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Very familiar, I thought, my stomach knotting, although whether in hope or fear, I wasn’t sure.

I had never been with him.

“Who the hell is that?”Alphonse whispered.“And why does he look like Pritkin?”

I swallowed and accepted that things had just gotten a lot more complicated.“Because that’s his father.”

Chapter Ten

Things changed abruptly with the arrival of the party crasher.The necromancers cleared the field so quickly that I lost our new guide, which I wasn’t exactly upset about, and it was just as suddenly flooded by demonologists, which I was.A large group of them ran forward to greet Rosier’s chariot as it came to rest on the riverbank, clustering about him so thickly that only the golden-red glow he was shedding for some reason allowed me to follow his progress through the crowd.

Which was fast because he was pissed, knocking groveling fanboys out of the way left and right and ignoring the screams of the one his creatures had just decided to eat.He had only one thing on his mind, and I damned well knew what.I just didn’t know if it was good for us, and if it wasn’t—

“What do you mean, his father?”Alphonse demanded.

“It’s a long story—”

“Condense it!”

“We don’t have time—”

“Make time!”Suddenly, I found myself lifted off the ground and jerked up to a vampire’s face.One I couldn’t see because his glamourie was hiding it, but which I assumed wasn’t happy.Maybe because he was feeling out of his element in a major way and thus vulnerable, and vampires hate that.

Especially master vamps who are used to being the biggest, baddest person in any given area, but not here.

This crazy world didn’t run by the rules he knew.It ran by these, I thought, as I sent a tendril of necromancy through his cloak, which promptly wrapped him up like a mummy and forced him to drop me back on my feet.Because I meant it; we didn’t have time for this!

“If you want to go back and wait with the fey, go back,” I told him harshly.“And that goes for the rest of you.But if you stay with me, I’m in charge, understand?”

“I don’t understand a damned thing, and don’t try the trick with the cloak,” Topknot said, pulling a wand on me.“Just explain.”

“That’s Pritkin’s father,” I said, pointing at Rosier.“And he’s volatile as all hell.I don’t know what he’s come for or what he’ll do, but it will probably involve dragging Pritkin off somewhere, and I need him!So we get to him before Rosier does, we get to the portal, and we get out of here!”

I was yelling but didn’t care, as nobody outside our group could hear me over the chaos anyway.

And, apparently, Topknot didn’t, either.

“Okay.”She put the wand away.

I stared at her.“Okay?”

“I just wanted to know,” she said amiably enough.And I belatedly remembered that, in the covens, screaming at each other was taken for civil debate.

“Well, come on then!”I turned to go.

And then had to turn back around to release Alphonse.I must have looked as harassed as I felt because Zara shot me what might almost have been a glance of sympathy.As if to say, “Leadership is fun, isn’t it?”

No, I thought grimly.

No, it wasn’t.

And then we were pushing through the crowd, part of which appeared jubilant, part dour—I guessed depending on which side the mages in question were on—and part confused, probably the ones too drunk to know what was going on.But the scaffold was still being worked on, the bonfire was still being built, and people were acting like a demon lord joining the festivities wasn’t any reason to call the whole thing off.Which meant we’d better hurry because whatever Pritkin was planning to do would happen soon.

Very soon, I thought, as more spell fire lit up the night in celebration like fireworks going off overhead.Caleb was getting a royal send-off, which meant he must have been causing them a lot of trouble.And yeah, that sounded about right.

There was just one thing I didn’t understand.

“Aren’t they afraid of alerting the gods?”I asked Zara, who had come up alongside me; I supposed for moral support.