WHAT SCREAMS MAY COME

Dulcie O’Neil #10

by

H.P. Mallory

Other Series by H.P. Mallory

Paranormal Women’s Fiction Series:

Haven Hollow

Midlife Spirits

Midlife Mermaid

Paranormal Shifter Series:

Arctic Wolves

Paranormal Romance Series:

Underworld

Lily Harper

Dulcie O’Neil

Lucy Westenra

Paranormal Adventure Series:

Dungeon Raider

Chasing Demons

Detective SciFi Romance Series:

The Alaskan Detective

Academy Romance Series:

Academy of Necromancy

Reverse Harem Series: (Writing as Plum Pascal)

Happily Never After

My Five Kings

What Screams May Come

Copyright © 2019 by H.P Mallory

All rights reserved.

Ebook Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Acknowledgements:

For my son, Finn, who makes me so grateful every day.

To my editor, Teri: Thank you for a job well done, as always.

To Jennifer Monroe: Thank you for coming up with the amazing title!

What Screams May Come

PROLOGUE

Hana, Former Secretary of State

On a crisp, autumn morning, a very particular someone was sitting on a beach in a place that, as far as everyone in the Netherworld was concerned, didn’t exist anymore.

The scene was cold and bright. Stars twinkled through a thick veil of clouds, smothered by rain that refused to fall. Thunder broke a long silence along the horizon, chased by thin tails of lightning. The only sound for a thousand miles in any direction came from the birds and the eternal tossing of a restless sea.

This particular someone was drinking excessive amounts of tea and watching the waves, waiting. Endlessly patient, she was smelling the air and listening to the gulls; their calls sounding ever-so-slightly less musical than their counterparts on Earth. They flew lower, landing frequently, still accustomed to dodging the horrid, flying nightmares of Melchior O’Neil, as rare as the flying abominations had been even back then in this place.

It was a futile precaution; when the monsters were here, they were invariably faster. That was the point. Melchior had a fondness for daring someone to run from him, just so he could make a brilliant, visceral display of his revolting strength.

And look where that got you, she thought as she sipped her tea.

The air fizzled and popped beside her as someone appeared.

She smiled, drank, and peered out at the ever-shifting sea, tasting the salt in the air. The wind carried wispy clouds of glittering sand up from the beach, plastering it to her bare legs. This was her home, her hiding place, full of the cold and everything that was allowed to exist here at the edge. This was her first and last refuge from Meg and the darkness Meg insisted on playing with. Though really, the darkness was playing with Meg now.

Meg and her obsession with Dulcie no longer concerned Hana; Meg and Melchior’s shambling empire was all she wanted now.

The newcomer cleared his throat and shifted his weight on the sand, visibly uncomfortable. She had that effect on people when she wanted to. She let him steep in his own silence for a while before she spoke. Instead, she took in the beauty around her.

A shallow wave swept the shore, splashing droplets of water with all the fervor of a morning mist onto the beach. In its wake lay shells, pebbles and the broken remnants of coral. The water hardly made a sound as it retreated. The rocking motion it exhibited was cool and calculated. It was too soft, gentler than the sea should have been in a place like this, where all the worst creatures in the world issued interminable threats. According to legend, these beaches were swallowed up by an earthquake followed by a typhoon hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Any surviving creatures of Hana’s ilk were assumed to be the offspring of those who managed to escape—but they all knew better than to believe that.

The heartland of the Valkyrie, so cold and pristine, where Hana had been born so long ago, remained a closely guarded secret. Any divulgence of its existence, let alone, its location, bordered on blasphemy.

Hana, of course, did not care.

“I hear Meg finally went crazy,” she said to the visitor eventually.

The man snorted. “And what gave that away?”

Hana ignored his tone, not in the mood to find herself out of sorts. “Did you see what Meg did to them? The ones who stayed after the White House fiasco?”

The sarcasm sloughed off him like water in the desert. He swallowed audibly. Sweating bullets of dread in buckets, he could have filled an ocean with his animal terror.

“Yes.” The word was a ghost of itself, so thin and brittle. He said it again. “Yes. I did.”

He uttered a few extra sounds, perhaps to say that what happened at the White House was a horrible, haunting, devastation of morality; or maybe only that it made his stomach turn. His own reaction would undoubtedly be his greatest concern; she doubted if he mourned for any of the innocent victims.

“It was awful,” he said. Admittedly, that was better than she expected from him. It was awful, horrible, detestable. Vulgar.

At last, she looked at him. He was tall and well-built with eyes full of ice and venom. Dark eyebrows, a squarish jaw, and one shoulder that rose higher than the other, due to the result of a bad brawl and a bone that never knitted together properly. The folds of his faded coat, just a tad too small, outlined the bones poking through his skin like a fishnet on a shark. Scars crisscrossed his face and arms, most of them fairly recent, and ostensibly inflicted by Knightly Vander.

“How are you, Jax?” Hana asked.

It had been quite a while since they last spoke; before Melchior blackmailed Dulcie into working for him. Hana had warned Melchior and Meg that the way they were going about handling Dulcie was a terrible idea, totally unsustainable. She’d suggested Dulcie would need a subtler incentive to persuade her to come to their side. But Melchior, of course, could not be swayed. Instead, he was set on threatening his daughter’s very dangerous boyfriend.

How did that pan out, Mel? Hana thought now. If you’d just left Dulcie and Knight alone, none of this would have happened. Meg’s darkness would not have been necessary. You wouldn’t be dead and this probably wouldn’t have blown up in all of our faces.

God, the look on Meg’s face when she found out Melchior nearly killed Dulcie in his library. The ensuing rage was just as hot and ferocious as a California wildfire. If Melchior had not already been dead, Meg would have torn him into tiny pieces and very slowly.

But Hana was getting distracted. She returned her eyes and thoughts to Jax.

“I’ve been better,” he said. “Glad I’m not one of Meg’s fucking zombies. You?”

She looked him up and down. “I’m better now.”

A smile curled the edges of his mouth. She felt his emotions as they spilled out of him, eagerness wrapped in a smothering blanket of caution—and arousal. He wanted her, and badly.

Good. It was easier to manipulate feelings that were already established.

“You know I don’t work for Meg anymore,” Jax started. “She’s… like you said, she’s fucking crazy. If you want to talk to her again, you’ll need to find somebody else. And anyway, everything’s gone to shit, so I doubt she could help you even if she wanted to.”

As though Hana didn’t already know that. “I could have contacted her myself.” Hana shook her head. “But I don’t want to talk to her.”

“You quit too?”

She bristled. “I never worked for Meg, or Melchior either. We were partners for a while. But only as long as they were useful.” Until they started making the kinds of stupid decisions that cause empires to crumble. Things such as blackmailing your daughter while consorting with an ancient evil like the Darkness to pick up your dead partner’s slack.

“Right,” Jax said. “Which is why I hardly ever saw you around.”

“Are you accusing me of something?”

“Prolonged absence, maybe.”

“I tried to keep them smart,” Hana answered. “They didn’t listen. They never listened.” She looked at him over her shoulder. “The most dangerous animal is not the lion or the bear, but the snake! You can’t see it until it’s already bitten you. Meg is a lion and Melchior might have been a snake, but he was the kind of snake that slithers in the grass and gives itself away. Their incompetence was hardly my fault.”

He nodded. “Uh-huh. So are you taking over now?”

“Something like that.” She reached out with invisible hands to twist and pull at his desire. His subdued physical appreciation morphed and swelled, blooming into a wire-bound need, a labyrinth of steel thorns that embedded themselves in his skin. His aura flared red around him, throbbing like an inflamed muscle. A moment later, he was hers. All it took was one “come hither” look for him to drop to his knees and begin salivating like Pavlov’s dog.

Sometimes, things were just too easy.

He swallowed hard. “What can we do?” We meant Jax, himself, and the paltry remains of his once formidable potion organization.

It had been a long time since they were anything close to “being together;” but luckily for Hana Jax had never moved on.

She grinned, almost leering. “A great deal, actually. You and a sizable number of your more loyal employees escaped in one piece. Meg’s disciples were not so lucky and suffered a more… colorful fate, as you witnessed. Meg is somewhere around still, but all the people willing to die for her are dead… and she doesn’t care about anything now but retrieving Dulcie.”

He stared at her blankly.

“Which means, Meg is distracted,” Hana said slowly. “And without friends or resources.”

He nodded, his eyes suddenly vacant.

She sighed, sitting back, and allowed his attraction to diminish to a prickling simmer. That gave him back some of his senses. He blinked with confusion—then smiled and tried his best to look seductive.

She repressed a grimace. He hadn’t gotten any better at it.

“Which means we are without opposition,” Hana continued. “Meg is gone, Melchior is dead, and there is a whole plane of existence out there just waiting for us to seize it. While the rest of the world continues to search for Meg and tries to prevent what I’m sure will be a spectacular and loud attempt to get Dulcie back from wherever she is now, we can move with grace and delicacy.”

“Delicacy?” asked Jax, crossing his arms.

“We can be sneaky, Jax.”

He chewed his lip, obviously unsure how to ask his question without sounding like an idiot. “And what do you want from me?”

“Your people. Your connections. You,” she said. She put her drink down and stood up, walking slowly towards him. “A partnership. I want to give you what we were promised.” She ran her hand slowly down his arm. “Better than what we were promised.”

He raised his brow. “Really? And what was that?”

Her expression turned to stone, her vision swimming with all the human faces that never paid her any mind because she was a Valkyrie—a magical creature and therefore, hard to control. She saw Odyssey’s red hair and burning eyes, the ever-present scorn of ignorant men like Richmond in their expensive suits, the idiots behind the Siphon Project, the human agents with synthetic magic scorched into their skin, a paper wall between humanity and the unbridled rage of the supernatural collective, the photographer taking the picture of Odyssey’s administration inside the Oval Office, the highest office in the world, and Odyssey sitting in the chair behind it, the one seat that belonged to her.

She took a breath. Behind her, the ocean swelled and the clouds darkened. Lightning split the sky somewhere far away. “Power, mostly. And revenge. The ashes of the empire Meg and Melchior left behind. The tools to put the whole human world right in the palms of our hands.” She smiled and put her hand on his cheek. “A better world.”

Not the most inspired answer, but it got her what she wanted. Jax’s face split into a wide skeleton smile.

“I’m in,” he said.

Not that he had any choice.

ONE

Dulcie

So I’ve got good news and bad news.

The good news: the supernatural community isn’t being expelled from the planet. Huzzah.

The bad news: the ANC has devolved into absolute shit. In other words, it no longer exists. Like. At. All. Most of the buildings were blown to hell and the rubble that was left got absolutely pulverized during the official disbanding of the Association of Netherworld Creatures. This decision was based on the grounds of the ANC “being unable to keep an ego-maniacal, magical, crazy person from trying to take over the world.”

Which might have been fair, but it still sucked.

We didn’t get fired, though. We just got transferred. I’m still a cop, which is great, but it means I now have a human partner. Yep, I’m now working for the human government in a precinct full of humans, armed with guns and thousand-yard stares, as well as oversized chips on their shoulders. Yes, there are lots of really good reasons not to trust supernatural creatures. Especially me. A good number of them think I’m the herald of the Apocalypse. Not that I blame them. I was almost-kinda-sorta slightly responsible for the attempted assassination of the leader of the free world.

And at least a little responsible for a lot of fires.

Like a lot of fires.

Okay, debriefing time. I’ll make this quick.

So, there’s this person named Meg. She calls herself “The Darkness,” because she apparently has something really dark and unfriendly on her speed dial. And all she wants for Christmas is to take over the world.

Not our world, though, just the Netherworld. She hates humans with a burning passion, along with the ANC, as well as the human government. She wants the humans out of the Netherworld, and she wanted it yesterday.

But if the ANC goes away, the Netherworld lacks infrastructure and has no security to rely on. Closest thing they had before was a mockery of a monarchy with all the big, scary Houses of the old Netherworld answering to the biggest, scariest House in the Universe. Apparently, that House had belonged to Meg and all of her vampire friends a long time ago..

Once upon a time, Meg had been in charge. Then she wasn’t. There was a really nasty war when the humans showed up in the Netherworld for the first time—not long after the supernatural creatures that were already on Earth went public. The United States (and other countries) naturally wanted to establish their own consulates in the Netherworld, especially if the Netherworldians insisted on building clubs, bridges, casinos and drug empires right on their front lawns.

Not all the creatures back home agreed with the decision to inform the human government of things that go bump in the night in the first place. Fewer still wanted to allow human influence into the physical bases on their plane. Most of them didn’t want any contact period, let alone, active human operations. Humans were not revered and generally considered stupid, lesser beings, lacking magic, and putting them in charge of anything on the wrong side of spacetime was a big no-no.

So, Meg wanted her power back, and all the House-related government entities that went with it. That meant exterminating the illustrious Association of Netherworld Creatures. And making sure the ANC would stay gone forever. And how did Meg eventually solve her problem, you ask? By blowing up damn near every ANC office in the country. And then she framed us, the ANC, for the crime, trying her damnedest to make it look like an inside job. She wanted us to appear like we were sick of government oversight and trying to overturn it from the inside out. Which was sheer bullshit! Half the time, we didn’t even know the federal representatives watching us were even there… That’s probably why everything went to shit in the first place. Not enough people were watching.

Well, it worked out swimmingly for Meg. Lots of things went boom across the United States, culminating in a synchronized domino effect in Chicago, Austin, Kansas City, Miami, and the District of Columbia—which, in case you reside under an extremely sound-proof rock, is where the President of the United States lives.

So they all went boom, and Meg used a portal-ripper that she stole from Bram (way to give the nightmare hellbeast the key to the Universe, dumbass!) and liberated herself, myself, and lots of bad guys from the Netherworld, all of which she later released on Earth.

Oh, and during all of this I got kinda of, um, glamoured. Yep, I was glamoured into thinking that Meg was my mother.

But that’s another story. And one I really don’t want to get into right now.

All the cities that went boom were suddenly crawling with beasties. The worst, most horrid creatures of the imagination started appearing everywhere, and the higher-ups in D.C. as well as the general public, shat their collective pants.

Everything within a hundred miles of any ANC was ablaze. Meg and I, along with a bunch of other people were in the White House lobby, staring at each other. President Odyssey was three tenths of a second away from expiring when pow! Federal Agent Rowena Gem snapped her fingers and in swooped a giant, green skeleton thing that just burned the ever-loving shit out of Meg. Meg went nuts and started screaming, like she was terrified, and then poof! She was gone. And so was the skeleton.

So Odyssey got up and called Canada, saying, “Help pls,” and thus began two long weeks of waiting and waiting and waiting. Whatever was left of our government had to decide what to do with the surviving parts that still remained from the questionably-dead ANC… which didn’t amount to much. Three offices still stood, two of them consumed by fire and smoke and swimming with all manner of Netherworldian parasites and mold-like spores. The rest were just big, black craters, still steaming in the ground.

There weren’t many survivors. Not anywhere.

The ANC was effectively dead, and Odyssey’s administration had more pressing issues to deal with—like the humanitarian crises in more than twenty newly demolished cities. So reestablishing our bureaucracy got shelved and they eventually decided to merge the surviving personnel with human law enforcement. Every aspect from the sheriff’s office to the FBI was integrated until a more permanent solution could be found.

And now here I am. Sitting at a tiny desk in a giant room, surrounded by angry pedestrians and the ghosts of my unpaid parking tickets.

Ta-da.

The office was crowded with uniformed officers as well as undercover cops who were busy hustling the small-time bad guys into cells at the far end of the building. Nobody noticed me—half of them didn’t care I was here, and the other half preferred not to be caught ogling the hyper-dangerous fairy lest I snap and set them and theirs on fire with my laser-focused eyes!

I heard a rumbling and the building trembled around us when an earthquake rattled, making everybody drop what they were doing and look around. Desks shook and computers clattered; the lights swung from the ceiling like kite tails, and the small number of transfers from states where this didn’t happen every Thursday were cautiously huddled under doorframes, visibly resisting the urge to crawl under their steel tables.

For a fraction of a second while it was happening, the air around me went ice-cold. My spine froze and I gasped, inhaling slowly and feeling like I was deep underwater. The air was getting thinner and something was coming. But what?

The earthquake stopped. The odd feeling went away.

Everybody looked at me. Like they thought I was the cause of it.

I glanced at a few of them. “Don’t look at me! I had nothing to do with that!” I snapped.

Nobody replied. They all looked down, coughing and shuffling papers until the hum of conversation reclaimed the uncomfortable quiet.

I turned back to my desk, bending down to pick up some papers that slid off in the quake. “It’s not like we live in fucking California or anything.”

Behind me I heard footsteps and a disgruntled sniffing. I sat up and lifted my coffee cup, remarkably still contained in its mug, and took a long drink while I watched the offensive sniffer round the corner.

Gary. Old, heavy, and set in his ways. Emotionally unbalanced. Unbearably human.

He caught me looking at him and glared back before disappearing into an interrogation room. I knew damn well there was nobody else in it. I scoffed. He was trying to intimidate me, make me think he was working a case so big and scary that it warranted interviewing somebody in a room with a two-way mirror and an angry, white guy. I don’t know what he intended to accomplish. If I were as tight with Satan as everybody thought I was, Gary’s pompously pedantic behavior wouldn’t be nearly enough to slow me down.

Oh, yeah, did I mention that basically everybody hates me?

I sighed, taking a very long drink of coffee and setting the mug down beside a short pile of papers. Blank forms for taking statements. I was waiting patiently for somebody out in the big, bad world to do something so stomach-turning that I could write a short story about it. Worse than a car accident, but better than terrorism. And it couldn’t cross state lines—the Feds would be only too happy to take a case off my hands. Anybody in the building would have been happy to take a case off my hands. Never mind that it meant more work for them and a wasted opportunity to watch the temperamental fairy take a flying leap into a career-devouring volcano.

I’d only been in the building for about two hours, waiting for my unidentified partner to make his appearance. It was weird having a desk again… It felt like years, maybe decades since I’d been at work. It couldn’t have been more than a month, but every memory I had from before I got sucked through a fucking wormhole was frighteningly blurry.

My doctors attributed my continuing recovery to a long-term glamour. They all agreed that it should go away within the year. Eventually I would be able to think clearly again, and remember my tenth birthday and the first time I shot an Op 7, and the time Knight ingested shapechanger blood and morphed into the living embodiment of an erection.

Now that was an ordeal.

It was a weird memory. All cloudy and red even before this happened, so now all I could really remember was hiding in a bush beside an increasingly horny Knight who insisted that I pinch him repeatedly.

I wondered for the better half of a second what Knight would say or do if I brought the memory up now. He hadn’t been able to remember what had happened when I’d told him about it in his office right after it happened. One of the hazards in drinking magic sex blood is convenient memory loss—so he probably wouldn’t remember it now. However, it might cause him to do that adorable, angry, blushing thing…

I smiled but then nearly smacked it right off my own face. Hades, stop that.

Oh. Right.

One thing I forgot to mention, mostly because I’m not quite sure how to say it: Knight and I are… something. We’re not quite together, and not quite apart. Dancing on static. Breathing in a sandstorm. Somewhere cold and uncomfortable, balancing on the razor’s edge of violation. Empty. Vulnerable in all the worst ways. Bared to the bone, our souls molded into effigies of ourselves, quivering, unsure what to do about each other, now that the worst of all possible things had happened.

Knight had sex with Meg. Right in front of me. He was under a glamour, but… still. It was a hell of a thing to see.

And I have no fucking idea how to process it.

To be totally honest—and this doesn’t make it any better—I had my fair share of glamoured-sex too. It was with a vampire in Meg’s household named Sebastian. It makes me sick to think of it now…

“Detective O’Neil?”

I looked up and standing in front of my desk was a gangly, twenty-something in a blue uniform with ash-blond hair and the biggest, goofiest grin I’d ever seen. With both hands in his pockets, he faced me. His wide, bogglingly blue eyes suggested at once that he had no concept of how easy it is to die.

I blinked squarely at him. He blinked back.

“Who’s asking?” I said slowly.

“Henry Cotton,” he replied. He seemed at ease in the strangest, most irritating way possible, like a middle schooler from fifties television. The kid could have addressed me with “Golly gee, mister” and I would not have been the least surprised.

“I’m your new partner.”

Greeeaaat, I thought, suppressing a powerful urge to sigh. “Yeah, that’s me.”

His eyes got bigger, if that were even possible. Almost like being my new partner excited him. I squinted at him, instantly suspicious.

Okay, on paper, it wasn’t too weird that they were saddling me with the new guy—technically, and I do mean strictly technically, I had almost seven years of professional ass-kicking experience under my belt. On paper, I was the ideal person to place the new grads with. And I say “on paper” because as far as everyone in this building and damn near every other building on this fucking planet were concerned, I was as fresh-outta-the-Academy-green as he was, and red, red, red to boot. I was totally inexperienced and guilty of so many things. Nothing I’d done in the now-defunct ANC now held any water. As far as everyone else was concerned, I was newborn and bloody, about as trustworthy as the kid they picked up off the street for peddling potions or whatever street drugs humans chronically use. I was trailing a long, angry list of really bad things that were totally not my fault, but which put me at the top of everybody’s “nope, not today” list.

Nobody here would have been stupid enough to place one of their own under the wing of the scary-fairy; and none of them trusted me enough to train somebody from the ground up. So, either this particular kid was in really hot water with somebody higher up the ladder, or the powers that be were playing a deliberate, and weirdly sophisticated hand—sticking me with the new kid so that if something went wrong, they’d conveniently have me to blame.

“It is such an honor,” he said, offering me his hand.

“Um what?” I asked as I took his hand slowly. He gave it a vigorous shake. “Honor,” I repeated blandly. “You’re looking for Dulcie O’Neil, right?”

“Yes, yes, the one from the Association of Netherworld Creatures! I am a huge fan!” he said, now shaking my hand hard enough to rattle my bones.

“Um,” I said. Okay, this is new. “Fan of… what, exactly?”

He stopped shaking my hand abruptly, looking very confused. “What do you mean, of what? You saved the world!”

I drew my hand back, still staring at him. “Well, yeah,” I agreed. I mean, I almost helped end it to start with—but yeah, sure, what the hell, I saved the world.

“Is it true what I’ve heard?” he asked, rounding the desk and plunking himself down in an empty, free-floating chair next to mine. “That you’re a fairy and a vampire?”

Along with a number of other things, I thought. “Um… yeah. It is.”

“Cool,” said Henry, practically squealing—then he caught himself and cleared his throat. “Sorry, Detective. I’m just excited they granted my request.”

“Request?” I repeated. “Wait, wait, wait! Hold up! You asked to work with me?”

Henry nodded enthusiastically. “I sure did, ma’am.”

I looked up. Behind him, a group of officers were casually loitering near the captain’s office, muttering to each other and casting spectacularly obvious glances at Henry and me. Their eyes widened and narrowed in turns, as if they were trying to decide if the kid were crazy or just good, old-fashioned stupid. Their hands were poised over their guns, like they fully expected me to set myself on fire, unhinge my jaw and swallow poor Henry like a foul-tasting pill.

My heart skipped a beat for a second, because their guns weren’t just guns anymore. Part of the merger included the introduction of bullets that were filled with dragon saliva—a supernatural paralytic that sometimes did its job too well. It made your lungs forget how to breathe. The saliva wouldn’t do anything to humans, as most every other supernatural poison, but the change in artillery went over without much of a fuss—a bullet filled with dragon spit is still a bullet.

The bullets weren’t filled with dragon blood only because the president worried about what dragon blood bullets would mean for those not of the human persuasion. Like if I coughed and someone spooked and shot me where I stood, I’d be dead on the spot. The president couldn’t allow any infighting to destabilize or castrate the entire police force. It was a tentative, and I do mean tentative grasp that the world currently had on peaceful coexistence with magic.

“What’s wrong?” asked Henry, louder than he should have. He followed my eyes to the officers who were still glaring at us. “What’s the matter with them?”

“They don’t like me,” I said pointedly. “Ignore them. You said your name was Henry?”

“It is.”

“Henry Cotton.”

“Yes.”

“And you asked to work with me.”

“I did.”

“You realize that being my partner is going to be a bitch-and-a-half, right?”

“I do. At least, I’ve been told that, ma’am.”

Ma’am, I thought. Fuck, I’m not that old, am I? “And also everyone in here will probably hate you at least a little just for talking to me.”

He laughed. “Yes. I’m aware of that.” He glanced over at the others. “Looks like they’re in the process of hating me now.”

“And did you also know I’m being actively accused of treason by the people you work with?”

He nodded. “An accusation isn’t a conviction.”

I sighed, blowing the air out my cheeks as I shook my head. I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell kind of crazy made Henry Cotton not want to throw me into an active volcano for crimes against the State.

Never look a gift horse in the mouth, I thought. Even if the horse is tapdancing and breathing fire. Even if you really should look inside its mouth, just to make sure it doesn’t have sharp teeth and an ancient vendetta.

Whatever. Henry seemed nice enough. I opened my mouth to say something trite and inclusive—Welcome to the force, wear your badge with pride, eat your vegetables, etc.—but the front doors banged open.

Everyone looked up at once.

A man, tall, dark and drenched in sweat, stood between four officers, two on either side of him. His hands were cuffed behind his back, and he was twitching, almost in spasms. He was thin and lanky with alabaster eyes and a mouth that looked like it never learned how to smile. He turned to me as they pulled him past, grinning maniacally. His eyes were wide and wild with the forced-adrenaline of a mandrake high.

I’d never seen him before.

“We should go,” I said, standing up. The last thing I needed was Gary making digs about my magical connection to every petty thief in the Universe: That a friend of yours? Want me to give you two a minute alone?

They wouldn’t be particularly intelligent digs, but I wasn’t in any mood to deflect them.

“Go where?” Henry asked.

The officers manning the front desk were looking at me. Apparently, they thought I couldn’t see them because they made a big show of examining their papers and computers when I looked back. Their auras glowed pink, grey and Indian yellow—indicating they were uncomfortable. Were they worried that the arrest of one of my “fellow creatures” might make me self-conscious, or worse yet, irritable?

“To the car,” I said to Henry. “We’ll start our patrol. I’ll, uh… show you the ropes. Or something.”

“Okay,” he said, shuffling excitedly as I made my way around the desk. I shoved my arms into my jacket and tried not to make eye contact with literally anyone in the office, but everyone was staring at me intently. A good third of their hearts were pounding furiously, their auras flaring in pale blue and white and grey—the colors of dread. There was an aching hollowness like an execution, or maybe they thought I was gearing up for a jailbreak.

“Evening, O’Neil,” said one of them as we walked past. He was polite, and his expression placid but his soul was squirming under his skin.

Hades! I wanted to turn to scream in his face. Not to say anything in particular. Just the wild, wordless cry of a girl who was sick and tired of having people think she was crazy enough to devise slow, creatively painful deaths to anyone who wasn’t a deviant like herself.

I didn’t scream, of course. I just smiled and said, “Evening, Tate,” hoping to high hell that my eyes weren’t red.

He didn’t flinch so I could only assume they weren’t.

Score one for me.

TWO

Knight

“There’s a regulation portal,” I said. “The one in LA is still mostly functional; it can get us to the Netherworld just fine.”

Hades didn’t reply. He was standing in the center of my living room, running his thumb up and down his staff, deep in thoughts that didn’t include me.

We’d been having this conversation for the better part of the last hour. In the immediate aftermath of D.C., I reluctantly agreed to help Hades save the world from whatever dark power Meg had drawn on when she ripped a hole in the White House lobby. At that moment, Hades promptly vanished, only to reappear three months later in my living room. Standing in front of the TV, he kept fiddling with his staff and offering zero helpful words of advice.

He needed me for something, and apparently pretty badly, but hell if he wanted me to actually get up and do something about it. The number of ways we could travel between dimensions was extremely limited in the wake of Meg’s nightmare-hellscape extravaganza. Hades apparently had a spiritual aversion to red tape, so the single remaining regulation portal was clean out of the question.

It is not time, he said, his voice filling my head like smoke. Hades was an increasingly claustrophobic presence. The longer he stayed in a room, the darker that room became, as well as suffocatingly warm and confining. He claimed it was one of many adverse effects his manifested form had on the lesser planes of existence, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

Of course, that was bullshit, but I had bigger things to worry about than the Lord of the Underworld fucking with my condo’s feng shui.

Like when was I scheduled to go to the Mountain in the Shadows or whatever the hell he called it?

“What are we waiting for?” I asked.

You missed your chance, he said casually. We must wait for another.

“What chance?” I demanded. “You’re a god! What do you mean we’re waiting for another chance? You control the chance factor! Chance is your bitch!”

Meg’s door was open, he said. And then it was closed. You did not act quickly enough to traverse the cosmos. Therefore, we must wait.

“You. Are. A. God. Just open the damn door yourself!”

It is not my door to open.

“Of course it isn’t.”

He was silent for a long time after that, twiddling his thumbs at the top of his staff and making a thin, lungless exhaling sound that might have been a feeble attempt at whistling. I walked around in front of him and crossed my arms, staring into his blank, black sockets with what I hoped was enough irritation to make him move.

“How long do we have to wait?” I demanded, peeved that he chose to appear as a skeleton. For some reason, when he donned that particular getup, it annoyed the fuck out of me. Maybe because it felt like I was having a serious conversation with a Halloween prop.

Not long.

“Not long? By human standards or by immortal-deity-for-whom-time-is-no-fucking-object standards?”

Not long.

I groaned and turned away, putting my hands over my nose and taking a deep breath. I shouldn’t have been here waiting, I should have been at the office with Casey, helping him track down Meg and her surviving allies. I should have been hunting the worthless waste of matter that glamoured me into fucking her right in front of the love of my goddamn life.

I stopped cold. I should have been with Dulcie.

I should have been with her, regardless of anything else. An apology was worth absolutely fucking nothing now, but I should have been doing something, anything, that didn’t feel like cosmic procrastination. Instead, I was avoiding having the worst conversation in the history of speech. Why? Because I was afraid it would end in nothing more than shouting and crying. I was afraid Dulcie hated me for what I’d done. Shit, I hated myself for what I’d done.

And she should hate me, that was the worst part. How do you beg forgiveness for something you yourself could never forgive in another?

I thought about it a couple of times. And honestly? I could probably just leave and let Hades get me when he needed me later. I mean, he had said I’d missed my opportunity to go wherever the hell we were going, right? I could locate Dulcie now and try to do the impossible and make things right, or at least give it my best effort. I owed it to the versions of us that weren’t throttled by forces beyond our control to do something, anything.

But I didn’t. Pacing my living room, I glared daggers into the ceiling and wished on stars I couldn’t see. I wished for someone to take me back in time to stop myself from having sex with Meg. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt, it’s a silence you can’t cough out of your throat. It’s slamming to a dead stop, going numb and falling hard off the treadmill into the deep abyss, before losing the ability to pick yourself back up.

I glanced back at Hades. He was still staring at nothing. Waiting. Wasting my damn time!

How are you and Dulcie?

I stiffened. “I beg your fucking pardon?”

How fares your relationship with the young fairy?

I glared at him, my hands curling into fists, my nails digging into my palms hard enough to draw blood. Hanging off the side of the Cliffs of Insanity, no thanks to you.

“Why do you ask?” I demanded.

I thought we were discussing things that were painfully obvious, he started.

“Are you fucking kidding me? You are in my house,” I said, “waiting for some nebulous thing to happen so I can help you save the world, and whatever you’re waiting for is about to fuck my life sideways again! Yet you continue waiting for it in the middle of my goddamn living room! And all I want to know is why the fuck you’re here!”

Answer the question, he persisted.

I paused, I scoffed, and I laughed. “Dulcie and I… After I screwed Meg right in front of her, how do you think we’re doing?” He was right about the “painfully obvious” part. Sighing, I ran my hands across my face and tried to blot out the horrible memory, but it was like trying to cover up the scribbles from a Sharpie with cheap white paint. I shivered every time I thought about it, as if I inhaled liquid nitrogen, but not enough to shatter my lungs.

I wanted to break something. Or set something on fire. I wanted to scream until the inevitable boiling death of the Universe, that it wasn’t my fault. Actually, it was my fault. I’d made a choice even if it wasn’t completely mine to make because Meg had been glamouring the hell out of me. But, even so, I should have been strong enough to withstand her power, her magic. Why the fuck hadn’t I just stopped touching her?

