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S omething smelled good. I felt my nose twitch. Really good.

“She’s awake,” a familiar, sardonic voice said.

“How do you know?” That was Enid, and she sounded worried.

“There’s food cooking.”

“There is?” I croaked and tried to sit up.

I failed, not because of my lack of strength, but because something heavy was draped over me. I pushed at it, and it was sort of cloth-like. And furry, I thought, as my hand hit the top.

I opened my eyes to discover that it was a bearskin—a huge, brown, somewhat moth-eaten bearskin that might have been a rug or some bizarre decoration in another life but was now serving as a blanket for me because I was still damp. Waterlogged armor doesn’t dry fast, with too many cracks and crevasses for small amounts of liquid to pool in, and mine had not morphed back into the tattered silver gown that was its alter ego when danger no longer threatened. Just as well; that thing was starting to take on an odor.

Of course, so was I, and as it was a cross between panicked sweat, spent magic, and hot, musty bear, it was not pleasant. But that was, I thought, finally reaching a sitting position and discovering a small but cheerful fire over which a pot was bubbling. That wasn’t so strange, except it was in the middle of what looked like a decrepit shopping mall.

Which it was because I had seen this place before.

“The coven’s enclave,” I croaked, staring at one of their funny advertising signs, this one with a cauldron that a pert redheaded witch was stirring with a wand. Or maybe that was supposed to be an oversized spoon; I couldn’t tell as she wasn’t moving, and neither were the contents of her brew. That wasn’t normal for the coven’s hideaway, which I’d visited once before when I obtained the prototype for the armor I was currently wearing.

The local covens had created a town with an underground mall in the desert outside of Vegas, complete with a portal system with no rivals I knew of anywhere. It not only connected the covens’ enclaves around the world to each other, allowing them to maintain their way of life outside the control of the Silver Circle, the world’s leading magical authority, but it also had connections to Faerie. I remembered traders striding up and down this street, levitating pallets of goods behind them, buying, selling, and chatting with the colorful part-fey, part-humans that had found a home here.

They were gone, along with the formerly brilliant, animated street, which had rivaled the neon lights of old Vegas. The magic that had illuminated it was dark now, with some signs still in place on tumbledown, dust-covered buildings, but none were working. I guessed that wasn’t surprising, as many structures looked like a fire had raged through them, collapsing roofs, eating through walls, and leaving everything looking more like a field of charcoal than the colorful, vibrant place I remembered.

And since the powerful wards that had protected the complex hadn’t been able to extinguish the fire, I was pretty sure I knew what kind it had been. The gods brooked no rivals. It was something that the coven’s patented go-to-ground model for survival had had no chance against.

“Look!” Enid said excitedly.

I turned back from perusing the dead street to see her kneeling excitedly on the floor, where cracks in the cobbles had allowed a single green sprout to shoot up between the stones. It was a hardy-looking little thing, nourished, I guessed, from some water source below and strengthened by the sunlight leaking through gaps in the ceiling. It looked like the witches had hollowed out a hill or magicked one on top of their town, but light was spearing through myriad holes in the shell above us, like in the great portal room where we’d arrived.

“Watch this,” Enid said, looking at me. And then back down to where her little discovery was doing something as she poured a small amount of water on it from a chipped teacup. The sprout shivered briefly as if in a slight breeze and then plopped out another leaf to join the three it already had.

Enid clapped her hands, seeming delighted, and I decided to blow her mind.

“Watch this ,” I said, and crawled over. I took the cup from her and dunked a finger in it, then touched the wet finger to the tiny “trunk” of the sapling...

And pulled out yet another leaf.

“How did you do that?” she breathed as if I’d just performed the world’s greatest magic trick.

“I didn’t. There used to be a great oak down that way,” I nodded at the far end of the concourse. “The witches who lived here could make seats for themselves by spilling water on a platform they’d caused to grow inside the hollow trunk. They just pulled them up from the wood, like plucking mushrooms,” I showed her with my hand. “It was some kind of spell—”

Pritkin said a word I didn’t know, but I guessed Enid did as her eyes got big.

“But that’s Blarestri magic!” she said, looking almost shocked.

“In Faerie. Here, there are no such restrictions,” he told her. “The witches learned their craft from the Old Ones who live in the mountains—” he paused. “Who used to live in the mountains,” he added more softly. “They taught them a unified system.”

“Why was it not so in Faerie, then?” Enid asked, her eyes sliding from him to ?subrand, who was trying to roast some small creature on a stick over the flames. “Before you two, I had never thought to meet anyone with all four elements. It was unheard of!”

“It wasn’t common, even here,” Pritkin said, glancing about at the destruction, expressionless. “But many of the people who built this place had two or even a weak third talent, and they all lived together, so what one couldn’t provide, another did.”

“Yet on our world, where the magic originated, we were so separate,” she said, frowning at the little plant. And then looked up, her color high. “Perhaps we could have fought the gods better if we hadn’t been!”

