Embrace the Night Read online

  Actually I thought that pretty much summed up the Senate. “You mean, with one person in charge?”

  “Not necessarily. Just a more centralized authority, with better oversight of everyone’s activities and more checks and balances on their behavior.”

  “There aren’t a lot of checks and balances on the Senate,” I pointed out. “None, in fact.”

  “Yet it works! Instead of elections turning into popularity contests, you have the best people appointed for each position by a concerned, capable leader.”

  “I don’t think I’d describe the Consul quite that way,” I said dryly. “She got her position by being the strongest and the craftiest, full stop.”

  “But she rules well. People respect her.”

  “People fear her!”

  “All strong leaders are feared by the ignorant,” Nick commented, patently not listening to a word I said. “We could learn a great deal from the vampires, if prejudice did not stand in the way.”

  I laughed; I just couldn’t help it. The mages seemed to have a seriously warped view of the vamps. Pritkin saw them as evil incarnate, while Nick was determined to set them on a pedestal. He didn’t look too pleased at my amusement, though, so I tried to explain while he looked up a particularly obscure word.

  “The vamp system works because of the bonds that force subordinate vampires to do the will of their masters and require masters to answer for the infractions of their followers. The mages don’t have that kind of setup. And you can’t expect people to—”

  “Perhaps if we did, we could coordinate our efforts and stamp out the dark once and for all!” he interrupted. “As it is, they stay one step ahead of us merely by crossing into another coven’s territory, and by the time we get through all the debates and favors and bribes and finally get the needed permission to go after them, they’re gone again!”

  He was looking pretty annoyed, with flushed cheeks under all those freckles. I’d have changed the subject, but something was bugging me. “I thought the Circle was the central authority. Isn’t it in charge of the whole magical community?”

  “No,” he snapped. “That’s the problem. What we have now is sort of an umbrella organization. Not every coven worldwide belongs to it—we’re especially spotty in Asia—and even those who are members joined at different times and with different agreements.”

  “I didn’t know that.” The vamps always talked about the Circle like it was synonymous with mages in general. Of course, in this country it might be. I’d never thought about it being different anywhere else.

  “It’s a total hodgepodge!” Nick said heatedly. “Some covens don’t allow searches of their territory at all and others only after receiving definite proof that questionable activity is going on. And, of course, sometimes we don’t have proof, just a gut feeling or a tip from someone they don’t recognize as a legitimate source. And explaining that our sources wouldn’t know the dark well enough to have information if they were legit gets us nowhere nine times out of ten. It would be so much easier if we all answered to one authority.”

  “A dictatorship, in other words.” Pritkin had come into the room without my hearing him. I jumped, trying to stand up and whirl around at the same time, and almost ended up on the floor. He caught me, and I tore away as soon as I could find my feet, panting a little, glaring a lot. “I see you made it back safely.”

  “It doesn’t have to be anything of the kind,” Nick argued, apparently not realizing that no one was listening to him anymore.

  Pritkin looked like he’d just come from a bath; his hair—short and pale blond again—was plastered down in wet strands that disturbed me for some reason I couldn’t quite define. Maybe because it drew attention to his face, like the older, longer version had. Maybe because it made me remember the last time I’d seen it wet, slick with sweat and glistening.

  God, I hated him!

  “You!” I couldn’t even talk, I had so many things I wanted to say. “You knew!” It was the only thing I could get out, the only words that didn’t threaten to choke me.

  “No, I didn’t. At the time, I merely thought you were a competent witch who was attempting to rob me.”

  “Don’t lie! You saw me shift!”

  “I thought you’d clouded my mind, you or the vampire. My defenses were down, my shields almost exhausted. It seemed a reasonable conclusion.”

  “And when we met again? You didn’t recognize me?”

  “After so long, no. Not immediately. I had wondered a few times, but I didn’t know. Not until I saw the dress.” He looked over the tattered remains. “It was memorable.”

  “More than me, it would seem,” I said tightly.

  “Nick, if you could give us a moment?”

  “But I’m right in the middle of…” He saw the looks we turned on him and gulped. “Or—or I could go see what’s keeping that coffee,” he squeaked, and headed out the door. He tried to take the page he was working on with him, but I held out a hand and he reluctantly handed it over.

  “You found it, then.” Pritkin’s voice held no emotion whatsoever. He’d learned a lot in two hundred years.

  “And I’m keeping it.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t allow that, Cassie.”

  I laughed, and even to me, it sounded bitter. “Oh, it’s Cassie, now, is it? So, let me make sure I have it straight. It’s Ms. Palmer when you’re pretending to be loyal, and Cassie when you’re stabbing me in the back. Good to know.”

  Pritkin flinched slightly, but he never dropped his gaze. “You don’t understand what’s at stake.”

  “And that would be why, I wonder? Because nobody ever tells me anything?” That last was pretty much a scream, but I didn’t care. I’d known that seeing him again would be hard, I just hadn’t known how hard. I’d been right before. Burying emotions was a hell of a lot better than experiencing them, especially when they felt like this.

  “I will tell you what you want to know, if you will promise to hear me out before shifting. If you thought you were a target before, it is nothing to what you will be with that thing in your possession. It must be destroyed!”

