An arrow flew by my ear and would have taken it off, except that I shifted out of the way just in time. I stared around in confusion when I landed on the opposite side of a small clearing because I wasn’t Supergirl. I hadn’t heard the arrow.
          I’d shifted because of a tangled mass of roots on the forest floor ahead which I suspected of being the grabby variety, because Faerie’s trees liked human blood. I also liked it—in my veins—so I’d learned the hard way: stay clear of the damned trees. But that was hard to do in a forest, and anyway, it wouldn’t help with the arrows.
          Why was somebody trying to kill me? I didn’t know; I couldn’t see much here, with the canopy overhead turning a sunny day into twilight. But it wouldn’t be the first time something like this had happened.
          In fact, it’s pretty much a weekly occurrence. My name is Cassie Palmer, and I’m Pythia, the Chief Seer of the Supernatural World. Nifty title; crap job, and one that frequently resulted in—
          Shit!
          I had to shift again before I could even finish my monologue because whoever was out there was good. And had eyes that worked better in deep shade than mine. Damn it!
          But I could cross territory faster than them since I didn’t cross it at all. I spatially shifted from one spot to another. It was one of the Pythian gifts, along with time travel and a bunch of time-related powers, only about half of which I’d had a chance to learn because somebody was always doing that, I thought furiously, as an arrow parted my hair.
          Okay, now I was getting pissed.
          There was a time, not so long ago, when the idea of being pursued by a bunch of murderous fey through a forest would have freaked me the heck out. Especially when I was sans weapons, sans allies, and sans the map I’d lost a while ago. But I’d learned a few things since then and managed to keep my cool despite arrows smacking into stuff all around me.
          I’d barely finished that thought when I had to shift away from an incoming barrage, which was tearing up the leaves in my direction, and which slammed into a tree in the shape of my body a second later. There must have been twenty arrows quivering out of the bark, mostly grouped in the head and torso region. So, plenty of enemies, and nobody was shooting to wound.
          Not that I’d thought they were, but now I had confirmation. And had to decide what to do with that. Or with that, I thought, my head jerking up as something started shrieking.
          It didn’t sound human. Not that I’d expected it to, considering where I was, but the terrible soul-rattling shrieks didn’t sound fey, either. Or not any fey that I’d ever encountered or wanted to.
          Damn it! Why was everything here so hard? And why were the shrieks not stopping, since whatever it was should have asphyxiated or paused for breath by now!
          I crouched in the shade of a clump of bushes I’d shifted into the middle of, holding my hands over my ears and thinking about leaving. Thinking hard, because the shrieking had been joined by yells and curses and a bunch of other stuff indicating that a diversion was going on, if not one that I’d had anything to do with. I could use it, though, to get the hell out of here, to figure out where I was, and maybe to get back on track.
          But then the shrieks leveled up in anguish, and I sighed.
          Being Pythia came with a boatload of duties, mainly concerning patrolling the timeline, fighting gods, and helping the little guy. And a little guy was yelling his head off. Which did not change the fact that I had shit to do and did not have time for this!
          But the wails were pitiful, and I was stupid and—damn it. I spotted a perch in a tree in the direction of the screams and shifted there before I had time to talk myself out of it. The perch was in a pine tree, or since this was Faerie possibly not, and there wasn’t much cover.
          Not that it mattered, as nobody was looking at me anyway.
          A bunch of dark-haired fey—think humanoid, if humans were regularly seven feet tall, long-haired, and supercilious looking—had gathered in a clearing where the sunlight had managed to find a hole in the trees. The fey faded into the background thanks to their dark green and brown leather ensembles, which mimicked the shadows even without magic being needed, although they had no shortage of that. But something else didn’t.
          Something else stuck out like a sore thumb because it was in the middle of the spotlight the sun was providing. Or because it was the focus of all eyes, some of them horrified. Or because it was a monster.
          I blinked at it, and it wasn’t like I didn’t have a good view. I had an awesome view, a center balcony view, a could-only-be-better-with-binoculars view, and I still had no idea what I was looking at. And didn’t want one because that . . . was just nasty.
          It was large, gelatinous, tentacle-strewn, and formless. If not for the tentacles, it would have looked like a giant had horked something up of the phlegm variety, only not so attractive. It was vile and oozing is what I’m trying to convey, and was grossing the fey out just as much as it was me.
          And then I realized there were two of them.
