by Karen Chance
“There was no one else there.”
I rolled my eyes. Maybe I’d hit him anyway. It was starting to look like the only viable option.
“There was you. I knew I would be okay because I was with you. I knew you wouldn’t—”
“Then you’re a fool,” he rasped. “For one moment, I didn’t know where I was, who you were—I didn’t know anything, but how good pulling on all that power felt. And a moment is all it takes!”
“But you didn’t do it,” I repeated, because he didn’t seem to get that. Which was odd, because for me, it was kind of the main point here.
“But I could have! I felt it, the hunger, the burning, the need.” His fists clenched. “I didn’t want to stop—”
“But you did. I remember when you pulled back. You’d have stopped it right then, as soon as you figured out what was happening, if your father hadn’t laid that damn spell.”
“You don’t know—”
“And even then, it’s not like you did all that much,” I said, talking over him, because it was the only way to get a word in edgeways with Pritkin sometimes.
He had filched the bottle back to take a drink, but at that he lowered it and looked at me, his eyes very green next to the amber liquor. “What?”
“I just meant, it wasn’t all that and a bag of chips. You know?”
He blinked at me.
“No offense,” I added, because he was looking kind of poleaxed. Like maybe he hadn’t had a whole lot of complaints before. Which was, frankly, pretty damn understandable. But I feigned indifference. “I mean, it couldn’t have been that bad if—”
“Bad?”
“Well, not bad bad.”
He just looked at me.
“I mean, I came and everything, so that has to count for some—”
I cut off because I was suddenly enveloped in a strong pair of arms, and my head was crushed to a hard chest. A chest that appeared to be vibrating. It took me a few moments to get it, and even then I wasn’t sure, because Pritkin’s face was buried in my hair. But I kind of thought—as impossible as it seemed—that he might be . . . laughing?
Chapter Twenty-nine
“I’m glad you two are having such a swell time,” Caleb said, slamming back in a minute later.
I barely heard him. I was too busy watching Pritkin, who had slumped over with his head on the sofa arm, shoulders shaking helplessly, and what looked suspiciously like tears leaking out from under his closed eyes. “Not that bad,” he muttered, and then he was off again.
Caleb looked at him like he thought the guy might have totally gone around the bend. I wasn’t sure he wasn’t right, because Pritkin rarely smiled, and he never laughed. But he was doing it now, and for a moment, I just absorbed the image. Of all the strange things that had happened on this very strange day, I thought that might just take the prize.
And then Caleb was jerking me out the door.
“Are you lucid?” he demanded.
“Pretty much.”
“Good. Then maybe you can tell me—” He stopped, because a door closed somewhere down the corridor. Caleb’s head whipped around like a guy’s in a spy movie, and then he hauled me across the hall and into another office.
This one had boxes lining the walls and stacks of files teetering dangerously high on the only desk. There was also a trench coat on a hook on the back of the door and he grabbed it, shoving it at me. “Do I want to know what happened to my T-shirt?”
“It was wet.”
“And why was it—No, wait. Don’t answer that.”
“Because I wore it in the shower!” I said, getting into the coat, which was about five sizes too big. “We just talked, Caleb!”
“Then talk some more. Like about what we’re supposed to do.”
“About what?”
“About the fact that John may have lost his ever-loving mind, but he’s physically doing pretty damn good for a guy who was almost dead an hour ago! And people saw, okay? And by now they’ve talked—”
“Talked to who?”
“How the hell do I know? We had maybe a couple hundred people on the ground, with most of ’em still there.”
“Why so many? Can’t you just go with ‘gas leak’ or something?” It was Dante’s default excuse for the not-sooccasional weirdness that went on.
“For the restaurant, maybe. It may even be partly true in that case. But that’s still leaves us with two wrecked buildings, a trashed parking garage and four thousand pounds of dragon flesh bleeding out in the middle of a—”
“Okay, I get it. We made a mess.”
“A mess? Do you have any idea how many memories, how many video monitors, how many—”
“I said, I get it.”
“I don’t think you do! But right now, I’m not even worried about all of that. Do you know what has me freaking the hell out? Would you care to take a wild fucking guess?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Let me give you some help,” he said savagely, beginning to pace around the tiny space between the desk and the door. “I keep going over and over it, trying to find another explanation. Telling myself I must be crazy. Telling myself I must be wrong. But two plus two equals four. And incubus plus human equals—”
“Stop right there.”
“Like hell I’ll stop!” He whipped around to face me, surprisingly fast for such a big guy. “Do you have any idea what’s going to happen when everyone else does the fucking math—”
“They’re not going to do it.”
“Oh, really? Let’s go through it, shall we? John gets hit with a crap load of dragon blood, enough to take out a fucking platoon. The usual spells for stopping shit like that aren’t worth a damn, and every single person in that car knows what’s what. I do, too, but I’ve known him a long time, so I’m gonna see to it that he gets back here, even if it’s only to have the docs hang a damn toe tag on him!”
