A Cassandra Palmer Book Cassandra Palmer recently defeated a god, which you'd think would buy a girl a little time off. But it doesn't work that way when your new job description is Pythia - the world's chief clairvoyant.
Cassie is busier than ever, trying to learn about her power, preparing for her upcoming coronation, and figuring out her relationship with the enigmatic sexy master vampire, Mircea.
But someone doesn't want Cassie to become Pythia, and is willing to go to any lengths to make sure the coronation ceremony never happens - including attacking her mother before Cassie is even born.
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Chapter Two
The thought cut cleanly through the gibbering in my brain. People had been trying to kill me in elaborate ways for months, yet if I didn’t get a grip, my epitaph was going to read: she drowned in the tub. But it wasn’t, it wasn’t, because I was damned if I was going to go out like that.
Only it didn’t look like I had a lot of choice.
The more I struggled, the more my body seemed to shut down. Trying to move was like battering against the lid of a coffin from the inside. I cried out furiously, but the shout stayed locked in my numb throat.
The worst part was the silence. Death was supposed to be loud—gunshots, explosions, screams and thunder. Not this eerie quiet that wrapped around me like a shroud. I couldn’t hear anything but the water lapping at the sides of the tub, like a watch counting down the seconds I had left.
And a harsh voice echoing in my ears: Assess, Address, Act.
For a second, the words just hung there in my head, refusing to connect to anything. And then I remembered Pritkin’s damn three A’s. I grabbed at the thought like a lifeline, before it could skitter away into the white noise of my panic.
Okay, I thought wildly. Assess. What was the problem? That I couldn’t fucking breathe.
Address. What could I do about it? Nothing. Not when my own body refused to follow my commands, when it seemed almost like it was under someone else’s—
Wait, wait. I didn’t need to move physically to use my power, which was independent of my human form. And my power could—
I shifted before I finished the thought, ending up outside the tub, with my bare ass several feet above the bathroom floor. Gravity took care of that, dumping me onto the cold tile before I’d even managed to get a breath, along with about forty gallons of tepid water. In my panic, I’d shifted the entire contents of the bath, which foamed over the floor, drenching the fuzzy rug and breaking against the walls like a miniature tide.
I barely noticed. I lay on the water-slick tile, sucking harsh gulps of air into my screaming lungs, while Billy hovered around me. He looked a little panicked now, I noticed irrelevantly, right before a hand clenched around my throat.
It took me a second to realize that it was mine.
Fortunately, I have small hands, so the one trying its best to choke the life out of me wasn’t having much success. It might have done a better job if it had had some help, but my other hand was locked white-knuckled around the standing towel rack and it wasn’t letting go. I stared at it, dazed and uncomprehending, and my own wide blue eyes stared back at me from the bright chrome surface.
“What the hell?”
The question echoed the one in my head, but it hadn’t come from me. It took me a second to realize that Billy had slipped inside my skin, the way he did when feeding. It gave him access to my power, something I’d learned to put up with but never to like. Today, I grabbed him in a metaphysical clench, almost sobbing from relief.
“Help!”
“Help how?” he demanded. “What’s happening?”
“Possession.” The word stopped me, since my conscious mind hadn’t connected the dots. But my unconscious seemed to be more organized, because that sounded about right. I’d had some experience with possession in recent months because it was one of the Pythia’s chief weapons, but I’d never before had it turned on me.
I decided I wasn’t enjoying the experience.
“By what?” Billy demanded.
“Like I know! Just do something!”
“Yeah, only what I can do depends a lot on what exactly is—”
“Billy!”
“Okay, okay. Don’t worry, Cass. I got this,” he told me. Right before he was thrown out of me, across the bathroom and through the wall.
I watched him disappear, a look of almost comical surprise on his face, and belatedly realized who’d had control of my other hand. Because it immediately went numb and joined the choke party at my neck. But amazingly enough, that wasn’t my biggest problem.
