Page 26

T his is what you do with your time?”

The question caught me off guard. I looked up from the vendor’s stall, which was spilling out of a slouching Winnebago that should have had a meth lab inside it, and saw the silver prince staring at me. It was disconcerting, not just because I hadn’t heard him approach but because that pewter gaze could intimidate more robust people than me.

Especially now.

It was all I’d been able to do to keep my hands from shaking as I searched the market that sprawled along the town’s main street for something more suitable for a raid on god-central than rotting saffron robes. I’d told Pritkin we were leaving tonight because we had to—once Zeus arrived with an army at his back, it was game over. Yet I had no idea how we were supposed to make that work.

None at all.

“This stuff is disintegrating around me,” I began, only to have him slash a hand through the air in a gesture that somehow said ‘cut your bullshit’ better than a hundred words would have done.

“Do not lie to me,” he threatened, coming closer. Probably because Pritkin was down the street, being measured for some boots. I wondered if ?subrand had waited to get me alone, but then rejected the idea.

Personal safety had never seemed high on his list of priorities.

“You may have some of the others fooled,” he added. “Alphonse thinks we are resting here for a few days while everyone regains their strength, eating and shopping and acting as if we haven’t a care in the world, but I do not believe that. No, not for a second!”

“You’ve been shopping, too,” I said because I didn’t know how to answer that. Not without him demanding the plan I didn’t have yet. And because it was true.

He had an oversized gray hoodie flung over his wrecked suit of armor, which I guessed didn’t do much for chilly nighttime temperatures. He also had a sword swinging from a brand-new leather belt, probably bought from the guy in a plywood and aluminum shack a little way back who had a forge going. He’d been banging out some nice-looking knives on an anvil that I’d briefly admired but hadn’t bought.

If we got caught, I didn’t think a knife was going to help.

“Bodil said to give you time,” he said, ignoring that. “Time for what? ”

To come to my senses. To remember my duty. To freaking grow a pair.

But what I said, because none of that was his Highnesses’ damned business, was, “To finish lunch?”

“Bah! You mock me!”

Right in one, I also didn’t say, because he looked a little crazed.

“I’ll take this and the leggings,” I told the elderly vendor, who was smoking a blunt in his ancient wife-beater and lounging in the RV’s doorway. “Do you have any coats?”

I already had boots, having gotten a pair of leather ones from the guy down the road who was currently helping Pritkin, as he’d had some ready-made ones that fit me. They were the moccasin type with a fringed top and leather lacings, and were comfortable and quiet on the hard-packed dirt. At least the gods won’t hear me coming, I thought, right before my wrist was captured in an iron-like grasp.

“Do you mind?” I asked because, of course, it was ?subrand.

“Do you think to leave us behind?” he hissed as the vendor went back inside to paw through some of the piles that towered to the ceiling of the RV.

“Where’s Enid?” I asked, shaking him off. “I saw you two together earlier—”

“She is with Bodil. They are both eating as if the world is coming to an end—”

“Too late.”

“—possibly a result of not believing you, either! I suspect the Lady Bodil knows what is happening—”

Yeah, from tiptoeing through my head, I thought sourly.

“—but neither will tell me! They fear I will oppose it as I did last time, but I did not understand! So I come to the source and I demand to know: do you plan to abandon us here? ”

I opened my mouth to answer but paused when I saw it: a flicker out of the corner of my eye, a presence so faint that I wouldn’t have noticed it at all if not for the shadow cast by a nearby building. And then it was gone when I turned to look head-on, melting away on the breeze like... well, like what it had been. A ghost.

And once I started paying attention, they were studded throughout the crowd but passing unseen in the bright sunlight. Just faint, faint, oh so faint, suggestions of bodies or parts of them. A hand glimpsed here, a flash of pale eyes there, a head floating without a body, rising like a balloon over a nearby stall to...

Look at me.

Are you following me? I thought, bewildered, and might have asked if one had come close enough. Not that ghosts didn’t follow me sometimes, as I was one of the only people they could interact with, but that type wanted to talk. These obviously did not, yet they were keeping me in sight, and it was creeping me out.

