Page 25

I hear it went well,” Pritkin said, climbing up some stairs that clung to the outside of the adobe-like building I was calling home. He was balancing a loaded tray and came over to join me under the flapping canvas awning someone had stretched over the roof to create a little shade.

The breeze was up, but the dust didn’t usually get this high, and my perch gave me a good look at the main street of the city, with people bustling about below, browsing an open-air market and eating from street vendors. I could see ?subrand in the distance, the sun making his silver hair flash like lightning, haggling with one of the latter. Surprisingly, Enid was with him, her brilliant coloring impossible to miss, even at this distance.

They appeared to be getting lunch from a pretty Latina sitting on an overturned plastic bucket selling tamales, while a young boy who looked like her son steamed more over an open fire nearby. I couldn’t smell them from here, but the fey seemed enthusiastic until ?subrand tried to eat one wrapper and all. The vendor stopped him and actually got off the bucket to demonstrate the right way, probably appalled at the insult to her cooking, but managing to hide it.

Pritkin had brought my food, but I didn’t want it. I didn’t want anything, but I knew I would need my strength. So I dug into some menudo, a soft taco filled with chicken and veggies, and a beer, because no matter what happens, every civilization manages to have beer.

“It went like shit,” I told him, my mouth full. I swallowed and drank some beer, which was lukewarm but otherwise good. “Tell me you and Mircea have a plan.”

He just looked at me.

They did not have a plan.

That was a problem since I didn’t, either. Worse, I wasn’t even sure if I was supposed to, since getting to Rhea might be a huge risk for no reward. I didn’t know anything, and time was passing, with every moment closer to Zeus raining fire down on us all.

“He’s coming,” I told Pritkin without bothering to say the name because I doubted it was far from his mind, either.

“I know.”

“We can’t just sit here!”

“I know.”

I looked at him from over the soup bowl I was drinking out of because spoons took too long. “Then what do we do? If seers really are useless these days—”

“We don’t know that.”

“We do . Or at least, we know how thorough you are. Do you really think he didn’t check?”

Pritkin was silent for a moment. “No,” he finally said. He wouldn’t have left that sort of thing hanging, not any part of him.

“Then maybe he’s right. Maybe Rhea knows nothing.”

“Meaning?” he asked, sitting forward with his arms on his knees. The khaki button-down he’d gotten somewhere while I was out had the sleeves rolled up to show strong, sun-bronzed forearms. For someone so pale, he always took on color quickly. It showed on his face, too, where a faint sunburn was already staining his cheeks and making his eyes stand out even more vividly.

They were earnest eyes. Pritkin had come to talk turkey. Too bad I didn’t have anything to offer him.

Except for the obvious, of course.

“I don’t know,” I said stubbornly.

“You do. I know you don’t want to face it—”

“God damn it—”

“—but you have to decide. And Jonas’s plan—”

“Which one?” I said angrily. “The one where I blow myself up, or the one where we all get eaten trying to get to Rhea, who probably doesn’t know any more than we do?”

“The first,” he said, because that city must be bad . “Perhaps, if we time it right, if you cast the spell as you’re feeding, using up the power as fast as you gain it…”

Yeah, which is why he sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as me!

I got up and walked to the side of the roof, which was flat-topped like all the others around here. They looked like the bedside table in my room below, or the wonky bench where I’d set down my lunch. Like survivors cobbled together from the ruins of the old world and made into something new, by a hardy bunch just like them who had refused to lie down and die.

But they would die, some of them, maybe all of them, if I chose wrong.

But going Jonas’s route meant killing everyone I’d brought with me; I hadn’t been lying to ?subrand about that. Pritkin knew that, but was willing to sacrifice himself and the others to get me home. I wasn’t, and that assumed I could do it at all before the madness overtook me. Because we’d have to get the power from somewhere, and there was only one source around, and without the steadying hand of Pritkin’s incubus...

I didn’t think I could do it. I didn’t think I could hold on. That Cassie wouldn’t give up power to some spell she would no longer see a use for. That Cassie wouldn’t go back to a time when she couldn’t feed. That Cassie would immediately be on the hunt, I knew she would, and even if the spell I started grabbed her, what would burst back through time into Nimue’s court but yet another monster? One just as bad as those I’d have to kill to—

My thoughts broke off, shuddering, and I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. And felt hard arms go around me from behind. “This is my fault,” Pritkin whispered against my neck. “I know that. Yet you’re paying the price.”

“It isn’t your fault.”

“It is . I should have made peace with him years ago. Should have tried to meet him halfway, at least.”

