Tempt the Stars

not happen.
    I looked at Marco, expecting a little sanity. Only to find him regarding the plate, too. “Maybe you could . . . fluff ’em up,” he said, apparently serious.
    “Fluff ’em up?
Fluff ’em up?
” Fred hissed. “They’re jelly doughnuts! There’s nothing to fluff!”
    “They’re
my
doughnuts,” I said, reaching for the plate again. And had it snatched away.
    “Have an apple,” Fred snarled, tossing me one from a bowl.
    “If I’d wanted an apple, I wouldn’t have bought doughnuts!”
    “Well, that’s too bad,” he hissed, hunched over my dinner like Gollum with the ring. “Because I’m not going out there and telling a bunch of mumble—”
    “What?”
    “—that we don’t have anything for them. I’m not, do you hear?”
    Not really. “A bunch of what?” I asked, for clarification.
    The darting eyes made a return, and his tone was barely audible. “Wumble,” he said reverently.
    “What?”
    He looked up, a faintly annoyed frown creasing his forehead. “Wichel!”
    “What’s a wichel?”
    Marco sighed. “Witches,” he translated.
    “Witches?” I frowned.
    “Yes!” Fred said vehemently. “Witches! Witches! Wi—” He suddenly realized he’d been yelling, and bit off the word. And crouched down behind the kitchen table so, I suppose, Marco and I would be the better targets. “Witches,” he whispered.
    I put a hand to my head. I just wanted a doughnut. A sweet, squashy, jelly-filled reminder that there were good things in life, however much fate seemed determined to deprive me of them.
    “What witches?” I finally asked.
    “The coven kind,” Marco said dourly. “They showed up almost an hour ago, demanding to see you.”
    “Did they have an appointment?”
    Marco looked faintly uncomfortable. “No.”
    “Then why did you let them in?”
    “’Cause they appeared on the balcony and let themselves in through the wards?” Fred asked, peeking over the table and prompting Marco to shoot him a look.
    “Because one doesn’t just tell a bunch of coven leaders to get lost!” Marco bit out.
    “If they don’t have an appointment, you do,” I said grimly.
    I wasn’t trying to be inhospitable, but seriously, this shit had to stop. Morning, noon, and night, ever since my not-exactly-a-coronation, it had been the same thing: senate leaders, Circle leaders, Pack leaders, press-tryingto-pretend-to-be-leaders of something, anything, that would get them in, all showing up. To gawk at me. And in the case of the latter, to get the story of the century.
    And the worst thing was, it wasn’t even mine.
    Yeah, I was the Pythia the vamps had pulled out of the woodwork a few months ago, who nobody knew anything about. And yes, that would have been front-page news in any situation. In any
other
situation.
    But, suddenly, nobody cared that I had been brought up by Tony the Louse instead of being carefully nurtured at the Pythian Court. Nobody was bothered by the fact that I’d therefore received practically no training for the job I was supposed to be doing. They didn’t even seem to care that an untutored vampire’s protégée was occupying one of the most important positions in the magical world while said world was being consumed by a major war.
    No.
    They only cared about one thing.
    They only cared about my mother.
    You see, it wasn’t my dad’s soul that had put that paperweight at the top of Jonas’ Christmas list. It was the fact that, shortly before he and Mom and their Buick were blown into a million pieces, my mother had done something that had linked her soul to his. So when Pop’s spirit was captured in the magical snare Tony had devised, hers went along with it.
    And hers was kind of a big deal.
    Because hers belonged to a goddess.
    Yeah, I know. It just gives the whole crazy mess that little extra touch of madness, doesn’t it? I spent my childhood thinking that Tony had taken me in out of the goodness of his cold, slimy heart, after my parents were killed in a tragic accident, only to find out that he’d arranged the accident. One that had killed not only my father, but the creature the world had once known as Artemis.
    Oh, she’d had other names, even before she started using the O’Donnell alias. All the gods had, skipping merrily around this new world they’d found, causing chaos and littering demigods about, while being worshipped under a hundred different titles. But she’d been Artemis in Greece, where she’d had an epiphany about just