Tempt the Stars

Page 60

“Oh, shit!”
And I guess Casanova agreed. Because he grabbed Caleb, who grabbed the other bit of rope. “No, Caleb takes Cassie!” Pritkin said. “You come with—”
I didn’t hear the rest, if there was any, because I was being shoved brutally backward. I hit concrete hard, just as red lightning exploded where we’d all been standing, and part of the roof disintegrated into a mass of flying stone. I would have ducked and covered my head, but it was the part Caleb and Casanova had been standing on, and I was screaming and scrambling up and—
And watching them zoom away along the slender lifeline that Caleb had somehow managed to snag even as they dropped. An almost dizzying wash of relief flooded me. They were going to be all right; as long as the line held, they were going to be—
“Cassie!” There were spells going off everywhere, deafeningly loud, but I heard that and my head jerked around. To see Pritkin, lit for a second by unnatural spell light, and silhouetted against a massive ball of boiling energy coming this way. And then I was grabbing him because he couldn’t grab me and the rope, too, assuming he was able to grab it at all when I couldn’t even see it with all the weird jumping light—
And then we were jumping, too, and falling, and the roof was exploding and—
And there was a disorienting moment of free fall amid flying debris and hot, rushing air, and no, no, no, no, NO—
But then we caught—a barely perceptible jerk on a filament of line that hardly changed the feel of things at all because this was almost free fall, too—a crazy mix of whistling wind and abject terror and pant-wetting desperation. And that was just the initial descent. Then we hit the curve at the bottom, where the line dipped almost all the way down to the street and I felt loose pebbles in the roadbed roll under my filthy toes for a moment, a completely surreal experience that would have lifted my heart to my throat if it hadn’t already taken up permanent residence there—
And then we took off, our momentum shooting us up and forward at the same time, on a mad slalom down a constantly changing street.
For a long moment, I couldn’t see anything but a rush of neon on either side, colorful streamers like kites in the night, rising and falling as signs and buildings sprang in and out of existence and taxis honked and people shouted at us or ran to get out of the way.
But for some insane reason, I was laughing as we ran up a car’s roof, pushed off, sprang over top of a bus, swooped down on the other side right in front of another madly honking car, and then bounced up onto a red, double-decker bus that caught us just as our improvised zip line gave up the ghost.
I hit the open aisle, still gasping on wild, insane, out-ofcontrol laughter to match a crazy situation that couldn’t possibly exist, but somehow did, and it took me a second to realize that Pritkin was laughing, too. And then we were running down the spiral stairs and jumping onto the sidewalk and crashing into Caleb and Casanova as they ran up to us on the street.
“Show-off,” Caleb said breathlessly.
From there it was a short dash through the doors of the great building, and across a strangely normal-looking lobby, and down a not-so-normal looking hall, and then through a set of double doors—
Into a seemingly endless dark oval, slick and seamless, and littered with stars.
And a voice that crashed like thunder all around us. “Council is now in session.”
Chapter Thirty
I don’t know what I’d expected. Maybe a courtroom or a boardroom, something made to look comfortingly familiar to human eyes. But all that had ended at the door. I guess if you made it this far, you either weren’t supposed to need comforting or weren’t thought to deserve it.
I wondered which category we fit in as I gazed around, trying to get a grip.
It was a little hard, since there was nothing to grip on. It was like we’d stepped out of a spaceship into a star field, being suddenly confronted by a big, dark space and hundreds, maybe thousands, of versions of the light creature I’d seen on the drag. Some were small and dim, others large and brilliant, but I couldn’t tell if that had to do with power or if some were just closer than others.
I couldn’t tell much of anything else, either, since I literally couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. There was plenty of light in here, but it didn’t seem to reflect on anything. It was like the space between the stars, limitless and black, just a featureless void.
And creepy as hell.
It was also really inconvenient. Not only couldn’t I see Pritkin’s face, or Caleb’s or even Casanova’s despite the fact that he’d been right beside me a second ago, but the utter darkness was playing havoc with my sense of direction. I kept thinking I was about to fall over but couldn’t seem to do that, either. Or maybe I already had. My brain kept sending me weird sensations, like maybe I wasn’t entirely vertical anymore.
It sort of felt like we were floating, just random spirits washing along on the tide, me, the guys, a bunch of pissed-off demon lords . .
