Curse the Dawn Read Online Free PDF Page B

mage is with Fawkes!” I gasped as another pair of cuffs clicked shut around my wrists. “They’re going to set this whole place off and we’re all going to die!”
    “Yeah, and if I let you go, we’ll die faster!”
    “I’m not going to help them!”
    “I know you’re not. You’re staying tied up here until I deal with this.”
    I glared at her. “I’m Pythia! I don’t really need you to release me!”
    She sat back on her heels, surveying me mockingly. “Okay, Pythia.” She waved a hand. “Do your thing.”
    “Okay, I will!”
    “Okay, then.”
    One of the few upsides of an otherwise hellish job is the ability to shift spatially as well as temporally. That’s a fancy way of saying that I can pop in and out of places as well as times, something that’s saved me on more than one occasion. I’d used the ability to move across continents; getting out of a pair of handcuffs was child’s play.
    I shifted a couple feet to the right, expecting to leave the cuffs behind. I’d pulled a similar trick once before and it had worked great. But this time, the cuffs traveled right along with me. Agnes demurely rearranged her skirts as I tried again. My body moved another couple feet to the left, but my hands remained as tightly bound as before.
    “What the hell?”
    “Magical handcuffs,” she murmured.
    “Get them off!”
    “I thought you didn’t need my help.”
    From the powder room, we heard the sound of angry voices and the clash of steel on steel. “You may need mine,” I pointed out.
    She sighed. “Some days I really hate my job.”
    I managed to get to my feet, but having my hands bound threw my balance off. I fell onto the steps, bounced off and ended up on my abused butt. “I hate mine all the time,” I said bitterly.
    “Okay, you’re a Pythia.”
    “We go through all that, and you believe me because I have a bad attitude?”
    She started working on the cuffs. “That and the fact that the Guild can’t do spatial shifts.”
    “So why did you attack me?”
    “Because you aren’t supposed to be here! This isn’t even supposed to be possible!”
    “Maybe the power thinks I need training, too,” I pointed out.
    “The power doesn’t think . It isn’t sentient. It follows a strict group of rules, such as those built into any spell. One of which is that you can’t interfere in a mission that has nothing to do with you!”
    “I’m not interfering,” I said crossly. “I just wanted to talk! You’re the one who—”
    “And in case you didn’t get the memo, we’re the good guys!” she added furiously, cutting me off. “We don’t go around changing time!”
    “Never?” I asked skeptically. Because if Agnes hadn’t broken that rule, I wouldn’t be alive.
    “Oh, God.” She threw up her hands. “Here we go again. Every initiate starts out thinking she can save the world.”
    “Can’t you? You’re Pythia. You can do anything you want.”
    She laughed. “Oh, you are new.” She tugged on the cuffs. “Damn.”
    “What?”
    “They’re stuck.”
    “What do you mean stuck?”
    “I mean, they won’t open,” she said patiently.
    I pulled on them until it felt like my wrists might pop off. “Why not?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t design these things. I just use them.”
    “What kind of dumb-ass philosophy is that?!”
    “You drive a car, don’t you? Do you know how that works?”
    “The general principle, yes!”
    “Well, I understand the general principle here, but for some reason they aren’t releasing.” She worked on them for another minute until things suddenly went silent in the next room.
    “What’s going on?” I whispered.
    “Do I need to explain the difference between clairvoyant and mind reader?” She gave up on the cuffs and dragged me to my feet, almost dislocating a shoulder in the process. “I still don’t trust you,” she said flatly. “But if you help me with those two, I’ll give you a hint.”
    “A hint about what?”
    “What did you