“Caleb—”
“I figured that’s what you were doing, too, and when you ordered those men out, I guessed you just wanted to give him some privacy in his last moments. Thought that ‘if you want him to live’ shit was just to get ’em moving or to give yourself some hope or something. But lo and behold. What happens?”
“Caleb—”
“You start putting the moves on what is basically a corpse, and then talking when there’s nobody there, and then some weird-ass shit starts going down with sparkly light and heat and John comes back to life and jumps your goddamn bones—”
“Technically, he didn’t—”
“And the next thing I know, he’s doing just fine. He’s fucking dandy. And you’re the one who looks like a corpse and almost are one—”
“I was not.”
“And he’s all energized with creepy, glowing eyes and enough power radiating off him to take on an army, and there’s only one way he got it, okay?”
“He could be possessed by an incubus,” I argued. “He doesn’t actually have to be—”
Caleb looked disgusted. “Sell it somewhere else. Everyone knows John is half demon—it’s not the kind of thing you can hide from the sort of work-up the Corps does on its recruits. But we didn’t know what kind. He told us Ahhazu—”
“Imagine that.”
“—but they’re minor-level functionaries. They can’t do that kind of shit. And a demon can’t possess another demon—or a half, for that matter. So two plus two, okay? His other half ain’t Ahhazu, it’s incubus. And there’s only one half human, half incubus ever been recorded—”
“Maybe Pritkin’s birth wasn’t recorded.”
“Bullshit. You know damn well who we got—”
“Don’t say it.”
“—next door, and John Pritkin ain’t his—”
“I’m warning you.”
“—name. It’s motherfucking Mer—”
“Say it and spend the rest of your life in the Jurassic,” I hissed.
We just stood there and breathed at each other.
; “You gonna tell me I’m wrong?” Caleb finally said.
“I’m not going to tell you anything. Which is exactly what you’re going to tell everyone else.”
“Okay.” He ran a hand over his buzz cut, which was too short for him to tear out. Which was probably just as well, judging from his expression. “Just for the hell of it, let’s say I don’t want to rat him out. Let’s say I’ve worked with him long enough that maybe I don’t want to see what’ll happen after everyone finds out he had another name once. Let’s say I’m on your side. What the fuck do you expect me to do? I already told you, too many people saw. And there’s gonna have to be a report, and—”
“They didn’t see what happened in the car. They only know—”
“That he’s alive when he shouldn’t be. And that’s more than enough to pique some goddamned curiosity!”
“All right!” I said. “Give me a minute.”
“I hope you don’t need much more than that,” he said grimly. “We got lucky when we came in, with almost everybody on shift called out to that disaster you left. But they’re going to be back soon, plus the first day crew is going to be coming on and—”
“How long?”
He glanced at his watch. “Less than an hour before the day crew shows up. And probably nowhere near that long before the first groups start coming back from Disaster City. They’re gonna need to make out reports before they go off the clock, and that takes—”
“So how long do we have?”
Black eyes met mine. “Minutes.”
“Then we had best make good use of them,” Pritkin said, opening the door behind us. “And you forgot a silence spell.”
Caleb cursed. “I’m losing it.”
“With cause.”
“Damn straight with cause!” Caleb gazed at his friend, his eyes scanning the familiar features, as if he expected him to have suddenly sprouted horns.
“What is it?” Pritkin asked stiffly.
Caleb didn’t answer for a moment; then he shrugged. “Nothing. Just never met a legend before.”
“A legend is merely a man history decided to bugger,” Pritkin said harshly. “I’m the same person I always was.”
“Yeah, maybe. It’s gonna take some getting used to.”
“Then get used to it.”
“Don’t take that tone with me when I’m risking my ass—”
“Then don’t look at me as if I’m a laboratory specimen on a slide!”
“Well, forgive the hell out of me for being a little fucking traumatized—”
“Will you two shut up?” I yelled.
They both turned to look at me. I hadn’t actually intended to shout, but it seemed to have worked. And Pritkin was right; we needed to figure something out before Jonas showed up with his fussy little ways and his too-sharp blue eyes and his seemingly innocent questions, and we were screwed.
“We need to deal with this,” I told them.
“I think that’s been established,” Caleb said nastily. “But unless you know—”
“What I know is that people like simple explanations for things. Especially weird things—”
“According to who?”
To every vampire I ever met, I didn’t say, because it wouldn’t have helped. “It’s a fact of human nature,” I said instead. “People don’t like complicated answers. They like simple, easy-to-imagine ones. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if you give them two solutions—a really complex truth or a really simple lie—they’ll take the lie. It’s just easier.”
“Okay, so what’s our simple lie?”
“That I did it.” I glanced at Pritkin. “We’ll say I bubbled you. Like with the apple.”
“But you can’t do that yet.”
“So? They don’t know that.”
“I am fairly certain that Jonas does,” Pritkin said drily. “We need to come up with something else.”
“We don’t have anything else! And we don’t—”
“What are you talking about?” That was Caleb.
“A trick,” I said, glancing at him. “Or, really, it’s not a trick; it’s something Agnes could do with her power—speeding up time in a small area. I’ve been practicing—”
“And you can do that?” he interrupted.
