“I can do that my—” He stopped when my fingernails sank into his thighs.

“Open your legs and hold your shirt up,” I snapped. And to my surprise, he did.

The bandage came off easily since it hadn’t been put on right to begin with, and underneath was—

I sucked in a breath.

Pritkin started to say something, but stopped when I glared up at him, so angry I could barely see. “Don’t.”

He didn’t.

The thing about having superhuman healing abilities is that you’re seriously out of practice when you actually need to do some first aid on yourself. At least, I assumed that was why the bandage had merely been slapped into place, why the cleanup job underneath had been halfassed and why the line of black stitches holding an ugly red wound together might have been done by a farsighted three-year-old. Or maybe he was just trying to piss me off.

If so, it was working really well. I was so mad my hands were shaking, but I didn’t know if it was at him or at me for letting him go. Damn it, I’d known this was going to happen. He was Pritkin. He couldn’t walk across a freaking street without getting shot at, and I’d let him go into goddamn Faerie.

I must have been out of my mind.

“I suppose you had to sew yourself up?” I asked harshly, going into the kitchen to run some water into a bowl.

“It seemed . . . advisable.”

Yeah. If the alternative was spilling your guts everywhere.

I brought back the water and the hand soap. Marco had told me that hydrogen peroxide wasn’t a good idea in deep cuts. Apparently, it could cause bubbles to form in the bloodstream that would kill you a lot faster than whatever had caused the cut in the first place.

I sat everything down on the floor and knelt back in place. I thought about asking him to unzip, because his jeans were in the way, but he usually went commando so I didn’t. I just tugged the fabric, which was soft and old and loose, down enough that I could see to work.

It looked like he’d showered before he came over, which, ironically, had left him clean except for the large patch of skin that had been covered by the bandage. I started on the dirt and the grass and the God knew what that he had somehow ground into the wound. And for once, he just sat there, without trying to give me orders or critique me or tell me a better way to proceed. It was odd but nice.

“What happened?” I asked after a few moments.

He cleared his throat. “I was ambushed.”

“Why didn’t you go back through the portal?” I was assuming he’d used the one the Circle had recently opened, since it was pretty much the only option available right now.

“I would have, had I been near it at the time. But I’d already made my way to the village where one of my contacts lives—or I should say, where he used to live.”

Some blood had dried around his belly button. I scrubbed at it with a fingernail until it came off. “Is he dead?”

“What?” Pritkin sounded a little strange.

“Your friend. Associate. Whatever.”

“Er . . . no. At least . . . I’m not sure.”

He fidgeted, and I tightened my hand on his thigh. “Don’t.” I was about to start cleaning the actual stitches now and I didn’t want to rip any out. He froze.

I pushed his jeans down enough that I could see the bottom of the wound, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. He’d already started to heal around the thick black cord he’d used as thread, but the wound itself was ugly and looked infected. And when I gently put the back of my hand against it, it was like a line of fire against my skin.

“Are you supposed to be this hot?” I asked, frowning.

He didn’t answer, and I looked up. And found him staring at me with a strange expression, part tender, part exasperated, part . . . something. I didn’t get a chance to figure it out before he looked away.

“Yes. When I’m healing.”

I decided to take his world for it, since I didn’t have a lot of choice. Pritkin had a severe allergy to doctors, and I knew better than to suggest one. I rinsed out the rag and carefully started cleaning the angry red line.

“What did you mean, you’re not sure?” I asked. “About your friend?”

“I meant . . . his village was deserted. There were clothes dropped in the road and many doors and windows had been left wide-open. I went into a few houses, and found half-eaten food on the table in one and a dog tied out back of another. I let the dog loose, and it took off down a road. I followed it—”

“Of course you did,” I said sourly.

“—and picked up the trail of the villagers almost at once. That in itself was strange enough—”

He broke off, probably because I’d gotten the rag a little too wet that time. “Sorry,” I said, wiping up the dribbles below the wound before they wet the front of his jeans. He closed his eyes.

“The Fey are excellent hunters and trackers,” he told me roughly. “They are usually very difficult to follow.”

“But not this time.”

