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“Local specialty. They ferment it from berries that grow in the hills,” Pritkin said curtly, knocking back the majority of his.
“Is it strong?”
Pritkin shrugged.
“If it gets a vamp drunk, it’s strong,” I warned.
Caleb raised an eyebrow and glanced at Casanova. But it was hard to tell if the vamp was actually sloshed or just overwrought. He’d been crying into his not-even-close-to-beer since we got here.
I guess Caleb must have decided he was just being his usual overly dramatic self, and took a healthy swig. And somehow kept it down. But under all that dirt, he turned about as white as a black guy can.
“Pritkin told me once that alcohol doesn’t affect him much—something about what he was raised on,” I told Caleb.
Caleb glared at his buddy. “What the fuck were you raised on?”
Pritkin held up his glass. “This.”
“Figures,” Caleb wheezed, and frantically gestured the bartender over to order some water.
I went back to glaring at Pritkin.
It was vaguely satisfying in a way I couldn’t immediately define. Maybe because it was the only normal thing in my life right now. I glared at Pritkin all the time. It was what I did. I decided to do it up right and put some oomph behind it.
“You can look at me that way all you like. It doesn’t change the facts,” he snapped.
“And what facts are those?”
“That getting to the council, even assuming we could manage it, won’t help. They hate me—”
“I bet they hate the gods more!”
“And that would be the point,” he said viciously, and gulped the equivalent of paint thinner.
“Okay,” I said, reaching tilt. “Okay. I’ve had kind of a bad week, and I’m not much for hints right now. So why don’t you just cut to the chase, and tell me what is wrong with you? Do you want to go back to Rosier’s? Do you want to sit around and wait for some assassin to get lucky? Or your dad to whore you out to the highest bidder? Is that really so much more appealing than coming back to earth with me and, I don’t know, having a goddamned life? Well, is it?”
Something squelched between my toes again, and I belatedly realized that I was on my feet and halfway across the table, and what I was doing couldn’t really be called glaring anymore. If he’d had a shirt on, I’d have had my fists in it. As it was, they were flat on the table and I was about an inch from his nose and if looks could kill, we’d both be dead.
“Oh, sure,” Casanova slurred. “Thas how it starts. But then you give them the bes’ centuries of your life, and wha’ happens? They lie to you and stab you in the back and . . . and . . .” He seemed to lose his train of thought, assuming he’d ever had one to start with. He trailed off.
And Pritkin slapped the table, hard enough to make all the glasses jump. “This isn’t about what I want,” he told me fiercely. “It’s never been about that!”
“Then what is it? Because you’re not making sense!” I’d hoped that, once we got this far, I’d have an ally. Instead, I was having to fight both him and his father. And it sucked!
By the look of him, Caleb didn’t get it, either. “If you got something to say, say it,” he told him. “Then we need to figure out how to get you out of here.”
“I’m not getting out. You are,” Pritkin said, and there was a note in his voice this time, a note of fierce jealousy and hopeless longing. And damn it! Whatever he said, he did not want to go back there.
“Why?” I demanded.
Pritkin sloshed some more rotgut-and-everything-else in his glass and sat back. “Do you remember your mother’s nickname on earth?”
“What?”
“Answer the question!”
“The Huntress,” Caleb rumbled.
Pritkin glanced at him. “Yes. Care to guess what she hunted?”
