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“His name is Tony, or Fat Asshole if you prefer,” Alphonse said.

“You always were a huge pile of shit, you know that?”Tony asked.

Alphonse punched him in the back of the head again.

“—to tell Lady Phemonoe where to find your mother,” Pritkin soldiered on.“Whom the Spartoi were stalking at the time.Had she shown back up at the Pythian Court—”

“She would have been killed,” I said.There was no doubt about that; I’d seen what hunted her.

“Almost certainly.That is why she and your father fled to begin with.”

“The Spartoi?”Zara asked.

“Demigod sons of Ares,” Mircea explained.“They were aware that the spell Artemis had used to bar the gods from returning to Earth drew part of its power from her soul.If she died, and her soul left this realm—”

“Daddy’s home,” Gray Curls said, scowling.

“Essentially, yes.”

“Is that how they did it, then?”Zara asked.“Is that how the gods got in?”She looked at Rhea, who blinked.

“No.Artemis perished some years ago, but her soul remains in this realm.Antonio had Cassie’s father make the orb, a magical talisman, to trap both of their spirits after the assassination—”

“I wasowed, all right?”The fat man said when everybody looked at him.“No reward, a death threat, and then the damned Spartoi crawling all over the place—because somebody talked and they got wind of it!But I saved you, okay?”He looked at me.“I put them off!Told ‘em I had no idea where they got the idea that I was sheltering the Pythia’s missing heir, and if she was around, you’d damned well better believe the reward was mine!

“And they bought it—”

“Of course, they did,” Mircea said.“Avariciousness was a far more believable defense than mere ignorance.”

“—so you wouldn’t even be here if not for me!”

“Should I thank you for killing my parents, too?”I asked, trying and mostly failing to keep my temper.“For trapping their souls so you could gloat over them like a trophy, just because they refused to have me See for you?For orphaning and then abusing me—”

“Abusing!”Tony snorted.“You were fine.Yeah, you had nightmares once in a while, but you were gonna have those anyway.I didn’t make you a Seer; you already were one.I just figured you should be mine in place of all that money I missed out on and all that risk I tookfor you.And for a while, you were really paying off.Shorting that airline stock alone made me millions—”

He was interrupted by me grabbing the front of his robe.

“Give me one reason I shouldn’t kill you right now!You murdered them to steal me away; you tormented me my whole childhood; you ripped Eugenieapart—”

“That traitorous bitch!She wouldn’t tell me where you’d gone.She wouldn’t—”

I belted him, which did nothing except hurt my knuckles, and then Alphonse did it, which had a lot more effect.Tony ended up on the floor, his jaw broken for a second before he healed it, and glowered up at us.Then he spat blood and a tooth.

“You getnothing, you hear me?”he said.“Nothing more from me until I get a guarantee—”

“The only guarantee I’ll give is to kill you fast,” Alphonse said, as I spotted something gleaming softly in the dust.“And believe me, that’s a mercy considering what I was gonna do—”

He was interrupted by the scholar and the murderous horde of gods again, while I crouched down and retrieved something from the floor.Something that had fallen out of Tony’s pocket when he hit the ground.Something that looked a lot like—

“Give me that!”he reached for it, only to take a boot to the face from Alphonse.I didn’t even reply.Just scooped my parents’ orb into the scarf Pritkin had lent me, tied the edge into a knot around it, and then tied the whole thing around my waist.

“I think I can take it from here,” Rhea said.

“Yeah!”Tony nodded.“Why don’t you do that?Tell ‘em what they owe me!Tell ‘em they wouldn’t even have this chance but for me!I saved the goddamnedworld!”

“You haven’t yet,” she said.

“Well, if they succeed, I will have!Who else were you gonna send back there?And you know, I could have stayed, right?I could have flashed back in, gone through a portal to Earth, and—”