He was better.
Which was probably why Jonas looked like Christmas had come early.
The silver-white mane currently looked like a troll doll’s, one that an enthusiastic toddler had been carrying around by the hair for a few weeks. The effect was heightened by rosy cheeks, bushy eyebrows, and a pair of coke bottle glasses, the latter of which magnified the already large blue eyes into owl territory. Jonas could be strangely cute at times, especially when he was looking jovial.
And right now, he was beaming.
Pritkin wasn’t, but he was having his own version of a good time. A bloody pair of knuckles hit a face that looked worse than mine, because that was not the first time that had happened. Not that it mattered. Nobody looked at the face when the eyes were that crazy.
Or should I say, eye?
Jonathan, AKA the Circle’s most wanted, was looking a little rough. For one thing, the scar that Emma Lantham’s cat had given him still pretty gruesome. He seemed to have rescued the eyeball somehow, but it glimmered out of an area of torn up flesh, the skin healed but lumpy and bumpy, like a permanent eye-patch.
For another, he was pasty pale, his blond hair limp and sweaty from our run, and his body rail thin. The glamourie he’d been using had been stripped off him by some irritated war mages, using spells strong enough to have left him smoking slightly. He was slumped like a half-stuffed rag doll in the chair the mages had thrown him onto, after taking him out of the maiden, which is what the black dots had indicated.
Luckily for me, the snares that had been deployed during the attack a month or so ago dealt with more than just the body. They also drugged the shit out of anyone who fell into them, which was why Jonathan couldn’t currently shift. Just as well; after that damned time stoppage, I was whipped.
But there was still a job to do, so I womaned the hell up.
He grinned up at me, his teeth red from a badly split lip. “That’s right,” he sing-songed. “That’s how you’ll all look before long. On a pike, on a pike, on a—”
Pritkin hit him again.
I grabbed the bastard’s hair and forced his head back. Both because I wanted to, and to keep Pritkin from murdering him before we got anything useful out of him. Not that I was too confident of that, because the maiden’s drugs weren’t the only problem here.
Jonathan was one of those dark mages who had greatly extended his lifetime by stealing other people’s magic. That did not-so-good things to the brain, after a while. Which meant that he was not only high, he was crazy.
So, this should be fun.
“I want to know three things,” I said. “First, why didn’t my power warn me that I had a time traveler to worry about?”
It had screamed its head off about Mircea, but not a word about a dark mage jaunting around the timeline, attacking people? Thanks a lot, I told it. As usual, it said nothing back, just quietly glimmered at me.
“Two, how are you using the Pythian power?”
Because he hadn’t been fueled by one of the volatile spells that suicidal types sometimes employed to skip through time. That had been pure Pythian energy, something that dick-face here should never have had access to. Yet he’d used it as easily as an acolyte, at the very least.
“Third, why did you kill Emma Lantham?”
“Emma?” Jonas said, his head coming up. He’d been talking to a war mage, one of a half dozen scattered around the rock cut room, but at that he broke off and looked at me.
“One of your librarians,” I confirmed. “Jonathan murdered her, and it wasn’t random. He targeted her, and I want to know why.”
“And you saw that how?” Pritkin asked, waving off the medic who was trying to attend to his bruised knuckles.
Dark mage faces are hard.
“I didn’t. Her cat did.”
“What?”
“Later,” I said, which caused him to flush a darker shade of red, but he was basically a tomato already, so it didn’t really matter.
“I’m not telling you shit,” Jonathan said, grinning.
I smiled back.
“Billy,” I said, and my ghostly buddy and Pritkin’s unseen shadow, drifted over.