  I couldn’t have shifted to save my life; I was having a hard time even standing up. But Pritkin didn’t know that. It gave me an advantage, a lever to finally pry some answers out of him. But for the life of me, I couldn’t work up much enthusiasm about it.

  “I’ve spent my whole life playing games,” I told him quietly. “It’s the vamp’s favorite pastime. A whisper here, a wink there, a clue that may or may not go anywhere and may or may not have been dropped on purpose. I’m tired of games. I just want someone to tell me the truth. Haven’t I earned that much yet?”

  Pritkin closed his eyes briefly, and swallowed, a brief bob of his Adam’s apple up and down. I searched his still-youthful face, trying to peer behind the mask. To see a thousand years of experience. But there was nothing.

  I’d grown up around creatures who never showed their age, at least not physically. But you could always tell the older ones, and not just by the aura of power they gave off. There was a gravity to them, like air took on extra weight when they entered a room. As if everything about them was somehow more: deeper, brighter, richer.

  He opened his eyes, but I didn’t look away. I scrutinized him, trying to keep the Consul in mind, the way she felt, the way she drew all eyes without seemingly doing a thing. I watched a faint blush spread across his cheekbones as I continued to inspect him, and mentally shook my head. No. No way was he that old.

  Which left the sojourn in Hell. He’d said that much of his younger years had been spent there, but also that he’d just got back in 1793. Which was crazy. If he’d disappeared from history because he had, in fact, disappeared from earth, then he’d left in the early Middle Ages. And if he’d only just returned…a thousand years on earth would scar a person; what would a millennium in the demon realms do?

  How would it be, I wondered, to be snatched into a world you knew nothing about, where your only
use was as a trophy? Some kind of freakish experiment for your father to show off? And what had Pritkin done to get thrown out anyway? How exactly did someone get tossed out of Hell?

  “Rosier tried to kill you so that you couldn’t do what you have just done—retrieve the Codex and with it a spell known as the Ephesian Letters,” he finally said.

  Maybe it was because I was tired, or under the strain of being near Pritkin and not being able to touch him, to hit him, to run my hands through his hair and make it stand up, damn it, but I was having a hard time following. “What?”

  “They were words carved into the ancient Temple of Artemis at Ephesus—”

  “Nick told me what the Ephesian Letters are,” I said impatiently. “Why does anyone care about an old spell?”

  “Because of what it can do. What, in fact, it did do, thousands of years ago.” Pritkin sat on the edge of the table. “What it will continue to do, if no one ever casts the counterspell that I foolishly wrote down. Merlin the wise, indeed.”

  “Then I was right. You are Merlin.” I found it hard to take in, despite all the evidence. Pritkin was just…Pritkin. Not some legend out of another time.

  “Myrddin, in fact, not that I used the name for long. A French poet thought it sounded obscene and changed it. Fair enough; he changed everything else.”

  “Then the stories aren’t true? There was no Camelot, or Lancelot or Arthur—”

  “Oh, there was an Arthur, after a fashion. And I can see his face, if he read half the things written about him! That rumor about his sister alone—he’d have cut out someone’s heart for that one.” He thought for a moment. “Or she would. Frightening woman.”

  “So you’re what, like a thousand years old?” I still didn’t believe it.

  “Not…precisely. I was born in the sixth century, but did not manage to live even one normal life span before Rosier came to claim me. And time in the demon realms runs differently from here, much like in Faerie. Only more so. I was there, as far as I can tell, barely a human decade. But when I returned”—he shook his head, and there was still wonder on his face—“the world had changed.”

  “When I met you in Paris, you told me that you’d only just come back. Was that when you returned?”

  “More or less. I had been back a few years by then, enough to learn my way around to some degree, but not enough to keep from being pickpocketed by a spell that hadn’t even been invented in my day but was old hat in the eighteenth century.”

  “By Manassier’s grandfather.”

  “Yes. He and an associate were living in that nebulous world betwixt and between. The Circle had rejected them for unbecoming conduct—and, I suspect, gross incompetence—but they didn’t have any skills wanted by the dark. They made a precarious living relieving naive country bumpkins of their worldly possessions and, whenever possible, draining them of their magic. They couldn’t get past my shields to make the latter possible, but they did manage to make off with the Codex.”

  “And that mysterious spell you were going to tell me about.”

  Pritkin propped his head on one hand, a tired gesture I could never remember seeing before. “I have made many mistakes in life, but the worst of all had to be writing down that blasted spell.”

  “But Nick said it was never written down. That it was lost after the temple burned and the priests all died.”

  “One survived and, in extreme old age, left exactly one copy. I don’t know whether he was senile, or merely unwilling to let his most precious secret die with him. Perhaps he’d forgotten what it does; maybe he never knew. I only know that I found his scribbled ramblings in an old temple in Angelsey. How they got there.” He shrugged. “Possibly a Roman legionary picked them up as a curiosity in the East before being reassigned. I never knew.”

  “How did you find it?”

