“I can tell you’ve, uh, put a lot of thought into this.” I held up my hands. “No judgment.”
“I’ve had a lot of time to decide how best to enact my revenge, and I have access to powerful artifacts most of the world has forgotten. Makes for a dangerous combination.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it well in hand.”
“I won’t ask you to join me. You’ve been through enough, kid.”
“Ithas wasn’t alone in his crimes.” I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t on her side. “Dis Pater gave him the Alcheyvaha bone. As far as I can tell, he’s the one who commissioned me from Ithas. Dis Pater wants me to act as his personal conduit and feed him magic from the burial grounds to supplement the power he’s lost since humanity quit worshipping him.”
“That tracks, since Ithas is a Titan. Dis Pater, huh? I’ve never met him, but we run in the same circles. He dabbles in mid-level artifacts, nothing too powerful, but none have piqued my interest.” She sucked her front teeth. “Gods never change, do they? They grow old. They grow bored. They dream up big ideas to occupy their endless days. Their inspirations result in a steady escalation of heinous acts until they reach the pinnacle and either achieve their success or lose interest.”
“And if you were to look down, you would see a mountain of bones under their feet.”
Studying me, she raised an eyebrow. “You’re sure you don’t want a piece of Ithas?”
“Ithas has a god blood servant. Ankou. He dated my sister for a year. Befriended my brother and me. We loved him like family. But the whole time he was surveilling us. In our home. At our jobs. All to gather intel on me for Ithas. I see that now.” A pop rang out where I had squeezed my knuckles too hard. “That violation is a wound that will take my sister years to heal, if it ever truly does. And Dis Pater is the one who killed me. So…yeah. I’m good with a divide-and-conquer strategy.”
“Dis Paterkilledyou?”
“Yeah.” It took a bit of effort to drop the instinctive glamour I wore to conceal the changes in myself that I couldn’t quite look at in the mirror each day, not yet, revealing luminescent skinand the pearly sheen of my hair as it rustled in an unfelt wind. “He did.”
Shock wiped the expression off her face as she scanned my features, but a mottled crimson began at the base of her throat and spread up into her cheeks the longer she beheld my otherworldliness.
To know your daughter was a demigoddess was one thing, but I guess it was another to truly see it.
“That son of a bitch,” she snarled, her canines glinting sharper than before. “You haven’t killed him yet?”
Hoo boy, I came from murderous stock. I wasn’t mad about it.
“I’ve been playing nice.” I touched my arm where the brand marked my skin. “Nice isn’t working.”
“It rarely does.” She scooted to the edge of the sofa. “Can you teleport yet?”
“I managed it once, when my sister was dying, but I haven’t done it since.”
“Your sister was…?” She blinked. “You have a lot to unpack, don’t you, kid?”
“I always thought I was a defective necromancer, and I haven’t been excelling at the death demigoddess thing either. Now I get that’s because I’m a demititan and a science experiment, so I don’t work the way that anyone else does. It’s nice, after everything, to know it’s not my fault for being a weirdo?—”
“Mon Dieu,”Jean-Claude bellowed from the kitchen. “What have you done?”
I shot to my feet and raced to the kitchen. I skidded into the room, spotted what had panicked him, and my heart dropped into my toes.
Oh, no.
Badb lay belly up on the table next to a beer bottle, her little legs pointing straight up in the air.
Hand to my heart, I pleaded with him. “Please tell me she’s not dead.”
With a sniff at her beak, he wrinkled his nose and swore in eloquent French under his breath.
“That bird is drunk.” He lifted the bottle. “I cracked open this bottle before I started baking cookies and forgot about it.” He shook it side to side, and it clinked. “Smart girl, that one. She used dried red beans from a bag on the counter. She must have dropped them in as needed to keep the level high enough for her to reach the beer.”
“No wonder she hasn’t pitched a fit to go to Kierce.” I scooped her into my arms. “I’ll carry her down and let her sleep it off with him. Can you entertain, um, Lucia, while I run Badb to the crypt?”
“Glad to do it.” He stroked a finger down her sleek forehead. “Poor thing.”
Grieving as hard as she had been, she must be exhausted, but chugging alcohol wasn’t the cure. “Be right back.”