          They slorped away from each other like an overgrown cell undergoing mitosis, or maybe one had just been on top of the other. Couldn’t tell; didn’t care. I just wanted to leave now, and that was before the smell hit me.
          What the . . .?
          My hair, which was blond and scraggly after the last few days shifting around the wilderness, wilted even more in the funk coming off the oozing pile. And I was pretty damned high in the tree, meaning that it had to count as some kind of germ warfare down there. I gagged and tried to do it quietly while a fey lost his lunch in the bushes.
          The rest didn’t give him hell for it, maybe because they looked like they were considering joining him. But then one decided to be brave, grabbed a stick, and gingerly poked the nearest bit of horror. The monsters did not appear to mind this or even notice because they were busy.
          Screaming at a cow.
          I had been too preoccupied with the horror show to notice before now, but that was definitely a cow. And it looked to be of the Earth variety. That wasn’t too strange, as the fey had co-opted stuff they liked from Earth over the centuries, including pigs, chickens, and cows, which they found to be as useful as we did.
          Some of those had ended up being crossed with fey animals, resulting in some pretty strange hybrids, but this did not appear to be one of them. This was just a cow. A mostly white with brown spots cow standing on the edge of the glade eating grass.
          Or rather, it had been doing so, as a tuft was still sticking out of its mouth. Now it was just standing because its tiny cow mind did not know what to make of the current state of affairs. Right there with you, buddy, I thought fervently.
          I also thought about leaving again. Because there was a whole host of things I didn’t understand here and didn’t need to and nobody was bleeding. Until one of the monsters started scrambling away from the horrible spotted monstrosity, that is.
          He was looking at the cow with the same expression that everybody else was using to look at him and backing off as fast as his tentacles could manage, which was pretty fast. And not looking where he was going, either because he was panicked or because he only had one eye and it was on a stick. Anyway, he crashed into a fey, who freaked the hell out and promptly stabbed him, and that he did notice.
          And then he ate the fey.
          It happened so fast that I barely had time to realize what was happening before the blob opened half his body, stuffed the fey inside, and closed again. Leaving the shocked-looking warrior peering out of the mostly translucent flesh of his captor while his buddies stared back in disbelief. Giving said creature a chance to take off with his lunch, lurching up and scrabbling through the forest like all the demons of hell were after him.
          Or a bunch of really, really freaked-out fey.
          The pointy-eared group tore through the undergrowth in pursuit, leaving me, the other monster, and the cow behind. Things were pretty loud for a minute, with the fleeing creature wailing, the fey yelling, and various bits of flora biting the dust as the ball of weird mowed them down. And possibly ran over a few fey in the process; I couldn’t really tell.
          But then everything calmed back down, as the cavalcade of crazy got too far away to hear, and the forest resumed being quiet and strangely beautiful, which was how Faerie often looked in between cycles of violence.
          The cow went back to chewing its grass. The remaining monster sat on the ground, its tentacles spread around it, and began to cuss. And I finally caught a clue and shifted down beside it.
          Or rather, I shifted down beside him because the monster wasn’t a monster, at least not of the oozy variety. As evidenced when its translucent blobbiness opened up to disgorge a rather beat-up-looking man. A very pissed off, very familiar, beat-up-looking man covered in transparent slime.
          “Pritkin!”
          A dripping blond head jerked up, a pair of green eyes skewered me for a second in utter disbelief, and then the cussing ramped up to epic levels.
          “Shhh!” I grabbed his shoulder and then pulled back with a handful of ooze. Which I ignored because I had bigger problems right now. “They’ll hear you!”
          This was undeniably true. The warriors’ ears might look a little strange, but they worked just fine and even better than the human variety. Of course, they were currently busy chasing down a ping-ponging, shrieking nightmare, but still.
          There might be others.
          Pritkin seemed to agree with my thoughts because he lowered the tone of his voice, if not the viciousness. “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded, getting back to his feet, probably to shake me.
          Or maybe to hug, I amended, leaning into it because I hadn’t seen him in a while, and so much had happened since then. The hug was moist and slimy and smelled like the creature he had just been thrown up by, but it was so good to be back in those arms that I almost sobbed anyway. But I bit it back, which was just as well because then the shaking commenced.
          Of course.
          I would have protested, but the blobby thing had reconstituted itself, plumped back up, and was watching us with an interested eye. I regarded it warily until the shaking increased, and I had to smack Pritkin’s hands away. “I came to find you, and what is that?”
