Karen Chance - [Cassandra Palmer 03] Read online

  I could feel my blood surging into him, warm and alive and pulsing hotly. I tried to push him away, but my hands found his shoulders instead, pulling him closer. Mircea locked one hand in my hair, bringing the other behind my hips, melding us together…

  And then I was sitting seaside, the green-blue water lapping at my toes, half buried in the sand.

  I looked around wildly, disoriented, expecting an attack from someone, somewhere. I rolled over and clutched the beach, trying to present a smaller target, and was momentarily blinded by the sun in my eyes. I froze, sure that someone would use the advantage to sneak up on me, but nothing happened. I blinked for a few seconds until I could get a clear view, but all I saw was sun and sky and sand—and, on the crest of a rocky hill, a small temple slowly crumbling to pieces.

  Nothing continued to happen. After a moment, my heart stopped trying to thud its way out of my chest, and my breathing returned to something like normal. I lay there and watched a flock of little brown birds dive in and out of the temple’s roof, where it looked like they had a nest. Other than the waves lapping around my ankles, they were the only things moving on the whole beach.

  I finally sat up and, when nothing attacked me, got to my knees. Enough adrenaline had left my brain that I could think again, so I knew who it was that I should be seeing. The being who had once owned my power had shown himself to me before in a similar situation. He seemed to find it funny to pay his visits at the most awkward moments possible.

  One of the small brown birds hopped along the sand, its feet making vague indentations that the water quickly filled in again. It ran out to the wet sand when the waves retreated, looking for whatever edible morsel they might have left behind, then raced them for the beach whenever they started back in. It finally tired of the game and hopped over to me, looking for a handout. I blinked and when I looked again, a handsome blond in a too short tunic rested on the sand beside me. For a second I thought he’d crushed the little bird, but then I realized the truth.

  “It’s all me, Herophile,” he said, gesturing about. “The waves and the sand and, of course, the sun, although it is easier to converse in this form.”

  “My name is Cassandra!” I snapped.

  He’d given me the name of the second Pythia at Delphi, his ancient shrine, at our first meeting. It was supposedly some kind of reign title, but I didn’t feel comfortable using it when I didn’t know how to do the job it represented. Not to mention that, as names go, it pretty much sucked.

  “Where have you been?” I demanded. “You promised to train me. That doesn’t translate into hanging me out to dry for a week! Do you know how close I just came to screwing everything up?”

  “Yes. That’s why I pulled you out of there.” He glanced up from toying with a piece of seaweed. Unlike the last time I’d seen him, he didn’t look like he’d been covered in gold dust. But I still couldn’t see his face, which was merely an oval of light. It wasn’t so much majestic as odd, like talking to an oversized lamp. “You can’t continue this way. Something must be done about the geis—it’s a distraction.”

  “A distraction?!” I could think of a lot of ways to describe it, and that wouldn’t have been on the list. “Mircea is dying and I’ll probably be next!”

  “Not if you retrieve the Codex. The answer you seek is there.”

  “I know that! What I don’t know is where it is or how to find it. Every lead we’ve had has led to a dead end—almost literally with the last one! Or weren’t you paying attention yesterday?”

  He finished braiding the seaweed and fastened it around my wrist, bracelet style. “If it was easy, it wouldn’t be a test.”

  “I don’t need any more tests; I need help!”

  “The help you need, you already have.”

  “Then I guess I must have missed it!”

  “You will find what you need when you need it. It is perhaps your greatest gift, Herophile. To draw people to you.”

  “Yeah, only they all seem to want me dead.”

  He laughed, as if my impending demise was the funniest thing he’d heard all day. “I promised to train you. Very well, here is your first task. Find the Codex and lift the geis before it causes more complications.”

  “And if I can’t?”

  “I have every faith in you.”

  “That makes one of us.”

  “You’ll succeed; I’m sure of it. And if not”—he shrugged casually—“you don’t deserve your position.”

