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“Okay.”
“And I won’t tell you that this is going to work. I’m not a witch; I can’t undo a hex their way—”
“And it wouldn’t help, even if you could.”
Apparently, those missing ears still worked just fine. And yeah. That must have been fun, lying helpless, and listening to everybody sound his death knell.
“No,” I confessed. “But I can try to take you back to before the damned thing was laid in the first place. Basically, I’m going to put you in a time bubble—”
Jules made a choking sound. “Spare me the details.”
Yeah. I probably wouldn’t want them in his place, either. He’
d been through enough tonight already, but I couldn’t leave well enough alone because he wasn’t well enough. And he wasn’t going to be if I didn’t manage this.
And we both knew it.
I nodded, licked my lips, and tried to concentrate.
It was just as well that Jules hadn’t wanted details, because he wouldn’t have liked them anyway. Not only because I hadn’t done something exactly like this before, but because I wasn’t the best at precision timing. It was why I hardly ever got away with anything when I shifted. Agnes had been able to come back to her body at virtually the second she left it, so nobody ever knew she’d even been gone unless she chose to tell them. But she’d had either a gift or a heck of a lot more practice, because I usually missed by a mile. Fortunately, there was no chance of that the way I felt. I’d woken up tired and was fast approaching exhaustion, and I hadn’t even done anything ye—
A bubble sprang up around Jules, small but perfectly formed.
I blinked at it, surprised, since I’d half expected to fail. But it was real. The light from the lounge shone off it in a swirl of iridescent colors. It looked like a soap bubble—and about as stable. I needed to hurry.
I concentrated on the mental biography Jules had shown me.
It was thick. Not only had Jules had a long life; he’d had a busy one. Luckily, we weren’t covering a lot of time here, and I didn’t need to worry about all those pages and pages. Just a few words back, maybe even a couple of letters ought to be—
The wind I’d felt before picked up again, fluttering the pages, and it was a lot stronger this time. I made a mental grasp for them, but they slipped through my fingers as if they were oiled. One, two, three pages back, and finally I managed to grab one, trying to tamp down my power enough to stop the gale without killing it—and the bubble—completely.
And it must have worked, because I heard a collective gasp. And glanced at Jules. And did a double take.
It looked like his face had been submerged in a vat of pale paint, and was now being raised up again. Eyes, nose, mouth were all becoming visible, as the slick, too-flawless surface sloughed away on every side. Pores emerged again, and eyebrows, and lashes and—
And I could barely breathe.
Because it was working.
His chest was harder to look at, doing strange things to my brain as it writhed and churned in a way flesh was never designed to. But the same process was happening there, with random bits of material coming together into a shirt once more. Like the body underneath, which was starting to look like a man again, and like the hands . . .
I’d barely had the thought when Jules’ beautiful, graceful hands rose up from his stomach like two birds, still encased by the bubble, but no longer trapped.
Like the pages of the book, I realized. They suddenly fluttered out of my grasp, as if they had a mind of their own. A gust of that strange wind caught them, and they fell in a single, rippling cascade, decades passing like seconds.
Shit! I grabbed for them, but they had an almost frictionless surface, impossible to hold. Until I finally slammed myself down in desperation, trapping the still bucking and moving book under the full weight of my mental body.
And at last, it was enough.
“Cassie—” someone said, and I glanced at Jules. And then stared, transfixed, as color bloomed on once-pale cheeks, as blond hair lightened, as a beard sprouted and then retreated and then sprouted again—
“Cassie!”
Marco’s voice rose in my ear, loud and panicked, as I slashed my hand through the bubble. It evaporated in a flash of light bright enough to make me close my eyes. And when I opened them, I saw Jules, still sprawled on the carpet but flexing two perfectly fine hands with a look of stunned wonder on his face.
And Marco, who was pale and tight-lipped. And Fred, who looked like he was about to faint. And Rico, the brunet member of the trio, a daredevil type who was famously unafraid of anything.
Except me, I thought, meeting eyes that held that unmistakable emotion, before quickly skittering away.
