Page 17

A s shaken as both Bodil and I were, no one else seemed to notice anything strange. Maybe because we’d been away for only a few seconds, our discussion taking place in the mind, with lightning-fast connections. I took a drink from a flask that was being passed around, and barely noticed as something burned its way down my throat.

“—emerged from a guild of magic workers in Cologne in the twelfth century, or at least, that’s as far back as the Corps could trace them,” Pritkin was saying. “The Guild was a mixed bag, with many in it for wealth and power, as traveling back even a few decades would give them opportunities to cash in from foreknowledge of coming events.”

“Like Tony did with Cassie’s gift,” Alphonse said, eyeing me as if he knew something had happened, but wasn’t sure what.

“Yes, but others appear to have been true believers, under the impression that the world was too corrupt and wrong-minded to save. They wished to start over, reaching far enough back in time to reset the entire culture, although they had different ideas about what their utopia should look like.”

“One man’s heaven is another man’s hell,” Alphonse agreed.

“Infighting eventually caused them to fall apart, after which the spells they had amassed after centuries of trial and error were split between the various factions. Some were lost to time, possibly literally, while others have continued to be passed around from one treasure-seeker to another. A few fanatics also persisted, calling themselves after the old guild and trying to force their version of utopia on everyone else. Fortunately, the Pythias managed to stop any whose spells actually worked.”

“So, some of them did?” Enid asked, her forehead wrinkling.

Pritkin shrugged. “Perhaps one out of a thousand, if that. Those with access to the old grimoires probably stood a better chance, as they contained centuries of knowledge about what didn’t work. Although the odds were still astronomically against them—”

“As they would be with me,” I said, finally coming back to life.

“Are you sure?” He looked at me seriously. “Jonas is right about one thing: you have more experience with this than anyone alive, and you told me more than once that shifting is your greatest talent.”

“The power made it easy, which I don’t currently have.”

“But if Jonas could give it to you?”

“He can’t—”

“But if he could?” Pritkin was pushing; I didn’t know why, but it was pissing me off. Maybe because we’d just discussed this!

“He can’t. No one can!”

“You don’t know that!” That last was ?subrand, coming around the side of the bed. Bodil must have kept him in check until now, but he’d slipped her leash while she was distracted. And he was furious.

Like I cared, I thought, standing up and walking out.

“Where the hell is she going?” he demanded from behind me.

I didn’t answer, didn’t even slow down. Just kept opening doors until I found them, four rooms down, a huddled knot of sour-faced women with straggling wet hair and borrowed gray shifts, crouched on the floor gnawing mutton. And looking up at me in shock when I burst in without so much as a knock.

But they weren’t shocked enough that they didn’t have wands out so fast that I hadn’t seen them move, wands that the Circle had failed to find and relieve them of and which they’d already used, judging by the two glassy-eyed war mages slumped in a corner.

“Dead?” I asked, staring at the men.

“Unconscious,” Butch Cut said. “Damned Circle put guards on our door.”

“They think we’re dangerous,” Topknot cackled.

“I hope they’re right,” I said seriously.

“Problem?” Zara’s voice was as sharp as her dark eyes.

“Not if we leave now,” I said. “Finish up. We’re out of here in five.”

“Out of here?” ?subrand said. He’d come in behind me and looked confused as I strode past him again. “In case you didn’t notice on the way in,” he said acidly, catching up. “The Corps has magicked up a storm outside capable of stripping the very flesh off our bones—”

“We’re not going outside.”

“Then where are we going?”

“Vegas. You’re good with portals, right?” I asked as I passed Bodil on the way back to my room.

“I am proficient with our own,” she said, following me. “And those of the covens which are based on our system. I am not so sure about the ones made by this Silver Circle. More to the point, how do you even know they have one going where we wish to?”

“Can’t you read Jonas’s mind and find out?”

“Not easily. He is resistant to mental intrusions, and I cannot push for fear of having him notice. And you cannot read him at all—”

“Don’t need to. He’s been waiting on my return for fifty years and must have assumed I’d go straight to Rhea, who is his daughter, by the way. He’ll have been keeping an eye on her, so he has a portal there.”

I re-entered my and Pritkin’s room, grabbed up my gross suit of armor, and turned at the unwelcome sound of ?subrand’s voice. And got a hand on his chest when he tried to come in after me. Only it was like trying to shove a statue bolted into place.

“I need to get dressed,” I told him shortly. “Wait in the hall.”

“You need to have your head examined!” the pewter eyes flashed. “We aren’t going back there—”

“Then stay here if you want.” I tried another shove, but again, nothing happened. “Alphonse?”

The big vamp looked unhappy but dropped a heavy hand onto the fey’s shoulder. “Hey. Let’s give her some privacy—”

?subrand said something I assumed was profane from the gasp that Enid let out and shrugged off the hold. And the next second, he was both in my room and my face. “Did you hear nothing of what we were saying?”