  And then I was back, clinging to strong, bare shoulders, fingers slipping on sweat-slicked skin. Even to someone used to the abrupt way visions came and went, it was a bit of a jolt. Especially since Mircea was still feeding, and it was still amazing.

  I’d never felt this connected, this anchored, this close to anyone, and I wanted it to go on forever. Only that’s what it seemed to be doing, I realized after a moment. Despite the fact that my heart was thundering in my ears and little spots were swimming in front of my eyes and my breath was coming in strangled gasps, he wasn’t stopping.

  “Let go, Mircea,” I said as clearly as I could, considering the fangs in my throat. Nothing happened, unless you counted the tightening of his hand on my hip, fever-hot even through the material. “Mircea! Unless you plan to kill me, let go!”

  I pushed as hard as I could, not caring at that moment if the movement tore my neck, just wanting him off. My hands were at an awkward angle on his shoulders and my strength was no match for his, but something about the action seemed to get through. He stopped.

  I could feel the hesitation in him, need warring with whatever reason he had left, and for a long moment I really didn’t know which would win. Then slowly, as if he were moving underwater, he pulled back, his teeth sliding out of me cleanly.

  “Cassie…” He looked dazed, and his voice was rough and cracked a bit at the edges. “I thought you were a dream.”

  I stared at him dizzily. “I think maybe I am.”

  He stared at me, swallowing harshly, the feverish glitter of his eyes even brighter, like an addict who has had a fix. “Then my dreams are improving.”

  I kissed him, a quick tangling of tongues, heat and softness. “We’re working on a solution.”

  “I know.” He paused and looked around the room, as if he was expecting to see someone or something. When he didn’t, he fell back, a shudder shivering through him as he pulled away.

  “You know? How?” The only answer was the tightening of his muscles under my hands.

  He closed his eyes, blocking out my face. “You must go, Cassie.”

  It was good advice, but it made no sense that Mircea was giving it to me. I knew why I was doing my best to avoid completing the geis, but he had no reason to do so. It would get him out of his current torment and gain him a valuable servant. There was no downside.

  “You don’t want to complete the geis?” I asked slowly, sure I was missing something.

  “No.” His fists clenched in the sheets, hard enough that the knuckles showed white. “I want you to leave!”

  “I don’t understand—” I touched his shoulder, not thinking, my own mind still muddied from the spell, and he flinched like I’d slapped him. He jerked away from me, all the way to the other side of the bed, and sat there facing the wall. “Go, Cassie! Please.”

  “Yes, all right.” Something weird was definitely going on, but I didn’t have time to figure it out. There was a crack like a gunshot, and I jumped, then realized that no one was shooting at me. The hand Mircea had curled around the huge bedpost had snapped it in two like a twig.

  In the next heartbeat, I was flying, the room swallowed by darkness behind me. I blinked hard, trying to clear my vision, and when I looked again I was back in the bar. The bartender gave a sudden start at the sight of me and fled to the back room.

  I stared blankly after him, then caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind the bottled liquors. It reflected wide eyes, flushed cheeks and a kiss-swollen mouth. I put a hand to my neck, and it came b
ack red. I stared at the blood on my palm, and tried to say something. I failed.

  Rafe handed me a napkin and I pressed it to my throat, Mircea’s kiss still throbbing on my lips. Already, the lack of his touch was a fierce ache behind my ribs, as if he’d left fingerprints on something deeper than skin. “Now do you understand?” Rafe asked softly.

  I slowly nodded. That had been no vision. I’d unconsciously shifted, straight to Mircea’s side. And if I’d lost that much control, how much worse must it be for him? The geis wouldn’t kill him, I realized; it would drive him mad. And to stop hunger like that, sooner or later a person would pay any price.

  Even take his own life.

  Chapter 5

  Crystal Gazing is not the supernatural community’s most respected journalistic voice. Its tagline, “All the news that’s not fit to print,” pretty much says it all. But, once in a while, its scandal-hunting reporters turn up a story that the more respectable papers reject as mere rumor. And even more rarely, that rumor turns out to be true.

