Tempt the Stars

coveted it, wanted to be part of it more than anything. But she was barred from it because of her almost nonexistent power.
    So she’d decided to augment that power—with some of Pritkin’s. I don’t know if that’s why she’d gotten with him in the first place or if there had been genuine affection there, as well. But if there was affection, it hadn’t been enough to stop her from initiating a power exchange on their wedding night, hoping to increase her own abilities and thereby her status in the demon world.
    Unfortunately, it had backfired horrifically, and Pritkin hadn’t been able to stop it. He’d never had sex with another demon before and didn’t know the ritual she was using. And Rosier hadn’t warned him, despite knowing her intentions ahead of time.
    “We don’t know what Rosier knew or didn’t know,” Casanova argued when I pointed that out. “She went to visit him before the wedding; who knows why? Perhaps she was attempting to get the two of them to reconcile. Perhaps she just wanted to meet her famous father-inlaw. Perhaps a million other things. We don’t know—and neither did he!”
    “I think Pritkin knows his father a bit better than you do!”
    “All right, say I give you that. Say Rosier knew ahead of time, or guessed, what the idiot girl was planning. Does that somehow obligate him to tell his estranged son—the son who said he wanted to know nothing of their world, the son who swore he wanted to live as a human—a damned thing?”
    “Yes! If he wasn’t a complete bastard—”
    Casanova looked at me like I might be crazy.
“Demon lord?”
    “It was still a shitty thing to do.”
    “And striding into hell to kill him wasn’t? How was that supposed to end well? And how is
this
?”
    “Because this isn’t about Rosier,” I told him impatiently. “This is about the demon council. They’re the ones who sentenced Pritkin to enslavement by his father for the attempted assassination. They’re the ones who can reverse it.”
    “And why should they help you?” Casanova demanded nastily.
    I took a deep breath, trying to keep my temper. Because he was an ass, but he was an ass with a point. If he was coming, he did deserve to know. And because we needed him.
    Without Rian, we would never find Pritkin before Rosier’s forces found us, and without Casanova, she would be spotted and identified before she could help us. She was supposed to be on earth, not here. And it wouldn’t take anyone who had known her long to figure out why she’d suddenly decided to return home after avoiding it for a couple of hundred years now.
    “You said it yourself,” I reminded him. “We’re at war. The council doesn’t want the gods back any more than the rest of us—”
    “And giving you one man is going to prevent that?”
    “It’s done a pretty good job so far!”
    Casanova sneered. “It’s done a pretty good job against exactly one god, who was already seriously weakened when he got here thanks to what he’d had to do to get through your mother’s spell. And who underestimated you because”—he gestured up and down at me, and made a face—“he was overconfident and it got him dead. But I don’t think the next ones will be!”
    “All the more reason to give me what I want,” I said, refusing to let him get to me. “It’s a small enough request; it cost them nothing; it asks them to risk nothing. But the rewards could be substantial.”
    “Then why not ask them before we trooped in here?” he demanded.
    “Because they can’t go into another demon’s realm! None of the council has the right to violate another lord’s sovereignty. And none of them are going to try it and risk setting a precedent that might be used against them someday. But if we can get him out—”
    “If being the operative word.”
    “—then they can tell Rosier it’s for the common good.” Or whatever they wanted to tell him; I didn’t care. But Mother knew demons better than I did, and she thought they’d go for it—if we could get him out.
    And we were going to. Somehow. But the city that shimmered into existence on the horizon, dim and distant and faintly blue, had me wishing we’d brought an extra canteen. Because my mouth had suddenly gone dry.
    “We shouldn’t fight among ourselves,” Rian said, a little sharper than her usual tones. Maybe because she was looking at the city, too. “If this goes according to plan, it should be a simple enough procedure.”
    “And when