“She’s from the past,” he pointed out. “Yet she sent us back here? You’re telling me your kind can manipulate the future now?”
“No.” At least, I couldn’t. I wasn’t so sure about the rest of them.
“Then how did she do it?”
“I don’t know. But that doesn’t matter right now, does it? All that matters is that we have to get to Pritkin. And for that I have to eat—”
“Eat all you want. Sleep. Take a holiday!” He threw out a hand. And then quickly replaced it on the railing as another gust came roaring by. “What difference does it make?” he yelled. “By now, his soul is back in the demon realm—”
“So?”
“So we can’t reach it there, little girl!”
Damn it! I glared at Rosier because I knew this was going to happen! It was why I’d been so desperate to catch Pritkin in Amsterdam. Since, shortly before that, he had spent what had seemed to him like fifty years or so in the demon realms, only to return to earth to find that more than a thousand years had passed.
Rosier had first snatched his son away sometime in the sixth century, when he was about my age, and the next time Pritkin saw earth, it was the late 1780s. Thanks to a much longer life span from his demon blood and the different time stream operating in hell, he hadn’t changed all that much. But earth . . .
It must have been a damned wrenching experience, coming back Rip van Winkle–like to find that everything he knew was gone and everyone he cared about was dead. Just one of the hits his psyche would take from the curse of having Rosier for a father. But it wasn’t much better for us, since our failure in the icy canals meant that our next stop was likely to be a whole lot warmer.
But impossible, it wasn’t.
“My power may not work in hell all that well, but it doesn’t need to,” I reminded Rosier. “I can take us back in time on earth, and then you can take us into the demon realm. It amounts to the same thing—”
“It is not the same thing! It is not remotely the same thing!” The fake eyebrow had come loose and started slapping his face as he talked, like a trapped moth. He reached up and ripped it off, taking half of his own brow along with it. The suave demon lord was getting kind of hard to see right now.
But I didn’t laugh.
He looked seriously demented.
“I had planned to catch Emrys on earth,” he informed me, using Pritkin’s hated demon name. “Not in hell!”
“But the hells are your home ground—”
“Yes! Yes, exactly!”
“And that’s a problem because?” I asked carefully.
“Do you have any idea how many enemies I have?” he demanded. “How am I supposed to go without magic into an area where I walk with caution even now? Why do you think the council has guards to protect us? For their looks?”
He was being funny, I assumed, since the demon council’s guards didn’t have faces. Or much of anything else. It didn’t stop them from being deadly, however.
“So we’ll . . . catch him when he goes to your court,” I said, thinking fast.
Pritkin had spent much of his time away in the Shadowland, a minor demon realm that served as a gateway to the vast array of worlds that made up the hells. I didn’t have fond memories of it, but Pritkin had apparently preferred it to Rosier’s domain, where a large number of jealous incubi wouldn’t have minded improving their rank by knocking off the royal heir. But he had been at court for a while, at least, and if we could catch him there—
“Oh yes. That would be better.” The sarcasm dripped.
“It’s your court!”
“Which is why I know it as well as I do,” Rosier said grimly. “And entering it as a demon, fat with power and with no protection, wouldn’t be foolhardy, it would be suicide.”
“He’s your son! And you’re a council member. Get the guards to protect you if you’re so worried about your precious neck!”
“I’m a council member now,” he said, gingerly feeling the raw skin over his eye. “He is a council member then.”
“He who?”
“Me who.”