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That had me sitting up again, because I’d managed to totally forget—I wasn’t the only one Gertie had rescued.
If she had.
“Did you kill him?” I said breathlessly. “Tell me you didn’t kill him!”
Gertie sighed, and rearranged her skirts. They were dark blue, with dark red cherries all over them. You had to give her credit: she had a theme, and she stuck to it. It was the same tenacity she showed in everything else, which was why I was clutching the bedcovers in fear.
“From what I understand about this spell, it links the two of you,” she said mildly. “Creating, in effect, one metaphysical being with two bodies. If I had killed the vampire—”
“It would have killed me, too.”
I felt vast relief flood my system, even though I’d already known that. Or I should have; it seemed like my brain was still waking up. And wondering what the other half of the equation was, because I knew she hadn’t just let him go.
“Where did you put him?” I rasped.
“Where he should have been all along.”
Chrono cell.
I started to get up, as crappy as I felt, because Mircea and I had to have a talk. But Gertie’s hand was on my shoulder. “He isn’t going anywhere,” she told me, “and you need to rest. But we have to have an understanding.”
I stared at her, already knowing what she was going to say. “Gertie. This is my problem—”
“No, it is my problem. You are my student; you put yourself under my tutelage—”
“Gertie—”
“—so that I might train you how to be a Pythia. I told you before; it is not an easy job. It requires things of us, changes us—”
“I’m not going to let you kill him!”
“At the moment, I can’t,” she agreed. “But we are working on a way to break that inconvenient spell. You have until we find it to resolve this. And this is not a test, Cassie.”
“Then what is it?”
“Consider it a professional courtesy.” The brown eyes were calm and steady on mine. “You may tell him that, if he shifts again, he won’t be dealing with you, he will be dealing with me. And I shall end this.”
~~~
The Court’s chrono cells were in a dark, featureless world filled with only two things: a line of glowing boxes arcing off into the distance with no discernable beginning or end, and pieces of diaphanous material wafting down from overhead, like tissues only thinner, a strange rain that never managed to make it to the ground.
Instead, other indistinct shapes moved in the twilit dimness, brighter than the tissues, although not by much. They appeared out of the darkness, darting here and there like dragonflies after gnats. And wherever one went, a tissue disappeared.
Because they weren’t tissues; they were ghosts. All of them. The dimmer versions were the remains of faded spirits who had run out of energy and could no longer cling to the earthly plane. They fell here, into the non-space between dimensions, where no time stream ruled. The other ghosts had discovered this and came here as predators, to feast on whatever energy the faded had to offer.
It was exactly as creepy as it sounds, but it afforded the Pythian Court the advantage of a place where time spells didn’t work. That was useful for holding people, usually dark mages, who occasionally tried some volatile enchantments to joyride through the ages. If they didn’t manage to blow themselves up in the process, they were put here, until the Pythia of the day decided what to do with them.
I tugged on the tether of my power, which was my only lifeline back into the normal world, for reassurance. It tugged back, as if my power wasn’t any happier about my being here than I was. Yeah.
I had some bad memories about this place.
Get in, get out, get gone, I thought, and hurried over to the cell holding the latest jailbird.
They were transparent from the outside, letting me get a look at him before I entered. And it was . . . weird. He wasn’t pacing back and forth, as I’d have expected. He wasn’t looking over the cage, trying to figure a way out. He wasn’t doing anything.
Unless you counted sitting in a corner on one of the benches, the cell’s only furniture, with one leg drawn up and a whiskey glass dangling from his hand.