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I couldn’t sleep despite the bottle of possibly moonshine Alphonse had found under a collapsed counter and shared around, which had had fifty extra years of aging and mellowed not at all. So, I left the bearskin behind and climbed the staircase Bodil had found that let out onto the rooftop garden she’d mentioned. Only it was more of a hilltop garden since that was what this place looked like from the outside.

Bodil wasn’t there, having decided to get some sleep, as she was as exhausted as the rest of us. But somebody else was. Pritkin had talked Alphonse out of the remains of the bottle, and he shook it at me as I walked over to join him on a rickety-looking wooden bench that had somehow survived the apocalypse.

He looked better, having explored more on the way up here and found a shirt. It was clearly a woman’s shirt, being black and showing a pert witch riding on a broom in front of a yellow moon, with the caption “Why, yes, actually. I can drive a stick.”

I grinned because if anything was ever true...

Pritkin saw my expression and smiled ruefully. “There wasn’t a lot of choice.”

“It suits you.”

It did. The t-shirt wasn’t small, but it hadn’t been built for his kind of muscles. It was straining a little trying to contain them all, and along with the black scuba-type trousers he was wearing, leftovers from our recent adventures in the land of the water fey, it left him looking sleek, pared down, and dangerous.

That was good. I needed a dangerous partner right now, as I felt about as strong as a kitten. I took the bottle and gazed around.

The “garden” wasn’t much of one, having run wild ages ago to the point that I was surprised anything had survived up here. Vegas gets water approximately three weeks out of the year, with most of that clustered close together in the summer months. Which, judging by the coolness of the night air, this wasn’t.

Yet there were some scraggly green beans, a few still with yellowed, bug-bit pods clinging to the stems, a sickly-looking tomato plant with no tomatoes, probably because they’d gone into our dinner, and various hardy little pepper bushes, poking up from the hard-packed soil. They weren’t in rows if they’d ever been, but scattered as randomly as if reseeded by the birds, like the desert scrub that also seemed to flourish here.

A leftover spell to make the soil more moist? I reached a hand down to the dry-as-a-bone, cracked earth around the bench and didn’t believe it. Not to mention that I didn’t know a spell that could survive fifty years after the caster’s death.

I felt a shiver run through me and slugged back a shot’s worth of whatever was in the bottle.

And immediately regretted it.

“Take it easy,” Pritkin said as I choked because what the hell? “You didn’t have any earlier?”

“No,” I finally gasped back and returned the bottle. “I smelled it first.”

“So why now?” he hiked a blond eyebrow at me.

“I’m stupid.”

I found myself enveloped in a strong arm, and... okay. That was better. “You’re not stupid.”

“I feel stupid. I was sure my power would come back as soon as we reached Earth.”

“It was a reasonable assumption.”

“Yeah. Story of my life.”

I reached for the bottle again, and he sent me a look but gave it to me. It was no better this time, but I didn’t care much. I was too numb right now to care about anything.

Well, except for one thing. Because I hadn’t gotten into this mess on my own. Pythias could go back in time but not forward, as the future didn’t exist yet, so how could you shift to something that wasn’t there?

You couldn’t, or at least, that was what I’d always been taught. But somebody had done it, jumping our little group fifty years ahead into a dystopian nightmare. Worst of all, that somebody wasn’t even a rogue Pythian acolyte or a crazy mage, both of which I’d fought before.

It was a vampire. To be more precise, it was the vampire, the bastard who had ruined my childhood, killed my parents, and now trashed my future. The one who was owed .

And the only thing keeping me sane was the fact that he was probably here, too.

He had to be. Vamps didn’t know crap about magic, especially the time-travel kind. Yet, in a split second, he had shifted us decades out of place, and he’d been standing right beside me when he did it.

So, he hadn’t had a chance to get out of the spell’s reach. It must have grabbed him, too, and although I hadn’t seen him since arriving in this nightmare a day ago, he had to be here. Everyone else near me had been swept up in the spell’s backwash, so why wouldn’t he?

Or maybe I was just telling myself that. Maybe I needed something to ground me because, time traveler or not, this was out of my league. Way the hell out.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Pritkin said.

“I’d rather hear yours.”

The eyebrow was back and doing double duty tonight. “About?”

“Oh, try it on someone else.” I took another swig, choked again, and got thumped on the back. Which helped not at all because nothing was caught in my throat; it was just on fire. I handed the bottle back and told myself to get wasted later.

“Meaning?” he asked, putting it on the other side of the bench.

“Meaning that you always have a plan,” I wheezed. “You know how to get to Rhea. Don’t tell me you don’t.”

“I have an idea,” he agreed reluctantly; why, I didn’t know, since it was our only play. If the power hadn’t come to me, it was with my heir. She could send us back to our own time.

