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T here was silence for a moment longer, then Zara laughed, her voice echoing loudly in the stillness. “Do you take us for vampires, witch? We don’t decide our leadership in such ways!”

“No, you decide it by the Gauntlet,” I said, “which I passed if you recall, to claim my coven .” I said that last a little louder than necessary because these bitches didn’t get to take that away from me; none of them did! “Something I assume was true for you?”

“Of course—

“But not for this one. No Gauntlet has been run for this... hodge-podge.” Shouts broke out at the term, but I doubled down. “Yes, hodge-podge! No wonder you haven’t been able to stand against your enemies! You aren’t a coven with a leader who fights for you; you’re a bunch of traumatized women cowering in holes—

“I fought!” Zara hissed. “What do you think the last fifty years have been if not the gauntlet of all gauntlets?”

“You didn’t fight,” I repeated loudly. “You hid. Maybe you felt there was no other choice, but now you have a challenger, and I say you faced no Gauntlet!”

“It’s true!” Someone yelled from the peripheries, only to get shouted down immediately by others. “You know she’s right!”

“It is,” someone else said, closer in. “And she’s right about the other, as well. Cowering is not what we do—”

“And what would you have us do?” Zara demanded, turning on the voice that had come from behind her. “This woman is reckless—always was! She’ll get you killed! I kept you safe—”

“Safe for what?” Someone else called. “To die in the dark?”

A massive argument, which I got the impression was of old standing, broke out, with everybody trying to yell over everyone else. Some things never change, I thought, remembering how much witches liked a verbal smackdown. And wondering what the odds were of Pritkin and me slipping away in the chaos.

Not very good, judging by the women who I assumed were loyalists crowding me thickly, like a hedge.

Guessed they’d had the same idea.

“Be silent!” Zara’s voice rang out, magically enhanced to echo off the walls and come back in waves, almost forcefully enough to knock me down. “She’s an agent of chaos here to destroy us!”

“Looks like you’ve done that well enough on your own!” I said, wishing I had the power to enhance my voice right now, but settling for screaming because the din hadn’t much abated. “This isn’t your coven, Zara; it’s up for grabs! And I’m grabbing it!”

Zara started to speak again, but an old woman I didn’t know with a massive bun of salt and pepper hair precariously perched on top of her head stopped her with a gesture. “You’re saying you’ll run the Gauntlet, then, for the right to lead us?” she asked me.

“That’s what I’m saying.”

I received a flash of yellowed teeth, with one missing on the side, then she all but dragged Zara back into a clutch of women.

I didn’t even try to eavesdrop on them; I didn’t need to. I’d just given them a coven-approved way of killing me that no one needed to struggle to explain away. Murdering me via coven law solved a problem without widening any cracks in their ranks.

It was perfect, except that it probably ended in my gory death.

“What are you doing?” The question crackled in my ear. It came from the translation spell I’d been wearing at the fey court because I speak exactly none of their languages. Pritkin had hacked it to give him a way to talk to me in an emergency.

And we seemed to have a lot of those.

“What you suggested,” I said softly, trying to be inconspicuous. That wasn’t hard with everybody still arguing and half of them yelling.

“I didn’t suggest this! ” Pritkin whispered viciously. “You’re supposed to name me as your champion—”

I managed to avoid rolling my eyes—just. “Pritkin. This is a coven —”

“And?”

“And you don’t know as much about them as you think you do.”

That wasn’t surprising since the Silver Circle had fought the covens and nearly annihilated them four hundred years ago. Pritkin wasn’t as close-minded as the usual war mage and knew more about them as a result. But he’d never been one of them—one of us, I corrected myself, because whether I felt like it or not, technically, I was a witch and a coven leader.

Or, I had been.

A pang went through my heart again, like a physical blow. My girls. It was worse than anything, far worse than an infuriated Zara trying to take my head. Dying young was a wartime likelihood, and I’d been forced to come to terms with it a while ago. But that was where I was concerned.

Not them.

This was never supposed to touch them.

“What does that mean?” Pritkin’s voice demanded, breaking me out of my sorrow.

“That there are no champions,” I said, my voice hoarse from screaming. “In the covens, you fight your battles yourself.”

“Then why the devil did you agree? You’re out of magic—”

“Yes, and they know that. Or I’d have shifted away from here by now and taken you with me.”

“Then what the hell —”

“Is Lover’s Knot still in place?” I interrupted, talking about the spell that linked us down to the metaphysical level. It was an old one, first developed in the Renaissance, and which I doubted even any of the witches here knew, as knowledge of it had been suppressed soon thereafter. And it had been suppressed hard.

That made sense when you considered that it allowed two magical creatures to borrow each other’s abilities for as long as the spell was active. Giving a vampire the capacity to throw spells, for instance, which is what it had been used for in some of the old vampire wars. But that ability came with a price, one that the Vampire Senate had decided was too high because the link was so strong that if one part of the duo died, they both did.

