“They don’t. It’s their own history they hope to help,” she said, glancing at me and grinning, the adrenaline rush sparkling in her eyes. “They were just getting started in these days. But before they could grow their numbers significantly, the Circle found out what they were up to and hunted them down, almost to a man. It took them centuries to recover. I suppose they think that a massive civil war might give the Circle more important things to worry about.”
She headed down the stairs and I followed silently. By Circle she meant the Silver Circle, the world’s largest magical association and an umbrella organization for thousands of covens. To most people in the supernatural community, the Circle represented order, safety and stability.
I wasn’t one of those people.
That had a lot to do with the fact that the Circle was currently trying to kill me in the hopes that a more suitable Pythia would take my place. Suitable in their view, meaning someone brainwashed from childhood to believe that they could do no wrong. They’d had a few thousand years of treating the Pythias as their personal errand girls and weren’t happy to have a more independent-minded type in office.
“Speaking of the Circle—” I began, before Agnes clapped a hand to my mouth. We’d reentered the outer room of the cellar, and I guess she didn’t want us alerting the mage that we’d returned. Just as well. I’d gotten the impression that a little tension between the Pythia and her magical protectors was normal, but the whole I-want-you-dead thing might freak her out.
What freaked me out was the reappearance of the mage, pale and wild-eyed, exploding out of the gunpowder room at a dead run. He crashed into me and I instinctively grabbed him, getting a fist to the stomach in return. I kicked him in the knee and he yelled and reared back, fist clenched, but stopped when he felt Agnes’ gun beside his ear.
“Go ahead,” she told him. “The paperwork for a trial is a real bitch.”
“So are you!” he snarled.
I clutched my stomach and covered him with my gun while Agnes pulled a pair of cuffs out of her coat. “I have a problem,” I told her quickly, before she could shift away. “I really am Pythia, but I don’t know what I’m doing and there’s no one in my time who can help me.”
“That’s a problem,” she agreed, snicking the cuffs shut.
“Yeah.”
“Good luck with that.” She grabbed the mage by the collar.
“Don’t you dare leave!”” I said furiously. “I helped
you
!”
“You almost blew this place sky-high! Anyway, even if I wanted to help you, there are rules.”
“Screw the rules! You stuck me with this godforsaken position—”
“I didn’t hear that.”
“—and now you think you can just walk away? You have a responsibility here!”
I’d been waving the gun around in my agitation, and it accidentally went off and took a chip out of a brick over the mage’s head. He blinked. “Uh, ladies? Might I suggest—”
“Shut up!” we told him in unison. He shut up.
Agnes tried to shift, but I grabbed her wrist, wrenching us back at the same moment that she tried to go forward. “Are you crazy?” she screeched, only it sounded like she was talking in slow motion.
Time wobbled around us: one second, we were back where I came in, with bullets whizzing around our heads; the next we were in the future, watching a party of cloaked men in funny hats examining the ruined door. One of them caught sight of us and paled, and then we were gone, bouncing backward once more.
Agnes somehow managed to put on the brakes, wrenching us out of the time stream with what I swear was an audible pop. For a moment, we stood there, white-faced and shaking, back where we’d started but a little worse for the wear. I don’t know about the others, but I felt like I’d just stepped off a roller coaster—light-headed and a little sick.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” the mage said weakly.
Agnes took a deep breath and let it out, glaring at me. “You’re a lousy liar. If I’d trained you, you’d have known better than to pull a stunt like that!”
“Didn’t you hear me?” I demanded. “You
didn’t
train me. That’s the problem. You gave me this lousy job and then died before—”
“La-la-la. Not listening.” She stuck a finger in one ear, which didn’t help much as the other hand still gripped the mage’s shirt.
I stared at her. My last image of Agnes was her heroic death to keep a rogue initiate from laying waste to the time line. Somewhere in my hero worship, I’d forgotten how deeply weird she could be. Of course, if I kept this job as long as she had, I might not be too normal, either. It wasn’t a comforting thought.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked, honestly worried that my last chance for a mentor was headed down the toilet along with her sanity.
