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I was silent for a beat, not sure if I wanted to go there. In fact, I was pretty damned sure that I didn’t. And I didn’t have to.

Something told me that I could step out of the shower, wrap myself in a towel, and walk back into the other room, and this time, he’d let me go. He wouldn’t say a word because we’d both vastly prefer to avoid this conversation. But if that happened, we also wouldn’t come to the understanding I wanted and that we needed because, without it, he was going to get himself killed.

So, I braced for a bad time. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning that we were both scarred that night. I have been dealing with the fact that I didn’t protect you—no, worse than that. That my incompetence resulted in you ending up in that mess in the first place—”

“You weren’t incompetent,” I said, because he hadn’t been. He’d been unlucky, something that could have happened to any of us. But apparently, it wasn’t my turn to talk.

“—and which resulted in you getting hurt and almost killed. I swore an oath to protect you, and I didn’t protect you, and it eats at me every day. Every day!” The green eyes were very bright, with what almost looked like flames behind them. “I hate that, more than I can tell you, but as badly as I have struggled with that failure—”

“You didn’t fail. You got me out —”

“Not in time! Not before—”

He broke off again with a curse and then cursed again and hit the wall, this time on purpose. And hard enough that, if a ward hadn’t protected the dirt in here to make it waterproof, he might have broken it. I wasn’t sure that he still wouldn’t.

His famous temper looked like it was teetering on the edge, too.

“Pritkin,” I said, low and forcefully, not that it mattered.

“I failed you ,” he said. “But I thought that, after we got you out of there, it was over, that you could begin to heal, and in some ways, you have. You’ve been far more resilient than even I expected, and I know your strength. But that’s become the problem, hasn’t it?”

“What has?” I said, confused. This conversation wasn’t going where I’d expected.

“Your strength . Most people in your position would have curled up into a ball and become non-functional for God knows how long. And that would have been a valid response! But not you.

“You did the opposite. A few days later, you were going toe to toe with Zeus —”

“I didn’t have a choice!”

“Maybe not,” those disturbing eyes were steady on mine. “I don’t know, as I wasn’t there. But you had one tonight, and what did you do?”

I tried to speak again, but he was on a roll. And while he didn’t look like he was enjoying this conversation any more than I was, he was determined to have it. Sometimes, Pritkin’s stubbornness could be a real pain in my ass.

“You ran straight at the danger, somehow making your way through a throng of the darkest of dark mages, and then, when you saw the odds against reaching Caleb, what did you choose? To stay back, out of the way, and trust me to handle it? To attempt a rescue by using your allies to cause a diversion? To make any attempt with a reasonable risk?

“No.” The very word vibrated with anger. “Instead, you sent up a bonfire a hundred feet high , deliberately drawing the attention of any god in the fucking Midlands! Just like you dueled Zara and looked like you were enjoying it instead of attempting to escape—”

“And how the hell was I supposed to do that?” I demanded. “We were cornered—”

“Which is what I told myself because that’s what I wanted to believe. But you weren’t tonight. You could have stayed where you were—”

“I was worried about you—”

“So you summon gods? ”

He seemed fixated on that point.

“You said it yourself. We needed a distraction. I provided one.”

Pritkin stared at me. “Yes, the most dangerous, over-the-top one possible!”

“As opposed to?” I noticed that my arms had crossed, and my stance was mirroring the one he’d had a moment ago, while he was currently far more animated.

“ Anything? ” his hands waved about as far as the walls would allow. “You could have used the witches; God knows they love an excuse to start a fight! The place was full of necromancers; you could have stolen some of their creatures and sent them on a rampage. My father was there, bellowing orders from the top of that damned scaffold; you could have called on him for help—”

“You know how dangerous that could be—”

“ So you summon gods? ”

“Stop saying that!”

“Someone needs to say it! Like someone needs to point out that you’re suddenly taking terrible risks all the damned time—”

“I am not—”

“Like hell! You used to hide from danger, and rightfully so—”

“I still hide. I hide all the time. I hid from that thing that almost caught us when we came out of the portal at Zara’s—”

“Yes, when you were exhausted and half-drowned. I wonder what you would do now?”

I wondered what he thought had changed, as I was still sitting on empty, not to mention still filthy, as someone was too busy yelling at me to let me bathe.

“The same thing,” I began, only to be cut off yet again.

“Bollocks!”

And okay, I was getting pissed. “I hide when I need to and fight when I need to,” I told him shortly. “But my first instinct isn’t always to run anymore. It didn’t always help, and I’m getting tired of it—”

“That’s what I’m afraid of!” the green eyes flashed. “Like I’m afraid that you’re dealing with your trauma by trying to prove to yourself that you’re strong, you’re invincible, no one can hurt you—”

“Bullshit.”

