by Karen Chance
Either that or he had the world’s biggest pimple on his left cheek.
His hair had flopped into his eyes, and he peered at me through the strands, like it was hard to see outside the circle of light. “Oh, good,” he said, after a second. “I thought it was that officious mage.”
“Not quite.”
“Hmm.” He sounded disapproving. “I’ve been told I’m not allowed to ask questions. But if I was, I’d wonder where that vampire you were tearing around London with is.”
“Mircea,” I said, my lips a little numb.
Roger nodded. “He may be dead, but he’s still a better catch.”
“It’s not like that,” I said, glancing at what he was making. It didn’t look like much of anything, just a few scraps of metal. “Pritkin and I aren’t . . . I mean, we don’t—”
“Really?” He looked surprised. And then relieved. “Oh, good. It’s just, well, Pythias always end up with war mages, don’t they?”
“Do they?”
“Oh yes. Makes sense when you think about it. Who else do they meet? And if they do go on a date, who is there, glowering at the poor chap the whole time? Makes a man feel intimidated.”
“It didn’t intimidate you.”
“Yes, well, wasn’t the same sort of thing, was it?” He looked at me over his glasses. “By the time your mother and I officially met, we’d known each other for over a decade.”
“After I showed up?” I asked, because no way hadn’t they connected the dots by now.
“I suppose you could say you introduced us,” he said dryly. “Although we’d have likely met in any case. She used to hunt out there.”
“In the Badlands?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“Same reason as the rest of them. She was hungry.”
The little creation he was working on started smoking, and he let out an abortive curse and slapped a shield spell over it. Just before something smattered against the inside and oozed its way down the sides, pinkish gray and viscous. Roger sighed and grabbed a towel.
“Why not go back to hunting demons?” I asked as he mopped up. “That’s how she got powerful before, right?”
“That’s how she became more powerful,” he corrected. “Enough to build that barrier of hers. But she was already more so than her prey when she started, or they would have turned the tables fast enough!”
“Like the gods did in that battle, after the wall went up?” I said, remembering something I’d been told.
He shook his head. “While it was going up. Her fellow gods realized what was happening at the last moment, and almost overwhelmed her. She triumphed, but was brought so low in the process that, afterward, any demon powerful enough to be useful was also powerful enough to be dangerous.”
“So she hunted ghosts instead?”
He shrugged and threw the smoking rag into a shielded trash can. “Life energy is life energy, wherever it comes from: demons, ghosts, or the Pythian power itself—which was part of Apollo’s life force once, if you recall. It’s what drew her to the court, but as an acolyte she had very limited access. Hunting augmented that slightly, and in the process we kept . . . meeting up.”
“Meeting up?”
“When she was dragging me back to my cell,” he admitted, and I grinned.
“How many times did that happen?”
“More than I care to admit.” He rooted around in a basket for what turned out to be burn ointment, for a few red patches on his hand. “But we finally got around to talking, and discovered that we had . . . mutual interests.”
“Like what?”
“A lot of things,” he said, not looking at me. “But in time, she agreed to help me escape from that damn court, and . . . well, we kept in touch.”
“While you were bilking the Black Circle out of their power?”
Last time I was here, Roger had told me how he’d joined up with the dark mages after Mom sprang him from jail, supposedly to construct them a ghost army. The Black Circle hierarchy had been receptive to the idea, which had promised invisible spies on the Silver Circle, and possibly even foot soldiers in the coming war, if Dad’s weird ghost golems worked out. In reality, he’d never given them a damn thing, instead using the opportunity to gain access to their magic, which he’d plundered mercilessly. I still didn’t know why.
“Trying,” he agreed. “And running. And hiding . . . It was an eventful decade.”
“I know the feeling.”
“But it’s different for you, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“Dating.” He blinked at me, eyes looking as large as an owl’s behind the glasses. “Vampires don’t intimidate easily, especially not that one. And they must find you fascinating.”
“Why must they?”
“Your position for one. They love power better than any creatures I ever met. Even demons . . . well, all right, maybe not more than demons. But on average, you know. And then there’s your necromancy—”
“I’m not much of a necromancer,” I said, trying to steer the conversation to the reason I’d come.
“Of course you are,” Roger said. “I told you, necromancers don’t just deal with dead bodies. We’re like any group—we specialize. And my specialty was always ghosts. You get that from me.”
“I don’t have to be a necromancer to talk to ghosts,” I pointed out. “Clairvoyants do that all the time.”
“But they don’t carry one around with them, do they? They don’t donate energy to make said ghost more mobile. They don’t essentially make a servant out of him, have him run their errands and spy on their enemies and do a little mental snooping, if they think it’s warranted.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, because this was kind of relevant right now. “I haven’t spent a lot of time around true clairvoyants—”
“Well, if you had, you might have noticed that they weren’t being followed around by a wad of ghosts.”
