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I squinted, but all I could see was a bunch of glimmering lights, which I finally recognized as torches smearing across my vision. I didn’t think whoever was carrying them could see us with all that brilliance in their eyes and with us crouched in the dark. And we didn’t have to worry about being heard because they were ridiculously loud.

But before I could relax slightly, shots rang out, some singles and others that were more like short bursts of machine gun fire. Men were cheering, sounding more drunk than the witches, and not all of them were on the road. Some were riding on top of what appeared to be a truck as it rumbled closer or, in one case, from on top of a cage the truck was carrying.

A mage was rhythmically beating the top of the cage with the butt of a gun, adding a metallic clamor that was loud enough to wake the dead. Or to get our group’s attention at least, as they had joined us by the time the cavalcade came into clear focus. And when Pritkin’s hand clenched on my arm, something I barely noticed because I’d just seen who was in the cage.

“Caleb,” we whispered together.

It was undeniably him, a war-mage friend of ours, although I wasn’t sure how I knew.

The cage was rusty and poorly welded into place on the back of a flatbed truck. It looked like it had been used a lot, like the truck itself, which rattled badly enough to make it seem like it would fall apart at any moment. But as bad as the vehicle appeared, it was nothing to the man inside.

Goddamn.

Just goddamn.

I had no idea how I’d even recognized him, as the face had almost been obliterated. Something had gotten through his formidable shields and scorched it up one side, peeling back the skin to show the charred, raw meat inside, along with a flash of bone. And the rest looked like it had been put under a pile driver or, more likely, a lot of fists and boots, turning it into a fair approximation of hamburger.

And yet, despite all that, he was somehow still conscious and more alert than his captors because he recognized us. The dark head lifted, causing torchlight to gleam on the bald head as he stared into the darkness straight at us. I didn’t know how he could see out of those eyes, which were so bruised and swollen as to look completely closed, but he knew we were there.

Which meant that others might!

“Steady,” Pritkin murmured, his hand on my arm.

“He saw us!”

“No, he didn’t.”

“He looked right at us! He’s looking now!”

“He’s responding to the message I’m sending.”

“What message? If you try to contact him, the others will notice!” There had to be forty mages on and surrounding that slow-moving truck, and no way could we take that many. I could feel the magic coming off them from here, a constant barrage like getting splattered with old, rancid oil, and they weren’t even targeting us.

But Pritkin didn’t seem worried. “No, they won’t. Not unless they’re wearing a coat that I spelled.”

That was when I noticed his other hand making small gestures in the air by his side, and caught a clue. He and I had accidentally caused the demise of Caleb’s treasured former coat, the long trench type that might as well have been the official war-mage uniform. They almost all wore it as camouflage for their weapons, and because of the spells they’d layered on the leather to resist hexes and serve as a backup to their shields.

Pritkin had promised to enchant one to replace what we’d ruined, but I hadn’t thought he’d gotten around to it. But I guessed so. Because this one had started to waft about in a non-existent breeze, going on the alert like the man himself.

They both knew we were here, but the question was, what could we do?

“This is it!” Grizzled Topknot said, clutching Zara’s arm. “We can get the cloaks while everyone’s distracted!”

“Are we going or not?” Zara asked me.

“You could wait for your people to find you,” I said, wanting to hear what she’d say when she couldn’t risk attacking me. “You don’t need to go in there.”

Her lips twisted. “My people aren’t coming.”

“The faction opposing us is in the ascendancy now,” Butch Cut said. “Assuming they didn’t get found out after another portal was activated hard on the heels of the last!”

“If so, they’d scatter and run to the rendezvous points,” Zara said. “If they’re discovered, there’s no reason not to use the other portals to escape.”

“And if they aren’t, they won’t open another gateway, not ‘til the coast is clear, and that could be days,” Topknot agreed.

“Either way, they’re not coming here,” Purple Hair added. “If we want to get back before the war party gets everyone killed, we go with you.”

“Or without you,” Zara added. “Come if you’re coming!”

I caught her arm as she started to rise. “Why are you helping me?”

“Damned if I know!”

“That’s not good enough! You were just trying to kill me. I need a reason!”

