Something squelched between my toes again, and I belatedly realized that I was on my feet and halfway across the table, and what I was doing couldn’t really be called glaring anymore. If he’d had a shirt on, I’d have had my fists in it. As it was, they were flat on the table and I was about an inch from his nose and if looks could kill, we’d both be dead.
“Oh, sure,” Casanova slurred. “Thas how it starts. But then you give them the bes’ centuries of your life, and wha’ happens? They lie to you and stab you in the back and . . . and . . ” He seemed to lose his train of thought, assuming he’d ever had one to start with. He trailed off.
And Pritkin slapped the table, hard enough to make all the glasses jump. “This isn’t about what I want,” he told me fiercely. “It’s never been about that!”
“Then what is it? Because you’re not making sense!” I’d hoped that, once we got this far, I’d have an ally. Instead, I was having to fight both him and his father. And it sucked!
By the look of him, Caleb didn’t get it, either. “If you got something to say, say it,” he told him. “Then we need to figure out how to get you out of here.”
“I’m not getting out. You are,” Pritkin said, and there was a note in his voice this time, a note of fierce jealousy and hopeless longing. And damn it! Whatever he said, he did not want to go back there.
“Why?” I demanded.
Pritkin sloshed some more rotgut-and-everythingelse in his glass and sat back. “Do you remember your mother’s nickname on earth?”
“What?”
“Answer the question!”
“The Huntress,” Caleb rumbled.
Pritkin glanced at him. “Yes. Care to guess what she hunted?”
I sat back down.
“There’s a reason that the ‘gods,’ as they’re known, liked earth,” he told me. “Even though they couldn’t feed there.”
I didn’t say anything. We were about to face the demon council, assuming we could find it, possibly about to be shivved in the back by one of our fellow patrons, and almost certainly being poisoned by the damned bartender. But Pritkin had dropped into lecture mode, and he didn’t do that for no reason.
“Like what?” I asked, crossing my arms and sitting back against the sticky seat.
“Earth in the Scandinavian legends was known as Midgard, or Mittlegard in Old English,”he told me. “It’s where Tolkien got his idea for ‘Middle Earth’; it’s almost an exact translation. The Vikings called it that because of its position in the middle of their map of the cosmos, halfway between the heavens and the hells.”
“Yes, so?”
“Have you read the sagas?” he demanded.
“They’re on my list.” Along with about a thousand other things.
“Well, if you had, you would know that they tell the story of beings, the ‘gods,’ who originated somewhere in the dimension known as the heavens. But like the Vikings, they became restless and went exploring. Among other worlds, they discovered Faerie, known as Alfheim, or the ‘land of the elves,’ to the Norse. It was fairly unremarkable, except for one thing: it was closer to the divide between dimensions than any other world they had encountered. And as such, it had connections that none of the others did—connections to a completely new universe the so-called gods knew nothing about.”
“Faerie connects to earth,” I said, wondering where he was going with this.
“Yes. Earth is the counterpart to Faerie on this side of the dimensional rift. And just as Faerie had connections to the rest of the heavens—”
“Earth has connections to the rest of the hells,” Caleb murmured, looking like something had just clicked into place for him.
Well, that made one of us.
“Earth is technically in the hell dimension,” Pritkin agreed. “But as the closest world to our side of the rift, it shares aspects of both dimensions, as does Faerie on the heavenly side. Together, they form a bridge—the only one known, and likely the only one that exists—between the two universes.”
“The bifrost bridge,” Caleb said softly.
Pritkin nodded. “The old legends—Greek as well as Norse—speak of a rainbow bridge allowing the gods to travel back and forth from earth to their home world. Presumably, they were referring to the ley lines running from here into Faerie, and the portals cut through them.”
Caleb just sat there, looking stunned. And making me feel even dumber than usual, because I didn’t see what difference any of this made. “So? We knew they came from somewhere else,” I pointed out. “All the legends talk of them going back home, to Asgard or Olympus or wherever, on a regular basis. This isn’t news.”
