Touch the Dark Page 23

  “There are tests,” Pritkin said through clenched teeth, as if even talking to me was torture. “But your vampire allies wouldn’t like them. They involve holy water and crosses.”

  I looked at Mircea in astonishment, and he rolled his eyes. What the hell kind of stuff was Pritkin reading? Bram freaking Stoker? Demons might be afraid of holy items, but vamps certainly weren’t. Mircea’s family crest showed a dragon, the symbol of courage, embracing a cross, a sign of the family’s Catholicism. It decorated the wall behind his seat in the Senate, but I guess Pritkin had been too busy glaring at me to notice. I thought about giving him the lecture on vampirism being sort of like lycanthropy, in that it was a metaphysical disease. But I doubted he’d believe that the legends claiming that a demon came to roost in every new vampire had been caused by the hysteria of the Middle Ages. Pritkin seemed to see demons everywhere, whether any were there or not. In fact, the only ones of Hollywood’s arsenal of weapons that actually worked on vamps were sunlight—for the younger ones, anyway—stakes and garlic, and the latter only if employed as part of a protection ward. Simply hanging the stuff over a door would have no effect at all—hell, Tony loved it on bruschetta with a little olive oil.

  Mircea was no help; he only grinned at me. “And to think, I always believed that my least favorite things were bad wine and poor fashion.” He smiled tolerantly at my expression. “Very well, dulceaţ?. I think we can find a few crosses somewhere. And unless I mistake it, Rafe is keeping several vials of holy water imprisoned as we speak.”

  Rafe came forward with his box. It sounded like a bunch of Mexican jumping beans were inside, urgently trying to get out, and all of us looked at it doubtfully. “I don’t agree with this,” Tomas spoke up. “I was charged by the Consul to keep Cassie safe. What if he lies, and those things contain acid or explosives? You know we cannot trust him.”

  “Never trust a mage,” Rafe agreed, as if quoting something.

  “I will test them,” Louis-César said and extracted a vial so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to stop him. He didn’t pour it over his own flesh as I’d half feared, but held the stoppered vial under Pritkin’s nose. “I am about to spill this over your arm. If it is not safe to do so, it would be well if you told me now.”

  Pritkin ignored him, his glare still on me, as if he was more worried about what I might do than a roomful of master vamps. He obviously hadn’t been around them long enough to understand nuances. Louis-César had said only that they wouldn’t kill him—that still left a lot of possibilities wide open. I’d have been worried, but Pritkin was so busy giving me the glower of death that he barely noticed when a few drops of colorless liquid were drizzled over his skin. We all watched as if expecting his arm to start to melt, but nothing happened. Louis-César reached for me, but Tomas grabbed his wrist.

  The Frenchman’s eyes flashed silver. “Be careful, Tomas,” he said softly. “You are not possessed this time.”

  Tomas ignored the warning. “That could be poison—he could have taken the antidote, or be willing to die with her. I will not have her harmed.”

  “I will take responsibility before the Consul if anything occurs.”

  “I don’t care about the Consul.”

  “Then you had best care about me.”

  Two tides of shimmering energy began to build, enough to raise goose bumps on my arms and to set my bracelet dancing against my skin. “Enough!” Mircea waved a hand and the power in the room faded considerably. He plucked the vial from the Frenchman’s hand and sniffed it delicately. “Water, Tomas—it is only water and nothing more.” He handed it to me and I took it before Tomas could argue.

  I trusted Mircea, and besides, neither the bracelet nor my ward reacted to it. “It’s okay.”

  “No!” Tomas reached for the bottle, but Louis-César knocked his hand away.

  I looked at Pritkin, who was watching me avidly. “Bottoms up.” I swallowed the whole thing. Just as Mircea had said, it was only water, if a bit stale. Pritkin stared at me, as if expecting wisps of steam to start coming out of my ears or something. “Satisfied? Or do you want to hang a few crosses around my neck?”

  “What are you?” he whispered.

