AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I was going to do this once I got him back.
Although, so far, that wasn’t going great.
It was another thing that should have been easy. Hell, I was a time traveler, wasn’t I? Just go back and change a few things. Make a few adjustments. See to it that the good guys won. Simple, right?
Of course, I wasn’t supposed to. In fact, it was pretty much exactly the kind of thing I was not supposed to do. Pythias guarded the timeline from alterations by others; we didn’t change it ourselves.
Except, of course, when we did.
Agnes had, when she warned me that I was about to be assassinated. If she hadn’t, I never would have met the maddening man known as John Pritkin in the first place, would never have needed him to save me, would never have royally screwed up his life in the process. He might have been better off if she’d minded her own business, but she hadn’t and I’d lived. All because she’d changed one little thing . . .
But that was the problem. Agnes had been doing this kind of thing for decades. She’d known what to change and what to leave the heck alone. Not to mention that the night she bent a rule for me had been easy mode compared to the craziness a week ago. If I did go back, where did I make the cut? I’d lain awake at night for a week, trying to figure it out.
The obvious place was right here in this room. The fight that had left it looking even more trashed than usual had been because of me. Someone on the other side of the war had wanted a device Pritkin carried, one that would summon me to an impromptu execution the next time I tried to shift. They’d fought. Pritkin lost it, chased after it, and as a result, found me in the nick of time.
So, if I wanted to change things, the easiest way would be to warn him about what was coming.
And that would work great—if he took the hint. But Pritkin defined stubborn and was making headway on a new meaning for paranoid; he might well ignore a heads-up like the one Agnes had sent me. And even if he didn’t and avoided following the would-be assassin to the battleground, that wouldn’t work so well, either.
Since in that case I’d be dead.
So then where? In the middle of a fight that I’d barely won the first time? Because I just didn’t see how that worked. The final battle had happened in a couple of minutes of frantic activity and gnawing terror. And, as usual, I’d survived by luck as much as skill. Any slight alteration might make things worse instead of better.
Not to mention the fact that, crazy as it had been, the duel I’d fought against another demigod had ended up being pretty damned useful. It had impressed the hell out of the six vampire senates, who had shortly thereafter decided that maybe they would join forces in the war, after all. If I avoided the battle, they might well avoid signing the treaty. And we needed that treaty.
Anyway, all of that was moot, because even if I found a way to save Pritkin, to not get myself killed in the process, and to not advertise that Pythias did alter time for their own purposes occasionally, what then? Because Pritkin would still be in a mess, and a bad one. And the fact that, for once, it had nothing to do with me didn’t help at all.
I didn’t want to rescue him just to put him back in the same tortured existence he’d been occupying for almost a century. I wanted to save him. For once, I wanted this power I’d never asked for, and which had been nothing but trouble from the moment I got it, to actually do its freaking job. And help somebody.
Somebody who deserved it.
I just wasn’t sure how.
I sat down on the bed to wait out the mess upstairs. The room was quiet except for the faint sigh of the air-conditioning, and peaceful. Or it would have been if the gap in the drapes hadn’t been illuminating a swath across one of the movie posters.
Not that it looked all that horrific at the moment. Someone had taken a Sharpie to it—some kid, I guessed, since I couldn’t imagine the dour war mage I knew drawing a mustache and glasses on Bela Lugosi. But then, that wouldn’t be the biggest surprise he’d handed me lately.
Sometimes I wondered if I’d known the man at all. I sure as hell didn’t understand him. One minute he was being an absolute horse’s ass, to the point that I just wanted to take him somewhere particularly nasty and leave him there, and then the next . . .
I felt my breath start to come faster, my hands to clench, and stupid tears to spring to my eyes. I dashed them away angrily. I’d said I wasn’t going to do this anymore, and I damned well wasn?
??t—
“Cass?”
“Ahhhh!” I leapt back, hitting the remaining nightstand with my already bruised butt, as Billy popped into existence through a flutter of playing cards.
The cards were mine. I hadn’t even noticed that I’d been fingering them, but it wasn’t a surprise. Kids have a favorite toy; Linus has his blanket; I have a greasy pack of tarot cards given to me by my old governess, which she’d had enchanted as a joke. And which were now all over the place and talking up a storm.
They had been spelled to tell your fortune on their own, and either by design or some flaw in the enchantment, they always tried to outdo one another. The result was seventy-eight tiny voices gradually getting louder and louder as each tried to talk over the rest. And ended up making a god-awful racket.
I started shoving them back into the pack, which was the only thing that kept them quiet, and simultaneously glared at Billy. “Don’t do that!”
“Then don’t run off without telling me. You’re supposed to be sleeping.”
Yeah. Like that had been going so great lately. “I had some unwelcome guests.”
“So shift ’em out of there. Why’d you have to be the one to leave? It’s your room!”