  But so far, although there was a lot of speculation about the identity of the new Pythia, no one had managed to come up with my name. It was only a matter of time, but I was grateful for any reprieve. And the lack of new information had allowed juicier stories to bump that one to the back pages. Today’s screaming headline concerned an unknown woman who’d been raiding the Circle’s facilities, although as usual, the article was short on facts and long on terms like “vixen vigilante” and “fetching fanatic.” I silently wished her luck. Her activities might account for why no one had yet managed to track me down.

  My break was over, so I stuck the rag in my locker, getting ready to go back to work. My current time-killing activity involved Casanova’s never-ending search for new ways to make a buck. He’d somehow conned an up-and-coming fashion designer into renting one of the overpriced shops in the gallery. Part of the deal had been space for a fashion show at the beginning of each new season, along with the services of the showgirls as models and enough casino grunts to handle the heavy lifting. I, of course, was one of the grunts.

  A pretty brunette was at the locker next to mine, and we paused to size up each other’s outfit. Hers consisted of a lot of corpse-like paint, a necklace of skulls and a skirt composed of withered arms. They’d been cut off at the elbow, so they formed a miniskirt effect, and were moving around just enough to be creepy.

  “Zombie,” she told me, fixing her lipstick in the mirror on the inside of her locker.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You know, the ones that used to work upstairs?”

  “I thought they’d been shredded.” They’d gotten in the way of the Circle’s hunt for me. And although zombies are pretty resilient as a rule, they hadn’t done so well when facing a cadre of war mages.

  “Well, yeah. But you know the boss. He didn’t want to waste a resource.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “He said zombies smart enough to wait tables but docile enough not to snack on the clientele are hard to come by. He’s using a human waitstaff while he locates some more, but he wanted something to remind everyone that it’s supposed to be a zombie bar, so…”

  “He harvested their body parts for your costumes?”

  “It’s not so bad,” she said, seeing my expression. “Except for getting felt up every time I sit down.”

  “What?”

  She frowned down at her skirt. “One of these guys keeps goosing me. But when I complained, the bokors said they couldn’t replace them all, so I’d have to figure out which one. But they all look the same.”

  We regarded the shriveled gray things around her waist for a moment. I managed not to shudder every time a bony finger brushed against her bare skin, but my dress wasn’t so coy. As with much of the collection, it was spelled to respond to mood, with a repertoire that would make a chameleon envious. It had been showing tranquil nature scenes all morning, but now it switched to a dirty yellow-brown haze, the color of sunlight filtered through smog.

  “I haven’t seen that costume before,” the brunette said, her eyes narrowing.

  “I’m helping with the show.”

  “You’re modeling? But they told me they didn’t need any more girls.”

  “I’m just doing backstage stuff. But the designer wanted us to dress up, too.”

  “Oh. That’s all right, then,” she said, mollified. “I thought something was wrong. I mean, you’re okay and all, just not exactly—”

  “Model material?” I smiled, but my dress took on the sulfurous yellow-gray of the San Francisco skyline. Great.

  “Yeah, exactly.” She scrunched up her nose at the new hue. “Ugh. How do you get it back to a prettier color?”

  “I’m not sure.” And the designer, a pouty blond named Augustine, was not likely to approve of the change.

  “Cheer up,” she told me breezily. “If you’re backstage, probably nobody will see you anyway.” She bumped the locker closed with her hip and gave a sudden yelp when one of the waving arms goosed her. And just like that, my dress returned to the color of a nice, sunny day.

  Well, that had been easier than I’d thought.

  One good thing about my latest assignment had been the chance to get a friend a job. Since she didn’t have a passport, a Social Security card or a strong command of the English language, I’d been wondering how she was going to earn a living. Especially since her references were about four hundred years out of date.

  I found Françoise backstage and helped her into her designated dress, a solid white sheath with a long skirt and cap sleeves. It was cute, but I couldn’t understand what it was doing in a collection that made even wealthy witches twitch before placing an order. Then a small dot detached itself from one shoulder, unfolded eight tiny black legs and went to work.