Of course, if she could send us, she could also send herself, and hadn’t done it, which was more than a little ominous. But I decided to leave that problem for another day. I had enough on my plate as it was, and anyway, she was the only possible chance we had, so getting to her was the plan, whether it was easy or not.

“Why does it sound like I’ll hate it?” I asked.

Pritkin pulled me in closer, and I went happily. It was the only good thing about this, the fact that he was with me. If I’d been here alone...

Well, I have been finishing that bottle and hoping it finished me at the same time. But Pritkin had a way of making even insane odds sound doable, maybe because he’d battled through them enough. We both had.

If I had to be at the end of the world with someone, I was glad it was him.

“The Circle recently cut a portal from its HQ in Stratford to its new, temporary digs on the outskirts of Vegas,” he told me.

“The old shoe warehouse?”

He sighed because he hated when I called it that. But I wasn’t trying to belittle the Circle’s accomplishments. After the demise of MAGIC, the old supernatural version of a United Nations out in the desert, where the local branch of the Silver Circle had once been based, they’d had to find another home and find one fast. They faced an unexpected war that wouldn’t wait, and the warehouse had been innocuous-looking and big enough...

But they’d still acted like it was embarrassing for the world’s premier group of mages, which was weird since their old HQ had been a hole in the ground.

I decided not to mention that.

“And?” I prompted because Pritkin looked like he wished he hadn’t said anything.

“The idea was to link our main bases of power so that, if an attack was made on one, the others could quickly come to its aid,” he told me. “Or help with an evacuation if needed. After the Black Circle attacked your court and we took far too long to respond, leaving you fighting a war with only a handful of newspaper reporters for backup—”

“Hey, the reporters kicked ass.”

“Yes, they did,” his hand tightened slightly on my arm. “But it was a close thing, and nobody wanted a repeat. The Pythian Court was, therefore, put right at the top of the list for areas to be linked into the new system, and plans had already been drawn up to provide a shortcut to it when I left the Corps. Or not directly to it, as that would compromise security, but in the region.”

“So we get to the shoe warehouse, and we get to my court?”

“To Dante’s, or just down the street from it,” he corrected, talking about the vamp-owned casino where my court had somehow ended up.

It was a long story.

“The difficulty is getting to the warehouse, considering where we are now,” he added. “The desert here is far too open, and I have seen no less than three giant shapes in the distance since coming up here.”

“Gods?” I said in alarm, staring out over the sand.

It didn’t help much, as the moon was barely a sliver in the sky, and the aurora borealis, which had brilliantly lit many of the nights in Faerie, was nowhere to be seen. The desert was dark, but there was no light pollution, allowing the Milky Way to arc overhead and provide a starfield all the way to the horizon. It wasn’t bright, but I could see how he could make out vague shapes, especially if they were moving.

But what were a bunch of gods doing in the middle of nowhere?

“I don’t know,” he confessed when I voiced my thoughts. “I also don’t think a god would have been fooled as easily as the creature attracted by our portal, but I cannot say for sure.” He shot me a look. “I haven’t had as much experience with them as you have.”

“Ha ha.” And then I realized what he’d meant. “You think it was the portal that attracted him?”

“What else?”

“I thought he must have seen one of you.”

Pritkin shook his head. “He was already coming our way when we topped the rise of the hill. At a guess, the power of a portal from Faerie was discernible even at a distance, and he came running. But we’ve done no magic since, having practically none available, yet there were other creatures like him in the vicinity.”

“So what attracted them?”

“Desperation?”

“What makes a god desperate?” I asked, frowning. “And why are they out here? You’d think they’d have better places to look for power than this,” I gestured at the small collection of hills, the flat sands beyond, and the sparse scrub. There were beautiful places in the deserts outside Vegas, but this wasn’t one of them. I’d thought before that the covens must have chosen it precisely for that reason.

If you wanted to go unnoticed, you could do worse.

“This is speculation,” he warned me.

“I’ll take it.” Pritkin’s speculation was better than most people’s certainty.

He looked out over the uninspired vista, his forehead wrinkling slightly. It was the expression I’d seen when I first came up here before he’d spotted me. As if he’d been trying to puzzle things out after everyone went to sleep, and I guessed he’d managed it.

“The gods might not have found what they expected when they returned,” he said after a moment. “At first, I’m sure it was a feast,” he added, his jaw tightening. “But what about after the initial conquest? With the survivors here and in Faerie either dead or hiding in small groups, and the powerful demon lords that the gods were really after, the ones who would make them a truly satisfying meal, absent…”

“But were they absent?” I asked because he was right. Earth or even Faerie wasn’t the point of all this. We were just the staging ground for the invasion of the hells the gods wanted because that was where their real prey lay. The ones with millennia of stored-up power that could satisfy even a divine appetite.

