Page 87

“No.”He nodded at the street below.“Look at what he’s built here, what he’sdone.When I was hurt, when Ruth—” he paused, as he always did at her name, even now.Even after knowing what she’d been.“After what happened withRuth,” he said again, stressing the name as if reading my thoughts, “what did I do?When my world fell apart, so did I.Disappeared into a bottle, so sunk in pain and self-loathing that I couldn’t see anything else.If Jonas hadn’t come and forcibly dragged me out, I might still be there.

“But with him…” he gestured at the thriving town.“He could have dropped off the face of the Earth—quite literally—and disappeared into one of the farther-flung Hells.The gods aren’t there yet, and it may be a long time before they arrive if the constant bickering and jealousy they’re prone to continue.

“But he didn’t.He also didn’t crawl into a hole and wish to die.He did this instead.”He looked around, and there was wonder on his face as well as in his voice.“Look at it.Do you know how many he’s saved here?How many he’s helped?”

“I—we didn’t get around to discussing it,” I said, feeling shitty all over again.Because we might have if I hadn’t immediately started demanding things of him.Things I had no right to expect after the way we’d parted.

“He’s been working with the covens.He has thousands of people here, but he’s helped many more to get out of the vicinity entirely, sending them abroad to safer areas using the coven’s portal system.It’s the main reason Zara and the rest stayed here: to help him.”

“But the portals draw the gods—”

“Which is why they don’t fire any up when they’re near, although it was easier in the early days when they were sending through the most people.The gods were feasting so heavily then that they barely noticed a portal firing, here or there…”

Yeah, I thought as he petered off.

I couldn’t imagine what that must have been like, either.

“He never told the covens who he was?”I asked after a minute.

Pritkin shook his head.“He didn’t trust even them that much and knew he was being hunted.There was a bounty on his head, but no one ever collected.No one knew.”

“He really did start over,” I said, wondering again how hard that must have been.

“He had no choice—and no warning.We were gone in an instant, and things became dangerous for him at the fey court immediately thereafter.”

“They thought he was you.”

“Heisme,” Pritkin said, in a first for him.“And he’d just won the second of two challenges for the throne.You know it was best out of five.”

I nodded; he’d told me back when we were attempting to do the same thing ourselves.It all seemed so pointless now, the games the fey had played, the politics, the stupid, endless bickering.Not that humans were any better...

“So they tried to kill him,” I said, and didn’t make it a question.They’d done the same to us.

“Immediately.It was a five-alarm fire by then, for if he won one more…”

I laughed suddenly; I didn’t know why.Maybe at the image.An incubus as king of one of the great houses of the Light Fey!

“He could pull it off if anyone could,” I said, getting an image of an insouciant Pritkin, like the young man I’d known once in medieval Wales, sprawled on the throne with a leg draped over the arm.It was strangely believable.

“What is it?”his other half asked, seeing something on my face.

“Just thinking about Wales.You were different then.”

“Life was different then.”

Yeah, I guessed so.He hadn’t had the weight of the world on his shoulders and had laughed a lot.That’s what I remembered about the young man; he’d always been laughing.And the worst thing I’d had to deal with then had been a pissed-off Gertie.

Well, and a returning Ares, but he’d proved to be, oh, so much easier than what we had now!Just so much.And I guessed that showed in my expression, too, because Pritkin nodded at the scene below to distract me.

It worked because Æsubrand and Enid had come this way, eating something on a stick.And then Enid squealed and pointed with her stick, and Æsubrand went forward to haggle with another vendor, this one selling what looked a lot like cotton candy, only that couldn’t be right.But there were cones of the stuff, admittedly in a light golden color, probably from the raw sugar used to make it instead of the neon brights I was used to.

“I thought there wasn’t any electricity here,” I said because I’d yet to see any sign of it.

“There’s not, except in Vegas.Out here, it would attract too much attention.The gods can sense it, although they sometimes confuse it with lightning.But a static lightning cloud in the desert might eventually pique someone’s curiosity, and not all the gods are mad.”

“Then how is he making it?”I asked, leaning forward for a better look.

“Watch.”