Hunt the Moon

Page 20

No, of course not, I thought blankly.
It’s kind of hard to scream with no vocal cords.
And then my paralysis broke and we were pelting back toward the street, just ahead of the tidal wave boiling toward us. Mircea threw us into the road and then slammed us back against a building all in one quick movement. I stayed there, nails biting into the cold stones, as the wave shimmered through the air right past us.
I still couldn’t see it, other than as a vague distortion against the night. But I didn’t have to. I could see what it did well enough.
The sidewalk in front of the alley cracked and splintered, and the section of roadbed beside it suddenly rippled like an angry sea. The individual stones began moving up and down like keys on a piano, the whole expanse to the other side dancing as the mortar between the pieces crumbled and age pushed them out of place. It was like watching hundreds of years of wear happening in seconds.
But it didn’t stop there. A lamppost across the street began to writhe, the metal twisting and groaning as rust surged up the sides. The lamp on top cracked and then shattered, before what was left of the structure tumbled into the road, exploding against the uprooted stones.
But it didn’t stop there, either. The fence around a grassy area disintegrated in a pouf of bronze rust, glimmering in the moonlight like fairy dust. Flowers in a small bed bloomed and died and bloomed again, pushing upward against the snow as the sticklike sapling they hedged suddenly shot toward the sky. Limbs bulged, bark flowed and leaves sprouted in abundance. Acorns rattled down like rain as the leaves changed and fell and sprouted again, piling up around the rapidly thickening trunk like a mountain.
I blinked, and when I looked again, it was at a fully grown tree, branches huge and rustling, spreading luxuriantly against the night where a moment before there had been only sky. I stared up at it, the breath coming fast in my lungs, because no way. No freaking way.
I’d been willing to take the shifting thing on faith, to believe that maybe the mage had somehow learned a spell the others hadn’t, or had a special talent that allowed him to control the needed power, or had just gotten really lucky. But that? That was the sort of thing that only a Pythia could do—and a damned well-trained one at that.
Or a well-trained Pythian heir.
My head turned on its own, and I found myself staring at the darkened mouth of the alley again. It looked a little different now, the bricks on either side of the entrance cracked and discolored and in some cases missing altogether, crumbled into dust. But there was no sign of the mage, nothing to show that a man had ever been there, much less that he had suffered and died on those stones. It was almost like nothing had ever happened.
But it had.
And my mother had done it.
“I believe it has stopped,” Mircea said softly, examining a nearby fountain. As far as I could tell, the wave had done nothing more than add a little to the verdigris etching over the elaborate metalwork. It should have made me feel better, because I’d had no clue how to counter it if it had just kept going.
But it didn’t.
“Why would she help him?” I asked harshly.
Mircea looked up. I couldn’t see him very well with the only nearby lamppost now a bunch of rusted shards in the street. But he didn’t sound surprised when he answered; he’d probably been thinking the same thing. “He must have her under a compulsion.”
“But . . . why bother? If he could make her do anything, he could order her to kill herself! He doesn’t need—”
“If he wished to kill her, why not do so at the party? Why take the risk of trying to control power like that?” He sounded slightly awed, as if he’d never before seen precisely what a Pythia could do. And maybe he hadn’t.
It sure as hell was news to me.
“Why take her at all, then?” I demanded.
“As you said, the Guild exists to disrupt time. But their power is insufficient to allow them to travel where they wish. And even when they manage to collect enough, through whatever means, for a shift, there remains the problem of controlling it. Perhaps they decided—”
“That it would be easier to get themselves a pet Pythia,” I rasped. “To act as their goddamned cab ride!”
“It would make sense.”
I didn’t say anything. But I had a sudden, vicious image of the mage, kneeling in place in that alley, hair shooting out of his head as his body slowly disintegrated along with his clothes. It was surprisingly satisfying.
“What do you wish to do?” Mircea asked, as a lone figure darted across the end of the street. One of the remaining mages, no doubt. I was going to have to get them back to their own time before they screwed up something here, whenever this was. But that would have to come later. Right now, my mother was top priority, or there wouldn’t be a later.
“I want to find her,” I said savagely.
“Then let’s go find her.”
