Tempt the Stars

battle, they might well avoid signing the treaty. And we needed that treaty.
    Anyway, all of that was moot, because even if I found a way to save Pritkin, to not get myself killed in the process, and to not advertise that Pythias did alter time for their own purposes occasionally, what then? Because Pritkin would still be in a mess, and a bad one. And the fact that, for once, it had nothing to do with me didn’t help at all.
    I didn’t want to rescue him just to put him back in the same tortured existence he’d been occupying for almost a century. I wanted to
save him
. For once, I wanted this power I’d never asked for, and which had been nothing but trouble from the moment I got it, to actually do its freaking job. And
help somebody
.
    Somebody who deserved it.
    I just wasn’t sure how.
    I sat down on the bed to wait out the mess upstairs. The room was quiet except for the faint sigh of the air-conditioning, and peaceful. Or it would have been if the gap in the drapes hadn’t been illuminating a swath across one of the movie posters.
    Not that it looked all that horrific at the moment. Someone had taken a Sharpie to it—some kid, I guessed, since I couldn’t imagine the dour war mage I knew drawing a mustache and glasses on Bela Lugosi. But then, that wouldn’t be the biggest surprise he’d handed me lately.
    Sometimes I wondered if I’d known the man at all. I sure as hell didn’t understand him. One minute he was being an absolute horse’s ass, to the point that I just wanted to take him somewhere particularly nasty and
leave him there
, and then the next . . 
    I felt my breath start to come faster, my hands to clench, and stupid tears to spring to my eyes. I dashed them away angrily. I’d said I wasn’t going to do this anymore, and I damned well
wasn’t
—
    “Cass?”
    “Ahhhh!” I leapt back, hitting the remaining night-stand with my already bruised butt, as Billy popped into existence through a flutter of playing cards.
    The cards were mine. I hadn’t even noticed that I’d been fingering them, but it wasn’t a surprise. Kids have a favorite toy; Linus has his blanket; I have a greasy pack of tarot cards given to me by my old governess, which she’d had enchanted as a joke. And which were now all over the place and talking up a storm.
    They had been spelled to tell your fortune on their own, and either by design or some flaw in the enchantment, they always tried to outdo one another. The result was seventy-eight tiny voices gradually getting louder and louder as each tried to talk over the rest. And ended up making a god-awful racket.
    I started shoving them back into the pack, which was the only thing that kept them quiet, and simultaneously glared at Billy. “Don’t do that!”
    “Then don’t run off without telling me. You’re supposed to be sleeping.”
    Yeah. Like that had been going so great lately. “I had some unwelcome guests.”
    “So shift ’em out of there. Why’d you have to be the one to leave? It’s your room!”
    “And I don’t want to have to redecorate it again. Like after three pissed-off witches finish trashing it.”
    “They wouldn’t trash the Pythia’s suite.”
    “Why not? They broke into it,” I grumbled, managing to shove most of the cards back into place. Except for a few still chatting away somewhere. I threw the bedding around, trying to find the damned things. “It was easier for me to leave.”
    “But why come here?” Billy looked around and his nose wrinkled. “It smells like a combat zone.”
    “I don’t care what it smells like.”
    “And it’s probably booby-trapped all to hell.”
    I paused for a second, my hand halfway under the bed. I’d known Pritkin mainly in his role as my Circle-appointed bodyguard/personal trainer/drill sergeant, but he’d had other titles at times. Like war mage assassin.
    “I don’t think he does that anymore,” I told Billy. Not since I’d popped in a few times unexpectedly.
    “Maybe not. But what about somebody else? It looks like this place was ransacked.”
    “It always looks like that.” Except for his weapons, Pritkin’s idea of orderly living was roughly that of a fourteen-year-old boy.
    “Yeah, but people gotta be wondering where he went off to,” Billy pointed out. “He’s a war mage, isn’t he? Isn’t anybody curious?”
    “Everybody.” I’d gotten asked about it daily by virtually everyone except Jonas, which was weird since Pritkin was technically his subordinate.