to scream. My nerves had a perpetually scraped-raw feeling these days, but it wasn’t Rafe’s fault. “You may as well go back,” I told him unsteadily. “There’s nothing I can do.”

  Rafe shook his head in a wild, negative motion, causing his dark curls to dance madly about his face. He looked around the room, eyes shifting in sudden darts as if he thought someone might be sneaking up on him. His nerves were showing, something he’d never been able to completely control, even at court. It had cost him more than once.

  His gaze returned to my face, and there was desperation in it, but also determination. “I am not well,” he said, and paused, as if waiting for something.

  I blinked, fairly sure I was missing the point. Vampires don’t get sick. Shot, burned, staked, yeah; the flu, not so much.

  “I can summon a healer,” I offered. Dante’s was more than familiar with little accidents. A couple of hungry gargoyles had decided to snack on some of the animal acts the night before, only to discover that the trained wolves weren’t wolves at all. The result had been a near apocalyptic battle in the lower levels that had given the on-site medical staff something to do for the rest of the night. And that sort of thing wasn’t exactly unusual.

  “I do not think a healer would be able to help,” Rafe said slowly, his eyes brightening as no visible retribution was taken. I realized what he was up to as he looked at me eagerly. If he pretended he was talking about himself instead of Mircea, he could get around the prohibition. The thought drifted through my mind that Mircea must not be up to his usual standard, to have left such an obvious loophole.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, hoping to forestall a painful explanation. “If I could do anything, don’t you think I would have?” The geis that was putting me through hell was doing even worse things to Mircea. It strengthened depending on how long it had been in place, and due to a little accident with the timeline, he’d been dealing with it longer than I had. By about a century.

  My former rival for the position of Pythia, a lunatic named Myra, had decided to remove the competition by a little creative homicide. She couldn’t kill me, because there was a rule prohibiting the murderer of the Pythia or her designated heir from inheriting. But being savvy about all things time-related, Myra had worked out an alternative. If Mircea died before Tony and I had our little blowup, it would remove his protection from me, allowing Tony to do the dirty work for her.

  The only problem with her plan was that it required fiddling with the time line, and my power didn’t like that. It kept sending me back in time to prevent the assassination attempts. And during one of those trips, I met Mircea in a period before the geis was placed. The spell immediately recognized him as the other component needed to complete itself and jumped from me to him. That not only gave him the geis a century early, but it ensured that when he had the original spell cast on us, he ended up with two strands of it, not one. And, as I could attest, one was bad enough.

  “But…there is no one else!” Rafe looked almost frantic at my refusal. He also looked surprised. I had a sudden rush of guilt, which was monumentally unfair. Mircea had started this, not me.

  “If I knew the countersp
ell, I’d have cast it already,” I repeated, with a little more bite to my tone than I usually used with Rafe. What did he think I’d been doing for the past week, anyway?

  The book containing the only known counterspell was the Codex Merlini, a compilation of ancient magical lore that had been lost long ago—assuming it had ever existed. Most of the people Pritkin and I had contacted had been of the opinion that the Codex was nothing more than a myth. It was like the rest of the Arthurian legend, we’d been assured by one supercilious mage after another. There’d never been a Camelot, except in the imagination of a medieval French poet. And there was no Codex.

  The only exception was Manassier, who’d had his own reasons for sending us on a wild-goose chase. So far, everyone else had refused to talk, didn’t know anything, or was looking to get rich quick off a couple of desperate suckers. I’d been battling rising panic already, and Rafe’s distress wasn’t helping.

  “Please, Cassie!” His voice cracked around the edges, and my stomach clenched at the almost heartbroken look on his face. If it had been anyone else—any vampire, anyway—that look would have had my paranoid instincts muttering furiously. But Rafe didn’t have that kind of deception in him. At least, he never had before. And I suspected his basic character was pretty set after more than four hundred years.