“What’s wrong with
me
?” She took the finger out of her ear to shake it at me. “You’re not supposed to tell me these things!”
“I haven’t told you that much—” I began, only to be cut off with a savage gesture.
“You’ve told me plenty! I have an initiate in training and she isn’t you. You said I got you into this, so what happened to her? Is she dead? Did she turn dark?” Her hands waved around, banging the mage’s head into the wall. “I don’t know!”
“Sort of both,” I said uneasily. Agnes’ second heir, Myra, had turned dark and began using her time-travel abilities for her own and her allies’ gain. Agnes would be forced to kill her to remove the threat to the time line but would die herself in the process. And that would leave an untrained nobody in the Pythia’s position—me.
“Don’t tell me that!” she whispered, clearly horrified.
“You asked.”
“No! I didn’t! I was explaining how much information I could get out of this meeting if I thought about it, which I’m absolutely not going to do because I may have already learned too much. What if something you say causes me to change the way I deal with the present—
my
present—which then alters
your
future? You might shift back only to find out that you don’t exist anymore! Hadn’t thought of that, had you?”
“No,” I said, working to keep my temper under control.
“But that doesn’t change the fact that I need training!”
“The early Pythias didn’t have much in the way of training, but they managed to figure things out. So will you.”
“Easy for you to say. You were trained. You never had to figure anything out!”
“Like hell.” She put the hand not choking the mage on her hip in a familiar gesture. “No amount of training really prepares you for this job.”
“But at least you know how the power works. I didn’t get the manual!”
“There
is
no manual. If our enemies ever figured out everything we can do, they would be much more successful in opposing us. And time isn’t all that easy to screw up any—”
She paused as, somewhere on the far side of the gunpowder room, a key turned in a lock. Agnes drew her gun and pushed it into the mage’s temple hard enough to dent the skin. “Say one word—make one sound—and I swear . . . ,” she whispered. He looked conflicted, ideology warring with self-preservation, but I guess the latter won because he stayed silent. Or maybe he couldn’t talk with her fist knotted in his collar.
The three of us peered through the missing door and caught glimpses of fire. A dark-haired man stood at the far end of the room. He sat a lantern that looked a lot like the mage’s well away from the casks, which he started shifting around. He was dressed like the mage, too, except for a long dark coat, and he had boots on. The spurs chimed softly in the quiet.
“Fawkes,” Agnes whispered. She nudged the mage with the barrel of her gun. “Did you change anything?”
He stayed silent.
“Answer me!”
“That’s not how it works,” he said irritably. “You can’t say you’ll shoot me if I talk and then ask me a question!”
We froze as the man paused, looking our way but not seeing anything. It was pitch-dark at our end of the cellar. We’d left the mage’s lantern behind when we took our stroll with the bomb and it must have gone out, because the only source of light came from Fawkes’. He paused, sniffing the damp air, where the acrid smell of the explosion still lingered. But after a moment, he went back to work.
“We’ve got to hurry this up,” Agnes whispered. “Where was I?”
“You said time is hard to mess up. But hard isn’t impossible. Some things
can
make a difference.” On a recent trip through time, I’d accidentally changed one little thing, merely meeting a man a few hundred years before I was supposed to, and the results had been insane. The results had almost gotten both of us killed.
“Of course they can,” she said impatiently. “That’s why we’re here.”
“But how do I know what can safely be changed and what can’t?” I asked desperately.
Agnes frowned. “What is this?” she demanded, her voice suddenly going flat and hard. It matched the icy color of her eyes. “Some kind of elaborate hoax?”
“What? No! I—”
She jerked the mage down to the level of her face. “Did you recruit a woman to try to fool me? Was that was this was all about?”
He glanced at me and then back at her. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “You got me.”
“I should have known! I knew the power wouldn’t allow two Pythias to meet!” she hissed, and turned her gun on me.
