Curse the Dawn
Page 17

“I don’t understand why you threw everything away in support of her, but it may not be too late,” Liam told him, suddenly earnest. “Help me bring her in and I’ll vouch for you. We all will. You can say anything—that you were bewitched, that she and those vampires did something to you—and as long as she’s out of the way, the Council will believe it. We need people like you now more than ever!”
“And the girl?” Pritkin demanded.
“She’ll get a trial,” Liam said, his face closing down.
“A trial she’ll lose.”
“It’s one life! One life against the thousands who will die if we can’t bring cohesion back to the Circle. You or I would gladly give our own lives in such a cause. If she’s any kind of Pythia, can she do less?”
“You can’t have it both ways,” Pritkin said harshly. “By your reasoning, she’s evil and must be destroyed before she can help our enemies, or she’s innocent and must be destroyed to preserve the Circle. Either way, she dies.”
“For the common good!”
“For the Circle’s good. I’m not so sure that has much to do with what’s good for everybody else. Not anymore.”
“What did she do to you?” Liam asked, his voice soft with amazement. “You almost died defending the Circle on more than one occasion!”
“It was a different organization then.”
“Nothing has changed! I know Marsden has been stirring up trouble, but—”
A spell came out of the night and dropped Liam to his knees. I looked around, confused, because Pritkin hadn’t cast it. A tall African-American mage stepped forward as Liam toppled over. He had a buzz cut and enough muscles to give Marco a run for his money. “We don’t have time for this,” he said harshly, and waved a hand at me.
My power suddenly came rushing back, a steady hum running under my skin, through my bones, singing in my cells, ready, ready, ready. I pulled it around me like a familiar coat as the mage glowered at me. “Caleb, meet Cassie,” Pritkin said dryly.
The mage didn’t look to be in the mood for pleasantries. “We have no way to get them out, assuming there is anyone alive down there. But you do,” he told me.
It had the flavor of a command more than a request, especially in his deep baritone. But at the moment, I wasn’t feeling picky. I didn’t really believe anyone had survived that, wards or no. But I had to know for sure. “I can take only two people with me,” I said.
“Me and Pritkin,” Caleb said, extending his hand. I eyed it unhappily. I’d already taken one mage’s hand tonight, and look where that had got me.
Pritkin didn’t say anything, letting me make the decision for once. Only there wasn’t much of one to make. Whatever my feelings toward the Circle, right now, I needed the help. I took his hand. “Where to?” I asked Pritkin.
“How strong is your ward?”
“I think the ley line blew it out. Why?”
“That creates a problem,” he said, glancing at the other mage.
“Don’t look at me,” Caleb said grimly. “The line all but fried me before I could get out of there, and what was left I expended shielding us from the debris. I’m done.” There was a general round of agreement from the watchers. It looked like nobody had shields worth a damn.
“What difference does it make?” I demanded. The idea that there might actually be survivors had lodged in my head and was beating a frantic tattoo against my skull. I felt almost dizzy at the rapid shift of emotions—from disbelief to rage to numb horror to barely acknowledged hope—all in the space of maybe half an hour.
“We can’t risk shifting in there without a ward,” Pritkin said flatly. “MAGIC’s shields may have held, but if not, we could find ourselves inside a landslide—”
“Then I’ll shift us back out!”
“—or solid rock.”
“We have to risk it!” Pritkin was usually the one pulling the crazy stunts. This was no time for him to learn caution.
“We can’t.” It sounded final.
“Watch me,” I told him seriously.
“There is a difference between courage and foolhardiness! Dying yourself will not help—”
“And neither will standing here! Rafe deserves better than that from me. He’d give me better than that!”
Caleb looked confused. “Rafe?”
“Vampire,” Pritkin said shortly.
“You’d risk your life for one of those things?” Caleb asked me, incredulous.
“Yeah. Too bad you don’t have friends like that. But if they’re all war mages, I can’t say I’m surprised,” I snapped.
“Miss Palmer.” That was Pritkin, and since he was back to formal mode, I assumed he wasn’t happy. Unfortunately for him, neither was I.
“I’m going with or without you. So which is it?”
He looked like he wanted to argue, but he couldn’t stop me from going alone and he knew it. “Take us to the Senate chamber,” he finally said. “It’s on the lowest level and well-warded. If anything survived, it should have.”
