by Karen Chance
“Then contact him mentally!”
“We already did. But it’s hard to send complex stuff across that kind of distance. I mean, maybe not for senators, but for the rest of us—”
“Fred,” I said through gritted teeth. “Did you get through?”
“Yeah, well, sort of. I think the idea that you’re in trouble was understood okay, but some of the details might have gotten muddled.”
“Meaning?”
“That.” Fred nodded at the door. Where another mass of master vamps had just appeared behind the group of mages. Half of whom suddenly whirled to face them.
“The Circle isn’t the only one who has backup,” Marco told them gently.
The mages still didn’t reply. They didn’t have to. Because their boss had just appeared like a reflection in the windows leading to the balcony.
They were the same ones where the magical news feed had been projected last night, showing the destruction of Agnes’ court. The same ones where I’d seen a dozen tiny body bags being lined up on a rain-drenched street. The same ones Jonas had been facing when he forbade me to go back and try to save them.
My vision started to pulse at the edges.
“I wanted to give you time,” he told me now. “But we are out of it. The war has seen to that. And recent developments have clearly shown that you need guidance—”
“Guidance like you offered Agnes?” I asked hoarsely. It was below the belt—the two of them had been lovers, and her death had hit him hard. But right then, I didn’t care.
No way would he have tried this with her.
No way.
“Agnes was an experienced Pythia,” he told me crisply. “You are not—”
“I seem to be gaining it quickly.”
“Agnes had years of training; you do not—”
“You don’t get to decide when I’m ready for an office you have nothing to do with.”
“And Agnes would have been in our care in the first place, instead of in the clutches of—”
“Agnes would be ashamed of you!”
That last hadn’t come from me. Rhea pushed through the crowd, eyes wild, face flooding with a dark stain. And still carrying a little girl who couldn’t have been more than two.
“You left them to die. You left her!” Rhea thrust out the child in her arms. What the hell someone that young had been doing at court, I had no idea. But right at the moment, she was staring at Jonas out of big brown eyes, confused and afraid, because loud noises had just woken her up, and big people were shouting, and she wasn’t at her home, in her bed.
Because those of us who were supposed to protect her had failed.
“Look at her!” Rhea demanded. “Look at who you would have condemned! Look at who you would have left—”
“That’s enough,” Jonas said sharply.
But Rhea apparently didn’t think so. In the past twenty-four hours, she’d seen her home destroyed, had been almost killed herself, and had been trying to project some sense of normalcy for a probably panicked group of girls. All while surrounded by creatures most people viewed as monsters.
I suddenly thought I understood that chicken better.
But it didn’t look like it had been enough, and now Jonas was being told.
“Look at them all!” Rhea yelled. “You’re sworn to protect us, but you didn’t. You didn’t! You left us to die, and now you dare to come and say we must go with you? For what? The only one to care about us is here!”
“Yes, she cared,” Jonas said, low and vicious, his eyes glittering into mine. “She cared enough to violate the whole purpose of her office, to go back in time, to risk her life—and thereby to endanger all of ours!”
“It was fifteen minutes,” I told him, jolted out of some of my anger by the rising tide of his. Rhea’s little speech seemed to have shaken something loose, and he was looking . . . I didn’t know for sure how he was looking, but I didn’t like it.
“I didn’t change much of anything,” I told him, more quietly. “I got the girls out of the building before it exploded, that’s all. It still went up on schedule; everything else stayed the same. The time line couldn’t have been that—”
“I don’t care about the damned time line!”
“Then what are we talking about?” I asked, honestly confused.
“We are talking about you!”
He looked from me to Rhea to the girls spread out on the cots, some clutching pillows and, in a few cases, stuffed animals for comfort. And staring at Jonas with wide eyes. He met them unflinchingly.
“I would have saved you had I known ahead of time,” he told them. “Would have sent an entire battalion to your aid had I had any inkling. But once you were dead, I would have left you so. For I could not have saved you then without risking that which I valued more.”
It was an unbelievable speech. Even more so, several of the older girls were nodding, as if they agreed with him. What kind of brainwashing bullshit had Agnes been teaching them?
“My life is not worth more than theirs!” I snapped. “I am not—”
“You are Pythia!” he shouted, rounding on me with blue eyes blazing. “You are the only one we have left! And we are facing a possibly world-ending war! So, yes, I would have left them to their fate. I would leave ten thousand more lying dead on the ground before I would risk you. For if we lose you, we lose the war. We lose everything.”
He wasn’t pink anymore; he was white, almost as much as his hair. I’d never seen him like this. Never seen him remotely close.
But I finally understood what all this was about.
I finally understood that Jonas was afraid.
It seemed incredible. He’d been a daredevil in his youth, racing insane flying cars through the ley line system, the massive rivers of metaphysical power that flowed over and around our world and which the more lunatic mages used for transport. It was a game that left competitors dead even more often than NASCAR, but Jonas had seemed to revel in it. And then in old age, he’d engineered a dangerous coup that had ousted his much younger counterpart and returned him to preeminent power in the Circle. To say that he was not a man who rattled easily was the understatement of the century.
