Then I blinked and he was on me, bearing down on my already injured wrist until I felt something pop. A dagger of pain shot up the length of my arm, making me gasp. And that was before he rotated his foot slightly, causing bone to grind against bone.

I screamed, trying not to curl around my broken wrist, trying to shift again. But God, it hurt, it hurt, and I couldn’t focus—

Couldn’t do anything, not even cover myself. My towel had ended up a few yards away, leaving me naked except for a lot of mud. But I didn’t think Niall cared. There was no lust in those horrible eyes as he looked me over, no heat, no human emotion at all. Just cold assessment, the same spine-shivering stare he’d given me in the air.

“You know,” he said mildly. “I think I will enjoy this.”

“This is about revenge?” I gasped.

“No, you foolish child. That will be a bonus. This is about the end of a chase that started long before you were ever born. When that damned bitch Artemis turned on her own, banishing the gods from what was rightfully theirs. Using her power over the pathways between worlds to slam a door shut in their faces, and her power over the hells to keep it there.”

“The hells?”

“Earth is an upper hell. How else could demons travel here so easily? She was a queen in her castle; no one could touch her. No one but the children the gods left behind.”

“You—you’re looking for Artemis?” Small world.

“Not looking; found. We hunted her for millennia, and nothing—nothing! But we were patient, because we knew, queen or no, this world doesn’t feed her kind. Every century that passed made her weaker, sapped her strength. Why do you think she had to form the Circle, to fuel her spell? Could not a goddess power it herself?”

“I . . . never really thought about it.”

“No. Neither did they. Never wondered why she had to rely on the humans she loved so much—because her own power was failing. We watched and we waited, knowing that, sooner or later, she would be forced to go to the only source of the gods’ power remaining in this world.”

It took me a moment to get it, because of the pain and because it felt like something was pounding on the back of my skull. “The Pythian power.”

“Yes. Her own brother’s legacy. How she must have hungered for it, lusted after it, more and more each year as her own vast store of power faded and thinned and drained away. And at last, after three thousand years, she broke and we had her. We had her!”

“You killed her?” I said, even knowing that wasn’t right. Knowing something . . . the pounding in my head was getting worse.

“We tried. Oh, how we tried. For you see, little Pythia, there is no spell that can block off a world. No word, no enchantment, no charm has that kind of power. The only way even she could manage it was to weave a piece of herself, a piece of the very fabric of her being, into her spell. She became part of it, an integral part. And what happens, little Pythia, when you remove a vital component of a spell?”

“It falls,” I said blankly.

“Yes. So we tried. But we missed her. An idiot mage helped her, something we hadn’t expected. And she disappeared again like smoke. But her power was weak—so weak! We knew we were close. We redoubled our efforts, worked tirelessly day and night. And finally, five years later, we found her again.”

The pounding was a hammering thrum now, like a thousand running horses.

Or one, pulling a crazy carriage through a distant street.

“The mage had hidden her away—with a vampire, of all things! And by the time we finally tracked her, the vampire had already taken care of the situation. He had been cheated by the mage on a business deal, or so he said. And had taken the most final possible revenge.”

The drumming was so loud, I could barely hear. Hard and fast, like the pounding of my heart, like the blood drumming in my ears, like the crest of a wave, about to break—

“He swore to us that she was dead, and after some checking, it appeared that he was telling the truth. And yet the spell hadn’t fallen! She had been blown to a thousand fragments by the vampire’s bomb, but it was as solid as ever. And that was when we realized—she must have left something of herself behind.”

“No.”

“Oh yes. But the vampire lied to us. He never mentioned a child, wanting to keep his little cash cow alive and well and working for him. And to our discredit, the idea never so much as crossed our minds. Why would it? She was the famous virgin goddess. There were no gods here, no one worthy of her, so who would she have taken to bed?”

“No!”

“Yes, horrifying, isn’t it? That ridiculous creature—but we should have known. It was all there in the name. Garm was Hel’s faithful companion in all the old sagas, was he not?”

I nodded slowly.

“But did you know? ‘Garm’ in Old Norse . . . is ‘Rag.’ ”

I shook my head. That didn’t mean—

He saw and smiled. “Ragnar Palmer—that was your father’s real name, wasn’t it? Before he changed it? And ‘Ragnar’ means ‘warrior of the gods’ in Old Norse.”

