I smelled our destination before I saw it. The stench was as bad as a battlefield, all raw viscera, blood and excrement, but the sounds were worse. Far worse.
          I stopped at the bottom of a hill to pull the end of my headscarf over my nose. I was dressed as a Romanian peasant woman, because noble ladies didn’t go running around the countryside in this era. And because the headscarf helped to hide my blonde curls and shaded my blue eyes, while the shapeless brown dress made me almost invisible in the deep woods. The scarf was also proving useful as a face mask, not that it helped much.
          A woman screamed in the distance and I flinched, and grabbed hold of a tree.
          There was no way I wasn’t going to be sick.
          “Cassie?” The man I was with turned back from a perch near the top of the hill. It backed up to the forest, but on the other side was open country leading to a small city, or so I’d been told. Fortunately, I couldn’t see anything from here.
          If my companion was bothered by the carnage on the other side, he gave no sign. Quite the contrary. He looked better than I’d ever seen him: youthful and energized, with the dark brown eyes sparkling, the sun-kissed skin flushed and rosy, and the mahogany colored hair, usually so tightly confined, flowing freely on the breeze.
          He almost looked human again.
          Of course, Mircea Basarab, one-time prince, and current member of the North American Vampire Senate, was usually as cool as a cucumber. It was one reason he’d been tapped to lead the vampire army in the ongoing war. He was also originally from our present bit of hell: old Wallachia, now part of modern-day Romania, but in this era a smaller, wilder, and far more vicious place.
          I flinched as another scream shredded the air, punctuating my thoughts.
          “Are you all right?” Mircea called back, as if wondering why I was hugging a tree instead of climbing up beside him. I refrained from shooting him the bird—double handed—because that would have necessitated letting go of said tree, which would have resulted in me face planting in the muck. But my expression must have been eloquent, because he started to climb back down.
          I watched him come and didn’t bother to wipe off my scowl.
          My name is Cassie Palmer, the time traveling, ghost whispering, chief seer of the supernatural world, a job description that sounds way more fun than it actually is. Meaning that, in the five months since I took office, I’d seen some shit. And smelled some, too, I thought, as the wind changed, bringing yet more evidence that, yes, people do soil themselves when they die, especially when they die screaming on the end of a pike, because a madman related to my current travel partner had decided that he didn’t like their nose or something.
          But today was kind of extreme, even for me.
          Vlad III of Romania, the man history knows as Dracula, was better known in his own day as Vlad Țepeș, “The Impaler.” And he’d really earned the title. Nobody had any idea how many people he’d killed by his favorite torture method, but it was a lot, possibly as many as eighty thousand over the course of his short reign.
          It sounded like half of them were on the other side of the hill. Possibly with their pikes—long, sharpened poles on which they were destined to writhe their last—arranged in pretty geometric shapes so that their nut job of a lord could admire the effect from the tower of his castle. I didn’t know, because I wasn’t going up there.
          I wasn’t going anywhere except back home.
          Seriously, screw this!
          “Cassie.” A strong hand, sun bronzed despite the fact that its owner had been dead for something like six centuries, grasped my arm.
          Good, that makes it easier, I thought, and prepared to shift us out.
          “You promised me.” The dark brown eyes were calm and steady on mine.
          I arrested the spell part way though, long enough to glare at him. “I said we’d see! We’ve seen.”
          “You haven’t.”
          I gave what sounded like a laugh and felt like a scream. “Yeah. Not gonna, either.”
          I had enough nightmare fodder for a couple hundred years already. I could do without adding to the pile. Not that the chorus of cries that seemed to be getting louder every minute wasn’t already doing that!
          “You don’t have to come,” Mircea assured me, the honeyed tones dripping with power, because he wasn’t above attempting to influence me.
          And despite the fact that I knew what he was doing, despite the fact that it was what he always did, I felt some of the tension leave my spine. Mircea’s voice sounded like an angel’s and felt like a drug. Mircea’s voice ought to be illegal.
