Page 24

I don’t understand one thing,” I said to Rosier.

“ One thing?” he snarled, maybe because we were racing the sun to get to this compound Mircea had talked about. The godly monsters could spot a rabbit from ten miles away in sunlight, and while they normally ignored the activities of us lesser creatures, there were times when they didn’t.

But driving at night had drawbacks, too, and I was starting to worry about Rosier’s vision.

“Make that two things,” I said as we hit the side of a bigger-than-average dune and almost capsized. “Who told you that you could drive?”

“You want to try it?” he snapped, wrestling with the steering wheel of what could only be called a jalopy. A cobbled-together one worthy of Mad Max, only no one in that world would have had the piece of junk.

It was part of a convoy streaming across the desert because my cavalcade wouldn’t trust me alone with “some damned vampire.” Or some damned demon. Or even with Pritkin, whom they were regarding with varying degrees of distrust after seeing him canoodling with Jonas.

They didn’t understand why we were taking a detour but suspected it had something to do with the Circle, and that had been enough to tear it for the witches. No one was saying much on the feys’ part, but they didn’t look happy, either. Maybe because there wasn’t much to be happy about or because of Rosier’s driving, but dour wasn’t the right word for their expressions.

And then, predictably, ?subrand blew up. He and the rest of the fey were squashed into the back of our jalopy, unwilling to let me travel with Rosier otherwise. But they clearly weren’t enjoying the ride, and the Ice Prince had had enough.

“He is trying to kill us!” he yelled as we jounced across the sand after another flight off the top of a dune.

“Wretched boy,” Rosier threw back at him, probably because the “boy” never failed to make the prince flush puce. “In that case, I’d die myself.”

“You are an infernal hell-beast! You can’t die!”

“Would that were true,” Rosier muttered and wrenched the steering wheel to avoid another one of the caravan of mismatched roadsters hedging us on all sides.

The vehicles were some that the dark mage contingent had come up with, as they had local connections. And had joined the cause because they were drawn to power and thought I had it. Enough at least to fight the gods who had betrayed them, along with everyone else.

A call had gone out for anyone who wanted to join up, and they were flocking to the camp in the desert. Meanwhile, Madesh and the bone squad were piled into two more jalopies, one on either side of us, neither of which he was driving. I eyed a skeleton wearing goggles on its leathery half-face while its white, bony jaw gleamed in the moonlight and wondered if I was going mad.

God, I hoped so.

“Why isn’t Pritkin’s incubus with you?” I asked Rosier, getting back to the point. “Instead of out here in the desert?”

“Because he’s still Pritkin!” he snarled as we banged over some more rocks, slid across some scrub, and plowed back into deeper soil again. “He’s stubborn as the day is long and wouldn’t help me! Here I am, trying to hold the Hell regions together practically on my own, and he’s putzing about in the wilderness, refusing to do a damned thing!”

“That doesn’t sound like Pritkin,” I said.

“And I couldn’t force the issue, as half of the remaining demon lords want him killed so that Zeus can’t absorb his power! They wanted me killed for the same reason until that fat bastard of a god hit me with his little curse, and it was no longer an issue. Now, they’re just waiting for me to run out of energy, and then it’ll be a free-for-all for the top spot, which will only aid our enemies, the idiots! Yet, do you think I get any assistance from my misbegotten spawn?”

“Referring to him as ‘misbegotten spawn’ likely doesn’t help,” Enid said from the backseat and received another lesson in the human expletive form for her troubles.

“That was being kind!” Rosier snapped. “Wait until you see—just wait until you get a good look at what he’s been wasting his time with!”

I also found myself curious about that. It was impressive that he’d even survived, which was more than I was certain was going to be the case for us. Because Rosier did not, it seemed, actually know how to drive.

But we somehow made it nonetheless, as a moment later, what had looked like nothing but bare desert suddenly wavered around us, blurred, and then we crashed through some sort of illusion, straight into—

Okay, wow.

“What’s this?” Enid said, looking around in amazement, and she wasn’t the only one. Because this wasn’t a compound, as Mircea had called it. It was a town, or more accurately, a small city, that we found ourselves screeching to a halt on the outskirts of.

