Tempt the Stars

how much chaos the gods were causing during their sprees—and about how many humans were getting dead in the process.
    She’d been Artemis when she grew a conscience.
    At least, I assumed she had, although who knows? The gods were nothing if not capricious. Maybe she just woke up one day and decided to punk her fellow divine beings—by tossing their godly butts off the planet.
    She did this, it turns out, by a spell sustained partly by—you guessed it—her own divine soul. It was the only thing powerful enough to cut off access to an entire world. And it had worked . . . sort of.
    Meaning that it had worked at the time. And even later, after she started to decline from a lack of compatible magic on the planet she’d just stranded herself on— great idea there, Mom—it still had. The spell was now supported by the group Jonas currently led, an alliance of human mages known as the Silver Circle. So, presumably, even if it was somehow brought down, the mages should be able to recast it.
    Assuming they had all the parts, that is.
    Which, of course, is where the record scratched. Since Artemis’ protection spell had been linked through her soul, that soul formed a vital part of the spell. Meaning that if it disappeared, the spell it was supporting went away, too.
    And since the other gods hadn’t been amused by her little come-to-Jesus moment or whatever the hell it had been, and
really
wanted back in, that was a problem.
    Particularly when the other side in the war was only too willing to welcome them back with open arms. The whole mess had Jonas wanting to tear his crazy hair out.
    What had me wanting to shred mine was that everybody assumed I could do something about all this.
    Yeah, okay, at some point the goddess famous for virginity had decided to hook up with a human for some reason, and pop out baby me. But that did not automatically confer any special insight. I’d had to learn about the whole mess the hard way, like everyone else—by piecing clues together over the last several months, ever since the war made it obvious that the gods were getting serious about the reclaiming-their-playground thing. And I still didn’t know much.
    In fact, I probably knew less than most, since nobody seemed to think it important to actually tell me anything. I was just their ace in the hole, the quasi-divine chick they’d lucked into who was expected to pull something out of her ass every time a god or his little homicidal offspring showed up to wreak some more havoc. It was infuriating.
    It was also terrifying.
    Especially since, along with that lack of insight I’d gotten a big old goose egg in the divine equipment department. Sure, I had the power that came with my office, but all Pythias had had that. And most of them had known more about it than I did. But if there was some kind of demigod bonus I was supposed to get on the side, well, it had been lost in the mail. My maternal line notwithstanding, I was just Cassie.
    And some days—most days—I was afraid that wasn’t going to be nearly enough.
    Like days when I was covered in bruises and my own blood, plus some two-decade-old spiderwebs I hadn’t noticed until now. “Shit!” I said, running frantic hands through my hair and knocking off a couple of little brown things that scurried for cover. And didn’t make it thanks to Marco’s size-sixteen boot. “I need a drink,” I told him honestly.
    “Drinks!” Fred’s head popped up. “That’s right. We’re going to need—”
    “Don’t even—” I warned as he grabbed the coffee cup I had stupidly set down on the kitchen counter.
    “You couldn’t get a large?” he snarled, playing keep-away. And then somehow my coffee ended up parsed out into three little demitasse cups, slapped on a tray along with the leaking doughnuts, and sped out the door, all in about the time it took to blink.
    I started after it, but Marco didn’t move out of the way. “Wait.”
    “I wait and I starve!”
    “There are worse things.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like having your dingle cursed off,” Fred said, sidling back into the kitchen through the half inch of space left by Marco’s bulk.
    “What?”
    “You know.” He looked pointedly downward.
    “They don’t do that!”
    “Like hell they don’t! I’ve
seen
things, okay? And these aren’t mages. They’re not part of the Circle. They don’t have rules—”
    “They have rules, just ones decided by their covens,” Marco argued.
    “Yeah, rules like