  I went back to my chair, but it was covered in brick dust so I opted for the couch instead. The window had shattered when Mircea tossed the grenade through it, so I had to brush shards of glass onto the floor first. Pritkin had better have some answers, because he was really getting on my nerves. “Tired, stiff and sick to death of you,” I told him honestly.

  Mircea laughed. “You haven’t changed, dulceaţ??.”

  Pritkin stared at me, and some of that terrible anger faded from his face. “I don’t understand. You cannot have drunk holy water and shown no reaction if you are demon kind. But you cannot be human and do what I have seen you do.”

  Mircea settled himself on the sofa after carefully dusting it off with his handkerchief. He picked up one of my bare feet and stroked it idly. I suddenly felt a lot better. “I have learned, Mage Pritkin, never to say never to the universe.” He glanced at me, and his expression was wry. “It delights in giving us that which we declare most emphatically cannot be.”

  Louis-César looked expectantly at me, and I nodded. “Yeah, I know. If people will stop trying to kill me for a minute, I’ll tell you about Françoise, at least as much as I can.” I quickly explained about my second trip, in as much detail as I could remember without mentioning that a seventeenth-century witch appeared to be wandering around Vegas. I didn’t want my cell, if I ended up in one, to have padded walls.

  “That is approximately what Tomas said,” Louis-César commented when I was done. “But that is not as I remember it.”

  “Which leaves us with three possibilities.” Mircea ticked them off on his fingers. “That both Tomas and Cassandra are lying for no obvious reason, that they hallucinated the same thing at the same time, or that they are telling the truth. I do not smell a lie on either of them.” He looked at Louis-César, who nodded. “And must I point out the absurdity of a dual hallucination of that degree of detail, about events neither could have known had they not been there?”

  “Which leaves us with the truth.” Louis-César gave a sigh that sounded like relief. “And that means…”

  Mircea finished for him. “That they changed history.”

  Chapter 11

  “That’s not possible.” I felt that I was on pretty solid ground. “I see the past; I don’t change it.”

  “The Pythia’s power is passing,” Pritkin murmured, as if he hadn’t heard me. “But no. It’s impossible.” He suddenly looked like a confused little boy. “The Pythia cannot possess anyone. She can’t have given you that ability; she doesn’t have it.”

  “Leave that aside,” Louis-César said almost breathlessly. He stared at Pritkin, his face eager. “Could the Pythia’s power allow Cassandra to travel metaphysically to other places, other times?”

  Pritkin looked even more unsure. “I need to consult my Circle,” he said, his voice slightly unsteady. “I was not prepared for this. They told me she was only a suspected rogue. The Pythia has an heir. Her powers should not come to this…person.”

  “What powers?” I decided to press my advantage now that I was back to person status, however tentatively. Better to find out what he knew before he decided I was some other weird kind of demon.

  “No.” Pritkin shook his head adamantly. “I cannot speak for the Circle.”

  “You’ve been trying to speak for them all evening,” Tomas said, grabbing the mage’s shoulder hard enough that he would have stumbled if Mircea’s power hadn’t still held him. “But now that you can help us by doing so, you refuse?” Tomas’ wrist had healed except for an ugly red scar; but his face was no better. His temper didn’t seem to have improved, either.

  “I…these are dangerous matters. I cannot speak of them without authorization.”

  “You said they know what you know,” Tomas growled. “Contact them; get permission.
”

  Pritkin looked about wildly, as if searching for help. He didn’t find any. “I will try, but I know they will want to meet to discuss this. And they will want her brought before them. It will not be decided quickly.”

  “How long?” Louis-César had joined Tomas, and together they did intimidating really well. Hell, they did okay separately.

  Pritkin made the mistake of trying to cover his nervousness with rudeness. He was far too offhand to deal with a senator. “I don’t know. Perhaps days.”

  Louis-César’s blue eyes abruptly flashed to a shimmering gray, like mercury, and his pupils almost completely disappeared. I held my breath, and I wasn’t alone. The only sound in the room was Pritkin’s harsh breathing, and it echoed loudly like someone had slipped a microphone on him. Mircea abruptly released him and he would have slumped to the floor if Louis-César hadn’t grabbed his shirt and slammed him back into the wall.

