Tempt the Stars

when she clearly could do without me now. Well, too bad. I was here and I was staying here, until I got what I’d come for. I’d gotten precious little in the way of preparation for this crazy life from either of my parents. But
I would have this
.
    She turned away to put the baby in the crib. “You’re as stubborn as your father.”
    “Then you know I won’t just leave.”
    “You would do well to reconsider.”
    “Like he should have reconsidered, that night in London?” It came out before I could stop it, but I wasn’t sorry. A human—a bumbling, clumsy, ham-fisted human—had saved her that night, from a group of creatures who made the gods shudder. It hadn’t been pretty and it sure as hell hadn’t been elegant, but it had worked.
    Sometimes we mere mortals could surprise you.
    “If he hadn’t been there, I would have died,” she agreed, tucking in the child. “But his life . . . might have been very different.”
    “And mine would have been nonexistent. So forgive me for being glad he was stubborn!”
    She glanced at me. “You even sound like him.”
    Her voice had been fond, almost indulgent. It seemed impossible that she should have cared for someone so . . . not divine. I’d mostly been assuming that she’d been using him in some way. But it had sounded . . 
    “How did you two meet?” I asked, because I’d always wondered.
    She didn’t answer. She also didn’t sit down, so I couldn’t, either. Maybe that’s why this felt less like a visit, or even an audience, and more like a bum’s rush to the door.
    Fine, I thought, angrily. But I was going to ask anyway. She could ignore me, but I was going to ask what I damned well liked.
    “It wasn’t that night,” I said defiantly.
    She still didn’t sit, but she leaned against the crib. She looked tired, I thought, and then I pushed it away. Goddesses didn’t get tired . . . did they?
    She smiled slightly. “We met when Agnes brought him back across more than three centuries. From a cellar in London, if you recall.”
    I remembered Agnes taking the furious mage he’d been away, but I hadn’t thought she’d planned to keep him. “Why didn’t she turn him over to the Circle?”
    “The Circle has no facilities for dealing with time travelers, however inept. Such is the responsibility of the Pythian Court. She brought him to London, and shortly thereafter, I met him—in jail.”
    “And fell in love with an inept, time-traveling jailbird?”
    It came out before I could stop it, but she didn’t seem offended. “No one knew he was inept at the time. I was designated to take him food, since he was presumed to be a dangerous dark mage and I could shift away on a second’s notice. Instead, I stayed. And we talked.”
    “About what?” I couldn’t imagine two people who had less in common.
    “The past, the future . . . a hatred of fate, of rules, of suffocating order.”
    “I thought order was a good thing.”
    “It depends on whose.”
    I blinked. That had sounded grim. “I don’t understand.”
    The lightning flashed outside, making her hair glow flame-red for an instant. “You do. You are the child of chaos, Cassie, of turmoil and mayhem and wild uncertainty. Your very existence is proof . . ”
    “Of what?” I asked, when she trailed off.
    “That hope cannot be chained. That fate can be undone!”
    I blinked again. She’d said it fervently, passionately, which was just as well. Because, otherwise, it might have sounded less like prophecy from the lips of a goddess . . . and more like the cheap babble some so-called clairvoyants used in a reading when they didn’t know what to say.
    Or when they were trying to change the subject.
    She smiled again, as if reading my mind. “You wish to rescue this demon, then?”
    I nodded.
    “Why?”
    “I—what?”
    “It is a simple question, is it not? You are proposing to risk much for him.”
    “He would do it for me.”
    “Would he? They are self-serving creatures, demons—”
    “You could say the same about humans—or gods.”
    An eyebrow rose. “Perhaps. But we are not talking of them. But of a creature who is struggling against his very nature. Sooner or later, he will give in to it. Perhaps it is best if it is among his own kind.”
    “They aren’t his kind! They’re—” I thought about the demons I knew, from the mostly benign to the frankly terrifying. None of which reminded me in the slightest of the man downstairs. “He’s