by Karen Chance
“Don’t you know?”
“I know that he doesn’t accept the truth about himself, any more than you do. ‘Pritkin’.” His lips curled. “A ridiculous, prickly sounding name, so wrong for an incubus. But so right for the mask he was wearing, and wears still.”
The creature suddenly lunged for me, grabbing my upper arms before I could stop him. I should have been afraid, should have been screaming my head off or trying to cower behind the furniture. But I wasn’t.
I was just angry.
“Let me go.”
He did not let me go. But he did crow. “There it is! There, once more, the goddess peeking out. Your mask is slipping tonight, Cassandra.”
I tore away, causing the hazy arms to momentarily go up in smoke, before reforming again at his sides. “I don’t wear a mask.”
“You’re nothing but a mask. Your whole life has been a mask. The poor, downtrodden Seer, afraid of all those terrifying vampires—when you could have stalked and killed and eaten any one of them! The defenseless runaway, cowering in the night—only nobody hurt you, did they?” He sat on Rhea’s chair and crossed his ghostly legs again. “It’s something I have noticed throughout my life: predators tend to sense a greater one, and to steer clear. Tell me, were you jumped a single time, while on those dangerous streets? Were you mugged? Beaten? Something worse? No?”
“Why are you still here?” I demanded, going to the wardrobe and flinging it open.
Only to discover that I’d had my ration of dresses for the day, and was all out.
“To tell you what I came to say.”
“Haven’t you already?” My God, it felt like he’d been talking for a year.
“No. As I said, when I arrived earlier today, I was . . . surprised. I did not expect what I found—”
“There’s a lot of that going around.”
“—but you needed to be warned about the current situation—and about the one you call Pritkin.”
I’d been trying to hop up to see if anything had been stashed on the top shelf, but at that I stopped and looked at him. “Come again?”
“He is like you—he has not embraced his other nature. He was born of multiple strands that were meant to be intertwined like a rope, to make it strong. But instead, he has shredded it, pulled it apart, locked much of himself away. It weakens him, it always has, but he was strong enough in other circumstances to compensate. He cannot do that anymore.”
I leaned back against the wardrobe and crossed my arms. “Seems to be doing okay to me.”
“Yes, to you!” the demon snapped. “To you who hides as efficiently as he does! Neither of you see what you are, and are so closed off, so sure you’re right that—” he got up again and moved closer to the bed. The darkness there allowed me to see what I hadn’t before: what appeared to be genuine emotion on his face. There was frustration and anger, but also regret, and something that I thought might be fear.
It was a strange sight on Pritkin’s features. Fear wasn’t an emotion that I usually associated with the man. Not that he was reckless, as I’d sometimes thought when we first met, but his abilities did allow him to walk where angels feared to tread.
Literally.
“You’re afraid,” I said.
“Of course, I’m afraid! I would be an idiot not to be.”
“Why? About the war? Because we’re winning—”
It was his turn to laugh, and despite coming from a smoke being, it was full-throated and contagious. I felt my own lips quirk in sympathy, before suppressing it. I didn’t hear Pritkin laugh like that too often.
He noticed, and his expression grew rueful, although he didn’t comment. “We are not winning.”
“We killed two gods—”
“Yes, two foolish gods who came here alone. Zeus will not make that mistake. Not after today.”
Suddenly, I remembered my first chat with the All Father, and the weird chorus of voices I’d heard on the edge of his words. Like it wasn’t just him speaking. And something about that thought made me shiver.
“He doesn’t have to worry about being controlled, like Apollo and Ares,” the incubus said, watching me. “He is the one whose control they were trying to avoid. That is likely why they chose to come by themselves; they were tired of his yoke around their necks.”
“But there’s no yoke on him,” I said, finishing the thought. “Because he’s already on top of the heap.”
The demon nodded. “Precisely. Which is why, when he comes, he will come with an army. Not of mortal men or the vampires who vaunt their power so, but which only serves to make them slightly larger ants on the hill with the rest of us. But an army of gods. They will sweep over this world like a tidal wave, and when they are finished . . .”
In my mind, I saw again that wasteland of ruined cities, those mountains of skeletons, the desert sand blown in drifts across highways that no one had bothered to clear, possibly because there was no one left.
Then I shook myself.
“And how do you expect me to stop it?” I asked, my voice harsh. “I’m already doing everything I can.”
“No,” he said quietly. “You are not.”
And then he told me.
~~~
The demon finally faded away, and I ran a bath in the tub wedged in between the door and the wardrobe. Unlike modern bathtubs, where the hot water came in as it filled up, this one required you to run it full of cold and then to use the gas heating unit in the base. Which would have been fine except that the mechanism was cranky and would roast you like a plucked chicken if you weren’t careful.
And sometimes, even if you were.
So, it took a while, which left me sitting on the floor by the tub, monitoring the damned thing, because it could go from tepid to lava pretty darned fast. I’d often thought that the Victorians, who had made the tub—and the lights downstairs, which would electrocute you if you handled them wrong, and the pretty, bright green wallpaper, which got its color from arsenic and could poison you—had had some kind of death wish. Or maybe that was why they’d ended up conquering half the world.
