I tumbled through the portal, along with a half-crazed mermaid and what felt like an ocean of water. We shot across an open space, falling, flailing and, in my case, half drowning. And hit what might have been a wall, or a mountain, or basically anything else, because I couldn’t see!
          Or breathe, I realized. Or move, with the giant firehose of liquid slamming into me from behind, smashing me into the pale golden stone like a bug on a pin. And hard enough that I would probably have the pock-marked imprint of the rock permanently embedded into my cheek if I survived this.
          I finally took a breath because it was that or pass out, and it was half water, half air, which did not improve things. But the mermaid was determined and fierce and currently cursing, and I don’t just mean audibly. She was cursing the water out of our way as she hauled me off the stone, and even stranger, it worked.
          The waves curled back on themselves as if offended or as if Moses had arrived to part them. Only it wasn’t Moses who stumbled out of there a moment later. It was two bedraggled-looking women, both on two feet because this mermaid could transform.
          Of course, I’d learned that many, if not all, of the Margygr could, but I’d learned so much lately and had yet to really categorize or absorb any of it that I had just started accepting things. Which was why I didn’t react when a huge vampire grabbed me, spun me around, and planted a fang-filled kiss on my cheek because I’d shifted him through the portal a minute ago and thus saved his life. And why I just stood there as a fey prince who hated my guts clapped me on the back, hard enough almost to force me to my knees, but he was smiling, so I decided to let it go.
          I’d saved him, too, by absorbing a bunch of power that some other merpeople had cast in a flooded, quickly collapsing room in another world. It had been intended for a spell to hold the ceiling up, or what was left of it, but it hadn’t worked because it wasn’t just the room collapsing. It had been the whole world, which was why they’d been killed before they could direct their magic anywhere and why the rest of us had been about to follow suit until I grabbed it and stuffed it down.
          I could do that, as my mother had been the goddess Artemis, and while I hadn’t gotten much of the godly side of the family tree, I could consume power the same way she had. I couldn’t drag it out of someone like her but had to wait until they coughed it up. Fortunately, the Margygr had, in preparation for a spell they'd never had a chance to cast.
          Unfortunately, I’d used it all up getting us out of there, and currently thought that passing out sounded like a good idea. But I didn’t, as it would destroy whatever tiny shreds of dignity I had left. Which, as usual lately, wasn’t much.  
          My name is Cassie Palmer, and not so long ago, I was Pythia, the chief seer of the supernatural world. But then Faerie happened, and things have been going steadily downhill ever since. Now, I found myself a refugee washed up on time’s shore somewhere I didn’t recognize because who could recognize this?
          I stared around and didn’t understand anything. But then I was grabbed by the rest of our party, including a water-logged demigoddess named Bodil and Pritkin, my other half, my partner in crime, and the guy I was gonna drag to an alter if we ever got out of here, wherever here was. Because it was supposed to be Earth, but . . .
          It didn’t look like it.
          But before I could point that out, the water, which had been spewing out of the portal with enthusiasm, hitting the wall where it had tossed us and flooding the floor up to our knees, abruptly cut out. The little knot of us all stopped grabbing and hugging each other to stare at it, with what was probably varying levels of shock. Considering that mine was pretty high and that hadn’t been my world that had just died, I couldn’t imagine what the rest were feeling.
          Nothing good, I thought, as Bodil, the oldest of us, abruptly sat down in the flood and just went blank. I sat beside her because it was either that or fall down, and I couldn’t get any wetter. Enid, the aforementioned mermaid, joined us. The men continued standing, maybe thinking it was more manly or because they were looking a little lost.

   Fair enough.
          It wasn’t every day you experienced the death throes of an entire world.
          Or maybe, like me, they just had no idea where the heck we were. That was even more of a problem when the portal disappeared as abruptly as the water had. I guessed its energy had allowed it to persist another few seconds before the magic ran out, but it was gone now, and with it went most of our light.

   Most but not all, I thought, staring upward.
          It was hard to see much past the portal’s swirling red aftereffects, but I could tell that we were in some kind of building. And while the little I could see was mostly sand-covered, it was definitely man-made. Or parts of it were.
          It looked more like a cavern that somebody had reinforced with heavy timber beams and reminded me of something I’d seen once, but I couldn’t think well enough to name it. But that was a ceiling high up there as sunlight was streaming in through a hole. Not much of it, especially compared to the portal’s previously blinding light, but enough for Pritkin to decide to take a look.
          “Take care of her,” he told Bodil and could have been referring to either Enid or me. But considering who was weaving about like she would collapse any second, even while sitting down, I was pretty sure he meant me. I tried to stop it; it was embarrassing, but nothing happened.
          So I just sat there, swaying gently, as he and Alphonse, the big vamp, and Æsubrand, the silver-haired fey prince, climbed up a sand drift that must have been three stories high to peer out of the hole in the roof.
          Alphonse made it first, which seemed to piss off Æsubrand, who was right on his tail. Pritkin, whose wet blond hair was shining like a beacon in the spill of sunlight and who wasn’t in the other two’s dick-measuring contest, brought up the rear. Leaving us three girls alone, although a demigoddess older than the pyramids probably didn’t qualify for that term.
          Neither did I, although I was only twenty-four. But as Indiana Jones once said, it wasn’t the years; it was the mileage. And mine was . . . kind of a lot.
