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I felt the unwelcome fur ball stretch along my lower back and, when Mac bent over to help me up, she flowed along my torso and down my arm. I looked in surprise at the line of bright red that suddenly appeared on his forearm. Despite the size of her paw, the gash it left behind was three inches long and deep enough to need stitches. Even worse, I had no idea how to call Sheba off.
Pritkin jerked me away from his friend and sent me staggering, releasing his hold quickly before Sheba could get her claws into him. His lips were thin with anger. “Stop it, both of you! Before you activate the wards for real and tear each other apart!”
I looked down at my hand, which now sported a painful two-inch gash, and gulped in enough air to say, “For real?” How much worse did they get? I don’t know what else I might have said, but I glimpsed Billy over Pritkin’s shoulder and temporarily forgot everything else. I pointed a trembling finger at him. “Where were you? It’s almost dark and MAGIC is right over there!”
“Calm down, Cass—it’s okay. Everything’s fine, but you need to get a grip or your new pet is going to do some serious damage.”
“My ward didn’t flare.” I stared at Mac, who was busy healing his wound. Lucky him—I’d wear mine for a while. Yet, although it was Mac who was bleeding, it was Pritkin who was glowering at me. That was so unfair it was breath-taking, considering that all of this was his damn fault.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Mac said. “It’s a bit more advanced than those. It’s designed to sense intent, and I didn’t mean you any harm.” He had managed to stop the blood flow, but a raw red weal remained behind to mark his skin, leaving a gap in the leaves that they brushed against but couldn’t cross. “I’m sorry, Cassie—I shouldn’t have grabbed you. But when you disappeared we—well, we didn’t know what had happened.”
So they’d thought I was dead, too. Mac’s confession that he, at least, had been worried helped me calm down—that and the fact that I wasn’t about to face an ambush alone. “I’ve been right here,” I told him shakily. “You two are the ones who disappeared. Where did you go?”
“You were aware that we were gone?” Pritkin asked with a frown. He glanced at Mac. “We were wrong, then.”
“Not necessarily.” Mac looked at me keenly. “Maybe time displacements don’t affect her like the rest of us. That could be why she didn’t come along for the ride even though she was as close to you as I was.”
“You went somewhere in time?” What, could anybody do it anymore?
“We think that thing”—Mac gestured at the rune Pritkin still held in his fist—“is a do-over.”
“A what?”
“It carries the caster back in time about twenty minutes. So if you get in a tight spot, you cast it and have a chance to redeem a mistake.”
I sent Pritkin a less-than-friendly glance. “Something that might have been very useful where we’re going.”
“I’m sure it will be,” he commented, tucking it out of sight inside his coat.
I would have reminded him that the rune was mine, except that he would almost certainly have replied that I’d just stolen it first. I glanced at Billy and nodded slightly toward the mage. He floated over while I started an argument to distract Pritkin. “Well, it’s useless now, at least for a month.”
“We could not risk employing it without first learning what it does,” Pritkin insisted, his eyebrows drawing together in their usual expression. “If it has not been used in as long as we think, it should be possible to cast it again soon.”
“But you don’t know that,” I pointed out angrily. “You can leave rechargeable batteries plugged in as long as you want, but they only hold one charge. Maybe the rune works the same way.”
“Permit me to think that I know a little more about magical artifacts than you,” Pritkin replied with disdain as Billy slipped an insubstantial-looking hand into his pocket. A few seconds later, my rune floated out as if levitated. It made its way to me and I surreptitiously pocketed it. “I am reasonably certain it will work,” the mage added. “Now, if you have finished having hysterics, we should be going.”
I said nothing but retrieved the backpack from Mac and took out my gun. It was fully loaded, but I checked it anyway. Pritkin’s lips thinned out even more as he watched; pretty soon he wasn’t going to have any at all. He obviously didn’t like the idea of my carrying a weapon—maybe he was afraid I’d shoot him in the back—but he refrained from comment.
He struck out across the desert and I followed. Mac and Billy Joe trailed after us as soon as the mage again absorbed his mobile business. Not a word was said for half an hour, until the dim outline of MAGIC spread below us.
The complex is designed to look like a working ranch, just in case any norms with a little talent wander by and manage to see through the perimeter wards. But it’s centered in a canyon with high si
des, far away from any tourist facilities, so that isn’t likely. Not to mention that there are all kinds of metaphysical KEEP OFF signs everywhere, starting about a mile out, that make norms very uncomfortable.
The starlight had turned the landscape into something like the moon’s surface—all mysterious dark craters and endless silver sand. MAGIC itself was dark and quiet, with all the external lights off and no movement among the buildings. It looked like whatever was happening tonight was taking place underground.
I collapsed onto a relatively rock-free piece of sand while Mac and Pritkin debated approaches. The hike had been a bitch. I’d stumbled through the growing darkness, stubbing my toe about every fourth step and falling on my face twice. The coat kept getting tangled around my legs and made me feel like I was carrying another person on my back. I’d been too busy lately for regular gym visits and it showed. Running for my life was obviously not giving me enough exercise.
“Is he in there?” Billy asked, hovering a few feet off the sand.
I hugged the coat around me, grateful for its thickness now that the desert had started to cool off. “I don’t know.”
“Want me to check it out?”
“No.” If Mircea was there, I didn’t want to know. With luck, we’d escape into Faerie before he figured out that I’d been crazy enough to drop by.
“Is your ghost here?” Pritkin interrupted to ask. He surprised me by being cautious for once—maybe the idea of breaking into MAGIC scared even him. He had Mac describe his guard friends to Billy, who agreed to go see whether anyone had changed the duty roster unexpectedly. He streamed off across the sand, quickly becoming invisible against the night. In the meantime, we waited.
