“For you,” I pointed out.
“For all of us!”
“Not for Pritkin.”
“He’s incubus whether he likes it or not!”
“He’s human, too, and for him that sort of life is more like slavery.”
“It’s nothing of the kind!”
“Like those people whose world you turned into your refuge?” I’d seen it recently, a vast, sprawling desert world that had been taken over by the incubi. It and its people.
“If we hadn’t, they’d have been conquered by someone else. In those days—”
“But those days are over, aren’t they? They’ve been over for a long time. But I haven’t noticed any emancipation going—”
“Bah!” Rosier suddenly yelled in my face, causing me to jerk back. And stare at him. “I’m through talking to you!” he proclaimed, and strode off, his feet throwing up little clumps of mud.
• • •
“You need to stop panicking,” I said very clearly, some hours later. We’d made our way out of the steamy valley and onto a frigid mountaintop, but our luck was about the same. As Rosier was busy demonstrating.
“You stop panicking!” he snarled. “They’re not trying to eat you!”
“They’re not trying to eat you, either.” Well, I was pretty sure. “They just want what’s in the bag. Give them what’s in the bag.”
Rosier glared at me from his perch atop a birch, where he’d landed after the rock fall but before the avalanche. I’d taken refuge in a sort of cave-like depression in the rocks, but he’d been forced to jump over the cliff or be crushed by hundred-pound boulders and a mountain of snow. The good news was, he ended up grabbing the top of a tree. The bad news was that a mass of wild pigs apparently lived under it.
And had no intention of letting him down.
“How is giving them food going to encourage them to leave?” Rosier demanded, staring at them, wild-eyed.
“Because you’re going to throw it away from the tree,” I said, exasperated. “No, no. Take off the cellophane first. They won’t know what it is!”
“I can’t take the cellophane off and hold on to the damned tree!”
“Use your legs.”
“What?”
“Your legs!”
Rosier stared at me like I’d lost my mind. “I’m an incubus, not a contortionist!”
I took a breath and closed my eyes. That seemed to be the only thing that helped with him, if I couldn’t see his stupid face. “Use your legs to hold on to the tree. Use your hands to unwrap the food. Throw the food away from you. Then, when they go after it, get down and run in the other direction.”
There was some grumbling I couldn’t make out very well, and then some cellophane crinkling. And then a lot of agitated squealing.
I opened my eyes to see several pigs jumping up onto the trunk like they were trying to climb it, Rosier screeching and retreating even farther into the swaying, leafy treetop, and cheesy crackers raining down like manna from heaven. I sighed. “I said away. You have to throw them away from—”
“I am not Sandy Koufax!”
“Who?”
“Oh, for . . .” The treetop shook some more, and an outraged face appeared through the foliage. “Just do what I told you!”
“I am not using magic,” I said, grasping his big bag o’ tricks a little more tightly. Fortunately, he’d decided to lighten his own load by making me carry it earlier. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use anything in it without bringing the Pythian posse of doom down on our heads.