I blinked at her, still giggling. “Option three?”
“Option three.”
~~~
Option three turned out to be the Pythia’s nuclear weapon, at least where dangerous places were concerned.
“I can’t do this for long,” I told Rhea nervously, on the stairwell a floor down, because I didn’t need an audience. “Billy isn’t here to babysit my body.”
Billy Joe and I had figured out pretty early that a Pythia could slip her body and travel through time as a spirit. Some of my predecessors had preferred that method, because it meant that you weren’t as likely to drag home bubonic plague or something. I found inhabiting another person’s body to be skeevy as hell, and avoided it whenever possible, but sometimes it wasn’t.
Which is where Billy came in.
Because a body without a spirit is what we call dying, which I wasn’t a fan of. Most Pythias weren’t either, and got around that little problem by shifting back to their shed skin at almost the moment they left it. But I didn’t have that kind of split-second timing, so I had to make do with Billy. He got to booze it up in my body while I was gone, in exchange for babysitting.
Because nobody ever said that the spirit in question had to be yours.
But Billy was busy guarding Pritkin, meaning that I was on my own. Which didn’t give me a lot of time to work with here. Being gone more than a minute or two in cases like these wasn’t considered optimal.
Well, not if you wanted any more minutes in the future.
“It will only take a moment to see if it works,” Rhea said firmly. I was glad to see that the lip chewing had been left behind, but it was starting to feel like we’d switched places. I was the one nervously switching from ghostly foot to ghostly foot, while she modestly arranged my skirts and then took up watch over my fallen form, her face serene.
And then expectant, when she looked at me.
I swallowed and turned back toward the dark stairwell, which was kind of looking like a tunnel straight into hell right now. How did I get myself into these things? Why hadn’t I just left Rhea a research list and headed home?
Never mind; I knew why. Because trying to explain the bath incident to my virginal acolyte with her sweet face and big, innocent brown eyes, had left me tongue tied and low key appalled. Kind of like this, I thought grimly.
But I didn’t have the time for cowardice, so I started creeping down the damned steps again. The hope here was that Mircea’s abilities were tied to my body, and wouldn’t cause me the same problems as a spirit. So, as long as I kept my ghostly fingers to myself, I should be okay.
In theory.
But it seemed to be working in practice, too. I glided down the steps unmolested, and out into the big main room. No torches lit up at my arrival this time, my ghostly feet apparently not enough to trigger anything. And no lights fluttered or samurai attacked. Nothing happened at all, in what was now just a big, dark, slightly dusty room.
Score one for Rhea, I thought, a grin breaking over my face. Score a big one! I should have thought of this be . . . uh . . . before . . .
My thoughts petered out as I caught sight of something that looked like a silver smear against the darkness. It was moving this way, but this time, it wasn’t something weird. Well, not to me, anyway, because Billy wasn’t the only ghost I’d dealt with in my life. Clairvoyants seem to attract them, maybe because we’re the only ones who can hear them, and I’d always been a ghost magnet.
Only this one . . . wasn’t looking impressed.
Not that I could see much of her, because she hadn’t bothered to fully materialize. I did get the impression that it was a she, however, or had been during life. I thought that her hair might be dark and looped up in braids beside her head, and that her eyes might be blue. Or maybe they were reflecting the color of the high-necked gown she wore.
But either way, she had a youthful looking face not much older than mine, and a sweet expression—until she got a good look at me.
Uh oh, I thought, retreating a step as the pretty young features melted, the eyes turned to crimson fire, and the jaw unhinged, showing a mass of razor-sharp teeth she didn’t need, because there were two swords now, one in each of her hands—
And that was as far as I got before they were carving up my spirit form like a Christmas turkey. My right hand detached and floated off, the fingers still splayed in a defensive move that had done no good at all. I stared at it for split second, my brain unable to accept what had just happened.
And then that sword was flashing again and I was running back up the stairwell, my mouth screaming bloody murder as more slices of my ghostly form were carved away—including my head, which was taken off and nailed to the wall by a thrown blade.
It took me a second to realize what had happened, and another to turn my still fleeing body around. I somehow managed, giving me the very disorienting sight of my headless spirit trying to yank my screaming head off the blade. Which wasn’t helped by the fact that the damned ghost had just caught up with me.
But I know a few things about ghosts, and as powerful as she was, so was I. And I was motivated! I elbowed her straight in tha
t horror of a face, saw her fall back into the darkness of the staircase, grabbed my head and ran—quite literally for my life.
“Lady?” Rhea said, as I blew past her. “Lady!”