“I know them,” Pritkin said flatly. “The demon lords are not cowards, but they’re not stupid, either, and they’ve fought this war before. They rarely have to be taught the same lesson twice.

“They would scatter as soon as the gods returned and were busy taking vengeance on Earth and Faerie. They’d head to the far reaches of their realm, possibly even beyond them, and stay there. Some plotting revenge, others hoping for better days. But what they would not do is to come here or anywhere near here.”

“And the gods were starved when they arrived,” I said, thinking it through. “And there were a lot of them. So they probably got what they barely considered a meal before the buffet closed. Leaving them what? Fighting over scraps?”

“Not the greatest of them,” Pritkin said. “Zeus and the like. If they were willing to venture into the hells after being reinvigorated with the energy they found here, they would find prey. Not everyone could flee, and many of the demon races are not much more powerful than humans when it comes down to it.”

I thought about the quirky, slightly harassed-looking denizens of the demon world known on Earth as the Shadowland. It was one of the few I’d ever been to, as it was a neutral zone where human mages could go to buy whatever esoteric potion supplies were only available there. And where demons from a thousand races met to work out problems, trade, and offer their services to the Demon High Council, which met there, and where many of its members had courts.

But the regular Joes I’d encountered, or regular demons, I guessed, while they’d been scary sometimes, more often were just trying to make a living. I wondered where they were now. I wondered if they were now.

Being close to Earth, metaphysically speaking, was no longer a plus.

“So the strongest gods are off ravaging the hells,” I said, “which haven’t even fully recovered from the last time they were here, and the rest... are prowling around Earth?”

“Possibly,” but Pritkin looked dissatisfied. “But why in the desert? And why so many? The gods need magical energy; it is the only thing they live off of and the one power source they can use. But this…” he looked around at the barren wasteland, his expression echoing my thoughts.

This didn’t look like the Vegas buffet they’d probably been hoping for.

“Maybe most of them are in the hells then,” I said, “and it’s just a few crazy ones out here.”

“No.” He sounded certain. “It would be suicide for the lesser gods. The demon lords have had time to plan, and they would not leave their worlds undefended. Not to mention that the people of those worlds must know they are fighting for their lives. There will be snares everywhere, fiendish traps, and ambushes, as there were last time. The demon lords first tried to fight, arraying their armies against the gods, and were decimated. They learned better. They won’t make that mistake again, but they won’t just lie down and die. They’ll have prepared for a fight; it’s in their nature.”

“You almost sound proud of them,” I said before I thought. Because Pritkin hated his demon half.

Only, he currently didn’t have it, did he?

Shortly before we were whisked away to the future, he’d used a spell to split the demon part of his nature off from the rest of himself. He’d needed to be in two places at once: to win a challenge in a contest we were engaged in and to rescue me. But that had left his counterpart behind to face the gods’ return on his own, as he’d been outside the spell that had grabbed us and sent us to this era. And if he’d still been in Faerie...

But no. He was Pritkin. He was smart.

He’d survive.

“I know them,” Pritkin said, watching me as if he knew the path my thoughts had taken. “The hells will live up to their name where the gods are concerned.”

“So, the greatest gods might chance it as they need more power than the rest. But everyone else... what are they doing?”

“Looking in holes,” Pritkin said, giving me a flashback to the great eye in the crack above us. “Searching for every scrap of power left in this world. And no fewer than four of them are prowling in this vicinity…”

His own eyes widened suddenly.

“What is it?” I asked as he all but leaped off the bench and started moving around the hilltop, hands spread slightly out beside him and parallel to the ground as if magically searching for something. But there was nothing there but beans and the staircase below, hidden by the fake hilltop. But Pritkin was never this excited over nothing, so I got up, too.

“What are we looking for?” I asked because he hadn’t answered me.

“Witches.”

“What?”

“Witches!” he looked up from kneeling by a bean plant. “What if they’re still here?”

I stared at him, feeling the first bit of hope in a while. We could really use some allies right now, especially ones that powerful! Oh, God, we could!

“You think they are?”

“I can’t tell.” He looked frustrated. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not here. To have survived for so long, they’d need a hell of a camouflage.”

I glanced around. I’d say they’d succeeded. “So, how do we contact them?”

“We don’t. If they’re here, they must know we are, too. That portal simply couldn’t have been missed. It even brought a god running from miles away. But they haven’t surfaced.”

“Maybe they don’t know who we are,” I said excitedly. “Faerie was supposed to be barren, too, and now it’s just exploded. They must have felt that; their magic is based on that of the fey—”

“Yes, and the death of a planet is not likely to have reassured them!”

“But there has to be a way to let them know we’re not just refugees, that we’re not a threat, that we can help —”

“Help?” The word slithered suddenly through the cold desert air, like the hiss of a giant snake. “What does the heir of Artemis know of help?”

And suddenly, we were falling.