For a second, I was staring at the surreal sight of a massive hound, its hide now covered in a carpet of squirming mages, rampaging back and forth down the length of the drag. Of Enyo plowing into the fight with her club, sending more mages literally flying on all sides. Of a mass of magical microphones circling overhead, screaming abuse.
And of Rhea staring at the ceiling, the entire breast of her gown stained bright red, her eyes going glassy.
“I can’t heal this,” Carla told me, her hands red, her voice panicked. “It’s too severe. The best I can do is slow it down, but it’s not going to make a difference in a minute. We have to have a healer. . . .”
She trailed off, because yeah.
I didn’t see any doctors in the room.
“Can you shift her?” she almost begged, for the life of a girl she’d just met. But it probably didn’t feel that way.
Battle does that to you.
“No,” I said, my voice barely recognizable. “I won’t be able to shift again
for . . . a long time.”
“But there must be something you can do!” she insisted, staring at me with innocent faith. Which looked kind of weird on those hard-bitten features. “You’re Pythia.”
I stared back with nothing to say. A Pythia was supposed to be able to do something. A Pythia was supposed to be able to do anything. But it had never seemed to work that way for me.
I looked down at Rhea, lying on the floor in front of me, but I wasn’t seeing her. I was seeing a man, old and withered, his salt-and-pepper hair leaning mostly to salt, holding one age-spotted hand over a terrible stomach wound. The other had clutched mine while he tried to tell me something before he bled out, while I’d worked desperately to save him.
While I’d failed.
Because being able to make someone younger or older doesn’t mean you can heal their wounds. As I’d discovered the hard way, applying power to them merely gave you a younger corpse. I’d only managed to help one person—sort of—because his was a metaphysical disease, a curse, and making him younger had changed him enough that the curse no longer recognized him.
And even there I’d had help, help I didn’t have now.
“But that man did not belong to you,” a voice whispered in my ear, causing me to jump and look around.
The only thing I saw was Augustine, the reporter’s little girl held fast against his chest, staring out at me from behind the distant counter. And the blackened, ruined storefront. And my own bedraggled reflection in smoke-clouded glass.
And a whisper in my other ear. “While this girl is yours, part of your coven.”
I whipped my head back the other way, and stared at the reporter, who stared back at me, her eyes huge. “What is it?” she asked fearfully. “What’s wrong?”
Take your pick, I didn’t say, because she was weirded out enough.
And then so was I, when everything abruptly went dark.
Chapter Eight
I panicked, thinking I’d been hit with some kind of spell. It hadn’t hurt, but it had been just that fast, just that debilitating. Like someone had thrown a switch, only there were no afterimages. There was no anything, just darkness, deep and velvety and absolute, except for a tiny pinpoint of light from somewhere up ahead.
Framing the body of the vampire walking toward me.
He was wearing only a pair of midnight blue sleep pants in a silky fabric that hung low on his hips. His chest and feet were bare and his dark, shoulder-length hair, usually caught back in a clip, was loose on his shoulders. He looked like he’d just gotten up, but the whiskey dark eyes were as sharp as ever.
“But the girl is yours,” Mircea repeated softly, kneeling opposite me. “And you . . . are mine.”
And abruptly, the scene shifted, giving me the weirdest split vision. Half the room remained dark, with the light barely limning Mircea’s head and shoulders. But everything behind me burst into comparative brilliance—and sound and sensation: the spill of neon, the hound’s unearthly bellow, the smell of gunpowder. . . .
“Which is real?” I whispered, confused, and put out a hand to where the dividing line between the two rooms boiled like steam. But when I tried to grasp it, I felt nothing, although the darkness receded faster now, like curtains closing—
Until a hand grasped my wrist. “They both are,” Mircea said, and night bloomed around us.
He seemed to be controlling the division between our two spaces, working to get the distractions down to something I could handle. But it didn’t help all that much. Because this place was plenty distracting all on its own.