A wave of hair sprang from his head, going gray streaked and then solid gray and then pure silver-white as it snaked over his shoulders, pooling in the mud and grime caking the cobblestones. At the same time, the body under the long leather coat began to move in odd ways, bucking and writhing, although his hands stayed on the ground as if glued. And then the wave ate through the coat, disintegrating it like it had been dumped in acid, and what was underneath—
“Don’t look at it,” Mircea said harshly, pulling me back.
But I couldn’t not look. Skin darkened and then peeled away in patches, muscle thinned and browned, nails sprouted long as talons and a cascade of what I recognized dully as ropy intestines hit the cobblestones with a splat. And then the face lifted, the mouth still open but no sound coming out anymore.
No, of course not, I thought blankly.
It’s kind of hard to scream with no vocal cords.
And then my paralysis broke and we were pelting back toward the street, just ahead of the tidal wave boiling toward us. Mircea threw us into the road and then slammed us back against a building all in one quick movement. I stayed there, nails biting into the cold stones, as the wave shimmered through the air right past us.
I still couldn’t see it, other than as a vague distortion against the night. But I didn’t have to. I could see what it did well enough.
The sidewalk in front of the alley cracked and splintered, and the section of roadbed beside it suddenly rippled like an angry sea. The individual stones began moving up and down like keys on a piano, the whole expanse to the other side dancing as the mortar between the pieces crumbled and age pushed them out of place. It was like watching hundreds of years of wear happening in seconds.
But it didn’t stop there. A lamppost across the street began to writhe, the metal twisting and groaning as rust surged up the sides. The lamp on top cracked and then shattered, before what was left of the structure tumbled into the road, exploding against the uprooted stones.
But it didn’t stop there, either. The fence around a grassy area disintegrated in a pouf of bronze rust, glimmering in the moonlight like fairy dust. Flowers in a small bed bloomed and died and bloomed again, pushing upward against the snow as the sticklike sapling they hedged suddenly shot toward the sky. Limbs bulged, bark flowed and leaves sprouted in abundance. Acorns rattled down like rain as the leaves changed and fell and sprouted again, piling up around the rapidly thickening trunk like a mountain.
I blinked, and when I looked again, it was at a fully grown tree, branches huge and rustling, spreading luxuriantly against the night where a moment before there had been only sky. I stared up at it, the breath coming fast in my lungs, because no way. No
I’d been willing to take the shifting thing on faith, to believe that maybe the mage had somehow learned a spell the others hadn’t, or had a special talent that allowed him to control the needed power, or had just gotten really lucky. But that? That was the sort of thing that only a Pythia could do—and a damned well-trained one at that.
Or a well-trained Pythian heir.
My head turned on its own, and I found myself staring at the darkened mouth of the alley again. It looked a little different now, the bricks on either side of the entrance cracked and discolored and in some cases missing altogether, crumbled into dust. But there was no sign of the mage, nothing to show that a man had ever been there, much less that he had suffered and died on those stones. It was almost like nothing had ever happened.
But it had.
And my mother had done it.
“I believe it has stopped,” Mircea said softly, examining a nearby fountain. As far as I could tell, the wave had done nothing more than add a little to the verdigris etching over the elaborate metalwork. It should have made me feel better, because I’d had no clue how to counter it if it had just kept going.
But it didn’t.
“Why would she help him?” I asked harshly.
Mircea looked up. I couldn’t see him very well with the only nearby lamppost now a bunch of rusted shards in the street. But he didn’t sound surprised when he answered; he’d probably been thinking the same thing. “He must have her under a compulsion.”
“But . . . why bother? If he could make her do anything, he could order her to kill herself! He doesn’t need —”
“If he wished to kill her, why not do so at the party? Why take the risk of trying to control power like that?” He sounded slightly awed, as if he’d never before seen precisely what a Pythia could do. And maybe he hadn’t.
It sure as hell was news to me.
“Why take her at all, then?” I demanded.
“As you said, the Guild exists to disrupt time. But their power is insufficient to allow them to travel where they wish. And even when they manage to collect enough, through whatever means, for a shift, there remains the problem of controlling it. Perhaps they decided—”
“That it would be easier to get themselves a pet Pythia,” I rasped. “To act as their goddamned cab ride!”
“It would make sense.”
I didn’t say anything. But I had a sudden, vicious image of the mage, kneeling in place in that alley, hair shooting out of his head as his body slowly disintegrated along with his clothes. It was surprisingly satisfying.
“What do you wish to do?” Mircea asked, as a lone figure darted across the end of the street. One of the remaining mages, no doubt. I was going to have to get them back to their own time before they screwed up something here, whenever this was. But that would have to come later. Right now, my mother was top priority, or there wouldn’t
“I want to find her,” I said savagely.
“Then let’s go find her.”
Two streets over, we came to another alley that looked a lot like the first, except that the light spilling in the end of this passage was a dim, hazy gold. The sun hadn’t suddenly come up, so I assumed that the light was man-made. It went with the sound of horses’ hooves on cobblestone, the rattle of wheels, and the shouts of people hawking something nearby.
I didn’t see my mother, but I kind of thought she might have been by.
“What is that?” Mircea demanded, staring at a mage loping along in the shadows beside us.
His arms were pumping, his legs were working, and his long coat was flapping out behind him as if caught in a stiff breeze. Only he wasn’t going anywhere. He also wasn’t paying any attention to us, which wasn’t surprising.
As far as he was concerned, we weren’t there yet.
Mircea frowned and reached out a hand, as if to give him a push. Until my fingers tightened over his wrist. “Don’t do that.”
He looked a question.
“Time loop,” I told him shortly, moving closer to the mouth of the alley. I was cautious, staying well inside the shadows provided by some stacked crates. I didn’t think my mother could manage another wave like that so soon—if she could, the man behind us likely wouldn’t be alive. But I wasn’t sure. And that little demonstration earlier wasn’t something you just forgot.
I kept telling myself that it hadn’t been her, that she hadn’t chosen to kill him like that, that she hadn’t known. But it still sent chills rippling over my flesh. God, what a horrible way to—
“Time loop?” Mircea asked, putting a hand on my shoulder.
I jumped and almost screamed.
He lifted an eyebrow at me, cool as always. Like he regularly saw people disintegrate into puddles of flesh. I licked my lips and told myself to get a grip.
“He’s stuck on repeat,” I explained, glancing back at the mage running his personal marathon.
“And that means?”
“That he’ll keep reliving the same few seconds over and over until the bubble fades or he breaks out of it.”
“He’s encased in a time bubble?”
