I didn’t make it, tripping over my own two feet and going down half way. A wave of pain went through my already bruised knee, but I ignored it and lunged for the doorknob. I even got a finger on it, before my hand was knocked away.

“Augghhh!”

“Stop screaming or they’ll hear—” my own voice told me.

“Good!” I cut myself off, and no, that wasn’t freaky at all!

“Then we won’t be able to talk—”

“Wouldn’t that be a shame?” I said wildly, and grabbed for the doorknob again. Only to halt halfway through the movement and crabwalk backwards, like some possessed thing, which… yeah. “Get out, get out, get out!”

“Will you please stop yelling and listen to me?”

“No,” I said, and tried to scream for help again, only to have a fist close around my throat.

It didn’t help with the imminent panic thing, because it was one of mine.

“Augghhh! Augghhh!” I whispered, while choking myself.

“Stop it!” The voice echoed in my head. It didn’t sound like Zeus, but right then, I didn’t care. “Stop fighting me; I don’t have much time!”

Well, that was encouraging, I thought, and redoubled my efforts.

“Stop it or Emrys will hear!”

I stopped it, mostly out of surprise. There weren’t too many people who knew the name that Rosier had given his son, and which Pritkin never used. And even fewer of them could be talking to me right now.

But one could.

I felt a surge of pure rage flood through me, hot enough to drive out everything else. “You!”

“Anger is as difficult to read through as fear,” Pritkin’s incubus said, after my hands loosened slightly. “I need—”

“I don’t give a damn what you need!”

“You don’t understand. We have to talk—”

“I don’t understand? I don’t?” I felt my skin flush. “You tried to rape me, barely a month ago, in this very room! And now you have the utter gall—”

“I was trying to take power from you so we could talk!” the creature said, and actually sounded insulted. “I was too weak to do that without a power boost, which incubi get through sex, and since you’re already having regular intercourse with—”

“Him! Not you!”

“I am him. I have always been him. There is no diff—”

“Son of a bitch, let me up!”

To my surprise, he did. The hand on my throat released, and I lay there, staring at the ceiling and breathing hard. The candle had guttered, leaving only moonlight for illumination, but I managed to see my traitorous right hand rise into the air when I told it to. And then my body follow as I slowly got back to my feet.

I caught my expression in the washstand’s mirror, and it was furious, but this time, the emotion was all mine—and for good reason!