Kind of like ?subrand.

“For that will not work, Pythia or no,” he snarled, backing me into the crusty side of the meth lab. “I do not care what happens to me, but the others—you do not get to simply erase them from existence! You do not get to make that decision! You do not—”

“I thought you were all for Jonas’s plan,” I said.

“That was before I understood the cost! I merely wished to return to our time—to fight! To prevent this!” He looked around, and the characteristic sneer, which he’d worn for so long that his face rested in that position, was nowhere to be seen.

Perhaps because the crowd passing us by was at least a quarter fey, plus a lot of part fey and people who might be part fey, but could also be some kind of demon I hadn’t met yet, because Pritkin’s other half didn’t discriminate. But plenty were recognizably from ?subrand’s world, and I saw the disconcerting gaze following them. In particular, I saw it focus on a Light Fey child of perhaps three who was toddling this way, her shoulder-length silver hair shining brightly in the sunlight.

She was wearing a stained but clean tunic and a pair of sandals that looked like they’d been cut down from old car tires. She was laughing and pointing at the prince, probably because she’d found someone who looked like her. Her mother did not, being human in appearance and frazzled as she ran after her wayward tot.

?subrand nodded briefly but said nothing as the woman, a pretty brunette with freckles across her nose, apologized and snatched up the child. But someone else did. Someone else shouted something that my translator either didn’t know or was too prim to translate.

I guessed it was the latter because ?subrand flinched. And considering that I’d recently seen him face down a massive Kraken without hesitation, I tensed up and looked around, wondering where the threat was. And spotted it a second later.

It was kind of hard to miss.

A furious fey man, tall and powerfully built, with his silver hair cut short, stormed up and got between ?subrand and the woman. “Don’t let our child near this one!” he told her, glaring at the prince. “Don’t let him see that some of us survived his father’s treachery, or else he may take vengeance upon us all!”

“I have no quarrel with you—” ?subrand began haughtily, only to be cut off by the same gesture he’d used on me.

“ Quarrel? ” The fey was huge, with muscles bulging out from under a short-sleeved homespun shirt in a way that few of his kind could boast. Yet that word reached a note a girl would have struggled with before descending into a growl. “You destroyed us! You and that bastard of a sire of yours—”

“I am not my father,” ?subrand said, low and dangerous. That tone would have had most challengers backing up because there was more to the prince than his size. He carried an air of menace about him, of anger and danger, and a temper barely kept in check that warded off most people.

But not this one.

“ Then where were you? ” The scream was back and loud enough to draw all eyes in the area. Including those of four more silver-haired types in the crowd, none of whom looked happy to see my companion.

Great.

“Pritkin, we have an... issue,” I said, hoping that the link through the crappy translator spell was still working, only to be cut off by a growl from ?subrand,

“I do not need his help!” he said—right before he was slugged in the face hard enough to punch all the way through it.

Or it would have done that to a human. In his case, it was enough to send him staggering back a few steps, blood blooming bright and vivid on his face, before another and another and another came in such furious succession that I barely saw them, but they managed to send ?subrand to the ground.

For a split second, before he flipped back to his feet, also almost too fast to see, with his spear in his hand.

“I do not wish to fight you,” he told the fey after spitting blood.

“I’ll bet you don’t, you coward,” the other snarled and jumped him, along with all four of his friends.

But it quickly became obvious that whatever these guys had been in their old lives, they hadn’t been warriors. Using the spear’s shaft like a fighting staff, ?subrand laid them out so fast that Pritkin’s response was still crackling in my ear when they hit the dust. “Come again?” I heard before ?subrand screamed.

“ I don’t want to fight you! ”

That did not mean that the fey didn’t want to fight him, though, and they were already back on their feet and coming, although more carefully now, and pulling a variety of weapons from underneath their clothing.

“On my way,” Pritkin said urgently because I guessed he’d heard that. “Take cover.”

“Trying,” I said, ducking behind a rusted t-shirt display, not that any of the combatants had even glanced at me.