          Enid, though, was a fresh-faced teenager and wasn’t looking like someone who had just lost her entire world. The sunlight turned her wet red hair to flame and gleamed in her hazel eyes. She’d been wearing a servant’s tunic when she transformed and had managed to keep it on despite hauling my exhausted ass through the portal, so she was dressed, if badly.
          But damn, she made it look good.
          Especially now, with her hand out, palm up, to catch the glistening rays of a foreign sun on her fingertips. Only . . . it wasn’t entirely foreign, was it? She was part fey but part human, too, and right now, she had a look of intense hunger on those stunning features.
          A second later, she was back on her feet and running up the slope after the guys with an almost feral intensity.
          “She wanted to go to Earth for years but stayed back to help others,” Bodil told me. “Her skills with glamourie are impressive and came in handy when we needed to hide someone.”
          She was talking about Enid’s ability to conceal half a face full of scars, which had been given to her by a jealous fey who couldn’t handle the fact that a little human mutt of a girl was better looking than her. I guessed that had encouraged Enid to work on one skill above all others, and starting so young, she had become amazing at it. Normally, the smooth perfection of her skin was flawless, even close up.
          It had allowed her to help Bodil and a handful of others to free the most endangered slaves of the so-called Green Fey, the ones whose court we’d just escaped, and get them to Earth. These were the descendants of humans brought to Faerie centuries ago, whether by choice or not. And many, like Enid, had never seen their home world.
          She wasn’t going to be seeing it at its best right now, I thought grimly, as the reason her adoptive world had just vanished from existence was operative here, too. And it looked like Bodil’s thoughts were traveling along the same lines as mine. The beautiful ebony face under its impressive cascade of tiny black braids was no longer blank but almost . . . fearful . . . if someone so formidable could be described that way.
          It seemed unlikely, as I’d just seen her take on an army of elder demons, buying us time to escape, but there it was again. A furtive look, a widened eye, a downturned lip. Bodil was sensing something I wasn’t, and she didn’t like it.
          “Get them back!” she said suddenly, gripping my arm.
          “What? Who?”
          “Everyone! Now!”
          I didn’t know how she expected me to do that, but it didn’t matter. Because here they came, pouring back through the crack in the ceiling, looking like they’d seen a ghost. Or a god, I thought, as a great blue eye appeared in the crevasse a moment later, peering down into the darkness.
          It was blue, the size of a car, and surrounded by pale blond lashes. But it wasn’t the size that had me reeling from a relief so palpable that, for a moment, it was more dizzying than my exhaustion. The creature I feared most had blue eyes, but his made this color pale into insignificance. If it hadn’t, in my current state, he wouldn’t have needed to kill me; I’d have probably had a heart attack all on my own.
          As it was, everyone froze, including Bodil and me, and then, without the need for discussion, we slowly sank into the tide still surging around us.
          It wasn’t deep, even though we’d brought a massive amount of water with us. The room we were in felt cavernous, but the sand that had blown in through the ruined roof had piled around the space, leaving a concave depression where we lay and where most of the water had gathered, forming a pond. But ponds were not frequently found in the desert where we looked to be, something that seemed to have occurred to our visitor.
          He obviously couldn’t see very well, as the room was dark, and the sunlight outside probably made it seem more so. But some of that sun was playing off the water around us and had caught his great eye. He’d probably glimpsed motion from the guys and come to investigate, and now . . .
          He was punching the ceiling with blows like a pile driver, trying to get through, causing cracks to spider everywhere and pieces to begin to cave in.
          Shit, I thought but didn’t say, as I didn’t know how good a god’s hearing might be. I flipped over instead and started half crawling, half swimming, even as the first pieces of rock started splashing down around us. They hit with crashes in the shallow water, which wasn’t deep enough to cushion the blows, sending pieces flying, waves churning, and screams echoing in my head that I wouldn’t allow myself to utter.
          Animals don’t scream, I reminded myself as shrapnel peppered my back. And that’s what I was if any of my movements were somehow heard above. Just some desert creature, having squirmed in here looking for a drink and now flailing around desperately.
          Not a person, not a human, and certainly not an out-of-work clairvoyant because my job didn’t exist anymore since the gods had returned and laid waste to two worlds. Like my power, which . . . hadn’t come back, I realized abruptly. So abruptly that I stopped moving for a second because that wasn’t how this was supposed to work.
          I was back on Earth now, where my little band had been desperately trying to reach because that was where my power was strongest. I had once had the ability to spatially shift myself out of here or flee back in time before all of this happened and try to stop it. Those abilities had been given to the Pythias by the god Apollo millennia ago, but he hadn’t trusted us with unlimited power. . .
          Which, considering that I’d recently helped to kill him, was fair. So, he’d tethered it to Earth, meaning it could only reach me in Faerie when a portal was open between the two worlds. But I wasn’t in Faerie anymore; I should have access to it! I should be able—
          To pay attention for half a second before I was crushed to death!
          Fortunately, I was jerked aside by Bodil right before a semi-truck-sized piece of ceiling hit down where I’d just been daydreaming and would have flattened me. As it was, it came close enough for my arm to be strafed by the edge, which would have probably taken it off, except that I was dressed in dragonscale armor. Because Faerie was a scary place, but not as much as Earth, apparently!
          Bodil took a wild-eyed second to internalize how close that had been and then jerked me into the darkness and out of the patch of sunlight. 
