“No!” I looked around, rubbing my arms as chills broke out all over them. “I’ve been Seeing the same thing ever since MAGIC blew up. But only in pieces, like my usual visions. But this . . . He’s here. I know it!”
“He can’t be.” Pritkin was adamant.
Dee had been looking at us out of the corner of her eye, and she’d started to edge away when I grabbed her wrist. “You told me once you can sense magic, right?”
“Maybe,” she said warily.
“Can you sense anything unusual now?”
“Other than the battle raging upstairs?” she asked with understandable sarcasm.
“I mean a single source, stronger than all the others. Like . . . like a supernova.”
“Maybe. But it don’t matter because there’s no way I’m going back in there! Not for—”
“A shopping spree at Augustine’s? Ten minutes, anything you can grab?”
Her eyes narrowed and she looked me over. “You got that kind of cash?”
“I’ve got that kind of credit.”
“I’d think you were lying, but you did have those shoes. . . .” She licked her lips. “Half an hour, take it or leave it.”
A war mage walked up. “There’s a mandatory evacuation,” he told us. “You’ll have to be moving on.”
“I’ll take it,” I said.
“Shit. I knew you were going to say that,” Dee told me, and slammed her gigantic purse into the mage’s face. He went down, and may have also gotten stepped on as 250 pounds of satin-clad fashionista ran over him and headed back up the street.
We ran to catch up, battling the tide of humanity going the other way. Mages were converging on us from all sides—it wasn’t like we were easy to miss. I grabbed Dee’s train to keep it from getting trampled and she towed me along like a freight train, scattering tourists and roses everywhere.
We passed the fake feed store that marked the halfway point with most of the mages on the street after us, and plowed into a dozen more. They’d formed a half-moon shape in the street, forcing the crowd to surge around them and re-form. As soon as we ran out of tourists, we barreled straight into them.
Dee almost knocked a hole in the wall of leather coats, but they kept their feet. I looked behind us, but the mages had closed the circle, leaving us nowhere to run. And then one of the closest caught sight of me. “Cassandra Palmer.”
The brown eyes searching my face still looked like they belonged to a mid-level flunky, but the snarl kind of ruined the effect. I didn’t say anything, panic and exhaustion closing my throat. But Saunders didn’t seem to expect an answer.
His gaze slid to Pritkin, who had stopped beside me. “Or is it?”
He looked Pritkin up and down, taking in the ruffled gold cape with a raised brow. “I’ve heard it whispered that the Pythia has more skills than she lets on. It would appear to be true. I’ve always been told that possession is impossible for humans, but either I accept that I was misinformed, or I have to believe that a slip of a girl threw me against a wall and almost shattered my shields. Which do you think I prefer?”
Pritkin didn’t answer him, either. He fiddled with his cape instead, looking twitchy and almost nervous. Saunders smiled.
“Of course, I could solve the riddle by killing both of you, but that would leave no one to put on trial. And the public does love the legal niceties,” he said, taking a few steps back. He glanced around, but the crowd had thinned and the few remaining tourists were being hustled out of the way by the mages who had been following us.
At a nod, his men parted to either side, pulling Dee and me back, and leaving Saunders and Pritkin alone in the middle of the street. “On a count of three, I think?” he asked politely. “Wasn’t that the way things were settled in the old—”
Pritkin threw out a hand and Saunders sailed off his feet, into the air and smashed against the side of a fake barn. Judging by the sound his skull made on impact, I didn’t think he’d bothered with shields. He slid down the side, bounced off a wagon and was speared by the iron spike atop a menu sign.
I swallowed and looked away as his body began to spasm. No. Definitely no shields.
The mage holding my arm twisted it painfully behind me. I cried out and tried to pull away, but there was nowhere to go. There was another group of mages jogging down the street toward us, as if the other side needed reinforcements.
One of them, a tall African-American in a battered coat, pushed his way through the circle to me. “Hello, Cassie,” he said somberly. He looked at the mage holding me. “Let her go, son.”
“They just killed the Lord Protector!”
Caleb scanned the area until his eyes lit on Saunders’ still quivering form. “Doesn’t look dead to me. Don’t you think you boys should maybe get him down?” I suddenly found myself released as the Apprentices rushed to aid their fallen leader.