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I didn’t see who. The balcony abruptly receded—the kids talking and laughing, Rhea and Hilde coming and going, taking the smaller ones to bed, and the vamps drinking and clandestinely smoking, because Tami was distracted and the firepit covered the smell. For a moment, there were only Pritkin’s lips, wet and shining from the alcohol, the warmth of his mouth, closing around my fingers, and the feel of his tongue, working the last remaining sticky marshmallow off my skin, making sure to get every . . . last . . . bit.
“Okay,” Tami said dryly, shocking me back into myself. “Time for bed.”
Couldn’t agree more, I thought dizzily.
“Wait—we’re not done!” Fred said, looking at Pritkin. “You didn’t guess that last one; what was that last one?”
“I have no idea.” It was rough.
“Woo-hoo, I won!”
“I think he won,” somebody said.
And then dinner was over.
But, unfortunately, my responsibilities weren’t. Because Augustine, who’d come in late, wanted to bitch about the mess we’d supposedly made in his workroom and get his key back. And Rhea cornered me to talk about one of the girls, who was acting out by stealing everybody’s stuff, which had been found under her bed. And then Hilde followed me in my room to talk about Rhea—and she wasn’t taking any hints.
“I don’t understand it,” she said, striding back in forth in front of my bed. “The girl has the talent—I know she does—but there’s some mental block in the way.”
“I’m sure she’ll, uh, deal with it eventually,” I said, pondering my sleepwear.
It consisted of old T-shirts and a pair of flannel pj’s I’d bought in anticipation of cold winter nights. I picked them up. They had little moose on them—mooses? Meece? And were about as unsexy as it was possible to get.
I’d had some nicer stuff, but it had all been bought for me by Sal, one of Tony’s vamps, who’d been trying to refine my look in order to butter up Mircea. She’d hoped that he’d take her on since her boss had gone screwy and joined the other side in the war. Mircea was Tony’s master, so technically he could appropriate any of his vassal’s vamps if he wanted, although since Tony was emancipated, that was seen as bad form. But then, so was turning traitor.
But the changeover had never happened. Sal had ended up being used against us by her master, and I had been left with a bunch of slutty nightwear I couldn’t have used in this case anyway, for obvious reasons. Not that it mattered. It had been tossed, along with everything else that reminded me of Mircea, in the post-breakup fury. Leaving me with . . . this.
I sighed.
“That’s the point!” Hilde said sternly. “She isn’t dealing with it. With her background, and having grown up at the Pythian Court, seeing the power being used on a daily basis—”
“But not trained in it,” I pointed out. “Agnes didn’t allow that.”
“Not formerly trained, perhaps. But she saw it, and as you know perfectly well, a good deal of the Pythian power is instinctive. At the very least, she should be picking up some of the simpler spells, refining her spatial shifts, perhaps even attempting a short time hop by now. But instead—”
“She isn’t even trying?” I guessed.
“It’s ludicrous!” Hilde plopped down into a chair with the air of someone who planned to be there awhile. “It isn’t as if she’s a lightweight magically. She can switch between normal magic and the coven variety with ease, and has enough power for a war mage! But ask her to do the simplest of time spells and she falls apart!”
I frowned, and then remembered Rhea’s panic when I had first made her an acolyte. I’d expected her to be pleased, intending it as a reward for all the help she’d given me, and as a way of making up for the fact that the position had been unfairly denied her in the past. But instead, she’d looked like someone headed for the gallows with a noose around her neck. She’d calmed down after a while, and I hadn’t thought about it again, but now . . .
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked, and Hilde threw her hands up.
“Who knows? She won’t talk to me. Acts evasive, sometimes even snappy or annoyed.”
“Rhea?” I frowned some more. “That doesn’t sound like her.”
“She doesn’t like me,” Hilde said flatly. “Thinks I’m pushing too hard—and not only her. She wants to wrap the girls in cotton wool instead of teaching them self-defense. That would be dangerous at the best of times, but in the middle of a war—”
“Most of them aren’t old enough to learn that much anyway,” I pointed out. “And they’ve been through a lot of trauma lately.”
“They’ll be through a good deal more if our enemies get to them!”
“They’re not going to get to them.”
“Of course not.” Hilde’s shrewd old-lady eyes met mine. “You’re going to be here every moment of every day.”
I crossed my arms at her. “We’re not doing this again.”