The screeching was necessary as we’d immediately been surrounded by a hodge-podge of unhappy-looking, weapons-wielding guards, half of whom looked to be fey in origin. Much of the rest were human, and I guessed the remainder were demons. Maybe?

It was hard to tell as I had never seen anything like them.

The one holding me at spearpoint was ogre-ish, with oversized tusks growing out of a human face, a shock of bright red hair, and muscles Arnold Schwarzenegger would have envied in his prime. He was accompanied by a woman with green hair done up in about a hundred multicolored ribbons, a leather bustier, and a skirt that was more patches than anything else. And when she bared her teeth at me, they were pointed.

I stared dizzily back, dazed from the journey and still trying to figure out what this was, which did not seem like the reaction she wanted. Because she grabbed my already hanging-by-a-thread robes and tried to jerk me out of the jalopy. She was battered back by a crack to the chin from ?subrand’s spear, which I guessed was sturdier than it looked because it stayed intact as he leaped out of the vehicle and started a fight with half the guards there.

“You, uh, you gonna help him?” I asked Bodil, who was watching the silver prince through narrowed eyes.

“He needs to work off some steam,” was her only reply.

“He’s doing well enough on his own,” Enid murmured without the usual sneer. Maybe because ?subrand had only a few battered pieces of armor left on his torso, and the rising sunlight was gleaming on muscles that were smaller than the ones the ogre-man boasted, but still an impressive display.

I glanced at Bodil, who rolled her eyes at me before a red-skinned demon snatched Rosier out of the vehicle and smacked him less than gently down onto its hood. “You were told not to return!” the creature growled, its eyes flashing gold before Rosier sent it flying into the distance.

Which didn’t help our case, as he was immediately piled on by a dozen others.

“Get off me!” he roared as the witches exited a nearby jalopy.

But they weren’t attacking or being attacked, as I’d have expected. Instead, they were staring around in confusion. And being greeted by a few of the guards, one of whom hugged Butch Cut and wasn’t zapped for his trouble. At the same time, assorted townsfolk ran up and called out to the rest to stop the beatings.

“Wait! Wait, wait, wait!” Zara was yelling, staring around at the growing crowd. And then she spied Rosier and marched over, pushing her way through the throng of guards, all of whom gave way before her. “What the hell is this?”

Rosier, who was now being held down by eight different demons, stared up at her in fury. “What the fuck does it look like? They’re attacking me! Get them off!”

“I thought you were supposed to be powerful,” I reminded him, trying to catch up.

“Not after rescuing you!” he snarled, but he was looking at Zara. “Call them off! ”

She did not call them off; she was too busy looking from him to me to Pritkin, who had been driving the vehicle at the front of the cavalcade and had just fought his way back to us.

He and Mircea had been leading because Mircea was the only one who knew where this “compound” was, and Pritkin hadn’t wanted me heading into something I wasn’t prepared for. You know, again. So he’d stuck me in the back and was now looking like he regretted it.

But no sooner had he shown up than the fighting stopped, but not because most people were listening to the witches. But because someone else had arrived at the same time, whom I had never seen before in my life. Someone with a powerful build, an attractive face, and a mass of black curls on his head that contrasted with piercing green eyes.

His skin looked Italian or maybe Spanish, or perhaps he had just been out in the Vegas sun a while. His face could have graced a Hollywood romance, and his body was bangin’, especially in a leather vest that left his arms bare. But I ignored all of it because the eyes...

I knew those eyes.

And I guessed he knew me, too. Because he ignored the ruckus, the guards who had just piled onto ?subrand en masse, finally bringing him down and causing Bodil and Enid to have to do something, the splayed-out, furious demon lord screeching from the hood of the car, and the man pulling me back against him, because he knew those eyes, too. And stopped dead in his tracks to stare at me.

“Cassie,” he said hoarsely, and the voice was the same, as well.

And for some reason, after everything, that was what did it. My brain decided it had had enough for one day, the desert went swimmy, and I sagged back against Pritkin, whose arms tightened abruptly. And then the sun came up and I went out, at almost the same moment.

