Embrace the Night

Page 54

After a few seconds gasping for breath, I peered through a curtain of tangled hair to see a leering, doglike face sticking out its tongue at me. I blinked at it, but its expression didn’t change. After another few seconds, my brain caught up and informed me that whatever my hands were clutching, it wasn’t alive.
I was suspended from a stone gargoyle that looked out over what would probably have been a panoramic view of Paris had it been daytime. Below, tiny lights occasionally lit up bits of the world between the shadows, and a sliver of moon danced on the Seine. I was on top of Notre Dame. Somehow I’d come full circle.
My arms were tired, my shoulders ached and it was a very long way down. With a lot of muffled swearing, I hauled my body over the side of the parapet and dropped onto the floor. My knees gave way and I abruptly sat down, clinging gratefully to the heavenly feel of a non-moving surface. The stone floor was cold and wet with half-melted snow, but for a second I seriously thought about kissing it.
The stars seemed to be spinning around above me, so I sat there, panting, until they stopped. The orb had landed a few yards away, and I watched it pulsing its strange light against the high stone wall of the parapet. At least Pritkin couldn’t follow me, I realized, and the idea cheered me up immensely.
I started searching the area for Pritkin’s clothing, which had scattered everywhere when I landed and the knot in my skirts came loose. I collected it into a small bundle in front of me and set about carefully examining each piece. I’d gotten away with a pair of woolen trousers, a white linen shirt with drawstring ties at neck and wrists, a potion-studded belt, a pair of sturdy leather boots and some warm woolen socks.
I regarded the latter with a twinge of guilt. I hadn’t expected him to be so literal, to even remove his footwear. Apparently, he’d believed that a bargain was a bargain, and I hadn’t made any exceptions to my demand. Or maybe he’d felt bad about subjecting me to that. Maybe he’d thought he deserved a few cold toes, at least…Okay, no. Probably not. But still, the socks made me feel a little bad.
Not bad enough to keep me from putting them on, though. The boots were too large, but I pulled them on as well, lacing them as tight as I could. I’d lost my shoes somewhere over Paris, and I wasn’t going to search for Mircea barefoot.
I looked through everything twice, then went back through it one more time, checking every seam for hidden compartments. I even held the little potion bottles up to the light, just in case he’d somehow stuffed a slip of paper into one of them, but no dice. The map wasn’t there.
Of course not, I thought furiously. I’d hoped that he’d been so ready to assume I’d stolen it that he hadn’t checked thoroughly before accusing me. But it looked like he’d been telling the truth. He really had lost it. And that meant it could be anywhere: still on the barge, trodden underfoot in the battle, or dropped as he dangled from his shields ten stories above the city. I would never find it.
I got up on tiptoe and leaned over the parapet, to see if anything might have fallen below. For the most part, the sky was brighter than the city, with buildings casting black shadows that wiped out everything in their path, like big slices of the world were just gone. But the famous rose window glowed as brightly as a searchlight against the black sky, illuminating the cobblestone expanse in front of the main doors of the cathedral. Nothing was there.
I was still standing there, trying to think what to do, when a brilliant yellow flash lit the night sky. I looked up to see half of an enraged, naked war mage leaning out of a ley line, his hair whipping across his livid face as he shot straight at me. I yelped and stumbled back, cursing myself. It looked like Pritkin wasn’t as exhausted as I’d thought. And with his shields intact, he didn’t need clothes or toys to access the ley lines. I scooped up his weapons in my transparent skirts and ran for it.
He landed right behind me, his eyes wild, his hair smoking from the energy that had leaked through his overtaxed shields. For the first time he looked like his father’s son. I looked around frantically and spied a single wooden door inside the bell tower. Mercifully, it wasn’t locked.
I saw Pritkin for a split second as I spun around to close it, silhouetted against the dim gray arches leading out to the parapet. He was almost to the door already, just a few steps behind me, as if he hadn’t even broken his stride in leaving the line behind. I didn’t try reasoning with him; his expression told me how well that was likely to go over. I slammed the door in his face, threw the bolt and fled.
The winding, claustrophobic staircase was so narrow that my dress brushed it on either side, and it was completely black except for the orb’s dim glow and occasional tiny elongated windows that showed slivers of the slightly less black outside. I could see maybe two steps in front of me as I wound my way downwards, trying to hurry without slipping on stones that were already slick with hundreds of years of wear.
I heard a crash behind me, and burning bits of wood cascaded down the steps along with a lot of sparks. It looked like Pritkin had used a fireball spell on the door. Luckily, the curves of the staircase shielded me from most of it, while he had to traverse a minefield of fiery splinters in bare feet. Unluckily for me, he seemed to manage it just fine.
