I blinked, dizzy and disbelieving, but the scene stayed the same. “Your what?” I finally croaked.
“The man chosen for the ceremony becomes my avatar for a time. His union with the heir consummates our marriage and confirms her in office.”
I choked. “I am not your wife!”
That laughter bubbled again, rich and infectious. “Do not be afraid, Herophile. It’s a spiritual union—you could not withstand me in my physical form.”
“I’m not afraid,” I said, and it was true. Compared to the visions I usually got, this one was a walk in the park. So far. “And my name is Cassandra.”
“Not anymore.”
I tried to turn around, but strong arms held me tight. They were the color of spring pollen, a bright true yellow that sparkled as if dusted with gold. The light danced over his skin the way it does on water, so dazzling that it hurt my eyes. It should have looked extremely strange on a human body, but somehow it didn’t. Suddenly the surroundings made more sense.
“You don’t miss a cliché, do you?”
“Your mind chooses how to perceive me,” he chided. “If there are clichés, they are yours.”
“Who are you?” I demanded.
“One who has waited long ages for someone like you. At last, things will begin to happen.”
“What things?”
“You will see. I have great faith in you.”
“Then you’re crazy,” I told him flatly. “I don’t know how to use this power you’ve stuck me with, and Myra’s going to kill me any minute now.”
“I sincerely hope not. As for the other, the power goes where it will. Once I gave it into human hands, I lost control.”
“But Myra—”
“Yes, for now, you must deal with your rival. We will speak again when that is done.”
“But that’s the point! I don’t know how to—” I never got to finish the sentence. There was an outpouring of heat and a rush of wind, and all around me surged a terrible, ancient power that rumbled through the ground and sent currents sizzling along my entire body. Then I was back in the cell, blinking in the suddenly dim light, unsure what had just happened.
Tomas had let himself go, and the sensations he was causing caught my breath in my throat and drove the questions from my mind. He pulled me closer to his chest, and I gasped as the length inside me shifted. His sweat-damp hair fell around me, and his teeth latched onto my throat. I felt my whole body constrict at the bite, and heard Tomas’ pleased growl as my inner muscles tightened around him. Large hands gripped my hips, driving him into me as far as he could go. He released my throat without feeding, tongue swiping once along the abrasion; then his hips began pumping faster, his face slack with need, and I lost all ability to think for long minutes.
He finished inside me in a delicious rush that felt scorching next to the lingering bits of ice at my center. It ate that cold, consumed it, burnt the final vestiges of it away and filled me up with a heated languor that spread throughout my body. My own pleasure was less overpowering now, but deeper, more persistent and sweet. I felt boneless with Tomas draped over me like the best of heaters.
After a long moment, Tomas pulled back to gaze into my half-closed eyes. He searched my expression, but whatever he was looking for, he didn’t seem to find. He kissed me anyway, and I arched into the sensual heat of his mouth, feeling somewhat bereft when he ended the contact too soon. “I’m sorry,” he said softly, his thumb tracing my lower lip.
I smoothed one of his fine, dark eyebrows with a finger. “What’s wrong?”
He took my face between his hands and gently kissed my forehead. “It’s all right, Cassie. It will be all right.”
“What will?” My afterglow was fast disappearing.
Tomas hesitated, then let his breath out in a sigh. “I can still feel the
geis
around you, like a cloud.” His jaw tightened. “It seems Mircea does not wish to release his claim.”
I shook my head. “There was a complication with the spell. Mircea couldn’t remove it, either.” I’d known this was a possibility, but it was still a crushing disappointment.
Tomas started to say something else, but the door suddenly swung inward and there was Françoise, hands on hips, looking impatient. She tossed a bundle of clothes at me. “It’s about time! It’s supposed to be a ritual, not a marathon.”
I scrambled to my feet, shivering in air that felt cold against my flushed skin. “What?”
“Well, come on! Get dressed! The king wants an audience, and he doesn’t wait well. Piss him off, and none of us are getting out of here.”
“Françoise?” I was getting a very bad feeling about this. The accent was suddenly gone, and the look on her face didn’t remind me much of the French girl’s usual nervousness.
