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“What is it?”I asked as he all but leaped off the bench and started moving around the hilltop, hands spread slightly out beside him and parallel to the ground as if magically searching for something.But there was nothing there but beans and the staircase below, hidden by the fake hilltop.But Pritkin was never this excited over nothing, so I got up, too.

“What are we looking for?”I asked because he hadn’t answered me.

“Witches.”

“What?”

“Witches!”he looked up from kneeling by a bean plant.“What if they’re still here?”

I stared at him, feeling the first bit of hope in a while.We could really use some allies right now, especially ones that powerful!Oh, God, we could!

“You think they are?”

“I can’t tell.”He looked frustrated.“But that doesn’t mean they’re not here.To have survived for so long, they’d need a hell of a camouflage.”

I glanced around.I’d say they’d succeeded.“So, how do we contact them?”

“We don’t.If they’re here, they must know we are, too.That portal simply couldn’t have been missed.It even brought a god running from miles away.But they haven’t surfaced.”

“Maybe they don’t know who we are,” I said excitedly.“Faerie was supposed to be barren, too, and now it’s just exploded.They must have felt that; their magic is based on that of the fey—”

“Yes, and the death of a planet is not likely to have reassured them!”

“But there has to be a way to let them know we’re not just refugees, that we’re not a threat, that we canhelp—”

“Help?”The word slithered suddenly through the cold desert air, like the hiss of a giant snake.“What does the heir of Artemis know of help?”

And suddenly, we were falling.

Chapter Four

The whole hilltop dropped out from under us, and we fell.It would have been to our doom, but the little bench we’d been sitting on caught us.It followed us down, scooped us up, and sent us rocketing through utter darkness, clinging to the weathered old slats without any idea where we were going or what we’d find when we arrived.

The journey didn’t take long.The demented little thing fell almost straight down for a few seconds, to the point that my butt lifted off the seat, then shot ahead at what felt like the speed of sound.Or maybe that was just because my screams were blown away almost as soon as they left my lips.

They echoed somewhere behind us as we abruptly dropped again, into utter darkness, the pale moonlight from above having been cut off by what I guessed was the top of a tunnel.And then we stopped so fast that it would have given me whiplash if Pritkin hadn’t been holding onto the back of my head.Until the bench abruptly tipped over and dumped us both out.

I lay on what felt like hard-packed dirt that bunched under my nails as I pressed them in, trying to ground myself.That didn’t help much, with my head spinning, my gut roiling, and my sense of direction too confused to figure out which way was up.Leaving Pritkin to handle this, whatever this was.

It seemed to involve many people crowding us on all sides and muttering things I hoped weren’t curses because his magic was sitting on empty, and mine was already there.I swallowed my nausea back down while he said stuff I couldn’t concentrate on, being too busy trying to focus my eyes, only that wasn’t working, either.Everything was black as sin, to the point that we might as well have been blindfolded, which we probably were, I realized.

Another spell, I guessed, but I didn’t have a chance to ask before I was snatched off the floor and half marched, half dragged down a hall.

I only knew that’s what we were in because the echoes changed, bouncing back faster inside a more confined space.But I still couldn’t see, and I guessed Pritkin couldn’t either, since he was cursing up a storm from behind me.But we didn’t fall, as whoever was manhandling us never gave us the opportunity.

My feet only touched down one out of every three or four steps, and the people hustling me along weren’t stopping to rest, maybe because they didn’t have far to go.We soon burst out of the tunnel into a much larger room; I could tell that much by sound, but nothing else.Until I was thrown back onto the floor, a rough stone one in this case, and someone began speaking.

“Cassie Fucking Palmer.Why am I not surprised?”

The blindfold I wasn’t wearing dissolved, and I blinked around in the dim light of a torch-lit cave.And realized why the voice had sounded familiar.Jasmine, I almost said, looking up, but caught myself in time because that wasn’t her name.

It was who she’d reminded me of when we first met, the beautiful, sloe-eyed, dark-haired princess of Agraba, or in reality, the Mother of one of the few covens who had been willing to send girls to my court.I stared up at her, trying to remember her real name, which shouldn’t have been difficult.But if I’d ever doubted that fifty years had passed, I didn’t anymore, and the years...had not been kind.

“Look at you,” she said, coming forward through a crowd of what looked like a couple hundred witches and crouching in front of me, her black robes pooling on the dirt.“Look at you!”

I really wished she’d stop looking at me because then I had to look back.And the changes were startling.Something I guess I wasn’t great at concealing because she smirked.

“It’s been a long time.”