And still was, because I was too busy running to look for it. I shoved a chair aside and knelt by the crumpled body, the one with an unexploded potion grenade falling out of one hand. Pritkin must have stayed conscious long enough to steal one off Big Red while being carried back, and shoved it down his boot.
And damn it! I should have thought of that. But I hadn’t thought it necessary to frisk a naked man.
“That’ll teach him not to bother with shields!” someone said, and I turned to see the creature itself standing in the doorway. The rain was blowing through a ghostly image of the colonel’s head rising out of the neck and looking smug.
“It won’t teach him anything if he’s dead!”
“Would you prefer your father dead, girl?” the colonel demanded.
I picked up the golden grenade and threw it at him. “He was going to trap him—not kill him!”
The colonel dodged back out the door, avoiding the sticky strands that hit the jamb and spread over the opening, like a giant web. “Well, how was I to know that?” he demanded, glaring at me through a gap. “And what good would trappin’ him do? This isn’t your time!”
“It might force him to tell the truth! How many of you does the Black Circle have? Where are they keeping you—”
“I should have anticipated that,” Roger said testily, coming over. He glanced at the colonel. “Next time, allow me to ask for assistance before you intervene.”
“He’s a war mage. You wouldn’t have had time to ask,” the colonel protested—to no one, because no one was listening to him anymore.
“Do something!” I told Roger, who had knelt beside Pritkin and was checking for a pulse for the second time that night.
He looked up at Big Red. “Flashlight.”
The giant snagged one out of a tool belt with one of the hooks it used for hands, and pushed it through a gap in the net. From the look of what else was hanging around its waist, it was plain that Red’s primary use wasn’t gardening. He could have hit Pritkin with something far worse than the flat of his hand, although that might have been enough.
Roger retrieved the flashlight and pried up Pritkin’s left eyelid, careful not to move the head. “Normal dilation,” he told me, after a second. “And his heartbeat is strong. He should be all right, but we won’t know for certain until he comes around.”
“If he comes around!”
“You worry too much. He’s half demon—”
“He’s half human, too!”
“Well, what would you have me do?” he asked impatiently. “I’m not a doctor and he isn’t a vampire. I can manipulate dead flesh any way you like, but I don’t have power over the living.”
Maybe not, but I knew someone who did.
He caught my arm as I jumped up. “She isn’t there. She—”
“Like hell she isn’t!” I broke away and ran for the stairs.
Chapter Eleven
There was only one flight, which let out onto a small hallway. There were two doors on either side, with the first opening onto a junk room, piled high with old furniture, and the next onto a tiny bath. But the door across the hall led to a bedroom, with a big brass bed, a window cracked enough to toss the sheers around, and an old-fashioned wardrobe. And another door—
Leading to a nursery.
There was no one in it except for a baby in a crib, who had somehow slept through the storm outside and the fight downstairs. But who woke up when I slammed in the door. Woke up and started screaming.
“All right, that’s enough,” Roger said, coming in behind me.
For a second, I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or to her.
Not that I guess it mattered.
He hurried past and picked up a small thing in a yellow onesie, with a mop of downy blond curls and a scrunched-up face. “Your mother is in the forest,” he told me, feeling frantically around in his jacket for something. “Dealing with the mess you two made before it consumes half the state!”
I didn’t say anything. He finally came up with a pacifier that he stuck in the wide-open mouth that was emitting all the noise. That worked for a couple of pulls, until she promptly spat it out. He sighed.
“I always wonder about babies who can be fooled by those things,” he said, jiggling her up and down. “She—you—never is. A few pulls and when nothing comes out . . ” He shrugged and put her head on his shoulder, doing the please-shut-up baby dance all parents seem to know.
I sat down.
There was a rocker underneath my butt, but I’m not sure I’d known that. Right then I wasn’t sure I knew anything. I was looking at a concerned father gently tending his fussy child, the dim moonlight from outside flooding in a small window to halo their blond heads, one straight as a pin, the other a mass of curls. And nothing made sense.
“You killed hundreds of people,” I said numbly.
He looked up. “What?”
“Ghosts don’t work for free. All that power . . ”
“What power?”
“To fuel your army. It had to come from somewhere.”
He frowned. “Are we back to that again?”
I stared at him, wishing he looked like the picture I carried around in my head. The crazed mage shooting at me and Agnes in a dank dungeon; the manic, stumbling idiot, barely staying ahead of the Spartoi on a desperate flight through London; the sarcastic, angry man downstairs. Any of them would make this easier.
Instead, I got a frazzled-looking guy with spit-up on his shoulder. I got a hand desperately clutching a diapered bottom, with the please-don’t-let-her-need-changing-while-her-mother-is-out look of men everywhere. I got a ridiculously goofy grin when he realized she was dry.
I didn’t get easy.
“What did you offer your legions?” I said, deliberately making it harsh.
“My what?” He looked confused for a moment, maybe because he’d started trying to fish a bottle out of a dorm-type fridge stuck under a table while also holding a squirmy baby.
“The ones you were telling Pritkin about!”
He finally snared the bottle. “The war mage, you mean? We never got around to introductions.”
“Yes! The one your creature almost killed! You told him—”
“What he wanted to hear,” he said, sticking the bottle on the table. And then muttering something and waving a hand at it. And then trying to test it on a wrist, but that’s a little hard with an infant drooling on your shoulder. “Here,” he told me, pushing her at me.
I shied back, but he just thrust her at me again.
I took her.
She didn’t look like me. She didn’t look like anything in that distinctive way of babies and half-baked loaves of bread. Until she got bored staring at the pocket on Pritkin’s shirt, and a familiar pair of baby blues met mine.
They didn’t appear impressed.
“Son of a—” Roger cursed.
I looked up to find him with a red welt on his wrist, courtesy of the now steamy hot and curdled contents of the bottle. I waited while he fished out another, tried whatever spell he was using again, and finally managed to get the temperature right. “I don’t usually do this,” he explained. “I’m not, that is, I drop things, and her mother said—”
“Your. Legions,” I repeated, because I had to. I had to know.
“Oh, for—” He broke off, looking like he wished he could still stop my mouth with a pacifier. “My legions consist of an ex-marine who died in the Spanish-American War and a bag lady who expired under the Forty-fourth Street Bridge! And I never drained anybody to keep them. It’s quite the contrary—they usually end up draining me!”