“So yes, he has them all,” Johanna said, sounding exultant. “Now all we have to do is sit back and wait.”
“Sit back. . . .” I stopped, because suddenly, nothing made sense.
And then everything did, and my heart froze in my chest.
“You . . . you’re not trying to take the staff out of the timeline, are you?” I asked. “You’re trying to bring Ares back now. You’re trying to bring him back here.”
It seemed impossible. Didn’t she get the implications? She was a time traveler. She had to!
But it didn’t sound like it. “Why not?” The voice was amused. “In our time, the Circle is perfecting all kinds of nasty new weapons, and the demons are gathering in force. But here . . . who is waiting here?”
“But this Ares doesn’t know you. He doesn’t know anything about you! If you bring him back now—”
“Ah, still thinking like everybody else.” Johanna clicked her tongue in disappointment.
“Then how should I be thinking?”
“Like a Pythia! Or, better yet, like a necromancer.”
“A necro—” I stopped.
“Now you’re getting it.” She sounded like a teacher with a particularly dim-witted pupil. “If you’re outside time, you’re outside time. It has no hold over you. And right now Ares is outside time in his own universe, waiting for a door to open into this one. Any door. And it will be here, where the other gods are conveniently banished, where the magical community is small and divided, and where no one, no one at all, is expecting it.”
I put a hand to my head. It was reeling so hard that I literally thought I might be going insane. “But . . . but even if you bring through the Ares from our time, he’s still planning to kill magic workers! All of them—or didn’t you get that??
??
“Oh yes, I got that.” And suddenly, there was something besides amusement in her tone. “He’s planning to kill all the magic workers . . . like those who marginalized me, belittled me, humiliated me my whole life, because my magic was different from theirs? Those magic workers?”
“But this is the past. Johanna, if the magical community ceases to exist, so do you! So do both of us!”
“Do you think I care? Do you have any idea—no, of course you don’t.” It was acid. “You don’t know what it’s like to grow up smarter than everyone else, more talented, more powerful—just not in an accepted way. So they shun you, or if you manage to successfully hide what you can do, they condescend—God, how they did! To me, who was a thousand times better than any of them!”
I didn’t say anything. My heart was pounding. I had planned for a lot of things, but not this. To fight the battle where I had almost no allies and a thousand enemies—no. Not here.
“I wanted to kill myself so many times,” Jo was saying. “Dreamed about it, lusted for it. But something always stopped me. Some rage at the unfairness of it all, the knowledge that I could die, but they would still be there, that they would win. Even if I took some with me, what was that? A handful out of a whole society? When it was the whole damn thing that had cursed me! Some passed the laws, others agreed with them, others just couldn’t be bothered to change anything, despite knowing they were wrong. When Ares was making his little pitch, trying to get us on his side, I was thinking the whole time—this is it. This is how I do it.”
I tried to force myself to think, but this time, my brain wasn’t cooperating. Part of it was concentrating on the sound of the search growing closer: cell doors banging, people shouting, fists hitting skin. Another was watching the ghosts, who would be on me in a second if I didn’t. And a third just kept repeating: Not here, not now. Not here, not now. Not here, not now.
“The others wanted prestige, power, fame,” Jo said scornfully. “Imagining themselves some conqueror’s queen, or listening to his empty promises of godhood. Or freaking out because he showed them visions of the destruction of his enemies. He planned to use us and then cast us aside, but me? I was sitting there the whole time, thinking about how I could use him.”
“Use him . . . how?” I asked numbly, watching Caedmon’s officer slosh furiously past the cell.
“How do you think? I’m not bringing back a god. I’m bringing back a weapon, a weapon against the world that hated me from birth. Let them die—let them all die! And I will laugh in the flames!”
“You’re crazy,” I said as the officer appeared in the door again, walking backward, his face incredulous. “You’re completely insane.”
“If I am, it’s because they made me that way. But soon, it won’t matter. In a few minutes, the duel starts and everything changes. And unfortunately for you, I want to be there to see it,” she said. And then three things happened at once: her ghosts dove for me, my power flooded around me, and the officer tore through the door—
And fell into a barely phased woman, who was too angry to straddle nontime properly, and was knocked out by his passing.
And into my arms.
“So do I,” I breathed, and shifted.
Chapter Fifty-four
“Are you mad? Let me go. Let me go!” Jo thrashed in my arms, but her ghosts weren’t around to help her this time. They’d been excluded, along with the mad-eyed officer and a crap ton of freezing water. Leaving just the two of us to rematerialize in the middle of the great hall.