          Not that it mattered in this case, because the surroundings were working hard against him.
          “We are not doing this.” My own voice was flat and completely lacking in any kind of charm.
          “You’re right,” he agreed easily, his arm going around my shoulders, and a sense of calm, peace, and singing joy spreading through my veins, because he was really pushing it. “This isn’t something for your eyes. I will find her and bring her here.”
          He started to move away, but I held on. “Not a chance.”
          Surprised brown eyes looked back at me, from over a muscular shoulder. Mircea wasn’t used to people disagreeing with him, particularly female people. Especially when he looked the way he did today.
          Unlike me, he was in a nobleman’s attire, which in this era meant a fur-lined velvet surcoat, dark blue in his case, but rich and buttery enough that the nap gleamed with every movement. A pair of tall, black leather riding boots that hugged sculpted calves, and a silk undertunic and trousers in a matching dark blue, completed the look. They outlined an impressive expanse of chest and thighs that had hardened over years of horseback riding and one-on-one combat.
          He looked like a medieval Vogue ad, and that was without the added hotness of a curved, scimitar-like blade shoved though a heavy velvet sash. Most girls would have melted at the sight of him, much less after the amount of power he’d just pushed through that casual comment. He’d probably expected me to be a puddle on the ground, patiently awaiting my master’s return.
          But he wasn’t my master, and he wasn’t the one in charge here. I was. I was Pythia, and any changes to the timeline were my responsibility.
          And this one wasn’t happening.
          “There has to be a few thousand people over that hill—” I began.
          “Cassie—”
          “—at a minimum. There’s no way you can fog that many memories. You know you can’t!”
          He turned back to me then, finally realizing that charm wasn’t going to work this time. He was going to have to plead his case. Of course, being Mircea, it was less pleading and more impatient explaining, but at least he was taking this seriously.
          “I don’t have to,” he argued. “The majority are poor sufferers soon to die. If they are aware enough to understand what they see, they won’t live long enough to tell anyone. I merely have to avoid the guards—”
          “And how many of those are there?”
          I could almost see the cogs turning. That alone told me that he wasn’t feeling himself. He should have had a smooth, easy-to-believe lie prepared before he left the hilltop. But I wasn’t the only one a little off kilter today.
          I guessed that was fair, considering that his wife was about to be on one of those pikes. That was why we were here: to rescue her from a hideous fate courtesy of Mircea’s own brother. And I thought I had family problems.
          Of course, Vlad hadn’t known that the peasant woman who’d come to court, claiming to be his elder brother’s secret wife, was the real deal. She’d wanted help in locating the child that she and Mircea had had together, and which she’d subsequently lost. But he’d assumed that she was trying to extort money from him, using his dead brother’s name.
          And extorting money from Vlad Țepeș was not a smart move.
          Predictably, she’d ended up as another of his gruesome lawn decorations, something that Mircea hadn’t known for years afterward, having been on the run at the time from some angry nobles who had blinded and then buried him alive. Mircea went into the ground as a clueless, cursed human, and emerged several hours later as a severely traumatized, half-healed, dirty vampire in a country that had a serious hate-on for his kind. It had been a toss-up as to which would get him first, the nobles or the torch wielding mobs.
          As it happened, it was neither, as he was nothing if not capable, even then. And imminent death does tend to focus the mind. He’d run like hell, but not before dropping what money he had off with his wife, by way of a trusted servant.
          It just goes to show how differently men view things than women. Mircea had thought that he was keeping Elena—his wife before death did them part—from the trauma of seeing him as a monster, and leaving her with enough money to last for years while he sorted out his strange new life. It had never crossed his mind that, of course, getting paid off by a tight-lipped servant would leave her with only one assumption: that she was being dumped. That her prince had found himself a princess, and that his dirty little secret was being shoved to the side with a bag of gold.
