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“I can’t!”I told him, and it was the truth.I could leave immediately.I had the power to shift anywhere in the world I wanted and save myself.I could even take some of the people that he was showing me and who were crowding the warehouse now, as more and more poured through the portal.

But not all.

Notmost.

“We will help you,” Mircea said, grasping my hand tightly.And forming a connection that—

God!It felt electric, but not like a battery.More like a lightning bolt slamming through me and making a connection to the blond on my other side, lighting up the room.

The color flooding the space changed from a golden glow to a blue-white intensity that I thought would tear me apart.Pritkin, I thought, desperately clinging to the name.His name was...

My brain whited out.

I distantly understood that Mircea had been draining me, siphoning off what he could, hoping it would clear my mind.And now he was giving it back.But I had already replenished it from the other gods I’d drained, and now it was all thrumming through me, theirs, mine, ours, so much, too much!

Then use it, Mircea’s voice came again.Or maybe it was Pritkin’s.I didn’t know; couldn’t think.

Except that it wasn’t enough, not for all of them, even now, and the enemy was coming.I could feel the gods like a hot wind over the desert, taste the spice of their anger in the air, and feel their power begin to pepper my skin.We had moments only; we had to go.

Not alone.That was Pritkin, his voice booming in my head through the bond we’d somehow rekindled.

We do it together, Mircea agreed, even as I sent them all the reasons it wouldn’t work, how it would gut us and leave us vulnerable, how the others were coming, and we couldn’t be here when they arrived—

And the rest?Pritkin said.They’ll torture them for what they know.They’ll kill them all—

They don’t matter!I screamed mentally, even knowing that they did.They mattered to me in a way they hadn’t just seconds ago.Maybe because they mattered to my partners and I was in their minds and they were in mine, Mircea using his mental gifts to stabilize my psyche at their expense, risking himself to bring me even this far back.Like they would both have us risk ourselves to save the rest.

But it wouldn’t work.I knew it wouldn’t.Only one thing might.

Leave me, I said desperately.Take the power and go with as many of them as you can.You can use it; you’ve done it before, and the gods want me, not you—

No.

It was the most final no I’d ever heard.

You said you’d leave me!I screamed at Pritkin.You said only the mission matters!You said—

I lied.

And then the horde broke through what remained of the wall, the ceiling came down in a resounding crash, and I gathered us all, every single one, and—

Chapter Twenty-One

Oh.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, God.”

I didn’t know who said it, but it was accurate.Goddamn, it was.I swam slowly back to consciousness and then immediately wished I hadn’t.

My head felt shattered, my body broken, my consciousness flayed into pieces I wasn’t even sure were all there.

And I was going to throw up.

“Here,” someone said, putting what felt like a wet cloth on my forehead.

I tried to thank them but couldn’t speak.Couldn’t do anything but cling to the wet rag with lacerated, throbbing palms and wait while the world spun wildly around and took my stomach along with it.I wasn’t sick; I’d been sick, and this wasn’t it.