I lowered my hands to blink at the street, unsure whether I’d just heard that or not. “Seriously?” I looked at him over my shoulder. “You hate him.”

“I hated myself. What I was, what I was afraid I’d become. I took it out on him.”

And there it was, so simple, so stark. And so belated. “What caused this change of heart?” I asked. “Just because we need him?”

“No.” He nodded at the street below. “Look at what he’s built here, what he’s done . When I was hurt, when Ruth—” he paused, as he always did at her name, even now. Even after knowing what she’d been. “After what happened with Ruth ,” he said again, stressing the name as if reading my thoughts, “what did I do? When my world fell apart, so did I. Disappeared into a bottle, so sunk in pain and self-loathing that I couldn’t see anything else. If Jonas hadn’t come and forcibly dragged me out, I might still be there.

“But with him…” he gestured at the thriving town. “He could have dropped off the face of the Earth—quite literally—and disappeared into one of the farther-flung Hells. The gods aren’t there yet, and it may be a long time before they arrive if the constant bickering and jealousy they’re prone to continue.

“But he didn’t. He also didn’t crawl into a hole and wish to die. He did this instead.” He looked around, and there was wonder on his face as well as in his voice. “Look at it. Do you know how many he’s saved here? How many he’s helped?”

“I—we didn’t get around to discussing it,” I said, feeling shitty all over again. Because we might have if I hadn’t immediately started demanding things of him. Things I had no right to expect after the way we’d parted.

“He’s been working with the covens. He has thousands of people here, but he’s helped many more to get out of the vicinity entirely, sending them abroad to safer areas using the coven’s portal system. It’s the main reason Zara and the rest stayed here: to help him.”

“But the portals draw the gods—”

“Which is why they don’t fire any up when they’re near, although it was easier in the early days when they were sending through the most people. The gods were feasting so heavily then that they barely noticed a portal firing, here or there…”

Yeah, I thought as he petered off.

I couldn’t imagine what that must have been like, either.

“He never told the covens who he was?” I asked after a minute.

Pritkin shook his head. “He didn’t trust even them that much and knew he was being hunted. There was a bounty on his head, but no one ever collected. No one knew.”

“He really did start over,” I said, wondering again how hard that must have been.

“He had no choice—and no warning. We were gone in an instant, and things became dangerous for him at the fey court immediately thereafter.”

“They thought he was you.”

“He is me,” Pritkin said, in a first for him. “And he’d just won the second of two challenges for the throne. You know it was best out of five.”

I nodded; he’d told me back when we were attempting to do the same thing ourselves. It all seemed so pointless now, the games the fey had played, the politics, the stupid, endless bickering. Not that humans were any better...

“So they tried to kill him,” I said, and didn’t make it a question. They’d done the same to us.

“Immediately. It was a five-alarm fire by then, for if he won one more…”

I laughed suddenly; I didn’t know why. Maybe at the image. An incubus as king of one of the great houses of the Light Fey!

“He could pull it off if anyone could,” I said, getting an image of an insouciant Pritkin, like the young man I’d known once in medieval Wales, sprawled on the throne with a leg draped over the arm. It was strangely believable.

“What is it?” his other half asked, seeing something on my face.

“Just thinking about Wales. You were different then.”

“Life was different then.”

Yeah, I guessed so. He hadn’t had the weight of the world on his shoulders and had laughed a lot. That’s what I remembered about the young man; he’d always been laughing. And the worst thing I’d had to deal with then had been a pissed-off Gertie.

Well, and a returning Ares, but he’d proved to be, oh, so much easier than what we had now! Just so much. And I guessed that showed in my expression, too, because Pritkin nodded at the scene below to distract me.

It worked because ?subrand and Enid had come this way, eating something on a stick. And then Enid squealed and pointed with her stick, and ?subrand went forward to haggle with another vendor, this one selling what looked a lot like cotton candy, only that couldn’t be right. But there were cones of the stuff, admittedly in a light golden color, probably from the raw sugar used to make it instead of the neon brights I was used to.

“I thought there wasn’t any electricity here,” I said because I’d yet to see any sign of it.

“There’s not, except in Vegas. Out here, it would attract too much attention. The gods can sense it, although they sometimes confuse it with lightning. But a static lightning cloud in the desert might eventually pique someone’s curiosity, and not all the gods are mad.”

“Then how is he making it?” I asked, leaning forward for a better look.

“Watch.”

