Chapter Thirty-seven
I’d like to say that
I planned what happened next, but I’d be lying. All I could think
about was getting the hell out of there, but the Spartoi went for
me at the same time. I started to turn back in the direction of the
train, and he leapt in my path and grabbed the
suitcase.
Although, in
retrospect, that turned out to be okay, because the spell was a
strong one and I was leaning forward with everything I had. And
instead of stopping me, he was dragged along underneath, his feet
making rhythmic bump, bump, bump sounds
on the crossties.
At least, they did
until a very alive-feeling hand gripped my thigh right over the
bullet wound and I almost whitedout in pain. My body jerked and the
scarred piece of luggage went shooting into the floor, hitting down
hard and then scraping the Spartoi’s entire body across
gravel.
I hadn’t planned
that, either, but I damn sure kept the pressure on once it
happened, knowing from personal experience exactly how sharp that
gravel was. The chunks were big and there had never been any rain
down here to wear off the knifelike edges. They were also coated
with a layer of black grit or dirt or dust or whatever the
hell—anyway, it was finer than sand, as it proved by flying up in a
choking cloud all around us, leaving me gasping for air and the
demigod cursing inventively beneath me.
But he still didn’t
let go. Instead, he pushed off the ground, trying to use his extra
weight to flip us, I guess to give me a taste of my own medicine.
Which might have worked if we hadn’t hit a bend in the tunnel,
which neither of us saw coming, thanks to the Underground’s idea of
adequate illumination. I might not have seen it, but I felt it when
we hit, and heard it when something of his went
crunch.
It was alarmingly
satisfying.
It was also useless,
because the next moment, he flipped us anyway, using the wall for
leverage, fighting and scratching and kicking as best as possible
from two different sides of the case.
“Just fucking
die,” he snarled, and I actually saw
the expression through the diffuse light sifting in from somewhere
up ahead.
I tilted my head back
and saw the body of the train, which had either slowed to a crawl
or was stationary. And either way would do.
“You first,” I
snarled back, and flipped us one last time. Last, because a second
later we slammed into the back of the train.
Or, to be more
precise, he did.
Being on top, I
sailed through the missing back window to experience the joys of
rug burn on a whole new level. Which, all things considered, was
better than smashing into a hunk of steel face-first. Although it
wasn’t feeling so much that way at the moment.
I rolled to my knees
after I rolled to a stop, almost to the door at the far end of the
compartment. My body was crying out for rest, for oblivion, but my
brain was telling it sternly to shut up. But it kind of looked like
the body might win, because when I tried to stand, I staggered and
wobbled and went back down. And not just because of pain and
dizziness and a distinct desire to throw up.
There was something
wrong with my feet.
I managed to focus
bleary eyes on my filthy, bloody soles, and the glass, gravel and
God knew what sticking out of them. Clearly, the Underground was
not the place to go barefoot. I doubted I could walk, much less
run, in this state.
And then the
Spartoi’s head poked up over the serrated edge of the window. He
would have looked like he was doing some kind of old vaudeville
act, the kind that makes people wince these days at its deliberate
racism. Except that blackface didn’t usually involve a ton of
blood, a halfmissing scalp or a bunch of gravel embedded in the raw
flesh all along one side of the face.
I screamed, and he
grinned and flopped another arm over the ledge. And this one held a
gun. And I discovered that—surprise—I could run after all, a
scrambling, hobbling gait that got me through to the next
compartment just before bullets started strafing this one. I stared
at the back of the seat in front of me as it was quickly shredded
and tried to think, only that wasn’t going so well. My brain was
frozen in horror and seemed to be stuck on a loop screaming
no, no, no, no over and over, which was
less than useful.
I told it to get a
grip, and it told me no, no, no, no,
and I screamed again, because it was do that or lose my
mind.
And for some reason,
it seemed to help.
For one, the barrage
stopped, maybe because the Spartoi thought he’d got me. And for
another, I could sort of think again, only all that came to mind
was that my knives weren’t likely to be a big help against a guy
who could walk out of a burning inferno. Among other
things.
But I couldn’t let
him get past me. I couldn’t let him get to my mother. And there was
only one way to ensure that he didn’t. I was going to have to grab
him and shift him out of here, and then try to shift back before he
could kill me. Which was not sounding like fun for so very, very
many reasons, including the fact that I would have to touch him,
and I thought that that might just send me the rest of the way to
Crazytown and—
And then Mircea
walked through the far door. He strolled down the aisle like a guy
looking for a good seat, despite the fact that the barrage had
started up again. Half a dozen bullets hit him in quick succession,
blooming bright against the white of his shirt. But he didn’t seem
to notice any more than the demigod had, just held out a hand like
that would stop the hail of bullets.
And then it stopped
the hail of bullets, or something did. I peered around the corner
in time to see the Spartoi slump over the window ledge, the gun
falling from his limp hand. “You killed him,” I said in disbelief.
