The Tears of Apollo glinted in the firelight, looking like liquid gold through the bottle’s amber glass. It was greenish-yellow outside it, with tiny herbs that floated in the solution, like Roy’s favorite drink. I knew that because the residue was still clinging to my shirt from the foamy saliva that had dripped from my mouth during the seizure. And because I could still taste it on my tongue, bitter and metallic harsh, something no tea could wash away.
But I licked my lips and reached for it anyway, unthinking, almost mesmerized—
Only to have it jerked back.
“I don’t think so.”
My eyes flew up to meet Gertie’s, and I felt myself flush. “I didn’t have a choice,” I told her. “Jo surprised us in Faerie. If I hadn’t used it—”
“And all the other times?”
“What other times?”
She just looked at me. It got uncomfortable surprisingly fast. “I didn’t have a choice then, either. You were chasing me all over Wales!”
“And you haven’t taken any since then? Yet you just happened to have an entire bottle on you in Faerie?”
I’d walked off, back toward my blankets, because Gertie’s fire was complete shit. I almost couldn’t feel it at all. But at her words I spun around. “You have no idea what I’ve been dealing with! No idea!”
“Then tell me.” She leaned back against the door.
I laughed, and it was bitter. Because sure. “And screw up the timeline even more than it already is?”
“I have a selective memory. And if anything preys on me too badly, I’ll take that mindwipe I dodged in Wales.”
I stared at her, but she sounded sincere. A Pythia actually wanting to hear my story? It was absurd. When I’d gone back in time trying to get some training from her successor, she’d shot me in the butt!
But Agnes had been a straitlaced stickler—about most things, I thought, thinking of Rhea. Whereas Gertie . . . hell. I was better at following the rules than she was! She’d been the one to grab all those Pythias out of the timeline to help hunt my punk ass down. And, somehow, she’d managed to talk them into it, even her predecessor, Lydia, who made Agnes look like a freewheeling hippie chick. And that was before they knew about Ares.
I didn’t know how she’d done it.
Or maybe I did, I thought, feeling the power of those eyes on me.
“It doesn’t matter,” I told her, after a moment. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
And, somehow, before I realized what was happening, I was back on the sofa with a new mug of tea, and Gertie was sitting beside me. Only I didn’t want tea. I wanted a rest, a break, a few days away from the constant pressure. I wanted—
What she’d just sat on the table, the little bottle shining in the firelight, that made all that go away. That made me feel invincible, like this impossible job was easy and that nothing in the world or out of it could hurt me. The Tears of Apollo made me feel like my mother, who had bestrode the world like a colossus, but had failed to pass on most of her godly attributes.
So far, the only one I’d noticed was the ability to open the gates between worlds, allowing me to shift from earth to the hell regions—even the ones I wasn’t supposed to be visiting—and back again. Mother had used the gift to hunt there, picking off powerful demon lords and absorbing their energy, and thus feeding her own. The Great Huntress, they’d called her, in awe and terror as their armies broke and ran before her. It was a name that had echoed through time so loudly that even the humans knew it. And built her a great temple that had once been among the wonders of the world, after her hunts made her more powerful than any other god.
Maybe more than all of them, because she’d thrown them out, hadn’t she? Exiling the entire pantheon and slamming the door behind them, the door in question being the barrier she had erected, which was still protecting us to this day.
But even a goddess isn’t invincible, and the battle had taken most of her power, so much so that she could no longer hunt the demons that had once fed her without becoming prey herself. So she’d faded, over thousands of years, unable to feed in any meaningful way, until she became so weak that a fat crime boss of a vampire had been able to do what entire demon armies had not, and take her out. But not before the goddess famed for her virginity did what nobody had expected: she had me.
And what had I done with that legacy? So far, I’d used my single talent to help rescue Pritkin from his father’s court after he broke his parole and got dragged back to hell. And that . . . was about it. If there were any other godly attributes lurking inside me, they were lurking pretty damned deep.
And that wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. My eyes found the little bottle again.
Not without help.
“My predecessor was strong, with a large, capable court,” I told Gertie. “On the surface, everything seemed fine. But she was fighting a war without even realizing it. The gods had determined to come back, starting with Apollo, because he had the ability to whisper to her acolytes through the Pythian power—”
“Because it was once his,” Gertie said.
I drank tea and nodded. I didn’t want it, but it warmed me inside, like clutching the mug kept my hands from shaking. “It didn’t serve him any longer, but he could still use it as a conduit. He eventually turned the Pythian heir, who poisoned her mistress and tried to seize control of the court. Only the power went to me instead—”