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“Then you must know I have to get to her!”I stared at him some more.He looked back calmly—too calmly.As if he was just humoring me, but we weren’t deciding anything.

“I should have waited on this until later,” he finally said.“You’re upset; I understand—”

“Well, that makes one of us!”

His head tilted.“Did you really think it would be that easy?You show up with my old captor, and I willingly go back into my chains?”

I gestured around wildly with the hand holding the cup, sloshing water on the bedding in the process, and didn’t care.“What isthisif not a prison?One populated by monsters whowantto eat youand who probably will eventually.Whatever you’re doing here, it won’t hold.Not against them, not forever.Sooner or later, they’ll find you, and you know what happens then!”

“I know what happens if we go to Vegas.I know what happens if I take up my chains.I know what happens if I trust you as I once did when you mugged me and left me powerless, allowing your lover to take control of me and my life yet again because itismy life, Cassie!”The green eyes flashed slightly in the dark.“It always was, just as much as it was his!But I could never live it, not until the world fell apart!”

Suddenly, he was the one gesturing around, and the creepy calm—which had been a show because whatever he pretended, Pritkin wasn’t remotely emotionless, especially not this side of him—was gone.

“Prison?This is paradise compared to what you would have me go back to!And for what?To martyr myself for a plan that hasnochance of working—and even if it did, and you reached your precious heir, what do you expect her to do for you?Give you your power back?”

“I won’t know that until I talk to her—”

“You’re not going to talk to her!You’re going todie.That city is impossible under the best of times, and right now, it’s turning into an armed camp!And if Rhea could help, don’t you think she already would have?”

“I need her for more than power,” I told him as levelly as I could manage, considering that I wanted to leap across the bed, grab him, and shake him until his smug head wobbled like a bobble-headed doll.

“Ah, yes, so I hear,” he said smugly enough to make the top of my head feel like it was about to explode.“Rhea, the font of all knowledge, is going to tell you what happened to the world and how to fix it.There’s only one problem—she can’t.”

“You don’t know that—”

“Says the woman who got here yesterday!”he snarled, looking like his father for a split second until he got that famous temper back under control.“No one knows how the world fell,” he said more calmly.“I know because I visited seers after the Fall, everyone I could find.Desperate to know when you’d be back, the great Pythia, who was destined to save us all.And you know what I found?

“Nothing.They can’t See anymore—not any of them.And I hunted down every one I could find, and not some storefront charlatans.I searched out former Pythian acolytes, and they all told me the same thing: as soon as the gods returned, their power left, whether blocked, stolen, or reclaimed, they didn’t know.But possibly the latter, as who knows if the human race even had seers before the gods—”

“Wedid,” I said harshly.“Delphi existed before they came.”

“Perhaps a shrine did, with people who claimed to be able to see the future if you crossed their palms with enough silver.But has it occurred to you that theylied?That you come from a long line of charlatans who only received real power because Apollo, god of seers, carved some of his off and gave it to you?That he made the graft real, and now that the gods have returned, they’ve taken it back.Or have you been having visions,Pythia?”

I stared at him, shock reverberating through me.I wanted to argue, to tell him he was wrong.That I had had a vision, one he’d been in with me back at Nimue’s court—

But that had been before the Fall, as they called it.Since then...nothing.I hadn’t noticed until now because I wasn’t used to having them anymore, and things had been insane ever since we got here—

“But you should have, shouldn’t you?”he pressed.“You regularly did before you were elevated to this position, and in far less fraught times.From your perspective, wasn’t that one of the chief advantages of the job?That the Pythian power needed your talents to look through time, and as a byproduct of its constant use, you were freed from those terrible visions you used to have?

“But what do I want to bet that you haven’t had a single one since your arrival?”he continued, watching me.“Yes, what do I want to bet?”He thought about it for a moment.“Not mylife,” he said viciously, jerked his arm away, and left before I could try to stop him again.

Leaving me sitting alone in a dusty room, speechless.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Ihear it went well,” Pritkin said, climbing up some stairs that clung to the outside of the adobe-like building I was calling home.He was balancing a loaded tray and came over to join me under the flapping canvas awning someone had stretched over the roof to create a little shade.

The breeze was up, but the dust didn’t usually get this high, and my perch gave me a good look at the main street of the city, with people bustling about below, browsing an open-air market and eating from street vendors.I could see Æsubrand in the distance, the sun making his silver hair flash like lightning, haggling with one of the latter.Surprisingly, Enid was with him, her brilliant coloring impossible to miss, even at this distance.

They appeared to be getting lunch from a pretty Latina sitting on an overturned plastic bucket selling tamales, while a young boy who looked like her son steamed more over an open fire nearby.I couldn’t smell them from here, but the fey seemed enthusiastic until Æsubrand tried to eat one wrapper and all.The vendor stopped him and actually got off the bucket to demonstrate the right way, probably appalled at the insult to her cooking, but managing to hide it.

Pritkin had brought my food, but I didn’t want it.I didn’t want anything, but I knew I would need my strength.So I dug into some menudo, a soft taco filled with chicken and veggies, and a beer, because no matter what happens, every civilization manages to have beer.

“It went like shit,” I told him, my mouth full.I swallowed and drank some beer, which was lukewarm but otherwise good.“Tell me you and Mircea have a plan.”

He just looked at me.

They did not have a plan.