Page 23

Y ou should listen to her,” someone said, but it wasn’t Pritkin. I looked around and realized that someone else had joined us while I’d been distracted. And while Pritkin had, too, I guessed, because he jumped slightly and whirled.

Only to recognize Mircea emerging from the dark.

“How long have you been there?” he demanded harshly.

“Long enough.” Mircea came forward, shedding shadows like a cloak.

His face was so different, almost bisected by that awful scar, but his eyes were the same: warm, dark, almost mesmerizing. And not just because they were vampire eyes, but because they were his, and I hadn’t been sure I’d ever see them again. He took my hand and smiled the smile he’d always reserved just for me.

“Cassie is absolutely right. Jonas and the rest can scheme all they like. It won’t work. Not as things stand.”

Pritkin said a bad word. “You don’t know how strong she is. You don’t—”

“I know about seduction!” It was sharp, and Mircea’s eyes flashed amber bright in the darkness for an instant. “What do you think blood does to vampires? How do you think it feels, that first draw, that first taste? Not of the blood itself but of what’s in it? Life energy, the same thing that Cassie wields with such power, but can’t control. She just proved as much—”

“She proved she can! She got us out—”

“And before that? You saw her; we all did. She loved the fight every bit as much as her mother, but she’s not her mother. And even if she was, the gods fell to its seduction, too, didn’t they? Not one of them failed to be corrupted—”

“Careful.” Pritkin was on his feet now, his jaw tight. “Cassie isn’t like them—”

“Not now,” Mircea agreed, squeezing my hand before letting it go. “But as I understand it, Jonas and Rosier’s plan is for the magic workers and demons to create distractions all over Las Vegas. Confusing the gods and forcing them to scatter on wild goose chases while we slip through the city to the current Pythia.”

“Yes, to keep Cassie from having to absorb any more corrupted magic—”

“It wasn’t corrupted,” I said quietly and caught Mircea’s eye. And saw a terrible kind of understanding. Yeah, he got it.

Of course, he did.

The gods had made vampires to feed similarly to how they did. It was a pale reflection, as vamps couldn’t absorb the amount of energy a god did, but it was enough for them to live and for him to understand. And to get angry on my behalf.

“Do you know,” he interrupted Pritkin, who had continued talking, “why new vampires are kept locked away by their families? Sometimes for months, sometimes for years?”

“What?” Pritkin said, as that must have seemed like a non-sequitur.

It wasn’t.

“There are any number of reasons. But one of the most serious is the unfortunate fact that some can’t handle that amount of power. Humans became aware of us for that reason. Some of the newly turned went on a mad tear, always ravenous, never satisfied, and littered bodies in their wake as a result.”

“Cassie isn’t a vampire!”

“No, but she feeds like one, and a new one at that, when she needs to feed more like one of you. Or like your father, a demon lord of immense power—”

Pritkin scoffed. “Is that what he told you?”

“Oh, not when you knew him,” Mircea agreed. “Back before the fall of this world, he was nothing so grand. But now... did you not talk to him? Did he not tell you?”

“Tell me what?” Pritkin snapped. “Whatever lies he concocted—”

“Oh, they’re not lies. The gods’ return was unexpected and caught the council off guard. Most fell in the immediate aftermath, and the remaining few scattered to raise their armies. They were pursued, of course, and hunted down one by one. The one called Adramelech was the last, and I hear he put up quite a fight.

“It wasn’t enough.”

“Adra is gone?” I asked, feeling my stomach fall. He was the most powerful being I knew, other than the gods. If he had fallen...

What chance did we have?

“Yes, but he was clever,” Mircea said. “When they found him, the gods discovered him to be less tasty than anticipated. He had transferred much of his power elsewhere and to the last person they would have ever expected. The one who is now leading the council, or what’s left of it.”

“That’s impossible!” Pritkin said. “My father—”

“Leads the Demon High Council, whether you choose to believe it or not. And he leads it well, from all I’ve heard.”

“And did he tell you that?” Pritkin asked with a sneer.

