Chapter One
I hit the ground
running—or stumbling or falling; it was kind of hard to tell when
it felt like the earth was crumbling under my feet.
And then I realized
that was because the earth was
crumbling under my feet.
“Craaaap!”
I plummeted straight
over a cliff and into thin air, arms waving and feet still moving
uselessly, screaming bloody murder. For a long moment, there was
nothing but me and crystal blue sky and acre upon acre of
sparkling, snow-covered land way the hell too far below. I knew I
was supposed to be doing something, but the wind was roaring in my
ears and my eyes were watering from the cold and the ground was
rushing up to meet me at a pace that promised one very mushed
clairvoyant in the very near future—
And then I was jerked
back up, fast enough to cut off my breath, to leave me dizzy. Or
maybe that was the feel of the hard arms around me or the harder
body behind me. Or the stunning relief of Not
dead, not dead yet—
Because that never
gets old.
My name is Cassie
Palmer, and I’ve cheated death more times than anyone has a right
to expect. In the past two months, I’ve been shot, stabbed, beaten
and blown up a few dozen times, and that doesn’t count all the
magical ways I’ve almost been killed. I’d have been dead a long
time ago if not for my friends, one of whom had just jumped off the
cliff after me.
I’d have been a lot
more appreciative if he hadn’t pushed me first.
My nose was running,
I couldn’t see worth shit and my brain was still frozen in abject
terror. So for a moment I just hung there, gulping ice-cold air and
waiting for my heart to stop trying to slam through my chest. Out
of the corner of my eye, I could see a small piece of what was
holding us up, and it wasn’t reassuring.
It was almost
transparent, except for a faint bluish tinge that was largely
invisible against the brilliant sky. It had a dome-shaped top and a
few filmy tentacles streaming downward to wrap around us, making it
look vaguely like a jellyfish—if they were as big as a bus and had
a habit of drifting around over the Colorado Rockies. What it was
was almost as strange: an expression of one man’s magic, formed
into a parachute that I didn’t trust at all.
On the other hand, I
did trust the man. Although I really wished he’d caught me from the
front instead of from behind. That way I could have kneed him in
the nuts.
“You did that on
purpose!” I gasped when I was able to breathe.
“Of
course.”
“Of course?” I looked up, but had to crane my head
back, leaving the features above me wrong-side up. The clear green
eyes were the same, and, unfortunately, so was the spiky blond
hair.
It didn’t look any
better from this angle, I decided.
“You have yet to
learn to react reliably under pressure,” I was told. “Until you do,
you are vulnerable.”
I tried swiveling my
head around, because glaring at someone upside down doesn’t work.
But all I saw was part of a muscular shoulder in an army green
sweatshirt. My sometimes friend, sometimes enemy, all the time pain
in the ass John Pritkin wasn’t wearing a coat.
Of course he
wasn’t.
It had to be subzero
out here, and if it hadn’t been for all the adrenaline pumping
through my system, I’d have been freezing to death—but a coat
wasn’t macho. And if I’d learned one thing about war mages, the
closest thing the supernatural community had to a police force, it
was that they were always macho. Even the women. It was kind of
scary.
Sort of like dangling
about a mile above a lot of very pointy mountains.
“Your abilities will
do you little good if you cannot learn to function under stress,”
he continued calmly, as we slowly drifted closer to the pointy
bits.
“Stress?” I asked, my
voice cracking slightly. “Pritkin, stress is a bad hair day. Stress
is gaining five pounds right before swimsuit season. This is not stress!”
“Call it what you
will; the point is the same. Remember what we discussed.
Assess—determine what is happening;
address—decide which of your abilities
can best deal with the problem at hand; and then act—quickly and decisively. You must learn to do
this automatically, without freezing up, and regardless of the
circumstances. Or you will suffer the consequences.”
“I’m trying!” I said
resentfully. It was barely two months since I’d been pushed off
another cliff, and the fact that it had been a metaphorical one
hadn’t helped at all. I’d been declared—over my loud and sustained
protests—Pythia, the chief seer of the supernatural
world.
It was a job that
some people were willing to kill for, as I’d discovered the hard
way. For my part, I’d spent a good deal of those two months trying
to give back the power that came with the office, only to find that
it didn’t want to leave. After a number of very hard lessons, I’d
finally accepted that I was going to have to make the best of
it.
As a result, I’d been
working my metaphysical butt off trying to make up for the lifetime
of training the other candidates had received. It would have helped
if Rambo up there hadn’t demanded that I learn self-defense, too. I
agreed that I needed it, but one thing I didn’t know how to do at a
time was enough.
