I’d just somehow ended up in a luxury hotel suite surrounded by his guys, with a credit card I hadn’t asked for and didn’t use because it felt weird, sitting around waiting for his call. Like one of the many mistresses he’d had through the years, but not like anybody permanent. Not like a wife.
Because he already had one of those, and nobody was allowed to take her place.
So I’d never really had a chance to find out how a normal relationship worked.
But I didn’t think this was it!
“I’m your partner, not your boyfriend, a word I hate in any—” Pritkin paused, and his head tilted. “Wait. Am I?”
“How the hell would I know?” I demanded, in a vicious whisper, because that thing was still too close. “When do we ever talk? About anything? Caleb’s always there, or Tami’s coming by with some more goddamned soup, or you’re running off half-dead to do some crazy errand for Jonas, or we’re both about to die!” I gestured around. “Even at the top of the world, something is always trying to kill us!”
Pritkin just looked at me some more, an odd expression on his face. I jerked away, waving my arms like a madwoman to dissipate the camo bubble. Outside, the sun was glaringly bright, but the snow was still coming down fast and hard. We needed to get this done.
I stomped over to the little bastards in the bag. They were called spriggans, and there were three of them, small, round, bumpy creatures that could hunch down and give decent impressions of rocks when they wanted. Which was why they were here.
Human tech didn’t work so well in Faerie, especially if you want it to beam info back to earth, so the spriggans were a work-around. They’d long been used by the dark fey as spies on their enemies. Put one or more where you wanted, and have a vargr—a sort of fey seer—peer through their eyes and tell you what was going on.
Of course, vargrs could do that with birds, too, but they were being shot down left and right by the Svarestri whenever they got too close. Besides, birds gave a brief snapshot of a scene before wheeling off again, and we needed constant eyes on the ground—or, more appropriately, the pass—to make sure our work crews didn’t get a surprise. Hence, the asshole contingent.
Luckily, Pritkin and I didn’t have to worry about their attitude problems. We just had to get the living cameras into place, along with some supplies, without anybody noticing. And then get ourselves out.
Which was going to be the hard part, I thought, glancing back down the mountain. We had to get back to the portal after this was done, a feat that would have daunted Edmund freaking Hillary, except for the Pythian ability to shift through space. It wasn’t as impressive as time manipulation, but it was a hell of a lot easier.
At least, it was when I hadn’t already done a spatial shift and a time stoppage practically back to back! And even a brief time bubble was expensive, powerwise. I needed to refuel.
“Do you have any granola—” I asked, starting to turn, before something caught my eye.
Because it didn’t look like Pritkin had conjured up a snowstorm after all. He’d conjured up a windstorm, which had picked up snow from one part of the mountain and dumped it on another. Including the snow that had been covering something sprawled beneath a nearby boulder.
Something wearing a dragon-hide coat.
It was bright green and shimmering softly under the brilliant sun, like a spill of emeralds. But it didn’t feel like them. It felt like sharp-edged silk, something almost liquid it was so fine, running through my fingers like water when I tugged on it, trying to see—
Oh God.
I stumbled back a step, because the head . . . wasn’t there. A ragged, blackened stump of a neck and a frozen bloody pool were all that was left. Until I spotted the missing piece a yard or so off, wedged between some rocks.
It hadn’t decomposed, being so high up. But it looked like it had been pecked at by birds or gnawed on by animals—maybe both. The eyes were gone—thankfully—and so was a lot of the soft tissue.
But the cracked and blackened teeth were still the same.
I stared into that frozen rictus, and a wave of dizziness hit me. Because that . . . was impossible. The remains looked like they had been here for days, maybe weeks, before the snow covered them up. But I’d been talking to Tristram just last night, and in a place that checked people for glamouries before they came in. He couldn’t have been anyone else—
Unless that someone else was a nine-hundred-year-old mage with the equivalent of a master’s powers. I’d even thought it myself: what if Jonathan had developed new abilities over all those years? Like being able to morph his looks without the need for glamouries?
It would explain how he’d been able to elude both the Circle and senate for so long, and how I could have been talking to him last night when—
When he’d suggested coming up here. When he’d sworn that he couldn’t get past Aeslinn’s security to spy on the pass. When he’d insisted that he needed me and my power to do it instead—
Holy shit.
I jumped back to my feet and spun around, a warning on my lips.
Only to find myself face-to-face with someone, but it wasn’t Jonathan.
It wasn’t Pritkin, either. He was where I’d left him, with an out-flung arm and a half-open mouth, caught in the middle of a spell. One he’d never had a chance to finish because somebody had frozen him, like I’d done to the little creatures in the bag.
Probably the dark-haired woman standing in front of me.