“They didn’t see what happened in the car. They only know—”

“That he’s alive when he shouldn’t be. And that’s more than enough to pique some goddamned curiosity!”

“All right!” I said. “Give me a minute.”

“I hope you don’t need much more than that,” he said grimly. “We got lucky when we came in, with almost everybody on shift called out to that disaster you left. But they’re going to be back soon, plus the first day crew is going to be coming on and—”

“How long?”

He glanced at his watch. “Less than an hour before the day crew shows up. And probably nowhere near that long before the first groups start coming back from Disaster City. They’re gonna need to make out reports before they go off the clock, and that takes—”

“So how long do we have?”

Black eyes met mine. “Minutes.”

“Then we had best make good use of them,” Pritkin said, opening the door behind us. “And you forgot a silence spell.”

Caleb cursed. “I’m losing it.”

“With cause.”

“Damn straight with cause!” Caleb gazed at his friend, his eyes scanning the familiar features, as if he expected him to have suddenly sprouted horns.

“What is it?” Pritkin asked stiffly.

Caleb didn’t answer for a moment; then he shrugged. “Nothing. Just never met a legend before.”

“A legend is merely a man history decided to bugger,” Pritkin said harshly. “I’m the same person I always was.”

“Yeah, maybe. It’s gonna take some getting used to.”

“Then get used to it.”

“Don’t take that tone with me when I’m risking my ass—”

“Then don’t look at me as if I’m a laboratory specimen on a slide!”

“Well, forgive the hell out of me for being a little fucking traumatized—”

“Will you two shut up?” I yelled.

They both turned to look at me. I hadn’t actually intended to shout, but it seemed to have worked. And Pritkin was right; we needed to figure something out before Jonas showed up with his fussy little ways and his too-sharp blue eyes and his seemingly innocent questions, and we were screwed.

“We need to deal with this,” I told them.

“I think that’s been established,” Caleb said nastily. “But unless you know—”

“What I know is that people like simple explanations for things. Especially weird things—”

“According to who?”

To every vampire I ever met, I didn’t say, because it wouldn’t have helped. “It’s a fact of human nature,” I said instead. “People don’t like complicated answers. They like simple, easy-to-imagine ones. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if you give them two solutions—a really complex truth or a really simple lie—they’ll take the lie. It’s just easier.”

“Okay, so what’s our simple lie?”

“That I did it.” I glanced at Pritkin. “We’ll say I bubbled you. Like with the apple.”

“But you can’t do that yet.”

“So? They don’t know that.”

“I am fairly certain that Jonas does,” Pritkin said drily. “We need to come up with something else.”

“We don’t have anything else! And we don’t—”

“What are you talking about?” That was Caleb.

“A trick,” I said, glancing at him. “Or, really, it’s not a trick; it’s something Agnes could do with her power—speeding up time in a small area. I’ve been practicing—”

“And you can do that?” he interrupted.

“In theory.”

He cursed.

“Look,” I said impatiently. “The point isn’t whether or not I can do it—”

“Then what is the point?”

“That I’m supposed to be able to do it! That a real . . . that a well-trained Pythia could do it. And it will be a lot easier for people to imagine that than a legend coming back to life and hanging out in their damn cafeteria!”

“If you could do it,” Caleb said. “Maybe so. But you can’t, and the old man knows you can’t. So how is that—”

“He knows I usually can’t, but that’s not the same thing. I can do it, just not on demand. But occasionally I luck out and my power works for a change. And that’s almost always in a crisis or when I’m pissed off or—”

“Which makes little sense,” Pritkin said, interrupting me.

I looked at him. “What?”

“You said it yourself: you can use the power. You have proven that on a number of occasions—you prove it every time you shift. And the power is the power; it doesn’t change. Merely your perception of it does.”

“Meaning what?”

“That if you can use it under duress, you should be able to use it all the time. You should be able to use it at will.”

