Tempt the Stars

Chapter Thirty-three

Half an hour later, I was back in my hotel suite in Vegas, and staring at another scene of carnage. It felt unreal, like the one I’d just left. It felt impossible.

“It happened shortly after you left us,” Jonas said. “We only managed to obtain the images a few moments ago.”

I tried to look like I was paying attention as he said something else I didn’t hear. His voice was fading in and out, like a distant loudspeaker in a high wind. And even when I could hear the words, they sometimes didn’t make sense.

Like the scenes in my head.

I shoved Rosier away and grabbed the too-limp body. Pritkin’s head dropped back, the short blond strands falling against my arm, soft, too soft without whatever product he usually used on them. Wrong. Like the body, so horribly still, or the face, lacking wit or anger or those weird flashes of humor—

Or anything.

“No.” I felt my skin ice over.

“It was a bomb, obviously,” Jonas said. “Likely a number of them. The wards had been tampered with. We’re still searching for the exact cause.”

Time rippled around us and Rosier stuttered, like a figure on an old TV screen flooded with static. But my power didn’t work right in the Shadowland; it never had. The time distortion fizzled out after only a few seconds, leaving Caleb and me staring at each other.

Jonas was looking at me, so I nodded. I’d seen the mansion that housed the Pythian Court once before. Mircea had taken me there to get a glimpse of my mother when she was still the heir. It had been a beautiful Georgian building, lit up for the party that had been taking place that night, the creamy white columns and elegant brick facade bathed in a warm golden glow.

It looked a little different now.

It was raining in London, which is where the images of the court were coming from, via some spell I didn’t care about, but which had turned the French doors to my balcony into a strangely chopped-up movie screen. It didn’t matter. The scene rippling across the beveled glass panes and luxe door pulls wasn’t one I wanted to see any better.

Jonas was watching the salvage efforts, looking strangely calm. I didn’t know if that was because he’d seen it all in his long decades with the Circle, and another crime scene just didn’t faze him. Or if he was trying to shield me.

Either way, I wished I had his detachment.

But the rain-soaked, fire-gutted building was hard to take. Although not nearly as much as the body bags, so many and so small, laid out on the sidewalk. They were getting wet, rain beading and then running off the plastic coverings, although there wasn’t any choice. There were too many of them to be taken away all at once, with more being drawn out of the wreckage all the time. It had been big, this court I’d never seen, these girls, sworn to my service, who I’d never even met. It had been . . . big . .

“Help him!” I told Caleb, who was already muttering something that surged over both of us, making my skin crawl from the power behind it.

But that’s all it did.

Caleb cursed, and jerked Pritkin away, shoving me back when I would have grabbed him again. He pushed him down to the floor and put a hand to Pritkin’s chest, snarling something that made the too-still body shudder, almost like he was coming around. Until the magic faded and Pritkin fell back against the lobby’s beige carpet again, unmoving.

“Turn it off,” Marco said gruffly. He wasn’t looking at the scene, although I doubted it affected him any more than it did Jonas. Marco had seen things through the years that would make a veteran war mage blanch; a bunch of anonymous bodies already zipped away in bags weren’t likely to turn his stomach.

No, as usual, he was looking out for me. Or trying to. And I appreciated it, but I didn’t want it.

I wanted to see this.

“Where did it start?” I asked hoarsely, trying to identify one part of the wreckage that looked worse than the others, something that might indicate an origin point. But the building was hardly a building anymore, with a blackened crater in the center that still steamed despite the gentle rain. There were pieces across the street, pieces stabbed through surrounding buildings, and so much broken glass in the road that the emergency vehicles had been forced to park well away, to avoid blowing out their tires.

The whole thing looked like the origin point.

No wonder nobody had gotten out.

A human word, savage and angry. Another incantation, strong enough to raise Pritkin’s limp body half a foot off the floor, to outline it in pale blue fire. And then another expletive, because that hadn’t worked, either.

“Caleb—” I breathed.

“A major curse,” Casanova muttered. “I saw it land—”

“Caleb!”

“He isn’t responding.” Caleb looked up, eyes dark with the same emotions flooding through me.

“Then try something else!”

“I’ve already put enough magic through him to lift a dozen curses!”

“Cassie?”

I looked up, and realized I’d missed Jonas’ answer. And based on his expression, whatever question he had asked after. “What?”

“Leave her alone! Can’t you see she needs to rest?” Rhea, I thought vaguely, seemed to have come out of her shell. Her eyes were snapping at Jonas as she handed me some coffee. I guess she’d figured out how to use the pods. Not too surprising; she looked completely unlike the frightened girl I’d come across in the kitchen.

“She will,” Jonas said calmly. “But first I must know.”

“Know . . . what?” I asked. My lips felt numb.

