I was in hell.
          No, that wasn’t right. I’d been to hell, and it was better. Like, by a lot.
          And that was before Pritkin started to swear.
          John Pritkin was an irascible war mage, the magical equivalent of a platoon, with a mouth that would make a sailor blush—and that was on a good day. This was not a good day. His usually spiky blond hair was extra spiky from the cold, frozen into pointy tips that looked like they’d stab you if you got too close. His expression matched them when he turned around to look at me out of furious green eyes.
          “What?” I said.
          “You didn’t mention them!” he accused, from the high perch of the coachman’s seat.
          “Them? Them who?”
          I leaned forward, but couldn’t see anything from here. I also couldn’t hear, with another icy blast howling down the cavernous riverbed far below and whipping by our coach, which was barely clinging to a narrow bridge as it was. Pritkin swore some more, this time at the horses, who bucked and caused us to rock alarmingly. I was treated to a brief, dizzying view over the railless side of the bridge: rushing water studded with shards of ice, snow-covered rocks sparkling in weak winter sunlight, dead looking trees stretching their skeletal limbs skyward as if grabbing for us, trying to stab, to drag us down, to—
          And then we righted again, with a thud and a shake, and I bit my tongue hard enough to taste blood.
          At least I didn’t scream, I thought, clutching the door. Six months ago, I would have been screaming my head off, and flailing my way out of the open carriage we were in despite it being freeze-your-ass-off degrees outside. And slip sliding my way back down the icy bridge, hoping that none of the finely dressed monsters in the carriages behind me were hungry.
          My name is Cassie Palmer, and six months ago, I was a down on my luck secretary who read Tarot in a bar. I clipped coupons, shopped yard sales, and knew fifteen different ways to dress up ramen. Had anybody told me that, by December, I would be Pythia, the chief seer of the supernatural world, and on my way to a vampire ball full of traitors, I’d have either laughed or edged slowly away, depending on how crazed they looked.
          I wasn’t laughing now.
          I was swallowing blood and looking up to find my second companion on his feet, his dark hair flying out behind him on the wind, his hand gripping the back of the coachman’s seat. “Where?” he demanded.
          “By the portcullis,” Pritkin said, his voice tight. “You see?”
          I assumed it was a rhetorical question, since a vampire’s eyes didn’t miss much, especially this vampire's. Mircea Basarab was a first-level master, the highest vampire rank, which came with a lot of nifty bonus features. That included eyesight with a telephoto ability that I’d found out about recently when Mircea and I had briefly shared power.
          In fact, that was the whole reason I was here, freezing my silk covered ass off: Mircea had discovered a spell that allowed two or more people to share magical gifts, assuming that they were lovers—or in our case, had recently been lovers.
          It sounded like a nifty idea—until you learned the catch. The spell wasn’t really about power sharing; that was just a byproduct. It was about soul sharing, linking you to someone else at the deepest level, which also didn’t sound too bad.
          Until you realized: at that level of connectedness, when one of you died, you both did.
          Yeah.
          I wasn’t a fan.
          People had been trying to kill me ever since I got this job, because we were at war and a Pythia was a formidable opponent. Especially a young Pythia who wasn’t frail and half dead from poison like the last. And then completely dead, because they’d gotten Agnes in the end, despite the fact that she was as wily as they came.
          But they hadn’t gotten me.
          Only they didn’t have to, because my ex-boyfriend was going to take care of that for them, risking his own neck along with mine and Pritkin’s, too. Pritkin was my current lover, which roped him into the enchantment as well, and explained why he was here. He was afraid that Mircea was going to get us all killed, because the spell was just fine with ménages à trois.
          Unfortunately, Pritkin wasn’t.
          I’d tried to play peacemaker by pointing out that the spell wasn’t a problem right now, since Mircea had had it removed. And had sworn never to have it cast again, in exchange for me taking him on this one last mission through time. Assuming we survived, that was.
          That last thought must have occurred to Pritkin, too, because my attempts at diplomacy had not been well received. The tension had been a little thick in the carriage as a result, and it didn’t look like things were improving. Mircea’s expression had turned dark and scowl-y, and his nose was twitching.
          I surreptitiously sniffed myself, wondering if my panicked sweat had broken through the rose-scented perfume I was wearing. But seriously, who could tell? All I could pick up was cold and horse, and I couldn’t see anything huddled under my heavy fur blanket, or talk without possibly being overheard by the dozens of carriages around us.
          So, I stood up, too. Another gust of freezing wind hit, making me shiver and causing our horses to do another jig across the slick, icy stones. But, this time, I barely noticed. This time, I was riveted by something even scarier than a plunge into the void.
          Shit.
          Two figures stood at the end of the death trap of a causeway, in long dark cloaks that billowed out on the wind like the banners on the castle ramparts above. If they were trying to look human, it wasn’t working. For one thing, they dwarfed the guy that they’d just snatched off a coachbox, and for another, one of them had turned him upside down, holding him easily by one leg and shaking him until the knives hidden about his person fell out and rattled against the stones.
          Seven feet tall, super strong, and with long, silver hair that whipped in the wind when one of their hoods fell back?
