Curse the Dawn cp-4 Page 2

  I dove for Agnes and we hit the floor together as a wave of force swept over us. A roar of sound deafened me, fire bloomed behind me and a wash of heat flooded the air. Dead, I thought in a rush of nausea.

  And then nothing.

  After a stunned moment, I opened my eyes to see a room filled with what looked like red and gold glitter. It took me a second to recognize it as flaming bits of wood and powder thrown off by the explosion, frozen in the air like confetti on the Fourth of July. A small piece was resting beside my cheek and it was hot. I knocked it away, and it moved a few inches before stopping, hanging suspended and molten as a tiny sun.

  "You know, you're a real pain in the ass," Agnes mumbled. I belatedly realized that I'd squashed her face against the floor.

  "Sorry. I—"

  "Get off me."

  I rolled to the side and stopped, blinking. A couple feet away was a freeze-frame out of hell. A ball of fire hung in space, surrounded by burning bits of wood that had once formed the sides of a barrel. Sparks were everywhere, turning the dull old stones around us bloodred and highlighting the pissy look on Agnes' face.

  "What happened?"

  "What does it look like?" she snapped. "You almost blew us up!"

  "You didn't tell me there was gunpowder in here!"

  "There was gunpowder out there!" She waved an arm wildly in the direction of the other room. "And someone threw a barrel at us from in here! What the hell do you want, a diagram?"

  "I want to know what's going on," I said heatedly. "All I know is that I followed you into a cellar—"

  "Which you had no business doing."

  "— and now some crazy man is trying to kill us!"

  "At the rate we're going, he won't have to," Agnes said, staggering back to her feet. Her hair had come loose from its once neat chignon and floated down over her temples and cheeks. It moved delicately with her breath, giving away how fast her heart beat. She put a hand to her head. "I'm going to feel like hell tomorrow."

  "You stopped time." I'd seen her do it once before; I'd even done it myself on one memorable occasion. Of course, in my case, it had been an accident.

  She eyed the suspended fireball. "What gave it away?"

  I decided to ignore that and retrieved my stick. I used it to push at the burning splinters. They were radiating outward from the blast in a concentric ring, like spores off hell's dandelion. They bent at my touch but didn't go out or fall to the floor. I stared at them for a moment, a strange echoing vertigo in my mind when I thought about the distance between this new life and everything I'd ever known.

  "Look," Agnes said, pointing at the far wall. The mage stood pressed against the stones, caught midscream. "I told you we didn't get him."

  As she spoke, she was starting to gather the wooden shards and bits of lit powder from the air. She looked pretty steady on her feet, but I knew from experience how much strain even a small hiccup in time could cause. "How long can you hold it?"

  "Long enough if you help. And be careful—if we miss even one. ." She didn't have to finish the sentence.

  I swatted the stray sparks like fireflies, knocking them to the ground and stomping on them before I realized that it wasn't doing any good. Time had stopped, meaning that I could jump up and down on the damn things all I wanted, but they weren't going to go out. I settled for gathering them into the tail of my T-shirt while Agnes dug into the barrels closest to the explosion. Flaming shards of wood had penetrated their sides, causing fire to boil up around their edges as the powder caught.

  The embers I held were uncomfortably warm. I finally resorted to stripping off my T-shirt and using it as a net to trap them without burning myself. I made a dozen glowing piles in the empty outer room before I had them all. By then Agnes had dealt with the barrels, and we turned our attention to the big boy.

  She poked the fireball with a stick, but it remained frozen in place, like the shadows on the ceiling and the clouds of smoke in the air. "I can handle that," I told her, taking the stick. To my surprise, she gave in without a fight. From the little I knew of her, I guessed that meant we were running out of time. "If you want something to do, you could tell me what's going on."

  "You really don't know about the Guild?" she asked, watching me whack at the ball like an oversized piñata. It wasn't elegant, but it seemed to work. The exploded cask and its attached flames slowly began to move through the air.

  "I don't know anything. That's my problem!"

