Tempt the Stars

Page 68

Huge brown eyes met mine. “I never have visions,” she whispered. “Well, almost never, and never about anything important. It’s why I’m still a senior initiate and not an acolyte. I help—I helped—to train the children, the new initiates.”
“But this time you saw something.”
“I saw Ares,” she said, looking off into the distance. “Towering over a field in front of a storm-racked sky. He was here, in this world, fighting our forces. And we were losing . . . badly.”
“Was anyone else with him?” Jonas asked sharply.
“What?”
“Any other gods?”
She shook her head. “I only saw him. But it was so quick—just a flash. I was going upstairs with some cold medicine. One of the children had arrived with the sniffles and had given a nasty head cold to half the dorm, and it just . . . hit me. All of a sudden, I was somewhere else and seeing these terrible things, and there was lightning and thunder, and people were screaming and trees were crashing to the ground and the sky flooded red and . . . and I dropped the tray.”
“I probably would have, too,” I told her, because she was white and shaking again, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Yes, but the stairs are marble; everyone heard,” she said, looking at me with so much pain in her eyes that I finally got it; I wasn’t the only one feeling responsible for tonight. “And I was so upset . . . the adepts made me tell them, and at the time I didn’t realize . . . I couldn’t see any reason not to . . . until I saw. They were happy. They were pleased about it. Then they saw me looking at them, and changed their expressions. But I knew, I’d seen—”
“And so you came to tell me.”
She swallowed. “No. I should have done, but there were such rumors about you, they were saying . . . It wasn’t until the coronation that I realized—you couldn’t be what they said. The power had gone to you, the Circle had accepted you, and then at the coronation, you killed the Spartoi. You killed him!”
And suddenly, I knew why she looked familiar. “You were there.”
She nodded again. “I saw you, but I—it was obvious you were trying to be inconspicuous and I didn’t—”
“But you knew who I was.”
She looked surprised. “Of course.”
“Even though someone else was pretending to be me?”
She blinked again, like I wasn’t making much sense. “Yes, but I knew that wasn’t you. There was no power, no aura, no—” She waved it away. “It was obvious.”
So much for my great disguise.
“But the others didn’t see you, and by the time I got away from them, you had disappeared. And then when I saw you again—” She gave another graceful little hand flutter, maybe because she didn’t know a polite way of saying “you were battling a Spartoi in your birthday suit and almost getting fried.” “But then the vampires took you away, and I didn’t know how to reach you—”
“So you went to the covens.”
“Yes. My cousin—”
“And the covens brought you to me.”
“Yes.”
“So you could tell me what? What are they planning?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, I don’t know! I tried following the adepts around, to let them think I agreed with them, hoping to find out more. . . . But I’m not an actress, and they’d seen my face that night. They didn’t believe me!”
I didn’t tell her it was okay, because it wouldn’t have helped. She didn’t look like a girl who needed platitudes. She looked like a girl who needed something to do.
I knew the feeling.
“I’ll go back,” I told Rosier. “I’ll stop the spell from being laid—”
“You will be prevented,” Adra said gently. “That is why it was done here, to preclude such a possibility.”
“Then give me the counterspell! I’ll go back in time, I’ll find his soul—” He just looked at me. “Pritkin did nothing wrong! If you have to hurt someone, hurt me!”
“They won’t hurt you. They need you,” Rosier choked. “But my son . . ”
Adra didn’t agree, but he didn’t refute it, either. And the worst part was, there was no hate in his eyes, no malice. This had been a policy decision to him, nothing more. A threat had been identified; a threat had been removed. But to me . . .
It felt like the end of the world.
“How many acolytes are there at present?” Jonas asked.
“It varies,” Rhea said, looking at me. “Most of the court is composed of junior initiates, who have just been brought in—young girls who have been identified with unusual promise. And senior initiates, that’s most of us, who have training but carry none of the power. The adepts are only a small group, chosen from the most gifted of the senior initiates. After Myra’s death, there were only five.”
I just looked at her for a moment, sure the state of my head right now was messing with me. But no. I must be hearing things. “Come again?”