“Try harder,” Mr.
Complete Lack of Sympathy told me.
“Look,” I said,
trying to reason with him despite extensive experience that this
rarely worked. “This isn’t a great time. I have my
inauguration—”
“Coronation.”
“—coming up, and I’m
trying to raise my abilities from pathetic to just sad before then
so I don’t totally embarrass myself in front of the people I’m
supposed to be leading. And then there’re fittings for the dress
they want me to wear, and about a ton of names to learn, and if I
get a title wrong it could cause some kind of international
incident—”
“I will make you a
deal,” he said, cutting me off.
“What kind of deal?”
I asked warily. Wheeling and dealing was a vampire trait, something
the other man in my life was much more likely to try. War mages
ordered, threatened and bitched, depending on the circumstance.
They didn’t deal.
Except for today,
apparently.
“We’re directly over
an area used by the Corps as a training ground,” he told me,
referring to the formal name of the war mages. “Stay ahead of me
for fifteen minutes, using any abilities you like other than time
shifting, and I won’t bother you again for a week.”
I didn’t say anything
for a moment. Because there were several types of shifting that
came standard with my office—through space and through time. They
might look the same to Pritkin, except that I moved from place to
place instead of from era to era. But they weren’t. His boss at the
Corps, Jonas Marsden, was the one training me in my newly acquired
abilities and he’d told me so himself.
So if Pritkin didn’t
specifically forbid me from spatially
shifting, I could easily stay ahead of him—and buy myself a free
week in the process. After the way things had been going lately, a
little time off would be heaven. But it would be a bad mistake to
sound like it.
“We’ve been out here
half the day already,” I complained. “I’m tired, I haven’t eaten
since breakfast and I can’t feel my toes any—”
“I’ll throw in a
picnic.”
My head came up.
“What?”
“I hid a basket this
morning. After the test, I’ll take you to it.”
“It’ll be cold by
now.”
“I left it with a
warmer,” he said drily. Because war mages ate their fried chicken
frozen to the ground and they liked
it.
God. Fried chicken,
potato salad, baked beans, maybe some apple pie or cookies for
dessert—yeah. I could so use a picnic right about now.
“All right,” I
agreed, faster than I should have. But I really was hungry. “No
time travel.”
“You’re sure? Because
when I win—”
“If you win.”
“—you’ll stay until
you’ve run the entire course. And you won’t whine about
it.”
“I don’t
whine!”
“Then we have a
deal?”
“I guess so,” I said,
trying to sound reluctant.
“Good,” he told me
pleasantly.
And then he let
go.
A couple of hours
later, I staggered into the Vegas hotel suite I currently called
home and face-planted onto the sofa. There was already someone
sitting there, but I didn’t care. I was too tired to even open my
eyelids and find out who it was.
Until someone pried
one open for me with a finger the size of a hot dog. “Rough
day?”
I rotated my
eyeball—and, goddamnit, even that hurt—to see the leader of my
bodyguards peering at me.
“No. I like being
dropped from airplane height without a parachute.”
Marco patted me on
the ass, which I guess was fair, since I was draped over his lap.
“You seem all right to me.”
Marco, I reflected
sourly, was getting awfully blasé where my health was concerned.
He’d started out assuming that I was as squishy as most humans, and
practically had a heart attack every time I got a hangnail. But
after seeing me survive a few dozen attacks, he’d started to relax.
These days, if I didn’t come in with a gaping wound or spewing
blood, I didn’t get much sympathy.
“Because I managed to
shift to the ground before I splattered on it!” I told him
testily.
“Then what’s the
problem?”
I turned over so I
could scowl at him. “The problem is that I just ran a marathon in
freezing weather with a maniac chasing me.”
“Why didn’t you
just”—he waved the ham-sized hand that went with his bear-sized
body—“you know. Poof.”
“You mean
shift?”
“Yeah. Why didn’t you
shift?”
“I did! But Pritkin
expected that, and he borrowed Jonas’s necklace.”
“What
necklace?”
I sighed and sat up.
“It’s some sort of charm that allows him to recall the Pythia in
times of emergency. As soon as I try to shift, wherever I am,
whenever I am, it pulls me back.” As Pritkin had known when he made
that bet, damn him.
God, I wished I kneed
him in the nuts.
Marco seemed to think
that was funny, which didn’t improve my mood. I got up and limped
into the next room, still freezing cold and starving to death.
Because Pritkin’s idea of a picnic left a lot to be
desired.
