Page 7

Y ou did what? ” Pritkin said sometime later, looking at the small circle of witches as if they might be mad.

To be fair, several of them looked it. They’d loosened up since Zara called for a truce, and the wine cellar we’d found via Alphonse’s nose and used to get off the street hadn’t hurt any. So now we had a bunch of boozed-up witches huddled around a scarred wooden table with a dozen open wine bottles, more empties on the floor, and cackles echoing off the walls and ceiling.

Bodil was starting to look like she and Pritkin were on the same page for once, and that page read, “Avoid trusting witches.” Or at least avoid following their insane plan to get inside what had been the Circle’s HQ and now belonged firmly in the enemy camp. I was leaning hard that way myself since the location of some of the gruesome but necessary items for the raid were too close for comfort to the facility’s outer wards.

“We buried ‘em where the wards would hide the magic,” Grizzled Topknot said.

“It’s all of the black variety,” the witch with the ginger butch cut added. “Ours and what they’re using, so it blends together. Their wards can’t tell the difference.”

Now that I’d had more time to look at her, I’d realized that she was pretty young, too, maybe not as much as the delicate purple-haired one, but certainly far more so than Zara, Topknot, and a short, shriveled-up, Native-American-looking witch with a cap of frazzled gray curls. Purple Hair looked about twenty, with Butch Cut maybe five or six years older, which meant they’d probably been born shortly before or even after the fall of the world. This was all they’d ever known, I thought dizzily.

“It’s here we need to get.” Grizzled Topknot pointed to a place near the river Avon, part of which ran across the underground complex that the Silver Circle had once called home. “We left everything behind after the last mission when we lost three of us out of five.”

“I thought you said these things you buried make you undetectable?” Alphonse said, looking worried.

“To the eyes,” Butch Cut said. “And to any wards that detect light magic. But the problem is those damned hyenas. If you meet one in a hallway, you’re dead. They can smell that we’re women and not the men we’re pretending to be.”

“We had to fight our way free last time,” Grizzled Topknot added. “It wasn’t pretty.”

“Why not just impersonate female dark magic users?” Alphonse asked.

“We thought about that, but they’re not allowed deep into the facility, where the planning rooms are,” Purple Hair said.

“Misogyny outlived even the fall,” Gray Curls added sourly.

“Black magic?” Bodil asked, somehow parsing the main point of all that.

“It’s a word for anything that breaks magical norms,” I explained, staring at the crude map and wondering how I got here.

“The Circle’s norms,” Zara said. “Magic is magic—”

“Not when it takes a life!” Pritkin snarled. He’d been looking increasingly unhappy as the witches’ plan unfolded and had apparently reached tilt.

“Oh, please,” Grizzled Topknot said scornfully. “Those we used were dark mages. You’d have killed ‘em yourself if you were there.”

“Killed, yes; butchered and…” his lip curled. “If we become what we fight, what is the point?”

“Not dying?” she said dryly. “Not allowing them to overrun our world like a pack of diseased rats?”

“Yes, and you did so well with that,” Pritkin snapped before I could stop him with a kick under the table.

We needed help, and theirs was the only kind available. Enid was excellent at glamourie, but she couldn’t cover all of us for long, and her power was of the light variety that would set off the wards. We needed the witches’ stash of nasty disguises to have any chance at this.

“So what’s your plan, Your Highness?” Topknot asked Pritkin. “Waltz in the front door? There are hundreds of mages down there, maybe thousands by now, for all I know.”

“That’s just it!” Pritkin’s hand hit the tabletop. “You don’t know anything! You fully admit that none of you has been inside that complex for more than ten years!”

“Which is better than you can boast,” Gray Curls snapped. She had shrewd eyes, the same color as her hair, strikingly set into a nut-brown face. “We didn’t take this step lightly, but there was no other way—”

“Then we need to bloody well find one!”

“How many of these suits are there?” Alphonse asked, frowning. “And how big? I’m a little broad in the shoulder.”

“We are not doing this!” Pritkin snarled.

“’Course we are. Have your little explosion, then suck it up, man. It’s not like we gotta choice.”

“I do not understand,” ?subrand piped up. His pin-straight silver hair had dried as perfectly as if he’d had access to a salon, making him look like he was slumming with a bunch of street people. But for once, the sneer was absent from his face.

Not that that was likely to last.

“You don’t want to,” Bodil muttered, but she hadn’t joined Pritkin. She hadn’t said no.

“It’s simple,” the young, part-fey witch said, tossing her long lavender hair over her shoulder. “We caught a dark mage—”

“Seven,” Topknot put in. “Had to take ‘em at different times.”

“—killed him, skinned him, and tanned the leather with potions and herbs—”

“The... leather?” ?subrand repeated blankly.

“—and cured it into a cloak. Which, if done correctly, allows the person wearing the cloak to take on the appearance of another—”

“Skinwalker,” Pritkin said, his lip curling back enough to show teeth.