          We soon ran out of room to maneuver at a sand dune taller than us, which we could have scaled but didn’t dare, afraid that the movement would draw the thing’s eye. We settled for flattening ourselves against it instead while a giant fist kept hammering away overhead. I stared up at the rest of our team, who were in the shadows under the jagged lip of the roofline, having squeezed between its shattered remnants and the top of the dune, staying out of the way of the fist but unable to come down as they’d be spotted sure as hell.
          They were staring back at us or where we’d just been. I really hoped they couldn’t see us because if they could, it could. And right on cue, my shiny silver armor went black.
          Love you, Augustine, I thought fervently, remembering the designer who had crafted it for me. I wondered if he’d survived. I wondered if anyone had, with gods prowling the damned landscape!
          I wondered if I would ever have the chance to find out, as a massive arm reached into the sizeable hole and started feeling around the floor, searching . . .
          For us.
          And that tore it for Bodil, who had clearly not spent her lifetime skulking in the shadows, praying that nobody noticed her. She was a warrior and wasn’t going out like this, accidentally smashed to death by a careless swipe from a divine hand. If she was going to die, she’d do it loudly and hurt her enemy as much as possible in the process.
          I felt her tense beside me, saw the fire come literally back into her eyes as flames eclipsed their usual sharp black, heard her suddenly indrawn breath—
And threw myself at her, taking her down more from the surprise of my assault than anything else. We hit dirt and water both, with me fighting like a wildcat with the last of my strength and her staring at me as if I’d gone mad. And maybe I had.
          The cumulative effect of the last few days—because boys and girls, that was all it had been, a COUPLE OF DAYS—would have done that to almost anyone. Especially since, in that period, I’d almost been killed a few dozen times, been forced to fight creatures I’d never even known existed outside the pages of some warped mythology book, and then had a whole damned planet crash down around my head. And yet somehow, somehow, I was still alive, and she was not messing that up for me!

   I had my heir to find, my power to regain, and two worlds to save and Bodil was going to help me, all of them were going to help me, or a rogue god was going to be the least of their problems!
          Bodil was staring up at me as if she’d heard all that, which . . . yeah. Mind reading was one of her gifts, wasn’t it? Just as well.
          I’m not sorry, I thought at her as hard as I could. And while you might know demigoddess stuff better than me, nobody knows how to skulk around better than I do. I spent my whole childhood at it, I’m good at it, and that’s how we’re going to get through this!
          No bravado.
          No crazy heroics.
          No, nothing, because this isn’t about us; it’s about our worlds. So we suck it up, we do the job, and since the job requires us to be alive, we swallow our pride, and we hide. We crawl. We do whatever we have to because if we don’t, there isn’t anybody else, and there never will be.
          Do you get it?
          Bodil nodded, looking a little gobsmacked. But I guessed she agreed because she didn’t overpower me, which she damned well could have. Right then, anyone could have, as I felt terrible, with my magic sitting at zero and now my human strength almost gone, too.
          That little dust-up had been really stupid.
          Or maybe not, I thought, barely aware of it when the giant got bored, the arm was withdrawn, and sunlight flooded back into our gloomy little world.
And I folded like a pack of cards and went out. 

 

          Something smelled good. I felt my nose twitch. Really good.
          “She’s awake,” a familiar, sardonic voice said.
          “How do you know?” That was Enid, and she sounded worried.
          “There’s food cooking.”
          “There is?” I croaked and tried to sit up.
          I failed, although not because of my lack of strength, but because something heavy was draped over me. I pushed at it, and it was sort of cloth-like. And furry, I thought, as my hand hit the top.
          I opened my eyes to discover that it was a bearskin—a huge, brown, somewhat motheaten bearskin that might have been a rug or some bizarre decoration in another life but was now serving as a blanket for me. I guessed because I was still damp. Waterlogged armor doesn’t dry fast, with too many cracks and crevasses for small amounts of water to pool, and mine had not morphed back into the tattered silver gown that was its alter ego when danger no longer threatened.
          Just as well; that thing was starting to take on an odor.
          Of course, so was I, and as it was a cross between panicked sweat, spent magic, and hot, musty bear, it was not particularly pleasant. But that was, I thought, finally reaching a sitting position and discovering a small but cheerful fire over which a pot was bubbling. That wasn’t so strange, except it was in the middle of what looked like a decrepit shopping mall.
          Which it was because I had seen this place before.
          “The coven’s enclave,” I croaked, staring at one of their funny advertising signs, this one with a cauldron that a pert redheaded witch was stirring with a wand. Or maybe that was supposed to be an oversized spoon; I couldn’t tell as she wasn’t moving, and neither were the contents of her brew. That wasn’t normal for the coven’s hideaway, which I’d visited once before and obtained the prototype for the armor I was currently wearing.
          They’d created a town with an underground mall in the desert outside Vegas, complete with a portal system with no rivals I knew of anywhere. It not only connected the covens’ enclaves around the world to each other, allowing them to maintain their independence and way of life outside of the Circle’s control, but it also had connections to Faerie. I remembered traders of all sorts striding up and down this street, levitating pallets of goods behind them, buying and selling and chatting with the colorful part-fey, part-humans that had found a home here. 
          They were gone, along with the formerly brilliant, animated street, which had rivaled the neon lights of old Vegas. The magic that had illuminated it was dark now, with some signs still in place on tumbled-down, dust-covered buildings, but none were working. I guessed that wasn’t surprising, as many buildings looked like a fire had raged through them, collapsing roofs, eating through walls, and leaving everything looking more like a field of charcoal than the colorful, vibrant place I remembered.
