I stumbled backwards, and my heel hit something that crunched under the light pressure. When I looked down, I saw two bodies on the ground. The nearest was a woman, so elderly as to be cadaverous, her skin papery and mottled with age spots, her hair wispy and bone white. The other was a man, at least I assumed so, based on his clothes. The slight breeze sent tiny pieces of a disintegrating mustard-colored shirt blowing away, like pollen on the air. The body underneath looked like a recently unwrapped mummy, all crinkled brown skin stretched over visible ribs. I stared at them, stunned and uncomprehending.

“Cass! Cass!” Billy was talking to me, and something pale rolled against my remaining sneaker. “Throw it!”

My eyes finally managed to focus on the small item, which I identified as the ball the mage had been holding earlier. Billy must have retrieved it, but I couldn’t understand why until I looked up and saw five more mages rushing towards us from the far side of the building. It looked like the cavalry had arrived, but with my usual luck, they were for the other side.

I shook my head, trying to clear it, and that jolted my arm, and oh, God, that hadn’t been a good idea. Luckily the mages weren’t paying any attention to me, either because they hadn’t seen me yet or because, compared to Mircea, I didn’t look like much of a threat. He was providing a hell of a distraction, stepping on one mage’s neck while wrenching another’s head almost completely off his body. It looked impressive, but if he had resorted to old-fashioned hand-to-hand, he was pretty damn drained. I didn’t know if he could survive another attack and I didn’t intend to find out.

I tried to grab the sphere, but my hands were slick with blood and I couldn’t seem to keep hold. Every time I thought I had it, it slipped away, my fingers just not able to hold on. I accidentally kicked it and held my breath, waiting for it to detonate and kill us all, but it only rolled off a few yards until stopped by a ridge in the concrete.

“Cass!”

I looked up to see that I was out of time. The mages had paused a cautious distance from Mircea, but that was only because any master vampire deserved a certain respect, even a wounded one. Maybe especially a wounded one. But the attack would come any second now. And I couldn’t stop it.

Chapter 12

“Billy! I can’t get it!” I looked at him desperately. “You have to do it.”

He shook his head. “I’m too drained. It took everything I had just to roll it over to you!”

I made another grab and trapped the ball under my hands, but it was too slippery. I had the impression that its surface wouldn’t provide much in the way of traction even if I wasn’t bleeding all over it. “Damn it! If I had more time—”

Billy looked at me like I was crazy. “You’re Pythia! You have all the time you want!”

“I can’t shift! I’ve tried.” It was probably the pain, but I couldn’t see past it. Maybe that was one of the things training taught, how to concentrate when your brain was fuzzy from blood loss and your hand felt like it was going to fall off and you had absolutely no time to get it wrong. I would have really, really liked to have had that lesson.

But I hadn’t, so I had to go with what I knew. I stopped plucking uselessly at the sphere and looked at Billy. “Take a draw.”

“Now?!”

“Damn it, Billy. Yes, now! Get your strength back and throw this thing!”

Billy didn’t waste any time. He slipped inside my skin before I’d finished talking, and I felt the energy drain immediately. Unlike normal, it hurt. Maybe because I didn’t have much left to give, maybe because Billy had to speed up the process, maybe because everything already hurt anyway. But whatever the reason, within seconds my heart was hammering, my hands were shaking and I could actually sense my life flowing out of me. My brain was stuck on a hamster wheel, bad idea bad idea bad idea bad idea, but there was nothing I could do; I didn’t have the strength to stop it. I heard someone sigh, a long whistling release of breath, and then I was falling a very long way.

I landed on the asphalt in time to see Billy scoop up the ball. He almost lost it once, it almost slipped right through his still mostly transparent hand, but he caught it at the last second. The throw looked a lot like something I’d have done, a wobbly underhand that didn’t land even close to dead center. It exploded a yard or so in front of the mages with a barely audible poof and a small cloud of hazy pink, as if a powder-filled balloon had been dropped onto concrete. The air seemed to ripple slightly, but the mages showed no discernible effects.

“It’s a damn dud!” Billy cursed just as the first of the newcomers reached Mircea. He turned, his elbow connecting with the mage’s face, and I had time to wonder why the man’s shields weren’t up, why they hadn’t stopped the attack. Then it was as if his head just exploded, like instead of a man, Mircea had hit a face made of nothing more than colored sand.

“Lot’s Wife,” Billy said, sounding impressed. “Bad stuff, dark magic.” I wondered if I should worry that his tone was approving.

