Pritkin didn’t react to this, so I scampered off to the minuscule bath Dante’s allowed its regular guests, which was about the size of my toilet cubbyhole upstairs.
Shit. Upstairs. Where the younger me was presumably hanging out and doing . . . well, whatever I’d been doing three weeks ago.
That was the first time Pritkin had taken me hiking on some god-awful mountain trail in the foothills of the Rockies. The Corps, the official name for the war mage branch of the Circle, used it as a training ground. It had been a memorable experience, mainly because it had rained the night before, turning the whole mountain into a massive mud pit.
Pritkin had made me run the trail anyway.
Of course.
The only good thing was that I’d twisted an ankle near the end, when I fell over a tree root, and had milked it for three days off the hellish workouts. Judging by the state of his boots, this was the first of those days, since I didn’t think he would leave them sitting around for long in that condition. Meaning that maybe Pritkin wouldn’t be going upstairs, and I wasn’t in as bad a mess as I’d originally thought.
Well, assuming I could come up with a reason for breaking into his room looking like a war refugee. The tee, what parts the bricks hadn’t shredded, was streaked with soot, my jeans looked like I’d been auditioning for a role as a chimney sweep, and my hair—what I had left—was dirty and sleep-matted. Not to mention that I had that pale look I always got when I skipped meals.
A siren I wasn’t.
I scowled at myself, wondering where that thought had come from. But it might not matter. For a guy who was so observant about other things, Pritkin never seemed to notice what I looked like.
Knuckles rapped on the door, loud enough to make me jump. “I’m going out.”
I opened it a crack and stuck my head through, since the rest of me wasn’t decent. “Why?” I asked, worried.
“To get some breakfast. What do you want?”
“How do you know I haven’t eaten already?”
He just looked at me.
“Does it have to be healthy?”
The look did not change.
I sighed.
“I asked what you wanted,” he reminded me. “I’ll run it off you later.”
“You already broke my foot!”
An eyebrow went north. “And yet you managed to get in there fast enough.”
I decided that maybe I should just shut up now. “They have cheesy bacon biscuits down at the café, if it’s before eleven.”
Pritkin gave me an odd look. “It’s seven thirty.”
“Well . . . then they should have some.”
He looked like he was going to say something else, but then stopped, eyes narrowing. “Some?”
“I want two.”
“You’ll get one.”
“I didn’t have dinner!”
“You ate with me,” he said, frowning.
Crap.
“Oh. Yeah. Well, one, then,” I said weakly, and slammed the door.
Chapter Six
I kept my back to it until I heard the door to the hall open and close, and then let out a trembling breath. God, I sucked at this. Which was why I ought to make up some excuse, leave him a note, and get the heck out of here before he returned.
So why was I getting into the shower instead?
Maybe because the active part of my brain had noticed something else it wasn’t bothering to share with the rest of me. But it felt important. And maybe I’d figure it out once I’d been awake more than two minutes.
I let the hot water hit me right in the face, and I guess it helped. By the time I’d lathered up my hair, rinsed it off, decided the damage wasn’t too bad, and washed a chimney’s worth of soot down the drain, I’d also chased down that elusive thought. Which proved that my subconscious was smarter than I was.
I’d been thinking that I needed a demon expert to have any chance of reaching Mom. So it had brought me to one. In fact, it had brought me to the one, the guy who knew more about demons than everybody else in the Circle combined.
There was only one problem: Pritkin hated my shifts through time. He was absolutely of the opinion that, if we kept shifting around here and there, sooner or later we were going to mess up something that couldn’t be fixed. He was so convinced that the first time I’d gone back in time to see my mother, when it had been about curiosity instead of abject need, I hadn’t even thought about taking him along. I’d already known what his answer would be.
And considering how that had gone down—demigods crashing the party she was at, trying to kill her—it was probably just as well. Pritkin’s reaction in cases of being shot at was to shoot back, and that wouldn’t have worked on that particular foe. But demons . . . yeah, he knew all about them.
Half of the vials that were so precisely and uncharacteristically arranged in the racks on his bookcase were potions for fighting various varieties of hell-spawn, since that was what he’d done before hitching his star to my unlucky train. He’d probably forgotten more about demon fighting than the rest of the Corps had ever known. In fact, he might know as much about how I could break him out of his current predicament as Mom would, only I doubted he’d be willing to tell me.
Because Billy had been right—Pritkin wouldn’t want me going after him. As badly as he hated his father, and as much as he might be hating his life right now, he wouldn’t want me risking it. I was probably going to be in for a major ass-chewing whenever I found him. . .
Only Billy had been right about that, too, I realized. I wasn’t going to find him. Not without help.
I stepped out of the shower and into the hot air swirling around the bathroom. The mirror was all fogged up, and a swipe across it with my hand only changed that for a second. But a second was enough. It showed me a face still slightly round with baby fat, with heat-reddened cheeks, blond curls plastered to my head, a tip-tilted nose, and big, guileless blue eyes. Sopping wet, I looked about as dangerous as a stuffed rabbit. Sopping wet, I looked . . . well, like somebody who had no business going on some daring rescue.
I scowled, unconsciously imitating a certain war mage I knew. But while on him the expression was fierce, even terrifying, on me . . . mostly it made me look constipated. I sighed.
But unlike last night, when I’d been feeling helpless and battered and a lot like giving up, today my lack of badass credentials didn’t seem so important. Because considering what I was up against, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I could have been the biggest, baddest mage of them all, could have been a master-level vampire—hell, I could have had an army of both—and it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Because I didn’t see any of them just waltzing into hell, either.
In fact, I wasn’t so sure that being me wasn’t an asset right now. Because Billy might have been wrong about one thing—I didn’t think Rosier was expecting me. Why would he be? Everyone else I knew underestimated me, and always had. Everybody else looked at me and saw the fluffy bunny in the mirror; well, almost everyone. But, despite his age, I didn’t get the impression that Rosier had his son’s insight, or much of anything else. And even Pritkin, when he wasn’t running me up mountainsides or pushing me off cliffs, still sometimes acted like I was spun glass and might break.
But I hadn’t broken.
I wouldn’t break.
I didn’t have that luxury.
And neither had Agnes. I looked in the mirror again, and decided that I didn’t look any more delicate than she ever had. Maybe less, in fact. She’d been all of five foot two in her stocking feet, with a heart-shaped face and porcelain skin and a little-girl air about her that I was coming to believe she’d deliberately cultivated. So that people would underestimate her.