by Karen Chance
“Then explain yourself!”
“I mean, I’m not a vampire!” I said, rubbing my injured neck and spelling it out for the crazy woman. “I haven’t crossed over, I haven’t died, I haven’t done anything! Except almost get killed by whatever you turned loose on me!”
“You’re not dead?” Gertie seemed to be fixated on that point.
“Do dead people throw up their dinner?” I asked thickly, wondering if I was about to do it again.
“Then what the devil is wrong with you?”
I sighed and gave up on the idea of waiting for a better time.
I told her.
~~~
“Absolutely unacceptable!” Rhea was slamming things around my bedroom, as furious as I’d ever seen her. Possibly because nothing got under her skin worse than her parents.
Or seeing her Pythia reamed out for half an hour, it seemed, in the ass chewing of the ages.
I didn’t say anything, not being up to it at the moment. I lay in the large, comfortable, squashy topped bed, and watched the ceiling slowly revolve above me. And wondered whether other Pythias got blessed out as much as I did. It seemed unlikely. I couldn’t imagine anyone talking to Gertie the way they regularly did to me.
Well, I couldn’t have before tonight.
A small smile split my face, despite everything, because Rhea had been magnificent. It occurred to me that, if she ended up succeeding me someday, Gertie’s little parlor had had four Pythias in it, all going at each other at the same time. Well, three of them had been.
I’d mostly sat and barfed pot pie. But at least I seemed to have finally gotten rid of all the Were blood. And it wasn’t like Rhea had needed the help.
I just wished that she’d finishing venting at Gertie, because I was really kind of sleepy right now.
“—for them to dare, and to a Pythia—” she was saying, while throwing things out of a large wardrobe.
“They’re Pythias, too,” I rasped, because my throat was raw. And wondered if she was looking for something or just enjoying tossing stuff around.
“That doesn’t excuse it!” she said, rounding on me. “You’ve saved the world—repeatedly! What have they ever done?”
I opened my mouth, but apparently that question had been rhetorical, because she kept going.
“The last time we were here, with Hilde and the others, what did they do? Jo was shredding the time line, sending shards of other eras crashing into this one, threatening to destroy everything! And what did they do?”
“They helped with—”
“Nothing! We stopped her, particularly you. You fought her to a standstill, whilst we did everything that we could to protect you! Jo threw an army against you, but you never faltered, not once! Meanwhile, they stood on the sidelines, and did a little mopping up once the real danger was past, yet they have the gall, the utter, utter—”
“Rhea.”
“—gall to dare—they should be down on their knees, both of them, thanking you—especially her. Jo was her damned acolyte!”
I didn’t say anything. Rhea’s facts were a little skewed, because she’d arrived late and hadn’t seen everything, but this wasn’t the moment to point that out. Agnes’s slap mark was still visible on her face, a testament to how strong it had been. It would probably bruise, although I doubted the physical pain was the biggest problem here.
To say that Rhea had mommy issues was to put it mildly.
And with cause. She’d spent her younger years with the covens, learning enough of their magic to be considered a coven trained witch. But that wasn’t why she’d been sent there. Agnes had some coven-affiliated relatives and had thought of them when she needed a place to stash the daughter that nobody could know about—at least until Rhea was old enough to join the court under a different name.
How she’d covered up the pregnancy I didn’t know, but strongly suspected a trip back in time, followed by a return with the baby, likely only seconds after she left. Of course, that sort of thing was a no-no. Pythias weren’t supposed to time travel except in emergencies, and to benefit others, not themselves. But maybe she’d felt that keeping the Pythian reputation intact qualified.
We all had our own definitions, didn’t we?
I didn’t feel like I was in a position to judge Agnes, especially now. At the very least, Mircea should have been in a chrono cell, a literal “time out” where he’d sit until we figured out how to solve this. But as I’d pointed out to Gertie, while that might assure that he couldn’t go joyriding around the time line, it wouldn’t help his psyche at all.
And the more it deteriorated, the worst the war was likely to go.
What she’d understood and Rhea didn’t, despite having grown up at court, was that this job wasn’t so cut and dried. Your power showed you things—sometimes—and if you were lucky you might even understand what they meant. But even then, it was you and only you who had to decide what to do about them.
It was why I’d gotten a blessing out instead of something worse, and then a cup of hot tea before being bundled off to bed. Gertie might be furious with me right now, but she knew that Pythias sometimes had to make truly gut-wrenching decisions without any help or even any assurance that they were right. It was what I would have told Marco, if I’d thought he would understand.
To be Pythia was to be alone.
Come to think of it, that was probably how Agnes had ended up in a relationship with Jonas Marsden. That was a no-no, too, considering that the Pythia was supposed to be the impartial arbiter of disputes in the supernatural community, something made a little hard when you were dating one of its chief members. But sometimes, the deafening silence from your power, which wasn’t human, after all, and couldn’t talk to or commiserate with you, got to be too much, and you just wanted someone to hold.
I could relate there, as well. In fact, the longer I had this job, the less Agnes felt like either the unknowable, perfect paragon I’d first thought her, or a vicious bitch, and more like a very human woman just trying her best. Only, unfortunately, her best hadn’t always been good enough.
I wondered if, someday soon, I’d be able to relate to that, too.
“If you want to talk about Agnes,” I began, thinking that maybe Rhea could use a sympathetic ear.
Only it seemed not.
“Why would I want to do that?” she snapped.
Rhea never snapped.
“This is my fault,” I told her carefully. “I get that—”
“How is any of this your fault?” she demanded, looking up from examining what appeared to be a water bottle, before tossing it aside.