They were bringing out smaller body bags now, ridiculously small. They couldn’t have belonged to initiates. They looked like they’d barely fit a child of five.

“The nursery,” Rhea snarled, and okay. Timid girl was definitely MIA. She was gripping the mug so tightly I was afraid she was going to break it and spill scalding coffee all over herself. It didn’t look like she’d have cared. I didn’t think I’d ever seen a purer form of hate on any face.

Well, maybe one.

“Where do you think you’re taking him?”

“Away from you!” Rosier snarled, his face white with grief. If I’d ever wondered if he loved his son, I didn’t now. “Away from you, where he should have stayed!”

“Cassie!” Jonas’ voice had sharpened. “I really must know if you’ve seen anything, anything at all, that might help us.”

“About this?” I shook my head. “No—”

“Not about this. About Ares.”

“What?” I looked up, confused, and tried to remember what we’d been talking about. But it didn’t matter, since the answer was the same. “I haven’t had a vision about anything.”

“Even in the tarot?”

“No. That is, the Star card showed up, but . . ”

“But . . . ?”

“It lied.”

“How can this be the will of the council?” Caleb demanded. “Did you hear nothing Artemis said?”

But the council was already leaving, the guards holding us back. They did not explain themselves to mere mortals. They’d killed him, and they wouldn’t even tell us why.

“Answer me!” Caleb said, because no one had ever said he lacked courage.

And then one hesitated, and slowly turned. The very last one I’d have expected. The one Mother had called Adra.

The one who had killed him.

“They heard,” Adra said quietly. “More than you, war mage.”

“Meaning what?”

The demon’s eyes found mine. “They heard the final gambit in a great game.”

“Goddamnit, Jonas!” That hadn’t been Marco or the girl, but rather the tall witch with the short gray hair, whose name I’d forgotten.

At least, I had until Jonas looked up, frowning. “Do you know, Evelyn, I really do not need—”

“It’s not your needs I’m interested in,” she said, getting in Jonas’ face. There was a war mage at his side, not Caleb, but someone I didn’t know. Someone I didn’t even remember arriving. But he made a small movement, and the witch bared her teeth at him. “Feeling lucky, sonny?”

“I don’t need luck,” he said, very low.

“No, but considering who you work for, I assume skill is too much to—”

I stopped listening.

“What are you talking about?” Caleb looked like he wanted to put a fist through Adra’s face.

I didn’t. I just wanted Pritkin to move. Wanted to see the chest go up and down. Wanted to see him open those eyes and glare at me about something, anything . . .

“I am talking about the fact that the being you call Artemis had won an entire universe for herself by her treachery, for she was the only great power left. She had ensured that by hunting the greatest of my kind to extinction, and then by exiling her own people. But she made one miscalculation. She left herself too weak to capitalize on her victory.”

“You lie!”

“Why? For telling you what you do not wish to hear?” Adra asked, unfazed. “The one you call Artemis may have founded your order, war mage, but make no mistake. It was to serve her needs, not yours.”

Caleb turned away with a curse and Adra looked at me. “We don’t know what went wrong. Perhaps the spell took more energy than she’d planned, perhaps her fellow gods fought harder than she’d expected. All we know is that the aftermath left her vulnerable, and she was forced into hiding. And she was good at it, for we sought her, those of us she had wronged. And while we did not find her, we ensured that she could not surface, could not risk feeding on our lower orders, could not regain her great strength. We might not be able to bring her to justice, but we could force her to fade into obscurity among the humans, to die alone and unsung, bitterly brooding over how close she came.”

I’d been bending over Pritkin, but at that I looked up at Adra through a veil of tumbled hair. “You’re twisting everything.”

“But we were wrong about one thing,” he told me steadily. “We underestimated, by far, how long that process of decline would take. Just when we were sure she must have died, just when we thought ourselves safe at last, she formed another plan. A plan involving a child.”

“I want a word with the Pythia,” the older witch said. It didn’t sound like a request.

“If Cassie wishes to speak with you, she may, when we are finished here,” Jonas informed her. “Perhaps you can agree that stopping the return of an ancient menace is a little more important than whatever minor issue—”

“Yes, minor,” she said. “Do let’s worry about the politics before we concern ourselves with silly women’s issues. But if I may remind you, it was a woman who brought you this information, women who assisted in getting her here, women who died tonight!”

“I am not going to do this with you, Evelyn. Really I’m not,” Jonas said, little spots of color appearing on his fair cheeks. “This is not an example of misogyny despite your strange determination to make it one. This is—”

“—ridiculous,” I said, looking at Adra in bewilderment.