“Hold your breath,” I told them. “If we shift into the middle of a mess, I’ll get us out. Don’t panic.”
Caleb looked at Pritkin. “Did she just tell me not to panic?”
“She doesn’t know you.”
“Guess not.”
I didn’t bother to comment. I took a deep breath and shifted.
It was second nature now to fling myself outward, everything blurring around me as I streaked through insubstantial layers of stone, thought translating instantly to motion. It was less familiar to land in a vast mud pit. But that’s where we ended up, in a suffocating ocean of muddy water, over my head deep and impossible to see or breathe through.
I was about to shift us back out before we could die an unfortunate and very moist death when the guys started swimming, taking me with them. A moment later, we surfaced with a splash and a gasp. The air was warm and full of dust and already going stale. Whatever method this place used for air circulation seemed to be off-line.
I floundered around, trying to free my hands from Pritkin’s and Caleb’s iron grips so I could wipe the mud out of my eyes. Even when I managed, it didn’t help. There was absolutely no light, with the enormous iron chandeliers that usually light the Senate chamber either dark or missing. But at least I could breathe.
Until someone forced my head back underwater.
It was so unexpected that I sucked in a lungful of mud and choked while I was towed what felt like half the length of the chamber. My head finally broke the surface again, but I couldn’t seem to get any air. Pritkin hit me on the back—hard—half a dozen times until I probably had bruises but, mercifully, also clear lungs. I clutched the edge of something solid and pondered the wonder of oxygen for a minute.
Light spun up and expanded from a sphere in Caleb’s hand, allowing me to see a few yards into the gloom. Not that there was much to see. The Senate’s main meeting hall was normally mostly bare, with a high ceiling that disappeared into shadow, leaving plenty of space below for the massive mahogany table that formed its only major piece of furniture. Except for today, when little was visible besides the undulating black ocean. And what I could finally identify as the Senate table, floating despite its weight and currently serving as our life raft.
A loud clanking noise suddenly came from overhead. It sounded like rusty machinery and reverberated harshly off the walls. Caleb held up the sphere and light glinted off the jagged metal tips of the chamber’s chandeliers.
They were enormous, easily twelve feet across, with rows of barb-filled rings sitting one inside the other. I couldn’t tell how many darts there were on each ring, but it looked like a lot. And every time a ring emptied, it dropped back to a lower tier, allowing a new one to cycle up into place. The sound had been the closest chandelier rotating a new set of lethal darts to bear on us.
I’d forgotten the tendency of the fixtures in the Senate chamber for launching iron spikes at intruders, mainly because they had never before viewed me as one. “Why are they shooting at us?” I demanded. As if they’d heard me, a barrage of foot-long projectiles tore loose from their moorings and came hurtling our way.
Our combined weight had pushed half of the table underwater, leaving the other half raised like a partial shield. But even the rock-hard mahogany didn’t stop them all. My eyes crossed, taking in a particularly vicious-looking dart that had partially penetrated the wood, stopping barely an inch from my face. It had hit with enough force to push out finger-length shards ahead of the razor-sharp point, one of which brushed my cheek. Somebody let out a small, hiccupping scream.
“Be silent!” Pritkin hissed in my ear. “The wards are attracted to motion and sound.”
Now he told me.
“The ley line breach confused them,” Caleb whispered. “They’re targeting anything that moves. Shift us into the corridor outside!”
I started to answer when there was a reverberating crack overhead. One of the darts that had missed us was sticking out of the wall, where its force had widened a fissure that had already been leaking water. What had been a spout was now a waterfall, and from the sound of things, it wasn’t the only one. It looked like an underground stream had ruptured. Trust me to find a way to drown in the desert, I thought as a flood of icy water poured onto my head.
It was heavy enough to knock my grip free and send me falling back into the void. I reached out, desperate to find a handhold, and something brushed my wrist. Something living, but not human-warm.
I jerked back, the small hairs on my arm prickling at the ghostly touch. I got a vague glimpse of it—motion, something like eyes that glittered in the almost darkness, teeth.
Oh, shit.
Hands grabbed me roughly under the armpits and hauled me back to the surface. Where I quickly discovered that I’d drifted beyond the protective shadow of the table. Pritkin jerked me out of the way right before two darts plowed into the water, and we ducked back into place with a slither of legs and flailing arms.