Two streets over, we came to another alley that looked a lot like the first, except that the light spilling in the end of this passage was a dim, hazy gold. The sun hadn’t suddenly come up, so I assumed that the light was man-made. It went with the sound of horses’ hooves on cobblestone, the rattle of wheels, and the shouts of people hawking something nearby.
I didn’t see my mother, but I kind of thought she might have been by.
“What is that?” Mircea demanded, staring at a mage loping along in the shadows beside us.
His arms were pumping, his legs were working, and his long coat was flapping out behind him as if caught in a stiff breeze. Only he wasn’t going anywhere. He also wasn’t paying any attention to us, which wasn’t surprising.
As far as he was concerned, we weren’t there yet.
Mircea frowned and reached out a hand, as if to give him a push. Until my fingers tightened over his wrist. “Don’t do that.”
He looked a question.
“Time loop,” I told him shortly, moving closer to the mouth of the alley. I was cautious, staying well inside the shadows provided by some stacked crates. I didn’t think my mother could manage another wave like that so soon—if she could, the man behind us likely wouldn’t be alive. But I wasn’t sure. And that little demonstration earlier wasn’t something you just forgot.
I kept telling myself that it hadn’t been her, that she hadn’t chosen to kill him like that, that she hadn’t known. But it still sent chills rippling over my flesh. God, what a horrible way to—
“Time loop?” Mircea asked, putting a hand on my shoulder.
I jumped and almost screamed.
He lifted an eyebrow at me, cool as always. Like he regularly saw people disintegrate into puddles of flesh. I licked my lips and told myself to get a grip.
“He’s stuck on repeat,” I explained, glancing back at the mage running his personal marathon.
“And that means?”
“That he’ll keep reliving the same few seconds over and over until the bubble fades or he breaks out of it.”
“He’s encased in a time bubble?”
“Yes.”
“Then why can’t I sense it?” Mircea asked, wrinkling his nose, as if he expected to be able to smell it or something.
I thought that unlikely. All I could smell was pee. The alley must serve as the local latrine.
“Did you sense the other one?” I asked.
“Not . . . precisely. But I saw something, like a current in the air—”
“Probably caused by the different weather patterns that piece of air was shifting through,” I told him, figuring it out as I spoke. “Rain, sleet, snow—on fast forward, they’re going to make it look a little weird.”
“Then you’re saying I didn’t actually see anything.”
“You can’t see time, just what it does.”
His fingers tightened. “Then your mother could throw a bubble over us and we would never see it coming?”
“Something like that,” I said grimly.
Mircea abruptly pulled me behind him.
“That won’t help,” I said, peering between the crates at a busy street. “If she hits you with something, I probably won’t know how to counter it. And without you, the mage can take me out easily.” He’d managed to throw a master vamp at a wall, so that was sort of a given.
“Then how do we fight something we cannot see?” Mircea demanded.
I glanced back at him. “By not getting hit with it in the first place.”
“And how do we do that?”
“I’m open to suggestion,” I told him honestly.
I actually had no idea what to do. I’d assumed that my mother would be resisting her captor, and that when we caught up with him, the fight would be three against one. I’d liked those odds; I’d been all about those odds. I wasn’t so thrilled with these.
Because I couldn’t manipulate time like that. I hadn’t known that anybody could manipulate time like that. And while I had to get only a finger on her to shift her away, I had to stay alive long enough to do it.
I also had to find her. But the light was lousy and the street was packed with people rushing home through the cold. Most were in dark colors—brown or black or dark gray—not electric blue. But outside the illumination of shop doors and gas lamps, pretty much everything looked the same. If she stayed in the shadows, she’d blend in perfectly.
But while I couldn’t see her, I could feel her rapidly getting farther away, the golden cord between us stretching like an elastic band. “She’s moving,” I said, and ducked out into the street.
Mircea didn’t try to stop me, but he looked less than thrilled. I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t any happier. As if I didn’t have enough other reasons, I was freezing to death. Unfortunately, my coat was a century or so away.
He must have noticed me shivering, because he stripped off the jacket of his tux and put it around me. It was thin, but the wool was top quality and still warm from his body. I clutched it around me as we dodged a street preacher, a hawker selling roasted nuts and a seemingly endless line of wagons.