I tried to strengthen my shields, but I couldn't raise them all the way or I wouldn't be able to contact my allies. As a result, impressions crowded me from all sides, wispy pieces of lives long gone and tortures endured. I Saw Roman soldiers whipping a young boy the full number of lashes of his sentence, despite the fact that he was already dead. Right behind them, a medieval witch hunter threatened a young woman, who was heavily pregnant and pleading for the life of her unborn child. I tightened my defenses a bit more to keep the worst of the faded horrors out, but I caught an occasional one here or there. And everywhere I looked, in long, crisscrossing, glowing lines, were ghost traces. They covered the floors and walls and wove patterns through the air so thick it was like walking through a sickly greenish mist. They lit the lower dungeons to the point that I abandoned the torch I'd lifted from an upstairs sconce. I didn't need it.
The worst was saved for last. I followed my guides to a tiny, inner room. I could hear sobs before I opened the door. They abruptly cut off at my approach and the heavy latch was wrenched out of my hand. The door flew open and Louis-César stared out at me. For a minute, I wondered whether something had gone horribly wrong. The robe had parted to his navel, and beside the heavy, cherry red brocade, a darker color gleamed. He was bleeding heavily from bites on his neck and chest, and his face was ashen. When he recognized me, he swayed, and I barely caught him before he hit the ground.
I looked behind him to see a figure kneeling in a puddle of darkness that I identified after a moment as a hooded cloak. Slowly, it raised its head and I saw what seemed to be a bearded skeleton. Skin the color of moldy Swiss cheese covered the fine bones of his face, and only the burning amber eyes made him seem real. I took a guess. “Radu?”
A bony hand pushed the hood back. I looked at the thing that had once had the nickname “the Handsome,” and wanted to be sick. They'd kept him under control, all right, but they hadn't used restraints. They hadn't needed them after they'd starved him almost to death. I hadn't heard that blood deprivation could kill a vamp, but the thing huddled across from me didn't look alive. I had never seen anything like it.
“Um, we're here to help. Did Mircea tell you?” The creature huddled in the corner didn't reply. I hoped Mircea had been right about the sanity thing, although I was beginning to doubt it. “We, uh, should probably go. Can you walk?”
“He cannot walk,
dulceaÅ£Ä
,” Mircea said in a dull, expressionless voice. He sat on the floor beside the door and his head flopped back against the wall as if he no longer had the strength to hold it up. “I have given him all the blood I can without risking this body's life, but it is not enough. He has been starved for years, kept conscious only by catching an occasional rat. No one visits him for weeks at a time, and when they do, it is only to bring torment.”
I forced myself to look carefully at the wasted figure. It was hard to tell with the cape in place, but I could probably carry him if it came down to it. The body I inhabited was slight, but he was barely more than skin and bones. But I really preferred an alternative that didn't require me to touch him. The thought of those sticklike hands on even my borrowed body was enough to cause me to break out in chills, not to mention that I didn't like the idea of becoming dessert. Radu might not be able to feed from afar in his current state, but if he got close enough, that wouldn't be an issue. I wasn't sure if it was because his face was so emaciated that the skin had drawn back from his teeth, or if he was still hungry, but his fangs were fully extended and I didn't like it.
“What now?”
Mircea hung his head, breathing in great gasps of air as if he couldn't get enough into his lungs. “Allow me a few moments to recover,
dulceaÅ£Ä
, and then together we will take him from this place.”
I was about to agree when it became obvious that we didn't have a few minutes. Into the corridor behind us poured a dozen humans and a wind composed of too many spirits to count. I knew who they were even before they coalesced. No mere ghost, however newly dead, has that much power. A young woman, maybe in her late teens, appeared first and stepped in front of the crowd. She had a ghostly dagger in her hand that looked something like the ones that came out of my bracelet. Her eyes focused on me for a moment, and I didn't like their expression, but then they fixed on Radu with an almost hungry look. A shadow behind her pushed her forward.
“That one! In the cloak! Kill him quickly!”