“No. I found a number of personal items that had been discarded along the way, haphazardly, as if they had fallen out of . . . of peoples’ arms while they ran. It had rained and the forest had a number of muddy areas, and the footprints I saw were running, too. Clearly, the villagers were fleeing some—” He looked down suddenly, his face a little flushed. “Are you almost done?”

“Almost. So you followed them?” I prompted.

“Yes. And that was when I was ambushed. I foolishly hadn’t considered that they might leave some of their number behind, to slow down whoever was pursuing them. That is, I hadn’t considered it until—” He sucked in a breath.

“I’m being as careful as I can,” I told him, patting him dry.

“Just hurry it up, will you?” he said harshly.

“I wouldn’t have to do this if you’d done a better job yourself,” I pointed out. “Having sped-up healing won’t do you any good if you get an infection.”

“I’m not worried about a damn infection!”

“Well, you won’t have to be now,” I said, smacking on a new bandage. And this one, I decided grimly, wasn’t going anywhere.

Pritkin watched me work for a moment in silence. “That’s adhesive tape,” he finally said.

“Mm-hm.”

“That’s . . . rather a lot, wouldn’t you say?”

“Never hurts to be sure.”

“But it’s going to hurt like the devil when I have to take it off.”

“Is it?” I looked up innocently and slapped on another piece.

His eyes narrowed, but before he could say anything, Jonas poked his head out the door. “Are you two done, then?” he asked politely.

“Yes,” I told him, cleaning up the cleaning supplies. “Pritkin is about to tell us what happens when you follow a bunch of panicked Fey into an unknown forest all by yourself.”

“Oh yes?” Jonas said curiously.

Pritkin closed his eyes and leaned his head back, looking martyred. “I ended up swinging from a rope, upside down, while some of the village men poked at me with poisoned spears,” he said dully. “I managed to convince them that I was not one of their enemies, but not before—”

“They gutted you like a pig?” I asked brightly.

He flushed and cracked an eye at me, but whatever brilliant riposte he’d managed to come up with was ruined by Jonas. “Who were these enemies?”

“The Alorestri,” Pritkin said, sitting up and wincing.

“The Green Fey,” Jonas translated for me. “They share a border with the Dark and have had an on-again, offagain struggle over land, resources, hunting rights”—he shrugged—“what have you, for millennia.”

“And currently it appears to be on again,” Pritkin said. “According to the villagers, the Green Fey broke through the border defenses a few days ago and overwhelmed the local Dark Fey forces. They were fleeing ahead of a contingent of Green Fey said to be coming their way.”

“There was an invasion?” I asked, my stomach sinking. I had a friend at the Dark Fey court, and I liked the idea of him remaining in one piece.

Pritkin noticed my expression. “This sort of thing isn’t unusual,” he told me. “The Dark Fey army will regroup and likely battle them back within a few weeks. But in the meantime, there is no way to reach my contacts, or even to know for certain where they are. And without them, there is no way to know what attacked you.”

Frankly, I couldn’t have cared less. I was just grateful to have him back, beat up and bloody or not. “It may not even be Fey,” I reminded him. “Billy’s decided it’s Apollo’s ghost come back to haunt me!”

“Oh no,” Jonas said, apparently serious. “I shouldn’t think so.”

“Well, yeah. I wasn’t actually suggesting—”

“This world leeched the gods’ power; it did not feed them. That is why all the old legends speak of them visiting Earth but living elsewhere: Asgard, Vanaheim, Olympus. And if they could not feed while alive, they certainly could not do so dead.”

“Yeah, well. Like I said—”

“No, I believe the gods we are dealing with are still quite alive.”

“Jonas, please!” I looked at him impatiently. “This isn’t freaking Ragnarok, all right?”

“It would be nice to think so,” he said mildly, the same way someone might say that it would be nice if it wasn’t raining, while standing in the middle of a deluge.

I was about to reply, but the kettle started whistling its head off, so we trooped back into the kitchen. Jonas made tea, and I waited for some kind of an explanation. A coherent one, preferably, but I wasn’t hopeful. Which was why it was a shock when a suddenly brisk Jonas sat down at the table.

“Three children of Loki; three gods to be overcome,” he told us. “Apollo has already been dealt with, leaving two. The difficulty was in knowing which god would be opposing us next, but I believe your tarot may have shown us that, Cassie. It is an invaluable aid, but it leaves us with a daunting challenge.”