Tempt the Stars

Chapter Twenty-seven

“Do you know who your mother was?” Pritkin demanded, scowling.

I scowled back, but not because of the attitude. I’d expected that. Actually, that was a lie. I’d expected worse.

He’d been bad enough when surprised and under fire at his father’s court, or fighting for his life against the council’s guards. But now he’d had time to think about it. And, apparently, to work up a massive attitude.

I seemed to have that effect on the men in my life, I thought darkly, and took another sip of something horrible.

We were in a bar in the hell known as the Shadow-land, because the demon council didn’t have anything like a normal jail. They had distant worlds where they marooned what they called the “Ancient Horrors,” creatures I wasn’t interested in knowing more about, thank you. And then, on the other end of the spectrum, they had . . . nothing.

I guess most people who pissed off the council didn’t live long enough to need a holding cell.

But that meant, instead of visiting Pritkin in some dark, dank cell, I was visiting him in some dark, dank bar. On the whole, I’d have preferred the cell. I was sitting cross-legged in my chair to avoid the floor, which had passed nasty a year ago and was working on horrific.

Something squelched between my toes anyway, something I’d managed to step in on the way to the table.

I was trying not to think about what exactly it might be.

I was trying hard.

“Bartender!” Casanova called hoarsely, and tried to snap his fingers. But he missed, and then kept on missing, frowning at his long, usually elegant digits as if he couldn’t figure out what was wrong with them.

Unfortunately, the summons had included everyone who had trespassed on the council’s good graces, i.e., had released a bunch of their former slaves into the ether. That included me and Caleb, as well as Pritkin. Along with one very sorry excuse for a casino manager, who was close to sliding under the table.

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” I asked, even as the shambling hulk of a bartender set another bottle down on the sticky tabletop.

Casanova sent me a helpful gesture that indicated that, no, he did not feel that way.

I didn’t return it, because I was busy trying not to be obvious about flinching away from the bartender. He had suspicious stains on his apron, and smelled like a slaughterhouse looks. He also kept squeezing Casanova’s shoulder whenever he came over, as if trying to gauge how much meat was under the expensive material. It normally would have skeeved me out, but after today, I was all out of skeeve. And Casanova was too drunk to notice.

“Did you hear me?” Pritkin demanded.

I clutched my glass and resisted a strong urge to throw it at him. “Do I know who my mother is? Yes, yes, I do, Pritkin, thanks.”

“I doubt that.” He crossed his arms and leaned back in his seat.

“And you do, I suppose?”

“I’ve had a good deal of free time lately,” he said grimly. “I used it to do some research. And let’s just say, she is not remembered in the hells quite the same way as on earth.”

“Is this relevant?” Caleb rumbled. “We got bigger problems, John.”

He pointedly didn’t look at the Rubik’s cube of a city beyond the bar’s dirty windows. I didn’t, either, since I was facing directly away from it, but it was like the elephant in the room. It made its presence felt.

Behind my back, buildings folded up onto buildings, streets became avenues, became trails, became dead ends, cars appeared and disappeared, trees and planters and mailboxes strutted and fretted their brief moment upon the stage and then, poof, were replaced by a parking lot. And the light constantly changed, as lamps and streetlights and lit billboards winked in and out of existence, each flip, flip, flip of the scene causing the shadows in here to move and shift, like a club with a lousy DJ.

It was giving my migraine a migraine, which was ironic.

Since that was exactly what it had been designed not to do.

The spell that masked whatever the real city looked like had been intended to be comfortable, even homey. It was supposed to make the place look like your hometown, or at least an area you’d be familiar with, which I supposed made sense for a place that served as a giant crossroads for the hells. No one look was going to work for everyone, when “everyone” was a thousand different species with totally different senses. So the Shadow-land’s proprietors had said screw it and just given everybody what they wanted.

Or they’d tried. It never worked quite as planned, since it didn’t cover the people, most of whom would have gotten a double take even on the Vegas Strip. But it also didn’t normally look like the origami creation of a possibly insane artist.

But then, it didn’t usually have a pissed-off demon lord messing with it, either.

At least, that’s why I assumed that the street outside, which was supposed to lead to the council building, had suddenly acquired a severe case of ADHD. Rosier was clearly intent on me not being allowed to make my case. And so far, he was doing a damned fine job.