But my bathroom
didn’t. I knew it was stupid, but my bathroom made me happy. Maybe
it was the size—which was huge bordering on sinful—or the soothing
white and blue color scheme, or the rain forest showerhead over the
Godzilla-sized tub. Or maybe it was because it was the one place in
the whole damn suite where I could actually be alone.
Marco wasn’t the
problem. Over the last month, he’d gone from treating me like a
burdensome pest to treating me like a slightly bratty younger
sister, and most of the time, I found myself actually enjoying his
company. But Marco was the tip of the iceberg where my bodyguards
were concerned. And they’d only been growing in number since the
date of the inauguration had been announced.
Everyone assumed
there would be an attack. Even I assumed it. The supernatural world
was at war, and killing off the opposite side’s leadership was SOP.
And whether I liked it or not, the Pythia was seen as one of our
side’s more important assets. Which explained Pritkin’s stepped-up
attempts to make me suck slightly less at self-defense, and the
dozen or so golden-eyed master vamps constantly patrolling the
suite.
They were there for
my protection; I knew that. But it didn’t make them any less
creepy. They watched me eat. They watched me drink. They watched me
watch goddamned TV. They even watched me sleep. I’d woken up more
than once to find one of them just standing in the doorway of my
bedroom, staring at me, like it was a perfectly normal thing to
do.
If it hadn’t been for
my bathroom, I really might have lost it.
Too bad I couldn’t
sleep in there.
Marco stuck his head
in the door as I was running hot water into my lovely big tub. “You
need anything? ’Cause I go off duty in a couple.”
“Food,” I said,
shrugging out of my coat.
“What
kind?”
“Anything. As long as
it isn’t good for me.”
He nodded and ducked
out when I started to pull off my T-shirt. It was far too flimsy
for where I’d been, but the saying on the front fit my mood
perfectly: “I keep hitting escape, but I’m still here.” I tossed it
on a pile with the coat, my stiff-with-cold jeans and the expensive
scrap of silk that had been wedged up my ass for the past half
hour. Then I slowly climbed into the tub.
Oh, God.
Bliss.
It was actually a
little too hot, but I figured the amount of ice clinging to me
ought to even things out. I added a generous amount of bath salts,
found my pillow under some towels and let my head sag back against
the tub. After a few moments, my muscles began to unclench and my
spine sagged in relief, and I seriously began to wonder if sleeping
here was such a bad idea after all.
I think maybe I did
drift off for a while. Because the next thing I knew, I was at the
pink and pruney stage, the mirrors were all fogged up and the water
was no longer hot. And a ghost was sitting by the tub, staring at
me.
I’d have been more
concerned, but this was a ghost I knew. I grabbed a towel and shot
him a look; I don’t know why. Billy didn’t worry about his numerous
vices. He’d cheated death like he’d cheated at cards in life, and
he intended to keep it up. That made his morality a bit of a mixed
bag, since he never intended to answer for any of it,
anyway.
With an insubstantial
finger, he pushed up the Stetson he’d been wearing for the past
century and a half. “I’ve seen it before,” he told me with an
exaggerated leer.
“Then why are you
looking?”
“’Cause I’m dead, not
senile?”
I threw the sponge at
him, which did no good, because it passed right through and hit the
wall. “I can’t feed you yet,” I said. “Not until I
eat.”
Billy and I had a
long-standing arrangement, dating from the time I’d picked up the
necklace he haunted in a junk shop at the age of seventeen. I
donated the living energy it took to keep him feeling frisky, and
he did little errands for me in return. At least, he did if I
complained enough.
He stretched
denim-covered legs out in front of him, as if on an invisible sofa.
“Can’t a guy drop by without you immediately assuming—” He caught
my expression and gave it up. “Okay, I’ll wait.”
I was trying to
decide between getting out and running some more hot water when
there was a knock at the door. “You decent?”
I pulled the towel up
a little higher. “Yes, if my wrinkled toes don’t
offend.”
Marco’s swarthy head
popped around the doorjamb. “Naw, they’re cute.”
I wiggled them at him
since I could actually feel them now.
“Anyway, grub’s
outside and I gotta go.” He grinned at me. “Big date
tonight.”
“Date?” I blinked in
surprise, because master vampires don’t date. Not unless forced,
anyway.
“Witch,” he said
succinctly.
“Isn’t that a little
. . . unusual?”
“I’m like the master.
I like to walk on the wild side.”
It took me a moment
to realize what he meant. “I am not the wild side,” I told him
flatly. “I’m about as far from the wild side as it’s possible to
get.”
He raised a bushy
black eyebrow. “If you say so.”
I opened my mouth,
then decided I was too beat to argue. “Well, have
fun.”
