Embrace the Night

Pritkin flinched slightly, but he never dropped his gaze. "You don't understand what's at stake."

"And that would be why, I wonder? Because nobody ever tells me anything?" That last was pretty much a scream, but I didn't care. I'd known that seeing him again would be hard, I just hadn't known how hard. I'd been right before. Burying emotions was a hell of a lot better than experiencing them, especially when they felt like this.

"I will tell you what you want to know, if you will promise to hear me out before shifting. If you thought you were a target before, it is nothing to what you will be with that thing in your possession. It must be destroyed!"

I couldn't have shifted to save my life; I was having a hard time even standing up. But Pritkin didn't know that. It gave me an advantage, a lever to finally pry some answers out of him. But for the life of me, I couldn't work up much enthusiasm about it.

"I've spent my whole life playing games," I told him quietly. "It's the vamp's favorite pastime. A whisper here, a wink there, a clue that may or may not go anywhere and may or may not have been dropped on purpose. I'm tired of games. I just want someone to tell me the truth. Haven't I earned that much yet?"

Pritkin closed his eyes briefly, and swallowed, a brief bob of his Adam's apple up and down. I searched his still-youthful face, trying to peer behind the mask. To see a thousand years of experience. But there was nothing.

I'd grown up around creatures who never showed their age, at least not physically. But you could always tell the older ones, and not just by the aura of power they gave off. There was a gravity to them, like air took on extra weight when they entered a room. As if everything about them was somehow more: deeper, brighter, richer.

He opened his eyes, but I didn't look away. I scrutinized him, trying to keep the Consul in mind, the way she felt, the way she drew all eyes without seemingly doing a thing. I watched a faint blush spread across his cheekbones as I continued to inspect him, and mentally shook my head. No. No way was he that old.

Which left the sojourn in Hell. He'd said that much of his younger years had been spent there, but also that he'd just got back in 1793. Which was crazy. If he'd disappeared from history because he had, in fact, disappeared from earth, then he'd left in the early Middle Ages. And if he'd only just returned…a thousand years on earth would scar a person; what would a mille

How would it be, I wondered, to be snatched into a world you knew nothing about, where your only use was as a trophy? Some kind of freakish experiment for your father to show off? And what had Pritkin done to get thrown out anyway? How exactly did someone get tossed out of Hell?

"Rosier tried to kill you so that you couldn't do what you have just done—retrieve the Codex and with it a spell known as the Ephesian Letters," he finally said.

Maybe it was because I was tired, or under the strain of being near Pritkin and not being able to touch him, to hit him, to run my hands through his hair and make it stand up, damn it, but I was having a hard time following. "What?"

"They were words carved into the ancient Temple of Artemis at Ephesus—"

"Nick told me what the Ephesian Letters are," I said impatiently. "Why does anyone care about an old spell?"

"Because of what it can do. What, in fact, it did do, thousands of years ago." Pritkin sat on the edge of the table. "What it will continue to do, if no one ever casts the counterspell that I foolishly wrote down. Merlin the wise, indeed."

"Then I was right. You are Merlin." I found it hard to take in, despite all the evidence. Pritkin was just…Pritkin. Not some legend out of another time.

"Myrddin, in fact, not that I used the name for long. A French poet thought it sounded obscene and changed it. Fair enough; he changed everything else."

"Then the stories aren't true? There was no Camelot, or Lancelot or Arthur—"

"Oh, there was an Arthur, after a fashion. And I can see his face, if he read half the things written about him! That rumor about his sister alone—he'd have cut out someone's heart for that one." He thought for a moment. "Or she would. Frightening woman."

"So you're what, like a thousand years old?" I still didn't believe it.

"Not…precisely. I was born in the sixth century, but did not manage to live even one normal life span before Rosier came to claim me. And time in the demon realms runs differently from here, much like in Faerie. Only more so. I was there, as far as I can tell, barely a human decade. But when I returned" — he shook his head, and there was still wonder on his face—“the world had changed."

"When I met you in Paris, you told me that you'd only just come back. Was that when you returned?"

"More or less. I had been back a few years by then, enough to learn my way around to some degree, but not enough to keep from being pickpocketed by a spell that hadn't even been invented in my day but was old hat in the eighteenth century."

"By Manassier's grandfather."

"Yes. He and an associate were living in that nebulous world betwixt and between. The Circle had rejected them for unbecoming conduct—and, I suspect, gross incompetence—but they didn't have any skills wanted by the dark. They made a precarious living relieving naive country bumpkins of their worldly possessions and, whenever possible, draining them of their magic. They couldn't get past my shields to make the latter possible, but they did manage to make off with the Codex."

"And that mysterious spell you were going to tell me about."

Pritkin propped his head on one hand, a tired gesture I could never remember seeing before. "I have made many mistakes in life, but the worst of all had to be writing down that blasted spell."

"But Nick said it was never written down. That it was lost after the temple burned and the priests all died."

"One survived and, in extreme old age, left exactly one copy. I don't know whether he was senile, or merely unwilling to let his most precious secret die with him. Perhaps he'd forgotten what it does; maybe he never knew. I only know that I found his scribbled ramblings in an old temple in Angelsey. How they got there." He shrugged. "Possibly a Roman legionary picked them up as a curiosity in the East before being reassigned. I never knew."

"How did you find it?"

"Because I was searching for it. Not that spell specifically but anything old that might have survived. I didn't have high hopes—the place had been burnt by the Romans during their Druid-killing sprees, and what was left was plundered by the Saxons a few centuries later. But no one had thought an old scroll to be of much use, especially one in a language none of them could read, and it somehow survived. Languages have always been a specialty of mine. And I pounced on it."

"For what?"

"For curiosity partly. For the rest…I was so proud of myself, thought I'd found my life's work, before I understood how long that life might be. It seemed an utter good—cataloging and preserving the old knowledge at a time in which the whole world seemed to be coming down around our ears. I had no way of knowing that what I recorded might well bring that to pass much more efficiently than the damn Saxons ever could!"

"But what does it do?" I thought I was going to go crazy if he didn't just tell me.

"The Ephesian Letters is a spell and a counterspell in one, depending on voice, inflection and which way it is read. One way closes a door; the other opens it."

"What door?"

"The door between worlds. Rosier fears that if the spell is found, someone might reverse it, opening a gateway to rivals his kind have not had to face in—" He had been sorting through the pile of pages at his elbow and had picked one out of the group. It must have been the translation Nick was working on, unless ancient Ephesian priests used lined notebook paper. His breath caught. "What is this?"