“Well, I passed. I passed all of them,” Roger told me proudly. “There were three of us, from my old neighborhood, and we all tried out at the same time. We’d played war mages growing up, and the idea that it could become a reality . . . it seemed like a dream. But only one of us made it, and it wasn’t me.”
“But you just said—”
“That I was strong enough. My body generates enough magic. But the path my magic chose to take was one of the unauthorized ones. In other words, I had the potential to be a great necromancer, but not much of anything else. And there’s no academy of necromancy, is there? I had all this power, but nowhere to use it.”
“So you became a dark mage,” Jonas said, crossing his arms.
Roger glanced at him. “No, although that’s how the dark gets plenty of its followers, let me tell you. The Circle practically slaps a bow on their heads as they shove them out the door!”
Jonas started to say something, but I cut him off. “So what did you do?”
Roger waved a hand at his collection. “What you see. I became the magical version of a garbage man, someone to defuse old charms before they blow up in someone’s face. The same sort of job a scrim gets,” he added, talking about magical humans who produce very little magic. They were considered handicapped, although some of the ones I’d met seemed to be doing okay.
“It’s an honorable profession,” Jonas said stiffly.
“Says the man who never had to do it,” Roger returned acidly. “It pays well, yes, because of the danger, so most scrims don’t care. But I did—yet had no chance of ever moving on to anything better. Do you have any idea how that rankles? How disgusted it makes you with the whole system, which seems designed specifically to ruin your life?”
I thought of Johanna, and wondered if that was how she’d felt. Because, according to Lizzie, the Pythian Court had had its very own necromancer, long before I showed up. And one who specialized in ghosts, at that.
I didn’t know why it had surprised me. I knew there were other necromancers around, even those with the much less common specialty of ghost-whispering—my own father was proof of that. Yet it had, just as it had surprised Lizzie, who had slowly put the pieces together.
Along with a plan to profit from them.
At first she’d intended to rat out Johanna, hoping to get her spot as acolyte. But that was before Jo offered to show her the Badlands, and how, if you stayed close enough to the time barrier, you could spy on people without actually being at the party yourself. It was how Lizzie had waylaid me, the second I returned from an earlier trip to Wales. I’d wondered how she’d stepped out of nowhere at just the right moment; I hadn’t realized, it was more like nowhen.
Thanks to Lizzie, I’d figured out a few other things, too. Like how an acolyte could travel fifteen hundred years into the past without needing the Tears of Apollo. Because, when you step out of time, it loses its hold on you, doesn’t it?
Like it loses the ability to determine when you’ll step back in.
Lizzie hadn’t told me that; Lizzie didn’t know. But I knew what I’d seen, on that brief trip with Billy Joe. How, when we got close to the time barrier, the location had stayed the same, but centuries had passed in seconds. And I was betting that a ghost whisperer with a good mind and a tenuous grip on the Pythian power might also figure out another way to travel through time.
And to bring back a god, when acolytes with more traditional magic had failed.
“So you decided to join the Guild,” Jonas was saying. “To wipe out history, erase countless lives, and remake it in your favor. But no, that isn’t dark!”
“It also isn’t true, and I wasn’t talking to you!”
“You weren’t a member of the Guild?” I asked.
Roger looked uncomfortable. “It’s . . . not in the way you think. Something happened and . . . afterward, there wasn’t much choice anymore.”
“There are always choices,” Jonas said. “You made the wrong ones. Don’t try to excuse them now.”
“I wouldn’t waste my time trying to excuse anything to you!”
“J— Pritkin, can you give us a minute?” I asked. Because I wasn’t going to get anywhere this way.
I expected an argument, but didn’t get one. “Come outside when you’re through,” was all he said, and he slammed out.
“Typical of the breed,” Roger said, looking after him. “Well, except for the demon part.”
“He’s not so typical, once you get to know him.”
“I don’t want to get to know him,” Roger said, and then he looked down, at the hand I’d put on his sleeve. “But then, I don’t suppose I will . . . will I?”
I met his eyes, and he looked . . . well, he looked like a man who was truly seeing his child for the first time. And the last. “It was the price,” I said. “She wouldn’t help me unless I promised not to come back.”
He shook his head. “She would have, you know. That is, I’m almost sure. She was quite . . . It hurt her, that we didn’t get more time with you in London. She said, of all the things life had stolen from her, that was the worst. I didn’t understand what she meant, not until . . .”