  “Because I was searching for it. Not that spell specifically but anything old that might have survived. I didn’t have high hopes—the place had been burnt by the Romans during their Druid-killing sprees, and what was left was plundered by the Saxons a few centuries later. But no one had thought an old scroll to be of much use, especially one in a language none of them could read, and it somehow survived. Languages have always been a specialty of mine. And I pounced on it.”

  “For what?”

  “For curiosity partly. For the rest…I was so proud of myself, thought I’d found my life’s work, before I understood how long that life might be. It seemed an utter good—cataloging and preserving the old knowledge at a time in which the whole world seemed to be coming down around our ears. I had no way of knowing that what I recorded might well bring that to pass much more efficiently than the damn Saxons ever could!”

  “But what does it do?” I thought I was going to go crazy if he didn’t just tell me.

  “The Ephesian Letters is a spell and a counterspell in one, depending on voice, inflection and which way it is read. One way closes a door; the other opens it.”

  “What door?”

  “The door between worlds. Rosier fears that if the spell is found, someone might reverse it, opening a gateway to rivals his kind have not had to face in—” He had been sorting through the pile of pages at his elbow and had picked one out of the group. It must have been the translation Nick was working on, unless ancient Ephesian priests used lined notebook paper. His breath caught. “What is this?”

  I glanced at it. “Nick was translating the counterspell for me, for the geis.”

  “This isn’t the counterspell,” Pritkin said, his face draining of color as I watched. I glanced down at the paper, but it didn’t make much sense.

  ASKION: Shadowless ones. Where gods once ruled,

  KATASKION: Shadowy. Humans now do.

  LIX: Earth. Earth is blocked

  TETRAX: Time. To Time’s Guardian.

  DAMNAMENEUS: Sun overpowered. With this, the sun is overpowered.

  AISION: True Voice. And the oracle speaks with a true voice.

  Pritkin grabbed me by the arms. “Take us back, quickly!”

  “Back where?”

  “To the moment Nick got up to leave! I have to catch him!”

  “Why, what did he—”

  “There’s no time to explain. Just do it!”

  I pushed a limp strand of hair out of my eyes and tried to focus. God, I was so tired. “I can’t shift right now. Maybe tomorrow—”

  Pritkin swore. “If I don’t find him, there won’t be a tomorrow!” And he was gone. I didn’t even see him leave, just the door slamming shut behind him.

  Chapter 26

  And then the lights went out. I sat there in the dark and seriously thought about putting my head down and going to sleep. It was nice and quiet down here, and maybe no one would find me until morning.

  If there was a morning.

  I groaned and got up. As I’d always suspected, being in charge sucked. Especially when no one even realized you were.

  I felt around until I was sure I had the entire Codex, rolled it all, including the translation of the spell I didn’t need, into a tube and wrapped a rubber band around it. Then I shoved the whole thing down my bodice. Mircea hadn’t laced it as tightly as Sal, but it still fit snugly, and with the tube down there taking up what little room there was, breathing once more became an issue. But at least no one was budging that thing. Now if I didn’t pass out from lack of air, everything would be fine.

  I eased out into the corridor and tried to remember how far it was to the fire stairs. But it’s not the sort of thing you really notice when the lights are on. I’d covered what I thought was about the right distance when someone grabbed me.

  I screamed and somebody yelled and then I was slammed up against the wall. It hurt and I was already in a foul mood. I didn’t hold back at all when I kneed whoever-it-was in the groin.

  “You’d better hope that doesn’t scar!” Casanova hissed.

  “You’re a vampire. You’ll heal. What are you doing here?”

  “It’s my ca
sino!” he said, a little shrilly. “I have every right to be here. It’s you and your hoodlum friends who need to go, before you cause any more trouble!”

  “Avoiding trouble is not a big motivator for me these days. Not dying is a big motivator for me; not watching Mircea go insane is a big motivator for me. Speaking of which—”

  “The Senate isn’t here, but I just received word that they’re on their way. And I haven’t been confirmed in this job yet, you know! How do you think it’s going to look when the Consul shows up and the whole damn place is dark?”

  “Why is she coming here?” That was all I needed.

  “How the hell should I know? Do I look like someone who is regularly consulted on Senate matters? I try to stay as far away from those crazy bastards as possible.” He paused. “Lord Mircea excepting, of course.”

  “Of course. Why is it dark in here?”

  “Because one of those freeloaders you dumped on me has caused a blackout!”

  “You can’t be sure it’s the kids,” I said, feeling guilty.

  “Oh, no? Well, the power company says we have power. They all but called me an idiot when I called them just now! Yet, no lights. And, if I may point out, no slot machines, no table games, no anything. I’m losing a fortune here!”

  “It’s been all of ten minutes. Relax. I’ll take care of it.”

  “You’re damn right you will. Right now!”

  “Stop yelling. I have a bigger problem. Have you seen Nick?”

  “Yes, how do you think I found you? He said—”

  I grabbed Casanova by what felt like his lapels and shook him. “Where is he?”

  He pried my hands off with a curse. “Again, how the hell should I know? And this is imported Italian silk, all right?”

  “Where did you see him?”

  “In the lobby. I ran into him right after the lights went out. He was trying to find a way out of here and I was trying to find you. We traded information.”