He grabbed me when I was barely halfway down the stairs, and the impact made me lose my footing. We tumbled, half falling, half rolling down the narrow, twisting spiral. I’d been holding the contents of his potion belt in the folds of my dress, and as I fell, little vials were slung everywhere. Some tumbled along with us, while others exploded against the walls, flooding the stairwell with a pungent stench that immediately brought tears to my eyes. Something must have splashed on Pritkin, because he cursed and let go.
I heard him falling, but I couldn’t help him. I lost my grip on the orb, which went bouncing down the stairs, disappearing around a turn and leaving the stairwell in complete darkness. The only reason I didn’t follow it was because I’d gotten my fingernails into one of the narrow windows, the only possible traction. The stench from the potions was unbelievable, but the cold night air from the window allowed me to breathe. I clung there, straining to hear over my own gasps, but there was no sound other than the wind outside.
“Are you hurt?” I finally yelled, but only echoes answered. I didn’t hear so much as a groan from below. The stairwell was suddenly eerily quiet.
I bit my lip, but there wasn’t really anything to think about. Even if I hadn’t been worried about Pritkin, there was no other way out. There was only one staircase from the bell tower and I was on it. And ley-line travel was impossible, even if I was willing to risk that again, with the orb at the bottom of the staircase.
After another deep breath, I took the plunge, through a miasma of fumes and shattered vials that crunched under my boots. At the bottom of the stairs, the orb had halted at a wooden door, presumably leading outside. Next to its small puddle of light, Pritkin lay on his side in a crumpled heap, not moving. I forgot about caution and ran down the last few steps, kneeling in the small area before the door, desperately feeling for a pulse under the skin of his neck.
He was warm, which I took as a good sign, but for a long moment I couldn’t feel anything else. Heavy strands of hair had wrapped around his neck, and I tugged them loose before trying again. I almost sobbed with relief when I finally found it, a tiny pulse that beat strong and sure under my fingertips. But a sticky wetness dripped off his jaw onto my hand, and after a little exploration, I found a nasty-looking cut on his scalp and another on his upper arm.
I propped open the door to let some of the vapors out, and turned back to find Pritkin on his feet. “It’s only fair,” he said nastily, before grabbing me by the shoulders and slamming me back against the unforgiving stone of the wall.
“Let go of me!” I twisted and fought, but he held me there while his eyes did a visual strip search by the faint light of the orb.
“Give it to me!”
“I don’t have it!”
“No more lies!” Pritkin hissed.
“I never found it!” I yelled, pushing at him but getting nowhere. “Now let me go or I swear—” He shut me up by kissing me, hard and angry, so angry that I didn’t know what to do except let him, silenced by him swallowing all my air. It was oddly like he was yelling at me in a new way, since all the old ones hadn’t worked. I felt the scrape of stubble and the indent of his fingers through the silk, pressing me closer, then he tore away, those icy eyes vibrantly green.
“Tell me!”
Startled out of fighting for a moment, I stared up at him, panting. There was drying blood tightening the skin on his forehead and a blooming bruise on his chin, but his eyes were glittering brighter than I’d ever seen them. A sweet, heavy warmth started to spread through me, and despite the cold I could feel sweat springing to the surface of my skin. Suddenly the idea of Pritkin as half incubus seemed plausible for the first time.
The suggestion surged through my veins, almost like a drug. “I was looking for it when you attacked me,” I said, not fighting it. I was telling the truth, and I needed to save my strength to escape. “I thought you had it on you, but it wasn’t in your clothes.”
“I said no more lies!” Pritkin kissed me again, hard, taking my lower lip in his teeth, biting. His lips were cold and a little chapped from the winter wind, but his kiss was deep, hot and hungry. My heart sped up, flight reflexes kicking in, but I wasn’t pushing him away. Suddenly my hands were clutching his shoulders, my nails clawing at the bunched muscles they found there, and I was kissing him back, brutally.
I wrapped my right leg around his, feeling him hard against my silk-clad thigh, while he tore at the lacings on my back. I wasn’t wearing much underneath the dress—the tight fit had made a bra unnecessary—which became obvious when he pushed the dress down to my waist. The feel of the freezing air on my skin slammed me back into my body, as he ran his hands over me. The only minor satisfaction was that he didn’t look much better than I did. His skin was shiny with sweat, and it was running out of his hair and down the back of his neck. And despite everything, I wanted to bury my face in that limp hair, to lick that glistening skin, to bite that flexing shoulder.