Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

“She wanted to ask me for a favor,” I said. “To leave Jonathan to her, or if I caught him, to bring him back alive so that she could have him.”

“Strange request,” Jonas said mildly.

I shook my head. “Not for a dhampir. They’re . . . touchy. Anyway, she wanted to give him to her lover, Louis-Cesare. He’s a senate member—”

“We know who he is!” Pritkin said, suddenly speaking up. “What does he have to do with Jonathan?”

“He was trapped by him,” I said simply, not beating around the bush because neither man was in the mood for it. “Vampires can draw power from their families, so Jonathan used him like a battery for a while, draining him almost to the point of death, day after day, to get the life magic he needed. Then, overnight, Louis-Cesare’s family would replenish him, healing him, bringing him back from the brink. Only to have Jonathan come in and do it all over again the next day.”

Pritkin said a bad word, but Jonas nodded. He’d been at the meeting where some of that had come out. “That would explain why we have a formal

request from the senate to be allowed to ‘question’ the mage, should we ever capture him,” Jonas said. “Somehow, I do not think they plan to return him in one piece.”

“You haven’t explained what all this has to do with you,” Pritkin snapped, staying on point.

Yeah. Been trying to avoid that, I thought. But there was no chance of it now.

“Jonathan captured Louis-Cesare a while ago,” I said. “I don’t know exactly when, but I got the impression that it might be a few centuries back. Yet he was already using enough magic to need to drain a master vampire, over and over again, to obtain it. I don’t know how much that is, but I’m thinking . . . a lot?”

Jonas nodded. “Safe to say.”

“Well, there you go.”

“There we go—what?” Pritkin demanded, which said a lot about how upset he still was. Normally, he was a couple steps ahead of me, whenever I tried to explain anything, but he was too angry to think clearly.

Which meant I was going to have to spell it out.

“What if illicit magic really is like a drug? And, like a drug, a person develops first a taste for it, then a dependency, and then an ever-increasing need? One that, eventually, they can’t sustain anymore?”

“Ah,” Jonas said. “You think he’s afraid that, one day, even all the Black Circle’s reserves won’t be enough for his needs.”

I nodded. “Unless, of course, he comes up with a new source of energy, one far more potent than any other on Earth. The remnant of an ancient god, but still bright and alive after all these years. The Pythian power would be practically inexhaustible, at least for a human’s needs—”

“But he has that already, does he not? With the acolyte, Jo, or what remains of her?”

I shook my head. “That’s not how the power works. You don’t get an all access pass. An acolyte could let him channel a small stream of it, yes, but only a Pythia could really open the floodgates and let it all—”

I cut off because Pritkin had just thrown his chair across the room.

The two-way mirror shattered, and he was through the opening a second later, almost before I registered what had happened.

Three huge war mages were quicker on the draw, and jumped him before he’d gotten halfway across the room, but he sent them flying with a spell that I guessed you weren’t supposed to use on your fellow mages. Because the yellow light abruptly went orange and then red when more mages joined the party and started fighting back. Pritkin broke free again—how I didn’t see—but the pause had given the other corpsmen a chance to get a barrier up between him and Jonathan.

He slammed into it, and then slapped it with both hands, and if looks could kill . . .

They wouldn’t have bothered Jonathan, I thought, who was still looking vaguely bored. He lolled at Pritkin drunkenly, but without any real fear. I guessed when you had other people’s faces sticking out of your stomach, your threshold for that sort of thing changes.

Mine, on the other hand, had just about been reached.

I walked to the door like a normal person, which several more mages were guarding. I hadn’t seen them from the inside, but I guessed that Pritkin had known they’d be there, which was why he’d taken an alternate route. They let Jonas and me by with no trouble, however, and I reentered the interrogation chamber, or whatever it was.

Pritkin was being dragged backwards by—I shit you not—something like twelve mages. They couldn’t all get a hand on him, but I guess they were there for the principle. Jonas went to rescue his commander, but I went in the other direction.

And stopped in front of the shimmering barrier that was now guarding Jonathan.

“That fey you sent,” I said. “The assassin. You didn’t mean him for me.”

Jonathan looked surprised. “No, no, course not. Came back for you, yes, once I knew where you’d be. So hard to find. Hop, hop, hop all over the timeline, never in one place for long. But I knew you’d be there then. Watched the whole thing from afar.”