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"What witches?" I finally asked
"The coven kind," Marco said dourly "They showed up al to see you"
"Did they have an appointment?"
Marco looked faintly uncomfortable "No"
"Then why did you let them in?"
"’Cause they appeared on the balcony and let the over the table and pro Marco to shoot him a look
"Because one doesn’t just tell a bunch of coven leaders to get lost!" Marco bit out
"If they don’t have an appoint to be inhospitable, but seriously, this shit had to stop Morning, noon, and night, ever since : senate leaders, Circle leaders, Pack leaders, press-tryingto-pretend-to-be-leaders of so up To gawk at et the story of the century
And the worst thing was, it wasn’t even mine
Yeah, I was the Pythia the vao, who nobody knew anything about And yes, that would have been front-page news in any situation In any other situation
But, suddenly, nobody cared that I had been brought up by Tony the Louse instead of being carefully nurtured at the Pythian Court Nobody was bothered by the fact that I’d therefore received practically no training for the job I was supposed to be doing They didn’t even seeée was occupying one of the ical world while said world was being consu
They only cared about my mother
You see, it wasn’t ht at the top of Jonas’ Christmas list It was the fact that, shortly before he and Mom and their Buick were blown into athat had linked her soul to his So when Pop’s spirit was captured in thewith 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 ofthat Tony had taken oodness of his cold, sliic 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 na the O’Donnell alias All the gods had, skippingchaos and littering de worshipped under a hundred different titles But she’d been Artemis in Greece, where she’d had an epiphany about just howtheir sprees--and about howdead in the process
She’d been Arterew a conscience
At least, I assu 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 workedsort of
Meaning that it had worked at the time And even later, after she started to decline froic on the planet she’d just stranded herself on-- great idea there, Moroup Jonas currently led, an alliance of hues known as the Silver Circle So, presues should be able to recast it
Assu they had all the parts, that is
Which, of course, is where the record scratched Since Arteh her soul, that soul for 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 as only too willing to welco to tear his crazy hair out
What hadto shredabout all this
Yeah, okay, at soinity had decided to hook up with a human for some reason, and pop out baby ht I’d had to learn about the whole ether over the last several ods were getting serious about the reclai And I still didn’t know much
In fact, I probably knew less than most, since nobody see I was just their ace in the hole, the quasi-divine chick they’d lucked into as expected to pull sood or his little ho showed up to wreak so
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 od bonus I was supposed to get on the side, well, it had been lost in the , I was just Cassie
And so 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 s that scurried for cover And didn’t make it thanks to Marco’s size-sixteen boot "I need a drink," I told hiht 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