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“I’m not making progress!” I said furiously. “I haven’t made any in weeks!”
“Not since the last crisis.”
“What does that have to do with—”
“Niall I-fell-asleep-at-the-beach-and-that’s-why-I’mlobster-red Edwards?” Caleb asked.
Pritkin ignored him. “In a crisis, you forget to tell yourself that you can’t do something. You forget your anxieties and your fears, your nervousness and your self-doubt, and you reach for your power. And it responds. It has been doing so since the first. I believe you have always been able to do what you need to do. You simply have to learn to get out of your own way, so to speak.”
“If it was that easy, do you really think Initiates would need years of training?”
“There’s more to being Pythia than manipulating the power, Cassie. You’ve primarily been dealing with that end because you’ve had no choice. From the beginning of your reign, we have been at war. I doubt Lady Phemonoe fought as many battles in her entire time in office as you have already done. But that is not normally the case, and a Pythia in peacetime has a number of other functions—”
I didn’t say anything, but Pritkin cut off anyway. I guess my face must have spoken for me. “You can do this,” he said simply.
I just stared at him. I wished that were true. I really, really did. But the fact was, I wasn’t Lady Phemonoe, beloved Pythia. I wasn’t even Elizabeth Palmer, heir extraordinaire. I was just Cassie, ex-secretary, lousy tarot reader and allaround screwup.
And coronation or not, I had a terrible, sneaking suspicion that I always would be.
“This is all very interesting,” Caleb said. “But can we get back to the—” He broke off when a door slammed somewhere down the hall. Booted footsteps started coming our way, a lot of them, echoing loud on the cheap laminate tile. “They’re
back,” he said, pretty unnecessarily.
Pritkin looked at me. “What are we going with?”
I spread my hands. “What I said. It’s all we’ve got.”
“Then we got nothing,” Caleb said. “Speeding up healing might work on a cut or bruise or broken bone. But something like this? If you sped up time, it might speed up his healing, but it would also speed up the action of the corrosive. He’d just die faster!”
“But not if she slowed it down,” Pritkin said thoughtfully. “You can say—”
“I can say?”
“Well, I can’t be seen here in perfect health,” he pointed out impatiently. “Not for a few days, until I could reasonably have been expected to heal. And Cassie is hardly up to an interrogation at the—”
“So you guys sneak out the back, and what? I stay here and lie my ass off?”
“Yes. Is there a problem with that?”
“Is there—” Caleb broke off, face flushing. “Oh, hell, no. Why would I possibly—”
“Good. Then all you need to say is that Cassie slowed down time around the car, except for you and her.”
“Which would have made you die slower and nothing more!”
“Not if you used the opportunity to clean out the wound.”
“With what? That stuff eats through everything it touches!”
“But some things take longer to dissolve than others,” Pritkin said, looking pointedly at Caleb’s shabby old leather coat.
Caleb clutched a lapel possessively. “No.”
“Have you a better idea?”
“Yeah! I’ll say we used your damn coat!”
“You can’t. Too many people saw the shape it was in. There wasn’t enough left to work with by the time—”