          “You should know,” he said savagely, turning on the blob. “Get away from there!”
          It had been sidling up to the cow while it watched us and had almost been close enough for a touch from a strangely hesitant tentacle, but at Pritkin’s comment, it jerked back. And said something in a screechy whine that had my ears wanting to close up and never open again. “Auggghhhh!” I whimpered.
          “Stop it!” Pritkin snapped, and we both did. And then the monster and I looked at each other because neither of us knew who he’d meant.
          “Um. I’m Cassie,” I said since there seemed to be some intelligence there.
          “It knows who you are! You sent the damned thing!” Pritkin informed me while trying to scrape some of the smelly sludge off his clothes.
          It didn’t work, just sort of smeared it around. He finally gave up and settled for glowering at me instead. I didn’t return the favor, being too happy to see him and also too confused.
          “I did?”
          “Yes!”
          I regarded the blob some more. I had seen a lot of strange things since becoming Pythia, like a lot a lot, but I thought I’d remember that. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
          “Oh, for—you sent them to guard Mircea!”
          I looked from Pritkin to the blob and back again and wondered which of us was having a senior moment. Considering that the war mage currently dripping in goo looked thirty-ish but was hundreds of years older than that, I knew who I’d put my money on. And I guessed my face showed it because he cursed some more.
          “Did you or did you not ask Adramelech for help guarding Mircea?”
          Mircea was the third member of the triumvirate of power we shared, a spell that connected the three of us down to the magical level and greatly expanded all our abilities. He was also my ex-lover, which was sometimes awkward as Pritkin was my current one. Or so I hoped, although he was not looking too happy with me at the moment.
          “Adra? I only asked him to—”
          “Stop calling him that!” Pritkin sat on a root that had conveniently grown into a nice perch, probably so that weary travelers might decide to plop down and be more easily attacked. This whole world was one huge Venus Flytrap, only it didn’t eat flies!
          But Pritkin saw the smaller root that was inching toward him through the dirt like a snake, with the pointy end serving as its one fang, and shot it a look. “Try it,” he invited.
          The root paused, then shivered a little before sinking back into the earth with a pissy little wiggle.
          The cow chewed on.
          I plopped down on the dirt because I was tired and hoped it wouldn’t eat me. “It’s his name,” I pointed out.
          “You do not give the head of the Demon High Council a nickname—or a diminutive!” he added before I could protest. “And did you or did you not ask him to assign two of his best demon guards to Mircea?”
          “Sure, back when I thought the consul was planning to have him killed.” AKA the good old days, when all I had to worry about was a jealous, two-thousand-year-old vampire queen instead of . . . everything. Just everything. I decided not to think about it. “But what does that have to do with—”
          I stopped, a horrible thought intruding.
          Pritkin just looked at me with a little smile on his face.
          My eyes slid over to the blob, which was sidling toward the cow again and trying not to look like it. “Don’t eat that,” I said before I thought.
          He understood me or chose that exact moment to stop and turn that one eyestalk in my direction.
          “It’s not your cow.”
          He did not seem to think much of this argument.
          “Eat it, and I’ll kill you,” Pritkin added, at which time it plopped down again, and the eyestalk drooped despondently.
          He was hideous and smelly and slimy, with a sheen of mucous-like substance that was already wetting the ground around him. But the eye had ridiculously long lashes, and the tentacles were waving about sadly and plucking up random things—a leaf, a stick, a rock—and examining them before tossing them away. I felt a surge of pity.
          And that was especially true if he was one of the previously invisible demons Adra had placed as bodyguards on Mircea. They had been spirits, allowing them to watch over him more easily without anybody being the wiser. Including him because I hadn’t known how he would take my possible paranoia.
          Sometimes, it was easier just not to ask.
          But then he ended up in Faerie, and I guessed his bodyguards got pulled in with him? I wasn’t sure how that worked, but it would explain why this one looked so confused. Spirits manifested bodies in Faerie, something that had probably surprised Adra’s guys, who might never have had corporeal form before.
          It didn’t look like this one was enjoying it.
          “Is he hungry?” I asked, a little worried. “Should we find something to feed him or—”
          “You are not. Going to sympathize. With that bloody thing!” Pritkin yelled.
I frowned at him. “There’s no need to yell.”
          “What are you doing here?”
