She shot me a look. “She’s my sister.”
And then she and Daisy were gone, too.
“I knew she reminded me of someone,” Billy said, but I barely heard him. I was too busy watching the forecast change.
My new helpers were tearing a swath through the trees, shifting here, there, and everywhere. Causing Pythias and acolytes to peel off after them—and the images flipping in front of my eyes to continually rewrite themselves. Until, finally, I saw a slender path opening up ahead.
But not for both of us. Not when Rosier was wearing bright crimson, I guess to celebrate being back to normal, and because God forbid he dress like a commoner. Or make any effort to blend in.
I grabbed him. “We’re going to have to split up.”
“Split up? We can’t split up! Emrys doesn’t even know me in this—”
“We have to!” I shook him a little, when he looked like he was about to protest again. “Get to the city. Find Pritkin. Stick to him like glue—”
“And what are you going to do?”
“Get you there,” I breathed as someone shifted in, almost on top of us.
Rosier took off—no one ever had to tell him twice—and I shifted an acolyte into two others, who had just appeared through the trees. The trio went down, but there were more right behind them, their dainty dresses in marked contrast to their expressions. Like the first girl, who was already jumping back up, a snarl on her face.
I thought of the group I’d stumbled across last time, and wondered where all that useful timidity went. And then I threw a slow time bubble behind me, at a warning from Billy Joe. And caught a Pythia who had just shifted in, her power signature markedly stronger than the girls’.
Oh, I thought.
That’s where.
And then I fled. A quick succession of jumps in the opposite direction from Rosier left my head reeling and my stomach queasy. And my hands shaking from effort, because yeah.
Not going to be doing this much longer.
“Options,” I breathed, but that was the problem—my power was already showing them to me, and they all sucked. There were four Pythias zeroing in on t
he power of my last spell, and no way could I take four.
“Billy—”
“For the record, I think this is a really bad—”
“Billy—”
“Maybe we could talk to them, try to explain—”
“They don’t want explanations. They want my head!”
“And a bunch of hungry ghosts don’t? You don’t want to go back there!”
“Well, I don’t want to stay here!” I said shrilly as a tree exploded beside us.
“Shit!” Billy said, and shifted.
But the weird, formless vault of nontime was a lot less formless this go-round. “What did you do?” I asked, staring at the X-ray landscape around us.
The forest was still there, in chalky off-white sketches, like an architect’s drawing. I put out a hand, and the exploding bits of wood from the tree passed right through it, twisting slowly in the air but weightless, like they weren’t even there. Because they weren’t—or, rather, I wasn’t.
But I wasn’t in the Badlands, either, at least not entirely.
“What did you do?” I asked again as a figure appeared through the trees.