Tempt the Stars

but I barely heard him. All I could see was Pritkin’s face. All I could think was that this might be the last time I ever saw it.
    And that was enough to do what an army of demons hadn’t, and send me into a full-blown panic. “You can’t go! You can’t!”
    Hard hands tightened over mine. “Cassie—”
    “Just try. You just have to
try
.”
    “It isn’t that simple. Even if—” He stopped.
    “Even if
what
?”
    “Cassie, the council . . . it isn’t like a human court, with rules and procedures and some semblance of justice. They are arbitrary and capricious at best, and at worst . . . they’re the definition of chaos.”
    I blinked at him. Because I’d heard that word before. “Mother said chaos is like jumping off a cliff, not knowing what’s at the bottom,” I told him. “But she didn’t seem to think that was so bad. I didn’t understand what she meant then, but I think . . . maybe I do now. Sometimes there are no guarantees. Sometimes, if you want something badly enough, you just have to
jump
.”
    Pritkin still didn’t move, but something shifted in his face as he looked at me. I wasn’t sure what it was, but his father didn’t seem to like it. At all.
    “Fine,” Rosier said flatly. “We’ll do this the hard way.”

Chapter Twenty-nine
    The hard way turned out to be pretty damned hard.
    “Shit!” Caleb cursed as the door blew open and the bar was swarmed by a mass of familiar blue-robed guards. Who looked like they remembered us, too. And no way could the two of us take on that many.
    But then Pritkin grabbed Rosier and threw him into the first wave. Who staggered back into a table full of the locals, sending mugs and arcs of hell juice flying. And knocking a bunch of dusty, gray-garbed patrons to the floor.
    That didn’t seem to bother the guards too much, who were busy thrashing back to their feet, more than one of them drawing those damned curved blades. Until a gnarly, lumpy, gray-green limb, less like a hand than a proboscis, snaked out from under one of the patrons’ cloaks. And crumpled the nearest sword like tinfoil.
    And okay, that works, I thought, right before guards and furniture started flying.
    I had to hit the disgusting floor to avoid a chair, which splintered against the wall behind me in a hail of bits. But by then I was under the table, grabbing Casanova and the bottle he was still holding. “Give me that!”
    “Getcherown,” he slurred, and grabbed it back. And blinked around blearily, before focusing on the veiled guard who had just dove after me. Only Casanova apparently thought he was also after his precious hell juice.
    So he bonked him on the head with it.
    “Was’ goin’ on?” he demanded as the guard slumped over, leaving us with a view of struggling legs and flashing blades. And a gray-green fleshy lump that appeared to be eating a chair.
    “Bar fight!”
    “Oh. I haven’t been in one of those in—” A curved sword cleaved the table clean in two. “And now I ’member why.”
    We scrambled back as the sides fell away, leaving us staring at a massive blue-robed warrior, his blade sheened with black blood. I stared at him and he stared back, and underneath the veil he wore, I saw him smile. Because we didn’t have any weapons and Caleb and Pritkin had been jumped by half a platoon and the closest cover was a pillar a few yards behind him, which might as well have been on another
planet
—
    And then the sword was slashing down and there was no time to scream, no time for anything except shifting or dying, and I couldn’t shift and I
knew
I couldn’t—
    And I didn’t.
    At least, not us.
    I knew that because a second later, we were still sitting in the same puddle of spilled hell juice, inside the same cleaved-in table, in front of the same murderous guard. But the pillar that had been over there . . 
    Was now over here.
    With a wicked-looking blade stuck halfway through the middle of it.
    “What did you
do
?” Casanova screeched, his voice reaching into the falsetto. Maybe because the tip of the blade had stopped inches away from his crossed eyes.
    I stared at the blade, and then out the window, which was still shuffling like a deck of cards. And thought maybe I knew. “This is the
Shadowland
,” I hissed as the guard started trying to pull his blade out.
    “So?”
    I grabbed Casanova’s head and turned it toward the window. “So you can think things how you want them!”
    “But . . . but that’s just