“She was eight,” he told me.
“You don’t have to do this.”
I might as well not have spoken. “I was away on a training exercise with the troops. She and her mother were back home, on the farm with my brother. He had a gimp leg and couldn’t serve, but he could wield a sword—I’d taught him that.
“And stupidly believed it would be enough.
“I still don’t know what happened. Never did. Just came back to a burnt-out farmhouse and the crisped body of my brother, still clutching that damned sword. And my wife and daughter in a ditch across the road, as if they’d been running away but hadn’t made it. And neither of them had been spared.”
“Marco—”
“Do you understand what I’m telling you? They were dead and worse than dead, and there was nothing left for me but burying the bodies! I don’t want to bury yours!”
“You won’t.” I barely got the words out.
“No, I won’t. I won’t have it. I won’t be there. You’ll die in some damned other place, in some other time, where I can’t reach you—”
“I’m not an eight-year-old child, Marco—”
“And you’re not your mother, either!”
It stopped me again, but not because of the violence. “I know that.”
“Do you?” He grabbed me, so lightning fast my eyes couldn’t track the movement. And the next thing I knew, I was over by the closet, facing the full-length mirror on the inside of the door. And a wild-eyed barbarian with tangled hair, blood-flecked skin, and a clenched fist.
It took me a second to realize it was me.
The stomach
of my T-shirt was completely drenched, parts of it were singed, and there was a bloody handprint on one shoulder. I stared at it, at the deep impressions where Mage Royston had gripped me so hard at first. And then at the elongated marks trailing down the front, as his strength failed.
A pulse started pounding in my head.
“Four months ago you were answering phones and making copies at a travel agency.” Marco grated. “I don’t care whose blood you have; you’re twenty-four. An untrained magic user with a damned tenuous grip on your power. And a sitting duck if you run out of it!”
For a moment, I saw myself through his eyes. Saw that girl I’d been for so long, small and weak and alone, huddled in the dark so the big bad things didn’t find me. Marco was right. That was who I’d been, who I’d been my whole life.
But it wasn’t who I was.
I wasn’t my mother, and I never would be. But I wasn’t that girl anymore, either. I looked in the mirror, and my own eyes stared back, but they weren’t the ones I was used to. They should have been clouded with fear, with uncertainty; should have been darting around, looking for the nearest exit, getting ready to run. Instead, they were angry, steady, defiant.
I wasn’t my mother.
I wasn’t even Agnes.
But I was Pythia.
I heard Marco curse. And slam out of the door a second later, because he could read expressions, too. He almost ran into Rhea coming in.
She flattened herself against the door frame, getting out of his way, and then stayed there, as if unsure whether she should come the rest of the way in or not. And yeah. I guess even human ears had been able to pick up that little discussion.
Right then, I didn’t care.
“I can’t use my power where I want,” I told her bitterly. “I can’t save who I want. What exactly can I do?”
She raised her eyes from the bloody bottle I was still holding up to mine. “Make an old man’s last moments free from torture? Give his death meaning? These are not small things, Lady.”
I stared back at her until her face started to blur. “Then why doesn’t it feel like enough?”