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“What?”
“Me—the other me,” he said impatiently. “The Rosier of that time. The one I would be assumed to be impersonating. An offense, I might add, that is punishable by death.”
“Damn it! There has to be a way—”
“There is.” I looked at him. “We wait.”
“For what?”
“For Emrys’ soul to enter earth again, natur—”
He broke off, possibly because he’d just been grabbed. And it looked like I wasn’t as tired as I’d thought. Because the next second I was slamming the rat fink against the windows hard enough to dislodge an avalanche of dust from the crevices above. It came down in a reddish brown billow, coating us and partly obscuring Rosier’s outrage.
It had nothing on mine.
“The devil is wrong with you?” he choked—literally, since his mouth had been open when the deluge hit. “You utterly insane—”
“Pritkin will be twenty-four by the time he reenters this world,” I ground out. “We’re supposed to let hundreds of years slip by and try to catch him in a few decades? Knowing that, if we miss, that’s it?”
And it would be. The damned demon council had known my abilities when they cursed him, and had used the one spell that would be the hardest for me to counter. His soul would only pass through each period of his life once, and then never again. I couldn’t go back to Amsterdam and try to get him again, because Pritkin’s body might be there, but his soul, the modern, precious, cursed version I had to save . . .
Would not.
It was gone forever, tumbling backward through his life into the period he’d spent in the hells. And if we couldn’t catch it there, with a millennium of time to work with, how were we supposed to manage it in a few short years on earth? How were we supposed to manage it before Pritkin literally aged right out of existence? And how was I supposed to even get us there to try it?
“We’ll be waiting for him when he emerges,” the damn demon was saying, because he still didn’t get it. “We’ll catch him the moment he—”
“No, we won’t.”
“And why is that?”
“Because I can’t go back that far!”
I suddenly found our positions reversed, and myself backed into the glass door, forcefully enough to leave bruises on my bruises. And, okay, I thought, staring up into a truly devilish face, Rosier was looking more the part now. “What the hell does that mean?” he hissed.
“What I said!” I snapped, too angry to be intimidated. “The farthest back I’ve ever been was four hundred years—and that was without a passenger! What you’re talking about would kill me. It also wouldn’t work,” I added, because Rosier didn’t look too upset at that idea.
“Then why do the rumors say your kind can travel at will, even back to the ancient world?”
“I don’t know! Like I know anything about this damned office. But I’m telling you I can’t do it!”
“And I am telling you that you have to.”
r /> “I don’t have to! We’ll find him in the hells—”
“We aren’t going to the hells,” he said, and then raised his voice to talk over me when I tried to interrupt. “Even if I lost my mind and decided to risk it, it wouldn’t work, girl. By the time you could recuperate enough to get us there, he’d already be gone.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! He was there for ages! We have plenty of—”
“Ages of your time. Earth’s time. But he wasn’t on earth, was he?”
I stopped, staring at Rosier. “What?”
“The hells are on a different time line—you know that.” He sounded annoyed. “And the spell isn’t on the time line, it’s on him. It follows him. And where he was, perhaps fifty years passed.”
It brought me up short. All the more so because I’d known that. I’d known it, but I hadn’t wanted to think about it, hadn’t wanted to acknowledge even to myself how close to the end we were getting. But suddenly, my hands were shaking.
I wanted to argue with Rosier, wanted to scream at him, to tell him that no, no, no, he wasn’t right, he couldn’t be. Pritkin was from earth. He was on earth time. . . .