          Shit, shit, shit.
          I guess Pritkin felt the same, because the howling of the wind, the creaking of the carriage wheels, and the whinnying of the horses abruptly cut out, when he threw a silence spell around us.
          “Son of a bitch!” he snarled, turning around, and Mircea shot him a warning glance.
          “They can still see you,” he said, talking about the vamps in the other carriages, I assumed.
          “Like I give a damn! We aren’t getting in there!”
          “We are.” It was implacable.
          “What are the fey doing here?” I asked, trying to avoid a fight, possibly literally.
          “Checking every carriage,” Pritkin snapped. “And I’m part fey—”
          “Which is why you shouldn’t have come,” Mircea said flatly.
          Pritkin’s eyes narrowed, taking on a color closer to the turbulent, icy water below. “Which is why you need me—”
          “I’ve dealt with the fey before—”
          “And how many men did you lose?” Pritkin asked sweetly. Because sure. This was the time to poke the bear.
          “Can we stay on target?” I asked. We were only three carriages away from the fey, with the huge portcullis behind them close enough to remind me of a mouth full of jagged teeth, ready to consume us. It didn’t help that icicles had formed on the pitted iron, turning the teeth into elongated fangs. Which was appropriate considering how many more of those there were in the surrounding crowd.
          Damn, I wanted out of here!
          But we had a job to do first.
          “—vampires,” Mircea was saying tersely. “Not men. And I know how much that thought disturbs you.”
          “It disturbs me that our forces are dwindling—of whatever kind,” Pritkin growled. “I would prefer that number not include us!”
          “A little late,” I pointed out, because we were almost there. The carriage with the stupidly armed driver had been allowed to pass, with a fey at the reins after the man himself was tossed carelessly over the parapet. We were now second in line.
          I need a drink, I thought vaguely, trying not to listen for the coachman’s terrified scream to abruptly cut out. I didn’t hear it—the bridge was freakishly high, and the wind was doing a banshee impression—but my brain kept insisting that I did, and rerunning the sound on a loop. Scream, splat, scream, splat, scream, splat.
          Mircea pulled a flask out of his coat as if he’d heard my thoughts, but the alcohol didn’t go into me. It went onto Pritkin, who snarled and grabbed the now mostly empty piece of silver. “Are you mad?”
          “They can’t smell you this way,” Mircea informed him, unperturbed.
          “They don’t need to smell me! They’re fey. They can sense—”
          And then it was our turn.
          The carriage in front of us—a closed one, to keep the late afternoon sunlight off delicate vampire skin—had been waved through almost at once. I didn’t know who had been in it, but they must have been trusted enough to bypass the goons, leaving us holding up the line. Pritkin had no choice but to brave it out, snapping the silence spell and clicking his tongue at the horses, causing them to move slowly forward.
          I knew I should sit back down, should smooth the fur over my knees, should try to act normal. But my blonde updo had taken a beating in the wind and was coming down around my cold-reddened and probably terrified face, so I doubted it would help. Plus, I couldn’t reach the guys that way.
          And I had the feeling that I was going to need to reach the guys.
          My hands tightened on Mircea’s arm and Pritkin’s leg, as I stared up at the portcullis some more. I probably looked like I was mesmerized by it, and I almost was, although not for its fearsome appearance. But for what was swirling around it.
          It was panting like a great beast, but the steady in- and exhales weren’t of air but of time. Time was the realm of the Pythias, the medium through which all our magic was done. Time usually soothed and comforted me, wrapping me in a warmer embrace than my fur, a sweet reassurance that my power glimmered at my fingertips, ready for use.
          It wasn’t glimmering now. It was stuttering, upset and worried, because it could only feel me intermittently. Because the castle . . . wasn’t really there.
Well, part of it was. The outside part, to be exact, where the portcullis was, and which had been carved from the same dull gray stone as the surrounding mountains. It was old and weathered and half tumbled down, but it was real enough. But the inside . . . well, who knew where that was.
          What I did know was that I’d seen this trick before.
          In the supernatural world, when you absolutely, positively didn’t want interruptions from nosy parkers like me, you had an option. You could park yourself outside of Earth, outside of time, outside of everything, smack in the middle of a ley line, one of the rivers of metaphysical energy that flowed between our planet and the realms beyond. Because, while you traversed the space between worlds, you weren’t really anywhere—or anywhen.
          You could fix yourself there, like a ship dropping anchor on storm tossed seas, and provide your guests a single doorway into your temporary oasis. Once they stepped through, they were somewhere that you controlled absolutely. And if you later shut that door?
          Well, then even time itself couldn’t reach you.
          Despite the weather, I felt my palms start to sweat.
          That was why I hadn’t just shifted us inside to begin with. I couldn’t risk it when my power was stuttering like a candle in a high breeze. Especially not while carrying three. And three it had to be, because my two companions were both Alpha males determined to help me, but who instead were giving me cancer. Pure cancer, just any time now.
          “—know who I am?”
