I looked over my shoulder to see Rhea standing in the doorway, watching me.
“What? Oh. The kind where everything is going to be fine, because Cassie is going to wave a hand and save the day. I think Jonas forgets sometimes that he’s not dealing with Agnes.”
“Why do you . . .” Rhea cut herself off.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She started picking up the bathroom, and soon had an armful of little soiled dresses. The formerly pristine white cotton was creased and sweat-stained, and, well, looked like it had been lived in for three days. But I guess it would have been hard to have them washed when the kids didn’t have anything else to put on.
I thought of Agnes’ perfect little court, so manicured and well behaved.
And then I thought of the giggling, glitter-streaked, slightly grimy one outside.
And, oh, look, I was having an effect already.
“Too bad we couldn’t have rescued more of Agnes’ stuff,” I said when Rhea noticed me watching her. “We could have outfitted the older girls, at least.”
“Most of her things were too warm for Las Vegas . . . if the court is to remain here?”
“I haven’t given it a lot of thought. Do you want to go back to London?”
“No.” It was emphatic. “The weather,” she added, grimacing.
“I can see that,” I agreed, remembering Agnes’ many coats. If I’d been her, I’d have moved the court somewhere sunny. The south of France maybe, or the coast of Spain.
Mmm, Spain. Paella and sangria and gorgeous guys . . .
Only Agnes’ gorgeous guy had been in rainy old London, hadn’t he? Well, her guy, anyway. I tried to imagine Jonas as a hot young stud and failed miserably. But he must have been once. Or at least she must have thought so. And they’d looked happy. . . .
I grinned, remembering the photo. The woman laughing and joking and kissing Jonas had had windblown hair and a top with half the buttons undone because it was being used as a beach cover-up. She’d had sunglasses on her head and what looked like a smear of that old white sun cream over her nose—to avoid more freckles, I guessed. She’d looked familiar in a way that her elegant rooms hadn’t. More relatable. More real.
More like the woman who had once shot me in the butt.
I wondered again where all the other pictures were. She must have had some . . . right? I mean, people did, didn’t they? Even before the era of the selfie.
But then, where were mine? If I died tomorrow and Rhea had to go through my stuff, what would she find? Some tacky old T-shirts? A few ratty tarot cards? A closet full of unsold ball gowns Augustine had foisted off on me so he could use my name in advertising, but that I’d never worn because I didn’t have a social life?
I shook my head; I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I was in the middle of a war. My lack of a social life didn’t matter.
Only, it did, somehow. Maybe because it had started to feel, especially lately, like I just jumped from one crisis to another. The idea that, sooner or later, things would calm down and I’d have time to get to the personal stuff didn’t seem to be happening. If anything, everything was speeding up, with even the thought of actually making it through to the other side getting harder to visualize.
And what if I didn’t?
Agnes hadn’t. She’d been something like eighty when she died, which might be a damn good run for a human, but not for a mage. For a mage, that was like dying at forty. And here I was at twenty-four, not at all sure I was going to make it to twenty-five, and—
And I suddenly wondered if that was how she’d felt. Like life was going by really fast, but nothing was happening. Not for her.
“In comparison to you?” Rhea asked suddenly.
I looked up. “What?”
“Yesterday you said something about Lady Phemonoe . . . in comparison to you?”
“Just that there isn’t much of one,” I said, grimacing.
But Rhea didn’t look like she got the joke.