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“So what attracted them?”

“Desperation?”

“What makes a god desperate?”I asked, frowning.“And why are they outhere?You’d think they’d have better places to look for power than this,” I gestured at the small collection of hills, the flat sands beyond, and the sparse scrub.There were beautiful places in the deserts outside Vegas, but this wasn’t one of them.I’d thought before that the covens must have chosen it precisely for that reason.

If you wanted to go unnoticed, you could do worse.

“This is speculation,” he warned me.

“I’ll take it.”Pritkin’s speculation was better than most people’s certainty.

He looked out over the uninspired vista, his forehead wrinkling slightly.It was the expression I’d seen when I first came up here before he’d spotted me.As if he’d been trying to puzzle things out after everyone went to sleep, and I guessed he’d managed it.

“The gods might not have found what they expected when they returned,” he said after a moment.“At first, I’m sure it was a feast,” he added, his jaw tightening.“But what about after the initial conquest?With the survivors here and in Faerie either dead or hiding in small groups, and the powerful demon lords that the gods were really after, the ones who would make them a truly satisfying meal, absent…”

“But were they absent?”I asked because he was right.Earth or even Faerie wasn’t the point of all this.We were just the staging ground for the invasion of the hells the gods wanted because that was where their real prey lay.The ones with millennia of stored-up power that could satisfy even a divine appetite.

“I know them,” Pritkin said flatly.“The demon lords are not cowards, but they’re not stupid, either, and they’ve fought this war before.They rarely have to be taught the same lesson twice.

“They would scatter as soon as the gods returned and were busy taking vengeance on Earth and Faerie.They’d head to the far reaches of their realm, possibly even beyond them, and stay there.Some plotting revenge, others hoping for better days.But what they would not do is to come here or anywhere near here.”

“And the gods were starved when they arrived,” I said, thinking it through.“And there were a lot of them.So they probably got what they barely considered a meal before the buffet closed.Leaving them what?Fighting over scraps?”

“Not the greatest of them,” Pritkin said.“Zeus and the like.If they were willing to venture into the hells after being reinvigorated with the energy they found here, they would find prey.Not everyone could flee, and many of the demon races are not much more powerful than humans when it comes down to it.”

I thought about the quirky, slightly harassed-looking denizens of the demon world known on Earth as the Shadowland.It was one of the few I’d ever been to, as it was a neutral zone where human mages could go to buy whatever esoteric potion supplies were only available there.And where demons from a thousand races met to work out problems, trade, and offer their services to the Demon High Council, which met there, and where many of its members had courts.

But the regular Joes I’d encountered, or regular demons, I guessed, while they’d been scary sometimes, more often were just trying to make a living.I wondered where they were now.I wonderedifthey were now.

Being close to Earth, metaphysically speaking, was no longer a plus.

“So the strongest gods are off ravaging the hells,” I said, “which haven’t even fully recovered from the last time they were here, and the rest...are prowling around Earth?”

“Possibly,” but Pritkin looked dissatisfied.“But why in the desert?And why so many?The gods need magical energy; it is the only thing they live off of and the one power source they can use.But this…” he looked around at the barren wasteland, his expression echoing my thoughts.

This didn’t look like the Vegas buffet they’d probably been hoping for.

“Maybe most of them are in the hells then,” I said, “and it’s just a few crazy ones out here.”

“No.”He sounded certain.“It would be suicide for the lesser gods.The demon lords have had time to plan, and they would not leave their worlds undefended.Not to mention that the people of those worlds must know they are fighting for their lives.There will be snares everywhere, fiendish traps, and ambushes, as there were last time.The demon lords first tried to fight, arraying their armies against the gods, and were decimated.They learned better.They won’t make that mistake again, but they won’t just lie down and die.They’ll have prepared for a fight; it’s in their nature.”

“You almost sound proud of them,” I said before I thought.Because Pritkin hated his demon half.

Only, he currently didn’t have it, did he?

Shortly before we were whisked away to the future, he’d used a spell to split the demon part of his nature off from the rest of himself.He’d needed to be in two places at once: to win a challenge in a contest we were engaged in and to rescue me.But that had left his counterpart behind to face the gods’ return on his own, as he’d been outside the spell that had grabbed us and sent us to this era.And if he’d still been in Faerie...

But no.He was Pritkin.He was smart.

He’d survive.

“I know them,” Pritkin said, watching me as if he knew the path my thoughts had taken.“The hells will live up to their name where the gods are concerned.”

“So, the greatest gods might chance it as they need more power than the rest.But everyone else...what are they doing?”

“Looking in holes,” Pritkin said, giving me a flashback to the great eye in the crack above us.“Searching for every scrap of power left in this world.And no fewer than four of them are prowling in this vicinity…”

His own eyes widened suddenly.