Curse the Dawn (34 page)

I fell on my butt and went sliding at what felt like sixty miles an hour down a steep embankment. There were no trees or rocks to grab, only slick, sparse grass and a lot more mud. My flailing hand finally grabbed someone’s arm, and I held on for dear life, tumbling and falling, until we finally slammed to a stop in—of course—a muddy puddle.

The impact tried to shove my tailbone up through my shoulder blades and made my teeth snap together. I stared up at the dim arch of the Milky Way while I tried to get my breath back, only to have a drop of water hit me right on the cornea. I wiped it away, dragging my muddy sleeve across my forehead in the process. Of course it would rain. Of
course
it would.

My usual post-almost-dying routine—and, God, there was an actual
routine
—mostly involved getting yelled at by Priktin and then going to get a sandwich. And a bath. And some aspirin. Since none of those was immediately available, I settled for rolling over to check on the source of the wheezing breaths coming from behind me.

I still couldn’t see clearly, with only a sliver of moonlight for illumination, but he was swearing inventively enough to make sight irrelevant. Pritkin’s grumblings are the soundtrack of my life these days, but my relief at knowing he was okay was immediately followed by the realization that there was something wrong with his voice. I fought to get free from the enveloping folds of the heavy leather coat I seemed to be wearing and the mud that had latched onto it with vicious suction.

I finally managed it and staggered over to the side of the puddle, dripping, filthy and exhausted, only to meet my own furious blue gaze. “What did you do?!”

I stared in complete shock. My voice wasn’t that high, was it? I sounded like a little girl. A very pissed-off little girl. I was struggling to absorb the fact that my body was sitting there, yelling at me, when a chill wind tickled my neck and wrists and tried to seep under my clothes. I started to tug my sleeves down, but quit when I caught sight of the hands sticking out of them. I stopped moving entirely for a moment after that, except for my ass, which abruptly made contact with the ground.

The cold knife of recognition twisted in my stomach. The things at the end of my arms were a man’s hands. To be more exact, they were Pritkin’s hands, only for some reason I seemed to be wearing them. After a few frozen seconds, when even breathing became difficult, I realized what that bastard Daikoku had done.

I’d asked to be able to shift, but that hadn’t been possible in my body. I’d also wanted to take Pritkin with me. Daikoku had granted both requests, but not by giving me some extra energy as I’d hoped. He’d switched our bodies. That had allowed me out of the body that was almost drained and into one that had enough fight left to get us gone. It had also ensured that I had no choice but to take Pritkin along.

Because I was stuck inside his skin.

“What happened?” Pritkin demanded, his clipped British tones sounding really odd coming out of my mouth. It occured to me that, with my eyesight, he probably couldn’t yet see the truth for himself.

My mind groped wildly for something to say. “I can fix this,” I finally got out, my voice unfamiliar in my ears. “I think.”

“Fix what?” The question was spoken in a low, controlled voice, which wasn’t good. Pritkin loud is in his normal state. It’s when he gets quiet that you have to worry.

I would have answered, or tried to, but the realization hit me that this body was in a lot of pain. I looked down at my chest, more than a little freaked to see a half-burnt shirt, singed body hair and an irregular red patch underneath it all. Caleb’s spell, I recalled. Pritkin’s amazing healing abilities had already given it the slick, shiny texture of a half-healed burn. Except it didn’t feel half-healed. It hurt like a bitch.

“You destroyed my fence.” The accusation came from the man with the black-framed glasses and the floaty Einstein hair who was standing at the top of the hill, looking down disapprovingly.

I realized that the hard thing I was sitting on was a fence post half-buried in mud. I pulled it out from under my borrowed behind and looked up at the farmer. “Uh, sorry?”

“Well, there’s nothing to be done about it now,” the man said rather charitably, I thought. “Come up here and I’ll make us something hot.”

“Answer me,” Pritkin ordered, and we were close enough that I could see past the naked horror in his eyes and spot the homicidal urge rising. I was trying to come up with a way of breaking it to him gently, but then the farmer pointed a flashlight at us, and I didn’t need to explain. Because Pritkin was staring not at me but down at his chest. Which was currently a lot rounder than usual.

