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“But you’re supposed to distract the Pythias!”
“There’s been a change of plan,” he said, shaking me off like a bothersome puppy. “You distract them, then meet me in town.”
And with that he was gone, striding off before I could point out that I didn’t know where “town” was. And that I wasn’t in any shape to distract anybody right now. And that I didn’t even have a weapon, because, unlike him, I actually cared about the—
My brain skidded to a stop on an image of Rosier’s handgun. Which, no, might not help me much itself, since using it here could trash the hell out of the time line. But which was sitting in a pack of magic that might.
A pack I’d dropped on the shore before going skinny-dipping.
A pack that might still be there, concealed by the weeds.
I glanced around again, dropped to the ground, and started crawling.
The riverbank was oddly undisturbed, except for the stretch where chunks had been carved out of it by the fey barrage. It looked worse than I remembered, an ugly, bare scar in an otherwise pristine stretch of sand, but it did help me to orient myself. Between that and the mill, I managed to find my former patch of weeds, and soon after that my discarded clothes.
And the pack!
I hugged it to me, almost disbelieving, because let’s face it, I don’t get luck like that every day. And then I pulled the “dress” over my head. Because ugly and lumpish and hot it might be, but it was also darker than my white tank top. I ditched the Keds, too—also white—but couldn’t make myself put my old “shoes” back on.
Until I thought of how extra crispy my soles were going to be, running through a fiery forest, if I didn’t, and reconsidered.
I was trying to find a missing lace, which, being leather and brown and stringy was doing a good job of imitating one of the squashed down reeds, when another explosion burst across my vision. I looked up, because that one had been a little close for comfort, and scanned the riverbank. But I didn’t see anyone.
Because they weren’t on the bank.
I had a second to stare at the sight of Pritkin, not walking on water, but running on it, full out, his bare feet kicking up little waves behind him in the firelit stream. He’d reacquired the board shorts, but not the Ghillie top, I guess because it wouldn’t be much use as camouflage unless it was on fire. And his precious walking stick was thrown over his back, in some kind of leather carrying device that didn’t stop it from smacking into his legs with every stride, because it hadn’t been made for a human’s use.
It had been made for the things chasing him.
And they were chasing hard. Right behind him were a bunch of fey, slipping and sliding and falling and half drowning, because they were wearing armor, not thin flax, and because they didn’t seem to find the water as accommodating as he did. But others were converging on the bank—a lot of others, a whole freaking lot of others, barreling this way like an otherworldly freight train—
And then Pritkin reached me. And snatched me up. And the next thing I knew, I was doing it, too, leaving little spongy footprints on the surface of a river less solid than land, but more than any stretch of liquid had any right to be.
For a minute, anyway. And then it was like the strange water balloon surface in front of us ran out, and we dove. Or, rather, Pritkin dove, and I fell off the edge, cursing and flailing and sinking, because he was pulling me down, I didn’t know why.
Until a flash of light missed me by a hair’s breadth, boiling through the water just above my face, scalding my flesh even through the chilly stream.
And, okay, I figured it out.
And we shot down like a bullet.
In a minute, my lungs were burning—it felt like bands of my skin had been seared off, and yet still we dove. Into blessedly cold water that was going to kill us anyway, because no way could we swim farther than the fey. There were too many of them and this wasn’t going to work and I was about to try to shift us out even if it sprained a magic muscle or brought every Pythia in five miles down on our heads, because at le
ast we’d have heads—
And then I saw it: something glowing blue at the bottom of the river.
It was hazy and seemed to fluctuate with the current, so I couldn’t see it clearly. Or much of anything else, because we were too deep now. But a second later I felt it, like a drain pulling us in, pulling us down. And before I could try to shift again, before it even fully registered, we were in, vacuumed up and sucked down a vortex of swirling light and color and sound, until it stopped abruptly.
Really abruptly.
Bug-on-a-windshield abruptly.
And I realized that I’d just fetched up against some kind of stretchy membrane that covered the opening to a cave.
The cave appeared to be full of rocks and dark and wet, although not as much of the latter as you’d expect with a gaping hole in the wall. It was also full of Pritkin, because the membrane hadn’t stopped him. He had passed through just fine and landed in a crouch on a wet stretch of rock on the other side. And was now arguing with some waist-high shaggy thing that appeared to be mostly nose and hair and attitude.
An attitude that got noticeably worse when I started thrashing against the barrier, distorting it into the cave in fist – and foot-shaped protrusions, because a ton of water was pressing down on me and shifting wasn’t working and I was about to be drowning and—
