It was a strange sight on Pritkin’s features. Fear wasn’t an emotion that I usually associated with the man. Not that he was reckless, as I’d sometimes thought when we first met, but his abilities did allow him to walk where angels feared to tread.

Literally.

“You’re afraid,” I said.

“Of course, I’m afraid! I would be an idiot not to be.”

“Why? About the war? Because we’re winning—”

It was his turn to laugh, and despite coming from a smoke being, it was full-throated and contagious. I felt my own lips quirk in sympathy, before suppressing it. I didn’t hear Pritkin laugh like that too often.

He noticed, and his expression grew rueful, although he didn’t comment. “We are not winning.”

“We killed two gods—”

“Yes, two foolish gods who came here alone. Zeus will not make that mistake. Not after today.”

Suddenly, I remembered my first chat with the All Father, and the weird chorus of voices I’d heard on the edge of his words. Like it wasn’t just him speaking. And something about that thought made me shiver.

“He doesn’t have to worry about being controlled, like Apollo and Ares,” the incubus said, watching me. “He is the one whose control they were trying to avoid. That is likely why they chose to come by themselves; they were tired of his yoke around their necks.”

“But there’s no yoke on him,” I said, finishing the thought. “Because he’s already on top of the heap.”

The demon nodded. “Precisely. Which is why, when he comes, he will come with an army. Not of mortal men or the vampires who vaunt their power so, but which only serves to make them slightly larger ants on the hill with the rest of us. But an army of gods. They will sweep over this world like a tidal wave, and when they are finished…”

In my mind, I saw again that wasteland of ruined cities, those mountains of skeletons, the desert sand blown in drifts across highways that no one had bothered to clear, possibly because there was no one left.

Then I shook myself.

“And how do you expect me to stop it?” I asked, my voice harsh. “I’m already doing everything I can.”

“No,” he said quietly. “You are not.”

And then he told me.

~~~

The demon finally faded away, and I ran a bath in the tub wedged in between the door and the wardrobe. Unlike modern bathtubs, where the hot water came in as it filled up, this one required you to run it full of cold and then to use the gas heating unit in the base. Which would have been fine except that the mechanism was cranky and would roast you like a plucked chicken if you weren’t careful.

And sometimes, even if you were.