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“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of heights!” I’d raised my voice a little, but it didn’t matter because the wind out here was something else. It came whipping around the side of the building like a banshee every few moments, carrying everything before it—including sound. But there was a railing, and it was sturdy.
Not that Rosier seemed to think so.
“Of course not,” he told me haughtily.
And stayed right where he was.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” I said. “You’re afraid of water and you’re afraid of heights. Anything else?”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Then what, exactly, is the problem?”
“Prudence. I might not survive a fall from that height. And while I could make another body, it would take time.”
“You’re not going to be falling?
??”
“I know that. Because I’m not going to be out there.”
“We don’t have time for this,” I hissed.
Rosier pried his hand loose from mine and began using it to strip off the double glamourie. The bulbous nose went first and then the fake pop eye. The real one had to stay, however, which meant that his looks didn’t improve much.
Or maybe that was down to his expression.
“On the contrary, we have plenty of time,” he said sourly, trying to pry off the shaggy left eyebrow, which had somehow become stuck. “Now that you’ve inexplicably brought us back to the present!”
“I did no such thing—”
“Then I was hallucinating the boat that almost drowned me?”
“You were doing that well enough on your own,” I snapped, not feeling charitable toward the guy who’d had one job and managed to screw it up. Just like he was managing to broadcast our conversation to every damned guard in the place.
At least, he was until I shifted him outside with me.
That elicited enough screeching and caterwauling to have brought every vamp in the hotel running. Except that I’d anticipated it and shut the door firmly behind him. And then put my back to it so he couldn’t dive back in, because I wasn’t going to be pulling that trick twice.
As it was, my knees felt wobbly.
“Why didn’t you hex him?” I demanded, to cover my reaction.
“Why did you shift us out of there before I could?” he returned savagely, whirling on me from where the shift had left him, half draped over the balcony railing.
“For the last time, I didn’t shift us! That other Pythia must have done that. The old one,” I clarified. “She . . . co-opted Gertie’s portal . . . used it to send us back to our own time. Or something.” It wasn’t a great explanation, but I actually wasn’t sure what had happened.
I’d been trying to shift us into the bright spring day that had been following us around like a panting puppy. It wasn’t a long-term solution, but it hadn’t needed to be. I’d just needed to buy a couple of seconds so Rosier could do his thing before Tweetie’s grandma followed us through the portal.
But she hadn’t given me the chance, hitting us with a time wave even as we dove. So instead of traveling half a year, or whatever it had been, we’d traveled two hundred, right back to our own time. And, somehow, she’d also managed to snatch Pritkin away in the process.
I didn’t know how she’d done that, either. Or how she’d known that he belonged in that other time instead of with us. But it was lucky considering the huge amount of trouble that would have been caused if she hadn’t.
I shivered a little. Removing Pritkin from the time line would have also removed me—from life, since he’d saved mine maybe a dozen times in the last few months. It was the same thing I was trying to do for him, if my damned counterparts would stop interfering! Especially with graduate-level Pythia stuff I didn’t know how to deal with because I was barely out of kindergarten.
Maybe I should have felt lucky just to have survived. But what I mostly felt was pissed. As if this wasn’t hard enough already!
And now Rosier was scowling at me again.