          That was Mircea, of course, talking to the guards and, despite what we’d just seen, sounding as imperious as the prince he’d once been. And looking like it, too, because the cold loved him. It made my face flush like I had a fever, sent enough static electricity through my hair to make it frizz and crackle, and caused snowflakes to gunk up my eyelashes like old mascara. But Mircea . . .
          Looked like the goddamned god of winter.
          The cold heightened his color, but just enough to faintly tinge the high cheekbones and redden the shapely lips. The glorious mane of thick, dark hair was loose and flowing on the breeze, the usually dark eyes were starting to glow amber bright, with striations of color spiraling up from the depths as his temper rose, and the rich, dark blue, mink lined robes he wore, old fashioned even in the seventeenth century, fit the scene perfectly.
          They were from the time when his family had ruled this region with an iron fist and a lot of pointy wooden stakes, or at least his brother had. But Vlad the Impaler was just a legend now, and not one that the fey appeared to have heard of, because they weren’t even looking at the current family scion. They also weren’t paying any attention to the blond huddled under a blue greatcoat and reeking of alcohol in the driver’s seat.
          They were staring at me.
           I looked back in surprise, because I was just supposed to be Mircea’s date for the evening and should have been beneath their notice. The Svarestri type of fey didn’t think much of their own women, and believed the human variety to be beneath contempt. My outfit ought to have helped with that, consisting of a frilly, shell pink dress with enough lace to choke a horse, and the currently fashionable “Spaniel ears” hairstyle, which looked exactly like droopy dog ears on either side of my head with a bun in back. If anyone had ever looked like the human version of a fluffy bunny, it was me.
          Yet the fey didn’t seem to think so. Twin pairs of pewter colored eyes, almost the same pale gray as the sky, stared into mine. Thanks to the height of the carriage, and the fussy, watered silk high heels I was wearing, we were almost eye to eye. And theirs were wide and getting wider.
          “Um,” I said, a brief, reflexive sound, barely a huff on the freezing air. But it had an outsized effect.
          Two powerful fey warriors, probably centuries old and covered with weapons, abruptly turned tail and ran, with one screaming something in a language I didn’t know. They disappeared through the portcullis, both of them yelling now, and two more pairs of eyes turned on me. One was now amber bright and one was as green as a new leaf, but they held identical, accusing expressions.
          I looked back, nonplussed. “What?”
          And then we found out what.
          The portcullis started to lower—faster than I would have expected for something that rusted—and the sound spooked the already unhappy horses. They started forward again, which threatened to bring the heavy iron thing crashing down on top of us. But Pritkin applied a quick lash to a couple of shiny russet backsides and they jumped ahead, slipping us through at the last possible second.
          Which would have been great except for the couple hundred fey now thundering toward us across a courtyard.
          “Shit!” I said, and shifted, the last swirl of my power taking us to the top of one of the castle’s turrets, just before the great gate clanged down.
          “What did you do?” Pritkin demanded, jumping up from the floor of a narrow, watchtower like surround, where he’d landed in a still-seated position.  
“What did you—”
          I didn’t answer, being too busy staring back at the portcullis, which had just effectively cut me off from my power. And because the army of fey were now climbing up the castle walls after us, as if their feet were velcroed to the stones. And because a rain of arrows had just headed our way.
          We ducked behind the crenelated battlements, seeking cover, but a shaft took Mircea in the shoulder, nonetheless, courtesy of some fey still in the courtyard. He pulled it out without so much as a curse and jammed it through the eye of the first guard over the wall. Blood spurted, the fey’s body fell back, already lifeless, and I screamed.
          “No!” And got a mouthful of ash for my trouble.
          It took me a second to realize that it hadn’t come from a chimney, which the castle didn’t seem to have anyway, but rather from Pritkin. He’d just sent a massive fireball at the next five guards leaping for us, which had hit them mid jump. The spell had been hot enough to dust them to ash and a few charred slivers of bone, which the wind whipped at us and at their friends now flooding over the battlements.
          I spat out pieces of fey and tried to talk, but my gag reflex kicked in.
“Shift,” Pritkin suggested, because the assault hadn’t so much as slowed our enemy down.
          I hacked and coughed and tried to explain that I couldn’t, but I didn’t get the chance. Because Mircea was opting for the better part of valor, and taking me with him. I felt a hard hand grip my waist and then nothing under my feet, as we took a flying leap into the air. We landed a second later, with me coughing out “Pritkin!” and Mircea finally cursing as half a dozen arrows slammed into his body from behind.
          They would have slammed into me, too, but he was keeping me in front of him, something that would have been marginally less terrifying if we hadn’t been sliding down an absurdly tilted roof of slick clay tiles, straight toward—
          “Auuggghhhh!” I yelled, finally getting my breath back, as we plunged over the edge and into darkness.
          Well, almost. I found myself on my hands and knees, my body jolting and sending pain signals everywhere, and my eyes staring down at a blinding circle of light. I appeared to be straddling it, I didn’t know why. Until my vision adjusted, and my confused brain finally figured out that I was looking through a round opening in the castle floor, below which was a huge drop that ended in the rushing river and a lot of rocks.
          And a lot of bones.
