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My fists clenched.

“I thought that’s what you feared,” I said, wondering if she’d been right about me all along.“That I was too much like her.”

“I’d heard things.But the experience of you is...somewhat different.”

I laughed suddenly.I bet!No one expected a demigoddess to be wracked by fear all the time, to flounder around out of her depth all the time, and lately, to want to kill every god she sawall the time!Okay, maybe that last part, but that wasn’t likely to end any better!

“No, it wouldn’t,” she agreed.

“Stay out of my head!”

“I would like to,” it was flat.“I don’t enjoy this any more than you do.My gift is a curse as much as a blessing, and lately, that has been truer than ever.But it has allowed me to understand you better—”

“That makes one of us!”I said bitterly.

“—and what I understand is that I was wrong, and you are right.At least in this instance,” she added as my startled eyes found hers.

“About what?”

“About all of it—so far.You cannot take what Marsden is offering.Even were it to work, which I very much doubt—”

I nodded.As a demigod herself, Bodil understood what the rest did not.That human power next to a god’s was just...no power at all.

“—the temptation would be too great.It was even for the gods themselves.It was for your mother.It likely would have been for my father had he not been too weak to channel enough of it to count.But if he had, or if I had…” Her eyes went distant.“I remember the rage I felt when he died, when your mother killed him to absorb his gift, as carelessly as I might swat a fly.She didn’t care about him or the daughter he left behind, watching from the shadows and terrified, and then all alone when her only protector was gone.”

I stared at her.I hadn’t known that Bodil had seen her father’s death or my mother’s part in it.No wonder she’d hated me when we first met!

I didn’t blame her.

But she only looked at me now and smiled slightly.“Not hate.Fear.I know what it’s like, Cassie.To be able to touch their gift but not possess it.It torments us, but it gives us...a sort of clarity.One they do not have.It buys us time.”

“Time for what?”I said bitterly.Because it looked like we’d run out of time!

She thought for a moment.And then that distant look came back as if she was seeing it all again.“I remember that night perfectly, the fear that consumed me and paralyzed my limbs, the rage that followed the fear.Your mother was gone by then, off wreaking havoc in the hells, but others were there.I had never been liked—too distant, too strange, tooother—to be trusted.But no one had dared...what they dared when he was gone.

“I hated them, yes, yes, I did, with every fiber of my being.And had I had his power, just that much, just my father’s limited scope...Ah, the vengeance I would have taken!It would have been epic had I left anyone alive to remember it!

“But I wouldn’t have.In my childish fear and hate, I would have burned them all to the ground, and I would have enjoyed it.I would have reveled in it as the gods do who wreak such destruction everywhere they go.And I would have been justified—for some.

“But it is easier to start that type of thing than to finish it when the fire burns in your veins, and the laughter bubbles up in your throat.And the other way, the slower, less satisfying, more frustrating way of winning out, the one I had to employ because I didn’t have that power...it’s harder.So very much harder.”

I thought about the kinds of battles I’d been waging ever since getting this job.And found myself nodding again.The clashes with Jonas, when I’d had to outwit him or move heaven and earth to bring him around to my side; the battles with the senate, with ages-old vamps who had started out smarter than me and whose intellect had been sharpened by hundreds of years of experience; the constant challenges from the gods and their allies, which had started on day one and never let up!

Yes, so much easier to wave a hand and make them all go away.To not have to struggle to learn diplomacy, to master my craft, to take my beatings and humiliations and failures.Because yeah, I’d failed plenty.But just to be able to think a thing and have it happen, to flick out my hand or glance at a problem and have it melt away.Oh, yes, so much easier!

“And so much more insidious,” Bodil said softly.“But we can’t do that, you and I.Stronger I might have been than any of them save Nimue, but stronger than all of them?Or than her when she never trusted me, not for a minute, because she knew the temptation I felt, the blood that boiled inside my veins, the longing for the power to make the pain go away.She felt it herself, lived with it every day, and so no, she never trusted me.

“The other half-breeds—yes, there were more of us once,” she added when she saw my startled look.“Although they faded away with time.Dying of old age, for not all demigods are favored with long life; or accidents, for they were reckless, those all-too-mortal children of the gods; or murdered, oftentimes by each other, because they bred a little too true.

“But not me.I survived.Do you know why?”

I shook my head, my throat too full to speak.

“I learned a lesson in my frustration.In all that time when power burned at my fingertips, only not enough.I learned that I was glad for my fey blood, for the weakness that bound me to a lesser existence, to a more mundane world.I saw the gods when they were here and recognized them for what they were: squabbling children who never had to learn any wisdom, any restraint, any compassion, any maturity.For what good are those things to those who can snap their fingers and have whatever they want?

“A person learns wisdom by being stupid and suffering the consequences of bad decisions.But they never had to learn anything, and they never suffered.Those who fell out of favor with their so-called betters merely died, and the others moved on without, it seemed, learning much at all.They were too busy chasing more—power, lust, greed, whatever their treasure of the moment was, whatever fleeting passion they had.

“Restraint, likewise, is learned from having to practice it, even when you desperately don’t want to.Compassion by feeling the scourge of the lash yourself, understanding the pain of others, and starting to see them as real people who suffer as you do, cry as you do, break as you do.But the gods never learned any of that, for they never experienced it.