There were a limited number of things that could possess a human. Ghosts were one of them, but unless they were welcomed inside like I did for Billy, they had to fight their way through the body’s defenses. And that meant a much weakened spirit by the time they finally got in—if they did.
But that hadn’t been weak. Whatever-it-was had exorcized Billy while maintaining its grip on me, and no mere ghost could do that. Which narrowed things down to the Oh, Shit list.
A fact that was demonstrated when the towel rack tipped over and tried to bash my head in. My hand wasn’t on it anymore—no one’s was--but it was going nuts anyway. It shattered the mirror over the sink, then ricocheted off and slammed into the tub, sweeping the jar of bath salts into the floor and turning the soggy tile fluorescent pink.
The result was enough noise to wake the dead, one of whom started hammering on the bathroom door.
“Miss Palmer. Are you all right?”
I didn’t know the voice, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t answer anyway. All I could think about was getting to the source. The vamps might not know any more about this than I did, but they could at least pry my damn hands off my neck.
I tried to shift, but this time, nothing happened. Maybe because the room was starting to spin and my vision was graying out and I was slowly sinking to my knees. And then Billy was back, looking pissed.
He slipped inside my skin, and immediately I felt a very familiar energy drain. “You’re feeding now?” I asked incredulously.
“I have to have energy to fight this thing, Cass! And I’m almost bottomed out.”
“And what do you think I am?”
Billy didn’t answer, and the drain didn’t stop. But a moment later, my hands sprang away from my neck like they’d been burned. Suddenly, I could breathe again.
I stayed down because I didn’t have the energy to get up, coughing and wheezing as my lungs struggled to drag in air through a throat that felt maybe half the right size. It was burning, and my head was swimming and I really, really wanted to throw up. But I would have cried in relief if my eyes had been under my control.
Unfortunately, they’d rolled up into their sockets and wouldn’t come back down.
“Miss Palmer?” The vamp was sounding seriously unhappy now, but the door still didn’t open. “Why isn’t he coming in?” Billy demanded angrily.
“He doesn’t want to upset me.”
“You and your damn personal space!”
I didn’t answer because he had a point. And because I suddenly realized that I could feel my legs again. It shouldn’t have surprised me. Holding onto a body that isn’t yours and doesn’t want to be held is no easy task. And it looked like whatever had its claws in me couldn’t keep all my appendages in thrall at once while also fighting off Billy Joe.
It wasn’t much of an advantage, but it was the only one I had. I staggered to my feet, wincing when a piece of broken glass cut my heel and almost tripping over the soggy, bunched up rug. I was trying hard not to panic, but it felt a lot like drowning again—being naked and blind and at the mercy of an enemy I knew nothing about.
Except that it wanted me dead.
And it wasn’t too particular about how I got that way.
I hadn’t taken two hesitant steps when my legs suddenly went numb, my body turned and I ran--straight into the nearest wall. My head happened to be twisted slightly, which saved my nose, but my temple hit hard enough to leave me reeling. I staggered back, but only to get enough leverage to ram the wall again.
“Eyes!” I mentally screamed, as I jerked out a hand to break my fall and almost broke the bone instead.
“Working on it.”
“Work harder!” I cried, as the impact sent me stumbling into the side of the sink.
My hip hit the unforgiving marble hard enough to bruise, but a moment later, my eyesight returned. That would have been a relief, except that it freed up my attacker to grab back one of my hands. Luckily, it was the bad one, and it dropped the hair pick it had snatched up before it could stab me in the eye with it.
The pick went down and my other hand came up—along with a jagged piece of the mirror that it used to slash at my jugular. Billy caught it just in time, but the hand didn’t drop. It hovered menacingly in the air in front of my face, shaking from effort, while three different spirits battled for control.
I couldn’t tell who was winning, but I didn’t think it was us. I stared at the wickedly sharp triangle as it slowly edged closer, reflecting back to me wildly matted blond hair, a bone-white face and dazed blue eyes—and the door to the living room over my left shoulder. It was nearer now, and I was still on my feet.
I ran for it.
