Curse the Dawn

"Yes. But I didn't believe. . I thought they were myths."

"For the most part, they are. There are very few of us who live long enough to acquire the sort of power needed for bodily transformation." His voice was admiring, as if the Consul had done a particularly nifty parlor trick."I've heard stories that Parendra—the Consul's Indian counterpart—can do it, too. They say he becomes a cobra."

I didn't say anything. I was too busy trying to swallow the lump that had risen in my throat. It felt like I might be sick after all, and then I wondered how the Consul would take that, if she'd be offended when she got back, all hundred pieces of her. .

I swallowed the lump back down.

"It can be a little. . disturbing. . the first time you witness it," Marlowe said, glancing at me. "I recall being somewhat taken aback myself."

Taken aback. Yeah. That covered it.

We sat there for a few moments while precious seconds ticked away. And then she was back. Dozens of dusty, scaly bodies wriggled their way out of gaps in the rockfall and fell onto the sticky floor. I blinked, and the Consul was the Consul again. She staggered over to the far wall and stood there, trembling slightly, looking more shaken than I'd ever seen her. Marlowe started toward her side, but she waved him back.

"It is blocked for thirty-two and one-half meters," she told me, sounding perfectly composed. "All the way to the mages' holding cells. Their wards are all that is keeping this level intact, and they will not last much longer." She looked at Marlowe. "You will accompany the Pythia on her errand."

I shook my head. "The more people I take with me, the faster my power is drained." And it was pretty low already.

"And the more desperate men become, the less clearly they think," Marlowe responded."These cells are among the most secure in the Circle's control. As a result, they house the most dangerous criminals. You ca

I wasn't sure I could go anyway. The idea of shifting into a place I'd never seen was making me feel a little faint, not to mention that I wasn't entirely clear on exactly how far a meter was. "So, it's about thirty yards, right?" I said nervously.

Marlowe sighed. "A little over thirty-five. But perhaps you should add one to be safe."

Right. Like anything about this was safe. But it was either try or accept defeat and go home now. And we were ru

The ground shook again, longer and more violently than before, throwing me to my knees. The vibrations ran through my skin into my bones, doing weird things to my balance even this close to the ground. And then a crack opened up right in front of us, exposing jagged, striated rock, with sand pouring over the edge like water.

Marlowe snatched me back as the floor beneath us completely disintegrated. Vamps don't fly, but he moved fast enough that it almost felt that way. The next thing I knew, we were down to the curve in the stairs, choking on a billowing cloud of dust.

"Go now!" the Consul ordered. I hadn't seen her move, but she was somehow beside us. I didn't wait to see how much more ground we were about to lose, just tightened my grip on Marlowe's shoulders and shifted.

We landed in another world—cold, sterile and dust-free, with sputtering lights and gray concrete walls. "This way," Marlowe said, pulling me down a corridor.

We passed a long row of cells, most of which had an occupant. I quickly realized that, unlike in human jails, the people incarcerated here weren't conscious. They were frozen in some form of stasis, leaning against the walls of their three-foot-deep cells like department store ma

I stared back at them in mounting concern. Ten, fifteen, twenty—and this was only one half of one corridor. There was likely at least this many in the other direction, and probably more than one passageway. .

It was simply impossible. I could feel it in my bones, like the jerking pulse of my own heart. There was simply no way could I shift so many. Even if I'd been well-rested, I could have made only four or five trips, taking out two at a time. As things stood, I'd be lucky to rescue the man the vamps seemed so interested in and still get the rest of my own party out.

We stopped in front of a cell containing a middle-aged man with frizzy brown hair. Marlowe worked to get the ward on his door to release while I glanced at the cells on either side of him. One contained a red-haired woman with a sly, calculating look on her face. The other held another middle-aged man who was losing the fight with male-pattern baldness, despite there being charms for that sort of thing. Maybe he'd been too proud to use them—his expression was certainly haughty enough—or possibly the Circle didn't allow such vanities in its cells.

Neither of them looked particularly sympathetic, but the thought of what was about to happen to them sent cold chills across my skin nonetheless. This was my doing. Not my fault—I hadn't told Richardson to betray us, hadn't thrown the spell that caused this. But if I'd left that meeting when Pritkin had warned me, none of this would have happened. His voice came back to me suddenly: "They'll die of starvation or drowning or by being crushed under a mountain of rock." I looked into the man's face and shuddered.

A ward snapped, the buzz ringing in my bones like a struck tuning fork, and the frizzy-haired man tumbled bonelessly into Marlowe's arms. "How many can you take?" Marlowe asked me.

"I. . not this many," I said, admitting the obvious.

"Tell me which ones."

"Which ones?" I stared at him. "You're asking me to choose who lives and who dies."

"Someone has to do it," he said with a shrug, hoisting the man onto his shoulder. "And the Senate has no stake here. We have the one we want."

I looked at the red-haired woman again. She had gray eyes that, in the flickering light, seemed almost conscious, almost aware. We stared at each other, her stiff and lifeless as a doll, me as wooden as a carved statue. In a few more minutes, she'd be dead. Or I'd take her and the rest would die. Like the human servants the vampires had housed upstairs, like anyone who had happened to be on the upper levels. It seemed so horribly random.

"There has to be a way," I said desperately.

"A way to do what?" Marlowe asked, his brow knitting.

"To rescue them. All of them. We can't just leave them here!"

Marlowe stared at me blankly. "Yes. We can. In approximately forty minutes this entire level will collapse and in the process take out those below it. Your compassion is admirable, but if we don't leave soon, none of us will get out of here. And I, for one, would miss me."

"And I'm sure a lot of these people would be missed, Marlowe!"

The light directly above us took that moment to blow out, raining plastic and glass onto the corridor floor and throwing Marlowe's face into shadow. The darker atmosphere accentuated the harsh planes of his face, making them visible behind the jovial mask. For a moment, he looked as dangerous as everyone always said he was.

"If there was a way to save them, we would do it. But there isn't," he said flatly. "And keep in mind where we are. For all you know, these people deserve their fate."

My gut clenched, my usual deny-repress-ignore method for dealing with uncomfortable facts suddenly not working so great. I looked up and down the corridor at the faces, young and old, hard and soft. They had won the Circle's enmity, but so had I. If Richardson had had his way, I'd be in one of these cells, too. They were no different from me, except that they were about to die. Condemned because I'd made a stupid mistake.