I faced Hades again. “And you could have stopped me.” A glamour would have been easy for a god to override.

It could have been easy. It could have been fine. It could have never happened at all.

I do not bother with such mundane enterprises.

I stepped forward and pushed him. He didn’t move, so I just ended up pushing myself away from him.

It would not have mattered regardless.

“Oh, really? And why’s that?” I said, getting right into his face. He didn’t have eyes, so I looked into the backs of his empty sockets, swirling with sooty darkness. “Emotional well-being isn’t worth cultivating in your fucking slaves as long as they can still walk and fight? Anything that doesn’t totally derail my goddamn destiny is open game?” My lungs heaved in my chest, burning from the inside out, desperately trying to funnel more oxygen into my pounding heart. “You could have helped Dulcie, too. You could have released her from that fucking glamour and saved us the same time you’re so pissed about us wasting. You could have fixed this.”

Hades inclined his head and examined me silently. Dulcie has her own destiny to contend with.

I didn’t like the sound of that. “Dulcie’s destiny should include having me by her side,” I said slowly. It was almost a question. Shouldn’t it?

He scoffed. It was a soft noise, and his skeleton didn’t move with it; for a second, I didn’t even realize he made the sound.

Then he started laughing.

His mirth was quiet and thin, like nails being dragged across rusty metal. I shivered and trembled when the whole room vibrated, creeping into my skin and freezing the marrow in my bones. His shoulders stayed put, but his mouth opened and closed, clicking his jaw while his fingerbones tapped incessantly against his staff.

“What?” I demanded. “What’s so funny?”

He didn’t answer my question. The silence stretched to a long ten seconds—pulling the time like taffy. Sagging in stagnant discomfort, the minutes seemed to pool on the ground until they barely existed anymore.

Then his derisive laughter stopped. The silence shattered the room like shards of glass, the sudden absence of all noise as shocking as something breaking. Slowly, slowly, Hades turned to face me.

How very mortal of you, he said, to think this is over.

Then there was an earthquake. Not a big one, just enough to rattle the plates in the cupboards. The building groaned like an old ship around us.

Hades looked up. He didn’t exactly have a face he could express his emotions with, but something about the way he stood changed.

Ah, he said. There it is.

The shaking stopped. He turned to me and I got the distinct impression that he was smiling.

Shall we?

“Shall we, what?”

Hades’ head quirked to the side, like a human rolling his eyes.

Save the world, as you say.

Anger bubbled in my stomach, hot as boiling metal. I sighed sharply. “Fine.”

Fine?

“Fine,” I repeated, “let’s just get this over with.”

Hades peered at me almost curiously.

Do you really believe this is something so simple that it can be ‘gotten over with’?

“You’ve been sitting in my house for an hour and haven’t told me a damn thing so now I’m getting a little cranky,” I answered.

You consider this a chore?

“I’d call it a colossal waste of my time,” I spat back. “While I’m sitting here, babysitting the Master of the Netherworld and promising to eradicate the monster under his bed, people are dying. That’s because I’m not out there helping Casey catch the real monsters! And Dulcie is all alone somewhere, hating me and I’m not doing a damn thing about it.”

Hades bristled. His skeleton leapt to life, licks of red fire coiling around his bones like snakes. Flaring, then vanishing, the rapid flickering was almost like lightning. You are a Guardian of Hades, a child of the Mountains of Shadows, in the lands beyond the rim of the world. You are a creature born of great purpose, you were designed to bear a mighty burden. You will treat your destiny with the deference and respect it demands.

“Deference?” I repeated with a laugh, which burned like acid in my throat. “I’m sorry, you want me to defer to the god I had to convince to help us stop a crazy, dark-magic vampire from carving a bloody, murderous canyon through the heart of America? The guy I had to beg to help us avert the nation-sapping war that broke out in front of you? A war that you were ready to just up and leave because it was a ‘lesser’ problem, and not important enough to catch your eye? Because it didn’t matter?”

You are very shortsighted, he answered. It is a flaw of mortality but one that you seem particularly fond of. Remember that you agreed to help me.

“After you wouldn’t leave me the hell alone about it,” I spat. “And saving people’s lives isn’t shortsighted. Yeah, sure, fine. I’m helping you save the world. But that isn’t a destiny worth seeking, not if it means monsters like Meg take a back seat and good people die because you’ve got something better to do. Sorry if I’m a little cranky, but I am really tired of listening to your apathetic nonsense. So, yeah, let’s get this over with so I can do my goddamn job.”

Suddenly, something in the air changed.

The flames around him gathered into one brilliant, burning light, surrounding him completely, reducing his skeleton and robe to no more than a dark silhouette, and half drowning his voice in its own furious thunder. He took a step towards me, holding the staff in both hands, and the embers flew wildly off him as he walked. His voice was lower now, like a cave echo that’s deeper than the sea, or the growling of an unfathomable monster, or the metallic grating of steel on steel.

The creature that troubles me is a beast of such power that Meg is little more than a nuisance. It is a nightmare beyond all mortal comprehension. I do not have the time to concern myself with anything less. This Meg you find so frightening is a vampire, and yes, a monster, to be sure, but no greater than any other ghastly abomination. You are a blind fool if you think she represents the greatest evil the Universe has to offer. If you dare to believe that preventing an entire dimension from swallowing your world in one gulp is no more than a trivial inconvenience, you are in for a remarkably unpleasant surprise. Yes, the conflict she instigated was lesser, when compared to the cosmic catastrophe that awaits all of us if you continue to hesitate on the grounds of being cranky.

He was right in my face now, his fire scalding my skin and turning everything I saw brilliant red. The air around him smelled like burning hair.

Your undying arrogance astounds me, and it will be the end of you and everything you hold dear.

I blinked. Half glaring, but mostly staring. I was unsure what to say.

He stepped back. The fire went out.

***

Hades vanished and I got back on my motorcycle, glaring through the visor of my helmet as he told me to go left here, right here and so on, down a long, convoluted road to the beach. The ground shook again, but softer this time, and now that I was outside, I also felt something shifting in the air with every tremor—something that was cold and dark, heavy as lead and sharp as icicles.

Left, he said, and I turned off the highway, following a short expressway that curled sideways down to the beach. The only sound was the thrumming of the bike’s engine. I felt the wind and saw the waves, the water slapping lazily against the sand, but they made no noise. I parked, pulled out the key, and the world closed in on me, the silence almost deafening. The ground vibrated beneath me as I walked, like I was standing on the back of a great, sleeping leviathan, wresting itself out of the earth to swallow the sea.

The ocean was night-black, its waves agitated by the frequent earthquakes. The beach itself was empty, and the roads leading down to it were too, strangely enough. It was late, but not so late that it could actually diminish the California traffic, not like this.

“Did you do something?” I asked. The ice I felt in the air easily could have been him, an unseen aura, persuading creatures with or without supernatural senses to give the beach as wide a berth as they could. Like divine caution tape.

No, Hades said.

“Then why’s it so quiet?”

The creatures can sense the opening, he said, and they know better.

I blinked. “Oh.” Well, that’s a fun sentence to hear in the dark.

I walked down to the beach, my footsteps sounding as loud as thunder. The sand crunched and shifted beneath me; wet from a recent rain, it kept caving under my heels.

Hades appeared in a soft wash of black smoke and cold air, standing beside me on the beach. His fingers were wrapped around his staff. The dark wood had a soft glow to it, pulsing like fading neon. We spent three seconds as statues, just staring. If the uncanny quiet bothered Hades, he didn’t reveal it—somehow, I doubt he understood the concept of an awkward silence.

Yes, he said, mostly to himself as he walked towards the water. When I didn’t follow, he stopped and turned to stare at me, the red lights flaring in his sockets. They always looked like embers, sparking and angry, but seemed especially irritated now. This way.

I pressed my lips together and followed.

He stopped when the water was knee-deep, his robes billowing around him, swirling in the surf. The air smelled like salt and sand combined with the smoke of a sleeping city.

“Okay,” I said. “What now?”

Wait.

I groaned. Loudly.

Hades said nothing but stared out over the horizon, the moonlight and streetlamps glinting off his skeleton, making him shine like glass. A soft wind scuttled across the water, wrapping around us, and stinging us with the salt spray. There were no gulls, no stray dogs or cats, no horns honking in the distance. Just the silence, the cold and the immutable.

Hades extended a hand out in front of him, palm up, his fingers twitching, feeling for something invisible. He went stiff when he found it.

Ah, he said. There you are. He turned to me. Don’t move.

Flipping his hand over quickly, like he was slamming a book shut, he made an earsplitting crack.

The ocean reeled in front of us, a single violent ripple that began at Hades’ feet and kept going until I couldn’t see the waves it created anymore. The force of it nearly knocked me flat into the water. Then it turned still, and was quiet again.

I blinked. “Okay,” I said. “What was that?”

He ignored me.

Inhale, he said.

I inhaled. The air tasted wrong. Thick and cloying like dead marigolds, stale as cigarette smoke and rust and rotting fruit. I fought the urge to gag.

Hold your breath.

I exhaled quickly. “Why?”

Hold. Your. Breath.

“Hades, fine,” I said, and I held my breath. Fuck, I’m gonna have to start cursing a different god’s name.

He laid a hand on my shoulder, the bones clicking. Three… two… he said.

And then he pushed me.

I expected to land on all fours in the shallows and be able to turn around and ask him what the hell that was all about.

But instead, I went under the water and I never hit the bottom.

***

Thick tendrils of frozen black kelp wrapped around my waist, my arms, and my face, pulling me down and drowning me in the darkness. I opened my eyes but there was nothing to see. As I was dragged deeper, the water surrounding me changed—not becoming warmer or colder but losing all temperature entirely, slowly replaced by air that was thick enough to swim through. The sensation grew more vivid, and I made the mistake of taking a breath, but felt nothing in my lungs, until I started gagging as though I’d inhaled the entire ocean.

It passed quickly. The tendrils released me. The water solidified, turning very cold again. I opened my eyes, and far above me I could see light.

I came up floundering. Splashing and gasping, I tried my damnedest to swim but the water was just so heavy, like liquified lead, clinging to my skin and dragging me down. I blinked the water away and found the shore, a narrow stretch of white sand with nothing but shadows on the horizon.

I hauled myself onto the beach, coughing, and spitting out the dirty water. Hades stood in front of me, impatiently tapping a skeletal foot against the sand.

“What the fuck was that?” I shouted, my lungs rattling.

He ignored me.

Come, he said.

I pushed myself onto my knees, my hands still in the sand, just trying to breathe. “You could have fucking warned me.”

Come. You are wasting my time.

“Fuck you,” I said, pushing the wet hair out of my face. I gave a loud, racking cough, and the last of the water I ingested spurted out of my lungs, tasting more like blood than salt water. I probably bit off my tongue or something.

Looking up, I found the world wasn’t the world anymore.

The sun was too close and big and round and watery. It seemed like I was looking at it from the bottom of a swimming pool. The sky was tinged red. The air had the alabaster bite of a dead Arctic winter. The horizon was comprised of a wall of mountains, towering masses of black stone, their peaks shrouded in a burning, red haze. Firework flashes of white light sprang out from their centers, lightning that was never followed by thunder. Behind me, the ocean stretched out long, dark and silent.

“This?” I said. It wasn’t California, but it sure as hell wasn’t the Netherworld either. Toto, what the fuck did you do with Kansas? “Where the hell are we?”

Close, he said, still prickling.

“Not what I meant, jackass.”

This is the land where gods are conceived.

Okay, closer. It seemed as likely a divine homeworld as any. “Which is… where, exactly?”

Hades clacked his teeth. We are in the lands beneath, he said.

“Beneath what?” I asked, standing up and brushing the sand from my knees and arms.

Everything. He looked at me with palpable pride.

I gazed at the mountains, their broad faces glinting like steel as the fog above them shifted and stirred. There was no way around them, and there was no path up that I could see, no stairs, and no rope-and-chain jerry-rigged to an invisible outcropping beyond my sight. Whichever peak was the notorious Mountain of Shadows, it had to be a bitch to climb.

Your army awaits you.

“Great,” I said. “So where are we going?”

Hades appeared briefly beside me, just long enough to point.

The big one.

THREE

Dulcie

Here’s the general rule about what happens when things go boom.

Say you were standing on a sidewalk in a city. And let’s assume you were a reasonably well-read person with no particular opinion regarding the domestic supernatural community and its ability to restrain its infrequent homicidal impulses. You also don’t care that fairies, vampires and werewolves aren’t just stories anymore.

Then something very close to you goes boom.

Of course, you’re startled. Scared shitless, probably. And witless, feeling totally incompetent in less than two-thirds of a second, your ears are ringing, and everything around you begins catching fire. The first thing you see while you still have all five of your senses would probably be something big and scaly with rows of unnecessary sharp teeth. Something undoubtedly supernatural.

The brightest souls among us would make the same assumption you probably did when faced with the threat of a razorblade tongue and brimstone eyes: Dragon bad. Dragon magic. Magic bad.

At this point, you might start running, along with anyone else who was unfortunate enough to be in close proximity when the thing went boom. By the time someone discovered you, you’d just babble senselessly about dragons, demons and large, carnivorous armadillos with trolls on their backs that bucked like mechanical bulls. Naturally, you’d expect the worst to happen.

Which is exactly what most of the population did.

The politics surrounding supernatural existence went from being tenuous but neutral to firehouse red and hostile, and from idle Thanksgiving chatter to maybe-we-shouldn’t-talk-about-this-with-grandpa in ten seconds flat. Never mind the evidence we had to the contrary; it didn’t do us any good. Meg was a vampire, a supernatural creature, just as evil and profane as the rest of us or more so. A feeble, plaintive public outcry that Meg didn’t represent the entire magical collective went unheard. You can’t extinguish the fire by lighting the match.

Even if it is one thousand percent the match’s fault.

“Okay,” I said. “So. Let me be honest with you.”

Henry frowned at me from the passenger’s seat. Streetlight stripes colored his face as we drove. “Have you been lying up until now?”

“What? No!” Then I thought better of what I’d just said. “Well… sort of,” I said, “but not about anything important. There’re just some things you don’t know yet, because, like, I’ve only known you for all of ten minutes.”

“Oh. That’s good, I guess,” he said so innocently that I knew it would start grating on my nerves any minute now. “What don’t I know yet? Do you have a bad back or something?”

“Just, listen for a second, will you?” I retorted as I sighed. A bad back?! “So you’re new. Like, really new. Fresh out of the Academy, and never-issued-a-parking-ticket new.”

I expected him to go on the defensive, but he just nodded, looking almost eager to hear more. When I hesitated another second, he added, “Yep!”

“Um,” I said. “Okay, so you know all the stuff that went down in D.C.?”

“Yeah.”

“With the vampire and the skeleton and the explosion?”

“And the dragon.”

I grimaced. “And the fucking dragon.”

“I do.”

“And you also know that everybody thinks it was my fault.”

“Not everybody,” Henry said.

“Okay, everybody but you,” I corrected. “Plenty of people blame me specifically for what happened. I even have friends who think it’s at least partially my fault—they just don’t admit it. Half the people I’ve made eye contact with today still hold me personally accountable.”

“For what?”

“For the cities that were torched, and the explosions, and for what almost happened to President Odyssey. They act like I’m a walking supernova or something.”

“They think you’re dangerous,” Henry said as he nodded, like I was dangerous and it was good to be dangerous.

“Yeah.”

“Are you not?” He sounded almost disappointed.

I sighed heavily, leaning with the wheel as I turned a corner. “I am,” I said. “Not to everybody—just the bad guys. I’m a cop before anything else, and I’m a good cop, so unless you’re breaking the law, we’re fine.” Not that anybody cares. “The point is: everybody is scared of me and would really love it if I were out of their precinct. Every other precinct feels the same way. I make them ultra nervous.” As volatile as storing gasoline and fireworks in the same tiny closet. Nothing bad could happen unless somebody lights a match, but still. Not a fun plan in the long-term.

“They don’t like you,” Henry said.

I snorted. “No, they don’t. Not at all.”

“Then why did they hire you?”

“They didn’t,” I said. “I’m part of a merger. All the cops from the ANC were moved to human precincts around the country. The captain’s my boss, yeah, but he doesn’t have anything to do with me being here.”

“What does this have to do with me, Detective?”

Hades, that title still felt weird. I’m not a detective, I’m a Regulator—calling myself anything else was sacrilegious. “I think they stuck us together in case something goes horribly wrong, because then they’ll blame me since I’m the superior officer.”

“Like a scapegoat?”

“Yeah. I think they’re just looking for an excuse before they formally request my discharge. They can’t ask for it out of the blue or say, ‘We’re scared’. Unless they have probable cause, it’ll read as hella racist, and Odyssey won’t have any of that.”

There was a long moment of silence. Henry put his elbow on the door, resting his chin in his hand. He stared at the glaring street lamps and the stone-black sky behind them. He must be trying to parse out what this means for his personal career.

“Do you think they’re going to try to make something bad happen on purpose?” he asked.

“That’s exactly what I believe,” I answered. Like planting drugs in my car or breaking my shoulder cam and claiming I roughed up a suspect in the dark. “I mean, I hope not, but… you saw the guys at the precinct, everybody thinks I’m hell-bent on taking over the world.”

“But you’re not, right?” he asked.

“No, I’m not!” I almost screamed at him and his eyes went wide.

“Oh. Sorry,” he said, suddenly appearing sheepish and shrinking into himself. Hades, this kid was young.

I sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m just beyond stressed out. And I might be wrong about all of this. Maybe we’re together because they find it amusing to saddle the fairy with an irritating newbie.”

“Am I really irritating?” asked Henry.

“Yeah, a little,” I answered. “But you can’t help it. You’re new and young, and you probably don’t even know what a VHS tape is.”

“I know what a VHS tape is,” he said, sounding a little offended.

I took a deep breath. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure they’re trying to mess with me. And maybe you too, but I’m gonna bet it’s aimed at me.”

“Maybe they’re hazing me.”

“Hazing you?” I asked incredulously. “By placing you with the super dangerous fairy-vampire monster that they think murdered everybody?”

He shrugged. “People can be mean.”

I looked at him. Suddenly, I felt really sad because it was such an innocent remark. But oh so true. “Yeah,” I said, turning back to the road. “Yeah, they sure can be.”

He was quiet again. In was dark, the streetlights drew thick orange lines across the windshield. A good portion of the businesses stayed open for most of the night, coughing out neon and bad music into the small hours of the morning. The roads were very smooth here—the first ones in Splendor to be repaired after the ANC explosion ruptured the better half of the city like a busted vein. Parts remained in hellish disrepair, nothing more than blood stains and smoke and towers of climbing water where the fire hydrants used to be. People slowly gathered up all the bits of rock and bone, trying to figure out which pieces went where—as if they were assembling a giant jigsaw puzzle. Except that all the edges of the pieces were incinerated.

“So what are we going to do?” Henry asked.

I blinked, somewhat startled. “What do you mean, what are we going to do?”

“What are we going to do?” he repeated with a shrug. “About the other officers, I mean.”

“Nothing,” I said. “This is pure speculation. All they’ve actually done is give me dirty looks.”

“That’s still harassment, isn’t it?”

“Bringing them up on a charge so petty will only make them hate me more. And it sure as hell won’t get any of them transferred.”

“Do we want to get them transferred?”

I sighed. “I only want them to be decent human beings that are smart enough to realize that one stupid, fucking vampire doesn’t speak for literally, an entire population.” I sucked in a breath, feeling the cold air on my teeth and trying to control myself. “I want them to be nice. That’s all. But apparently, that’s not going to happen. They’re jackasses and they think that’s how you make it in the jungle.”

“But we’re not in the jungle,” said Henry.

“Yeah,” I said. We’re in a city on the brink of destruction. Creatures and humans had been living within blocks of each other in the aftermath of the most devastating domestic attack since 9/11. Tensions weren’t just high, they were soaring, and we might as well have been leaning casually out the window with nothing but a plastic bag for a parachute. We were a country in recovery, a wounded animal desperate to sever the bleeding head of the thing that hurt it so badly.

“So what’s the answer? What’s our next move?” Henry asked, with obvious enthusiasm.

“I appreciate your, uh… commitment,” I said. “But there’s nothing we can do. Not really anything we should do either, it’s just… I wanted you to know why you got saddled with me.”

“I openly asked to get saddled with you,” he said.

“Okay, then the reason why they let you saddle yourself with me,” I corrected myself. “And why you should expect to get a lot of nasty looks in the office. Just brace yourself, okay? Talking to me will get you into trouble with somebody, never mind, actively working with me. And if it gets too uncomfortable or anything, don’t hesitate to put in for a transfer or request another partner.” I turned to face him. “It wouldn’t offend me at all. I mean that.”

“I’m not gonna do that!” he vowed adamantly.

I scoffed. “Hey, it’s your funeral.”

Silence. Oodles of it. Stretching the length of an airstrip. It felt taut and trembled like a plucked guitar string.

“Is that a vampire thing?” he asked after a while.

“Is what a vampire thing?”

“Your eyes.”

“What about my eyes?”

“They’re red.”

I was so exhausted, I didn’t even care. I sighed. “Yeah. It’s a vampire thing.”

“Does it mean you’re thirsty?” he asked, gulping slightly.

I couldn’t help smiling as I shook my head. “No. Actually, it means I’m angry.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” he said. “Did I make you angry?”

I took a deep breath. “No. No, you didn’t. Our coworkers did.” I sighed heavily.

“By being racist?”

“Among other things. It’s fine. Worse things could have happened.”

“Worse things,” he said quietly. “Worse things like…?”

I almost laughed.

Like being glamoured into thinking your worst enemy is your mother. Like watching your boyfriend sleeping with her right in front of you. Like burning your entire city to the ground because you thought you were doing the world a favor. Like nearly turning your best friend’s esophagus to slag. Like being a part of the nightmare-monster country club that almost ended the whole fucking world…

“I don’t know,” I said. “Jury duty.”

He nodded as he looked out the window.

***

“So,” said Henry. “What are we going to do tonight?”

I shrugged. “Technically, we’re supposed to be in the office, but now that feels like a bad idea. You’re new, I’m… me… and it’s a slow night for nightmares. Nobody’s busy, everybody’s bored. We’d just be asking for trouble by sitting in there, let alone, trying to do any actual work.”

“Okay,” said Henry. “So… no office.”

“No office,” I agreed. “We’ve only got a couple hours left before we can clock out for the night, so I guess we’ll just drive around for a while. Give everyone a chance to get used to the idea of me being in the building with them all the time.”

“So we’ll go on patrol?”

“Yeah, sure.” I had one hand on the wheel as I glanced up and down each side of the street, unsure of what I was looking for but also not finding it. “Not like we’ve got anything better to do.”

Henry nodded. We drove for several minutes in silence, but I could practically hear the gears spinning in his head. He was fidgety, casting me sidelong glances, and biting his lip. The kid had questions, maybe some of which he deemed disrespectful to ask. I sighed.

“Ask away,” I said as I frowned at him.

“Okay.” He swallowed audibly. “Um… so. What kind of stuff can you do?”

I scoffed. “A lotta things, you’ll have to be more specific.”

“Okay, okay, um… can you smell blood?”

“Yes.”

He was quiet for a beat. “Can you smell mine?”

“Kind of,” I said.

“What’s it smell like?”

“Salt and rust,” I said. “Same as it smells to you, only stronger.”

“Does everybody’s blood smell like that?”

“No,” I answered. “I mean, not really. Humans pretty much smell alike. Magical creatures vary more often. Fairy blood smells like pomegranates, werewolves smell like wet steel, vampires smell like rotten flowers, depending on how old they are…” I looked over and found him listening intently, his eyes wide. He was totally enthralled. Not that I could blame him. This stuff was pretty interesting. Well that is, if you weren’t a vampire yourself and you could study it from a long, long distance.

When I didn’t say anything else, he asked, “Do you have to drink blood to survive?”

I scoffed again. “No,” I said. “I mean, I can. I suppose I could technically survive on a diet of pure blood, but it’s gross and I like eating food. So, you know. Not worth it.”

He seemed to sense my discomfort and leaned forward tentatively. “Are you also other things?”

I hesitated. “Yes.”

“Like what?”

“Um… like a werewolf,” I said. “Sometimes I wake up and my teeth are sharper than they should be and I feel super irritable. That’s the Draconian part of me. I’ve got some dryad stuff going on too, a super green thumb and infrequent, but powerful urges to become a vegetarian and burn coal plants to the ground. The vampire stuff was just what I got the most of,” I said carefully, “and the rest just gave me, like… I don’t know, chemical deficiencies or something.”

“How’d you get… how’d you become like… that?”

“Um,” I started. “I was injected with the blood of a whole array of creatures, and because I’m a fairy, they just assimilated instead of killing me like they normally would.”

For a second, I was terrified he would ask me why that happened, and I’d have to find some way to say “You know that vampire that almost killed the president? Yeah, she was the one responsible for doing that to me,” without sounding complicit.

“So you can see in the dark?” he asked.

Thank Hades. “Yeah. I can.”

“Consistently?”

“Yes.” The vampirism was the most consistent of all the abilities I had packed into my blood. Probably because it had been there the longest.

“Are you fast?”

“Faster than I was.”

“Are you immortal?”

“Fuck, I hope not.”

“Are you allergic to sunlight?”

I laughed. “Allergic? No, but I’m probably way more susceptible to sunburns now.” Not that my pasty face wasn’t sunburn-prone before.

Henry nodded thoughtfully. “Can you see your reflection in a mirror?”

I glanced at him and frowned. “Of course I can. Any vampire can. The mirrors don’t have silver backing anymore.”

“Huh. Cool.”

“Cool?’

“Cool,” he said. “Can you fly?’

“Until I hit the ground.”

Henry chuckled. “Can you teleport?”

“Nobody I know can teleport without a portal generator,” I said, “and those things use ridiculous amounts of power; so there’s nobody in the world that can supply enough without collapsing in on itself, whether they’re immortal or not.” I thought for a second. “I can dematerialize. It’s hard, and really uncomfortable, but I can do it if I need to.”

“Dematerialize?” Henry asked.

I tried to remember Sam’s explanation when I asked how Bram managed to move so fast.

Oh, right, Bram. A vampire friend of mine. Wickedly fast, questionably moral. Obsessed with me in an irritatingly sexual way. He helped stop Meg from making everything go boom, so he isn’t quite a bad guy—but he had some personal incentive to keep her from taking over the world, so his assistance wasn’t outright altruism. But nothing Bram ever does is purely altruistic.

“It’s like breaking yourself down to your basic components, your physical and ephemeral parts, and then reconstructing them briefly into a form that is thin enough to move slightly slower than light. Or something like that.”

“Or something like that?”

“Hey, I’m a Regulator, not a scientist,” I said.

“Right, is that what they called you before? A Regulator?”

The word almost stung my ears. Burning buildings flashed across my mind’s eye and I banished them away angrily. “Yeah. That was my job.”

“As a detective, or something else?”

“Basically as a detective,” I answered, “but also everything else. Domestic disturbances and potion smuggling and traffic violations. Depended on what station you occupied, but we didn’t really have names for those. There were no meter maids in the ANC. Just people with no better criminals to catch.”

“So you gave out parking tickets?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “Usually, that was somebody else’s job, though.”

“Huh. So what’s the lowest level in the ANC? The most basic entry level job?”

“Uh… Junior Regulator, but I had to train with somebody for a while before I earned that title.”

“Does that make you a Senior Regulator?”

“Yes, it did,” I said, my heart splintering at my use of the past tense. “All the big scary cases were sent directly to me.”

“Like what?”

“Like…” Shit, where do I even start? “A shapeshifter from a few years ago who was killing people that owned alchemy supply stores. Or the dreamstalker who put people I knew into comas and killed them in their sleep.”

Henry blinked like a little kid being told his first scary story—he was awed, stunned, and scared. Excited beyond description. “Whoa.”

“Yeah,” I said. And those cases seemed so tame now. So easy to solve.

“How many people have you arrested?” he asked.

“More than I care to count.”

“Supernatural prisoners are deported to the Netherworld, right?”

“They are.” To one of five prisons—which, with all the power-changing happening Netherside, I suddenly realized was a really bad idea. Hades, we need better infrastructure.

“Do they still?”

I hesitated. Good question. “I think so,” I said. “I mean, they’re doing all of this integration stuff with our departments because…” because we almost got the president killed, but whatever. “…well, you know, but I doubt they’re putting magical baddies away around here. They’re entirely too dangerous, and the prisons in the Netherworld are magically reinforced from the foundation up. Any wards we can place on existing buildings here would be no more than window dressing unless we’re willing to tear it all down and start again.”

“Are we?”

“Henry, we can’t get our government to fill potholes in the streets.”

“This is more important than potholes, isn’t it?”

“It is, but it’s not where the money’s going. Not while we have facilities that look perfectly fine, especially since we have enchanted prisons already. It’s just more practical.”

“Isn’t it dangerous to keep them all housed together?”

I sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

Before he could say anything else, the radio sputtered and we looked down.

“What frequency is that?” I asked. The numbers were blurred over so I couldn’t read them—twitching with the vibrations of the car, maybe.

Could it be…

You don’t believe that, I thought, but surely I was just being paranoid. Relax, it’s just a broken fucking radio.

Henry squinted at the numbers and shook his head. “No idea,” he said. “I don’t know what’s—”

The dial spun one way, then shot back and settled on the police frequency. The numbers sputtered and flashed. Through thunderclap static, a voice, strained and deep, said something in an urgent tone, but I couldn’t make it out.

Henry and I looked at each other.

“What the,” Henry started, but I cut him off with a sharp wave of my hand.

“Wait,” I said.

“S… back… go… hel…” the radio said.

“Captain Chase,” Henry whispered. I nodded as I reached for the console to respond.

The static died. Someone screamed. Something on the other end inhaled. Laughter and high-pitched squealing followed like gears in a broken clock.

“Dul… cie…”

A little voice in the back of my head said, See?

The static came back, only louder now. I palmed the response key on the console. The radio didn’t respond.

Henry looked over at me slowly. “What was that?’

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something very bad. We’re going back to the precinct. Call for backup.”

Henry nodded and pulled out his phone. For a moment, his hands were shaking and hovering over the keys like his fingers didn’t know where to go, what to press, or whom to call.

Ghostbusters, I thought inanely.

Henry put the phone to his ear.

FOUR

Dulcie

We pulled into the station parking lot ten minutes later. There were the same number of cars as when we left, and the lights were still on inside. The windows were all broken. Glass was ground into glitter and scattered all over the sidewalk, like something inside must have exploded.

I stopped and listened for a fraction of a second as I sucked in a deep breath, throwing my door open and barreling out of the car.

“Something’s wrong,” I said. We already knew that, but now it also felt wrong on top of sounding wrong. I took my gun from my holster and held in it low ready, plastering myself against one side of the front door. Henry mirrored me, staring at me with wide eyes—frightened,.

“What’s in there?” he whispered. “What do you hear?”

“Nothing. Nobody’s breathing,” I whispered back. “Nobody.” There should have been a number of night officers, a secretary, the poor, bored bastard who kept the records, and at least one detective working late. Gary was usually around, trying to prove he was exceptional at his job, but there was no sound. Nothing audible but the hiss and hum of a broken vent, the blades clicking against an outcrop of metal or plastic. No breathing, no beating hearts.

Henry swallowed. “Do you smell blood?”

“Yes.” I adjusted my grip on the gun, my thumb hovering over the safety latch. The front doors were shut tight, but I could taste something in their metal, in the bars that bound the door hinges to the walls and floor—something like blood and salt and sulphur. Something arcane, bleeding heavily—a monster brushing against metals that melted its skin, a werewolf against silver, a fairy against iron. Something must have touched it, gotten burned, and left a little of itself behind.

We opened the door and gagged.

The smell of blood beyond the door was toxic, a liquid-gold miasma hanging in the air. Even Henry could taste it. To his credit, he didn’t stagger. He just closed his mouth and swallowed hard.

“What the hell?” he said, taking a tentative step forward, both hands still clasping his gun.

I barely heard him. I was staring blank-faced at the scene, which was black and bloody. Everything was shiny and slick. The whole room seemed to be liquified, and smeared in red. The tiled ceiling was splattered in heavy bursts like fireworks. Scarlet lines ran down walls, handprints reaching for phones or guns. The computers were tossed on their sides, thrown wildly across the room. Bits of shattered monitors and motherboards were scattered across the floor. Half the lights were blown out, shattered bulbs hanging from the ceiling, swinging slowly, sputtering.

