Tempt the Stars

his best was pretty damned good.
    The fat lady is singing, I thought numbly, right before Jonas grabbed me.
    “What is happening?” he demanded, looking pissed that his impressive display of magic wasn’t looking so impressive, after all. “Who is back there?”
    “Mircea,” I admitted, and Jonas cursed.
    “A first-level master? You didn’t tell me one of them would be here!”
    “I didn’t know. And . . . actually . . . it’s two. Marlowe’s with him,” I admitted, glancing behind us. Mircea must have ended up on one side of the hall, when the first wave of animated furniture flooded the corridor, and Marlowe on the other. Which left us caught between the ultimate rock and a hard place, with two furniture dams barely holding back two master vamps and us stuck in the middle.
    With nowhere to go.
    “I suppose it is too much to hope that you can shift, just at the moment?” Jonas asked dryly.
    I shook my head, and he scowled. But he didn’t argue with me. He’d been the lover of the former Pythia, and he knew things about the job that most mages didn’t. Like that the power of the office might be inexhaustible, but the Pythia herself wasn’t. And that a shift, even a spatial one like to get us out to the road, required concentration.
    Something that’s a little difficult to manage after being almost choked to death.
    Instead, he dropped my hand and raised both of his, mumbling a long string of something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and his already wild mane go positively electric. And all the doors to all the rooms between us and the furniture dams to slam open. And the contents start to stream out, like reinforcements going to the front lines.
    “The instant you can, shift us out of here,” he yelled, to be heard over the creak of wood and metal moving in ways the designers never intended, and the high-pitched shriek of the wards. “We’ll have to come back for the other!”
    “No . . . need,” I gasped, trying to will air into my starved lungs.
    “What?”
    I reached up and yanked off the fedora, which was somehow still sticking to the crackling mass on his head, and fished something out. It was a smallish bronze sphere encased in glass, which glowed faintly when I touched it. “Spelled,” I explained breathlessly. “You have to know . . . it’s there . . . or it isn’t.”
    Jonas’ blue eyes moved from the paperweight to my face, going sharp and squinty along the way. “I assume there’s a reason you didn’t tell me about this before?”
    I licked my lips. “Uh-huh.”
    “Pythias!” He threw his hands up in a manner that reminded me eerily of Agnes, my predecessor, who would probably have had some trick to get us out of this. But the most I could do was to slide down on my heels, put my arms over my head to cut the noise, and concentrate on recovering.
    I only hoped I did it fast, because Jonas hadn’t bought us much time. Two first-level masters redecorate quickly, and the rooms were already running out of things to shred. We needed to get out of here.
    “Billy,” I whispered. “The train is leaving the station.”
    I didn’t get anything back, even though I knew he’d heard me. Billy didn’t need ears to pick up on my call; whether he chose to answer it or not was another thing. But he’d sounded eager enough to leave before.
    I started to try again, but Jonas grabbed my arm. “Change of plan. When you can shift, take us back to the office.”
    “What? Why?”
    “We have the orb,” he explained, less than helpfully.
    “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
    He looked exasperated. “Yes, but not to take it out of this time stream! The spirit it contains is the only thing keeping the world’s protective barrier in place. To remove it would drop that protection, exactly as our enemy wants!”
    “Then hide it somewhere. Someplace where Tony can’t find it. Then we can look it up when we get back to our—”
    Jonas shook his head. “We have no idea what Tony used it for between now and then.”
    “To hold down papers?”
    “And what else?” Jonas asked severely. “We don’t know; therefore we cannot risk removing a piece of a very delicate puzzle. We could inadvertently change history!”
    I frowned. “If you’re not going to take it and you’re not going to hide it, then what are we doing here?”
    “I needed to see it, to know what I’m looking for. ‘Paperweight’ could mean anything—”
    “I described it to