Pritkin jerked away from me a second later, but it didn’t help. Nothing did. The loop was fire, the loop was eternal, the loop was going to burn us both to cinders and there was nothing I could do about it.
And it smelled like it had already started.
I’d closed my eyes in an attempt to calm down the fun house effect, but they suddenly flew open. To show me burning curtains, the material thrashing as it was eaten by flames, the pretty colors glowing brightly for a moment before going black, the pert maidens looking like they were being burnt at the stake. As we would be any minute, whether the power consumed us or not, because the whole room was on fire.
The power we were shedding was setting everything alight. It was already so hot in here that the room wavered in front of my vision, like the desert at noon. I tried to sit up, to roll onto the floor, to do anything, but I couldn’t.
Except to watch Pritkin kneeling by the bed, trying yet another spell. I could see his lips moving even though I couldn’t hear him. I couldn’t hear anything but the roar of the fire and the terror pounding in my ears. Or do anything but lie here and wait to die.
But maybe somebody else could.
Mircea, I thought, reaching out through the bond, throwing it wide. I couldn’t tell if he heard me; there was too much noise in my head for that. But we were in Lover’s Knot together; he had my power. He could shift us out of here—
But he’d better do it fast.
The power flowed out of me again, back into Pritkin, and I gasped in relief. But I hadn’t even taken a second breath before it was back. The flow was almost continual now, an unbroken stream too much for any single body to hold, so it had taken both of us. But that wouldn’t help for long, if it had at all.
My eyes were flame, my body was fire, my whole world was starting to burn.
“Mircea!” I screamed, as my left arm went up in flames.
And the next second, I was slamming against cold, hard ground.
I knew that much. I could feel dirt against my palm and on the side of my face, yet I burned. So much so that, for a moment, I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I writhed against the ground, wanted to scream in pain, but my throat was closed
and wouldn’t let anything out.
Through my hair I saw Pritkin, now kneeling on snow, half of his face covered in a nasty burn. But it was the wild expression in the eyes that had me coming back to myself a little. Pritkin never looked like that. Pritkin was Mr. Cool Under Pressure.
But not right now.
I couldn’t see why because he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at something behind me. But when I tried to turn around, to see it for myself, I bumped my left arm and almost passed out. The world went swimmy, pain lanced through me, and I felt like throwing up. And then I almost did, when I caught sight of my arm: from the elbow down, it was a blackened mess, with the skin cracked and dead, and raw meat peeking through.
Third degree, I thought, staring at it. And I’m in shock. That’s why I feel this way.
And then I felt even worse when a voice came floating through the crisp, cold air. “So glad you could join us. I was beginning to wonder what the holdup was.”
Jonathan. Which was impossible, but so was everything else right now. Like Pritkin watching me bleed and doing nothing.
Was his incubus in charge? His eyes were green, but maybe that didn’t mean anything anymore. Not if it had absorbed all that energy. And it must have, because the feedback loop had stopped, but the power it had created had to have gone somewhere.
And I sure as hell didn’t have it.
I couldn’t even seem to breathe properly, although that may have been smoke inhalation. I wasn’t sure. But Jonathan didn’t seem to like my inattention, because the next moment, I was being kicked over onto my back.
He looked different, I thought, staring up at the blond head haloed by a blue sky. But I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then I realized: there was no eye patch. Tom’s handiwork was nowhere to be seen.
There was no smashed-in face, either. And while the Corps’ medics were good, they weren’t that good. So, either a glamourie, which I seriously doubted he’d bother with, or—
“Chimera,” I whispered, kicking myself for not thinking about it sooner.
No wonder he hadn’t looked worried in the Circle’s hands. He’d done the same thing that Jo once had, and created a copy of himself before he went on his mission. Or maybe it was the copy that he’d been sending on missions while the original had stayed somewhere safe. Where nothing could scratch his eye out or beat his face to a pulp, and where he could move around freely even while his other half was lying in a Circle jail.
He bent down and patted my head. “Gold star.”
He walked off a little way, giving me a view of a wide-open courtyard in what looked like a small castle, if a run down one. It was high in the mountains of Romania, at a guess. I was becoming familiar with the velvety forests and rocky slopes, like the ones falling away from our current perch.
I just didn’t understand what we were doing here.