But he was sure looking like it now.
And that I didn’t understand.
Yes, we were facing a possible invasion. Yes, it was by creatures out of legend, creatures who should have stayed there, because they were far too much for humanity to handle. And yes, it was scary as hell, because our main defense, a wall of energy once erected around our world by one of the gods themselves, had recently been proven to be less than the perfect barrier we’d always thought it was.
Which was even more of a problem than it normally would have been, because the being battering at the gates right now was the worst possible scenario for a world already torn by war: the god who personified it.
I got that.
I got all of that.
What I didn’t get was what Jonas thought I could do about it.
“Do you expect me to fight Ares for you?” I asked, bewildered. It sounded incredible just saying it.
But Jonas apparently didn’t think so. “You defeated a god once before—”
“I helped defeat Apollo. And he was mostly dead already.”
He’d been the first one to breach the barrier, and had ended up the godly version of crispy fried for his trouble. He might still have been okay, if he’d taken time to heal, but of course he hadn’t. Godly pride had made him assume that he was still more than a match for us pathetic humans. And that plus some really amazing good luck on our part had left us alive and him . . . well, we all hoped he was dead.
Nobody had heard from him since, anyway.
But that was Apollo. Known for lyre strumming and nymph chasing, if the old legends were to be believed. This was Ares. I’d recently
fought his half-human kids and barely survived, and that was with help I wouldn’t have again. But the god of war himself?
“You are a demigod,” Jonas pointed out, causing several of the war mages to flick me quick glances, as if they didn’t believe it.
Of course, sometimes neither did I. And with my hair hanging limp and dripping around my face, my body wrapped in an old gray bathrobe, and my feet in fuzzy pink slippers, I didn’t look like someone whose mother had been a goddess. But then, I didn’t look like it all dressed up, either. I was a five-foot-four blonde with skinny legs, out-of-control curls, and freckles.
Imposing I was not.
Mom had been more so, and had been the one, in fact, to erect the wall that was still keeping out her kind, thousands of years later. But Mom was dead, and I was what we were stuck with. And I was not going to be enough.
“You have abilities even the gods do not possess,” Jonas argued, as if he was trying to convince himself.
I hoped he was succeeding, because he wasn’t doing a damned thing for me.
“Like what?”
“You can stop our time stream—”
“Which helps us how?” I asked, bewildered. “You know how long that lasts, and that’s against humans. I don’t even know if it would work on a god. But even if did, it would give you what? A few minutes? What kind of damage can you do in a few minutes?”
“More than you think.” It was grim.
“Not enough,” Rhea said hollowly, because she’d been the one to receive the vision of Ares’ return, not me. And even in memory, it was enough to blanch her skin, to flood her eyes. Because she hadn’t just seen Ares return.
She’d seen us fail.
More specifically, she’d seen the Circle fail, seen Ares mopping the floor with them, news that had apparently hit Jonas harder than I’d realized at the time. So, okay, if ever a man had reason to panic, he did. But I still didn’t see what he expected me to do.
It was one reason I’d been working so hard to get Pritkin back. I didn’t know how to fight gods, didn’t even know where to start. So rather than sitting around, wringing my hands over what I didn’t know how to do, I’d been concentrating on what I did. And not just for personal reasons.
Yes, I cared about him. Yes, I owed him my life many times over. But it was also a fact that he’d forgotten more magic than Jonas ever knew. He’d been hiding out under the name of John Pritkin for centuries, but it wasn’t the one he’d been born with, the one history knew him by, the one he’d desperately kept hidden because of the myth, the magic, the aura that still encircled the name of the greatest mage of them all.
Merlin.
That’s who I was after, that’s who I’d been desperately chasing through time, that’s who I’d gone to hell and back for—literally. But if Pritkin was to have any chance at a normal life after this was all said and done, I couldn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t tell Jonas that I was working on a way to deliver us from Ares, the only one likely to work: by bringing back the most dangerous mage of them all.
If anybody could come up with a way to defeat a god, it was Pritkin.
I didn’t just want him back; I needed him back.
And I didn’t have time for this.
“I’ve never refused to help you,” I reminded Jonas. “I’ve done everything you asked. I’ll help you in the future, too, however I can. But this . . .” I gestured at the mages. “This is not helping! It’s the opposite, in fact: it’s endangering the alliance between the Circle and the Senate—”
“We don’t need the Senate,” Jonas said, dismissing one of the most powerful supernatural groups on the planet with a wave of his hand. “We need you. That is what the prophecy foretold. If we are to successfully resist Ares, we need you and your mother—”
“My mother is dead.”
“But she helped you to defeat Ares’ children, did she not? Perhaps that was her part of the journey. The rest, you must walk, but not alone. The Circle will—”
“Be leaving now,” Marco said flatly. Because his eyes had never left the mages, and he must have noticed something I hadn’t. Some escalation in power that had put up a red flag to vampire senses.