“Many people have, through the years,” Mircea said evenly. “And he’s still alive, isn’t he?”

“Yes, probably from hiding!”

“In part, no doubt. We all have since the Fall. But he isn’t hiding now, even though Earth is a perilous place for him to be. I received the impression that he has been holding on all these years, waiting for your return, as we all were. Those who believed…”

“And what do you believe?” I asked him. “Mircea, what do you expect me to do? Ever since we got here, I’ve been struggling just to survive, and that was before I stupidly announced to the gods that I’ve returned. They all know it now, Zeus included, or if he doesn’t, it won’t be long. And I’m no closer to Rhea than I ever was! And you said you understand why I can’t go to Vegas—”

“Oh, but you must go, only not now. Not with a compulsion riding you that you cannot control.”

“And you think what?” I asked, spreading my hands. “That I’m suddenly going to get better? This isn’t going away. I can’t handle this! ”

“No, you can’t,” he agreed. “Not alone. You need our help. Specifically, you need Mage Pritkin’s help to absorb godly energy, use it as food, and not be influenced by it. That is the great power the demon lords have that the gods do not—”

“Bollocks!” That, of course, was Pritkin.

And Mircea didn’t like it. The scar that twisted those perfect features flushed a darker shade, making me wonder how he’d gotten it. Master vamps healed almost instantly, and the fact that he couldn’t, that it looked more like something a human might wear, old and healed over, but not erased...

Told me more about how bad things had been than anything else.

But he kept his temper, which was never as reactive as Pritkin’s, not after centuries of training at vampire courts. “Demons were made to use this power,” he said. “It is how they evolved, whereas the gods did not. They stumbled into this universe, discovered the incredible advantage they had here, and promptly went mad with it. Just as Cassie almost did.”

Pritkin started to speak, but Mircea plowed ahead. “Don’t let your hatred for what you are blind you,” he urged. “ Use it! Cassie needs your abilities, and there are none that can substitute. Even could we find a way to bring your father into our triumvirate, which, considering the nature of it, is highly unlikely—”

“Goddamned right!” I said because the spell linking us was based on love, and romantic love at that. And I sure as shit didn’t love Rosier!

“—it wouldn’t matter. Zeus has shut down his ability to multiply power. The All-Father almost caught him several times and, during the last, managed to hit him with a spell that all but crippled him—”

“The red smoke,” I said, and Mircea nodded.

“Yes, it boils around him now, marking him as one of Zeus’s leading enemies for anyone who would like to curry favor by bringing him down. But that wasn’t the worst of it. He can no longer feed as he once did and has been running off Adramelech’s legacy ever since. But that won’t last forever, and he cannot multiply the magic to help himself after Zeus crippled him. Our old adversary wants to consume his life and thereby his abilities, but Rosier denied him that.”

“So, if Zeus can’t have it,” I whispered.

“No one can,” Mircea said heavily. “Rosier cannot leverage his greatest gift, which means there is only one person alive with the abilities of the incubus royal line: Mage Pritkin. He could increase your power enough that you could shift to your heir, gain her knowledge, and then take yourself and your party home—”

“I can’t —” Pritkin began, but I cut him off that time.

“Didn’t you hear me before?” I asked Mircea incredulously. “I can’t have that kind of power again! If I do, I’ll be just as bad as the gods—”

“On your own, yes. But not with his help,” Mircea said firmly, nodding at Pritkin, who exploded.

“If you would listen for half an instant instead of lecturing me about things you don’t understand—”

“But I do understand,” Mircea said and looked at me. “Answer me this. When you and Mage Pritkin made power together before, you had trouble holding onto it. Human flesh wasn’t designed for such things, and it almost burned both of you up. But not this time. Why?”

“I... don’t know,” I said slowly because all of that back in Jonas’s cavern and then in the warehouse was vague now. Almost as if it had happened to a different person, and maybe it had.