And I lost it. Alphonse and Pritkin were there, but I didn’t need them. Not after guts raining down on me like rain, corridors that took off on their own, ravenous gods eating people—and Jonas doing his best to turn me into the same thing!

Not to mention the death of one world and the near destruction of another.

My world.

Mine.

So I broke, only not in the way the silver prince had probably expected.

“I heard you,” I said coldly. “Now, you can listen to me. I drained one of your people, a nobleman of your court, almost to the point of death. And used his power to make a small spatial shift—by far the easiest kind of Pythian spell. Do you know how far it got me? Would you like to guess? ”

He managed to look pissed off and confused at the same time. “Drained? Drained who?”

“Lord Arsen,” Pritkin said, and ?subrand turned to stare at him.

“Twenty yards, maybe less,” I said. “And then I was out . All that magic, all that power, had moved me less than the length of this hallway. And a spatial shift is nothing compared to traveling even a moment in time. That takes the power of a god, a strong one, which Jonas can’t give me. There’s only one person who can, and she’s in Vegas.”

“You don’t know that she can give you anything!” ?subrand said. “Yet you’re pulling us away from the only people who can! What are you so afraid of?”

Myself, I didn’t say, because I’d had enough of baring my soul for one day.

“He has a point, Cassie,” Pritkin said quietly.

“What?” I looked at him, feeling betrayed. And confused because he knew damned well that Jonas’s plan wouldn’t work. Not if he sacrificed every mage on the planet! “It’s fifty years —”

“Yes, which means that the Pythian spells are out of the question,” he agreed. “But Jonas hasn’t been using Pythian magic—”

“No, and how many times has that worked for him?”

“You’re not him.”

“What are you saying?”

“That your father was part of the Guild or claimed to be. And his spell worked . We know that, or you wouldn’t be here today. I don’t know whether he found some of the old grimoires or not, but he successfully traveled back in time to meet your mother—”

“What?” ?subrand said.

“—and he did change time. You’re living proof of that.”

“That was him, not me!” I snapped. “I don’t have those books, and even if I did—”

“You are literally a child of time,” ?subrand said, sounding awed more than angry for a change. “You are perfect for this!”

“—I wouldn’t be any more proficient with that kind of magic than anyone else. He got lucky —”

“And perhaps you will as well,” Pritkin said grimly. “It is worth at least considering.”

“You agree with Jonas!”

“Yes!” ?subrand said. “Yes, finally, someone sees sense!”

“Hoss, I’d back off if I were you,” Alphonse told him.

“I don’t agree or disagree,” Pritkin said, a muscle jumping in his jaw. “I merely think it is worth considering. I don’t like this any better than you do, but if Jonas’s plan has a better chance of success—”

“I’ve considered it. The answer’s no.”

“You don’t get to make that decision!” That, of course, was ?subrand.

“Then you have another idea?” Pritkin asked me.

I glanced around. We had everybody’s full attention, with the whole group poking their heads in the door or already in the room. “I don’t want to discuss this now.”

“I think you damned well better discuss it!” ?subrand snarled. “This concerns all of us!”

“Seriously, my dude,” Alphonse told him. “Back away.”

“You back away!”

“Your funeral,” the big man shrugged.

I glared at Pritkin because I did not want to do this in a roomful of people. “Mircea,” I said and said no more.

“Ah.”

“And what does that mean?” ?subrand demanded.

I answered him only because everyone else was going to be asking next. “There’s more than one way to generate power.”

“There was ,” Pritkin said. “I... am not fully myself at the moment. The bond between the three of us was weakened when I performed Chimera, and my other half broke away. That may be why we can no longer borrow his power or hear him from here. We’re too far away—”

“Then he must still be in the vicinity of Vegas,” I said. “Because it worked there—”

“It worked there once, in extremis; whether it will do so again is unknown. Without my other half, part of the spell is missing. And you know what happens when a piece of a spell is removed.”

“But part of you, most of you, is still here!”

“That doesn’t mean the spell will work, Cassie, and if it does, it will be glitchy and unreliable, possibly even dangerous—”

“And what Jonas is planning isn’t?” I stared at him.

“Will someone tell me what the hell is going on?” ?subrand demanded in a very unprincely-like screech. His reputation as a stone-cold badass was taking a beating tonight.

“I would like an answer to that as well,” Bodil said. Because I guess she couldn’t read through the storm of emotions I was currently dealing with.

“I already gave you one,” I said. “There may be another way of generating the power we need, but he’s back in Vegas, too, along with the only person who might know what happened to cause all this. Or did you forget that we need Rhea for more than just power? Unless Jonas knows how the gods got in, and where, and exactly when?”

“No,” she said simply. “It was the first information I looked for.”

