Page 134

Only that didn’t help, because, “What?”

“I know how it sounds—”

“You know, I kind of doubt that!”I said, feeling like my own head was about to explode.“Rhea, you don’t understand—”

“It’s you who doesn’t understand,” she said, shaking off her shock, because she was nothing if not resilient.“I need to explain, and I have rehearsed this so many times, but—”

“You thought there would be more time,” Mircea said, causing her to look at him in surprise.

“Time?No, that isn’t the problem—”

“Isn’t it?”I asked, grabbing her.“So, if you sent him, you can still use the power?”

“No.The gods didn’t dare reabsorb it, for fear of what it might do to them, but—”

“Then can I?”I said, not letting her finish.

“No.Or rather, I doubt it.You’re often the exception to the rules, but the Pythian power only interacts with our clairvoyance, and the gods rescinded Apollo’s gift.Without it—”

“Goddamn it!”

“But you said you sent Tony?”Pritkin repeated.

“It would have been more accurate to say that I asked him to go,” Rhea clarified, looking from Pritkin to me.“The power to do so came from the orb containing your parents’ souls, and, ultimately, from your mother—”

“Well, that’s just great!”Alphonse said.“How the hell are we going to get back now?”

“The same way we got here!”I looked at Tony.“Tell me you still have it!”

“You know, I don’t think I like your tone—” he began, before Alphonse ripped out his comb-over.“Son of a bitch!”

“It won’t work.”That was Rhea, talking fast.“Not unless you want to wait another fifty years.Your mother is dead and cannot access the Pythian power.All she had to work with was the excess charge built up in the orb over the last five decades and her own residual power.But two trips through time, one to get Tony there and one to return all of you, has expended it.She was so exhausted, she couldn’t even talk when they returned.”

“I am not staying here for another fifty goddamned years!”Alphonse roared.

“I’d worry more about surviving the next few minutes,” Billy said, as the whole room suddenly shook like—well, like there were a bunch of gods at the door.

“Saferoom,” Tony snapped.“Now!”

“What saferoom?”I said, but Rhea was already moving.Out of the living room and into the hub beyond, where a bunch of corridors met.She took the one to the audience chamber at a run, before looking back at the rest of us.“Come on!The wards won’t hold!”

“Why are they bothering with that?”Alphonse asked, as the entire suite quaked with the ferocity of the assault.“Don’t they have the password?”

“No, Zeus set the spells himself,” Rhea told him as we rushed after her.“No one gets in but him.”

“That… must have been fun,” I panted.

“He’s a monster,” she said fervently.“But he was useful.I think he was trying to suborn me in the early years, to get me on his side—”

“He’s good at that.”

“Not good enough,” it was vicious.“But he was willing to provide some comforts, including books, in the early days.I told him I was bored, with nothing to do here—”

“And how are books supposed to help us?”Gray Curls demanded.

“It’s not the books.It’s what they came in.”

And then she threw open the great outer doors to my audience hall, only… it wasn’t the hall anymore.Instead of a sunlit space with an expansive row of floor-to-ceiling windows on one side, a ridiculous throne I’d never liked, and a lot of honey-colored wooden floors so shiny that they looked more like petrified stone, there was… a library.The Pythian library, or so I guessed.