After hanging out in their houses for a while, nothing scared them anymore.
Plenty of things scared me, however, like Pritkin’s incubus.
But not because he was a demon.
Demons were actually easier for me to understand than for most people, who just assumed they were evil. I thought a little differently, maybe because I’d grown up with vamps. From what I’d seen, demons were basically vamps on steroids: self-interested to the core, but potentially helpful if assisting you netted them a significant gain.
In fact, vamps were harder to predict, because they’d started out as humans and still sometimes acted like it. They could surprise you, doing things occasionally even if they didn’t directly help them. It wasn’t a good idea to bet on it, but it did happen. My governess, Eugenie, for instance, had literally died for me, refusing to tell my old vampire guardian where I’d run away to, even as he ripped her apart.
Demons, on the other hand, had never been human, and they didn’t act like it. Every demon I knew was completely egocentric, and not because centuries of life—and all the backstabbing, betrayal, and general bullshit that came with it—had made them that way. They were like that because they were like that; it was their nature.
But that didn’t mean that they were evil; in fact, they didn’t even seem to understand the term. Something was “good” if it helped them, and “bad” if it didn’t. The action itself was almost irrelevant.
To figure out if you could trust a demon, then, you first had to know what it wanted.
Take Adra, the head of the demon high council. He skeeved most people out just by walking into a room, maybe because of the less-than-convincing glamourie he wore, which was designed to make him look like a slightly chubby boy scout. It didn’t.
Sometimes, the pleasant, round face blanked entirely, when he forgot that humans required expressions in order not to look like something out
of a horror movie. Sometimes, he got confused about the—to him—rapidly changing human culture, which resulted in him doing things to fit in, like taking snuff, that had been out of fashion for hundreds of years. And sometimes, he just got the expressions wrong altogether, like when he’d grinned at the mention of the massacre at Aeslinn’s court.
That had happened at the last war council meeting he’d attended, which was probably why he hadn’t been invited to any more war councils. The vamps and mages had taken heavy losses in that battle, and hadn’t appreciated the sly grin that Adra had deemed appropriate. The meeting had halted early, after a lot of shouting, and Adra and I had ended up out in the hall where I tried to explain it to him.
“They are soft,” he announced. “We took more casualties in one day of your mother’s depredations in the hells than your side has known in this entire war—a great many more! I have seen her mow down entire armies, and use their power to crush others, yet they cry over a few thousand men!”
“It wasn’t a few thousand,” I said, feeling more than a little angry myself. “It was closer to ten if you include the vamps, which was a quarter of the entire force assembled for the war—”
“Then they must assemble a larger one. And stop mourning our victories as though they were defeats. Did they think there would be no casualties in this conflict?”
“No, but not in these numbers. The Senate and Circle have had a treaty for hundreds of years. They’re not used to this—”
“Then they had best get used to it,” Adra said bluntly. “Those of us who battled the gods in the past knew exactly what to expect when—” he broke off, possibly because I’d just crossed my arms. Which I guessed he interpreted correctly, because he sighed. “Oh, very well. In the interests of preserving peace in our ranks . . . how is this?”
“Auggghhh!”
He frowned, which was a considerable improvement over whatever the fuck that had been.
“Not good?”
“No! No! Don’t ever do that again!” Damn, that face was going to haunt my dreams.
“Then what?” he sounded exasperated. Dealing with humans and their fanged cousins was clearly a trial.
I glanced around, but nobody was in view. “Like this,” I said, and attempted to look sad and respectful at the same time.
“Yes?” Now he sounded impatient.
“Like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like the face I just made—”
“You did not make a face.”
“Yes, I did—"
“You did not. You always look like that. Are you always in mourning?”
“No! And I do not always look like that.”
The fake gray eyes squinted at me in obvious disbelief. “Try it again.”
I tried it again.
“You see?” he gestured at me. “No change.”
“There was a change! Look,” I made a happy face. “See, that is happy.”
“Yes, your mouth moved.”
“And this is sad—”
“Yes, your mouth moved again. Upwards is happy; downwards is sad. I already know this. But your mouth was in neither of those positions before.”
“There are other things to an expression than mouth movements.”
“Such as?”
I was starting to see why Adra had problems controlling his face. “Like eyebrow changes and . . . and the sort of micro expressions that—”
“There are micro expressions now?” he sounded horrified.
“Yes! Otherwise, you look like bad CGI—”
“I do not know what that is.”
I sighed, and attempted to avoid banging my head against the wall, because he’d probably pick up on that one. “It means you won’t look real.”
“I am not attempting to look real, if by that you mean human. I am attempting to be polite, and achieve normal, working relationships—”
“Which you don’t do by laughing at our dead!”
