Hunt the Moon

I fisted my hand in Mircea’s shirt, and fisted my power in the current swirling thickly between us. And pulled.

For a long moment, nothing happened. He didn’t even move toward me this time, not an inch. But while he wasn’t moving in space, he was moving through something. Because I could feel the resistance dragging on him, tugging him back, wanting to fix him in place while I was doing my best to yank him out of it.

It was unbelievably difficult, far harder than it had been in my own case. I started to shake, and sweat broke out on my face, and for a second, I almost lost him. It was like time was slippery and he was oiled, and along with the sheer physical strain was the stress of keeping my wobbly grip. But I could feel time peeling away from him, layer after layer, as if he were shedding some kind of strange skin.

And then suddenly I was hitting the floor, with a hundred and eighty pounds of freaked-out vampire on top of me.

Mircea jumped back to his feet and then ducked into a crouch as I lay there, panting and half-sick. God damn, that had sucked. He seemed to think so, too, because he was staring around, minus his usual sangfroid. Mahogany silk whipped around his face as he took in the motionless crowd, the frozen clouds of smoke and a glass that had been caught midfall a few feet away, the contents spilling out like a champagne waterfall.

He put out a tenuous hand and touched it, and then jerked back when it wet his fingers. He looked at me, dark eyes wide. “What did you do?” he asked in wonder.

“Never mind that.” I staggered back to my feet, wondering why I felt like throwing up. “We’ve got to get to him before he finds her.”

“The man who attacked you?”

“Yes.”

“He’s trying to harm the Pythia?”

“Yes!”

“Why?”

“Because Agnes and I stopped him on his last mission. And because that’s what the Guild does—they disrupt time!” And killing a Pythia and her heir would definitely do that.

It would also do something else, I realized. My mother was still the Pythia’s chosen successor, still the good little Initiate preserving her virginity until the all-important transfer ceremony. She had yet to meet my disreputable father, yet to run away with him.

Yet to have me.

Suddenly, my skin was too cold, too tight, and my lungs couldn’t seem to pull in any air. “Mircea—” I grabbed his sleeve.

But I didn’t need to explain. I saw when he got it, and I’d never been more grateful for that whip-fire intellect, which rarely missed little details. Like the fact that if the maniac succeeded, he wouldn’t take out two Pythias tonight.

He’d eliminate three.

Mircea didn’t ask any more questions. He caught me by the waist and surged ahead, cutting a swath through the motionless crowd faster than I’d have thought possible. But the mage had a sizable lead, and in the few moments it had taken to get Mircea on board, I’d lost sight of him.

It didn’t help that smoke hung heavy in the air like a thick, dark fog. I thought it would get better as we moved farther from the source, but the opposite seemed to be true. The far end of the room was a sea of clouds, darker in some areas and lighter in others where lines of spell fire crisscrossed in the gloom.

The clouds were annoying, but it was the spells that had me worried. They were frozen in place like neon tubes at a bad ’80s disco, but there were a lot of them. And while they wouldn’t slam into us with time the way it was, if we hit them—

I didn’t know what would happen if we hit them. But I didn’t think it would be fun.

“Can you shift us across?” Mircea asked grimly.

“Not without seeing where I’m going.” And the smoke pretty much excluded that.

“Then we’ll go around.”

“There’s no time! He’s already—”

“Then I’ll go,” he said, putting a heavy hand on my arm as I dropped to the floor, preparing to crawl under the nearest beam.

“You can’t manipulate time, and he can! He can freeze you and kill you before you know what’s happening.”

“I’ll take that chance.”

“Well, I won’t!”

His jaw clenched stubbornly, and I felt like screaming. “Mircea, you’re going to protect me to death!”

He stared at me a moment longer, and then cursed inventively and dropped beside me. I took that as assent and started forward. But it wasn’t nearly as easy as it sounds.

A bright beam sparkled in the air above our heads like a frozen column of raspberry ice. Frost spell, cold enough to burn, cold enough to freeze any skin it touched. Cold enough to kill. I made very sure to hug the floor as I slithered below.

It was marginally safer down here, because most of the spells were higher up, forming a brilliant lattice above our heads. But even though the smoke was thinner down here, visibility was actually worse, with gowns caught in midswirl everywhere and a forest of men’s trouser legs. I scurried forward anyway, careful not to topple any of the living statues in my path.

“I thought only Pythias could manipulate time,” Mircea said, from behind me.

“So did I.”

“Then how is he doing it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, aggrieved. “Agnes didn’t say anything about the Guild being able to do something like this. They’re supposed to be time travelers, but she said that most of them are losers who manage to blow themselves up attempting dangerous spells they can’t control.”

“And yet this one is different.”

“He didn’t seem that way,” I complained. “At least not when Agnes and I were after him. He was kind of an idiot. He couldn’t shoot worth a damn, and he kept running around screaming, and running into—”

I stopped because I’d slammed into something, hard enough to hurt. It turned out to be the faint green bubble of a protection spell, so dim against the glowing colors that I hadn’t seen it. An older man was underneath, his hand up, projecting the shield over himself and the woman lying beside him. Her gray chiffon evening gown, silver hair and colorless pearls blended perfectly with the frightened pallor of her face.

“Let me,” Mircea said, taking the lead. I didn’t argue, because his sight was about ten times keener than mine. “And tell me about this Guild.”

“I don’t know much,” I said, hugging his heels. “Just what Agnes told me. She said they’re some kind of freaky cult. They think they can make history better, solve humanity’s problems, if they can identify where we screwed up and then go back in time and change it. Only they’re the ones who get to decide what was a mistake and what wasn’t.”

“Fanatics.” Mircea sounded disgusted.

“She called them utopians.”

“Same thing under a different name.”

“She said they could be dangerous—”

“They always are. Anyone who can only see their point of view is. Once a group decides that their way is the only way, it is an easy progression to vilifying anyone who doesn’t agree with them. And once someone has been demonized, has been characterized as opposing the good, killing him becomes a virtue.”

He sounded like he knew firsthand, but I didn’t get a chance to ask. Because we’d reached the middle of the room, where a dark red stain spread over the floor, like someone had dropped a bucket of paint. But paint didn’t simmer like the top of a boiling pot, with potion bubbles rising from the surface to spill into the air. They were sluggish now, like gas trapped in viscous oil, but they wouldn’t stay that way for long.

“What is it?” Mircea asked.

“It’s fading.”