Chapter Forty #2
The woman next to her was the opposite, anxious, yes, but in a happy, excited way that translated into a bright teal with yellow sunbursts.
She was hoping to be told that the object of her passion felt the same.
I could see the handkerchief she twisted in her lap, glowing almost neon with her pheromones and longing.
A nearby man, meanwhile, had a dark gray aura that radiated stress.
Possibly financial, as the stronger emotions—love, lust, anger, and grief—were absent.
There were only brooding gray skies that followed him like a cloud as he paced up and down near the windows, the color dripping down on him like rain.
My counterpart dug deeper, going further back in time. Where more and more scent beings had been shredded into vibrant pieces that swirled around the room like bright scarves, shouting their worries at us in broken snippets of emotion. And there were hundreds.
I tried to pull back because it was too much, too fast, but she didn’t let me.
She was getting close now, her nose twitching up a storm, drawing a flood of emotion to us, including from several men who had been propping up the opposite wall weeks ago, their auras bleeding into each other—dark, sinister, dangerous.
She could smell the blood magic on them, but I doubted anybody else could, as it was well hidden.
As I watched, some kind of shadow being, invisible to human eyes, separated from one of the men. It flickered through the scent painting like a shark gliding through water, searching for prey. And searching successfully, as it avoided witch and vampire alike, all the way to the throne...
Where it encountered something it didn’t expect.
I hadn’t, either, because there was no fanfare, just a single man who stood behind the Pythia’s throne, his body wreathed by three different kinds of magic. And two of them weren’t ones I knew. One of those was probably fey, as it had a hint of their strangeness, but the other...
I had no idea about the other, and that alone was enough to rock me back on my heels.
It was likely something demonic, as they only had about a million kinds of magic, corresponding to their many races.
But even more worrying than the fact that he was carrying three, often contradictory, magical auras was the fact that the man himself seemed perfectly normal.
Even to my counterpart’s nose, he smelled of nothing more than his morning coffee.
Yet he suddenly threw a cloud of magical force so strong that it shredded the shadow being where it stood, burning it right down to the ground.
And did it so fast and so subtly that I doubted anybody else had even noticed.
The image snapped, the little vignette fading back into the morass of overlapping scent stories, and I tried to resurface again, desperate to force my way back to the present.
But it was difficult, for the stories went back for months.
And the feelings that accompanied them were so strong that I could taste them in the back of my throat, could track them with my own accelerated heartbeat, could feel them as if I was experiencing them myself: anxiety, hopefulness, boredom, impatience, anger, fear—
My counterpart paused on that last one, her nose scrunching. There was fear, and then there was fear, and this was the latter. The heart-pounding, bitter taste-inducing, cold sweat on a warm night, breath-catching form of the emotion that had no place here.
That kind belonged in a different time, when just surviving another day counted as victory.
When it could make someone used to constant vigilance drop everything and listen, food forgotten in their mouths as they fought to hear over their own heartbeat.
Straining to know what was out there, what was hunting them, what was coming.
It was still found in this world in places like war zones and back alleys.
It stained the inside of soldiers’ combat gloves along with their sweat, and rode the rapid breathing of trafficked women and children in the back of trucks, bumping toward an unknown destination.
It shouldn’t be here, in the Pythia’s beautiful reception room.
And yet, it was.
I was vaguely aware that our caftan, which, despite my orders, must have come from the crazy shop on the drag, had been cycling through the emotions we were sensing in a swirl of psychedelic colors.
But at that one, it stopped and flooded black with pointed red spikes.
They crackled across it as my counterpart slowly sifted out all of the remaining scents to focus on the one she wanted.
It was elusive, weeks old, and badly decayed, but it was there, right there, right… there. We moved to where it was deepest, like a well of dark energy on the honey-colored planks of the floor, and then just stayed there, soaking in it. Fear.
Jagged, sharp-edged, and spiking like a heartbeat in the throes of an attack, unmistakable.
But not, as she’d first thought, the terror that accompanied the spurting of blood and the shattering of bone.
This was more like the fear that puddled around a hunted creature that has stowed itself away, desperate to avoid a predator.
Someone was hiding.
Someone was hiding… from us.
And while my nose might have picked up some clues, because everyone carries a unique scent based on their age, genetics, diet, and health, it told her more. It told her everything. Male, Were, young but not too young, muscular but flabby from too easy a life…
Familiar.
I thought back to the beginning of the month, when the leaders of the Were world and their entourages had come here to be presented to the new Pythia.
It was tradition, whenever there was a change in the leadership of the supernatural world, and they were all about tradition.
And this one couldn’t be avoided, even by someone who was desperately afraid that the Pythia would See more than he wanted.
As I now did.
A lot of strange things suddenly made more sense: a man running from a fight when doing so would undermine his new leadership role in front of his entire clan, when he outclassed his opponent in size and strength, when he had already gotten in one good hit that had staggered her and might get more, and in a setting where no one could easily interfere on her behalf.
But he ran anyway, like a beaten dog with his tail between his legs, because he was afraid, but not of me. He’d recognized something in me, something that had spooked him so badly that he couldn’t think straight, throwing him into a panic. Something familiar to him, too.
No one had questioned it at the time, not even me, because the mystery had been lost in the confusion, alarm, and pain that followed. I was questioning it now. And remembering a lot of other things that had gone largely unnoticed in the chaos of my recent life.
A Black Circle mage acting like a panicked schoolgirl, and taking terrible chances when his kind never did; Chayton, telling me that the symbols in that run-down hotel mostly guarded from spiritual attacks, like the the ghost beads I’d found scattered at a crime scene; Dave saying that many native beliefs included the idea that the souls of the dead could return to this world, whether to harm or to protect; Jen identifying the chindi on Hargroves, but saying they were limited in what they could do; a corpse with a ripped-out heart—
It was crazy, but it fit: a dark mage finding that the chindis he’d been binding were insufficient to help him with his campaign to gain control of a Relic army.
So he raised something else, something bigger, something old, and got more than he bargained for.
Resulting in him losing control of said spirit because it found its own agenda—and its own host.
But where did the Reaper fit in? And me—what the hell was up with me? And why was my third remembering things from freaking prehistory?
I didn’t know for sure, but I knew one thing. The man she’d known, and who she had been searching all over Vegas for, had been here. There was just no doubt, not with that scent in my nose, that deathly worry staining the boards of the floor, that fear—
That the Pythia would See. That she would know. What he was, what he’d done, what he planned.
Not revenge for a father killed a month ago, but for a whole tribe done to death in the distant past. When Rand’s power had been shattered so completely that it still hadn’t recovered. When it had lost its right to rule, its lands, everything, because one woman had stood up and said no.
And still did.
Name him, the harsh demand washed across my mind, because she hadn’t been party to most of this, had she? Having the same problem I had when she was awake, being only partially aware. But I had been there, and I was smelling him now, the scent as clear as day in my mind, along with the name.
“Bleddyn.”
I spoke aloud, and my voice was so hoarse that the humans—the Pythia, Carales, half a dozen vampires—didn’t understand.
But my counterpart did.
I felt her lips draw back from her teeth, a single terrifying motion, or so I assumed.
Because the vampires yelled and shoved the Pythia behind them, Jen cursed, and Sophie grabbed for my arm.
Too late because we were already running, Changed again, but into my wolf form this time, to move faster while not losing that scent.