?subrand stared at Purple Hair for a second, then I guessed what she’d said registered. Because he jumped back from the table with a sudden, violent movement and snarled something in a language my translator wouldn’t touch, as the prissy little thing didn’t do profanity. “You’re all cursed!”

“No, we cursed them ,” Topknot said with satisfaction. “Seven of ‘em, like I said, only one of the cloaks didn’t cure quite right, so it has patches where the illusion doesn’t work. We normally didn’t use that one.”

?subrand wasn’t listening any longer. He was too busy staring at Bodil. “This doesn’t surprise you. You knew what they meant!”

“Yes.” The beautiful ebony face was carefully expressionless. “We had one such creature invade Nimue’s lands centuries ago. He was discovered by a hunting party who took him for the deer he was pretending to be until they shot him, and the beast began cursing. They brought him back to court, where Nimue stripped him of his magic. He was dispatched shortly thereafter, but she kept the skin as a curiosity.”

“A curiosity!”

“We had never seen such a thing. We do not possess this skill.”

“This abomination!” he spat. “Yet you stand there and say nothing?”

He was looking between the two of us now, why I didn’t know. The guy didn’t even like me. “It’s... not pretty,” I agreed, since he seemed to expect an answer. “But it will work.”

“And you know this how?”

“I also saw one once. At Convocation, a kind of get-together for the leaders of the vampire world. They used to hold it every few years—”

“You got in there?” Alphonse looked impressed.

“As Mircea’s guest, briefly.” I grimaced. It hadn’t been fun. “Anyway, I saw a vamp wearing a cloak made out of a Were he’d skinned when it was halfway through the change so that the skin was half Were and half human—”

“God,” someone said.

“The vamps like to show off their power at Convocation, to stave off anybody who might seek to challenge them,” I explained. “I asked Mircea later what it meant, and he said it was the man’s way of showing that he was strong enough to take down a battle-hardened Were and that he had a magic worker who knew how to make skin suits. So, challenge him, and who knew what he might look like when he infiltrated your house to take you down.”

“Nice one,” Alphonse approved.

“It is not nice!” ?subrand said, now glaring at Bodil. As if to say, ‘And these are our allies?’

“Do you have a better idea?” was her only reply.

“Yes! We fight!”

She sighed and shared a glance with Pritkin, whose jaw tightened. “Prince Emrys tells us that the portal is deep inside the complex under a maze of tunnels that can change configuration on a whim. And it is guarded by the hordes of dark mages who currently populate the place and dozens of wards.”

“Even so,” ?subrand straightened his shoulders. “Better to die in the attempt than to degrade one’s honor—”

“Degrade?” Enid said, her hazel eyes flashing. The witches had magicked up some spell light, basically moonlight from outside trapped in warded balls, and tucked them around here and there to allow us to see in the windowless cellar. And the light loved Enid, glimmering off her red curls, turning individual hairs prismatic, and gilding her pale skin.

Like ?subrand, hardship made her beauty shine all the stronger, and her expression had helped with that. She’d been standing aside, soaking up everything with a rapt look since I guessed this was the first time she’d had a chance to observe her people outside of Faerie. She seemed to find the motley crew of magic users fascinating.

Until ?subrand started talking, that was, and her face fell into a look of disdain that would have done the prince himself proud. “What honor do you think you have, Svarestri?”

?subrand flushed slightly. “More than a scullery maid!”

I winced but didn’t have time to do more before she was over the table and in his face. “Better a scullery made than a traitor’s son!”

“Do not dare speak to me in such a—”

He broke off when a wand tip dented his throat. “Tell me, princeling,” the beautiful redhead hissed, “do you know what your father has in the hallway leading to his throne room? Do you know what he keeps there so that he might gloat every time he passes it? Do you? ”

“What does he have?” Alphonse asked, looking curious.

“An entire Margygr village,” Enid rasped. “Suspended forever in the hardened stone that he caused to roll over them in battle, and then had chiseled out and taken back to his palace to make into a decorative frieze commemorating his victory! They were some who stood by their vows to Nimue, who defended her kingdom’s eastern flank even though it was beyond the reach of her great shield, and that was the reward they received. She let them down, but your father—there were children among them, do you understand?” The wand tip pressed in a little more. “Have you seen it?”

“I have seen it.” To his credit, ?subrand looked sick. But not enough to avoid trying to excuse the old man. “My father’s mind has been overwhelmed. The gods did something to him—”

“Yes! Brought out what was already there!”

“And why would you care?” A little fire came back into those pewter eyes. “A half-breed rejected by those very people? What does it matter to you what happened to them? You should be—”

He cut off because the silver-haired, aristocratic-looking prince, yes even now with half of his armor gone and his cheek streaked with mud, had just been roundly slapped by a kitchen maid.

It was worse than using the wand; it was a gesture of contempt, and her expression backed it up. It said that he wasn’t worthy of combat in her eyes. And Grizzled Topknot approved.