“Yes, we will be,” Jonas said curtly. “With Cassie.”
I swallowed, trying to think. I had a little power saved up, thanks to some food and a couple hours’ sleep, but not enough. Not that I knew what I’d have done even at full strength. Freeze time so Marco and company could kill everyone more efficiently? Because we were supposed to be on the same side!
Something nobody else seemed to remember.
And then Rhea grabbed my hand.
And, suddenly, it felt like it had when Pritkin gave me energy. Okay, not exactly like, but there was a definite power boost. She met my eyes.
“You’re risking a lot for an old prophecy,” I told Jonas, taking the fussy child from her.
And feeling another, smaller hit of power flow through me.
“We’ve seen its worth,” he argued, because he didn’t want this to end in bloodshed, either.
“We’ve seen what could be coincidence,” I told him, pushing through the vampires toward the other girls, as if taking the fussy child back to her bed. “You said it yourself: myths have to be interpreted.”
“And how else would you interpret this one?” he demanded. “There were to be three gods, according to legend, and three champions to help you fight them. Apollo was the first, and as foretold, he was injured by contact with the ouroboros spell that hedges our world, before you finished him off.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” I argued, handing the girl to a plump initiate with chocolate skin and ringlets. And then sitting down beside them on a cot, in the midst of several others. “Anyone coming into our world would have to get by that spell.”
“It nonetheless followed the pattern that was foretold. As did your defeat of Ares’ sons. Your mother was to be your champion there, and I think disposing of four out of the five qualifies!”
“But the Spartoi weren’t Ares, and my mother is now gone,” I pointed out. “If Ares does come through, I won’t have her help.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re stronger than you know.”
“You think I can defeat the god of war, yet you send a squad of mages to kidnap me?” I looked over at them, and saw that several were now openly watching me, instead of the mass of master vampires. It would have been funny, under other circumstances. Them with their ton of weapons and me with my fuzzy slippers. Only I wasn’t feeling like laughing.
“I think you can defeat him with guidance,” Jonas said. “Which you are not getting here—”
“That’s not your call.”
“I am making it mine, until you are old enough—”
“I’m twenty-four.”
“And I am one hundred and seventy-nine!” he said angrily. “When you are my age—”
“I’m not likely to get to your age.” At this point, I’d settle for seeing my next birthday. “But even if I do, I won’t agree to put the Pythian power under the control of the Circle.”
“As opposed to leaving it in the hands of the vampires? They do nothing that is not self-serving!”
“And this isn’t?” I asked as more and more of the girls gathered around, as if for comfort. “Breaking with the vampires, just when we need them most, pressing your rights beyond anything tradition allows, destroying any chance of Pythian neutrality—”
“There is no neutrality in war!”
“There must be, Jonas. We need the others—all the others. I can’t defeat Ares on my own—neither can you. Rhea’s vision showed you that. If you try to do this alone, prophecy or not, you’ll fail. And then we all fail.”
“I do not intend to do this alone,” he told me. “That is rather the point.” I felt Rhea grab my hand again, felt the girls press close,
felt a surge of power hit me, everything they had, even as his voice said: “Take her.”
I didn’t wait to see the group of mages move, didn’t even wait for the words to finish leaving his lips. I threw out a hand, and with it went everything I had left, and everything my court could give me. I held nothing back—and I still didn’t think it had been enough.
But I couldn’t tell. Because a second later, I was on my knees, retching and half blind from a power loss I couldn’t afford. And hands were grabbing at me, and the room was spinning and Rhea was yelling something I couldn’t hear over the roaring in my ears and the frantic beating of my heart. But through swimming eyes I saw half a dozen master vampires sprawled in the floor in front of the door, having jumped in that one split second—
For men who were no longer there.
Chapter Eight
I woke in a puddle of drool, facedown on a soggy bit of squishiness that I finally identified as one of the sofa pillows. It had little jewels in the embroidery that a fumbling hand told me had left pockmarks all over my left cheek. And a crease in my face from some decorative cording that was definitely not rated for sleeping.
I groaned and tried to sit up, but it didn’t work. And I couldn’t see why, since my hair was in my eyes and my lids were half stuck together. And something was slapping me softly in the face.
Finally, I managed to pry my eyes open enough to realize that it was the sheers that were usually hanging demurely beneath the drapes framing the balcony. And which were now all over the place because the doors were open and the wind was blowing them around. I knew this because it was blowing across me, too.
And the sofa I had apparently passed out on.
And the kid who was asleep on my butt.
And something with hard bits that was wedged up my—
I fumbled around underneath me until I found a stuffed werewolf that had been getting way too personal. And then I pried my body off the sofa and shoved the pillow under the little girl’s face, soft side up. And stepped off the couch.
And froze.
Because my foot had just crunched glass.