I’d started to think that wasn’t possible.
“For the moment,”
Mircea said grimly.
“What does that
mean?”
“It means that these
things don’t stay dead,” he said, giving the Spartoi’s body a
vicious kick. “I killed the creature I chased in here, but within
thirty seconds he was alive again.”
“Alive. . . You mean
he was a zombie?”
“No, I mean he was
alive. I just now drained him for the second time. It is virtually
the only thing that works with these things—and it doesn’t work for
long.”
“Then . . . then
however many times we kill them, they’re just going to continue
chasing her?”
“Unless you can
help.” The quiet voice came from behind me. I turned to find my
mother in the doorway, the mage behind her.
“This is crazy,” he
told her urgently. “I told you—”
“And I told you, did
I not? We can use tricks to elude them, as we did before. But
they’ll keep coming. Or we can end this, now, once and for
all.”
“But you weren’t
there! You don’t know—”
She took his hand.
“Hush now.”
He stared at her,
obviously frustrated. And then he transferred that stare to me. And
if looks could kill—
“Right back at you,”
I said dizzily.
My mother had turned
to look at him, but now those lapis eyes swung back to me. “There
is little time,” she said simply. “Will you help?”
“I . . . there’s . .
.” I had about a million questions, but looking into her face, I
couldn’t seem to remember a single one. And a glance at the dead
demigod showed that he was already stirring, flesh flowing along
his body like water, jagged wounds pulling together, raw red flesh
retreating, the whole turning into a seamless garment of pale olive
skin. Any minute now, his heart was going to start to beat and his
eyelids were going to open and . . . and I really didn’t want to be
here when that happened.
I looked back at her.
“What do you want me to do?”
Thirty seconds later,
we were still on the Underground, still rocketing through a dark
tunnel, but things looked a little different. There were plush
bench seats of padded leather, posh lights overhead and shiny wood
panels on the walls. And the passengers all looked like they were
going to the same fancy dress party as the people in the
cab.
Or they would have,
if they hadn’t been shrieking in shock at seeing a group of people
pop out of thin air in front of them. Or maybe it was more the fact
that one of those people was mostly naked and completely dead.
Again. Mircea pried his hand away from the creature’s throat, and
he hit the floor like a sack of rocks.
I stared down at the
man’s sightless, staring eyes, shimmering in the gaslight. They
were blue. I swallowed. “What the hell is he?”
“Spartoi,” my mother
confirmed. “Ares mated with one of the dragon kin long ago, and
they were the result.”
“That’s why they can
transform into one?”
She nodded. “Yes, but
not here. The tunnel is too small; it would trap them. And without
that ability, much of their power is lost.”
“That’s why you came
down here, isn’t it? You knew—”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Those beautiful eyes
met mine. “They have been hunting me for a long time.”
I didn’t get a chance
to ask anything else, because screams and gunshots came from ahead
of us. I looked up in time to see another red lightning bolt take
out a connecting door a couple of cars away. I couldn’t see what
was going on next door because of all the smoke, but there were
more screams and more terrified people bursting through into our
car. And then, over their shoulders, I got a glimpse of two more
Spartoi tearing down the length of the train.
And then we were
shifting again, sort of.
This time, it wasn’t
so much like we went anywhere than as if the scene shifted around
us. The train stayed pretty solid, except for the ads on the walls,
which bloomed and faded in bright spots of color. But mostly the
people changed, morphed, flowed into each other and then into new
people, like they were liquid, along with the time stream barreling
us along. Days, weeks, months of passengers spilled around us,
flickering in and out as we were probably doing in their view as we
ran forward, through space and time and back through the
compartments.
My feet hurt, my body
ached and I was half-convinced I had a damn concussion. And I
barely noticed. I had a vague impression that I was staring around
with my mouth hanging open, but I didn’t care about that, either.
I’d never seen anything remotely like it.
Of course, that went
for most of the stuff that had happened lately. I wondered if this
was what training was like, real training, the kind I was never
going to get. I thought Agnes would have liked setting me some
crazy obstacle course, making me run after her, challenging me to
keep up or have my ass left behind in some other place, some other
time.
Only this wasn’t
training; it was real. And getting left behind here wouldn’t mean
an inconvenience or an embarrassing return; it would mean never
returning at all.
From what I
understood after all of a half minute of explanation, the Spartoi
had managed to get some kind of spell on my mother that caused
their state to mirror hers. That meant that they piggybacked along
whenever and wherever she shifted. It also prevented her from using
any of the tricks I’d seen at the party—stopping time or slowing it
down—where they were concerned. She could still slow down time, but
if she was immune to it, they would be, as well.
Until, presumably,
she ran out of gas and they killed her.
I had no idea why
they wanted to kill her, or where the kidnapper fit into all this,
or much of anything else. But I knew the main thing. I knew how she
planned to break their spell.