“We all float down here,” Caleb muttered, somewhere off to my left, as if he’d heard me. And yes, that’s what I need right now, Caleb, I thought viciously, Stephen freaking King. But, for once, my brain didn’t latch onto the prompt and start torturing me. Maybe because it already had that covered.
It was so unbelievably quiet. After that initial statement, nothing else was said. I didn’t know if they were waiting for us, if we were supposed to do or say something, but nobody was. Including Pritkin, who had been here before, so presumably knew the drill. So I didn’t, either, but it wasn’t fun.
I’d read somewhere that the human brain doesn’t do so well when deprived of the usual sources of input. Like when people go into those sound-deadening chambers that cut out normal background noise. It would seem like it should be restful, peaceful even, all that quiet . .
But after a few minutes, their input-starved brains start to freak out, because they need that kind of stuff for navigation and balance and to not start imagining monsters in the corners.
Not that that was an issue here.
But only because this place didn’t have corners.
No, it just had a crap-load of things that went bump in the night and who didn’t like me much and who ate people anyway and who probably thought they were due some payback after everything Mom had put them through and—shut up, Cassie.
Yeah. Yeah, that would be good. Except that when I shut down my mental babble, I started having trouble with the auditory stuff, half-heard whispers and distant, not-found-on-earth sounds. And odd rustlings, like if I could see behind the collective light show, what was there wouldn’t look entirely human. Or, you know, at all.
And okay, maybe I’d been wrong.
Maybe dark wasn’t so bad.
And then it suddenly wasn’t anymore.
Two things happened at once: my mother popped into the middle of the huge space, shedding a large halo of light around her, and a massive power drain hit, hard enough to send me staggering.
Not a normal I’m-so-tired drain, like the one I’d been experiencing lately . . . like ever since I visited her. And yeah, maybe I should have put that together before now. But this was worse, and also a lot more literal, as if all that power I hadn’t been able to access for things like shifting and fighting and saving my life had been welling up, like a wall of bright water behind a dam. A dam that had just been breached.
And oh, crap.
I could almost see it, a sparkling river of power flowing from me to her, curling around her feet in a glistening stream. Or maybe a flood because this was way, way more power than I used for shifting or stopping time or . . . or anything. Way more than I’d ever channeled at once before in my life.
And that was despite the fact that she wasn’t really here. I could see stars through her on the other side, although she wasn’t a ghost. I knew ghosts. It was more like she was on an intertemporal version of Skype.
And the signal was running straight through me.
So it took me a moment to pull myself together, to pay attention to something besides the forceful complaints of my too-human body, and to notice—that she looked exactly the same.
Okay, maybe not exactly. There were a few changes; the mane of bright hair was a copper flame in the darkness, the violet eyes were huge and luminous, the porcelain skin glowed like it had its own light source. But she was still dressed in simple white, she wasn’t thirty feet tall or a mass of boiling energy like the last god I’d seen, and she wasn’t carrying any of the props I suppose I’d subconsciously expected: bows, arrows, shield, crown. . .
It wasn’t that I was disappointed . . . exactly. It’s just that, well, we could have used a little intimidation factor right now. Instead, she took a moment to survey the scene and then smiled, almost coquettishly. “It has been a long time, my lords. Miss me?”
Not cool, Mom, I thought a little desperately, as an unhappy rumble reverberated around the room.
But it didn’t seem to bother her. Long eyelashes shadowed porcelain cheeks for a moment as a wry smile tugged at her lips. “No. I suppose not.”
“We know you, oh, Ninmesarra.”
One of the stars dropped from the sky, transforming into a pleasant-looking man in a dark business suit. He was blond, like Rosier, but the similarities ended there. His hair was thin and sleeked back, his face was round and not particularly memorable, except for a noticeable cleft in an otherwise unremarkable chin. He looked young, maybe my age, maybe a few years older, and his voice was mild, almost sweet.
I frowned at him.
He had no business being a demon.
“What we do not know is why you come before us,” he added, stopping a few feet away from the glow Mother was shedding on—yes, there was a floor down there, I guess for the use of us corporeal types. I could see it when he walked, in the shadows shed by his body. Because Mother’s light did throw them.
And it was amazing how much better I felt, just seeing those few square feet of normality. I picked my feet up, one at a time, and put them back down again, deliberately scraping them over the floor I could actually feel now. And the weird loop-de-loop my brain had been do