“—when plenty of people can and will, given half a chance. You’re a demigod, Cassie, but that doesn’t make you invulnerable!”

“Don’t you think I know that?” I stared at him. I rarely felt anything but vulnerable!

“What I think is that you’re trying to prove something to yourself, and in the process—”

“So you don’t trust me?”

“It’s everyone else I don’t trust!” He ran a hand through his hair in exasperation. And then scowled at it when it returned dripping in mud. He flung the mass at the wall and took me by the shoulders. “Listen to me. I know I can’t understand what you went through that night and never will, and that you haven’t had time to recover, that the world never gives you time—”

“I don’t need any more time.”

“I think you do,” it was flat. “But we don’t have it. The gods may not know you’re back yet, but they’ll figure it out; Zeus will figure it out. And when he does, he’ll come for you. We have to do what we’re going to do quickly, and that means quietly, subtly, sliding under everyone’s gaze without attracting attention, not throwing a rave for the brain-dead bastards the gods left behind! Do you understand? ”

“Of course I do! I told Bodil the same thing shortly after we got here!”

“Then what the devil happened tonight?”

I took a second because something told me I needed to get this answer right. But the truth, which was that Hail Mary had been all I could think of at the time, probably wouldn’t go down well. And neither would the rest of the truth, which was that I hadn’t expected three of them.

Or the rest of the rest, which was that I’d wanted a fight.

That last thought surprised me, as I hadn’t expected it. But the more I thought about it, the more it resonated. I’d been exhausted, terrified, and half-dead when I arrived back in this world, washing up on Earth’s shores like a beached fish, only to find that my home was almost unrecognizable. And ever since, my fury had been growing, tamped down by circumstance and unacknowledged, but there anyway.

Fury at that idiot Aeslynn, whose pride and cruelty had led to the demise of his world and the wreckage of mine. Outrage that I had to hide from the gods’ castoffs, the mindless creatures they’d left to ravage an already dying world. And disgust and seething resentment at the Black Circle, who had helped to ruin everything that other people had created, the vultures who built nothing themselves, worked for nothing, helped no one in their whole useless lives, but had come out like maggots to feed on the corpse of a world they’d helped to kill!

And then I’d seen Caleb.

He wasn’t just Pritkin’s friend; he was mine. And as loyal as the day was long and as selfless as all war mages were supposed to be, but rarely were. He had no wife, no kids that I knew of, no anything but a lifetime of service, and what had it gotten him?

What had he thought when his world fell apart? When he and the rest of his brothers went into battle, knowing before they left that they were doomed to lose? What had kept him going over five long decades when everyone he knew died around him, and the maggots grew fat and bold and inherited what was left of the Earth?

And what had they done to him, that one good man?

Yes, I’d been horrified, but I’d been furious, too, to the point that it had burned in my veins like acid. The whole time we were traversing that nightmare of a town, when I’d been forced to grovel in front of that posing “holy man,” when I’d spotted Caleb, pummeled into near unrecognizability and locked in a cage like an animal, when I’d had to witness the real animals drinking and partying around him, laughing at what they’d done, it had been building.

The fury of a goddess, of my mother, who wanted to watch them all burn .

“Cassie?”

“According to Zara, the gods don’t regularly hunt in that area,” I heard myself say. “The Black Circle settled there because it’s supposed to be deserted, and they stay mostly underground. Plus, the locals use some minor level magic for wards and things, and it covers for them.”

“Then why signal to creatures you didn’t think would be there?”

Because I’d hoped they would, I didn’t say. “Everyone’s terrified of them, so if they thought there was a chance one might see that signal and happen by—”

“You thought they would scatter?”

“Something like that,” I said evenly. “There were a lot of mages around, and we couldn’t take them all, and as you said, we needed a distraction…”

“A distraction!” Pritkin said, shaking his head in disbelief, and then his eyes narrowed.

Because he’s not stupid and he knows me.

“When I ran up to you,” he said slowly. “You said to hurry because you’d just summoned a god. Not that you’d caused a distraction.”

Yeah, that was... inconvenient. “Well, it was a possible outcome—”

“Cassie!”

“I was angry, all right?” I said, looking into those clear green eyes and breaking because I didn’t like lying, especially to him. He was another good man in a sea of terrible ones, and I owed him more than that. I owed him everything. “And I didn’t expect three of them. But it worked —”

“This time! What about the next? What about—”

“I don’t know, any more than you do!” I said, because if he wanted honesty, what about some goddamned honesty? “Not here, not anymore! The world’s upside down, and the bastards who put it that way are running things. Did you see them? Did you see how they were laughing about what they did to Caleb and Jonas and—did you see? ”

“I saw.” His jaw was tight. “You wanted to hurt them. I know; I felt the same.”

