I watched, horror-struck, as they lapped it up, licking their fingers like kids with a half-melted ice cream. But it wasn’t enough. They were starving, and this was only a taste. They wanted it all.

“She is not lawful prey!” I heard someone call and looked up to see Pritkin stumbling into the middle of the feast, still half blind and probably extremely confused.

“Lord Rosier gave her to us,” the leader said, crouched over me jealously. “As he did you.”

Several creatures broke off the pack and started for Pritkin, but he avoided them and flung his flimsy, powerless form straight at the leader. For a split second, the pack forgot about me in the surprise of seeing someone running straight at death instead of cringing away. Then they released me to spring at Pritkin, and I threw myself backward, sending my consciousness crashing into his body lying so still on the floor.

Between one thought and the next, I was convulsing awake, my breath rasping in lungs gone tight and dry, starved for air. Red and violet spots exploded behind my tightly clenched lids, and I dragged in a ragged breath, coughing and gasping. Everything hurt. It was like the flu: no localized source of pain, just an all-over pervasive sense of illness.

For a second, I didn’t understand what was wrong with me. I’d been gone for only a minute; Pritkin’s body shouldn’t have suffered any damage in that time. And then I remembered: spiritual attacks manifest on the body once you return to it. If those things savaged him badly enough, it wouldn’t matter if we managed to get him back to his body. Because he’d die anyway.

Chapter Twenty-four

Marsden was there, helping me up, and he was saying something but I couldn’t hear and didn’t care. I threw him off and lurched for the table and the one chance Pritkin had: his potion belt. But once I had it, I realized that I could barely see the pack now, and if I missed even one . . .

My fingers fumbled on the belt, clumsy with adrenaline, my heart beating no time, no time, in a frantic pulse. In the end, I just threw everything as fast as I could shuck the little tubes out of their holders. My only concern was not to hit Billy, who was darting around the kitchen in my body, pursuing Pritkin’s fleeting form.

The shadows retreated to the stairwell, waiting for me to run out of ammunition, which wouldn’t take long. It was now or never, I realized, and threw myself at Pritkin. Billy had the same idea at the same time and lunged from the other side, causing us to crash into each other with Pritkin’s spirit trapped between us.

For a split second, I couldn’t tell which of us had him, or if either of us did. Then Pritkin stumbled into my body, I think by accident, but that was good enough. It grabbed him in a tight embrace and dragged him in despite his panicked efforts to get free. And just like that, we were back where we’d started.

“Cassandra! Is that you?” Marsden asked as Pritkin sank slowly to his knees. He was white and shaky looking, but he appeared to be in one piece. That was the important thing, I told myself.

“No, it didn’t work,” I said, bitterness staining my voice. Damn it! We’d been so close!

Marsden gripped my arm. “What happened?”

“Rakshasas.”

“They aren’t supposed to attack the living!”

“Tell them that.” I knelt beside Pritkin and revised my earlier assessment. His pupils were dilated, his color was bad and he was breathing heavy—until he suddenly slumped over my legs, his body relaxing into an awful stillness.

“I’ll get my medical kit,” Marsden said.

A clock fell off the wall, shattering into a hundred pieces. My head whipped around. “Now what?”

“We’re under siege.”

“Since when?!”

“It began a few moments ago. It seems you were correct—the Circle is unwilling to wait for us to come to them.”

“But you said they wouldn’t attack you!”

“Those who served under me wouldn’t. But Saunders sent Apprentices.” Marsden’s tone was bitter.

“Who?”

“Young mages still in the last phase of their training. They joined the Corps after I left office. Saunders is the only Lord Protector they’ve ever known.”

“Let me guess. They’ll follow his orders—whatever they are!”

“That is a distinct possibility.”

“So now what? Because I can’t shift!” At the moment, I was lucky to be vertical.

He put a hand on my shoulder. “One crisis at a time, child,” he told me, and jogged upstairs.

He’d barely gone when Pritkin tensed subtly and his eyes snapped open. I bent over him and, before I could say anything, he grabbed me by the back of my head, dragged my mouth down and kissed me. Kissed me, with no drama and no explanation, like it was just something we did.

Knowing in a half-forgotten way that he kissed like a demon was one thing; experiencing it all over again was quite another. There was no refined seduction—Pritkin kissed openmouthed, hard and hungry, until I could hear nothing over the pounding of my heart, until I could taste my blood on his lips as his tongue thrust into me. My skin shivered helplessly, but my flesh wanted more, suddenly starving for this. . . .