And the bodies. So many bodies.

“Oh, my God,” said Henry. “That’s the captain.”

He was looking at a man lying face-up not three feet from the door. His mouth was open, and half his teeth were missing. His eyes were by his feet. His fingers were all broken, some severed completely. He was bathed in his own fluids that flowed from the craters that now comprised his stomach.

None of the other corpses looked any better.

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

Henry eyed me expectantly. Right. Superior officer.

I pulled out my cellphone and tossed it to him. “Call…” Fuck, who do you call when everyone in your office is dead? The next precinct over? “Chief of Police,” I said at last. Might as well go to the top of the ladder.

“We already called for backup,” he said.

“And now we’re calling again to tell them what the hell we just found,” I snapped sharply. “Do you know the number?”

Henry nodded briskly and dialed, trying his hardest to avoid looking at any one body for very long. I wondered if he’d never seen a corpse before. Well, nothing like getting thrown in the deep end on your first day.

I took a long breath through my mouth, drawing the polluted air across my tongue. The salty tang of blood, rotting flesh, sweat, and the violet reeking of abject animal fear nearly made me vomit. I listened and still heard nothing. No heartbeats but mine and Henry’s, breaking the silence like thunder inside a morgue. I barely heard the conversation—sixty seconds of secretaries connecting him to the higher office, then something about sending backup and telling us to stay where we were.

He hung up. “Should we clear the building?” he asked.

Right, I thought. Protocol. “Yeah,” I said. “But whoever, or whatever did this is long gone.” There was no one left with functioning lungs at least—which didn’t exactly mean that we were actually alone. Vampires were, as a rule, more elegant when they went on rampages, but there’s always the exception.

“Come on,” I said.

We started to walk. Slowly, while trying not to stare at the ground, we tramped through blood, and stepped over the stiffening bodies. They hadn’t been lying here long. The smell was still fresh, sickening sweet and warm. My mouth watered and I gagged. My stomach growled—feeling hungry and repelled all at once.

“You okay?” Henry asked, barely two steps behind me. His shoes kept sticking to the floor, leaving thin red prints wherever he walked. I worried about us contaminating the crime scene, but at this point, it didn’t really matter. Anything that was so reckless would have left pieces of itself in everything—a few disturbed puddles of blood wouldn’t make any difference.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”

We checked the building. Every office, interrogation room, and broom closet. Only two of them were untouched. Broken tables, overturned trashcans, spilled coffee. Anything with the potential to break was scattered in pieces.

Blood was everywhere. Obviously so.

“Clear,” Henry said, backing out of the last room. I sighed heavily and holstered my gun, running my hands through my hair.

“Fuck,” I muttered. Two hours at work and already we’ve got a massacre to deal with. Maybe it was a callous thought, but this would play hell with supernatural sensibilities. Nothing human could have done so much carnage—the human population would be wielding torches-and-pitchforks once this got out. Especially when people learned that I was not only there to witness the aftermath, but also seemed to be the only survivor. Well, that is, my new partner and me. They already had their reasons to hate me. When the other cops discovered I was the first one to stumble over this latest disaster, they’d riot. The optics couldn’t be worse. “Fucking fuck.”

“Yeah,” said Henry. “Yeah.”

Props to him for not saying anything more. Another person might have tried to voice something profound.

We stood there in total silence for a long time, just observing the emptiness. Staring at lifeless faces, and quickly looking between them so we never thought about one person for too long. I was chilled from the inside out. My body was numb. It was cold and dark, filled with a chronic emptiness, heavy enough to become a presence of its own…

“Hang on,” I said as I started toward the front of the building. Henry followed without a word, his gun still in his hand.

We walked back through the swath of bodies, tracing our footprints so we didn’t disrupt anything else, all the way back to the captain and the doors—where the metal was gouged by claws as long as knives.

“Okay,” I said, looking around. Feeling for the salt and sulphur behind the air, the gangrenous smell that was worse than death. The aura remained of something that didn’t belong here or anywhere else. Something hauntingly familiar.

“What is it?” Henry asked softly.

“Something…” It was really, really bad, but I couldn’t tell what. A heaviness in the atmosphere, a smothering presence with no weight. A dark aura with no glow… “I don’t know. It’s magic, but I can’t tell what kind…” What kind wasn’t even the right word. It wasn’t a different genre, but an entirely different medium. Whatever it was, it was as dissimilar as trying to compare a newspaper to a possessed person who was speaking in tongues. Red and white versus the intangible cobalt blue of a worried soul—the color swiftly leeched out of Henry in thick smoky clouds.

Aura reading was new—one of a hundred thousand innovative race-traits that were injected into me by Mother Dearest, although Hades knew where this came from. Drakes can’t do it, or vampires, or werewolves, or fairies, or dryads, as far as I knew, but something allowed me to see the colorful manifestations of a person’s life force intermittently. Fairy magic was sunlight yellow, vampire magic gave off twisting bands of shadow and scarlet, werewolves were an ironic mix of ocean blue and silver, of all things. Most of them were rather obvious, but this? This wasn’t any color I’d ever seen. It was dark, sure, but what kind of dark was the real question.

“Is it evil?” Henry asked and I almost laughed.

“Um,” I replied while looking around us and then at him as I shrugged. “This doesn’t look much like a social call.”

“So, it is evil?”

I instantly thought of Sam casually brandishing a book explaining the inherent complexity of souls and how absolute evil wasn’t even a thing… Sure. This was weird enough to be evil.

“About as evil as it gets,” I said.

The precinct doors opened, and the officers started pouring in, their yellow caution tape, cameras and latex gloves at the ready. We turned to them, our faces blank.

“Detective O’Neil?” someone said.

They saw us. The walls, the crimson stripes, the shattered glass, the bodies, the faces growing paler by the second. Pools of blood inching ever outwards, devouring the palette of colors around them like black holes. Singularities in red, consuming whatever they touched.

Everyone came to a screeching halt. Their sentences ended midway and evaporated. Nobody blinked for ten seconds. Nobody breathed. Every heart was beating like a jackhammer, threatening to burst through their chests.

“By God,” someone said. Everyone was slowly swimming back to reality. After twenty seconds of wire-tight silence, the horde of professionals drank it all in.

“Yeah,” I said, looking down at the captain. “I know.”

***

I made it home three hours later, everybody’s questions were still ringing in my ears.

No, I don’t know what happened. No, there was no one in the building when we got there. No, I didn’t see anyone leaving. Yes, there was bad magic there. No, I didn’t know what type of bad magic it was. Yes, they called for backup. Yes, we called for backup the second we heard the transmission. Yes, we were away from the precinct the whole time. And no, we didn’t have any reason for being away.

I opened my door, closed it, inhaled and sighed long enough to make my lungs hurt.

The apartment wasn’t mine—not my old one, anyway. That entire complex had been razed to the ground in the earthquakes I caused when I leveled my old office. Now I was in a posh, little something-or-other and closer to Sam. It was a small four-room unit on the fifth floor filled with plush new furniture and overly modern kitchenware beneath wide windows.

It was fine. It didn’t exactly feel homey, but too nice was better than the impoverished sinkhole I expected to come home to.

Blue came bounding out of the kitchen, whining softly before he sat at my feet, looking up at me expectantly.

I couldn’t help but smile at him. Blue is a golden retriever, not yet past puppy-stage. He was a gift from my old boss, Quillan, whom I hadn’t seen since, hell, since the stupid dance we had after we killed Melchior. We talked really briefly in the hospital after D.C. when he came to get Christina—and they’re an item now—but it wasn’t longer than ten seconds. Mostly, we just wanted to make sure neither of us were dead and then we moved on—we had statements to give and other people to locate.

“Long day, buddy,” I said, scratching Blue’s furry head. His tail thumped appreciatively against the carpet.

I laughed at myself. Long day? My entire precinct was slaughtered by a crazed, magical something-or-other and I dared to call it just a long day?

Part of my brain wanted to give a more descriptive answer, but it wouldn’t be a pleasant self-conversation, so I just plunked myself down on the couch and turned on the TV. I needed some background noise. It was already turned to the news. Nothing had been mentioned yet about the precinct, or the magical creature that was definitely responsible, or the infamous fairy’s deployment and subsequent survival of the magical catastrophe—but it probably hadn’t come up yet.

Hades, this was a disaster in every sense of the word. They had to think it was me, and it was no secret that I hated basically everybody there. Sure, they hated me first, but that didn’t matter. I wasn’t physically there, but rumors abounded of my alleged ability to be in two places at once, and my presumed hatred for the human race.

Dulcie O’Neil, that crazy shadow monster from the news? She’d totally be down for mauling her coworkers into globs of Jell-O like a sociopathic bear. Just another day at the office.

Happy thoughts, Dulcie, happy thoughts.

Okay, I thought, okay, get up. Go shower or something. Don’t just sit here or you’ll go crazy.

I dragged myself through the apartment to the bathroom, staring at the carpet as I walked stiffly. Off-white, it was new enough to still feel squishy. I made it to the bedroom, kicked off my shoes, shrugged off everything else, and stepped into the bathroom. I smelled like smoke, blood, stale air, disinfectant, latex, and the metallic tang of busted computer parts.

I turned the shower on and stepped under the flow when the water was still cold. I didn’t care. I just stood under the nozzle for a long time, letting it wash away everything that insisted on clinging to my skin. I shampooed my hair until apple-cinnamon was the only thing I could smell and the mirror fogged up three times over. I stood in the comforting steam for what felt like hours, just staring at my fuzzy reflection and trying my best not to think about the most recent images my brain received. My stomach hurt like a bitch and I was crazy light-headed.

I dried, dressed, and staggered back out into the living room, running my hand through wet, tangled hair. Blue was at my heels as I made my way to the couch and plunked myself down on it. He rested his head on my knee and wagged his tail, whining softly.

“Hey, sweetie,” I said, patting the couch beside me. Blue was up in a second, licking my face before settling down in my lap, and draping his fluffy tail over the edge of the cushion.

I scratched his head and stared at the wall, ignoring the muted television beneath it. The weatherman was bemoaning the perpetually warm California summer and pointing eagerly at the one day this year when it might actually rain. For most of the state, the forecast was inaccurate—there were only ten square miles that might see a water-spritzer drizzle. So everyone was prepared for more drought and heat. More than half the roads within a hundred miles of Splendor were basically just dirt and rocks, ever open to the harshest elements.

Blue stuck his nose in my stomach and sniffed me. Then he buried it in my shirt, possibly trying to figure out why the hell the new cinnamon flavor was all over me. Somewhere underneath the cinnamon, the energy from the precinct still clung to me like the odor of sweat. It faded the further away I got from work, but it was still there, seeping into my clothes and hair. The shower couldn’t do much to counter the stench. It wrapped around my stomach and squeezed me like a vice, sitting in the back of my throat and tasting of sour medicine. I recognized it; it was really familiar like a face from a nightmare, but I just couldn’t place it—

Oh fuck. Oh fuck.

My emotions swept through me like a cold wind. My skin prickled and turned hot. My vision blurred, focused, and faded in and out. My heart was pounding while my lungs busily sucked in air until they burned. Bones frozen in place, they cracked like spring ice when I moved.

I was beginning to experience one of the nastiest side effects of having too much monster blood pumped into you.

She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s supposed to be dead.

Darkness, sour air. The conspicuous absence of color. The absence of anything combined with the undeniable presence of something, and a stubborn cold that burrows into your bones.

Hades, I’m so stupid, of course she’s not dead.

I stood up from the couch, and the room spun around me before I fell forward onto my hands and knees. Breathe, I thought as I crawled to the end of the couch where I dropped my phone. I picked it up and unlocked it. Fingers trembling, my stupid bloodstream sensed my panic and made the phone twist before setting it on fire, as if it were daring it to scream.

I called Sam.

She answered in two rings.

“Hey, hon,” she said sweetly. “What’s up?”

I took a rasping breath. My voice came out in spurts. I had a minute, maybe two, before this got really bad. “Meg is alive,” I said. “And I think she just killed everybody in my precinct.”

FIVE

Dulcie

Supernatural duality has quirky side effects. To say the very least.

There’s only so much a single body, even a magical body, can handle—vampirism and fae blood alone don’t mix well… less like oil and water and more like fire consuming all the air and leaving an endless vacuum of dead space.

Maybe it was due to the realization that Meg was still alive and worse still, that she was responsible for what happened at the precinct but suddenly, I wasn’t doing so hot.

Every part of my body was trying to burn, strangle, or drown every other part. Mix that kind of dissonance with Draconian, Lycan, and Dryadic bloods and vapors, not to mention, a host of other simmering fluids that really shouldn’t have been in my bloodstream, and you wind up with a murder-mystery cocktail, capable of exploding like a nuclear facility and leaving me with the worst hangover.

Add a fair dose of fear, a general sense of doom, and the self-conscious hesitation of a fourteen-year-old girl, and you get… well, you get this. It had happened a few times since D.C., every time I got too angry, irritated, frightened, or worried. If an emotion got out of hand and manifested in my blood, it relentlessly began pulling every other urge and impulse from my body until one of them reigned supreme. I would have to surrender to the emotional integrity of a teenage werewolf, and the depressive sloth of a vampire with too much time on her hands, and the bloody thirst for vengeance that most people connected with the drakes.

Right now, I was the angry teenager. Adrenaline pumping through me, every part of my brain was ablaze and bright red. Angry, angry, angry! Scratching the carpet, I left deep gouges in the wood beneath. The only thing I lacked were big headphones and a Jonas Brothers poster…

There was also lots and lots of fear, but werewolves are prideful creatures, so hell if I dared admit that, even to myself.

By the time Sam got to my apartment, I was a mess—and by that, I mean, I was in complete emotional meltdown. Sitting in the middle of the living room, I was trying really hard not to tear everything in the building to shreds—including some of the people who lived in it and their unsuspecting pets. I could hear a cat on the lower floors mewing quietly, ostensibly sensing all the hostile werewolf hormones my body was pumping into the ventilation system. Even poor Blue was huddled in the corner of my bedroom on the other side of the apartment, growling and baring his teeth.

The door opened and closed before Sam sat on the floor beside me, her hands on my arms, shushing me softly. I jumped when she first touched me.

“Hey, hon,” she said softly. “It’s Sam.”

Samantha White. Short, brown hair and sand-white skin. Academic wicca extraordinaire, a witch formerly in the employ of the Association of Netherworld Creatures—chiefly in the business of potion detection and neutralization. She identified all the bad potions and played a large part in the long, arduous process that ultimately destroyed them. She was also our primary medic. Currently, she was working in a government research facility with witches, warlocks, and human scientists, all seeking solutions for the influx of scary problems with too-many-teeth—the least of which was me.

“It’s Sam, Dulcie,” she repeated.

I nodded. I wasn’t that far gone.

“Don’t worry. I’m right here. You’re going to be just fine. Can you hear me okay?”

I nodded again.

“Good. That’s very good. I’m going into the kitchen, okay?”

Another nod.

“Good,” she repeated as she stood. I heard her unzip a bag and pull something out, which she set on the counter with a loud clink. “Look around and tell me five colors you can see.” She popped the lid off something powdery, emitting a garlicky puff that made her sneeze.

“Red,” I said, my voice guttural, like it was being dragged through a bed of angry regret and rusty nails.

“Okay,” she said casually and conversational. She began opening more jars filled with leaves and stones and wings and reptile legs; basically she was equipped with all varieties of classic arcane supplements. Everything smelled earthy and wet. “Four more.”

“Four more what?”

“Four more colors,” she replied. “Can you do that for me?”

I looked around. “Red,” I repeated, squinting at the room. Everything was the color of blood, including the couches, carpet, walls, curtains, window and the black sky beyond… Wait…

“Black,” I said, locking onto the sky. “Black. Black.” The word seemed heavy in my mouth. Fuck, she’s alive, Meg’s alive and she’s back. She’s no doubt looking for me; that has to be why she was at the precinct at all.

“Good,” she said. “I like black. It’s very slimming.” She dropped a handful of clacking items that looked like scales into the glassy bowl. It was the blood-spiral bowl she used for creature-specific healing potions. There was a small explosion. “Three more?”

Three more, I thought.

“Dulcie? Can you look at me?”

I stared back at her. My breath sputtering out of my lungs on rattling tracks.

“Good,” she said, smiling. A thin haze of purple surrounded her, shining softly. Glitter hung in front of her eyes like stars. “I want you to push all the air out of your lungs. Can you do that for me, hon?”

“What’s that smell?” I asked as my nose turned up to sniff more.

“Bleeding heart flowers, eggs, cloves, and plasma,” she said. “Can you push all the air out of your lungs?”

All the air. I nodded as I exhaled.

“Slowly,” she said. I blew the air out through my teeth, almost whistling. She nodded and smiled. “Perfect. That’s exactly right, you’re doing great, sweetie. Is all the air out?”

I nodded;

“Okay. I want you to breathe from your diaphragm,” she said. “Inhale very slowly until it hurts. Can you do that for me?” Another small explosion, this one accompanied by a blue flash of light.

I nodded and started to inhale. My stomach ballooned out, then my chest as my shoulders rose. Inhaling until I couldn’t anymore, and my lungs were close to bursting, I waited for the next step.

“Hold it for three seconds,” said Sam. “One… two… three… Now exhale slowly. Blow it out gradually through your lips, and that’s it.”

The air left me, and the red started to fade from my vision. The couch was grey again, the walls were blue, and the curtains a transparent beige.

“Can you tell me three more colors you see?”

“Yeah,” I answered, “beige. Blue. Grey.”

“Where are those colors?”

“The curtains, the walls, and the couch.”

“Awesome,” said Sam, “That was great! Can you take another really big breath for me? Blow all the air out, then suck it back in like we just did. But very slowly, okay?”

All the way out. All the way in. Hold for three seconds, blow it all back out. Behind me, Sam was chanting something under her breath—Latin or Sumerian, one of those ancient languages people only used when they cursed the laws of the natural world. Not something she used very often.

“Now tell me four things you can hear,” she instructed.

“Ceiling fan,” I responded. “Your breathing. Your heartbeat. My heartbeat.” Like thunder over the savannah. The resting heartrate of a werewolf is three times faster than that of an average human—and I had enough adrenaline inside me to run from here to Florida and back again and still manage to murder everybody within a hundred miles of my apartment complex. And probably their dogs too.

“Good,” she said. “Can you listen to my heartbeat?”

I nodded. Thump… thump… thump…

“Can you still hear it?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, good. Can you tap out its beat on the floor for me?”

Tap… tap… tap… tap… Her heart was slow, steady. Calm. Sam remained always perfectly controlled even during a crisis.

She broke something open that smelled like ice cream and pine, spices and winter.

Thumpity thump thump, thumpity thump thump, look at Frosty go, I thought, and I started drumming that out instead.

“Good,” she said. “Take another deep breath. Yes, that’s fine, that’s so good… Now tell me three things you can touch.”

“My shirt,” I said slowly. “The carpet. My hair…” It was matted to my forehead with sweat. Reeking too, but maybe only to my werewolf acute sense of smell.

Sam sat down next to me, a tall glass of raspberry-pink slush in her hand. “Here. Drink this.”

I sniffed it and recoiled as an honest-to-Hades growl escaped my throat. “All of it?”

Sam nodded, her expression placid. “All of it,” she said, holding out the glass to me.

I took it, afraid I might crush the glass and spill the suspicious pink smoothie on the plush carpet. I didn’t need to be yelled at by the landlord—who was already more than unhappy to lease his property to a dangerous fairy-monster hybrid in the first place.

“Drink,” said Sam.

“Right,” I answered and I drank. Slowly. Whatever she put together was sickeningly sweet. It looked and tasted like Pepto-Bismol. I gagged and she patted my back softly.

“It’s okay,” she said, “you’re doing great. Just keep drinking it. That’s right.”

I handed the empty glass back to her, swallowing hard when the aftertaste lingered. It sat heavily in my stomach for a moment, and I worried I wouldn’t keep it down—but a moment later, the feeling vanished, and my stomach turned icy cold.

“Tell me five colors you can see,” said Sam.

On and on she went, talking me through deep breaths, anchoring me to the room. Slowly but surely, she pulled me out of my stupor. It might have been minutes or hours, but eventually, I looked up and all the red was gone. My heart was still hammering, but it was running at its own pace, and I could feel the adrenaline dissipating, leaving me trembling.

“Dulcie?” Sam asked as she studied me intently. “How do you feel?”

“Good,” I answered slowly. “I’m back to myself, I think. I’m… I’m pretty good, Sam.”

She smiled. “Great. I’m going to get you a glass of water, okay?”

“Okay.” My throat was raw and my voice sounded so quiet.

She got up and walked to the kitchen, opened a cabinet, and turned on the faucet. She came back a second later with a tall, cold glass.

“Drink it slowly,” she said, and I did. When it was all gone, I set it on the carpet, sighing. Sam observed me for a long time, her arms wrapped around her knees. Not saying anything, just listening to me breathe.

Eventually, she said, “Can you talk now?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s start with what you told me on the phone.”

I nodded. “My precinct was attacked.”

“Yeah, I saw it on the news.”

“I don’t know by what. But blood was all over the place. And… everything was broken. Including computers and windows and tables. Everything was totally destroyed.”

Sam nodded, looking at me attentively. Clearly desperate to ask me about Meg, but holding back, and letting me walk myself through the worst of it.

“Okay,” she said when I stayed quiet.

I swallowed. “And there were eyes missing. And teeth and arms pulled off. Just like that shapeshifter all over again.”

If that description spooked her, she didn’t let it show. Fagen—the first shapeshifter’s victim—wasn’t a friend to either of us, but a ruthless mauling like this could evoke pity in anyone.

She blinked and gave me the smallest nod, waiting for me to continue.

But I couldn’t. I stopped and stared at the carpet, seeing the red spatters in everything. Empty sockets and gaping red mouths, arms and legs thrown across the room, discarded and inconsequential. Everything was doused in the odors of rust and vinegar. The captain’s face, angled at mine, saw nothing, but accused me of the one crime I hadn’t committed…

“Dulcie?”

I looked up. Sam reached for my face, wiping away tears I hadn’t noticed falling. I blinked them away, rubbing them off on my sleeve.

“It’s okay,” said Sam. “Take your time.”

I sighed. It was a long while before I could inhale regularly again.

“Let’s go back,” she said. “What happened before the precinct was attacked?”

“Before,” I answered slowly. “Before I left with my partner, I was waiting for him. Henry. Henry Cotton. New kid. Young and gullible, but… you know, he seems nice. He just has a long way to go.”

“That’s nice to hear,” she said. “We need more good people. Go on.”

“Um… I was doing paperwork. Prepping documents for other detectives while I was waiting. I got a lot of weird looks, but we expected that.”

“We did. Was anyone particularly rude?’

I shrugged. “Nobody was very nice, but they were all just uncomfortable. Sure, they know who I am and what I can do… kind of, but not well enough to determine if any of it was true.” I took a deep breath. “Gary was grandstanding from the minute I walked in. I don’t know why.”

“Really? How?”

“He kept going into the captain’s office and the interrogation room. Trying to look busy and important, I guess. There was no one to interrogate, and the captain was out of his office almost all day. So he was just like standing in an empty room for ten minutes.”

“Wow, that’s pretty pathetic,” Sam said, laughing.

“Isn’t it?” I answered, and only then, I realized I was smiling.

Fuck, Sam, how do you do that?

The laughter faded, and we were just staring at each other. Sam blinked, still smiling, but not too much. She was putting me at ease, giving me plenty of room to describe the nightmare nonsense that followed.

“Before all this happened, they arrested somebody,” I said. “He was high on mandrake or Adderall or something, and everybody got all tense and kept looking at me. Like they were worried that the guy in custody was a friend of mine and thought I’d get offended and burn down the building just for solidarity or something.”

“Did you?’

I laughed. “No, of course not,” I said. “I left. Henry and I just drove around for a while with the radio on, waiting for… I don’t know, a robbery or something. We were also talking about vampirism and magic and stuff.”

“How’d that go?”

“Not bad. He seems pretty chill about being my partner. Weirdly chill, actually.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Um… We’d been gone about ten minutes, maybe a little longer, and then… the radio did a thing.”

“A thing?”

I nodded. “A thing.”

“What kind of thing?”

“It became all staticky and unintelligible.”

“Okay,” she said.

“And it started spinning through different frequencies and the numbers went all fuzzy and… and then there was this voice.”

“A voice?” Her face didn’t change, but her words were very quiet.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sam, it spoke my name.”

“Oh,” she replied, a little louder.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Do you think it was Meg?”

“No. It didn’t sound like her. It was all hissy and distorted, but not just because the radio was being weird. It sounded like it was having trouble speaking.” I swallowed. “And not only that, but there were also these wicked, deep claw marks in the front doors at the precinct. Definitely not from vampire nails.”

“Okay. So the voice wasn’t hers.”

“No.”

“But you still think it was Meg?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” She took a breath, resisting the urge to straight up ask me why. “What happened next?”

“Um. We heard screaming. And then the captain’s voice, like he was trying to call for help but his radio wasn’t working. Then this weird voice said my name and the radio cut out altogether, and we drove back. We called for backup, but…” It was too late.

“Yeah,” said Sam as she took my hand.

“When we got there, everything was ruined… everybody was dead,” I said, biting down hard on the last word. “Not just dead, but mutilated. Mauled. Dismembered. There were broken computers and shattered glass… Some of the people didn’t have eyes… and…” I looked up at her. “Sam, it was a fucking bloodbath.”

Sam nodded, her lips pressed together in a firm line. She squeezed my hand and did her best to smile. She was clearly waiting for me to say more, although she didn’t want me to say it but she knew I would because I had to.

“And there was… I don’t know, something wrong with the air,” I said slowly. “It was heavy and cold and… dark… and everything was too quiet.” Like all the sounds in the world had been swallowed up. “And it was cold and I felt hollow inside.”

“Okay,” she said slowly. “And that’s why you think it was Meg?”

“I don’t think it was Meg, I know it was Meg,” I said, almost snapping. “It had to be! The carnage was too much like the thing she did in D.C. with all the shadows. Sure, it’s different, but only slightly; it felt bigger, but it was…” I trailed off, my head throbbing. Meg was still alive and she was gunning for me and everybody close to me. “It just felt like Meg.”

Sam nodded. “Then it must be Meg.”

“You believe me?”

“Well, yeah, why wouldn’t I?”

“Because I could be projecting the past trauma onto a new disaster to force it to make sense?”

“I mean, maybe?” Sam shrugged. “I trust you. And if you’re wrong, it means Meg is actually dead, and we’ll all be pleasantly surprised.”

“Yeah.” I wrapped my arms around my legs and looked at her.

“Have you told anybody else?” Sam asked—meaning, Did you or did you not do your job and call somebody at the FBI?

“No,” I said. “I called you first.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay… you know you need to inform them.”

“I know.”

“And soon. Really soon.”

“I know.”

“Did you tell anyone on site?”

“It didn’t occur to me until I got home.”

“They need to know too.”

“I know.”

“Especially if they’re still working the scene. Magic like that comes from somewhere, even if it’s not from Meg, and if they’re exposed to it for too long—”

“I know.”

She raised her eyebrows—just a hair, barely enough for me to notice. I sighed.

“Sorry,” I said.

“No, don’t worry,” she said. “You’ve had a long, bad day. That’s normal.”

There’s that long day again. At least, I wasn’t the only one getting desensitized. I scoffed. “Normal?”

“Relatively speaking.”

I chuckled bitterly, shaking my head and biting my lip.

“Would you feel better if I went with you?”

Feel better, I thought, suddenly thinking how stupid I must sound. I’m not some little kid who can’t get a shot by themselves. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I can just call them.”

“They’ll want you to come in.”

“Yeah.”

“You might as well go straight to them. I can go with you, if only to keep you grounded.”

I nodded. She fully intended to go with me anyway, just to make sure I actually went. There weren’t many things I hated as much as human bureaucracy—not that ours was any better, but I’m allowed to hate the stairs when the escalator’s broken.

“Okay, good,” she said. “Great. Don’t worry. I’ll be beside you the whole time.”

I nodded numbly.

“I’ll talk to Casey when I get home. Let him know what’s up so he can be ready for you in the morning.”

“You were with Casey before I called you? And you came over here?” I asked. Oh Hades, I’m a supernatural cock-block. “Fuck, I’m sorry, Sam.”

“Don’t be.” She took my hand and gave it a squeeze. “This always takes precedence, Dulcie. You know that.”

“I’m still sorry.”

“And it’s totally okay,” Sam said, smiling.

“I didn’t, like… interrupt you, did I?”

She laughed—blushing. “No,” she said, “you didn’t and even if you had, it wouldn’t matter because an emergency call from you is way more important than insane, mind-blowing sex, right?”

At her statement, I immediately thought of Knight and my stomach flip-flopped. I stifled the sudden urge to hit something really hard and hugged my knees tighter. “I guess so.”

Sam squeezed my hand again. “Do you want to get something to eat? We can talk for a little while you settle down?”

“Yes,” I said immediately. She needed to get back to Casey, I knew that, right down in the pit of my stomach, but I couldn’t be alone. Casey would eventually forgive me.

“I’ll drive, okay?” she asked.

I almost laughed—I didn’t even have a car anymore. “Okay.”

SIX

Dulcie

Twenty minutes later, it was still dark, but colder and raining. We sat against the wall of a diner that stayed open past midnight. It was newly refurbished with green-and-white tile floors, plush green booths, and a jukebox that accepted five-dollar bills.

Sam and I were staring at the menus. I kept scanning it, not registering anything, and trying not to look at Sam. She ordered ages ago, and now she was eating, but every so often she looked at me, and tried to get me to look at her, which I could not do. If I looked at her, she’d start asking questions. Inevitably, she’d go straight to the bad stuff, the how-are-you-and-Knight? stuff, and that was the last thing I wanted.

Hades, she meant well, she really did. But a girl can only take so much traumatic analysis in one day.

I needed to sneeze, so I grabbed for a napkin—and we made eye contact.

“So,” she said. “You and Knight...”

My veins turned to steel. The world went slate-grey. I took a frosty breath and set my menu down in front of me, sneezing into my elbow. “Knight and I,” I said after a moment.

She leaned forward a little. “How do you feel?”

“Sam,” I started.

“Dulcie.”

“I thought our dinner was supposed to relieve my stress.”

“You don’t have to talk to me, but you should.”

“Can’t we discuss something else?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” I said, looking back down at the menu. “Global warming.”

“Climate change,” she said. “Global warming assumes the only effect is warmer temperatures, but—”

“Sam, I love you, but I honestly want to talk about climate change even less than I care to talk about Knight.”

“Okay,” she said. “Then let’s talk about Knight.”

“Ugh.”

“Hey, if you want, we can go talk to the FBI right now?”

I frowned at her. “Are you blackmailing me?”

“Yes.”

“You’re so brutal.”

She smiled, resting her chin on her folded hands. “Let’s start with how you’re feeling.”

I sighed. Sam loved to play psychiatrist. To take a hike through my brain, picking out all the weeds and anything that didn’t belong in my garden, asking me to smell them and explain why some had thorns… I was bristling with thorns tonight. Concertina wire and liquid death. If she asked, I would answer, and I wouldn’t stop answering until I was blue in the face, or reduced to the nonsense screaming of a child totally incapable of expressing herself. But I still wouldn’t be able to properly convey the sheer immensity of the emotional shitstorm that was ripping through my insides right now like a pissed-off asteroid.

How did I feel?

Empty. Empty and cold. Like all my organs had sharp edges, pricking the underside of my skin.

“I’m fine,” I said.

Sam nodded slowly. “That’s some bullshit.”

I blinked at her. She chewed slowly and swallowed, cutting her meat with the infuriating daintiness of a Disney princess. Calm as you like, watching me expectantly. Waiting.

“What?” I asked.

“I said, that’s some bullshit,” Sam repeated. “Dulcie, you know you can talk to me. I mean, you don’t have to if you really don’t want to, and that’s totally fine, but I’m always here if you just want to get it all out. I know!” Then her eyes went wide. “Why don’t you make a list of all the things you’re upset about? That helps me sometimes.”

