“How?”
Those beautiful eyes met mine. “They have been hunting me for a long time.”
I didn’t get a chance to ask anything else, because screams and gunshots came from ahead of us. I looked up in time to see another red lightning bolt take out a connecting door a couple of cars away. I couldn’t see what was going on next door because of all the smoke, but there were more screams and more terrified people bursting through into our car. And then, over their shoulders, I got a glimpse of two more Spartoi tearing down the length of the train.
And then we were shifting again, sort of.
This time, it wasn’t so much like we went anywhere than as if the scene shifted around us. The train stayed pretty solid, except for the ads on the walls, which bloomed and faded in bright spots of color. But mostly the people changed, morphed, flowed into each other and then into new people, like they were liquid, along with the time stream barreling us along. Days, weeks, months of passengers spilled around us, flickering in and out as we were probably doing in their view as we ran forward, through space and time and back through the compartments.
My feet hurt, my body ached and I was half-convinced I had a damn concussion. And I barely noticed. I had a vague impression that I was staring around with my mouth hanging open, but I didn’t care about that, either. I’d never seen anything remotely like it.
Of course, that went for most of the stuff that had happened lately. I wondered if this was what training was like, real training, the kind I was never going to get. I thought Agnes would have liked setting me some crazy obstacle course, making me run after her, challenging me to keep up or have my ass left behind in some other place, some other time.
Only this wasn’t training; it was real. And getting left behind here wouldn’t mean an inconvenience or an embarrassing return; it would mean never returning at all.
From what I understood after all of a half minute of explanation, the Spartoi had managed to get some kind of spell on my mother that caused their state to mirror hers. That meant that they piggybacked along whenever and wherever she shifted. It also prevented her from using any of the tricks I’d seen at the party—stopping time or slowing it down—where they were concerned. She could still slow down time, but if she was immune to it, they would be, as well.
Until, presumably, she ran out of gas and they killed her.
I had no idea why they wanted to kill her, or where the kidnapper fit into all this, or much of anything else. But I knew the main thing. I knew how she planned to break their spell.
She and I weren’t using our own power to shift; we were borrowing it from the same source—the enormous well of energy left to the Pythias by Apollo. That put our magic on the same wavelength, for lack of a better term, and was how I was able to track her. My magic “felt” it whenever she used hers, and could follow it to the source.
The idea was to use that similarity to confuse the Spartoi’s spell. I was to keep up as she shifted, to stay right alongside her, until our spells merged, overlapping to the point that the piggyback spell got confused and latched on to both of them. Then we were to shift in opposite directions, ripping our spells apart in the process and hopefully destroying theirs, as well.
If we timed it right, if we did it in the middle of a shift, that should leave them in the same position I’d accidentally almost ended up in a few days ago—scattered on the winds of time, never to be reassembled anywhere or anywhen. It wasn’t death, because these things couldn’t be killed. But it was damn close, and I’d take it.
Assuming I didn’t pass out first.
This was hard. This was really, really, goddamned hard. The shifts were so close together that it wasn’t like a series of them at all, but more like one long, continual slide back into time, one that was taking everything I had just to keep up.
It wasn’t helped by the fact that the maniacs behind us kept firing, even while we were in the middle of the shift. It didn’t look like it was doing much good—most of the spells and bullets vanished into the weird liquid time we were passing through, seemingly without connecting to anything. But not all of them.
Every so often, we were solid a split second too long and some of the barrage got through. Mostly, it hit the kidnapper’s shields, because he and Mircea were behind us at the moment. But they couldn’t shield us completely, and that left Mom and me in the line of fire more than once.
I felt a couple of bullets whiz by me, one of which took out a window somewhen and probably scared a bunch of passengers to death. Another must have been fired just as we shifted, because it raced right alongside my head as time sorted itself out, before vanishing like smoke. I didn’t care.
I didn’t care about anything, except—please, God—not falling over. But my hands were shaking and sweat was coursing down my face and I couldn’t hear anything anymore but my heart hammering in my ears. I think the only thing that kept me upright was Mircea’s hand on my arm and a healthy dose of pure rage.
Goddamnit, I was supposed to be good at this! The one thing, the only thing, that had ever come naturally to me in this whole, crazy job. Yet here I was, panting and swearing and falling through time, nothing like Mother’s elegant, effortless shifting, power boiling around her as she calmly walked ahead, as though this were nothing, just an afternoon’s stroll through the park.
And that is a Pythia, I thought, staring in awe and pride and pain and more than a little disbelief. Agnes had boasted of mother’s abilities, but I’d never understood what she meant until now. Until I saw how she made it seem so easy. How she made it seem like breathing. Commanding time, not being thrown around by it, not tripping and stumbling and almost falling as the room blurred around us.
A smooth white hand cupped my face, cool to the touch, unlike my overheated skin. Concerned lapis eyes stared into mine, and I cringed at the thought of what she must be seeing. Frazzled hair sticking to my sweaty face, filthy clothes and panicked eyes, as I fought what was rapidly becoming clear would be a losing battle.
“Almost there,” she told me softly, and I nodded, no breath to talk, nothing to say anyway, nothing that would help, at least.
Then the pace picked up, and what had been torment became impossible. I didn’t know how I was keeping up, or even if I was. I couldn’t think, couldn’t see, couldn’t even be sure that my feet were moving forward anymore because I couldn’t feel them. Days became months became years became decades, time flipping by like pages in a book, a book that was smearing and fluttering and shredding before my eyes, and I screamed in pain and fury. Because I wasn’t strong enough, because I couldn’t keep up, because I was about to fail at the thing I was supposed to be good at, and I couldn’t—
Suddenly, there was a horrible wrenching, like my body was coming apart at the seams. Only it wasn’t me. It was our magic pulling and tearing and ripping as she veered one way and I fought the current of her power to go the other. But she was so strong, so unbelievably strong, and I didn’t have anything left, and I felt myself stalling and flailing and starting to turn—
And the damn Spartoi saved me. They had started firing more wildly, sending panicked people scrambling away from them—and straight at us. It didn’t help that the crazed crowds usually disappeared before they reached us. I kept flinching back, expecting a collision, and the near panic made it impossible for me to concentrate well enough to keep shifting.
I felt myself falter, my grip on time shaking along with my concentration. And I suddenly—belatedly—realized that I didn’t have to shift away from her. All I had to do was remain stationary somewhere, and she’d shift away from me.
And then a big guy in an old-fashioned suit and a bowler hat barreled right into me, sending me sprawling. We went down in a pile of tweed and leather and outraged pink skin, and there was an umbrella in there somewhere, too, because it was stabbing me in the backside. And then Mircea pulled me up and I realized that something wonderful had happened.