Reap the Wind (37 page)

He didn’t have to jerk Fred, who had already hit the ground, still staring at the mages ahead of us. Until the wall beside his face burst into flames when the spell hit, making him curse and draw back. And lose his grip on the little group of thieves.

Luckily, they were too busy fighting with each other to notice. And with the guys behind us, who they assumed had just attacked them. And it didn’t look like the Black Circle was any better at talking out differences than the Silver.

So much for not altering the time line, I thought grimly. And for once, hoped my murderous acolytes actually were, and that none of these men had been fated to get out of here anyway. But there was no time to worry about it now, no time for anything except scrabbling forward on hands and knees as the battle raged above us and we made for the door.

Which we somehow hit before anything hit us, maybe because Rhea was shielding for all she was worth.

At least, I assumed that was why a spell deflected off the air maybe a foot above our heads, hit some other mage’s shield, and then went ping-ponging around, striking shield after shield before finally finding a target in the ceiling.

And blowing a hole in it.

Plaster rained down, dust billowed out in a choking cloud, and the door we’d finally reached was thrown open. And a bunch more mages ran out, drawn by the crazy. But thanks to the camouflage we’d just unleashed, they didn’t see us.

Until they fell over us.

Rhea’s shield had given up the ghost at some point, so I felt every bit of the boot to the ribs I took when one of the mages tripped over me. And then Rico jerked the remainder, who were trying to draw back into the room, out into the fray. Boots stomped, coats were slung in my face, and the yelling, cursing, and spell slinging suddenly intensified. But I didn’t care. I had my eye on the open door, and I dove for it, the others sliding, crawling, and, in the case of Fred, rolling through along with me.

And then someone slammed the door.

“Like that’s going to
help
?” Fred said, his voice a little high.

“No, but this will!” Rhea snarled, and smashed her hand down on a small button on the wall.

I’d taken it for a dimmer, but I guess not. Because a shield shimmered into place right in front of my face a second later, almost close enough to cut off my nose. But it didn’t matter, because we were in!

“Oh,” Rhea said softly, her anger evaporating into shock as she stared around.

And, yeah. The place looked a little different now. The coffee table was cracked, the many sofa cushions were slashed, and the bar had been emptied of its crystal and most of the booze. A few half-empty bottles were lying on their sides, above stained and dirty carpeting, leaking onto the imprints of dozens of muddy boots. It looked like we’d arrived at the tail end of the pillage.

Which made it strange that the safe was still there and still intact, despite the van Gogh having gone.

A moment later, I understood why.

“Shit!” Rico jerked back his hand.

“What is it?” I hurried over.

“Wards.”

“But they’re supposed to be down. That’s the whole point of this!”

“The safe was probably set up to be independent of the house grid. Either that or—”

He looked at the door.

But Rhea was already shaking her head. “It’s a perimeter ward only. It shouldn’t affect anything else.”

And too bad if it did, because we couldn’t exactly lower it, could we?

“How long will it hold?” Rico asked her.

“I— Ten minutes? Perhaps a little more? It was meant as an extra level of protection for the Pythia in times of distress.”

“Well, I think this qualifies,” Fred muttered from behind the sofa. He was doing something, but I couldn’t tell what. But if it was cowering, I didn’t intend to say anything.

Bet he didn’t volunteer next time.

“I am no mage,” Rico told us. “But I know a few tricks. As long as we have time, I will use it.”

“We don’t have much time,” Rhea said, biting her lip.

“Then I will be quick.” He shot her a devastating grin over his shoulder. “Although that’s not my usual style.”

She looked at him blankly. He grinned wider. I went over to see what Fred was doing.

He was behind the sectional of many pillows, but he wasn’t cowering. He was peering myopically at something ugly. I assumed he’d pulled it out of the largish sack on the ground next to him, which one of the thieves must have dropped on the way out the door.

Although why any thief had wanted that thing was beyond me.

“Have you seen this?” he asked, looking up.

“Yes.” And I didn’t want to see it again.

“It’s a hell of a thing,” he told me.

“It’s a bezoar.”

“That’s what I mean.” He held it out to me. “Someone rescued that from
a goat’s stomach
, prettied it up, and made it into a
cup
.”

“I know,” I said, trying not to shy back, but the thing was nasty. And that was despite the nice little framework of enameled gold someone had added in a seriously misguided attempt to add some class. Although what else they could have done I didn’t know, since it was basically a dung-colored, hairy softball.

That now looked like a dung-colored, hairy Fabergé egg.

“Why would anyone
do
that?” Fred demanded.

“Lady Phemonoe collected poison remedies,” Rhea told him, glancing at the empty shelving. Which, until recently, had held the world’s creepiest cup collection. Which seemed to now be residing in the sack Fred was looking through.

“All of them?” Fred asked, clearly fascinated. “Even the horn?”

