Chapter Twenty
I woke up on a hard, furry chest for the second time in one day, and it was still not fun. My mouth was dry, my body ached, and I felt like I’d been drugged. Or hit in the head repeatedly with a large, padded hammer.
I felt something else, too.
“Have to pee,” I gasped, and the chest underneath me moved around before my hand was placed on the side of what felt like a wooden bucket. Opening bleary eyes, I saw that, yep. Bucket. “Seriously?” I asked Pritkin, who was sharing what looked suspiciously like a cell with me.
“Fey accommodations for prisoners are not luxurious,” he confirmed.
That was an understatement. The little room was about the size of a large bathroom, which was ironic considering that it didn’t have a toilet. It did have a rocky floor to match the walls and all of it was in the local black stone, which left it dark and foreboding.
That wasn’t helped by the fact that there was only a single window set high in one wall with bars across it to provide light, but that mostly just striped the darkness. And another, smaller opening in the door, although it seemed to face a dark corridor because nothing was coming in that way at all, and nobody had left us a lantern. They hadn’t left a cot, blanket, or water source, either, just a plain, slightly damp, black room with some straw on the floor and a bucket.
Goddamn, I hated the fey.
“Prisoners or captives?” I snarled. “What’s her name kidnapped us!”
“Lady Bodil, and so it would seem.”
“What’s the point?” I demanded, stumbling to my feet and finding a corner where I could use my bucket. “Locking us up so we can’t beat her pathetic champion? Like somebody else won’t?”
“I assume that she is planning to cheat,” Pritkin said, leaning his head against the wall and closing his eyes. “And doesn’t want us interfering.”
“Obstructing a champion is supposed to be off-limits!” I said, only to have him snort derisively.
Because yeah.
Faerie.
“So, are you going to get us out?” I asked when I’d finished and walked back over. The stone walls looked pretty thick based on the amount of rock visible on the window ledge, but Pritkin had an app for that.
Or, to be more precise, a fey ability that he’d inherited from his mother, who’d stolen it from his father before imprisoning him in a tree and running off to Faerie. Where she’d been sure that her command of all four elements would cause her to be welcomed with open arms at court. Spoiler alert: it hadn’t.
She’d been a mongrel mix of human, fey, and god blood since her mother, Igraine, was Nimue’s child with a human. Nimue had wanted a leader to manage the slave trade she’d started on Earth but didn’t have confidence in any of her courtiers. So, she’d given birth to one and sent her to Earth with lofty lies about earning her place at court through her devotion to the cause.
Once there, Igraine had married another human, and their twice-mongrel daughter Morgaine was therefore considered beneath contempt at court regardless of who her grandmother was. But she’d had ambitions, and they hadn’t included dying on Earth like her mother. Ambitions that had made her an abomination as far as the fey were concerned.
To improve her status, she had co-opted their abilities by stealing them through sex magic with a demon lord. Who had stolen them in turn from the various part-fey women with whom he’d knocked boots through the years. And the half-demon child that had resulted was something the fey didn’t even have a name for.
“Abomination” fell seriously short in Pritkin’s case.
So, prince or not, he’d been left to struggle and hopefully die on Earth. And the few times he’d made his way here through the years, being eager—at first—to learn about his fey heritage, had not gone well. It looked like nothing had changed.
“Enchanted,” he said briefly.
“What?”
“The walls. And the window. And the door. This is one of the storerooms for the stables, but they’ve held fey here before. The entire room is warded.”
“But what about demons? Or mages?” I squatted down and poked him. “You must have something!”
That won me a vivid green look. “And Pythias?” he said pointedly.
I sat down on my metal ass. “I’m tapped out. Even if the portal gods favor me, I’m going nowhere for at least a day.”
“Then that is a problem.”
I felt my suspicions rising. He sounded entirely too Zen for Pritkin, who was not known for his patience or his ability to sleep in the middle of a crisis. Yet he appeared to be dozing off again.
“And you’re perfectly fine with this because?” I demanded.
“I’m . . . conflicted.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that, in here, you’re likely to survive. Bodil isn’t entirely benign, but she isn’t likely to murder us. She was the one who helped us get away from that massacre in the deep.”
“ She helped us?” She’d looked more likely to stick a knife in us to me.
“Her people did,” Pritkin clarified, his eyes still closed, and I wondered if that was what that ominous-looking cloud had been, some of Bodil’s black-robed guards. “Rhosier called them, but they didn’t have time to check with her first.” His lips twisted. “Probably just as well.”
