Embrace the Night

Page 35

Pain made the world go white for a heartbeat. Then I screamed and tried to jerk away, but it did nothing except to unbalance me. I fell on my butt and kicked out at the same time, hitting the blackened face hard enough that crumbled skin fell off in a withered cascade. Stark white bone showed through, but the demon only bared its teeth at me in a parody of a grin.
“You’ll look worse in a moment,” it whispered, and upped the speed of the drain.
For a second, the world went gray. “Don’t even think about it!” Billy said frantically. “I got nothing left, Cass. Pass out and it’s over!”
“I’m fine,” I told him, biting the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood. My knives were continuing to stab and pull out, over and over, but it was as if the creature had stopped noticing them. “The neck,” I told them, my voice barely audible even to me. “Sever it.”
To my lasting shock, they not only heard but obeyed. They set to work with a will, sawing away at the tendons and flesh, until I heard them hit bone. Blood roared in my ears and my eyes were growing dark, but I wouldn’t let them close. Little pinpricks of light had started exploding in front of my vision by the time the knives finally completed their task, severing the spine with an audible crack.
The room was immediately filled with a hurricane. Clothes, bedding and shards of glass went whizzing by in dangerous parabolas that had me clutching my head and trying to shrink into as small a space as possible. I could feel everything spin crazily around me while my gut clenched and tried to force itself up my throat and my whole body seized up like a giant cramp. I wanted to pass out. I wanted to know what was happening. I wanted to see Pritkin’s face and I didn’t want there to be blood on it.
Dimly I heard yelling from somewhere nearby, but I couldn’t even work out the separate sounds. Scream after scream of tortured air passed over me, around me, but I huddled into myself and refused to look. Then, as quickly as it had started, it was gone. Utter silence descended, except for the sound of my faint, whistling breaths.
I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. It was all I could do to heave the air into and out of my lungs. My hand lay open on the floor, fingers still slightly curled around the knife I’d never used. Even with solid concrete under me I felt dizzy, like I was going to fall right off the edge of the world. At least the creature’s body was gone, I thought dully, right before I was violently sick.
It seemed to go on for a while, although my time sense was so screwed up by then that I really had no idea. My vision kept trying to go dark again, and cleared only spottily, black fading away until I could see the scuffed toes of Pritkin’s boots and the pale skin on the inner side of his bicep as he held me. My head was pounding and my body was shaking in a way I’d have been embarrassed about if I hadn’t been so busy trying not to give a repeat performance.
I got a hand on the floor, trying to get enough leverage to push myself upright, but Pritkin merely pulled me in a little closer. “Give it a moment.” His voice dripped fury, but his fingers were warm and gentle against my skin. That was good, because I felt really odd, cold and light, like a frozen bubble.
Blood speckled him from where the window had torn his flesh, tracing winding trails from his forearm to his elbow, and his eyes looked like they were having as much trouble focusing as mine. I had no idea why he wasn’t a smear on the parking lot, but then, it seemed I’d been underestimating him all along. I stared at him, speechless, but Billy Joe knew just what to say.
“So the Circle’s best-known demon hunter is half demon himself,” he commented, floating over from beside the closet. “I have to tell you, I didn’t see that one coming.”
I had to admit, neither had I.
Chapter 15
I spent the rest of the day in bed, hurting so much that even relaxing my muscles made them ache. It was hard to believe I could be this sore and live. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the attack or the whole stopping-time thing. My predecessor had died shortly after pulling that trick for the last time, which maybe should have told me something. For whatever reason, my whole body felt like one big bruise.
My mental state wasn’t much better. When I finally managed to sleep, my dreams were full of Pritkin’s face, wearing a brilliant and unguarded grin, which alone was enough to weird me out, since it wasn’t an expression I’d ever seen in real life. Then it began to sag, with waxlike rivulets of flesh running down his cheekbones to drip off his chin, eyes rolling in their sockets, the sunny grin fading to a skeletal grimace. I woke up in a cold sweat.
I stared at the patterns the bedside light made on my ceiling, consciously slowing my runaway heartbeat. This isn’t me, I told myself furiously. My breath doesn’t catch unless I tell it to. I don’t think about things I don’t want to. And I don’t scream like a little girl over a freaking nightmare. I breathed in and out for a few minutes, nice and steady, until my breath was calm without my having to work for it.