  “I told you, I don’t have the spell,” I said, more gently. “Maybe in a few weeks—”

  “But I’ll be dead in a few weeks!” he blurted out.

  For a moment, the world tilted. There was a hollow roaring in my ears and the bar seemed to be closing in, with not enough air, not enough light. It felt like the heavy bass of Purgatory’s continuous pulse was suddenly pounding inside my skull.

  Rafe stared at me soberly. “I am sorry, Cassie. I didn’t intend to tell you that way.”

  For a moment, I just stared back, understanding whipping through my mind with a white-hot sizzle. I’d known the spell was vicious—my own reactions had been more than enough for that—but that it could go so far I’d never even considered. Mircea was a first-level master. There were only a handful of them in the world, and they were almost impossible to kill. The idea of his dying because of a spell, any spell, was crazy, but especially one that hadn’t even been designed as a weapon.

  “There has to be some mistake,” I finally said. “I know you’re suffering, but—”

  “Not suffering, mia stella,” he whispered. “Dying.”

  “But if I go to him, it’ll only make things worse!”

  Rafe flinched when I dropped the wrong pronoun, but it didn’t stop him. “The Consul has called in experts from around the world. And you know they would not lie to her.” No, I didn’t suppose so. The Consul headed up the Vampire Senate, and was easily its scariest member. “I heard one tell her that if you complete the spell, perhaps it will free…me. But he knew of nothing else that would.”

  “I’ll find another way,” I promised, feeling sick.

  Rafe looked genuinely puzzled at my refusal. Like asking me to risk a lifetime of slavery was no big deal. “I do not see what is wrong with this one. Mircea would never hurt you—”

  “That’s not the point! How much have you enjoyed being Tony’s eternal errand boy?”

  “Mircea is nothing like that bastardo Antonio,” Rafe said, appalled.

  I shook my head in frustration. No, Mircea wasn’t Tony; despite the geis, despite everything, I knew that. But he was a vampire. And the one thing no vamp could resist was power. If the geis gave Mircea control over mine, he would use it. And, just like with Tony, I’d have no say about what he did with it.

  Tony wanted me dead mainly because I’d set him up for the Feds. I’d had a number of reasons for helping them out, but top of the list was that he’d used my visions to point him to wherever disaster was about to strike—and therefore where an opportunity for profit was to be found. Young and naive, I’d believed him when he assured me that he wanted the information to warn the people who were soon to be in distress. When I found out what he’d really been doing with it, I’d sworn never to be used like that again. Not by him, not by anyone.

  I swallowed, knowing this wasn’t going to go over well. But I had to ask. “Tell me the truth, Rafe. Did Mircea send you?”

  If he really was dying, it would make sense for him to send Rafe to tell me so. Mircea had saved my life by refusing Tony his revenge. I owed him one, and I would have expected him to try to cash it in.

  What didn’t make sense was why he would order Rafe to put on an elaborate pretense, to make me think he’d actually told him to stay away. But although Mircea looked to be in his early thirties, he was five hundred years old. And, like most of the older vamps, to call his thought processes Byzantine was a serious understatement. I’d discovered long ago that the easiest way to figure out what a vampire really wanted was to look for whatever would benefit him the most, and ignore everything else. And what would benefit Mircea was completing the geis.

  Rafe blinked at me, and for a moment there was something lost and wide open in his expression, almost bruised. “You think I would lie to you?”

  “If Mircea ordered you to, yes. You wouldn’t have a choice!”

  “There are always choices,” Rafe said, offended. “Had I been ordered to tell you a lie—” He gave a small shrug. “I cannot help it if I am not so good an actor at times.”

  “But you’re fond of Mircea. It might be an order you’d agree with.”

  He sighed in exasperation. “Mircea has many fine qualities, Cassie. I know them well. But he has flaws, too—one in particular that I hope will not prove fatal. He is stubborn. Too stubborn to listen to the Consul’s experts when they tell him he cannot defeat this. Too stubborn to believe that even his power can fail. And too proud to admit it, even if he did believe!”

