Karen Chance: Embrace the Night

"Then you must start monitoring your endurance. Otherwise, you could become trapped in another time or overtax your system, possibly resulting in serious injury."

"You don't say?" I started down the corridor, my feet feeling like they were encased in cement. "I'd have never figured that out on my own."

"I am serious." Pritkin grabbed my arm, in his favorite spot, right over the bicep. I was probably going to have the permanent indentation of his fingers there someday. "You must begin experimentation, to discover your limits. How many times can you shift before you reach exhaustion? Does going farther back in time cause more of a drain than more recent shifts? What other powers over time do you possess?"

"If I'm not letting someone piggyback along, three or four, depending on how tired I am to start with; hell, yes; and I don't really want to know," I answered him, in order. "Now, can we deal with the current crisis, please, and leave the twenty questions for later?"

Pritkin shut up, but with a meaningful silence that said this wasn't over. I let him brood while I concentrated on not falling on my face. We felt our way down another dark, dusty corridor.

We finally found the storeroom by the simple method of running into it. Or, to be more accurate, into the rusty iron-work gate that blocked the entrance. I backed up a few steps while Pritkin scuffled around. I heard a match strike and suddenly I could see. Watery yellow light filtered outward from a small lantern set in a niche, allowing him to check the area for booby traps. He didn't find any, which seemed to worry him more than the reverse.

"What's wrong? Manassier said this place was abandoned."

Pritkin ran a hand over his hair, which despite the water and the sweat and the limestone dust was still acting like an independent entity. "Can you shift yet?"

"Maybe."

"If anything goes wrong, you are to shift away immediately. Do you understand?"

"Sure."

Pritkin shot me a suspicious look, and I gave him my best bland expression right back. He'd asked if I understood, and I'd said yes. I hadn't agreed to anything.

He smeared his finger across the door mechanism, cutting through an inch of dust and grime. Something clicked and he pulled back before cautiously nudging the door with his toe. It swung inward obligingly, but he hesitated on the threshold. "I don't like it. This is too easy."

I personally thought easy was just fine. In fact, it was about damn time easy showed up. "Maybe our luck is chang—"

Pritkin stepped into the room and disappeared with a strangled sort of sound. "Pritkin!" There was no answer. I knelt by the threshold, but there was nothing to see—only a small, empty cave, with no exit, and no mage.

I got a death grip on the iron bars of the door and reached out. My hand encountered nothing but dusty limestone for about two feet, then disappeared into the floor. I snatched my arm back, but there didn't appear to be any damage. An illusion, then.

I stretched out on the floor, closed my eyes and leaned over, to the point that my forehead would have hit stone if there really had been a floor there. When it didn't, I opened my eyes in blackness. After a moment, my sight adjusted to show me dirty fingers, white with strain, clinging to a shard of limestone three or four yards down. They were human, and below them, almost out of sight, was a familiar, spiky head.

"Grab my hand and I'll shift us out," I called, hoping I could actually do it. The head snapped up.

"What did I just tell you?!" Pritkin demanded.

"Hi, I'm Cassie Palmer. Have we met?"

Steel entered the suddenly soft tones. "Miss Palmer. Move away from the edge. Now."

"I'm not going to fall in," I told him irritably.

"Neither did I! There's something down here." I couldn't see Pritkin's face very well, just a pale blur against the shadows, but he didn't sound happy. Some people thought he had only one mode—pissed off. In reality, he had plenty of them. Over the past few weeks, I'd learned to tell the difference between real pissed off, impatient pissed off and scared pissed off. I suspected that this was the last kind. If so, that made two of us.

That feeling amped up a few notches when he cursed and fired several rounds at something out in the darkness. The faint, acrid smell of gunpowder floated up to me as I wiggled forward, keeping my legs spread, hoping that if I distributed my weight over a larger surface I wouldn't cause a rock slide. I stretched until I heard something pop in my shoulder, but I wasn't even close. And if I couldn't touch him, I couldn't shift him.

I bit my lip and stared up at the floor that wasn't there. It was kind of odd seeing it from this angle, as if the ocean's surface had been smeared with dirt and pebbles. It didn't help my concentration, so I pulled back up to a sitting position and stared at the top of it instead.

Once upon a time, my reaction to scary things had been to run and hide. It was an effective strategy for staying alive in the good old days when all I had to worry about was a homicidal vampire. The difference between then and now was that once upon a time I'd had problems I really could outrun. Now I had duties and responsibilities, the kind of things that are always with you. There were about a dozen nightmares vying for the top spot every day, each of them spectacularly horrible in its own way. And right at the top of the list was the fear that I'd have to stand by and watch another friend die trying to help me.

I was suddenly really glad I couldn't see the bottom.

The rock felt crumbly under my fingers as I slithered over the side. Or maybe that was my hands shaking. A cascade of small rocks disappeared beyond the illusion and some of them must have hit Pritkin, because I heard him swear again.

"What the hell are you—"

"Sheer bloody-mindedness, remember? And can you see my leg?"

I was holding on to the edge of the chasm by my arms and elbows, and still felt unbelievably unsteady. I carefully did not look down, but for a few seconds, I strained to hear the rocks hit bottom. I never did.

I tried to feel around with my toe without falling off, but met only air. Damn it, what if I needed to be touching bare skin? Why hadn't I thought to remove my shoes first? I tried toeing one off, but the water had made the sneaker shrink around my foot. "Grab my ankle."

A lot of less than genteel language echoed off the walls. "I can't grab anything without letting go!"

"You have two arms!"

"Listen to me." Pritkin's voice was low and controlled, the tone he used when he was pretending to be reasonable. "I can't let go of the gun. There's something down here. It pulled me in. It could get bored with me at any moment and come after you. You have to—" He broke off at the sound of shouts and explosions and booted feet echoing down the corridor. "Shift, goddamn it!"

"Grab my leg!"

I lowered myself down to the point that my head was barely over the top of the chasm, but still touched nothing. The damn rock was falling apart under my fingers and nervous sweat was making my palms slippery. My arms were sending sharp little pains up to my shoulders and there was no purchase on the side of the chasm for my feet. How the hell far down was he?

And then it didn't matter, because a pair of booted feet stopped right in front of my eyes. I craned my neck enough to see an older man with salt-and-pepper hair and pale gray eyes smiling down at me. Manassier. Well, didn't that just explain a lot.

"I didn't think you would get this far," he told me in his thick accent. And to think, only that afternoon, I'd found it attractive.

Somewhere along the line I'd bitten my tongue hard enough to taste copper. I swallowed blood. "Surprise."

He shrugged. "No matter. I still collect the bounty."