          I could sympathize; I honestly could. Especially since the poor woman had shortly thereafter discovered that she was pregnant. That wasn’t a great fate in a time when single mothers were looked upon less than kindly.
          Of course, they were looked on considerably kinder than the mothers of bouncing baby dhampirs.
          Because the half vamp, half human, result of coitus between a partly turned vamp and a human woman were deemed monsters, too. Elena had been alone, reviled, and terrified for her baby. So, she’d taken what must have seemed like the only chance for her child, and given her away to a passing gypsy band.
          The gypsies were far more worried about vamps on the long stretches of lonely roads through the mountains than they were about dhampirs. In fact, they prized the latter for their tendency to kill the former, and took the child gladly, knowing that she’d be a potent asset once she grew up. It seemed as if everything had worked out as well as possible under the circumstances, but if it had, we wouldn’t have a story, now would we?
          As might have been expected, Elena had regretted her decision almost immediately, and had run after the band to retrieve her child. But they’d already broken camp, and she couldn’t find them. And search though she might, that had continued to be the case.
          Her daughter was well and truly lost, and with Mircea gone as well, she was left with only one hope: Vlad.
          And you know how that had turned out.
          So, yes, I sympathized with Mircea’s desire to save his wife from a completely unearned and truly terrible death. Taking her out of the timeline and bringing her into the future with us had seemed maybe, possibly, doable since she’d died, so her absence wouldn’t affect anything that happened afterward.             At least, it wouldn’t if no one knew about it.
          And no one was supposed to. Mircea had developed formidable mental powers in the last six centuries. The idea had been for him to fog the minds of any onlookers, allowing them to believe that the execution had happened on schedule. But even he couldn’t control the memories of a whole regiment.
          And based on the fact that he still hadn’t answered me, I was guessing that’s what we were looking at here.
          “You can freeze time,” he began, before I shook my head.
          “You know damned well—”
          “You can.”
          “And be powerless for the next day, or day and a half?” Because that particular spell sapped the hell out of me! “And with us stuck in freaking medieval Romania—”
          “I can protect you—”
          “—with a traumatized woman and half of your brother’s soldiers after us for stealing her away? Not to mention—”
          “Not half. No more than two, perhaps three hundred—”
          “—that he wants you dead anyway and will probably—” I stopped, my brain catching up. “Three hundred?”
          He took my arm in his and pulled me off the tree. “There was starting to be pushback from some of the nobles, and even a few commoners, to the number of executions,” he told me. “Mob violence was feared, and a large contingent was thought appropriate.”
          “Which only proves my point. I’m sorry, Mircea—”
          “However,” he persisted, leading me up the hill. “The soldiers are spread out in pockets, only two of which are close enough to cause us any problem. And once you freeze time—”
          “I am not freezing time!”
          “—we can be well away before anyone realizes what happened.”
          “If she’s even there,” I pointed out, because on top of everything else, we weren’t even sure that this was the right place.
          Vlad, of course, had tried to hide his mistake, after his brother returned some years later. Afraid for his life, he’d gone to the lengths of torching the village where Mircea’s wife had lived, slaughtering the inhabitants and putting out the rumor that a plague had carried them off. The bodies had had to be burned, he’d claimed, to keep the disease from spreading.
          Mircea might have bought the story, as diseases wiped out whole towns fairly regularly in this period. But his dhampir daughter had returned looking for her mother at around the same time, and instead found a knife that Vlad had dropped with the family crest on it, in the smoldering ruins of the village. Bent on revenge, she’d gone to the castle looking for him, but found Mircea instead. Who had immediately recognized the nine-year-old girl as the spitting image of his wife.
          He’d escaped with her, prizing her life above revenge. But he’d later returned once more, intending to rain down some serious justice on his brother, who was more of a monster as a human than Mircea had ever been as a vamp. But before he could close the deal, Vlad had let slip a secret, a little something that he’d learned as a young man, while serving as a page to the last Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. He’d informed Mircea that there were women called Pythias, who could travel in time and undo past wrongs, were they so inclined.
