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W hat?” I looked at Billy Joe blankly.

He stared back. “I mean, I knew something wasn’t right. The whole metaphysical atmosphere around here was churned up after that battle at the warehouse. Do you have any idea how much power you guys were putting out?”

“Um—”

“It looked like a goddamned supernova, and nobody knew what was causing it! None of my sort could even get close enough to take a peek without risking getting ripped apart, although there were guesses. All of which pale by freaking comparison to the truth!” He stared at me some more, the hazel eyes accusing. “What the actual fuck? ”

“Billy!”

“And you wonder why I came back!”

“You shouldn’t have—”

“Oh, hell yes, I should! You know, this fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants shit might have worked for your mom, but she was freaking Artemis. You aren’t—”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“I think you don’t know that! And those bozos you pal around with are no better! Pritkin and his stupid demon half, with a beef that’s been going on for more than a century and is now threatening the goddamned world! Mircea and his let-me-manipulate-you-into-something-crazy-yet-again bullshit. Jonas and his arrogance—”

“He isn’t arrogant—”

“You’re right—he’s worse. Here, Cas, just drain this half of a god I hunted down for you like a good girl— the absolute psycho! ”

I almost smiled at that because Billy always had a way of cutting through the BS. “Okay, maybe he is a little psycho—”

“And you’re no better!”

“What?”

I thought he was joking at first, but his brows had pulled together, and he looked pissed. “I was gone for a few months , and this— this is what you get up to?”

“It wasn’t me!”

“ It never is! Yes, somehow, here you are, right in the middle of—”

He cut off abruptly, which might have given me a chance to get in more than a couple of words, but he held up a finger. And since he’d also cocked his head and seemed to be listening for something, I swallowed my comment back down. And waited while nothing happened except for the wind throwing a tumbleweed around.

Until a dim scarf of a ghost zoomed up and stopped abruptly in front of Billy Joe.

It was disturbing, consisting of nothing but a vague, amorphous torso and a couple of huge, pale eyes. And even that much looked like it was disintegrating. Some parts were thicker than others, to the point that they mostly obscured the landscape behind them, but others were so pale that it looked like he had holes in what I was charitably calling a body.

I finally decided that he looked like an amoeba, which was not normal. Ghosts tended to keep the shape they’d died with, or else took on an appearance that had meaning for them in life. An elderly woman might show up youthful again or wearing her wedding dress, for instance, but this?

Nobody would want to look like this. Yet he did. And that, plus the lack of anything like a human shape, made me wonder if he’d started out as one to begin with.

“Relax, it’s just Hansen,” Billy said, like that explained anything.

“Who?”

“One of my guys. He’s part of the crew who found you for me and has been watching you ‘til I got here.”

I didn’t understand that, but there were other priorities right now. “Why... does he look like that?” I whispered.

“Like what?” Billy glanced at him. “Oh, yeah. I forgot you don’t know.”

“Know what?”

“Sometimes, when the so-called gods can’t catch something more tasty, they go after whatever they can find. And one of ‘em found Hansen. And ate about half of him before another god attacked the first, and he managed to tear away—literally.”

I stared at the little thing that had once been a man, after all, or the ghost of one, until a god had—

Gooseflesh broke out all over my arms.

“Can’t he... feed back up and... and fix that?” I whispered.

“Yeah, but food is kinda hard to come by these days, and when he does get energy, he doesn’t like to waste it manifesting the limbs that bastard tore off. It’s wasteful. Now, hush.”

I hushed because I couldn’t form thoughts currently, not that it mattered. If words passed between the two spirits, I couldn’t hear them. But it looked like information was conveyed somehow because, after a minute, Billy sighed.

“The goon squad has noticed you’re gone,” he told me. “And they’re panicking. Pritkin can’t raise you on whatever communication link you two got going—guess you’re outta range—and they’re tearing up the place looking for you. Better send that fey telepath, what’s her name—”

“Bodil.”

“Better send her the message that you’re coming back.”

“For what?” I said because nothing had changed there. Yes, Billy had returned and was reaming me a new one—and really, why hadn’t I expected that? It was our usual method of communicating, after all. And while that was both great and terrible, it didn’t change what was coming.

Or the fact that I wasn’t ready.

“Oh, give me a break,” he said. “For once, can we skip this shit?”

“Skip what?”

“You know very well what!” He knocked his hat back on his head and took on a gormless, big-eyed expression that didn’t make sense until I figured out it was supposed to be me. “Oh, no, I’m just a poor widdle Pythia, powerless and scared and surrounded by big bad gods—”

“Cut it out.”

“—who I throw around easier than a professional wrestler kicking a newbie’s ass in the ring—”

“It wasn’t like that!”

“—and then crack ‘em open and suck ‘em dry like—what’s that stuff in the silver pouches?” he snapped his fingers at us. The little part-ghost and I looked back at him blankly. “You know,” he said impatiently. “The foil ones?” Still blank. “You pop a straw in and drink ‘em with lunch. They’re fruit juice, or they’re supposed to be fruit juice; God knows what’s really in there—”

“Juice boxes?” Hansen offered, making me jump because I hadn’t known he could talk.

