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Her hand followed the motion a second later, but I’d expected that and already thrown myself at the floor, jerking Pritkin down with me. As a result, the time wave she threw rippled overhead, missing us by inches. And hit something to our rear that collapsed in a cacophony of rusty metal and shattering glass that I didn’t see because I was busy.
Freezing two Pythian acolytes in place before they could do the same to me.
It was lucky I was already on my hands and knees, because the power drain of stopping time was immediate and terrible, especially after flipping through the damn stuff all day. If “day” even meant anything anymore, which I wasn’t sure it did, I was just sure I was going to throw up. And then Pritkin grabbed me again.
“Where is it?”
Dear God, he was single-minded, I thought, trying to crawl off. I’d forgotten that, somehow. Although I was remembering as he dragged me back to my feet and shook me.
I caught sight of myself—red face, tumbled blond curls, startled blue eyes—in some brass platters hanging on the wall. And damn Rosier! He must have taken off the unflattering glamourie when he sent me after his son, and hadn’t bothered to mention it.
Well, that explained my reception, anyway.
My Pritkin might not be here yet, but this one . . . well, we’d met before. To be precise, we’d met in 1793 on one of my previous time jaunts, which had been barely a year ago from his perspective. It was why I’d needed the glamourie.
Okay, and because the last time we’d met, I’d made like one of Rosier’s street toughs and mugged him.
It hadn’t been intentional—all right, it had been, but it was for his own good. He’d been looking for something he absolutely couldn’t be allowed to find, and he’d had a map on him to its location, and, well, I’d had no choice but to take it.
And strip him and steal his clothes.
And get him beaten up by a vampire.
And then there was the small matter of burning the only map that led to the location of his most prized possession, so, yeah, I probably wasn’t his favorite person just now. But I had one big advantage. “I’m n-not t-trying to k-kill you,” I told him, pointing at the girls. “They are!”
It wasn’t a lie.
Because the frozen barmaid, and the time wave, and the girls’ prim little outfits all added up to one thing. One very, very bad thing. And if there was about to be a time battle in here, I didn’t want him anywhere near it.
“You have to go,” I told him frantically, when he finally stopped shaking me.
But Pritkin didn’t go. He just stood there, looking bemused, as I tried my best to push him out the back door. “Why?”
“Because . . . there are some . . . people . . . after me and . . . goddamnit!” The guy weighed a freaking ton.
Green eyes narrowed. “Perhaps we could work out an arrangement—”
“No! No, we can’t!”
“Give me what I want, and I will help—”
“You can’t help me with this. It’s . . . new magic,” I said, thinking fast. “Really new. Like super new.”
Pritkin frowned, but he didn’t call me on the lie, maybe because he couldn’t. This Pritkin wasn’t the spell master of my day, when there were few enchantments he didn’t know or hadn’t invented. This one was just back from an extended jaunt in hell, and was therefore out of the loop as far as magical theory went.
Way out. It was why he’d lost the property he was trying to recover from me to a couple of low-end scam artists who didn’t have as much magic in their whole bodies as he did in his little finger. But knowledge is power, and they’d known stuff he didn’t.
I could almost see the thoughts running through his head, but he still wasn’t moving. And that was a problem since he was half again as heavy as me and most of that was muscle. But I was determined, because we didn’t have a lot of time.
And then we had less, when he glanced at the curtain and then at me, and I suddenly found myself up against the wall again.
But this time, the knife was nowhere in sight.
“No, see—” I managed to say, right before a hard mouth came down on mine.
Chapter Two
“This . . . is no time . . . for a snack!” I gasped furiously when Pritkin let me up for air. Only to have him scowl in a very disturbing impression of his father.
