Tempt the Stars

by Karen Chance

  “You didn’t know about that,” I said, watching him.

  “Bullshit. Everyone knew—”

  “You didn’t. Not half an hour ago.”

  Marco didn’t say anything, but his face was enough. Because he was no more a diplomat than Jules. Mircea didn’t send diplomats to me; they’d just be wasted anyway.

  He sent tanks.

  “How did you find out?” I demanded.

  Marco crossed massive arms and tried staring me down. “I told you. Mircea knows what goes on around here—”

  “Mircea? He called you?”

  “That’s not the—”

  “When?”

  “A few minutes ago, and we’re not—”

  “Mircea called you . . . and not me?” I asked, wanting to be sure.

  “Maybe he thought he’d get further with me!”

  Yeah, or maybe he was avoiding me.

  And suddenly, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Mircea was avoiding me. I’d been so busy doing the same thing to him, I hadn’t noticed. But of course he was.

  He was busy, but he was also a first-level master. He could go without sleep for days if he needed to. There was a cost in power, sure, but he had it to burn. If he’d wanted to talk to me, he’d have talked to me. For as long as he liked and about whatever he wanted, and I doubted that my attempts at evasion would have worked for a second.

  But they had.

  “He’s avoiding me, isn’t he?” I asked Marco, in disbelief.

  “Stop it! Stop it right now!” the Valkyrie demanded. We looked at her. She pointed at the portal. “What the hell is that?”

  “Yes,” Jonas said, coming up behind her. And regarding the hellmouth over his spectacles.

  I looked back at Marco. “Tell me the truth. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he want to see me?”

  Marco looked around, like he expected somebody to offer up a suggestion. But the vamps were clearly all suggestioned out. A couple of them were trying to talk Jules into going back down the hall, but hysteria feeds hysteria, and it didn’t look like they were having much luck. A lot more were over by the bar, clearly feeling that tonight went into the above-and-beyond category and they’d had enough. And the rest—Jonas, the witches and the girl—were staring at the hellmouth, which had started spinning fast enough to flip the pages of a magazine on the coffee table.

  Marco didn’t find any help.

  “Marco—”

  “I don’t know, all right?” he told me, exasperated. “I don’t even know if he is.”

  “Did he ask to talk to me?”

  “No. I—”

  “Did you tell him I was unconscious or something?”

  “No, he—”

  “That I was in the shower?”

  “No! Damn it, he didn’t—” Marco stopped suddenly.

  “He didn’t what? He didn’t ask?”

  Marco just looked at me.

  I stared back. “He called you up, informed you that I’d been seen battling demons on the drag, asked about the master vamp I just deprived him of, and then he hung up?”

  “You need to ask him about this,” he pointed out.

  “How can I when he won’t talk to me?”

  Marco started to answer, but then Jules let out an especially shrill shriek. Maybe because the portal had started whirling around at something approaching warp speed. And unless I was mistaken, it was also getting smaller.

  “Would somebody shut him the hell up?” Marco snarled.

  But Jules didn’t seem to like that idea. Jules appeared to have had about enough of us and our ideas. He gave another shriek and dove through the middle of his buddies, careened into some others, spun out of their hold like a football player heading for the goal line, and then ran all out for the door.

  Marco went after him, but changed course halfway and lunged at me instead. Because I’d taken what was likely to be my only shot and dove for the rapidly closing portal. But then a second impossible thing happened, when the huge-but-graceful Marco suddenly tripped and went sprawling on the carpet, hitting down hard enough to rattle the windows and shake all the glasses in the bar.

  I had a second to see what’s-her-name, the initiate I’d spoken all of a few dozen words to, with her leg out. And judging by the angle, it hadn’t been an accident. I looked at her and she looked at me, big-eyed and faintly horrified. And then I was through the flames and gone.

  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 Shadowland, 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 Shadowland’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-even-close-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 goddamned 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-everything-else 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 oth
er 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?”