Tempt the Stars

almost into powder. A splatter of some potion had eaten right through to the studs on one wall, and still gave off a faint, noxious odor, despite a week of air-conditioning. And a large stain soiled the carpet by the window, looking black in the low light.
    I stared at it, and everything came flooding back: the shock, the horror, the fury of the night when the obstinate son of a bitch who’d lived here had taken it upon himself to trade his life for mine. The week that had passed since hadn’t dimmed the memory at all, or the emotion that went with it. If anything it was stronger than ever, the urge to grab him, to demand where he got the nerve, the
right
, to make that decision for me—
    I stood there a minute, shaking, furious all over again but with no one to hit. Because he wasn’t here. Just the room, cold and empty and generic without its larger-than-life occupant, the echoing silence broken only by my ragged breathing. I hugged my arms around myself and waited for my heartbeat to back off attack levels.
    Only it didn’t seem to be obliging.
    I’d read once that there were five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But that hadn’t been my experience. There had been a little denial, yeah, when I first realized what had happened, but it hadn’t lasted long. And afterward . . . well, let’s just say that I’d entered phase two with a vengeance.
    And that was where I’d stayed.
    I supposed that was why my nails had sunk into my upper arms, hard enough to draw blood. I slowly pulled them out and carefully wiped my hands on my already filthy jeans. I wasn’t going to do this now.
    I was going to do this later.
    I was going to do this once
I got him back
.
    Although, so far, that wasn’t going great.
    It was another thing that should have been easy. Hell, I was a time traveler, wasn’t I? Just go back and change a few things. Make a few adjustments. See to it that the good guys won. Simple, right?
    Of course, I wasn’t supposed to. In fact, it was pretty much exactly the kind of thing I was not supposed to do. Pythias guarded the timeline from alterations by others; we didn’t change it ourselves.
    Except, of course, when we did.
    Agnes had, when she warned me that I was about to be assassinated. If she hadn’t, I never would have met the maddening man known as John Pritkin in the first place, would never have needed him to save me, would never have royally screwed up his life in the process. He might have been better off if she’d minded her own business, but she hadn’t and I’d lived. All because she’d changed one little thing . . 
    But that was the problem. Agnes had been doing this kind of thing for decades. She’d known what to change and what to leave the heck alone. Not to mention that the night she bent a rule for me had been easy mode compared to the craziness a week ago. If I did go back, where did I make the cut? I’d lain awake at night for a week, trying to figure it out.
    The obvious place was right here in this room. The fight that had left it looking even more trashed than usual had been because of me. Someone on the other side of the war had wanted a device Pritkin carried, one that would summon me to an impromptu execution the next time I tried to shift. They’d fought. Pritkin lost it, chased after it, and as a result, found me in the nick of time.
    So, if I wanted to change things, the easiest way would be to warn him about what was coming.
    And that would work great —
if
he took the hint. But Pritkin defined stubborn and was making headway on a new meaning for paranoid; he might well ignore a heads-up like the one Agnes had sent me. And even if he didn’t and avoided following the would-be assassin to the battleground, that wouldn’t work so well, either.
    Since in that case I’d be dead.
    So then where? In the middle of a fight that I’d barely won the first time? Because I just didn’t see how that worked. The final battle had happened in a couple of minutes of frantic activity and gnawing terror. And, as usual, I’d survived by luck as much as skill. Any slight alteration might make things worse instead of better.
    Not to mention the fact that, crazy as it had been, the duel I’d fought against another demigod had ended up being pretty damned useful. It had impressed the hell out of the six vampire senates, who had shortly thereafter decided that maybe they would join forces in the war, after all. If I avoided the