“You felt—” I was surprised; I don’t know why. Maybe because, despite his well-known temper, his face had been expressionless watching Caleb being trundled down that road. If he’d felt anything, it hadn’t shown.

Well, except for taking off after him without a word, I thought dryly.

I swallowed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—” summoned gods to rip through my enemies and stuff them down their gory maws “—done that. But we were running out of time and everyone was looking at me, and—it was all I could think of.”

Pritkin also just looked at me because he wasn’t buying it.

“I’m not a strategist!” I said angrily. “I’ve gotten this far by instinct and luck and having people at my side to help me. But you were gone, and Caleb—I couldn’t leave him there. He’s my friend, too!”

“We both should have left him,” Pritkin said flatly. “He isn’t the priority here, and if we succeed, none of this will have happened to him or any of the rest. And if we fail…”

Nothing will matter because who wants to live like this?

He didn’t finish the sentence, but it hung in the air between us, nonetheless.

“But I forgot that,” he said after a pause. “And left you alone, and I’m sorry.” He rubbed a hand over his face, smearing the mud around. “I’m sorry for a lot of things.”

“You haven’t done anything wrong,” I put a hand on his arm. “You got us out of there.”

“Yes, I seem to be good at that after landing you in it to begin with!” It was savage.

“You didn’t do anything wrong either time,” I said more forcefully. “I’m not a child, Pritkin. I make my own decisions—and my own mistakes.”

“But you can’t make them here. Neither of us can. And the fact that we somehow got away with it this time doesn’t change that.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” He tilted my chin up, searching my eyes. He didn’t seem to like what he saw. “You can’t shove it all down, the pain, the stress, the fatigue, and terror, pretending that none of it matters until it starts coming out in different ways.”

“I don’t do that—”

“You always do that. And sometimes, you make it work. But you’re not handling this. And the way it’s manifesting is putting you in danger. What if, next time, you get into a situation you can’t get out of?”

I pulled away, feeling guilty and annoyed and proud—because it had worked, however badly—and pissed off because he still didn’t get it.

“What exactly do you think would change?” I demanded. “I’m not Pythia anymore. I don’t have the power. Making me no more important in this than you or Alphonse or Bodil—maybe less than Bodil as we wouldn’t be here if not for her—”

“Or for you.” Suddenly, the anger drained away, leaving him looking strangely hollowed out and almost... vulnerable. “Or for you,” he repeated and pulled me close, heedless of the fact that we were both still filthy.

It was a surprise because I was hyped up for a fight he was no longer giving me, but for some reason, I felt myself relaxing for the first time in days. My hands tightened on him reflexively and then refused to let go even when I told them to. I didn’t want to fight, but I needed to, or else this same thing would keep happening.

“You can’t prioritize me,” I said softly. “If Zara had killed me in that duel, you would have died, too. You didn’t sever the link like I asked you to.”

“Mircea was in the back of my mind, saying he could help. He needed the connection.”

“And if he hadn’t?” I pulled back so I could see his eyes.

“I would have done as you asked.”

The voice was steady, but the green gaze flickered away from mine for an instant before returning, and his already high color crept further up his face. Honestly, I could have done better, and I was a shit liar. And I guessed my thoughts showed on my face because he suddenly exploded.

“Damn it, Cassie, what do you expect? For me to let you die in this godforsaken hellhole? Or worse, to die for it, and then I have to return to—”

He broke off and hugged me close again. “I won’t let that happen. I can’t!”

“You have to, or else we’re going to get each other killed, trying not to get each other killed. I didn’t know what you were doing tonight; you didn’t know what I was. We can’t keep that up. The witches say that Vegas is ten times worse than anything we’ve seen so far. Do you honestly think we’re going to get through that if we’re both more worried about saving each other than we are the planet? ”

Pritkin said something rude about the planet and looked like he’d like to hit the wall again. But he knew I was right, just as I was starting to suspect that he was. That damned camp had left him overly cautious and turned me into Revengebot 2000, and neither was okay.

“I have to let go of my anger,” I said. “Like you have to let go of your fear. Or we’re not getting through this.”

“So, I’m to let you die, then?” It was hoarse.

“If we work together, maybe we don’t have to. But if it comes down to it... yeah. You do.”

“And the reverse? Will you let me go if the worst happens?”

I looked up at him. And unlike he had done, I held his eyes. “I will.”

And once again, the strange, mercurial man I loved surprised me. “Then you were wrong before,” he said, kissing my dirty forehead. “You are Pythia. And stronger than I am.”