“A cook called the guards of a noble house?” I asked, not understanding anything. And when he didn’t answer, I poked him again.
Damn it, wake up!
Pritkin sighed and sat up, realizing that I wasn’t going to let him sleep. “She hit me with an extra dose of Somnolence,” he said, rubbing a hand over his face. “It’s starting to wear off but keeps trying to pull me back under.”
“Can’t you do something to negate it?” Counterspells were drilled into war mages until they were almost automatic. I’d have expected him to have used one already.
He pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment and then shook his head as if trying to clear it. “No. You’re not the only one who’s tapped out.”
I felt my eyes widen. “But . . . all that energy, all that magic that you took from a whole camp full of fey—”
“Gone. I’m surprised it lasted this long.”
“But there were hundreds of fey —”
“And hundreds more harrying me the whole way here and ever since I arrived. It’s gone, Cassie. I used the last of it, along with most of my own magic, in the fight in the kitchen.”
His head slumped back against the rock again, and I sat there for a second, feeling stunned. Pritkin didn’t run out of magic. The demon blood he so deplored had made him far stronger than any war mage I’d ever met.
Even on a bad day, he was a tank .
But it looked like the tank . . . was pooped.
And then the rest of what he’d said hit me. “Wait. Wait . You were chasing down a couple dozen fey on your own while practically out of magic?” He cracked an eye and just looked at me. “Why?”
“You know why.”
Yes, I did! Which only made it worse. If they hadn’t been so dead set on taking me down, that little stunt would have gotten him killed! And it wouldn’t have even helped me and—
And then I was hitting him, which didn’t make much of an impact as I was currently as weak as a kitten. And found my wrists captured after a second anyway, which only increased my fury. “You could have died! ”
“So could you.” The green eyes were practically neon, never a good sign. “And as you said once to me, why is it all right for you to risk your life every moment of the day, but I can’t risk mine to save you?”
“There were three dozen fey! You weren’t going to save me! You were going to die alongside me!”
“And you think I wouldn’t prefer that?” I abruptly found myself on my back, with an angry war mage on top of me. And, okay, I couldn’t complain about sleepiness now. Pritkin looked like he had when he’d burst into that kitchen, having tracked me down after our last fight.
And yeah.
We hadn’t had a chance to talk that out, had we?
“You think a crown means a damn to me if you aren’t there to share it?” he demanded. “What do you think I’d do if you die? Have you ever considered that? What do you think I’d do?”
“You’d finish this,” I said, staring up at him, my anger dissipating in the force of the heat coming off him.
Pritkin said a very bad word. And I guessed it felt good because he chased it with a few more. “We are through with this, do you understand? I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, even talking to Bodil. As if she could somehow protect us!”
“I don’t think that’s too likely after the impression I made,” I confessed. “I’m sorry; I should have listened—”
But he was already shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter. I had time to think about it while you were out, something this place didn’t afford me before. And we’re not going to be her champion; we’re not going to be anything. When we get out of here— if we get out—we’re done. We’re packing up and—”
“We are not—”
At which point I didn’t get hit back, but I did get shaken hard. Which wasn’t much better as the back of my head impacted the floor a few times before he noticed, grabbed me up, and cradled the bruised item in one strong hand while hauling me against his chest. Which was going a mile a minute because Somnolence or not, remembering that awful moment in the watery death trap had woken him up.
And set his resolve.
“Pritkin,” I began after a moment as he rocked us back and forth, but apparently, it wasn’t my time to talk.
“Do you think I care about any of this?” he whispered against my hair. “Crowns and thrones and power and wealth—” he spat another curse. “That’s what my father lives for. Not me!”
“But you’re a war mage . You took an oath—”
“To protect the Pythia, which is what I’ve damned well been trying to do!”
“It’s a little more comprehensive than that,” I said softly, but he wasn’t listening.
“And I used to be a war mage. Something I took on after my wife died to give some meaning to my existence. The Corps was hemorrhaging mages whenever they faced a demon, so I stepped in to help, and maybe I did. Or maybe that was a lie I told myself since what else was there to live for?”
His voice grew rough. “The fey were right. I never should have been born. But I was and can do one good thing with my life. I can get you out of here!”
Somehow, I didn’t think he meant out of the cell.
“And go where?” I asked.
“The hells.”
That had been a rhetorical question, so I hadn’t expected an answer. Especially not that one. “What?”
“The answer is the hells.” He pulled back to look at me. “We can go there, Cassie—”
“But . . . you hate the hells—”
“I hate most of them; there are a few exceptions. And they make up an entire universe, which even the council doesn’t know the full extent of! We could travel for years, centuries, and never see everything.