“Is it? A child who would be half human. A child who could feed here, on earth, as the gods could not. A child who could be hidden in the most unlikely of places until she grew up, until she came into her power—”

“No! That isn’t what—”

“A child who could be groomed to succeed to the only power of the gods that remained on earth, and then use it to go back in time, to join forces with a mother who may have lost her strength through the centuries, but none of her cunning—”

“I’ve been fighting the gods,” I told him furiously. “Not trying to bring one back!”

“Of course you have. They are rivals, threats that could challenge and overthrow you. They had to be fought off until you could find her, and bring her here—”

“I haven’t brought her anywhere!”

“You brought her thoughts. You opened a connection in the council’s own chamber. Do you have any idea how it felt, to see her again? Standing there, alive and amused— amused—at our consternation, at our shock and fear? To hear her give orders as if no time had passed, as if nothing had changed—”

“She was giving advice, not orders. And her thoughts are not her—”

“But you are in touch with her. You can go back, can find her, whenever you like. You’ve proven that—”

“And yet she didn’t bring her here.” That was Caleb’s angry voice. “If Cassie was part of some elaborate scheme, that would have been the first thing she did on becoming Pythia. There’s no getting around that!”

Adra smiled slightly. “Isn’t there? It’s clear you were not cut out for the political realm, war mage.”

“You let her go into hell,” Evelyn said. “Yet you won’t let her save her own coven? And when did it become a case of you letting the Pythia do anything?”

“We have an understanding with the council,” Jonas told her. “And I know a council summons when I see one—just as I know a trap! There was no reason to kill those children, no reason at all, unless it was to force Cassie to come to a place and time of her enemy’s choosing—”

“What if it was? Whatever the cause, those children are just as dead—”

“And that is a tragedy. But losing Cassie would be a greater one. And at any rate, one does not willy-nilly corrupt the timeline!”

“You and I corrupted it,” I reminded him numbly. “We went back—”

“To save a world. Not a handful!”

So where do you draw the line? I wondered. At a million? A thousand? One?

Because right now one seemed a terrible loss to me.

“And what does that mean?” Caleb snapped.

“The council suspects that she is Artemis’ daughter in more ways than one,” Rosier said spitefully, answering before Adra could. “That she decided, after meeting my son, after learning not only who he is but what, that she no longer needed her mother. That with his help, she could mine the demon lords for all the power necessary to fight off her rivals, to secure her control, to rule herself—”

“I don’t want to rule!” I choked. “I didn’t even want to be Pythia.”

“And you never should have been!”

“We were talking about the information Ms. Silvanus has brought us,” Jonas said, looking at Rhea over his glasses.

“What information?” I asked, trying to force my attention back to the here and now, when all it wanted to do was go back. To find a solution. To make it right.

But some things don’t have a solution.

“The incubus has been regressed,” Adra told me. “It is an old method of execution that sends the soul back through his or her lifetime, into previous versions of himself. When his soul reaches the beginning of its life journey, it will wink out of existence, and the body will die.”

“That’s a bunch of bullsh—” Caleb began.

“It isn’t,” I said, thinking of Jules. And for a second, my heart sped up as I wondered if I could do the same thing for Pritkin. But there was a difference. Jules’ body had been changed, but his soul hadn’t. It had been in there, encased in a fleshy tomb, but present. Pritkin’s wasn’t. And it was his soul that had been cursed.

Adra had chosen his weapon perfectly.

Rhea was looking at me, her eyes huge and pained. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t need to. I knew that expression. I’d seen it in the mirror once or twice. “You had a vision,” I said.

Huge brown eyes met mine. “I never have visions,” she whispered. “Well, almost never, and never about anything important. It’s why I’m still a senior initiate and not an acolyte. I help—I helped—to train the children, the new initiates.”

“But this time you saw something.”

“I saw Ares,” she said, looking off into the distance. “Towering over a field in front of a storm-racked sky. He was here, in this world, fighting our forces. And we were losing . . . badly.”

“Was anyone else with him?” Jonas asked sharply.

“What?”

“Any other gods?”

She shook her head. “I only saw him. But it was so quick—just a flash. I was going upstairs with some cold medicine. One of the children had arrived with the sniffles and had given a nasty head cold to half the dorm, and it just . . . hit me. All of a sudden, I was somewhere else and seeing these terrible things, and there was lightning and thunder, and people were screaming and trees were crashing to the ground and the sky flooded red and . . . and I dropped the tray.”

“I probably would have, too,” I told her, because she was white and shaking again, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Yes, but the stairs are marble; everyone heard,” she said, looking at me with so much pain in her eyes that I finally got it; I wasn’t the only one feeling responsible for tonight. “And I was so upset . . . the adepts made me tell them, and at the time I didn’t realize . . . I couldn’t see any reason not to . . . until I saw. They were happy. They were pleased about it. Then they saw me looking at them, and changed their expressions. But I knew, I’d seen—”

“And so you came to tell me.”