          “Looking for you. Only the fey started shooting arrows at me and—how did you end up with the demons?” I asked because I still wasn’t clear on that point.
Pritkin took off a boot, and a gob of slime slugged its way out. “They became lost after following Mircea into Faerie, and before they could adjust—to that and to suddenly having bodies—they encountered some fey. Who immediately became hostile—”
          As if they were ever anything else, I thought, being slightly pleased that something I’d done had managed to traumatize the fey for a change.
          “—causing the idiot twins to run off, thus making them more lost. They finally calmed down, realized what had happened, and became determined to find Mircea again and, thus, a way home. I believe they planned to stuff him through the nearest portal—”
          I very deliberately didn’t say anything.
          “—but they followed the wrong man. They aren’t used to having human-like senses, and I smell more familiar, being half demon. . .” he shrugged.
          “And the fey were shooting at me because?”
          “They weren’t shooting at you; they were shooting at me,” he said tersely. “You got in the way and are damned lucky you didn’t take an arrow through the head. You need to leave.”
          I frowned as he pulled his slightly less slimy boots back on. “Wait. Why were they shooting at you? They looked like Alorestri. Aren’t the Green Fey supposed to be your people?”
          Or partly, anyway. Genetically speaking, Pritkin was a bit of a patchwork quilt, but his great-grandmother had been Nimue, Queen of the Green Fey. Which explained what he was doing here because the queen had recently passed away. That had come as a shock to everyone because fey didn’t die all that often, other than in battle, and that went double for one who was a daughter of Poseidon and thus a demigod.
          But dead she very definitely was, and thus a successor was needed. So, all the claimants, those closely enough related to the queen to qualify and crazy enough to try it, had been invited to participate in a contest to vie for the throne. Or to die trying, which appeared more likely.
          But as far as I knew, the contest hadn’t started yet, so what the hell? The Green Fey might not like Pritkin much, considering him demon spawn due to his father’s blood, but they didn’t usually try to kill him. He was one of their princes, after all.
          That won me a short bark of a laugh when I pointed it out, although Pritkin didn’t sound happy. “Tell them that.”
          I would if they’d stop being homicidal weirdos for five seconds, I didn’t say, because I wanted to stay on track. “Don’t they know you might be their next king?”
          Pritkin had more colorful phrases in reply, perhaps because it was the last thing he wanted on Earth—or Faerie. He’d once longed to be accepted by his mother’s people but had finally realized that a part human/part demon/part fey child would never be good enough, even if his fey blood was from the royal house. He had, therefore, concentrated on the human part of his lineage and left his dreams of being a fey prince behind.
          But we were currently in an all-out war for survival against another king of the light fey, Aeslinn of the Svarestri, and his godly allies, and needed all the help we could get. Nimue’s army was strong and battle-tested, and they knew Faerie as we did not. And as king, Pritkin could command it.
          But he had to win it first, which was why I was here. I had no problem at all cheating my ass off if it helped him and damned if I cared what the fey thought about it. There was just one thing I didn’t understand.
          “Is trying to kill you part of the contest?” I asked, just as Pritkin’s head jerked up.
          He was staring at something in the trees I couldn’t see, but I threw up a time shield anyway because Faerie.
          And had no sooner done so than a dozen spells lashed it in a storm of magic that made the whole world crackle around us.
 

          “Sons of bitches!” Pritkin yelled and jumped up, only to have me tackle him before he ran through my time spell. “What the—”
          “I’m aging out their weapons. Don’t touch it!”
          He stared at an arrow a few feet away that some bright spark had shot into the midst of all the magic being flung around. Maybe it was reflexive, or maybe the fey archer had thought it might get through the spell as their curses had not. But he was learning otherwise.
          Pritkin stared at it as the wooden shaft cracked and splintered and dusted away, as the white fletching curled up, turned brown, and then was gone, too, and as the metal tip corroded, rusted, and flaked off. The last little nub of what had been an arrowhead fell to the ground, and a fey voice could be heard yelling at the top of his lungs.
          “Pythia!”
          Caught that one, I thought wryly, even before my translation spell crackled in my ear.
          And then the fey were gone as well, melting into the forest like leaves on autumn’s wind, which was good because a moment later—
          “Are you alright?” Pritkin said, clutching my arm as my spell faltered and fell apart, dissipating like smoke.
          “Yeah.” I swallowed. “Harder here.”
