Honestly, I needed to verify whether or not godhood would stop her, should her sworn chains one day break. Was she a god-killer?
I brushed past the Soul Eater, suppressing a shudder.
If the conversation between Izi and my father went south, I’d keep such deflecting questions prepared. It was never a bad idea to have a topic change or two at the ready.
I pushed open the double doors to see the figures poised beneath rows of opulent chandeliers. Izi was seated with uncertainty on a settee on the far side of the room. My father folded his wings behind him as if they’d just been flared in the heat of battle. Both of their rigid postures and tight expressions told me I’d interrupted a heated exchange. Izi’s scent of amber and heat splashed against his pomegranate and spice the moment I stepped between them, as if I’d plunged my head beneath an ocean of perfume. The assault on the senses was almost too much after my prolonged time with the humans, but I was not the only one suffering.
My sister’s tucked position suggested that she was on the losing end. Good. Whatever the fight, I was on my father’s side.
“I was summoned?” I asked.
I had exactly one guess as to the topic at hand, and I didn’t want to hear it. Apparently, my grace period had run out. It was time to defend myself, and I was in no mood.
Izi opened her mouth to speak, but my father went first.
“Word of your human has spread beyond our walls,” he said. There was a sympathy in his voice that I didn’t appreciate. I clasped my hands behind myself, widening my stance and planting my feet, but said nothing. He went on. “We’ve established relations with numerous pantheons. You’ve kept your word as emissary after our discussion. But prior to that? The realms who feel you tore through their people before dignifying them with a greeting? This was not the best way?—”
Ah. This was the angle. I was brought into the kingdom to fulfill the obligations of a monarch, and my crown was ill-fitting? Sure. I could work with that.
“I disagree,” I said coolly. “I was there in a way that posed no threat. They had a chance to see Hell in a companionable light.”
“There’s no power in what you’ve established,” Izi snapped. “We look chaotic at best and weak at worst.”
Our father shot her a silencing look. She’d clawed her way into our meetings, but would do well to remember which, between the two of us, was set to inherit the throne.
“This isn’t about the other gods,” I said. “Why don’t the two of you come out and tell me what you’ve called me in to say: you don’t care for my human.”
My sister’s terse laugh earned her a second silencing glare.
“If I’m the first to keep a human, do tell me,” I said. “For it would be news to me.”
He sucked his teeth. “Of course, you’re not the first. Gods, demons, cryptids, fae…lore of such dalliances lives in infamy.”
I’ll admit, I was too offended to lean into deference. It wasn’t my most respectful of moves, but I buffed my nails against the cloth pressed to my collarbones, then examined my handiworkas I recited text from the pantheon that had banished our kingdom. “The sons of god found the daughters of men beautiful and took them for wives as they chose.”
Quoting a passage from the King of Heaven’s book earned me a glare from them both.
“Angels falling in love with human women is why half of the dukes and counts and marquises in our realm were kicked out of Heaven in the first place. So please, lecture me as to why I am not permitted. Forbidden love is a pillar of our fall.”
He lifted his hands as if soothing a wild horse, but whether the gesture was for me or to calm himself, I wasn’t sure. “It’s not that you have a human.”
I clapped my hands together. “Excellent. Then, we’re done here?”
Izi got to her feet. “Claiming a mortal is not the problem,” she said. “It’s that you haveonehuman. And you’re making choices that put her interest above Hell’s.”
I opened my mouth to respond.
Izi stamped a foot over my first syllable, speaking over me as she pushed. “The Hellenic pantheon turned a blind eye when their nymph wound up dead, but there isn’t an immortal soul who doesn’t point silent fingers at you. What was her crime? Seeing you with that girl? What was her name?”
I waved it away.
“Eleni. That was the one.”
She must have caught the way my face tightened. She’d gotten to me and, from the way she relaxed her weight into one hip, berry-dark lips twisting up in a wicked, charcoal smile, she knew it.
“How do you…”
She sneered. “I could fill tomes with what you think I don’t know.”
