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I didn’t want to have to figure out what was trying to kill me this week.
But while I didn’t know who or what had it in for me, at least I knew what didn’t. “All that stuff with the gods . . . it’s over,” I told him. “They can’t hurt us if they can’t get back to Earth, and they can’t.”
“You sure about that?” he asked skeptically.
I didn’t answer, because no, I wasn’t. Not entirely.
It had been a shock to find out recently that a lot of the myths I’d grown up with were all too real. But not nearly as much as discovering that some of them were still alive. And that they were plenty pissed.
Their bitch was that they’d been banished from Earth, aka the land of milk, honey and slavishly devoted worshippers, by one of their own, Artemis. She’d turned traitor, teaming up with some of the less-devoted types, because her fellow immortals viewed humans as disposable. And they had been disposing of a lot of them.
So Artemis gave humankind the ouroboros spell to solve the problem. It banished the gods back to their home world and sealed off Earth so that they couldn’t return to their favorite playground. The Silver Circle, named after the alchemical color sacred to Artemis and in the shape of her symbol, the moon, had been formed to furnish the power needed to fuel the barrier.
It was still doing so, all these millennia later. But no one believed that the Circle or the spell were foolproof any longer. Not since one of the self-styled gods had found a way past them barely a month ago.
Fortunately, it had been a short trip.
“Apollo got in,” Billy said, like he’d been reading my thoughts.
“And he’s dead,” I said harshly.
“Yeah.” Billy fell silent, and I rolled over, pushing the conversation away.
It was surprisingly easy. The bed was extra soft, just the way I like it, with a duck-down mattress pad and matching comforter. They were usually too hot, and the comforter often ended up on the floor. But tonight it was perfect. I felt myself start to relax, start to sink into the warm cocoon between all that squashy goodness, start to drift off—
“Where do you think they go when they die?”
Billy’s voice jolted me back to unwelcome consciousness. I turned my head to frown at him. He’d stretched out on his back, hands behind his head, and was staring at the reflection of his own ghost light on the ceiling.
“Where does who go?”
“The gods.” He turned his head to look at me. “They have to go somewhere, don’t they? Everybody goes somewhere.”
“I don’t know.” Somewhere nasty, hopefully. “Why?”
“I was just thinking about that thing that possessed you. It wasn’t demon or Were or human or Fey, right?”
“Jury’s still out on Fey.”
“But not any Fey we ever heard of.”
“No.”
“So what about a god?” Billy gestured, throwing leaping patterns like blue candlelight on the walls. “They were said to be able to possess people, weren’t they? In some of the old legends?”
I frowned. So much for sleeping. “Apollo’s dead,” I said irritably. “He couldn’t possess anybody.”
“I’m dead. And I possess people all the time.”
“You’re a ghost.”
“So? Maybe he’s a ghost now, too. You killed him—”
“And now he’s come back to haunt me?” I asked incredulously.
He shrugged. “I know it’s far-fetched, but compared to some of the other shit that’s happened to you—”
I pulled the pillow over my head. This was so not what I needed to hear tonight. Or any other night.
