"Essentially."
"I don't see it on him."
"It's a spell, not a physical device," Pritkin said impatiently. "Is there a reason for your interest?"
"Yes. Can you check to see if I have one?"
He handed me a bottle of water from the ticket taker's fridge and splashed his face with another. "You have three." He started down the road at a fast enough clip that Rafe and I had to hurry to keep up.
"Wait a minute. How do you know?"
"One of them is mine."
"You bugged me?"
"It isn't a listening device, Miss Palmer. It merely records your location. Which, considering how many people wish to kidnap and/or murder you, is a reasonable precaution."
"If it's so reasonable, why didn't you mention it?" Water and perspiration had turned his usually pale eyelashes dark and clumpy, emphasizing the color of his eyes as he rolled them. "Because I wanted it to work! Something it would not have done had you persuaded the witch to remove it."
"Her name is Francoise and you're damn right she'd have removed it!"
"Which is why I didn't mention it."
If I'd been less exhausted, I'd have been livid. As it was, the best I could manage was disgusted. "When I was growing up at Tony's, I was followed everywhere," I told him. "By bodyguards, by my governess, by someone all the time. I had zero privacy. But even Tony didn't go so far as to put a spell on me!"
"He doubtless didn't have anyone competent enough to cast it," Pritkin said, striding ahead.
I shouted after him. "You said one was yours. It doesn't worry you that two other groups are tracking me?"
Rafe cleared his throat. "Ah, Cassie. ."
"Mircea bugged me?" I guessed.
"And Marlowe, I believe."
"Why? Was he afraid Mircea might not tell him everything?"
Rafe looked shocked. "We all have the same desire, mia stella: to keep you safe. And a new version of the spell was recently perfected. It is much harder to detect, even by mages."
"Then why not remove the old one?"
"We were not aware that the mage was also planning to cast one on you. And if someone did abduct you, they would expect to find such a spell."
"So the original was left to give them something to remove, in the hopes that they wouldn't look any further."
"Exactly!" Rafe seemed pleased that I'd grasped his point so easily. Yet he managed to totally miss mine. Sometimes I forgot that Rafe, who had taken to modern clothes and cars, music and art, almost better than any vamp I knew, had been born in the same century as Mircea. No wonder he didn't understand why I'd object to having my every movement followed. The women back then had probably enjoyed it.
Pritkin met my eyes. He got it; he just didn't care.
"You could have asked me," I pointed out, keeping my temper because I was too tired for anything else.
"You admitted that you would have had it removed."
"If you had explained that you'd done it for my safety—"
"Yes, because safety is so important to you!" He rounded on me. "So important, in fact, that you deliberately lied in order to stay in a situation you knew was perilous. For no reason!"
"No reason?" I felt my face flush with more than sunburn. "I had the impression that you needed my help!"
"Until the prisoners were freed, yes. Afterward, there was nothing more you could do and no reason for you to remain. You should have left when I instructed you to do so!"
"Partners don't abandon each other to die."
"If the alternative is to stay and die with them? Yes! They do!" His words were angry, but his face was oddly still, strained and pale.
I tried again. "I am concerned with safety. But I can't always do my job and—"
"That was not your job. Rescuing those prisoners had nothing to do with the time line! Had I guessed that you were foolish enough to almost get killed over them, I would never have agreed to help you!"
"It might not have been my job, but it was my doing. If I hadn't gone to that meeting—"
"Then we wouldn't know that there is a problem with the lines."
I frowned. "What are you talking about? The battle—"
"Should have had no effect. If the lines were that unstable, they would be useless to us. Someone or something must have weakened the structural integrity of that line before the battle."
"Someone? You think this was deliberate?"
"I don't know. But I've never heard of anything of the kind occurring naturally, and the fact that the breach targeted MAGIC is highly suspect."
I thought about the incredible power of a ley line, all those acres and acres of jumping, brilliant energy, and didn't believe it. "But how?"
"I can't explain it. No one has that kind of power. Not the dark, not even us."
"Apollo does."And if anyone had reason to want MAGIC destroyed, it was him.
But Pritkin didn't seem to think much of that idea. "If he could send that amount of energy to his supporters, he would have done so long ago and destroyed the Circle at the outset. Thankfully, you possess the only remnants of his power on Earth."
The conversation had to pause at that point because we'd reached Tremaine and, just beyond him, his idea of a ride. He shot us an apologetic glance. "It seems that any food that doesn't make it into tourists' stomachs is made into high-quality pig feed," he explained. "And Mr. Ellis here hauls leftovers from several casinos to a recycler. He's kindly agreed to drop us at Dante's on his way back for another load."
"It's on my way," the old man repeated cheerfully. "Now settle yourselves any old where. The drums are empty; you won't hurt anything."
Empty, as it turns out, is a relative term. The buffet sludge leaking over the sides of a half dozen black plastic drums was joined by several weeks' worth of dried flotsam rattling around the truck bed. It was also about one hundred degrees with no shade, causing Rafe to hunker down with the sheets pulled up over his head.
"Are you all right?" I asked him, worried. Rafe was a master, but only fourth level. The sun didn't merely drain someone like him of power; it could hurt or even kill him in sufficient quantities.
"Well enough," he told me, but he didn't sound good. Thankfully, it was only about twenty-five miles into town.
"I don't get it," I told Pritkin, who shook his head before I could even frame a question.
"Not here."
"I don't think he's listening," I said, nodding at the driver. The radio was blaring Johnny Cash at ear-ringing decibels, and that was from where we were sitting. The sound in the cab had to be deafening.
Pritkin just looked at me, so I turned to the nice war mage. "I don't understand what stopped that thing. Once there was a tear in the fabric between worlds, why didn't it continue all the way to the end of the line? Like ripping a seam when the thread's cut?"
Tremaine looked nervously at Pritkin, who muttered something but answered the question. "My best guess would be that the ley line sink at MAGIC had enough energy to seal the breach. In your analogy, it would be like encountering a knot in the thread."
"But what if that hadn't been enough? What would have happened?"
"The tear would have continued until reaching a vortex big enough to counter it."
"And that would be where?" I asked, getting a very bad feeling.
"The line where the eruption occurred runs from MAGIC straight to Chaco Canyon, where there is a great vortex—a crossing of more than two dozen lines. It is one of the most powerful in this hemisphere."