“No, they’re pouches,” Billy insisted, “but whatever. You drain gods like they’re juice boxes,” he told me. “And yet, poor you, you can’t handle all this pressure —”

“Stop it!”

He didn’t stop it.

“I think it’s habit at this point,” he said accusingly. “You know you can handle this; I know you can handle this; everybody else knows you can handle this, but we gotta do this stupid ceremony anyway. It’s like that boxer with his rituals before going in the ring—”

“What boxer?” Hansen asked.

“Any boxer; they’re all superstitious as shit. But specifically, this one guy I knew in Philly. You remember,” Billy said to me. “One of Tony’s guys. Big, ugly bruiser, with a nose that had migrated two-thirds of the way across his face ‘cause it had been broken so many times—”

“Eddie,” I said. “And he has nothing to do with—”

“He has everything to do with this,” he said, warming to the topic. “He was a legend on the local circuit,” he told the little ghost. “Maybe could have even hit the big time if he hadn’t sold his soul to Tony the Bastard to get out of some gambling debts, and if he hadn’t been a little past his prime. Anyway, he had this ritual before every fight, where he had to have exactly three drinks at this certain bar and play this one song on the jukebox—”

“What song?” Hansen asked breathlessly, seemingly hanging on Billy’s every word like some kind of ghost groupie.

“It doesn’t matter what song,” I said, but nobody was listening.

“Eye of the Tiger,” Billy told him. “You know, from Rocky? It got him all pumped up before the fight, and the drinks probably helped, too, even though he wasn’t supposed to have ‘em. But they’re kinda lax on the local circuits, and anyway, even if his opponents knew, they wouldn’t have cared. I mean, better for them if he was a bit tipsy, you know?”

What do you think you’re doing? Bodil’s voice demanded in my head, suddenly enough to make me flinch.

“Oh, much better,” the little ghost said, nodding.

Nothing , I thought back, as hard as I could, which was apparently too hard because she screeched slightly and went silent.

Shit.

“But one day,” Billy said, “Eddie rocks up to get his usual on the eve of a big fight, and you know what the owner had done? He’d had the jukebox removed!”

Hansen gasped.

“Yeah,” Billy nodded. “It was old, a relic of another time, and had finally given up the ghost—so to speak. So he’d had it trucked off, and when good old Eddie heard, he freaked out. I mean, what was he gonna do? It was bad enough he was facing a real bastard in that fight, one he wasn’t sure he could beat, and now his go-to song wasn’t available, either?”

What just happened? Bodil demanded, coming back into hearing range and sounding furious.

“What happened?” the little ghost echoed.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Billy said.

Sorry , I mentally whispered.

“The barkeep tried to play the song for Eddie on his Walkman ‘cause the guy was like a walking mountain of muscle, and he probably thought his days were numbered otherwise. But it wasn’t the same. Rituals gotta be observed exactly, you know? That song had to be played on that jukebox while Eddie drank exactly three gin and tonics in that bar. And now the whole thing was ruined.

Who is Eddie? Bodil asked. I guessed she could hear Billy because I could, and she was in my head, but it still weirded me out.

It’s a long story , I told her. And it was getting very long. “Billy—”

“But you remember what happened, right?” Billy asked me. “Cause that’s the moral of the story.”

“I didn’t pay much attention to Tony’s prize fighters—”

“Well, luckily, I did. And good old Eddie had to fight ‘cause Tony wanted him to take a dive in this other bout that the fat man was gonna make bank on in a couple weeks, betting on his opponent. And Eddie didn’t get to that fight if he didn’t win this one. So, he had to win—there was no other choice. And here’s the thing—he did.”

“He won?” the little ghost gasped.

“Sure did. It turned out that the ritual was just a thing he always did ‘cause back when he first started fighting, he’d done it once and then gone on to win a match he hadn’t thought he would. And he’d kept it up ever since, even though he didn’t need it anymore. Even though he’d grown past that nervous kid a long time ago and was now the saltiest of salty dogs. Like a certain someone who went toe to toe with Zeus and left him scurrying away with his tail between his legs—”

“I thought I wasn’t Artemis,” I said sourly.

“You’re not. But you’re not this, either,” he said. “Cowering in the seat of... whatever that thing is... and sobbing your heart out—”

“I get it, okay.”

“—afraid of those bastards in there when they should be afraid of you —”

“I’m not afraid of them—”

“Uh-huh. Which is why you were doing what? Coming out here so we could talk privately? I’m a ghost . We can talk anywhere. You were thinking of leaving; don’t tell me you weren’t—”

“Why would I tell you anything when you already know everything?”

“Oh, sarcasm,” he smirked. “Nice. But it’s not gonna work. Not with me—”

“So what if I was?” I said, fed up. Why had I ever missed this guy? “What if leaving is the best thing I could do for them?”

