by Karen Chance
And then everything froze, like another time stoppage, only it wasn’t. The lightning still flashed; the girl in front of me still breathed in quick, shallow motions. Gertie’s sharp brown eyes still glistened as she coldly assessed the new situation. And Rosier continued to thrash around and scream bloody murder.
Nobody had ever accused him of reckless bravery, I thought, wondering what came next. Because the idea of dueling Gertie was not . . . attractive. But we couldn’t stay like this forever. My spell would unravel soon, and the only thing I liked less than the thought of dueling an experienced Pythia was dueling her while plunging through the air.
But I didn’t have to worry about it, because Gertie decided things for me, stretching out her arm, and thrusting Rosier’s small body over the abyss.
“I. Will. Drop. It,” she told me, voice low and venomous.
“My spell will catch him,” I replied, trying to keep my own voice steady, even while wondering if it would. And if I could shove Agnes at her and freeze them both before Gertie did something to Rosier or to me. Or before Agnes did. Or before I fell off the roof, because the damn thing was slippery as ice.
But my power didn’t seem to have an opinion this time, maybe because it didn’t work so well on fellow Pythias. Or maybe I was just having trouble concentrating. Which wasn’t helped when Gertie made a sudden, savage gesture and half my spell collapsed.
The wagon tilted sharply toward me, one side abruptly reentering real time. And I started to fall, my feet slipping dangerously on the wet roof, with no hope of traction. Until my back hit a wheel and I managed to grab on. And to tighten my grip on Agnes’ throat, because she was struggling now, and struggling hard. “Cut it out!”
“Let her go!” Gertie thundered.
“It’s not my fault she’s here!” I yelled as a wash of rain and wind slapped me in the face, and the wheel turned perilously behind me. “This is between you and me—”
“Let her go or I drop it! Now!”
“Let her go!” Rosier screeched, now dangling over open, active air. “Let her go!”
“There’s a net!” I pointed out, furiously. “The witches—”
“Hate demons, and are savage in this era, girl!” Gertie said, looking pretty damn savage herself, even with purple-tinged curls whipping around her face. “And the wind down there would likely blow him off course in any case! Now let my acolyte go if you want to live!”
“Give me my partner, and we’ll trade!”
“You’re in no position to make demands!”
“Neither are you!”
Although I could be wrong about that, I thought, when a tunnel of quick time boiled through the remains of my spell, hitting me with a burst of wind as strong as a fist. I staggered back, ten minutes or more of storm all slamming into me at once, although that might not have been so bad: I had a damn death grip on that wheel. At least, I did until Agnes took that moment to slam her foot down on mine, to wrench away, to lunge for her mistress—
And to fall, because slanted, rain-slick boards are not forgiving.
I had a split second to see Gertie drop Rosier, reaching desperately for her heir; to see him plummet over the side, still screaming; to see Agnes sliding backward, unable to find purchase—
And then we were both falling, the force of her impact sending us over the side and into thin air.
I grabbed her, wrapped my arms around her, and tried to concentrate enough to shift. But I didn’t get the chance. Because what looked like a mini cyclone blew up out of nowhere, right below us, the maw swallowing the world in darkness. And then swallowing us, the swirling bands of black closing over my head, the force of the disturbance wrenching Agnes away and pulling at me even as I struggled and tried desperately to shift.
Tried and failed, because I’d felt something like this before, and it wasn’t a cyclone. I stared at the tiny scrap of sky still visible far above me, knowing that I was in the maw of a portal. Specifically, a time portal that Gertie had used on me a couple of times now, a return to sender that plopped me back whenever and wherever I’d started out.
It meant that Agnes was probably back in Victorian London right now, wondering, What the hell? And that I was about to be back in Vegas, in my damn apartment sans Rosier, sans Pritkin, sans anything to show for two-thirds of a bottle of potion. A bottle I couldn’t replace at the moment, and wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to. And fuck that, fuck everything about that, I thought, gritting my teeth and fighting.
And God, it sucked—literally. I felt like I was about to be wrenched in two, the forces inside the portal far worse than the storm outside. It felt like my flesh was being torn from my bones, like I was about to be turned inside out, like I was coming apart at the seams.
Felt like freedom, I thought, gasping and sobbing as my power flowed around me, as the storm bands of the spell dissipated, as I shot out of the great maw and realized one absolute, inescapable fact.
I was still falling.
Shit!
I shifted—somehow—with no real destination in mind except down. Which my power interpreted as several feet above the ground and on an incline. One I promptly smashed into with my face.
And then rolled down, hitting every rock and stick along the way, before finally coming to rest inside a small copse of oaks.
For a moment, I just lay there, staring at the wildly thrashing treetops. Lightning flashed, rain poured, presumably thunder crashed, but I couldn’t hear it—my ears were seriously screwed up. Something to do with the awful pressure in that portal, which had left me looking at a scene out of a silent horror flick. All it needed was a guy in a cape.