“Did I—was something not clear?” she asked, starting to look worried.
“I really hope so,” I said tightly. “You said the senior initiates don’t carry the Pythian power. So by implication . . . the adepts do?”
She nodded. “They have to, for training purposes. They all receive basic instruction in the Pythian arts, and the one who masters them the best is often selected as the heir. It also allows for circumstances when an heir dies or is deposed. There has to be someone else who can take over, who has been trained. They are also available to help the Pythia, in times of need.”
“In times of need?” I looked at Jonas.
He didn’t say anything, but he took off his glasses and polished them, despite the fact that he’d just done that thirty seconds ago.
“If a mission is more hazardous than she feels would be prudent to handle alone,” Rhea explained.
I continued to look at Jonas.
“Yes, well,” he said briskly. “We already knew there was a problem with the court, thanks to Ms. Silvanus’ testimony—”
“Jonas.”
“You had enough on your plate as it was, Cassie! There was no reason to add more—”
“There was no reason to tell me there’s a whole group of Myras running around?”
“It is hardly that,” he argued. “The acolytes only have a small fraction of the heir’s power, barely enough for training—”
“Jonas.”
“And Myra was a traitor. Until now, there has been no reason to believe the rest of the court was the same, much less that they would attack their own coven—”
“Jonas!” He stopped, and looked at me. And something on my face must have registered, because he stopped whatever it was he’d been about to say. “Never keep something like this from me again. Never.”
I got up and shoved through the French doors, out onto the balcony. Jonas didn’t follow me, which was fortunate. I honestly don’t know what I’d have done if he had.
It had been this way my whole life: people keeping things from me. Sometimes for what they thought were good reasons, sometimes, most times, because knowledge was power, and the less I had of the former, the less I’d be able to challenge them for the latter. Tony, the Circle, the senate, Mircea . . . someone was always working to keep me in the dark.
But there were things in the dark that could bite you if you didn’t know they were there. If you couldn’t avoid them because you didn’t even know they existed. Knowledge wasn’t just about power; it was about survival, mine and that of everyone who depended on me.
And I was heartily sick of the dark.
Evelyn came out onto the balcony. She didn’t say anything. But her wrist was resting on the railing, not far from where my hand was clenching on it convulsively. And in hers . .
It had been a wand, I thought, watching her twirl it expertly, back and forth, between her fingers.
Our eyes met.
“I think it’s time the girls and I were going,” she said. And then she just looked at me, gray eyes into blue.
I licked my lips. “I’ll walk you out,” I said hoarsely.
Chapter Thirty-four
The mansion was dark and quiet when we shifted in to the front hall of the Pythian Court. London is seven hours ahead of Vegas, which would make it somewhere around midnight, and I had jumped us back as far as I could. Which wasn’t very damned far, because carrying five has a cost, and it is high.
I dropped to my knees, staggered at the power drain.
“Lady—”
“I’m fine,” I told Rhea, harshly enough that she jerked back her hand.
I stayed down for a moment, watching the marble tile of Agnes’ front hall pulse in and out, wondering if my eyeballs were about to pop. And cursing inwardly, because my time sense had kicked in to tell me what I’d already suspected. I’d had to drop the time shift earlier than I’d wanted or risk rupturing something.
At most, we had fifteen minutes.
Which meant I didn’t have time for this, I told myself severely, and got up.
The place looked about the same as the last time I’d been here. Shafts of what were probably streetlights, but which looked like silver moonbeams, slanted through high, neoclassical windows. There was lots of marble, some paneling that looked like it might be genuine mahogany, and a couple statues of Grecian-looking women holding jugs. A staircase, the one where Rhea had had her vision I assumed, ran up to a landing.
A chandelier tinkled softly overhead, blown about by the freshening wind through a transom. It sounded impossibly loud to my straining ears, like the world’s most expensive wind chime. Nothing else moved.
I found that less than reassuring.
Rhea seemed to think the same. “There should be guards,” she said worriedly. “The Circle—it keeps people here, all the time.”