I sighed. I didn’t have any list, I had a damn scroll: I envisioned it unrolling, bouncing comically down a long flight of stairs and disappearing into the abyss.

“Thanks, but um…” I picked up my glass and took a sip. “I don’t want to talk about it. Not right now.” Maybe not ever, I thought.

Sam nodded, finally resigned to my silence. “Okay. That’s totally fine. If you do, though—”

“I know where to find you.”

I wouldn’t call her, I knew I wouldn’t. I’d just sit on the couch, staring at nothing, clutching my knees to my chest, desperately wishing for someone to talk to, if only so I could unload the strangling terror in my brain. If only somebody else knew… but I couldn’t call Sam. I’d rather stare at the carpet and not do a goddamned thing, because it’s not that simple. Nothing is ever simple.

“Honey,” she said slowly, “you do this strange thing. You and Knight both do it; you lock yourselves inside your own brains, away from everybody because you think, or think you know, you have to solve the problem yourselves. You both hesitate to bother anybody about it because we’ve all got our own problems to deal with, but Dulcie—and I say this with nothing but love— you suck at solving your own problems.”

“You’re always so supportive,” I said.

“I am, and I’m honest. You don’t have to work through it with me, or with Knight, but you can’t bail out a sinking ship all on your own.”

“As long as I’ve got a bucket, I’ll be fine.” I waved a hand dismissively.

Sam slouched a little, visibly defeated. “I wish you’d let me in,” she started.

I tried to smile. Maybe I succeeded—my cheeks twitched and I’m pretty sure my teeth were showing. “I’m all right. Not really, but… you know.”

Sam nodded, smiling sadly, her lips pressed tightly together, her heart in her throat. “Making it through?”

“Yeah.” God, I was a bad liar! I could hack my way through the densest jungle with only a machete, but it’s a whole different story when the strangling vines and tenacious roots and branches are coming from inside you.

“Good,” she said. “I don’t mean good but… well, it’s better than bad.”

Here’s the rule for talking about your significant other with your best friend: it’s a lot easier if you know what you want to say. It’s better if there’s a specific problem to complain about and rattle your saber against; it’s different than just sitting at the bottom of a black hole with no concept of what you hope to achieve at the end of the day.

What the hell did I want? Did I want Knight back? Did I already have Knight back? Or did I want myself back? Did I want Knight gone? Did I still want to disappear into the mountains to become one of those pining, lovelorn shepherds from old fairytale books?

Hell, maybe.

No. I knew what I wanted, it just wasn’t something I could actually get. I wished it never happened. I wanted to go back in time and unwrite the whole damn thing: Meg, the glamour, Knight and all that time she spent using him to “teach” me how sexual intercourse should be conducted. I wished I could unsee everything and Knight and I could go back to how we were before. Go back to being with each other without ever feeling violated and betrayed whenever we touched.

And I wished all those times I’d had sex with Sebastian never happened. Sure, I was more than aware that I was guilty of the same thing Knight was, but I couldn’t help trying to justify my situation. I hadn’t been in my right state of mind. Having been glamoured by Meg, I was acting out and doing things I would have never done in a million years. Meg had basically magicked me into being her puppy dog.

But wasn’t Knight glamoured the same way? I asked myself. How can you let yourself off your hook but keep him hanging on his?

Letting him off the hook isn’t the point, I argued with myself. That’s not the problem. The problem is that I can’t get the visual of him with Meg out of my mind. And if I can’t the visual out of my mind, how am I supposed to look at him the same way I used to? How are we supposed to just pick up the pieces and go on with our lives? How are we supposed to pretend like nothing ever happened when it did? When I can’t get the images out of my head. How am I supposed to make love to Knight knowing he was inside that horrible, disgusting woman?

“Better than bad,” I said sadly.

Ten seconds of silence. I was listening to the diner, various voices muttering, and the odd-smelling people you usually find at twenty-four-hour restaurants in the wee hours.

“So,” I said, as brightly as I could manage, “what about you and Casey?”

Sam physically couldn’t suppress the smile that brightened her face—I saw her trying though, for my sake. It’s never fun to be deliriously happy in front of your not-quite-single friend.

Valiant effort, sweetheart, but you’re a terrible liar who also happens to be in love. But I sincerely wanted to hear about her relationship. I wanted to hear it from somebody I trusted. I needed someone to remind me that it was still possible to find happy, calm waters in the middle of a storm. I forgot that it was possible to be happy anymore at all. I needed to believe it in a weird, selfish way. Just because Knight and I had fucked ourselves sideways didn’t mean everybody else had, too.

And I really wanted to stop talking about Knight. I was this close to calling him “he-who-must-not-be-named.”

“Me and Casey,” she started.

“How’s that going?”

She hesitated, and for a second I worried she wouldn’t let me change the subject so easily. Then she sighed, smiled again, and said, “Really, really well.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s great to know.” I couldn’t remember the last time Sam had been in a relationship, let alone, a good one. The last substantial partner I could recall was Bram, and she was madly in love with him—but Captain Clusterfuck was only dating her to get closer to me.

He’s classy like that.

“He’s really sweet,” she said, suddenly wrapped up in her romantic delirium. “And he loves baking with me, although he’s not very good at it yet, but it’s so much fun. And he’s so cute when he tries.”

“Well there’s no batch of cookies the almighty baker, Sam can’t save, right?” I said.

“We’ve had a few casualties,” Sam said as she giggled. “But he really does try. He came into the bedroom one morning, absolutely covered in flour, holding a tray of brownies. Sure, they came out of a box, but they were perfect and oh, my gosh! He was so proud. You should have seen the look on his face. He was grinning like a little kid on Christmas, with flour on his glasses, his shirt and his face, and we got it all over the comforter…” She shook her head, smiling at the memory. “And he loves cookie-cutters. I still have those cheap snowman ones I got when I was a kid and he’s obsessed with them. When it comes to the frosting, he’s totally useless. He never waits for them to cool enough, so we end up with all these white cookies that have weird stripes.”

“So what, if you’re just going to eat them anyway?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I bought a little dragon cookie cutter the other day for him. When I gave it to him, he spent three days doing nothing but making dragon cookies! Occasionally, he burned the batches, so he started shouting ‘the dragon strikes again!’ and ‘the kingdom is doomed!’ while running around with smoking, black cookies.”

“I’m really glad you’re so happy,” I said. “You—”

“I love you, Dulcie,” Sam said, suddenly very somber. “You know that, right?”

“Of course I do,” I said.

Sam reached across the table and took my hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “And I’ll always be here for you.”

I smiled but couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just squeezed her hand back.

We sat there for a while, just looking at each other. Sam’s eyes were brimming with sisterly concern, and her mouth was somewhere between a grimace and a smile, in that place where fear and love meet while exchanging worst-case scenarios. Someday, she was going to make a really spectacular mother.

I almost killed you.

The thought chilled me. Sam, my beautiful Sam, so sweet and smart and fierce, who would have been rendered to a smoldering corpse if not for Special Agent Casey Strickland. I was so grateful for his absurd courage that drove him to tackle a burning fairy-demon-thing to save a witch he didn’t even know. A witch he now loved and protected from monsters like me.

I wanted to say I was sorry. My mouth opened, but I couldn’t. I saw her face the way it was that night, wreathed in fire, my own fingers searing long, silver scars into her skin. That’s what happens when you forcibly inject your magic into the skin of someone as powerful as Sam—her body rejects it and then melts beneath it, like using oil to turn water to ash. How do you just say “sorry” after something so awful as that? How do you say anything?

Yeah, Knight slept with Meg, I thought. I almost melted your head off your body. How is that any better?

“You’re going to be okay,” Sam said. Not a question or even a strong reassurance. Just a statement.

Okay. Never mind the darkness and dead men and voices in radios, shadows with sharp smiles around every corner, treason and attempted murder and seven different candy-coated flavors of betrayal… I was going to be okay.

I smiled in spite of myself. Sam has a way of making you believe the impossible.

“Say it with me,” she commanded.

I chuckled. “I’m going to be okay.”

“Good,” she said.

“You should bring me some of those dragon cookies. Maybe not the burnt ones.”

“I will.”

The lights suddenly went out.

The diners muttered and guffawed their irritation. A manager cursed loudly somewhere in the back behind the swinging steel doors. My eyes tingled before my vampire vision took over, tinging everything slightly red, outlining the silhouettes and gleaming human eyes. Most everyone remained where they were, their arms crossed, and looking extremely put out. The rest were fumbling for their bags and purses and cards, some of them even planning to stiff the waiters in the dark. Everybody’s heart was beating just a little bit faster than before.

“Well, then,” said Sam. “I have plenty of cash. We can just leave it on the table and go.”

“Okay,” I said, and we stood up.

The ground started to shake. Violently.

Sam and I dropped down, crouching by the booths, our feet apart, our hands landing on the ground just in time to catch ourselves. The floor pitched and heaved beneath us, throwing people from their booths into the opposite walls and windows. Tiles cracked, florescent bulbs burst and fizzled, and a thunderous sound roared all around us.

Beneath us came a rumbling. Not from motion exactly, more like bubbles rising from deep, black water, or the gurgling of a river monster.

Eight seconds was all it took; then it was over.

The building settled, and everyone inside let out a collective sigh of relief. Silhouettes pulled phones from their pockets and turned on flashlight apps, asking if everyone was okay. Someone coughed, and somebody else groaned, but I didn’t smell any blood, and everyone’s heart rate was about where it should have been. Some poor bastard in the corner tried to get up and screamed when broken fragments of his tibia ground together, but his leg was already broken. Apparently, his cast landed the wrong way when he dodged the toppling table. He’d be fine. Probably.

“Hades!” said Sam, pulling herself to her feet. A luminescent bulb hovered over her palm, casting blue light across the room. If anybody cared about the witch in the room, they didn’t respond. Nobody even spared us a glance. Good. Last thing we needed was for them to start accusing Sam of causing the quake. Or recognize me and start screaming.

“Yeah,” I said, looking around. “No kidding.” The floor had wide cracks damn near everywhere, dozens of ceiling tiles littered the ground, and every booth and table had been violently torn off the floor and shifted at least a foot or more from its former position. There was much more damage than the jitterbug-like shaking should have caused.

“Dulcie?” Sam asked.

A thick, choking miasma hung over everything, hovering between the motes of dust in the air that smothered the inside of my lungs like tar.

Fuuuuuuuck.

“Oh, hell,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“What’s it feel like to you?” I asked, if only to make sure.

“Thick,” she said. “Very claustrophobic. And cold. Like if darkness became a physical being.” She swallowed audibly. “Like Meg.”

“Shit,” I said.

Sam bit her lip, thinking. “Do you think we should—”

All of a sudden, the encroaching darkness disappeared. The air was clear again, and the world became visibly lighter. A physical weight was suddenly released from my chest.

“It’s gone,” I said.

Sam nodded. “Yeah,” she agreed. “It’s gone.”

We looked at each other, waiting for whatever it was to spring back with renewed strength.

Although we stood there for a long time, nothing happened.

“Do you think whatever Meg did at the precinct could be causing the earthquakes?” asked Sam. It wasn’t the craziest theory.

“Maybe,” I answered, feeling sick to my stomach as I remembered the earthquake that occurred before the attack. That awful, nightmarish, ice-cold sensation at the bottom of my lungs. I wondered if it meant another attack was coming.

Dammit, Meg has been here the whole time. Hades only knew where here was, but… fuck, I should’ve known.

“Or maybe it was just another earthquake,” Sam said.

“Yeah, with a coincidental veil of nightmare magic just hanging over it by chance?” I asked, shaking my head. “In what universe could we ever get that lucky?”

Sam shrugged, looking around at the dust, the dirt and the general disrepair. “We can always dream.”

SEVEN

Dulcie

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Sam asked me for the nth time. We stood in the parking lot by her car, staring at the road, or what was left of it. The concrete was splintered, frozen in uneven ripples like waves in a storm, but thankfully, still drivable.

“Yeah,” I said. “I want to walk around a bit. See if that odd feeling comes back.”

“Okay,” Sam said, clearly dubious. Worried. Where I was concerned, she was always worried. “I’m going to see Casey. Tell him what just happened. And you will call me if you need me?”

I nodded even though I wasn’t planning on calling her. “I will. I promise.”

“Okay,” she said as she hugged me. “I love you, Dulcie.”

“I love you too,” I said. She smelled so nice, like strawberries and old textbooks. “I’ll see you later.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let me know when you’re ready and we’ll go to the FBI together, okay? No more than a few hours? We’re pushing it by waiting at all.”

“I know. I just…” I shrugged. “I just need a minute.”

Which was true. But I didn’t need the minute to think. I needed it to walk around and see if something big and angry was about to jump out of the cracks in the sidewalk and kill everybody. I’d go to the FBI office afterwards. I’d call Sam and Casey and we’d debrief somebody important together and see what to do about it as a team.

But, for now, I needed a breather.

Downtown Splendor had suffered the brunt of the tremors. Much of the neighborhood was still in recovery, and the mountains of dug-out concrete were taped off. Now-empty dirt lots, wooden planks over busted windows, and lots of missing doors revealed a scene of utter annihilation. These buildings were older, made of brick, stone and cheap mortar, ridiculously underprepared for earthquakes of any magnitude, let alone, the nightmare tremors I’d caused when I’d been under Meg’s influence. Splendor was one of those places in California that had never been retrofitted or brought up to code.

The majority of shops were still standing, a number of them even open, despite the fact that nobody in their right mind would drive down there. At least, not until the roads were repaved and all the shrapnel carted away. Many businesses were targets of looting in the initial chaos, but most of these businesses didn’t sell things, but services, like hairdressers and handymen. Some small boutiques and carpentry stores lost all of their merchandise, which was either destroyed or spirited away by the kinds of people who lived for such disasters.

The looting contributed to the street’s bad rep of late, but now it wasn’t totally desolate, despite the wee hour. Pockets of night people—most of them kids—were out, hunting for a decent club to party in or a generous creature to bum potions off. Seemed to be lots of those types around Splendor recently. It was getting hard to keep track of them all; especially when the police force and others responsible for potion regulation were, you know, no longer a viable entity anymore.

Look for monsters, look for monsters. But the sensation I felt in the diner was totally gone. The only Meg-esque magic I detected was the much thicker stuff I felt in the precinct, and whatever remained in my lungs and clung to my skin. It was uncomfortably pervasive, crawling in places and refusing to leave, like wet sand.

A faint, nagging voice in my head kept whispering that I wasn’t really out here looking for monsters but I ignored it. Mostly.

I sighed hard enough to hurt my lungs, and dragged my hands over my face as I walked. Most of the street lamps here were shot out—a lot of them fallen across the roads like gigantic shoelaces—but I could see everything just fine. Rimmed a little in red, I knew the werewolf part of me was vying to dominate the vampire part of me. Both creatures have night vision, but werewolves rely more heavily on scent in the dark. If the conflict continued, I’d have a hell of a headache later, but unless I wanted to crawl back to Sam immediately, there was nothing else I could do.

I’ll see her tomorrow, I thought. I’m just making sure everything’s okay here before I get some sleep so I can be calm and useful while explaining what happened to the officers and why I took so long to report to them.

Yes, I’d go to the FBI tomorrow. I had to, even if Sam didn’t come over and make me. I just needed a second. In the morning, I planned to hunt down Casey (or whoever his superior was now—they kept getting replaced as the investigation grew more complicated) and spend the better part of forever explaining why I thought Meg was A. still alive; and B. behind the bloodfest at work. I knew I’d be in there for hours, answering the human interrogators, letting those weird, empathic, slug-like organisms crawl all over me to absorb what remained of the sensation, and all of it while drinking that piss-poor coffee they served in the break room.

I needed to take a minute before facing that kind of day. I’d had a long day as it was and I’d certainly earned a decent night’s sleep, hadn’t I? Six hours of fitful slumber while trying to come to terms with it all? Half a hundred people were dead and everyone would blame me. I don’t know, I just needed a second to prepare for that. Brace myself for something that would head the Top Ten Worst Days of My Life.

So there I was, walking alone and looking for monsters that weren’t there, without thinking any feasible thoughts. Screaming wordlessly into the void, I hoped for some relief.

I don’t know why, but Knight’s face flashed across my mind. Smiling, laughing, and shaking his head. I couldn’t pin it to any particular moment, but Hades, for two seconds it was the most real thing in the world. And it was the most beautiful thing in the world. From a time when we could laugh, when we could love each other, when we were still… innocent. And now? All that memory made me want to do was scream.

Scream into the void, I thought. I kind of wanted to. It was about as productive as anything else I could do right now.

You know what? Fuck it. It was worth a shot.

I stopped walking, threw my head back, and just fucking screamed. I was a lot louder than I thought I’d be. My voice echoed like thunder in the valley, bouncing back to me in ways it really shouldn’t have. The buildings rattled, and mounds of brick and concrete started shaking and breaking apart—not too much, just enough for me to feel. Any number of things could have been responsible—werewolves, drakes, vampires, and half a dozen other creatures. All of them could be stupidly loud if they chose to. Functionally speaking, I had a built-in bullhorn now.

The sound faded ten seconds later, dissolving into the atmosphere like wisps of smoke. There was a long moment of silence.

A block away, I heard somebody say, “Fuck, dude, what the hell was that?”

“Demons, probably,” the friend responded. The people they were with laughed and cringed by turns. Hell, maybe it was a demon. They all kept walking.

I smiled, feeling slightly better. Crossing my arms, I leaned back against the wall of an ancient brick something-or-other. It had no windows and lots of scrap metal on the ground inside. Iron comprised most of it, enough to sting my lungs when I breathed—possibly the only hazard of being a fairy. It was a nice night, almost cold, and cloudless, like the dying breath of a cool breeze, without any massacre-monsters, at least, none that I could see or smell. I was hovering on the edge of something, a feeling that might have been relaxing.

Ugh, maybe I should just go to the FBI now and get it over with. I was just procrastinating, I knew I was, and honestly? I knew why. But that conversation was not one I wanted to have with myself, especially alone in the dark, in a Splendor back street. Or anywhere else really.

But you gotta.

I forced myself to actually think the thought. I didn’t want to go to the FBI to tell them I thought Meg was alive because—and this was pathetic—of the chance I’d run into Knight in the building. I just didn’t know what I’d say to him. What he’d say to me. Would we just stand there awkwardly and shuffle our feet?

I wasn’t stupid and I knew Knight was the reason I was avoiding going—but if the earthquake before the precinct attack were a sign of the arrival of whatever was responsible, I was rapidly running out of excuses.

Avoidance isn’t something you eventually grow out of. If anything, it gets worse, because the older you get, the higher your expectations become of yourself. You expect to have mature, healthy conversations about the most immature and unhealthy things. We’re supposed to keep calm and smile and forgive one another, or at least hate one another openly enough that everybody knows not to put certain people together in the same room for any length of time. During your whole childhood, your anger comes easy, and you’re either disappointed or mad at someone claiming you never want to see them again.

Then you wake up one morning, all grown up, and realize that after years of evolution, you still have no idea how to properly hate the people you love.

I hated him. More than anything, but I didn’t, I couldn’t. It wasn’t his fault, but it was, and it wasn’t, but—and on and on it went like that forever. There’s no one to blame, the blame belongs to both parties. You can’t even begin to try to find a solution when you don’t know how to classify the problem.

I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to debrief him. I didn’t want to chance having awkward eye contact with him in the hallway. I wanted to crawl under a rock and just stay there until the world magically made sense to me again.

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt—it’s a fairy named Dulcie, who’s just doing her best.

“Okay,” I said aloud, “okay, okay, okay.” Hyping myself up like a football coach on a Disney Channel afternoon special, I felt like I was hopelessly coaching the losing team. “Come on, you’re a goddamn adult, just go. Just fucking go, and if he’s in the room, don’t look at him. You don’t have to give him eye contact. Pretend he’s somebody else. Pretend he’s Sam. Pretend he’s Casey. Pretend he’s Gilbert Godfrey with a head cold.”

I was trying, okay?

Yeah, I needed to go. Continuing to avoid my not-a-boyfriend was an astoundingly stupid thing to do. The longer I waited, the longer Meg was left to her own devices, wherever she was and totally unattended, which as a rule, was probably a very Bad thing.

Sam said it was fine, I thought, and immediately afterwards, No, she’s humoring you because your life sucks ass, like, all the time now. And she shouldn’t do that. She’s a good friend, but she should really tell you to shut up and do your goddamn job. Saving the world is more important than feeling awkward around your pseudo boyfriend.

“Okay,” I said, sucking a stream of hot air through my teeth and nodding once in resolution. “Okay. I’m going. He probably won’t even be there. It’s fine. I’m going.”

Hades, Dulcie, just start walking.

Then I heard footsteps. Not mine, but somebody else’s. Heavy, clumsy, and not many of them. Three, maybe four people, no more, stumbling down the street, their speech slurring badly enough to require subtitles. I sniffed the air—salt, sweat, alcohol, testosterone. A lot of alcohol.

And the metal-and-oily smell of guns.

Well, fuck.

Four guys, I guessed. Angry, drunk. Itching for a fight, and probably looking for any Netherworldian to rough up and make themselves feel like men. They were armed, all of them, and probably with the one thing that might have stopped me from killing them if the mood struck me. Dragon saliva doesn’t have a particular smell, but anyone out this late, with the audacity of carrying weapons, would definitely be packing anti-creature bullets. They were either off-duty cops or armed civilians. They were also about to get their open-carry licenses revoked and hard.

Just around the corner, they were moving with purpose—as much as a belligerent band of drunks could muster, at least. I shrank into the shadows, waiting for them to pass… watching their faces so I could report them later.

The first one to drag himself around the bend was the drunkest of the bunch. Average height, red hair, a buttoned-up blue shirt that was open past his ribs. Drunken out of his skull. With a badge that shone on his belt.

Shit, now I have to say something. I slid right back into cop-mode mentality. “Sir, are you on duty?” I asked, stepping forward. He wasn’t wearing his uniform, but nothing makes the force look worse than a conspicuously drunk officer wandering the wasteland in the dark—except maybe the same officer stumbling across an equally drunk supernatural teenager and beating the shit out of him. That’d be bad news no matter who got blamed.

“NO!” he spat back. I saw a bottle in his hand, long-empty, its contents clinging to his paper-white tongue for dear life. “I’m off… I’m off! I’m off for the night!”

“Uh-huh,” I said, and the rest of his motley crew crept up behind him, their eyes narrowing as they gave me accusing stares.

“Are any of you gentlemen sober enough to take him home?” No sense pissing them off if I didn’t have to. I’d met a very small number of cops who managed to maintain a civil conversation with me, and he was a brother in blue before he became a stupid punk on the street. Besides, my hair covered the points of my ears, so there was nothing inherently magical about me, none that they could see. Maybe they wouldn’t recognize me and we could all go home without a fuss.

“Dulcie O’Neil,” said another one, and the steady well, well, well gibe of a petty supervillain came to mind.

Well fuckity-fuck you too, Universe.

I recognized the guy, but barely—Morris something, a short, stocky guy from my orientation. One of a few that quit the day they found out I was joining their little corner of the force. He wasn’t nearly so drunk as his redheaded friend, but his cheeks were rosy pink and he was having a hell of a time just keeping his balance.

Great, just what I need right now.

“Go directly home now and I won’t arrest you for public intoxication,” I said, half reaching for a gun I’d left at home—not that I needed it if things went sour. Things won’t go sour. They’re just drunk and tired and stupid. They’ve got better things to do than cause trouble.

“And what if we don’t?” Morris asked, following my hand. He grinned when he saw I wasn’t armed.

I almost laughed. “Then I’ll arrest you for public intoxication.”

“Hell of an earthquake just now,” said the one next to him, someone I didn’t recognize. Tall, square face, big, angry eyes with all his veins stenciled in painful detail. Bulging muscles, he was taking long, deliberate strides forward, something that a less capable creature than I might have found intimidating.

“Yeah,” I said, adjusting my stance. I was suddenly ready to make a break for it. The last thing I needed was a bunch of idiot cops screaming that Dulcie O’Neil tried to kill them. I could call somebody else to pick them up when I was in the clear. “Hell of an earthquake.”

“Funny you happened to be here when it happened.”

“Dude, really?” I asked. “We’re in California. This is, like, the earthquake sanctuary of the world.” Yeah, maybe we didn’t have that many earthquakes but I didn’t know what else to say. It wasn’t like I was going to tell them what really caused it. Mainly because I didn’t know.

He scoffed, his eyes drifting left, then pitched into the building, barely catching himself. “Fucking freak,” he said. Not the most inspiring insult, but the subsequent look he gave me could have sent Hades scuttling for cover.

“I didn’t cause the earthquake,” I said lamely. “I can’t create earthquakes.” I don’t think.

They all pretended not to hear me.

“Ryland’s dead,” Thomas said, taking a giant step forward. “Wanna know why?”

Well, fuck. I didn’t have a clue who Ryland might be, but if I had to guess, I’d say he was a cop—one whose death was about to be pinned squarely on me. “Let me guess…” But I wasn’t able to finish my sentence.

“That fucking monster you brought back with you,” he said. He glared at me, his heart thrumming under his ribs. The sound was enough to make me salivate, although I couldn’t tell you why.

“Monster?” I repeated as I frowned. Wait, so I’m not the monster in question right now? “What monster?”

“The thing that killed Ryland,” Thomas spat out, “and everybody else. It ripped them to pieces.”

Oh, I thought. The precinct monster. Got it. “I didn’t bring anything back from anywhere. We still don’t know who or what is responsible for the attack.” Learning that they knew about it at all this early did not bode well for the morning news. If their buddies were leaking the story to them, and especially, if someone they knew was now dead, they’d be more than eager to tell any news station that would listen, whether the department was ready to release a statement or not. This was going to be very bad for the former ANC. “I had absolutely nothing to do with it.”

They ignored me, and all four took staggering steps forward. I groaned. Hades, here we go.

My plan was to dodge them at the last second and dematerialize a few steps away. I wanted to give them a little taste of the scary vampire they’d heard so much about and a chance to make the smart decision of skedaddling home. Barring that, I would leave. Even running sober, none of them were nearly half my speed, so they’d never catch me. I’d become a disembodied blur for half a second, and then poof! Gone.

Before I could respond, a shadow leapt out from nowhere and punched Thomas in the face hard enough to shatter his teeth. None of my theatrical dodging was necessary.

Five seconds later, all four drunken men were rolling on the ground, moaning and cursing in various degrees. All of them were bleeding from deep cuts in their mouths, and scrapes on their elbows, the little wounds filled with asphalt and humiliation. Their guns were removed from their holsters and now sitting idly at the feet of the face-punching shadow.

He, meantime, was looking rather pleased with himself.

“Evening,” he said in his thick English accent, his fangs glinting in the moonlight as he smiled broadly at me.

I suppressed a groan. “Bram.”

EIGHT

Sam

I went home. Driving slowly, I kept my phone in my lap in case Dulcie called. It buzzed a few times, but the buzzing was just email notifications. I didn’t hear from Dulcie during the entire twenty-minute drive. Which I hoped was a good sign. However, Dulcie isn’t known for making intelligent decisions on the fly, especially when it involves asking someone for help. Even if that someone is me.

I had to talk myself out of turning around and trying to follow her a number of times—not only because she would absolutely see me coming, but also because she would feel personally attacked. Like I didn’t trust her enough to go on a walk. That’s fair, I guess. Even though she knows I know she was procrastinating. And, what was more, I was fairly sure she was afraid she’d run into Knight. And I guess I couldn’t blame her for that.

She’ll call me if she has another episode, I thought, trying to avoid becoming the overbearing mother. I actually doubted she would have another episode; she seemed stabilized enough for the night. All I had to worry about now was Dulcie deliberately doing something stupid. Like demolishing an abandoned building or identifying herself in a bar just to start a fight. No, it was not typical Dulcie behavior, but she’d done a lot dumber things and for dumber reasons. Today was rough. My worry was well-founded. At this point, I could do nothing else but worry.

I turned slowly onto my street. My house had miraculously been spared any damage from the nightmare earthquakes. The roads getting there, however, were in pretty bad shape. Cracked and splintered like palm trees after a hurricane, pieces of rubble covered the medians and shoulders, all surrounded by orange caution cones and reflective signs. There were only so many bulldozers in the state, and most of them were busy in bigger cities where the citizens thought they mattered more. My car—a silver Jetta—was barely high enough to handle the ups and downs of the buckled streets, and not without making me supremely nauseous.

I parked the car, took out my keys, and spent a minute just climbing out of the seat. My stomach kept flipping and churning, while the rest of my body tried to ignore it.

Maybe I ate something bad at the diner, I thought. I hadn’t eaten much, but fried food plus bad driving is always a recipe for disaster.

Eventually, I made it to the front door. The white paint was scratched and scorched, but that was my fault. Whenever I get stressed, I accidentally set things on fire. That accounted for the ash-black flower beds and smoke-stained façade. And the broken garage lights. And the dark, scorched circles on the lawn.

I’ve been very stressed out lately.

I looked down at my keys and started sorting through them to find the house key. The door flew open before I could manage to do it.

“Hey, beautiful,” Casey said, one arm propped against the door frame. Dark hair, square glasses, a sweet, little, nerdy smile quirking the corners of his mouth. He was wearing a blue button-up with the sleeves pushed back to his elbows. The sight of him made my heart splutter like a light bulb in a haunted house.

For those of you just tuning in, Casey works as an FBI agent in the Preternatural Division—a group of amusingly underfunded federal employees that were tasked with the maintenance and regulation of the supernatural community. They existed before and after the fall of the Association of Netherworld Creatures and were, in theory, our supervisors. In a worst case scenario, they were also our enforcers.

Casey was here because we’d crashed into worst-case-scenario territory like a meteor.

Knight had been Casey’s ANC contact, whose job was to keep the FBI informed of any suspicious goings-on. Things like the aggressively dangerous crime of kidnapping the daughter of the former leader of the Netherworldian regime that was just overturned. Suspicioso. You’d think that Knight would have reported that before he went gallivanting off into the dark on a mission to save her with a historically unhelpful vampire and no plan. When Knight went missing—along with a host of other high-ranking ANC employees—it brought Casey and his band of crazy people down on our heads, and not a moment too soon. By the time he got here, I was all that was left of Knight’s office.

“Hey,” I said to my boyfriend as I slumped forward into him before he closed the door behind me. I buried my face in his shirt and spent a full minute just breathing, inhaling his delicious smell. “You smell really nice,” I said through his shirt.

He chuckled, squeezed me, and let me go, trailing his hands from my shoulders to my arms where they stayed. “You smell nice, too.”

I slipped my hands under his shirt and pressed them into his sides, keeping my face still buried in his shirt. “Give me your body heat,” I said.

“Sure, it’s not like I need it for anything.”

“I demand your warmth.”

“Right. Damn, your hands are cold.”

“Shut up, I’m working on them.”

He laughed. After a long moment, he asked, “How’s Dulcie?”

I pulled back a little to look at him and, after a short pause, I shrugged. “She was in a state when I got there. The werewolf part of her was taking over and fighting with all the other parts of her. Kind of like when a were turns for the first time, except she managed to keep herself anchored until I got there. I talked her down.”

“That’s good,” he said, vaguely familiar with Dulcie’s episodes. He grimaced. “She’s going to have to come in. The division is down at the precinct right now, examining all the information about the attack. Mom agreed to give Dulcie until the morning, but that’s the best we can do.”

“I know,” I said. Casey’s mother led the Preternatural Division, and had been more than sweet to all of us. “Thank you.”

I called Casey before I left Dulcie and gave him the gist of the story. I practically begged him not to drag Dulcie into the office at this ungodly hour. After the day she had—hell, the life she had—Casey agreed to pull some strings that would allow her a little more time. It wasn’t very long, but better than nothing, and while Dulcie might try to convince you she was fine, the best friend always knows better. We’d been living at a breakneck save-the-world pace for so long, she needed… I don’t know, more than a single hour to sort herself out.

Casey told his mother and other superiors that he had reason to believe Meg was still alive, and he sent them to Dulcie’s precinct to do what they could. A few more hours without Dulcie’s personal story wouldn’t kill anybody.

Hopefully.

“So the thing you felt,” said Casey. “You mentioned…”

“That I thought it was Meg,” I finished. “Yeah. I can’t be sure, it was pretty faint, and it was… I don’t know, laced with something else? Maybe it was just me, but Dulcie felt it too, and she said she sensed the same thing at her precinct… In fact, she was totally convinced it was Meg.” I sighed. “Honestly, I’d be more surprised if it weren’t at this point.”

