Karen Chance - Tempt the Stars

No.

They only cared about one thing.

They only cared about my mother.

You see, it wasn’t my dad’s soul that had put that paperweight at the top of Jonas’ Christmas list. It was the fact that, shortly before he and Mom and their Buick were blown into a million pieces, my mother had done something that had linked her soul to his. So when Pop’s spirit was captured in the magical snare Tony had devised, hers went along with it.

And hers was kind of a big deal.

Because hers belonged to a goddess.

Yeah, I know. It just gives the whole crazy mess that little extra touch of madness, doesn’t it? I spent my childhood thinking that Tony had taken me in out of the goodness of his cold, slimy heart, after my parents were killed in a tragic accident, only to find out that he’d arranged the accident. One that had killed not only my father, but the creature the world had once known as Artemis.

Oh, she’d had other names, even before she started using the O’Donnell alias. All the gods had, skipping merrily around this new world they’d found, causing chaos and littering demigods about, while being worshipped under a hundred different titles. But she’d been Artemis in Greece, where she’d had an epiphany about just how much chaos the gods were causing during their sprees—and about how many humans were getting dead in the process.

She’d been Artemis when she grew a conscience.

At least, I assumed she had, although who knows? The gods were nothing if not capricious. Maybe she just woke up one day and decided to punk her fellow divine beings—by tossing their godly butts off the planet.

She did this, it turns out, by a spell sustained partly by—you guessed it—her own divine soul. It was the only thing powerful enough to cut off access to an entire world. And it had worked . . . sort of.

Meaning that it had worked at the time. And even later, after she started to decline from a lack of compatible magic on the planet she’d just stranded herself on— great idea there, Mom—it still had. The spell was now supported by the group Jonas currently led, an alliance of human mages known as the Silver Circle. So, presumably, even if it was somehow brought down, the mages should be able to recast it.

Assuming they had all the parts, that is.

Which, of course, is where the record scratched. Since Artemis’ protection spell had been linked through her soul, that soul formed a vital part of the spell. Meaning that if it disappeared, the spell it was supporting went away, too.

And since the other gods hadn’t been amused by her little come-to-Jesus moment or whatever the hell it had been, and really wanted back in, that was a problem.

Particularly when the other side in the war was only too willing to welcome them back with open arms. The whole mess had Jonas wanting to tear his crazy hair out.

What had me wanting to shred mine was that everybody assumed I could do something about all this.

Yeah, okay, at some point the goddess famous for virginity had decided to hook up with a human for some reason, and pop out baby me. But that did not automatically confer any special insight. I’d had to learn about the whole mess the hard way, like everyone else—by piecing clues together over the last several months, ever since the war made it obvious that the gods were getting serious about the reclaiming-their-playground thing. And I still didn’t know much.

In fact, I probably knew less than most, since nobody seemed to think it important to actually tell me anything. I was just their ace in the hole, the quasi-divine chick they’d lucked into who was expected to pull something out of her ass every time a god or his little homicidal offspring showed up to wreak some more havoc. It was infuriating.

It was also terrifying.

Especially since, along with that lack of insight I’d gotten a big old goose egg in the divine equipment department. Sure, I had the power that came with my office, but all Pythias had had that. And most of them had known more about it than I did. But if there was some kind of demigod bonus I was supposed to get on the side, well, it had been lost in the mail. My maternal line notwithstanding, I was just Cassie.

And some days—most days—I was afraid that wasn’t going to be nearly enough.

Like days when I was covered in bruises and my own blood, plus some two-decade-old spiderwebs I hadn’t noticed until now. “Shit!” I said, running frantic hands through my hair and knocking off a couple of little brown things that scurried for cover. And didn’t make it thanks to Marco’s size-sixteen boot. “I need a drink,” I told him honestly.

“Drinks!” Fred’s head popped up. “That’s right. We’re going to need—”

“Don’t even—” I warned as he grabbed the coffee cup I had stupidly set down on the kitchen counter.

“You couldn’t get a large?” he snarled, playing keep-away. And then somehow my coffee ended up parsed out into three little demitasse cups, slapped on a tray along with the leaking doughnuts, and sped out the door, all in about the time it took to blink.

I started after it, but Marco didn’t move out of the way. “Wait.”

“I wait and I starve!”

“There are worse things.”

“Like what?”

“Like having your dingle cursed off,” Fred said, sidling back into the kitchen through the half inch of space left by Marco’s bulk.

“What?”

“You know.” He looked pointedly downward.

“They don’t do that!”

“Like hell they don’t! I’ve seen things, okay? And these aren’t mages. They’re not part of the Circle. They don’t have rules—”

“They have rules, just ones decided by their covens,” Marco argued.

“Yeah, rules like if someone pisses them off, they can curse his ding —”

“Would you man the hell up?” Marco snapped. And clapped a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt over Fred’s mouth. Fred’s displeasure thereafter took the form of outraged grunts.

“I thought the covens were under the Circle’s authority,” I said, trying to remember all the info Jonas had been force feeding me lately.

“Not the most powerful ones. They never joined.”

Marco shot a look over his shoulder. “I guess they figured they didn’t need to.”

Yeah. And if they’d just waltzed in here through the kinds of wards the Circle had on this place, I kind of agreed with them. But that still didn’t make it okay.

“Why are they here?” I demanded.

“They wouldn’t tell me,” Marco said, effortlessly keeping Fred under wraps. And since, despite all evidence to the contrary, Fred was also a master-level vamp, that was actually kind of impressive. Or it would have been, had Marco not been simultaneously hiding from a few old ladies.

“You’re intimidated,” I accused.

He scowled. “Do you remember how old I am?”

“What does that mat—”

“It matters ’cause I didn’t live this long by being stupid. Sometimes it’s smart to be intimidated. Sometimes it’s smart to look before you leap.”

“I do that.”

Fred suddenly stopped struggling, I guess so he and Marco could both send me the same look of stunned disbelief.

“I do!” I said again, and it was true. Mostly true. Okay, true when I had a chance to look, which wasn’t often these days. But that wasn’t the point.

“That isn’t the point,” I told him.

“Then what is?”

“That I’m sick of this, okay? I’m not their slave—or the Circle’s or the vamps’ or anybody else’s. I’m not going to live like this—”

“It’s your job.”

“Bullshit.” I glared at him, too tired and hungry and lacking in caffeine to bother with diplomacy, which was something else I sucked at anyway. “What do you think Agnes would have done if they’d broken in on her in the middle of the night?”