I smiled suddenly, because he sounded so serious. And with those glasses . . . “Is that the proper term?”
“What?”
“A murder of crows, a gaggle of geese, a wad of ghosts . . .”
He put down his instruments in order to look at me disapprovingly. “You can joke all you like, but it’s true. Clairvoyants talk to ghosts. What you do goes far beyond that. But, of course, that couldn’t possibly be necromancy, which only deals with rotten flesh and oozing bodies and . . . well, whatever else the Circle can dream up to keep the public so scared of us that they lock us away.”
“You’re locked away because so many of you go bad,” Jonas said, from the doorway.
Roger sighed. “You again. I thought you’d gone out to play in the rain.”
Jonas opened his mouth, but I got there first. “You have to admit, a lot of necromancers do end up working for the dark.”
“Well, of course they do.” Roger looked surprised. “What else is open to them?”
“You found work with Tony—”
“Yes, and it’s been such fun.”
“And there are plenty of freelance necromancers—”
“Patching up vampire boo-boos, what more could a man ask for?”
“—and you have magic. You could—”
“You have magic. You wouldn’t be able to do much in our world without it. But where does it go, hmm?”
“Go?”
“What is it used for?” he asked. “Magic isn’t just this lump of power, is it? A reserve to be employed any way you wish. That would be like saying that any human could play the piano beautifully just because he has fingers!”
“Well, of course people have different talents—”
“Yes, and what they can do is largely limited by those gifts. Look at me. When I was a boy, I wanted to be a war mage—”
Jonas mad
e a strangled sound and Roger shot him a glance. “Oh yes, laugh all you like, but the fact remains that I had the power to do it. I was strong enough.” He turned his attention back to me. “They make you do these tests, you know, when you come in, to measure your magic. To see if you’ve got what it takes. If you don’t generate enough, there’s no need to go any further, because you won’t be able to cast the kind of spells you’d have to learn anyway.”
I nodded.
“Well, I passed. I passed all of them,” Roger told me proudly. “There were three of us, from my old neighborhood, and we all tried out at the same time. We’d played war mages growing up, and the idea that it could become a reality . . . it seemed like a dream. But only one of us made it, and it wasn’t me.”
“But you just said—”
“That I was strong enough. My body generates enough magic. But the path my magic chose to take was one of the unauthorized ones. In other words, I had the potential to be a great necromancer, but not much of anything else. And there’s no academy of necromancy, is there? I had all this power, but nowhere to use it.”
“So you became a dark mage,” Jonas said, crossing his arms.
Roger glanced at him. “No, although that’s how the dark gets plenty of its followers, let me tell you. The Circle practically slaps a bow on their heads as they shove them out the door!”
Jonas started to say something, but I cut him off. “So what did you do?”
Roger waved a hand at his collection. “What you see. I became the magical version of a garbage man, someone to defuse old charms before they blow up in someone’s face. The same sort of job a scrim gets,” he added, talking about magical humans who produce very little magic. They were considered handicapped, although some of the ones I’d met seemed to be doing okay.
“It’s an honorable profession,” Jonas said stiffly.
“Says the man who never had to do it,” Roger returned acidly. “It pays well, yes, because of the danger, so most scrims don’t care. But I did—yet had no chance of ever moving on to anything better. Do you have any idea how that rankles? How disgusted it makes you with the whole system, which seems designed specifically to ruin your life?”
I thought of Johanna, and wondered if that was how she’d felt. Because, according to Lizzie, the Pythian Court had had its very own necromancer, long before I showed up. And one who specialized in ghosts, at that.
I didn’t know why it had surprised me. I knew there were other necromancers around, even those with the much less common specialty of ghost-whispering—my own father was proof of that. Yet it had, just as it had surprised Lizzie, who had slowly put the pieces together.
Along with a plan to profit from them.
At first she’d intended to rat out Johanna, hoping to get her spot as acolyte. But that was before Jo offered to show her the Badlands, and how, if you stayed close enough to the time barrier, you could spy on people without actually being at the party yourself. It was how Lizzie had waylaid me, the second I returned from an earlier trip to Wales. I’d wondered how she’d stepped out of nowhere at just the right moment; I hadn’t realized, it was more like nowhen.
Thanks to Lizzie, I’d figured out a few other things, too. Like how an acolyte could travel fifteen hundred years into the past without needing the Tears of Apollo. Because, when you step out of time, it loses its hold on you, doesn’t it?
Like it loses the ability to determine when you’ll step back in.
Lizzie hadn’t told me that; Lizzie didn’t know. But I knew what I’d seen, on that brief trip with Billy Joe. How, when we got close to the time barrier, the location had stayed the same, but centuries had passed in seconds. And I was betting that a ghost whisperer with a good mind and a tenuous grip on the Pythian power might also figure out another way to travel through time.
And to bring back a god, when acolytes with more traditional magic had failed.
