“—room 28A—” Jonas cut off. “I beg your pardon?”
“I said no. I’m staying here to guard Cassie tonight, and will be returning with her to court tomorrow, as soon as she can shift. I’ve been away too long as it is.”
“May I remind you that we are on the eve of invasion?”
“Yes, we are. And I have done everything humanly possible to help you prepare for that. There’s nothing more I can tell you about Aeslinn’s territory—”
“And if something should go wrong? You are one of our leading experts on both the fey and demons alike—”
“Who you can contact at the Pythian Court as easily as you can here.”
“Damn it, John!” Jonas stared at him. “What has gotten into you?”
“What has gotten into me?” Pritkin’s voice had gone soft, which was never a good sign. “That,” he gestured at the monster still slumped on the screen. “That has gotten to me. Cassie faced that thing alone because of me. She needs someone to watch her back—”
“She has someone. A whole court full of someone’s—”
“Old women and children! Not good enough—”
“You didn’t seem to have a problem with it all week,” Jonas pointed out, making Pritkin flush.
“I had a huge problem with it, but convinced myself that she’d be safer at her court than with me, if a damned fey was stalking me!”
“Wait, what?” I said, frowning at him. “You knew you were the target, all the time?”
“The assassin was in my room,” said the most infuriating man in the world.
I stared at him, momentarily speechless. “Then why in the hell—”
“I didn’t want you risking yourself, trying to save me again! I wanted you back at court and well out of it for once! But I should have known—”
“You lied to me?”
“—that you can’t stay out of trouble for five minutes! I send you home, and the next time I see you, what are you doing? Dragging in the man at the top of the Circle’s most wanted list and bleeding like a stuck pig!”
“You lied to me!” I said, in disbelief. “You stayed at HQ, knowing you were being targeted, like a—like a—” My eyes suddenly widened, as the truth dawned. “You were hoping they’d try again, weren’t you? You were offering yourself up as bait—”
“If I may interrupt?” Jonas said.
“—while knowing damned well—did you ever think about what it would do to me, if they killed you?” I raged. “How I would feel, sitting in comfort at court, listening to people’s stupid problems, while you bled out? Did you? Or was that just irrelevant as long as the job got done? Goddamnit!” I yelled, feeling my blood pressure skyrocket. “I thought we’d been through this! I thought you understood—”
I broke off for a second, because fury had closed my throat and I couldn’t talk. I just stared at him accusingly, and watched him flush to his hairline, as he damned well might! I thought we’d gotten past the whole ‘your life is more valuable than mine’ bullcrap after I chased his soul through time for fifteen hundred years! But I guessed not.
What the fuck?
For a moment, we just sat there and breathed heavily at each other. But then Pritkin did the last thing I’d expected. Something that the contrary bastard almost never did, because he loved to argue.
He agreed with me.
“You’re right.”
I blinked, caught off guard. “What?”
“You’re right,” he repeated. “Every word of it. What do you think I was telling myself, whilst watching you drag in that damned mage? Exhausted, covered in blood, and alone, when I should have been with you? But I wasn’t, and not only because I was wasting time training men when the Corps has hundreds of others to do that—”
“Not that know Faerie like you do,” Jonas said, because with age does not always come wisdom.
“—but because I had warned you off, forbidden you to go back there, to that time and place, and accost a fey warrior. I wanted to protect you so much that I put you in danger. I know you; I should have known you’d do it regardless. It was the only way to find out how he got in and to discover whether anyone was with him. But instead of offering to accompany you—”