◆◆◆

“Here, take this,” someone said, pressing a glass to my lips.

I drank convulsively. It was water—tepid, faintly dusty, and with the mineral tang Vegas water always had unless bought in bottles and trucked in from somewhere else. And it tasted like ambrosia, like the best thing ever, and I drained half of the large cup in a few gulps only to have the rest pulled away.

I gasped and reached for it, sitting up in what felt like a bed—maybe because it was one—in a room with the curtains closed to make it fairly dark. But it was bright outside; I could see the sun shining through the loose weave of the fabric and highlighting the man sitting at the foot of the bed. He still had the dark curly hair, but his face was back to the one I knew.

“Pritkin.”

“Well. Part of him, at least.” He gave me the water back. “Drink it slowly. You were dehydrated and will make yourself sick.”

I drank it more slowly, although it was hard. The room was hot and close, although a faint breeze filtered in sometimes through the open doorway. I couldn’t see much beyond it, just a plain wooden floor and some white plastered walls, the same kind that were in here.

“My alter ego has been checking in regularly, so he’ll be back soon,” he told me, and started to get up.

I caught his hand. “Wait.”

“Why?” a dark eyebrow raised. “I’ve already told him everything I know. He’ll fill you in.”

“That’s... not what I meant.” My head felt fuzzy and incapable of taking in much information right now, even if he’d wanted to give it. Or picking the right words to express the emotions flooding through me at seeing him alive, unhurt, and acting perfectly normal.

It hadn’t hit me until now how worried I’d been, how unsure that I’d ever see him again, or that he’d somehow survived all these years. And yet here he was, warm and alive and looking at me with all sorts of things on his face that I couldn’t parse any more than I could my own emotions. My hand tightened as if to reassure myself that he was really there, and for a second, he responded.

Then he tried to leave again, but I held on, and even though he could have forced the issue, he didn’t. He just settled back down with a sigh. And looked at me with an expression I couldn’t name.

“It won’t work, you know,” he said.

“What won’t?”

A dark eyebrow went up. “Isn’t this where you give me the sales pitch? I should warn you that I’ve already heard it from Mircea. More than once.”

“What sales pitch?” I rasped as he reached over to refill the earthenware cup from a matching carafe on a bedside table. The table didn’t match the room, looking like it had been looted from a Vegas hotel and had had some adventures since. It still had some gilt clinging to the scalloped edges, but most had gone wherever the rest of its paint job had.

I felt like that, too, beaten, battered, and now confused because Pritkin’s incubus was looking at me kindly but almost sadly. “You really don’t know, do you?” he asked.

“Know what?” I said after taking another drink. “And why do you look like that? And what is this place? And how—”

“My other half can fill you in on all that,” he said again. “I only have one thing to tell you: No.”

“No?” I blinked at him, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand and wondering what I’d missed. “No, what?”

“No, I’m not reuniting with my other half. No, I’m not helping you go to Vegas and get killed—or worse. No, I’m not going to take part in any other schemes that Mircea or anyone else may hatch. No .

“What I will do is shelter you, help you get away from here, and assist you in starting over—”

He stopped talking because my dirty nails had just dug into his arm without me telling them to. Or maybe I had; I wasn’t sure anymore. “What do you mean, get away? ”

The eyebrow was back. “Get out of here,” he explained patiently. “Where in a little more than a day, you have started a massive manhunt—or woman hunt, I suppose—looking for you. There’s been an unusual amount of activity around the city and beyond. The gods are calling in the troops, with more of them arriving every hour from this world and beyond. My scouts—”

I didn’t wait to hear about his scouts. “Get away where?” I repeated. “Where the hell is there to go?”

“That’s one option,” he conceded. “Rosier could help you there.”

“Rosier?” I stared at him, understanding nothing. “Rosier gave up the last of Adra’s power to get us this far! He’s on his last leg and can’t even feed—”

“I know that. It’s why I told him to stay away. There are too many creatures hunting him in the area—”

“Go where?” I interrupted, trying to stay on point. “The only place that makes any sense for us to go is Vegas! To Rhea. My heir —”

“I know all about your heir.”

