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Soain, and I belatedly realized that I was oncouldn’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 andand" He see he’d ever had one to start with He trailed off

And Pritkin slapped the table, hard enough to lasses 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 ot 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 hi to say, say it," he told hiet you out of here"

"I’ out You are," Pritkin said, and there was a note in his voice this ti And dao back there

"Why?" I deelse in his glass and sat back "Do you remember your mother’s nickname on earth?"

"What?"

"Answer the question!"

"The Huntress," Caleb ruuess what she hunted?"

I sat back down

"There’s a reason that the ‘gods,’ as they’re known, liked earth," he told h they couldn’t feed there"

I didn’t say anything We were about to face the de we could find it, possibly about to be shivved in the back by one of our fellow patrons, and al 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 ainst the sticky seat

"Earth in the Scandinavian legends was known as Midgard, or Mittlegard in Old English,"he told ot his idea for ‘Middle Earth’; it’s als 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 de 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 dis, they beca other worlds, they discovered Faerie, known as Alfheim, or the ‘land of the elves,’ to the Norse It was fairly unre: 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 co 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," Calebhad just clicked into place for him

Well, that made one of us

"Earth is technically in the hell direed "But as the closest world to our side of the rift, it shares aspects of both diether, they fore--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 fro to the ley lines running froh the me feel even dumber than usual, because I didn’t see what difference any of this made "So? We knew they caends talk of theular 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 ied when yourso hard, and for et back?"