“You’re you,” Rhea said fervently. “You’re special—”
“Hush,” I told her, and she stopped.
“But things changed, somewhere along the line. I don’t know exactly where. I remember staring at some sand that I’d accidentally brought back from an alien world, one of the hell regions. I was in my old bedroom at Dante’s, and it shook out of some alien harem-type pants I had on, because I’d just broken my boyfriend out of hell, and . . . it got to me. It was a big moment for me. Alien sand. It shouldn’t have been there, but it was, so I hadn’t been dreaming, you see?”
Rhea nodded, although her expression said that she still thought she should go get Gertie.
“Or the time I brought a time-traveling fish back in my bra,” I said reminiscing.
“In your—what?”
“Or the time I flushed a weakened god down a metaphysical toilet while riding in a flying car. Or the time I watched the ghost of that same god help to rip another one to shreds. Or the time—well, you get the idea.
“Gertie says that this life changes you, and she’s not wrong. I used to want . . . I don’t know. I don’t think I ever let myself really want things. With a crazed vampire after your blood, that sort of thing doesn’t make a lot of sense. But I used to daydream that, maybe someday, Tony might stop chasing me. Assume I’d died or something, since his people hadn’t found me. And then . . .”
“And then?” Rhea was suddenly watching me intently.
“And then a home, a family. A job where I’d wake up when the alarm went off in the morning, and come home to dinner around the dining table at night. A normal life, you know? No stress, no one trying to kill me, no reason to run. Roots, a permanent home that I could let myself start to love, because I’d be there long term, might even grow old there. Someone to grow old with . . .”
“Don’t you still want that?”
“Parts of it, yes. But I want other things now, too. The world is so much bigger than I ever thought, and I’ve seen so much more of it now. You know, I used to hear that Pythias died young, living maybe half as long as regular magical humans—"
“It varies, depending on how much they use the power.”
“Maybe. Or maybe you’re just seeing the part that they live in this time period. Agnes once told me that she mostly didn’t tell the Circle when she had a mission. She didn’t like having a war mage detachment sent with her. She didn’t need them; they just got in the way. And that was assuming they didn’t start blasting everything in sight.”
Rhea smiled.
“I’ve wondered since, how many years she lived in other eras that nobody knew about?”
Rhea shook her head. “You can’t do that. You can’t just travel with no reason—"
“Like you can’t have a child?”
Her face suddenly shut down. “She didn’t want to. I was a mistake.”
“She told you that?”
“Her whole life told me that. She competed hard to be Pythia, to win out over all the other acolytes. Do you think she wanted to jeopardize that . . . for me?”
I ate the last biscuit, as they called them here, because you can’t put back just one. “I think Agnes did what she wanted. I used to think she was so strait laced, so by the book. Because that’s what she wanted people to see. The perfect Pythia so that nobody ever scratched the surface. But underneath . . .”
“What? What was underneath?”
“What you saw today. She liked that fight. She was good at it—"
“Yes.” Rhea grimaced. “A little too good.”
“—so were you.” That won me startled eyes, but it was the truth. She’d been living out there. “Tell me something, if you leave court, what will you do? Knowing what is out there, how big the world and time really are, what will you do?”
“I don’t know. I never . . . I never thought about it. I was brought up at court; this was the only home I ever knew. Even when I was very young at the covens, I always knew I’d be coming here. I never even thought about leaving it.”
“Yet now you want to?”
Her face crumpled again. “I don’t want to; I have to.”
“Why?”