She smiled grimly. “Françoise isn’t home right now. Can I take a message?” Before I could come up with an answer to that, she grimaced and clutched the wall, her fingers clawed and white with strain, as if they were trying to dig into the stone. “Damn it! Not now, girl! Do you want to stay here forever?”
Tomas was looking back and forth between the two of us, but I could only shake my head at him. I had no idea what was wrong with her. “Um, Françoise,” I finally said, as she began to vibrate as if her finger were stuck in a socket. “Is there something we can . . . do for you?”
She suddenly stopped, stock-still, and stared at me, impatience flooding her features. “Yes! You can get dressed! How many times do I have to say it?”
I was cold without Tomas’ body heat, so I decided to humor her. The dress was too large, and stiff with embroidery, but the dark red wool was warm. I decided that my best bet was to concentrate on one problem at a time, and Françoise’s mental glitches weren’t even close to top of the list.
“Françoise, do you have friends here? People who would help you?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“It’s Tomas. . . . If he leaves Faerie, he’ll be killed. He can’t go back, but he can’t stay in this place, waiting to be executed, either. Do you know someone who can hide him?”
“Cassie.” Tomas touched my elbow. “What are you doing?”
“I need to know that you’re safe. What if the king orders us deported back to MAGIC? If you return, they’ll kill you!” The Consul had offered me his life, but only in return for information I didn’t have. I hadn’t meant to place the
geis
on Mircea, and I certainly couldn’t lift it.
“And if you go before the king without me, he may blame you for my escape. I won’t endanger you further,” Tomas said flatly. I would have argued, but the set of his jaw told me it would be a waste of time. Besides, Françoise was looking apoplectic.
“You’re worried about a
vampire . . . now
, of all times?” She shook her head. “Cassie, he was a means to an end, that’s all. He served his purpose; let him look after himself. They’re pretty good at that, you know.”
Okay, that clinched it. There was more going on here than Françoise having a fit. “You want to tell me who you are right now? Because I never told Françoise my name. Not to mention that she only used to speak French.”
“We don’t have time for this!”
I sat on the bunk and looked at her mulishly. “I’m not going anywhere until I know who you are and what is going on.” I’d had about enough of flying by the seat of my pants. The past week had taught me the hard way that I sucked at it.
She threw up her hands in an oddly familiar gesture. Somewhere, I’d seen someone use that movement in the same way, but it eluded me. “I told you once you’d be either the best of us all or the very worst. Want to bet which way I’m leaning?”
It took a few seconds to sink in, and even when it did, I didn’t believe it. “
Agnes?
What . . . what the hell are you doing in there?”
“Existing,” she said bitterly. “Some afterlife.”
“But . . . but . . . I didn’t know you could even do possessions! The mages said—”
“Right. Like we tell them everything!” She put her hands back on her hips in another eerily familiar gesture. “The less the Circle knows about our abilities, the better! Did you really believe you could do it and I couldn’t?”
“But you don’t have Billy Joe,” I protested. It was something that had been bothering me, both with her and with Myra. “How can you shift in time without a spirit to babysit your body while you’re gone?”
Agnes just stared at me; then she shook her head. “Well, that’s an original approach, I’ll grant you,” she muttered. “We go back to our bodies at almost the same moment we left them, Cassie. Our bodies don’t die, because as far as they’re concerned, we never left.”
“But . . . your body . . .” I stared at her, wondering how to phrase things. There didn’t seem to be a lot of options. “Agnes, I’m sorry, but . . . it
is
dead.”
She looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Of course it is! What do you think I’m doing here?”
“I have no idea,” I told her honestly.
“Well, it certainly wasn’t my first choice!” She looked pissed. “This is supposed to be my bonus life, my time to enjoy myself for a change. I left you intending to return to my body, to gather strength to migrate into a nice German girl. She was supposed to die in a rockfall—a hiking accident— and I was all set to take her over—”
“Take her over?” I don’t know what my face looked like, but Agnes let out a laugh.