          The river curved about the castle here, creating a fairly sharp turn, and allowing anything dumped below to pile up. And the bones had done exactly that, washing up onto the riverbank in heaps of rotting ribcages, dirty clavicles, shattered femurs, and a few skulls, one of them alarmingly outsized. Its features looked more human than animal, with green, trailing slime for hair and eye sockets that must have been as big as my head. The river was pouring through them, making the giant skull look like it was weeping—
          For us, probably, I thought, snapping out of it, as a fey hit the floor in front of me.
          Mircea pulled me up, and I received a brief glimpse of a small, roofless room; of a long-decayed sheep’s head, its tongue lolling from a perch by a door; of a bunch of empty meat hooks, originally plain wood like the tables scattered about, but stained dark from years’ worth of dried blood; and of more bones, most of them near the opening in the floor, because we were in the castle abattoir, weren’t we? It was on the edge of the structure, probably so the animals could be butchered and their unwanted bits chucked down the hole for the river to sort out.
          Fitting, I thought, as Mircea grabbed a cleaver.
          The fey in front of me went staggering back with his head bisected down to the neck and flopping to the sides, spilling his brains out. My gorge rose, but I swallowed it back where it belonged because more fey were sliding down the steeply sloped roof, some shooting as they came. Thankfully, the little room had once had a thatched covering, some decayed bits of which still clung to the stones and acted as an arrow trap.
          But not enough of one.
          A shaft took me through the hand, I screamed, Mircea swore, and then the bastards were on us.
          And really wished they weren’t.
          An enraged master vampire is a terrible and strangely beautiful sight, what you can see of him. Which wasn’t much in this case, because Mircea was little more than a blur against the gray stone walls. But then, I didn’t have to see him move.
          I saw the results.
          Fey warriors suddenly appeared, writhing, on those no-longer-empty meat hooks, as abruptly as if I’d shifted them there. Others disappeared down the well, tripped or thrown, one with the aforementioned cleaver sticking out of his forehead, right between his surprised looking eyes. The fey in our time had fought an army of master vamps recently and gotten their asses handed to them, but these hadn’t. I wondered if they’d have been so gung-ho to follow us if they’d realized what they were getting into.
          But what they lacked in vamp-killing ability, they made up for in numbers. I had no idea what they were doing here—they weren’t supposed even to be on Earth in this era—but they were flooding down the roof like the water tumbling over the stones below, and just as deadly. And just as impossible for us to kill, because we were in the past, damn it!
          I grabbed for Mircea as he streaked by, and somehow managed to snare an arm. “You can’t kill them! We’ll destroy the time line!”
          He paused to stare at me as if I was mad, a fey in each hand. “Then what would you have me do?”
          “Run?”
          He looked vaguely offended. I half expected him to remind me that the great Mircea Basarab did not run. But then a dozen arrows slammed into him, into the wall, into a still writhing fey body on a hook, and into the remains of my updo.
          And, a second later, he had knocked his prisoners unconscious, scooped me up, and we were pelting through a series of storerooms full of half frozen, hanging carcasses.

          Meaty thud, thud, thuds punctuated the air, as arrows hit flesh that was thankfully far beyond feeling it. I was not beyond feeling it, and my hand burned like somebody had shoved a red-hot poker through it. But worse than that was not knowing what was happening to—
          Pritkin, I thought, as the scene skewed around me. My eyes blinked and I was suddenly looking at another corridor, this one full of old stones and torchlight, and a bunch of screaming, running fey. They were chasing not one, not ten, but maybe a hundred Pritkins, who were racing through side corridors and down cross-tunnels and into rooms where what sounded like major battles were going on.
          It was like some kind of slapstick sketch—Monty Python in a dungeon—but it wasn't funny. Because that particular spell was exhausting, and normally used as a last resort, since there wouldn’t be enough magic left for many more after it. I stared around, looking frantically for the real Pritkin, before abruptly realizing: he was me.
          The hand clutching the stone of a doorway in front of my face was a familiar one. It didn’t match the blunt instrument that Pritkin often pretended to be, looking more like something that should belong to a pianist or an artist. Sun bronzed and slender, with just a smattering of fine golden hairs that caught the light of the fey’s torches, it was like the rest of the man—surprising.
          And dead, if he didn’t get out of there. The fey were running his copies through left and right, although some of them were holding their own. A handful of crazy-haired mages had banded together and were ambushing individual fey, lobbing spells and stabbing them wildly—and further screwing up time.
          “No!” I thought, horrified, and all the Pritkins looked up.
          The one whose eyes I was currently seeing through started, and then cursed inventively. “What are you doing in my head?” he demanded.
          “Looking for you?” I said, confused at the fury in his voice, and then the implication hit. I wasn’t a telepath; I couldn’t do this.
          But someone else could.
          “Son of a bitch!” we said together, before the scene suddenly popped.
          “Damn it, Mircea!” I glared up at the vaguely harried looking vamp, although whether that was because we were still dodging arrows or because he’d just seen the same thing I had, I wasn’t sure. But I was sure about something. “I’m borrowing your abilities, aren’t I?”