Or a monster in a tree.
My ears popped after a moment, allowing me to hear the vulgar cussing going on somewhere nearby. Which broke off abruptly—I guessed because I’d just been spotted. “Well?” a furious voice squeaked. “Are you just going to leave me up here?”
I looked around and saw Rosier wedged in between two tree branches, glaring down at me. It looked like demon lords were sturdier than I’d thought. And then he started cussing again, fluidly, impressively, in a multitude of tongues, at Gertie, at the world, at me—
“Why . . . are you mad . . . at me?” I finally asked, when I could speak.
“You didn’t let her go!”
“What?” I stared up at him.
“The girl! I told you to let her go!”
“And then what? Gertie would have—”
“Transferred her attention to you!”
“Her attention . . . was already . . . on me,” I said, wondering what I was missing. “Did you hit your head?”
“Her attention was half on you and half on me. I needed her distracted—”
“For what?”
“For this!” And he held something out in his tiny fist.
Something that dropped at my side a second later, small and shiny and looking a lot like—
“A dart?” I picked it up.
“She wasn’t planning to kill you,” he told me, heatedly. “She was planning—”
“To drug me.” My fist closed over the small thing, and my head jerked up.
“I managed to lift it off her in the chaos,” he continued while I got shakily to my feet. “But I wasn’t close enough to use it and she had me by the back of the neck, like a misbehaving kitten! If you had listened—”
“I thought you were panicking.”
“I don’t panic.”
I looked back at him.
“I rarely panic. You need to learn some trust—”
“It wasn’t about the trust—it was about the crazy.”
“Sometimes you have to get a little crazy!”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said, locating a break in the treetops. And staring upward at a sky boiling with clouds, at a rainstorm pelting down, at a smothered moon hiding
the insanity until a burst of lightning flashed, just outside the range of my spell. And illuminated an upturned wagon suspended impossibly in the air above us.
With its rider still in residence, because, like me, she’d just performed a major spell.
And she was tired.
“Wait here,” I told Rosier.
“What? Why?”
“I have to get closer.”
“Closer? What do you mean, clos—” He looked up. And then back at me, his eyes going huge. “Are you insane?”
“You’re the one who told me to get crazy,” I reminded him, trying to gauge the distance.
“I take it back!”
“Just stay out of sight,” I said, a little harsher than necessary because the wagon was even higher than I’d thought. Gertie looked like a tiny doll, the horses like children’s toys, the floating contents of the cage hidden by curtains of rain and almost indistinct.
But shifting her to me—definitely my first choice—wasn’t going to work. Unlike shifting myself, that sort of thing wasn’t instantaneous. It had taken me several seconds to latch on to the hound; if it took me that long with Gertie, and she felt it—
I’d lose the element of surprise, and it was the only advantage I had.
I took a breath and shifted.
Spatial shifts are usually easy compared to time travel. Like walking up a few steps instead of thirty flights—or a couple hundred in the case of Wales. But they also aren’t usually done in almost pitch-darkness. Or aimed at a target that looked smaller than my palm. Or was wet and slippery and not entirely level.
Make that not level at all, I thought, rematerializing along with a burst of lightning on the rain-slick wagon top. The flash was all but blinding, and close enough to lift strands of my hair and make me jump. And to explain why Gertie didn’t immediately notice me.
Until I lost my footing and slid straight into her.
She fell, hitting down hard and sliding herself—into the hole she’d made in the roof to try to dart me. And it looked like I’d been right; she didn’t totally fit. But halfway was good enough, because she got stuck, which would have been perfect if the wagon hadn’t tipped and careened around from the shift in weight. And if I hadn’t been forced to grab an axle to hold on to. And if she hadn’t started slinging spells everywhere.
And if we hadn’t started to fall.
“Son of a bitch!” I yelled, feeling my time spell start to unravel.
Lightning flashed, this time close enough for a small branch to get stuck in the bubble of slow time. It spread weird, neon light around as we began to tumble head over heels—or wheels over cage. And the fact that we were moving at only a fraction of regular speed didn’t help, because that wouldn’t be true for long.
And then the axle I was clinging to burst into dust.
The spell Gertie had flung missed my head, but left me with nothing to hold on to, and we were about to go over again. So I threw myself at her, grabbing her around the neck, trying to keep her from cursing me out of existence. And because she was the only thing I could reach.
But she didn’t seem to like that, and a fist immediately started hitting the side of my head. “Get off me! Get off!”
But I couldn’t get off, frizzy purple hair in my mouth or not, budding concussion or not, cursing bitch or not. Because I still had to get the dart into her. And because we were Ferris-wheeling around again. And because Gertie’s butt wasn’t as big as I’d thought and was about to come out of the hole.
“Damn it!”
I grabbed her hair, pulled her head to the side, and slammed the dart into her neck less than gently—
And the next moment we were in free fall.
