“It feels nice,” he told me. “Like a fuzzy pet rock. Do you want to—”
“No!”
He looked down at it fondly. “It does seem weird, though, doesn’t it?”
“‘Weird’ is not the word I’d use.”
“Not the cup. Myra.”
“What about her?”
“That she left so much to chance. Killing someone like that . . . you know, when she didn’t have to.”
“She did have to. If an acolyte kills a Pythia directly, the power will refuse to go to her. It’s something to do with the conditions laid on the power when Apollo gave it.”
“Apollo,” Fred said, frowning. “You really believe that stuff you told Jonas the other night, about us fighting gods?”
For a moment, it threw me. Maybe because, for the last three months, I’d been living in a crazy world of gods and demons, myths and monsters, and Fred hadn’t. Well, okay, he’d been there for that last one, the demigod sons of Ares called the Spartoi, who could shift into dragon form at will. And damn, you’d think something like that would have woken him up.
But there were dragons in faerie, and for all I knew, maybe he’d seen one. He hadn’t seen a god. He hadn’t been there when Apollo died, hadn’t seen him glowing bright as a star fallen to earth, a boiling mass of power. And that was after he’d been seriously drained getting past the barrier. Yet I’d hardly been able to look at him. . . .
“Cassie?”
“Not gods,” I told him tersely. “Just beings powerful enough to make ancient people think they were.”
I started sorting through the stuff on the coffee table to give myself something to do. Maybe the girls would like some mementos of Agnes, if I could find a couple dozen that weren’t too horrifying. Which wasn’t looking like it was going to be easy.
“But why so powerful?” Fred asked, sitting forward.
“What?”
“The gods. Why were they so powerful here?”
“I don’t know. They come from another world—”
“The fey come from another world. And their magic doesn’t work here.”
“It works. They use Elemental magic, same as the covens.”
“Not the same,” he argued. “The same idea maybe, but the fey can’t feed from our world at all. The covens can ’cause they’re from here, but the fey aren’t. Their bodies generate some magic, and they bring talismans and shit with them to extend it. But when their power starts to run low, they hightail it back to faerie. They have to, or become sitting ducks!”
I blinked at him, because that had sounded . . . kind of vicious.
He saw my expression and grimaced. “We’ve been having some problems with the fey lately. It’s one of the things the master’s doing in New York.”
I nodded.
“But none of this explains why the ‘gods’ were so damned powerful here,” he persisted. “Shouldn’t they have run dry eventually, like the fey?”
“They’re not fey.”
“But they’re magical beings and all magic gives out eventually; why didn’t theirs?”
I shrugged. “They cycled out, went home sometimes. That’s why the old legends say they lived in places like Asgard or Olympus, not earth.”
“But the legends also say that they fought wars here,” Fred persisted. “Including some with each other. So, what did they do when their power ran low? Say time out and go home?”
“No,” I said, and tossed a ruby on the pile. “They fed on demons.”