          And Mircea had intended to make damned sure that they were inclined.
          In the meantime, he’d kept Vlad alive and imprisoned, trying to force him to give up the place and time of his wife’s execution. Vlad had taken the knowledge to his grave, but the Pythian power was able to show me enough for Mircea to guess the locale, and a quick history lesson had coughed up a date. But who knew if it was the right one?
          She might not even be here, I thought, as we topped the hill, and the whole grisly scene spread out below us.
          For a moment I just stood there. It was farther away than I’d expected by the sound, which was fading in and out on the wind. But not far enough.
          Not even close.
          I don’t know what I’d expected, but not this. The ranks of the dead were like an army, and went from those long since expired, who were closer to the city walls, their sun-blackened corpses serving as a feast for a huge flock of birds; to the still suffering farther out, writhing slowly in their agony, their faint cries blending into a symphony of horror; to the poor unfortunates stacked like cord wood in wagons, waiting to their turn to die.
          I guess I’d always assumed that there must have been some exaggeration in the old stories, maybe a lot of it because plenty of people had hated Vlad and had reason to slander his name.
          But apparently not.
          I slowly sank to my knees, wanting to look away, but finding myself unable to do so.
          “You see, Cassie,” Mircea said softly, catching me. “We cannot leave her here.”
          No, we couldn’t. My skin iced over at the very thought. But even if I’d been willing to freeze time the way he wanted, that was a spell and like any other it had a range.
          No way would a time bubble extend so far.
          “Where is she?” I asked thickly, after a moment. There were so many people, some still slowly moving, that my eyes didn’t know where to look.
I’d seen less disturbing scenes in hell.
          “There.” Mircea pointed at a wagon far to the left, almost out of my field of vision. I could hardly make out anything at this range, and didn’t know how he could. But a moment later I understood, when a hand descended on my shoulder and some of his strength coursed through me. “Do you see now?”
          And, suddenly, I did. It was as if my eyes had acquired telephoto lenses, with the scene rushing at me so fast that I would have fallen, if I wasn’t already mostly down. My vision skewed as I tried to right myself, showing me a close-up of the underside of a bird, soaring far overhead, in an incongruously beautiful bright blue sky. Before coming in for a landing in the decomposing shell of a man’s rib cage, where its mate had made a nest.
          I jerked my eyes away, focusing on the individual blades of grass along a muddy cart path, instead. And at the mud and blood that had run together to form pools underneath the pikes. And at a wagon parked on the grass, where people were being unceremoniously unloaded like sacks of grain.
          They were being chucked casually onto the dirt, not with any particular malice, but just as if it didn’t matter anymore what happened to them. Which I guessed it didn’t. But with their hands and feet bound with heavy ropes, they had no way to stop their heads from being split open on rocks, or their faces from hitting the hard roadbed, or their limbs from being crushed by their own body weight or that of the other prisoners being thrown on top of them.
          I felt Mircea’s hand clench, and knew that, if I didn’t do something soon, he would. But we had to be careful. Broken bones could be mended; a broken time line was a lot harder to fix, as I knew from personal experience.
          “The other wagon is moving off,” he said, drawing my attention to an empty cart that had just started trundling its way back toward the city, probably to pick up another load. A contingent of soldiers moved along with it, leaving just the one close by. There were other such groups, but they were spaced out, the concentric circle having gotten fairly large at this point.
          And a time bubble might just cover the ones who were left.
          “All right,” I told him. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
          But we didn’t do that.
          We didn’t do anything.
          Because, a second later, a soldier grabbed for a woman whose long, dark hair had fallen down, hiding her face. Even with Vamp-o-Vision, I could only see a pair of dark eyes glittering from behind the strands. But they didn’t look panicked or terrified or crazed like everyone else’s.
          They looked furious.
