“I consider you and Louis-Cesare to be friends of my court, and as such, would feel remiss if I did not finish our discussion, however uncomfortable it might seem at the present.”
“Uncomfortable for who?” I said sourly, but he was already moving on.
“As I said, I do not think that your sister, as you call her, is a monster—or a demigod, either. The gods seem to have begun their experiments by crossbreeding themselves with humans, as well as with demons and fey, and fairly indiscriminately at that. But the results were . . . a mixed bag. Some of the children they sired were mad, if the ancient myths are anything to go on, and the rest were either too weak or too disobedient to be useful. They frequently caused as many problems as they solved.”
“Iphemedia,” Louis-Cesare said. “She was a human woman who gave birth to the Aloadae giants by Poseidon. They were so powerful that they kidnapped Ares and required both Apollo and Artemis to take them down.”
I looked at him over my shoulder. “Hassani told you that,” I accused.
He looked hurt. “I read.”
“You read Barbara Cartland.”
“Shh,” he said, because Hassani was continuing.
“The gods did not want rivals,” the consul said. “But rather loyal and capable armies. Indeed, looked at through the right lens, that is what most of the old legends are about. The story of Lycaon, King of Arcadia, for instance, who was transformed along with fifty of his sons into the first werewolves by Zeus. Or the centaurs, who may have been a failed attempt at another shapeshifting army y Zeus, but which stalled halfway. Or the Spartoi, who were said to be Earth born warriors who sprang from the teeth of a dragon. We now assume “teeth” to mean DNA, which is often found in the roots of teeth, and which Ares crossed with the human genome to make another fey-human hybrid.”
“Can we fast forward?” I asked Louis-Cesare.
“He’s coming to the point,” he assured me, and then dunked me into the waterfall to rinse my hair.
When I emerged, I discovered that that had been a lie, because Hassani was still going strong.
“—Amazons, who were described as the daughters of Ares and a wood nymph, but nymphs in the Greek tradition are almost always fey of one type of another, and most of the Amazons do not appear to have been strong enough to have been demigods. This may indicate a fey-human hybrid which was facilitated by Ares—”
“Oh, God, make it stop!” I said.
“—but I digress,” Hassani went on, as if he’d heard. “The point is that the gods seemed to have replaced their early efforts at having children to assist them in their wars with attempts to make armies by hybridizing “lesser creatures”, possibly infused with a small amount of godly DNA to bump up their effectiveness. Which brings me to your sister.”
I sat up.
“The gods must have learned a great deal from their experiments, information they left with their fey allies, who continued their work. We both saw the results of some of the fey’s experiments, which were loosed on us at your consul’s court. They were supposedly the failures, and yet they were formidable.”
“Damn,” I said, and Louis-Cesare reached over and stopped Hassani mid-word, giving me a moment.
I needed it, because the consul was right about that much—the fey had been experimenting. I’d been running across some of their rejects for a while, including my adopted son and the misbegotten monsters the fey had thrown at us as cannon fodder. I just hadn’t thought that I might be one of them.
I scowled. Only I wasn’t, and neither was Dorina. This was—I didn’t know what this was, but it didn’t prove anything.
“You don’t believe him,” Louis-Cesare said, watching me.
“Do you?”
“I don’t know. But it would explain a great deal—”
“It explains nothing! My mother died.” I didn’t know why nobody seemed to get that simple point. “If she was some super soldier, she might still be here. She certainly wouldn’t have met her end screaming on the end of a pike!”
Louis-Cesare didn’t say anything, but I could tell that he wanted to.
“What?”
“Merely that, when your parents met, two lines of godly experimentation came together for the first time. Vampire from your father, and . . . whatever your mother may have been. Neither of the two strains may have been completely satisfactory on their own, but together . . . they created something new.”
I frowned at him, because that had actually made a weird sort of sense. Except for the obvious. “Then why the hell was she in Romania, living like a peasant?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “But she blended in well enough to fool even your father. Perhaps that was one of her gifts: camouflage. Perhaps she escaped from the fey, made her way to Earth, and went to ground, in the most out of the way place she could think of. Perhaps she thought she’d be safer in a peasant’s cottage than somewhere more prominent—”
“So she dates a prince?”