Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,106

even more trouble by shooting up the timeline!

“Hey, girl, are you—oops, sorry!” Tami said, coming in the door, and probably seeing the pale moons rising over the balcony.

I raised my head. “It’s okay. I needed some sun. You wanna join me?”

She brightened, and then her face fell. “I have to start dinner, and there’s some laundry on, and the accounts have to be brought up to date—”

“Serve leftovers, the hotel has a laundry, and tell Fred to do the books. That’s what he used to be—an accountant.”

“Is that what he told you?” She laughed. “He can’t even add in his head. He had to ask me what to tip the pizza guy the other day.”

“Well, maybe he was head of the accounting department or something.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “He still can’t add!” And then she left, I assumed to get a suit.

I got up and put on a bikini, in case anybody else popped in, fished out an old tube of sunscreen and slathered it on, and went back to slow roasting. The sun was better than a masseuse, and I gradually began to feel some of the stress of the day fall away, despite having no reason for it. Like, none at all.

“The Ancient Horrors were locked away for thousands of years, and yet two show up in one day?” Pritkin said, finally resuming his seat.

“They do get loose from time to time,” Adra conceded. “However, two at once is cause for concern. Particularly the second.”

“Kulullû,” the creature in the fish tank cried. It seemed to be all it could say.

“What do we know about it?” Pritkin asked, and Adra did the eyebrow thing again, probably because of the “we.” But he didn’t comment.

He sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers, as if he’d been watching old Sherlock Holmes movies. Only he had more of an air of Mycroft about him: pudgy, unassuming, easily overlooked. But with a devastating intellect behind the facade.

Not to mention that Mycroft didn’t have who knew how many thousands of years of experience on his side.

“There is a legend,” we were told, “from long before even my time—and not only among the demons. Greek, Roman, Scandinavian, and Babylonian mythology all tell a similar tale. A group of elder gods and a group of younger ones fought a war for dominance, and the younger gods won.”

“The Titans and the Olympians,” Pritkin said.

The blond head inclined. “In one version of the story. The Vanir and the Æsir would be another. In any case, during this titanic struggle, if you will, both sides attempted to gain an advantage. But there were only so many gods to go around. Where was one to find extra troops?”

“The fey,” I said, because this was finally a question I could answer. “There are stories that say that’s how the Dark Fey came into being: the gods tinkering with fey genetics.”

“Yes,” Adra agreed. “Although not just with the dark. The one who calls himself Caedmon, for instance, the king you fought alongside yesterday, is believed to be the result of a pairing between a fey princess and one of the sky gods, although we have not been able to determine which one.”

I didn’t say anything, but I was pretty sure I knew which one.

Those streaks of lightning on the painting hadn’t been artistic license.

“That was often their way,” Adra continued. “The gods scattered children everywhere, then took any who showed promise into their service while discarding the rest.”

Yeah, it was something the fey had emulated, I thought, thinking of the part-fey children I’d seen in old Wales, on the search for Pritkin. Because the stories of changelings weren’t just a myth. The fey took human children—mostly girls, to use as breeding stock—since human fertility was legendary in their world. And because, sometimes, those half-fey kids ended up inheriting their fathers’ abilities and could be useful as frontline troops, to spare the full-fey children that their families actually valued.

But those who took after their mothers . . . well, their fate was even worse. They had been tossed back onto earth as rejects, so-called half-breeds who often looked like monsters to the human population, who shunned and, in some cases, hunted them. While even those who could pass for human never really fit in. Like Pritkin . . .

And then it hit me: I suddenly realized that I’d never told him about his mother! It had been more than two weeks since I’d found out about her, and