Then the door opened and Pritkin was there, staring at me. There was a sudden rumbling, rushing noise and a soft rustle of air. I screamed like a little girl.
He leapt into the room, snatched me off the bed and threw me to the floor, covering my body with his own and tucking his head down. I waited for the sickening lethargy to settle in, for the horrible sucking sensation on my power to start, but nothing happened. After a minute, the whirring noise shut off. I started to feel my face burn, despite being pressed against the cold concrete floor.
“Not that I’m not grateful for being protected from the air conditioner,” I mumbled, “but can I get up now?”
Pritkin released me, helped me back to bed, and vanished. Which was just as well. I still didn’t have the faintest idea what to say to him.
I went back to sleep like a person falling off a cliff, and didn’t dream. But by midnight, I’d slept as much as I was going to and had hit the point where boredom had overtaken aches and pains. I sat up, feeling thirsty, sweaty, and groggy. The mirror showed me a pale, washed-out version of myself, with an impression of the blanket’s weave on the left side of my face. But after a very hot shower, food and four aspirin, I went to find some answers.
Pritkin wasn’t at the scene of the crime. The glass had been swept up, though, and the opening had been covered with a sheet of heavy plastic printed to look like the once beautiful window. I assumed it was there as a placeholder, so that at least from the outside, everything looked semi-normal despite the chaos within. I could kind of relate.
I’d have liked a different perspective on things, but Billy was off duty, crashing in my necklace to soak up whatever energy it had managed to accumulate. The gold and ruby monstrosity, which was so ugly I usually wore it inside my clothes, was a talisman, storing magical energy from the natural world and feeding it to him in small doses. It was enough to allow him to remain active but was never as much as he’d have liked. I usually supplemented it from my own reserves, but at the moment I didn’t have any.
I went looking for the only other person who might know anything and found him glaring at the slots on level two. I thought from Casanova’s expression that someone must have just hit one of the big jackpots, but no. It was worse.
By then it was after one in the morning, but that’s prime time for Dante’s. So I’d thought it a little odd that fully a third of the main salon was empty, with row after row of forlorn slot machines silently begging to be petted, to be loved, and to be fed money. Then I’d rounded a corner and seen that there was, in fact, a good reason for their isolation.
Two of the three ancient demigoddesses known to myth as the Graeae were in residence. They looked harmless—short, wrinkled, and blind—except for Deino, who currently had the one eye they all shared. It must have been her lucky day, because when she grinned and gave me a little finger wave, I saw that she was also sporting their only tooth.
I’d accidentally helped to release the gals from their long imprisonment recently, which had made them my servants until they each saved my life. Considering how often I get into trouble, that hadn’t taken long. Now they were free and able, as Pritkin had put it, “to terrorize mankind again” unless I could trap them.
It was something that I absolutely intended to get around to one of these days, only it had slipped farther and farther down the to-do list lately, displaced by more-pressing crises. Françoise had volunteered to take it on for me, as a way of saying thanks for getting her semi-regular employment. I’d felt a twinge of guilt from involving her in a mess that, no matter what spin I put on it, was all mine. But frankly, a powerful witch would likely have better luck dealing with the Graeae than I would.
Not that she seemed to be doing much at the moment. She was watching them narrowly, but making no obvious attempt to trap them. She caught my eye and shrugged. “Zey ’ave a bond.”
“What?”
“A metaphysical bond,” Casanova snapped. “It causes magic to treat them as a single entity.”
I watched the gals while I absorbed that. Pemphredo was nowhere in sight, but Enyo was playing nickel blackjack and Deino was beside her, standing on a stool. She was gutting a poker machine, systematically strewing its mechanical innards all over the psychedelic carpeting. I guess she hadn’t been happy with the payoff.
I decided I needed a little more information. “So?”
Casanova tapped the small black box Françoise held in one hand. It was a magical snare that, despite its size, was perfectly capable of trapping and holding the Graeae—one just like it had once imprisoned them for centuries. “The spell,” Casanova repeated, less than patiently, “needed to get them in here and out of my hair?”
“Yeah.”
“For some reason it sees the gruesome grandmas over there as three parts of a single whole, which maybe they are, for all I know. Unless they are all present, they simply don’t register as being here at all, at least not to the spell. And they’ve figured out that we’re trying to trap them.”