Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,107

I hadn’t told him. I’d meant to, but we never got any time alone anymore, and it wasn’t something you brought up in front of a crowd.

Of course, he knew part of the story already: that she had been a part-fey, part-human woman who Rosier seduced, hoping for a child. Demon birth rates were even worse than those of the fey, so he’d been trying to have a child with human women for a while. But the half-incubus fetuses had drained them all dry before they could give birth, resulting in the deaths of both mother and child. So he’d opted for a hybrid instead, hoping that fey heartiness coupled with human fertility would finally be the winning combination.

And he’d been right.

What Pritkin hadn’t known was his mother’s name or much about his true heritage. Rosier had carefully kept that from him, wanting his son in hell with him, not roaming about Faerie. So Pritkin had only discovered her identity right before the last, crazy battle against Ares, and I didn’t know how well his memory was after that and a mindwipe and fifteen hundred years! But I’d actually met her, and—God! I had so much to tell him!

But Adra wasn’t done.

He did something that caused the bloody monster to disappear and to be replaced by a pretty Greek vase. It was black and orange and painted with a lounging woman on the side. She was pretty, too, in a jaded, seen-it-all sort of way.

“This is the goddess Tethys, as she was known to the Greeks,” he informed us. “She is shown here alongside her fish-tailed husband, Okeanos—”

“Fish-tailed?” I asked worriedly.

And, sure enough, as the vase rotated, here he came. I braced myself, but he looked more like a conventional image of a merman. Not the beautiful, ethereal creatures I’d seen in the coven’s version of a train station, but also not the hideous, misshapen thing we’d fought at the consul’s. Basically, just a guy with a fish tail instead of legs.

It was a serious relief.

Adra nodded. “Our research indicates that Tethys was among the gods who believed that the path to victory was through sourcing additional troops from among the supposedly lesser species. We believe her to be directly responsible for the creation of the merpeople who still live in Faerie, for instance.”

“Like the one who opened my book.”

He nodded. “Exactly so. But her experiments there did not prove powerful enough for her needs, and the war was trending against the elder gods. She therefore chose to . . . broaden her horizons.”

I sat there, waiting for the punch line, but it seemed that Pritkin already had it. Because he was back on his feet again, his face furious. “That’s absurd!”

Adra looked up at him blandly. “Is it?”

“The gods killed demonkind! They wouldn’t have—they didn’t—it’s absurd!”

“War makes strange bedfellows,” Adra murmured.

“Wait,” I said, finally catching a clue. “She married a demon?”

“It would be more accurate to say that she experimented with a demon,” Adra qualified. “With a number of them, in fact, although some exchange of genetic material does seem to have occurred.” He glanced at the tank, but the small creature was currently silent.

“She started with the Apkallu, like our friend over there, a race inhabiting one of our water worlds, but she did not end with them. Tethys was known as Tiamat to the Babylonians, who told stories of the many fearsome children she birthed.”

The scene changed again, and now it showed a whole grouping of creatures, some so hideous that I could hardly bear to look at them.

“Eleven children, from four different demonic races, each more powerful than the last,” Adra said. “We believe that some of the other gods followed her example, although it is possible that the other Ancient Horrors could be children of the original eleven.”

Pritkin just stared at them, looking gobsmacked. Because yeah. Goddess + anything = demigod, didn’t it? And goddess + powerful demon lords . . . well, what the hell was that?

I felt sick, suddenly, and the room seemed to close in, until all I could see were Tiamat’s little horrors on the table.

“How many in all?” I finally asked, my lips numb.

Adra looked up, the bland face as expressionless as always. Like the voice when he said, “Hundreds.”

* * *

* * *

“Look who I found,” Tami said, breaking into my thoughts.

“And look who we found,” Saffy and Vi said, pushing Rhea through the door. She was clutching her blouse as if she was afraid they’d rip it off