Karen Chance: Tempt the Stars

And I was heartily sick of the dark.

Evelyn came out onto the balcony. She didn’t say anything. But her wrist was resting on the railing, not far from where my hand was clenching on it convulsively. And in hers . .

It had been a wand, I thought, watching her twirl it expertly, back and forth, between her fingers.

Our eyes met.

“I think it’s time the girls and I were going,” she said. And then she just looked at me, gray eyes into blue.

I licked my lips. “I’ll walk you out,” I said hoarsely.

The mansion was dark and quiet when we shifted in to the front hall of the Pythian Court. London is seven hours ahead of Vegas, which would make it somewhere around midnight, and I had jumped us back as far as I could. Which wasn’t very damned far, because carrying five has a cost, and it is high.

I dropped to my knees, staggered at the power drain.

“Lady—”

“I’m fine,” I told Rhea, harshly enough that she jerked back her hand.

I stayed down for a moment, watching the marble tile of Agnes’ front hall pulse in and out, wondering if my eyeballs were about to pop. And cursing inwardly, because my time sense had kicked in to tell me what I’d already suspected. I’d had to drop the time shift earlier than I’d wanted or risk rupturing something.

At most, we had fifteen minutes.

Which meant I didn’t have time for this, I told myself severely, and got up.

The place looked about the same as the last time I’d been here. Shafts of what were probably streetlights, but which looked like silver moonbeams, slanted through high, neoclassical windows. There was lots of marble, some paneling that looked like it might be genuine mahogany, and a couple statues of Grecian-looking women holding jugs. A staircase, the one where Rhea had had her vision I assumed, ran up to a landing.

A chandelier tinkled softly overhead, blown about by the freshening wind through a transom. It sounded impossibly loud to my straining ears, like the world’s most expensive wind chime. Nothing else moved.

I found that less than reassuring.

Rhea seemed to think the same. “There should be guards,” she said worriedly. “The Circle—it keeps people here, all the time.”

“They’re here,” Evelyn said grimly, from behind me. I turned around to see her over near the main doors, where a figure in a leather trench coat lay slumped behind a potted plant.

I’d been about to ask how he’d died, but then she rolled him over. And I didn’t have to. The skin was gray and papery, and crumpled into unrecognizability, since the flesh underneath had mostly withered away. It pulled back the mouth into a silent scream, left the eyes sunken into the head and the bones brittle enough that several cracked just from the gentle movement.

A ring dropped off a wasted finger, to clatter against the floor, and Rhea made a small sound. “McClaren,” she whispered. “One of his granddaughters . . . She’s a new initiate. . . ”

“Adepts,” Evelyn cursed. “I was hoping Marsden was wrong.”

“Question is, are they still here?” Beatrice asked.

“They shouldn’t be.” That was Jasmine. “A bomb destroyed the building, not an attack. If the adepts had any sense, they fled after setting it.”

I swallowed. Maybe cutting things close hadn’t been such a bad idea. But Beatrice didn’t seem convinced.

A streetlight was shining through a window, glinting off her chains and turning her Afro faintly blue. And highlighting the frown on her face. “Then why attack the Circle’s men? The adepts were already inside and free to move about. Why involve the patrols?”

“If they were messing about with the wards, they might have been nervous,” Jasmine offered. “Wanted them out of the way—”

“And speaking of wards, why didn’t we set any off when we came in just now?”

“You’re with me,” Rhea said, but she sounded doubtful. “But that should only have kept the general alarm from sounding. There should still have been somebody here by now, to check. . . ”

“Hence the attacks on the corpsmen,” Jasmine said.

“All of them?” Beatrice demanded. “And how did a group of untrained girls manage that, Pythian power or no?”

“Took ’em by surprise,” Evelyn said, fingering her wand. “Must have.”

“And again I say, all of them? You know what they’re like: suspicious, jumpy buggers, every one. And yet—”

“Let’s just get the kids out,” I said, glancing around. My skin was crawling. “Where are they?”

I didn’t have to ask twice. Rhea had been vibrating, just standing there, and now she took off for the stairs. “Wait!” Evelyn called, and put a hand on my arm.

“We have less than fifteen minutes,” I told her.

But she didn’t answer. “Beatrice.”

The little witch already had her staff up. One of the little indentations that I’d mistaken for hollows in the wood was glowing with a pale blue light, like a flashlight. Which I didn’t understand the point of, since we could already see—

Nothing, compared to when she brought it down on the floor, hard. And a pulse came out of the bottom, like a wave heading to the beach. Or maybe like a stone thrown into a pond, because this one was moving outward in all directions, highlighting mop marks on the floor, dust in the corners, cracks here and there in the grout between tiles. Like a black light at a crime scene, it showed everything hidden.

Including the feet of a bunch of men arrayed along the walls.

“I hate when I’m right,” Evelyn muttered, and then shoved me at the door. “Go!”

I hit the floor instead as the paneling bulged outward in the shape of bodies, dozens of them. And then melted away entirely as the spell ran up their legs, stripping off the camouflage as it went. War mages, and not ours, I realized, as they peeled off the walls and started slinging spells that sparked off the shield Jasmine had thrown up, barely in time.

But one had gotten through, a split second before the shield snapped closed, strobing the room in poisonous green. It missed, thanks to a curse I hadn’t even seen Evelyn hurl, which hit the thrower at almost the same moment he moved. But it took out the transom and most of the front door with it, showering us with glass.

And finally sent wards screaming through the house.

“Well, the kids are up,” Beatrice said as Evelyn turned on me.

“Damn it, are you deaf?” she demanded.

“If I leave, and the adepts show up, you die,” I said, fumbling with the dead war mage’s coat. And trying not to breathe because it was covered in flaky white dust that flew up everywhere as I pushed and pulled and broke him to pieces trying to get it off. But I had to have it. The coats were spelled to resist assaults, and I was about to get assaulted unless I was way luckier than usual.

“You heard Zara,” Evelyn said. “They’re probably already gone!”

It took me a second to realize she meant the witch I’d been calling Jasmine. “And if they’re not? You may be good—”

“We’re better than good.”

“But you can’t fight someone who can manipulate time!”

She started to answer, but the shield shattered as a dozen spells hit it all at once. And then Beatrice brought up her staff again. A different hollow glowed this time, a dark, bloody red. And all the lights around the room suddenly shattered, showering the floor with sparks and sending flames running up the walls.

“Nice parlor trick, old woman,” a mage said, grabbing her.

The staff came down again.

And lines of flame tore out of every light, carving a pentagram of fire in the air and spearing half a dozen mages through with flame.