“Right, ‘cause they’re going to handle this without you—”

“Better than me leading them off a cliff!”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” he said, and then he finally noticed that I was trembling. Because, sure, I’d been talking a good game, first to Pritkin and then to ?subrand, but it was all bullshit. I had no game, no plan, no nothing. I’d been out here because I couldn’t be there, with everybody looking at me like I was the solution to all their ills when I was part of the damned disease!

Or I might be, given half a chance.

I looked at Hansen, or what was left of him, and my entire soul cringed. That was what we were, I thought. That was what we did, what I had done to those gods, only I hadn’t stopped short.

Would they have looked like him if I had, doomed to go through life with no resemblance to what they’d once been? Or as mad as that old ghost I’d seen in town, who had probably starved to death in the aftermath of the gods’ wrath and, even now, was looking for scraps of food he could no longer eat? I shuddered all over, and suddenly, Billy got it.

I heard when he put it together and exhaled in that particular way he had when something finally made sense. He’d always read me better than anyone, and I’d never been able to lie to him. Not even when I wanted to.

“We’re too much alike,” he said, his expression softening as if I’d said that last out loud, and maybe I had. Who knew anymore? “Two losers trying to make a difference and failing most of the time. But not all of the time. Not when it matters.

“When it matters, we do okay.”

“Do we?” I had been staring fixedly at the ground, but now I looked up at him and knew it was all over my face, whatever mix of emotions I was feeling: fear, anger, desperation, and a deep-seated insecurity that had never entirely gone away. And had recently been dredged up by the fact that I could literally turn into one of the monsters we were fighting at a moment’s notice.

“You’re not scared of them,” Billy said, his voice soft. “You’re scared of you.”

“Shouldn’t I be?” I said angrily, wiping my damned eyes on the sleeve of my coat. And managing to drag a piece of the ludicrous fringe across my eyeball. Goddamnit! “I told you what happened, and Pritkin’s demon won’t help!”

“Yeah, fuck him.”

“And on my own, I can’t—”

“You’ll be fine.”

“Let me get a word in edgewise!” I snarled, and he held up his hands in his you’re-being-unreasonable-but-I’m-indulging-you gesture that was not one of his more endearing traits. “How the hell do you know I’ll be fine? How do you know anything? ”

“I know you,” he said simply. “You were caught off guard before, and it’s like a drug—trust me, I know. Ghosts live off of life energy, too; hell, everything lives off of life energy, that’s why it’s called that. But when you get hit with a big bunch of it, all at once... It’s heady stuff. It can mess with you for a while.

“But the important thing to remember is that you came back . And it wasn’t Pritkin—any part of him—or Mircea who did that; it was you. You standing there with all the power in the world, or at least enough to get clean away before the god brigade showed up, yet you stayed. Like an idiot, you stayed,” he amended because this was Billy. “And risked your life to save Asshole and Company from the results of their own folly.

“I’d have expected nothing less. Cause you’re Cassie Palmer, and you may go down one day, but it won’t be like a little bitch, crying in a car. It won’t be to one of the morons waiting in that city and probably pissing their godly pants right now. It won’t be running away because you’re too scared to be who you were born to be and to do what you were born to do.

“No. It won’t be that way at all. Now, will it?”

I blinked at him through yet more tears because that’s all I seemed to do anymore—cry. “Pritkin said the same thing, more or less,” I whispered. “But—”

“But it didn’t hit the same way, coming from him.” Billy nodded. “Understandable.”

“Why understandable?”

“He’s just the toy boy. I’m the real man in your life.”

I rolled my eyes. “He isn’t a—”

“Sure. And if he didn’t have all those muscles and, uh, other things, and those incubus moves—”

“That’s enough!”

“—would you still be hanging around Mr. Moody Pants? Oh, Billy, his eyes are soooo dreamy—”

“I never said that!”

“You didn’t have to. You get all cow-eyed. It’s honestly embarrassing. I’m embarrassed for you—”

“Goddamnit!”

This is so bizarre , Bodil said to someone else.

What is? Enid asked, her voice echoing distantly in my head. Did you find her? What is she doing?

Arguing with a dead man.

What?

“Get out of my head!” I told her angrily.

“So, what happened to the prizefighter?” Hansen asked.

“Oh, him.” Billy shrugged. “Like I said, he won. Turns out the ritual was just something he’d convinced himself he needed ‘cause, I don’t know, he’d been punched in the head one too many times and thought it was a requirement. When the only real requirement was for him to get off his ass and go do what he knew how to do better than just about anybody else —”

“I said I got it, okay?” I snapped.

I hope so. We’re supposed to be leaving in less than an hour , Bodil commented, causing my blood pressure to rise precipitously.

“I’ll be back in a minute and get out of my goddamned head!” I snarled and felt the connection finally drop.

“ Will you be going back?” Billy asked archly as I climbed to my feet, feeling cold, sore, grumpy, and faintly stupid.

“Yes!”

“Good. Then we can talk about what I came here to talk about, but was interrupted by the angst-fest.”

“Are you going to tell her about the army?” Hansen asked breathlessly, or maybe he always sounded like that.

Then his words sank in.

“What army?” I demanded, looking back and forth between the two of them.

Billy smiled.