It was only one of the small silver ones that had hitchhiked back from Amsterdam, little more than a sardine, but still. Other people had lipstick-smeared tissues in their trash. Or empty nail polish bottles. Or napkins with cute guys’ phone numbers scribbled on them.
What did I have?
A dead, possibly time-traveling fish.
I threw a tissue over the tiny corpse and got in the shower.
I bet Agnes had never brought back a fish-filled bra. I bet Agnes wouldn’t even have been in Amsterdam in the first place, because she’d have grabbed Pritkin in London. I bet Agnes would have known what to say to Jonas.
Too bad I wasn’t Agnes.
But, somehow, I was going to have to find a way to deal with him anyway. And to figure out what to do with the coven I’d somehow ended up with and didn’t want. And how to handle a bunch of rogue acolytes, and a pissed-off demon lord, and to get Pritkin back—
And I was. I was going to do all of it. But not right now.
Right now, I was going to wash my hair.
And I did, and it was glorious. Twenty minutes of soaping away salt and dirt and God-knew-what made me feel a lot better. And reek a lot less of whatever had been in those canals besides water. I even did the girlie stuff I never had time for anymore, the shaving and the plucking and the moisturizing, and felt almost human again by the time I got out and wrapped myself in a big white bath towel.
And swiped a hand across the bathroom mirror. And, despite everything, burst out laughing. Because guess who was scaly now?
Glamouries, the kind you bought out of a box anyway, had two parts: a base coat, which you spread over your face like lotion, and the control to tell it what to do. Rosier had removed the control when he wiped off the little patch, letting the real me shine through, because he knew a nemesis would get Pritkin’s attention better than any femme fatale. But the base of the spell had remained, and was now flaking off in pieces like week-old sunburn.
Or like dried fish scales.
I shuddered a little and started peeling them off in strips, revealing the pale, freckled skin below. It was weirdly therapeutic. Or it would have been, if I’d been able to Zen out. But of course not. I decided that maybe my breakneck pace lately hadn’t been such a bad thing. Too much free time and I started to think about all the stuff I didn’t know how to deal with.
Like that dream earlier.
Because what the hell?
It was no big deal, I told my reflection. Just exhaustion mixed with the remnants of a powerful incubus’ spell. That sort of thing was supposed to get a person hot and bothered, so the incubus could feed. Or in this case, so he could donate some energy to someone he needed to keep around a little longer.
Pritkin had wanted his damned map back, and if I ended up getting fried by an angry witch, that wasn’t going to happen. But he couldn’t fight her off and be sure of success, because he didn’t know enough about modern magic. So he’d fed me some energy so I could do it for him. And he’d fed me a lot. It wasn’t surprising that it had had some . . . lingering effects.
Like the perma-hard nips it appeared to have left me with.
I peered down the front of my towel, in case I was imagining it, but no. Things were definitely perky down there. Really perky. Uncomfortably perky.
“Stop it,” I told them.
Nothing. Except two happy little nubs that shouldn’t be there because it wasn’t cold in here. Was exactly the opposite, in fact, after my marathon shower, but that didn’t appear to matter to a body that was having incubus flashbacks.
And wasn’t that just all I needed?
“Seriously, cut it out,” I said, frowning.
And then frowned some more, when they listened to me about as much as anyone did. And, okay, this was starting to piss me off. Along with everything else I couldn’t control, I had to include my own body now?
“Damn it!” I said, feeling ridiculous and not caring because there was no one around to see me anyway. “I mean it. Cut it out right—”
“Cassie?”
I jumped, because the voice came out of nowhere, and not from outside the door. It sounded like it was right on top of me, loud and strong and echoing in the small, tile-lined box. I whirled around, staring at the soggy bath mat. And the wet floor. And the walls running with condensation.
And then, slowly, down at my own chest.
“Cassie—”