“I was not laughing; I was smiling at the thought of our victory, but I shall attempt to refrain in future.” He applied a mournful expression which, thankfully, was less exaggerated than the last, and therefore managed not to look like a tortured soul screaming in hell. I decided not to ask where he’d acquired that template.
“You look like you just lost your best friend,” I told him.
“I do not have a best friend.”
I waited.
The mournful expression became slightly less so, albeit with a tinge of crushing depression.
“Now you look like you just got fired and came home to find out that your house burned down.”
“But, if I was on fire, would I not expect—” I held up a finger. He sighed again. “Very well, show me once more.”
I showed him. He, in turn, made an expression that was a mixture of sadness and anger, maybe because I was too annoyed to demonstrate it properly. But it was an improvement on the others.
“Better?”
“Better,” I agreed, and then bowed out of the conversation when the consul came up, with real anger all but boiling off her.
Adra tried out his new expression, and she stopped abruptly, as if caught off guard. He gave me a subtle thumbs up and smiled. And then realized that he’d made a mistake and tried to reapply the mournful mask, but went too far again.
I hotfooted it down the hallway, with the consul’s horrified cry floating through the air after me.
So, yeah, Adra was having issues with his allies. But he put up with it because we were fighting the same enemy. The gods, as he mentioned, had hunted demons, devastating whole races in their never-ending thirst for power.
He and the rest of the council feared a return of the bad old days if the barrier keeping their opponents out of our shared universe ever fell. He feared it so much that he was even willing to work with the daughter of the greatest demon hunter ever in order to prevent it. My mother’s name was still feared and hated in the hells, despite her change of heart and her success in ridding them of the others of her kind. And despite the fact that the barrier currently protecting them was something she had made.
I guessed one good deed didn’t really make up for scouring a few thousand worlds.
But demons were practical, and the past was less important to Adra than the future, specifically his future. He didn’t want to die, and as one of the most powerful demons out there, he’d be a fat prize for some hungry god. So, he was putting up with us—the Circle, the Senate, even me—since he knew the demons couldn’t win on their own.
I trusted Adra—to a point—because I knew what he wanted.
The question was, what did Pritkin’s incubus want?
Because I didn’t think it was merely to help us in the war, as he’d claimed.
He’d said that he wanted to convince Pritkin to use more of his demonic powers against our enemies. Or, to be more precise, that he wanted me to convince him. “He won’t do it for anyone else, but he would do it for you.”
And maybe he would. But I wasn’t planning to test that theory, and not only because I wasn’t stupid. The more Pritkin used his demon side, the more control it gained over him, something I might have overlooked considering our current situation.
Except for one thing.
I had been warned.
“It is a simple question, is it not?” Artemis asked. “You are proposing to risk much for him.”
“He would do it for me.”
“Would he? They are self-serving creatures, demons—”
“You could say the same about humans—or gods.”
An eyebrow raised. “Perhaps. But we are not talking of them. But of a creature who is struggling against his very nature. Sooner or later, he will give into it. Perhaps it is best if it is among his own kind.”
“They aren't his kind! They're—” I thought about the demons I knew, from the mostly benign to the frankly terrifying. None of which reminded me in the slightest of the man downstairs. “He's human.”
“He is part human. It is his other half about which he has yet to learn.”
The conversation had taken place after I traveled back in time to see my mother, seeking information. Rosier had kidnapped Pritkin and dragged him into the hells and I’d needed help to get him back. She’d been less than enthusiastic about giving it, but in the short talk we’d had, she’d made one thing very clear: waking Pritkin’s demon was a bad idea.
And when you get life advice from a goddess, it’s probably best to take it.
Chapter Seventeen
M y body informed me that my back was finally getting warm. I reached up and carefully tested the bath water with a pinkie. It was hot, but in the good way, not the scald-your-skin-off-and-end-your-life-screaming kind of way.
I turned off the heater, dropped the robe and climbed in.
And, okay, that was terrible, so terrible that I almost climbed right back out again, with all of my healing burns waking up to bitch at me. And then wonderful, when I persisted and they got tired of yelling and settled down. The tension in my body held for another minute, as if afraid to let up.
And then it released all at once, as if I was boneless.
It felt so good that I almost cried, and I hadn’t even added the soap yet.
I remedied that, but didn’t scrub down, because I didn’t want to wake up the burns again. There were a lot of them, although nothing like I had expected. The terrible silver scrawls were gone, and so too were the disturbing scars they had left behind. But Mircea must have run out of juice before he’d gotten to the rest of my collection, leaving me with pink polka dots all over my body from the rain of burning coal, as well as cuts and abrasions galore. I looked like I’d been in a fight, but not like I’d won.
“We are not winning.”
Shut up! I pushed the memory of what the incubus had said away, and lay back in the hot, hot, almost too hot water. And gave a deep, and heartfelt sigh.
This was nice, I thought drowsily. This was very nice. There was a little green oil slick on the water’s surface, probably from the awful salve. But it looked like somebody had sponged me off at some point, probably in order to tend to the wounds, so I hadn’t dirtied my bath too much.