She swallowed. “No. I should have done, but there were such rumors about you, they were saying . . . It wasn’t until the coronation that I realized—you couldn’t be what they said. The power had gone to you, the Circle had accepted you, and then at the coronation, you killed the Spartoi. You killed him!”

And suddenly, I knew why she looked familiar. “You were there.”

She nodded again. “I saw you, but I—it was obvious you were trying to be inconspicuous and I didn’t—”

“But you knew who I was.”

She looked surprised. “Of course.”

“Even though someone else was pretending to be me?”

She blinked again, like I wasn’t making much sense. “Yes, but I knew that wasn’t you. There was no power, no aura, no—” She waved it away. “It was obvious.”

So much for my great disguise.

“But the others didn’t see you, and by the time I got away from them, you had disappeared. And then when I saw you again—” She gave another graceful little hand flutter, maybe because she didn’t know a polite way of saying “you were battling a Spartoi in your birthday suit and almost getting fried.” “But then the vampires took you away, and I didn’t know how to reach you—”

“So you went to the covens.”

“Yes. My cousin—”

“And the covens brought you to me.”

“Yes.”

“So you could tell me what? What are they planning?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know, I don’t know! I tried following the adepts around, to let them think I agreed with them, hoping to find out more. . . . But I’m not an actress, and they’d seen my face that night. They didn’t believe me!”

I didn’t tell her it was okay, because it wouldn’t have helped. She didn’t look like a girl who needed platitudes. She looked like a girl who needed something to do.

I knew the feeling.

“I’ll go back,” I told Rosier. “I’ll stop the spell from being laid—”

“You will be prevented,” Adra said gently. “That is why it was done here, to preclude such a possibility.”

“Then give me the counterspell! I’ll go back in time, I’ll find his soul—” He just looked at me. “Pritkin did nothing wrong! If you have to hurt someone, hurt me!”

“They won’t hurt you. They need you,” Rosier choked. “But my son . . ”

Adra didn’t agree, but he didn’t refute it, either. And the worst part was, there was no hate in his eyes, no malice. This had been a policy decision to him, nothing more. A threat had been identified; a threat had been removed. But to me . . .

It felt like the end of the world.

“How many acolytes are there at present?” Jonas asked.

“It varies,” Rhea said, looking at me. “Most of the court is composed of junior initiates, who have just been brought in—young girls who have been identified with unusual promise. And senior initiates, that’s most of us, who have training but carry none of the power. The adepts are only a small group, chosen from the most gifted of the senior initiates. After Myra’s death, there were only five.”

I just looked at her for a moment, sure the state of my head right now was messing with me. But no. I must be hearing things. “Come again?”

“Did I—was something not clear?” she asked, starting to look worried.

“I really hope so,” I said tightly. “You said the senior initiates don’t carry the Pythian power. So by implication . . . the adepts do?”

She nodded. “They have to, for training purposes. They all receive basic instruction in the Pythian arts, and the one who masters them the best is often selected as the heir. It also allows for circumstances when an heir dies or is deposed. There has to be someone else who can take over, who has been trained. They are also available to help the Pythia, in times of need.”

“In times of need?” I looked at Jonas.

He didn’t say anything, but he took off his glasses and polished them, despite the fact that he’d just done that thirty seconds ago.

“If a mission is more hazardous than she feels would be prudent to handle alone,” Rhea explained.

I continued to look at Jonas.

“Yes, well,” he said briskly. “We already knew there was a problem with the court, thanks to Ms. Silvanus’ testimony—”

“Jonas.”

“You had enough on your plate as it was, Cassie! There was no reason to add more—”

“There was no reason to tell me there’s a whole group of Myras running around?”

“It is hardly that,” he argued. “The acolytes only have a small fraction of the heir’s power, barely enough for training—”

“Jonas.”

“And Myra was a traitor. Until now, there has been no reason to believe the rest of the court was the same, much less that they would attack their own coven—”

“Jonas!” He stopped, and looked at me. And something on my face must have registered, because he stopped whatever it was he’d been about to say. “Never keep something like this from me again. Never.”

I got up and shoved through the French doors, out onto the balcony. Jonas didn’t follow me, which was fortunate. I honestly don’t know what I’d have done if he had.

It had been this way my whole life: people keeping things from me. Sometimes for what they thought were good reasons, sometimes, most times, because knowledge was power, and the less I had of the former, the less I’d be able to challenge them for the latter. Tony, the Circle, the senate, Mircea . . . someone was always working to keep me in the dark.

But there were things in the dark that could bite you if you didn’t know they were there. If you couldn’t avoid them because you didn’t even know they existed. Knowledge wasn’t just about power; it was about survival, mine and that of everyone who depended on me.

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.