“Leave her!” Topknot said. “She’s as much of a warmonger as the rest. You heard her before; she wants to fight —”

And so did Zara, I realized, looking into those dark eyes. But not at the expense of her people. The ones she had hidden all this time, cared for all this time, and thought were in danger the second she saw me.

We stared at each other, and I thought I finally understood.

“Get me home,” I whispered. “I’ll do the rest. Your people don’t need to be involved.”

“Agreed.” It was immediate.

And then, of course, something had to go wrong.

“Hey,” Alphonse said, having brought up the rear because he was finishing off a bottle. And looking at the suddenly empty spot at my side. “Where’s Pritkin?”

◆◆◆

Son of a bitch! I thought, trying not to trip over my own too-large feet. It wasn’t working because I wasn’t actually wearing the scuffed and dirty size twelve boots, with one toe flapping open like it was laughing at me, that were sticking out from under a tattered war mage coat. But my brain kept insisting that I was, and since my own feet weren’t visible anymore, I kept getting confused.

“Don’t do that,” Alphonse said from beside me.

“Do what?” I whispered because my voice hadn’t changed along with the rest of me, and it didn’t match my current appearance.

“Look over everybody’s head like that. You’re going to get us caught—or in a fight. You look like you’re ready for one.”

That was bad, as I was definitely not ready for one.

“I’m seven feet tall! How else am I supposed to look?” I demanded while I tried staring down, although it didn’t help. The big face bobbing around the air above me continued to glower fixedly, like a department store mannequin with a grudge.

Guess this guy had died defiant, I thought sickly.

Distantly, I could feel one of the hideous cloaks the witches had enchanted flapping around my shins because the mage this one had come from had been enormous, and bits of him kept grabbing at me like clutching fingers. Which they probably were, I thought, feeling a shudder tear through me. I had a sudden, visceral urge to grab the grisly thing, throw it off, and stamp it into the ground, all while screaming my freaking head off because this was wrong, wrong, wrong!

But all I did was shiver and swallow my shrieks back down into my roiling gut and look at Alphonse. It was hard because the fake body I was wearing was in between us, appearing to me like a semi-transparent balloon. I could see the outline of the limbs encasing my own, but not control them properly.

It felt like I was steering a clumsy Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade float and trying not to knock into other people while I did so, because whenever that happened, our illusions looked like they were melding together.

Which was less than convincing as a disguise, and damn it, this wasn’t working!

“You need to switch with me,” I told Alphonse after almost face-planting again.

“ Now you tell me?” His voice came from over my actual head because he was a bruiser. But the lips on the image he was projecting moved considerably lower than that because his cloak had come from a guy maybe five feet tall and nearly that wide.

That left Alphonse having to puppet his avatar from above, like walking a marionette around, because the cloaks didn’t actually change our skin, as the name would suggest. I guess I’d been braced for a werewolf-like transformation, with the cracking of bones and reordering of body parts that came with it. Instead, they appeared to be more like souped-up glamouries, only ones that no detection spell could see through.

Or at least, I really hoped not as we were taking our new skin suits for a spin through a crowd of boisterous, laughing, putrid-smelling dark mages. None of whom appeared to have bathed in weeks, with greasy, dirty skin, limp, scraggly hair, and teeth—the ones they had left—so yellow that I could see them in the moonlight. And I could see a lot, as they were having the time of their lives.

I guessed our cellar wasn’t the only one that had survived, or else somebody had set up a still. Because they were drunk off their asses and shooting guns into the air with no concern as to where the bullets came down. The ones who were slightly less drunk were running around, setting up what looked to be a scaffold in the distance with room for a dozen nooses, even though they only had one guy to hang.

The one Pritkin was presumably after, although I didn’t know that for sure. All the magic being slung around seemed to be messing with the reception on the jacked-up translation spell I wore, which sent me snippets of a dozen Earth languages as we wove through the crowd, but wasn’t letting Pritkin’s voice through. Assuming he was trying to contact me instead of doing the war-mage equivalent of la-la-la-can’t-hear-you because, sure, I was the problem here!