“Then you must know I have to get to her!” I stared at him some more. He looked back calmly—too calmly. As if he was just humoring me, but we weren’t deciding anything.

“I should have waited on this until later,” he finally said. “You’re upset; I understand—”

“Well, that makes one of us!”

His head tilted. “Did you really think it would be that easy? You show up with my old captor, and I willingly go back into my chains?”

I gestured around wildly with the hand holding the cup, sloshing water on the bedding in the process, and didn’t care. “What is this if not a prison? One populated by monsters who want to eat you and who probably will eventually. Whatever you’re doing here, it won’t hold. Not against them, not forever. Sooner or later, they’ll find you, and you know what happens then!”

“I know what happens if we go to Vegas. I know what happens if I take up my chains. I know what happens if I trust you as I once did when you mugged me and left me powerless, allowing your lover to take control of me and my life yet again because it is my life, Cassie!” The green eyes flashed slightly in the dark. “It always was, just as much as it was his! But I could never live it, not until the world fell apart!”

Suddenly, he was the one gesturing around, and the creepy calm—which had been a show because whatever he pretended, Pritkin wasn’t remotely emotionless, especially not this side of him—was gone.

“ Prison? This is paradise compared to what you would have me go back to! And for what? To martyr myself for a plan that has no chance of working—and even if it did, and you reached your precious heir, what do you expect her to do for you? Give you your power back?”

“I won’t know that until I talk to her—”

“You’re not going to talk to her! You’re going to die . That city is impossible under the best of times, and right now, it’s turning into an armed camp! And if Rhea could help, don’t you think she already would have?”

“I need her for more than power,” I told him as levelly as I could manage, considering that I wanted to leap across the bed, grab him, and shake him until his smug head wobbled like a bobble-headed doll.

“Ah, yes, so I hear,” he said smugly enough to make the top of my head feel like it was about to explode. “Rhea, the font of all knowledge, is going to tell you what happened to the world and how to fix it. There’s only one problem—she can’t.”

“You don’t know that—”

“Says the woman who got here yesterday!” he snarled, looking like his father for a split second until he got that famous temper back under control. “No one knows how the world fell,” he said more calmly. “I know because I visited seers after the Fall, everyone I could find. Desperate to know when you’d be back, the great Pythia, who was destined to save us all. And you know what I found?

“ Nothing . They can’t See anymore—not any of them. And I hunted down every one I could find, and not some storefront charlatans. I searched out former Pythian acolytes, and they all told me the same thing: as soon as the gods returned, their power left, whether blocked, stolen, or reclaimed, they didn’t know. But possibly the latter, as who knows if the human race even had seers before the gods—”

“We did ,” I said harshly. “Delphi existed before they came.”

“Perhaps a shrine did, with people who claimed to be able to see the future if you crossed their palms with enough silver. But has it occurred to you that they lied? That you come from a long line of charlatans who only received real power because Apollo, god of seers, carved some of his off and gave it to you? That he made the graft real, and now that the gods have returned, they’ve taken it back. Or have you been having visions, Pythia? ”

I stared at him, shock reverberating through me. I wanted to argue, to tell him he was wrong. That I had had a vision, one he’d been in with me back at Nimue’s court—

But that had been before the Fall, as they called it. Since then... nothing. I hadn’t noticed until now because I wasn’t used to having them anymore, and things had been insane ever since we got here—

“But you should have, shouldn’t you?” he pressed. “You regularly did before you were elevated to this position, and in far less fraught times. From your perspective, wasn’t that one of the chief advantages of the job? That the Pythian power needed your talents to look through time, and as a byproduct of its constant use, you were freed from those terrible visions you used to have?

“But what do I want to bet that you haven’t had a single one since your arrival?” he continued, watching me. “Yes, what do I want to bet?” He thought about it for a moment. “Not my life ,” he said viciously, jerked his arm away, and left before I could try to stop him again.

Leaving me sitting alone in a dusty room, speechless.