Karen Chance - Claimed by Shadow

As if she'd heard me, Pemphredo suddenly turned her gaze on the nearest mage, a delicate Asian woman, who didn't even have time to scream before the heavy lacquered chandelier came crashing down on her head. Pieces of splintered wood went flying everywhere, and the woman disappeared under a pile of red silk lanterns. It seemed the gals had been practicing.

The mage managed to crawl out from under the fixture a few seconds later, looking battered and bloody, but still breathing. She was in no condition to rejoin the fight, though, and her companions were having trouble holding Enyo on their own. She was tearing through the net almost faster than they could reform it, and it was starting to look like a question of who would tire first. I couldn't tell whether she was getting weary, but even with their backs to me, the mages looked strained, with their raised arms visibly shaking.

"We have a problem," Casanova said.

"Duh." I watched as Pemphredo glanced at one of the other mages, who promptly shot himself in the foot. Deino was sipping beer and trying to flirt with the new bartender, who had crouched behind the bar with his arms over his head. Casanova was probably going to get requests for combat pay after today. I decided that I could live without learning what her special talent was.

"No. I mean we really have a problem." I glanced up at Casanova's tone to see a pissed-off mage standing in the doorway, a sawed-off shotgun leveled on us.

I sighed. "Hello, Pritkin.”

"Call off your harpies or this will be a very short conversation.”

I sighed again. Pritkin has that effect on me. "They aren't harpies. They're the Graeae, ancient Greek demigoddesses. Or something.”

Pritkin sneered. It was what he did best, other than for killing things. "Trust you to side with the monsters. Call them off." An edge of anger threaded through his words, threatening to grow into something more substantial soon.

"I can't." It was the truth, but I wasn't surprised that he didn't believe me. I couldn't recall Pritkin ever believing anything I said; it kind of made me wonder why he bothered talking to me at all. Of course, conversation probably wasn't foremost on his list. It'd be somewhere after dragging me back to the Silver Circle, throwing me in a really deep dungeon and losing the key.

I discovered that a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun sounds very loud when cocked in a small room.

"Do as he says, Cassie," Casanova chimed in. "I like this body as it is. If it acquires a large hole, I will be very annoyed.”

"Yeah, and that's really what's worrying us." The comment came from the ghost who had just drifted through the wall. Casanova swatted in his direction as you might a pesky fly, but missed him. "I thought incubi were supposed to be charming," Billy said, wafting out of the way.

Casanova couldn't see Billy, but his demon senses could obviously hear him. His handsome forehead acquired an annoyed wrinkle, but he didn't deign to respond. I was glad about that, since it meant that Pritkin couldn't be sure that Billy was there.

Billy Joe is what remains of an Irish-American gambler with a love for loose women, dirty limericks and cheating at cards. Because of that last item, he cashed in his chips for the final time at the ripe old age of twenty-nine. A couple of cowboys hadn't liked his faint Irish accent, his ruffled shirt or the fact that the saloon girls were paying him a lot of attention. But the real kicker had come when he won too many hands at cards and they caught him with an ace up his sleeve. Billy was soon thereafter introduced to the inside of a croaker sack, which in turn made the acquaintance of the bottom of the Mississippi.

That should have ended a colorful, if abbreviated, life.

But a few weeks earlier Billy had won a variety of favors off a visiting countess-at least he claimed she'd had a title- one of which was an ugly ruby necklace that doubled as a talisman. It soaked up magical energy from the natural world and transmitted it to its owner, or in this case, to its owner's ghost. Billy's spirit had come to reside in the necklace, which gathered dust in an antique shop until I happened along looking for a present for my notoriously picky governess. I've been able to see ghosts all my life, but even I was surprised by my gift with purchase.

We'd soon discovered that not only was I the first person in years who could see him, I was also the only one of the necklace's owners who could donate energy in excess of the subsistence it provided. With regular donations from me, Billy was able to become much more active. In exchange, I got his help with my various problems. At least in theory.

He caught my look and shrugged. "This place has too many entrances. I couldn't watch them all." He glanced behind the mage. "He's got his helper with him.”

He was looking at what appeared to be a man-sized clay statue. I had mistaken it for one the first time I'd seen it, but it was actually a golem. Rabbis versed in kabbalah magic were supposed to have invented them, but these days they were popular among the war mages as assistants-maybe because it's hard to hurt something with no internal organs.

I reviewed possible strategies, but none of my usual defenses seemed like a good idea. The lopsided pentagram tattooed on my back is actually a ward that can stop most magical attacks. It was crafted by the Silver Circle itself and I had seen it do some fairly amazing things, but I didn't know if it would stop a nonmagical assault of that caliber. This didn't seem like the best time to test it.

I also had a bracelet made of little interlocking daggers that seemed to dislike Pritkin even more than I did. It had once belonged to a dark mage who had used it mostly to destroy things. He'd been evil, and I suspected his jewelry was, too, but I couldn't seem to get rid of it. I'd tried burying it, flushing it down a toilet and feeding it to a garbage disposal, but no go. No matter what ì did, the next time I looked it was on my wrist again, whole and shiny and new, glinting at me impudently. Sometimes it came in handy, and mostly it obeyed my commands, but it never passed up a chance to relive old times. All on its own it had sent two ghostly knives to stab Pritkin the last time we met. The hand with the bracelet was firmly in my pocket at the moment; no need to escalate this further. Fortunately, I had another option.

"Hey, Billy. Think you can possess a golem?" Pritkin's eyes didn't waver, but his shoulders twitched slightly.

"Never tried." Billy floated over and eyed the golem without enthusiasm. He doesn't like possessions. They sap his energy level and often don't work anyway. Instead, his favorite trick is to drift through someone, picking up any stray thoughts and leaving a hint or two of his own behind. But that wouldn't help us now. "Guess there's only one way to find out," he muttered.

As soon as Billy stepped into the thing, I found out why experiments are done under controlled conditions. The golem began careening about the outer office, knocking over tubs of plants and sending the girls screaming into the next room. Then it altered course and crashed into Pritkin, sending him sprawling.

I couldn't tell whether that had been deliberate, but I sort of doubted it when the creature started ricocheting around our tiny cubicle like a pinball on speed. It knocked me a glancing blow on its way to destroy the table and sent me stumbling into the mage. I started to yell at Billy to get out of the thing, but my breath was knocked out by Pritkin's knee, which came into contact with my stomach when I fell on him. To be fair, my high heel might have gotten him in a sensitive spot, but it had been an accident. I didn't think his knee was.

As I was struggling to get enough breath back to tell him off, a very familiar and extremely unwelcome feeling came over me. Time shifting is supposed to be under the Pythia's control, not vice versa, but someone needed to tell my power that. I had only enough time to think, Oh no, not now, before I was flailing about in that cold, gray area between time.