I stood there, gaping at them for a second. It was disconcerting to discover that my diversion had been right on target. I put myself between Radu and the girl, but she merely walked through me. I wasn't used to a ghost being able to do that without my permission. I had unconsciously put up a hand to ward her off and my bracelet decided it was showtime. I spun around, and the next second she was screaming as two gaping holes appeared in the hazy outline of her body. She didn't bleed, of course, but she was obviously in pain. Great. I'd ended up hurting the person I was trying to help.
The dark presence behind her drew back behind a wall of humans, who surged towards me as a single entity. My daggers went back to work, but there were too many of them. Three were dropped by those flashing knives, but most got through. The first to reach me grabbed my shoulder, and my ward flared, throwing him across the room to slam against the hard stone. I stared at him in amazement. I wasn't in my body, so how had my ward tagged along? The mage couldn't tell me, since he'd slid down to the floor and lay still.
Another mage spoke something that sounded like the word Pritkin had used on the were at Dante's, and a curtain of flame leaped up all around me. I flinched back before I realized that it wasn't touching me; the fire stopped about a foot away, behind the golden tracery of a pentagram on the floor. My ward had to be using a huge amount of energy to stop a word of power, but I felt no drain. Whatever was powering it, it wasn't me.
Through the flames I saw a tall, dark shape start to ease around the wall. He was trying to get behind me, and that would not be good. Mircea was in no shape at the moment to fight off a two-year-old child, much less even the spirit of a master vamp. I glanced at the army behind me and nodded at him. “He's all yours.”
A storm of shadows descended on the ghost like a swarm of bees, and he disappeared from sight with a choked scream. They might not be able to do anything to humans, but spirits were fair game. A few seconds later they reformed at my back, and the enemy specter was nowhere to be seen. “They ate him,” I clarified for the tall figure who stood behind the mages, surrounded by his fellow spirits. No heroics for Rasputin. Smart, if not real brave. “Leave or I'll give them another course.”
“They can't feed on humans, sybil,” he said, echoing my thoughts. He moved slightly and I caught the impression of a pale face framed in greasy black hair. There was nothing handsome about it, but there was an odd, hypnotic quality to the eyes. “Even you cannot win against a dozen mages of the Black Circle. Let us have the vampire. We mean you no harm.” The deep voice was heavily accented but strangely soothing. His vamp powers were weakened when he was no longer in his body, but they obviously weren't gone. He was trying to influence me, and it was working. I could suddenly see his point. Why die here, hundreds of years and thousands of miles away from anything familiar? Why give my life for someone I didn't even know and who, in any case, would be better off dying quickly than living to face centuries of torment? It seemed almost a kindness to let them past, to let Radu die. Rasputin would make it quick, and then I could â I literally slapped myself. It hurt, but the pain cleared my head. Damn! Even in spirit form, he'd almost gotten to me.
“Twelve mages?” I looked at the body of the mage by the wall, who hadn't moved a muscle; his neck was lolling at an angle that said he probably never would again. Three others had been taken out by my knives, which had returned to hover beside me, one on either side of my head. None of the three on the floor looked dead, and their buddies must have agreed because they were pulling them back towards the stairs instead of leaving them where they fell. But they also didn't look like they would be returning to the fight. “I only count eight still active, Rasputin. Ask your friends which one wants to die next.”
He didn't bother. Maybe he didn't like the odds, or perhaps his friends weren't all that friendly when it came down to giving up their lives for him. Anyway, his spirit corps streamed at me in a shining cloud and got as far as the edge of my ward when my group attacked. “Don't hurt the girl!” I yelled, as thousands of spirits flashed past me in a flickering wave of color and shade. Greenish white sparks rained down everywhere as the spirits of Carcassonne began cannibalizing their enemies, draining them of every spark of life. I had a feeling there were a lot of vamp bodies that weren't going to rise after this night.
