I managed to focus bleary eyes on my filthy, bloody soles, and the glass, gravel and God knew what sticking out of them. Clearly, the Underground was not the place to go barefoot. I doubted I could walk, much less run, in this state.
And then the Spartoi’s head poked up over the serrated edge of the window. He would have looked like he was doing some kind of old vaudeville act, the kind that makes people wince these days at its deliberate racism. Except that blackface didn’t usually involve a ton of blood, a halfmissing scalp or a bunch of gravel embedded in the raw flesh all along one side of the face.
I screamed, and he grinned and flopped another arm over the ledge. And this one held a gun. And I discovered that—surprise—I could run after all, a scrambling, hobbling gait that got me through to the next compartment just before bullets started strafing this one. I stared at the back of the seat in front of me as it was quickly shredded and tried to think, only that wasn’t going so well. My brain was frozen in horror and seemed to be stuck on a loop screaming
I told it to get a grip, and it told me
And for some reason, it seemed to help.
For one, the barrage stopped, maybe because the Spartoi thought he’d got me. And for another, I could sort of think again, only all that came to mind was that my knives weren’t likely to be a big help against a guy who could walk out of a burning inferno. Among other things.
But I couldn’t let him get past me. I couldn’t let him get to my mother. And there was only one way to ensure that he didn’t. I was going to have to grab him and shift him out of here, and then try to shift back before he could kill me. Which was not sounding like fun for so very, very many reasons, including the fact that I would have to touch him, and I thought that that might just send me the rest of the way to Crazytown and—
And then Mircea walked through the far door. He strolled down the aisle like a guy looking for a good seat, despite the fact that the barrage had started up again. Half a dozen bullets hit him in quick succession, blooming bright against the white of his shirt. But he didn’t seem to notice any more than the demigod had, just held out a hand like that would stop the hail of bullets.
And then it stopped the hail of bullets, or something did. I peered around the corner in time to see the Spartoi slump over the window ledge, the gun falling from his limp hand. “You killed him,” I said in disbelief. I’d started to think that wasn’t possible.
“For the moment,” Mircea said grimly.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that these things don’t stay dead,” he said, giving the Spartoi’s body a vicious kick. “I killed the creature I chased in here, but within thirty seconds he was alive again.”
“Alive. . . You mean he was a zombie?”
“No, I mean he was alive. I just now drained him for the second time. It is virtually the only thing that works with these things—and it doesn’t work for long.”
“Then . . . then however many times we kill them, they’re just going to continue chasing her?”
“Unless you can help.” The quiet voice came from behind me. I turned to find my mother in the doorway, the mage behind her.
“This is crazy,” he told her urgently. “I told you—”
“And I told you, did I not? We can use tricks to elude them, as we did before. But they’ll keep coming. Or we can end this, now, once and for all.”
“But you weren’t there! You don’t know—”
She took his hand. “Hush now.”
He stared at her, obviously frustrated. And then he transferred that stare to me. And if looks could kill—
“Right back at you,” I said dizzily.
My mother had turned to look at him, but now those lapis eyes swung back to me. “There is little time,” she said simply. “Will you help?”
“I . . . there’s . . .” I had about a million questions, but looking into her face, I couldn’t seem to remember a single one. And a glance at the dead demigod showed that he was already stirring, flesh flowing along his body like water, jagged wounds pulling together, raw red flesh retreating, the whole turning into a seamless garment of pale olive skin. Any minute now, his heart was going to start to beat and his eyelids were going to open and . . . and I really didn’t want to be here when that happened.
I looked back at her. “What do you want me to do?”
Thirty seconds later, we were still on the Underground, still rocketing through a dark tunnel, but things looked a little different. There were plush bench seats of padded leather, posh lights overhead and shiny wood panels on the walls. And the passengers all looked like they were going to the same fancy dress party as the people in the cab.
Or they would have, if they hadn’t been shrieking in shock at seeing a group of people pop out of thin air in front of them. Or maybe it was more the fact that one of those people was mostly naked and completely dead. Again. Mircea pried his hand away from the creature’s throat, and he hit the floor like a sack of rocks.
I stared down at the man’s sightless, staring eyes, shimmering in the gaslight. They were blue. I swallowed. “What the hell is he?”
“Spartoi,” my mother confirmed. “Ares mated with one of the dragon kin long ago, and they were the result.”
“That’s why they can transform into one?”
She nodded. “Yes, but not here. The tunnel is too small; it would trap them. And without that ability, much of their power is lost.”
“That’s why you came down here, isn’t it? You knew—”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Those beautiful eyes met mine. “They have been hunting me for a long time.”
I didn’t get a chance to ask anything else, because screams and gunshots came from ahead of us. I looked up in time to see another red lightning bolt take out a connecting door a couple of cars away. I couldn’t see what was going on next door because of all the smoke, but there were more screams and more terrified people bursting through into our car. And then, over their shoulders, I got a glimpse of two more Spartoi tearing down the length of the train.
And then we were shifting again, sort of.
This time, it wasn’t so much like we went anywhere than as if the scene shifted around us. The train stayed pretty solid, except for the ads on the walls, which bloomed and faded in bright spots of color. But mostly the people changed, morphed, flowed into each other and then into new people, like they were liquid, along with the time stream barreling us along. Days, weeks, months of passengers spilled around us, flickering in and out as we were probably doing in their view as we ran forward, through space and time and back through the compartments.
My feet hurt, my body ached and I was half-convinced I had a damn concussion. And I barely noticed. I had a vague impression that I was staring around with my mouth hanging open, but I didn’t care about that, either. I’d never seen anything remotely like it.
Of course, that went for most of the stuff that had happened lately. I wondered if this was what training was like, real training, the kind I was never going to get. I thought Agnes would have liked setting me some crazy obstacle course, making me run after her, challenging me to keep up or have my ass left behind in some other place, some other time.
Only this wasn’t training; it was real. And getting left behind here wouldn’t mean an inconvenience or an embarrassing return; it would mean never returning at all.
From what I understood after all of a half minute of explanation, the Spartoi had managed to get some kind of spell on my mother that caused their state to mirror hers. That meant that they piggybacked along whenever and wherever she shifted. It also prevented her from using any of the tricks I’d seen at the party—stopping time or slowing it down—where they were concerned. She could still slow down time, but if she was immune to it, they would be, as well.