They were too busy confronting the guy who laid into them a second later, disarming them with a few quick strikes, which only enraged them further. And it seemed to freak him out as well because the stoic prince had tears streaming down his face as he proceeded to beat the living crap out of them, all while taking blows that I knew damned well he could have blocked or evaded. I’d seen him fight.

But it looked like he also wanted to bleed, which all six fey were doing by the time Pritkin ran up with only one boot on, although that had taken him maybe ten seconds.

He assessed the situation but didn’t interfere because ?subrand had been right: he didn’t need the help. They came at him again and again, the fey bodies taking abuse that would have had a human needing an ER or worse. And were battered back again and again until their hair ran with streaks of red and bruises bloomed on bare arms and on the torso of one guy who was only wearing an open leather vest over his jeans.

But ?subrand didn’t look any better.

And yeah, it was deliberate. He was letting them get their blows in, too, but being subtle enough about it that I didn’t think they knew. But Pritkin did.

I saw his jaw clench as they landed several horrific cracks on ?subrand’s ribs, but he still stayed on the sidelines. And so did I, although I could have shielded him, at least. But somehow, I didn’t think that would be appreciated.

And the fey didn’t kill him as I’d half feared. Not even when they bore him to the ground and pinned him there, with three of them working him over at once. He could have gotten out of it; I knew damned well he could, but he just lay there unflinching, taking the beating.

Even when the first fey spat in his face and screamed what I guessed were obscenities in his language mixed with just about every human one I’d ever heard.

“You left,” he panted, blood dripping from a bisected lip. “You left , and we died. I could kill you for that alone, but I’d rather you live with it. Live and remember... how you failed your people. Live and suffer... as we have suffered... as we still do every goddamned day! ”

He made a furious gesture, which these fey seemed to talk with as much as their mouths, and the five left their prince lying in the dust. They staggered off, with those who could still stand helping several who looked like they were about to face-plant any second now. But their friends supported them, as I guessed they’d been doing for the last fifty years after somehow escaping the cataclysm in Faerie.

They picked up their useless weapons as they went, but no one came back to use them.

They weren’t going to give him an honorable death in battle, I realized.

They weren’t going to give him anything at all.

“Give us a minute,” I told Pritkin softly, who looked reluctant because he didn’t know how ?subrand was likely to react after that. But he went, perhaps because the silver prince didn’t look capable of standing, much less anything else.

But looks could be deceiving. No sooner had the fey left and the crowd, which had gathered to watch the show, dispersed than ?subrand was back on his feet with his pike held loosely in the fingers of one hand. He stared in the direction that the retreating fey had gone, expressionless, for a long moment.

Then he sat down in the dirt and hung his head, defeat in every line of his body.

I didn’t think it was the physical kind.

“Um,” I said, biting my lip because I hated it when people asked me if I was all right. And because, in his case, the obvious answer was no.

But it brought his attention back up, and he looked at me through straggling strands of bloody hair, the pewter-colored eyes lost in bewilderment. “How did we get here?” he whispered.

I crouched down and didn’t ask what he meant because that was obvious, too. As was his distress, and clear lack of anything to help frame the moment. I glanced around, hoping for inspiration, and found it in the faded image on a gray tee hanging off one of the vendor’s racks and rippling slightly in the breeze.

“I don’t know what Apocalypse means,” it proclaimed. “But it’s not the end of the world.”

And the fact that people were still wearing stuff like that here...

God, I loved humans.

“Look,” I said quietly and pulled out my tattered tarot deck.

Pritkin had returned it to me on the roof earlier, having rescued it from one of the few remaining pieces of Augustine’s armor that had still been clinging to me after everything.

“You’re going to do a reading for me?” ?subrand said hollowly. He’d been to Earth before, long enough to know what that was, but he didn’t appear impressed.

“Not exactly.” I dumped out the cards, which were muttering incoherently because they’d been through the wringer lately, too. And found the remains of the World card. It had gotten ripped in half during some of our adventures at Nimue’s court, and I hadn’t had time to repair it. “Do you have any tape?” I asked the vendor, who’d just been standing in the RV’s doorway, watching everything with a bunch of coats over his arm.

