“Do you remember the light I used in Amsterdam, to search for you?” Gertie asked.
I nodded. It had been dark as pitch, because seventeenth-century cities didn’t have streetlights. But Gertie had opened up what I’d thought had been a portal to another time, one with a sunny day that followed her around like a puppy, and was better than any searchlight. It was one of those times that had shown me just how lacking my training had been.
“It is called Shards,” she told me now. “It is supposed to be used as a window on another time, to check on a problem in one era while you are dealing with one in another. But this Johanna has distorted it into a weapon.”
“One that’s unraveling the time stream as we speak!” Agnes said. “I’ll go after her!”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Gertie said sharply.
“Why the hell can’t you all go?” Pritkin demanded. He was usually more polite to Pythias, deferential even, but he’d obviously had enough.
She looked at me, and I explained. “If she dies, if any of them do, it’ll screw up the timeline even more than Jo is doing. That’s why Pythias clean up their own messes. Jo is my problem.”
I tried to move back, to give myself room to shift, but Pritkin wasn’t having it. He held on, fighting me, I didn’t know why. I gave up and pulled him a little way off.
“Jo intended to trap me here,” I said, before he could say anything. “But it works both ways. She can’t run—”
“She doesn’t want to run. She wants to kill you!”
“Which is why I have to face her. Pritkin, there’s nobody else who can.”
A hundred expressions chased themselves over his face, before he finally settled on grim determination. “Listen to me. I didn’t get a chance to finish telling you what I had to say in the café—”
?
??It can wait—”
“It can’t!” The green eyes burned. “You don’t see it, but I do—everyone does. You’re changing, becoming more like your mother. And yes, I know what I said before, about her kind! But there are advantages to your heritage as well as the rest, one of which is in how they feed.”
“Pritkin—”
He gripped my shoulders. “If you could feed from me last night, you can feed from Johanna! Get close, get her distracted, and take her down the way your mother did a thousand demon lords—”
“I’m not my mother!” I whispered. “I can’t hold that much power—you know that!”
“Then take what you can and use it against her. Don’t let her direct the fight—keep her on the defensive. Remember what I’ve taught you.”
I nodded.
“You can do this. You may not have had their training, but you’ve had mine! You’re better in a fight than she is, you’re stronger where it counts, you’re—”
He broke off and pulled me into his arms. The kiss was burning, fiery, explosive—almost as much as the street around us. Maybe more. Because I felt power flooding into me, a torrent of it, because he wasn’t holding anything back. And he kept it up until I broke it off, staggering a little and pushing him away, afraid he’d give me too much, afraid he’d give me everything.
“Stay alive!” he told me hoarsely, and I nodded.
“You, too.” But he’d already turned away, I guess so he wouldn’t see me go, and was already issuing commands to the crowd of young men assembling at the gate. And, unlike the others, these mages didn’t look afraid of him. They looked desperate and grateful and, in a few cases, hero-worshipping, because most of them appeared to be trainees, probably from the nearby center, and there was finally someone to take control.
Like I had to do now.
Jo, I thought, reaching for my power, feeling it tingling around me, flooding through me, coursing down to my fingertips. Take me to her.
And the street winked out.
Chapter Fifty-two
There was nothing but a yellowish haze everywhere I looked, and the air was thick and heavy in my lungs. Even worse, it burned in my nose, my throat; every mucus membrane I had felt like it was on fire in seconds. It was like breathing acid.
And to top it all off, I couldn’t see a damned thing.