          He nodded curtly. And then unleashed his magic, which I assumed was of the demon variety since the blob perked up. Talons of fire went screeching after the fey, with fiery bodies glimpsed briefly in the air like demented birds.
          I couldn’t see them well; they were only flickers in the vague shape of winged creatures and were quickly lost among the trees. But the fey didn’t seem to like them much. I heard screams, warning cries, and then more screams, and the vicious little half-smile on Pritkin’s face told me that at least some of his bolts had hit home.
          “Okay, that went well—” I began right before he grabbed me again.
          “Go home.”
          “My ass.”
          “Your arse is very nice,” he said, grabbing it and giving a squeeze. “And I like it in one piece. So, get it out of here!”
          “I came to help you!”
          “I don’t need any help.”
          “Yeah, it looks like it!”
          But then he was gone because he was an asshole, and between the dark and the trees and the no-doubt cloaking spell he was using, I had no clue what—
          I suddenly had an idea.
          “Hey! Hey, you!” The blob looked around and then slowly up at me, the stalk-eye appearing somewhat startled. “Follow him!”
          The blob did not have hands, but a tentacle stopped messing with a leaf and touched what could, very charitably, have been termed its chest. “Yes, you! Hurry! He’s getting away!”
          And, okay, part of what followed was my fault. I knew that the blob, AKA one of Adra’s top operatives, was having a bit of a moment. It was in a world not its own, in a form that was its own but probably didn’t feel like it, and likely only understood English in a rudimentary way.
          I should have been more specific. But I was fast losing Pritkin in a forest full of murderous fey, I had not been having fun trying to find him before this, and I didn’t know how much longer it would take to do so again—or what I’d see if I did. So, I wasn’t thinking about the blob.
          Until it ate me, opening up and stuffing me inside and leaving me looking out at the world through a mass of translucent flesh, just like the unfortunate fey.
          “Auggh—urp.” I opened my mouth to scream because that is what you do when a demon has just eaten you, but that was not a good move. The hollow I found myself in was large enough to accommodate me and had at least a little air. But it also had a lot of phlegm or whatever the goopy clear stuff was, and it was everywhere, including in my mouth!
          I spat it out and tried not to hurl, but it smelled. Oh, God, it did! And I didn’t know how to—
          We were moving.
          No, we were moving.
          I stopped worrying about losing my lunch because of the stench and started worrying about losing my life because of the speed. Which was absurd! We were in a forest; big trees were everywhere, and some were sapient!
          Experience had proven what would happen if we hit one—
          Annnnnnd we did, we hit a lot of them, but the blob didn’t seem to mind ping-ponging off the rough old bark at sixty miles an hour. Or getting lashed at by angry roots and overhanging limbs and then stung by a bunch of wasp-like insects that had had a nest in one of the branches until it smashed into us. I did mind, but not physically, since whatever receptacle encased me did not appear connected to the demon’s outer body.
          It was like racing around like a gyroscope made from very stinky flesh as we tore through the trees after Pritkin. Or, at least, I guessed we did, although despite remaining relatively upright and stable, I couldn’t see much. Everything was thrashing leaves, stabbing roots, and buzzing wasps, and anything I could see past all of that was distorted by the rippling wall of flesh.
          Then we hit water—a lake, a river, hell, maybe an ocean for all I knew—but it was deep, and we were diving fast.
          I tried to tell the translucent submarine I was in that it wasn’t going the right way. I wanted to find Pritkin, not a watery grave, and it needed to turn around! It needed to turn around right now!
          But I couldn’t scream without ingesting more terrible goo, and beating on the sides of the thing didn’t work, and trying to communicate mentally didn’t work, not that it usually did with me, but I thought that maybe a demon might be able to pick something up. But if it could, it was ignoring me. And diving ever deeper, with my frantic stares upward now showing me only a vague glimmer of sunlight on the water . . .
          Before it was gone, too.
          Leaving me in an eerie, dark world where everything was quiet except for my harsh breathing, and everything was disorienting as the whole world was suddenly one shade of murky blue-black.
          Screw this, I was shifting, I decided. And I tried. But my power was acting up again as it did everywhere in Faerie, where I had to draw it through whatever portal I could find to Earth.
          The Pythian power had been tethered there by the gods millennia ago when Apollo first gifted it to his seers at Delphi, and it couldn’t leave. Only I had discovered that that wasn’t entirely true. As long as I was near enough to a portal, I could pull some power to my location.