She and I weren’t
using our own power to shift; we were borrowing it from the same
source—the enormous well of energy left to the Pythias by Apollo.
That put our magic on the same wavelength, for lack of a better
term, and was how I was able to track her. My magic “felt” it
whenever she used hers, and could follow it to the
source.
The idea was to use
that similarity to confuse the Spartoi’s spell. I was to keep up as
she shifted, to stay right alongside her, until our spells merged,
overlapping to the point that the piggyback spell got confused and
latched on to both of them. Then we were to shift in opposite
directions, ripping our spells apart in the process and hopefully
destroying theirs, as well.
If we timed it right,
if we did it in the middle of a shift, that should leave them in
the same position I’d accidentally almost ended up in a few days
ago—scattered on the winds of time, never to be reassembled
anywhere or anywhen. It wasn’t death, because these things couldn’t
be killed. But it was damn close, and I’d take it.
Assuming I didn’t
pass out first.
This was hard. This
was really, really, goddamned hard. The shifts were so close
together that it wasn’t like a series of them at all, but more like
one long, continual slide back into time, one that was taking
everything I had just to keep up.
It wasn’t helped by
the fact that the maniacs behind us kept firing, even while we were
in the middle of the shift. It didn’t look like it was doing much
good—most of the spells and bullets vanished into the weird liquid
time we were passing through, seemingly without connecting to
anything. But not all of them.
Every so often, we
were solid a split second too long and some of the barrage got
through. Mostly, it hit the kidnapper’s shields, because he and
Mircea were behind us at the moment. But they couldn’t shield us
completely, and that left Mom and me in the line of fire more than
once.
I felt a couple of
bullets whiz by me, one of which took out a window somewhen and
probably scared a bunch of passengers to death. Another must have
been fired just as we shifted, because it raced right alongside my
head as time sorted itself out, before vanishing like smoke. I
didn’t care.
I didn’t care about
anything, except—please, God—not falling over. But my hands were
shaking and sweat was coursing down my face and I couldn’t hear
anything anymore but my heart hammering in my ears. I think the
only thing that kept me upright was Mircea’s hand on my arm and a
healthy dose of pure rage.
Goddamnit, I was
supposed to be good at this! The one
thing, the only thing, that had ever
come naturally to me in this whole, crazy job. Yet here I was,
panting and swearing and falling through time, nothing like
Mother’s elegant, effortless shifting, power boiling around her as
she calmly walked ahead, as though this were nothing, just an
afternoon’s stroll through the park.
And that is a Pythia, I thought, staring in awe and
pride and pain and more than a little disbelief. Agnes had boasted
of mother’s abilities, but I’d never understood what she meant
until now. Until I saw how she made it seem so easy. How she made
it seem like breathing. Commanding time, not being thrown around by
it, not tripping and stumbling and almost falling as the room
blurred around us.
A smooth white hand
cupped my face, cool to the touch, unlike my overheated skin.
Concerned lapis eyes stared into mine, and I cringed at the thought
of what she must be seeing. Frazzled hair sticking to my sweaty
face, filthy clothes and panicked eyes, as I fought what was
rapidly becoming clear would be a losing battle.
“Almost there,” she
told me softly, and I nodded, no breath to talk, nothing to say
anyway, nothing that would help, at least.
Then the pace picked
up, and what had been torment became impossible. I didn’t know how
I was keeping up, or even if I was. I couldn’t think, couldn’t see,
couldn’t even be sure that my feet were moving forward anymore
because I couldn’t feel them. Days became months became years
became decades, time flipping by like pages in a book, a book that
was smearing and fluttering and shredding before my eyes, and I
screamed in pain and fury. Because I wasn’t strong enough, because
I couldn’t keep up, because I was about to fail at the thing I was
supposed to be good at, and I couldn’t—
Suddenly, there was a
horrible wrenching, like my body was coming apart at the seams.
Only it wasn’t me. It was our magic pulling and tearing and ripping
as she veered one way and I fought the current of her power to go
the other. But she was so strong, so unbelievably strong, and I
didn’t have anything left, and I felt myself stalling and flailing
and starting to turn—
And the damn Spartoi
saved me. They had started firing more wildly, sending panicked
people scrambling away from them—and straight at us. It didn’t help
that the crazed crowds usually disappeared before they reached us.
I kept flinching back, expecting a collision, and the near panic
made it impossible for me to concentrate well enough to keep
shifting.
I felt myself falter,
my grip on time shaking along with my concentration. And I
suddenly—belatedly—realized that I didn’t have to shift away from her. All I had to do was
remain stationary somewhere, and she’d
shift away from me.
And then a big guy in
an old-fashioned suit and a bowler hat barreled right into me,
sending me sprawling. We went down in a pile of tweed and leather
and outraged pink skin, and there was an umbrella in there
somewhere, too, because it was stabbing me in the backside. And
then Mircea pulled me up and I realized that something wonderful
had happened.
We’d
stopped.