Halfway there, my body went into spasms and I went down. But I managed to snag a potted fern on the way. The pretty piece of blue and white Delftware was on a pretty little stand, which made a pretty little crash when it tipped over and exploded against the hard tile.
And, finally, that was enough for the guards. The door burst open and three vamps rushed in, stopping in confusion when they saw nothing but a skinny white girl ripping the bathroom apart. And then it felt like something was ripping me, too, a burning, tearing sensation that mercifully only lasted a second before something shot out of me.
A wordless scream knifed through the silence and something shivered through the air of the bathroom. The presence was oily and slick and wrong, but the smell was worse: sickly sweet, thick at the back of my throat, cloying, instantly nauseating. It sparked a feeling of primal revulsion deep in my gut, and it didn’t look like I was the only one. The vamps ducked and pulled guns, despite the fact that there was nothing for them to shoot--except for me, and they managed not to do that even when I suddenly dove through the middle of them.
I wasn’t driving, but I didn’t think the entity was, either, because I could feel every inch of hide getting burnt off as I hit the carpet in the dining area face-first. “Not helping!” I told Billy, just as the remains of the mirror shot by overhead and imbedded themselves in the remaining guards.
I didn’t have time to apologize, because the apartment was going nuts. A decanter set flew up from a nearby cart and slammed into the wall behind me in a wash of booze and expensive glass. The cutlery on the room service cart followed and would have skewered me if a vamp hadn’t thrown himself in the way. And then the light fixture over the dining table ripped out of the ceiling, whirling for me like a crystal tornado.
Billy flung us behind the sofa, which didn’t help, and then rolled us under the coffee table, which did. At least for the moment. All I could see through the glass top was a few hundred crystals, beating against it like an expensive hailstorm, but the view through the side was less obstructed.
I stared around, as much in disbelief as panic, because I’d never seen anything like it. Ghosts find it very difficult to move even tiny things, like a paperclip or a piece of paper. They don’t rip curtain rods off the walls or toss heavy paintings at people’s heads or throw chairs through plate glass windows.
Except for bleeding walls, it looked like something out of the Amityville Horror.
I blinked, finally making the connection. And then I squeezed Billy so hard he yelped. “Cut it out!”
“We have to get to Pritkin,” I told him quickly.
“What? Why? What can he—”
“This isn’t a ghost.”
“No shit!”
“So it’s probably some kind of demon.”
“So?”
“So he’ll know how to drive it out!”
Billy didn’t say anything, maybe because Pritkin was our resident demon expert. Or maybe because the coffee table had just splintered down the middle. He flipped us onto all fours and we scrambled out the other side, just as the chandelier burst like a crystal grenade all over the living room.
It might not have been made for this type of activity, but the dozen or so thick columns of wood flying around looked sturdier. They also looked familiar. I finally recognized one when it slammed through the piano trying to get at me. I stared at one of the legs off the dining set and wondered why the entity would bother trashing that. We were on the other side of the apartment now, so it didn’t seem to make a lot of sense.
Until I saw one of the guards run past, being pursued by the equivalent of a flying stake. He dodged it—mostly—and it hit his leg instead of his heart. That was lucky, because it punched through flesh and bone as easily as the other pieces did the walls, the furniture and the flimsy sides of the piano.
The vampires who formed my bodyguard were all senior-level masters and, presumably, they’d seen a lot of wild stuff through the years. But it didn’t look like they’d seen this. Vamps who prided themselves on strength and impassivity were running around wild-eyed, attacking the misbehaving furniture as if they thought it was the problem or just trying to avoid being vamp shish-kebob.
But other than for the sound of the suite imploding, it was weirdly quiet. I couldn’t talk and the vamps didn’t need to—at least not aloud. They could communicate mentally with each other as easily as I talked to Billy, something that usually gave them a hell of an advantage in a fight. Except, apparently, for right now.
But at least one guy had decided that they needed outside help, because he’d whipped out a cell phone. He was on the other side of the room from where I was hunkered down behind the baby grand, and I didn’t have control of my vocal chords anyway. So I poked the guy who did. “Tell him to call Pritkin!”