“What have you done?” His appalled whisper grated on my already ragged nerves.

“Got us out of there alive,” I snapped. Okay, it wasn’t an ideal situation, but neither was getting shot, strangled or spelled to death by the Circle. “And at least you’re inside me. I’ve had to possess a vampire before,” I reminded him.

Pritkin seemed at a loss for words—pretty much a first—but his steadily reddening face flushed even darker. He was going to give me a heart attack if he didn’t cut it out.

“You need to calm down,” I said more gently. I distinctly recalled my first out-of-body-and-into-someone-else’s experience, and it had been a little . . . traumatic.

“I am calm.”

Sure. Which was why he looked like he was updating his hit list.

“Yeah, only that’s my body you’re using and I’m trying to make it to thirty before my first heart attack.”

“Are you planning to sit there all night?” the farmer asked. “Get up here before you catch your death!”

“How?” Pritkin asked me, grasping my arms. It didn’t feel anything like his usual iron grip. I swallowed.

“There’s a path to the left. Less muddy than the way you came down,” the farmer answered helpfully.

“It’s a long story,” I told Pritkin nervously.

“Give me the short version.”

“A Japanese god with a lousy sense of humor?”

Pritkin just stared at me. Dark circles crowded his eyes and my hair was falling into his face. It looked like my body hadn’t recovered from the fight yet. It had started to rain harder, and cold drops were running in rivulets down his cheeks and dripping off the end of his chin. He was obviously suffering and, to tell the truth, I wasn’t thrilled about getting back a body that had a raging fever. We needed to get out of here.

“Let’s get back to Dante’s and I’ll explain,” I told him, gripping his shoulder. It felt strange, like the bones were too fragile under my new, larger hand, but I ignored it. I gathered my power around us and shifted—all of about four feet. We ended up sitting farther back in the mud puddle, almost up to our waists in smelly water. Pritkin sneezed.

“What happened?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.” I was listening to the sounds of steps getting closer. The farmer had apparently given up trying to talk to the crazy people hanging out in his field and disappeared from view. But I could hear him as he traversed what I assumed was the path down.

“You’re telling me you can’t shift?” Pritkin demanded, apparently unaware that we were about to have company.

I tried again, just to make sure, and the same thing happened. Only this time, Pritkin lurched into me on landing and I slipped, taking an unexpected mud bath. I sat up, filthy and steaming, and spat out a mouthful of truly disgusting water. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

“But you got us here!”

“And it looks like we’re stuck here.”

I looked around for cover, but even with Pritkin’s eyesight, there wasn’t much to see. Other than an open-sided, tin-roofed shed, which appeared to be busy falling apart, there was only a flat plain filled with soggy grass and more mud. There were some indistinct black shapes silhouetted against the dark sky that might have been a tree line, but it was too far away to do us much good.

Then Pritkin’s head jerked around and he threw up a hand. At almost the same second, something hit his shield and ricocheted back to explode against the shed’s roof. The crash reverberated across the field and turned a third of the roof into a sizzling mess. I didn’t have time to ask him how he’d managed to create a shield using my power, because it collapsed and he jerked me down beside him. Something else whizzed over our heads, more an impression of light and heat than a visual image, and then Pritkin pushed my face down into the muck.

“Over here! There’s two of them!” I heard the yell as I surfaced.

A spell shot by and exploded just behind us, sending a wall of mud skyward before setting the row of heavy fence posts alight, like candles on a nonexistent cake. It occurred to me to wonder if it was the farmer I’d heard approaching, after all. Then I dodged one way and Pritkin went the other, barely in time to avoid a third spell.

Goddamnit, I didn’t even know where we were! How had my enemies found me so fast? I didn’t have time to figure it out, because someone grabbed me from behind.

I used one of the maneuvers Pritkin had been teaching me—which worked a lot better with his strength behind it—and broke the hold. A large, heavyset man wearing a dark Adidas sweatshirt stumbled back. He lost his footing on the slimy soil and went down, but the slew of magical weapons that had been hovering around his head flew straight at me.

