I blinked some more. “I—well, you know. If you want to talk—”
“Then you’ll have to ask someone else!” It was vehement. “I never knew her. She treated me almost exactly the same as the other girls, unless you count not allowing me to be trained as an acolyte. And once a week—if she had time—we took tea in her chambers, after she’d sent everyo
ne away on some training exercise. She’d ask me how my studies were going. She’d tell me that she’d heard good things about my work in the nursery. And that was all! Afterwards, she was free of me for another week, free to forget I existed!”
She started to turn away, back to the wardrobe, but then she spun around.
“That’s why she did it, did you know?”
“Did what?” I was a little confused.
“Never let me be trained! I used to think I just wasn’t good enough—”
“Rhea—”
“—and maybe that was true. But the older I became, the more I suspected a different reason. If she made me an acolyte, she would have to see me, be around me, on a daily basis. That’s what acolytes do: they attend on the Pythia. She couldn’t avoid me then—”
“Rhea!” I sat up, decided it was a bad idea when the room got swimmy, and just propped myself on a pillow instead. “She was your mother. Why would she want to avoid her own daughter?”
“Why would yours?”
Chapter Nineteen
That was the last response I had expected. “What?”
Rhea paused with a blanket clutched to her chest. And while her body might be that of a slender young woman, her face was suddenly that of a child. One with huge, miserable eyes that made me want to hug her.
“You told me that you went back,” she said. “To see your parents before they died.”
I nodded carefully. “A couple of times.”
Being Pythia meant that a little thing like death was no barrier to a meeting. Not that there hadn’t been other barriers—plenty of them. Getting to my parents had been hard, and once I had . . . I’d kind of wondered why I’d bothered.
To say that the welcome hadn’t been warm was an understatement.
That was especially true where my mother was concerned. She was kind of a sore point with me, although for different reasons than Rhea had with Agnes. At least she knew what she was mad about. I knew . . . next to nothing. My mother had been closed down, cold and silent. Even now, I didn’t know much more about her than what I read in the mythology books.
And based on my limited experience, I’d say they’d been kind.
“But you also said that she didn’t want to see you,” Rhea said carefully. “Or even to talk to you.”
“She wasn’t exactly . . . friendly,” I agreed.
“So, you know what it was like,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “When you told me that, I thought, finally, here is someone who understands. Someone who knows what it is to be unwanted.”
“I . . . don’t know that I was unwanted exactly—”
“She left you with that vampire! That Gallina—”
“Because she died, Rhea.”
Technically, of course, goddesses didn’t. They just faded away. Until they were so weak that they could be taken out by a car bomb, planted by a jealous vamp who wanted to adopt her orphan daughter, but needed her to actually be an orphan first.
That was true even of the mighty huntress, Artemis to the Greeks, Diana to the Romans, and Elizabeth O’Donnell when she was hiding out as an acolyte at Agnes’ court.
It was a long story as to how she got there, but basically, there was a war, thousands of years ago, between different factions of gods over who would control Earth, and mom won. Not mom’s group, mind you, but mom, on her own. She’d gotten her nickname by hunting demons, not deer, and had amassed a ton of power in the process. Added to her own, it had allowed her to throw her fellow gods off the planet and to slam a metaphysical door shut behind them, and slam it hard.
So hard, in fact, that they’d been barred from Earth—and Faerie, which had been encompassed by mother’s spell as well, since it provided a conduit to Earth—ever since. But despite the fact that she won, it hadn’t been a flawless victory. In the brief time they’d had, the other gods had fought back, and the battle had severely drained her. So much so that she could no longer risk hunting demons, not when there was only one of her and millions of them, and all of them seriously jonesing for some payback.