          A second later, the guard staggered back, his face a mass of blood, like the splatter now dripping down her chin. I heard his screams, saw the others look up, saw her spring out of the wagon with no ropes to bind her, and what, at a guess, was the guard’s knife in her hand.
          I didn’t see much of anything after that, because she was a blur, savaging the squad so quickly that even vamp eyesight couldn’t follow it. And then she was gone, her naked body nothing but a pale blur before she disappeared into the thick tree line. Leaving two dozen corpses on the ground behind her, some of them still wearing the same shocked expression that I probably was.
          Because what the hell?


 


          “What was that?” I asked—no one. Because Mircea was no longer there. I looked around, surprised but not shocked—not at first. Vamps could move like the wind when they chose, and he was definitely motivated. But that was not what had just happened here.
          I felt the familiar magic of a shift swirl around me for a second, the kind that Pythias used to move through space instead of time. It dissolved into the wind, but it didn’t take me with it because I hadn’t cast it. Mircea had.
          Son of a bitch!
          “Mircea!” I yelled, furious.
          And then I went after him.
          A second later, I materialized in the middle of the dissipating trail of his spell. One that shouldn’t have existed, because Mircea wasn’t a Pythia. He could do a lot of things, but shift across space or time wasn’t one of them.
          Or it wasn’t supposed to be. But he’d recently run across a spell called Nodo D’Amore, or Lover’s Knot, that our enemies had been using in the war to allow one magic user to “borrow” another’s skill set. The only catch was that the two people involved had to be lovers.
          And guess whose ex-girlfriend happened to be Pythia?
          It was partly the fear that he’d shift himself to the past if I didn’t take him, hijacking my power and causing who knew how many problems in search of his murdered wife, that had gotten me here. Because magic didn’t seem to understand break ups. Mircea and I had, until recently, been an item, and I guessed that was good enough.
          “Mircea!” I yelled again.
          But it wasn’t Mircea who came thundering out of the trees.
          I just stood there for a second, staring at a party of at least three dozen fey warriors, their shiny black armor dappled with sunlight, their charging horses so light of foot that they almost seemed to fly, their silver hair streaming on the wind—
          And then I was shifting again, maybe half a second before they ran me the hell down.
          I rematerialized behind them, not having had time to think of another destination, facing the other way and confused and disoriented. And even more so when I spun in time to see Elena on the back of one of the steeds, fighting and clawing and screeching blue murder in some language I didn’t know. But I didn’t really need to.
          Profanity tends to sound the same in any tongue.
          And then, before I could even get my breath back, somebody was snatching me up, onto a huge fey horse that I wasn’t at all sure was under control, because it wasn’t a fey in the saddle.
          “Mircea!” I wheezed. “God . . . damnit!”
          “Hold on!” he told me, and pulled me into a seated position in front of him.
          Which would have been a relief, except that the fey had started firing at us!
          A white fletched arrow zipped by my head and would have taken me between the eyes, but Mircea had jerked the reins to the side at the last second, and fey horses had the reflexes of the gods. As it was, I felt the air of its passing, and saw several more fey turning around to shoot at us, because their horses didn’t seem to need hands on the reins. Then I was sending a time wave ahead of us, despite the fact that I didn’t want to waste the power.
          But I didn’t want to be shish kebob, either!
          “That’s it! That’s perfect!” Mircea said, as a whole volley of arrows disintegrated on their flight through the air, aging out of existence in the middle of my spell.
          The one we were about to plow right through!
          “Go around! Around!” I yelled, panicked.
          He went around—barely. My headscarf, loosened in the fray, blew off and dusted away, fluttering like a dissipating ghost on the breeze as we plunged into a thicket. The denser forest slowed us down enough that I was fairly sure we’d lost the riders. Something that I, for one, was completely fine with!
          “Tell me . . . you didn’t kill the guy . . . who owned this horse,” I panted, wondering how badly we’d just screwed up.
          “No. Knocked him out,” Mircea said, way too calmly. “One of the others threw him over the back of his animal. Didn’t you notice?”