I screamed and ducked with my hands over my head—like that was going to help. Only it seemed to, because nothing happened. I looked up to see the line of burning pickets hovering in front of me, getting impaled by knives and riddled by bullets, and Pritkin with a hand outstretched and a face pale with strain. Then I had to dance back to avoid another knife, this one in the hand of an angry mage.

Make that an angry war mage. Levitating weapons are one of their favorite tricks, allowing one man to act more like a squadron. In his little hoodie, Adidas didn’t look much like a war mage, but he fought like one. Which meant I was in a lot of trouble.

“Switch us back!” Pritkin yelled as the knife ripped through the sleeve of my coat.

I glared at him. “Busy!”

The remaining pickets attacked Adidas while I sloshed backward, fighting to stay on my feet and to find a weapon, and then someone else came out of nowhere and tackled me around the legs. The new assailant was taller, whip-thin and wiry. We hit the ground, or what passed for it, with a splash and a squelch. I twisted and fought and somehow ended up on top, pressing his face into the mud with one hand while trying to locate Pritkin’s holster with the other, which had ended up at the small of my back.

Adidas jumped both of us. I got hit in the ribs and cuffed upside the head, but I managed to gouge someone in the eye and got an elbow in someone else’s neck. Then Adidas punched me hard enough to set my ears ringing, but the fight had taken us near the shed and I shoved him back under the dripping metal of the awning.

He screamed and somebody cursed. My head jerked up, expecting more trouble, only to see my own pissed-off form glaring at me. “Get out of the way!”

I dodged to one side just in time to avoid the spell that Pritkin hurled at the guy, which sent both him and the remains of the shed flying. But we were definitely dealing with a war mage, because he managed to concentrate enough even with a face full of liquid metal to get his shields up. The blow threw him into the air, but his shields cushioned the landing and saved him from the hail of flying shed fragments. I stared incredulously as he rolled to his feet and took off.

My fingers closed over the holster at last, and I struggled to my feet, gun in hand, only to be dumped back on my ass by Skinny. He also decided on retreat but took off in a different direction than his buddy. The dark swallowed him before I could get a shot off.

Pritkin jumped to his feet—or, more accurately, my feet—and ran full-out after Adidas. “Stay put!” he yelled over my shoulder.

“Pritkin!” He didn’t even slow down. I gave up on Skinny and took off after my fast-disappearing body. Without his usual strength or his portable arsenal, he could end up getting me killed.

With the wind slapping me in the face and the rain in my eyes, it was tough going. Not to mention the waterlogged coat, a new, lower center of gravity and feet that felt too far from the ground. I stumbled twice and almost lost sight of them three or four times, but Pritkin’s vision was better than good, and despite the heavier musculature, it was amazing how fast his body could move. By the time we crested a hill near the tree line, I’d almost caught them.

Pritkin and Adidas went plunging down the other side. I started to follow when something slammed into my left arm. The pain was so vivid that it blocked everything else out for a moment. Then a movement caught my eye and I turned in time to see that Skinny hadn’t abandoned the fight after all—and to meet the force of his body as he leapt at me. We went down together, rolling and cursing and getting pummeled by the rocks hidden in the tall grass almost as much as by each other.

We crashed into a tree at the bottom of the hill, and luckily Skinny took the brunt of the collision, his head smacking against the trunk with a wet, thudding sound. It was hard enough to stun him or worse, but at the moment, I didn’t care much. I’d taken a glancing blow myself, and a stab of agony ran through my temple before spreading over the rest of my skull, competing with the pain in my arm.

I looked down to find a second slash in Pritkin’s sleeve and blood welling up to soak the leather. It took me a second to realize that I’d been shot. I took a steadying breath, yanked off his belt and tied it high on my arm, above the wound, using my teeth to draw it tight. If the mages didn’t kill me, Pritkin was probably going to when I returned his body stuck full of holes.

“Are you going to let her tackle Jenkins alone?” someone demanded from behind me.

I spun to find that the farmer had caught up with me. His glasses caught the light, making him look like some other-worldly owl as he bent to relieve Skinny of his potion belt. He seemed awfully blasé for someone who had just witnessed a magical battle. But I didn’t have time to figure out what his deal was. Down the hill, Adidas was being tackled by a small, determined figure.