“Of course.” This was all fairly interesting, not to mention scary, but I still didn’t get what this had to do with—
And then I did, and felt the world tilt around me.
Chapter Thirty-five
My whiskey glass hit the floor with a thud, but the thick, leaded crystal didn’t shatter. Unlike me, because it felt like my whole world had just come apart. I stumbled back, hit a table, and would have hit the floor, but Mircea caught me.
He was saying something, right in my ear, but I couldn’t process it. Not with what sounded like a hurricane roaring in my head. What have you done? I thought in horror. Mircea, what have you done?
“Cassie! Cassie!” He was yelling but I still couldn’t hear him, could barely even see him. I was too busy seeing something else: the malevolent eyes of Agnes’ old acolytes. Because Jo hadn’t been the only one to join the other side. They’d all fallen, one by one, as the gods used fear and intimidation, and the promise of power and immortality, to lure them away, while their Pythia lay dying, too weak to oppose them.
They were dead now, except for a little idiot who lay in the Circle’s custody, drugged half out of her mind. And Jo herself, whose necromancer abilities had allowed her spirit to evade the fate of her body. The last time I saw her, she’d been animating corpses with her remaining magic, to stave off the inevitable.
I didn’t know if she still was. My power had been silent on the subject, not dragging me away to some other time to finish her off. Because that’s what a Pythia had to do to rogue acolytes. That’s what I’d had to do to the others, the ones who hadn’t ended up savaging each other. That’s what I had to do to anyone threatening the timeline, anyone at all.
Didn’t Mircea understand that?
And then I was screaming at him, grabbing hold of his shirt and shaking and yelling. “What did you do? What did you do?”
“Nothing! Cassie, listen to me! I’ve done nothing; I’m not going to do anything!”
I stared at him, my hair in my face, because that had finally gotten through. “You didn’t cast it? You didn’t steal my power to go back?”
I looked around, half expecting to see Elena, Mircea’s dead wife, come walking through a door.
But she wouldn’t; she couldn’t. If he really had used Lover’s Knot to take my power, to treat me like those vampires had those witches, I would have received a warning. The Pythian power couldn’t stop itself from being used by those with access, but it always knew when it was happening. And it had never minded throwing me through history to deal with an heir gone wrong or a dangerous acolyte.
How much more would it have freaked out at a master vampire on a joyride?
I collapsed against Mircea’s chest, my hands spreading over his warmth, feeling that he was solid, that he was okay. And then my nails were digging into his flesh, even through the material, bright moons of blood welling up, shock in his eyes. Because he didn’t get it, even now, he didn’t.
“I have to kill those who misuse the Pythian power, Mircea. I have to kill all of them, do you understand?”
“Cassie—”
“No. You’ve been talking for half the night, now you listen. I threw a young woman through a third story window, saw the fear and panic in her eyes as she fell onto cobblestones that left her looking like a broken doll. I dueled another through this building—the night of the attack, that’s what I was doing. We fought through time, darting around frozen combatants, all while I was sure I was going to die. But she did instead, when I shifted her into the midst of another person’s spell.”
“Cassie, please—”
“No, you listen! You don’t know me. You know who I was, not who I am! Not who I’ve had to be. I pushed Jo—Jo Zirimis, the best of Agnes’ acolytes, although nobody knew it—into a puddle of magical ice, flash freezing her body, if not her soul. I then pursued that soul through half a dozen bodies, both living and dead, fighting her every inch of the way, countering her tricks, leeching her power, until she fled before me. Until she ran for her life, because that was what was at stake, and she knew it!”
I stared at him, my eyes full of everything I was feeling: pain, horror, shock, disbelief. “Don’t you realize, I’d do the same to you?”
He just looked at me.
And, no, he didn’t realize it. Or, more likely, he didn’t believe it. And that was so dangerous that I didn’t have words, or even a place for it in my head.
I let him go, got up, and went to the phone on a table.
It wasn’t on speaker, but it didn’t need to be. Mircea could hear every word. I picked it up and dialed a number that few people had.
“Lord Mircea?” Jonas sounded pissed. “I demand—”
“It’s not Mircea,” I said roughly. “It’s me.”
The tirade cut off. “Cassie?”
“Yes, I’m in Mircea’s rooms, I’m using his phone—”