“With the Pythian power,” I said, leaning on Mircea’s emotions to keep from losing my shit. Master vampires took this sort of thing a lot more in stride than I did.
Jonathan looked up at me, and this time, the pale eyes were shining. He was proud of himself, I realized sickly. He wanted someone to know how clever he’d been, and since I’d already guessed it, why not crow a little?
“You killed most of her,” he told me. “But she was a necromancer. She liked ghosts.”
Once again, his eyes went to Billy, who shivered all over. “Okay. Skeeved out now.”
“Yes, she liked ghosts,” I said. “But that . . . isn’t one.”
In fact, I didn’t know what it was. I’d seen it in his mind, seen him stroking it and talking to it, as he was now. But I hadn’t gotten an explanation.
Not one that I could understand, anyway.
“It’s part of a ghost,” he said, looking down fondly. “She was going to face you, but she was afraid. Pretty little goddess is savage, sometimes.”
“So she did . . . what?” I asked through numb lips, hoping I was wrong.
“She told me about it, you see? Chimera, isn’t that what it’s called?” He looked up, and once again, the strange, colorless eyes met mine. There was nothing sane in them, but there was intelligence, and cunning.
“Shouldn’t be chimera—stupid name. It means something composed of disparate parts, like the Greek original. A monster with the body of a lion, the head of a goat, and a snake for a tail. You lot called your little spell that, when all it does is chop you in half. Stupid name,” he said again, running fingertips over Jo’s blind eyes.
“Not so stupid now.”
I felt an icy shiver run down my spine, and I wasn’t the only one. Billy was bobbing up and down a little way off, because he hadn’t bothered to materialize all the way. But what I could see of him looked horrified, with wide eyes and a hand over his mouth.
I felt numb; just numb. And surer than ever that Jonathan was mad. Because I knew what he’d done.
“She created a chimera copy, before going to fight me, didn’t she?” I asked. “So that, if she lost, her soul would snap back into her second body.”
But he shook his head. “No, no. That would have halved her power, and she wanted all of it to deal with you. No, she carved off a little piece of herself, just a tiny bit of soul, and took the rest with her. Instead of fifty-fifty, it was more like ninety-five to five. The soul she left in Faerie was so small, it couldn’t animate her body at all. She couldn’t even sit up.
“It was a kindness, really.”
“A kindness?”
He blinked. “When I took her back into this world. Faerie manifests bodies for souls, thus the spell hadn’t had to make an extra, you see? But once you leave, those bodies fall away, leaving only—”
“The soul itself.”
He nodded. “I welded it to mine, that little piece, and when she died, it survived. She’s a part of me now. She’ll always be a part of me—”
He’d started stroking the face again, but he suddenly stopped, and looked up. “I’ll make you a part of me, too,” he promised. “Won’t let them just kill you, no, no. Told them so. They said I could have you, once they were done. Well, part of you, anyway—"
He suddenly cut off, but not because he’d planned to.
But because Pritkin had all but put a fist through his face.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“We’re not going anywhere until you calm down,” Jonas said.
“I’ll calm down when he’s dead!” Pritkin snarled, his hair as wild as his eyes. Which were less worrying than the little filaments of what looked like lightning that were fritzing off his coat and attacking things in the small room where we’d ended up.
I didn’t think he was doing it on purpose, but it was wreaking havoc anyway. Already, a small lamp was a smoking nub, having gone up almost as soon as we came in. But there were also several black marks on the walls, a small fire on a table top, and a now-missing secretarial type, who had gotten an electric goose on the way out the door.
I was fine. Mentally, there was some white noise between my ears that was probably shock, but I was busy ignoring it. A lifetime of compartmentalization does have its advantages. It would wear off eventually and I’d probably go screaming down a hallway, but right now, I was fine.
That included the physical, although I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t think Pritkin could fully control his magic right now. But my pretty new coat might have had something to do with it. It was bristling all over, with the little pockets fluttering up and the belt snaking out to poke the air warningly whenever he stalked back this way.