Only to get kicked in the chin when she looked back up, snarling.
“You know, being queen doesn’t sound so bad,” I told her. And shifted to the lower floor where I’d come in. Because I might not be a great fighter, but I was a pro at running away. I could teach classes on running away.
Or I could have—if she hadn’t followed right on my heels.
I whirled around at a sound behind me, and she sent a time wave that I somehow shifted away from, but not before it turned a clump of my hair old and brittle enough to crumble when I rematerialized. And threw out a hand. And shifted her—into the wall.
Literally.
I’d accidentally done something similar to myself once, getting stuck in a fireplace because I was shifting too fast to pay attention. It had taken ten minutes and a huge amount of magic from Jonas to get me out. She managed it alone and in seconds.
“You really are good with the power,” I told her.
“Thank you,” she said. And froze me.
It happened so fast, I never even saw her move. In fact, I don’t think she did. I’d always made some sort of gesture when shifting, even if it was only a small one. But maybe that was just me, the human part of me, who felt a need to move when I was moving.
But I guess it wasn’t technically necessary, because she never even twitched.
But something else did.
The frozen curtain of water behind her was not so frozen anymore. It glimmered softly in the light, like a fey waterfall, cascading sluggishly toward the floor. And behind it, just visible through the slowly moving stream, was every color of the rainbow.
Or at least the lethal, warmer shades of the aggressive spells war mages used.
I gazed at them as my rigid body tottered and threatened to fall. And remembered all those spells, that corridor’s worth of spells, the very last spells that all those dying mages had thrown. The ones she’d avoided once—but not this time.
And no, it turns out that you really don’t need to move to throw a spell, after all.
Epilogue
Half an hour later, I was sitting on what I guessed had once been a balcony, overlooking what might once have been a great hall. It was hard to tell, since it was mostly rubble now, but it looked like the consul liked to live well. You could still see touches of it here and there: the gleam of inlaid marble under heaps of collapsed walls, rich fabrics threading through mountains of broken f
urniture, the glint of what remained of a wall of mirrors shining in the firelight, because something over to the left was still burning.
Instead of the seat of vampire power on earth, it finally looked like what it was: a war zone.
But the fighting was over for the moment, and everybody was busy picking up. And licking their wounds. And planning their next move.
A vampire came by in dirty, wrinkled clothing, with a smear of blood on his nice, white tunic. But his silk sash was still straight, and he’d paused at some point to wipe the dust off his highly polished shoes. He had a tray with him—silver, of course—containing cups of coffee. I took one but declined the blanket he also offered, from a group draped over his arm.
He moved on.
I sat and thought about power. Specifically mine. Because maybe it had been talking to me, after all. Or at least listening. And I hadn’t been asking for one thing, had I?
I’d been asking for two.
All week, practically every thought had been about two things: finding Pritkin and trying to locate a weapon to fight the gods. What if my power, which wasn’t human and didn’t think like us, had decided to take a shortcut? What if it had decided to take me back to the one place and time . . . where I would find both?
I heard again Fred’s voice asking, “How did they fight each other?” Felt once more the smooth old surface of a staff of unbelievable power. Heard the brunette saying that my last rogue acolyte was after “an ancient relic” that could challenge the power of a god.
Maybe because it had been made by one.
Everyone had been looking for a weapon against Ares: Jonas thought I was one; Mircea wanted me to make him one. Everyone was looking for answers, but what if the ones we needed weren’t here? What if they were fifteen hundred years in the past, at a court still shrouded in myth and legend? What if the story of an ancient king’s return to save us at humanity’s darkest hour was truer than anyone had ever realized?
My hand clenched on the pitted surface of a tiny bottle. It was the one the acolyte had dropped when she hit the wall, the one she’d never had a chance to retrieve. It was the last one, the last full bottle of the rarest potion on earth, and my last chance.
To rescue Pritkin.