Page 7

He looked better, having explored more on the way up here and found a shirt.It was clearly a woman’s shirt, being black and showing a pert witch riding on a broom in front of a yellow moon, with the caption “Why, yes, actually.I can drive a stick.”

I grinned because if anything was ever true...

Pritkin saw my expression and smiled ruefully.“There wasn’t a lot of choice.”

“It suits you.”

It did.The t-shirt wasn’t small, but it hadn’t been built for his kind of muscles.It was straining a little trying to contain them all, and along with the black scuba-type trousers he was wearing, leftovers from our recent adventures in the land of the water fey, it left him looking sleek, pared down, and dangerous.

That was good.I needed a dangerous partner right now, as I felt about as strong as a kitten.I took the bottle and gazed around.

The “garden” wasn’t much of one, having run wild ages ago to the point that I was surprised anything had survived up here.Vegas gets water approximately three weeks out of the year, with most of that clustered close together in the summer months.Which, judging by the coolness of the night air, this wasn’t.

Yet there were some scraggly green beans, a few still with yellowed, bug-bit pods clinging to the stems, a sickly-looking tomato plant with no tomatoes, probably because they’d gone into our dinner, and various hardy little pepper bushes, poking up from the hard-packed soil.They weren’t in rows if they’d ever been, but scattered as randomly as if reseeded by the birds, like the desert scrub that also seemed to flourish here.

A leftover spell to make the soil more moist?I reached a hand down to the dry-as-a-bone, cracked earth around the bench and didn’t believe it.Not to mention that I didn’t know a spell that could survive fifty years after the caster’s death.

I felt a shiver run through me and slugged back a shot’s worth of whatever was in the bottle.

And immediately regretted it.

“Take it easy,” Pritkin said as I choked because what thehell?“You didn’t have any earlier?”

“No,” I finally gasped back and returned the bottle.“I smelled it first.”

“So why now?”he hiked a blond eyebrow at me.

“I’m stupid.”

I found myself enveloped in a strong arm, and...okay.That was better.“You’re not stupid.”

“I feel stupid.I was sure my power would come back as soon as we reached Earth.”

“It was a reasonable assumption.”

“Yeah.Story of my life.”

I reached for the bottle again, and he sent me a look but gave it to me.It was no better this time, but I didn’t care much.I was too numb right now to care about anything.

Well, except for one thing.Because I hadn’t gotten into this mess on my own.Pythias could go back in time but not forward, as the future didn’t exist yet, so how could you shift to something that wasn’t there?

You couldn’t, or at least, that was what I’d always been taught.But somebody had done it, jumping our little group fifty years ahead into a dystopian nightmare.Worst of all, that somebody wasn’t even a rogue Pythian acolyte or a crazy mage, both of which I’d fought before.

It was a vampire.To be more precise, it wasthevampire, the bastard who had ruined my childhood, killed my parents, and now trashed my future.The one who wasowed.

And the only thing keeping me sane was the fact that he was probably here, too.

He had to be.Vamps didn’t know crap about magic, especially the time-travel kind.Yet, in a split second, he had shifted us decades out of place, and he’d been standingright beside mewhen he did it.

So, he hadn’t had a chance to get out of the spell’s reach.It must have grabbed him, too, and although I hadn’t seen him since arriving in this nightmare a day ago, hehadto be here.Everyone else near me had been swept up in the spell’s backwash, so why wouldn’t he?

Or maybe I was just telling myself that.Maybe I needed something to ground me because, time traveler or not, this was out of my league.Way the hell out.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Pritkin said.

“I’d rather hear yours.”

The eyebrow was back and doing double duty tonight.“About?”