Pritkin and I had been risking it at the fey court because we hadn’t had much choice, but he hadn’t liked it, and he sounded wary when he replied.

“Yes, but that only allows you to borrow my power and not my skill, and I have little enough of the former to help you—”

“Then help yourself,” I said because I didn’t have time to beat around the bush. “Send me what you can, then cut the connection. I’ll use what power you have to hold them off for as long as possible. In the meantime, get to the others and get out—”

“What?”

“—have Enid help to hide you. Her abilities should be enough to get you across the desert, then get to Rhea somehow and—”

He said a bad word I didn’t know because it was in an arcane language that might not have even originated on Earth. But the tone was telling. “I’m not leaving you! Not again, never again!”

“Really? I remember a time when you blessed me out for saying something similar to you—”

“That was different!”

“How?” I demanded loudly enough that a couple of nearby witches paused their conversation to stare at me. I smiled weakly back and turned away, trying to spot Pritkin in the crowd. But they’d pulled him off somewhere, or too many witches had crowded between us because I couldn’t see him anymore. “We either both die here—tonight,” I hissed. “Or one of us lives, gets to Rhea, and ends this —”

“And what about you?” it was strident. “You die here, and changing the past will alter nothing! You’ll still be dead—”

“Pritkin. There are two worlds at stake.”

“There are always bloody worlds at stake!” he exploded. “Or gods to fight! Or some fucking other thing that—”

“And we just had this discussion,” I added, because he was right. We were always fighting something these days, which meant that one of us was nearly always in danger. It was what he’d struggled with more than anything else, not with the danger to himself as war mages all had the assumption that they’d die in battle someday, and, with how reckless they were, almost acted like they were looking forward to it. But with the danger to me.

But we’d had this discussion because one life didn’t matter anymore. Bodil had been right: only the mission mattered. But now, the first time he had a chance to prove that he understood what partners meant, we were right back to square one.

And I couldn’t do this.

“You agreed,” I said, my voice breaking slightly with some emotion between desperation and anger. “You said—”

“Don’t do this to me.” It was flat.

“—we were partners , but if that isn’t enough, try this. You are bound to me by oath and—”

Pritkin cursed some more, inventively, and cut me off. “Tell me you have a plan!”

“I have a plan.”

“ Cassie —”

That was his ‘you’re lying to me, and I know it’ voice, but I didn’t give him a chance to get started. “So you will leave me, and you will fight to save them or live knowing that you failed us all when it mattered the most!”

I cut the connection because I was starting to hyperventilate, and that wouldn’t work, not here, not now. The only thing the covens valued in their leaders was strength, and I had to project it, at least long enough for him to get away if he was going. I couldn’t tell, but I did get hit with a rush of magical energy the next second, which helped to steady me.

But it wasn’t much because he didn’t have much left. We’d been almost non-stop fighting gods, fey, and every other conceivable creature for days. This fight wasn’t going to take long.

But there would be one because it looked like Zara’s people had had time to talk sense into her. Refusing a challenge would make her look weak and embolden those unhappy with her leadership. Killing me would get rid of a problem, slake the witches’ lust for vengeance, and make her look strong, all at the same time.

Her magically enhanced voice rang out around the great cave once more, bringing the room’s cacophony to a pause.

“Very well. If the vampire’s bitch wants a duel, she shall have one. It will substitute for the Gauntlet and decide once and for all who leads this coven!”

There was some muttering to this, but nobody defied her, perhaps hoping I’d kill her and then they’d gang up and take me out. Or maybe I was just being paranoid. Because I didn’t think I was going to kill her.

No, I didn’t think that at all.

The witches drained away from the central area of the floor where we stood, leaving just Zara and me in the center. Then somebody levitated the crudely made torches out of dozens of witches’ hands and sent them spiraling above us, casting flickering tongues of light below like a wildly rotating chandelier. It reminded me of the crazed lights at the fey court, although those had been balls of spell-light that actually illuminated something, while these—

Were throwing shadows that masked the first hammer blow of a spell that almost took my head off.

Only it didn’t, and not because Zara was playing games. But because I dodged it. Or, no, that wasn’t exactly right. I dodged it with a fluid grace and speed that I was incapable of on my best day, which this was not.

I’d slept in my smelly suit of armor, giving me bruises on top of my bruises, and had eaten God-knew-what in wholly insufficient quantities. I was frazzled, exhausted, freaked out, and spent, completely used up after the week I’d had, and in no shape to be doing... whatever the hell I was doing. But the rapid-fire curses hitting the ground all around me, that tore up the stone in explosions, the flying detritus of which alone slapped me in the face and punched my body almost as hard as fists, never actually touched me.

