Pritkin pulled me through an Alice in Wonderland–type forest filled with familiar things that suddenly made no sense: trees recognizable only by their height, ground just a huge thing that tilted under my feet like a carnival ride, sky an expanse so immense I couldn’t look at it, couldn’t look, not without feeling like I might fall into it and go mad.
Only I was sort of feeling that way anyway.
And instead of better, the sensory distortion was getting worse, and getting worse fast, along with a gut-twisting craving I couldn’t identify, but that had my hands shaking and my skin chilling one second and flushing hotly the next. I looked at my hand and thought I could see actual steam rising from it, an orange-red haze so bright, so bright against the darkened forest that I could only stare.
The branches that we pushed through lashed my body like a hundred little whips. They painted my skin with lines of fire, hot and peppery. Until the sound, the taste, the scent of them swirled up around me with every new stroke, leaving me writhing under their pain-filled touch in a different sort of ecstasy.
Pritkin stopped abruptly, and I ran into him. And discovered that I hadn’t known ecstasy at all. My front connected with his back, and he felt so good, so good I couldn’t believe it. All the other impressions faded, leaving just this: just smooth, warm, rigid, flexing under my hands. Salt under my tongue. Musk in my nose from the sweat I was still trying to lick off when somebody pulled me away, when somebody else wrapped me in a coat, when they separated us.
Pritkin was cursing. I couldn’t understand the words, but the sounds spoke right to my brain, like the sounds of scuffling. He was fighting them; who was he fighting? I didn’t know, couldn’t tell. Just knew that I missed him, that I needed to get back to him, that I had to touch—
I found him again—I have no idea how. I was all but blind, my eyes working but not seeing, my senses so overwhelmed they had practically shorted out, my head reeling and steps faltering—
Until I touched him. And suddenly, everything made sense again. He was still trying to talk, to say something, whether to me or to them I didn’t know, but it was a problem with my tongue down his throat. I didn’t care. He tasted good; he tasted like life, and sanity and steadiness. Where my hands touched him, they felt almost normal, except for this weird sensation that they were sinking into his chest, merging with it. But that was fine, too. I wanted to merge with him, wanted to sink inside, wanted—
Hands wrenched me away, a physical pain. Harsh voices sounded in my ears, but I didn’t understand. And then someone stopped in front of me, pulling my face up to the light, but I couldn’t see anything; my eyes had gone crazy again. They kept trying to taste things, and that wasn’t right . . . was it?
“See what happens when you play around with time, girl?” a terse voice asked. And then the hands were pulling me farther away, and I was starting to panic, and fight to get back, slipping out of the coat and out of their grip, and running—
For a second. Until they caught me, and wrestled me back, and someone said, “Enough of this!”
And then there was a light.
And then there was nothing.
Chapter Nineteen
I woke up in what I guessed was the Pythian Court, since I was pretty sure Gertie was the one who’d just snatched me out of Wales. Pretty sure, but not certain, because Pritkin’s spell was still in full force. And right then, I couldn’t be certain of anything.
But I came around on a chaise in a small, dark room. It had garnet curtains with pompom fringe, an open door with light spilling in, and people talking in heated but hushed voices outside. And some wallpaper, some terrible, terrible stripy wallpaper that I fell into before I could decipher what they were saying, and then couldn’t get back out of again.
Every which way I turned there was another line, shooting up immensely high, into the sky. Like the tallest of trees in a strange forest. And for some reason that thought made me panic and run, and get even further entangled in the never-ending jungle of lines, like bars on a cage, like poles on a merry-go-round, like light posts flashing by in a long, steady line. . . .
The carriage stopped.
Which surprised me since I hadn’t realized I’d been in one.
Someone pulled me out, onto the sidewalk by one of the light posts, and I stumbled into it. I couldn’t catch myself because my hands were cuffed behind me. Someone else gripped my arm, steadying me, and tried to say something, but he was cut off by voices from several sides.
It didn’t matter. I couldn’t concentrate on the voices. I couldn’t concentrate on anything.
Because whenever I did, it was terrifying.
A monster twisted its neck around to look at me, a horrible, elongated thing, like something out of a nightmare. Its massive curve filled half the street, along with a head full of flaring nostrils and enormous teeth. And rolling eyes that stared at me, before it gave an awful, whinnying roar, like it was laughing at my terror—
“Get her away from the horse!” someone said, and I was jerked back, screaming.
And was then marched down the sidewalk in the middle of a crowd of people I didn’t look at, was afraid to look at. I just stared at the sidewalk instead, a boring stretch of brick that even my messed-up brain couldn’t seem to do anything with. And at the feet of the guards or whoever they were, marching alongside me in their black, black boots.
The boots started to leave tarry footprints on the stones, like rubber on a hot day melting in the sun, even though it wasn’t day. I knew that because we kept passing under streetlamps that threw circles of light onto the sticky footprints. And then onto pools of melted leather as the boots began to dissolve, first into puddles, then into holes that opened up in the perfectly uniform brick, deep and dark and—
The sidewalk swallowed a guard.
