Curse the Dawn

Page 71

“If I’m going to die tonight, I would prefer it to be with a little dignity!”
“I don’t get you,” I said, leaning against the wall for support. My five-inch, fire-engine-red, glitter-covered Mary Janes were just as hard on the ankles as they looked. “You just spent over a day in a woman’s body—”
“Not by choice!”
“—and you’re hundreds of years old. Didn’t men once wear makeup and—”
“Court fops, perhaps. I wasn’t one!”
“Then expand your horizons,” I told him, throwing a boa around his neck. “And pick something.”
Pritkin eyed the selection Dee had provided with loathing. She noticed and crossed her arms over her massive chest. “You’re cute, but you’re getting on my last gay nerve.”
“I’m never going to live this down,” Pritkin muttered, snatching up an opera-length cape made of a profusion of gold lamé ruffles. It must have been designed with platforms and towering wigs in mind, because it swept the floor after him and the hood covered his head and face. I decided it would do.
A few minutes later, three sequined and bejeweled visions glided out of the club and into the middle of the crush on Main Street. Dee was in front, providing distraction, her massive breasts jutting out in front of her like the prow on a ship. Pritkin and I followed behind. I was kind of short for a drag queen, even in the platforms, but the rainbow-sequined jumpsuit and towering Marilyn Monroe wig more than made up for it.
The mages were everywhere, their eyes scanning the exiting crowd. Yet most barely glanced at us, despite the spectacle we made. And those who did quickly looked away when Dee blew them kisses or flashed a little thigh. It looked like hiding in plain sight might work after all. I’d barely had the thought when a vision crashed into me with all of the subtlety of a baseball bat to the head. It knocked the breath out of me and dropped me to my knees. It was like nothing I’d experienced before, vivid and crystal clear, and so solid that I couldn’t even see the street anymore.
Vegas was burning, fire leaping into the sky, shedding sparks like shooting stars. It was impossible to recognize anyone in the darkness and chaos or to pick out a single voice among the panicked crowd. Just screams and faceless, running people.
Beyond, the desert sand was being consumed, mile after mile under a blackened sky. Long after all the scrub had burnt, it raged on. Like a forest fire without a forest, or what it was: a seemingly endless exclamation of wrath from a creature with power and rage and centuries of bottled resentment but no compassion. No compassion at all.
The world had remembered the healer, the lyre player, the golden god, but had forgotten the other stories. The ones that whispered of brutal punishments, of rape and murder and a beautiful face that laughed as it flayed its enemies alive. They remembered now, for an instant, before memory was wiped clear in a rain of blood.
The vision shattered as abruptly as it had come, leaving me gasping on all fours in the middle of the sidewalk. “—a little too much wine with dinner, you know how it is. Always was a drinker,” Dee was saying to someone. She reached down and pinched my cheek. “Come on, love. Up you go. You can pass out at home.”
She dragged me to my feet and I did my best to keep my head down when what I actually wanted was to run back up the street screaming. My dreams had been warning me all along, but I’d been blind to what they really meant. And now it might be too late.
A cold wire tightened around my heart. There was something wrong with my chest; I couldn’t seem to get a deep breath. What had I done?
Dee and Pritkin started towing me back toward the lobby again. I gripped their arms. “We can’t leave.”
“Oh, yes, we can,” Dee said. “I think I just ruined this dress. My heart can’t take another scare like that!”
“We’ll deal with whatever it is later,” Pritkin told me, hurrying us along.
“Apollo’s here.”
He stopped abruptly, and we were almost run down by a harassed-looking woman with a kid in each hand. “Watch it!” she snapped, pulling the kids around. Pritkin dragged me over to the sidewalk.
“That’s impossible!” he hissed. “The spell—”
“He got around it,” I whispered. “I don’t know how, but I Saw it. He’s here!”
He was shaking his head in disbelief. “That spell has held for more than three thousand years. Yet he suddenly finds a way around it now?”
“I can’t explain it. I just know what I Saw.”
“It could be the future, the outcome of a civil war within the Circle. What could happen if we don’t solve our internal—”
“No!” I looked around, rubbing my arms as chills broke out all over them. “I’ve been Seeing the same thing ever since MAGIC blew up. But only in pieces, like my usual visions. But this . . . He’s here. I know it!”
“He can’t be.” Pritkin was adamant.