They caused the witches to scream, shield, and back the hell up even farther than they already were. They took out some of the torches, raining sparks and steaming pitch down on me and Zara, and causing others to spin wildly as they were knocked out of rotation. The fiery whirls crisscrossed the darkness in front of my dazzled eyes, strobing my vision and making an already difficult-to-follow fight virtually impossible. The blows looked like they were coming from all directions at once, and maybe they were; maybe her friends were cheating.

And yet, somehow, I was staying ahead of all of them. Jumping over one that came from the side in a leap that would have made an Olympian proud, and causing it to smack into another that had either ricocheted off the walls or been thrown by someone else. And sending the original curse flying back the way it had come, almost frying Zara had she not ducked at the last second.

As it was, it seared some of the wild salt and pepper hair off and caused both of us to stare for a moment.

Damn, I didn’t understand anything!

Until I did, when everything suddenly slowed way, way down.

I glanced around for a second as fiery motes turned in the air, drifting leisurely toward the floor, as spells streaked the night, still fast but suddenly possible to track with my vision, and as a blow, camouflaged to hide it this time, rippled across the air between my opponent and me, like a heat wave on the desert.

I stepped to the side, watched it go by, and wondered what the hell. “Pritkin?” I whispered, but there was no reply.

Or maybe I couldn’t discern it through the distortion in my hearing, which was no less altered than my vision. I could hear the roar of the surrounding crowd, but distantly, like the surf hitting a beach. It was also slowed down and warped to the point that I couldn’t make out any individual words. Like the sizzle of flying spells, like the beating of my heart, like—

Like a new whisper, not in my ear this time, but in my head.

“Dulceat?…”

And just like that, I knew . Not only that I wasn’t fighting alone, after all, but that someone else had survived the fifty years between when I’d disappeared and this misbegotten hellscape.

I also knew something else. Pritkin hadn’t dissolved the spell linking us, even though every second that he waited could mean his death. And someone else’s because this spell of ours had a third member, forming a triumvirate of power that I had thought lost to time. Our third was supposed to be either dead in another universe or fighting his own battles there, but fifty years is a long time, and if ever anyone was resilient, capable, and fucking hard to kill, it was—

“Mircea,” I whispered, and heard him laugh.

“You are fighting for us all, little one. Show them what that means,” and with the comment came a flash of vampire fangs so clear in my vision that I thought for a second that he was really there.

He wasn’t, but his power was, and the next second, I felt it slam into me so hard that I nearly staggered.

And I guessed the crowd of surrounding witches noticed. Or, at least, they noticed something, probably my eyes starting to glow, which tended to happen when I was hopped up on our triumvirate’s strength. Because they suddenly threw up shields all around the circle where I was, trapping me on one side and everyone else, including Zara, on the other. Because yeah.

They didn’t like gods around here, did they? Not even the low-rent, demi-god variety. And apparently, they didn’t like us enough to change sides abruptly, even those who had been wavering.

Because suddenly, everybody was firing at me.

Crap!

The only thing that saved me was that I was still in the slow-time vamps used when shit had hit the fan, giving me more time to react and allowing me to dodge the maybe three dozen spells crisscrossing the makeshift arena, all zeroing in on me. But I couldn’t avoid this kind of barrage forever, not when more and more witches were getting on the screw-Cassie train by the moment. So I threw up a shield, vaulted over the ring of semi-transparent, light blue barriers in front of me, and tried to grab Zara.

I had no idea how long Mircea’s power might last when it depended a lot on how many of his Children had survived the Apocalypse, which I had no way of knowing. So I needed this fight over with yesterday! But before I could grab the witch who had started this and who was looking at me like she’d just seen a slavering, two-headed ghost, I was met with a combined spell that must have involved half the room.

It hit my shields hard enough to throw me back into the air and over top of the blue wall, and before I could jump to my feet, those damned shields were pressing in everywhere.

I found myself suffocating under a cerulean mountain, with goddamned witches crawling on top of the buzzing energy shields to weigh them down even more and press me closer and closer into a pancake. I couldn’t see anything but hateful, distorted faces, couldn’t expand my chest enough to breathe, and couldn’t shift away even though I might now have the energy because I was about to suffocate! And no matter how much I twisted and fought in my panic, it made no difference.

I was going to die in here, and even Mircea, who was shouting something in my head that I couldn’t focus enough to concentrate on, wasn’t able to save me.

But somebody else was.

I felt the stones move underneath me, felt a sucking sensation I had come to know so well grab me, like a great hand from beneath, and felt myself start to move into the ground. And then the portal that had just been ignited under my ass kicked into high gear, and I was sucked down what felt like a raging highway and into a maelstrom of heat and light so intense that I wondered if this was a rescue or another attack. I honestly wasn’t sure, but I grabbed a passing person, one of the witches tumbling through non-space along with me, tight, tight, so very tight, hoping for something to ground me—

And then we were gone.