          And since the wards that had protected the complex hadn’t been able to extinguish the fire, I was pretty sure I knew what kind it had been. The gods brooked no rivals. It was something that the coven’s patented go-to-ground model for survival had had no chance against.
          “Look!” Enid said excitedly.   
          I turned back from perusing the dead street to see her kneeling excitedly on the floor, where cracks in the cobbles had allowed a single green sprout to shoot up between the stones. It was a hardy-looking little thing, nourished, I guessed, from some water source far below and strengthened by the sunlight leaking through gaps in the ceiling. It looked like the witches had hollowed out a hill or magicked one on top of their town, but light was spearing down through myriad holes in the shell above us like in the great portal room where we’d come in.
          “Watch this,” Enid said, looking at me. And then back down to where her little discovery was doing something as she poured a small amount of water on it from a chipped teacup. The sprout shivered briefly as if in a slight breeze and then plopped out another leaf to join the three it already had.
          Enid clapped her hands, seeming delighted, and I decided to blow her mind.
          “Watch this,” I said and crawled over. I took the cup from her and dunked a finger in it. And then touched the wet finger to the tiny “trunk” of the sapling . . .
          And pulled out yet another leaf.
          “How did you do that?” Enid breathed as if I’d just performed the world’s greatest magic trick.
         “I didn’t. There used to be a great oak down that way,” I nodded at the far end of the concourse. The fire had been worse in that area, blackening everything, but the canopy of spreading limbs would have been hard to miss. “The witches who lived here could make seats for themselves by spilling water on a platform they’d caused to grow throughout the hollow trunk. They just pulled them up from the wood, like plucking mushrooms,” I told her, showing her with my hand. “It was some kind of spell—”
          Pritkin said a word I didn’t know, but I guessed Enid did as her eyes got big.
“But that’s Blarestri magic!” she said, looking almost shocked.
          “In Faerie. Here, there are no such restrictions,” he told her. “The witches learned their craft from the Old Ones who live in the mountains—” he paused. “Who used to live in the mountains,” he added more softly because the shock of losing a world was still resonating through all of us. “They taught them a unified system.”
          “Why was it not so in Faerie, then?” Enid said. “Before you two,” her eyes slid from him to Æsubrand, who was trying to roast some small creature on a stick over the flames, “I had never even thought to meet anyone with all four elements. It was unheard of!”
          “It wasn’t common, even here,” Pritkin said, looking about at the destruction, expressionless. “But many of the people who built this place had two or even a weak third talent, and they all lived together, so what one couldn’t provide, another did.”
          “Yet on our world, where the magic originated, we were so separate . . .” she said, frowning, and then looked up, her color high. “Perhaps we could have fought the gods better if we hadn’t been!”
          “You’ve answered your own question,” Bodil commented. She had been tending our pot and seemed satisfied as she pulled it off the fire and started divvying the contents into fire-blackened bowls.
          “What?”
          “The gods separated the different streams of magic, giving only one to each of their groups of “children,” and killing anyone who dared to find a way to have more.”
          She glanced up at Pritkin and Æsubrand, the latter of whom looked uncomfortable, although that could have just been the effect of her remarkable eyes. They were back to black now, but honestly, it didn’t make much difference. Bodil could cow the gods themselves.
          “They wanted us separate and warring with each other,” she added. “So that we could never unite to fight against them. And they achieved their goal.”
“But he has all four elements,” Enid said, pointing at Æsubrand.
          He was looking rough, crouched on the dirty cobbles with only about half his once sleek suit of dragonscale still in place. He’d lost the helmet, along with the chest piece of his cuirass and a single greave, but had used his belt to hold the back piece of the cuirass in place; I guessed because it helped to stabilize the rest of the suit. He had acid burns on his chest from the battle to get here, and his formerly sleek, silver-blond hair was frazzled, having dried without any of the usual unguents the fey used to keep their pride and joy in place.
          He also had the look of a man who just wanted to eat his groundhog or whatever in peace.
          He had found a replacement for his once beautiful and now destroyed sword, however, in the form of a rusty pike. I didn’t know if he’d picked it up here because some of the witches liked old-fashioned weapons as much as the fey or from Faerie before we left. But I suspected the latter.
          It was old and ugly, but he had it cradled in the crook of one arm like the finest of blades. And like a man who was nervous about being attacked again. Or perhaps there was a different reason.
          I realized it might be one of the only things left from his homeworld.
          “Yes, his father made sure of it,” Bodil was saying. “He married a woman with the two powers he lacked. But that was after the gods were gone, and it was done to help them return. Although, the prince would likely have been killed thereafter by them had he not escaped with us.”
          The latter was said casually, almost as an aside, but it seemed to put Æsubrand off his meal. Or maybe that was the tiny, dangling feet of his treat hanging off the stick. They would have done it for me.
          But not for Alphonse, the big vamp, who, unlike most of his kind, liked to eat just fine. And while he didn’t need the nourishment, I guessed the familiar action was soothing. He picked up the discarded stick and helped himself, tearing into the small body with evident relish.
          Æsubrand accepted a bowl from Bodil without comment.
          Just down the road, there was a mostly intact teashop, which it looked like they’d raided for supplies. In place of the pot, a dull brass kettle with enough dings and scratches to bear witness to a long life of teamaking was plopped onto the small fire while the bowls finished being passed about.