Not that I blamed him for trying a rescue. Caleb had once gone with me into hell—literal, honest-to-God hell—after Rosier, Pritkin’s estranged demon lord father, jerked his son back to his court. I’d decided to go in after him, and when I’d thought of who might just be crazy enough to help me on a mission like that, there’d only been one name on the list.

So, yeah, I understood. But he could have talked to me first! Or better yet, let me help!

There were only a few thousand dark mages prowling around along with their little pets, and one man, no matter how good, against all that was a sucker’s bet. Maybe he’d find Caleb—I wouldn’t put it past him because Pritkin was almost as good as he thought he was—but getting both of them out? When we had the cloaks that could disguise them and enable us all to just walk through the crowd?

It was freaking maddening, not to mention dangerous as all hell! And he had to know that. So what the hell was he thinking?

Scratch that; I knew what he was thinking. It was what he always thought where I was concerned, and it was starting to give me hives. We were supposed to be partners, but that word seemed to have a different connotation for him than it did for me. Maybe because he’d started out as my bodyguard what felt like a lifetime ago, but still clung to the whole her-life-over-mine mindset no matter how little sense that made anymore.

He could risk his life going after Caleb, but I couldn’t even though I wasn’t Pythia any longer; Rhea was, God help her. I was just an occasionally useful clairvoyant and no more important than anybody else on this little crusade and probably less than some. But he refused to recognize that, and this is what resulted: a compromised mission because now we weren’t in one group anymore, but three, and—

“And now you’re staring at the ground instead of where you’re going,” Alphonse hissed as I bumped into him.

“I thought this thing was supposed to follow my movements,” I whispered, backing up.

“It does if you have the magic to imbue it with,” Topknot said softly beside me. “What happened to yours?”

I didn’t know the answer, except that I couldn’t feel Mircea—or his power—anymore. I hadn’t been able to in a while, but hadn’t noticed as things had been pretty fraught since we arrived. But I’d felt his absence after putting on this monstrosity and having no juice to power it with.

Well, except for my own crappy store of magic, which had in no way recovered from the beating it had taken in Faerie, and the little I had leftover from what Pritkin had sent me during the fight. But I tried anyway, reaching out to the shell of semi-transparent “flesh” and pushing a little power into it. And had the damned illusion burst as if I’d put a pin in a balloon, which I had not!

“Not that much! Not that much!” Topknot whisper-shouted—in vain. Because we’d been seen by three nearby mages leaning against a charred part-wall, who weren’t drunk enough to disbelieve their own eyes.

“What the—” One of them said, dropping his beer.

“ Wi —” Another managed, his eyes blowing wide, before a small, portly, fake mage hit them like a whirlwind and dragged them backward over the wall.

Some familiar sucking, slurping, and tearing sounds followed because Alphonse wasn’t bothering to be subtle, causing the witches to wince. And then the tubby mage’s head that the vamp was wearing popped up over the bricks. And it looked like he, at least, had figured out the control mechanism because his avatar’s bloody mouth scowled at me convincingly.

“Get over here!” he hissed, and I scampered to obey.

“Dark magic!” Zara whispered as she hopped over the crumbling wall and landed beside me. “The cloaks were imbued with it. You can’t use a light spell!”

“Well, somebody might have mentioned that!” I hissed back while Alphonse stripped off my cloak and gave me his.

“Do you even know any dark magic?” he demanded, slinging the hideous thing around him with no more concern than if it had been made out of cashmere. And then he stretched, looking far more comfortable in the larger illusion. “Okay, yeah. This is better.”

“Do you?” Zara poked me with a bony finger.

“Of course, she does,” Purple Hair said. Her name was some old witchy thing I couldn’t remember, because it didn’t look like her. Especially now, when she was wearing a goofy-looking man’s face with a bulbous nose, a shock of greasy corn-colored hair, and a bunch of pimples. But she, too, had the mechanism down because her expression turned worried after a moment. “Don’t you?”

“What do you think?” I whispered testily, testing out my new shape. Which was no better than the last, hanging on me like a blanket.

A really, really horrible blanket, and I was going to lose my shit, just any second now!

“I don’t know what to think!” she whispered back. “You’re supposed to be... I don’t know... some kind of monster. You deserted us to save your own skin—”

“I did no such thing!”

