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O h.”

“Oh, no.”

“ Oh, God .”

I didn’t know who said it, but it was accurate. Goddamn, it was. I swam slowly back to consciousness and then immediately wished I hadn’t.

My head felt shattered, my body broken, my consciousness flayed into pieces I wasn’t even sure were all there.

And I was going to throw up.

“Here,” someone said, putting what felt like a wet cloth on my forehead.

I tried to thank them but couldn’t speak. Couldn’t do anything but cling to the wet rag with lacerated, throbbing palms and wait while the world spun wildly around and took my stomach along with it. I wasn’t sick; I’d been sick, and this wasn’t it.

This was...

“Oh, God,” I whimpered, and then I threw up everything.

It lasted a long time. It lasted forever. Dry heaves took over when I had nothing left, even as people touched my back, as someone wiped my lips, as someone else tried to give me water only nothing was going down because everything was still coming up.

It only stopped when I was too wiped out to function well enough even for that.

“Oh, God,” I whispered, and felt someone hug me. To my surprise, it was...“Enid?”

She didn’t answer, just cried and cried. I could feel her tears hitting my face, splattering my skin like the start of a summer shower. What the...

“I thought you were dead,” she whispered.

“I’m not?”

I was confused. And then even more so when everything came rushing back, and I remembered. I should be dead; we all should because there was no way I had made that shift.

No way in hell.

“Not in hell, maybe,” came a familiar, crabby voice because I guessed I’d spoken aloud.

I paused, slowly removed the towel, and blinked at a face to match the voice. There was a campfire nearby, as we seemed to be somewhere in the desert, and the flames were flickering on the side of the new arrival’s face. Appropriate, I thought, and saw him smirk.

“But definitely with hell’s help,” he added, coming over and squatting beside me, where he took his time checking me out. “You don’t look much like a goddess at present.”

“Good.” I shuddered and wondered why I was wearing a tattered and dirty saffron-colored robe instead of my tunic. My much-abused armor was also gone, probably flayed off in the fight I could barely remember, or maybe I’d burst out of it when I suddenly expanded to the size of a house.

I thought about passing out again.

“You have something here, did you know?” my tormentor said and flicked a finger at my cheek.

I took the towel and rubbed off what was probably a bit of vomit, but I didn’t look to see. There were so many other options. Including some that made me want to puke all over again.

“What are you doing here, Rosier?” I rasped, struggling to sit up until Enid helped me. Which left me sprawled against her like a broken rag doll, staring at Pritkin’s father, who had somehow found us after all.

And wasn’t that just what I needed?

“What are you doing here, Rosier?” he mimicked in a high falsetto. “Saving your asses, it would seem! Something I could have done with much more efficiency if you had, I don’t know, talked to me in Stratford. Instead of siccing those things on me—”

“I didn’t sic them on you,” I said thickly because my tongue was still remembering how to talk. And my stomach was debating being sick some more. “I sicced them on the dark mages. You weren’t supposed to be there—”

“But I was there, and you knew I was there, and you didn’t trust me!”

“Trust you?” It came out pretty calmly, mainly because I didn’t have the strength for anything else. “Is that a thing people do?”

He scowled ferociously. “It’s something you should do, considering our history! I thought you knew me well enough—”

“To think you’d help out a bunch of people you don’t even know, at great risk to yourself, instead of snatching up Pritkin and running for the hills?” I asked, gratefully accepting what looked like a goatskin of water that Enid had found somewhere. Possibly our previous abode, as it had a pretty strap decorated with geometric designs.

She was rock solid at my back, as if afraid I’d die if she moved from my side, but she was the only one. Pritkin and Mircea were nowhere to be seen; neither were Jonas and his crew, although I’d taken them, too, I knew I had. And the fey and witches, who were staying well away from the demon currently shedding scarlet light to rival the fire as his temper rose.

But Enid stayed put, and after a moment, ?subrand wandered over, I guessed refusing to be outdone by a kitchen maid. But he looked spooked as hell, probably because Rosier’s face kept going amorphous every so often. It changed from a guy who looked like a younger, considerably less weather-beaten Pritkin into a blob with pure white, barely-there features unless you counted little humps under the skin.

It was the appearance he took on when healing, and he did it again as I watched, the regular features disappearing into a white mask, like someone submerging themselves in a sea of pale paint. I frowned at him. “What’s wrong with you?”

He had been haranguing me about something—I wasn’t listening—but at that, he stopped, and a normal-looking mouth poked out of the blob for a moment.

“Excuse me?” It sounded outraged.

“That.” I waved a ridiculously weak hand at the horror. “You look like hell.”

“Yes, I wonder why!” he seethed and reached for me, probably to shake me, but a rusted pike slammed into the ground between us before he could. And ?subrand’s voice came cold and clear on the night air.

