Of course, as the son of one of those she'd hunted, Rosier had a slightly different take. Namely that she'd kicked out the other gods in order to rule supreme on her own. Only they had resisted more than she'd expected, leading to her expending most of her newly acquired strength in the battle. And that had left her vulnerable to payback from all those outraged demons-if they could have found her.

They never did.

But they did find me. And naturally assumed that some nefarious plot on my mother's part had led to my conception. Rosier especially was a big fan of that idea. Recent events had mitigated the council's view somewhat, but Rosier . . .

He was still in tinfoil hat land, and showed no sign of coming back.

"It was a different age then," he told me, looking off over the spread of mountains. "My father strode the gaps between worlds like a colossus, magnificent in his power, breathtaking in his influence. In his era, incubi were respected, admired, even coveted. Our people were considered ornaments to any court, valued councilors, trusted spies, functionaries, diplomats . . ." He trailed off.

"And then?" I prompted.

He shot me a glance. "And then came the dark times, and the world we knew shattered and broke. Everyone was set adrift as courts scattered and people fled and my father-we never recovered."

"So Pritkin was supposed to help you reclaim lost glory?"

"He was supposed to help me survive!" Rosier said, slashing at some gorse bushes that had grown over the "road." "That's all any of us have done ever since. And it was damned hard, girl. Our specialized abilities, honed to a fine sheen over countless centuries, were suddenly useless. Beauty, luxury, flattery-none of these things mean a damn when you're scratching and clawing for survival! When your very civilization is coming down around your ears!

"But survive we did, among them all, among creatures a thousand times more powerful. The ones everyone assumed would be among the first to go, the soft, the indulgent, the useless incubi, survived when countless stronger races fell."

He whirled on me suddenly, so much so that we both almost went sprawling. "I did that, do you understand? I kept the remnants of us together; I forged us into a functioning whole; I found us a refuge! All I ask is for Emrys to help me hold it. And he could-easily, pleasurably. With two of us to absorb power, and with our gifts . . . no coalition would ever be able to challenge us. It would mean absolute security-"

"For you," I pointed out.

"For all of us!"

"Not for Pritkin."

"He's incubus whether he likes it or not!"

"He's human, too, and for him that sort of life is more like slavery."

"It's nothing of the kind!"

"Like those people whose world you turned into your refuge?" I'd seen it recently, a vast, sprawling desert world that had been taken over by the incubi. It and its people.

"If we hadn't, they'd have been conquered by someone else. In those days-"

"But those days are over, aren't they? They've been over for a long time. But I haven't noticed any emancipation going-"

"Bah!" Rosier suddenly yelled in my face, causing me to jerk back. And stare at him. "I'm through talking to you!" he proclaimed, and strode off, his feet throwing up little clumps of mud.

"You need to stop panicking," I said very clearly, some hours later. We'd made our way out of the steamy valley and onto a frigid mountaintop, but our luck was about the same. As Rosier was busy demonstrating.

"You stop panicking!" he snarled. "They're not trying to eat you!"

"They're not trying to eat you, either." Well, I was pretty sure. "They just want what's in the bag. Give them what's in the bag."

Rosier glared at me from his perch atop a birch, where he'd landed after the rock fall but before the avalanche. I'd taken refuge in a sort of cave-like depression in the rocks, but he'd been forced to jump over the cliff or be crushed by hundred-pound boulders and a mountain of snow. The good news was, he ended up grabbing the top of a tree. The bad news was that a mass of wild pigs apparently lived under it.

And had no intention of letting him down.

"How is giving them food going to encourage them to leave?" Rosier demanded, staring at them, wild-eyed.

"Because you're going to throw it away from the tree," I said, exasperated. "No, no. Take off the cellophane first. They won't know what it is!"

"I can't take the cellophane off and hold on to the damned tree!"

"Use your legs."

"What?"

"Your legs!"

Rosier stared at me like I'd lost my mind. "I'm an incubus, not a contortionist!"

I took a breath and closed my eyes. That seemed to be the only thing that helped with him, if I couldn't see his stupid face. "Use your legs to hold on to the tree. Use your hands to unwrap the food. Throw the food away from you. Then, when they go after it, get down and run in the other direction."

There was some grumbling I couldn't make out very well, and then some cellophane crinkling. And then a lot of agitated squealing.

I opened my eyes to see several pigs jumping up onto the trunk like they were trying to climb it, Rosier screeching and retreating even farther into the swaying, leafy treetop, and cheesy crackers raining down like manna from heaven. I sighed. "I said away. You have to throw them away from-"

"I am not Sandy Koufax!"

"Who?"

