Karen Chance: Curse the Dawn

"Don't tell me you don't know how!"

She was glaring at me, so I glared right back. "Hello! No training, remember? That's why I'm here!"

"That's why you're useless!" she yelled, poking me in the shoulder with the gun. Her expression was pretty fierce, but her head was doing some weird wobbly thing, like her neck was broken. I stared at her for a heartbeat before realizing that she was nodding at the mage's little vial collection. Oh, great.

She poked me again, this time in the stomach, and it hurt. I stumbled away from her, moving a few steps farther into the room. "Oh, so what? I can't perform on cue so you're going to shoot me? Is that how this works?"

"Maybe I will," she said furiously. "A Pythia who can't do anything is no help to anyone. The people in your time would probably thank me."

She had no idea. I retreated a few more steps, almost within arm's reach of the vials. "You can't kill a Pythia or her designated heir, or the power won't go to you," I reminded her. "Even I know that much!"

"News flash, kiddo," she said, aiming for my head. "I already have it!"

Agnes let off a round and I screamed and ducked, only half acting the terror thing. I lurched into the barrel, tipping it over and scattering vials everywhere. The mage cursed and leveled his gun at me, but Agnes picked up Fawkes' fallen sword and chucked it at him. He instinctively ducked and fell backward off his seat.

I dropped to the floor, trying to feel around behind me with tightly bound hands. My fingers touched two small vials and I grabbed them. I couldn't see them, but it didn't matter; I wouldn't have known what they were anyway. I stared over my shoulder and, as soon as the mage popped his head up, I flipped them at him.

The first burst against his shields in a scattering of dry orange powder and didn't appear to have any effect. But the second, a blue liquid, bit a chunk out of his shields. I started looking for more of those while Agnes kept alternating gunfire with throwing things: a wooden footstool, a burnt-out torch and a dead rat all sailed past my face to go splat against the mage's shields.

I flinched back from the rat, and then I saw it—another blue vial, nestled up against the bottom of a barrel. I crouched awkwardly, scrabbling around on the grimy floor, and at last my fingers closed over it. I didn't wait for the mage to pop back up this time, just chucked it over the pile of casks.

For once, my aim must have been pretty good. He screamed and shot out of the hedge of barrels like he was on fire. He sprinted past me, shedding sparks in his wake and—Oh, crap. "He's on fire!" I screamed.

Agnes tripped him up and he went sprawling just outside the door. She sat on his butt and clocked him upside the head with her gun. He collapsed like a sack of sand.

"You wanted a hint," she panted, batting out the flames on his back. "Here it is. You're clairvoyant. Use your gift."

I waited a few seconds, but she didn't say anything else. "That's it? That's your big hint?"

"What did you expect?"

"Something else! Something more! There has to be. . I don't know, some kind of trick to it!"

" You're the trick," she told me, retrieving his cuffs. "Why do you think clairvoyants are chosen as Pythias? If anyone could do it, these morons wouldn't screw things up every time they try to 'improve' things. They can't see what effect their actions will have; they have to guess. We can know ."

A headache started to pound behind my eyes. I hadn't realized how much I'd been counting on Agnes to help me until this minute, when she refused. "Maybe you can know," I told her. "My gift doesn't work like that. Some days, it doesn't work at all!"

"Maybe you need to exercise it a little more. And to answer your earlier question, fiddling with the time stream usually causes more problems than it solves. Trust me on that one."

"So that's it?" I asked furiously. "That's what you have for me? Don't mess with time and trust my gift?"

"That's all you really need." Agnes dragged the mage's hands behind his back and clicked the cuffs on. Once he was secure, she looked up at me, and for the first time, her gaze held a flicker of compassion. "Your power will work with your natural ability, training it—and you—over time. Eventually, you will learn what you need to know."

"If it was that easy, you wouldn't spend decades training a successor!" I said quickly before she could shift out on me.

"I never said it was easy. Nothing about this job is. I said you will learn."

"And what if I don't last that long?!" I screamed, but Agnes was already gone.

I arrived back at Dante's, Vegas' hell-themed casino and my current hideout, exhausted, filthy and steaming. The worst part was, I'd gotten exactly zip out of it. I might be the world's chief clairvoyant, but my power didn't seem to know that. It came and went, ebbing and flowing like the tide, but never on such a precise schedule. And that meant I couldn't do visions on demand. I couldn't choose what I saw and what I didn't. I wasn't that strong and I never had been.

Despite the lurid theme of the casino, the penthouse was sleek, Scandinavian and contemporary, with a soft blue and gray color scheme that I usually found soothing. It wasn't working so well today. That was doubly true when I walked into the living room and was immediately accosted by a couple of half-crazed thugs. I'd have been worried, except that they were mine. Sort of.

Marco, the one weaving a quarter through his fingers as he surveyed me, was six foot six with a twenty-inch neck. The guy made dump trucks look petite. The fact that he was a vampire was almost irrelevant.

I didn't know the other guy, but that wasn't unusual. Marco's partners constantly changed, but they were always vamps armed to the teeth. This one was no exception and looked enough like Marco—slicked-back dark hair, barrel chest and tree trunk legs—that they might have been related. Of course, they just as easily might not. That description fit almost every babysitter I'd had in the last three days.

"What's the deal here?" Marco asked, his voice thick with muscle. "You said you was going for a fitting. That you had to get naked for this designer guy, so we might as well stay here since you wasn't letting us in the room anyway. You said you was just going downstairs. That you'd be right back ."

"I don't have time for this," I told him. I ached pretty much everywhere, except for my shoulders, which had stopped screaming and started going numb. It was making me think about lack of blood flow and gangrene. "Can you get me out of these cuffs?"

"Yeah, I'll get right on that." He made a savage gesture, and the quarter sailed through the open balcony doors and took out a window on the next building. It made me jump, since Marco had so far shown no emotion whatsoever. "As soon as you tell me what's going on. Because I'm thinking we got a communication problem, you and me."

"You took advantage of our trust," his partner added in a high-pitched squeak.

"What's going on is that I need to get out of these cuffs and into a bath!" I snapped, my temper hanging by a thread. "Mircea is coming—"

"Yeah. I know," Marco said tightly. "The front desk called to say he's on his way up."

"He's on his way now ? Why?"

"You have a date."

"Appointment. And that's not until two a.m.!" I whirled, looking for a clock, but of course I didn't find one. Clocks made you think about bedtime and bath time and dinner-time instead of gambling the night away in blissful ignorance. The casino didn't like clocks.

"It's five to two," Marco informed me, shoving his hairy wrist in my face. "You've been gone all night ."