He was supposed to be trying the same trick on Aeslinn. Let the fey king and his people die for the cause of the gods’ return. If he was successful, maybe throw him a bone and allow him to rule Faerie while Zeus and the rest of the pantheon swept into Earth, their real target, since it was the gateway to the hell regions beyond. There, they could feast on fat demon lords full of centuries of accumulated power, while the fey and whatever humans they had left alive slaved to serve them.

And if Aeslinn failed? Well, Zeus hadn’t shed any tears over Paris, and likely wouldn’t again. There were always other power-hungry patsies out there. I ought to know; I’d battled more than a few of them myself.

That was the problem: our side had too many enemies willing to sell out Earth for whatever crumbs of power the gods offered them. And while we had to win every time, they only had to get it right once. Once and they bypassed the barrier that Artemis had thrown up millennia ago to protect Earth from Zeus and his divine buddies, after she kicked them out of this realm. Whether that move had been altruistic, as the magical community believed, or a bid to keep this rich honeypot all to herself was an open question.

What wasn’t in question was that she was no longer around to help, we were a world besieged, and I couldn’t fight Zeus in her place!

But that was looking more and more like what people expected me to do. Because great Artemis, the famed virgin goddess, might have overtasked herself in the fight with the other gods and eventually faded, but she’d left behind a single, half-human child in her stead. Just another one of the kids that the gods had littered about all over the place, most of whom had come to a sticky end.

I didn’t know why she’d done it. Maybe it had been an oops moment, a little sexual healing with a mortal that got out of hand. Maybe it had been deliberate, the result of her wanting someone to cling to in those last few years of life, because the one thing the gods didn’t seem to know how to do was to die. Or maybe she’d actually hoped that I’d finish what she’d started. Like so many things with her, who the hell knew?