“Girl has spirit,” the old witch grinned. “Perhaps we should adopt her.”

“Have a care,” Pritkin said to ?subrand, who was just standing there, looking incredulous.

“She hit me.” His tone said that he couldn’t believe it.

“Yes, and leave it there. We cannot afford to fight among ourselves.”

“He isn’t going to strike her back,” Bodil said. “His honor forbids it.”

“But it doesn’t forbid using the bodies of his enemies as décor?” Alphonse asked because diplomacy had never been his strong suit.

“The White King does as he pleases,” was all she said. ?subrand didn’t say anything, being too busy touching his cheek as delicately as if Enid had kissed him instead.

Since she seemed ready to “kiss” him again, I looked at Pritkin and asked a question to bring the conversation back to the matter at hand. And because I needed to know. “You’re refusing to do this, then?”

“And you aren’t?”

I exchanged a glance with Alphonse. The swarthy vamp rolled his eyes at me, clearly tired of us humans and our delicate sensibilities. And right now, he had a point.

“If it means us not being skinned, too? Then, yes, I’ll do what’s required.”

“Thatta girl.” The big vamp slapped me on the back.

“Can I see you for a moment?” Pritkin asked. Since it was through his teeth, I didn’t have high hopes for the conversation, but I went with him nonetheless.

We climbed the stairs to the ground floor of what had been a fine, two-story house and was now a burnt-out ruin. The cellars had survived, but the area up here didn’t offer much concealment, with bare, blackened support beams open to the sky, which was dark enough that a few stars had started to peek out from between the clouds. The rain had mostly stopped, but this part of the world was fast sliding into night, although a little orange still smeared the horizon.

The whole, once picturesque town, with its Tudor buildings and climbing roses, looked similar. As if a fire, possibly godly in origin, had blown through here and taken almost everything with it. The great swath it had carved had left open land that grasses and weeds had reclaimed, but a house here and there had been spared, although they looked deserted.

I didn’t know where all the people had gone, but it wasn’t here.

Pritkin made a savage gesture in the air, and a silence shield clicked shut around us. I was surprised he had the strength, as he’d given most of his to me. But maybe it wasn’t a super effective shield because he pulled me further away from the staircase and toward what was left of the road before he spoke. And even then, it was in a savage whisper.

“Those witches just tried their best to kill you! And,” he continued relentlessly when I tried to comment, “the ones who were sucked down that portal were those closest to Zara. They ran to surround her when it became obvious that you weren’t as weak as you seemed. And yet you’re planning to follow their advice? This is a trap! ”

“Maybe—”

“ Maybe? ” His skin, usually a light tan the Vegas sun had given him, flushed dark enough that I could see it even in the gathering gloom. “They are planning to let the damned Black Circle do their work for them! This is madness! And even if we take them at their word, which I do not, those damned cloaks won’t work. They stopped their missions because they were caught— ”

“Trying to spy on the Black Circle,” I reminded him. “To find the location of more of their sisters before they were attacked. We’re not doing that. We’re going straight in, getting to the portal, and—”

“We are not going in!”

“And what’s your plan if we don’t?” I asked, crossing my arms, because that was the real stopping point. I didn’t trust Zara and her group any more than he did, but like Alphonse said, what was the alternative?

But Pritkin was on a roll and didn’t answer. “You were in HQ occasionally to meet me for dinner! ” he said, referring to my habit when he was still on the Circle’s payroll, when our infrequent meet-ups to eat were almost the only time we’d had together. “You know the common areas to a degree, but not the lower levels where all the wards are. You don’t know what they can do. I don’t even know anymore—”

“But the witches do,” I broke in. “And they’re coming with us. Pritkin, they want to go home , not die in a hole in the ground on the other side of the planet—”

“They’ll go home, all right,” he said bitterly. “Do you think there is even a chance Zara’s people aren’t figuring out, right now, where their sisters went? They’ll come for them, probably soon, which is why we have to get you out of here before they arrive!”

“You think she’s stalling—”

“Of course, I think she’s stalling!” he exploded. “Those damned witches are drinking wine and feeding you a story, knowing their sisters are right on their heels. We have to go —”

“And do what?” I asked, frowning. “We still have to get to that portal. You said it yourself—it’s the only way to Rhea. And there are six of us, exactly the number of reliable skinwalker cloaks they have—”

“Yes, quite the coincidence!”

“—and while you may be right about everything else, they came up with that idea really fast for people embroidering on the fly. If there’s even a chance those things are real, and let’s face it, they got into HQ somehow—”

“So they say.”

“If they weren’t spying on the Circle, why did they have a portal that went straight here?” I shook my head. “We get the suits, figure out our play, then ditch the witches—”

“If they’re not leading us straight into the Circle’s clutches! That close to the wards, we’ll almost certainly be—” he broke off abruptly and then forced me into a crouch behind one of the few walls still partly standing. —seen,” he whispered as something came rumbling down the road.