My power worked, to a limited degree, in the Shadowland, at least when I wasn’t exhausted. But I couldn’t shift when I didn’t know where I was going. And when the road was changing even as I looked at it. And while dragging along a guy who apparently didn’t want to go anyway.

“Yes, it’s relevant!” Pritkin said. “I am trying to make Cassie understand why she needs to drop this and go home!”

“I’ll be happy to,” I told him evenly. “After we see the council—”

“We don’t need the council—”

“We do when you can’t go back to earth without them!”

“I’m not going back to earth.” It sounded final.

Like hell it was final.

“I didn’t come all this way, go through all that”—I waved an arm wildly, because I didn’t have words for the last week—“just to go home without you!”

“Well, get used to the idea,” Pritkin said curtly, and sloshed some more hell juice into his glass.

“What is this stuff?” Caleb asked, looking at his drink suspiciously. He had yet to touch it.

“Local specialty. They ferment it from berries that grow in the hills,” Pritkin said curtly, knocking back the majority of his.

“Is it strong?”

Pritkin shrugged.

“If it gets a vamp drunk, it’s strong,” I warned.

Caleb raised an eyebrow and glanced at Casanova. But it was hard to tell if the vamp was actually sloshed or just overwrought. He’d been crying into his not-evenclose-to-beer since we got here.

I guess Caleb must have decided he was just being his usual overly dramatic self, and took a healthy swig. And somehow kept it down. But under all that dirt, he turned about as white as a black guy can.

“Pritkin told me once that alcohol doesn’t affect him much—something about what he was raised on,” I told Caleb.

Caleb glared at his buddy. “What the fuck were you raised on?”

Pritkin held up his glass. “This.”

“Figures,” Caleb wheezed, and frantically gestured the bartender over to order some water.

I went back to glaring at Pritkin.

It was vaguely satisfying in a way I couldn’t immediately define. Maybe because it was the only normal thing in my life right now. I glared at Pritkin all the time. It was what I did. I decided to do it up right and put some oomph behind it.

“You can look at me that way all you like. It doesn’t change the facts,” he snapped.

“And what facts are those?”

“That getting to the council, even assuming we could manage it, won’t help. They hate me—”

“I bet they hate the gods more!”

“And that would be the point,” he said viciously, and gulped the equivalent of paint thinner.

“Okay,” I said, reaching tilt. “Okay. I’ve had kind of a bad week, and I’m not much for hints right now. So why don’t you just cut to the chase, and tell me what is wrong with you? Do you want to go back to Rosier’s? Do you want to sit around and wait for some assassin to get lucky? Or your dad to whore you out to the highest bidder? Is that really so much more appealing than coming back to earth with me and, I don’t know, having a god-damned life? Well, is it?”

Something squelched between my toes again, and I belatedly realized that I was on my feet and halfway across the table, and what I was doing couldn’t really be called glaring anymore. If he’d had a shirt on, I’d have had my fists in it. As it was, they were flat on the table and I was about an inch from his nose and if looks could kill, we’d both be dead.

“Oh, sure,” Casanova slurred. “Thas how it starts. But then you give them the bes’ centuries of your life, and wha’ happens? They lie to you and stab you in the back and . . . and . . ” He seemed to lose his train of thought, assuming he’d ever had one to start with. He trailed off.

And Pritkin slapped the table, hard enough to make all the glasses jump. “This isn’t about what I want,” he told me fiercely. “It’s never been about that!”

“Then what is it? Because you’re not making sense!” I’d hoped that, once we got this far, I’d have an ally. Instead, I was having to fight both him and his father. And it sucked!

By the look of him, Caleb didn’t get it, either. “If you got something to say, say it,” he told him. “Then we need to figure out how to get you out of here.”

“I’m not getting out. You are,” Pritkin said, and there was a note in his voice this time, a note of fierce jealousy and hopeless longing. And damn it! Whatever he said, he did not want to go back there.

“Why?” I demanded.

Pritkin sloshed some more rotgut-and-everythingelse in his glass and sat back. “Do you remember your mother’s nickname on earth?”

“What?”

“Answer the question!”

“The Huntress,” Caleb rumbled.

Pritkin glanced at him. “Yes. Care to guess what she hunted?”

I sat back down.

“There’s a reason that the ‘gods,’ as they’re known, liked earth,” he told me. “Even though they couldn’t feed there.”

I didn’t say anything. We were about to face the demon council, assuming we could find it, possibly about to be shivved in the back by one of our fellow patrons, and almost certainly being poisoned by the damned bartender. But Pritkin had dropped into lecture mode, and he didn’t do that for no reason.