“You’ve answered your own question,” Bodil commented. She had been tending our pot and seemed satisfied as she pulled it off the fire and divvied its contents into fire-blackened bowls.

“What?”

“The gods separated the different streams of magic, giving only one to each of their groups of ‘children’ and killing anyone who dared find a way to have more.”

She glanced at Pritkin and ?subrand, the latter of whom looked uncomfortable, although that could have just been the effect of her remarkable eyes. They were back to black now, but it didn’t make much difference. Bodil could cow the gods themselves.

“They wanted us to be separate and warring with each other,” she added. “So that we could never unite to fight against them. And they achieved their goal.”

“But he has all four elements,” Enid said, nodding at ?subrand.

He looked rough, crouched on the dirty cobbles with only about half of his once sleek suit of dragonscale still in place. He’d lost the helmet and a single greave, along with the chest piece of his cuirass, but had used his belt to strap the back piece in place and stabilize the suit. He had acid burns on his chest from the battle to get here, and his formerly sleek, silver-blond hair was frazzled, having dried without any of the usual toiletries the fey used to keep their pride and joy in place.

He also looked like a man who just wanted to eat his groundhog or whatever in peace.

He had found a replacement for his once beautiful and now destroyed sword, however, in the form of a rusty pike. I didn’t know if he’d picked it up here, because some of the witches liked old-fashioned weapons as much as the fey, or had obtained it from Faerie before we left. But I suspected the latter.

It was old and ugly, but he had it cradled in the crook of one arm like the finest of blades. And like a man who was nervous about being attacked again. Or perhaps there was a different reason.

I realized it might be one of the only things left from his homeworld.

“Yes, his father made sure of it,” Bodil was saying. “He deliberately married a woman with the powers he lacked. But that was after the gods were gone, and the rules relaxed, and was done to help them return. Although they would have likely killed the prince eventually had he not escaped with us.”

The latter was said casually, almost as an aside, but it seemed to put ?subrand off his meal. Or maybe that was the tiny, dangling feet of his treat hanging off the stick. They would have done it for me.

But not for Alphonse, the big vamp, who, unlike most of his kind, liked to eat just fine. And while he didn’t need the nourishment, I guessed the familiar action was soothing. He picked up the discarded stick and helped himself, tearing into the small body with evident relish.

?subrand accepted a bowl of soup from Bodil without comment.

There was a mostly intact teashop down the road, which I guessed they’d raided for supplies. In place of the pot, a dull brass kettle with enough dings and scratches to bear witness to a long life of teamaking was plopped onto the fire while the bowls finished being passed around.

It surprised me despite the good smells that had woken me up. “How did you make this?” I asked as Bodil handed me a bowl and spoon.

“Garden up top,” she said shortly, gesturing vaguely at the ceiling. “Ran rampant all these years, but some plants survived. And those little creatures—”

She looked at Pritkin, who started to supply a name, then glanced at me and stopped. Which meant that this probably wasn’t groundhog. I looked at my bowl but then shrugged and ate it anyway.

I was freaking ravenous.

“At any rate, they are plentiful,” Bodil said. “We will not starve, at least.”

Her words were laced with irony, as none of us thought that would be our fate. There were plenty of ways to die here, and that one took too long. Longer than we probably had.

That thought brought me to the conversation I needed to have with everybody, and postponing it wasn’t likely to make it better. But I didn’t want to ruin any more appetites, so I sat quietly for a moment, sucking down some of the best soup I’d ever had. Or maybe I was just hungry.

“Other than for the garden, there’s not much in the way of provisions,” Pritkin told me. “We’ve checked the buildings that are safe to enter, and almost everything usable was destroyed.”

“Not that there was much,” Alphonse added. “Witches got ways of preserving food, but there wasn’t much to preserve. It looked like they were hunkered down for a while, probably living off the gardens and their stores and maybe getting some supplies through the portals.”

“That could have been what betrayed them,” Bodil said. “Portals leave a trace if you know how to read it.”

I didn’t say anything, but I was impressed. She’d just seen her world explode around her, killing everyone and everything she had ever known, but here she was, cooking soup and calmly having a discussion. I would have been...

Sitting here and calmly eating soup, I guessed, because my world wasn’t much better off. If this was how a secret enclave full of some of the most powerful people I had ever known had fared, what did everything else look like? I shivered slightly, not wanting to know, and concentrated on packing away dinner.

“We don’t need provisions anyway,” Alphonse said, breaking the small silence that had followed her words.

“Maybe you don’t,” Bodil said, eyeing him as if wondering when he might decide to snack on one of them.

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “Fey blood tastes nasty. Of course, I never tried any god-blood—”

“And your first attempt will be your last,” she assured him, but for some reason, Alphonse just laughed, with his dark eyes smiling along with his lips. It looked weird on a face that nobody could call handsome, with its crushed cauliflower nose, too-strong features, and swarthy stubble that added to the low-level mobster vibe. Which was unfair, as Alphonse had been a high-level mobster.

One who seemed to be in an excellent mood.