“Horn drinking vessels were believed to vibrate on contact with poison,” she told him. “Vintners used to wear a piece of horn around their necks when they tested their wine, to make sure it hadn’t gone off.”

“Seriously?”

“Rock crystal was similar,” she added as he pulled out another cup. “When exposed to poison, it was supposed to lose its transparency and turn cloudy. This one is set with amethyst, as it was believed to change brightness when near poisoned items.”

“And the one with the shark teeth?”

“Fred,” I said, interrupting. “Can you do me a favor and try to find any potion bottles that Rhea and I might have missed? Your nose may be able to pick up on something we didn’t.”

“Well, yeah,” he agreed. “That’s why I came over here. These things
reek.
”

“Of potion?” I asked sharply.

He nodded.

I suddenly got a lot more interested in the weird collection.

“There’s probably residue on most of them,” Rhea said, looking at me apologetically. “These weren’t just for show. She used them. She wouldn’t drink from anything else.”

Fred whistled through his teeth. “Wow, paranoid much?”

“It wasn’t paranoia,” Rhea said. “It had been prophesied that she would die from poison if she wasn’t vigilant.”

“But she was
Pythia
. Wouldn’t she know if someone was trying to slip her something?”

“How would she know?”

“I just thought she’d get a vision or something.”

“We don’t see visions about ourselves.”

“Oh.” Fred looked like he hadn’t known that. “Well, looks like she took it seriously. Sharks’ teeth?”

I glanced at Rico, who had just jerked his hand back again, cursing softly. But I couldn’t help him. So I found a spot on the ruined sofa and sat down, and a moment later, Rhea joined me. Like we were having a polite chat instead of plundering a dead woman while thieves battered at the door and a bomb ticked away its last minutes.

“A cure rather than a preventative,” she told Fred. “Sharks’ teeth set in an agate cup—both said to render poison harmless. Like the bezoar.”

“And these?” Fred pulled a miscellany of items out of the bottom of the sack. A small gold cup set with rubies. A handful of precious stones, some the size of a marble, others large as hens’ eggs. A tangle of amulets. Some odd charred bones.

“For an extra precaution, you could add a bezoar or an amulet to the cup,” Rhea explained. “Lady Phemonoe usually used several.”

“But that’s . . . just superstition. She had to know that, right? It doesn’t work.”

“It worked,” I said. “Just not the way it was intended.”

“Come again?”

“It’s what killed her.”

Fred looked down at the cup in his hands and dropped it like it was hot.

“They’re not going to hurt you,” I told him. “It was an amulet that did it. It contained arsenic—”

“Arsenic?”

“—because of an old belief that poison attracted poison and would draw it out of whatever it was dunked in.”

“That . . . seems like a really bad idea.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be able to get out.”

“But it did,” he pointed out.

“It had help.”

“Help?” That was Rhea. She’d been looking back and forth between the two of us, but now her eyes focused on me.

And I remembered: not too many people knew for certain how Agnes had died. There had been rumors, of course. But the reputable—read Circle-controlled—papers had done a pretty good job of hushing them up.

I guess they didn’t want to give people ideas.

But Rhea had been part of Agnes’ court; she deserved to know.

“It was Myra,” I said, talking about Agnes’ former heir, who had been a little too impatient to inherit. “She poked a pinhole in one of the amulets—”

“She did what?”

I suddenly wished I’d kept my big mouth shut. Because Rhea had just turned white as a sheet. But it was too late now.

“It, uh, it enabled the poison to leak out a little at a time, whenever it was used,” I told her. “Agnes, well, she did the rest herself, every time she had a drink.”

“Why . . . why weren’t we told this?”

“I thought you had been.”

“No. No.” She looked stricken.

Way to put your foot in it, Cassie, I thought darkly.

“Did the Lord Protector know?” Rhea asked, using Jonas’ official title. And then didn’t give me time to answer. “Of course he did. Of course he did!”

“Well, yes,” I said, because clearly.

“Why would he do that?” she demanded, her expression caught between tears and rage. “Why would he deprive her of her right?”

“What right?” Fred asked. “She’s dead.”

I shot him a look.

“The right to avenge herself on her attacker!”

“But . . . she’s
dead
,” Fred reiterated, as if maybe Rhea had missed that part.

“But her soul is not!” she snapped.

“Yes, well, I’m sure it’s, uh, in a better place,” Fred said awkwardly.

Rhea shook her head. “You don’t understand. A Pythia devotes her life to her purpose, and is rewarded by being allowed to merge with another at death.”

“Merge?”

“Her soul migrates to another body, a host body.”

“Just . . . anybody’s?” Fred asked, suddenly looking alarmed. And glancing at me out of the corner of his eye.

“Anyone willing,” I clarified.

“Oh, good. Because I’m not. Willing. In case you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Good ’cause . . . I’m really, really not.”

