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“Thank you?Thank you?That’s all I get?”

“What do you want?”I asked, feeling worried.

The blob face finally found an expression, and it was terrifying.“Come and see.”

???

“What’shedoing here?”I asked when my little cavalcade located the others.

The witches and fey were trailing well behind Enid, Æsubrand, and me, with Rosier out front leading the way.The scarlet smoke surrounding him like a fog was partly blocking the view ahead, so I hadn’t noticed the unexpected addition to the knot of people on a hill for a second.Until we came closer, and an ash-covered holy man glanced up and saw me.

He hurried forward, trailed by a reduced number of clanking skeletons, some of which were wearing the same tattered saffron robes that I currently was.I guessed I knew who had supplied them, although I still didn’t know why.Maybe because I outgrew everything else when I decided to grow to the size of a building and mug some gods.

“Ah, Goddess of Death!”He bowed low, his forehead touching the ground.“We are honored to be in your presence!Honored!”

“Do I want to know?”I asked Rosier.

“You’re a necromancer and half-god whose mother went by that title, among others,” he said testily.“What else should he call you?”

“Cassie?”

But the man did not call me anything because he was too busy gesturing at his horde to kneel, which was difficult as that didn’t appear to be something they usually did.I heard a couple of tendons snap in brittle knees and felt like I was about to do the same.I was shaking with exhaustion to the point that when Alphonse came up and subtly caught my arm, it was the only thing keeping me from face-planting.

I skirted the bowing tribe because I couldn’t deal right now, and finally cleared the scarlet cloud.Only to be rewarded with the sight of Pritkin, Mircea, and Jonas standing at the top of a small hill, with a bunch of war mages below them, an equally large number of dark mages hanging out below that, and some demons at the bottom of the incline, glimmering redly.The whole unlikely mass was backlit by Vegas shimmering in the distance and the Milky Way arching overhead.

I stared at them for a beat, maybe two, then turned on my heel and started back the other way because nope.Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.Nope.

“Where are you going?”Rosier demanded.

“Somewhere else.”

The demon lord tried to follow, but Alphonse strong-armed him, Æsubrand threatened him with his pike again, and the witches hurried up, with Gray Curls and Topknot making signs in the air and hissing.

“Charming,” Rosier said sourly, eying them without favor.“But your little cadre of weirdos notwithstanding, you have a job to do—”

“Yeah.Fuck that,” I said, striding off.

Alphonse nodded in agreement.“Bet.”

“Cassie!”Someone called from behind me, but Nope.

I walked back the way I’d come, with everyone trailing after me again, including the clacking skeletons and their master.But he wasn’t saying anything, just looking worshipful and glad to be there, so I didn’t either.Which was just as well as anything I did say would be profane.

Seriously, seriously, profane.

“Cloak.Now,” Zara hissed as footsteps pounded the ground behind us.I guessed we’d been spotted.

But the witches’ spell worked because the next time I glanced around, some war mages were looking confused and staring about before one spotted our footprints in the loose topsoil.Only to have a gust of wind courtesy of our silver prince come up and blow them back in our pursuers’ faces, causing a few to curse, pawing at their eyes, while more kept on our trail.Until Enid hit them with some Margygr spell that had them disoriented, stumbling, and cursing as the rest of us made our escape, only not back where we’d been.

I found another hillock to set up camp on and plopped my exhausted butt down while the witches set subtle wards around the perimeter, probably to keep up the cloak.It wasn’t perfect; there were no perfect cloaking spells, but they seemed to think it would do if we weren’t moving about much, which...yeah.Hadn’t planned on it.

Then we just settled down and drank because Gray Curls, bless her, had a flask.It was the same hideous stuff from the enclave, but I didn’t care.I belted some back, regretted it, and then did it again.Empty stomach or not, I needed the hit.

And I guessed everyone else did, too, because we passed it around for a while, with no one having anything to say, and not only because the war mages would have likely noticed a silence spell being cast so close.But because processing the past day’s events wasn’t happening right then.So we just watched the mages doing a methodical search that did them no good because witches didn’t specialize in the Circle’s in-your-face, beat-them-over-the-head kind of magic.

Their spells were subtler, a whisper instead of a yell, but no less effective.As evidenced by some of the best and most resilient mages on the planet turning away right before reaching us, time and again, their attention redirected by the scurrying of a desert creature over the sand, a few pebbles sliding down a hill, or a bird suddenly taking off from the nearby scrub in a furious flapping of wings.They didn’t find us.

“We spent fifty years perfecting our hiding techniques,” Zara said, her voice low.“You have time.”