AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It was really hard to think, and, ironically enough, time-travel paradoxes aren’t my best thing. But there were a few oddities I was starting to notice. Like, if this wasn’t how things were meant to play out, why hadn’t I met Mircea the last time I was here? And why had I seen only two dark mages that night instead of the dozen or so who’d apparently been hanging around? If Mircea and I hadn’t fought them off before, who had? Because I hadn’t seen anyone else volunteering.
“Cassie. We should go,” Françoise said gently.
I looked at her blearily. She appeared to be bouncing up and down without actually lifting off the ground, and all her edges were blurry. I decided that was probably me. “How did it go?”
She grimaced. “Don’t you remember?”
I thought back for a minute, to my experiences here two weeks ago. “You were captured. I remember freeing you, but that’s about it.” I hadn’t really wanted to know what a bunch of witches and a pixie were doing locked up in one of Dante’s lower levels. I’d run across them while here on other business and helped them get away, but I hadn’t asked a lot of questions. “I’m a little fuzzy on details,” I admitted.
“Zee mages, zey thought I was one of zee slaves, who ’ad escaped,” Françoise explained. “Zey locked me up, and when Radella tried to ’elp me, zey captured her as well.”
“Did you get it?”
She nodded gravely. “I was in the second group. I over’eard the spell when the others were sent. I was to go next, but zen ze news came that you were ’ere—ze other you,” she explained helpfully. I nodded. “Zey closed ze portal and left us, because everyone was told to drop what zey were doing and find you.”
Yeah, I bet. Tony had wanted me pretty bad. I suppose his goons thought they could finish the slave run later. I was suddenly viciously glad that they’d been denied that much, at least.
“I should never ’ave left you,” Françoise said mournfully.
“I want to see the damn rune before I go anywhere else with you people,” the pixie put in, crossing her tiny arms.
“Why?”
“Because you’re all completely insane!” Radella snapped. Her eyes were on the vamps, who were kneeling beside the diamond pattern on the asphalt, debating whether it was worth trying to scrape anything out of the cracks,
or if a new paving job would be easier.
“Because I could ’ave ’elped you,” Françoise said, looking at me like she wondered if maybe I’d gotten hit in the head. Which I had, as my throbbing jaw was busy reminding me. I’d forgotten about that until just now. Oh, yeah. That suggestion was going south pretty fast.
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” I told her. “And you might have gotten killed.”
“Better zan you!”
I shook my head, but stopped because it made it ache worse. “Since when is my life worth more than yours?”
“Since you became Pythia!”
From halfway across the lot, Mircea’s head whipped around. I repressed a sigh. Damn vampire hearing.
“Yeah. That’s kind of the point,” I said, grabbing her hand. Françoise looked confused, but I didn’t stop to explain that the Pythia is supposed to be the one protecting other people, not needing it herself. Mircea was striding toward us, looking determined, and I was not up to a verbal fencing match with him tonight. Hell, I lost those even when my brain didn’t feel like it was about to throb out of my skull. “Hold on,” I said, really hoping I could manage one more shift before I passed out.
Chapter 13
Sight down the barrel of the gun. Balance the butt on your other palm if you need to steady your aim. Squeeze the trigger lightly. You won’t have to apply much pressure to get it to fire. I breathed slowly and watched the paper target flinch as if the bullets were cutting through flesh. Almost all of them hit outside the target range, and not a single one was inside the circle that represented the vital organs. Ironic, that.
The unused storeroom had good ventilation for an indoor locale, so Pritkin had set it up as a firing range. Daily practice was supposed to improve my aim—at least that was the theory. So far, the paper cutouts at the far end of the room hadn’t had too much to worry about.
I released the empty clip and reloaded. The weapon felt the same as always in my hand; the weight, the smoky scent of the oil and powder, the almost-there smell of burnt paper, were all familiar after almost two weeks of this. When I’d picked the gun up today, that had seemed strange. Like killing a man yesterday should have changed it somehow, added weight, shown up on the sleek black surface like a mark. Something.
But it didn’t.
Nine mm Beretta, clip holds fifteen rounds. Maximum effective range is fifty meters, but it’s better close up. Remember to take the safety off and aim for the torso. Pritkin had been giving me pointers, determined, as he put it, to reduce my status as a giant bull’s-eye in the field. And that’s how I’d been thinking of the lessons: as something designed to help with defense. It had somehow never registered that defense with a gun usually meant shooting something more substantial than a paper target. That defense with a gun might mean killing.
I’d grown up around guns, had seen them so often that they were just a part of the scenery, no more remarkable than a vase or a lamp. I hadn’t owned one myself, because I wasn’t expected to fight. At Tony’s, I’d been among the group of useful noncombatants whom other people were supposed to protect. I’d been told a hundred times that, if an attack ever came, my job was to get to one of the many bolt-holes secreted around the place and wait it out.
There had been a certain comfort in my old position that I’d never really appreciated until now. Because the simple truth was, the moment you took on a position of responsibility, there were people who would look up to you, who would expect you to shield them, who would expect you to save them. I was used to running away, was damn good at it in fact, or I wouldn’t have lasted this long. I knew how to get fake IDs almost anywhere, how to change my appearance, how to blend in.
I didn’t know how to keep people alive.