          It surprised me despite the good smells that had woken me up. “How did you make this?” I asked as Bodil handed me a bowl and spoon.
          “Garden up top,” she said shortly, gesturing vaguely at the ceiling. “Ran rampant all these years, but some plants survived. And those little creatures—”
She looked at Pritkin, who started to supply a name, then glanced at me and stopped. Which meant that this probably wasn’t groundhog. I looked at my bowl but then shrugged and ate it anyway.
          I was freaking ravenous.
          “At any rate, they are plentiful,” Bodil said. “We will not starve, at least.”
Her words were laced with irony, as none of us thought that would be our fate. There were plenty of ways to die here, and that one took too long. Longer than we probably had.
          That thought brought me to the conversation I needed to have with everybody, and postponing it wasn’t likely to make it any better. But I didn’t want to ruin any more appetites, so I sat quietly for a moment. Sucking down some of the best soup I’d ever had, or maybe I was just hungrier than usual.
          “Other than for the garden, there’s not much in the way of provisions,” Pritkin told me. “We’ve checked the buildings that are safe to enter, and almost everything usable was destroyed.”
          “Not that there was much,” Alphonse added. “Witches, they got ways of preserving food, but there wasn’t much to preserve. It looked like they were hunkered down for a while, probably living off the gardens and their stores and maybe getting some supplies through the portals—”
          “That could have been what betrayed them,” Bodil said. “Portals leave a trace if you know how to read it.”
          I didn’t say anything, but I was impressed. She’d just seen her world explode around her, killing everyone and everything she had ever known, but here she was, cooking soup and calmly having a discussion. I would have been . . .
          Sitting here and calmly eating soup, I guessed, because my world wasn’t likely any better off. If this was how a secret enclave full of some of the most powerful people I had ever known had faired, what did everything else look like? I shivered slightly, not wanting to know, and concentrated on packing away dinner.
          “We don’t need provisions anyway,” Alphonse said, breaking the small silence that had followed her words.
          “Maybe you don’t,” Bodil said, eyeing him. As if wondering when he might decide to snack on one of them.
          “Don’t worry,” he told her. “Fey blood tastes nasty. Of course, I never tried any god-blood—”
          “And your first attempt will be your last,” she assured him, but for some reason, Alphonse just laughed, with the dark eyes smiling along with the lips. He seemed to be in an excellent mood. 
          “Probably would,” he agreed. “I saw what you did to that army. Damn. And I mean damn, woman. You can throw down.”
          “At home,” Bodil said dryly. She glanced around the silent street. “I don’t know about here. The desert is not my preferred battlefield.”
          No, for someone with water magic, I wouldn’t expect so, but again, Alphonse only chuckled. “Well, good thing our fighting is behind us, then.”
          “Behind us?” Æsubrand said suddenly. Whether over the purloining of his dinner or Alphonse’s relentless good humor, I didn’t know, but he looked pissed. “I would say it’s just begun!”
          Alphonse cheerfully ate a tiny leg at him. “How so?”
          “How so? How so? We are in an alien world—yes, even you! I do not know what fifty years of the gods’ tender care have done to your planet, but I doubt you will like it, vampire!”
          “Alphonse,” the big vamp corrected, “or I’m going to start calling you elf.”
          “I do not care what you call me!” Æsubrand snarled. “We are in an alien world stalked by creatures of unimaginable power! And yet, somehow, we are expected to cross a desert, find this Pythian heir—who is guarded by those very gods—and have her send us back in time to change history and erase all of this! And if we fail, both our worlds stay dead! And yet you sit there, laughing like an idiot—”
         “I’m gonna overlook that statement since you just lost your world and all,” Alphonse said magnanimously. “But you should probably learn some manners. There are no princes anymore. You’re either one of them, or you’re one of us, and if you’re one of us, you’re on a par with these things,” he said, waving around the denuded stick with only a few scraps of meat still clinging to the wood, “so we gotta stick together—”
          “And do what?” Æsubrand asked bitterly. “Cower in the shadows like vermin as we did before? I have never been so humiliated in my life—”
          Ah, so that’s what was eating him.
          “Didn’t look humiliated,” Alphonse offered. “More like pissing your pants terrified, which—”
          Æsubrand jumped him.
          “—was perfectly understandable, if you’d let me finish,” Alphonse said while the sleekly dangerous fey prince did his best to pound his skull in.
          Æsubrand seemed a little freaked out when he discovered it was like trying to cave in solid steel, spread over granite, with a titanium underlayer. Alphonse just took it for a second because the prince wasn't using a weapon, and fists were not very effective against vampire flesh. Then he plucked the enraged fey off his back like a dog scratching a pesky flea.
          “You done, hoss?” Alphonse said, only to have Æsubrand do one of those acrobatic flips he’d used a few times on me and get the big man into a headlock.
          “You insult me!”
          “Not at all. I was there, remember? Cowering right beside you. Or have you forgotten already?”
          “But that is to be expected from one such as—” Æsubrand caught himself just in time.
          Or maybe not.
          “One such as me, huh?” Alphonse asked. “You know, you’re burning through that whole compassion thing real quick. And for the record, some of us low-life scum—”
          “I did not say that!”
          “But you thought it. And us low-lifes think kind of highly of ourselves, too.”
          “It’s not about what you think! Reputation is everything—”
          “Where?” Bodil suddenly piped up, causing Æsubrand to look at her.
          “What?”