          But it was never as strong as on Earth, and the further I got into this crazy world, the more unreliable it became, to the point of just putzing out entirely. It was like trying to find cell phone service in the mountains and never knowing when or if you’d come across a good spot. Or when you’d get cut off since some of Faerie’s portals were omnidirectional.
          Running a portal was expensive, magically speaking, so having one that cycled from place to place on a set schedule was efficient. It allowed one portal to serve many destinations and saved power. But it also meant that my power could get cut off randomly as the portal I was tapping into cycled away from Earth.
          Like that, I thought, as the strands I had been trying to grasp suddenly disappeared, fading into nothingness in my hands. And leaving me at the mercy of the crazed little taxi I was now stuck inside, without knowing how much air I had left or where I was going. Or what the heck that was, I thought, peering through the rippling surface at something in the distance.
          It didn’t stay distant for long. That was concerning not only because it was huge, a dark, oblong shape that I couldn’t see very well in the gloom but also because it appeared to be able to give a whale a decent run for his money. Only whales didn’t have teeth that big, did they?
          I didn’t think they had teeth at all, just a screen for filtering krill and why was I thinking about that when we were about to get eaten? Because we were, we very definitely were, and the blob finally appeared to wake up to that fact. And started churning up the water with its tentacles.
          But they were short and stubby, and the Not Whale was still coming, and the little burst of speed we’d put on was only doing us the dubious favor of allowing me to see our pursuer better.
          That didn’t help because I still didn’t know what it was. I didn’t want to know what it was. It looked like a cross between a whale and a shark, with a tremendous body and a gaping maw, and why did every freaking thing in Faerie have a gaping maw?
          With teeth larger than me, by the look of them.
          I had a second to stare at the biggest set of chompers I’d ever seen when suddenly, I was no longer trapped. Because my little friend had decided that it was every demon for himself and shat me out before hauling ass, zipping off into the darkness like a fleeing jellyfish. And leaving me as the sole hors d’oeuvre on the tray.
          How did I get here, I thought, staring at looming death. And wondering if the set of armor that my dress was quickly transforming into would save me from those teeth. It was dragon scale, but I supposed that even that had limits and—
          And shut up, shut up, shut up, you’re about to die!
          That was undoubtedly true, as the giant creature was now on top of me, the maw was gaping even wider, and I was about to find out how Jonah had felt—
          When what looked like a human fist, if it was fifty times the size and made of golden light, popped out of nowhere. And crashed into the creature’s jawline, hard enough to send several of those teeth flying. One of them shot past me, disturbing the water, but not half as much as when the whole great body flipped around, tail thrashing, and sent me tumbling head over heels, lost in a wash of bubbles and a current that left me feeling like I was being torn apart.
          But the armor held me together, although it did nothing for my burning lungs because I had no air. And what little I’d had that encounter had forced out of me. Leaving my vision darkening, my body flailing, and my brain telling me that I should have listened to Pritkin and gone home.
          Because Faerie was just one big way to die.
          And it would have been, but the portal took that moment to cycle back to Earth, and my power immediately reached out to me. It found me just before I lost consciousness, enveloping me in warmth and shooting magic down to my fingertips. And a second later, I had a new enclosure, which smelled much better than the old one.
          This one smelled like loamy earth and wildflowers and the rich greenness that permeated this part of Faerie, but not because I’d shifted up there. But because I’d reached out and shifted it down to me. Or a portion of it, anyway, with crumbly soil under my feet, a bunch of little river rocks that threatened to trip me up, and a branch full of leaves that promptly fell into my face.
          Not that I cared because air.
          I gulped it down, my lungs greedy and seemingly impossible to satisfy for a moment, maybe because the damned branch kept getting in the way! I spat out a mouthful of leaves, heaved in a deep, satisfying breath, and coughed much of it back out because I already had a lung full of water. Then, I breathed in more clear, sparkling breaths that a few seconds ago had seemed like a mirage in the desert and something I would never experience again.
          Before looking around and realizing the fight wasn’t over.
          The fight was just gearing up, in fact, and the Not-Whale was pissed.
          The fist had just made it mad, so I decided to make it madder before my power cut out again, and it succeeded in eating Pritkin. Because that had been his fist, a massive extension of his tiny-looking body, which was still going to town on whatever part of the bastard it could find. But it didn’t seem to be making much of a difference.
