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Where she had already whirled to meet me.
“They sucked up to me,” she said, as if nothing had happened. “Fawned and flattered and bought me things, all kinds of pretty things: cars I couldn’t drive, clothes and jewelry I wasn’t allowed to wear. But I loved it; I loved all of it! Not because of the things, but because of why they bought them. How they hushed when I came into a room, the way their eyes followed me, the way they crawled.”
I darted out of the way of a spell, and it hit a column j
ust to my left, twining around it like a vine. And sending the plaster and bricks underneath crumbling and crashing and then scattering and dusting to nothingness on the floor beside me.
Apparently, nobody had ever told her that the villain monologues and then attacks.
“But Myra got the nod,” she said, “and all of a sudden, I was back to being invisible. I was never good enough, no, no. Not for my family, not for the Lady, not for anyone. But now look. Even the master himself, even a god waits for me.”
And before I could dodge, she sent another wash of power at me, one hard and fast enough that I barely had time to counter. The two time spells met in midair, forming a coil that writhed and twisted and seemed to be trying to eat each other. And then abruptly flew apart, into a thousand tiny spheres that sped away in all directions.
We hit the floor, both of us at the same time. Because the air around us was suddenly filled with little floating orbs of death, like mirrored bubbles reflecting the scene. And peppering the remaining walls of the area with holes from the faster-moving ones, like the blast from massive shotgun shells.
“Wow. Never saw that before,” she said, sounding awed. And then she threw again.
I scurried behind a group of filing cabinets that rusted apart as I passed, into a doorway that collapsed almost on top of me, and out into a room strewn with papers underfoot and muddy boot prints. Both of which sloughed away into nothingness as the spell ate along the ground behind me.
Until I threw a slow time wave over my shoulder, thick enough to be considered a wall, frantically trying to buy time. And it did—about a second’s worth. Until a fast time spell of hers came boiling through the middle like a concentrated dart, or like a missile launched underwater. And then tore out the other side, slamming into the same type of spell I’d just thrown on myself, shattering them both.
And sending me crabbing backward out into a hallway as the remnants of the spells flew over my head, barely missing my face. And then she was there, right there, and I did the only thing I could, the only thing in this whole Pythian arsenal that I’d ever been really good at. And shifted.
But not me.
I shifted a cabinet, old carved walnut by the looks of it, jerking it off one wall and slamming into place right where she’d been standing.
And then just lay there for a moment, panting and exhausted, and hoping like hell that had worked.
And maybe it had. Because dust and bits of flaking wallpaper, now centuries old, fluttered down around me like confetti, but nothing else moved. And the staunch solidity of the cabinet gave me reason to hope that maybe, just maybe, nothing would.
Until the door opened and she stepped daintily out, her little slipper still Pythian white against the filthy floor.
“Good one,” she told me. “I barely had time to get up a shield.”
“Glad you liked it.”
“When we used to duel, that was Victoria’s favorite move.” She smiled. “Want to see mine?”
No, I thought, and shifted.
And that time I did shift me, because I needed a moment. And ended up on the roof I’d glimpsed earlier through the missing ceiling, since it was the only place I could think of where there weren’t other people around. I landed on hands and knees, panting, staring around for a telltale glimmer of white. But there didn’t appear to be one.
Which . . . was both good and not. Because I couldn’t risk her tiring of our game and running off to get her reward. But the whole keep-her-talking-until-the-demons-arrive-and-hopefully-shred-her plan did not appear to be working.
At all.
I gulped in cool evening air and tried to think of an alternative. But I wasn’t coming up with much. Because of course they used to duel. And they must have done it a lot, because she was damned good. Meanwhile, I had gotten my butt kicked by Gertie twice, and had barely managed a draw with the redhead—and that had been with Rhea’s help.
But staying up here wasn’t going to work. I had to find her again. I had to think of something—
“Pretty, isn’t it?”
I spun around.
And found her looking up at the big silvery moon floating serenely overhead, on a bank of silver-gray clouds. My hand twitched and she looked down, grinning. Like she knew how close to bottoming out I was.
“No offense,” she told me. “But I have a hard time believing your mother was a goddess.”
