AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I sat back down.
“There’s a reason that the ‘gods,’ as they’re known, liked earth,” he told me. “Even though they couldn’t feed there.”
I didn’t say anything. We were about to face the demon council, assuming we could find it, possibly about to be shivved in the back by one of our fellow patrons, and almost certainly being poisoned by the damned bartender. But Pritkin had dropped into lecture mode, and he didn’t do that for no reason.
“Like what?” I asked, crossing my arms and sitting back against the sticky seat.
“Earth in the Scandinavian legends was known as Midgard, or Mittlegard in Old English,” he told me. “It’s where Tolkien got his idea for ‘Middle Earth’; it’s almost an exact translation. The Vikings called it that because of its position in the middle of their map of the cosmos, halfway between the heavens and the hells.”
“Yes, so?”
“Have you read the sagas?” he demanded.
“They’re on my list.” Along with about a thousand other things.
“Well, if you had, you would know that they tell the story of beings, the ‘gods,’ who originated somewhere in the dimension known as the heavens. But like the Vikings, they became restless and went exploring. Among oth
er worlds, they discovered Faerie, known as Alfheim, or the ‘land of the elves,’ to the Norse. It was fairly unremarkable, except for one thing: it was closer to the divide between dimensions than any other world they had encountered. And as such, it had connections that none of the others did—connections to a completely new universe the so-called gods knew nothing about.”
“Faerie connects to earth,” I said, wondering where he was going with this.
“Yes. Earth is the counterpart to Faerie on this side of the dimensional rift. And just as Faerie had connections to the rest of the heavens—”
“Earth has connections to the rest of the hells,” Caleb murmured, looking like something had just clicked into place for him.
Well, that made one of us.
“Earth is technically in the hell dimension,” Pritkin agreed. “But as the closest world to our side of the rift, it shares aspects of both dimensions, as does Faerie on the heavenly side. Together, they form a bridge—the only one known, and likely the only one that exists—between the two universes.”
“The bifrost bridge,” Caleb said softly.
Pritkin nodded. “The old legends—Greek as well as Norse—speak of a rainbow bridge allowing the gods to travel back and forth from earth to their home world. Presumably, they were referring to the ley lines running from here into Faerie, and the portals cut through them.”
Caleb just sat there, looking stunned. And making me feel even dumber than usual, because I didn’t see what difference any of this made. “So? We knew they came from somewhere else,” I pointed out. “All the legends talk of them going back home, to Asgard or Olympus or wherever, on a regular basis. This isn’t news.”
“Then perhaps this is,” Pritkin said, leaning forward. “The gods stayed on earth, even though they could not feed there. Why? Why was it so important to them? Why were they so enraged when your mother found a way to banish them? Why have they been working so hard, and for millennia, in order to get back?”
I frowned at him. Now that he put it like that, it didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. “I don’t know. Maybe they liked being worshipped?”
“Enough for everything we’ve seen them do? Enough to risk dying, for nothing more than an ego stroke, and from a people they treated as little better than animals?” He shook his head. “No.”
“Okay, then, what’s your theory?”
“It’s not a theory. I’ve spent months on this, and it wasn’t easy. The only beings who had the information I wanted were not keen to discuss the subject. But I managed to get a hint here, some confirmation there, and then another piece from—”
“Pritkin! Just tell me.”
Green eyes met mine. “The gods weren’t interested in earth for its own sake. They wanted it for its role as a . . . a watering hole . . . if you like, for their real prey.”
“What prey?” I asked, starting to get a really bad feeling about this.
“The gods can’t feed off human energy, not because they can’t process it, but because it is so weak it does almost nothing for them. Your mother could have drained a city and been very little the better for it. But there were creatures on this side of the divide who lived far longer, gained energy much better, and stored it up far more efficiently—”
“Cows!” Casanova said, waving his glass. “Ever’body’s jus’ somebody’s cow.”
I frowned at him, not least because he’d just splattered hell juice all over my arm. But Pritkin nodded. “It’s not a bad analogy.”
“That we’re cows?” I demanded, vainly looking around for something to mop up with.