"Oh, for . . ." The treetop shook some more, and an outraged face appeared through the foliage. "Just do what I told you!"

"I am not using magic," I said, grasping his big bag o' tricks a little more tightly. Fortunately, he'd decided to lighten his own load by making me carry it earlier. Unfortunately, I couldn't use anything in it without bringing the Pythian posse of doom down on our heads.

"Then use the gun!"

"The-you brought a gun?" I opened the pack, and sure enough, toward the bottom was a shiny new Beretta. "Why did you bring a gun? We can't shoot anybody-"

"The hell we can't."

"We can't! It would change time! I told you-"

"And I told you to shoot the damned pigs! Or will that change time, too?"

I put the gun away before I was tempted to use it on Rosier.

More tempted.

"Shoot them!" he yelled.

"That mountain just tried to bury us," I reminded him, trying to speak calmly. "Do you want another avalanche?"

"We don't have a choice!"

"It's only been a few minutes. If you stop screeching-"

"I don't screech. I have never screeched!"

"-maybe they'll get bored and go away."

"Perhaps if I hadn't just thrown food at them! They'll never leave now!"

"You don't know that," I said, just as several more pigs started trunk jumping. "And can I remind you that it takes all of a second for a Pythia to pop in?" I added, over his renewed screeches. "Once they know where we are-"

"Shut up and get me down, you appalling woman! Get me down, get me down, get me down!"

"I can't talk to you when you're like this, you know; I really-"

"Augghhh!"

I would have put the infernal noise down to Rosier's tendency for hysterics, but then I heard something else. Something like the creak-crack-pop of splintering wood. And, okay, it was just barely possible that this tree wasn't in the greatest of shape.

Annnnnd now the pigs were ramming it.

I started rooting around in the bag. "What else do you have in here?"

"Use the yellow ones. The yellow ones!"

"The yellow what?" There were only about a thousand things in here. "Pills, potions, amulets-"

"Augghhh! Augghhh! Augghhh!"

I turned the bag upside down and scrabbled around in the snowy, muddy slush. And found a bunch of individually wrapped little yellow rubbery things falling out of a small bag. Great, now I had to get one open. And thanks to recent events, my nails were shot.

But I managed, and a moment later looked up. And saw Rosier's tree swaying back and forth madly, like it was trying to do the hula. Or, you know, like it was about to topple over into a herd of crazed wild boar.

I licked my lips. "Okay, now what?"

"Their throats!"

"What?"

"Their throats! Their throats! You have to get them down their-augghhh!"

I stared at him. Yeah, like that was happening.

But for once, Rosier's panic was justified. I didn't have to be a lumberjack to know that tree was on its last leg. Or limb. Or- "Throw me the backpack!" I yelled.

"Oh yes. Yes, you'd like that, wouldn't you?" he said furiously. "So you can take off with the food and leave me here-"

"No! You stupid-I'm not planning to leave you!"

"Then why?"

"For the pigs, you stupid, stupid-"

A great leather thing hit me in the face, hard enough to knock me down.

But there really wasn't time to complain. My butt smacked down into an icy puddle, and the next second, I was throwing junk food everywhere. And this was not the moment to mess about with crap like strawberry roll-ups or turkey jerky. No, this called for the big guns.

I pulled out a little white box and went ballistic with the Twinkies.

A moment later, Rosier's tree gave up the ghost, and fell into some others with a great snap, creak, crack, as loud as a bullet echoing out over the forest. It normally would have had me flinching and panicking and fleeing in the opposite direction, before everybody and their dog came to find out what the hell. But right then, I was having a problem doing that.

Right then I was having a problem doing anything but standing and staring with my mouth hanging open.

I was still doing it when Rosier joined me a few moments later. His tree had ended up wedged against an outcropping of rock a little way down the path, instead of hitting the forest floor, allowing him to scramble back onto solid ground. And I guess the intervening time had given him a chance to get his shit together, although the usual smugness had yet to return.

Or maybe he was having a hard time finding the right words, too.

"You . . . didn't use the knockout pills, I take it?" he finally asked, staring out into the void.

I shook my head.

He sat down and we split the last Twinkie.

"You realize we just sent a herd of flying pigs soaring out over medieval Wales," I said, sometime later, when the last little oinking cloud had disappeared over the horizon.

"Hm."

"You don't look too concerned."

Rosier got to his feet and then actually extended a hand to help me up. "Maybe it will give the Pythias something else to do. And in any case . . ."

"In any case?"

"Well. The expression had to start somewhere, didn't it?"

Chapter Sixteen.

"I thought you knew where this place was," I said as we passed a familiar-looking mossy stump for the third time.

"I do."