I watched the guy grab a pot from over a barbeque grill he had to one side, on which he’d just finished heating some sugar and water to a deep golden color. He then took a couple of forks and, tilting the pot, began flicking sugar strings into a large metal bowl. Within a minute, he had enough to stuff into a new cone because ?subrand wasn’t buying the old ones that might have dust in them.

But he did buy this, although with what I wasn’t sure. Until I saw the merchant bite a gold coin as if he couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t either, but I wasn’t looking at the coin.

I was looking at ?subrand, scion of one of the most noble houses of Faerie, handing his prize off... to a kitchen maid.

“We should have known when they hated each other,” Pritkin said, and I burst out laughing.

“Yeah,” I choked. “We should.”

And then I spied someone else down below, shielding his eyes with his hand and looking up at us. His face was back to the swarthy Latin lover type, but the eyes were the same. I stared down into them for a moment before he turned on his heel and walked quickly away, melting into the crowd before I had time to say anything.

Although what that would have been, I had no idea.

And then I saw someone following him.

It caught my attention because it wasn’t a person or even a zombie, a few of which were lurching around the street below, not getting nearly the reaction from the crowd that I’d have expected. One old woman batted at one that had gotten too near her stall with a broom, shooing it away like you might a stray dog, and others moved out of their path to avoid them, mild disgust on their features. But nobody looked freaked out, and nobody so much as flinched at the far more subtle ripple on the wind that followed the incubus.

It was so pale that I almost didn’t notice it either, but then, I didn’t need to. I could feel it: a tingle up my spine, a ripple along my skin, a wash of gooseflesh down my arm. Like a cool breath on a too-hot day, murmuring seductively of darkness and moonlight.

Ghosts.

Now that I started looking for them, they were everywhere. Not easily seen because of the brilliant light of day, and not noticed by the people thronging below. But here, nonetheless, almost as many as had been in Stratford.

But then, of course, they were, I thought. Vegas was nearby. How many people had been in that city when it fell, and how many had fallen along with it?

And how many of those had been unready for that death, unable to reconcile it, unable to move on? A lot, by the feel of things. So many that I wasn’t sweating despite the sun.

If anything, it was getting a little chilly up here.

“Cassie?” Pritkin said, and I shook off the feeling of... I wasn’t sure what.

“Did you tell him?” I asked as we watched his incubus disappear into a building down the street. “About your epiphany?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Too little, too late.”

Yeah, I thought.

Just about summed up everything lately, didn’t it?

“So now what?” I asked. Because we had to face it—I had to—sooner or later. This was my job, however much I wanted it not to be.

“That’s not for me to say.”

“If not you, who?”

“The one who has to do it,” Pritkin said flatly. “I can give you information, present alternatives, advise—”

“Then what would you advise?” I asked harshly, pretty sure I already knew.

But he surprised me.

“—in most cases, but not this one.”

“Why not this one?” It came out as a whisper.

Pritkin was silent for a moment, but then he told me the truth. “I don’t know what to do any more than you do.”

It was a rare admission from someone who prided himself on always knowing everything. Who’d had stacks of magic books in his room almost as high as the ceiling and who had memorized plenty more. Who had lived, fought, and almost died in service of the good for longer than most people, and now...

Had we reached the end?

Because it sure felt like it.

“You’ll die if I have to leave you here,” I whispered, gripping the arms he’d crossed in front of me. “All of you—”

“Cassie, you can’t—”

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” I said furiously. “Don’t tell me not to figure that into the equation because it’s in , do you understand? You couldn’t leave me back in that damned warehouse, and I can’t leave you now, not like this .”

I heard my voice break and shut up because I didn’t have anything useful to say anyway. And I guessed Pritkin didn’t, either, because he was silent, too. We just stood there, staring at the bustling, weirdly normal-looking crowd, which had somehow found equilibrium in the madness.

It was better than I was doing.

Especially after spotting the baby that a mother was carrying in a wrapper on her back. It was cute with a head full of nut-brown curls and a fist holding something I couldn’t see too well from here. But it was probably some kind of candy because the kid had a bright red circle around his mouth.

He looked like a miniature clown, but I wasn’t laughing. Because that kid might never be born if I went back, yet if I didn’t... what kind of life was this? And how long would he or his parents have it, because Pritkin’s incubus couldn’t hide them forever, no matter what he thought.

“No one should have this kind of power,” I said, watching the child get whatever it was stuck in his mother’s hair.

“And no one should have to make this kind of decision,” Pritkin said. “But you do. And it must be yours, not mine or anyone else’s, no matter what Jonas may think.”

