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P ritkin was still talking, but I couldn’t hear him with what sounded like Niagara Falls suddenly rushing through my head. Shock, I thought blankly. I’m in shock.

Only no, it was worse than that.

Seeing Jonas somehow still alive when he’d been ancient, even by magical standards, fifty years ago had made my heart leap—first with fear that we might not be able to save him and then with a flood of relief when we somehow did. We’d had our problems, he and I, ever since he’d realized that I wouldn’t be a puppet for the Circle anymore than I was for the Senate. But I’d still been so happy to see him!

With the wily old mage on our side, our chances had just shot through the roof, I’d thought. Maybe I didn’t have to do this with just a ragtag group of refugees, I’d thought. The Silver Circle had survived, and its leader with it, and we could do this, I’d thought.

And now all I could think was: he’s mad.

My God, Jonas Marsden was mad, and we were so freaking screwed.

“Bodil scanned him after we arrived when he was too exhausted to have any walls up,” Pritkin was saying, although I could barely hear him over the roar in my head. “She heard it all, and it isn’t pretty.”

“I got that much,” I said numbly.

But he didn’t seem to believe me. He seemed to think I was about to lose it because he was suddenly talking fast and low, not trying to excuse the old man, because what could excuse that? But doing something I didn’t understand because I couldn’t understand anything right then.

“We’ve been through it,” he said, “all of us, but especially you, for a while now. But for us, this has lasted less than a year. Imagine an ordeal fifty times as long and with no wins or reprieves to lessen the impact. Nothing but blow after blow, year after year, seeing everything you worked so hard to build, your legacy, your entire world, being eradicated with no way to stop it.

“Jonas hoped we would return, but he didn’t know . Everyone else believed we had died, early casualties to the wrath of the gods, which seemed a fair assumption. And even if we did somehow come back, it might be too late.

“So he sacrificed the remaining Corpsmen, one after another, on futile attempts to return to the past. He didn’t have to force them; from what Bodil saw, they volunteered. They’d lost everything, and it seemed the only chance they had left.

“But those spells are treacherous, and the old Guild records that might have helped improve them were not available—”

“Guild?” Someone else said, I couldn’t focus enough to understand who. My body was still riding shockwaves, and my head was chanting, screwed, screwed, we’re so very screwed .

“It’s what they called themselves,” Pritkin said, eyes on me. As if trying to determine just how bad this was going to be. Apparently, he decided pretty bad because he went into lecture mode to give me a minute.

It wasn’t going to be nearly long enough.

His voice faded into the distance as my latest bunch of nightmare fodder hit me like a fist. I’d just seen monsters ripping through people, destroying bodies to get to the soul energy inside, cracking them like eggs—and reminding me viscerally that I wasn’t much different. My mother had been one like them, only far worse. Instead of ripping through a bunch of dark mages, she’d destroyed entire worlds, sucking armies of demons dry to feed her never-ending hunger and then using the energy she obtained to attack her own kind, banishing the gods from this universe and allowing her to rule alone.

Her plans hadn’t worked out quite the way she’d hoped, but that didn’t change what she’d done or what I was. And now Jonas wanted to give me a crap ton of unrestricted power? When my temper was out of control half the time, when the creatures who destroyed my world were everywhere, just begging to be fought, when the Pythian power that usually leashed me was dormant and wouldn’t have any control over this new mass of energy, even if it wasn’t?

Chills went up my arms suddenly.

He was mad.

“You’re not your mother,” Bodil said abruptly as if she’d been following my thoughts. And I guessed she had because she was suddenly in them.

The whole room went dim as if a veil had been thrown over it, and everything beyond that veil slowed way the hell down. I glanced around in confusion and found only one person looking the same as always: just as vibrant, just as awe-inspiring, and just as serene. Bodil had decided that we needed a chat when what I needed—

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 saw all 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, too other —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.

“And so, they never matured. Their power shielded them and, in the process, stole any opportunity to be better.”

I thought about my mother then and wondered if she’d learned anything in all those lonely years on Earth after her plan worked and the gods were driven out or killed. Leaving her to rule this universe as her personal fiefdom. Only to swiftly realize that the final battle had drained her more than she knew and that she was now the hunted one, with all her old enemies among the demons and the children the gods had left behind now stalking her.

“I don’t know,” Bodil said quietly, picking up on my thoughts. “And neither do you.”

“No,” I said, my mental voice cracking. “I don’t know much about her. Even after going back to the past to find her. I know it was wrong,” I added, noticing her surprise. “But I just wanted to see her…”

“And what did you see?”

I didn’t know why she bothered to ask, as I seemed an open book. But she was looking at me with those eyes glowing reddish again as if her power was up and surging. As if this mattered.