“Like what?” I asked, crossing my arms and sitting back against the sticky seat.

“Earth in the Scandinavian legends was known as Midgard, or Mittlegard in Old English,”he told me. “It’s where Tolkien got his idea for ‘Middle Earth’; it’s almost an exact translation. The Vikings called it that because of its position in the middle of their map of the cosmos, halfway between the heavens and the hells.”

“Yes, so?”

“Have you read the sagas?” he demanded.

“They’re on my list.” Along with about a thousand other things.

“Well, if you had, you would know that they tell the story of beings, the ‘gods,’ who originated somewhere in the dimension known as the heavens. But like the Vikings, they became restless and went exploring. Among other worlds, they discovered Faerie, known as Alfheim, or the ‘land of the elves,’ to the Norse. It was fairly unremarkable, except for one thing: it was closer to the divide between dimensions than any other world they had encountered. And as such, it had connections that none of the others did—connections to a completely new universe the so-called gods knew nothing about.”

“Faerie connects to earth,” I said, wondering where he was going with this.

“Yes. Earth is the counterpart to Faerie on this side of the dimensional rift. And just as Faerie had connections to the rest of the heavens—”

“Earth has connections to the rest of the hells,” Caleb murmured, looking like something had just clicked into place for him.

Well, that made one of us.

“Earth is technically in the hell dimension,” Pritkin agreed. “But as the closest world to our side of the rift, it shares aspects of both dimensions, as does Faerie on the heavenly side. Together, they form a bridge—the only one known, and likely the only one that exists—between the two universes.”

“The bifrost bridge,” Caleb said softly.

Pritkin nodded. “The old legends—Greek as well as Norse—speak of a rainbow bridge allowing the gods to travel back and forth from earth to their home world. Presumably, they were referring to the ley lines running from here into Faerie, and the portals cut through them.”

Caleb just sat there, looking stunned. And making me feel even dumber than usual, because I didn’t see what difference any of this made. “So? We knew they came from somewhere else,” I pointed out. “All the legends talk of them going back home, to Asgard or Olympus or wherever, on a regular basis. This isn’t news.”

“Then perhaps this is,” Pritkin said, leaning forward. “The gods stayed on earth, even though they could not feed there. Why? Why was it so important to them? Why were they so enraged when your mother found a way to banish them? Why have they been working so hard, and for millennia, in order to get back?”

I frowned at him. Now that he put it like that, it didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. “I don’t know. Maybe they liked being worshipped?”

“Enough for everything we’ve seen them do? Enough to risk dying, for nothing more than an ego stroke, and from a people they treated as little better than animals?” He shook his head. “No.”

“Okay, then, what’s your theory?”

“It’s not a theory. I’ve spent months on this, and it wasn’t easy. The only beings who had the information I wanted were not keen to discuss the subject. But I managed to get a hint here, some confirmation there, and then another piece from—”

“Pritkin! Just tell me.”

Green eyes met mine. “The gods weren’t interested in earth for its own sake. They wanted it for its role as a . . . a watering hole . . . if you like, for their real prey.”

“What prey?” I asked, starting to get a really bad feeling about this.

“The gods can’t feed off human energy, not because they can’t process it, but because it is so weak it does almost nothing for them. Your mother could have drained a city and been very little the better for it. But there were creatures on this side of the divide who lived far longer, gained energy much better, and stored it up far more efficiently—”

“Cows!”Casanova said, waving his glass. “Ever’body’s jus’ somebody’s cow.”

I frowned at him, not least because he’d just splattered hell juice all over my arm. But Pritkin nodded. “It’s not a bad analogy.”

“That we’re cows?” I demanded, vainly looking around for something to mop up with.

But everything in here was already dirtier than I was.

“No, we’re grass,” Pritkin said. “The demons are the cows.” He saw my expression. “Think of it this way, Cassie. Humans can eat grass, correct?”

“Yeah, I guess. Technically.”

“But nobody does. Why is that?”

“I don’t know . . . because it’s grass.”

“It’s lacking in nutrition, in calories, in all the things we need for life, yes?”

I nodded.

“A human would starve on a diet of grass. But a cow . . . a cow does quite well on it. Gets fat, even. And then, if a human eats the cow—”

“Okay, wait,” I said, my head spinning. “You’re telling me . . . that the gods came to earth, found a bunch of fat demons chewing up all the human grass, and decided to have a barbecue?”