  That did sound like Mircea. And I’d never really stopped to wonder how he would react to the geis’ malfunctioning. If anything, I’d assumed his only thought would be to use it to get me under his power. But while I’d almost become used to my life spinning out of control, it definitely wasn’t the norm for him. Mircea manipulated other people, used them to get what he or the Senate wanted. He wasn’t accustomed to having anyone, or anything, do the same to him.

  “And consider this,” Rafe said urgently, “when you think on deception. Mage Pritkin has no reason to save Mircea. If he dies, the spell is broken. All he has to do is stall long enough for that to happen, and you are free.”

  An automatic denial rose to my lips, but died before I could utter it. The Codex contained some mysterious spell that Pritkin didn’t want found. We’d agreed that once the book was located, I’d let him remove it before I searched it for the counterspell to the geis. But what if he didn’t trust me? I didn’t know enough about the magical community to know whom to ask for information. So all the experts we’d spoken with had been Pritkin’s. Had all that “you go, I’ll stay” stuff in Paris been about my welfare or an attempt to make sure I didn’t find anything? What if the real reason we kept striking out was because that was what he wanted?

  “I almost forgot. I have something for you.” Rafe fumbled under the cloak for a moment, then brought out a small package wrapped in a piece of black felt. “The Fey returned them to Mircea. As your master, they assumed he could get them to you.”

  I parted the felt and into my hands dropped a ratty old pack of tarot cards. They were dirty and creased, and more than a few were missing the corners. I was a little surprised to see them, since I’d lost them while on a disastrous trip to Faerie in search of Myra. I’d been happy to get out of there alive, and hadn’t worried too much about what I left behind.

  A card suddenly poked up from the deck with no help from me. “The Magician Reversed,” a resonant voice began, before I shoved it back inside and slipped the pack into the pocket of my shorts. It did not add to my peace of mind.

  My old governess had had the deck spelled to report on the overall spiritual climate of a situation. It was suppose
d to be a joke, but over the years I’d noticed that its predictions were depressingly accurate. That was a problem because, no matter how I tried to twist it, the Magician Ill-Dignified was never a good thing.

  You know the guys with the three beans under the shells at carnivals? The ones with the stuffed animals that are going all moldy because they never actually give any away? The Magician Ill-Dignified is a lot like that: a salesman or con man who can make you believe almost anything. You can avoid him, but you have to be on your toes, because he will not seem like a deceiver.

  The card was safely tucked away, but an image of the tiny magician’s face still seemed to hover in front of me. And my imagination was giving him Pritkin’s bright green eyes. I didn’t know how far he was willing to go to ensure that the mystery spell stayed lost. And if Mircea died, my biggest reason for finding the Codex died with him. Maybe Pritkin didn’t view a single death as too high a price to pay to keep the secret.

  Especially if that life was a vampire’s.

  Chapter 4

  Rafe watched me in silence for a moment, then cleared his throat. “There may be an alternative.”

  I waited, but he just sat there, his jaw working but no sound coming out. “I’m listening.”

  “I can’t tell you,” he finally said, sounding defeated. Apparently Mircea’s command hadn’t been so flawed after all.

  I glanced at Billy, who sighed and shrugged. He doesn’t like possessions, but they do allow him to tiptoe through someone’s thoughts, gathering stray information here and there. And I doubted Mircea had prohibited Rafe from even thinking about whatever it was he didn’t want known.

  “Drop your shields,” I told him, “and hold that thought.”

  Rafe looked a little nervous, but since Billy slipped inside his skin a few seconds later, he must have done as I asked. I glanced around, wondering what the tourists would say if they knew that a ghost was currently possessing a vampire a few feet away. It made Dante’s staged shows look a little tepid by comparison. Then Billy stepped out of Rafe’s other side, looking freaked. “Oh, hell, no.”