“Then no one else knows, either—except possibly for a talented clairvoyant with the Pythian power who lived through it . We can’t stop an invasion if we don’t know what happened, and Rhea can give us that.”

“ If we can reach her,” ?subrand said. “And if you can generate this power you haven’t bothered to explain with a malfunctioning spell. And if and if and if! When right here, right now, you could—”

“Do nothing but blow myself up!”

“You don’t know that!”

“I know a damned sight more about it than you!”

One aristocratic lip carved itself into a sneer. “What I know is that you’re a coward.”

“Well, shit,” Alphonse said.

“It’s all well and good, being the hero when you have the power of a god backing you up,” ?subrand continued relentlessly. “When you can manifest whips of golden energy that slice through any defenses, when you risk nothing—”

“You can say that after tonight?” Enid said. “She saved us—”

“She saved him ,” he said, looking at Pritkin. “Her lover and protector, or she tried to. She had no idea what she was getting into—Bodil saw!”

“None of us did!” Enid said. “But when she realized, she didn’t run—”

“Run where?” he demanded. “There was nowhere to go! And the mages got us out of there, not her. And now that she could be useful and save us all—”

“Save you?” I cut in, my voice low and savage. “ Save you?”

“Yes, save us! Get us back home and out of this hellish nightmare! Give us a chance to fight —”

“If you want a fight, you’ll get one in Vegas.”

“I’ll get nothing of the kind!” he said and started for the door, only to find the path blocked by a bunch of pissed-off witches who had just arrived. “Get out of my way!”

“And since you like talking about ifs,” I said, coming up behind him and causing him to flinch and whirl around while reaching for a sword he no longer had. “If you are thinking about running to Jonas and telling him any tales, consider this. Even if he could give me enough power for a shift, which I assure you he can’t, it would be enough for me . Myself. I.

“The Pythian spells require exponentially more power to take another along for the ride, so I wouldn’t be taking any passengers. And that is also true for those dark mage spells you seem to like the idea of so much.”

I tilted my head. “Do you understand what that means, Prince ?subrand? It means whatever spell I use, you stay here . If we follow your plan, you, Lady Bodil, Enid, Alphonse, and Pritkin will all be left behind. Waiting in this hellscape for the timeline to reform around you. If I die or fail to stop the invasion, you will wait forever. Or until a god comes by and wants a snack. But if I succeed...

“Well, I’m afraid it doesn’t get any better for you,” I said as he stared at me. I didn’t know where my anger had gone or if it had. All I felt was ice. “You don’t go back home. You simply cease, along with this entire branch of time’s family tree—”

“Cease?” He looked confused, although whether because he didn’t understand much about time travel or because he was unfamiliar with the concept of his own demise, I didn’t know.

And didn’t care.

“Yes, cease. End. Die . And not a glorious death, a hero’s death. One that your people believe will allow you to be reincarnated eventually and live again. But finally, completely, with no one to remember or care. You’ll fade into nothingness because you were plucked out of time, which has rerouted around you and this whole era. Everybody else will go on, all of those back there, but not you . You won’t exist anymore. All anyone will know of you is that you disappeared in the middle of a trial, one you failed , and were never heard from again. Unless I tell them a story—and trust me, if I do, it won’t be flattering. It will be about how you sandbagged us—”

“Sand—”

“—and ratted us out to Jonas—”

“He did what? ” Gray Curls snarled, peering in the already crowded doorway.

“—and kept us from having any hope of getting back and preventing all this. But you don’t have to worry,” I added, as he stared at me, almost as if he’d never seen me before, “you’ll be dead long before all that. Jonas will sacrifice everyone in this room, including you, because fey princes have a lot of magic, don’t they? Only not enough.

“He’ll probably even sacrifice himself to get power that won’t take me back one. Single. Day. And do you know what I’ll do then, should I survive? The same thing I’m doing now,” I said, moving toward him; ice cold, yet with my blood pressure through the roof. And weirdly, ?subrand yielded, walking backward into the corridor while I stalked him. “I’ll fucking die trying, but I will try because, unlike you, I don’t care about thrones or people remembering my name or chiseling out goddamned statues—”

“I don’t—”

“I’ve had the statues, and do you know where they got me?” I gestured around again savagely. “ Fuck the statues, and fuck you, and fuck anybody who isn’t on the let’s-get-Cassie-to-Rhea train because that’s the only chance any of us have or ever will have! I am the time traveler here, and believe me, I’ve earned that title. So we do this my way, not yours, and we leave now before another well-meaning idiot comes along who thinks he knows better than me and screws everything up! Do you get me? ”

“I get you,” someone said quietly, but it wasn’t ?subrand.

It was Zara, somehow still managing to channel Jasmine despite wearing one of those damned ugly Circle tunics and looking at me for the first time without a scowl on her face. “What do you need?”