The wave broke, crashing over my brain, whiting out all thought for a moment. And when I could think again, it was a succession of images, clues, things I should have seen and totally hadn’t. My mother overriding Agnes’s spells at the party, something no heir should have been able to do. Her unbelievable stamina, leaving her stronger at the end of a fight than I was at the beginning. Her saying that the Spartoi had chased her for “a long time.” The look on Deino’s face when I asked about the child of Artemis.

I finally recognized it for what it was: stunned incredulity.

I could sympathize.

“After your parents died, the trail went stone-cold,” Niall told me casually. “We had no choice but to work on other avenues. Five times we painstakingly amassed the power to go back in time, to attack her when she was weakest. And five times we failed, dying over and over as those damned spells misfired and backfired and ripped us to shreds!”

The face lowered until I could feel the hot breath on my face, warm—too warm—to be human. Not that there was any chance of that with those eyes staring directly into mine. I stared back at them, paralyzed less by fear than by sheer disbelief.

This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t—

“Having the ability to be resurrected by one’s brothers does not mean one does not feel pain in the dying,” he hissed. “I bled, my brothers bled, over and over again. For nothing. Until a month ago, when that idiot Saunders came to me, wanting a little favor. It seems the vampires have a golden girl, a shiny new Pythia, whose name he would like me to blacken. Oh, and by the way, you’ll never guess who her mother was.”

That last was a scream, but I didn’t even flinch. I was way too far gone for that.

“Must have been a shock,” I said blankly.

“It was ridiculous! That one stupid little girl could be so much trouble. Before you came on the scene, Myra was well on her way to destroying the Senate. Our allies among the vampires were posed to take over what was left. Our people had infiltrated the Circle, removing Marsden and substituting a greedy, duplicitous idiot in his place, who could be manipulated and blackmailed at will. Weakened on all fronts, with no allies and nowhere to turn, the Circle would have fallen to our forces in a matter of weeks, and Artemis’s damned spell along with it.

“But at the ninth hour, what happens? A stupid, bumbling, ridiculous child stumbles onto the scene and ruins everything. In a matter of a few months, you destroyed Myra, reinstated Marsden and are on the brink of uniting the vampires! Oh yes, we know what they’re really doing up there,” he said, gesturing at the house. “But that isn’t going to happen, Pythia. You’re going to repair the damage you’ve done. This ends now.”

Chapter Forty

He jerked me to my feet, and I finally realized what he’d been waiting for. The house lights had extinguished, leaving the once glowing ballroom dark and silent. I couldn’t see very well, but from what I could make out, a solid wall of people stretched across the glass opening, their heads blacking out the lighter walls beyond, their jewels occasionally catching the light.

It’s like stadium seating, I thought blankly. Only what they were watching tonight wasn’t the latest football game. It was an execution.

“They can’t help you,” he told me. “But they can watch—as all their plans and schemes and useless alliances go up in smoke. You die, the spell fails and my father returns. And the last legacy of that traitor is gone forever.”

I didn’t answer, mainly because he backhanded me and I went sprawling. But then, I didn’t have to. Because the darkness suddenly faded, the trees whispering to one another as the pale smudge of a moon, like a coy lady, glided up over a hill. And immediately, everything changed.

The dark sky flooded the color of polished silver, the wet grass sparkled like diamonds, the hills and the trees and everything around us was bathed in a brilliant white light. It reflected in the puddle I’d landed in, a luminous, wavering orb like the one Deino had offered me, but that I hadn’t understood. I’d never seen anything so beautiful.

Not since the look of mingled joy and pain and disbelief on my mother’s face as she gazed at me.

My mother, who, if the Spartoi hadn’t hounded her, wouldn’t have had to flee, wouldn’t have ended up with Tony, wouldn’t have died. They may as well have killed her. They’d driven her into the hands of the one who had.

But they hadn’t killed her. They hadn’t been able to kill her. She might have lost her power over the centuries, but she’d never lost her courage. She’d taken on four of these things twice over and won. And she’d done it all while drawing from the same well of power I did, power that was hers by right of birth.

As it was mine.

My power wasn’t some alien thing, I thought, watching the sky in wonder. It wasn’t borrowed from another or stolen from a better candidate. There was no better candidate; there never would be. It had flowed away from Myra as soon as it saw me, like the tide when the moon comes out. Because it was mine—it was mine; it knew it was mine.