That Cassie hadn’t felt like me. That Cassie hadn’t felt like anybody I knew or wanted to know. She had been... not evil exactly, not in her mind at least. Or no more so than anybody stepping on a beetle on the sidewalk thinks of themselves as evil.

She just hadn’t cared and that coldness, that indifference, that complete lack of anything like a soul...

I shivered in remembered horror.

I never wanted that kind of power again!

“Then let me tell you,” Mircea said. “He helped you. Or rather,” he added as Pritkin tried to interrupt again. “His other half did.”

“What?” Lost in my thoughts, it took a second.

“Mage Pritkin is half demon, the species meant to use the life energy they take from others for food,” Mircea said again. “They are natural predators of it in the way that even vampires are not. But his demon grew up on Earth with no one instructing it how to use its gift. And being part of a strange hybrid of light fey and human blood, well,” he shrugged. “It didn’t have to.

“There were other ways to feed and no pressing dangers. Like a petted and pampered housecat, it might have learned to hunt eventually, for pleasure or sport, but need... no. It had all it needed. And when it required a top-up, all it had to do was push its other half toward some willing young thing—”

“Enough,” Pritkin said, sounding strangled.

He was probably thinking about his wife and the night his demon half had drained her dry. She’d been in the pay of a man opposing the gods, who had wanted a knife at Pritkin’s throat in case Zeus found him and came close to absorbing his gift. Having the All-Father able to multiply power at a whim was not something the demon world could tolerate, so Pritkin’s very existence was seen as a threat.

I’d never been sure whether his incubus had subconsciously recognized her for the danger she was and used the first opportunity to remove her, or whether it had been an accident, as he claimed. Either way, it had devastated Pritkin and set him on the path he’d only finished recently when he separated himself from his other half using a Pythian spell he wasn’t even supposed to know. And, I strongly suspected, he did not want it back.

“My point,” Mircea continued to Pritkin, “is that your unfortunate stint in the hells after your father returned to Earth to claim you made you loath to use the other half of your abilities. And what happened to your wife—”

“Enough!” Pritkin said, but Mircea didn’t stop.

“—sealed the deal. As a result, your demon was woefully unskilled for one of its kind, to the point that it couldn’t help you with the power that you and Cassie generated. And once you abandoned it, shifting to the future with no warning, it was left like a zoo animal, finally freed from its cage but with no idea how to hunt. It was afraid to use its powers for fear of bringing attention to itself, for it knew that Zeus coveted its abilities. And it also thought of itself as useless without you, for you had always been the dominant partner—”

“How do you know all this?” I asked before a fight broke out. Pritkin had flushed darkly enough that I could see it even in the low light, and his fists were clenched.

“Partly from flashes into its mind that I’ve experienced over the years, likely due to the bond we all share. And the rest from deduction. It’s the only possible answer for what we just witnessed. The incubus must have learned a few things since you’ve been gone and decided to help—”

“Absurd!” Pritkin said. “He is a selfish son of a—”

“But in that case, why was I out of control?” I asked. “I didn’t burn up, but I wasn’t clear-headed. I wasn’t sane , Mircea!”

“My point exactly,” he said, those eyes flashing amber again, which alone would have told me that we’d reached the crux of this. “Our link is faulty. It was damaged when Mage Pritkin separated the two parts of his nature into two separate men. That was not how the spell was laid, and any tinkering with the components of a spell can be enough to break it. This one didn’t completely shatter, as one of the needed elements was simply missing, but it shut down until the two of you returned. And now it is active but damaged and unstable, with four people currently in a link designed for three.”

I just stared at him because I was belatedly catching on to where he was going, and... damn.

“As it is, the spell comes and goes,” Mircea added. “And we cannot risk the faulty connection happening in Vegas. You must have full control, and for that, our triumvirate must be restored to its original form.”

What Pritkin might have said to that, I didn’t know because he abruptly turned around and strode off while I just gazed at Mircea. “You sound sure.”

“I am. Mage Pritkin’s incubus possesses the power to absorb essentially unlimited energy without having it tear him apart—or influence him. To him, it is food, nothing more. He has the control you need, and he is the only one who does.”

