"I will test them," Louis-César said and extracted a vial so quickly that I didn't have a chance to stop him. He didn't pour it over his own flesh as I'd half feared, but held the stoppered vial under Pritkin's nose. "I am about to spill this over your arm. If it is not safe to do so, it would be well if you told me now."
Pritkin ignored him, his glare still on me, as if he was more worried about what I might do than a roomful of master vamps. He obviously hadn't been around them long enough to understand nuances. Louis-César had said only that they wouldn't kill him—that still left a lot of possibilities wide open. I'd have been worried, but Pritkin was so busy giving me the glower of death that he barely noticed when a few drops of colorless liquid were drizzled over his skin. We all watched as if expecting his arm to start to melt, but nothing happened. Louis-César reached for me, but Tomas grabbed his wrist.
The Frenchman's eyes flashed silver. "Be careful, Tomas," he said softly. "You are not possessed this time."
Tomas ignored the warning. "That could be poison—he could have taken the antidote, or be willing to die with her. I will not have her harmed."
"I will take responsibility before the Consul if anything occurs."
"I don't care about the Consul."
"Then you had best care about me."
Two tides of shimmering energy began to build, enough to raise goose bumps on my arms and to set my bracelet dancing against my skin. "Enough!" Mircea waved a hand and the power in the room faded considerably. He plucked the vial from the Frenchman's hand and sniffed it delicately. "Water, Tomas—it is only water and nothing more." He handed it to me and I took it before Tomas could argue.
I trusted Mircea, and besides, neither the bracelet nor my ward reacted to it. "It's okay."
"No!" Tomas reached for the bottle, but Louis-César knocked his hand away.
I looked at Pritkin, who was watching me avidly. "Bottoms up." I swallowed the whole thing. Just as Mircea had said, it was only water, if a bit stale. Pritkin stared at me, as if expecting wisps of steam to start coming out of my ears or something. "Satisfied? Or do you want to hang a few crosses around my neck?"
"What are you?" he whispered.
I went back to my chair, but it was covered in brick dust so I opted for the couch instead. The window had shattered when Mircea tossed the grenade through it, so I had to brush shards of glass onto the floor first. Pritkin had better have some answers, because he was really getting on my nerves. "Tired, stiff and sick to death of you," I told him honestly.
Mircea laughed. "You haven't changed, dulceaţă."
Pritkin stared at me, and some of that terrible anger faded from his face. "I don't understand. You cannot have drunk holy water and shown no reaction if you are demon kind. But you cannot be human and do what I have seen you do."
Mircea settled himself on the sofa after carefully dusting it off with his handkerchief. He picked up one of my bare feet and stroked it idly. I suddenly felt a lot better. "I have learned, Mage Pritkin, never to say never to the universe." He glanced at me, and his expression was wry. "It delights in giving us that which we declare most emphatically cannot be."
Louis-César looked expectantly at me, and I nodded. "Yeah, I know. If people will stop trying to kill me for a minute, I'll tell you about Françoise, at least as much as I can." I quickly explained about my second trip, in as much detail as I could remember without mentioning that a seventeenth-century witch appeared to be wandering around Vegas. I didn't want my cell, if I ended up in one, to have padded walls. "That is approximately what Tomas said," Louis-César commented when I was done. "But that is not as I remember it."
"Which leaves us with three possibilities." Mircea ticked them off on his fingers. "That both Tomas and Cassandra are lying for no obvious reason, that they hallucinated the same thing at the same time, or that they are telling the truth. I do not smell a lie on either of them." He looked at Louis-César, who nodded. "And must I point out the absurdity of a dual hallucination of that degree of detail, about events neither could have known had they not been there?"
"Which leaves us with the truth." Louis-César gave a sigh that sounded like relief. "And that means…"
Mircea finished for him. "That they changed history."
Chapter 11
"That's not possible." I felt that I was on pretty solid ground. "I see the past; I don't change it."
"The Pythia's power is passing," Pritkin murmured, as if he hadn't heard me. "But no. It's impossible." He suddenly looked like a confused little boy. "The Pythia cannot possess anyone. She can't have given you that ability; she doesn't have it."
"Leave that aside," Louis-César said almost breathlessly. He stared at Pritkin, his face eager. "Could the Pythia's power allow Cassandra to travel metaphysically to other places, other times?"
Pritkin looked even more unsure. "I need to consult my Circle," he said, his voice slightly unsteady. "I was not prepared for this. They told me she was only a suspected rogue. The Pythia has an heir. Her powers should not come to this… person."
"What powers?" I decided to press my advantage now that I was back to person status, however tentatively. Better to find out what he knew before he decided I was some other weird kind of demon.
"No." Pritkin shook his head adamantly. "I cannot speak for the Circle."
"You've been trying to speak for them all evening," Tomas said, grabbing the mage's shoulder hard enough that he would have stumbled if Mircea's power hadn't still held him. "But now that you can help us by doing so, you refuse?" Tomas' wrist had healed except for an ugly red scar; but his face was no better. His temper didn't seem to have improved, either.
"I… these are dangerous matters. I cannot speak of them without authorization."
"You said they know what you know," Tomas growled. "Contact them; get permission."
Pritkin looked about wildly, as if searching for help. He didn't find any. "I will try, but I know they will want to meet to discuss this. And they will want her brought before them. It will not be decided quickly."
"How long?" Louis-César had joined Tomas, and together they did intimidating really well. Hell, they did okay separately.
Pritkin made the mistake of trying to cover his nervousness with rudeness. He was far too offhand to deal with a senator. "I don't know. Perhaps days."
Louis-César's blue eyes abruptly flashed to a shimmering gray, like mercury, and his pupils almost completely disappeared. I held my breath, and I wasn't alone. The only sound in the room was Pritkin's harsh breathing, and it echoed loudly like someone had slipped a microphone on him. Mircea abruptly released him and he would have slumped to the floor if Louis-César hadn't grabbed his shirt and slammed him back into the wall.
Seeing Louis-César in action at the casino hadn't convinced me that here was a predator's predator. He fought well, but I'd seen a lot of good fighters through the years, and I wasn't sold on the idea that a rapier, however long and sharp, was a substitute for a decent firearm. I'd spent too much time at Tony's, better known as Guns R Us, for that. I understood why he scared the crap out of me—he was my portal to the land of crazed ghosts and filthy dungeons—but other people didn't have that problem, so I hadn't understood why they seemed so afraid of him. Most of the time, he looked almost sweet, with his big blue eyes and his dimples. But I finally got the message. He was still handsome, but it was the splendor of a tornado right before it rips through a city. In that second, I believed that he could have made that crazy plan at Dante's work, that he really could have held off twenty vamps while Tomas got me to safety. "We don't have days," he hissed, and the blood drained the rest of the way from Pritkin's face.