“So you decided to join the Guild,” Jonas was saying. “To wipe out history, erase countless lives, and remake it in your favor. But no, that isn’t dark!”
“It also isn’t true, and I wasn’t talking to you!”
“You weren’t a member of the Guild?” I asked.
Roger looked uncomfortable. “It’s . . . not in the way you think. Something happened and . . . afterward, there wasn’t much choice anymore.”
“There are always choices,” Jonas said. “You made the wrong ones. Don’t try to excuse them now.”
“I wouldn’t waste my time trying to excuse anything to you!”
“J— Pritkin, can you give us a minute?” I asked. Because I wasn’t going to get anywhere this way.
I expected an argument, but didn’t get one. “Come outside when you’re through,” was all he said, and he slammed out.
“Typical of the breed,” Roger said, looking after him. “Well, except for the demon part.”
“He’s not so typical, once you get to know him.”
“I don’t want to get to know him,” Roger said, and then he looked down, at the hand I’d put on his sleeve. “But then, I don’t suppose I will . . . will I?”
I met his eyes, and he looked . . . well, he looked like a man who was truly seeing his child for the first time. And the last. “It was the price,” I said. “She wouldn’t help me unless I promised not to come back.”
He shook his head. “She would have, you know. That is, I’m almost sure. She was quite . . . It hurt her, that we didn’t get more time with you in London. She said, of all the things life had stolen from her, that was the worst. I didn’t understand what she meant, not until . . .”
He looked up, at the second story, where baby me was sleeping. “I suppose that’s why I’m not supposed to ask the obvious. Why you’re here. Why you couldn’t just ask us whatever you wanted in your own time.”
I swallowed. Because yeah. It was kind of obvious, wasn’t it?
“It’s all right,” he said softly, his hand tightening on mine. “Considering what we’re up against . . . well. We knew how things might have to go.”
“But it doesn’t have to,” I said tentatively. “I could help. . . .”
A blond eyebrow went north. “And did you ask her about that?”
“No.”
He smirked. “What would this be, then? Mother is sure to refuse, so you ask Dad?”
“This isn’t funny. You don’t know what’s coming—”
“And I don’t want to.”
“Why?” I demanded. “You were involved in a group whose whole purpose was to change time!”
“Yes. And I’ve learned a few things since then.”
“Such as?”
He leaned back against the desk, the wavering light sending ripples over the surface of his glasses. He must have seen that it was bothering me, because he took them off and wearily rubbed his eyes. They were the same color as mine, I realized. Mother had blue, too, but hers were a rich almost-violet. But his were the same plain shade as mine.
Human blue.
“It seems like it should be the answer to all our dreams, doesn’t it?” he asked, smiling. “If you control time, you control everything. When I was your age, I believed that with absolute certainty. I could do it; I could change the world.” He looked heavenward, or maybe just upstairs. “But I think it ended up more the other way around.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. I was struggling with whether or not to tell him what was coming. It was the last thing I was supposed to do, but how else could I make him understand? And we needed their help.
“Roger—”
“No.”
“You won’t even listen to what I have to say?” I demanded, confusion, fear, and anger mixing into a familiar acid burn in my stomach. “I could help—”
“Cassie—”
“I could!
“No. Not even the Pythia has pow
er over death.”
It was quiet, but it stopped me cold. “What?”
“Your mother is dying,” he told me gently. “Whether by the Spartoi’s hand or not, nothing can stop that now.”
“But . . . she’s immortal—”
“Which does not guard against illness or injury.”
“She’s been hurt?”
“She’s been starved. For more than three thousand years. And as with humans who go without sustenance long enough, it takes a toll.”
“But . . . I have the Pythian power. If it’s energy she needs—”
“It’s gone beyond that. She discovered that when she went to court. She could still manipulate the power, still use it, but it didn’t repair the damage. I am afraid there is nothing on earth that can.”
“But there has to be a way—”
He shook his head. “Do you think she didn’t look?”
“There has to be!”
“Listen to me.” He dropped his tools so he could take me by the shoulders. “You have your mother’s gifts, as well as mine. There’s no knowing what you’ll someday be able to do—what you can do now, if you only knew. No Pythia has ever held that diversity of talents—”
“Then let me use them to help you!”
“You would try, but you would fail. No,” he said, shushing me. “Not for lack of ability. But for lack of understanding.”
“Understanding what?”
The blond head tilted. “That, sometimes, the only way to win is to lose.”
Chapter Forty-five
I found Jonas around the side of the house, standing by what looked like a Dumpster. Well, sort of. A few random sparks flew up as I approached, and made pinging noises against the lid, which was half up and reflecting a bunch of moving colors beneath.
“Stay back,” Jonas said grimly.
I started to ask why, but then another spark flew out and landed on a paver. Which shimmied and shook—and disappeared. Or so I thought, until I ran into it a second later.