Onto the water.
It was no less solid under my feet than the land, despite the fact that my brain kept telling me it should be. It was more than a little trippy, though; the skies were overcast, and the wind was surging, sending waves rolling all around me. Like the ones slapping the ghostly outline of ships along the opposite shore, making them bob at their anchors . . .
“Billy?” I said, looking down, because I’d just realized my feet were wet.
And then we were under.
“Sorry! Sorry!” he said, jerking my soggy form back into nontime. “It’s a learning curve!” he yelled as I coughed out a lungful of water.
And then froze, a hand over my mouth, as two shadows splashed across my body.
I looked up to see two Pythias walking through the waves just overhead, as if on a glass ceiling above me. One had her face turned away, but the other . . . was Isabeau. She looked older now, with a few crow’s-feet around the big gray eyes, and strands of gray in the abundant auburn hair. But it was definitely her.
And her companion, I saw a second later, was Eudoxia.
Bet they have a lot to talk about, I thought viciously, before Billy jerked me down.
They didn’t notice, despite the fact that the water was no more opaque than anything else here. Because who looks beneath your feet? But I could see them perfectly, walking through nontime as if it was no big deal, as if strolling on the surface of a wavy sea just outside time’s grip was an everyday occurrence. And maybe it was.
They had a word for it, after all.
“That’s just so freaky,” Billy said, and I turned to agree. Only to see him standing eyeball-to-eyeball with some type of shark. The waterway here was a tidal river, according to Rosier, letting out into the nearby sea, and deep enough for oceangoing vessels to make their way up it.
Or oceangoing fish.
“Death has been so much more interesting than life,” he told me, staring at the creature in fascination. “Sure, you give up some stuff—some really important stuff—but then you get to do things like this.” And he reached out, one finger just poking through the skin of time.
And booped the shark’s nose.
“How close to the real world are we?” I asked, as the startled predator raced off.
“Close as I can get us. I am not comfortable with wacky ghost land. We need to get back where we belong—”
“Not with them chasing us.”
Hazel eyes cut to me.
A couple minutes later, I was wading ashore, a long, wooden dock on one side, and the walls of Arthur’s city on the other. While behind, sailors yelled and fell back as the sails they were struggling to furl suddenly went up in flames. Because a ghost tripping on demon power was ripping through the line of ships.
I crouched on the rocky soil near the dock and watched Billy go a little crazy. He almost never had energy to spare, especially lately when I’d been too tapped out to feed him. But that hadn’t been true of Rosier, and he was taking full advantage. On half a dozen ships, barrels hit the ocean waves, lanterns went flying, sailors yelled.
And hot oil flew, causing fires to spring up everywhere.
Eudoxia started while still among the waves, her forehead wrinkling suspiciously. Isabeau looked around from the deck of one of the now merrily burning ships, where she’d just rematerialized. Maybe because searching something when your feet keep trying to float through the floor isn’t so easy.
Or when the massive sails, which had been rolled tightly against the weather, abruptly unfurled, the wind billowing them out to full capacity, causing the ship to jerk hard against the anchor.
Until that line was cut, too.
The mighty vessel careened off toward the opposite shore, the startled Pythia still on board, and Billy swooped down beside me. “I’ll keep ’em busy, do what I can to lead ’em off,” h
e said, grinning like a maniac.
“Get back as soon as you can,” I said, watching Eudoxia shift to her beleaguered former apprentice. “I’m going to need you. I can’t use the power without bringing every Pythia in history down on my head.”
He made a face, but then grinned again, having too much fun to argue. He pulled me back into real time, my feet suddenly encountering hard rocks and shifting sand, and I watched him zoom away. And then switched my gaze to the forest, scanning for movement among the trees.
I didn’t see any, but they were out there, and Billy was right; this wouldn’t fool them for long.