I slipped in the slush on the floor as I staggered back to my feet, only her hand on my arm keeping me standing. “The flying things—the microphones! Do you have any more?”
“What? Yes—I—yes.” She stared at me like I was crazy. “Why?”
“Send one to the Graeae. Tell them to pull back to defend the shop—”
“But the tourists—”
“The mages aren’t interested in tourists—they’re interested in me.” It wasn’t a guess; fully half those spells had been aimed my way. Looked like the hound had made an impression. “Keep them that way. We only need ten minutes—”
“But, Lizzie, your court—”
“They can’t reach Lizzie if they’re busy trying to kill me! Pull everyone back behind Augustine’s wards, have the Graeae defend you if they break, and make sure you keep my body in view—”
“Your body?”
“—and try to find a way out through the floor, the back, whatever. But do not take me out until you absolutely have to. They have to see me. They have to stay focused on me—”
But she wasn’t focused, and who could blame her?
“What do you mean, your body?” She grabbed me. “Are you hit?”
“I’m all right!” I said, at the same time that a ghostly cowboy finally decided to join the party. “It’s showtime,” I told him.
Billy Joe, my ghostly companion for years now, yawned. “You know, I really hate it when you— Holy shit!”
The reporter was fumbling around in my clothes, looking for some terrible wound I didn’t have instead of listening. But I saw Françoise staring at us from the shop opening, where she’d managed to drag Rhea. “Did you get all that?”
She nodded, handed Rhea off to a young man, and sent a huge fireball at a couple of mages who had just jumped back to their feet. It blew them backward, almost to the opening in the ward, where they crashed into some of their buddies on the way in. The flames hitting off multiple sets of shields all at once sent mad red flashes over the crowd.
And finally snapped the reporter out of her panic.
She snatched her purse off her back and started throwing things out of it, and I looked at Billy. “You’ve got babysitting duty.”
“What?” He had been staring around, mouth open, hand holding on to the cowboy hat he’d been wearing for the last century and a half. But at that his head swiveled back to me. “Wait!”
But there was no time to wait.
“Get everyone back to the shop and get that ward up,” I told the reporter as our desperate SOS took flight.
“And what are you going to do?”
“Buy ten minutes,” I said, and closed my eyes.
Chapter Ten
Suddenly, everything was easier.
I gave a sigh of pure relief as the pain from a dozen wounds fell away, like my body behind me. Until Billy caught it, halfway to the floor. I felt him step inside my skin as I broke free, a warm, comforting presence who might not know what was going on, but who knew the routine.
Because we’d done this before.
When I first started shifting, I hadn’t known what I was doing, but I had known that body - soul = corpse. So when I found out that Pythias often shifted in spirit form—easier and we didn’t pick up any nasty plagues that way—I’d had some issues with it. Like possessing someone in another time, which I’d never learned to enjoy, and like returning to a dead body afterward.
I’d eventually realized that every other Pythia managed it by using time travel to return to their bodies at almost the same moment they left, making the interval away too short to do any damage. But in the beginning, I hadn’t known that. So I’d handled it the only way I knew how: by leaving another soul behind in my place.
And since the only soul I trusted—more or less—was Billy Joe, he got the nod.