  "They're a bunch of utopians out to create a better world through time travel. Stop plagues, wars and famines before they start—that kind of thing."

  "Doesn't sound so bad," I panted as the explosion moved in fits and starts into the outer room.

  "Maybe you should sign up. Except they don't like women much. Might have something to do with the Pythias thwarting their plans for the last five hundred years. Send it up the stairs," she added as I stopped to get my breath.

  I eyed the staircase without enthusiasm. "Why? The other one exploded in here and nothing happened."

  "The other one was a lot smaller. This could bring down the ceiling on our heads."

  I sighed and started thumping the fiery thing again. "And you might want to check out their manifesto," she continued as I battled my way upward. "Not all of us like the idea of living in a Stepford world where if we do anything the Guild doesn't like, they go back in time and change it. Repeat offenders are to be snuffed out of existence. Couples are to be denied the right to reproduce if their child is seen as a future threat to the Guild."

  "Okay. That sounds a little less enticing," I admitted.

  "And it goes on and on. They aren't big on free will. They don't care that one person's utopia is another person's hell," she said as we emerged into a long room.

  It was covered wall to ceiling in biblical-themed murals. The light of the explosion brought the colors to life, glinting off gilt paint and causing the jewel-colored glass in the high, arched windows to shimmer. I blinked, staring around like a tourist until Agnes poked me in the back.

  "That way." She pointed at a door I hadn't noticed. "And hurry. I can't hold things much longer."

  I gave up hitting the cask and started pushing it instead. It had a weird, spongy feel in the center, I guess from the ignited but not-yet-burned gunpowder, which didn't make for great leverage. But I nonetheless managed to maneuver my bomb-on-a-stick through the long, narrow room and outside. Three- and four-story buildings of stone and wood hemmed in a courtyard. Frozen smoke belched from their chimney pots, reaching pale fingers toward a leaden sky.

  It was bitterly cold and the air hit my face like a wet rag. It took me a moment to realize it was raining. Sheets of water hung suspended in the air like a beaded curtain, gleaming in the light we threw off. Heavy drops dangled like cabochon diamonds from the edge of rooftops, spangled low-hanging limbs and congealed half-in, half-out of puddles. It was strangely beautiful.

  "The river," Agnes gasped, from cold or exhaustion. "That way." She pointed toward the right, where a line of scattered trees blocked the view.

  Mud squelched under my feet as I started forward. I kept my head down, but it didn't help. Soon water ran down my forehead and dripped into my eyes, its movement the result of my own forward momentum. The rain wasn't falling on us; we were running into it as we hurried forward, leaving a path of clear air behind us like the wake of a ship.

  To make the going even tougher, there was very little light. Only a few stars were visible in the cloud-covered sky, and while we shed a glow, it didn't extend far in any direction. Everything beyond our immediate vicinity was lost in shadow.

  That was a problem because the place was a minefield of carts, wheelbarrows and junky lean-tos. I kept running into things and slipping on slick paving stones, which became worse after we left them behind for dirt. But Agnes turned to glare at me every time I slowed down, so I hurried after her.

  We navigated across a more or less open area, around a rickety-looking fence and down a path
to an iron railing. Below us was undoubtedly a river. I couldn't see much, but the smell was unmistakable: a mixture of rotting fish, sewage, mold and damp.

  Agnes gave me a shove. "Get rid of it!"

  I looked around. A mass of dark buildings clustered along the water's edge in either direction, just waiting to be firebombed. The only safe place for an explosion was over the water. But the stick was too short to push the fireball far enough to do any good, and climbing over the railing wouldn't help. A stone retaining wall started immediately on the other side, flowing straight down to the water's edge.

  But I had to do something. The explosion had begun expanding again in super slow motion. Agnes was losing her grip on time.

  I pulled off my T-shirt again and draped it around the fiery mass. "What are you doing?" she demanded.

  "Improvising!"

  The glowing mass lit up the thin cotton, and a few brown spots appeared. The shirt was on fire, but with time still in slow mo, I thought I might have a minute before it disintegrated. I grabbed both ends, creating a big slingshot, and spun around in a wide circle until I got up some momentum. Then I let go, sending the entire burning mass spinning away into the night.