  A row of other dots that I’d mistaken for buttons peeled away from her shoulder and followed. By the time the dress was buttoned up, the spiders had covered half the bodice with a tracery of black embroidery, as delicate and intricate as the cobwebs they mimicked. The designs were constantly being woven and unwoven, so quickly that it looked like silken fireworks were exploding all over the fabric, each blooming in a unique design before morphing into another even more elaborate.

  I gazed at the dress in covetous admiration while Françoise drew on her gloves. All of the models were wearing them as a way to tie the collection together. In her case, they were long and black and did double duty, hiding the scars where, four hundred years ago, a torturer who knew his craft had left her permanently disfigured.

  She’d started life in seventeenth-century France, where she’d run into the Inquisition, which hadn’t approved of witches so much. She’d eluded them, only to get dragged into Faerie against her will, by slavers trying to make a fast franc selling young witches to the Fey. The scars had occurred right before the kidnapping, and her purchaser, a Fey nobleman with a jealous wife, had not dared to heal them. She’d eventually escaped to the Dark Fey, who decided that she would be more useful as a slave than as a meal. They, of course, hadn’t even noticed the scars.

  The whole adventure lasted only a few years from Françoise’s perspective, but the Fey timeline isn’t in sync with ours. By the time she managed to escape, the world she knew was long gone, making her the only person I knew that fate liked to mess with even more than me. Luckily, she was tall, dark and exotic, characteristics that hadn’t been prized in her own century, which preferred women petite, fair and traditional. But in our time it had been enough to persuade Augustine to overlook her lack of credentials. It seemed that yesterday’s unfashionable Amazon was today’s supermodel.

  Once Françoise was set, waiting for makeup she didn’t need, I turned my attention to trying to corral a rogue handbag. I finally cornered it between a rack of dresses and the wall. I pounced, grabbing the scaly handle as it thrashed and wriggled and did its damnedest to claw me in the face.

  Augustine appeared at my shoulder, but didn’t bother to h
elp. He watched the fight for a moment over the top of wild purple spectacles that were about to fall off his long nose. They looked like something Elton John might have worn to sing “Rocket Man,” with wide frames shot through with glitter. They didn’t go well with his pale blue eyes or artfully arranged curls. Of course, it was kind of hard to think of anything they would have complemented.

  “There are some…people…who are demanding to see you,” he informed me. “They don’t have tickets, and frankly—”

  “What people?” I asked, dreading the answer. I could number the ones who might consider me a friend on one hand. And except for Rafe, none of them knew where I was.

  “Well, I don’t know, do I?” Augustine’s eyes flashed. “Why don’t I stop everything I’m doing seconds before the show to take care of your scruffy friends, who aren’t even on the guest list?”

  I didn’t immediately answer, because the bag was currently winning. It had already sprouted four stubby legs and a tooth-lined snout. Now a tail covered with hard jade scales protruded suddenly from the rear, giving it enough leverage to thrash out of my grasp. It dropped to the floor and hurried off after a snakeskin belt. The belt tried slithering away, but the bag caught it by the tail, swallowing the writhing thing in a couple of gulps.

  I wrestled the truant fashion accessory to the floor with Françoise’s help and wrapped a scarf around the snout. “What do they look like?”

  “That’s my point,” Augustine snapped, tossing his curls. “They look like rejects from a low-budget production of Rent. Not to mention the smell. Get rid of them. Now.” He flounced off in a huff.

  I peered out from behind the curtain separating backstage from the catwalk, trying to spot my visitors, but it wasn’t easy. The ballroom was packed with witches dressed to impress. It looked like big hats were in for summer, because at first all I could see was a field of brightly colored circles, bobbing and swaying like flowers in a breeze. There was no one in sight who looked like they smelled of anything that cost less than a hundred dollars an ounce. Then a couple of witches who had been partly blocking the view settled into their seats and I saw them.