Chapter Forty
I awoke with the big vamp nose-to-nose with me.
He had to stoop to manage it, even though I was on my feet and out in the corridor for some reason, but he didn’t seem to mind.
I should have minded; I should have been shitting my pants right now, like any sane person when a master vamp wants you dead, much less one his size.
Instead, I barely noticed.
“What did you do?” Sophie’s voice came from behind me. Furious. Worried. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing.” That was the Pythia, sounding soft and surprised.
“Don’t lie! You put a spell on her, showed her something—”
“No. She showed me.”
I felt the Seer come up behind me, but I barely noticed that, either. Her smell was familiar, catalogued, known. Like that of the big vamp who wasn’t allowed to kill me, but who wanted to so badly that his scent all but screamed it.
Didn’t know vampires could sweat, I thought, but it was distant, too. As if I wasn’t all the way back yet, from that other place. And despite being in human form, I wasn’t the one in charge.
The world was different like this. Or no, not different; my counterpart simply concentrated on other things. The sight I so relied on was there but less critical, the way a human nose often was. We pass a thousand odors a day, some pleasant, some not, but most simply unnoticed.
The way the visuals of the suite were for her.
She didn’t care that a designer had been at work in here, that the creams and soft golds that formed the base layer of the living room we passed into were perfectly complemented by the glowing, vibrant shades of old masters on the walls, of a gorgeous, earth tone rug on the floor, by a profusion of green, growing things out on the balcony by the pool.
She didn’t care about the textural contrast between the slick, expensive nap of the sofa and the chunky knitted throw tossed over the back.
She didn’t care about the people: vampires everywhere, on high alert; witches blocking the path to the kids outside, putting their bodies and their magic in between them and us; and the quiet presence of the Pythia’s heir off to the side, subtle, watchful, and more dangerous than all of them, judging by the magic suddenly spilling off her.
My counterpart noticed, marked her as potential trouble, but didn’t really care about her, either, being too focused on...
That.
There it was, almost lost in the abundance of other scents.
She raised her head and sniffed, but the smell she sought was faint, all but overwritten by the busy court.
The bright reek of chlorine from the pool was stronger, as were a mix of lesser scents: the waxy crayons scattered around a half-finished drawing on the coffee table, which was also smeared with traces of candy bracelets and chocolate milk; the coppery blood on the big vampire’s clothing, which he had been too distracted to finish absorbing; the pungent alcohol in the glasses the witches had been drinking from, with one woman’s lipstick still warm and fragrant on the rim; the perfume of an expensive candle, shedding spicy notes into the air despite having been burned last night; the hay-like tobacco in the package of cigarettes rolled up in one vampire’s sleeve. ..
She whined softly, and Carales cursed and stiffened, but the Pythia held him back with a word.
“Marco.”
“Let me protect,” it was almost agonized.
For the first time, my counterpart approved of the big vampire. She understood that need, yes, she did. She was feeling it now.
But where was the scent she sought?
Not here.
She abruptly turned and left, the caftan she wore swirling around our ankles.
“Cassie!” Carales barked.
“Stay with her. Don’t interfere.”
He did as he was bade, but so closely that he almost stepped on our heels as we made our way through the suite. It was large, sprawling across the entire floor of this tower. Maybe several floors, I corrected, detecting the skin-ruffling scent of vampires from below.
The Pythia was well-guarded, not that she needed it. But not well enough. Someone had gotten inside her sanctum, someone who shouldn’t be here, who couldn’t be...
My counterpart stopped again, sniffing, looking for that thread of scent we’d lost in the labyrinth of Tartarus.
And a flood of information came to us from a room on the far side of the suite, a thousand different notes, a working anthill of sensory input.
But overriding it all was a potent mix of ozone and magic, so thick that she could almost reach out and touch it.
It was hard to read through, even for her.
She exerted more control over our senses to the point that the information we were receiving threatened to swamp me, like drowning inside my own head.
