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“Bullshit!”
“That is what Adramelech thinks,” he persisted. “What the council were trying to prevent when they cursed me.”
“I know,” I said, covering his hand with mine, because he was clearly taking this hard. “Adra said as much—”
“You know?”
I nodded.
Pritkin frowned. “What do you know?”
“That the council freaked out. The genetically designed super soldier and the demigoddess scared the crap out of them. They found out that we were involved, were afraid that you’d increase my power more than they could handle, and killed you to deprive me of my ‘battery.’ Adra admitted it when you were off getting your weapons, and it doesn’t change anything—”
“How can you say that?”
“Because I told him the truth.” I leaned over the table and lowered my voice, despite the silence shield. And so that Pritkin’s body blocked the damned war mages from reading my lips. “We can generate the power of a god between us—for a moment, maybe enough for a single spell. But we can’t hold on to it. It would burn us up if we tried—”
“Cassie—”
“—which means they were wrong. We’re not a threat—”
“We’re not a threat yet,” Pritkin said grimly, and something about the way he emphasized it stopped me.
“Meaning what?”
He let go of my hand and sat back, crossing his arms over his chest, closing himself off. “You already know the answer to that. You saw what lies within me last night, the monster I live with—”
I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. He stared at me some more.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. And I was, because Pritkin clearly didn’t find this remotely funny. “But you can’t seriously equate that poor little starved thing with—”
He suddenly lunged at me over the table, fast enough to pull several of the watching war mages back to their feet. Pritkin didn’t even notice. “That poor little thing is the hybrid of a demon lord and a fey with godly antecedents!” he hissed. “It is what the gods were trying to create, but failed to manage—”
“I know that—”
“No, you don’t,” he insisted, his face flushed and angry. “No more than they did! Nobody thinks about the incubi! The gods likely never even considered my father’s people when doing their experiments, and why should they? They were looking for power, some already uncommonly strong creatures that they could make even more so. Not the notoriously weak incubi.
“But that is the chief power of my father’s people—we mix with anything. That is why other demons pay my father whatever he asks for a night with him—his power doesn’t just magnify that of some of the demon races; it magnifies all of them. He is the universal solvent, the power stream that will blend with and enhance any other it touches, the very thing the gods needed but never found.
“But somebody else did.”
“Rosier,” I said, but thinking of the beautiful, mercurial, powerful woman who had been Pritkin’s mother.
He nodded. “By accident, at least I’m fairly sure, but does it matter? And if that poor little starved thing you feel so sorry for becomes less starved—”
“That’s why you didn’t want to do it last night?” I asked, suddenly understanding. “You said—”
“That you were injured, which you were—and still are—and I didn’t want to make it worse. And demon sex is nothing if not . . . intense. But I also worried about what continued exposure to that kind of power might do—to both of us!”
“Why?” I challenged. “You never explored that part of yourself, never even tried. How do you know—”
“Thankfully!”
“—that you wouldn’t like the results? You don’t know what might lie ahead—”
“And I don’t want to know! And neither should you!”
I looked at him steadily. “You don’t scare me, Pritkin. And you never will.”