          “I said where?” the beautiful fey asked, her dark eyes gleaming. “Where does reputation still matter? In your father’s court? In mine? Before the soldiers who served with you? For they are all gone.”
          She never raised her voice, but the hairs on my arms suddenly stood up, nonetheless. 
          “Reputation is meaningless,” she added flatly. “As are most things now. Only the mission matters. Only that is real. Or else. . .” She looked around. “This will become all that is. Can you stomach that, Prince Æsubrand? Can you live with it?”
          “No.” It was a whisper.
          “Then let the vampire—” she caught herself. “Let Alphonse go and come and eat. You will need your strength.”
          And to my surprise, he did as she asked.
          Alphonse turned to me. He was done with his snack and likely didn’t need another, at least not yet. And when he did, it wouldn’t be an animal he’d be going for.
          But right now, he wanted information. 
          “So, when are you gonna do it?” he asked.
          I ate soup to give myself a second because I knew damned well what he meant. And why he was in such a good mood. Alphonse thought the battle was over and our victory was on the horizon line. Because that was how it was supposed to work, why we’d fought so hard to get here, and why my head was buzzing every time I thought about what lay ahead.
          “Do what?” Enid asked.
          “You know, that thing she does.” He waved a hand; I guessed to indicate a spatial shift. “And flip out of here to go see Rhea, her heir, and . . .”
          He trailed off, his sunny smile still in place but his eyes going dark. Because I was still hunched over my bowl, eating soup as noncommittally as possible, and he wasn’t stupid. He knew me.
          He had since I was a kid when I’d served as court seer for his old boss. Alphonse had been the cauliflower-nosed bruiser who made a mockery of the tall, dark, and handsome vamp trope and served as Tony’s chief enforcer. He’d been good at his job, and not only because he could pick up and break most vamps in half. But because those dark eyes didn’t miss much.
          At least one thing hadn’t changed, I thought grimly.
          “You can do that, right?” he said slowly. “Your power is back, and you’re just resting up to be able to use it. Right?”
          I licked my lips and tried to think.
          But not fast enough.
          “Oh, son of a bitch!”

          I couldn’t sleep despite the bottle of possibly moonshine Alphonse had found under a collapsed counter and reluctantly shared around, which had had fifty extra years of aging and mellowed not at all. So I left the bearskin behind and climbed the staircase Bodil had found that let out onto a rooftop garden. Only it was more of a hilltop garden since that was what this place looked like from the outside.
          Bodil wasn’t there, having decided to get some sleep, as she was as exhausted as the rest of us. But somebody else was. Pritkin had talked Alphonse out of the remains of the bottle and shook it at me as I walked over to join him on a rickety-looking wooden bench that had somehow survived the apocalypse.
          He was looking better, as if he’d done some more exploring on the way up here, and found a shirt. It was clearly a woman’s shirt, being black and showing a pert witch riding on a broom in front of a yellow moon, with the caption “Why, yes, actually. I can drive a stick.”
          I grinned, because if ever anything was true . . .
          Pritkin saw me and smiled ruefully. “There wasn’t a lot of choice.”
          “It suits you.”
          It did. The t-shirt wasn’t small, but it hadn’t been built for those kinds of muscles and strained a little trying to cover them all. Along with the black scuba-type trousers he was wearing, a leftover of our recent adventures in the land of the water fey, it left him looking sleek, pared down, and dangerous.
          That was good. I needed a dangerous partner right now, as I felt about as strong as a kitten. I took the bottle and gazed around. 
          The “garden” wasn’t much of one, having run wild ages ago, to the point that I was surprised anything had survived up here. Vegas got water approximately three weeks out of the year, with most of that clustered close together in the summer months. Which judging by the coolness of the night air, this wasn’t.
          Yet there were some scraggly green beans, a few still with yellowed, bug-bit pods clinging to the stems, a sickly-looking tomato plant with no tomatoes, probably because they’d gone into our dinner, and various hardy little pepper bushes, poking up from the hard packed soil. They weren’t in rows if they’d ever been, but scattered as randomly as if reseeded by the birds, like the desert scrub that also seemed to flourish here.
          A leftover spell, to make the soil more moist? I reached a hand down to the dry as a bone, cracked earth around the bench and didn’t believe it. Not to mention that I didn’t know a spell that could survive fifty years after the death of the caster.
          I felt a shiver run through me, and slugged back a shot’s worth of whatever was in the bottle.
          And immediately regretted it. 
          “Take it easy,” Pritkin as I choked, because what the hell? “You didn’t have any earlier?”
          “No,” I finally gasped back and returned the bottle. “I smelled it first.”
          “So why now?” he hiked a blond eyebrow at me.
          “I’m stupid.”
          I found myself enveloped in a strong arm, and . . . okay. That was better. “You’re not stupid.”
          “I feel stupid. I was so sure my power would come back as soon as we reached Earth.”
          “It was a reasonable assumption.”
          “Yeah. Story of my life.”
          I reached for the bottle again, and he sent me a look but gave it to me. It was no better this time, but I didn’t care much. I didn’t care about anything.
          Well, except for one thing. Because I hadn’t gotten into this mess on my own. Pythias could go back in time but not forward, as the future didn’t exist yet, so how could you shift to something that wasn’t there?
          You couldn’t, or at least, that was what I’d always been taught. But somebody had done it. Worst of all, it wasn’t even a rogue Pythian acolyte or a crazy mage, both of which I’d fought before.