I sighed, which soon became a deep, woeful groan. I buried my face in Casey’s shirt again and just let the noise exude, the moisture of my breath condensing on my cheeks and underneath my eyes. He squeezed me tight once and kissed the top of my head.

“Meg didn’t die,” I said. I never really believed that she had, but I’d chalked the feeling up to stupid paranoia. “She’s still a major threat.”

“Maybe.”

Maybe, I echoed silently. Yes, we didn’t know for certain. That shadowy, heavy feeling was similar in all cases, but could’ve meant anything. Bram’s shadows involved some necromancy, but they were very different schools of magic. This could be another twig on the dark-magic branch. And have nothing to do with Meg. Nothing at all.

My fear was cold and heavy in my stomach, and I clenched my teeth as I remembered the cold darkness and the skeleton-god that drove it away.

I must have made a sound because Casey squeezed me even tighter.

“I know,” he said. “We’ll do everything we can. I promise.”

I sighed again and looked up at him, smiling. “Thanks, babe.”

“If Dulcie needs anything, just let me know, okay? I’m always here.”

“I know,” I said. We stayed there like that for a long moment, just looking at each other. Watching our pupils dilate, hearing our inhales and exhales, smiling when they synchronized. God, he was cute.

“She will have to come in tomorrow,” he said. “She had the world’s worst day, so we can give her the night, but no longer than that.”

I nodded. “Yeah.” It was stupid to wait at all, but a strung-out Dulcie in a small, metal room was the last thing we needed right now.

Casey gestured back to the kitchen and a conspicuous grey-brown haze that was drifting into the living room. He didn’t look away. “I finished dinner.”

I sniffed the air. Something sweet, something salty, and something that was definitely still burning. “Did you?”

“I tried. Really, really hard.”

I pushed myself up on my toes and kissed him. “You’re awfully sweet.”

He gave me a peck on the nose, grinning. “And you’re spicy?”

I pushed him back, laughing. “You wanna fight me and find out how spicy I can be?”

“I don’t know, probably.”

I punched him in the shoulder—not hard, just playfully. Not that I even possessed the upper body strength to dive into him if I really wanted to anyway.

He grinned. “That was adorable.”

I glowered at him. “Shut up; I could set you on fire if I really wanted to.”

“Because you’re so hot?”

“Hades, never mind.”

He laughed and lunged forward, bending down and wrapping his arms around my waist. In no time, he was spinning me around fast enough to blur the room into a palette of colors and fog.

“Hey!” I said, laughing. He stopped and put me down, grinning like a little kid.

“Hey, guess what?” he said.

“What?” I answered, reeling.

His expression changed. He leaned forward, putting his lips right next to my ear and exhaling slowly. He stood there a full minute, letting the warmth of his breath sink into my skin. His hands lifted my shirt, pressing against my stomach and my waist, then rising, higher, higher… his lips parting, inhaling deeply…

“Is there a sentence I should be waiting for?” I whispered.

He leaned down, kissing my neck, once, then twice. His hands began wrapping around me and pressing into the space between my shoulder blades. “Probably not.”

My hands rumpled his hair, and I pulled it. “Mmm… maybe we should just… skip dinner tonight?”

He nipped the skin of my neck with his teeth, kissing a trail to my ear and whispering softly, “I don’t see why we can’t have both…”

Snaking one arm around my waist, he used the other to brace himself against the dining table. With one sweeping motion, he cleared the table of the plates, the flowers, and a vase full of water. Before they could crash onto the floor, I immediately wove a spell that landed them daintily on the ground. Then I whipped my hand up and watched everything float up to the counter and gracefully alight on it. My attention returned to Casey when he lay down on top of me. I wrapped my legs around him and wove his hair between my fingers. The look in his eyes was intense, sharp, focused and hungry, a liquid-silver smoldering expression that melted me from the inside out.

He plucked a strawberry from the fruit bowl beside my thigh. “Open wide.”

I hesitated for just a second, then obeyed, opening my mouth to accept the sweet fruit, and he fed it to me. I closed my lips around it and bit down. I chewed and swallowed.

“You want one?” I said, offering him a berry of his own. His eyes went wide and hungry.

I dropped it down my blouse. “Get it.”

He grabbed the fabric of my shirt, curling his hands into fists, and ripped it down the center, sending the buttons flying in all directions.

Wow, I thought. He really wants that strawberry.

He clasped his hands on either side of my neck and brought his lips down over mine. The strawberry rolled off the table and landed on the floor.  I broke away from his mouth, our limbs still entangled. “You dropped your strawberry,” I said, gasping for air.

His laugh sent chills up and down the length of my spine. My hips rose to meet the bulge in his jeans, and the deep, animal part of me emerged from the pit of my stomach. Suddenly, I wanted to feel him on top of me, between my thighs where my heartbeat was suddenly throbbing.

Casey obliged. He reached under my skirt with both hands, his eyes never once leaving mine, and slid my panties off me. He slowly pulled them down my legs until they dropped to the floor, catching for half a second on my heels.

He looked down at my skirt—business casual, not pencil-tight, but close—and undid the button with a single deft motion. I lifted my lower half up so he could pull it off me. He did, and crawled on top of me before I heard his zipper. Pinning my arm to the table, his free hand on my waist, he thrust himself inside me, plunging his tongue inside my mouth. My eyes closed at the thrill of it. I put my hand on his chest, and swirled my tongue in his throat. His breath hitched, and his body spasmed for the briefest moment.

I dragged my fingers along his bare back, selfishly refusing to allow any space to exist between us. My thighs clenched around his pelvis. I moaned into his ear. His fingers grew scorching hot. I could feel his heartbeat in every part of him, especially his throbbing member, taking long strokes, then heavy and fast, demanding my cooperation, creating a vibration like an earthquake, as the thunder bubbled up from the bottom of the ocean. I was caught in a storm you can’t see until it’s already upon you, drowning you, filling your lungs with cold wind and lightning-bright desire…

He dropped his head to my breasts, licking the space where the strawberry was, squeezing them with his hand as he worked his way back up, and thrusting deeper inside me every second, faster and faster, until it was all I could comprehend.

I orgasmed hard—and he followed two seconds later. He always had such spectacular timing. I half expected him to slump down, slick with sweat, but his movements remained deliberate. He looked at me, taking my face in his hands, and kissed me. Slipping his hands under me and picking me up, he carried me down the hall to the bedroom, dropping me in the middle of the bed and climbing on top of me.

And he went inside me again. And again after that.

I have to confess, I don’t have a whole lot of experience with sex, so I might be speaking from a position of hilarious ignorance here, but…

Hot damn.

He rose up slowly, still inside me, smiling. His bright blue eyes glowing like stars.

“I love you,” he said.

I blinked, not quite hearing him. “Oh.”

Pulling out of me, he slumped to the side, but kept looking at me. He was still smiling, but it was a little off now. “Oh?”

Then what he said clicked, and I beamed, my eyes going wide. “Oh!”

“Oh?” he said again, this time chuckling.

“Yes, oh!” I answered, reaching out to touch his face as I smiled up at him. “I love you too, Casey.”

His smile grew as he wrapped his arms around me. “Cool.”

I snorted. “Cool? I tell you I love you, and you say ‘cool’?”

He shrugged but his hands tightened around my waist. “Hey, I said it first and you said ‘oh’. I think we’re even now.”

“Touché.” I rolled away, getting off the bed and dizzily standing on my feet. “I’m gonna go take all this off,” I said, indicating my makeup—by now it was surely smudged beyond all salvage.

“Okay,” he said, propping himself up on his elbow. He reached behind him and grabbed his glasses, putting them on. They sat crooked on his nose, and one of the arms was pressed against the outside of his ear.

“Um,” I said as I giggled. “Hang on.”

I crawled back onto the bed and reached over to straighten them on his nose. His hand rose slowly to meet mine, wrapping around my wrist. Clamping down like a shackle, he started pulling me forward closer to him.

“Hey,” he said, his forehead pressing against mine.

“Hey yourself,” I answered, kissing him, my hands on his chest, feeling my way around him again. “I’ll be right back.”

“Mmm,” he said softly, biting his lip. “Hurry.”

“Will do,” I said equally soft, as I sauntered off to the master bathroom.

I closed the door, sighing dreamily, and looked in the mirror. I nodded thoughtfully, placing my hands on the counter—I wasn’t quite all the way to Panic at the Disco as far as my comical black mascara and eye liner streaks went, but close enough to make anyone wonder if my high school emo phase ever really came to a close.

I washed my face with cold water, pulling a towel across my skin, casually bemoaning my obsession with panicking discos and romantic chemicals.

And I heard something.

A thump like a bird hitting the window. A very large, very purposeful bird hitting a window.

“Casey?” I called, and in the same second, he shouted, “Sam?”

“What was that?” I asked.

“Something hit the window,” he said, and I could hear him fumbling back into his pants. “It sounded big.”

Oh, hell.

Thump, thump, thump. Each one was louder than the last.

I heard a click, and realized it was Casey pulling his gun from the nightstand and cocking it.

“What is it?” I called out, this time sounding more concerned.

Silence. Silence. Silence.

“Casey?”

And another noise. I was trembling like the sheen on a piano wire, tight and thin and icy. The tension was straining the glass, and spiderweb cracks began creeping through it, shattering it half a second later.

“Sam, run!” shouted Casey.

“Shit,” I said, bursting out of the bathroom, a bulb of fire sputtering to life in my hand.

In the bedroom, the window was broken, and glass shards sparkled all over the carpet. The curtains were blowing in the dark, pulled out by a viciously cold wind. The whole room was cloaked in palpable darkness, an ethereal smoke turning everything grey. It smothered the fire in my hand, dragging the air out of my lungs in sharp bursts, and stinging my throat. It was consuming all sound.

There was blood on the windowsill. Enough to drip in a pool and stain.

“Casey?” I called out, barely able to hear myself.

Outside, I heard gunshots and a high-pitched, animal scream.

NINE

Bram

I must begin by assuring you that I was not, in fact, stalking my favorite fairy.

Rather, I was merely keeping a close watch on someone whom the world has developed a particular and fervent distaste for. I was in the service of ensuring her continued safety. Yes, I was following her, and hoped she could not see me; but stalking is such a morbidly unpleasant word, don’t you agree? Yes, she did not know I was in such close proximity, but my presence was not hurting her in any way. I was merely an extra pair of eyes to watch her back, a staunch defender in the shadows, creeping beside her and just close enough to be of service should anything unpleasant befall her—or if she should become something unpleasant and endanger someone else. I was protecting her, and to do that properly, I had to follow her. I am the first to admit I did so without her knowledge or consent.

I suddenly realize how bad that sounds. Allow me to explain.

Meg—the living amalgamation of nightmares that befouled Dulcie’s soul and tried to assassinate the President of the United States—is also my maker. She is the vampire that bit me and created the illustrious dark-walker you have come to know and I have had the pleasure to be.

Clinically, Meg is calamitously insane, as well as catastrophically powerful. She undoubtedly is still nursing a titanic grudge for our dear Dulcie after she thwarted Meg’s valiant attempt to end the world.

So as you see, I was not stalking Dulcie, I was just protecting her from the fury of my maker. This is purely a security operation and most definitely not an excuse for me to get uncomfortably close to a person for whom I have developed an undying affection.

Undying. In the name of Hades and the darkness he crawled out of, how far must I have fallen to resort to issuing puns?

The obvious answer, I suppose, is very; but such is not the point.

If you find me a bit creepy, let me assure you, I have only the best intentions.

And, yes, I am very worried about our heroine. Satisfied?

Standing outside Dulcie’s apartment complex for hours, I was melting myself into the shadows and staring at her window. Her light was still on, the curtain moving back and forth as she traipsed across the room. Changing, she was fresh from a shower, and still wet after hours of washing away all the blood and smoke and darkness…

Yes, darkness. Darkness similar to the sour magic my maker had grown so fond of; yet where Meg acquired this arcane stink, I know not. The mystery of its source created a flood of anxiety that flows inside me. The only creatures capable of secreting it also have a peculiar fondness for committing cold-blooded murder.

I had every intention of telling Dulcie as much, in case she hadn’t already noticed it for herself. But when she busied herself with a visit and dinner with Samantha, the opportunity to talk to her was taken from me.

So now, here we stood, in the darkest alley surrounded by unconscious perpetrators who would have harmed her, had they been given the opportunity.

She was glaring at me, tapping her foot with her arms crossed and looking decidedly unhappy.

“Bram,” she said. Her honey-blond hair fell loose and tangled around her shoulders and it trembled as she breathed.

“That is my name,” I said, brushing imaginary dust from my hands, “last I checked.”

“Bram, what the fuck?”

I frowned. “Excuse me? ‘What the fuck?’”

She gestured sharply to the unconscious men behind me. “Yes! What the fuck?”

“Whatever do you mean by that vulgar expression?”

“You just made this whole situation a hundred times worse than it would have been,” she said.

“I believe I was merely helping.”

“When they wake up, all they’ll remember is Dulcie O’Neil was threatening to arrest them before a weird shadow started kicking their asses. You know what that’s gonna look like?”

“Like you beset them?”

“Exactly.”

“And you consider that a bad assumption?”

“Yes, Bram, it’s bad. Very bad.” She ran her hands down her face, leaving them for a moment over her mouth as she inhaled and exhaled slowly. “What the hell are you doing here?”

I shrugged. “Nothing in particular.”

“Bram.”

“Yes, my dear?”

“What are you doing here?”

I shrugged, nudging one of her coworkers with my shoe who was bleeding from the mouth, although the cut on the inside of his cheek was nothing internal. Yes, his blood assaulted my nostrils and made me aware that I had yet to dine this evening. But, even so, I possess a modicum of self-control, although I frequently refuse to practice it. Tonight I was not half bad; and one could even say I was half good.

“Were you following me?”

“Why would you ask that?” I replied, feigning surprise.

“You were following me.”

My false reaction failed, apparently. “I believe it was more like I was helping you.”

“I don’t need your help, Bram.”

Hades, but it thrilled me to hear her say my name, never mind how angrily she voiced it. She was correct and did not require my help. Now that her vampiric augmentations were established, the odds of more successive victories were perpetually in her favor. But one still should not look within the mouth of the gift horse or the gift vampire, as it may be.

I shrugged. “Forgive me for worrying about you unnecessarily and indulging an old habit.”

Dulcie scoffed and looked away for a moment, shaking her head. “Habit? Since when did you make a habit of helping me?”

“Since…” Now that I thought about it, she was asking a legitimate question. In the realm of altruism, I was a fairly recent visitor. “Since now, I suppose.”

“What do you want from me, Bram?” she asked, her mouth looking so adorable when it quirked to one side. Seeing no surprise on her face, but the distinctive presence of dread—I knew she quite clearly expected me to impose on her with a repulsive request.

“Nothing,” I said.

She frowned at me. “Nothing?”

“Nothing,” I repeated.

“Nothing,” she clarified, “as in no things. You don’t want anything from me? Nothing at all?”

I shrugged. “I would like for Meg to die and the majority of the mortal world to forget that supernatural creatures exist,” I said. “And since you are asking me, I should also like to have a pony.”

“Dammit, Bram! You know what I mean. You always want something from me.”

I held up my hands in mock surrender. “Let me speak quite plainly. Dulcie, I want nothing from you in this world or any other.”

Her face changed and she went from dubious to outright startled. Confusion surrounded her like a fog. But what was she confused about exactly?

I realized I made the basic mistake of calling her by her name. I so rarely erred in my choice of words to address her, but under the circumstances and based on our personal history, I should have been more condescending and instead called her by my pet moniker, sweet. Then she would have appeared less surprised.

Damn. If I were not more cautious, she might think I was sincere, which may have been true, but I had no intention of letting her know that.

“Well,” I said, clapping my hands together so abruptly that it made Dulcie jump. “So all is well and good in the hood.”

“Promise me you’ll never say that again,” Dulcie snapped. “You sound like such an idiot.” Then, her eyes glowed and I glimpsed the sweltering pools of burning magma.

What could I say? Dulcie O’Neil was excellent at muddling one’s mind. Brilliant honey-golden hair, breasts that were the envy of every fertility goddess, and curves that must have been a cosmic oversight to not be sculpted in marble. In all my innumerable years, I have never been so vexed by a creature as fantastic and enthralling as she is…

“You’re staring at me that way again.” She frowned and added, “Stop it.”

“Ah,” I said, ashamed at having been caught. “Do I make you uncomfortable, sweet?”

“Yes! You know you always make me uncomfortable.”

“Really?” I replied when she caught me offguard. She did not surprise me very often, but her reply was unexpected. She spoke it as an accusation, and not a casual observation as she might have on any other night.

“Bram, you are the poster child when it comes to making people uncomfortable.”

Something strange plucked my insides and I experienced the absurdly human rush of heat in my chest that typically accompanies a blush—an archaic response I can no longer produce. How peculiar. “Ah, please forgive me. I meant no offense.”

She frowned at me, narrowing her eyes into the suspicious glare she usually reserved for people who were doing something nefarious—or lying. On any other night, I would have proudly lied to cover up my nefarious activities.

“Bram, did you just apologize to me?” she asked slowly.

“I begged for your forgiveness. Is that an acceptable form of apology?”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Are you high or on something?”

“On something?” I repeated. “I fail to see what you mean.”

“Drugs, Bram. Are you on any drugs? Or potions? Or anything else?”

“At this moment?”

“At this exact moment, yes! Are you on anything?”

“Chemical substances cannot alter my consciousness,” I answered. “Although I must confess your presence is rather intoxicating in its own right.”

“And you’re not drunk?”

“I lack the organs necessary to process alcohol, as you are well aware,” I responded. “If I did, it would merely dissolve into my skin and disappear.”

“And you’re not under the influence of anything else?”

“Would you care to elaborate on that?”

“I don’t know,” she said, throwing up a hand in exasperation—while the other remained planted firmly on her hip.

I admit I was temporarily lost in her sublime curves and realized too late that she said something else to me. I cleared my throat.

“I am not under the influence of any substance,” I said, hoping that would suffice.

“Right. Whatever,” she said, shaking her head.

“And now,” I said as I cleared my throat, “I must be on my way as my work here is finished for the evening. I am quite like the bat creature of the night, am I not?”

“You mean Batman?”

“I do.”

“No, you’re nothing like Batman, Bram.”

“I feel I am quite similar,” I answered with a shrug. “Defending the helpless…”

“I’m hardly helpless.”

“And punishing those who deserve it,” I finished.

She glanced down at those who had received my wrath. “They’re all cops and now I’m probably going to have to take the heat for this.”

“Just tell them it was me, sweet,” I answered. “I will answer for in their human courts.”

“Right,” she said with disbelief as she sighed.

“Adieu, my sweet.”

Raising my hands, I prepared to wrap myself in the shadows and disappear—but we both went stiff at once.

“Do you feel that?” I asked, referring to a dramatic shift in the air. Something as vibrant as electricity seemed to erupt from the bottom of the ocean. Distant and muffled, it seemed very desperate to emerge.

And worse still, it was achingly familiar.

“Yeah,” said Dulcie. Her eyes flashed red, indicating her vampirism was in high gear. It acted as a protective mechanism that I’m sure she didn’t appreciate fully.

A moment later, a sound accompanied the uncanny feeling. An actual scream was followed by a series of gunshots.

“Shit,” said Dulcie as she turned her gaze towards the empty sky where the gunshots came from. “I have to check that out.”

“Allow me to accompany you,” I said—perhaps too eagerly.

“Yeah, but no,” she replied with a look of derision over her shoulder that might have turned a lesser man to stone. “You’re done with following me for the night.”

She almost sounded amused but perhaps that was my imagination.

“Why do you insist I was following you?” I demanded. “I really was not.”

She said nothing, but raised her brows at me. It managed to make me hesitate, however briefly. Dulcie and I were, miraculously, now of a common ilk—and she was more than capable of matching her stare with a stinging slap I could actually feel.

“I can only be of service to you,” I said. “If I become a liability, just say so.”

“You’re a liability.”

I cleared my throat. “I meant, during our investigation, sweet.”

She grumbled something while thinking it over, and eventually decided she could never have too much fodder in her defense. “Fine,” she said, the shadows swimming at her feet as she prepared to dematerialize. “You do whatever you have to.”

The shadows rose around her, swarmed, shrank, and abruptly vanished over the buildings into the blinking starlight. A gust of cold wind lay in her wake, her shadows and mine blowing all the warmth from the air away.

I followed her a moment later, of course. She expected nothing less.

***

I materialized on a red tile rooftop in a nearby suburb—one I instantly recognized as belonging to Samantha White, Dulcie’s beloved wicca. The air felt cold here, chillier than any breeze one would expect to enjoy at night in California. The empty street was barely illuminated by the dim, orange lights, allowing the patch of sky Dulcie was staring at with unbridled animation and fervor to be more easily distinguishable.

I followed her gaze. “Well. That’s less than ideal.”

“Yeah, no shit,” she agreed.

Hanging in the sky—or perhaps floundering is more descriptive—something was doing all it could to drown itself in the air, if such a thing were possible. The unique beast possessed wide, arcing wings and a long, lashing tail. It kept screaming loudly, along with the silhouette of the prey it had clutched in its talons. A sudden flash was accompanied by a loud bang, and I realized the silhouette held a gun, although it seemed incapable of using it.

“Do we know him?” I asked, pointing at the poor wretch.

“I don’t know, can’t tell from here,” said Dulcie.

I looked between her and the monster now writhing in the sky. The hollow lightning sensation felt much more powerful here than back on the street. “Do you think perchance this beast came here for you?” I inquired. The most singular and scary ones almost always were looking for Dulcie.

“Fuck, probably,” Dulcie answered wearily. Holding shadows and fire in her hands, she was looking for an angle, an open shot, I supposed, but the pair moved so quickly that even I had trouble seeing them.

Now that I think more about it, I was having trouble in seeing the monster at all. The rest of the world, however, despite being cloaked in the mantle of night, was crystal clear. Every detail of every house on the street and car and stray animal stood out in my mind, perfectly clear in every aspect, owing to my vampiric eyes. The monster, however, remained a silhouette against the starless sky, and barely visible at that.

“It feels like Meg,” Dulcie remarked.

“It does indeed,” I agreed. The foul feeling felt much stronger here, and I had absolutely no doubt this beast was the product of Meg’s evil mind—or the dangerous powers she routinely called upon.

“Dulcie!”

We both looked down and saw Samantha stumbling out of her house before waving at us from the street. She was wearing pajama pants and a purple top, her hair still tangled as though she quite recently arose from her bed. At this distance, I could hear her heart pounding with all the fury of a tropical thunderstorm. Her hand was wreathed in flames, and crackling madly. Her eyes glowed as well, although that may have been a trick of the light.

In the large and expanding realm of Dulcie’s friends, only Samantha had a fair reason to find me detestable—and I predicted she would give me all kinds of hell for being spotted in the company of her beloved Dulcie. Nearly everyone knew I embraced a sincere affection for the fairy. To avoid unnecessary conflict, I made myself smaller, shrinking into the shadows so Samantha would not see me.

Yes, in hindsight, it seems a remarkably childish reaction, but I digress...

“It’s Meg!” shouted Samantha. She meant that the monster had the same coarse aura that all of Meg’s nightmarish magic possessed. Or perhaps she thought the winged beast was Meg herself? I doubted that though. Meg could transform into many things, but she was never incompetent at any of them. And that thing in the sky was having a hell of a time trying to kill whoever was clutched in its talons. “I know,” Dulcie shouted back, staring at the apparition defiantly. “Apparition” was a fitting word, too. It appeared to be no more than a puff of smoke with leathery wings like a bat. There were more flashes and more bangs before the winged smoke-beast screeched a terrific scream—without dropping the tiny silhouette.

All at once, I grew more certain that the silhouette as the admirable Special Agent Casey James. But the question remained: how had he managed to be scooped up by an angry, arcane something-or-other?

“Dulcie, it has Casey!” Samantha shouted.

Aha! And there you have it! I am nothing if not an accurate witness in times of crisis.

“Fuck!” said Dulcie, “Okay, okay, um…”

“By any chance, can you fly?” I asked Dulcie.

“No,” she said. “You?”

“Hardly,” I answered. “Although I am a rather excellent jumper.”

“Do you think you can jump high enough to grab that thing or at least to help get Casey away from it?”

I looked up and found the creature spinning closer to us with every second. I estimated it would be directly above us in a moment or two. The pervasive smell of blood was rank, mixed with something sulphuric, like rotting eggs, which I attributed to the creature. It most likely carried the stink of whatever ancient cesspool Meg dragged it from.

“We shall see.”

When the beast moved directly above us, I bent my knees and leapt into the air.

It had been quite a while since I had any reason to leap. Vampires are not particularly known for their skills in jumping, but my absurd strength includes many abilities, and jumping is only one of dozens.

Launching myself off the roof as hard and fast as I could, with four hundred years of nourishment from pure hemoglobin coursing through my veins—I slammed face-first into a furry and extremely odorous torso.

I grabbed my first fistful of fur and clung to desperately. Its bat-like wings battered me relentlessly as its talons scratched my chest with rage and fury. The blood I lost was inconsequential, but the beast’s claws were so sharp, I scarcely felt them entering my flesh. Now that I was up close and personal, however, the smoky effect seemed to clear, and I could begin to detect its almost human shape. Darkness clung to it like a frightened child, giving it the effect of wet glass in its lack of definition. Its shape became more pronounced, but it remained rather vague. Mostly it was comprised of fur and an overly ripe stench.

I have not gagged for decades, maybe even centuries; my stomach lost the ability to digest after hundreds of years in retirement. However, the human reflex remained active, and I was doing my damnedest to restrain the urge to vomit.

A hand landed on the back of my leg and I looked down and saw the outline of Agent James. There was a massive black claw impaled deeply into his shoulder. Blood spurted from the wound as the monster rose and fell, readjusting its grip on its hostage and at the same time, trying but failing to drop him. One leg suddenly spasmed and kicked out, as if it were shaking off a bug, but its claws only gripped its prey more tightly. Agent James began screaming rather loudly as a result.

What now? I thought. Then the bright solution appeared to me. I reached up and grabbed the beast’s head, snapping it sideways with all the strength I could manage.

Not the best solution, as it turned out.

The monster growled a horrific noise and I reached for the fur on the back of its head. I dug my nails into its thick skin, scoring it deeply and the blood that flowed smelled foul, like a bog, all acrid and muddy. Squeezing its grip once again on the unfortunate Agent James, who could only scream louder, the wings continued to buffet and batter me. With its free leg, it grabbed my ankle, and began pulling with all its strength. It managed to tug me down just barely an inch and it lowered its head with me.

I worked my fingers into the back of its skull until I scraped the bone under my nails. It squealed like never before, a shrill bleating like the sound of iron scraping over glass. A thick, purplish-black cloud gushed out from between its teeth, sucking out all the air and smothering us. It filled my lungs like quarry dust, and clung to the sides of my throat. My lungs were little more than sentimental ornaments now, but I heard Agent James coughing below me.

“Hold on tightly!” I shouted, although I doubt he needed any encouragement from me. The monster’s shrieks far surpassed human hearing and I could scarcely think.

Pulling back on the monster’s head, I managed to tear out part of its skull. The sound of its skull cracking was as loud as a hovering thunderclap. The pathetic screaming ended abruptly. The wings stopped flapping and the creature’s terrible claws curled inward. The ones embedded in Agent James’s shoulder all but ripped his arm off.

Then, together, we fell.

I shook the blood and brains off my hand and reached down, tearing the leg clean off the monster, and Agent James along with it. “Try to hold on,” I shouted and he nodded. I wrapped my arms around him and leapt into the air.

The monster crashed to the ground, nearly fracturing the entire street. Agent James and I were not far behind it. I carried the agent in my arms and landed on my feet, bending my knees to absorb the impact as best I could. Agent James did little more than gasp and groan.

I carefully put him down and noticed his glasses had remarkably remained on his face. One of the lenses was cracked and the other was gone altogether. He was wearing a pair of jeans and conspicuously shirtless. His manly physique glinted in the orange lamplight—particularly where he was oozing blood.

“Oh, dear,” I said as I started towards him. The monster’s claw was still attached to his arm and shoulder like a torturous fishing lure. With every breath he took, I could hear the talon scraping against his bones. He tried to remain utterly still to avoid more pain. “You should sit, my friend.”

Agent James began to laugh and immediately collapsed to the ground. Samantha ran to his side at once, placing her hand on his uninjured shoulder.

“What could possibly be amusing you?” I asked as I approached him.

“I never figured you for a do gooder,” he answered.

I shrugged as this was a new role for me as well.

I knelt beside him to examine his ghastly wound. His blood had a pleasant aroma, one that might have become intoxicating if not for the overwhelming stench of the dead beast behind me. Samantha looked at me. There was surprise in her eyes.

“You are the witch,” I said. “Any recommendations?”

“I’m no battlefield medic,” she snapped. I saw the tears in her eyes, staining her cheeks in long shimmering lines. She must have endured a very long night.

“Of course,” I said. “Please accept my apologies.”

“You are lucky the talons failed to puncture any major veins or arteries,” I informed Agent James. “A fair number of minor veins and tissue have been damaged. Not any that are life-threatening.”

“Thank God,” Samantha said on a sigh.

“We must remove the claw before we can clean and bind the wound. It appears to be nothing more complicated than that.” I turned to Samantha and asked, “Do you have any bandages, my darling?”

“Don’t ever call me that,” she warned before adding, “and yes, I’ll get them.”

“My apologies. Would you also be so kind as to include any rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide or similar wound-cleaning agent? Whatever you might have in the house.”

She blinked at me, frowning. “Okay. I’ll… I’ll be back.” She stood up and hurried off, exchanging a visibly confused look with Dulcie as she went inside. “Did he just apologize?” Samantha asked Dulcie in a meek voice.

“Yeah, it threw me too,” Dulcie answered.

Are apologies so rare coming from me? I wondered. They both reacted as if it were a cosmic event…

Hmm.

“This will be remarkably unpleasant,” I cautioned Agent James.

TEN

Bram

Samantha emerged from the house a moment later. She was carrying a roll of first-aid gauze and tape and a small bottle of rubbing alcohol. While she was gone, Dulcie said nothing, appearing totally lost in her observation of the now still beast. Wrapped in the smothering darkness, it was inert, and the fuzzing effect was substantially diminished now. I could see its hands and claws with relative clarity, and the orange lamplight glimmered off its teeth and eyes, but there was little more to describe than that.

Dulcie was stroking her chin, pondering the sight more thoroughly than I’ve ever seen her, and looking very confused.

“Are you all right, sweet?” I asked her.

“Fine,” she said absently then she looked up at me with renewed interest. “You can feel this too, right, Bram?”

“If you mean the palpable aura of dread, doom, and imminent destruction wrapped up in sugar-sweet despair? Yes. Yes, I can.”

“Yeah, that too, but I was referring to…” She frowned, and began hugging herself. “There’s something else. Something much stronger. I just can’t put my finger on what it is.”

I swallowed—another human impulse I never managed to discard, along with blinking, breathing, and groaning whenever someone did something blatantly stupid.

“Meg,” I answered.

Dulcie turned on me in an instant, her eyes wide. “Yes.”

The sensation of Meg’s magic was much stronger now, which meant, whatever it was might be edging closer, gaining ground in our reality, if indeed it came from Somewhere Else. At this point, I had trouble believing it could have been anything but Meg’s doing.

Naturally, that made it a very bad thing for the rest of us.

“Bram, that means Meg is still alive,” Dulcie continued.

“Give me a moment,” I responded to her as I turned to Agent James. “Try to remain as still as possible. Samantha, hold his hand. Do you have a stick or a bit of leather for him to bite down on?”

“Just do it,” he replied.

I shrugged. “Suit yourself, good sir. I will count to three.” I examined the first of four claws with my hand—three toes pointing forwards, and one pointing backwards, similar to a bird, however, each one of these was thrice as thick as any of my fingers. “Try not to bite off your tongue.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t,” he said.

“Grand. One,” I announced as I pulled the first claw from his shoulder.