He nodded. “Something like that. Remember, demons live much longer lives than humans, and have the capacity to store up a great deal more energy. In some cases, from thousands of feedings over hundreds of years. And not merely from earth. But from all their home worlds, as well.”

“But their home worlds don’t yield as much,” I said, recalling something Rian had said.

“No. Which is why earth was so prized when my father’s people, and others, stumbled across it long before the gods ever did. And then started coming in droves, to feed off the humans who couldn’t detect them and had virtually no defenses against them.”

“But someone’s always higher on the food chain,” Caleb said, with a certain grim satisfaction.

Pritkin nodded. “And when the gods discovered the demons, they felt toward them the way the demons had felt toward the human population. Here was a huge source of energy, ripe for the plucking, who had almost no defenses against them. Yes, they could buck and kick a little, but does that stop a lion from taking down a gazelle? And only the greatest of them could even manage that much of a response.”

“Then why didn’t the demons just stop coming?” I demanded. “Once they knew the gods were here—”

“Do gazelles stop coming to the watering hole?” he shot back. “Even though they know the lions come there, too?”

“Yeah, but that’s water. That’s a necessity.”

“As is energy in a world where power rules. Why do you think Rian betrayed Casanova? She’s known him for centuries. They have a bond—”

Casanova huffed out a bitter laugh.

“It’s true,” Pritkin insisted. “You gave her a great gift. The greatest you can give a demon. You gave her power, more than any other host she could possibly have found. And power can give her . . . everything else.”

“So she sold me out for power,” Casanova said bitterly. “I suppose she thought a vampire would understand that.”

“She sold you out for life,”Pritkin said sharply. “Which she might otherwise have lost in one of the power struggles that are epidemic at court—at every court. Rian was young and weak when she came to earth. Now, after gorging for centuries on as much energy as she could absorb, she goes home, not as a pawn to be used and possibly sacrificed to someone else’s ambition, but as a power broker in her own right.”

Casanova blinked at him, looking as thoughtful as a guy with that much hell juice in him could. But I just stared at the tabletop, where the flickering light turned the dust that had gathered in the sticky bits into a topographical map. A map of a universe that was suddenly far larger than I’d ever imagined.

“And at the time we’re discussing, power was even more important than it is now,” Pritkin added. “The ancient wars were ongoing, with the few demon races who stumbled across earth losing badly before its discovery. The power they gained from it helped renew their resources, gave them a fighting chance in battles on a scale humans can’t imagine, battles that lasted hundreds of years and spread across countless worlds, battles that, if they had been lost, might have resulted in the destruction of their entire species. So yes, they came, no matter the risk. And the gods knew that they would.”

There was silence at the table for a moment, as everyone struggled to grasp that. I didn’t know how the rest of them felt, but I wasn’t doing so hot. Pritkin was right; I couldn’t imagine war on that scale. I couldn’t imagine something else, either.

“I still don’t see what this has to do with my mother, or with you,” I said, after a moment.

“Artemis the Huntress,” Caleb murmured, his eyes suddenly widening. As if maybe he did.

“Yes,” Pritkin confirmed. “She was the most feared of the gods by demonkind. The most respected, and the most hated.”

“Why? You said all the gods hunted demons!” I said hotly.

“Yes, but she didn’t merely wait at the watering hole for them to come to her,” Pritkin said quietly. “She could open the gates between worlds, a talent that allowed her to take the offensive far more easily than the rest of her kind.”

“She hunted them here,” Caleb said, as if he didn’t quite believe it. “She hunted them in their own worlds.”

“No,” I said, but Pritkin was nodding.

“Every source I’ve managed to find says the same thing. She tore a bloody swath through a hundred worlds. Cassie—” He held up a hand, when I started to protest again. “I’m sorry, but it’s true. You must have seen the souk in Zarr Alim?”

“Zarr Alim?”

“My father’s capital city.”

I nodded, confused and angry.

“Well, if you’d had time to look around, you might have come across small amulets being sold by old women in the marketplace, amulets with a familiar face on them. They are still used as wards against bad fortune by the local inhabitants, even though no one really remembers why anymore. Just that once, long ago, their ancestors wanted protection from the face on those coins.”

“And what a pretty face it was, too,” someone said as a hand stroked down the side of my hair before abruptly clenching in it.

A very familiar hand.

And fuck.