          Mircea had set the rows of carcasses swinging behind us, throwing off the fey’s aim, but it wasn’t enough. A couple of arrows slammed into the dead deer we’d just dodged behind, and another took off one of my fake dog ears. Mircea’s hand grabbed my exposed head and tucked it closer into his chest.
          “Perhaps we could discuss this another time, dulceață?”
          “Don’t dulceață me! You know full well—”
          He threw open a door at the end of the room and ducked inside.
          “—that we had a deal!”
          “One I am perfectly willing to uphold,” he said, slamming the door and smashing his arrow-riddled back against it. The abrupt motion caused the pointy tips of the weapons to suddenly erupt from his torso, ruining the fine lawn of the shirt he wore under all that velvet. He winced but otherwise didn’t seem to notice. “Once we are finished here,” he added.
          “It looks like we’re finished now!”
          We were in a long hall that resembled the one that Pritkin had been in, except that it had a line of Romanesque arched windows looking over the stunning view. I could see pale, blue-gray sky, fir covered mountains, and craggy heights, but couldn’t really appreciate it considering that the door was already thudding like there was a giant on the other side. Or a heck of a lot of fey.
          And I guessed Mircea didn’t like our odds against their arrows in an open corridor, because he pointed at the wall. “If you would be so good as to hand me a spear?”
          I looked behind me to find that the side of the hall opposite the windows was decorated with numerous lethal looking weapons, arrayed in pretty formations. The nearest group contained a bunch of spears with thick wooden shafts. I started to jerk one off the wall, had my hand scream bloody murder at me, and swore.
          And then jerked the arrow out of it, because I didn’t have a choice, and immediately went swimmy headed from the pain.
          The arrow head had broken off at some point, but just removing the wooden shaft was horrible. Why had I done that? Why the hell had I done that?
          Bad idea, bad idea, bad idea.
          Even worse, the wound did not immediately close up, as I’d half expected since I was currently channeling the power of a master vampire. It didn’t look like there were any bones broken, the head having sliced cleanly through the middle of two of them. But the pain was horrible and the red, gaping mouth looked like it was laughing at me—
          “Cassie!”
          I snapped out of it, belatedly remembering that we were still in battle. Get a grip, I told myself savagely, or you’re about to have a lot more wounds courtesy of a lot more fey. I grabbed the spear and tossed it to Mircea.
          He caught it mid-air and used it to brace the door.
          It did not appear to help much.
          “The deal was that you take the spell off,” I reminded him shakily, refusing to get side tracked. “And once we’ve found this guy you want—”
          “This fey I want,” he corrected, motioning for more spears.
          “—then that’s it. You don’t do this again—”
          “Exactly so.”
          “But you’re doing it now!” I tossed him the rest of the thick shafts, one at a time, using my good hand as much as possible. “You never removed it!”
          “I did, in fact.”
          I looked at him.
          “And then I had it reapplied,” he admitted.
          “Why?”
          “That’s why,” he said, right before the door, now braced by no fewer than six huge spears, nonetheless blew inward.
          The blow, which simply had to be magically enhanced, caught Mircea as well as the door, shooting them both almost halfway down the hall. And leaving me facing the mass of fey muscling in with no magic and no time. But thanks to Mircea being a bastard, and my current terrible mood, I did have one advantage.
          “I hate it when you’re right,” I muttered, and slammed a heavy shield into the nearest fey’s face, hard enough to send him and the three immediately behind him staggering.
          “I heard that!” A distant voice said.
          “Shut up and help me!” I yelled, and for once, Mircea did as he was told.
          A bunch of spears machine gunned through the air, thrown hard enough to blow the vanguard off their feet, and to affix them to the wall like bugs on a pin. It was the sort of thing that would normally merit a double take or two, but not now. I was too busy lobbing every weapon I could find at the fey while walking backward down the hallway.
          Using my own strength, I’d have had trouble even lifting many of the heavy maces, war hammers and flails, much less rapid-firing them with devastating effect. But I wasn’t using my strength; I was using Mircea’s. And he didn’t have any problem at all.
          The initial barrage paused some of the feys’ forward momentum, and the second—half a dozen of the heavy shields—stopped it altogether. The iron banded disks slid across the stone floor, hard enough to cause sparks to fly up, before tumbling the fey like bowling pins. And before they could react to that, Mircea was running at them carrying the heavy oak door.
          “What are you doing?” I demanded as he blew past. “The hinges are broken!”
          “Then make me some new ones!”
          “What?”
          He didn’t answer. He just waded into the fey, half of whom were already back on their feet, completely defenseless except for the door he was holding in front of him. I had no idea what the hell he thought he was doing.
          “Why don’t I ever fall for sane men?” I said, and grabbed some swords.
          “Your life . . . would drive them mad . . . soon enough,” Mircea informed me, while using the door as a club to beat back the fey. “It is easier to start out that way.”
          I opened my mouth to make a response to that, realized I didn’t have one, and started throwing swords. Because the fey had surrounded him now and ex or not, I didn’t want him dead! Not until I get the chance to kill him myself, I thought, slamming swords through fey bodies hard enough to pin them to the floor.