          “No, I damned well didn’t notice!” I yelled.
          And immediately realized that that might not have been the best plan when more arrows were suddenly vibrating out of the trees around us—and Mircea’s shoulder. He pulled two from his flesh and tossed them away, unconcerned, because for a vamp that was akin to an insect bite. But for me—
          “Hold the hell up!” I said, grabbing for the reins.
          And missing, because the horse wasn’t the only thing with good reflexes.
          “We have to catch them,” Mircea said, turning the beast in the direction of the lethal weapons. “They’ll lose us in the forest, otherwise.”
          “Good!” I whispered this time, not that it probably mattered with fey hearing.
          And, sure enough, five or six more arrows sped by, one of them leaving a gash on the horse’s neck.
          “Mircea, they’re going to kill us!”
          “They’re not trying to kill us, else they’d have left some of their number behind to ambush us,” he said, with the lack of concern of an immortal. “They’re trying to slow us down.”
          He thought about it for a moment.
          “Can you shift a horse?”
          “I can shift you—back home!” I said, furiously.
          And the next thing I knew, my bottom was smacking down onto the hard forest floor.
          “Mircea!”
          I shifted back onto his horse as he plunged ahead, which had not been the plan. I don’t shift onto moving objects given a choice. Especially one that was ducking and dodging and fleeing through a thick wood with low hanging branches that smacked me in the face, and arrows that ripped through my curls, and a surprised deer that darted out in front of us and would have been a serious road hazard if we’d had a road!
          But my power had sent me straight back to Mircea anyway, maybe because the damned spell had us linked. I’d ended up slamming into the back of his horse and then grabbing hold of him, both to keep from falling off and so that I could shift us out of there! But he shifted me first—high into a tree this time—so high that all I could do for a second was to cling to the upper, very thin looking limbs, and try not to scream.
          And then I did it anyway, in a delayed reaction that startled a few hundred birds out of their perches. A ton of small bodies hit me from all directions, causing me to shut my eyes and cling tight for all I was worth. And when I opened them again . . .
          It was to see the fey thundering across an open field, toward a rocky outcropping.
          The tree’s height gave me a stunning view of rolling hillsides blowing with golden grain, blue skies filled with fluffy white clouds, and Mircea, bent low over his horse and riding hell bent for leather after the fey. He was actually closing on them, with no armor and no second passenger to slow him down, but they didn’t seem concerned. They weren’t even looking behind them anymore; I didn’t know why.
          And then I realized why: they were heading straight for a sheer drop off, a rocky plunge into nothingness at the top of the mountain, as if the whole damned group was suicidal.
          I didn’t have Vamp-o-Vision anymore, so I couldn’t tell what the hell they thought they were doing—
          And then I could, because Mircea wasn’t here to lend me his abilities, but with Lover’s Knot in effect, I didn’t need him. The zoom feature had me crying out again, and clinging harder to the rough bark under my hands, as the sudden feeling of rushing forward almost caused me to literally go flying. But I held on, and sure enough, there was a portal there.
          It was situated maybe half a dozen yards off the edge of the cliff, I supposed so no human accidentally stumbled into it. It was purplish gray and swirling, like a rotating patch of storm clouds, and increasing in size because the fey had activated it. Intending, I supposed, to take their captive straight through into Faerie.
          What they wanted with Mircea’s wife, I didn’t know, but I knew one thing: he was absolutely going to take that leap right after them. And that was a no-no for so many reasons that I didn’t even wait to count them. I shifted, grabbed him by the shoulders, and almost succeeded in pulling him off the horse.
          But when you learn to ride from basically the time you can walk, and hone your skills by keeping your seat in battle, you don’t fall easily. He caught me, cursing. And then hauled me in front of him again, just as we approached the cliff. The fey must have already taken the leap, for they were nowhere to be seen. And neither was anything else except for the rapidly closing mouth of the portal, which no, no, no—
          “It’s too small!” I screamed. No way were we making that.
