More questions came in—wow! I haven’t had this many for a while. But just as in the last Q and A, beware of spoilers. If you haven’t read Shatter the Earth, please don’t read this until you do! Or, at least, don’t blame me for spoiling you, lol!

1. Rhea could suddenly shift there at the end when she brought the librarian to Cassie. Is the mental block gone because Agnes trained her?

You saw Rhea shift Cassie into the Thames during training at the old Pythian Court. That was when she broke through her mental block against using the power—when she saw Cassie in danger. She can use the Pythian power now (she could always use it, but was just afraid that she wasn’t worthy of it.) But Rhea is at her best when protecting others, and she knew Cassie needed her, both in that garden at Gertie’s and later in eighteenth century Romania. So, she womaned up and went to help her as a true heir should.

2. Is there going to be a conflict between Dorina and Cassie since she killed Jonathan?

No. Dory would have liked to have had that kill, or to have given it to Louis-Cesare. But the big thing for her was that it happened at all. That’s why she told Cassie in Brave the Tempest to “take a picture” if she had to end him herself. She knew it might be necessary, as Jonathan was targeting Cassie, and Dory is not heartless. She would not expect Cassie to endanger herself in order to give Dory some added satisfaction over Jonathan.

Also, Dory was not aware at the time that she asked to have Jonathan delivered to her alive that he could time shift. With Jo’s power, Jonathan was a terrible threat, and Cassie as Pythia was absolutely correct to end him. Of course, that wasn’t the main thing in her mind when she did it, but it was why she’d promised Billy to take care of it in the first place. Jonathan was brilliant and treacherous and could now also shift through time. Leaving him alive long enough to escape or be rescued was absolutely not a smart move.

3. Did you know in the beginning that the Pythia would have so many ways to use her power when you started this series?

It’s funny you should ask, because I just had this conversation with someone. Not specifically about that, but about the fact that everyone—including my old editor, who should have known better—has always said “oh, she’s making it up as she goes along.” No, I’m not. The main story beats are the main story beats and have always been there.

4. Pritkin seems like a heavy sleeper since Cassie can move around and have a conversation with Billy while Pritkin still sleeps. That goes against a combat Mage’s paranoia doesn’t it?

I’m a little confused by this question. As stated in the novel, the suite they were in had three rooms: a living area with a balcony, a bedroom and a bathroom. Pritkin was in the bedroom, while Cassie was in the living room. But even so, she asked Billy to come out onto the balcony so that they could talk without waking Pritkin up, and she closed the French doors behind her.

5. That little voice inside Cassie’s head that she sometimes argues with. Is that her power talking with her?

No, it’s her inner monologue.

6. Can Pritkin’s incubus choose to either draw power from Cassie’s personal magic or the Pythia power? When he was in steam form he left Cassie exhausted, meaning he drew from her personal energy, right?

Normally, yes, it could choose. However, this was not a normal instance. Pritkin’s incubus was having to travel through her link with Mircea in order to reach her (because she was in the past.) The Lover’s Knot spell used incubus energy, so it could hijack the spell as a conduit. But the link with Mircea was to Cassie herself, and thus to her own power, not to the Pythian power. So that was what the incubus had to draw on in that instance.

7. You wrote that Mircea gave Cassie the validation he never had before. What did you mean? That he saw her as a power and trusted her to take care of the coming threat?

Yes. This book saw an interesting shift between Mircea and Pritkin. In the past, Mircea was trying to basically sit on Cassie (or have his vamps do so) in order to keep her safe, while Pritkin was training her to save herself when needed. But then, Mircea was her lover at the time and Pritkin her bodyguard, so their attitudes made sense.

In this book, however, you see a bit of a reversal in the status quo. Pritkin, now Cassie’s lover, is starting to be a lot more paranoid about her safety. Now, in fairness to him, Jonathan represented a bigger personal threat to Cassie than anything she had dealt with before. The other enemies she’d faced wanted to kill her; he wanted to harvest her and use her as a perpetual slave. And then there was that whole battle in Faerie, which was completely next level even for Pritkin. He spent half of the book freaking out.

However, he was showing signs of that as early as the conversation in Jonas’s office, which predated those two massive jolts. Pritkin loves Cassie and wants her safe, but that’s not really her job description, as she points out in the book. She’s actually been pointing that out since Claimed by Shadow, where she made the case that she wasn’t the princess languishing in the tower awaiting rescue; she was the knight doing the rescuing! And in this book, you see Pritkin struggling with that, as Mircea has in the past.

Mircea, on the other hand, is starting to show signs of growth. He treated Cassie as an ally more in this book than he usually does, maybe because he had to—it was her power he was borrowing, after all—but also because he’s beginning to see her for who she really is. Cassie said to him once that he never saw her for her, just as that little girl he’d known all those years ago. But she isn’t that little girl anymore; she’s becoming someone truly formidable, and the men in her life are going to have to find ways of dealing with that.