He nodded, dropped the coats, and went back inside. And returned with a roll of what had to be the oldest Scotch tape on record. It was yellow, peeling, and falling apart, and wouldn’t hold anything together.

I looked up at him again. “Glue?”

He went back inside once more, and I started pawing through the coats.

“They did not deserve this,” ?subrand said, looking at the crowd again, his voice soft yet with an undercurrent of something I couldn’t name.

“No, we failed them,” I said, trying to decide between a rustic, Wild-West-looking dark brown suede with a fringe, a moth-eaten nubby black, or a pale tan sheepskin with worrying stains on it. I chose the brown and tried it on.

It was too big, but it was dark enough, and if there were bloodstains on it, they didn’t show. I decided it would do and started to pull it off when I saw him. Another ghost peering at me through the crowd, half eclipsed by passing bodies.

Only this one I knew.

But it couldn’t be, I thought, frozen in shock. I was losing it, whatever remained of my mind. I knew I was—

And then I knew it again when he was suddenly gone, in between one blink and the next, leaving my soul hurting and my stomach flipping—

And my wrist throbbing when a half-bewildered, half-angry prince grabbed it. “Do you not care?” he demanded. “You are surrounded by... by all this... you see it as I do, yet you do not care? ”

“We failed them,” I said, focusing on him or trying to, even as my mind reeled. “It doesn’t mean we have to keep on failing them.”

“Meaning what?” he stared at me with wide, desperate eyes as if I were the oracle my position made me out to be. When I was just a person, like him, trying to find a path through this and failing as often as not.

And possibly going mad in the bargain!

The vendor was back, and I handed him the brown coat. “Add that to the others. How much do I owe you?”

I pulled out some gold coins that Pritkin had given me before we started this little equipment trip, which I guessed Mircea had supplied because we sure hadn’t brought any with us. But the man shook his head. “On the house,” he told me from around his blunt.

I blinked at him. “Seriously?”

“You’re Pythia. Aren’t you.”

I didn’t say anything because his tone didn’t make it a question. And because I didn’t want to end up with the crap beaten out of me like ?subrand if angry types in the crowd overheard. But the man didn’t seem to need confirmation.

“It’s all over town,” he told me. “You can’t keep secrets around here. Too many like him,” he nodded at ?subrand and tapped the side of his head.

“I do not have that ability,” ?subrand said, frowning, while I wondered just how many people were tiptoeing through my head.

“I had a shop once, a dispensary,” the man said abruptly, returning my attention to him. “One of the real ones, not those trash fake things on the Strip, you know?”

I nodded.

“Like to have it back. Like to have my family back, too.” He looked at me steadily for a minute out of a lined and dirty face. “Give ‘em hell, Pythia.”

He pressed something into my hand and went back inside, and I looked down to see a little pot containing something off-white and sticky. And while obviously homemade, it did sort of look like glue. It came with a small brush that I used to dab some of the contents on the ripped-up card and mush it back together.

It wasn’t the greatest job in the world, with the two halves slightly off-kilter from each other, but it held. Enough that the enchantment took hold again, the one my old governess had paid a witch to cast on it years ago, and that had somehow persisted through every adventure I’d had. The voice that came from the card was wrong; instead of deep and resonant, it was high and breathy, as if it was having a day, too.

But it was clear enough.

“—indicating that the road is nearing an end, and your efforts are about to bear fruit. But it speaks of endings that may not always be what we want. The fruit could be sour or sweet, depending on what you now do. This card says to use its insight to your advantage to change the outcome of your situation. Good or bad, it is telling you that this is your World, your actions, your choice .”

I looked at ?subrand to find him staring at the card, a look of mingled pain and wonder on his features. “You haven’t failed your people yet, prince.”

“I no longer deserve that title,” he whispered, still gazing at the mutilated little thing in my palm.

“Then win it back .”

He looked up, and something like fire kindled in those strange eyes. “When?”

“Tonight. Tell the others.

“We’ve rested long enough.”