  Seeing Louis-César in action at the casino hadn’t convinced me that here was a predator’s predator. He fought well, but I’d seen a lot of good fighters through the years, and I wasn’t sold on the idea that a rapier, however long and sharp, was a substitute for a decent firearm. I’d spent too much time at Tony’s, better known as Guns R Us, for that. I understood why he scared the crap out of me—he was my portal to the land of crazed ghosts and filthy dungeons—but other people didn’t have that problem, so I hadn’t understood why they seemed so afraid of him. Most of the time, he looked almost sweet, with his big blue eyes and his dimples. But I finally got the message. He was still handsome, but it was the splendor of a tornado right before it rips through a city. In that second, I believed that he could have made that crazy plan at Dante’s work, that he really could have held off twenty vamps while Tomas got me to safety. “We don’t have days,” he hissed, and the blood drained the rest of the way from Pritkin’s face.

  Mircea spoke, and his voice was like a calm stream of water flowing about the room, quieting tempers and cooling cheeks. I felt my heartbeat slow down and I was finally able to get a deep breath. “Perhaps Mage Pritkin would like to contact his Circle elsewhere? I think he has told us what we needed to know, by implication, if nothing else.” He smiled at Pritkin. “You might think to ask them why they sent you, their best-known demon hunter, after Cassie. You have something of a reputation for being—how shall I put it?—extremely single-minded? If I were the suspicious type, I might almost believe that they wanted you to mistake what she was, and remove a possible rival from contention.” Pritkin stared at him, and his face slowly flushed an angry brick red. I hoped his heart wasn’t getting as much of a workout as his complexion. I had the feeling that if he didn’t give himself a heart attack, someone in the Circle was about to have some explaining to do.

  “He isn’t leaving!” Louis-César and I spoke at the same time. He deferred to me with a graceful gesture, and I watched him nervously as I scrambled up to face Pritkin. The vamp’s eyes were still silver, and I didn’t want to find out what happened when he really lost his temper.

  “You aren’t going anywhere until I get some answers. Who is the Pythia, why do you keep calling me sybil and what powers are you talking about?”

  Pritkin complied without even an argument. The fight seemed to have gone out of him for the moment, and his voice was slightly hoarse. “The Pythia was the name of the ancient seer of Delphi, Apollo’s greatest temple. For two thousand years, the women selected for the position were considered the oracle of the world, with kings and emperors deciding policy based on their advice. The position lapsed with the decline of Greece, but the term is still used out of respect. It is the title of the world’s chief seer, a strong ally of the Circle. She is one of our chief assets, since nonhumans do not have the gift.”

  “What does this have to do with me?”

  “Every time a new Pythia is chosen, a sybil—our name for a true clairvoyant—is selected as her heir. She is carefully trained from childhood to understand the burden and how to bear it. The Pythia is old and her control of the power is failing. It should pass to her heir, but she was kidnapped by Rasputin and the Dark Circle more than six months ago.” His eyes looked haunted. “The Pythia’s power has passed in an unbroken tradition for thousands of years. But now, I fear for the succession. The heir must be dead. Why else would the power come to you, even in part? A rogue with no training, no understanding of what the position entails?”

  Two words of that speech echoed in my brain. I stared at him in horror. “In part?! What the hell does that mean?” My voice had gotten shrill and I paused to calm down a little. “No way. Tell your Circle that I don’t want the job.”

  “It is not a job. It is a calling. And the heir has no choice.”

  “Like hell I don’t! You need to find this sybil person and get her back.” I looked at Tomas, and it was almost painful to do so. “And what did you use on his face? It isn’t healing.”

  Rafe answered. “It was dragon’s blood, mia stella. Don’t worry, it will heal with time.” Tomas sent me a surprised look, as if he hadn’t expected me to care what happened to him, and I looked away. I noticed Mircea regarding me thoughtfully, and I put on as neutral a face as possible. Let them think whatever they liked. I would have been as concerned about anyone who got hurt trying to help me.

