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No, it just had a crap-load of things that went bump in the night and who didn’t like me much and who ate people anyway and who probably thought they were due some payback after everything Mom had put them through and—shut up, Cassie.
Yeah. Yeah, that would be good. Except that when I shut down my mental babble, I started having trouble with the auditory stuff, half-heard whispers and distant, not-found-on-earth sounds. And odd rustlings, like if I could see behind the collective light show, what was there wouldn’t look entirely human. Or, you know, at all.
And okay, maybe I’d been wrong.
Maybe dark wasn’t so bad.
And then it suddenly wasn’t anymore.
Two things happened at once: my mother popped into the middle
of the huge space, shedding a large halo of light around her, and a massive power drain hit, hard enough to send me staggering.
Not a normal I’m-so-tired drain, like the one I’d been experiencing lately . . . like ever since I visited her. And yeah, maybe I should have put that together before now. But this was worse, and also a lot more literal, as if all that power I hadn’t been able to access for things like shifting and fighting and saving my life had been welling up, like a wall of bright water behind a dam. A dam that had just been breached.
And oh, crap.
I could almost see it, a sparkling river of power flowing from me to her, curling around her feet in a glistening stream. Or maybe a flood because this was way, way more power than I used for shifting or stopping time or . . . or anything. Way more than I’d ever channeled at once before in my life.
And that was despite the fact that she wasn’t really here. I could see stars through her on the other side, although she wasn’t a ghost. I knew ghosts. It was more like she was on an intertemporal version of Skype.
And the signal was running straight through me.
So it took me a moment to pull myself together, to pay attention to something besides the forceful complaints of my too-human body, and to notice—that she looked exactly the same.
Okay, maybe not exactly. There were a few changes; the mane of bright hair was a copper flame in the darkness, the violet eyes were huge and luminous, the porcelain skin glowed like it had its own light source. But she was still dressed in simple white, she wasn’t thirty feet tall or a mass of boiling energy like the last god I’d seen, and she wasn’t carrying any of the props I suppose I’d subconsciously expected: bows, arrows, shield, crown. . . .
It wasn’t that I was disappointed . . . exactly. It’s just that, well, we could have used a little intimidation factor right now. Instead, she took a moment to survey the scene and then smiled, almost coquettishly. “It has been a long time, my lords. Miss me?”
Not cool, Mom, I thought a little desperately, as an unhappy rumble reverberated around the room.
But it didn’t seem to bother her. Long eyelashes shadowed porcelain cheeks for a moment as a wry smile tugged at her lips. “No. I suppose not.”
“We know you, oh, Ninmesarra.”
One of the stars dropped from the sky, transforming into a pleasant-looking man in a dark business suit. He was blond, like Rosier, but the similarities ended there. His hair was thin and sleeked back, his face was round and not particularly memorable, except for a noticeable cleft in an otherwise unremarkable chin. He looked young, maybe my age, maybe a few years older, and his voice was mild, almost sweet.
I frowned at him.
He had no business being a demon.
“What we do not know is why you come before us,” he added, stopping a few feet away from the glow Mother was shedding on—yes, there was a floor down there, I guess for the use of us corporeal types. I could see it when he walked, in the shadows shed by his body. Because Mother’s light did throw them.
And it was amazing how much better I felt, just seeing those few square feet of normality. I picked my feet up, one at a time, and put them back down again, deliberately scraping them over the floor I could actually feel now. And the weird loop-de-loop my brain had been doing quieted down somewhat.
Too bad it didn’t do anything about the power drain.
Mother glanced at me. “Communication using Seidr is difficult for humans, and my daughter must carry the burden alone. I will therefore be blunt, for my time here is brief. She has come to ask you for the life of one man. I . . . have not.”
That did get a reaction, in the form of a dull blink, from me. And a mental replay of some of Pritkin’s history lesson. Please tell me I haven’t fucked this up, I thought blankly. Please, please, please . . .
“Then why are you here?” the man asked, frowning slightly. As if he wasn’t any happier with her answer than I was.
“To grant you a boon, Adra. Or should I say, another?”
“When has the World Destroyer ever done us anything but harm?” It was a harsher voice this time, but I couldn’t tell where it came from.
Until a shorter, stouter figure stomped onto the bit of floor Mother’s light was illuminating.
