He beamed at me. “Right in one! You know, I think we’re going to deal very well together. Any particular bit you’d like to claim, by the way? Getting a bit crowded on the stomach.”
He rolled up a shirt sleeve to show me a stringy bicep, as if asking for my opinion on where to get a new tattoo. Which I supposed he sort of was. I stared at his arm and thought about passing out.
I thought hard.
But Pritkin was currently unconscious and would likely be dead as soon as Jonathan got tired of beating on him. Mircea wasn’t laying waste, which meant God knew what, because the only way to stop a first level master was to stake him. And Rhea—I had no idea what Rhea was even doing here, except that she’d brought me a librarian.
Which probably meant that I needed to hear what she had to say.
But that was a little hard at the moment.
Of course, so was thinking with my arm feeling like it was on fire! A glance down told me why. The flesh was seared, red and bubbly, as if I’d stuck it over a stove and just left it there to—
I blinked. It was red and bubbly, where a minute ago it had been black and bloody. It didn’t feel any better, but it looked . . . like someone was healing me. I glanced back over my shoulder and found Mircea’s eyes boring straight into mine.
For a second, until one of the guards struck me in the head with the end of a wooden pike. I fell over, because I was not doing well, and Jonathan jumped up and started screaming at the fey. And I started trying to mentally communicate with Mircea, because pain or not, I needed to know what the hell was going on!
But I wasn’t going to find out anything that way. Mircea’s head wasn’t full of whispers anymore, it was a full-on hurricane of voices. What sounded like thousands of them yelling and fighting, bellowing and howling, and none sounded remotely sane—or anything like him. I didn’t even think they were the voices of his family members, although some of them may have been. It was like trying to pick out an individual shout in a stadium full of cheering fans.
Only these fans sounded furious, and half of them weren’t speaking any language I’d ever heard.
“What did you do to Mircea?” I asked numbly, when Jonathan hauled me back up.
He grinned. And then silently opened his shirt. The little green lump on his side, which had looked dead and shrunken before, was pulsating furiously, like he had affixed an extra heart to his chest.
I guessed I knew what to tell Jonas it did, if we ever got out of this.
“When he tried to get in your head,” I said. “Back in the interrogation room. You . . . got into his.”
“Not stupid at all,” he said approvingly.
“Is it . . . permanent?”
Jonathan shrugged. “Well, for him it will be.”
I felt another ice cube drop into the collection in my stomach.
“You know, if you hadn’t cut the connection between you two, I’d have had you as well,” he added conversationally.
He turned back to the main event, which hadn’t started yet. But it would, any time now, and . . . and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t!
I felt panic start to rise, a bitter taste on my tongue, a lump in my throat, threatening to choke me. I was naked other than for a robe, in excruciating pain, and was about to be murdered along with everyone I loved. I had no weapons that would work on this group and almost no information. Except that we were about to lose—the war, our lives, everything—if I didn’t come up with a plan, right freaking now.
And instead, what was I doing?
Thinking about throwing up.
So, I thought about something else instead. About my mother, who would be ashamed to see me sitting here, cowering before this creature. I might be a shitty demi-god, but I was her daughter. I must have gotten something from her!
And then about Rhea. I had no idea what she was doing here, but she was likely being kept alive as insurance that I wouldn’t throw myself off the cliff to avoid becoming Jonathan’s latest body mod. Because if I did, the Pythian power would go to her and she would be harvested in my place. And I couldn’t let that happen!
But most of all, I thought about Gertie. She’d been training me hard all month, and not just on the Pythian skills. She’d taught me a lot there, but she’d seemed to emphasize this sort of thing even more, putting me time and time again in situations where I had to think creatively under pressure, to find solutions that no one else could see, and then to implement them flawlessly. She’d been a good teacher; I had tried to be a good pupil.
And now it was graduation day.
I nudged Billy Joe.
“Don’t come out,” I told him. “Come inside.”