“Touch her and die.”

“Touch her?” Rosier’s voice reached into the falsetto again, but for a different reason this time. “ Touch her? I saved her! I saved all of you! You wouldn’t be here, you wretched boy, without me all but draining myself to give a boost to that... to that... to that .” He flapped a hand at me, speechless.

“You saved us?” I asked because I didn’t remember that.

“Of course I did! How else do you think you got here?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember much.”

“Then let me help you with that,” it was acid. But then he proceeded to give me a retrospective of his whole day instead. “I was almost pulverized in Stratford by a brute who knocked me half a mile away! By the time I got back, you had vanished— with my son —and a massacre was going on, which rather hampered my efforts to search the battlefield for the two of you!

“I finally acknowledged that you must have fled through the portal I could feel thrumming away underground, but I couldn’t get to it with great hulking gods in the way—”

“Rosier,” I said, trying to get a word in, but no.

“—and as if that wasn’t enough, and it damned well was , before I could finish sorting through the mess you’d made, what happened? The earth opened up, spewing forth a bunch of madmen who began systematically slaughtering everyone in sight! Those they didn’t drag back into the ground with them, that is!”

Jonas’s boys, I thought, wincing slightly.

“ And then the bastards started targeting me! ” The outrage was palpable, with even the blob face going red. “I cloaked, managed to evade them, and watched as they attacked one of the gods that had been attracted by the chaos, and did I mention that there were more of them?

“Within minutes, six or more were messing about, half attacking the other half, and the rest of us just trying to survive while they fought it out above our heads! I followed some war mages underground, got lost in that labyrinth of theirs, was almost skewered a dozen times by some of their infernal traps, was buried twice, and finally fought my way through to a dark portal where I found a bisected god —”

I felt the monster that lived inside me perk up and ruthlessly stomped it back down.

“—still sizzling on the floor! So I opened the gateway again, hoping to find you two on the other side, and what did I find instead?”

“Um—”

“A nightmare! Bodies everywhere, some living, some not, the other half of the bloody god , now looking like a charcoal briquet, and I knew— I knew —it was you! No one—and I have lived a long time, I have lived a damned long time—but NO ONE leaves a scene like that except for Cassie Bloody Palmer! ”

“Do you have that water?” I asked Enid because I’d handed it back to her, but she didn’t respond, being too busy staring at Rosier in what looked like shock. I guessed demon lords were supposed to be a little more dignified. But he was screeching like a madman, reaching highs that a coloratura soprano would have envied.

?subrand passed over the skin and I gave it to Rosier, who drank violently, wiped his mouth violently, and looked at me more than violently, but I was too tired to find the right word for it now. “You,” he said, pointing a shaking finger at me.

“Yes, me. And I’m sorry about—”

“Don’t.” It was savage. “I looked around, but no one was there. Just a cavernous room full of bodies that might as well have had your signature on it. So, I thought, I wonder where that other portal goes? And when I stepped through, what do you think I found?”

I winced again but didn’t say anything because... yeah.

Silence was probably the way to go here.

“You trying to shift a small town’s worth of people and about to rupture yourself in the process; my son bound up in the spell with you and about to fly apart at the seams; fey, mages, zombies , and a whole army’s worth of gods tearing the fucking building apart trying to be the first to reach you!”

I took the goatskin back and had a drink myself because I could have done without the reminder.

“And to make it even lovelier, your damned spell was too far advanced for me to have any hope of stopping it. Leaving me with two choices: either step back through the portal before anybody noticed and let you destroy yourselves, or throw everything I had at you, allowing you to drain me dry to boost your power enough to have a chance at completing it! And if you failed, to be left with no way to defend myself with half a city’s worth of godly assholes about to rip into mine!”

Well, when you put it like that, I thought and had another drink, wishing it was whiskey. Or tequila. Or anything that might blot some of that out.

I handed the skin back to ?subrand, who looked at it with distaste, although whether because my lips had been on it or Rosier’s had, I wasn’t sure.

“Thank you,” I said to Rosier because he deserved it. Which, strangely enough, stopped the tirade when nothing else had.

“Thank you? Thank you? That’s all I get?”

“What do you want?” I asked, feeling worried.

The blob face finally found an expression, and it was terrifying. “Come and see.”

◆◆◆

“What’s he doing here?” I asked when my little cavalcade located the others.

The witches and fey were trailing well behind Enid, ?subrand, and me, with Rosier out front leading the way. The scarlet smoke surrounding him like a fog was partly blocking the view ahead, so I hadn’t noticed the unexpected addition to the knot of people on a hill for a second. Until we came closer, and an ash-covered holy man glanced up and saw me.