It just opened up and gobbled him down between one second and the next, I was sure of it. But no one else seemed to notice he was gone, no one else seemed to notice, and what if I was next? What if—
A surge of panic hit, and I tried to run, in a burst of speed that got me nowhere. Because the coat I was wearing again tripped me and arms caught me, and I was twisting and fighting and I must have hit someone, because a voice cursed. And someone else asked a question I didn’t hear.
“Damned if I know!” the first voice said. “Just get her inside. Sooner she’s put away, the better!”
And then I was thrown over someone’s shoulder, and carried down an alley and up some rickety wooden stairs, and into a hallway. It was dim, too, almost dark, with just a few patches of diffuse light from above giving any illumination at all. But even that was too much.
Because there were posters on the walls, most small, more like flyers, others as large as a newspaper page. But almost all of them contained faces, sneering, jeering, hateful faces that seemed to leap off the walls, yelling and threatening, or rattling the bars of the cells many of them seemed to be in, trying to get at me. And some weren’t even human.
A large Were leapt out of a page and into the hall, snapping at me with huge, slavering jaws, causing me to shriek and twist away and end up on the floor when the man carrying me lost his grip.
I leapt to my feet, in a crouch, panting, looking for the threat—
Which was suddenly gone.
I stared around in panicked confusion, not sure where to go or what was real. Someone had hit one of the hanging lights, and the dim circle strobed the small corridor, making the gallery of horrors that much more terrifying. They all seemed to be coming for me now, a hundred ghostly hands stretching impossibly long, reaching, reaching, reaching—
Until one of them jerked back with a curse. “The bawd bit me!”
“What do you expect?” someone else asked. “She’s off her chump.”
“She isn’t mad; she’s bespelled!” a more familiar voice said, sounding furious. “I would expect a group of
magic users to be able to recognize the diff—”
There was a sound of a fist hitting meat.
The voice cut off.
And then I was dragged into a room that branched off the corridor.
It was wood floored and walled, with old gas lights overhead and a large wooden piece of furniture in the middle, like a freestanding counter. There were no posters. But there were two boxes on the counter, black ones the size of shoe boxes that looked familiar, but that I didn’t look at too long in case they turned into something else.
I looked back toward the door instead.
And found Rosier standing just behind me, bleeding from the lip.
“It’ll wear off,” he told me, low-voiced and hurried. “Until then, don’t trust your senses. They’ve been compromised—”
“No shit,” I told him thickly, and had the pleasure of seeing him stare.
And then one of the men on the other side of the desk slapped a baton down on it, with a crack that reverberated through my confused brain like a gunshot. “No talking!”
Okay, I thought, trying not to collapse in a heap.
And then someone was stripping the coat off me, but he’d forgotten about the cuffs. So the leather pooled at the ends of my arms and sent me to my knees when he jerked on it. He finally figured it out and released me, so I could sprawl naked on the dirty floor.
I looked up to see another leather coat coming toward me, with one of the boxes in his hand. And Rosier suddenly tried to fight, and then to run, and he seemed really dedicated to the idea. Because it took three of them to wrestle him to the floor as well.
I didn’t run.
What was the point?
The sidewalk would just eat me.
And then the lights went out.
• • •
It was wonderful.
It was wonderful.
I didn’t know where I was or how I got here. But suddenly, there was no light, no sound, no anything to provide stimulus for my overheated brain. Just a lot of warm, floaty nothingness, peaceful, calm, allowing me a chance to breathe.
Which made it pretty damned close to paradise.
After a while, I put out a hand but didn’t touch anything. I felt around with a toe, but there didn’t seem to be anything down there, either. And strain as much as I liked, I still couldn’t hear a sound.
That was okay; it gave me time to think.
I thought about taking a nap.
It would be so easy here, to just drift away. . . .
But there was something I needed to do first. Something that scratched at the inside of my head like a persistent fingernail. It was annoying, like an insect I couldn’t shoo, or like Rosier when he was talking and talking and—
Rosier.
I needed to find Rosier. And then we needed . . . we needed . . . we had to do something that I couldn’t remember right now, and chasing down the memory that skittered around inside my skull sounded like way too much work. But it was important, and Rosier would know what it was.
I had to get to Rosier.
I wondered how.
And the next second, my butt hit a dusty, hardwood floor with a thump.
It was a loud thump, and it hurt like I’d fallen from a height. For a moment I just stayed there, dazed from the shock of the fall, waiting to be grabbed, to be jerked up, to be reimprisoned. But none of that happened.
Possibly because no one was there.
I took stock.
Dirty wooden floor, check. Big, hulking wood thing, check. Rosier—no Rosier. But I was back in what I guessed was the Victorian equivalent of war mage HQ, where I’d been a second ago. Or maybe not a second; I couldn’t really tell. But it felt like longer, and my head felt a little clearer.
I realized I was holding a box.
It was black and shiny, the same one they’d imprisoned me in, at a guess. And I’d been right: I had seen ones like it before. The mages used them as magical traps, and as an alternative to coming up with cells for bad girls like me.
