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“Either way, they’re not coming here,” Purple Hair added.“If we want to get back before the war party gets everyone killed, we go with you.”

“Or without you,” Zara added.“Come if you’re coming!”

I caught her arm as she started to rise.“Why are you helping me?”

“Damned if I know!”

“That’s not good enough!You were just trying to kill me.I need a reason!”

“Leave her!”Topknot said.“She’s as much of a warmonger as the rest.You heard her before; she wants tofight—”

And so did Zara, I realized, looking into those dark eyes.But not at the expense of her people.The ones she had hidden all this time, cared for all this time, and thought were in danger the second she saw me.

We stared at each other, and I thought I finally understood.

“Get me home,” I whispered.“I’ll do the rest.Your people don’t need to be involved.”

“Agreed.”It was immediate.

And then, of course, something had to go wrong.

“Hey,” Alphonse said, having brought up the rear because he was finishing off a bottle.And looking at the suddenly empty spot at my side.“Where’s Pritkin?”

???

Son of a bitch!I thought, trying not to trip over my own too-large feet.It wasn’t working because I wasn’t actually wearing the scuffed and dirty size twelve boots, with one toe flapping open like it was laughing at me, that were sticking out from under a tattered war mage coat.But my brain kept insisting that I was, and since my own feet weren’t visible anymore, I kept getting confused.

“Don’t do that,” Alphonse said from beside me.

“Do what?”I whispered because my voice hadn’t changed along with the rest of me, and it didn’t match my current appearance.

“Look over everybody’s head like that.You’re going to get us caught—or in a fight.You look like you’re ready for one.”

That was bad, as I was definitely not ready for one.

“I’m seven feet tall!How else am I supposed to look?”I demanded while I tried staring down, although it didn’t help.The big face bobbing around the air above me continued to glower fixedly, like a department store mannequin with a grudge.

Guess this guy had died defiant, I thought sickly.

Distantly, I could feel one of the hideous cloaks the witches had enchanted flapping around my shins because the mage this one had come from had been enormous, and bits of him kept grabbing at me like clutching fingers.Which they probably were, I thought, feeling a shudder tear through me.I had a sudden, visceral urge to grab the grisly thing, throw it off, and stamp it into the ground, all while screaming my freaking head off because this was wrong, wrong, wrong!

But all I did was shiver and swallow my shrieks back down into my roiling gut and look at Alphonse.It was hard because the fake body I was wearing was in between us, appearing to me like a semi-transparent balloon.I could see the outline of the limbs encasing my own, but not control them properly.

It felt like I was steering a clumsy Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade float and trying not to knock into other people while I did so, because whenever that happened, our illusions looked like they were melding together.

Which was less than convincing as a disguise, and damn it, this wasn’t working!

“You need to switch with me,” I told Alphonse after almost face-planting again.

“Nowyou tell me?”His voice came from over my actual head because he was a bruiser.But the lips on the image he was projecting moved considerably lower than that because his cloak had come from a guy maybe five feet tall and nearly that wide.

That left Alphonse having to puppet his avatar from above, like walking a marionette around, because the cloaks didn’t actually change our skin, as the name would suggest.I guess I’d been braced for a werewolf-like transformation, with the cracking of bones and reordering of body parts that came with it.Instead, they appeared to be more like souped-up glamouries, only ones that no detection spell could see through.

Or at least, I really hoped not as we were taking our new skin suits for a spin through a crowd of boisterous, laughing, putrid-smelling dark mages.None of whom appeared to have bathed in weeks, with greasy, dirty skin, limp, scraggly hair, and teeth—the ones they had left—so yellow that I could see them in the moonlight.And I could see a lot, as they were having the time of their lives.

I guessed our cellar wasn’t the only one that had survived, or else somebody had set up a still.Because they were drunk off their asses and shooting guns into the air with no concern as to where the bullets came down.The ones who were slightly less drunk were running around, setting up what looked to be a scaffold in the distance with room for a dozen nooses, even though they only had one guy to hang.

The one Pritkin was presumably after, although I didn’t know that for sure.All the magic being slung around seemed to be messing with the reception on the jacked-up translation spell I wore, which sent me snippets of a dozen Earth languages as we wove through the crowd, but wasn’t letting Pritkin’s voice through.Assuming he was trying to contact me instead of doing the war-mage equivalent of la-la-la-can’t-hear-you because, sure,Iwas the problem here!