And very Pritkin.

“—is ruptur . . . now!” The garbled phrase was loud enough to make me jump and to practically crack my eardrum—and I’d never been so happy to hear anything in my life.

“I’m already out! Stop looking for me!” I yelled, but the wind blew half my words away.

“Are you . . . right? Can you . . . before—”

“Stop talking! Why are you still talking? Bail out, damn it!” “—the ground. Stay—”

“Shut up! Stop giving me orders and get the hell out of there!”

I didn’t hear his answer, if he gave one, because the sky exploded. Blue lightning had been threading through the seething clouds, and now a huge branch arced downward, hitting a nearby hill with enough force to blow sand half a mile high. I hunched down with my arms over my head, trying to protect myself from the resulting hail of rocks and debris. And a hand descended on my shoulder.

I turned, grateful and furious, a few appropriate comments trembling on my lips—and looked into the face of a stranger. He was tall with spiky black hair and startled hazel eyes. It looked like someone bailed out early, I thought. And then my ward flared, throwing him back a dozen yards.

I watched his body arch pale and limp against the night, and then I turned and ran in the other direction. A flash of lightning hit nearby, with a thunderclap that threw me blind and rolling across the ground. I stumbled and almost fell down the side of the hill, stunned and furious. I was sick of having to dodge the people who should have been my allies while I fought my enemies and theirs. And where the hell was Pritkin?

The residual static in the air had the hair on my arms standing up as I scrambled back to my feet. I glanced back at the mage, but he didn’t look too dangerous at the moment. His body lay in the weird, contorted position he’d landed in, sprawled across the dirt like a broken doll. I paused, my heart pounding wildly, flight reflex kicking in, sweat springing to the surface of my skin.

Normally, I wouldn’t have wasted any sympathy—my ward doesn’t flare unless there is a serious threat. That and the fact that he was with the guys who’d just tried to kill me was all the incentive I needed to get out of there. Except I couldn’t. Because he’d landed facedown in a pile of loose sand deep enough to suffocate him.

The wind wrestled with my hair while I struggled with the life-or-death decision that had been dumped on me. I didn’t have Pritkin’s knowledge of magic. My only real defenses were my ward and my ability to shift, and neither was inexhaustible. Letting him suffocate might be the only sure way to stop him from dragging me off to a swift trial and a certain death.

But that level of ruthlessness wasn’t in me.

More important, I didn’t want it to become me.

I felt the chill in my chest that always came before I did something really stupid. I ran over, intending to kick him faceup and get out of there. But his damn coat weighed a ton and he wasn’t exactly a lightweight. By the time I finally managed to flip him, I was panting from the effort and he still hadn’t moved. “Hey.” I shook him. That didn’t seem to do a lot of good. “Hey, you!” I slapped his face. “Come on, don’t die on me.”

He didn’t answer. He also didn’t try to grab me again. He just lay there like a broken doll.

“I’m serious. You don’t want me to have to try CPR. I killed the dummy fourteen times.”

I don’t know if that did it or if he’d had time to come around. He coughed up some sand and gasped in a breath, blinking grit out of his eyes. He got a clear look at me and an arm snaked out and latched onto my shoulder, jerking me down to the dirt.

My ward flared but only dimly this time. And although I could hear it sizzle against his palm, he didn’t let go. So I kneed him in the groin and, when he collapsed, hit him in the back of the neck like Pritkin had taught me. He fell back against the sand with a thud.

I stared at him, awed and slightly freaked out. The work-outs that Pritkin called “a decent warm-up” and I called “evidence that you’ve gone crazy, oh my God, I’m having a coronary” had actually paid off. Despite the fact that that had been the point, it was a shock.

As was the fact that he’d landed facedown again.

Son of a bitch!

I finally managed to turn him over, decided I’d done my good deed for the year, picked up my skirts and ran. Psycho war mage aside, it had been almost a relief to have something to distract me from the unwelcome awareness that Pritkin was still inside the line. And that the fissure was widening and pretty soon no one was going to be able to survive in there no matter how good their shields and, oh, look, I was thinking about it after all.

There wasn’t much natural cover, but some of the dunes had long shadows that, with the wind and the debris and the dim, rippling light, should have been enough to hide me. Except for the dress. I called Augustine every name in the book and invented a few new ones while my dress sobbed and cried and whined about a tear in its hem and a smear of dirt on my backside. The damn man had apparently spelled it to protest—loudly—whenever it got dirty.

