Page 70 of The Demigod

I think I managed to point.

The rest, well, the rest was a blank.

Somehow, though, Aggy got us to the motel. She even managed to get me inside, to set me on the bed.

Where I fell into a sleep so deep it was damn near a coma.

When I woke, it was like a goddamn electrical current shot through my body, making everything inside me wake up.

“Well, that sure did the trick,” a feminine voice said. Unfamiliar, but there was a strange… comfort at the sound of it.

I sought the voice, finding a black-haired woman sitting at the edge of my bed.

A stranger.

Yet so, so familiar.

“Hello, my daughter.”

Nyx.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Daemon

Pain.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Nox

“Mom?” I asked, hearing a needy little girl hint in my voice, that part of me that had always craved a maternal figure, no matter how much I tried to pretend that my father was all that I could ever need. Because he was all that I had. Because I didn’t want him to think I found him lacking.

“That is a strange word,” Nyx admitted, head tipped to the side. “But I did carry you within me. I did hold you after you came from me,” she said, eyes far away for a moment. “Those soft cheeks and big, round eyes. You turned out quite beautiful. I wondered, over the years.”

“You could have visited.”

“Not if I wanted to keep you safe,” she countered. “A half-human child. The things that could have been done to you. But you know all about that now, don’t you? Clever girl,” she added, offering me a smile. “To think to look for your sister. To work with a demon to free her.”

“And a witch,” I said, gaze moving around the room, heart sinking when I didn’t see Aggy around.

“She is currently breaking open that metal box full of food. If you can call it that.”

Thank goodness.

She hadn’t run off.

I knew she said she had no home. But if what Arick said about witches and warlocks was true, she couldn’t be out roaming the world alone, unprotected.

Granted, I had little to offer her.

But I at least had money. A car. A motel room. Clothes for her to borrow. And if nothing else, access to a warlock who could maybe protect her.

“It is no wonder you have faded so much, eating that garbage. When all you needed was this,” she said, holding a bottle of bright, golden liquid.

The same liquid I’d seen in my siblings’ cups.

“One drop, and you have almost fully recovered,” she said, making my stomach twist.