He had gone slack jawed and horrified, staring first at me and then, slowly, like a guy in a horror flick, at Bathrobe Cassie. She was just standing there and she didn’t look terrified any longer. She gave Pritkin a vague, slightly loopy smile when he ran over and shook her.
But then he did something else, I wasn’t sure what, but I was suddenly back again, wrapped in soggy terrycloth instead of the warm embrace of the entire landscape. I felt cold and alone. I didn’t like it; I wanted to go back—
“Cassie!” I saw him mouth it, and then he slapped me across the face—and he slapped me hard.
My eyes finally focused on him, and for a second I was shocked and then I was pissed. And then I was worried, because I’d rarely seen him look that afraid. “What?”
He said something, but I couldn’t hear him. Until another war mage came over and cast a silence spell around us, I guessed because he was wounded and couldn’t help with the shield. I glanced at him, and then did a double take.
“Caleb!” I said, seeing an old friend. One with a bandage over both his eyes. “What happened to you?”
“Faerie.” It was terse. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Caleb was big, bald, black and blunt, especially the latter. Of course, most war mages were, but he took it to an art form. So I tried not to take offense. “Trying to help.”
“You let her come?” he demanded, looking at Pritkin. And although I couldn’t see his eyes, I somehow knew he was glaring.
“I tried to talk her out of it!”
“You should have tried harder!”
Pritkin ignored that in favor of shaking me some more. “What the hell were you thinking?”
I assume he was talking about my new ride. “I was thinking about getting us some extra troops—”
“You could have lost yourself in there! People sink into their elements, and they don’t come back out again! Do you understand?”
“No,” I told him. “All I understand is that we’re about to die if we don’t start fighting back. Are we going to stand here and argue, or do something?”
“I have been doing something!”
“The reinforcements are coming, then?”
“No, better—”
“What could be better?”
“I’d like to hear that, too,” Caleb said.
Pritkin glared at both of us, but I took the brunt of it because Caleb couldn’t see him. “Remember what Aeslinn said about the Old Ones?”
“No?” I said.
“What Jonathan told us! That they were going to rue the day that they joined our cause!”
“Oh, yeah.” I remembered him saying something like that.
“I informed HQ and they told the Old Ones’ representative and—” he shook his head. “Long story short, they’ve determined that they might be able to shift the ley line just a bit more.”
“A bit?”
“Maybe a dozen meters or so.”
“Which does what?” Caleb demanded. “We’re nowhere near there. A dozen meters won’t do shit—”
“It will if there’s a ton of our enemies standing in the middle of it!” Pritkin said furiously. “They’re going to shift it—and rip it open at the same time. All we have to do is get the other side over there—”
“How?”