Dee had been looking at us out of the corner of her eye, and she’d started to edge away when I grabbed her wrist. “You told me once you can sense magic, right?”
“Maybe,” she said warily.
“Can you sense anything unusual now?”
“Other than the battle raging upstairs?” she asked with understandable sarcasm.
“I mean a single source, stronger than all the others. Like . . . like a supernova.”
“Maybe. But it don’t matter because there’s no way I’m going back in there! Not for—”
“A shopping spree at Augustine’s? Ten minutes, anything you can grab?”
Her eyes narrowed and she looked me over. “You got that kind of cash?”
“I’ve got that kind of credit.”
“I’d think you were lying, but you did have those shoes. . . .” She licked her lips. “Half an hour, take it or leave it.”
A war mage walked up. “There’s a mandatory evacuation,” he told us. “You’ll have to be moving on.”
“I’ll take it,” I said.
“Shit. I knew you were going to say that,” Dee told me, and slammed her gigantic purse into the mage’s face. He went down, and may have also gotten stepped on as 250 pounds of satin-clad fashionista ran over him and headed back up the street.
We ran to catch up, battling the tide of humanity going the other way. Mages were converging on us from all sides—it wasn’t like we were easy to miss. I grabbed Dee’s train to keep it from getting trampled and she towed me along like a freight train, scattering tourists and roses everywhere.
We passed the fake feed store that marked the halfway point with most of the mages on the street after us, and plowed into a dozen more. They’d formed a half-moon shape in the street, forcing the crowd to surge around them and re-form. As soon as we ran out of tourists, we barreled straight into them.
Dee almost knocked a hole in the wall of leather coats, but they kept their feet. I looked behind us, but the mages had closed the circle, leaving us nowhere to run. And then one of the closest caught sight of me. “Cassandra Palmer.”
The brown eyes searching my face still looked like they belonged to a mid-level flunky, but the snarl kind of ruined the effect. I didn’t say anything, panic and exhaustion closing my throat. But Saunders didn’t seem to expect an answer.
His gaze slid to Pritkin, who had stopped beside me. “Or is it?”
He looked Pritkin up and down, taking in the ruffled gold cape with a raised brow. “I’ve heard it whispered that the Pythia has more skills than she lets on. It would appear to be true. I’ve always been told that possession is impossible for humans, but either I accept that I was misinformed, or I have to believe that a slip of a girl threw me against a wall and almost shattered my shields. Which do you think I prefer?”
Pritkin didn’t answer him, either. He fiddled with his cape instead, looking twitchy and almost nervous. Saunders smiled.
“Of course, I could solve the riddle by killing both of you, but that would leave no one to put on trial. And the public does love the legal niceties,” he said, taking a few steps back. He glanced around, but the crowd had thinned and the few remaining tourists were being hustled out of the way by the mages who had been following us.
At a nod, his men parted to either side, pulling Dee and me back, and leaving Saunders and Pritkin alone in the middle of the street. “On a count of three, I think?” he asked politely. “Wasn’t that the way things were settled in the old—”
Pritkin threw out a hand and Saunders sailed off his feet, into the air and smashed against the side of a fake barn. Judging by the sound his skull made on impact, I didn’t think he’d bothered with shields. He slid down the side, bounced off a wagon and was speared by the iron spike atop a menu sign.
I swallowed and looked away as his body began to spasm. No. Definitely no shields.
The mage holding my arm twisted it painfully behind me. I cried out and tried to pull away, but there was nowhere to go. There was another group of mages jogging down the street toward us, as if the other side needed reinforcements.
One of them, a tall African-American in a battered coat, pushed his way through the circle to me. “Hello, Cassie,” he said somberly. He looked at the mage holding me. “Let her go, son.”
“They just killed the Lord Protector!”
Caleb scanned the area until his eyes lit on Saunders’ still quivering form. “Doesn’t look dead to me. Don’t you think you boys should maybe get him down?” I suddenly found myself released as the Apprentices rushed to aid their fallen leader.
“Caleb—” Pritkin began.
His onetime colleague raised a hand. “Jonas called us. Said he challenged and Saunders refused.”
“Yes.” Pritkin went very still.
Caleb exchanged glances with the mages he’d brought along. None of them looked young enough to be trainees. Several had gray hair, and one or two looked like they might even be Marsden’s age. Their expressions ranged from sour to disgusted to war mage neutral.