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“This stuff is disintegrating around me,” I began, only to have him slash a hand through the air in a gesture that somehow said ‘cut your bullshit’ better than a hundred words would have done.

“Do not lie to me,” he threatened, coming closer.Probably because Pritkin was down the street, being measured for some boots.I wondered if Æsubrand had waited to get me alone, but then rejected the idea.

Personal safety had never seemed high on his list of priorities.

“You may have some of the others fooled,” he added.“Alphonse thinks we are resting here for a few days while everyone regains their strength, eating and shopping and acting as if we haven’t a care in the world, but I do not believe that.No, not for a second!”

“You’ve been shopping, too,” I said because I didn’t know how to answer that.Not without him demanding the plan I didn’t have yet.And because it was true.

He had an oversized gray hoodie flung over his wrecked suit of armor, which I guessed didn’t do much for chilly nighttime temperatures.He also had a sword swinging from a brand-new leather belt, probably bought from the guy in a plywood and aluminum shack a little way back who had a forge going.He’d been banging out some nice-looking knives on an anvil that I’d briefly admired but hadn’t bought.

If we got caught, I didn’t think a knife was going to help.

“Bodil said to give you time,” he said, ignoring that.“Time forwhat?”

To come to my senses.To remember my duty.To freaking grow a pair.

But what I said, because none of that was his Highnesses’ damned business, was, “To finish lunch?”

“Bah!You mock me!”

Right in one, I also didn’t say, because he looked a little crazed.

“I’ll take this and the leggings,” I told the elderly vendor, who was smoking a blunt in his ancient wife-beater and lounging in the RV’s doorway.“Do you have any coats?”

I already had boots, having gotten a pair of leather ones from the guy down the road who was currently helping Pritkin, as he’d had some ready-made ones that fit me.They were the moccasin type with a fringed top and leather lacings, and were comfortable and quiet on the hard-packed dirt.At least the gods won’t hear me coming, I thought, right before my wrist was captured in an iron-like grasp.

“Do you mind?”I asked because, of course, it was Æsubrand.

“Do you think to leave us behind?”he hissed as the vendor went back inside to paw through some of the piles that towered to the ceiling of the RV.

“Where’s Enid?”I asked, shaking him off.“I saw you two together earlier—”

“She is with Bodil.They are both eating as if the world is coming to an end—”

“Too late.”

“—possibly a result of not believing you, either!I suspect the Lady Bodil knows what is happening—”

Yeah, from tiptoeing through my head, I thought sourly.

“—but neither will tell me!They fear I will oppose it as I did last time, but I did not understand!So I come to the source and I demand to know:do you plan to abandon us here?”

I opened my mouth to answer but paused when I saw it: a flicker out of the corner of my eye, a presence so faint that I wouldn’t have noticed it at all if not for the shadow cast by a nearby building.And then it was gone when I turned to look head-on, melting away on the breeze like...well, like what it had been.A ghost.

And once I started paying attention, they were studded throughout the crowd but passing unseen in the bright sunlight.Just faint, faint, oh so faint, suggestions of bodies or parts of them.A hand glimpsed here, a flash of pale eyes there, a head floating without a body, rising like a balloon over a nearby stall to...

Look at me.

Are you following me?I thought, bewildered, and might have asked if one had come close enough.Not that ghosts didn’t follow me sometimes, as I was one of the only people they could interact with, but that type wanted to talk.These obviously did not, yet they were keeping me in sight, and it was creeping me out.

Kind of like Æsubrand.

“For that will not work, Pythia or no,” he snarled, backing me into the crusty side of the meth lab.“I do not care what happens to me, but the others—you do not get to simply erase them from existence!You do not get to make that decision!You do not—”

“I thought you were all for Jonas’s plan,” I said.

“That was before I understood the cost!I merely wished to return to our time—to fight!To prevent this!”He looked around, and the characteristic sneer, which he’d worn for so long that his face rested in that position, was nowhere to be seen.