Karen Chance: Embrace the Night

"He believed in reincarnation, man. Maybe he came back."

I fought my way out of a large cobweb, and managed not to slip on the stone tiles, which were slick with rain and decaying leaves. "Shut up!" I whispered viciously.

The older ghost sniffed. "At least the mystics aren't rude."

I squinted down at the vague squiggles that were supposed to be a map and tried to ignore him. It might have been easier if I wasn't soaking wet and filthy with a pounding headache. I really, really wanted to get out of here. But, thanks to a certain devious master vampire, that wasn't an option.

I was prowling around a cemetery in the middle of the night, dodging guard dogs, lightning bolts and crazed war mages, because of a spell known as a geis. The vamp in question, Mircea, had had it placed on me years ago, without bothering to get my permission or even remembering to mention that he'd done it. Master vamps are like that, but in this case, there might have been more than the usual arrogance behind his forgetfulness.

On the one hand, the spell provided me protection growing up—it marked me as his, meaning that no sane vampire would touch me with a ten-foot pole. On the other, it was designed to ensure loyalty to a single person: exclusive, complete and utter loyalty. Now that we were both adults, the spell wanted to bind Mircea and me together forever, and it didn't appreciate my noncooperation. That was a problem, since people have been known to go mad from this thing, even committing suicide rather than live with the constant, gnawing ache that was just one of the spell's tricks when thwarted. But sitting back and enjoying the ride wasn't an option, either.

If the bond ever fully formed, our lives would be run by the dominant partner—which I had no doubt would be Mircea—leaving me stuck as his eager little slave. And since he was a member in good standing of the Vampire Senate, the governing body of all North American vampires, I would doubtless end up running their errands, too. The thought of what some of those requests might be was enough to put me in a cold sweat. It was what the Circle feared—the Pythia under the control of the vamps. And while I wasn't in favor of their method of preventing it, I could grudgingly concede the point: it would be a disaster.

Becoming Pythia had made me a target for anybody in the supernatural community who was attracted to power—in other words, pretty much everyone—but it had bought me some time as far as the spell was concerned. How much, I didn't know. Meaning that I really needed that counterspell. And rumor was, the only grimoire that contained a copy was buried somewhere around here.

Of course, it would help if I could read the damn map. I squinted at it, but the only illumination was moonlight filtered through the remains of once beautiful stained-glass windows. Half of a seated Madonna looked out onto a charcoal gray sky, with the occasional flash of lightning outlining layered clouds. I had a flashlight, but turning it on would only make me that much better of a—

Something lunged at me out of the night. "Don't shoot!" a man whispered.

He smelled of sweat, metal and dirt, plus a static crackle of nervous energy that was practically his signature. I turned on the flashlight and saw what I'd expected: a shock of pale hair, which as usual was making taunting gestures in the face of gravity, a square jaw, a slightly overlarge nose and furious green eyes. The Circle's most famous renegade and my reluctant partner, John Pritkin.

I breathed a sigh of relief and clicked my gun's safety on. To know Pritkin was to want to kill him, but so far I'd resisted temptation. "You shouldn't sneak up on me like that!" I whispered.

"Why didn't you shoot me?" he demanded.

"You told me not to."

"I—that's—" Pritkin seemed momentarily incoherent, so I shoved the gun's barrel lightly against his stomach. At least I'd thought it was his stomach. I'd only intended to show that I wasn't defenseless, but in a flash, I was slammed against the side of the crypt, my gun arm pinned to the wall, my body stuck between the hard surface and a very angry war mage. I reluctantly admitted that there may have been a fantasy or two that began with this scenario, but I doubted the evening was going to end the same way.

"I knew it was you," I told him before his ability to vocalize returned. "You smell like gunpowder and magic." That was truer than usual because his coat, a thick leather duster that hid his weapon collection, had a large spot where the leather was crisped and curled up. Like maybe a spell hadn't missed him by much.

"Those are mages out there!" he whispered savagely. "So do they! And what the hell are you still doing here?!"

"I have the map," I reminded him.

"Give it to me and go!"

"And leave you here alone? There's a dozen of them!"

"If you don't leave right now…"

I raised my chin, even though I'd turned off the flashlight so he probably couldn't see it. "What? You'll shoot me?"

His hand clenched my shoulder, almost painfully. Don't tempt the crazy war mage, I reminded myself, just as a bullet sliced through the open doorway. It ricocheted several times around the crypt's inner walls before crashing through what remained of the Madonna. "If you're here much longer, I won't have to!" he whispered furiously.

"Let's just get the damn thing and we can both leave," I said reasonably.

"In case it has somehow slipped your notice, this was a trap!"

"Damn it, you can't trust anybody anymore!" The elderly French mage we'd visited in his sweet little country cottage had seemed so reliable, with his Old World charm and his kind eyes—and his lousy map that had sent us on the treasure hunt from hell. It wasn't fair; the bad guys weren't supposed to look like someone's grandfather. "And Manassier seemed so—"

"If the next word out of your mouth is ‘nice, I will make your life hell when we get back. Pure hell."

I didn't bother to dignify that with a response. Pritkin was just…Pritkin. At some point I'd learned to mostly roll with it. I'd often wondered if he gave the Circle half as much trouble before he broke with them over his decision to support me. If so, you'd think they'd have thanked me for taking him off their hands. Maybe they planned to send a nice bouquet to the funeral.

"Look, all we know for sure is that some mages got here ahead of us. Maybe we all decided to burgle the place on the same night." I didn't really believe it—they'd attacked us almost as soon as we'd arrived and we hadn't even found anything. But I hated to give up on our best lead yet. And leaving Pritkin to pursue it alone wasn't an option. He had all the self-preservation instincts of a bug near a shiny windshield.

A strong hand clenched my arm. "Ow!" I pointed out.

"Give me the damn map!"

"Not a chance."

"Hey!" I looked up to see the younger ghost staring at us. "In case you missed it, people are trying to kill you."

"People are always trying to kill me," I said irritably.

"The only way you're dying tonight is if I kill you," Pritkin informed me.

"I've been in relationships like that," the ghost sympathized.

"We're not in a relationship," I muttered.

"Sheer bloody-minded—what?" Pritkin broke off his rant, which I hadn't been listening to anyway, to look around wildly. "What's happening?"

"You mean you let him talk to you like that and you aren't even getting any? Man, what a rip-off."

"Nothing. Just a couple of spirits," I said, shooting ghost #2 a look.

"Hey, standing right here."

"And," his counterpart chimed in, "I resent that ‘just' comment. We're the two most active spirits in this entire—"

"Active?" A hand moved down my arm, the touch both gentle and rough, calloused from holding guns and doing push-ups and snapping people's necks. "Don't even think about it," I told Pritkin, then turned my attention back to the ghost. "How active?"