Tempt the Stars

genuine mahogany, and a couple statues of Grecian-looking women holding jugs. A staircase, the one where Rhea had had her vision I assumed, ran up to a landing.
    A chandelier tinkled softly overhead, blown about by the freshening wind through a transom. It sounded impossibly loud to my straining ears, like the world’s most expensive wind chime. Nothing else moved.
    I found that less than reassuring.
    Rhea seemed to think the same. “There should be guards,” she said worriedly. “The Circle—it keeps people here, all the time.”
    “They’re here,” Evelyn said grimly, from behind me. I turned around to see her over near the main doors, where a figure in a leather trench coat lay slumped behind a potted plant.
    I’d been about to ask how he’d died, but then she rolled him over. And I didn’t have to. The skin was gray and papery, and crumpled into unrecognizability, since the flesh underneath had mostly withered away. It pulled back the mouth into a silent scream, left the eyes sunken into the head and the bones brittle enough that several cracked just from the gentle movement.
    A ring dropped off a wasted finger, to clatter against the floor, and Rhea made a small sound. “McClaren,” she whispered. “One of his granddaughters . . . She’s a new initiate. . . ”
    “Adepts,” Evelyn cursed. “I was hoping Marsden was wrong.”
    “Question is, are they still here?” Beatrice asked.
    “They shouldn’t be.” That was Jasmine. “A bomb destroyed the building, not an attack. If the adepts had any sense, they fled after setting it.”
    I swallowed. Maybe cutting things close hadn’t been such a bad idea. But Beatrice didn’t seem convinced.
    A streetlight was shining through a window, glinting off her chains and turning her Afro faintly blue. And highlighting the frown on her face. “Then why attack the Circle’s men? The adepts were already inside and free to move about. Why involve the patrols?”
    “If they were messing about with the wards, they might have been nervous,” Jasmine offered. “Wanted them out of the way—”
    “And speaking of wards, why didn’t we set any off when we came in just now?”
    “You’re with me,” Rhea said, but she sounded doubtful. “But that should only have kept the general alarm from sounding. There should still have been somebody here by now, to check. . . ”
    “Hence the attacks on the corpsmen,” Jasmine said.
    “All of them?” Beatrice demanded. “And how did a group of untrained girls manage that, Pythian power or no?”
    “Took ’em by surprise,” Evelyn said, fingering her wand. “Must have.”
    “And again I say, all of them? You know what they’re like: suspicious, jumpy buggers, every one. And yet—”
    “Let’s just get the kids out,” I said, glancing around. My skin was crawling. “Where are they?”
    I didn’t have to ask twice. Rhea had been vibrating, just standing there, and now she took off for the stairs. “Wait!” Evelyn called, and put a hand on my arm.
    “We have less than fifteen minutes,” I told her.
    But she didn’t answer. “Beatrice.”
    The little witch already had her staff up. One of the little indentations that I’d mistaken for hollows in the wood was glowing with a pale blue light, like a flashlight. Which I didn’t understand the point of, since we could already see—
    Nothing, compared to when she brought it down on the floor, hard. And a pulse came out of the bottom, like a wave heading to the beach. Or maybe like a stone thrown into a pond, because this one was moving outward in all directions, highlighting mop marks on the floor, dust in the corners, cracks here and there in the grout between tiles. Like a black light at a crime scene, it showed everything hidden.
    Including the feet of a bunch of men arrayed along the walls.
    “I hate when I’m right,” Evelyn muttered, and then shoved me at the door. “Go!”
    I hit the floor instead as the paneling bulged outward in the shape of bodies, dozens of them. And then melted away entirely as the spell ran up their legs, stripping off the camouflage as it went. War mages, and not ours, I realized, as they peeled off the walls and started slinging spells that sparked off the shield Jasmine had thrown up, barely in time.
    But one had gotten through, a split second before the shield snapped closed, strobing the room in poisonous green. It missed, thanks to a curse I hadn’t even seen Evelyn hurl, which hit the thrower at