And Billy tried. But between my burning throat and the mortal peril and the deafening noise, nobody paid any attention. “These guys are new—I don’t even think they know who he is!” Billy said frantically.
“Then you’ll have to go get him.”
“How? We’ll never make it to the door through all that!”
“I won’t, but you will. It isn’t after you.”
“Yeah, except if I leave, that thing’ll have its claws back in you!”
“And if you don’t, it’ll beat me to death!” I wasn’t seeing a whole lot of difference, really.
“Okay, okay.” Billy sounded like he was trying to calm down, and wasn’t doing so great. “Say I find the mage. Then what? He can’t see me.”
Shit. Billy was so solid to me, that I had a problem remembering that that wasn’t true for everyone. But Pritkin wouldn’t even know he was there.
It was hard to concentrate over the sound of the piano’s death throes, but I tried. Only the three A’s weren’t doing me a lot of good right now. I knew what the problem was—I needed to get to Pritkin. But I didn’t have any abilities to help me do that.
If I could have shifted, it would have been easy. But his room was five stories down and on the other side of the hotel. And I knew without trying that I couldn’t make it that far. It was hard to shift after Billy had fed even when I wasn’t already exhausted. As it was, I’d be lucky to get five yards, and that wouldn’t—
I stopped, my thoughts reversing. “Get to Pritkin,” I told Billy, over the sound of the blood pounding in my temples.
“I just told you, that won’t—”
“Listen to me! He has Jonas’s necklace. He used it to pull me back to him today when I tried to shift.
You’ve got to get it!”
“And then what? It only works on you when you use your power, and you can’t--”
“I only need to shift—it doesn’t matter how far! A couple inches should be enough to activate it. Now go!”
For once, he didn’t argue, maybe because he didn’t know what else to do, either. I felt him leave and braced myself for another onslaught. But the entity was having too much fun to notice Billy slipping away, and I didn’t give it time to figure things out. I grabbed the top of the piano bench for a shield and started crawling.
A guard was on top of a tipped-over chair, batting at the flying shards of wood with a bloody table leg like a slugger at a baseball game. He saw me and his eyes went round, as if he assumed I must have been skewered ages ago. “Not dead yet,” I croaked encouragingly, and crawled on.
The dining room had been destroyed, but the room service cart had miraculously survived, wedged in the doorway between the bar and the kitchen. I pushed it the rest of the way inside and peeked under the warming lid. Fried chicken, and it was still hot.
There was a God.
I hunkered down behind the kitchen island and concentrated on regaining enough strength to shift on my own if Billy failed. That basically involved stuffing down as much as possible as fast as possible without throwing up. I was making a serious dent in Marco’s vast quantities when something caused me to look up.
Three vamps stood in the kitchen doorway, staring at me. They looked a little shell-shocked, and a glance at the stainless side of the fridge told me why. I was naked and bloody, with tufts of half-dried hair sticking up everywhere and a chicken leg distorting one side of my mouth. I looked startlingly like a mad cave woman.
I removed the leg and licked my greasy lips. “Um. Hi?”
They didn’t say anything. For a moment, we all just looked at each other. And then the creature attacked again and I stopped worrying about the impression I was making and started worrying about getting my brains bashed out against the side of the island. I saw stars and red exploding things that probably came under the category of not healthy.
And then I saw Pritkin staring at me in utter shock.
I didn’t remember trying to shift, but I must have, because instead of cold kitchen tile, my toes were suddenly sinking into the carpet in his hotel room. I’d landed by the bed, which he’d been in the process of turning back. His hair was damp and curling around his neck and a few drops of water still clung to his shoulders. And either he hadn’t bothered to put on pajamas yet or he slept in the nude, which might have been awkward if I hadn’t been in the process of dying.
“Possession,” I croaked, before my hands formed themselves into claws and my body launched itself off the floor, going straight for those clear green eyes.