She paid me no more mind than she had anyone else, leaving me to claw my way back to the surface on my own as her head tilted and her nose worked, and she took off down a hallway toward that fascinating cloud.
She’d smelled that combination before, in the kitchen, where a tiny woman had stopped a battle with barely a word. Power, heralded on the wind like the coming of a storm, the kind that made even the puddle around the heir seem thin and weak by comparison. Pythia.
This was her throne room we found ourselves in, her seat up the small flight of stairs, her scent everywhere, like her magic curling around the walls…
Yes, powerful, yes, dangerous, yes. The small woman with the strange eyes. The one who could have hurt us, but had not.
She was stronger than she seemed. She looked like a scrap of flesh, thin and lacking in muscle—muscle she didn’t need. Her power sparkled in the room, highlighted by the beams of sunlight flooding through the floor-to-ceiling windows, potent, insidious, wondrous...
But not the point.
After a moment of shock, my counterpart brushed it aside and concentrated on the background notes in that same air.
Beeswax and lemon polish, warmed in the sunshine, were punctuated with scatterings of perfume, cologne, lotion, and hair products.
A few of the latter were based on flowers or spices, but more reeked of chemicals, their pungent traces making her wrinkle her nose in distaste.
It was distracting, like the jewelry people wore, with the chemical reaction between the ore and the oil in their skin giving off a metallic tang.
She excluded all of that, too.
The air was getting clearer as she worked, yet still busy. This room was used often, with a great many people coming and going. A few dozen were here now, their smells bright and sharp, like their tongues as they surged to their feet, with a flood of questions aimed at the woman behind us.
The Pythia, I realized, had tagged along, but lagged behind so as not to interfere. But the people saw and swamped her, stirring up the scents in the room like a stiff breeze, loud, strident, impatient. Which increased exponentially when she abruptly ordered them all out.
“Do you know who I am?” A man demanded shrilly, reeking of the gin and tonics he’d had with lunch.
“What do you mean, leave?” Another man in an expensive suit demanded, with the air of someone used to being obeyed. He had cancer; my counterpart could smell it on him—advanced, inoperable. He probably wanted to know how much time he had left.
“I have an appointment!” That was a woman, her sweat threatening to swamp the expensive perfume she wore, despite the room’s air conditioning.
No hint of illness there, but a brittle self-control that almost crackled when she moved, like a shell of ice.
Like the cold, banked anger that fed it, screaming silently for vengeance.
“See Francoise,” the Seer murmured, as the vampires who remained mobile began ushering them away. “To reschedule.”
That sparked a flurry of further protests, along with the emotions that accompanied them, threatening the entire, ephemeral scent painting hanging in the air.
And the vampires crowding in didn’t help!
I wanted to scream, but my counterpart just waited, standing there like a statue, until the angry people left and the picture slowly came together again, if slightly pulled out of shape.
There were layers of scent here, far too faded for my nose to have picked up, but hers was sharper. She could see things going back weeks, and “see” was the right word. Because as I watched, her power raised a roomful of ghosts.
I stared at them in shock, although they shouldn’t have surprised me.
I had seen scent people before, as my wolf’s senses could also conjure them up, if the traces they left behind were strong enough.
But the images that my mind reconstructed were washed out, distant, ephemeral memories of people and animals left hanging in the air until a breeze tore them to shreds, less useful than the forensic spells I normally employed instead.
But here...
There was the orange-red figure of a woman, her scent translated into color in my counterpart’s mind for easier classification, like the clothes downstairs.
She was glowing like a miniature sun, except at the edges, where the colors were beginning to bleed into the tints of the room because she’d been here days ago.
But the core remained solid, bright, and almost as clear as if I was looking at her.
I could practically see my reflection in her highly polished, patent-leather shoes, discern the haze of hairspray around her elaborate updo, and detect the linen suit she wore—grassy, subtle, sweet.
Her ankles were primly crossed, her hands folded calmly in her lap, but the pose lied.
Her anxiety roared at me, so intensely that I wanted to flinch back, but I wasn’t running this show.