It had probably seemed like a cute joke back at Dante’s; here, it wasn’t so funny. I might as well have a neon sign over my head glaring, HERE SHE IS. I stayed huddled where I was for a moment, watching the wind pull cayenne-colored veils off the ground and spread them across the electric blue of the sky. And every time a wave of airborne dust hit us, the dress moaned that much louder.

I dragged myself to my feet, hoping to get far enough away that the damn thing wouldn’t matter. But the wind had picked up even more to the point that it felt like it would actually lift me off my feet any minute, and visibility was going south fast, with lightning sputtering overhead like a bad fluorescent bulb. And then someone tripped me.

I went down in a tangle of sobbing velvet right before a hand reached out from the dark and wrapped around my throat. My ward didn’t flare at all this time, so it was down to old-fashioned, dirty fighting. I wasn’t nearly as strong as the mage, and no matter what Pritkin said, strength does matter. Not to mention that war mages train in human as well as magical techniques, and I still couldn’t shift.

Weird strobelike flashes started exploding across my vision. But it wasn’t from the choke hold, at least not entirely, because something really not good was happening to the sky overhead. The mage’s head whipped around, a hand still on my throat, and we watched in silent awe as one lightning bolt was followed by another. Within seconds the sky was filled with them, the line shedding thousands of crackling fingers of energy as its massive bands of power unraveled.

In the middle of all that tumult, my eyes somehow managed to focus on a tiny dark smudge. Someone was bailing out a dozen stories above us. “Hold on; I’m coming,” Pritkin told me, sounding calm despite the pyrotechnics going on all around him. I didn’t answer, but the mage saw him, too. He dragged me to my feet and put a gun to my temple.

Pritkin landed hard, letting his shields absorb the crash instead of taking the time to form them into a parachute as I’d seen him do once before. He was coming for us at a dead run, but above him, off to the east, the sky tore open like a dozen blue stars had been born all at once. And each one contained the dark form of a war mage. Either they’d seen him leave and figured out that I wasn’t up there anymore, or else it was getting too hot in there even for them.

I watched their shields flow up into a dozen little chutes to carry them gently toward us on the night breeze. The maneuver would preserve whatever was left of their shields, while Pritkin’s had probably been severely weakened by the ley line battle and the fall, and mine were nonexistent. We were so screwed.

“Don’t be a fool, John,” the mage shouted. “You can’t fight these odds! You’ll have to find someone else to help your ambition!”

Pritkin paused and glanced upward at the pulsing wound in the sky. “I don’t know what you’ve been told, Liam, but my sole ambition at the moment is to survive the night.”

“Then go! I’ll tell them you overpowered me. Leave the pretender and I will stall them long enough for you to get away!”

I blinked at him, but Priktin didn’t look surprised. “You owe me more than that,” he chided. “She goes with me.”

“I’m afraid not,” Liam said, although he looked torn. Not torn enough to let me go, though.

“Release her and I will stay and face what passes for justice in the Circle these days.”

“You would die for this one?” Liam asked incredulously.

“I have been trying to avoid it” was the dry-as-sandpaper response.

“Then go, while you still can!”

“Not without her.”

“A life debt is not transferable,” Liam said furiously. “I might owe you my life, but I don’t owe it to her!”

Pritkin lunged forward and Liam struck out with an elbow, catching him on the chin. It snapped his head back hard enough to break his neck, had he been fully human. Thankfully, he wasn’t. He rolled back to a crouched position and flung out a hand. I didn’t hear an incantation, but he’d done something. Because Liam jerked like he’d been shot and hit the ground hard enough to carve a furrow in the dirt.

I scurried back out of the way as Liam looked up. Stray light played over his face, distorting the features with odd ripples and shadows. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have guessed him for the one with the demon father. He threw a spell that caught Pritkin in the upper body, knocking him off his feet and using up what remained of my patience.

I hadn’t wanted to carry a gun to a supposedly friendly meeting, so the only weapons I had were a couple of ghostly knives that resided in a bracelet around my wrist. Despite their appearance, they were deadly, which was why I hadn’t already used them—I was supposed to be trying to keep the Circle intact, not to help destroy it. But if I had to choose between Liam and Pritkin, Liam was toast.

Pritkin had staggered back up, looking the worse for the wear. But when he saw what I was doing, he shook his head. “Don’t kill him!”