“Someone who was very good with the Pythian energy, almost effortless,” I finally answered. Just seeing her use it had taught me, oh, so much! It had been like breathing for her, like shifting was for me. So simple and natural...

“And what else?” Bodil pressed.

And I tried; I honestly did. But while I could have talked all day about my father, that mess of contradictions, talent, boldness, insecurity, and sheer goofballness that he’d been, with his bag-lady ghost and constant scrapes, my mother...

“Is a blank,” Boldil whispered.

I nodded slowly. I still didn’t understand her. I knew what she’d done, but who she was, what she’d wanted beyond power, if anything, even how she’d felt about me...

No. I didn’t know that. She was a blank, and she always had been.

“I don’t know if they can learn,” Bodil said after a moment. “The power stunts them, and even after they shed it, I’m not sure they shed its effects. But you and I were raised differently. We can choose .”

And so we came to the crux of it. I looked at her and saw none of the serenity I was used to. She was still afraid, I realized.

She was afraid of me.

“Should I not be?” she asked. “The daughter of Artemis?”

“The very human daughter,” I reminded her. “And far weaker than you ever were.”

“Are you?” It was suddenly sharp. “You can feed as she did, and there are plenty of free-floating spirits here. You saw some of them before, and I saw glimpses of them in your mind. The remains of the billions the gods killed and did not consume, for they were not powerful enough to be worth the effort. But there are so many, and for you, they could form a veritable feast—”

“I can’t do that!” I said, staring at her in horror. “They’d fight me off!”

“For a while,” she agreed serenely. “Until you absorbed enough energy for it not to matter. Until you became too powerful—”

I had a sudden, absurd image of a giant-sized Cassie striding over the land, gobbling up masses of ghosts the way the mad gods had done to the mages until I became strong enough to cannibalize something more powerful. Until I started going after the gods themselves, first the weaker, crazed variety too stupid to run, and then the rare stronger ones who still resided here on Earth. And finally, after using another ability I’d inherited from my mother, to open the pathways into the hells, feasting and growing fat on everything I found there, demons and gods alike, until—

Until what? I wondered. Until I fulfilled her dream and became just like her? Or until a coalition of the leading gods killed me, and I became just another idiot demigod punching above her station? And left the world, all the worlds, of this universe to the ravages of a horde that never became satiated, never got enough?

I stared sickly at Bodil, and she stared back, saying nothing because she didn’t have to. We both knew it was possible; hell, after my recent experiences, maybe even likely. I wouldn’t have made it fifty years like Jonas, I thought with sudden clarity.

I’d have tried it.

Sooner or later, I knew I would have.

Maybe with the best of intentions, but how long until the hunger took me, and that was all I knew anymore? How long before I gave into it, as every single one of the others had, including my mother? How long—

Bodil grasped my wrist suddenly enough to make me gasp and break the spiral I’d been falling into. And whatever this was—a vision, a mind-invasion, a trick—it felt real. She felt real, gripping my skin hard enough to leave little indents from her nails in my skin.

“But you have an advantage they didn’t have, not even her,” she told me. “ You get to choose. And can choose differently—”

“Can I?” I looked at her and didn’t bother to hide the despair I knew was in my eyes. It was echoing all through me, shuddering right down to the bone. Because I feared and lusted for that future so much it scared me.

I wanted to make them hurt; to see them bleed . I was tired of skulking in the shadows, of scurrying around, and trying and trying and trying and failing more often than not! Of being their victim when I’d never asked for any of this!

I wanted to stand up for once and take them on, all of them, and wipe them out with a wave of my hand or with more than that. With cracking bones and sundering skin if need be, with draining power and growing darkness, with the certainty that death reached out its clutching fingers for us all. And feel myself falling into its embrace just as long as they fell with me—

“ Stop it .” Bodil’s voice was flat, but her hand tightened enough that it felt like I’d experience some of those cracking bones sooner than expected. “Stop it and choose .”

“And if I choose wrong?” I challenged, looking up at her with burning eyes. “If I choose mother’s path instead of father’s—”

“Then you’re a fool, Cassie Palmer. Your mother failed, all her strength not excepted. Your father won .”

And just that fast, I was out of it and panting in a suddenly brilliantly lit room filled with color and light and a shaken-looking Bodil gulping something out of a hide skin bag. Because I guessed that hadn’t been easy. No, for us demigods, that sort of thing never was, was it? I thought, catching her eye as she wiped a hand across her lips and stared back, her rich skin tone as ashen as it ever got.

Choose , the word floated in the air between us, and I suddenly realized I had a bigger challenge than I’d thought. Battling gods I could do; I’d done it before. But this time, I had a bigger enemy. This time, I had to overcome myself.

And that was likely to be a much harder fight.