          It was amazingly easy. The steel felt feather light, as if I was holding a needle and was stitching them to the stone like embroidery. If embroidery writhed and bled and tried to stitch you back. I dodged a barrage of fey weapons with liquid speed and grabbed another shield, but I didn’t use it for protection. I threw it like a frisbee, and watched the heavy, iron rimmed edges mow half a dozen bodies down.
          I don’t know how I got here, I thought blankly, my stunned brain finally catching up to my actions.
          “You are Lady Cassandra, Pythia and guardian of the Pythian Court,” Mircea told me, reading my mind. He was regarding me out of dark, flashing eyes while holding the door shut, which he’d somehow gotten back in place. “And a damned fine one!”
          I stared at him for a moment, because I didn’t get a lot of compliments these days, not since I’d started talking back to him and the other vamps. They’d wanted a good, docile little Pythia, and were perfectly happy to pat me on the head and to protect me, as long as I was doing their will. A hard headed, willful little Pythia, on the other hand, who felt like the power had come to her and she should have a say in how it was used, was something else altogether.
          Which might explain why I just stood there for a second, until Mircea yelled. “Any time now, dulceață!”
          I blinked, and realized that the same thing that had happened before was about to happen again. The door was going to blow in, assuming that the fey left in the room didn’t kill us first, and we’d be overrun. But I still didn’t know what Mircea had meant about—and then I did, when he snatched a sword out of a fey’s body, used it to run another through, and then kept on going, jamming the bloody blade through the door and burying it deep into the stone of the wall.
          New hinges, I thought, and grabbed a bunch more swords, short spears, and anything else that might work.
          A moment later, I had finished ensuring that a certain door would never open again, and Mircea had a fey in either hand, clearly intending to throw them out the windows.
          “Don’t kill them!” I reminded him, which earned me an eyeroll, probably because of our body count. Which didn’t mean we needed to kill any more! Mircea compromised by battering their two, helmet clad heads together.
          I wasn’t sure that that was an improvement, as I distinctly heard a sound like cracking eggs, but before I could point that out, the room went dark. At the same time, there was a terrific whooshing noise paired with a sucking sensation, and then a bellow of what felt like air but hit like a fist, sending me stumbling back against the wall. I hit, bounced off, and spun back around—
          In time to see something flash by the windows, going up. Something black and huge, but moving so swiftly that I blinked and it was gone, before I could identify it. And it didn’t look like Mircea had had any better luck.
Even more worrying, the fey had stopped pounding on the door.
          “What—” I asked him, but he shook his head.
          He cautiously approached the line of windows, gesturing for me to stay back. Which made no sense. If the fey were planning to flank us, and climb around the building and come in through the openings, then we were both about to be—
          “Don’t stick your head out!” I said, hurrying over as he did just that. An arrow through the brain could sideline even a master for a few moments, and with the fey, that might be enough.
          “There’s nothing here,” he said, glancing around the gray expanse of mountains, sky and wall. There was nowhere for anyone to hide, not even behind the vine that had scrawled up the castle’s side and died, leaving only withered fingers clawing at the stone.
          I felt myself relax slightly.
          “All right,” I said. “Let’s get out of here, find Pritkin, and—”
          And then I was flying.
          It took me a moment to realize what had happened. All I saw for a dizzying second was a swirl of gray and something huge and black that appeared and disappeared in flashes. I caught the latter out of a corner of my eye, but couldn’t see it too well, because I’d been caught by one leg, leaving my skirts falling into my face. And before I could fix that, I was interrupted again.
          By another vision.
          “Got him!” Pritkin’s voice said triumphantly.
          My eyes blinked in sudden darkness. A torch somewhere nearby was splashing dark stone with honeyed light, which was also reflecting off the eyes of a very strange looking creature. It looked like the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, with its fur covered body dressed in old timey clothes—if the rabbit had been a really messed up goat with savage looking horns and a maw of razor-sharp teeth that it was using to snap at me. It made me worry that I—or rather, Pritkin—was holding the creature only by the neck.
          “Cassie! Did you hear me?” Pritkin demanded. “I’ve got him; we can go!”
          “Yes, I—I heard you. But I’m kind of busy right now—”
          “Doing what?”
          “I’m not . . . entirely sure—”
          “What do you mean you’re not sure? What’s going on? Where’s that bastard Basarab?”
          I never knew whether it was Pritkin calling out his name, or Mircea himself deciding to interrupt our conversation, but suddenly I was seeing through a different pair of eyes. Ones that were looking at a small, pink balloon being borne aloft by—
          “Oh, shit.”
          “Is that you?” Pritkin’s voice demanded accusingly. “Tell me that’s not you!”
          “Um—”
          Pritkin said something very rude, right before the goat thing jumped him. Damn it! And then Mircea was talking very fast and very loud in my head.
          “Cassie, listen to me. You need to bring the creature back this way, do you understand? I can try to get in its head, but it’s too far away and I don’t have a connection with it—”
          “Bring it back?”
          “—and therefore must be closer in order to—”
          “How the hell do you expect me to bring it back?”
