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The vision faded, bringing his features more clearly into view, or maybe that was the brilliant white light of the laser spectacle behind him. I spread my hands. “Go for it.”
“I have seen something like that once,” he said. “Long ago. I saw one who could fight in spirit as well as in body, and lay waste to hundreds, all on his own. I saw one who moved faster than eyes could track, even our eyes. I saw an army in the guise of a single man, and I never forgot it.”
It took me a minute, because my mind was mostly still back at the souk, trying to reconcile the two versions of events, mine and Hassani’s. And then I still wasn’t sure that I understood him. Because he seemed to be implying . . . no. No!
“You think Dorina is . . . like that thing downstairs?” I said slowly. My skin crawled at the very t
hought. It crawled hard.
“You misunderstand—”
“I damned well hope so! She doesn’t—she isn’t—I damned well hope so!”
“I only meant,” Hassani began, but I wasn’t done yet.
“That thing didn’t fight like her! He wasn’t a spirit, or whatever the hell. He was a snake—”
“Which is rather the point,” the consul said mildly. “He could take many shapes, but not hold two different ones at the same time. We had deprived him of his greatest power by burying him so far underground, away from the sun. He therefore he chose his next favorite form—”
“Bullshit! This is bullshit! They are not the same!”
“I never meant to imply—”
“Then what the hell did you mean?”
“I would like to hear that myself,” Louis-Cesare said, his jaw tight. He looked disturbed. Yeah, no shit!
Hassani sighed, and ran a hand through his hair. It was dark brown and lay in perfect waves, because he was using a glamourie. I’d seen him without it and it had been half gray and wiry, and his face had been lined as it wasn’t now. But the natural elegance of the man wasn’t fake.
Yet his movements at the moment were abrupt and lacking grace, and his face was showing too much emotion for one usually so poised. It occurred to me to wonder if there was a reason why he had been beating around the bush so much, taking me to see the remains of the creature downstairs today and stalling tonight.
He didn’t know how to talk about this, either.
“I am explaining this badly,” he finally said. “Let me go back to the beginning. To what we were discussing in the temple earlier today.”
I realized that I’d stood up at some point without even realizing it. I wanted to keep on going, to walk right out. I’d been so sure that Hassani had something useful, something that would lead me to Dorina or at least to Jonathan, and this was it? Some crazy shit about—
God, I was pissed!
I should have left as soon as I woke up this evening, just grabbed Louis-Cesare and gone. He’d seen what was in the morgue, before it tried to kill us. If there were any clues, he had them, and I had people—
Hell, I was a senator now. I didn’t even need my old contacts, although I had them, I had plenty of them! But I could also call on the Hounds the senate employed. Their vamps could track a fly in a hurricane. I didn’t need this—
Louis-Cesare took my hand. Immediately, I felt calmer, more grounded, more in control. I resented it, because I didn’t want to be calm right now, but I acknowledged that I needed it. Because, yes, I could do all of that. But if Jonathan had taken a portal what good did it do me? He could be anywhere by now, and Hassani’s people were the only ones who might have seen something useful.
I was going to have to be a freaking diplomat if it killed me.
I sat back down. “All right.”
Hassani looked like he was about to say something, then changed his mind and just got on with it. “The gods became aggressive toward each other after a time on Earth,” he said, “unable to decide how to allocate its resources and those of the hell regions beyond. Yet they were too well matched for one group to triumph over another, and thus tried to create themselves armies to tip the scales in their favor. But humans were not strong enough for the purpose, and thus experiments were made to improve them.”
I bit my tongue to keep from pointing out that I knew all this. Some I’d heard from the Irin, and the rest from the countless senate sessions we’d had lately about the war. How all the gods had been vying with each other, trying to come up with some kind of advantage over the rest. Then one, Artemis, realized that she already had it. While everyone else was struggling to build armies, she was building up herself, using her unique ability to traverse the hells to hunt the juiciest prey: age old demon lords with millennia of accumulated power, all of which she’d absorbed after killing them.
It had made her into an army all on her own, which had eventually allowed her to kick the other gods off Earth and to slam a metaphysical door—in the form of a powerful spell—behind them. But Artemis had since died, and the old gods were now pounding on the door trying to get back in. And to make matters worse, they had supporters on this side of the barrier, including the fey king Aeslinn, who had donated all those warriors last night.
We were attempting to hunt him down before he succeeded in finding a way to throw open that door, leading to the ass kicking of the century for our side. So far, it had been going better than expected, mainly because we had a demigod in the ranks, the child that Artemis had had before her death. And despite the Pythia’s questionable taste in jewelry, she had been able to pull victory after victory out of her ass.
Problem was, it only took one defeat, one thing that we didn’t see or account for, for the tide to change. Once the gods were back, they were back, and we had no way to fight them. Aeslinn’s capitol currently lay in ruins, his people scattered, his army decimated. But he was still out there, he had a fighting force, and he was plotting.
