“No. But you are Pythia.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning nobody talks about it, okay? But I’ve seen how fast it burns them up. How fast we go through Pythias. Just normal use shortens their lives considerably, and what you’ve been using isn’t normal.”
I laughed, a short, ugly burst that escaped before I could bite it back. “So you’re worried about my longevity?”
“Shouldn’t I be?” He ran a hand over his head. “Look, I want John back, too. I think I’ve proven that. But you’re the only Pythia we’ve got and we’re at war. You need to stay safe. He’d say the same if he was here. You know he would.”
I just stared at him for a moment. It was times like these that I felt the gulf between us, the widening gulf between me and everybody around me. Maybe because I’d been at the center of this thing for too long, maybe because I hadn’t had enough rest—or any—lately, maybe because I was crazy. Or they were, which was what it was really starting to feel like.
“Tell me something, Caleb. Were you in the group dispatched to Dante’s this morning?”
“Of course. I think every war mage in Vegas was.”
“How long did it take you to get there?”
“From the time we got the call? Twenty-two minutes. It’s something of a record: that many people over that distance—”
“I’m glad to hear it. We lasted nineteen,” I said, and shifted.
Chapter Fifteen
“Get off the road.” Rosier gripped my arm.
“Don’t touch me!” I snarled.
“Then get off the damn road!”
“All right, all right, just don’t—no, don’t touch—don’t touch!” I ran off the sheep trail pretending to be a road, sloshed through a ditch half-filled with water, and scrambled up the other side. There were old-growth trees hedging the path on both sides, the kind you don’t see anymore because they went for fuel or something centuries ago. And bushes and undergrowth everywhere else, because this was Wales and Wales had some kind of law that required every inch to be covered in green. But for once, I was grateful for it.
I dodged behind a tree, completely and utterly skeeved out, and clung to the bark, panting.
“It’s just a hand,” Rosier said, in his teeny tiny squeaky voice.
“Don’t talk, either,” I said, trying not to hyperventilate.
“We have to—”
“I said, don’t talk!”
He shut up. The army we’d spotted barely in time marched closer, still eerily silent. And I did my best to get my breathing under control before I passed out.
It didn’t work.
“God!” I shrugged out of the backpack and ran off a little way, biting back a scream. I managed it—just—because the soldiers headed this way were fey, and those ears had to be good for something.
I finally got a grip and turned around to see Rosier sitting on top of the pack, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. Which would have been fine, if they’d had cigarettes in medieval Wales. And if he hadn’t been naked. And if he’d looked remotely human.
But he was in his disgusting white slug phase, which was apparently how demons recreated bodies, but which looked nothing like a human child.
Nothing.
I’d been carrying the icky thing around in the medieval equivalent of a backpack—a sack with ropes that fit over my shoulders. It had left him closer to me than I’d like, but at least I hadn’t had to look at him. Now I did, and it was just as bad as before, and maybe a little worse. Because the suite had been dark, but now the moon was out. And the light filtering through the trees was glistening off the mucous membrane that covered him from bald head to webbed toes, and off the tracery of tiny purple veins spidering all over the stark white “skin.” And pulsing.
I shuddered again and looked away.
The-thing-that-would-be-Rosier smoked.