But not because my spell had completely unraveled, but because we’d fallen off the side that was in real time. And a few dozen stories go by really freaking fast in real time. I had a couple seconds to feel the wind, to smell the ozone, to see myself enveloped in glittering golden strands—
And then we were hitting down, Gertie cussing as the force of the drop sent my elbow into her stomach before wrenching us apart. I didn’t know where she went, but the bounce sent me flipping back into the air, like a kid on the world’s biggest trampoline. And left me staring around at a world gone mad, at a wildly skewing landscape, at streams of lighting and lashes of rain—
And at a hint of purple off to the left.
I didn’t even wait to land. I threw the last spell I had energy for, giving it everything I had, praying it connected. And, for once, the universe decided to throw me a bone. Because the next second I was coming down alone, tumbling into darkness more gently this time, the majority of the momentum having been used up by that first massive jump. But it was enough to send me through several smaller bounces, bounces of victory, I thought, grinning like an idiot in sheer relief.
Until I looked up.
And saw the huge wooden thing now speeding down at me.
“Shit!” I somehow shifted to Rosier, barely managing the tiny spatial move, because my power was flat-lined.
And found him surrounded by girls in white.
Chapter Twenty-one
For a second, I stared at them and they stared at me, all of us looking surprised and vaguely horrified. And then they shifted out, all at once, before I could say anything. Leaving leaping afterimages in front of my eyes, the result of lighting flashing off their bright white dresses a second before they fled.
I went to my knees on wet leaves, half-blind and breathing hard, and wondering if I’d actually managed to intimidate somebody.
Or if, more likely, they’d gone to rescue the boss. Who my power obligingly showed me floundering around in a bog, miles from here, cursing as she realized what I’d shoved into her neck. And that her power wasn’t going to get her out.
But her acolytes would.
We needed to get gone.
But my body didn’t seem to agree. My body had had it. I grabbed Rosier, who the girls had helpfully fished out of the tree, hoping against hope to eke out one more shift. Only to end up sliding down onto my ass instead. While the heavy wooden wagon bounced around on the other side of the tree line, like a piñata caught between two candy-hungry kids.
I watched it blankly for a minute.
That wasn’t something you saw every day.
But there were no witches this time, no rush to release the contents, no movement at all, except for the screaming, flailing horses. For some reason, the rescue party, or whatever they were, was hanging back, staying low, hiding in the shadows. Probably because of the next-level crap they’d just seen, I thought, grimacing.
And that was . . . that was bad, right? Not that I wanted them butchered by the damn fey, but . . . they were supposed to be, weren’t they? Like the slaver was supposed to be shot through the throat and left to choke on his own blood, only he wasn’t, either. Because the witches weren’t there. So, instead, he was scrambling out of the net; he was staring around wildly; he was looking straight at me.
Or no, I realized, as somebody jerked me up.
He was looking at the fey behind me.
The next few minutes were a blur. Just the vague impression of being dragged here and there, of being loaded onto something—maybe another wagon—of rain soaking me and wind beating me, and Rosier whispering things I couldn’t concentrate enough to understand. Maybe because I was already concentrating on something else.
Something I’d learned recently about people who were alive and weren’t supposed to be. Something about when my power didn’t seem to care about that. Something about the implications . . .
None of which I had time to focus on before we stopped abruptly and I tumbled out into a patch of mud.
I wasn’t the only one. At some point, the other women had been pulled out of the destroyed wagon and loaded up alongside me. And whatever new conveyance we were on ha
d been going pretty fast, and didn’t have bars, so there was nothing left to catch us anymore.
But there were plenty of armored fey surrounding us, and a forest of spears in our faces.
I lay there, blinking back to awareness, watching firelight gleam on a circle of broad, flat blades. They were so shiny I could see my too-wide eyes reflected in the nearest, along with a few scattered raindrops and the frightened faces of the women behind me. And the merchant climbing down off a wagon and coming around.
And starting to curse.
“Put those damn things away,” he told the ring of fey. “I’ve lost enough tonight!”
“You don’t give us orders, old man—”
“No, but your Lady does! And she likes the work I do. So take it up with her!”
He snatched Rosier off the dirt beside me and started striding toward the entrance to a palisade. Like the checkpoint earlier, it looked recently erected from stripped, sharpened logs, some of them massive. Like the two that a couple of wooden gates were swinging from, currently closed against the night.
And which were hedged by two equally massive bonfires, which had somehow survived the deluge, and which the merchant was heading for with obvious intent.
Oh, crap.
I scrambled to my feet, wobbly-legged and dizzy. And stumbled after the man, catching up and grabbing on to his right arm for support, because I was about to fall over. And because it was the one holding Rosier.
“No,” I said, breathlessly. “No, please. I told you; I need him.”
He frowned down at me. “Why are you using a translation spell? Where are you from?”
“Somewhere else. And I need him,” I repeated, because he hadn’t let go.
The frowning intensified. “Your new master is never going to let you keep this thing! Best throw it on the fire now and be done with it.”