I stared at her. “He’s lying!”
“If he was lying, you wouldn’t have asked me that!” she spat. “No Pythia would.”
“Asked what? All I want is some help!”
“Oh,
I’ll
help you!” she said, and lunged for me. The mage took his chance and ran into the gunpowder room while Agnes and I went down in a flail of limbs, her trying to cuff me while I attempted to get free without either of our guns going off. It wasn’t easy. I swear the woman had an extra arm, because she somehow managed to hold both my wrists while a tiny fist clocked me upside the jaw.
“The mage is with Fawkes!” I gasped as another pair of cuffs clicked shut around my wrists. “They’re going to set this whole place off and we’re all going to die!”
“Yeah, and if I let you go, we’ll die faster!”
“I’m not going to help them!”
“I know you’re not. You’re staying tied up here until I deal with this.”
I glared at her. “I’m Pythia! I don’t really need you to release me!”
She sat back on her heels, surveying me mockingly. “Okay, Pythia.” She waved a hand. “Do your thing.”
“Okay, I will!”
“Okay, then.”
One of the few upsides of an otherwise hellish job is the ability to shift spatially as well as temporally. That’s a fancy way of saying that I can pop in and out of places as well as times, something that’s saved me on more than one occasion. I’d used the ability to move across continents; getting out of a pair of handcuffs was child’s play.
I shifted a couple feet to the right, expecting to leave the cuffs behind. I’d pulled a similar trick once before and it had worked great. But this time, the cuffs traveled right along with me. Agnes demurely rearranged her skirts as I tried again. My body moved another couple feet to the left, but my hands remained as tightly bound as before.
“What the hell?”
“Magical handcuffs,” she murmured.
“Get them off!”
“I thought you didn’t need my help.”
From the powder room, we heard the sound of angry voices and the clash of steel on steel. “You may need mine,” I pointed out.
She sighed. “Some days I really hate my job.”
I managed to get to my feet, but having my hands bound threw my balance off. I fell onto the steps, bounced off and ended up on my abused butt. “I hate mine all the time,” I said bitterly.
“Okay, you’re a Pythia.”
“We go through all that, and you believe me because I have a bad attitude?”
She started working on the cuffs. “That and the fact that the Guild can’t do spatial shifts.”
“So why did you attack me?”
“Because you aren’t supposed to be here! This isn’t even supposed to be possible!”
“Maybe the power thinks I need training, too,” I pointed out.
“The power doesn’t
think
. It isn’t sentient. It follows a strict group of rules, such as those built into any spell. One of which is that you can’t interfere in a mission that has nothing to do with you!”
“I’m not interfering,” I said crossly. “I just wanted to talk! You’re the one who—”
“And in case you didn’t get the memo, we’re the good guys!” she added furiously, cutting me off. “We don’t go around changing time!”
“Never?” I asked skeptically. Because if Agnes hadn’t broken that rule, I wouldn’t be alive.
“Oh, God.” She threw up her hands. “Here we go again. Every initiate starts out thinking she can save the world.”
“Can’t you? You’re Pythia. You can do anything you want.”
She laughed. “Oh, you
are
new.” She tugged on the cuffs. “Damn.”
“What?”
“They’re stuck.”
“What do you mean stuck?”
“I mean, they won’t open,” she said patiently.
I pulled on them until it felt like my wrists might pop off. “Why not?”
“I don’t know. I don’t design these things. I just use them.”
“What kind of dumb-ass philosophy is that?!”
“You drive a car, don’t you? Do you know how that works?”
“The general principle, yes!”
“Well, I understand the general principle here, but for some reason they aren’t releasing.” She worked on them for another minute until things suddenly went silent in the next room.
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
“Do I need to explain the difference between clairvoyant and mind reader?” She gave up on the cuffs and dragged me to my feet, almost dislocating a shoulder in the process. “I still don’t trust you,” she said flatly. “But if you help me with those two, I’ll give you a hint.”