"What are you talking about?" Still dazed, he wasn't quite sure he had heard her rightly.
"When they told me the same thing. After the original Diana was killed in a 'hunting accident'—frankly, she seems to have been too independent to suit Hera—and I passed my own finals, I—"
She stopped.
"Now don't look at me like that," Diana said. "And pull yourself together, because we've got to get to the Final Investiture. But it's all true. I'm a substitute too."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Great God Dionysus, Lord of the Vine, Ruler of the Revels, Master of the Planting and the Harvest, Bestower of the Golden Touch, Overseer of the Poor, Comforter of the Worker and Patron of the Drunkard, sat silently in a cheap bar on Lower Third Avenue, New York, slowly imbibing his seventh brandy-and-soda. It tasted anything but satisfactory as it went down; he preferred vodka or even gin, but after all, he asked himself, if a God couldn't be loyal to his own products, then who could?
He was dressed in an inexpensive brown suit, and his face did not look like that of Dionysus, or even of William Forrester. Though neatly turned out, he looked a little like an out-of-work bookkeeper. But it was obvious that he hadn't been out of work for very long.
Hell of a note, he thought, when a God has to skulk in some cheap bar just because some other God has it in for him.