          There was too much blubber in the way, which cushioned the blows, and when Pritkin decided to go for the mouth again, his impressive fist got introduced to the chompers from hell.
          And they didn’t give a damn about his magic.
          Try mine, bitch, I thought, and sent a spell speeding through the ward encasing my air pocket and out into the open water.
          It didn’t change the water as water doesn’t age. But the same could not be said for the Not Whale. I once thought that Faerie’s creations were eternal, but apparently not.
          Because a large section of its scarred old hide suddenly burst outward, as if from decaying gasses, blowing a hole big enough for me to see what was happening inside. It wasn’t pretty. Entrails were churning and dissolving into soup, ribs were cracking and blackening and falling to pieces, and the great spine was liquifying as the spell, shot at an angle, boiled through to the other side and punched a hole there as well, bisecting the creature that was no longer looking quite so angry anymore.
          In fact, it wasn’t looking so much like a creature anymore and more like something called lunch. Because out of nowhere, the formerly empty water was churning with life, as a myriad of weird aquatic . . . things . . . came zooming in, determined to get a piece of the pie. Or of the whale. Or of something I didn’t care about because my power had just cut out again.
          Son of a bitch!
          The ward I’d been sustaining popped, letting the water rush in and slap me in the face. The tree branch decided it had had enough and floated off, but not up because things were too churned up thanks to the feeding frenzy to obey gravity. And while I had a lungful of air this time, as there was no longer anything to force it out of me, it wouldn’t last.
          How many minutes had it been between cycles of that portal? I thought frantically. And didn’t know, having been busy almost dying that whole time. And was about to do it again, and that wasn’t fair.
          We’d won, damn it!
          But then a hand, normal-sized and not glowing, caught mine. I jerked in surprise and looked up to see Pritkin, visible in the spectral light that some of the water creatures were giving off. He had a bubble over his head and was yelling something at me, which I thought was a bit much right now.
          But suddenly, I had one, too. A bubble, that is, filled with air that I gasped in gratefully. So much so that the fact that I could now hear him bitching at me almost didn’t matter.
          We took off, with me latching onto his back and him plowing through the water faster than he could run on land, and he could run pretty fast. But he could swim even faster, which was lucky as I was so disoriented that I had no idea where we freaking were. Or even which direction we were headed, although it appeared to be mostly down.
          Down, down, down, to the point that I didn’t know how he could see anymore. The bioluminescent creatures had been left behind, and the murky water had swallowed up what little light they’d shed. My eyes met only blackness, and only the sensation of my fingers digging into the muscles of Pritkin’s back and shoulders kept me somewhat grounded.
          Then we abruptly hit bottom, on a sandy bed that I could feel against my skin as it was stirred up by Pritkin scrabbling around as if searching for something.
Something that I guessed he didn’t find since he started cursing. And while Pritkin had many different styles of profanity, which he cheerfully used for everything from his coffee not being strong enough to sending his enemies into oblivion, this one was serious. This one meant business.
          But then it stopped, he grunted with surprise, and manically started digging again. The next moment, we were on the move, plowing through the clouds of sand he’d stirred up into utter darkness. Before entering a vast cave, with torchlight glimmering on black rocks as we sloshed and then crawled out of the depths and onto a shoreline with people all around, none of whom I cared about because I was too busy collapsing into a soggy pile.
          The bubble around my face burst, but there was air in the cave, so it didn’t matter. Someone was talking in a sonorous voice that echoed, but which I could barely hear over my heavy gasps. My lungs were not convinced that this air would stick around and were drawing in as much as possible while they could. But my ears finally popped, and a bunch of water ran out, allowing me to hear what was being said.
          “—the statue is genuine. The winner of the first Challenge is, therefore, Prince Emrys of the Earthly Realm—”
          “I protest!”
          “Prince! He’s no prince of mine!
          “Earthly Realm! Say rather the hell regions. He’s a demon!”
          “He cheated! That damned woman is with him!”
          There were a lot of similar comments, shouted at us from all sides, but ‘that damned woman’ was too tired to pay them much attention. I rolled my head over to look at Pritkin, who was also lying on his back, breathing hard and looking back at me. And picking up my sandy hand and pressing a kiss to the back of it, because he was clearly over them all, too.
          “You’ve landed in it this time,” he murmured.