Rosier looked crabby. “The council blocked my abilities, remember? Worried I’d try a power play back in time, and give some of them what they deserve. I told you this.”
“But . . . that was about magic—”
“It was about everything except the countercurse. And in any case, what do you think my abilities are if not magic?”
I frowned. “But you did help—”
“I did not.”
“Then what was that?” Because one minute, I’d been freaking out, and the next . . . I felt myself blush again. “That wasn’t me.”
“Well, of course it—” Rosier stopped abruptly, and the big eyes narrowed. And when his voice came again, it was different. “You’re telling me you didn’t plan that?”
“Plan what?”
Instead of an answer, I got an explosion. One that left me flinching back in surprise. “You can’t be serious! I thought you were playing a dangerous game, but under the circumstances, I understood. But now you’re telling me—” He broke off, glaring. “You didn’t know!”
“Know what?”
“That you’ve been feeding off of my son!”
I didn’t respond, because whatever I’d expected, it hadn’t been that. But it didn’t matter. Rosier didn’t give me a chance to say anything anyway.
“Remember Amsterdam?” he demanded. “When that Gertie creature caught up with us the first time?”
“I—yes, but—”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t feed! I sent you into the back of that bar to seduce him, and when you came out, it damn well looked like you’d succeeded!”
“That . . . wasn’t a seduction,” I said, because I was confused. And because I kind of thought they involved less yelling. “I was just trying to keep him in sight until the soul turned up. Only Gertie did instead, and he donated some energy so we could get away—”
“He didn’t just donate!” Rosier snapped. “If that were the case, he should have been tired afterward, even haggard. But instead he was invigorated!”
I paused, because I’d noticed that, too. But it hadn’t seemed like a big deal at the time. And, frankly, it still didn’t. “So?”
“So how does that work? He gives you power, yet has more at the end than he started out with? That doesn’t sound like a donation to me!”
“Then what does it sound like?”
“I think you know.”
I just looked at him.
“How quickly they forget,” he said dryly. “I was under the impression that this whole odyssey began when Emrys was sent back to hell for having demon sex—defined as an exchange of power—with you.”
I had been about to say something, but stopped. Not because I understood what he was getting at, but because a flood of memories suddenly swamped me: lying on a hillside, a huge moon riding the clouds overhead, the hulk of a dead dragon steaming in the distance, and my life force trickling away into the dirt. Cold; it had been so cold. . . .
Pritkin had recovered from his wounds, but we’d gotten separated. And I’d ended up battling the last Spartoi on my own. I’d won, if you count dying later than him as a win. But then Pritkin had shown up, barely in time, and returned the power I’d given him earlier, saving my life. And forfeiting his own—the only one he cared about, at least—because he’d thereby broken the terms of a parole he’d been laboring under for more than a century.
Breaking it had sent him straight back to hell, and me on this crazy journey.
Rosier was right; that was where everything had started.
But I still didn’t see his point. “What are you getting at?”
“That a feedback loop of power was set up between the two of you that night,” he said, still weirdly intense. “You gave him power in the car—he gave it back to you on the hillside, triggering the loop. Admittedly, it was a very poor one, which never had a chance to really get started before he was snatched away. But it existed. And apparently still does!”
“You’re basing that on what? One incident in Amsterdam?”