  It made it almost to mid-river, a bright ruby ball of fire against the black of the water, before splashing down. It went under, lighting up a school of fish as it slowly began to sink. Then Agnes gave a small sigh, time sped back up to normal and the underwater explosion threw a column of water twenty feet into the air.

  Chapter Two

  Most of the water fell on a nearby sailing ship docked for the night. But not all. I scooped fish guts out of my bra and glared at Agnes. She didn't notice, having already taken off.

  "What's the rush?" I demanded, jogging to keep up.

  "It'll be November fifth in another hour," she said as light erupted behind us. I looked over my shoulder to see lanterns being lit all over the ship. Sailors scrambled to the railing, staring alternately at the waves rocking them back and forth and at the mangled sushi that had splattered the deck and lay draped over the ropes.

  I turned back to find that Agnes had almost disappeared up the path. I ran after her, rain slapping me in the face.

  "And?"

  "Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent, to blow up King and Parli'ment," she singsonged.

  Something clicked. "Three-score barrels of powder below, to prove old England's overthrow." She looked surprised. "I had a British governess," I explained.

  "Then you know the score. Some English Catholics want to blow up parliament and James the First along with it. They don't want a Protestant king, and they think his death will return the country to Catholicism. It might have worked, if one of the members of the plot hadn't had a relative in parliament. He received a letter warning him to skip tomorrow's session and ratted them out."

  "And Fawkes was found in the cellar surrounded by the evidence hours before parliament met."

  "But the Guild is here to see that this time, he succeeds."

  "Why would they care about that?"

  She put on a burst of speed instead of answering, probably in response to the candles appearing in windows all around us. We ran, slipping and sliding over mud and water-slick grass, until we reached the painted room. I slammed the door on a few shouts from outside and leaned against it, panting.

  "They don't. It's their own history they hope to help," she said, glancing at me and grinning, the adrenaline rush sparkling in her eyes. "They were just getting started in these days. But before they could grow their numbers significantly, the Circle found out what they were up to and hunted them down, almost to a man. It took them centuries to recover. I suppose they think that a massive civil war might give the Circle more important things to worry about."

  She headed down the stairs and I followed silently. By Circle she meant the Silver Circle, the world's largest magical association and an umbrella organization for thousands of covens. To most people in the supernatural community, the Circle represented order, safety and stability.

  I wasn't one of those people.

  That had a lot to do with the fact that the Circle was currently trying to kill me in the hopes that a more suitable Pythia would take my place. Suitable in their view, meaning someone brainwashed from childhood to believe that they could do no wrong. They'd had a few thousand years of treating the Pythias as their personal errand girls and weren't happy to have a more independent-minded type in office.

  "Speaking of the Circle—" I began, before Agnes clapped a hand to my mouth. We'd reentered the outer room of the cellar, and I guess she didn't want us alerting the mage that we'd returned. Just as well. I'd gotten the impression that a little tension between the Pythia and her magical protectors was normal, but the whole I-want-you-dead thing might freak her out.

  What freaked me out was the reappearance of the mage, pale and wild-eyed, exploding out of the gunpowder room at a dead run. He crashed into me and I instinctively grabbed him, getting a fist to the stomach in return. I kicked him in the knee and he yelled and reared back, fist clenched, but stopped when he felt Agnes' gun beside his ear.

  "Go ahead," she told him. "The paperwork for a trial is a real bitch."

  "So are you!" he snarled.

  I clutched my stomach and covered him with my gun while Agnes pulled a pair of cuffs out of her coat. "I have a problem," I told her quickly, before she could shift away. "I really am Pythia, but I don't know what I'm doing and there's no one in my time who can help me."

  "That's a problem," she agreed, snicking the cuffs shut.

  "Yeah."

  "Good luck with that." She grabbed the mage by the collar.

  "Don't you dare leave!"" I said furiously. "I helped you!"