“Well, those are the stories told, all right? But you don’t even know dark magic?”

“She’s a witch ,” Topknot said. “’Course she does. She may not use it, being around too many of those high and mighty Silver Circle types all the time, but…” She trailed off, her borrowed, middle-aged, and heavily jowled face starting to look concerned. “You do, don’t you?”

Everybody looked at me.

“There must be another way,” I said, feeling inadequate when that was completely unfair. I wasn’t supposed to know black magic!

And to top everything off, half of my face stuck out of the top of Shorty’s head, giving me a bifocal-like take on the world, with part clear and part obscured by the mage’s thinning hair. Goddamnit! I compensated by hiking the whole thing up a bit, even though that caused my feet to stick out the bottom under the mage’s crappy boots.

But the illusion should cover that fact. And at least this way, I could see my own feet, which meant that maybe I could walk straight. I hoped so, although if I fell over, maybe everyone would just assume I was drunk since that seemed to be the case for most of the—

I looked up and saw everyone still staring at me.

“Alphonse doesn’t know any kind of magic, and he’s doing fine!” I said defensively.

“Alphonse is a vampire ,” Zara said.

“So?”

“So they are dark magic, personified—”

“Are not!” Alphonse and I said simultaneously.

That won us a raised eyebrow and a glance to where Alphonse’s empties littered the ground around his feet. “You eat people to stay alive,” Zara pointed out. “You literally absorb their life essence to sustain you. And the definition of dark magic—”

“Fine,” Alphonse said, brushing it away. “If you want to get technical about it. But what about Cassie?”

“We should have left her with the fey,” the skinny old bird I’d decided to name Gray Curls said. Her tight cap of old lady hair was currently hidden under a bald pate, pop-eyed face, and scraggly beard, but the voice was the same, and it didn’t approve.

“They can’t use black magic, either,” Butch Cut pointed out. “That’s why they had to stay behind.”

I frowned at her. She was wearing a tall, lanky number with long, dirty dreads that reminded me of one of the tube men outside of car dealerships because she kept leaning too far this way and that, as the top third of her body wasn’t real. But nobody was telling her to go back!

“The fey stayed because those damned hyenas would sniff them out in a heartbeat,” I snapped.

“And you think they won’t sniff us?” Alphonse asked as something howled in the distance. “Damn, this place is creepy,” said the vampire.

“Well, maybe if you’d stop eating people!”

“Can I point out that I had no choice, thanks to you?”

I decided to ignore that, as I didn’t have a good reply. “Bodil can’t be sure of reaching anyone else,” I said instead.

That had been my main argument earlier. The fey couldn’t do dark magic and so couldn’t use the cloaks, and we didn’t have any more anyway. And between that and them glowing like light bulbs in the dark, they’d had to be left behind.

Needless to say, they hadn’t been happy about that, especially ?subrand, who had acted as if I was abandoning him in one of the lower pits of hell. But even he had finally agreed that having us scout ahead, find a way into HQ, clear it of hostiles, and open a path for them would improve their odds considerably. They were waiting for me to notify Bodil, who had gotten a good link with my mind from all the eavesdropping she’d been doing, and Enid, who would hopefully be able to hide them on the way to join us as soon as I gave the all-clear.

Which might be a while if we kept standing here!

“So the fey witch said,” Topknot muttered.

“How do we know Bodil wouldn’t lie for you?” Purple Hair agreed.

“She doesn’t even like me!” I pointed out testily.

“Imagine that,” somebody commented. I didn’t see who, but let’s face it, it could have been any of them.

“And Pritkin won’t listen to anyone but me,” I added, while not being sure that he would. One minute, he was lecturing me about how we needed to get away, and the next, he was running off to save Caleb. Of course, if this damned spell would stop cackling in my ear like a drunken witch, maybe I could figure it out!

I hit my ear a few times, but it didn’t help.

“What’s she doing now?” Topknot whispered.

“Like I know?” Gray Curls said. “We should send her back!”

“I’m not going back!” I snarled. “I’ll stay behind the rest of you. I’m short now, it’s dark, and everybody is drunk off their balls. It’ll be fine.”

“Famous last words,” Zara said.

But nobody had any better ideas, so we got going again.