I laughed suddenly, and it hurt, because my throat was sore from screaming. One of these days, just once, I’d like to be the cool action figure type, like in all those movies. The one who casually walks away when a building is exploding right behind her, instead of shrieking and ducking for cover and possibly wetting her pants.
Of course, I’d always wondered how many of the people who made those movies had ever been in an explosion. Had felt the heat, smelled the smoke, and thought for a second their eardrums were going to rupture from the noise. And been sure that they were about to be burned alive any second now.
Like Rosier had been.
For me.
“What’s so funny?” he asked, “sitting” on the ledge. Meaning his butt was hovering a couple inches over the top of it.
I glanced at him. “Time. I’m supposed to be master of it, but there never seems to be enough.”
“Strange. I usually feel the opposite. But then, I’ve never been human.”
“Try being Pythia. I’m expected to know . . . so much. Just so much. It’s . . . overwhelming sometimes.”
He tilted his head to the side. “Like what?”
I hesitated, because I hadn’t expected him to ask. But it wasn’t like it was a secret. It wasn’t like the whole damn supernatural community didn’t know anyway. “Like everything. Like how to use the Pythian power with no one to teach me. The stuff you’ve seen Gertie do? I can’t do half that—”
“And yet where are you and where is she?”
I shook my head. “And even if I could, even if I ever get this stuff down, that doesn’t scratch the surface. I’m supposed to know a couple thousand years of supernatural politics when I don’t even know everybody’s name yet. And to make up for a lifetime of magical training when I can’t even do a proper protection spell. And to understand everything about the vamp world, including how to deal with the senate, when I grew up at the court of the vamp version of Tony Soprano! There’s no time!”
“I know,” Rosier said calmly.
“You know?” I adjusted my position so I could see his face again. “How do you know?”
A ghostly eyebrow rose, in an elegant arch. “How do you think it was for me? I went from carefree, bachelor prince to beleaguered ruler overnight, with damn little training myself. I think my father thought he’d have another son eventually—or a daughter. It’s much the same with us. Someone, in any case, who would be more like him. I was never like him. I was more like my mother, he always said, but not fondly.”
“They didn’t get along?”
He smiled slightly. “They got along famously, for as long as it lasted—our kind rarely forms permanent bonds. Her spirit, her joie de vivre, her vivaciousness, were all assets in a consort. But, like fathers for time out of mind, he assumed his son would take after him. Be strong, statesmanlike, astute. When I turned out to be . . . less than that . . . he didn’t bother to hide his disappointment. Nor did he provide the training I was never supposed to need.”
“And when you did need it—”
“You think you’re lost? Try waking up one day to find that your father has been slaughtered, your court is in complete panic, and your enemies are taking the opportunity to invade. And that you, with your completely inadequate training and a power you’ve mainl
y been using to seduce sweet young things, are expected to save the day. That day. Right then.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Or maybe it was just uncomfortable on my part. Because my mother was the reason he’d been in that mess.
As hard as it might be to believe, looking at me, she’d been one of the creatures humans had once called gods. Not because of their morality, which they mostly seemed to find a foreign concept, or their justice, mercy, and wisdom, which they didn’t have any of, either. But because what else do you call beings so powerful that they just mow down everything in their path?
Including Rosier’s father, powerful demon lord though he had been, because even a mediocre god was on a whole different level.
And while my mother had been a lot of things, mediocre had never been one of them.
She’d been the goddess with a thousand names, who showed up in one form or another in virtually every culture on earth. But the one the world remembered best was Artemis, the Great Huntress. And guess what she’d best liked hunting?
And she wasn’t the only one. The whole misbegotten pantheon had been thrilled when they discovered earth, while exploring a rift between our universe and theirs. Not because of humans, who they thought fit only for slaves. But because earth offered access to their real prey: the demons.
As I’d discovered on my search for Pritkin, the hells were composed of a vast array of worlds populated by a wide range of creatures, from the mostly innocuous incubi, to beings even the other demons called “ancient horrors” and did their best to lock away. But they all had one thing in common: they fed off other species—humans, other demons, even fey if they could get them. And they stored up much of that power for later.
Or, at least, they did until the gods showed up, to turn the tables and hunt them instead.
Most of the gods had stayed on their staging ground, earth, and waited for the demons to come to them. But my mother hadn’t been content to just wait around. She’d gone into the hells themselves, searching out the fattest, juiciest prey, the ones with enough energy stored up to not need to hunt on earth. The ones who had ultimately made her more powerful than any of her kind. The ones who had allowed her to cast a spell throwing the other gods out of their new acquisition, and slamming the door behind them.
Leaving it all for her.