“Probably would,” he agreed. “I saw what you did to that army. Damn. And I mean damn , woman. You can throw down.”

“At home,” Bodil said dryly. “I don’t know about here. The desert is not my preferred battlefield.”

No, for someone with water magic, I wouldn’t expect so. But again, Alphonse only chuckled. “Well, good thing our fighting is behind us, then.”

“Behind us?” ?subrand said suddenly. Whether over the purloining of his dinner or Alphonse’s relentless good humor, I didn’t know, but he looked pissed. “I would say it’s just begun!”

Alphonse cheerfully ate a tiny leg at him. “How so?”

“How so? We are in an alien world—yes, even you! I do not know what fifty years of the gods’ tender care has done to your planet, but I doubt you will like it, vampire!”

“Alphonse,” the big vamp corrected, “or I’m gonna start calling you elf.”

“I do not care what you call me!” ?subrand snarled. “We are in an alien world stalked by creatures of unimaginable power! And yet, somehow, we are expected to cross a desert, find this Pythian heir, who is guarded by those very gods, and have her explain to us what happened before going back in time to change it! And if we fail at any part of that, both our worlds stay dead! And yet you sit there, laughing like an idiot—”

“I’m gonna overlook that statement since you just lost your world and all,” Alphonse said magnanimously. “But you should probably learn some manners. There are no princes anymore. You’re either one of them, or you’re one of us, and if you’re one of us, you’re on a par with these things,” he waved around the denuded stick with only a few scraps of meat still clinging to the wood, “so we gotta stick together.”

“And do what?” ?subrand asked bitterly. “Cower in the shadows like vermin as we did before? I have never been so humiliated in my life—”

Ah, so that was what was eating him.

“Didn’t look humiliated,” Alphonse offered. “More like pissing your pants terrified, which—”

?subrand jumped him.

“—was perfectly understandable, if you’d let me finish,” Alphonse said while the sleekly dangerous fey prince did his best to pound his skull in.

?subrand seemed a little freaked out when he discovered that it was like trying to cave in solid steel, spread over granite, with a titanium underlayer. Alphonse just took it for a second because the prince wasn’t using a weapon, and fists were not very effective against vampire flesh. Then he plucked the enraged fey off his back like a dog scratching a pesky flea.

“You done, hoss?” Alphonse said, only to have ?subrand do one of those acrobatic flips he’d used a few times on me and get the big man into a headlock.

“You insult me!”

“Not at all. I was there, remember? Cowering right beside you. Or have you forgotten already?”

“But that is to be expected from one such as—” ?subrand caught himself just in time.

Or maybe not.

“One such as me, huh?” Alphonse asked. “You know, you’re burning through that whole compassion thing real quick. And for the record, some of us low-life scum—”

“I did not say that!”

“But you thought it. And us low-lifes think kind of highly of ourselves, too.”

“It’s not about what you think! Reputation is everything—”

“Where?” Bodil suddenly piped up, causing ?subrand to look at her.

“What?”

“I said where?” the beautiful fey asked, her dark eyes gleaming. “Where does reputation still matter? In your father’s court? In mine? Before the soldiers who served with you? For they are all gone.”

She never raised her voice, but the hairs on my arms suddenly stood up.

“Reputation is meaningless,” she added flatly. “As are most things now. Only the mission matters. Only that is real. Or else. . .” She looked around. “This will become all that is. Can you stomach that, Prince ?subrand? Can you live with it?”

“No.” It was a whisper.

“Then let the vampire—” she caught herself. “Let Alphonse go and come and eat. You will need your strength.”

And to my surprise, he did as she asked.

Alphonse turned to me. He was done with his snack and likely didn’t need another, at least not yet. And when he did, it wouldn’t be an animal he’d be going for.

But right now, he wanted information.

“So, when are you gonna do it?” he asked.

I ate soup to give myself a second because I knew damned well what he meant. And why he was in such a good mood. Alphonse thought the battle was over, and our victory was on the horizon. Because that was how this was supposed to work, why we’d fought so hard to get here, and why my head buzzed every time I thought about what lay ahead.

“Do what?” Enid asked.

“You know, that thing she does.” He waved a hand; I guessed to indicate a shift. “And flip out of here to go see Rhea, her heir, and then…”

He trailed off, his sunny smile still in place but his eyes going dark. Because I was still hunched over my bowl, eating soup as noncommittally as possible, and he wasn’t stupid. He knew me.

He had since I was a kid, when I’d served as court seer for his old boss. Alphonse had been the bruiser who made a mockery of the tall, dark, and handsome vamp trope and served as Tony’s chief enforcer. He’d been good at his job, and not only because he could pick up and break most vamps in half. But because those dark eyes didn’t miss much.

At least one thing hadn’t changed, I thought grimly.

“You can do that, right?” he said slowly. “Your power is back, and you’re just resting up to be able to use it. Right? ”

I licked my lips and tried to think.

But not fast enough.

“Oh, son of a bitch! ”