          Considering that I was currently dangling from the giant paw of a massive black dragon, I thought that was a fair question. But then Mircea sent me his plan, which had me uttering some of Pritkin’s best verbal explosions, not that anybody could hear them. And then grabbing the damned skirts and using vamp strength to rip them off, giving me a free field of vision.
          Which I could have really done without.
          A huge expanse of black scales gleamed above me in the weak sunlight. They weren’t smooth like a snake’s but ridged, each having a little mountain in the middle of it, like an alligator’s hide only pointier. It made the creature look like it was bristling all over and would shred any skin that it came into contact with. And I was pretty sure that I wasn’t able to borrow Mircea’s healing abilities, since my hand was still on fire.
          This was really going to suck.
          “You can’t overpower that thing!” Pritkin yelled, as if hearing my thoughts, and maybe he could. “Use magic!”
          “I don’t have my magic—”
          “You don’t need yours. You have mine!” And the next second, he sent me a spell so strong and so compelling, that I felt my lips forming the words before I could stop them.
          A massive ball of blue flame erupted out of nowhere and shot straight up the monstrous body, as if the creature had been doused in propane. It hit mid-way on the chest, as if I’d just lobbed a bomb into the middle of a 747, and ran over the gnarled old scales like water. In seconds, the entire top half of the creature was burning.
          Only no, not burning, I realized sickly.
          Because the tough old dragon hide seemed impervious to fire, including the magical variety. Even the great, leathery wings, which were the thinnest and thereby most vulnerable part of the beast, sloughed off the flames like water from a tarp. Huge, burning blue droplets cascaded backward and tumbled off the slick surface, almost hitting me in a few cases, despite my position dangling from a back paw. But most sailed over my head, leaving a trail of blue flame streaming out behind us that I stared back at in confusion.
          Not at the visual, although it was impressive enough, but at the thought that we were supposed to be parked in the middle of a ley line. We had been since we passed through the portcullis, taking us who knew how far away from the outer world. So how were we flying off into the sky? How had we gotten back out again? Or had we, because a quick attempt to shift did nothing, my power being as locked away from me as ever.
          I stared around at the landscape, seen through the rain of strange, blue fire, and felt my stomach tilt and whirl even more than it had when I’d first been snatched away. Because this looked like Earth, smelled like Earth, felt like Earth, except for the great, fiery dragon flapping through the sky above me. But it couldn’t be Earth, or I’d have been able to shift out of this already.
          What if that portcullis hadn’t been a doorway to a stationary bubble, as I’d initially thought? What if we’d gone much further than that? What if the reason my power didn’t work was because we weren’t in a bubble at all, but had stepped through some kind of portal, all the way to—
          “Faerie!” I screamed through the link at both men. “We’re in Faerie!”
          I didn’t get a reply, or maybe I just couldn’t hear it over the sound of the dragon suddenly screeching overhead, an awful, tearing metal sound that maybe indicated that the fire was doing something, after all. The terrible shriek certainly was, namely rupturing my eardrums, not that it mattered. Corpses don’t need ears, which is what I was about to be, because the creature had just opened its paw.
          And the difference between being carried and being dropped was like a shock of cold water to the face. Or a slap of cold air, as the enveloping cave of flesh fell away, and I started to plummet to my death. The old Cassie would have dropped the thirty or so stories to her doom, probably screaming the whole way.
          The new Cassie reacted a little differently, because this wasn’t the first time that I’d been dropped from a height. Pritkin had done it at least a dozen times in training, to help me learn to use the Pythian power even under duress, although he’d always been there to catch me. Nobody was there now, but I didn’t need the help. Not with borrowed vampire reflexes allowing me to snare one of the great claws a split second later.
          I held on for dear life, my hands sliding on the thick, horn-like surface, while my body twisted and turned in the freezing air.
          The screaming part was, however, was pretty much the same.
          I couldn’t hear myself; I couldn’t hear anything but dragon screeches. But I felt every one of those screams, which kept going on and on because the dragon was writhing now, turning and twisting, as if trying to shake me off. Or as if trying to shake someone else off, I realized, finally glimpsing the colossal battle being waged in the skies above me.
          For a moment, in spite of everything, I just stared. Because that is what you do when your ex-boyfriend is darting through the air, battling a massive dragon in the middle of the sky. What the hell?
          I blinked a couple of times, the cold air forcing tears from my eyes, or maybe that was due to them not believing what they were seeing. Mircea looked like a dark angel, I thought in shock. Or the opposite type of creature, because the wings he was currently using to batter the air were huge and black and leathery, growing out of his back near his shoulder blades, and he held in each hand a wicked looking spear tipped with more of that strange, blue fire.
          “—the joints!” Pritkin’s voice was yelling in my head, but I didn’t think he was talking to me. His voice was dimmer, farther away, and harder to make out because of the wind in my ears. “Where the wings attach to the body. Strike there!”
          Mircea struck there.
          The words were still echoing in my head when he dove, the wings he shouldn’t have had tucked close to his body, the two glowing spears held together and out in front of him, forming his whole being into a sleek projectile that screamed through the air, hitting the huge beast exactly where Pritkin had advised.
