I contemplated my shredded toes and sighed. One day, one fine, fine day, I was going to be in peril in a damn pair of sneakers. Of course, I’d settle for not being in peril at all.
Not being in peril at all would be good.
I grabbed a couple of sinfully plush towels and got my beat-up, grimy self into the nice, clean shower. I didn’t even try for a bath, because I’d immediately turn the water black. Kind of like the evening’s entertainment had done to me.
After I got clean enough to be fairly sure that whatever was left wasn’t dirt, I took stock. I had a swelling bruise on my ankle, another on my hip and a third, long and horizontal and rapidly darkening, on my lower stomach, probably where I’d hit down on the damn carriage ride from hell. Add that to the bruises I was still carrying from the bathtub incident and, oh yeah, I looked sexy.
Not that I wasn’t happy to be alive in any shape. I just didn’t understand why I was. Particularly not if Mircea’s theory was correct about what we’d been fighting.
It had seemed crazy when he said it, because demigods weren’t exactly thick on the ground. The gods, or the creatures calling themselves that, had been banished a long time from Earth, and most of their by-blows had either gone with them or been rounded up by the Circle. And because I couldn’t imagine what a bunch of half gods could want with my mother.
But now that I had a chance to think, it did explain a lot. Like how resilient the mages had been, not bothering with shields but bouncing back from blows that should have left them a smear on the concrete without them. And why they’d seemed so damn strong.
Pritkin had once told me that war mages never used a hundred percent of their power for attack. In battle, the standard ratio was seventy-thirty, meaning that seventy percent of a mage’s power went to defense—to the shields and wards needed to keep him or her alive—with maybe thirty percent leftover for offensive stuff. Particularly powerful magic users could hedge on that a bit, maybe taking the total needed for defense down to sixty-five or even sixty percent, because their excess power made up for it. But nobody went completely unprotected. If they did, the first spell to so much as nick them might take them out of the fight—permanently.
Pritkin himself regularly used only about a quarter of his power for defense, although he didn’t admit as much to the Circle. But what if someone could shrug off being trampled under horses or slung against buildings or dragged half the length of a street, despite not using shields? Being able to put everything toward attack would make even a low-level mage look pretty damn impressive. And if he or she was already extra-strong to begin with . . .
Well, that mage might look something like what I’d just seen. But as reasonable as that sounded, it couldn’t be right. Because my mother couldn’t have fought off four demigods and a crazy-ass kidnapper all by herself.
Could she?
It seemed ridiculous. But, then, if the answer was no, why was I still here? If the mages had killed her or the kidnapper had carted her off, or anything had happened to keep her from meeting my infamous father, then I should have vanished. And other than for the rather large amount of skin I’d left in the road, I hadn’t.
And that was . . . well, that was kind of an epiphany. The whole damn night had been, really. Because I’d never seen the Pythian power used like that. In fact, I’d rarely seen it used at all, which was one of the reasons I’d been having so much trouble mastering it.
Jonas did his best to help me, but he wasn’t a Pythia. He’d overheard some of the stuff Agnes had said when training her heirs, and he’d seen a lot of what she could do. But trying to harness time with his help had been like building a car from a set of oral instructions when you’ve never seen one and the guy giving them has only a vague idea of what one is supposed look like.
It had been the blind leading the blind all month.
It had gotten frustrating enough that I’d actually thought of going to the Pythian Court for help. But I hadn’t, and not just because one of their number had already tried to kill me. They probably weren’t all homicidal maniacs, but I doubted I was real popular with a group who had zero chance of advancement as long as I lived.
Which might explain why I hadn’t heard from them all month. Not a “congrats,” however insincere; not a “fuck you”; not a peep of any kind. I didn’t know what that meant, but it was more than a little ominous. And Jonas sure as hell hadn’t suggested stopping by for a chat.
So I’d been on my own.
And being on my own sucked ass.
But then had come tonight. And . . . damn.
Somehow, I’d gotten into the habit of thinking about my power as defensive—shifting to get out of a tight spot, throwing time bubbles to ward off attackers, stopping time to give me a chance to run like hell. Maybe because that was mostly how I’d been using it. But my mother . . . she hadn’t been real big on defense. She’d been real big on kicking some demigod butt.
The war mages might have been running a full-on offensive, but she’d been right there with them. She’d sent them screaming in terror. She’d imprisoned one like a bug under glass. She’d run one the hell down.
Mom, I realized in shock, had been kind of a badass.
And so was the Pythian power in the hands of somebody who actually knew how to use it. And while I didn’t realistically think I’d ever be anywhere near that good . . . still. It gave me a lot to think about.
Only this wasn’t the place, because I was going all pruney. I hadn’t known a shower could do that, but this one was hard and hot and enthusiastic, to the point that my fingers and what was left of my toes were wrinkling up. I got out of the shower, dried my hair, and swiped a hand over the nearest mirror.
It showed me what I’d expected: a thin, pale girl with scraggly blond hair, dark circles under her eyes and a bruise in her hairline. I leaned in, pulling my hair back, searching my own face. I had a lot more to go on now than a grainy photo taken at a distance. I’d stared her right in the face from barely a foot away. Yet try as I might, I couldn’t see even a distant echo in me.
My eyes were blue, but they were just blue. My hair was reddish, sort of, in the right light, but nothing like that beautiful bronze color. And my face was . . . just a face.
It looked back at me now, too-round cheekbones, a toostubborn chin and a scattering of unfashionable freckles over a tip-tilted nose. It wasn’t a bad face, as faces go, but it wasn’t going to be launching a thousand ships anytime soon. I stood there, searching it anyway, desperate to find some trace of that ethereal beauty.... And it suddenly hit me. If I hadn’t taken after my mother, then I must look like—
Him.
The dark mage who had wooed her away from the court, from her rightful place in the succession, from everything she’d ever known. Agnes had told me once that my mother had been a natural with the power, the best she’d ever seen, and I’d had plenty of proof of that tonight. And yet she’d left it all behind for an evil man, a onetime member of the notorious Black Circle, who looked like . . . me?
I leaned closer. Was this the face that had commanded an army of ghosts to spy on the Silver Circle, who had almost seized control of the Black and who had somehow seduced the virgin heir to the powerful Pythian throne? My reflection didn’t answer; it just dripped at me, looking vaguely like a drowned Kewpie doll.
I scrunched up my face and tried to look menacing.
Now I looked like a Kewpie doll with gas.
I sighed. Maybe I’d taken after some distant relative or something. I might never know, since I didn’t have even a grainy image of my father. Not that I wanted one, at least not as a keepsake, but it would have been nice to know what he’d looked like.