          And we wouldn’t have, had Mircea not shifted us at the last second, with our horse halfway through its leap off the cliff and nothing but open air below us.
          We landed in the middle of a rain of what remained of our ride on the other side, because Mircea hadn’t shifted the animal, too. And the portal had not been large enough. Fortunately, I didn’t get much of a look at the result before we were rolling down a hill on a bloody slip and slide.
          “Not . . . on your goddamned . . . life,” I panted, clinging like a limpet when Mircea tried to rise.
          “Let go!”
          “Bite me!”
          “Another time, dulceață,” the bastard said, using the pet name he’d always had for me. Only, right now, I wasn’t feeling all that sweet. Right now, I was feeling fairly murderous. Not only had he co-opted my power, but he’d used it to bring us to the last place I wanted to be! Faerie was breathtakingly dangerous, and even worse, my power didn’t work here.
          “Any distance . . . from the portal . . . and the Pythian power . . . won’t function,” I gasped, as we wrestled together.
          “I don’t need it now that we’re here!” Mircea snapped, and then frowned, possibly because I had him in a head lock. “How are you this strong?”
          “I’m not!” I snarled. “You are. Nodo d’Amore, remember? It works both ways!”
          Mircea said something in Romanian that I’m fairly sure was profane, and then proved that six hundred years of dirty tricks trump strength any day. The next second, I found myself face down in horse parts, and he was gone, sprinting for a tall, rock-cut canyon like all the demons in hell were after him. Or one really pissed off Pythia.
          Try to help someone, I thought furiously, getting back to my feet and shaking out my bloody skirts. And this is what you get. When we got back, I swore to God—
          Well, actually, I didn’t know what to swear. I’d never figured out any method of dealing with Mircea that actually worked. Except for letting him have his way, and that was not happening here!
          I held out a hand toward the now tiny figure of the fleeing vamp, because masters can haul ass when they choose, and concentrated. Standing almost right in front of a portal, my power still worked, something I guessed Mircea hadn’t thought about. And I knew a few tricks, too.
          I grabbed him metaphysically and pulled, trying to shift him back to me. It should have worked, as I’d been able to shift without touching someone for a while now. And I’d been getting a lot of practice with my taskmaster of a teacher, a purple haired martinet whose sarcastic voice I could almost hear in my head.
          “What’s the matter, girl? Still thinking about weight? The Pythian power doesn’t care about such things!”
          Which was a load of horse apples, because shifting something like a pencil and shifting the Empire freaking State building were two entirely different things. But a hundred-and-eighty-pound asshole should be doable. Only he wasn’t coming.
          Because he was fighting me.
          “Son of a bitch!” I yelled, and that was another mistake. The effort of speaking caused my concentration to wobble, which was enough for Mircea’s spell to grab me. And to send me flying at him instead.
          I hit hard, and we both went down, but at least there was no bloody horse carcass this time.
          There was something worse.
          “What is that?” Mircea demanded, looking up at the sides of the very tall canyon. Where somebody, probably centuries ago, had made some elaborate carvings in the rock. Dozens of them, ranked along both sides of the walls, maybe ten stories tall and looking like stone sentinels.
          Their faces were cracked and parts were missing, with noses being in especially short supply. And some kind of vine, brown and lifeless now, had once flourished here, eating through gray stone armor and carved flesh alike. But most of the statues were still intact, and their weapons—massive swords, huge spears and heavy maces—seemed to have weathered the centuries just fine.
          Of course, they had, I thought, as a cascade of small pebbles started to rain down on us.
          “What is it?” the bastard at my side demanded. “What’s happening?”
          “Faerie,” I breathed, and grabbed him. “Run.”
          “What? Why?”
          “That’s why,” I yelled, as a giant leg burst out of the rock, sending a spray of hard little shards slamming into us. Because these were Svarestri lands, and their element was earth and all its various components. And they could do an alarming number of things with it.