Agent James predictably screamed. “Hey! You said you would—”

“Two.” I pulled out the second claw with a gush of blood. “Three.” The third did not come out so easily. It was curled more than the others, and stubbornly lodged behind his collarbone.

“You said you’d count to three first!” he gasped in protest.

“That is exactly what I did.”

“Not exactly,” he started.

“Brace yourself,” I interrupted as I began to pull the last one out as quickly as I could manage, also drawing more blood in the process. Agent James grunted, clenching his teeth tightly.

“Careful or you might break a molar.” I moved behind him to reassess the claw’s position and sucked in a deep breath. This one was a sight to behold, entering the center of his shoulder and emerging from the top like an oversized, tasteless body piercing.

“Ah,” I said.

“What?” Agent James asked, smelling strongly of fresh perspiration now.

“What’s wrong?” said Samantha, but when she glanced up, she saw the problem plainly. “Oh. Casey, look at me.”

“That sounds good,” he muttered, turning to face her.

“Just keep looking at me, okay? The whole time,” she said. Her knuckles were red from Agent James squeezing her hand. If it caused her any pain, she gave no sign.

“Just one moment,” I said. “This one will have to come out more gradually.”

“Okay,” said Agent James, tensing up.

“Ready?” I asked. “One…”

I pulled the claw out in a curving motion, following the path of the wound and quick as a whip. Agent James gasped as he lurched forward, collapsing into Samantha’s arms. She caught him and patted his back. Having fully composed herself now, she donned the powerful expression of Mother Samantha, Dulcie’s endearing friend for whom all crises were but trifles and all problems easily solved.

“Can you sit up for me?” she asked.

He managed to prop himself up with a fair bit of grunting, and Samantha set to work cleaning and covering the wounds. If his wounds were ghastly before, they were downright obscene now. The mere observation of them wounded the eyes. The three holes on his front side were large and red and black, pulsating flesh on the verge of bursting apart. The blood oozed from them like water sliding down a stalactite. His entire right side was drenched in crimson, reaching the top half of his jeans, which were now a sick purple color that went all the way down to his knee. He took a deep breath, but didn’t scream when Samantha poured alcohol onto a square of gauze and gently patted him down with it.

“I would offer your special friend my blood,” I started as I faced Samanth who looked up at me in wonder. “But A. I do not imagine my suggestion would fall on receptive ears; and B. I am reasonably certain the Siphon parts of Agent James’ person will not allow any intrusion of supernatural blood in his veins, no matter how much his body might need it.”

Siphons were a peculiar brand of government-funded humans with exceptional abilities but they could not tolerate a blood transfusion from a magical creature such as myself.

“Thank you for offering, Bram,” Samantha said, her eyes still wide with wonder. “But, you’re right—your blood would probably kill him.”

I nodded and chose to stand beside Dulcie on the other side of the beast. She held her hand under her chin, pondering the creature.

“Oh, dear,” I said.

“Yep,” said Dulcie.

The roads were already in terrible disrepair from the earthquakes Dulcie caused during the annihilation of the ANC, but at least their poor conditions ensured careful driving. Now a deep crater was formed after a meteor seemed to have landed in the middle of Samantha’s driveway. It was the width of an average car and the depth of a kiddie pool. Samantha couldn’t go anywhere, not unless her car could vault the hole.

The creature lay on its back, its lifeless wings stretched wide, the unstained concrete turning dark crimson as it bled. The light was dim and the shadows obscured most of the scenery, but using our enhanced sight in the sudden stillness, Dulcie and I saw more clearly than the others. All Samantha and Agent James could distinguish was a vague, distorted, black blob, and possibly a tail or a flash of claws.

“What is that thing?” asked Agent James, looking between us.

“I have no idea,” Dulcie answered.

The monster appeared slightly human, like a transformed werewolf. Its entire body was covered in hair that was previously grey and black but now, a deep, ugly scarlet. It had long protruding fangs, curling black claws at the end of every finger, and paws rather than feet at the ends of its legs, which bent the opposite way of most familiar creatures. A strange combination, but all the same, a form I recognized.

“Bram?” asked Dulcie as she faced me.

I shrugged. “It looks like a potpourri of different creatures,” I said. “An abomination. A beast comprised of the worst evil, if I had to guess.”

“An abomination?” Agent James repeated, his breath rasping.

I nodded. “A creature born from foul magic, usually by the fusion of something living with the newly risen forms of the recently dead. Necromancy at its core. Nasty business.”

“So, is it dead?” Agent James asked.

“Yes,” I replied, “and no. To properly kill an abomination, one must kill the soul that is animating it. That can only be done with the use of precious metals or an unimaginable amount of fire—neither of which I currently have any access to.”

“Soul,” said Samantha, “as in… as in a person’s soul?”

I nodded. If an abomination was indeed what we were now looking at, it meant at least one being, presumably innocent, at least by modern standards, must have been sacrificed in its creation. Perhaps plenty of other beings also died so that this terrible monster could live. I sincerely doubted Meg, or the warlock Meg coerced into whipping this thing into existence, would have gone grave-digging for her little science project. But necromancy was always easier with the freshly dead. Or so I have been told.

As I said. Nasty, repulsive business.

But a more callous observation dominated my thoughts: the work was shockingly well done. Studying it closer, I could see all the different creatures that were fused together—a griffon or a manticore provided the clawed legs, a fur dragon donated the wings, a werewolf comprised most of the body, definitely a manticore’s tail. For the most part, I could scarcely tell where one creature ended and the next began.

“Necromantic fusion is almost always ridiculously obvious,” I explained. “Splicing any number of creatures, be they two or two thousand, and trying to merge the opposing genes into one functioning biological entity is a nightmare in itself. Making that creature autonomous is an even worse nightmare—souls are, predictably, reluctant to occupy new, unholy bodies; and they can be permanently destroyed in the fusion process with homebrewed monsters.”

“But?” Dulcie said as she faced me.

I nodded. “But this anomaly is seamless in its connections between the various creatures. The conspicuous absence of sutures and scars without a single cauterized wound from all the lightning that is required in the process… The result is incredible. The magical equivalent of extracting an entire Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup from its wrapper without tearing anything or ever touching the wrapper in the first place.”

“Fuck,” Dulcie answered.

“Fuck, indeed,” I said with a nod.

“Essentially impossible, and yet, undeniably impressive.”

“Impressive is bad,” Dulcie said.

“Whoever did this was extremely talented,” I said, scratching my chin for emphasis as I continued to stare at it.

“Could Meg be responsible?” Samantha asked quietly. She was standing very close to Agent James, and his arm was wrapped around her. The suspicious glances he aimed at me made me wonder if he thought I might decide to drink her blood dry on a whim. I also wondered if she described our brief and unfortunate relationship.

Forgive me, Samantha, I thought, pitying her. You deserved much better than my poor treatment and excuse for companionship. At the time, Samantha was the only vehicle I perceived in my effort to capture Dulcie’s rare and delicious attention. I know not why I thought such an approach could work, and courting Samantha had landed me in exactly the opposite role I desired.

Samantha is beautiful and intelligent, and I dare not insult her in any way… but she cannot hold a candle to Dulcie, not in my perception.

I blinked, seeing Samantha staring at me with confusion, and realized I was also staring at her.

“Bram?” said Dulcie. “Are you listening to me?”

“Not exactly,” I replied. “Did you address me?”

Dulcie rolled her eyes, putting one hand on her hip and gesturing irritably at the abomination with the other. “Could Meg have possibly made this? Whatever it is?”

I shrugged. “Perhaps. You witnessed the kind of power she has access to firsthand, and also felt it in this beast. At the very least, it reeks of her, so perhaps it is her calling card.”

“What?” said Agent James, frowning.

I sighed. “The monster emitted Meg’s bad magic. So regardless of whether or not Meg was directly responsible for its creation, she undoubtedly has some connection to it. I think it most likely came here to kill one of you, possibly our lovely lady, Samantha.”

Samantha scowled at me, but I could hear her pulse growing ever so slightly faster.

“What? Why?” Dulcie asked.

“Why do you think?” I asked as I looked at Dulcie. “Revenge. Remember our old friend, the dreamstalker?” It had been quite a while since the dreamstalker incident occurred, but Dulcie would have remembered it well. Whatever the convict’s name was, upon being released from prison for good behavior, he decided to get even with our Dulcie by killing all the people she knew—starting, for some reason, with her primary school classmates, people Dulcie hadn’t seen in years. Points for enthusiasm and motivation, but his execution was hilariously inefficient.

He eventually made his way to Samantha. And, of course, the rapid transition from targeting relative strangers to her best friend did not sit well with our dear Dulcie.

“What’s your point?” Dulcie demanded.

“Apparently you have been through enough this evening that you cannot connect the dots?” I asked her with a telling smile.

“No,” she answered. “Connect them for me.”

“Perhaps the creature was here to kill Samathan in revenge towards you?”

Dulcie shook her head. “No. This thing probably killed everybody at my precinct. It’s got the same feeling, and it’s big enough, and its claws match the claw marks I found in the front door—look! They touched the metal somewhere and got burned by it.”

“Then it wasn’t revenge it was after,” Agent James said in a small voice. “It was after you, Dulcie. It must’ve been looking for you.”

“I agree. However, it is also possible,” I continued, “that Meg intended to kidnap Samantha and hold her for ransom. Perhaps the abomination simple mistook Agent James for his girlfriend.” That theory was well within the bounds of likelihood too; abominations were not bred for their high intelligence capacity.

“Ransom?” Dulcie asked

“Meg knew you well, no?” I asked with a shrug.

Dulcie nodded. “Yes.”

“Then she knew how loyal you are. You have gone on many a foolish missions to protect those you love.” A reel of prominent examples sprang to mind—working for the notorious Melchior O’Neil to protect Vander; and not telling him because it would do more harm than good; that was my personal favorite—but now seemed inappropriate to bring such examples up. An angry Dulcie couldn’t do any of us favors, speaking of myself in particular. “But I rather suspect if a ransom was in Meg’s plan at all, she wants you in exchange.”

Dulcie pressed her lips together in a thin, flat line. “Hades,” she whispered. “Why is it always me?”

“Vampiric obsession is a rare and potent thing,” I said. “It is not entirely beyond the realm of possibility that Meg made this thing just to find you without chancing the risk of exposing herself. This creature sought you at your office, and, when it failed to find you, it started down the list of people you know, or to whom you might run in such a crisis. Or maybe it was looking for friends of yours to kidnap? What if it was simply on a mission to kill everyone unfortunate enough to know you?” That last alternative was a poor choice of words, I realized, but if Dulcie took offense, she did not show it.

“Great,” she muttered. “Fan-fucking-tastic.”

I was going to say something more—suggesting the creature came here to attempt to murder her friends, threatening them just enough to persuade Dulcie to do her bidding. Possibly to return to her affected “mother” without actually killing anyone she really cared about. We had to air all of the possibilities—but just then, the monster stirred.

That was my recompense for talking overmuch.

The monster barely managed to lift its ruined head to face Dulcie. My fists clenched, and shadows swirled around me. I was preparing to dematerialize and re-appear behind it so I could deftly rip out its heart. That was where the animating soul most certainly was hiding. So much dematerialization would surely play havoc with my head on the morrow, but it was an affliction I would have to accept.

It occurred to me I should probably warn my compatriots before I made any sudden moves. “I will tear out its heart,” I said aloud. Without a silver instrument to cut through the enchanted skin, it would prove very difficult, and painful for both of us, but we did not have the luxury of time to search for one. “Everyone please, step back. There will be lots of blood and screaming.”

Dulcie did not move. Her eyes went wide and her arms dropped to her sides. As we watched in abject horror, she knelt down and crept toward the abomination. It heaved and buckled beneath its own weight, hopelessly dragging its head up until it could barely see her approaching. Its head was hanging at an unnatural angle and unsupported by its broken neck, courtesy of yours truly, and the eyes were vacant. The mouth, however, which was no more than two thin, grey lips pressed into a gaunt, ashy face, was moving.

Dulcie held up her hand to me and said, “Wait. It’s talking.”

That surprised me because abominations, as a rule, cannot speak.

They can certainly scream, and growl and hiss, but only on the most basic and guttural level. They can also grind their vocal chords harshly together and make very loud, unpleasant noises to express their pain, but their muscular control is somewhat limited. They prefer to fly, but only sometimes, and often swing their winged arms to injure people, but little more than that.

This one, to everyone’s shock and amazement, was trying to speak. And almost succeeding.

Listening very closely, I barely heard the faintest whisper, but scarcely more than that. I found that odd considering my nature and age. Vampiric abilities improve with every century we survive. I was the oldest vampire after Ezra and Meg, but Meg’s powers were augmented so they did not count. I should have been able to hear a faint whisper within ten miles, if I wanted to concentrate and listen. I could also hear the blood rushing through Samantha’s veins, the furious breathing of her grievously wounded boyfriend, and the subtle whisper of dust and stone when Dulcie moved; but for the life (and death) of me, I could not hear the monster’s voice.

“Do use caution, sweet,” I warned, feeling increasingly ill at ease the closer she ventured to the ugly thing.

Dulcie could though, or at least, she was trying to. Getting closer to it now until she was able to touch it, she was listening very hard. Her hand was up, poised to react by twisting and breaking its neck again should the abomination try anything, but there appeared to be little autonomy left beyond its attempts at speech. The limbs and wings twitched spastically, and its eyes rolled back in its head, while its clawed hands and feet clenched and unclenched. The brain probably signaled panic to the rest of its body through its fractured spinal cord. Its breathing was labored, rattling as it strained for oxygen, its lungs filled to bursting with its own blood.

“What—” started Agent James, but Samantha shushed him sharply. She pointed to Dulcie and Agent James nodded.

We waited. For a long while.

Eventually, the abomination went still. It exhaled but did not inhale again. Dulcie stayed where she was, kneeling beside it, her expression going completely blank. The longer she stayed there, the more troubled her face looked.

“Okay, have at it,” she said, frowning at the ground.

I darted forward, faster than anyone but Dulcie could see. I thrust my hand down its gaping throat—faster and much easier than breaking its ribcage. Ripping through the dry tissues until I felt the cold, hard lump, I wrenched it out to examine it: a heart of stone. It was hard as granite, coarse, cold, and drenched in liquid black. It was also broken open, perhaps owing to the fight, and completely empty inside.

“Huh,” I said.

“What?”

“Under normal circumstances, in order to kill the trapped soul, one must slice into the heart with a blade of silver, or something equally pure. But it simply…” I held out the empty heart for her to see, and finished my sentence, “disappeared. Perhaps Meg’s creatures are less stable than I previously thought.” It honestly should not have surprised me; Meg’s magical capabilities could create abominations of a caliber I could never imagine, but she also lacked the advantage of sanity. She could easily miss a simple, rudimentary binding spell that would make it easier to release the soul once we got past its bones.

Imagine Evel Kneivel jumping over seventeen buses only to ignore a red light on the street.

But that did not matter. The creature was dead, the soul, such as it was, no longer existed, and Dulcie was still on the ground. Her jaw tightened.

“Sweet?” I asked in a low voice. “Are you feeling well?”

She shook her head. Stupid question, I thought.

“What did it say?” asked Samantha.

Dulcie blinked and looked away from the abomination toward a spot on the street, apparently seeing something that was not visible to anyone else. No one said anything for a long time. The air was as fragile as spring ice, and I had a strong sense that the slightest sound could shatter something that should not have been shattered.

Then Dulcie swallowed and did not look up as she spoke.

“It said…” Her voice was fresh as a summer breeze and tight as piano wire. She shook her head. “It said a lot of things to me. ‘Mother will save you. Mother will kill them. Mother will avenge us.’ Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother!” She began striking the ground with her fist hard enough to break the concrete. She barely noticed the destruction.

“It came here to kill Sam,” she continued, her voice shaking with anger or fear, possibly both. I could not say. “It was ready to kill all of you if necessary, in order to… take me back.” She took a deep breath, the slow inhalation of a person fiercely holding back tears. “There’s another one. A… a sibling. It was looking for me at the station. They both were. It said, ‘Don’t worry. They’re all dead. She killed them.’ It couldn’t find me, and it…” She pressed her lips together and looked away.

Samantha and Agent James glanced at each other. He squeezed her hand and she nodded, before standing and an entire silent conversation passed between them.

I had a moment—be it brief, stupid, bitter and fleeting—when I wondered what that sort of understanding felt like. I imagined Dulcie and me exchanging a look that comprised paragraphs of speech left unspoken, words of kindness and understanding and love rather than…

But I digress.

“So,” I said. “Meg.”

“Yeah,” said Dulcie. “Meg.” All our worst fears were confirmed but it was nothing new to any of us. At this point, I would have been more surprised to learn this creature was not of Meg’s doing.

Dulcie sniffed and blinked and her face was clear. Her eyes reflected pools of utter despair, rage and frustration. Her grief was as deep and infinite as the ocean. The colors of her sorrow pierced my heart like arrows, and for a moment, I thought I might collapse.

Empathy, it is called. A sensation as old as hope and fear. Such a peculiar feeling. And not one I enjoyed by any stretch of the imagination.

“What do we do?” inquired Samantha. She should have asked, what did Dulcie want us to do? This crisis belonged to all of us—every one of us had been burned and drowned and tortured at the hands of my maker—but it was Dulcie’s personal crisis now, so the decision belonged to her.

“Call the FBI,” Dulcie commanded. “Um… and provide protection details for everyone.” She pushed herself onto her feet, brushing the loose dirt and pebbles from her knees. She looked at all of us with eyes of iron as she took a long breath. “And find its sibling before it does something awful.”

ELEVEN

Knight

I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

It was inane and overly distracting, as I was climbing a goddamn mountain. I really should have paid more attention to the thousand-foot drop, but I didn’t. I was staring at the blank black stone, and using my hands and feet to find my way. Dulcie’s face was in every crevice and shadow. Nothing nearby was even remotely shaped like a face, let alone, Dulcie’s, but it didn’t matter. The mountain was right in front of me and she wasn’t, so I guess that was enough to bring her to mind.

I wondered not-so-casually if Dulcie knew I was gone from the office and if she even cared. I wondered if she’d be pissed or relieved to realize I’d disappeared.

I also wondered what she’d do if I died here. Count her blessings and move the fuck on, I replied to myself miserably.

You have slowed down, said Hades.

“Shit really?” I asked, grunting. “I didn’t know we were timing our pace.”

Your time runs short.

“Yeah, along with my fucking patience,” I muttered. Reaching forward, I hooked my fingers around the next stair, and pulled. A whole chunk of sandy black and red earth broke away, falling behind me into the deep, dark nothingness, and leaving me swinging by one arm.

Do not think of her. She is overly distracting you.

I hauled myself up onto a low, slightly wider stretch of ground, grinding my teeth together so hard, I was a little surprised one of them didn’t break. “Actually, you’re the only one distracting me.”

Hades paused. Climb.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

Stalling.

“Fuck you.”

What I was climbing up wasn’t really stairs as much as shallow, infuriatingly steep cutouts perfectly designed for mountain goats and other animals that have no fear of falling. They glowed when I touched them, humming faintly, a piano staircase only a hundred thousand years out of tune. Even with a gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you how long I climbed up, but I can tell you the stairs consisted of a lot of bullshit winding. They had to go down a couple of times whenever the jutting rocks or masonic founders prevented them from continuing up. By the time I stumbled on the rock landing above the clouds, I was so tired and pissed, I was ready to punch Hades in the face as hard as I could. I’d probably break my knuckles just trying, but honestly, that might not have been enough to stop me.

There was a deep rumbling sound, and then a high whine like a humpback whale song. The ground shook and the clouds went totally dark. Even the sky seemed to literally tremble, like it was glitching right out of existence.

Hades made a deep rumbling noise of his own. His presence grates upon this place, he said, sounding more irritated than anything else.

“His?” I asked.

Meg and her Darkness have violated my dimension in their contact, reaching through and joining hands, dripping the viscera of their union upon my altar, he explained as his grip tightened on his staff.

“Can you repeat that in English?”

He sighed audibly, his shoulders drooping. The Darkness lies beneath this world. You and Meg are from the places above it. To connect, one must pass through here. There are many holes now: in the earth, the clouds, the sea, always opening and closing like hungry mouths. His teeth clacked loudly together. They wound the sky and offend the sand.

Hades suddenly went quiet.

We’re here, he said, tapping his staff against the ground. Smugness poured out of him like a fog machine.

“No… shit…” I said, bent over, my hands on my knees as I fought to catch my breath. A massive arch of old, red stone loomed before us. The air around it pulsed like a beating heart. From beneath the stone came the screech of gusting wind.

Do you require a moment?

I scoffed. I need a fucking drink, I thought.

You will find nothing of the kind out here. You may rest though if you must.

“I’m fine.” I pushed myself upright and wiped away a mustache of sweat.

Hades drifted forward. He looked a little different, now that we’d been here a while. He was not that much changed, but his skeleton seemed darker, if that were possible, and the lights in his eyes appeared brighter. They flared every time the lightning struck the clouds above.

Inside, he said.

“Inside,” I mimicked. He gave me what I would have called a scathing look if I saw it on a human face.

A thick wave of heat washed over me as I walked beneath the arch.

I stared down into the frothing magma, letting the heat warm my face. The mountain seemed to breathe; and a rumbling could be heard underneath the wind, like the inhale and exhale of something ancient and unimaginably big. A gong stood at the edge of a long platform suspended above the lava, gleaming red from beneath. Its polished gold surface was a mandala of shallow etchings: mostly demons on fire and Lokis with burning swords. None of the Lokis had faces, and all of the demons had eyes.

The whole edifice appeared to be a forgotten temple, the kind of place where you would find lots of traps and monsters hidden inside the brickwork. I put my hands into my pockets, sweating and panting as I whistled softly.

“Whoa,” I said.

Whoa, indeed, replied Hades.

“It’s hot in here.”

It certainly is, he agreed.

“Am I supposed to hit it?” I asked, pointing over my shoulder at the gong.

What do you think?

I raised my eyebrows at him.

Strike it, said Hades, eventually.

“With what?”

Your fist. Your foot, your head. It does not matter, but you must be the one who awakens it.

I didn’t like the implication that the gong, or the volcano, was a sleeping, living entity, but we were leagues past the point of no return. I stepped up to the gong, took a deep breath, and punched it as hard as I could.

I expected to hear a deep, metallic tolling; what I actually heard was a high ping and an echoing whisper that spread out like ripples in the golden circle. It instantly sent thousands of hushed voices spinning though the cavern. They became absorbed inside the red walls and withered away into nothing.

Slowly, things began to take shape.

Shadows poured out of the stone, smoke and vapor twisting themselves into something human with a sound like a cement mixer.

They had bodies and faces too. Beings…

Gabriel collapsed onto the stone, coughing and spitting. “What… the… fuck…?”

“Gabe?” I asked as I looked at Hades and held up my hands. My face was stretching with utter confusion. “What the hell? What are you doing here?”

Then I remembered what Hades said about coming here to “collect my army.” It never occurred to me to ask what my army was composed of.

Lokis. Of course. What the hell else could it have been?

Your army, he said, seconds after I got it.

“Right,” I said as I walked over to Gabe to pull him to his feet. Around us, more shadows were forming, solidifying, and bubble-bursting into five, ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred Lokis. Some I knew, and some I’d never seen before. Several fell over while coughing and cursing, and a few sputtered like they’d been close to drowning, while others landed perfectly on their feet. They calmly looked around as they pulled their sleeves back into place. A few of them were wet and naked, yanked straight out of the shower. (Yeah, that was pretty funny.) All of them revealed the glowing gold skin that distinguished all Lokis in the Netherworld. Now, however, it was not a dull, pulsating Christmas light, but much more substantial, like a flash grenade under a blanket. Maybe their blood was glowing.

We were inside the mountain of our own making, so hell, maybe it was.

Gabe was cursing as I knelt beside him. “You okay, man?” I asked, knowing it was a really stupid question, but it seemed like the right thing to say.

“What the flying fuck,” he answered, staring at his hands with confused, narrowed eyes, and his mouth in an O shape. “What the hell is this? I’m a goddamn lightbulb.” He looked up and a full ten seconds passed before he recognized me. “Knight?”

“Hey, Gabe,” I said, placing a hand on his shoulder to keep him from falling over.

“Are we dead?”

“No,” I answered.

“Um,” he started and looked around.

“You lucid?” I asked. “Not going to have a panic attack or some shit?”

“Sorta lucid but no panic attack.” Gabe shook his head and immediately, his eyes unfocused, like the whole world was turning cartwheels around him. “God damn. Where the fuck are we?”

“Loki City,” I said. Hades made a disgruntled sound behind me and I rolled my eyes. “The Mountain of Shadows. We’re in a magic Loki group-call or something.”

“Mountain of Shadows?” Gabe nodded like it sounded about right and looked around. “Fuck, there’s a lot of us.”

You will need each and every one, said Hades.

Gabe’s eyes narrowed. “Um. Who the hell is that?”

I followed his stare and realized he was looking at Hades. I guessed it made sense that the other Lokis could see him too. “That’s Hades,” I said.

“Like… the…god?” he asked slowly.

I am your maker, said Hades, sounding cold and severe. Gabe blinked at him a few times, as if he expected the ebony skeleton to abruptly disappear, or maybe burst into flames.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling like I was apologizing for what my racist grandma said aloud in a restaurant. Sorry, she’s just like that sometimes.

“It’s a long story.”

“No kidding,” Gabe replied absently, peering around me to gawk at the God of the Underworld. “Think it’s a long story we should hear?”

“Probably,” I said. “But not right now. We’ve got bigger problems.”

“Bigger problems than Hades?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Meg.”

The lights under Gabe’s skin flickered like dying bulbs. “Oh. Shit.”

“Right?”

“I thought she was dead?”

“Yeah, not so much.”

“So, what’s she trying to do now?”

“To end the world or something.”

“Or something?” asked Gabe.

Around us, Lokis were groaning and cursing as they recovered from whatever magic the gong used to bring them here. “Yeah. That’s what all this is for.” I spun my finger in a circle in the air, indicating everyone around us.

She has bound herself to a darkness that is beyond even my ken, Hades intoned. I’d never heard anyone say something I could label as intoning before, but his words were so long and oily, and they sounded less like an answer and more like a prayer or a prophecy. In practice, it may have been both.

“Okay,” said Gabe. “And?”

And, Hades continued, she is prepared to unleash its full fury upon the world.

“Full fury… meaning what, exactly?” asked a Loki I didn’t recognize. He was tall and broad, like all of us were, with dark hair and olive skin. He glared at Hades unashamedly with his arms crossed. The way he was standing, while staring daggers into the god, reminded me so much of Dulcie. His stance was slightly different, and his eyes were all wrong, and even if he wasn’t as righteously angry as she definitely would have been, if she and Hades ever crossed paths, his sheer attitude brought her to my mind.

She’d no doubt hate this and probably laugh in my face if I told her I was preparing to lead a whole army of Lokis into battle. She’d say something snarky about my poor impulse control and how Lokis can’t listen to anybody but themselves, which was absolutely true. Then she’d laugh and kiss me and I’d kiss her and… fuck.

I forgot for half a second what had happened between us and where we now stood--nowhere. Now Dulcie was way more likely to slap me or, worse, just ignore me than to smile at me, let alone, do anything more. My stomach sank into my heels and the cold I felt came from the inside out.

Full fury means hordes upon hordes of monsters only you can kill, said Hades. His fingers clicked against his staff. I began to think his finger clicking was an old habit, something he did when his creations acted really fucking stupid.

“Just us? We’re the only ones that can kill Meg’s monsters?” asked Gabe.

Yes. They originate from the place where I was born. Only those born of my fire can banish them permanently. We must rip out their hearts of stone and crush the shadows within to dust. Other creatures may slay the bodies, but the corrupted soul will simply abandon its shell and find another to occupy.

“Rip out their hearts,” I said.

“So like,” said Gabe, scratching his head, “why can’t you just get rid of them?”

It is not within my capability.

“Of course it isn’t,” I grumbled. Hades didn’t dignify me with a response.

“Aren’t you a god?” Gabe asked.

Of course.

“So?”

Gods can lead. Gods can advise. Gods can summon. But they cannot get their hands dirty.

Gabe looked at me. “Is he for real?”

“Yeah.”

Gabe raised his eyebrows. “Well. All right.” He blinked a few times as his eyes got wider. “Whoa.”

“What?” I said.

“Dude, has your hair always been that dark and your skin is like gold…”

I looked at Hades. “How long will it take them to pull out of this?”

Hades surveyed the stumbling crowd. Not long. Seconds more.

He didn’t move, but I got the distinct impression he was smiling. I am sure.

It only took another minute for everyone to recover from their transport-induced stupor. After plenty of cursing and blinking, everyone looked like they had the mother of all hangovers, but eventually we got the plan, such as it was, into everybody’s head. Go back, find Meg, and kick her ass. Or something to that effect. Everyone already knew who she was. It was pretty much impossible not to know, regardless of where you lived or worked.

Hades stood at the edge of the pit, staring at me, his impatience oozing like toothpaste.

“Okay,” I said, gesturing to the disgruntled glowing masses. “I’ve got my army. Now, how do we get back?”

Hades tilted his head at me, at all of us really, and turned slowly toward the magma pool that was gurgling far below. His skeleton became a burning crimson from beneath, and he stared into it like a hawk stares into a field for a mouse. He was searching for something none of us had any hope of seeing at this distance.

He spoke to me. Jump.

I blinked. “I’m sorry, what?”

Hades was unamused. Jump into the volcano.

“Jump into the volcano,” repeated Gabe.

Yes.

“This volcano?”

Yes.

“Are you fucking insane?”

Hades looked at him, the embers in his eyes flaring with irritation. You. Are. Fireproof.

“Fire and lava are two very different things, my dude,” said Gabe.

I blinked and Hades was suddenly in front of him, the hollow of his nose barely inches from Gabe’s face. You were forged in the fires of Hades. These fires. You were born here. Your bones were carved from these walls, your soul was distilled from the heart of the mountain below. He pointed behind him. Jump. Into. The. Fucking. Volcano.

I laughed uncomfortably. It was the first time I’d heard Hades curse. So it was kind of funny.

Go, he said. His voice had the rumbling undercurrent of a pissed off thundercloud.

“A’right, dude, just chill,” said Gabe. He rubbed his hands together and smiled at me. “Viva la Pluto.” He jumped in with a “Woo-hoo!” and disappeared beneath the lava.

“Is he going to be okay?” I asked Hades.

I would not have dragged you all this way if my only intent was to kill you.

“I wouldn’t put anything past you,” I responded.

Hades made a deep grumbling sound and his eyes sparked violently red.

I held up my hands. “I jest.”

Just jump.

I turned to the rest of the Lokis and clapped once. “Let’s move.”

“Right,” someone said, leaning over the edge, “into the volcano.” He shook his head and stepped back, saying, “What the hell,” before he took a running leap into the lava.

***

Ten minutes later, everyone was successfully through.

“That’s all of us,” I said.

No, said Hades as he held up a hand. No. Not yet. We must wait.

A scream was building in the pit of my stomach. “For what?”

He cocked his head like he was listening for something. I do not know. Something.

“You don’t know? Something? Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said, running a hand through my hair and looking up at the blistering, red sky. The sun, or wherever the red light came from, broke through the clouds at intervals, and shafts of orange, gold and crimson kept appearing and dissolving within seconds of each other. The clouds boiled and shifted, harassed by a wind I couldn’t feel. I dropped my eyes to the ground and kicked the thin layer of red dust all around us. “What the hell else are we waiting for?”

As if to answer me, somebody screamed. I looked up just in time to see a body tumbling headlong out of a gaping red hole in the sky.

Ah, said Hades. He has arrived.

“Who has arrived?” I asked as the body hit the dirt.

“Oof!” it said.

Hades looked at me and pointed. Him.

“Jesus, kid, are you all right?” I asked, helping him to his feet. He was scrawny with shaggy, brown hair, cracked glasses, and an empty holster on his right hip. The gun was in the sand a few feet from us, its barrel-up. The red light made the old metal shine like wet paint.

“I’m good.” Taking a step back from me to brush himself off and retrieve his gun, he looked around before turning back to face me. “Am I in hell?”

I chuckled. I couldn’t help it. “No.”

He glanced at Hades and I could have sworn he saw him. “You sure?” he asked. “Um, ‘cause that dude looks like he could be the devil or like the Angel of Death or something.”

