Page 56 of Lost and Stolen Gods
Oh god. No wonder he’d acted odd when I’d told him about Nani. He’d lost someone too.
“Wait, didn’t one of those pissy things kill your gran?” Eve said bluntly.
The table fell silent, everyone either looking at me in concern or throwing dagger eyes Eve’s way.
“What?” she said. “It happened.”
The more I confronted that night, the less hold it could have over me. “Yeah, it did. And yeah, it was. I told Pashim about it today. I didn’t know about his jodi though.”
“Even worse, I hear that she was pregnant,” Priti said.
“What?” Poppy and Regina said in unison.
“It happens.” Dharma shrugged. “The bond is powerful, and some drohi and demigods do have a sexual relationship.”
A kiss was one thing but, “How? They have such big dicks.”
And now I was the total center of attention. Shit.
“How do you know that?” Dharma asked with a dirty smirk.
“I knew all that tension between you two had to be going somewhere,” Priti added.
“Is that why you fell off the log?” Eve asked. “Was your crotch hurting?”
“Oh my god!” Sylvie smacked Eve’s arm.
“Whoa, whoa!” I held up my hands to quieten them all down. “It’s nothing like that. I walked in on him changing, that’s all. So they have children and then what? They stop fighting?”
“Nice change of subject,” Remi muttered beside me.
For a moment I was worried that it wouldn’t work, but then Priti took pity on me and went with the topic change. “The children go into the cradle to be raised by yaksha,” she said. “Offspring of demigods and drohi are always drohi. The children just add to the army.”
“And what if they don’twantto be in the army?”
“I doubt they get a choice,” Dharma said. “I doubt anyone gets a choice here.” She threw up her hands. “Hell, look at us.”
“Except gods,” Priti added. “Gods get a choice.”
But it wasn’t right. Taking their children. Owning a race…It was oppression. My gut knotted.
Everyone was quiet now, expressions as troubled as mine.
“We can’t do anything.” Priti said. “We don’t have the power.”
“No, not yet,” Dharma said.
But maybe when we were gods, wecoulddo something. Anything, if enough of us banded together.
“I think I have a renewed interest in becoming a god,” Joe said.
Dharma held up her glass of water. “To becoming a god.”
“To becoming a god!” we all echoed.
I just hoped we all made it.
The factthat I’d missed having a proper go at the dummy gauntlet grated on me, so once we were done with supper, I headed back out to the arena with the intention of taking a closer look at it. I asked Priti for her map, and she loaned it to me on the proviso that I not try out the gauntlet alone, just in case I got hurt. Once I promised, she marked the map with the route I’d need to take through the complex to get to the second arena.
