He seemed a little taken aback by that, why I didn’t know. But then he grabbed me—by the arm this time, thankfully—and shook me. “What have you done to me? What have you done?”

“Nothing! Let me go!”

“You’re a witch, and you have bespelled me!”

“I’m a Pythia, and my power doesn’t even work here!”

“Then what happened to me? Why am I here? Where am I?”

“Dude, you’re asking the wrong person. I don’t even know what I’m doing here—”

“Liar!”

“Hey, watch who you’re calling a liar,” I said, just as a tree threw a tent full of fey at us.

I jumped, and somehow stuck the landing despite being twelve or more feet off the ground at one point and still enmeshed in the strands of a glimmering spell. Which I broke using vampire strength when I hit back down, and then looked up. And saw Arsen staring at me from where I guessed he’d thrown himself out of the tent’s path.

“Your power doesn’t work here?” he snarled.

“That’s… not my power,” I told him. And then I ran, because if I’d ever seen murder on someone’s face…

But getting away was harder than it looked, much less finding Mircea or Pritkin. The camp was now a mass of churning trees and ruined tents and spreading fires and fleeing horses. Fey were also running and leaping everywhere, including a bunch who had gotten their shit together and come up with some torches, which they were using to try to scare off the misbehaving trees.

Only that was proving counterproductive, because now the trees were pissed. I saw one grab a torch from a fey and start chasing him with it. While his fellow soldiers just stood there, flatfooted, as if this hadn’t been covered in the training manual.

Welcome to my world, I thought, and then things got worse.

Because of course they did, I thought, as Arsen grabbed me again.

But he wasn’t the reason I was worried. No, that would be the horrific sound that had just cut through the skies, like the screech of a jet engine. Only louder and shivering not only across my skin, but feeling like it was trying to shake my insides apart as well.

Arsen flinched and stared upward, too, along with much of the rest of the camp. The trees were still running around, destroying things, but the people had momentarily forgotten to be scared of them, because they were too busy being scared of something else. Something worse.