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Adra sighed in what sounded like annoyance. “Humans live on fast-forward,” he told me. “It’s quite distressing.”
“Is it?”
“Terribly. I adopt a habit to help me fit in, and the next time I visit, it’s doing precisely the opposite. Snuff, you know.”
“Snuff?”
He nodded solemnly. “Your people used to have these pretty little jeweled or carved boxes—I had one of elephant ivory—at the European courts. All the nobility carried them, even the women. They went around sniffing and sneezing all day long.” His nose twitched, and something about the combo of the round face and the wide eyes and the rapidly twitching nose reminded me of a rabbit. It made me want to laugh, in spite of everything.
I wondered if that had been the point.
“But the next time I visited,” he continued, “just a few hundred years later, and took out my box, everyone looked at me as if I was mad!”
“It . . . must be frustrating,” I said, because what do you say to that?
“You have no idea. And now you tell me that these”—he regarded his cigarette sadly—“are on their way out, too?”
“They’re bad for your health,” I said, and received an eye roll in return.
“As if humans ever cared about that.” He put it out in an ashtray he conjured up—at least, I was pretty sure that it hadn’t been there a second ago—and looked at me pleasantly. “I was wondering if perhaps there was a reason you sicced an Ancient Horror on us?”
I blinked at him for a second, having been caught off guard by the question, which had been asked in the same genial tone as everything else. “What?”
He regarded me for a moment, and then he nodded. “As I thought. You didn’t know.”
“Know . . . what?”
“That yesterday morning, you shifted an ancient demon into the Shadowland, right in the middle of the marketplace.”
“What?” Pritkin said, suddenly coming back to life.
Adra stopped and considered. “What was the marketplace,” he amended. “As you may have noticed, the damned thing destroyed most of it.”
I looked back and forth between the two men, feeling seriously confused. “Adra, I don’t know what you’re—”
And then I did.
It said something for the way my life worked lately that I’d actually forgotten all about that.
“Oh, shit.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “That’s what we said. Among other things.”
“And how do you know Cassie had anything to do with this?” Pritkin asked harshly.
“Ah, yes, that’s right, isn’t it?” Adra asked him. “Unlike most heirs apparent, you never bothered to attend the meetings.”
“Adra,” I said, but he held up a hand.
“There are safeguards to protect the city. They were needed in the dark times, and were never dismantled afterward due to the number of delicate issues regularly discussed here. Among other things, they do not allow one of the Great Dangers to simply transition in.” He’d been looking at Pritkin, but now he glanced at me. “At least, not without help.”
“How . . .”
I stopped and swallowed, feeling sick. I’d shifted away the creature at the coven’s version of Grand Central Station to protect the people there, without bothering to consider the ones here. I’d been attempting to help, but instead, I’d just passed the buck. How many had paid for it?
“Were there many casualties?” I asked, because I had to know.
“None, as far as I know.”