          It was a vampire. To be more precise, it was the vampire, the bastard who had ruined my childhood, killed my parents, and now trashed my future. The one who was owed.
          And the only thing keeping me sane was the fact that he was probably here, too.
          He had to be. Vamps didn’t know crap about magic, especially the time-travel kind. Yet, in a split second, he had had shifted us all fifty years out of place, and he’d been standing right beside me when it happened.
          So, he hadn’t had a chance to get out of the spell’s reach. It must have grabbed him, too, and although I hadn’t seen him since arriving in this nightmare a day ago, he had to be here. Everyone else near me had been swept up in the spell’s backwash, so why wouldn’t he?
          Or maybe I was just telling myself that. Maybe I needed something to ground me because, time traveler or not, this was out of my league. Way the hell out.
          “Penny for your thoughts,” Pritkin said.
          “I’d rather hear yours.”
          The eyebrow was back, and doing double duty tonight. “About?”
          “Oh, try it on someone else.” I took another swig, choked again, and got thumped on the back. Which helped not at all because nothing was caught in my throat; it was just on fire. I handed the bottle back and told myself to get wasted later.
          “Meaning?” he asked, putting it on the other side of the bench.
          “Meaning that you always have a plan,” I wheezed. “You know how to get to Rhea. Don’t tell me you don’t.”
          “I have an idea,” he agreed reluctantly.
          “Why does it sound like I’ll hate it?”
          He pulled me in closer, and I went happily. It was the only good thing about this, the fact that he was with me. If I’d been here alone . . .
          Well, I have been finishing that bottle and hoping it finished me at the same time. But Pritkin had a way of making even insane odds sound doable, maybe because he’d battled through them enough. We both had.
          And if I had to be at the end of the world with someone, I was glad it was him.
          “The Circle recently put a portal from its HQ in Stratford to its new, temporary digs on the outskirts of Vegas,” he told me.
          “The old shoe warehouse?”
          He sighed because he hated when I called it that. But I wasn’t trying to belittle the Circle’s accomplishments. After the demise of MAGIC, the old supernatural version of a United Nations out in the desert, where the local branch of the Circle had once been based, they’d had to find another home and find one fast. They were faced with an unexpected war that wouldn’t wait, and the warehouse had been innocuous looking and big enough . . .
          But they’d still acted like it was embarrassing; I didn’t know why.
          Their old HQ had been literally a hole in the ground.
          I decided not to mention that.
          “And?” I prompted because Pritkin looked like he wished he hadn’t said anything.
          “The idea was to link our main bases of power so that, if an attack was made on one, the others could quickly back it up,” he told me. “Or help with an evacuation if needed. After the Black Circle’s attack on your court, when we took far too long to respond, leaving you fighting a war on your own with only a handful of newspaper reporters—”
          “Hey, the reporters kicked ass.”
          “Yes, they did,” his hand tightened slightly on my arm. “But it was a close thing, and nobody wanted a repeat. The Pythian Court was, therefore, put right at the top of the list for areas to be linked in, and plans had already been drawn up to provide a shortcut to it when I left the Corps. Not directly to it, as that would compromise security, but in the region.”
          “So we get to the shoe warehouse, and we get to my court?”
          “To Dante’s, or just down the street from it,” he corrected, talking about the vamp-owned casino where my court had somehow ended up.
          It was a long story.
          “The difficulty is getting to the warehouse, considering where we are now,” he added. “The desert here is far too open, and I have seen no less than three giant shapes in the distance since coming up here.”
          “Gods?” I said in alarm, staring out over the sand.
          It didn’t help much, as the moon was barely a sliver in the sky and the aurora borealis, which had brilliantly lit many of the nights in Faerie, was nowhere to be seen here. The desert was dark, but there was no light pollution, allowing the Milky Way to arc overhead and provide a starfield all the way to the horizon. It wasn’t bright, but I could see how he could make out vague shapes, especially if they were moving.
          But what were a bunch of gods doing out here in the middle of nowhere?
          “I don’t know,” he confessed when I voiced my thoughts. “I also don’t think a god would have been fooled as easily as the creature attracted by our portal, but I cannot say for sure.” He shot me a look. “I haven’t had as much experience with them as you have.”
          “Ha ha.” And then I realized what he’d meant. “You think it was the portal that attracted him?”
          “What else?”
          “I thought he must have seen one of you.”
          Pritkin shook his head. “He was already coming our way when we topped the rise of the hill. At a guess, the power of a portal from Faerie was discernable even at a distance, and he came running. But we’ve done no magic since, having practically none available, yet there were others in the vicinity . . .”
          “So what attracted them?”
          “Desperation?”
          “What makes a god desperate?” I asked, frowning. “And why are they out here? You’d think they’d have better places to look for power than this,” I gestured around at the small collection of hills, the flat sands beyond, and the sparse scrub. There were beautiful places in the deserts outside Vegas, but this wasn’t one of them. I’d thought before that the covens must have chosen it precisely for that reason.
          If you wanted to go unnoticed, you could do worse.
          “This is speculation,” he warned me.
          “I’ll take it.” Pritkin’s speculation was better than most people’s certainty.
          He looked out over the uninspired vista, his forehead wrinkling slightly. It was the look I’d seen on his face when I showed up, before he’d spotted me. As if he’d come here to puzzle things out after everyone went to sleep, and I guessed he’d managed it.