“But... we could recast the spell,” I said, trying to think while shock reverberated through me. Because Pritkin and his other half loathed each other, and that was before one of them abandoned the other to die. Not that Pritkin had meant for that to happen, but his incubus, left to fend for itself for fifty years in a place worse than most hells, probably didn’t see it that way.

This wasn’t going to be good.

“We could make it accommodate four,” I said desperately. “Take off the faulty spell and reapply it—”

“I already thought of that,” Mircea said, “and discussed it with Rosier. But the spell was based on a bastardized version of incubus magic designed to be used on humans and vampires. It won’t hold one of the very creatures its power derives from. It would be like one incubus trying to enthrall another.”

“Which doesn’t work,” I said, feeling ill.

Mircea shook his head. “Rosier suspects that it only took in Mage Pritkin’s case because he was part human at the time it was laid, which his incubus no longer is. And if we remove the faulty spell and attempt to recast it now, and it doesn’t work—”

“Then we have nothing.”

He nodded. “The only choice is to repair the spell.”

“Which requires me rejoining that thing!” Pritkin said, suddenly coming back.

I hadn’t heard him, but I guessed Mircea had, as he didn’t so much as flinch even with an irate war mage at his back. “You may hate your father’s people,” he said mildly, not bothering to turn around. “I am not overly fond of them myself. But I will work with them, and so will you—”

“Oh, will I?” Pritkin began heatedly, but Mircea cut him off. And it looked like his diplomacy might have taken a beating in the last half century, after all, because the usual suave courtier was suddenly nowhere to be seen.

“Yes, and for the same reason!” he said, turning to face him. “If we do not, Cassie dies. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But she was right earlier. Zeus knows she has returned, and he feels... oh, he feels . He remembers the sensation of Artemis’ power, draining him dry, knows the fear she once instilled in him that no other could, and experienced that again when he faced her daughter in battle... and ran.

“He will kill her, and he will do it soon, not in honorable combat, but by sending a multitude to tear her apart as we saw today. And they will come, even if they do not want to help him, for they fear her, too.

“Fear is perhaps the greatest motivator, save one, and their kind does not seem capable of love. But you are. So, I suppose the question we must ask is, do you love her enough? ”

“Mircea—” I said urgently, but he wasn’t done.

“You expect—we all do—for Cassie to risk everything to save us. Can we risk any less for her?”

“And by we, you mean me,” Pritkin said, but his voice sounded hollow, as if Mircea’s words had landed like a punch to the gut.

And he didn’t let up. “Do you think you’re the only one?” Mircea hissed, his calm demeanor now completely gone. “I have risked , and I have lost . My wife , who I had only just found after five hundred years of searching; my men, taken one by one as I stood helpless to save them; my daughter ,” his voice broke slightly on that last word before he abruptly grabbed Pritkin by the throat in a move I didn’t think was planned because Mircea froze immediately thereafter.

And Pritkin didn’t retaliate, despite having the opportunity, perhaps seeing the expression on the other man’s face. For a moment, we all just stood there in a frozen tableau, a witness to grief so great that I didn’t have a name for it. Then Mircea blinked and slowly let him go, and both men stood there, looking shaken.

I did, too, because I honestly didn’t know what Pritkin would say. Not because I doubted our feelings for each other, but because Mircea didn’t know what he was asking. I wasn’t even sure that I did, but I knew one thing.

Pritkin had finally managed to split his hated demon half off from himself because the separation wasn’t supposed to be permanent, just long enough for them to be in two places at once. His incubus had had no reason to fight it and probably little knowledge of how to do so, as it may not have expected that particular spell any more than I had. But this time...

This time, it would know and would be watching for it.

This time, if they reunited, it was for keeps.

And Pritkin knew it.

For a long moment, there was silence, with only the night wind sighing softly around us, and then—

“Where?” It was one word and growled so roughly that I barely understood it.

But Mircea did. “He has a... compound... out in the desert. Come, I’ll take you to him.”