“She was going to
die
, Cassie! On the whole, I think she’d have preferred sharing a life with me to that!”
I felt dizzy. “I don’t get it.”
Tomas spoke up suddenly, startling me. “One to serve, one to live,” he murmured.
Agnes shot him a less-than-kind look. “I don’t know where you heard that, but just forget it.”
“Then it’s true,” he said, apparently stunned. “There have been rumors, but no one believes—”
“Which is how it’s going to stay.” Agnes said emphatically.
It was my turn to look back and forth between the two of them. “Will somebody please tell me what is going on?”
“There is an old rumor,” Tomas said, ignoring Agnes’ frown, “that the Pythia is rewarded at the end of her service with another life—a type of compensation for the one she gave up to her calling.”
I closed my mouth, which kept trying to hang open in shock. For a moment, I just stared at Agnes. “Is that true?” I finally managed to ask.
“Do you want to get out of here or not?” she demanded.
“Just tell me!”
She sighed and threw up her hands again. I didn’t know if that was a regular habit, or if it just happened a lot around me. “Okay, long story short—yes, it’s true. We find someone slated to die young, and cut a deal with them. We possess them and feed off their energy, and in return we help them to avoid whatever catastrophe was about to occur.”
“That’s horrible!”
“No, it’s practical. A shared life is better than none at all.”
“But if you can do it once,” Tomas said slowly, “why can you not continue to do it life after life, century after century? ”
“That’s why I hate vamps,” Agnes said to the room in general. “They’re so damn suspicious!”
“But can you do it?” Tomas asked.
“Of course not!” she snapped. “Think it through! Once our time in service is over, the power migrates to someone else. Without it, we have no way of knowing who is going to die, and therefore no way of choosing another body. It’s a onetime deal.”
Tomas gave a short laugh. “You expect us to believe that no one has ever tried to cheat death? To live through many lifetimes by taking whomever they wanted, whether they were doomed or not?”
Agnes shrugged. “That’s one of the many duties of the reigning Pythia—to make sure it doesn’t happen that way.”
I shook my head. This was happening too fast, all of it. My brain just couldn’t keep up. “But why Françoise?”
“I told you—I didn’t have a choice! I started to return to my body but discovered that I’d wasted too much energy helping you. I hadn’t planned to have to freeze time—that’s not an easy trick, especially after a jump of more than three hundred years! I found that I didn’t have enough left to jump the centuries one last time.”
“But I could have taken you back with me!” Agnes had helped me fight off Myra. If it wasn’t for her help, I’d probably be dead already. I would certainly not have refused to give her a lift.
“If you recall, Cassie, you were in the middle of a room full of hungry ghosts. They were bent on devouring every spirit in sight! I couldn’t risk it. Once time started up again, I had to get out of there fast. So I went into the only person I knew of in that time who was near death and might be willing to cut a deal.”
“And did she?” Françoise wasn’t just any old norm: she was a witch, and from one very memorable trick I’d seen her perform, a powerful one. And it looked to me like she was fighting.
Almost as if she’d heard my thoughts, Agnes made another grimace and clutched her stomach. “In a manner of speaking.”
“How did you end up here?” Tomas asked before I could demand something a little less nebulous.
“I’d planned to get back to Cassie before she left that century, once I was in possession of a body to keep the spirits away. But the damn dark mages showed up.”
“They kidnapped you for sale to the Fey,” he reasoned. “And you have been here ever since? But that was centuries ago!”
“Years, actually,” Agnes corrected.
“Time runs differently here,” I reminded him. Marlowe had said it, but I hadn’t realized just how big the difference could be. “You’re saying you’ve been here continually, ever since we left France?”
Agnes nodded, then held up a hand to stop me when I tried to say something else. “If you’ve seen us since, don’t tell me about it. Françoise can hear us, and she doesn’t need to be influenced by knowing what will happen in her future.”
Her future, I thought dizzily, but my past. She’d killed a dark mage at Dante’s a week ago, helping me escape. Or, rather, she was going to kill one. . . . My head was starting to hurt.