          Like that, I thought, as the canyon around us cracked and morphed and changed. And the huge sentinels that had been looking like ancient stone carvings a second ago, became an ancient stone army instead. One with spears the size of fir trees and boots as big as—
          “Shit!” I yelled, and reached for my power.
          And found nothing. Maybe because I was tired, and holding concentration is hard when massive boots are slamming down all around you. Or maybe because we were too far away from the portal, which I couldn’t even see anymore.
          Not that I would have been able to, anyway. The heavy dust cloud raised by all those crashing limbs had blinded me, and the stabbing spears had me seriously disoriented. Not to mention freaked out, especially by the sound, which was beyond deafening. It ricocheted around my skull, making it hard to think, and the dust made it all but impossible to breathe.
          But Mircea didn’t need oxygen, and his arm was about my waist, threatening to bisect me every time he jumped us out of the way. Which was constantly, his vampire senses somehow keeping us just ahead of the living avalanche. But he only had to falter once and we were toast.
          This wasn’t going to work!
          And then I felt it: the glimmering stream of my power, like a literal lifeline, pouring through the portal. Like it was reaching for me, too. I grabbed hold of it, wrapped my hand around it, and then slung it about our bodies for good measure.
          “Hold on!” I told Mircea, who had just slammed us back into one of the indentations in the cliff made by the now missing sentinels.
          “For what?” he yelled. “I can’t shift!”
          “But I can!”
          “How?”
          “Because I’m Pythia,” I snarled, and proved it.
          My power swirled around us, far stronger than Mircea’s spell, because it wasn’t borrowed, it was mine. But, for a second, we still didn’t go anywhere. He whirled us out of the way of a spear, then through the legs of another assailant, while I wrestled with my power, pouring everything I had into strengthening the connection between us.
          I could feel it, reaching for me as desperately as I was for it, like familiar fingers grabbing for the hand of a drowning woman. I almost had it, but then we moved again. Upward this time, jumping onto one of our assailant’s boots, because anything was better than being on the churning ground right now!
          Although not by much.
          The other sentinels converged on the one we were using as a perch, uncaring that they were attacking another of their number so long as we died, too. Rock cracked, massive limbs flailed, a head the size of a large house came crashing down to splinter against the ground. And my spell finally caught.
          Only my power couldn’t seem to shift the two of us the normal way from this far out. What it could do was to pull us along at record speed back toward the portal. The glittering rope gave a yank and we went flying, speeding through the air like Clark and Lois, if Clark and Lois were screaming and being chased by several dozen huge stone soldiers who weren’t giving up.
          But neither was my power, which sent us zipping between legs and under reaching hands, and then through a forest of spears, rock shards and billowing dust, with Faerie doing what it always did and trying to kill us. But not quite succeeding before we tumbled, bloody and filthy and half crazed—at least I was—back through the portal. Only to abruptly remember—
          That it was over open air.
          “Shit!” I yelled, and shifted—at the same time that Mircea did. The two shifts, which must have been in opposite directions, counteracted each other, and we went nowhere. Except straight down, because gravity doesn’t care about magic.
          We plummeted, I screamed again, because I do not intend to die with dignity, and Mircea snagged a small tree. It was part of a patch of firs poking out of the cliffside and did not seem to have a great root system, because it immediately toppled over along with us. But it bought me a couple of seconds to get my shit together, and I finally managed to shift us to the river bank, far below.
          Or close enough.
          We fell the last six feet or so, because judging distance under those circumstances is not easy. But six feet beats sixty, or whatever the hell. I hit down hard on top of Mircea, rolled off, and then just lay there, gasping and panting and staring at the relentlessly cheerful blue sky.
          One where a tiny swirl of storm clouds moved overhead, looking about the size of my fist, before suddenly contracting even more.
          And winking out altogether, while a master vampire stood on the riverbank and screamed his rage at the sky.