Well, that solved that mystery. “He’s not the devil,” I answered.

“Then you’re good guys?” the kid inquired cautiously.

“As good as you’ll find,” I answered.

The kid sighed and took a big breath before reholstering his gun and smiling at me from behind a pair of totally wrecked glasses. The left lens was a spiderweb of cracks and scratches. Light flashed off them whenever he moved, growing brighter where the cracks were deepest, like sunlight on a broken windshield.

“Sorry,” he said as he held out his hand. “I have no idea why I’m here or how I got here, but Henry Cotton, at your service, sir.”

I shook his hand. He had a firm grip. “Right,” I said. “You just fell from the sky.”

“I did, sir.”

“And you’re not at all fazed by that?”

“Don’t have time to be fazed, sir.” He looked around a little uncertainly as he sucked in his bottom lip. “Where are we anyway?”

“Inside a volcano or beneath it,” I said, “or something.” I turned to Hades and whispered, “Is he supposed to be here?”

Hmmm, said Hades. The question is not of presence, but of purpose.

“What does that even mean?” I asked, growing exasperated.

“So, if he’s not the devil, who exactly is he?” asked Henry.

“God of the Netherworld,” I said without thinking.

“Oh. Cool. Is he also a skeleton?”

“Yeah, he… hang on,” I interrupted myself as I turned to face Hades. “He can see you?”

Hades was staring at Henry, his skull forward, and a deep, rumbling murmur bubbled up from somewhere beneath his bones. Yes, he can.

“Why can he see you?” I continued. Henry’s skin was perfectly average, with no lights or lines or Netherworldian alterations visible. His eyes weren’t glowing, his nails weren’t longer, and he wasn’t turning furry. By all accounts, he appeared to be human but he wasn’t having an emotional breakdown. That normally happened to humans if they were exposed to a magical atmosphere without first being prepared. Yet Henry seemed perfectly calm. Perfectly human, and perfectly sedate.

Hmmm, said Hades, thinking about that.

I snapped my fingers in front of him. “Yo, Hades. Why can the human kid see you?”

Hades stared at Henry and didn’t react.

“Fucking whatever,” I said, fed up. I turned to Henry. “Okay, how did you get here, exactly?”

Henry pointed up, and I saw the heel of his hand was all scraped up. The kind of abrasion you get from falling hard onto concrete or gravel, not just sand. “I fell out of the sky.”

“Yeah, but how did you get into the sky to begin with?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged, looking bizarrely nonchalant. His eyes were enormous behind his glasses, bulbs of wonder and curiosity. Maybe he was about to have a total and complete mental breakdown. I hoped not.

“I went to check on Agent O’Neil when the monsters came and an earthquake shook everything, and then there was a big, red line in the air and, I don’t know, I guess it sucked me in or—”

“Hold up,” I said, raising my hand in case he didn’t understand English. “Agent O’Neil? As in… Dulcie O’Neil?”

He beamed. “Yes! Do you know her?”

“I do. I, um…” I swallowed hard, not sure exactly what to say. “I work with her. Sometimes.”

“Nifty, so do I. I’m her new partner. Well, I was, before I ended up here.” Henry adjusted the glasses on his nose, which seemed to hang permanently askew. “Does the Lord of the Dead work with Agent O’Neil too?”

“Um.” I looked at Hades, who didn’t respond. He was staring into the clouds, his fingers clacking contemplatively on his staff.

“Sir?”

“Call me Knight,” I said. “And no, he doesn’t work with her. He’s new… ugh he’s new on the force.”

Beside me, Hades made a ripping-metal sound that might have been his attempt at a snort.

Henry nodded and put his hands on his hips, surveying the desert. He kept nodding for a while before he asked, “So… where ya going?”

“On a mission to kill monsters, I think,” I said. “You said you saw monsters before you ended up here?”

“I heard about them. Something attacked our precinct and mauled everybody inside it to death, and that same thing showed up again at Agent O’Neil’s friend’s house, although I don’t technically know if it was the same monster.”

I swallowed hard. “Mauled everyone inside your precinct?”

“Yeah. It was awful. Blood spatters everywhere, and ripped body parts. Agent O’Neil said she could feel something bad in the air too, that made her sick.”

“Then Dulcie is okay?” I felt my heartbeat start to calm down.

“Yeah, she’s fine. Well, she was, last I saw her.”

“Okay, getting back to the part about her feeling something that made her sick… what do you mean? Something bad? Like, magic?”

Henry nodded. “Something like that. She couldn’t identify it so it was really bugging her. She went home before I could ask her about it again.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Well…”

I trailed off, watching Hades. He strode forward and touched Henry’s forehead. A light pulsed through Henry, and bright gold waves appeared under his skin.

Ah…

“Ah?” I said. “What ‘ah’?”

I had forgotten, Hades said, more to himself than to either of us. He dropped his hand and appraised Henry, cocking his head to one side, his ember-eyes flickering. Yes, you will do. He chuckled. The Universe always provides.

“Provides what?” I asked.

Henry looked up at me, trying his damnedest not to look at Hades. “Am I in trouble, sir?”

Hades walked behind Henry and placed a skeletal hand on his shoulder, one finger after the other as he leaned in.

Hold your breath, he said. And remember—you must be the one to kill Meg.

“Meg? I have to kill her? What?” asked Henry.

Your soul is unsullied, Hades said. Carry my power into the world, and use it to destroy her and the ancient evil she embraces.

“Oh, sure, you’ll answer his questions,” I said.

Hades ignored me and Henry looked down into the lava, taking a deep breath.

Then Hades pushed him in.

“What the hell?” I shouted. I ran to the edge, but Henry was already gone by the time I looked down. I searched for his hand reaching up out of the magma, or what was left of the ripple his splash would have made, but I saw nothing. I glared over my shoulder at Hades. The lights under my skin flared and burned. “What the fuck, Hades?”

He looked back at me, but only radiated a calm demeanor. Is there a problem?

“Yes there’s a problem, you just pushed a human being into a boiling pool of lava!”

I certainly did.

I stood up and stormed towards him. “He’s not a Loki; he isn’t fireproof!”

His head joggled sideways, giving the vague inclination of someone rolling his eyes. Lokis, he said, are so impatient. He reached forward and placed his hand on my shoulder, preparing to push me in, too.

“Hey, wait a minute!” I grabbed his wrist and almost screamed—it was burning, hot as a red poker.

Brace yourself.

He gave me a hard shove before I careened backwards into the pit.

TWELVE

Sam

Something happens to you the longer you live like this.

We’d been some version of “on the run” every day for the last… Hades only knew how long. Even our average days, the good ol’ days, were filled with dreamstalkers, skinchangers, shapeshifters and every monster that had the gall to go bump in the night. Most of our adversaries are armed to the teeth with poisons, potions and deceptively small guns. We are the good guys: cops, technicians, witches, fairies, elves and lokis; it’s part of the gig. It’s the life we signed up for, filled with the perils we knew we’d have to face eventually, and we were trained to face them.

We didn’t, however, sign up for a gig facilitating the end of the world.

It’s like agreeing to foster a dog and receiving a dragon with a broken thirty-day chip from anger management stuck between its teeth. Then, more and more dragons are sent to you every day for the rest of your life because the Universe is brimming with monsters, and hey, you can handle them, right? You’ve been through worse, and dealt with all kinds of nightmarish creatures, so this should be a walk in the park. An egomaniacal vampire overlord sending abominations to kill and kidnap you and your friends?

It must be Tuesday.

It’s been Tuesday now for a really long time.

“We need to inform everybody we know, Dulcie,” I said. “There’s no telling how many abominations Meg has out looking for you.”

Dulcie appeared slightly nauseous. “What? Do you really think there’s more?”

“Why wouldn’t there be?”

She pursed her lips and snorted at herself, like her previous question was a stupid one. “No. I’m sure there’s definitely more. How many depends on how long it took Meg to make them, but… yeah. No way she stopped at only two.”

“So, we should start making those calls.”

Dulcie nodded. “Yeah, definitely.”

“I’ll call Agent Miles,” said Casey—referring to the guy that was heading the Splendor branch of the ongoing investigation. He’d be working in a lab somewhere with a bunch of witches, analyzing the weird energy signals left behind not just by Dulcie’s glamoured tantrum, but also the wormhole Jax used to spirit her away in the first place. Knowing Meg was alive would turn his team’s progress on its head.

“I’ll do it,” said Dulcie. “Text me his number and I’ll start telling him everything that happened. You can just…” She gestured toward his bleeding shoulder, finishing, “deal with that.”

“Probably a good idea,” I said. The bandages wrapped around it were already soaked through with blood. I needed to get Casey inside so he could drink something that would click all his blood back in place.

Casey cooperated, and Dulcie dialed. “Agent Miles? Yes, this is Dulcie O’Neil, Casey James just gave me your contact information. We have a serious situation. Meg is alive and she manufactured a series of monsters called abominations to search for me and the people I know. I believe one of these abominations killed everyone in my precinct. We personally dispatched at least two…”

Okay, we had to head inside and get to work.

“Bram, can you… Bram?” I said slightly louder. He was staring at Dulcie with narrow, pensive eyes as she talked quietly into her phone. His arms were crossed and he was leaning on one side with his head tilted. He appeared totally enthralled with her and was probably indulging leery, asinine thoughts about her. Actually, there was no “probably” about it. I was sure that was exactly what he was in the process of doing.

I snapped my fingers a few times, the way you do to get the attention of a dog. “Hey, Bram?

He jumped just a little, and turned toward me slowly as he inclined his head. His eyes cleared like he was pulling himself out of a daydream. He answered a little too slowly. “Yes?”

For a second, I didn’t know what to say. “Um.” I looked from him to Dulcie and back again, trying to ask the question using only my eyes.

“What?” he asked.

“What were you looking at?”

“Nothing,” he replied. “Would you like me to look at something?”

“No.” He was lying, which was normal, but now he did it badly. His eyes were shifty and he was just a little too sure of his answer. The longer I watched him, the more it seemed like he was trying really hard not to look at Dulcie again. Maybe whatever he’d been thinking was something embarrassing? But what thought could he have about Dulcie that would actually embarrass him? Everyone had heard plenty of horror stories about the kinds of things he demands in exchange for help. With hardly a stellar reputation to project, why did Bram look like cat that ate the canary for the first time since I met him?

Stranger still, he apologized. Like, on his own. Without any prompting or threatening and without even being particularly glib about it. He almost could convince me he meant it. And all that stuff he’d just done to free Casey from the Abomination and then helping him by removing the talons? What the fuck, Bram?

Whatever… I decided to take some time to parse him out, but later. “I’m gonna take a feather and see if I can track the other one,” I said. “Can you help me get Casey inside?”

“I can walk,” said Casey.

“Well, you’re not going to,” I said. “Just let Bram carry you, okay? Your phone’s still inside anyway.”

“Sam, I’m fine.”

“The hell you are,” I snapped. He started to protest and I clamped my hand over his mouth. “Just let the vampire carry you, please?”

Casey sighed a muffled, “Fine” through my fingers so I took my hand away and kissed his forehead.

“Bram?” I asked.

Bram nodded and walked over to him, scooping him up like a bride and starting for the house. I couldn’t restrain my smile. Casey grimaced and Bram deliberately avoided looking at him as he walked. If I’d been in a better frame of mind, I might have found the whole exchange hysterical. But with Casey bleeding out like he was, it was hard to see the humor. Dulcie followed when she saw us moving.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “We’re fine. Agent James’s shoulder was ripped to hell, but nobody died.”

An unspoken yet belonged at the end of that sentence.

We went inside and Bram set Casey down with surprising care and gentleness on a chair in the living room. Thankfully, it was a darkish red one, and not the white couch.

“Sorry I’m staining your furniture with my blood,” Casey said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I answered as I opened my cabinets, finding one of twenty pink phials. I walked over and handed it to him. “Drink this. It’ll kill the pain.”

Now, I had to find the other monster.

I took out the bowls and whisks as I went through the kitchen, along with the mortar and pestle and some stone implements which I arranged on the island with a deliberate clicking sound. Mason jars filled with ground herbs, bottles of commercial distillations, bat wings, newt tails, lizard tongues and manticore claws were also in abundance.

Setting everything in as neat a pile as I could manage on one side of the island, I left the center clear for one large bowl and the mortar and pestle.

“May I assist?” asked Bram.

“You may,” I responded. “There’s a bottle of distilled…” dryadic sap, I was about to say, but Bram would have had no idea what that looked like. “There’s a bottle of green, sloshy stuff in the fridge. Upper left shelf inside the door.”

Bram nodded, opened the refrigerator and pulled it out, asking, “This?”

“Yes,” I said. “Put it right there.”

“What next?’

“Open it and pour, like, a tablespoon into the bowl.”

Bram uncorked the bottle and made a face. The smell was ripe even from here. Cloying sweet, it stunk like an olfactory explosion of long dead flowers and burning grass.

“Um,” he said, looking between the bowl and the bottle.

“What?” I asked.

“Exactly how much is a tablespoon?”

I almost laughed. “You’re how old? And you don’t know the basic measurements?”

“Shall I remind you that I am not a chef?”

“No, you shall not,” I said. The laugh stopped abruptly, almost as if I didn’t have enough energy to make the sound. I suddenly felt very hollow inside, like I hadn’t eaten in a hundred years. I opened a drawer and handed Bram a small, plastic measuring spoon. As a rule, I avoid keeping pure metals around the house. Lots of my friends are monsters that suffer from magical allergies, so it would have been rude as much as dangerous to have them nearby.

“This is a tablespoon,” I said.

He spent a long moment examining the spoon, as though he’d never seen one before. Then he reached into the jar and retrieved a little more than the tablespoon could hold. He knocked it lightly against the side until it evened out.

“I baked once,” he said, “but it was many years ago. It was dreadful.”

Years ago? I went stiff for a fraction of a second. During our very short and stupid relationship, he came home with me a few times and I persuaded him to bake with me once. We made chocolate chip cookies—but not from scratch. Dreadful was his description of them?

“I was dreadful, I meant,” he added, possibly realizing how I’d take it. “I have never had any flair for domestic aptitude.”

“Just put it in the bowl,” I said, more harshly than I intended to.

He looked at me, nodded, and emptied the spoon.

Tracking spells are pretty easy because they don’t require very much: just a fetish and a magical opposite’s distilled saliva, blood or any other fluid strong enough to separate the ectoplasm from the physical being. In this case, dryadic sap was the catalyst to begin dissolving the actual feather, while leaving all the other parts intact. Might have been ectoplasm, or it might have been smoke, but that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the color it turned when you asked the Universe the right question, i.e., by doing some good, old-fashioned chanting.

So I did. Bram didn’t seem especially perturbed, but Casey couldn’t stop staring at me. Not that I blamed him, since there was a good chance my eyes rolled completely white. Not to mention, I was speaking an ancient language. Hollywood movies have chronically portrayed the pagan arts in a bad light, but sometimes it is a little spooky.

The feather dissolved, leaving behind a slightly green-grey goop. I waved my hand over it and said an old Sanskrit word for sibling. I wanted to keep it undefined in order to include all the species siblings or siblings of motivation, just in case it wasn’t an abomination. Then the color started to change.

“Okay,” I said, watching the colors shift. Orange, then blue, before settling into a rotting grey. “It’s… it’s definitely an abomination.” That was good and bad: good because I could track it that much easier; and bad because the dead abomination outside was telling the truth. Not a happy statement to hear. “Meg is coming for you” it said before it died, making it all the more ominous.

“This one should be similar enough to the other one that we recognize it,” I continued.

“So we should look for another werewolf-manticore something-or-other?” Casey asked.

“I guess so,” I answered.

“Where should we look for it?” asked Casey.

I popped the cork off a small bottle of clear liquid, a pre-mixed tracking potion. I always keep at least a few of them on hand. And that was just about all I did in my downtime anymore. “Let’s find out.”

I poured out the potion and the smoke rose and twisted as a silhouette slowly formed inside it.

“Um,” I said, staring into the smoke. “Close. It’s really close. And it’s moving.” The silhouette leapt, fell, hit the ground and started running. I saw houses, streets and cars forming around it, and then it smashed and slaughtered them with trenchant claws of solid steel. “Looks like it’s heading for Knight’s house,” I said, when I recognized the familiar shapes of the buildings. Knight was the only one of us who lived in that area. “Or at least it’s nearby his area. It could also be nothing.”

“That makes sense,” said Bram. “The first one came here and the second was dispatched to Vander’s.”

“Sam?” said Casey.

“Already on it,” I said, my phone in my hand as I waited for it to start ringing. There was a long, thin, whining sound and Knight’s voicemail played.

“Shit,” I said before trying again. Same thing.

“What?” Casey asked.

“It goes straight to voicemail,” I said. “Every time.”

We shared a moment of tense quiet.

“Okay, so either his phone is dead,” said Casey.

“Or he is,” Bram finished in a tone that lacked any remorse.

I shot him a look. “Thank you, Captain Optimist, we really appreciate your rosy input.”

“See what’s up,” said Casey, jutting his chin towards the door.

“Me?” asked Bram, his expression falling flat.

“Yes, you,” said Casey.

“Vander can take care of himself.”

Casey glowered at him. “I just got skewered by an angry, flying monster, so unless you want to send Sam or Dulcie to track it…”

“Fine,” said Bram with a frown. He clearly was not stoked at the idea of spending his evening saving Knight. Looking sideways at Dulcie, who was still on the phone with the captain, Bram’s expression gradually went from irritated to resigned. He sighed as he looked at me and said, “Remind me where Vander lives.”

I gave him the address. “You should probably go alone, without Dulcie,” I said quietly.

“Such was my plan,” Bram replied. “I know very little of what transpired between them, but I was not wrong in believing it must have been most unpleasant.”

“Most unpleasant doesn’t even begin to cover it,” I started to reply but I figured the less Bram knew, the better.

Bram nodded thoughtfully and I waited for him to ask for more details—details I had no intention of giving him. He was silent for a while, and when he spoke again, it was only to say goodbye.

“I will return once Vander is safe,” he said. The words sounded wrong coming from his mouth. He even made a face like he’d just eaten something sour as he shook his head.

“Bring him back with you,” I said but then realized maybe that wasn’t a good idea as I glanced over at Dulcie. But we needed Knight to be in on this. We needed his protection and he needed ours. “We should all be together.”

“Vander can take care of himself! I am sure there is more than one safe place left in Southern California,” Bram spat with visible repulsion. “And I hardly think keeping all the victims on Meg’s to-do list in one place will earn us any favors. Call someone else you know if you don’t want to leave him alone. Dia, perhaps, the head of the ANC in Moon. Or was she from Estuary? You know so many people in law enforcement, it’s hard to keep track.”

Not a bad idea. And again—Knight and Dulcie probably shouldn’t have been together in the same room right now. “I’ll call her,” I said. “Just get going.”

Bram nodded. A cold wind blew and a black blur appeared before he was gone.

“I still don’t like him,” said Casey.

I snorted. “Yeah? None of us do.”

“Why do you keep him around, then?”

“We don’t keep him around, he just shows up periodically and it’s usually difficult to make him go away. Besides, sometimes he’s useful.”

“Only sometimes?”

“Yeah. He kind of helped us with Melchior, and he saved Dulcie’s life a few times, but he’s the reason she needed saving in the first place, so…” I shrugged. “He tries to balance out his bad deeds with some good ones.”

Casey cast a furtive glance at Dulcie and raised his eyebrows at me. “Are they…?” he whispered.

“Are they what?”

“Together?”

“No, why?”

“He keeps staring at her.”

“Yeah, I noticed that too.” I looked at Dulcie, who didn’t hear us. “No. They have a long history, but it isn’t a good one.”

I opened my phone and scrolled through my contacts. My thumb hovered over Dia’s name and I bit my lip. She was as busy as any of us, spending most of her time traipsing through the dreams of the monsters we managed to catch in the immediate aftermath of D.C. It was an appealing alternative to enhanced interrogation. Even if she weren’t busy right this second, babysitting Knight to make me feel better was hardly a better use of her time, especially if they suddenly needed her somewhere else. And that’s if Knight agreed to being babysat in the first place, which I seriously doubted.

“What’s the matter?” said Casey.

“Dia’s still doing that dreamwalking stuff for your mom, right?”

“Right,” he said.

“So she’s already pretty busy.”

“More than likely.”

“I’ll call someone else.” I scrolled down through my contacts; down, down, down, down, I went, all the way to the very bottom.

“Huh,” I said, looking at the name.

Quillan.

It had been quite a while since I’d last seen him. He’d volunteered to join the potions branch of the Preternatural Division, partly to avoid jail time, and partly to personally atone for his former bad behavior.

He was currently helping human officers identify different types of potions and their side effects, cautioning how to avoid ingesting airborne narcotics. Meg had yet to concoct Jax’s threat, but that hellishly addictive drug with no side effects was still out there somewhere. Quill’s job was important, yes, but less urgent than the others. And it might have been good to have a new face around… He’d been out of touch with the friend circle for a long while, so he’d naturally be the last person to know what had happened between Dulcie and Knight.

Besides, I missed him. He was a good boss.

“Did you ever meet Quillan?” I asked Casey.

He shook his head. “No. But I heard some decent things about him. Why?”

“I’m gonna call him instead.”

“Cool. I’m gonna sit here and try not to bleed to death.”

“Have fun with that,” I said as I dialed.

He picked up almost immediately. “This is Quillan.”

“Hey, it’s Sam,” I started.

“Oh.” He sounded pleasantly surprised. “Hi! What’s up? How are you?”

“Are you free right now? I need a favor.”

“Of course, anything,” he said. I smiled. Always so eager to help. I wondered how much of that was an effort to simply redeem himself. “What do you need?”

“Where are you?”

“Still in Splendor,” he said. “Temporary FBI office on Fifteenth and Elm. Why, where are you?”

“At my house, but I want you to go to Knight’s. Do you remember where he lives?”

“Yeah, vaguely. Why, what happened?”

“Meg’s still alive.”

“Oh. Oh.”

“Yeah. Something attacked Casey and me at my house and another very similar something is at Knight’s right now. Bram went to check it out, but if Knight isn’t dead or dying, Bram will probably take off, and I don’t want to leave Knight alone. Everybody else is either busy or just straight up not in the state.” I stopped and cringed at myself. “This sounds really stupid.”

“No, you’re worried about your friend,” said Quillan. “That’s never stupid. I’m on my way, okay? Don’t worry anymore.”

“Okay. Thank you, Quillan.” I hung up and sighed. “He’s on his way,” I said.

“Good,” said Casey. “That’s very good.” Then, in a quieter voice, he added, “How’s she doing?” Then he motioned to Dulcie.

I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Across the room, Dulcie ended her own call and sighed heavily before collapsing onto the couch. “Fucking fuck, guys.”

“Yeah,” said Casey, looking at me. “No kidding.”

“Is someone coming?” I asked.

“They are,” said Dulcie. “Everyone and their grandmother from the Preternatural Division and the FBI and a couple people from the CIA.” She put her hands over her face and groaned loudly. “This is gonna be such a disaster.”

It’s already a disaster, I thought, but I knew what she meant. This was more than just a monster on the run. It was another item on the mountain of grievances that would soon become the why-do-we-still-trust-Dulcie? list. People were dead, and that mattered a lot, but it felt less like a tragedy and more like another nail in a coffin that seemed to be made exclusively of nails.

I didn’t want to tell her Knight was missing.

“I’m not the only one starting to go numb, right?”

Casey and Dulcie looked up. I took a moment to realize the words were mine. “Oh,” I said. “I meant…” Nope, no way to back pedal on that one. Casey pressed his lips together, his expression melting into something grim and cold. He did his best to smile.

“No,” said Dulcie. “You’re not.”

I nodded. It was quiet for a long time.

When my phone rang, I nearly jumped out of my skin. I looked at the name on the screen.

“Bram,” I said as I answered. “What the—”

“He is not here.”

I went ice cold all over. “He… What do you mean he isn’t there?”

“Who?” Dulcie asked.

Casey glanced at me hesitatingly as Dulcie repeated her question. Then he looked back at her and answered.

“Knight. He’s missing. Bram is over there right now trying to find him.”

“Fuck,” said Dulcie as I looked up. Casey and Dulcie were paper-white.

“I mean he is not here, Samantha,” Bram said. “I have looked in every room of this meager abode and cannot find hide nor hair of him.” He paused. “His smell is also old. He has not been here for several hours at least. And his motorcycle is gone. Perhaps he is in an office somewhere?”

I looked at Casey and asked, “Where would Knight be if he isn’t at home?”

Casey frowned. “Headquarters, maybe, but not this late. I’ll call and ask, though.”

Shit, shit, shit, I thought. Dulcie was standing stone-still, staring at me, waiting to hear more.

“The beast was here, though,” Bram continued, his voice echoing through my phone. “The door was broken down, and everything in the house has been torn to ribbons. Vander apparently had feathers in his bed.” He sounded snarky.

“Don’t knock it ‘til you try it,” I muttered, watching Casey make his call to Headquarters.

“He’s fine,” Dulcie said, but more to herself than to either of us. “He’s fine.”

“I’m sure he is,” said Casey, placing a hand gently on her arm. She didn’t notice.

“Fuck,” she muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” Despite her cursing, her panic continued to grow.

“Hey, it’s gonna be all right,” Casey said. “At least he’s not where the abominations are. Remember that, okay?”

Dulcie nodded wordlessly.

“Oh, dear,” said Bram.

I went cold all over. “What?”

“It appears I am not alone.”

“Wait, hang on, that might be Quillan,” I said.

I hoped it was Quillan… or Knight.

Bram paused. “Quillan,” he repeated half as a question and half as an accusation.

“Bram, you told me to call someone so Knight wouldn’t be left alone,” I explained after the obvious annoyance I detected in Bram’s tone.

Bram mumbled something I couldn’t make out and sighed. He pulled the phone back from his mouth and called out, “Quillan?”

“Yes, here,” Quillan said.

“It is Quillan,” Bram said, sounding aggravated.

“Never would have guessed,” I answered blandly. “Play nice, okay? He’s only there to help.”

“Isn’t he always?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing at all,” said Bram, but the bitterness in his tone suggested it definitely meant something. “Stay on the line, I will tell you what I see.”

“What both of you see.”

I heard the rumbling of a not-quite-suppressed groan. “As you wish. Here.” There was a rustle and then Bram’s voice sounded a little more granular. “You are on speakerphone, Samantha.”

“Hi, Quillan,” I said.

“Hi, Sam,” he answered.

Casey put his phone down and looked at me. “Sam, Knight isn’t at Headquarters either. There are people out looking for him now, but no one’s heard from him today.”

“That isn’t like him,” Dulcie said in a soft and very scared voice. “Something must have happened to him.”

“We don’t know that,” I answered her, maybe a little too sharply. “We don’t know that,” I said again, but this time, it was softer.

We could have ventured a pretty good guess…

Fuck, fuck, fuck. “Okay, um… maybe…” I started before I lost my train of thought. Where else could he possibly have gone? Knight got a lot of flak for ducking out of the ANC to rescue Dulcie without notifying anyone in Casey’s division. Riding off into the sunset with no explanation or warning was an exceptionally stupid thing to do.

He’s done dumber things for dumber reasons, I thought.

“Sam, there’s something here,” Quillan spoke loudly.

“Samantha is on speakerphone, you do not have to shout,” Bram said, audibly grinding his teeth. “And might I remind you that you are standing just beside my ear!”

“Sorry,” Quill started but was interrupted by Bram.

“And might I continue to remind you that vampires have exceptional hearing!”

“Bram, shut up!” I yelled at the phone. “What, Quillan? What is it? What do you see?”

“Um,” Quill started.

“It is an abomination,” said Bram in a disinterested tone. “Dead. Just one moment.” After some shuffling and a godawful sucking sound, he added, “There.”

“Gross,” said Quillan.

I could practically hear Bram scowling. “Hmm. How peculiar.”

“What?” I asked. “You can’t just say that and go quiet, Bram!”

“What are they talking about?” Dulcie asked, her eyes widening. I shook my head to let her know I wasn’t sure. Her improved hearing explained how she could eavesdrop on my phone conversation from across the room.

“My apologies. The heart of the beast is not disintegrating as it did before,” said Bram. “And it—”

“There’s something in its mouth!” Quillan said.

“Why in Hades name are you looking inside its mouth?” Bram asked.

“It looks like… smoke, I think. Or mist.” Quillan paused. “It’s… twitching.”

“Oh, dear God,” Bram muttered. Then, to me he said, “Can you bring some witchy trinkets and come have a look at this?”

Some witchy trinkets? I didn’t bother asking what the hell he was talking about. “Um, sure, I’ll be right down. Will you keep her company until everyone gets here?” I asked Casey while gesturing to Dulcie. “Quillan and Bram found something that they want me to look at.”

“What did they find?”

“I don’t need any company,” Dulcie protested with a frown. “I’m okay.”

“I know you are, Dulce, but Casey’s in no shape to leave here and you’re waiting for the FBI so can you both just wait together?”

“Yes,” she answered.

Then I faced Casey again. “They found something that may or may not be smoke,” I said. “And it’s moving. Twitching, actually. I don’t know, maybe I can use it as a fetish.”

“Aren’t you supposed to save those for me?”

“Casey… Not now.”

Casey smiled and nodded. “I will keep Dulcie company. Just be careful.”

“I will.” I leaned over and kissed him gently on the cheek. “I’ll be back soon. Promise.”

“A team of Feds are on their way to Knight’s,” he said. “You may want to stay there and tell them whatever you can. Including what you feel and see and anything else that’s pertinent.”

“You don’t trust Bram,” I said, more as a statement than a question.

“Do you?”

“Hardly,” I answered. Honestly, I hoped Bram would duck out when Casey’s teams arrived. The last thing I looked forward to was spending a thousand hours in a small, dark room answering questions with Bram of all people. “Don’t move too much, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

“Scout’s honor.”

And I left.

THIRTEEN

Sam

“Oh, hell,” I said as I walked in.

Bram looked over his shoulder at me, his expression more than a little grim. “My sentiments exactly.”

Everything was trashed, but that wasn’t quite the right word. A destroyed hotel room covered in spilled drinks and broken bottles, tangled sheets and torn curtains would have been bad, but this didn’t have the look of a rock-star riot gone awry. It was the scene of a violent mauling, with lots of blood and purposeful destruction.

The sofa was torn in pieces, cleaved in half as though a massive scythe bisected it. The inside padding drifted through the room like fresh snow. The walls were gouged out by four claws, strong enough and big enough to pierce through the stone façade outside. The ceiling fan lay on the floor in the middle of the living room surrounded by the shredded remains of the thin beige carpet. The carpet was torn up completely in some places, exposing the tired, pale, wooden planks beneath. They were all streaked and crosshatched with claw marks.

“Is that Knight’s blood?” I asked, indicating the long reddish-brown stripes on the carpet, the walls, and the ceiling—what was left of them, anyway. I flashed to an image of Casey with the claws still embedded in his shoulder and wondered if we were just lucky.

“No,” Bram answered. His arms were crossed as he surveyed the scene with casual disinterest. His foot kept tapping ever so slightly, a nervous tic I remembered from our brief stint together.

“The blood is not Vander’s,” Bram replied. “It belongs to the abomination. It must have fought something else or went insane and managed to hurt itself in its search. I suspect the latter, due to the number of head-bashes and blood splatters clinging to the walls.”

“Why would it do that?”

“Insanity, my dear,” Bram answered with a shrug. Then he strode forward into the living room, his frown deepening and turned to me. “Do you feel that?”

“Feel what?”

“There is… hmmm.” He moved away and took a few more steps, standing in the middle of the living room. His fists clenched so tightly that his nails pierced the skin on his palms. “Something was here.”

“Yeah, the abomination,” I said slowly. “Right?”

“No. Something else entirely.”

I swallowed hard. “Um. What kind of something else?”

Bram shook his head. “Something… I fail to recognize it. It is similar to the vacuum of Meg’s power, but also different… somehow. It seems colder, and less stifling. I have no idea what it could be. I have never felt anything like it before.”

“Oh, good,” I muttered. All we needed now was another unknown unfriendly to add to our neverending list of bad guys.

“It does not feel inherently bad necessarily,” Bram added. “And its residue is also very faint, but I do not believe it could be benevolent, not by any means. It also lacks Meg’s signature…” he waved his hands in the air, as if he were searching for the word.

