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“Kulullû,” the creature in the fish tank cried. It seemed to be all it could say.
“What do we know about it?” Pritkin asked, and Adra did the eyebrow thing again, probably because of the “we.” But he didn’t comment.
He sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers, as if he’d been watching old Sherlock Holmes movies. Only he had more of an air of Mycroft about him: pudgy, unassuming, easily overlooked. But with a devastating intellect behind the facade.
Not to mention that Mycroft didn’t have who knew how many thousands of years of experience on his side.
“There is a legend,” we were told, “from long before even my time—and not only among the demons. Greek, Roman, Scandinavian, and Babylonian mythology all tell a similar tale. A group of elder gods and a group of younger ones fought a war for dominance, and the younger gods won.”
“The Titans and the Olympians,” Pritkin said.
The blond head inclined. “In one version of the story. The Vanir and the Æsir would be another. In any case, during this titanic struggle, if you will, both sides attempted to gain an advantage. But there were only so many gods to go around. Where was one to find extra troops?”
“The fey,” I said, because this was finally a question I could answer. “There are stories that say that’s how the Dark Fey came into being: the gods tinkering with fey genetics.”
“Yes,” Adra agreed. “Although not just with the dark. The one who calls himself Caedmon, for instance, the king you fought alongside yesterday, is believed to be the result of a pairing between a fey princess and one of the sky gods, although we have not been able to determine which one.”
I didn’t say anything, but I was pretty sure I knew which one.
Those streaks of lightning on the painting hadn’t been artistic license.
“That was often their way,” Adra continued. “The gods scattered children everywhere, then took any who showed promise into their service while discarding the rest.”
Yeah, it was something the fey had emulated, I thought, thinking of the part-fey children I’d seen in old Wales, on the search for Pritkin. Because the stories of changelings weren’t just a myth. The fey took human children—mostly girls, to use as breeding stock—since human fertility was legendary in their world. And because, sometimes, those half-fey kids ended up inheriting their fathers’ abilities and could be useful as frontline troops, to spare the full-fey children that their families actually valued.
But those who took after their mothers . . . well, their fate was even worse. They had been tossed back onto earth as rejects, so-called half-breeds who often looked like monsters to the human population, who shunned and, in some cases, hunted them. While even those who could pass for human never really fit in. Like Pritkin . . .
And then it hit me: I suddenly realized that I’d never told him about his mother! It had been more than two weeks since I’d found out about her, and I hadn’t told him. I’d meant to, but we never got any time alone anymore, and it wasn’t something you brought up in front of a crowd.
Of course, he knew part of the story already: that she had been a part-fey, part-human woman who Rosier seduced, hoping for a child. Demon birth rates were even worse than those of the fey, so he’d been trying to have a child with human women for a while. But the half-incubus fetuses had drained them all dry before they could give birth, resulting in the deaths of both mother and child. So he’d opted for a hybrid instead, hoping that fey heartiness coupled with human fertility would finally be the winning combination.
And he’d been right.
What Pritkin hadn’t known was his mother’s name or much about his true heritage. Rosier had carefully kept that from him, wanting his son in hell with him, not roaming about Faerie. So Pritkin had only discovered her identity right before the last, crazy battle against Ares, and I didn’t know how well his memory was after that and a mindwipe and fifteen hundred years! But I’d actually met her, and—God! I had so much to tell him!
But Adra wasn’t done.
He did something that caused the bloody monster to disappear and to be replaced by a pretty Greek vase. It was black and orange and painted with a lounging woman on the side. She was pretty, too, in a jaded, seen-it-all sort of way.
“This is the goddess Tethys, as she was known to the Greeks,” he informed us. “She is shown here alongside her fish-tailed husband, Okeanos—”
“Fish-tailed?” I asked worriedly.
And, sure enough, as the vase rotated, here he came. I braced myself, but he looked more like a conventional image of a merman. Not the beautiful, ethereal creatures I’d seen in the coven’s version of a train station, but also not the hideous, misshapen thing we’d fought at the consul’s. Basically, just a guy with a fish tail instead of legs.
It was a serious relief.
Adra nodded. “Our research indicates that Tethys was among the gods who believed that the path to victory was through sourcing additional troops from among the supposedly lesser species. We believe her to be directly responsible for the creation of the merpeople who still live in Faerie, for instance.”
“Like the one who opened my book.”
He nodded. “Exactly so. But her experiments there did not prove powerful enough for her needs, and the war was trending against the elder gods. She therefore chose to . . . broaden her horizons.”
I sat there, waiting for the punch line, but it seemed that Pritkin already had it. Because he was back on his feet again, his face furious. “That’s absurd!”
Adra looked up at him blandly. “Is it?”
“The gods killed demonkind! They wouldn’t have—they didn’t—it’s absurd!”