He hurried forward, trailed by a reduced number of clanking skeletons, some of which were wearing the same tattered saffron robes that I currently was. I guessed I knew who had supplied them, although I still didn’t know why. Maybe because I outgrew everything else when I decided to grow to the size of a building and mug some gods.

“Ah, Goddess of Death!” He bowed low, his forehead touching the ground. “We are honored to be in your presence! Honored!”

“Do I want to know?” I asked Rosier.

“You’re a necromancer and half-god whose mother went by that title, among others,” he said testily. “What else should he call you?”

“Cassie?”

But the man did not call me anything because he was too busy gesturing at his horde to kneel, which was difficult as that didn’t appear to be something they usually did. I heard a couple of tendons snap in brittle knees and felt like I was about to do the same. I was shaking with exhaustion to the point that when Alphonse came up and subtly caught my arm, it was the only thing keeping me from face-planting.

I skirted the bowing tribe because I couldn’t deal right now, and finally cleared the scarlet cloud. Only to be rewarded with the sight of Pritkin, Mircea, and Jonas standing at the top of a small hill, with a bunch of war mages below them, an equally large number of dark mages hanging out below that, and some demons at the bottom of the incline, glimmering redly. The whole unlikely mass was backlit by Vegas shimmering in the distance and the Milky Way arching overhead.

I stared at them for a beat, maybe two, then turned on my heel and started back the other way because nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Nope.

“Where are you going?” Rosier demanded.

“Somewhere else.”

The demon lord tried to follow, but Alphonse strong-armed him, ?subrand threatened him with his pike again, and the witches hurried up, with Gray Curls and Topknot making signs in the air and hissing.

“Charming,” Rosier said sourly, eying them without favor. “But your little cadre of weirdos notwithstanding, you have a job to do—”

“Yeah. Fuck that,” I said, striding off.

Alphonse nodded in agreement. “Bet.”

“Cassie!” Someone called from behind me, but Nope.

I walked back the way I’d come, with everyone trailing after me again, including the clacking skeletons and their master. But he wasn’t saying anything, just looking worshipful and glad to be there, so I didn’t either. Which was just as well as anything I did say would be profane.

Seriously, seriously, profane.

“Cloak. Now,” Zara hissed as footsteps pounded the ground behind us. I guessed we’d been spotted.

But the witches’ spell worked because the next time I glanced around, some war mages were looking confused and staring about before one spotted our footprints in the loose topsoil. Only to have a gust of wind courtesy of our silver prince come up and blow them back in our pursuers’ faces, causing a few to curse, pawing at their eyes, while more kept on our trail. Until Enid hit them with some Margygr spell that had them disoriented, stumbling, and cursing as the rest of us made our escape, only not back where we’d been.

I found another hillock to set up camp on and plopped my exhausted butt down while the witches set subtle wards around the perimeter, probably to keep up the cloak. It wasn’t perfect; there were no perfect cloaking spells, but they seemed to think it would do if we weren’t moving about much, which... yeah. Hadn’t planned on it.

Then we just settled down and drank because Gray Curls, bless her, had a flask. It was the same hideous stuff from the enclave, but I didn’t care. I belted some back, regretted it, and then did it again. Empty stomach or not, I needed the hit.

And I guessed everyone else did, too, because we passed it around for a while, with no one having anything to say, and not only because the war mages would have likely noticed a silence spell being cast so close. But because processing the past day’s events wasn’t happening right then. So we just watched the mages doing a methodical search that did them no good because witches didn’t specialize in the Circle’s in-your-face, beat-them-over-the-head kind of magic.

Their spells were subtler, a whisper instead of a yell, but no less effective. As evidenced by some of the best and most resilient mages on the planet turning away right before reaching us, time and again, their attention redirected by the scurrying of a desert creature over the sand, a few pebbles sliding down a hill, or a bird suddenly taking off from the nearby scrub in a furious flapping of wings. They didn’t find us.

“We spent fifty years perfecting our hiding techniques,” Zara said, her voice low. “You have time.”

But for what? I thought and took another drink.

“Here,” my resident nursemaid said, handing over some beef jerky he brought out of a pocket in his pirate pants. “Took it off a mage,” he said with a shrug when I tried to raise an eyebrow at him and, as usual, raised both.

I took a piece, thankful for Alphone’s snacking habit, and he passed around the rest. We sat there munching quietly, with everybody seemingly content to let me lead. Yeah, because I’d been doing that so well.

“We’re still alive,” Bodil said quietly, reading my thoughts.

I decided I didn’t care for once. She could have them, what little there was. Which wasn’t much because I had no idea what was going on.

And desperately did not want to.

But what I didn’t know could kill us, so after a while, I poked the sadhu, who was sitting a little further down the hill, with my toe. “What?” I asked him and got a dark-eyed glance over his bony shoulder.

“You won’t like it,” he warned me.

“Yeah. I already figured that.”

And then he told me.