17. Max
Max
Afist hammered the door.
“What?” Caspian barked.
“Quill. A witch you cracked out of the glass last night.”
“If you’re here to thank us, save it. We don’t have time.”
“Oh my dearest warlords,” Quill sighed loudly from the other side of the door, while Caspian and Nikolai traded an annoyed look.
I didn’t think anyone had ever called them warlords before.
“Forgive me for interrupting, but I brought Lady Max a bowl of herbal soup, good for healing and mood, and my arms are screaming from holding it.”
“Just get this over with,” Nikolai grated.
He crossed to the door in a blur and yanked it open with his new hand.
Quill pressed her free hand to her chest as she stared into Nikolai’s crimson eyes. He took the steaming bowl from her swiftly, not wanting her to drop the soup.
“Thank you, witch,” Nikolai said. “Dismissed.”
Before he could slam the door shut with his foot, Quill slid her leg into the doorway, then the rest of her body followed. It was a wonder that she could squeeze in between the massive form of the vampire prince and the door, but then, she was a petite woman.
“Oh joy,” she said.
I looked at her, then looked again.
Same Puritan clothes, same wide-brimmed pointed hat. But the woman I’d seen inside that display column had been sliding toward middle age, and this one was old. Wrinkles at the eyes, laugh lines cut deep, gray showing under the hat, a thickness through the waist that hadn’t been there last night.
Her power had run the other way entirely. No collar on her now, and her magic hung around her in a pulsing violet seam.
She read the question on my face before I asked it.
“I let myself settle at this age,” she offered. “People feel sorry for a granny. And I like being underestimated. You’d know something about that.”
“Thank you for the soup, Quill.”
Nikolai set the bowl in my hands. The smell of it, marrow and ginger, told me how long it had been since I’d eaten.
“Yeah, thank you for the soup, Quill,” Caspian said. “We’re in the middle of something. Say your piece and go.”
“That geas,” Quill said, “is more complicated than the healer told you. It isn’t an ordinary one at all. It’s blood magic.”
Nikolai’s eyes narrowed. “You were listening at the door.”
“Yes, my warlord!” Quill beamed at him. “It’s one of my talents. So is this.”
A card deck appeared in her hand, worn soft as cloth. Wrinkled knuckles, and not one age spot on the skin.
“I was collected at forty-one, right in the teeth of my midlife crisis,” she said, inviting herself into the chair Nikolai had vacated.
“I’d just bought myself a very impractical red coat and a black hat, and I was deciding between changing my life and burning it down.
Xander went and made the decision for me. ”
Nikolai gave her a sidelong evil eye, but Quill was oblivious to it as she started to shuffle the cards.
“Nothing so grand as the Oracle in the glass cookie jar you freed. Rest in peace, my kin.” She made a witch sign across her heart.
“I can’t see a thousand years down the river.
But the near water, the next bend, that I see true.
And when a message wants delivering, I get an itch on my old left tit that won’t be scratched. ”
Caspian grimaced, and Nikolai pretended that he hadn’t heard it.
Quill cleared a corner of the nightstand and laid three cards down with a snap apiece. The first card was a stone tower split by lightning, small figures falling from its heights.
“I drew these two hours ago and hoped I was wrong, so I drew them again. Same three. Cards repeat themselves when they think you’re not listening.” Her finger tapped the first. I didn’t remember her wearing that ring in the glass.
“The Tower isn’t a stronghold. It’s this house,” she said. “This safe house falls tonight.”
“We’ll be gone by dusk,” Nikolai said.
“It’ll be too late then.” Quill tapped the second card. A pale moon over a dark road, two beasts howling at the margins.
“Your timetable is what the second card is about. The Moon. Deception on the night road. The dark you’re counting on, my lords, someone else is counting on too.
Every fugitive runs at night. That’s when the hunters hunt.
The roads out of this city are already salted and waiting.
Drive into that dark and you’ll never drive out of it. ”
The room went quiet.
I studied the third and last card as the witch turned it under her fingers. A bright sun over an open field, a banner, a white horse.
“A sun,” I said.
“The Sun, upright, standing in the position of the way out. High noon, when no fugitive with sense would move, which is exactly why the watchers thin out to eat and rub their eyes. Three more vans on the road are just three more vans. There’ll be a tight chase, but the path is open.
” She gathered the cards back into her palm and looked at me, then at the heirs.
“Your window opens at high noon, and it will not open twice.”
I looked at the shuttered window, at the blade of white daylight along its seam, and nodded at the heirs.
“Noon is in an hour,” Nikolai said.
“Wake the crew, vamp,” Caspian said, already turning. “It’s daylight. I’ll drive.”
Nikolai didn’t argue over who should take the wheel this time, and both heirs shot out the door in a flash. Quill followed them, swift as a twenty-year-old, the granny act abandoned the second nobody was watching for it.
I got my wobbly legs under me and aimed for the bathroom, and their voices came up through the floor before I made it three steps.
“Fueled and turned around in twenty minutes!” Caspian, all wolf. “Wounded loaded first, and our dead ride with us in the third van.”
“Daylight clothes, nothing that reads military.” Nikolai, colder and faster. “We’re three delivery vans in a lunch rush. We roll at twelve hundred.”
The warehouse came awake all at once, boots on concrete, van doors banging, voices sharpening.
I braced a hand on the wall, took the daylight as a promise, and went to get ready.