          And the advice had been good.
          I felt the thud of the blow shiver through the great body, almost hard enough to throw me off. And then the beast reacted, and if I’d thought it had been writhing before, it was nothing to this. It thrashed in mid-air, while a spew of red and gold erupted from the huge maw, turning the world above us into a canopy of contrasting fire, and blocking out my view of—
          “Mircea!” I screamed, my throat raw, but I didn’t hear anything back. Or maybe, as before, my ears were too full of dragon screeches to hear anything.
          “Where is he?” Pritkin asked, his mental voice now loud in my head.
I looked everywhere, feeling my heart pounding against my ribcage, threatening to beat out of my chest. But I couldn’t see him. Billowing black smoke and leaping blue and red flames blocked my view, while the twisting of the great beast was slinging me about so hard that even vampire strength was being tested. I couldn’t see him.
          “Cassie!” Pritkin’s voice had turned urgent.
          “I don’t know; I don’t know!”
          The tears streaming out of my eyes were from a different source now. I’d only recently lost a dear friend to this war, the wound still bright and sharp and burning. I couldn’t lose Mircea, too. I couldn’t.
          And then the great beast gyrated, so abruptly that my body slung out behind me, and I lost part of my grip. Leaving me dangling by one hand as it spun in mid-air and started back for the castle, I didn’t know why. Until I saw them: a whole phalanx of fey spread out along the ramparts, and nocking arrows.
          I stared at them, at the fairy tale castle behind them, at the colorful pennants snapping in the breeze, and my brain went blank. Humans are great adaptors, but not this fast. All I could think of for a second was: “how pretty.”
          But I snapped out of it, because I’ve never believed in going quietly into that good night. I tried to remember the fireball spell, which hadn’t worked so well on dragon flesh but might do better against fey. But my brain was occupied by rushing white noise, my hand was slipping on the slick, horn-like material of the claw, and my stomach was threatening revolt despite the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything today.
          Nothing remotely resembling a spell made it out of my mouth.
          Which was why it was surprising to see the line of fey go up like birthday candles, nonetheless.
          “Silent spell casting,” Pritkin yelled in my ear, before I could ask. I received a brief, one second flash of him running through the now virtually deserted halls of the castle, with something tucked under his arm. “Anything you can see, I can burn!”
          Good to know, I thought, and lost my grip.
          It seemed less of a deliberate thing than a reflex as the great beast realigned its legs, preparing to land. Or to crash, which was more likely to be the case here. But that was less of a concern to me than to the burning, panicked fey, because this time, I was falling.
          Until, suddenly, I wasn’t.
          I looked up, gasping at two shocks in as many seconds, and saw Mircea’s face backlit by the light through huge, leathery wings. “Hold on!” he yelled, clutching me tight.
          I held on.
          Yet I couldn’t help wondering why we were following the dragon straight down into—
          “Heeeeeeellllllll!” I screamed, and Mircea’s grip tightened even more.
          But he didn’t let go, or change course. What he did do was to follow the dragon straight back through the side of the castle. Which promptly ceased to be a castle and became a burst of flying blocks larger than my body, of tiny, shrapnel-like pieces as big as my fist, and of dust and screams and blood and arrows, because some of the crazed fey appeared to be trying to shoot the dragon.
          This did not work, any more than shooting an out-of-control jumbo jet would have. And like anyone foolish enough to try, the fey ended up getting mowed the hell down. Or slammed against whatever remained of this part of the castle. Or kicked away from us by Mircea, who was still right on the dragon’s tail for some reason.
          Maybe that reason, I thought, as we burst out of the shattered building and back into the courtyard where we’d first come in, and where still more fey—did they respawn or something, I wondered dizzily—were rushing to form up.
          Only one does not form up before a dragon.
          One gets the hell out of the way of a dragon, or one wishes one has.
It was a fact these fey were learning quickly, with the pretty, pretty lines, so shiny and smart, scattering and flying and, in some cases, getting ground into the stones of the courtyard beneath the great belly.
          And then continuing to be so as the wounded beast thrashed around, giving me a brief, confused view of leather sheets blocking the sun, of great claws scrabbling at the ground I was trying to run over after Mircea touched down, of the feys’ silver hair streaming like banners in the wind, while we ducked and dodged and tried to avoid the churning caldron of dust and death that the once orderly forecourt had become.
          And avoid it we did, because somebody had opened the portcullis, not that I could see it from here. But I could hear it clang, clang, clanging upwards, and more importantly, I could feel it. A blinding, shimmering tide of the Pythian power surged through the opening, as if it had been bunched up on the other side, collecting into a mighty wall as it struggled to reach me, but was denied.
          It wasn’t denied now, and it didn’t grab me so much as snatch me up and throw me through the gate, where Pritkin was waiting on the other side, because of course he’d gotten the portcullis open; of course, he had. I snatched him up, too, on my way past, getting rewarded with a flash of brilliant green eyes in a bloodied face, and a triumphant yell as the portal released us and another power took us. My power.
          And then we were gone.