Free Hunt the Moon : Cassandra Palmer #5 by Karen Chance

some of the nervous energy that kept me from eating half the time, kept me from sleeping. And just when I told myself I was being paranoid and everything would be fine, something tried to drown me in the goddamned bathtub.
    But I didn’t get up. Because then I’d lose that brief, human connection. A connection that shouldn’t have been there, because Pritkin wasn’t the touchy-feely type. He touched me in training, when he had to, and grabbed me in the middle of crises. But I actually couldn’t recall him ever touching me just . . . because.
    I sat back again. The damn balcony wasn’t big enough for pacing, anyway.
    “And yet, from what Jonas tells me, you shift with more alacrity than Lady Phemonoe ever did,” he said, using Agnes’s reign title. “And the power is the power. If you can use it for one application, it would seem logical—”
    “Yeah, except it doesn’t work that way. At least not for me.”
    “It’s only been a month, whereas most heirs—”
    “Train for years. And that’s just it. I don’t feel like I’ll ever catch up. And even if I do, nobody is going to listen to me!”
    “And why not? You’re Pythia.”
    “No, I’m some kind of . . . of trophy to be fought over. At least that’s how I’m treated. So if I do get a flash of something, something useful, something important, who the hell is going to pay attention?”
    “The opposition, apparently. They seem to insist on paying you a great deal of attention.”
    “I’ve noticed.”
    “And you don’t find that strange? If you’re so powerless?”
    I shrugged. “I’m still Pythia. Killing me would—”
    “Would what?” he demanded. “Say they had succeeded tonight. What would it have gained them? When the power leaves you at your death, it simply goes to another host, probably one of the Initiates. There’s no gain for the opposition there; in fact, they might have reason to view it as a loss. For the moment, the Initiates are probably better trained.”
    “Thanks,” I said, even though it was true.
    “Then the question remains: why you?” he asked, leaning forward with that sense of pleased urgency he always got when debating. I tried not to take it personally; Pritkin just liked to argue. “Why are they still concentrating on you?”
    “Why have they been for the last two months?” I countered. “Apollo—”
    “Was focused on you, yes. But only because he had to be. He wanted to use your pentagram ward as a direct line to your power. It was the one thing that would allow him to break through the barrier and exact revenge on those who had banished him.”
    I unconsciously rolled my shoulders, stretching the skin between the blades, where my ward had sat ever since my mother put it on me as a child. The big, saucer-shaped thing had never been pretty, and had somehow ended up lopsided and droopy, like something a tattoo artist had done after a late-night bender. But it had felt like a part of me.
    It didn’t now. Ever since Apollo’s attempt to find a way back into the world his kind had once misruled, everyone had been freaked out about it. They were afraid I might be captured with it on my body, allowing our enemies to use it to drain my power. So it remained in a velvet case on my dressing table, like a discarded piece of jewelry.
    I’d thought I’d get used to its absence after a while, the way you get used to a tooth that’s been pulled. But so far, that hadn’t happened. It was funny; I’d never been able to feel the ward, which had no more weight than the tattoo it resembled. But I could feel its absence, could trace the path where the lines ought to have been, like a brand on my skin.
    “But that also didn’t work,” I said, because Pritkin was waiting for a response.
    “Which is my point. His allies have to know that we wouldn’t put the ward back on you. You’re safer without a direct conduit to your power plastered on your back. And yet they remain focused on you, despite having a thousand