“But I can’t. I told you before: once in a while I get lucky, but most of the time—”

“Then perhaps you have been trying too hard. Did you not tell me that Lady Phemonoe said the power would teach you, that it would show you what it can do?”

“Yes, and I keep waiting—”

“And it has been showing you things, has it not? Or did Niall somehow teleport himself to that desert?”

“Niall?” Caleb asked.

“Jonas shouldn’t have told you about that!” I said, flushing.

“He didn’t do it to embarrass you,” Pritkin said. “But as an example of your progress.”

“Niall Edwards?” Caleb persisted.

“I’m not making progress!” I said furiously. “I haven’t made any in weeks!”

“Not since the last crisis.”

“What does that have to do with—”

“Niall I-fell-asleep-at-the-beach-and-that’s-why-I’mlobster-red Edwards?” Caleb asked.

Pritkin ignored him. “In a crisis, you forget to tell yourself that you can’t do something. You forget your anxieties and your fears, your nervousness and your self-doubt, and you reach for your power. And it responds. It has been doing so since the first. I believe you have always been able to do what you need to do. You simply have to learn to get out of your own way, so to speak.”

“If it was that easy, do you really think Initiates would need years of training?”

“There’s more to being Pythia than manipulating the power, Cassie. You’ve primarily been dealing with that end because you’ve had no choice. From the beginning of your reign, we have been at war. I doubt Lady Phemonoe fought as many battles in her entire time in office as you have already done. But that is not normally the case, and a Pythia in peacetime has a number of other functions—”

I didn’t say anything, but Pritkin cut off anyway. I guess my face must have spoken for me. “You can do this,” he said simply.

I just stared at him. I wished that were true. I really, really did. But the fact was, I wasn’t Lady Phemonoe, beloved Pythia. I wasn’t even Elizabeth Palmer, heir extraordinaire. I was just Cassie, ex-secretary, lousy tarot reader and allaround screwup.

And coronation or not, I had a terrible, sneaking suspicion that I always would be.

“This is all very interesting,” Caleb said. “But can we get back to the—” He broke off when a door slammed somewhere down the hall. Booted footsteps started coming our way, a lot of them, echoing loud on the cheap laminate tile. “They’re back,” he said, pretty unnecessarily.

Pritkin looked at me. “What are we going with?”

I spread my hands. “What I said. It’s all we’ve got.”

“Then we got nothing,” Caleb said. “Speeding up healing might work on a cut or bruise or broken bone. But something like this? If you sped up time, it might speed up his healing, but it would also speed up the action of the corrosive. He’d just die faster!”

“But not if she slowed it down,” Pritkin said thoughtfully. “You can say—”

“I can say?”

“Well, I can’t be seen here in perfect health,” he pointed out impatiently. “Not for a few days, until I could reasonably have been expected to heal. And Cassie is hardly up to an interrogation at the—”

“So you guys sneak out the back, and what? I stay here and lie my ass off?”

“Yes. Is there a problem with that?”

“Is there—” Caleb broke off, face flushing. “Oh, hell, no. Why would I possibly—”

“Good. Then all you need to say is that Cassie slowed down time around the car, except for you and her.”

“Which would have made you die slower and nothing more!”

“Not if you used the opportunity to clean out the wound.”

“With what? That stuff eats through everything it touches!”

“But some things take longer to dissolve than others,” Pritkin said, looking pointedly at Caleb’s shabby old leather coat.

Caleb clutched a lapel possessively. “No.”

“Have you a better idea?”

“Yeah! I’ll say we used your damn coat!”

“You can’t. Too many people saw the shape it was in. There wasn’t enough left to work with by the time—”

“Well, we’re not using mine!” Caleb said angrily.

“I’ll buy you another one—”

“I don’t want another one! I’ve had this coat for twelve damn years—”

“Then perhaps it’s time for an upgrade,” I pointed out, grabbing a sleeve.

“Like hell! I just got it spelled the way I like—”

“I’ll help you spell a new one,” Pritkin told him, tugging at the back.