The other mages had stopped, frozen in various stages of movement. One had been running, caught with a single leg raised, and his own momentum toppled him over. He exploded against the asphalt and Mircea gave a purely vicious smile. He walked to the next human statue, a young man with sandy blond hair, and gave him the barest push with the flat of his hand. The mage toppled backwards into another, and they both hit the ground with a bang, dissolving into a cloud of multicolored dust. It so mixed them up that it was impossible to tell where one body started and the other ended.

Mircea went on to the last while I stared at the flesh-colored sand pouring out of a scuffed leather tennis shoe. A gust of wind blew across the lot, pushing little grains of the substance against the cheek I couldn’t seem to lift off the asphalt. They didn’t feel like sand; they didn’t feel like much of anything at all.

I heard the thud as another body hit the ground, felt the billow of wind as it broke into crumbly pieces, but I couldn’t focus on it. Shock, I thought vaguely. I knew what I technically should be feeling, but I wasn’t sure I was actually feeling it. My whole body hurt, but the pain seemed to reach me only through a buzzing, staticky distance.

I stared at the pile of human remains and wondered what the spell did. Billy was saying something. Maybe he was trying to tell me, only I couldn’t understand him. Maybe it sucked all the water out, I thought vaguely. Was that what was left of a person with the moisture mostly gone? A pile of crumbly, chemical-smelling stuff that looked like a human, but couldn’t be because people didn’t turn into powder when you touched them? That was just wrong, not possible.

Like me shooting a man through the heart.

Someone knelt beside me and cut off the plastic bracelet. I could see flashes of white through the bloody meat of my wrist, but it didn’t look like a vein had been hit. It felt bad, though. I was hauled into someone’s arms, my back against a warm chest that was breathing too quickly, or maybe that was me. I tried to slow it down but nothing happened, so I decided it wasn’t me after all.

Strong hands stroked through my hair, gently separating the tangled strands for a moment. Then a whisper of breath was at my ear. “Dulceata?, I can heal this, but it would be better if we went to MAGIC. There are healers there with more skill than I possess.”

Mircea, I thought. He was the one smelling like smoke and blood and sweat. That seemed odd; I always associated him with expensive cologne. I looked down and there were black smears and fingerprints on my skin where he had touched me. That seemed odd, too, although I couldn’t think why.

“Cass, we gotta get out of here. He can’t take you back to MAGIC.” Billy hovered in front of my face, and that was all right. Because he looked the same as always.

“I can’t go back to MAGIC,” I said, parroting Billy’s words, and my voice sounded almost normal. Weird.

“It is a bad break, dulceata?, and there are many bones in the wrist. I may not be able to repair all of them perfectly.”

I looked up into his face. It was dirty and sweat-soaked, and there was a fading pattern of diamond shapes all over his left cheek. But new skin was already pushing the crisped away as I watched, leaving it to blow off like so much ash in the wind. And his eyes were the same, bright with intelligence, soft with concern, full of understanding, beautiful. He was okay. Mircea was going to be okay. Relief was so sharp that, for a second, it hurt more than my wrist.

I wanted to say something, but there was too much raw emotion burning too close to the surface. I didn’t think you were supposed to say what I was thinking, anyway: that, even if my endgame was short, I liked the idea that his wasn’t. It was sort of a future by proxy, and while it wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for, it was good enough. It felt good enough. So I just looked at him instead, unblinking, until I couldn’t see more than a blur of pallor and darkness, the colors all bleeding into each other for some reason.

“I will heal it here,” Mircea said harshly, cradling my wrist in one large hand.

He looked strange, feral and too tightly controlled, with something brimming right under the surface, rage or frustration or both. The others could see it too, because the vamps were all trying to act submissive and the pixie was gazing at him with big worried eyes. Françoise was sitting on the ground next to us, but she looked hesitant, like she had no idea what to say. It occurred to me to wonder what they were all doing here, but then Mircea did something that made warmth spread up my arm, and the sudden lack of pain made me catch my breath in wonder.

I looked down to see my wound closing and odd little shiftings taking place under the skin. Bones realigning, I thought vaguely, and that part wasn’t so pleasant, but it still didn’t hurt and suddenly I could even think a little better. I could feel my blood shoving roughly through my veins, and my skin felt tight and flushed, but there was no lethargy, no pain.

Mircea was biting his lip as he followed the lines of tendon and muscle in my hand, reshaping them with his finger as if it were a scalpel. It was a light sensation. He barely brushed my hand, but I shuddered. A touch that simple shouldn’t be so powerful.