Hunt the Moon

Something reached into my brain like a rain of quicksilver, clean and cold, but burning down all my nerves. “Obscene.”

I couldn’t see what was attacking me—the transition from watery daylight to thick darkness had left me half blind—but I really wasn’t that curious. I reached for Mircea, intending to shift us out of there, but I didn’t find him. His strong grip was no longer on my hand, and I doubted that he’d have just let go. For one thing, I couldn’t remember him materializing with me. And for another—

For another, he usually objected when people kicked me in the ribs.

The pain was breathtaking, like a dagger through my flesh, robbing me of breath and bringing tears to my eyes. But it wasn’t bad enough to keep me from shifting. That was something else, grabbing me, jerking me back the second I tried.

“Oh no. Not this time, little Pythia.” A booted foot came down on my wrist, crushing it into the dirt, sending pain lancing up my arm—and trapping my daggers against the ground. My hand spasmed, still holding a warm scone, which tumbled into the mud.

“This time, there won’t be any running away—or any powerful friends to save you. This time, I have you all to myself.”

I looked up to see boiling, dark clouds laced with distant lightning, backlighting a face. It blurred across my watering eyes, or maybe that was the rain, which was still coming down. But for a moment, I couldn’t tell what I was looking at.

And then my vision cleared and I still couldn’t.

On the surface, it was a sharp-faced brunet with slickedback hair, thin cheeks and a long nose, vaguely familiar although I didn’t . . . and then it snapped into place. Niall, the officious pain-in-the-ass from the publicity department. It had taken me a second to recognize him, because while the face was the same, the eyes—

The eyes were horrible.

No, not horrible. They would have looked perfectly fine in the face of his alter ego, the dragon that had chased Pritkin and me through an office building. But seeing those same firelit orbs in a human’s face, complete with elongated pupils and reptilian, nictitating membranes . . .

A wave of visceral revulsion washed over my skin, making every hair stand on end.

I guess I knew where the fifth Spartoi had gone, I thought wildly, even as I panicked and tried to shift again. But the same thing happened—I was slammed back onto the dirt at his feet, hard enough to hurt, like I’d been grabbed by one of the Circle’s lassos. But I didn’t think that was it. Because the creature standing over me held something up.

Lightning flashed off a slim gold chain, and the familiar charm dangling from the end of it. “Recognize this?” Niall asked pleasantly. “I took it off your good friend the war mage. I told him Jonas had sent me after it, but he didn’t seem to believe me.”

I stared at the innocuous-looking little thing, swinging slowly to and fro, and remembered with a lurch that I hadn’t seen Pritkin today. I hadn’t thought about it; had assumed he was resting. But what if instead—

My blood ran cold.

“What—what did you do?” I asked thickly. Blood dribbled down my chin. I didn’t bother to wipe it off.

“Let’s just say, I don’t think you should count on having him come to your rescue yet again. Or anyone else, for that matter. The coronation has begun; the lockdown is in place. And by the time it ends”—he smiled—“I do not think there will be much left to rescue.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” I snarled, and shifted.

Of course, I didn’t go very far. The damned necklace that I was going to grind into powder if I got out of this saw to that, jerking me back almost immediately. But that got my arm free, and when I rematerialized, I was a couple of yards away—behind Niall.

He spun, some sixth sense warning him of danger just as two ghostly daggers shot out of my bracelet. They looked brighter than usual in the dim light, but had all of their normal enthusiasm for any kind of violence. As they demonstrated by slamming into his torso with enough force to send him hurtling back into a tree—and to pin him there.

For about a second. His hands were free, but he didn’t bother to use them. He just leaned forward, against the knives, which disappeared into his blood-drenched shirt up to the hilts. And then vanished completely when he simply walked right through them. There was a little pause as the hilts caught on something—his heart, his rib cage; who the hell knows?—and then he tore free with a sucking, squelching sound that left me a little dizzy, even before I saw the knives quivering in the wood behind him.

Then I blinked and he was on me, bearing down on my already injured wrist until I felt something pop. A dagger of pain shot up the length of my arm, making me gasp. And that was before he rotated his foot slightly, causing bone to grind against bone.

I screamed, trying not to curl around my broken wrist, trying to shift again. But God, it hurt, it hurt, and I couldn’t focus—

Couldn’t do anything, not even cover myself. My towel had ended up a few yards away, leaving me naked except for a lot of mud. But I didn’t think Niall cared. There was no lust in those horrible eyes as he looked me over, no heat, no human emotion at all. Just cold assessment, the same spine-shivering stare he’d given me in the air.

“You know,” he said mildly. “I think I will enjoy this.”

“This is about revenge?” I gasped.

“No, you foolish child. That will be a bonus. This is about the end of a chase that started long before you were ever born. When that damned bitch Artemis turned on her own, banishing the gods from what was rightfully theirs. Using her power over the pathways between worlds to slam a door shut in their faces, and her power over the hells to keep it there.”

“The hells?”

“Earth is an upper hell. How else could demons travel here so easily? She was a queen in her castle; no one could touch her. No one but the children the gods left behind.”

“You—you’re looking for Artemis?” Small world.

“Not looking; found. We hunted her for millennia, and nothing—nothing! But we were patient, because we knew, queen or no, this world doesn’t feed her kind. Every century that passed made her weaker, sapped her strength. Why do you think she had to form the Circle, to fuel her spell? Could not a goddess power it herself?”

“I . . . never really thought about it.”

“No. Neither did they. Never wondered why she had to rely on the humans she loved so much—because her own power was failing. We watched and we waited, knowing that, sooner or later, she would be forced to go to the only source of the gods’ power remaining in this world.”

It took me a moment to get it, because of the pain and because it felt like something was pounding on the back of my skull. “The Pythian power.”

“Yes. Her own brother’s legacy. How she must have hungered for it, lusted after it, more and more each year as her own vast store of power faded and thinned and drained away. And at last, after three thousand years, she broke and we had her. We had her!”

“You killed her?” I said, even knowing that wasn’t right. Knowing something . . . the pounding in my head was getting worse.

“We tried. Oh, how we tried. For you see, little Pythia, there is no spell that can block off a world. No word, no enchantment, no charm has that kind of power. The only way even she could manage it was to weave a piece of herself, a piece of the very fabric of her being, into her spell. She became part of it, an integral part. And what happens, little Pythia, when you remove a vital component of a spell?”

“It falls,” I said blankly.

“Yes. So we tried. But we missed her. An idiot mage helped her, something we hadn’t expected. And she disappeared again like smoke. But her power was weak—so weak! We knew we were close. We redoubled our efforts, worked tirelessly day and night. And finally, five years later, we found her again.”

The pounding was a hammering thrum now, like a thousand running horses.

Or one, pulling a crazy carriage through a distant street.

“The mage had hidden her away—with a vampire, of all things! And by the time we finally tracked her, the