“It shouldn’t be me. It shouldn’t be anyone!”

“Yet it has to be someone. And you are Pythia.”

And how shitty an excuse that was, to rewrite history to my liking!

I tilted my head back to look at him. “Did he send you up here to talk to me?”

“No. Mircea. Although I was coming anyway.”

“And what does our third think should happen?”

“He still wants to go after Rhea.”

“Why? Doesn’t he know what your other half found out?”

“Yes, he was there when the two of us... talked.”

I winced. I doubted much talking had been done, at least at normal decibel levels. “So why…”

“He says that, throughout all the time he’s known you, your instincts have been spot on. That’s why he trusted you with his family when he was incapacitated. It’s why he trusts you now.” He turned me around. “And so do I. Your first instinct on arrival was to get to your heir. If that’s still what you want, then that’s what we’ll do.”

“I don’t want any of this,” I whispered.

“I know.” Our foreheads met. “And I would help you if I could.”

“ You could—the other you,” I said bitterly. “What chance do we have otherwise?”

“From what my alter ego maintains, even if he wanted to help, it wouldn’t work. The gods can detect power, especially the kind you wield. It would bring everyone running if we showed up in force, particularly now, with the warning they’ve had. Did he tell you what’s happening in Vegas?”

“Enough.” I didn’t want to hear any more about the obstacles in our way. I didn’t want to hear any more about anything. “So, we go in powerless. Is that what you’re saying?”

“He says it’s the only way, but he also says…” Pritkin’s jaw tightened. “That it won’t matter. We might get further slipping in unobtrusively, but not far enough.”

“No wonder he doesn’t want to help. He really thinks it’s useless.”

Pritkin didn’t say anything that time, but I could read the thinness of his lips, which hadn’t been plump to begin with. He knew his other half. He didn’t think we had a chance, either.

But he’d go if I said so. And I knew without question that Mircea would, too. And how did I, of all people, get in a position to tell two men like that to risk their lives? How did I have the right to decide any of this?

I looked down again at the people doing what people do, just getting through life. Some had baskets over their arms, shooing a few random chickens out of the way while doing their shopping because someone was farming around here. Produce was piled high on tables and stuffed into great sacks in the case of corn, because I guessed it was harvest time.

A few were buying the fresh ears, still wrapped in their leaves, but more had clustered around a couple of guys working an old-fashioned, hand-cranked machine. One of them was feeding whole dried cobs into it, and the other was using a different part of the contraption to grind the kernels into masa for tortillas. Which several women were cooking up beside them, selling the fresh rounds in stacks, ready for stuffing.

Those people had fought and run and hidden and survived to rebuild their lives against all the odds. Who was I to tell them they couldn’t live them? That their children couldn’t be born, that their lovers, whom they might never have met without the cataclysm that had thrown them together, couldn’t be there, that the life they’d struggled so hard for couldn’t exist? That I was about to try to wipe it all out?

But if I didn’t, how did I face the ghosts, all the multitudes who had died who shouldn’t have, and who wouldn’t have if I’d been better, done more, tried harder—

“Stop it,” Pritkin told me, his voice low and dangerous.

I didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t right then.

“Don’t do this,” he said as if we were having a normal conversation, instead of me having my fiftieth nervous breakdown and him...

I didn’t know what he was doing, but it wasn’t working. I sank slowly onto my haunches, still staring at the crowd who had no idea, no idea , that the girl in the tattered-looking saffron robe and bare, dirty feet was deciding their fate. Even though she had no right to it, none at all, but still had to choose.

Or else that was a choice, too, wasn’t it?

“You did the best anyone could have,” Pritkin said because he desperately wanted to help; I knew he did. But no one could help me right now.

To be Pythia is to be alone , I heard Gertie say, and my mentor had been absolutely right, as usual.

We didn’t answer to anybody, she’d said, because no one sees the things we do or would understand them if they did. Worlds within worlds, timelines constantly changing, splitting, growing this way and that, like the gnarled roots of a tree. Like the world tree that the old legends had talked about, only which world, I wondered?

Which one was it to be?

Choose .

I didn’t know that time if it was Gertie’s voice or mine. Didn’t know if I was right. Didn’t know anything and had no right to decide any of this.

No right at all.

“Tonight,” I said hoarsely. “Before Zeus gets back. We go for Vegas.

“We go for Rhea.”

Pritkin, who had sunk down behind me without me even knowing it, tightened his arms and let his head drop onto my shoulder. “So be it.”

It rang like a bell in my ears, but whether of victory or warning, I didn’t know.