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I received a flash of yellowed teeth, with one missing on the side, then she all but dragged Zara back into a clutch of women.

I didn’t even try to eavesdrop on them; I didn’t need to.I’d just given them a coven-approved way of killing me that no one needed to struggle to explain away.Murdering me via coven law solved a problem without widening any cracks in their ranks.

It was perfect, except that it probably ended in my gory death.

“What are you doing?”The question crackled in my ear.It came from the translation spell I’d been wearing at the fey court because I speak exactly none of their languages.Pritkin had hacked it to give him a way to talk to me in an emergency.

And we seemed to have a lot of those.

“What you suggested,” I said softly, trying to be inconspicuous.That wasn’t hard with everybody still arguing and half of them yelling.

“I didn’t suggestthis!” Pritkin whispered viciously.“You’re supposed to name me as your champion—”

I managed to avoid rolling my eyes—just.“Pritkin.This is acoven—”

“And?”

“And you don’t know as much about them as you think you do.”

That wasn’t surprising since the Silver Circle had fought the covens and nearly annihilated them four hundred years ago.Pritkin wasn’t as close-minded as the usual war mage and knew more about them as a result.But he’d never been one of them—one of us, I corrected myself, because whether I felt like it or not, technically, I was a witch and a coven leader.

Or, I had been.

A pang went through my heart again, like a physical blow.My girls.It was worse than anything, far worse than an infuriated Zara trying to take my head.Dying young was a wartime likelihood, and I’d been forced to come to terms with it a while ago.But that was where I was concerned.

Not them.

This was never supposed to touch them.

“What does that mean?”Pritkin’s voice demanded, breaking me out of my sorrow.

“That there are no champions,” I said, my voice hoarse from screaming.“In the covens, you fight your battles yourself.”

“Then why the devil did you agree?You’re out of magic—”

“Yes, and they know that.Or I’d have shifted away from here by now and taken you with me.”

“Then what thehell—”

“Is Lover’s Knot still in place?”I interrupted, talking about the spell that linked us down to the metaphysical level.It was an old one, first developed in the Renaissance, and which I doubted even any of the witches here knew, as knowledge of it had been suppressed soon thereafter.And it had been suppressed hard.

That made sense when you considered that it allowed two magical creatures to borrow each other’s abilities for as long as the spell was active.Giving a vampire the capacity to throw spells, for instance, which is what it had been used for in some of the old vampire wars.But that ability came with a price, one that the Vampire Senate had decided was too high because the link was so strong that if one part of the duo died, they both did.

Pritkin and I had been risking it at the fey court because we hadn’t had much choice, but he hadn’t liked it, and he sounded wary when he replied.

“Yes, but that only allows you to borrow my power and not my skill, and I have little enough of the former to help you—”

“Then help yourself,” I said because I didn’t have time to beat around the bush.“Send me what you can, then cut the connection.I’ll use what power you have to hold them off for as long as possible.In the meantime, get to the others and get out—”

“What?”

“—have Enid help to hide you.Her abilities should be enough to get you across the desert, then get to Rhea somehow and—”

He said a bad word I didn’t know because it was in an arcane language that might not have even originated on Earth.But the tone was telling.“I’m not leaving you!Not again, never again!”

“Really?I remember a time when you blessed me out for saying something similar to you—”

“That was different!”