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Not that I blamed him for trying a rescue.Caleb had once gone with me into hell—literal, honest-to-God hell—after Rosier, Pritkin’s estranged demon lord father, jerked his son back to his court.I’d decided to go in after him, and when I’d thought of who might just be crazy enough to help me on a mission like that, there’d only been one name on the list.

So, yeah, I understood.But he could have talked to me first!Or better yet, let me help!

There were only a few thousand dark mages prowling around along with their little pets, and one man, no matter how good, against all that was a sucker’s bet.Maybe he’d find Caleb—I wouldn’t put it past him because Pritkin was almost as good as he thought he was—but getting both of them out?When we had the cloaks that could disguise them and enable us all to just walk through the crowd?

It was freaking maddening, not to mention dangerous as all hell!And he had to know that.So what the hell was he thinking?

Scratch that; I knew what he was thinking.It was what he always thought where I was concerned, and it was starting to give me hives.We were supposed to be partners, but that word seemed to have a different connotation for him than it did for me.Maybe because he’d started out as my bodyguard what felt like a lifetime ago, but still clung to the whole her-life-over-mine mindset no matter how little sense that made anymore.

He could risk his life going after Caleb, but I couldn’t even though I wasn’t Pythia any longer; Rhea was, God help her.I was just an occasionally useful clairvoyant and no more important than anybody else on this little crusade and probably less than some.But he refused to recognize that, and this is what resulted: a compromised mission because now we weren’t in one group anymore, but three, and—

“And now you’re staring at the ground instead of where you’re going,” Alphonse hissed as I bumped into him.

“I thought this thing was supposed to follow my movements,” I whispered, backing up.

“It does if you have the magic to imbue it with,” Topknot said softly beside me.“What happened to yours?”

I didn’t know the answer, except that I couldn’t feel Mircea—or his power—anymore.I hadn’t been able to in a while, but hadn’t noticed as things had been pretty fraught since we arrived.But I’d felt his absence after putting on this monstrosity and having no juice to power it with.

Well, except for my own crappy store of magic, which had in no way recovered from the beating it had taken in Faerie, and the little I had leftover from what Pritkin had sent me during the fight.But I tried anyway, reaching out to the shell of semi-transparent “flesh” and pushing a little power into it.And had the damned illusion burst as if I’d put a pin in a balloon, which I had not!

“Not that much!Not that much!”Topknot whisper-shouted—in vain.Because we’d been seen by three nearby mages leaning against a charred part-wall, who weren’t drunk enough to disbelieve their own eyes.

“What the—” One of them said, dropping his beer.

“Wi—” Another managed, his eyes blowing wide, before a small, portly, fake mage hit them like a whirlwind and dragged them backward over the wall.

Some familiar sucking, slurping, and tearing sounds followed because Alphonse wasn’t bothering to be subtle, causing the witches to wince.And then the tubby mage’s head that the vamp was wearing popped up over the bricks.And it looked like he, at least, had figured out the control mechanism because his avatar’s bloody mouth scowled at me convincingly.

“Get over here!”he hissed, and I scampered to obey.

“Dark magic!”Zara whispered as she hopped over the crumbling wall and landed beside me.“The cloaks were imbued with it.You can’t use a light spell!”

“Well, somebody might have mentioned that!”I hissed back while Alphonse stripped off my cloak and gave me his.

“Do you even know any dark magic?”he demanded, slinging the hideous thing around him with no more concern than if it had been made out of cashmere.And then he stretched, looking far more comfortable in the larger illusion.“Okay, yeah.This is better.”

“Do you?”Zara poked me with a bony finger.

“Of course, she does,” Purple Hair said.Her name was some old witchy thing I couldn’t remember, because it didn’t look like her.Especially now, when she was wearing a goofy-looking man’s face with a bulbous nose, a shock of greasy corn-colored hair, and a bunch of pimples.But she, too, had the mechanism down because her expression turned worried after a moment.“Don’t you?”

“What do you think?”I whispered testily, testing out my new shape.Which was no better than the last, hanging on me like a blanket.

A really, really horrible blanket, and I was going to lose my shit, just any second now!

“I don’t know what to think!”she whispered back.“You’re supposed to be...I don’t know...some kind of monster.You deserted us to save your own skin—”

“I did no such thing!”

“Well, those are the stories told, all right?But you don’t even know dark magic?”

“She’s awitch,” Topknot said.“’Course she does.She may not use it, being around too many of those high and mighty Silver Circle types all the time, but…” She trailed off, her borrowed, middle-aged, and heavily jowled face starting to look concerned.“You do, don’t you?”

Everybody looked at me.

“There must be another way,” I said, feeling inadequate when that was completely unfair.I wasn’tsupposedto know black magic!

And to top everything off, half of my face stuck out of the top of Shorty’s head, giving me a bifocal-like take on the world, with part clear and part obscured by the mage’s thinning hair.Goddamnit!I compensated by hiking the whole thing up a bit, even though that caused my feet to stick out the bottom under the mage’s crappy boots.