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“That’s the problem,” I told Adra. “I don’t know for sure—”
“You don’t know?” Rosier repeated. “Where did you get it?”
“—but they might be trying to use it to bring back one of the gods.”
“How?” Adra asked mildly.
“Let me see,” Rosier said, and snatched for the vial, before I yanked it back, glaring at him.
“I don’t know that, either,” I told Adra. “But they have to be dealt with, and there’s five of them, and only one of me, and there’s a chance that they’re not all staying together—”
“They would be wiser not to.”
I nodded. “One was already missing when I saw them, and after what happened, they might have scattered even farther. But I can’t sense them, which probably means they’re hiding out in faerie, like Myra. But their power doesn’t work there, so they’ll have to come back to earth to do anything—”
“You want us to find them for you,” he guessed.
“We can’t find them for her!” Rosier exploded, before I could answer. “My people have been searching all day, ever since you mentioned the damned things, and there’s not a vial of Tears to be had for love or money anywhere. And I mean that literally!”
I ignored him, because that’s the only way to get anywhere with Rosier. He loves the sound of his own voice so much he often forgets to listen to anybody else’s, treating them like background noise. I decided to do the same with him.
“It would help,” I told Adra. “I have to do this, but I can’t let them run amok in my absence, and there’s no one else who can deal with them—”
“I am not certain we can deal with them,” he said quietly.
“But you’re the demon council—”
“Something that is less than useful when dealing with the crooks of the merchant class!” Rosier spat.
“And they are channeling the power of one of the old gods,” Adra pointed out, without so much as a glance at Rosier. He must have been used to him.
“But they’re not gods,” I reminded him. “They’re human.”
“A fact that does not make their power any easier to counter.”
“Those bastards would sell their own mothers for what I’ve been offering,” Rosier grumbled. “And probably throw in their daughters, too, yet not a single one has so much as seen the formula! It’s of no use to anyone here—”
“It’s a lot easier than it will be dealing with the real thing,” I told Adra. “If they succeed in bringing him back—”
“If. They’ve had long enough to try. Your predecessor died more than three months ago.”
“But Apollo didn’t.”
“Not that it stopped one of the crooks telling me he could find some, if I ponied up enough to pay off the right people,” Rosier complained. “When everyone knows he’s rich as Croesus! I told him, if I was desperate enough to hire mercenaries for a raid on the Circle’s supply, I could do it myself without paying him an exorbitant fee as a go-between!”
Adra’s eyes narrowed. “What does Apollo’s death have to do with this?”
“The Tears only work on earth,” I said, “or somewhere with a link to earth. Or a crack—”
“You think Apollo’s transition through the barrier weakened it, making it possible to shift someone through?”
Damn, he was quick. “I don’t know,” I repeated, because I didn’t. “But one of the acolytes mentioned that she’d been talking to Ares on a regular basis and she shouldn’t be able to do that. She shouldn’t be able to talk to him at all. Apollo could talk to Myra because the Pythian power was originally his, and he always maintained a link to it. But none of the other gods were ever able to get messages through before. Yet suddenly Ares is communicating with earth all the time? Something changed.”
“What is all this?” Rosier asked, finally waking up to the fact that no one cared about his useless search. “What are you talking about? The
gods aren’t coming back.”
“One of them already did.”