My brain informed me that there was absolutely no reason to find the scent of my hair or the soft spot beneath my elbow the slightest bit erotic. It pointed out that I was, essentially, kissing myself, but Pritkin’s body wasn’t buying it. Soft little hands racked up my shirt, slid across my chest, tweaked a nipple and oh, God.

A breath of wind curled around me, an almost living prickle against my skin. It slid around my body sinuously, cool but not calming, not calming at all. I shuddered and the current shivered along with me. And a jagged cut on Pritkin’s arm softened, faded and melted into the golden skin over his bicep. I blinked, and when I looked again, there wasn’t even a scar. It was as if the wound had never even existed.

I was dazed and extremely confused when we broke apart. Pritkin lifted his head and his eyes were fever bright and slightly unfocused. He radiated a barely leashed violence that was strange and nearly alien—but also echoingly familiar.

I screamed and started scrambling away, but he caught me, holding me fast. “No! It’s me! It’s only me! Rosier isn’t here!”

My own face coalesced in front of me and there was honest emotion in those striking eyes—worry, pain and a healthy dose of self-loathing. I stopped struggling. I was willing to bet Rosier had never had an honest emotion in his life.

“But I felt—”

“I’m wounded,” Pritkin said, flushing slightly. “It’s . . . something of an automatic reaction. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Automatic?” He didn’t take time to explain, just levered himself to a standing position using the counter.

“Where do you think you’re going?” I demanded.

“We need to get out of here,” he said as another barrage hit.

“You can barely stand up, much less fight!”

“I’m perfectly fine,” he said stubbornly.

“Not after attacking half a dozen demons on your own! What the hell did you think you were doing? You had no weapons, no shields, nothing.”

“They would have killed you.”

“So what did you think they were going to do to you?” He didn’t say anything. “Or was that the idea? While they were busy ripping you to shreds, I’d have time to escape?”

“It was the only reasonable course of action.”

The matter-of-fact tone had anger surging through me. “Reasonable? That was my idea—my stupid, stupid idea! If someone died for it, it should have been me!”

“Your plan would have worked, had you been with anyone else.”

“What are you talking about? Those things—”

“Cannot normally attack the living. The demon lords made a covenant long ago not to ruin Earth—the hunting ground they all share—by overfeeding. Each race was limited to taking only one form of energy. In the case of the Rakshasas, they can only feed on whatever is left after death. But your body still lived; you should have been beyond their reach.”

“So did yours. And that didn’t seem to matter!”

“Rosier petitioned the Assembly of Lords to grant a special dispensation in my case.” There was an odd light in his eyes, not sorrow or pain or regret but some terrible combination of the three, a kind of emptiness that made me want to shiver. “One it seems he has managed to extend to you.”

“I don’t understand.”

Pritkin took a deep breath. “I have never explored the demon part of my nature. It’s what Rosier wants, why he performed his obscene experiment in the first place. He hoped by incorporating Fey and human blood with his own, he would create a demon without the limitations of his kind. By refusing to investigate my nature, I’ve denied him the results.”

“But you’ve also denied yourself. Don’t you wonder what else you can do? What abilities you may have inherited?”

“I worry about that all the time.”

“But that other side of you gave you immortality, didn’t it? So it can’t be all—”

“I’m not immortal, and my longer life span came from my mother’s Fey ancestry,” he snapped. “Nothing from my father’s side is remotely positive! As he is currently demonstrating. I thwarted him, you humiliated him and he wants revenge.”

“But Rakshasas can’t hurt me when I’m in my body. So how does he—”

“You heard Jonas—you can’t do your job safely without resorting to possessions. But they cause your spirit to become vulnerable, even if only for an instant. And with the Rakashasas, that will be enough.”

“But my power as Pythia is supposed to be inexhaustible. Even if they attacked me—”

“You’re confusing types of energy. Rakshasas feed off life energy, as do your vampires. Your magic doesn’t interest them.”

Marsden ran down the stairs with a basket draped over his arm but stopped short when he saw Pritkin on his feet. He nonetheless proffered a vial of viscous orange sludge that boiled with darker glints in it. Pritkin scowled but downed half of it anyway before I could ask what was in it.