“Okay.”

“I mean, not even a little—”

“Fred!”

“We have to find her,” Rhea broke in. “We have to give her that chance!”

“Myra is already dead,” I said, trying to think of a way to change the subject.

“Yes, but the others are not! They had to know! They were thick as thieves, all of them! There’s no way they didn’t—”

“Rhea.”

“We can find her! She can help—”

She stopped suddenly, probably at the look on my face. And it was times like these that I wished I had a tenth of Mircea’s diplomatic ability. Or even some of that weasel-out-of-questions-you-don’t-want-to-answer ability. Because this answer wasn’t anything she wanted to hear.

“Rhea,” I told her gently. “Let it go.”

“You know something.”

The pallor from before had morphed into two high red circles on her cheeks. It made her look like a kid who’d gotten into her mother’s cosmetics and gone crazy with the rouge. But it didn’t look funny to me. It didn’t look funny at all.

“Rhea, please.”

“I want to know.”

“Rhea—”

“It’s my right to know!”

And I wasn’t going to get out of this, was I?

But I really didn’t want to tell her. If she looked this bad, just getting confirmation that Agnes was murdered, how would she feel about the rest of the story? How would she like knowing that her beloved Pythia had died on her last shift back in time, had thereafter hitched a ride in the body of a young girl kidnapped by the fey, and had waited out the centuries in faerie, where time runs differently. Just so she and the girl could make their escape back here at the perfect time for Agnes to merge with a new host—her old acolyte, Myra. And to slit her throat from ear to ear, releasing both their souls at the same time.

Not for revenge, but as her last act as Pythia. She had been determined to free the world from the horror she’d unwittingly unleashed. And to deny Myra the chance to come back in a new body, in the only way she could.

By dragging her soul away with her into the afterlife.

I could close my eyes and still see it, the red, red blood spilling down Myra’s snowy white gown, the two souls entwined, fighting to the last, the small body slowly slinking to the floor, almost gracefully. I’d seen it in nightmares a few times since. I didn’t want to pass them on.

But Rhea was right; as a member of the court, she ought to know.

“It’s a long story,” I finally told her. “And I don’t know most of it. If you want to hear everything, when we get back to Dante’s, talk to a witch named Françoise. She works at Augustine’s,” I added. “She can tell you more than me.”

To my relief, she seemed to accept that.

“May—may I be excused,” she asked, “for a moment?”

I nodded, and she abruptly ran off. I watched her go, feeling crappy. And reminding myself to be careful what I said in front of the court from now on.

“Sorry,” Fred told me. “I didn’t mean . . .”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I didn’t know she was going to take it like that.”

That made two of us.

Fred retrieved his terrible toy and sat on the sofa, and I put my feet up on the coffee table, because it didn’t matter anymore. And for a moment there was silence, except for the scritch, scratch, scritch of Fred petting his hairy cup. And damn, that was disturbing.

“Stop that,” I told him.

“Stop what?”

“Touching that thing.”

“It feels nice,” he told me. “Like a fuzzy pet rock. Do you want to—”

“No!”

He looked down at it fondly. “It does seem weird, though, doesn’t it?”

“‘Weird’ is not the word I’d use.”

“Not the cup. Myra.”

“What about her?”

“That she left so much to chance. Killing someone like that . . . you know, when she didn’t have to.”

“She did have to. If an acolyte kills a Pythia directly, the power will refuse to go to her. It’s something to do with the conditions laid on the power when Apollo gave it.”

“Apollo,” Fred said, frowning. “You really believe that stuff you told Jonas the other night, about us fighting gods?”

For a moment, it threw me. Maybe because, for the last three months, I’d been living in a crazy world of gods and demons, myths and monsters, and Fred hadn’t. Well, okay, he’d been there for that last one, the demigod sons of Ares called the Spartoi, who could shift into dragon form at will. And damn, you’d think something like that would have woken him up.

But there were dragons in faerie, and for all I knew, maybe he’d seen one. He hadn’t seen a god. He hadn’t been there when Apollo died, hadn’t seen him glowing bright as a star fallen to earth, a boiling mass of power. And that was after he’d been seriously drained getting past the barrier. Yet I’d hardly been able to look at him. . . .

“Cassie?”

“Not gods,” I told him tersely. “Just beings powerful enough to make ancient people think they were.”

I started sorting through the stuff on the coffee table to give myself something to do. Maybe the girls would like some mementos of Agnes, if I could find a couple dozen that weren’t too horrifying. Which wasn’t looking like it was going to be easy.

“But why so powerful?” Fred asked, sitting forward.

“What?”

“The gods. Why were they so powerful here?”

“I don’t know. They come from another world—”

“The fey come from another world. And their magic doesn’t work here.”

“It works. They use Elemental magic, same as the covens.”