“You didn’t interact with your mother, the last time you were here. Things were crazy and . . . well, there wasn’t time—”
She laughed, and it was bitter. “When was there ever?”
“—but I should have thought that being here, doing research, possibly for days . . . you were bound to run across each other. I’m sorry. I was so focused on—”
“Stop saying that!”
I blinked. “What?”
“You always apologize! When nothing about this is your fault!”
“Okay,” I said, because meek little Rhea was definitely gone, and in her place was the spitfire from downstairs, who I was starting to suspect was a lot closer to the real woman than the version I usually saw. Considering who her parents were, that wasn’t too surprising. There was no way she was going to turn out to be a fluffy kitten.
Although, at the moment, she was looking more like a pissed off tigress.
One that was suddenly in my face.
“You want to know about my mother?”
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.
She’d therefore gone into hiding, her remaining power slowly draining away over the centuries until she was on the brink of starvation. In desperation, she’d joined the Pythian Court in disguise, since the power that Apollo had once given to his oracle was the only source of godly energy left on Earth. But that plan had its own pitfalls, including some demigod sons that Ares had left behind they’d who were watching the court, knowing that, sooner or later, she’d turn up.
I knew that much about her, because I’d seen some of it myself on a trip back in time, and because Pritkin had done some research to fill in the rest. But that was all I knew. Well, other than that she’d somehow hooked up with dad, who she met here at court after Agnes dragged him back from an illegal jaunt through time. And then, for some reason, that they’d decided to have me.
Or maybe she just got knocked up. Maybe I wanted it to be more complex than that, when in reality, I was just the product of a godly booty call. It would explain why she had been so cold when I finally met her.
“You know what it was like,” Rhea repeated, watching me. “You were left with that vampire; I was left with the covens. But my mother didn’t die, and eventually, she came back for me.”
“Doesn’t that show that she cared?” I asked. “She could have just left you there—”
“Could she? When the covens hate the Circle with a passion, and might have discovered who my father was at any time? You know they’d have used that information to hurt him—they did so, as soon as they found out!”
I nodded, because that had happened only recently. Fortunately, the scandal had been minimal since Agnes was dead by then and a new Pythia was on the throne. One who had as many ties to the vamps as to the Circle.
But it was probably a big reason for Jonas’s comment to Pritkin about being careful. Having me seen to be hanging out with a war mage, even dating one, was one thing. Having me seen to be getting too close to him, like able-to-be-influenced close, was another. They had to avoid it looking like Pritkin and I were Agnes and Jonas version 2.0. Which we weren’t!
Pritkin wasn’t the head of the Circle, and he didn’t try to tell me how to run my court.
But would people believe that?
“What are you thinking about?” Rhea asked, probably watching the different expressions flit across my face.
I didn’t know whether to answer her or not. It wasn’t in my best interest to tell her what it was like the be Pythia on a personal level, which was definitely not a selling point. But Hilde’s comment was still ringing in my ears, making me ashamed of myself. And the fact was that I had a perspective on her parents that no one else did.
“I don’t know much about my mother,” I said. “Whether she really loved my father, or whether he was just a means to an end, some useful idiot she picked up because she needed protection, or help with some scheme she was running. I may never know. But I know that your mother loved your father, and I know that she loved you.”
Rhea stared at me. “How do you know that?”
“Because I know what they risked to be together, how hard it was. And while Jonas might have gotten something else out of it, added influence or help for the Circle with their problems, your mother . . .”
“Yes?”
“She didn’t get anything. Except for companionship, of course. But it came at a price. It’s difficult enough to balance a career and a personal life as a woman anyway, but as a Pythia? With everyone watching you all the time and everyone thinking that they have a right to say how you live your life? Yeah, it’s fun.”
“I’m sorry,” Rhea said. “I know that you and Mage Pritkin . . . it must be difficult.”
“Not so much. Not so far. But it will be. They’ll make sure that it is.”
“They?”
“Everyone. The vampires aren’t going to like me being with a mage, especially a war mage. The only reason they’re not bitching about it already is
that there’s a war on and they need me, plus they have other priorities right now. And because most of them don’t know.
“The majority think I’m still with Mircea, and that he’s got me right where the Vampire Senate wants me—as their very own pet Pythia. They assume that any rumors they hear about Pritkin were planted by the senate to lessen concern in the Circle over my relationship with a master vamp. Meanwhile the mages think the same thing about Mircea: that he was trying to advance his status by claiming a closer relationship with his vampire’s little protégé than he actually had.”
“Where did they get that idea?” Rhea asked, looking surprised.
“Your father, for one. Jonas has been spreading that rumor from the beginning, although I didn’t know it for a while. And now that I’m dating a war mage . . . well, that’s what he wanted all along, you know? He even sent me one once—”
“Sent you what?”
“A war mage to date.”
“He did not!” Rhea looked shocked, and then pissed off on my behalf.
I nodded. “Handpicked and bearing flowers and candy. And under orders to be charming.”
“That’s horrible!”
“That’s politics.”
She blinked at that, why I didn’t know. She’d grown up at court. She must have known that everything a Pythia did was political, whether she meant it to be or not. People would make it that way, trying to spin it for their advantage.
Or maybe that’s why Agnes had kept her in the nursery, to shield her from all that.
Thanks, Agnes, I thought. Thanks a lot.
“It didn’t go well,” I said, after a moment. “But then I ended up dating Pritkin anyway, although Jonas was less than completely happy there. The war mage he sent me was a good little Corpsman who would have put the needs of the Circle first. Pritkin . . . he’s not too sure about. But it’s better him than a vampire, so . . .”
“It’s not any of his business!” Rhea said. “It’s not any of their business!”