“Demons?”
“That’s what they wanted with earth in the first place: as a staging ground for their hunt. Humans don’t have enough energy to bother with, but the demons had more, sometimes millennia of accumulated power, and it . . . fattened the gods back up.”
“Ah. I didn’t know that.”
“It’s why the demons hate them. The gods were using us as bait to lure them in. The demons came to feed off us, and then the gods fed off them.” Like lions hanging o
ut at the watering hole, as Pritkin had phrased it.
Hungry lions.
Fred frowned. It didn’t look like he enjoyed learning that he was low man on the food chain. “Are the gods like us in other ways? Can they pull from family? Share power?”
“Not that I know of.” I kind of got the impression that the gods didn’t share much of anything.
“But then, how did they fight? Each other, I mean?”
“I told you. Maybe they fed off any demons that happened to be around, if they got low.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t look convinced.
“Vamps do that,” I pointed out. “Tony’s boys did, in a scuffle. They used to drain their opponents to heal themselves.”
“A scuffle is not a war,” he argued. “And while that’s technically possible, it takes concentration. And losing concentration, even for a split second, with one of us . . .”
I nodded. The best way to survive a vamp fight was not to get in one. Sort of like with the gods, I thought grimly.
“Here, put these in your pockets,” I told him, scooping up the jewels. I’d decided against the amulets. The creep factor was high, and I didn’t need anyone else poisoned. But some of the raw stones might be pretty all polished up. Maybe the girls could get rings made or something.
“You can tell me, you know,” he said as I was stuffing his jacket pockets.
“Tell you what?”
“Why you’ve been running around like a headless chicken for two weeks—”
“I have not.”
“You have. You stumble back in, dirty and beat up and wearing seriously weird clothes. You throw back some dinner, grab some sleep, and then you’re off again. Everybody’s curious.”
“Then tell them to be less curious.”
“Some of the guys think Mage Pritkin has gone and got himself in trouble, and that you’re trying to help him—”
“They can think whatever they want.”
“—but I told ’em that you were probably doing something about the war. Trying to find us some advantage maybe.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So which is it?” he persisted. “War or war mage? I got a bet riding on it.”
“Can’t it be both?” I asked, distracted by the sight of one of the cups, which had ended up under the coffee table. I picked it up. They were really beautiful, some of them. This one had been carved entirely out of amethyst, like a single great jewel.
But it hadn’t saved her. None of them had. I was beginning to think that those sorts of precautions never did. Hunker down, play it safe, take precautions . . . and die anyway.
Because Mircea was right about one thing: how did you win a war playing defense? The answer was you didn’t. Not usually, anyway, and not this one.
But what other choice did we have?