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“What?”
“You never said ‘I love you’—until now.”
He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Of co
urse I love you, you complete idiot!” And he pulled me against him.
I laughed, I couldn’t help it, and it was louder and went on longer than it might have elsewhere, because it was tinged with an edge of madness. And then I kissed him, because the world was insane and I didn’t care anymore. And, for a surreal moment, he kissed me back.
And then he thrust me away in order to kill a couple of zombies, and didn’t that say everything about our love life, I thought, staring at them.
Until Pritkin jerked me back into the doorway.
His eyes kept scanning the street, looking for threats, but his throat was working. “You don’t understand,” he said again.
“Then explain it to me. Explain that this is not about my competence—or your view of it. Because you haven’t been around. You haven’t seen—”
“It’s not about your damned competence!”
“Then what is it?”
He glanced at me, a quick gleam in the night, and then looked back at the street. “We need to get out of here.”
Goddamn it!
Why did I keep picking men I needed a crowbar to get anything out of?
“This is Jo,” I told him again. “I have to—”
“You don’t know that!”
I grabbed him, his biceps rock hard under my hands. “Pritkin! Look around you! Who else could do this?”
For a second, he just stared at me, anger, fear, and frustration so massive that he might have just invented a new emotion all warring on his face. But that prodigious intellect won out instead. I saw him glance at the strange jewels gleaming in the sky, and then at one of the blue-black variety that was slowly descending across the street.
Only it didn’t look like a jewel from this angle. It looked like a dark shadow had fallen on a row of houses, snuffing out the lights, deepening the night, and ignoring the slurry of colors from the fight down the road as if they didn’t exist. It also changed little details, I noticed, watching flowerpots vanish, a mail slot appear in a door, and a banister railing change from stone to cast iron as the darkness fell.
Because we were looking at the same street, I realized, just in a different time.
And, finally, something clicked.
And I guess it did for Pritkin, too. “The Blitz,” he said blankly, as an air raid siren blared out of the shadow, followed by brilliant bursts of light that tore across the darkened sky above the houses, lighting up his face.
I nodded. My Victorian nanny had told me stories of the bombing of London, back during World War II; I’d just never thought to see it for myself. Much less to potentially die in it!
“And if that’s the Blitz, that’s the Great Fire,” he added, glancing at one of the boiling orange shapes, which had just crashed into a building at the end of the street, causing it to go up like a torch.
“The what?”
“In 1666, it destroyed most of the city.” He stared around at the other shapes, stunned disbelief on his face.
“The plague,” I added, watching the never-ending fall of bodies. “She must be animating the corpses—”
“How?” Hard hands gripped me. “She’s a bloody acolyte!”
“She’s a ghost of an acolyte,” I corrected, thinking back to something I’d learned on the search for him. “And ghosts aren’t like humans—or demons. There’s no upper limit on how much power they can absorb. That’s why the ghost of Apollo was such a threat to Ares—he could have drunk him down, all of him, because they don’t get full—”
The street whited out.
