Tempt the Stars

was to shoot back, and that wouldn’t have worked on that particular foe. But demons . . . yeah, he knew all about them.
    Half of the vials that were so precisely and uncharacteristically arranged in the racks on his bookcase were potions for fighting various varieties of hell-spawn, since that was what he’d done before hitching his star to my unlucky train. He’d probably forgotten more about demon fighting than the rest of the Corps had ever known. In fact, he might know as much about how I could break him out of his current predicament as Mom would, only I doubted he’d be willing to tell me.
    Because Billy had been right—Pritkin wouldn’t want me going after him. As badly as he hated his father, and as much as he might be hating his life right now, he wouldn’t want me risking it. I was probably going to be in for a major ass-chewing whenever I found him. . . 
    Only Billy had been right about that, too, I realized. I wasn’t going to find him. Not without help.
    I stepped out of the shower and into the hot air swirling around the bathroom. The mirror was all fogged up, and a swipe across it with my hand only changed that for a second. But a second was enough. It showed me a face still slightly round with baby fat, with heat-reddened cheeks, blond curls plastered to my head, a tip-tilted nose, and big, guileless blue eyes. Sopping wet, I looked about as dangerous as a stuffed rabbit. Sopping wet, I looked . . . well, like somebody who had no business going on some daring rescue.
    I scowled, unconsciously imitating a certain war mage I knew. But while on him the expression was fierce, even terrifying, on me . . . mostly it made me look constipated. I sighed.
    But unlike last night, when I’d been feeling helpless and battered and a lot like giving up, today my lack of badass credentials didn’t seem so important. Because considering what I was up against, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I could have been the biggest, baddest mage of them all, could have been a master-level vampire—hell, I could have had an army of both—and it wouldn’t have made a difference.
    Because I didn’t see any of them just waltzing into hell, either.
    In fact, I wasn’t so sure that being me wasn’t an asset right now. Because Billy might have been wrong about one thing—I didn’t think Rosier was expecting me. Why would he be? Everyone else I knew underestimated me, and always had. Everybody else looked at me and saw the fluffy bunny in the mirror; well, almost everyone. But, despite his age, I didn’t get the impression that Rosier had his son’s insight, or much of anything else. And even Pritkin, when he wasn’t running me up mountainsides or pushing me off cliffs, still sometimes acted like I was spun glass and might break.
    But I hadn’t broken.
    I wouldn’t break.
    I didn’t have that luxury.
    And neither had Agnes. I looked in the mirror again, and decided that I didn’t look any more delicate than she ever had. Maybe less, in fact. She’d been all of five foot two in her stocking feet, with a heart-shaped face and porcelain skin and a little-girl air about her that I was coming to believe she’d deliberately cultivated. So that people
would
underestimate her.
    And then she shot them in the butt.
    I let one finger run over the faint scar she’d given me, which thanks to a certain vampire’s healing ability was far less prominent than it should have been. Just barely a dimple now, no big deal. But the thing was, I didn’t think she’d been aiming for my butt at the time.
    At the time, she’d been after a Guild member, one of a secret sect of crazies that wanted to alter time to their own ends, and she hadn’t been playing around. She also hadn’t had a problem going after him alone, without the war mage escort she’d been entitled to. She’d told me they often caused more problems than they solved by shooting everything in sight, and given what I’d seen in my brief acquaintanceship with the Corps, I had no reason to doubt her. But I thought most people chasing a dangerous dark mage would still have wanted one or two along, just in case.
    Agnes hadn’t even told them she was going.
    So, yeah, if she’d started to lecture me about taking chances, I’d have had a few things to say right back. And then I’d have asked her what she’d have done in this situation. Only she probably wouldn’t have told me because she’d refused to talk to me, in case I gave her some hint