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“Your mother referred to him as Adra, for short. I am not sure why.”
“I am,” I said dryly. Mom hadn’t exactly been on her best behavior in there. Or maybe she had.
At least she didn’t kill anybody this time.
“She didn’t seem pleased about the composition of the council,” Pritkin agreed. “But while not, perhaps, polite, the term was not an insult. Adramelech is a title, not a personal name. He functions as the speaker or president of the council.”
Damn. And he’d seemed like the nice one. “I thought you said the council doesn’t have a head.”
“It doesn’t, if you mean someone with more power than anyone else. He is mainly there to maintain order.”
“So he’s the one who should have maybe got around to mentioning that the old gods were about to stage a comeback?”
“Not necessarily. The Adramelech only organizes matters to be discussed and attempts to keep the debate on topic. He doesn’t usually propose topics himself.”
“Then who does?”
“Whoever has the oversight of the region in question.”
“And who has oversight of earth?” I asked, because Pritkin was sounding grim.
“You saw. That was the reason he was called forward. Asag of the Asakku.”
Great. “So, what reason does this Asag guy have for just ignoring the return of one god and the kids of another?”
Pritkin shook his head. “I don’t know. And I’m not likely to. I had difficulty even obtaining the basics on your mother. No one wants to talk about the ancient wars—or how they ended. Most go about trying to pretend they didn’t happen.”
“So they’re about to let them happen again?” I asked, in disbelief. “They can’t be that blind!”
“It’s not a matter of being blind,” Pritkin said, drinking beer. “It’s . . . fear, terror even. You have to understand, Cassie, the demons who dared to face the gods once . . . they were ancient compared to the ones you saw, powerful beyond belief, and bloodthirsty to a fault. They gloried in battle, lived for it, reveled in it. And yet they fell, as one of the few who would talk to me about it said, like a sky full of falling stars. Those who survived believe they cannot fight—”
“They can’t if they won’t even try! Would they prefer to be slaughtered?”
“They’d prefer not to think about it at all. The ones who lived—remember, they were those who didn’t interest your mother or the other gods. Who weren’t powerful enough to be pursued, or who survived by hunkering down, by playing it safe, by being cautious—”
“You can be too cautious. You can die hiding under a bed or whatever the demon equivalent is, as much as on your
feet, fighting.”
Pritkin sent me an odd look.
“What?”
“When I met you, you preferred running, liked hiding. You told me several times it was what you were best at.”
“Yes, but it made sense then, when all I had to worry about was Tony. But it won’t help us now. Like it won’t help them!”
If anything, it would help our enemies, if the council decided to hide its collective head in the sand until a hungry god came along and ripped it off. No wonder Mom had been pissed. She must have looked over the group and wondered what had happened to the kind she’d fought. Or maybe she’d wished she’d left a few of the scarier ones alive.
“You look furious,” Pritkin said, watching me.
“I just—I can’t understand not fighting for your life—for what you want. Just giving up—”
A corner of his mouth quirked. “No. You would not understand that. You never stop trying, do you?”
“What else is there?”
“Despair. Hopelessness. Anger. Depression.”