I didn’t succeed in scratching them out—Pritkin’s reflexes are better than that, even when totally gob smacked—but I did tear an inch-long gash down one of his cheeks. “Sorry!”
“What kind of possession?” he asked grimly, one hand locked around each of my wrists.
“Not ghost, but I don’t—”
I stopped talking, because my throat had closed up, and my body started thrashing against his hold. Pritkin looked startled for a moment, like I was harder to control than he’d expected. But the next second, I found myself on my back on the bed with my hands pinned over my head by one of his. He used his other to summon a stream of little vials from a bookshelf he’d installed, apparently as a sort of filing system for nasty potions.
Most of which were soon all over me.
Some were sticky and some were sludgy and all of them were really, really vile. But I wouldn’t have cared if they’d done anything. But as far as I could tell, the most they accomplished was to stain my skin in blotches without apparently affecting the thing inside me at all.
And then my entire body suddenly went numb and I had maybe a second to think—oh, shit—before the entity used my legs to send Pritkin sailing across the room. I saw him hit and pass through the wall, in an odd mirror of what Billy had done. Only Pritkin’s much more material body took the flimsy sheetrock and hard struts along with him.
And to my surprise, the creature decided to follow. Maybe it assumed that I wouldn’t be much of a challenge if it killed him first, or maybe he’d managed to piss it off. I didn’t know, but I felt when it started to pull away, when all of the sensations of a seriously overtaxed body came rushing back at once, forcing out a whimper that I promised myself to deny if I survived long enough.
And then I felt its shock as I slammed my shields shut, trapping it inside.
I hadn’t been able to expel the thing, but this was a different story. It had managed to possess me in the first place because I’d been exhausted and careless and I’d been expecting Billy any moment so my shields were down. But they weren’t now and this was my body and ownership bestowed some privileges. And I was damned if I was going to let that thing finish off the one guy who had a chance to get me out of this while he was possibly unconscious and—
And it had figured out that my body had become its prison and it really wanted out.
We apparently didn’t speak the same language, but it didn’t matter, because it started showing me a cascade of images like something out of a horror movie: my heart exploding in my chest, my lungs shredding like tissue paper, my brain--
“If you could do all that, you already would have,” I thought back viciously, sending the image of it trying to stab me in the eye with a freaking hair pick. I didn’t know why it could trash the apartment and not me, but every single attack had been external or passive, like holding me underwater while I drowned. It was starting to look like maybe it wasn’t all that strong inside the body.
Or like it wasn’t so used to this possession thing, either.
That didn’t make sense for a demon, who presumably did this all the time, but I didn’t have a chance to figure it out before it started thrashing around inside me. And if I thought I’d been in pain before, it was nothing compared to this. It was determined that I was going to let go and I was determined I wasn’t, because if it killed Pritkin I was dead anyway.
And then he was back, bloody and bruised and reaching through the hole to grab something from his foot locker that he tossed at me. “Cassie, catch!”
My arm shot up automatically and I felt my fist close around something cold and hard. And then I didn’t feel anything else for a long moment as I levitated completely off the bed. Definitely Amityville, I thought blankly, and let go of my shields. My body gave a huge convulsion and I was immediately surrounded by a storm of dark, flapping wings, a noxious odor and an infuriated, screeching cry.
And then I hit the bed and rolled off the side. That was lucky, because a second later what felt like a miniature cyclone burst out through the window and a shower of glass exploded into the room in flagrant disregard for the laws of physics. But most of it didn’t hit me, since I was huddled on the floor with my hands over my head trying not to scream.
Pritkin had crawled back through the wall at some point, because when I looked up, he was crouched on the floor, staring at me. I stared mutely back, panting and limp, every limb shaking in reaction, as a confetti of dust and tattered bits of wallpaper rained down all around us. And then the door slammed open and Marco charged in.
He took in my naked, multicolored self, the hole in the wall, the broken window and the battered, bleeding war mage. “The fuck?” he said distinctly.
I swallowed, licking lips that tasted like dust and copper. “I think I freaked out the staff,” I told him weakly. And then I fainted.
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