          “The gods might not have found what they expected when they returned,” he said, after a moment. “At first, I’m sure it was a feast,” he added, his jaw tightening. “But what about after the initial conquest? With the survivors here and in Faerie either dead or hiding in small groups, and the powerful demon lords that the gods were really after, the ones who would make them a truly satisfying meal absent . . .”
          “But were they absent?” because he was right. Earth or even Faerie wasn’t the point of all this. We were just the staging ground for the invasion of the hells the gods wanted, because that was where their real prey lay. The ones with millennia of stored up power that could satisfy even a god’s appetite.
          “I know them,” Pritkin said flatly. “They’re not cowards, but they’re not stupid, either, and they’ve fought this war before. And they rarely have to be taught the same lesson twice.
          “They would scatter and disperse as soon as the gods returned, while they were busy taking out their vengeance on Earth and Faerie. They’d head to the far reaches of our realm, possibly even beyond them, and they would stay there. Some plotting revenge, others hoping for better days. But what they would not do is to come here or anywhere near here.”
          “And the gods were starved when they arrived,” I said, thinking it through. “And there were a lot of them. So they probably got what they barely considered a meal before the buffet closed. Leaving them what? Fighting over scraps?”
          “Not the greatest of them,” Pritkin said. “Zeus and the like. If they were willing to venture into the hells after being reinvigorated with the energy they found here, they would find prey. Not everyone could flee, and many are not much more powerful than humans when it comes down to it.”
          I thought about the quirky, slightly harassed-looking denizens of the demon world known on Earth as the Shadowland. It was one of the few I’d ever been to, as it was a sort of neutral zone where human mages could go to buy whatever esoteric supplies were only available there. And where demons from a thousand races met to work out problems, trade, and offer their services to the Demon High Council, which met there and many of whose members had courts there.
          But the regular Joes I’d met there, or regular demons I guessed, had been scary sometimes, but more often, they’d just been trying to make a living. I wondered where they were now. I wondered if they were now.
          Being close to Earth, metaphysically speaking, was no longer a plus.
          “So the strongest gods are off ravaging the hells,” I said, “which haven’t even fully recovered from the last time they were here, and the rest . . . are prowling around Earth?”
          “Possibly,” but Pritkin looked dissatisfied. “But why out the desert? And why so many? They need magical power; it is the only thing they live off of, the one power source they can use. But this . . .” he looked around at the barren wasteland, his expression echoing my thoughts.
          This didn’t look like the Vegas buffet they’d probably been hoping for. 
          “Maybe they are in the hells then,” I said, “and its just some crazy ones out here.”
          “No.” He sounded certain. “The demon lords have had time to plan, and they would not leave their worlds entirely undefended. Not to mention that the people of those worlds would know that they were fighting for their lives. There will be snares everywhere, fiendish traps, and ambushes, as there were last time. The demon lords first tried to fight, arraying their armies against the gods, and were decimated. They learned better. They won’t make that mistake again, but they won’t just lie down and die. They’ll have prepared for a fight; it’s in their nature.”
          “You almost sound proud of them,” I said before I thought. Because Pritkin hated his demon half.
          Only, he currently didn’t have him, did he?
          He’d used a spell to split the demon part of his nature off from the rest of himself shortly before we were whisked away to the future. Leaving his counterpart behind to face the return of the gods on his own. And if he’d still been in Faerie . . .
But no. he was Pritkin. He was smart.
          He’d find a way.
          “I know them,” Pritkin said, watching me, as if he knew the path my thoughts had taken. But he didn’t comment. Except to add, “The hells will live up to their name where the gods are concerned.”
          “So, the greatest among them might chance it, have to chance it, as they need more power than the rest. But everyone else . . . what are they doing?”
          “Looking in holes,” Pritkin said, giving me a flashback to the great eye in the crack above us. “Searching for every tiny scrap of power left on this world. And no fewer than four of them are prowling in this vicinity . . .”
          His own eyes widened suddenly.
          “What is it?” I asked, as he all but leaped off the bench and started moving around the hilltop, hands spread slightly out beside him and parallel to the ground, as if magically searching for something. But there was nothing here but beans, and the staircase hidden by the fake hilltop below. But Pritkin was never this excited over nothing, so I got up, too.
          “What are we looking for?” I asked, because he hadn’t answered me.
          “Witches.”
          “What?”
          “Witches!” he looked up from kneeling by a bean plant, feeling the air. “What if they’re still here?”
          I stared at him, feeling the first bit of hope in a while despite everything. We could really use some allies right now, especially ones that powerful! Oh, God, we could!
          “You think they are?”
          “I can’t tell.” He looked frustrated. But that doesn’t mean they’re not here. To have survived for so long, they’d need a hell of a camouflage.”
          I glanced around. I’d say they’d succeeded. “So how do we contact them?”
          “We don’t. If they’re here, they have to know that we are, too. That portal simply couldn’t have been missed. It even brought a god running from miles away. But they haven’t surfaced.”
          “Maybe they don’t know who we are,” I said, getting excited. “Faerie was supposed to be barren, too, and now it’s just exploded. They must have felt that; their magic is based on that of the fey—”
          “Yes, and the death of a planet is not likely to have reassured them!”
          “But there has to be a way to let them know we’re not just refugees, that we’re not a threat, that we can help them—”
          “Help?” The word slithered through the cold desert air like the hiss of a giant snake. “What does the heir to Artemis know of help?”
          And suddenly, we were falling.