“Then perhaps this is,” Pritkin said, leaning forward. “The gods stayed on earth, even though they could not feed there. Why? Why was it so important to them? Why were they so enraged when your mother found a way to banish them? Why have they been working so hard, and for millennia, in order to get back?”
I frowned at him. Now that he put it like that, it didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. “I don’t know. Maybe they liked being worshipped?”
“Enough for everything we’ve seen them do? Enough to risk dying, for nothing more than an ego stroke, and from a people they treated as little better than animals?” He shook his head. “No.”
“Okay, then, what’s your theory?”
“It’s not a theory. I’ve spent months on this, and it wasn’t easy. The only beings who had the information I wanted were not keen to discuss the subject. But I managed to get a hint here, some confirmation there, and then another piece from—”
“Pritkin! Just tell me.”
Green eyes met mine. “The gods weren’t interested in earth for its own sake. They wanted it for its role as a . . . a watering hole . . . if you like, for their real prey.”
“What prey?” I asked, starting to get a really bad feeling about this.
“The gods can’t feed off human energy, not because they can’t process it, but because it is so weak it does almost nothing for them. Your mother could have drained a city and been very little the better for it. But there were creatures on this side of the divide who lived far longer, gained energy much better, and stored it up far more efficiently—”
“Cows!”Casanova said, waving his glass. “Ever’body’s jus’ somebody’s cow.”
I frowned at him, not least because he’d just splattered hell juice all over my arm. But Pritkin nodded. “It’s not a bad analogy.”
“That we’re cows?” I demanded, vainly looking around for something to mop up with.
But everything in here was already dirtier than I was.
“No, we’re grass,” Pritkin said. “The demons are the cows.” He saw my expression. “Think of it this way, Cassie. Humans can eat grass, correct?”
“Yeah, I guess. Technically.”
“But nobody does. Why is that?”
“I don’t know . . . because it’s grass.”
“It’s lacking in nutrition, in calories, in all the things we need for life, yes?”
I nodded.
“A human would starve on a diet of grass. But a cow . . . a cow does quite well on it. Gets fat, even. And then, if a human eats the cow—”
“Okay, wait,” I said, my head spinning. “You’re telling me . . . that the gods came to earth, found a bunch of fat demons chewing up all the human grass, and decided to have a barbecue?”
He nodded. “Something like that. Remember, demons live much longer lives than humans, and have the capacity to store up a great deal more energy. In some cases, from thousands of feedings over hundreds of years. And not merely from earth. But from all their home worlds, as well.”
“But their home worlds don’t yield as much,” I said, recalling something Rian had said.
“No. Which is why earth was so prized when my father’s people, and others, stumbled across it long before the gods ever did. And then started coming in droves, to feed off the humans who couldn’t detect them and had virtually no defenses against them.”
“But someone’s always higher on the food chain,” Caleb said, with a certain grim satisfaction.
Pritkin nodded. “And when the gods discovered the demons, they felt toward them the way the demons had felt toward the human population. Here was a huge source of energy, ripe for the plucking, who had almost no defenses against them. Yes, they could buck and kick a little, but does that stop a lion from taking down a gazelle? And only the greatest of them could even manage that much of a response.”
“Then why didn’t the demons just stop coming?” I demanded. “Once they knew the gods were here—”
“Do gazelles stop coming to the watering hole?” he shot back. “Even though they know the lions come there, too?”
“Yeah, but that’s water. That’s a necessity.”
“As is energy in a world where power rules. Why do you think Rian betrayed Casanova? She’s known him for centuries. They have a bond—”
Casanova huffed out a bitter laugh.
“It’s true,” Pritkin insisted. “You gave her a great gift. The greatest you can give a demon. You gave her power, more than any other host she could possibly have found. And power can give her . . . everything else.”
“So she sold me out for power,” Casanova said bitterly. “I suppose she thought a vampire would understand that.”
“She sold you out for life,”Pritkin said sharply. “Which she might otherwise have lost in one of the power struggles that are epidemic at court—at every court. Rian was young and weak when she came to earth. Now, after gorging for centuries on as much energy as she could absorb, she goes home, not as a pawn to be used and possibly sacrificed to someone else’s ambition, but as a power broker in her own right.”