“Oh, I will.” He
paused. “And just FYI, there’s a bunch of new guys on tonight.
Well, not new new, but new to
you.”
I didn’t know why he
was bothering to tell me. The bodyguards were changed on a regular
basis. Round-theclock security meant that some of them got stuck on
the day shift, which was hard on vampires. At least I assumed that
was why, after a week or two, they started looking a little
peaked.
I nodded, but Marco
just stood there, as if he expected some kind of answer.
“Okay.”
“It’s just . . .” He
hesitated. “Try not to freak them out too much, all
right?”
“I freak them out?”
“You know what I
mean. It’s those things you do.”
“What
things?”
His eyes darted
around the bathroom. “Talking-toinvisible-people kind of
things.”
“They’re ghosts,
Marco.”
“Yeah, only most of
the guys don’t believe in ghosts, and they’ve started to think
you’re a bit . . . strange.”
“They’re vampires and
they think I’m strange?”
“And no popping out
of nowhere in front of a guy. That takes some getting used to. I
don’t think Sanchez has recovered yet.”
“The only place I’m
popping is to bed.”
“Good plan.” Marco
looked satisfied. “See you on the flip side.”
I rolled my eyes at
the slang, which as usual for the older vamps was decades out of
date, and let my head sag back against the tub. I really didn’t
want to move now that I was warm and relaxed and actually starting
to feel my extremities again. But the smells drifting in from the
next room were making my stomach growl plaintively.
I couldn’t
immediately identify the source, but it didn’t matter. If Marco had
done the ordering, it had to be good. Unlike Pritkin, Marco didn’t
worry about things like trans fats and cholesterol. When Marco ate,
he ate big: pasta dripping in cream sauce, huge peppery steaks,
mashed potatoes with gravy, and cannoli sweet enough to crack
teeth. Often at the same meal.
The fact that
vampires didn’t technically need to eat didn’t appear to worry
Marco. He’d told me that one of the best things about finally
reaching master status had been the return of working taste buds.
And he’d spent the time since making up for all those flavorless
years.
I decided that maybe
I was clean enough. “Turn around,” I told Billy. “I’m getting
out.”
He made a pouty face
but he didn’t argue. Maybe he was hungry, too. I wrapped the towel
around myself and started to get out of the tub.
But instead my hands
slid off the porcelain, my knees bent and I slipped back into the
rapidly cooling water.
For a second, I just
lay there, more confused than worried. Until I kept on sinking.
Then I snapped out of it and began to struggle.
And found that it
made absolutely no difference.
The best I could do
was keep my face above the bubbles for a few seconds while I
struggled to move, to cry out, to do something. But my body was as frozen as the shout
trapped behind my teeth, which my lips stubbornly refused to let
out. The most I managed was a muffled grunt as my head slowly went
under.
Immediately, all
sound vanished. The whoosh of the air-conditioning, the almost
silent footsteps of the guards, the soft clink-clink of someone
dropping ice cubes in a glass in the dining room, all faded into a
watery roar. Silence constricted around me, a heavy, cold hand that
robbed me of breath as effectively as the water over my
face.
The bubbles had half
dissolved by now, with pockets of suds floating here and there,
like the sky on a cloudy day. In between I could see the ceiling of
the bathroom, rippling with my barely discernible struggles. But
they weren’t enough, weren’t nearly enough, and my lungs were
already crying out for air.
After what felt like
an hour but was probably no more than a few seconds, the scene
above me was obscured by Billy’s indistinct shape. He was saying
something, but I couldn’t hear, and then his face passed through
the water and he gazed at me curiously. “Time to get
out.”
No shit, I thought
hysterically, trying to flail limbs that suddenly felt like they
belonged to someone else. A frown appeared between Billy’s eyes.
But it was the impatient Billy look, not the panicked Billy look.
He still didn’t get it.
“Seriously, Cass.
Your dinner’s gonna get cold.”
I just stared at him,
my eyes burning from the soap, willing him to understand. Nothing
happened, except that a chain of bubbles slipped out from between
my lips, heading for the air a few inches away. It might as well
have been a few thousand, for all the good it was doing
me.
My toes were floating
near the surface of the water, right beside the switch that
controlled the drain. It was mounted just below the faucet, within
easy reach—if I’d been able to move. As it was, I could only stare
at it, stark terror creeping over my body, chilling my skin and
threatening to paralyze whatever brain function I had left. I
couldn’t move and Billy was useless and I couldn’t even take a deep
breath to calm down because—
Because I was about
to drown in the goddamn bathtub.