While the pyrotechnics went off over our heads, I bent to help the dazed figure of the lost sybil. She looked pale and frightened, but at least she was alive. Large gray eyes peered at me out of a small, oval face, framed by limp blond hair. “Don't worry,” I told her, although it sounded pretty strange under the circumstances. “I won't let him harm you. We need to get â ”
I never finished the sentence because, suddenly, everything froze. I looked around fearfully, wondering what new threat I had to deal with, and noticed that the knife was still in the sybil's hand. It was also all of about a millimeter away from my chest. I stared at it in disbelief. The bitch had been about to stab me! And, judging by the angle, it would have been a heart blow. Admittedly, it wasn't my body, but I thought it would be polite to return it without any big holes in it. Besides, I didn't know what would happen to me if the woman died. Even Billy hadn't known. Maybe I'd survive, maybe not, but I sure as hell wouldn't be much help to Radu or Louis-César. Not to mention racking up yet another death on my conscience.
“I see you received my message.” A voice floated across the room, as silvery clear as chiming bells.
I looked up to see a slender, short girl with long, dark hair rippling down her back almost to her knees. She was weaving past the hovering ghosts, some of which had frozen, jaws wide, busily gulping down other phantoms. No one moved, no one breathed. It was like I'd wandered into a photograph, except that two of us continued to be active.
“What?” I eased back from the sybil and her knife, which also allowed me to back away from whoever the newcomer was.
“The one on your computer,” the woman continued. “At your office. That was clever, don't you think?” She peered at Louis-César but made no move towards him. Her big blue eyes came back to me and her sweet little face took on a somewhat peevish air. “Well? Don't I at least rate a thank you for saving your life? The obituary was real, you know. If you hadn't left your office when you did, Rasputin's men would have found you. You'd have managed to get away from them, but a couple of streets over you would have encountered the vampires sent by that Antonio person and been shot. I brought the obit forward to warn you. Clever, wasn't it?”
“Who are you?” I realized the truth the same time I asked the question, but I wanted to hear her say it.
She smiled, and her dimples were almost as big as Louis-César's. “My name is Agnes, although no one uses it anymore. Sometimes, I don't think they even remember.”
“You're the Pythia.”
“Right in one.”
“But . . . but you look younger than me. They told me you were on your death bed, that you're really old.”
She gave a small shrug. It caused me to notice what she was wearing â a long, high-necked gown much like those Eugenie used to have made for me. It looked like something out of a tea party circa 1880. “Right again, I'm afraid. In fact, it is quite possible that this little trip will do me in. My power has been fading for a while, and four hundred years is a lot to manage.” She didn't sound very upset about her impending demise. “Anyway, you'll learn how to manipulate your spirit to look any way you want after a while. I prefer to remember myself as I was. In fact, in recent years, I've spent more time out of that wrinkled old hulk than in it.” She flexed her fingers. “Arthritis, you know.”
I stared at her. I'd somehow expected the Pythia to be more, well, regal. “What are you doing here?”
Agnes laughed. “Solving a problem, what else?” She bent over to look in the distorted face of the woman about to plunge a dagger into me. I'd moved, but the sybil hadn't; the face was still set in a scowl and the knife was caught halfway through its arc. “I spent twenty years training this one. You wouldn't think it to look at her, would you? Twenty years and look what I have to show for it.” She shook her head. “I'm here because this mess is partly my fault. I chose your mother as my apprentice. I trained her for almost a decade. I loved her like a daughter. And when she took up with your father, I forbade it, telling myself that I was doing her a favor. He was a member of the vampire mafia, for God's sake! Hardly a fit match for my beautiful creation.”
“I don't understand.”
“I could have found her!” Crystalline tears glistened in Agnes' big blue eyes. “I told myself, if she didn't care anything about her calling, if she could throw it all away so easily, I didn't need her. I could start afresh, could choose another apprentice, make another shining star . . . only, of course, I couldn't. I was too proud to admit that it hadn't been my tutelage that made Lizzy what she was, but her own innate talent. I didn't go after her, and that vampire boss of your father's had her killed to get to you.” She covered her face and wept.