“In theory.”
He cursed.
“Look,” I said impatiently. “The point isn’t whether or not I can do it—”
“Then what is the point?”
“That I’m supposed to be able to do it! That a real . . . that a well-trained Pythia could do it. And it will be a lot easier for people to imagine that than a legend coming back to life and hanging out in their damn cafeteria!”
“If you could do it,” Caleb said. “Maybe so. But you can’t, and the old man knows you can’t. So how is that—”
“He knows I usually can’t, but that’s not the same thing. I can do it, just not on demand. But occasionally I luck out and my power works for a change. And that’s almost always in a crisis or when I’m pissed off or—”
“Which makes little sense,” Pritkin said, interrupting me.
I looked at him. “What?”
“You said it yourself: you can use the power. You have proven that on a number of occasions—you prove it every time you shift. And the power is the power; it doesn’t change. Merely your perception of it does.”
“Meaning what?”
“That if you can use it under duress, you should be able to use it all the time. You should be able to use it at will.”
“But I can’t. I told you before: once in a while I get lucky, but most of the time—”
“Then perhaps you have been trying too hard. Did you not tell me that Lady Phemonoe said the power would teach you, that it would show you what it can do?”
“Yes, and I keep waiting—”
“And it has been showing you things, has it not? Or did Niall somehow teleport himself to that desert?”
“Niall?” Caleb asked.
“Jonas shouldn’t have told you about that!” I said, flushing.
“He didn’t do it to embarrass you,” Pritkin said. “But as an example of your progress.”
“Niall Edwards?” Caleb persisted.
“I’m not making progress!” I said furiously. “I haven’t made any in weeks!”
“Not since the last crisis.”
“What does that have to do with—”
“Niall I-fell-asleep-at-the-beach-and-that’s-why-I’mlobster-red Edwards?” Caleb asked.
Pritkin ignored him. “In a crisis, you forget to tell yourself that you can’t do something. You forget your anxieties and your fears, your nervousness and your self-doubt, and you reach for your power. And it responds. It has been doing so since the first. I believe you have always been able to do what you need to do. You simply have to learn to get out of your own way, so to speak.”
“If it was that easy, do you really think Initiates would need years of training?”
“There’s more to being Pythia than manipulating the power, Cassie. You’ve primarily been dealing with that end because you’ve had no choice. From the beginning of your reign, we have been at war. I doubt Lady Phemonoe fought as many battles in her entire time in office as you have already done. But that is not normally the case, and a Pythia in peacetime has a number of other functions—”
I didn’t say anything, but Pritkin cut off anyway. I guess my face must have spoken for me. “You can do this,” he said simply.
I just stared at him. I wished that were true. I really, really did. But the fact was, I wasn’t Lady Phemonoe, beloved Pythia. I wasn’t even Elizabeth Palmer, heir extraordinaire. I was just Cassie, ex-secretary, lousy tarot reader and allaround screwup.
And coronation or not, I had a terrible, sneaking suspicion that I always would be.
“This is all very interesting,” Caleb said. “But can we get back to the—” He broke off when a door slammed somewhere down the hall. Booted footsteps started coming our way, a lot of them,
echoing loud on the cheap laminate tile. “They’re back,” he said, pretty unnecessarily.
Pritkin looked at me. “What are we going with?”
I spread my hands. “What I said. It’s all we’ve got.”
“Then we got nothing,” Caleb said. “Speeding up healing might work on a cut or bruise or broken bone. But something like this? If you sped up time, it might speed up his healing, but it would also speed up the action of the corrosive. He’d just die faster!”
“But not if she slowed it down,” Pritkin said thoughtfully. “You can say—”
“I can say?”
“Well, I can’t be seen here in perfect health,” he pointed out impatiently. “Not for a few days, until I could reasonably have been expected to heal. And Cassie is hardly up to an interrogation at the—”
“So you guys sneak out the back, and what? I stay here and lie my ass off?”
“Yes. Is there a problem with that?”
“Is there—” Caleb broke off, face flushing. “Oh, hell, no. Why would I possibly—”
“Good. Then all you need to say is that Cassie slowed down time around the car, except for you and her.”
“Which would have made you die slower and nothing more!”
“Not if you used the opportunity to clean out the wound.”
“With what? That stuff eats through everything it touches!”
“But some things take longer to dissolve than others,” Pritkin said, looking pointedly at Caleb’s shabby old leather coat.
Caleb clutched a lapel possessively. “No.”
“Have you a better idea?”
“Yeah! I’ll say we used your damn coat!”
“You can’t. Too many people saw the shape it was in. There wasn’t enough left to work with by the time—”
“Well, we’re not using mine!” Caleb said angrily.
“I’ll buy you another one—”
“I don’t want another one! I’ve had this coat for twelve damn years—”
“Then perhaps it’s time for an upgrade,” I pointed out, grabbing a sleeve.
“Like hell! I just got it spelled the way I like—”
“I’ll help you spell a new one,” Pritkin told him, tugging at the back.
“Get off me!”