Or bad boys.
Slowly, I got into a crouch, and then even more slowly, I poked just my eyeballs over the edge of the wood thing.
There was another box.
It was just sitting there, all alone, out in the open, without even anyone to guard it. And I guess that made a sort of sense. Why worry about people in little boxes? People in little boxes didn’t go anywhere.
Well, not usually.
But whether it had to do with mother’s blood, or with being Pythia or what, I’d never had any problem opening the things. It had mostly gotten me into trouble before, when I’d let out stuff I wasn’t supposed to. Like when I’d ended up rooming for a while with three old women, ancient demigoddesses the Senate had imprisoned and I’d accidentally released.
That had been fun.
I’d spent more than a few moments in those weeks cursing whatever Fate thought it was a laugh to constantly mess with me.
I was sort of okay with it now.
Now I just had to let out Rosier.
Which would have been a lot easier if another man hadn’t just come in from the hall.
He was big and brown-haired and bearded, and dressed like a war mage. I’d just stood up when he banged the door open and I spun around and stared at him. For a moment, we just stayed like that, me with my back to the counter, my box hidden behind my leg, and him with his coat half off, water rolling off the waxed leather to puddle at his feet.
And then he blinked and finished taking off his coat.
“If this is Cavendish’s idea of a birthday surprise, I approve,” he told me, hanging the coat on a rack. And revealing a Victorian-era version of Pritkin’s war mage getup of potion belts and holsters, guns and knives. But he didn’t draw any of them, or even look particularly concerned.
Maybe he didn’t find a blond naked chick all that intimidating.
His eyes went over me, and a slight smile broke out behind his beard. “It’ll be hard to top this come November,” he told me. “If I do the same for him, the poor gel’ll freeze!”
I didn’t say anything.
“What do you have behind your back, little one?” he asked, finally noticing my awkward stance.
I shook my head and still didn’t speak.
“Oh, come now. You can show me.” He came toward me, face cracking into a full-on grin. “You can show me anything you like.”
So I did.
And then the room was empty again, and the box didn’t even feel heavier.
I clutched it.
I really liked this box.
His coat was still dripping onto the floor where he’d left it. I went over and put it on. It was huge on me, even bigger than the last one, and it didn’t have any weapons in it. But I still felt better.
I’d been a naked chick with a box.
Now I was a clothed chick with a box.
That’s what you call progress.
I grabbed the second box off the counter and fled.
Back through the door into the hall, back through the gallery of monsters, who still tweaked and flinched a little as I passed, but no longer tried to leap out of their wanted posters to claw at me. Back through the door, which wasn’t locked, because who locks the front door of a police station? Even a supernatural one? And then back into the narrow alleyway, which had turned into a narrow, brick-lined, water-filled canal, because it was bucketing down outside.
I stopped abruptly.
I might just as well have run straight into hell.
Rain pelted me in stinging silver lines that burst on my skin, hissing and fizzing like miniature comets. Lightning flashed like fireworks overhead, illuminating the street and making all the shadows grow and writhe. I stared around, seeing van Gogh’s Starry Night come to life if you added a few Goya monsters in the co
rners, and I suddenly wondered if either of them had known an incubus.
And then thunder hit, practically on top of me, crashing like a nuclear blast inside my skull, until it was all I could do not to start screaming again.
I slammed back inside, put my back to the door, and then just stayed there, shuddering and shaking and breathing hard.
And realizing just how much of a mess I was in.
I couldn’t go out. I couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t shift, might never be able to shift again, the way I felt, which meant they were going to find me. They were going to find me any minute and lock me up, because the trap might not work, but they’d find something that did. I knew war mages well enough to know that, and I didn’t have that kind of time; I didn’t have any—
I didn’t have any.
Boots hit a wooden floor, coins jingled in a pocket, and the smell of a cigar, sweet and pungent, teased the air. And then a cry from inside the room I’d just left: “They’re gone!”
And I was slamming back into the rain-drenched hell outside, leaping off the wooden landing, and scurrying under the stairs, just before three guys burst out of the door behind me, the rattling of boards over my head as they descended almost worse than the thunder.
But in a way, that was good. Because I was so preoccupied with the drum, drum, drumming in my head that I forgot to react. I don’t think I so much as flinched when brilliant lights illuminated the outside of the building a second later, or when an alarm began blaring inside, muffled but still distinct this close, or when more thundering feet tore out of the door, calling instructions to each other.
Or when a man stopped, right over the top of my head.
And just stayed there.
I felt my heartbeat, which had already been pretty fast, edge into the danger zone. All he had to do was look down. The area under the stairs was dark, but light from above striped it like Gertie’s damned wallpaper.
I could see the soles of his boots through the slats of wood, scuffed and worn but still solid. Like the bulk of him, heavy enough to make the boards groan when he shifted weight from foot to foot, although that could have been because of all the hardware he was wearing. Hardware I didn’t have, because I didn’t have anything, not anything, just a soaking-wet coat and a shivering body and a couple of—