  Pritkin spoke in a tired voice. “We have searched for her. For the last six months, we have done little else. The Pythia is very old and has had to carry the power far longer than she should have done. Her health is failing, and her control along with it. We understand the necessity for speed better than you, but our search has been in vain.”

  I didn’t see the problem here. “Then appoint someone else heir.”

  “I told you; it is not an appointed position. The power goes where it will, to whoever is most worthy, the ancient texts say. There should have been no contest. You are young and untrained, whereas our sybil has studied for years for the position. She was selected late, but she was trained well. We did not think you would be a rival…”

  He stopped, too late, and I pounced. “You knew about me? How?”

  The arrogance began to bleed back into his face. “Your entire line is tainted. Your mother was the same; you even look like her.”

  “Wait a minute. You knew my mother? How?” He looked about thirty-five, maybe younger. So he wasn’t aging at normal speed, either, unless the Circle admitted its members at fifteen.

  “She was the heir,” Pritkin told me, his lips thin with rage. “She had to be pure, untouched, as she knew very well. But she had an affair with your father, a vampire’s servant! And worse, she hid it from the Circle until she became pregnant with you and ran away with him. Who knows what would have happened to the power, had we let it fill an unclean vessel?”

  “Unclean?” Okay, now I was pissed. “She was my mother!”

  “She was unfit to be the heir! I can only be grateful we discovered her in time.”

  “So, if someone’s not a virgin, they can’t be heir?”

  “Exactly.” He smiled nastily at me. “Yet another reason you are disqualified.”

  I didn’t bother to correct him. I was willing to bet that my sexual experience gave their pure-as-the-driven-snow sybil a run for her money, although not for the same reasons. Eugenie had guarded me like a hawk, and when I wasn’t with her, I was running for my life. I’d never trusted anyone enough to get that close. It also helped that most of the vamps at Tony’s had rivaled Alphonse in the looks department, and that they’d been warned off me anyway. The most temptation I’d experienced had been with Tomas, the Senate’s spy who had been feeding off me without permission, and Mircea, who was probably plotting some nefarious scheme. I have no taste in men.

  “Let me get this straight. First you decide I’m a demon because of a power I didn’t ask for and don’t even understand. Then, when that falls through, you label me a fallen sybil and a ho. Am I missing something, or do you just not like me?”

  Mircea laughed, and even Louis-
César’s lips twitched. Tomas either didn’t get the joke or wasn’t in a laughing mood. Pritkin, of course, was annoyed. “Everything you say only confirms my initial impression. You would be a disaster as Pythia.”

  “The power doesn’t seem to care.”

  “That is why the Circle exists, to intervene in these cases!” He glared at me, so fiercely that I flinched back before I could stop myself. “Haven’t you ever wondered why your mother named you Cassandra? It is our term for a fallen sybil, one who uses her power for ill instead of good. One allied with the Black Circle. One who might be able to summon ghosts and dark witches to fight for her, to possess humans like a demon, and to command a dark weapon so easily. The power will not be allowed to pass to someone like you!”

  “And if it does?”

  “It won’t.” It was emphatic enough that I mentally added another group to the long list of people who wanted me dead.

  “The Senate will protect you,” Louis-César assured me.

  I turned jaded eyes on him. “Sure it will. As long as I do whatever it wants.”

  Mircea smirked at Louis-César’s expression. “She grew up at one of our courts. Did you really think she would not grasp the situation? Now remove the mage,” he ordered Raphael. “We will talk business with our Cassandra in private.” Pritkin was wrestled from the room, and I for one was glad to see him go. If I never met another war mage in my life, I’d count myself lucky. I waited to see what the Senate’s continued help was going to cost me.

  “We will not turn you over to the Circle, mademoiselle.” Louis-César’s eyes, which were back to blue, shone with sincerity. I stared at him. Was he really that naive, or was it all part of the honorable-little-boy routine?

  “But we may not be able to protect you if their ally wins the duel tonight,” Mircea added. “Rasputin would decide things then, and I would not like to see you in his power. The Silver Circle might kill you if you fall into their hands, but I do not wish to speculate about what the Black will do. It is to your advantage that we win, Cassandra.”