Touch The Dark

I felt like screaming. "Will you stop talking and listen to me? I. Am. Not. The. Pythia!"

She crossed to me quickly and kissed my cheek. "You are now," she said, and disappeared. That same second, I got hit with something that felt like a Mack truck had mowed me down. There's no way to adequately describe it, so I won't even try. The closest thing I'd ever felt was when I was in Tomas' body and his heightened senses proved so distracting. Only the senses that were sharpened this time weren't smell or sight, but that awareness of other worlds, different but meshing with ours, that I'd always had a little of when I spoke with ghosts. Now I had a lot of it, and the sights and sounds around me were so distracting that I didn't even notice that time had started back up. Not, that is, until someone stabbed me in the foot.

I looked down to see that the rogue sybil had got me after all, although not in the way she'd planned. It still hurt like a bitch and blood began welling up through the satin of my little high-heeled slipper, turning the material a dark purple. I looked up at the battling forces over my head.

"Okay, I changed my mind. Eat her."

A group of ghosts broke off from the main cloud and dove for her, but Rasputin moved with vamp quickness and got there first. He grabbed her about the waist and they disappeared, along with the few of his vamps who had escaped the ghostly attack. The mages saw their ally run for it and immediately followed suit. My little knives got overly excited and chased them out the door and up the stairs and I let them go to it. Killing off a few more dark mages might alter the timeline, but at that moment I was too tired and fed up to care.

I sat down and tugged off the slipper. Damn it! The crazy bitch had almost severed a toe. Mircea handed me a handkerchief from the pocket of his robe, and I bound up the wound as best I could. I didn't think she'd lose it, unless it got infected. But considering the state of the dungeon, that seemed at least possible. Great.

I looked up to see my ghostly army hovering there, an unspoken demand in their eyes. I knew what they wanted, and there was no point trying to talk them out of it. The energy they'd stolen from Rasputin's vamps might sustain them for years, but who wanted to exist someplace like this?! They had only one interest, and I had promised, but there were going to be a few conditions.

"No townspeople and no innocents," I said, and got a creepy, collective nod in return. I sighed. "Okay, then, the rest are yours."

Immediately, a swirling maelstrom of spirits rose up, like a multihued blizzard around my head. It was so thick that it blotted out the room for an instant and so full of pent-up rage that their collective wails sounded like a freight train. Then, in the blink of an eye, they were gone. I didn't try to follow them with my senses; that was one party I preferred not to see.

I took my hands away from my ears to find Mircea watching me, a cautious look in his eyes. I sighed. I did not want to have this conversation, wanted it less, in fact, than facing Rasputin again. But there was no way out. "I think we did it," I told him. "Did you explain things to Radu?"

He nodded slowly. "Yes. He has agreed to bring Louis-César over and to leave him to develop alone as happened before. Radu will escape but avoid contact with anyone for a century, until the time I rescued him from the Bastille. And even after that, he will keep a low profile, as you would say. Will that do?"

I thought about it for a minute. It wasn't perfect, but barring locking him in a room for three and a half centuries, I didn't see an alternative. And I somehow doubted that Mircea would go along with that. "Yeah, it ought to, as long as he doesn't make any vamps until our time. Somehow Rasputin is already making unregistered vamps, and we don't need two people doing it. Oh, and tell Radu about Françoise. I get this feeling that some of the mages might try to recoup some of their losses with her tonight."

It was a measure of just how close to the edge Mircea was that he didn't question what I meant. "As you like."

I gestured around. "How much of that could you see?"

"Very little, but I received the impression from our being alive that we won."

"Not exactly." I explained the situation in brief, including my promotion. When he got back and found out Agnes was dead, he'd figure it out anyway. "You'll need to tell the Senate that Rasputin got away, and that the sybil went with him. I don't know if she'll keep the power she borrowed now, but she may." Considering that Myra had flashed out right after my talk with the Pythia, it seemed a good bet. Maybe that would fade in time, but there was no way to know for sure. Which left me with a major problem. When she recovered from my little knife attack, she could do to me what she'd been trying to do to Louis-César. The possibilities were endless, including killing me as a child or attacking my parents before I was even conceived, making sure I wasn't born at all. The only good thing for me was that, for most of my life, I was either in Tony's fortress of a house, warded like the vamp equivalent of Fort Knox, or in hiding. So I wouldn't be an easy target. But something told me that Rasputin liked a challenge.

Mircea was quiet for a long moment. When he finally spoke, he sounded as tired as I felt. "You could tell them yourself."

I smiled. "No, I don't think I can." He started to say something, but I put a finger over his lips. About one thing, at least, I was sure. "I won't go back to that, Mircea. It was bad enough before, but now everyone will be fighting over me—the Senate, the two circles, maybe Tomas… no. What kind of a life would that be?"

He took my hand in his and kissed the fingers carefully. His eyes were tired, but still beautiful as they met mine. The glowing, cinnamon amber completely overwrote Louis-César's blue. I had a feeling that I'd never see another pair so stunning, or so sad. "You cannot run forever, Cassie."

"I hid before. I can do it again."

"You were found before." He clutched my hand as tightly as he could and, for the moment, I let him. It might be a long time before I knew the touch of another person, much less one I cared about.

"Only by you and Marlowe," I told him gently. "Tell him to take a vacation. He'll need one to recover from the attack. Take one yourself."

Mircea shook his head, as I'd known he would. He wouldn't lie to me even now. For a vamp, he was a hell of a catch. I reached out and ran a hand through his hair, wishing it was his own dark, straight strands under my fingers instead of the Frenchman's bronze curls. It was somehow hard to imagine never touching him again, never holding him. But the price was too high. There were simply too many strings attached.

"I will find you, Cassie. I only pray it will be before the circles do. Both of them will come after you, you can be sure of it. Do not underestimate them."

"I won't." I started to rise, but he held on to my hand.

"Cassie, stay with me! I will keep you safe; I swear it!"

I asked him the same question I had put to Tomas. This time I got an answer. "Would you want me, even if I wasn't Pythia?"

He raised my hand to his mouth. His lips were cold. "I begin to think I would prefer it."

I looked around at the body of the fallen mage, the slimy walls and the despair-filled room. I tightened my grip. "I know I would," I told him, and shifted.