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That was a problem since I didn’t, either.Worse, I wasn’t even sure if I was supposed to, since getting to Rhea might be a huge risk for no reward.I didn’t know anything, and time was passing, with every moment closer to Zeus raining fire down on us all.

“He’s coming,” I told Pritkin without bothering to say the name because I doubted it was far from his mind, either.

“I know.”

“We can’t just sit here!”

“I know.”

I looked at him from over the soup bowl I was drinking out of because spoons took too long.“Then what do we do?If seers really are useless these days—”

“We don’t know that.”

“Wedo.Or at least, we know how thorough you are.Do you really think he didn’t check?”

Pritkin was silent for a moment.“No,” he finally said.He wouldn’t have left that sort of thing hanging, not any part of him.

“Then maybe he’s right.Maybe Rhea knows nothing.”

“Meaning?”he asked, sitting forward with his arms on his knees.The khaki button-down he’d gotten somewhere while I was out had the sleeves rolled up to show strong, sun-bronzed forearms.For someone so pale, he always took on color quickly.It showed on his face, too, where a faint sunburn was already staining his cheeks and making his eyes stand out even more vividly.

They were earnest eyes.Pritkin had come to talk turkey.Too bad I didn’t have anything to offer him.

Except for the obvious, of course.

“I don’t know,” I said stubbornly.

“You do.I know you don’t want to face it—”

“God damn it—”

“—but you have to decide.And Jonas’s plan—”

“Which one?”I said angrily.“The one where I blow myself up, or the one where we all get eaten trying to get to Rhea, who probably doesn’t know any more than we do?”

“The first,” he said, because that city must bebad.“Perhaps, if we time it right, if you cast the spell as you’re feeding, using up the power as fast as you gain it…”

Yeah, which is why he sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as me!

I got up and walked to the side of the roof, which was flat-topped like all the others around here.They looked like the bedside table in my room below, or the wonky bench where I’d set down my lunch.Like survivors cobbled together from the ruins of the old world and made into something new, by a hardy bunch just like them who had refused to lie down and die.

But they would die, some of them, maybe all of them, if I chose wrong.

But going Jonas’s route meant killing everyone I’d brought with me; I hadn’t been lying to Æsubrand about that.Pritkin knew that, but was willing to sacrifice himself and the others to get me home.I wasn’t, and that assumed I could do it at all before the madness overtook me.Because we’d have to get the power from somewhere, and there was only one source around, and without the steadying hand of Pritkin’s incubus...

I didn’t think I could do it.I didn’t think I could hold on.That Cassie wouldn’t give up power to some spell she would no longer see a use for.That Cassie wouldn’t go back to a time when she couldn’t feed.That Cassie would immediately be on the hunt, I knew she would, and even if the spell I started grabbed her, what would burst back through time into Nimue’s court but yet another monster?One just as bad as those I’d have to kill to—

My thoughts broke off, shuddering, and I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.And felt hard arms go around me from behind.“This is my fault,” Pritkin whispered against my neck.“I know that.Yet you’re paying the price.”

“It isn’t your fault.”

“Itis.I should have made peace with him years ago.Should have tried to meet him halfway, at least.”

I lowered my hands to blink at the street, unsure whether I’d just heard that or not.“Seriously?”I looked at him over my shoulder.“You hate him.”

“I hated myself.What I was, what I was afraid I’d become.I took it out on him.”

And there it was, so simple, so stark.And so belated.“What caused this change of heart?”I asked.“Just because we need him?”