  "You almost blew this place sky-high! Anyway, even if I wanted to help you, there are rules."

  "Screw the rules! You stuck me with this godforsaken position—"

  "I didn't hear that."

  "— and now you think you can just walk away? You have a responsibility here!"

  I'd been waving the gun around in my agitation, and it accidentally went off and took a chip out of a brick over the mage's head. He blinked. "Uh, ladies? Might I suggest—"

  "Shut up!" we told him in unison. He shut up.

  Agnes tried to shift, but I grabbed her wrist, wrenching us back at the same moment that she tried to go forward. "Are you crazy?" she screeched, only it sounded like she was talking in slow motion.

  Time wobbled around us: one second, we were back where I came in, with bullets whizzing around our heads; the next we were in the future, watching a party of cloaked men in funny hats examining the ruined door. One of them caught sight of us and paled, and then we were gone, bouncing backward once more.

  Agnes somehow managed to put on the brakes, wrenching us out of the time stream with what I swear was an audible pop. For a moment, we stood there, white-faced and shaking, back where we'd started but a little worse for the wear. I don't know about the others, but I felt like I'd just stepped off a roller coaster—light-headed and a little sick.

  "I need to go to the bathroom," the mage said weakly.

  Agnes took a deep breath and let it out, glaring at me. "You're a lousy liar. If I'd trained you, you'd have known better than to pull a stunt like that!"

  "Didn't you hear me?" I demanded. "You didn't train me. That's the problem. You gave me this lousy job and then died before—"

  "La-la-la. Not listening." She stuck a finger in one ear, which didn't help much as the other hand still gripped the mage's shirt.

  I stared at her. My last image of Agnes was her heroic death to keep a rogue initiate from laying waste to the time line. Somewhere in my hero worship, I'd forgotten how deeply weird she could be. Of course, if I kept this job as long as she had, I might not be too normal, either. It wasn't a comforting thought.

  "What the hell is wrong with you?" I asked, honestly worried that my last chance for a mentor was headed down the toilet along with her sanity.

&nbs
p; "What's wrong with me?" She took the finger out of her ear to shake it at me. "You're not supposed to tell me these things!"

  "I haven't told you that much—" I began, only to be cut off with a savage gesture.

  "You've told me plenty! I have an initiate in training and she isn't you. You said I got you into this, so what happened to her? Is she dead? Did she turn dark?" Her hands waved around, banging the mage's head into the wall. "I don't know!"

  "Sort of both," I said uneasily. Agnes' second heir, Myra, had turned dark and began using her time-travel abilities for her own and her allies' gain. Agnes would be forced to kill her to remove the threat to the time line but would die herself in the process. And that would leave an untrained nobody in the Pythia's position—me.

  "Don't tell me that!" she whispered, clearly horrified.

  "You asked."

  "No! I didn't! I was explaining how much information I could get out of this meeting if I thought about it, which I'm absolutely not going to do because I may have already learned too much. What if something you say causes me to change the way I deal with the present—my present—which then alters your future? You might shift back only to find out that you don't exist anymore! Hadn't thought of that, had you?"

  "No," I said, working to keep my temper under control.

  "But that doesn't change the fact that I need training!"

  "The early Pythias didn't have much in the way of training, but they managed to figure things out. So will you."

  "Easy for you to say. You were trained. You never had to figure anything out!"

  "Like hell." She put the hand not choking the mage on her hip in a familiar gesture. "No amount of training really prepares you for this job."

  "But at least you know how the power works. I didn't get the manual!"

  "There is no manual. If our enemies ever figured out everything we can do, they would be much more successful in opposing us. And time isn't all that easy to screw up any—"

  She paused as, somewhere on the far side of the gunpowder room, a key turned in a lock. Agnes drew her gun and pushed it into the mage's temple hard enough to dent the skin. "Say one word—make one sound—and I swear. .," she whispered. He looked conflicted, ideology warring with self-preservation, but I guess the latter won because he stayed silent. Or maybe he couldn't talk with her fist knotted in his collar.