“And maybe, somewhere, find a place for us. Something beautiful in its way, and strange and different, possibly enough to accept a couple of vagabonds without too much fuss. . .”
He trailed off, but I could see it in his eyes, the first spark of hope he’d shown in a while. And it completely creeped me out because Pritkin . . . no. Just no.
He hated the hells and everything to do with them.
But maybe he hated this place more. He’d come here expecting to lose, knowing far more about Faerie than I had. And expecting to die shortly after that, which was something he had long ago come to terms with.
But then I’d shown up, the fey had freaked out, and he’d had to watch me in danger on almost an hourly basis ever since. No wonder he wanted to flee and take me with him! It wasn’t like the thought had never occurred to me.
“You know what I used to daydream about?” I asked him. “Sometimes in Vegas, after a particularly close call, but especially at Gertie’s. After one of those days when I’d had my ass handed to me by Agnes a dozen times, and I was sure I’d never figure this out. That the only thing I was proving was that I wasn’t worthy of my title?”
His jawline alone said that I wasn’t getting through. But it didn’t stop me because he needed to hear this and to understand—he wasn’t the only one who’d ever been caught in a pit of despair that seemed to have no way out. I’d lived there for months, maybe years; I didn’t even know anymore.
But long enough to recognize it on someone else’s face.
“I thought about you ,” I said. “About picking you up and just . . . going. Somewhere, somewhen, where nobody would find us. First as a vacation, and God knows we’ve earned one! And then. . .
“Well, it’s not like anyone would know we were gone, would they? Or if I extended it for a little while, maybe even a long while. Time enough to have a life—”
“What’s wrong with that?” Pritkin rasped, even though I saw the truth in his eyes. He knew what was wrong with it, just as I had every time I’d looked at myself in the mirror. Which is why I hadn’t much, not wanting to meet my own eyes.
Because I could have done it. My God, I could have! So many times.
Even with the risk that somebody, maybe Gertie herself, would come after me, because what was that next to the dangers I faced every day? And perhaps she’d have had pity, even let me stay. After all, if there was no future, what was there for me to go back for?
“To make sure that there is one,” I could hear the words in her voice and see her gimlet eyes boring a hole through my soul.
Gertie had never let me get away with anything. Gertie, who had given up everything to be Pythia, understood the price she’d paid, that we all had. And she’d made sure that I did, too.
And why.
“Because if I did that,” I said softly. “I might never come back. Might not be able to; the Pythian power might desert me. But even if it didn’t . . . after years, after a child or two—” Pritkin closed his eyes as if in pain. “After what we have becomes all there is, could you give it up? For the war, for everyone else’s good, while knowing the cost —”
“I could give a fuck about the war!” he said savagely, those green eyes flying open. “I’m here for you. Not Faerie, whoever the hell she is, not the human realm, who never accepted me and never will, and not the damned demons. They and the fey can all burn, but not you. Not you!”
And then he kissed me, and it was all there, every word he’d said written in another language, a harsher, darker, more primal one, that raised something similar in me. Something dangerous because he could talk me into this; oh, yes, he could. Not because it was right—there was nothing right about it. But because it was easy, like kissing him, like falling into his arms and never looking back.
So easy that it took everything I had to wrench away.
“And what exactly would be the point in having that life,” I demanded harshly. “Those children, that future—when we’d know, every single day, that it was a lie? That we weren’t building something lasting, something real ? Just living on borrowed time until it all fell apart, for us, for them, in a blaze of hate and retribution from a bunch of divine monsters we weren’t willing to fight?”
“To fight, but not to defeat,” Pritkin said, his face white and terrible. “If we can’t even take a bunch of fey—”
“Fuck the fey!” I said, because yeah, he knew. John Pritkin was a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t get lost in fantasy sometimes when the reality felt so very bleak. But he knew everything that I’d been saying.
He just didn’t see a way out.
I took his hands. “You keep saying that they’re winning, but so far, there’s only one point on the board, and it’s ours. And yeah, they’ve been trying their best to kill us ever since we got here, but we’re not dead yet . It seems like they’re the ones who are losing, and they know it. Why bother to risk so much to take us down if we’re not a threat?”
“They know exactly how much of a threat you are—”
“And they’re right.” I looked at him steadily. “But they’re underestimating you. Prince of two realms, holder of all four elements, commander of three forms of magic—”
“When I have any to command.”
“—and all-around badass. They should worry.”
“So should I,” Pritkin muttered and pulled me down.