“Fuck-you-ness?” I suggested.

“That works.”

“So is that all you found?” I asked.

Bram shook his head. “No. Quillan is with it right now in the other room.”

“It? As in…?”

He shrugged. “Something neither of us can identify. We have no doubt it is magical, but beyond that…” He shrugged again and gestured for me to enter the bedroom off the hallway. “Go and see for yourself.”

I looked around the demolished room one more time, feeling sick to my stomach. Bram said a few hours had passed since Knight was last here, but still, I worried. Was it even possible Knight could have survived this? I figured he must have or else they would have discovered his body...

I walked into the bedroom and found Quillan kneeling on the ground in front of a massive grey shadow. Covered in feathers and fur, it had long teeth and red, sharp claws. He was staring intently at its face, which was thin, gaunt, and now, sunken in. The features appeared to belong to something that died a long time ago.

Its eyes were shut and its mouth was hanging open. The skin was stretched tightly over the bones in the mummified expression of something in a great deal of pain. Its teeth were sharp, and of varying shapes. Some were needle thin and lengthy, while others were thick and flat, and still others were round and pointed, as if they were hammered haphazardly into its gums. Suture marks were clearly visible at its throat, shoulders, wrists and ankles. All the bits and pieces of deceased creatures, and not nearly so clean as the one at my house. The stitches on this one were clumsily done, and many were falling apart, oozing out a thick, black substance that might have been blood. A distinct smell arose from it, something thin and sharp, like rust in the rain.

“This one is older,” said Bram. “Meg’s first attempt, I think, or thereabouts. Sloppy work. The dark magic she used to so lovingly render the one at your home is definitely lacking here.”

“Like pancakes; the first one’s always a throw-away,” I muttered.

I knelt beside Quillan. The abomination was dead, and there was no doubt about that. It wasn’t moving, and the blackish liquid it lost had soaked the carpet from here to the windows. I looked down at my knees and saw it staining my skin like hair dye, leaving behind ugly purple circles and splotches like bruises. I worried that it would be impossible to wash out of my clothes, but that was hardly my priority now.

“Ew,” I said.

“Yeah,” Quillan answered. He looked tired—like all of us—but appeared mostly unchanged. His hair was still blond, although it was a little longer now, and decidedly more unkempt. His skin was pale and currently spotted with the abomination’s blood. It looked like he caught an awful Netherworldian pox, but he was an elf, so the rest of his body was damn near flawless. He wore a yellow dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and dark blue jeans. He was also leaner than I remembered.

He looked up and smiled at me with eyes that seemed cold and haunted, and in which I saw the reflections of a hundred different ghosts. For a moment, I was briefly transported to where it all began: sitting behind my desk at the ANC, checking the contents and side effects of confiscated potions. Back in the good old days when Dulcie was writing a romance novel about Quill and the three of us were besties.

“Hi, Quillan,” I said. “It’s been a while.”

“It has,” he agreed. His smile was warm, sincere, and sad. I wondered if he was also remembering the ANC, in the days when nobody wanted to kill us and he and Dulcie could have been in love. “How are you?”

“As a rule, not great,” I said. “How’s Christina?”

“She’s doing very well.”

“And the two of you?”

His smile widened and for a second, the shadows left his eyes, making him appear a little brighter on the inside. “We’re doing well too.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Really good to hear.”

Behind us, Bram cleared his throat. “Forgive me, but are there not more pressing matters to attend to at present than discussing the status of your romantic relationships?”

Quillan snorted and scowled at Bram over his shoulder. “This, coming from the high king of screwy priorities?”

“I have never pretended to be even remotely gallant,” said Bram. Quillan stiffened beside me, and I sensed this was part of a much larger, longer conversation. I wondered how long it had taken them to get at each other’s throats. Quillan was as level-headed as they came, and Bram so high and mighty that I couldn’t imagine their reunion had been a good one. And since both were in love with Dulcie at one time or another, it was more than enough to start a fire raging between them.

“I had no choice,” Quillan seethed. I went cold as I realized what they were talking about.

Bram grinned and opened his mouth, preparing to say something unfriendly.

“Okay,” I said, clapping my hands, breaking the silence with a snap as sharp as cracking glass. “What are we looking at?”

Quillan shot Bram a look, which Bram returned with red-eyed, vampiric fervor, and the air seemed to get sucked out of the room.

“Bram,” I said slowly.

He sighed as he turned his attention to me. Slowly, ever so slowly, the red faded from his eyes. “This,” he said.

And he held out the heart for me to see. It was totally calcified, a thin, broken, grey stone—like somebody used a meat cleaver on a papier-maché balloon. The inside was blackened with something similar to wet soot that oozed from the hardened arteries like ancient toothpaste.

“Shit,” I said. “That’s… that’s really ugly.”

Bram nodded solemnly. “The heart,” he said, “is where the afflicted soul usually embeds itself.”

“Is that the soul?” I asked, my stomach twisting. Or what’s left of it. “Is that what happens when you…”

“Force a newly dead soul into a cursed body?” he asked. “No. Not at all. Whatever was inside this heart a moment ago was no soul, be it mortal or immortal, not that I have ever seen, and I have seen many over the centuries.”

“Then what is it?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” he answered. “But it is certainly not a soul, or any part of a soul.”

That was good to know. Probably. “Okay. How can you tell?”

“Because souls like yours and mine—and I do have one, despite what your romance novels might say—are composed of non-organic components that more closely resemble light than… whatever this is.” He tilted his hand to the left and right so I could see the black gunk glinting in the reflection. “If it expired in a manner that allowed it to leave something behind, it should be a faint, colorless glimmer with a smell like cold wind on snow. Not this.”

“Could Meg’s darkness have corrupted it somehow? Or made it look that way?”

“Perhaps,” Bram responded. “Or she may have discovered a Darkness-driven method to twist bodies into terrible monsters that can only be called other. This seems to be a unique prototype and not a perversion of something less sinister.”

“And you’re basing that on?”

“Just a feeling.”

Quillan snorted.

“There is only dark magic here,” Bram said without looking at him. “No traces of anything that might once have been remotely human. If a soul was involved here of any kind, Meg must have pulverized it straight out of existence. Whatever this is, it exists in its own right and merit, much to our chagrin and that of the natural world.”

“Aww, just like you,” Quillan said. “Maybe you can become friends.”

“Quillan, come on,” I said. It was a cheap dig and we had more important things to do than insult each other.

“Why do you know so much about this?” Quillan asked Bram, his eyes narrowing.

“I have been alive for four hundred years,” Bram proudly stated although his voice was cold and steely. “Suffice to say, I have seen many things.”

“You can’t expect me to believe it’s that simple.”

“No, I expect you to believe it because you are that simple, and historically willing to accept your fate with total ignorance. But if it makes you feel superior to believe that I spent several years learning how to make homemade monsters to use for more nefarious purposes, I welcome you to indulge yourself.”

“Boys,” I said, and they abruptly stopped glaring at each other. I looked between them with an expression Dulcie refers to as “motherly venom.” I love you, but if you don’t shape up, I will throw you off a cliff. “Priorities. Get them sorted.”

Quillan looked down, visibly ashamed. Bram snorted his derision and looked away.

I sighed. “So what is this?” I pointed to the black goop that coated the inside of the heart.

Bram took his time replying. “That answer, I hope, will come from you,” he said. “Regardless of its origin, this is only the residue. Whatever was formerly inside it is now hiding inside the body. It is incapable of reanimation without the heart, so the body is in no danger of posing a threat to us. But we should all know exactly what we are dealing with, since it is not a proper soul.”

“Is that what’s in its throat? The mist or whatever?”

“Precisely.”

I leaned forward a bit and peered between the jumbled teeth. Just behind a slate grey tongue swirled a mass of black smoke, twisting over and under itself like a writhing snake.

“What is that?” I asked.

Quillan shrugged before looking in with me. Bram took a step forward to see it as well, leaning over both of us with his arms crossed and a sour, uninterested expression on his face.

“I don’t know,” Quillan said. “It was more solid before. And I doubt it’s just smoke, otherwise it should be rising, shouldn’t it?”

“It should,” I answered.

“It is losing control of itself,” said Bram. “This is most likely what was animating the body, since no soul was present. Without its heart intact, there is nothing to which it can anchor itself.”

“Hold this open for me.” I handed Quillan my purple apothecary bag of knicks and knacks, filled with sweet-smelling ingredients in glass bottles, my “witchy trinkets” as Bram referred to them. Quillan obliged.

“Anything I may do to assist you?” the self-impressed vampire asked.

“As a rule, no,” I said, “Just don’t move.” I dug around in my bag for a teeny, tiny, minute mason jar of white powder.

“What’s that?” Quillan asked.

“Ground bat bones,” I answered. “If this is black magic, the bones will turn black and dissolve as soon as the smoke absorbs their power. If it’s neutral magic, they’ll change color; and if it’s just super weird smoke, nothing will happen.” I hesitated. “It’s almost definitely dark magic, but I want to make sure we’re not just dealing with a weird, slimy parasite.”

“You think Meg would use parasites to animate these things?” Quillan asked.

“Maybe. She’s done weirder shit before.”

“Wow, Sam, you’ve really come a long way,” Quillan said, his tone of voice nostalgic. I faced him with a sad smile.

“Thanks.” Then I turned to face the third person in our party who was frowning at us both. “Bram, hold this.”

Bram stretched out his hand and gingerly accepted the mason jar. He shivered as the glass touched his palm. “I would not think the bones of bats could carry enough arcane energy to be felt through a jar.”

“There’s other stuff in there too,” I said. “Sage, ginger, and garlic, but not much. Just, ah, don’t eat it or anything.”

“I will try to resist with all my strength,” Bram said sarcastically, holding the jar as far away from himself as possible. He frowned at me, apparently not exactly thrilled with the task.

I pulled a small, silver, rectangular box from the bag. It was covered in flowery stickers with my name etched into one side of it. I popped off the lid and removed the paintbrush, popsicle stick, and a tiny round jar of green paste from the indentations inside the green foam base.

“Give it here,” I said, and Bram handed the bat bones back to me, so fast that I nearly dropped it. “Shit, be careful,” I said, “if this breaks, it’ll go up in a toxic cloud and you will die.”

“It would take more than a touch of garlic to kill me,” Bram retorted. He sounded a little offended, or maybe he was just unsure. Pumpkins had a far more detrimental effect on vampires than garlic ever could, but it would still be wildly unpleasant if any of it landed on him, let alone, if he inhaled it.

“Sure, whatever, just be careful,” I said. “This stuff is also expensive.”

“Of course,” he responded as he stepped back a bit before bowing. “Not to mention it is quite stinky.”

I popped the glass lid off the green paste and dipped the brush into it. It ran thick as syrup from the bristles as I lifted it out and dipped it into the powder bones. They hissed and steamed as they connected, and when I raised it up, the green paste had lost all of its color and turned completely white. I brushed the new color onto one end of the popsicle stick, laying it on as thick as cream so I’d definitely be able to gauge the reaction.

“What’s that?” Quillan asked, gesturing to the small green jar.

“An all-purpose medium,” I said. “Sugar paste. Like what they use for color indicators in chemistry. It allows you to see the reaction happening that would otherwise be invisible.” I handed him the box and bone jar and turned to the mouth of the abomination. The smell of its blood seemed to coat my mouth, sloshing around in my lungs like inhaled saltwater. “You guys feel that too, right? The extra weight in the air whenever you breathe?”

“Yes,” said Bram. “It is most unpleasant. Luckily for me, I do not need to breathe.”

“I feel it too,” said Quillan. “It’s the blood. It’s emitting something.” He took a half-breath and swallowed, grimacing. “Like burning tar, almost.”

“Yeah, but it tastes different,” I said. “Maybe because it’s losing its integrity.” I held the popsicle stick over the abomination’s mouth and waved it around, seeing if I could coax more smoke out of its throat with the smell of bat bones and calcified sugar. If it stirred, I failed to see it.

Quillan’s eyes remained on me, watching me expectantly. “So?”

“Give me a minute,” I said. I started to put the popsicle stick into its mouth, then hesitated and turned to them. “There’s a very real chance this is going to end up bad, so just… be ready, okay?”

“What do you mean by bad?” asked Quillan.

“Angry-magic-smoke-with-a-vendetta bad,” I answered.

Both of them nodded and they each took a step back.

“Okay,” I said, “here we go.”

I slowly eased the pasted part of the stick into the smoke, keeping it just high enough to watch it and see if it would change colors or dissolve entirely. It parted for the stick, as smoke does when it is disturbed, but made no effort to close back around it.

Before the paste could react, the mist burst into flames.

The mist and paste went up in a plume of black fire, sending me, Quillan, and Bram reeling backwards. The stick was still in my hand as I fell away. A second later, the fire was dancing down the wood to my fingers, my wrist, my sleeve, and engulfing me in the dark, smothering flames. My first reaction was to banish it, snapping my fingers and commanding the fire to kindly screw off.

But when I did that, nothing happened.

I snapped my fingers again and whispered the ancient words for banishment and water and cold and death, but none of them did a damn thing.

“Sam!” Quillan screamed as I felt him throwing something on top of me. It was a thin blanket he formerly used to smother the fire. He pressed it down over my face and my stomach before it caught fire too, being swallowed up at once in darkness, darkness, darkness…

It didn’t matter because I wasn’t burning.

The flames rose around me, growing dark as onyx and bright as stars, but there was no heat coming from them. They caught on my clothes, and my skin remained unmarred and intact. They rose and rose and rose until I couldn’t see the walls anymore, and the ceiling was nothing but a huge cloud of smoke.

In a sea of writhing, black tongues, I saw something. A silhouette, a shadow with long hair that was standing over something I couldn’t identify, and something enormous was draped across her lap. She had a needle in one hand, a stone heart in the other, and she was sewing away, stitching something together. Her shoulders shook as though she were laughing.

Then she looked up and a pair of burning red eyes stared right at me before a gaping, white mouth opened up wide, maybe to scream. She pushed the mound off her lap, dropped her needle, stood up, and made a claw with her hand. She raked it down across the air, like she was trying to scratch me out of existence. The scars on my neck instantly burned as if they were only a few seconds old.

Then there was a violent flash of red light, and Meg, the fire, and the black mist suddenly vanished.

“Sam!” Quillan yelled. I was on my back, staring dizzily up at the ceiling, and he was standing over me. I did not fail to see the abject terror carved into his face. “Are you all right?”

“I…” I rolled to one side, pushing the thin blanket he used in his attempts to smother the fire on me. It wasn’t burned either, nothing was, but a faintly ashy taste hovered in the air now, making it hard to breathe. “Did you see that? I… saw something,” I said breathlessly. “I… I saw…”

“Hey, take it easy,” said Quillan. He put one hand on my back and another on my arm, slowly rubbing between my shoulder blades and spoke softly. “Just breathe in and out.”

“I’m… trying,” I said before falling into a fit of coughing. It didn’t feel like there was any oxygen in my lungs, but every time I took a breath, my body rejected the air. I looked at Quillan to see if he was having the same trouble, but he was breathing fine.

Bram knelt beside the body and looked into its mouth, grimacing. “Unstable indeed,” he said. “Was that a portal, do you think? Perhaps it was taking the mist back to wherever Meg pulled it from in the absence of an anchor?” He held up the stone heart, just in case we forgot what anchor he was talking about. “If so, this is most unpleasant news.” He dropped the heart and it broke into innumerable powdery grey pieces on the floor. It soaked up the black blood like Bounty paper towels. “Meg can just keep summoning them over and over and over again; they will never run dry.

But I was barely listening to him. “I saw someone,” I said. “Through the fire. I think…” I coughed when something sharp and cold lodged in the back of my throat. “I think it was Meg.”

Quillan frowned, and Bram furrowed his brow. It was then that I realized the blast of fire from the concoction had completely burned Bram’s eyebrows and eyelashes off. And part of his black hair was singed and now smoking.

I couldn’t help but laugh because he looked like a drag queen without her makeup on.

“And what, pray tell, would convince you of that?” said Bram, remaining absurdly calm.

“Bram, your…” I started but then swallowed my words because I figured Bram would find out about his missing facial hair soon enough.

I stared at the abomination and reached up to touch my throat. The grey scars Dulcie gave me when she burned down our office were still prominent. The skin was stinging again when I drew my fingers across them, sharp and thin, like a sudden fever.

“It just felt like Meg,” I answered, clearing my throat and trying not to cough again. “And it looked like Meg, too.” Honestly, to suggest it was anybody else at this point was just plain stupid.

“What did you see?” asked Quillan. “What did you see exactly?”

“A shadow,” I replied. “With long hair, red eyes and she was stitching something together, something huge… and she had a heart in her hand.” I looked at the abomination again, and the black blood oozing between the clumsy, grey stitches. The skin stretched around them as the pieces were pulled apart.

“Oh, dear,” said Bram. He was standing over the abomination, a layer of soot on his shirt, and staring with crossed arms into its mouth. “Forgive me. I believe I have made a grievous mistake.”

“Just the one?” asked Quillan but I quickly shushed him.

“What mistake?” I inquired.

“I believe I know why the abomination at your house did not burst into flames,” Bram said. “And why there was no residue on the heart that turned to dust in my hands.”

“Okay, why?”

“Because this one,” he gestured to the unmoving abomination, “did not have time to vacate the heart before it broke. Due to some glitch in its fusion, perhaps, a disconnect existed between the body and the Darkness that precluded it to self-destructive madness. Without a functioning heart, it was inherently unstable. Eventually, it burst into those strange flames and vanished, most likely heading back to the land from whence it came. The other smoke, or mist or sludge or whatever we agree to call this substance—I believe it saw me coming and hastily abandoned the heart I removed for something else that could contain it.”

“The heart you removed,” I repeated slowly. I went cold when I caught up with him. “Oh, shit.” Shit, shit, shit. My heart started pounding like a bass drum in my chest. “We have to get back there. Now.”

“We should call Dulcie and Casey,” he said. “There was no fire or red explosive light because it did not lack stability. I believe the one we left in your driveway has more than just one heart.”

FOURTEEN

Dulcie

“Okay,” I said, “great. Thanks. We’ll be waiting here.”

I hung up and sighed, staring at the blank black screen on my phone. My hand was shaking, as well as the rest of me from the rush of adrenaline or hunger pangs or possibly, something screwy in my blood. I hoped I was just hungry. The Feds and all their friends would be here in ten minutes, and a debriefing wasn’t exactly the best time to have a magic meltdown.

“Who was that?” asked Casey.

“Agent Madsen,” I said. “Different division, I think, calling for the the Cliff’s Notes version of what happened.”

“Got it.” he paused. “So, everything good?”

I snorted. “Good? Are you kidding?”

“You know,” he said, “as far as good can be here.”

I shrugged and nodded. “Well, they’re on their way. I told them the basics, but they’ll want a more detailed story when they get here. I think they believe me, for whatever that’s worth.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

Of course it wasn’t. “I’m fine,” I said maybe a little too quickly.

Casey quirked a brow at me. “Fine and good are two very different things.”

“Are they?”

“Sam says they are. And for the record, so do I.” Casey shifted in his seat, wincing as he lifted his arm to rest it on the counter. The bandages were soaked with blood, but Sam would be back soon, and I didn’t trust myself to change them properly. After the night I was having, I feared I’d smell his blood and drink him dry before I could resist the urge. I looked at the carpet and scuffed it with the heel of my shoe.

There was blood on my laces. Lots of it.

“Well,” I said absently, “Sam’s not usually wrong.”

“In my experience, she’s never wrong,” said Casey, smiling.

“So you two are doing fine?” I asked, before he could ask again how I was doing. Casey was a sweet guy, and I was really happy for Sam, but right now, any pity from either of them would have been most unappreciated. I already felt small and powerless, I didn’t need another well-meaning friend to put me in the panicked-little-kid box.

“We’re fine,” he said.

“Fine’s not… oh, fuck you,” I said, but I kept smiling.

“See?”

“Yeah, whatever,” I said. I’m still sticking with “fine,” though. “Good” wasn’t a word I thought I’d be able to use again for a very long time. Not referring to myself, anyway. “But seriously, are you guys happy?”

“Very,” he said. His smile got a little wider, he sat up a little straighter, and his arm didn’t seem to hurt him so much. The whole day seemed to melt away as I spent a long minute staring at his face, imagining him looking at Sam with those big, blue, puppy-dog eyes. It was a refreshing, uplifting thought, better than I’d conceived for a while. In the back of my heart, it stung me too. As unexpected as a bee sting. Casey’s face shimmered, and for a second, I saw Knight sitting there with his arm wrapped up in gauze, shirtless, and staring at me with the glowing eyes that proved I was strong enough to be his mate. I remembered when he claimed me, what it felt like to be taken and bound to somebody after receiving the cosmic confirmation that our relationship could work. The thought made me nauseous the way lost precious things do, and I got really close to crying. My eyes watered, primed for the slightest signal and a little whimper or even a hiccup could have started the waterworks.

I had a growing hunch that I was becoming a super depressing person. Then I thought that as long as I kept my depression on the inside and didn’t let it show, I’d be fine. And no one would know, right? Only me.

That turned out to be the emotional equivalent of storing gasoline and matches with fireworks in the same small, poorly ventilated room—but I never claimed I was good at this.

So I smiled and replied, “That’s nice to know,” trying to keep my smile genuine. I could already feel it fading, the stress and fatigue overwhelming me and sapping all of my energy. I suddenly felt like I was being pulled underwater, sinking deep down into the dark where light and air no longer exist and nothing but bubbles come out when you scream.

I leaned against the couch and closed my fists over the plush white fabric, digging my nails into the fake leather despite the chance I might leave permanent imprints, or actually tear it open. My heart felt hollow and as if it were inside my throat, thumping quietly. My lungs expanded and contracted slowly, like breathing through a straw, and my skin felt too tight. My tongue seemed extra large and my ribs began collapsing like a house of cards over my heart, pressing down on it like an elephant crushing a watermelon with its foot…

Hades, Dulcie, what happened to the happy thoughts?

“You good, Dulcie?” Casey asked.

My face twisted into a grimace. I tried to straighten it out but only managed to unfurrow my eyebrows. “No,” I said. “But I’m fine.”

Casey nodded. He rolled his bloody shoulder and we both heard something pop between the joints.

“Oof,” I said, and he nodded, grinding his teeth.

“Yeah,” he said, “that’ll hurt in the morning.”

I snorted. “It doesn’t hurt now?”

“Not even a little,” he said. “So when will the Feds be here?”

“About twenty minutes. There might be a few other people coming first to get a look at the… thing…” I waved my hand vaguely towards the door, and the feathered monstrosity outside it. “But we’re not under attack anymore so it’ll be a hot minute.”

“As opposed to a cold minute?”

“Yeah.”

I looked down at the carpet and Casey tugged on a loose corner of his bandage before tucking it between the folds of gauze. An awkward silence descended, like an incompetent guardian angel, making us cough and wheeze, until our own breathing became an effort.

“So,” I said, hunting for something to talk about that didn’t involve the shambling clusterfuck that had become all of our lives.

“Do you golf?” I asked.

Casey laughed his surprise. “Um… no? Why?”

I sighed and shrugged. “No reason. I just figured most humans like to do that sort of thing.”

“Are you being racist in that query?”

“Probably, but the question still stands.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Okay… No, I don’t. Do you play golf?”

“Does miniature golf count?”

“Sure.”

“No, I don’t.”

He laughed through his nose, smiling and shaking his head. “Does Sam play golf?”

“Not really, but you could probably get her to play miniature golf if you bought her an ice cream first. Or some cotton candy. Anything sweet.”

He nodded. “Duly noted.”

The silence resumed as the ceiling fan in the living room rotated slowly. Every now and then, the little silver chains beneath it would click together and the air conditioner powered on, making the whole house rumble softly, like a snoring bear.

“Has she texted you?” I asked.

“No,” said Casey. “But I’m sure she’s fine. Bram and Quillan are with her.”

“Quillan?” I asked, obviously surprised. I didn’t realize Sam called him. I thought she was talking to Bram.

“Yeah, Sam asked him to come. She didn’t want Knight…” He cleared his throat. “She called Quillan to help her look at something Bram found.”

The lie hung in the air like a bad smell, but I figured out why. Sam didn’t want to bring Knight here and put us in the same room together. She also didn’t want to leave him alone. Knight would have hated the idea of having to be chaperoned and I wasn’t sure how that was going over. If it was going over. If they’d been able to find Knight. If he wasn’t already dead...

Knight’s not dead, I swore to myself. Instead, I made myself think about the exchange Bram and Knight and Quillan would be having right about now. Somehow, and I wasn’t sure how, the thought brought a smile to my face.

I wondered what they’d choose to fight about first.

Me, probably, I guessed.

“Oh, cool,” I said. “Did you ever meet Quillan?”

“No.”

I paused. “And there’s still nothing from Knight?”

Casey shook his head. “He’s not at the office and not at his house. But I’ve got people looking everywhere; don’t worry.”

I swallowed hard as a fresh wave of panic started up again in my gut. I had to take a few deep breaths to calm down. Not that my breathing did all that much. I nodded, kneading the stuffing in the couch with my thumb and forefinger, pulling it out and flattening it. “Yeah, right. Cool. Thanks, I guess?”

“I’m sorry. I know this is weird for you.”

I nodded again. “Maybe he’s just out for a walk,” I said, deliberately ignoring his comment. “Or a ride.”

“This late? Does he regularly do that?”

“I don’t know, maybe.” Maybe not. When Knight was stressed, he worked. He didn’t go roaming through the city like a depressed ghost, and he never rode anywhere just for the hell of it, not unless he was with me.

Or somebody else, I thought. Maybe he had a new riding buddy I didn’t know about. I imagined someone on the back of his motorcycle, her arms wrapped around him, laughing as the wind whipped her hair around her face. I had to stifle the urge to throw up.

Don’t be stupid, Knight wouldn’t do that. He didn’t replace me when I broke up with him before, and that was for much less valid reasons. There was no way he’d do it now, no way at all. Maybe. Probably. But what if…?

Hades, I hated my brain for its incessant thoughts sometimes.

“He’s fine,” said Casey. “Knight can take care of himself.”

I remembered him writhing underneath Meg and I clenched my teeth, thinking, Oh, can he?

Casey’s phone rang and I jumped before a startled, high-pitched whine came out of me, originating deep down in the pit of my stomach. “Sorry,” I said.

Casey smiled reassuringly and answered his phone. He really was an attractive guy, not so different from Knight. Piercing blue eyes, square jaw, and strong arms corded with muscle over more muscle—which made sense, given the kinds of creatures he was now obligated to wrangle. He wore glasses, and the square black frames hung crookedly on his nose, held together only by a strip of blue painter’s tape. He seemed almost bookish at first glance, nerdy even. And he was also what every nerdy guy in the world dreamed of becoming—big enough to scare the bejeesus out of anyone stupid enough to give him any shit.

“Hello?” said Casey.

I heard Sam answer frantically, “Casey?” at the exact same moment.

One of the perks of vampirism was my recent uncanny ability to eavesdrop, even when I wasn’t trying to. Sort of like listening to a couple having a noisy argument in a restaurant. You don’t want to listen to it, but it’s right there, and too loud to ignore.

“What’s the matter?’ he asked, but Sam was already babbling over him.

“The abomination isn’t dead, and the mist is transferring hearts! Casey! It’s not dead.”

“The mist? What mist?” he asked, shaking his head.

The earth suddenly shook but it didn’t last long. The quake was minor, maybe a 3.5 on the Richter scale, barely enough to make the bottles and plates rattle on the shelves.

However, I collapsed into a heap on the floor when it occurred.

I felt like all the oxygen in my lungs abruptly solidified before shattering into a hundred pieces that were now trying to come out of my body. I opened my mouth and sucked in air but it tasted like smoke. I closed my eyes and something gold and glowing like magma appeared in my mind, then a million golden bodies that materialized out of nowhere. Somewhere in the distance, but also right next to me, and echoing from everywhere, I heard the unmistakable clang of a massive metal gong.

“Dulcie!” said Casey before he was at my side. I could barely hear him.

The metal ringing deafened my ears, growing louder and louder, like the shrill feedback at a sound studio. I plugged my ears and squeezed my eyes shut, but it wouldn’t go away. When I opened my eyes again, the room was gone, and all I could see were gleaming, white-gold silhouettes. Some were standing, some were curled up on the floor.

I heard a voice that sounded deep and gravelly, ancient too, that said, Your army.

And it was over.

The room snapped back into focus. The sudden quiet was more than a little jarring. I inhaled and exhaled, my whole body shaking with the movement.

“Dulcie, what the hell?” asked Casey. “Are you okay? What happened?”

I pushed myself up to my feet, my lungs burning like I was holding my breath underwater. He gripped my forearm and pulled me up. “I’m fine,” I said. “I think. Um.” My brain was still in a fog. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“The gong.”

“The gong?”

Fuck. “Yeah, the gong, you know, a big, ringing, metal thing? You didn’t hear it?”

Casey shook his head and frowned at me. “Do you ever have visions?” he said. “Like prophecies or anything?”

“No. I’m probably just hallucinating,” I said, which was really fucking dumb. Nobody we knew was immune to clairvoyance, especially not me. Maybe visions were on my list of new powers.

Casey turned back to his phone. “Sam, did you feel that?” he asked.

“No,” said Sam. “Feel what?”

“The earthquake.”

“Earthquake? No, I didn’t feel anything!”

Outside, we heard a shift and a heavy whump as something big fell hard onto the concrete.

Casey and I looked at each other.

“Not an earthquake,” I said.

“Casey?” Sam called from his phone.

We stood up and ran out the front door, scuttling down the fractured driveway to the crater where the abomination lay. The ground wasn’t shaking anymore, but the body was jittering slightly, almost vibrating.

“Casey,” I said.

“I see it.”

The body spasmed.

And it opened its eyes.

Change of plans—now was the perfect time to have a meltdown.

I indulged my panic, letting it fill me until I thought my heart would burst. My muscles swelled and my skeleton even shifted, stretching my bones and rearranging them until I was just a little taller and a little wider. My nails became claws and my vampiric night vision turned grey as I let myself shift into the werewolf part of me, or what I hoped was the werewolf part of me.

“The fucking thing just came back to life!” Casey yelled as if I wasn’t seeing the same thing happening right before my eyes.

The abomination was lumbering to its feet, twitching and stumbling like a broken marionette. Its neck was snapped, probably by Bram or the great fall, and it was looking over its shoulder, its bones poking out underneath its skin. The sound it made was horrific, like spoons in a blender or the screaming of the damned. It clumsily got to its feet and wheeled around to look at me with widened white eyes, reflecting the orange light of the flickering streetlamps.

I heard Casey’s phone ringing from his pocket. He lifted it up to his ear but didn’t say anything.

“What’s going on?” Sam demanded.

“The abomination’s moving. It’s in a bad way, but it’s still alive.”

Bram’s voice was muffled but it came through: “It will soon gain more ground as the mist anchors itself to the secondary heart. I do not know how long that will take, but you probably do not have much time. Dulcie must rip the heart out, if she can.”

“Through its mouth?” I said, eyeing its many, sharp teeth dubiously.

“Maybe don’t,” said Casey. He was probably also thinking that now was not a good time to have my arm bitten off.

The abomination took a long, whistling breath. “Sister,” it whispered, its voice a bloody gurgle. “Come… home…”

“What did it say?” Casey asked.

“It asked me for directions to Los Angeles,’” I said, rolling my eyes at Casey when he looked confused.

“Home,” said the abomination. It dropped on all fours and started to crawl towards us, dragging one leg limply behind it. “Home.”

“Home?” Casey asked.

“Yeah. Come home. To Meg, probably.”

“I got that far,” he said.

We watched it lumbering slowly towards us. It had a hell of a time getting around. I could hear its bones crunching together like gravel under tires, digging into its muscles with soft squelching sounds, sawing at its tendons, and making parts of it go limp when they finally snapped.

I took a step forward and flexed my claws. Casey grabbed my arm. “Wait.”

“Why?” I asked. “It’s basically dead already. I can probably just rip its head off and pull the heart out that way.”

“What if it grabs you?”

“It won’t.”

“And if it does and drags you back to Meg?”

Okay, not a thrilling thought, but still. “Then we’ll know where she is and we’ll have one less problem,” I said. “She’s not gonna hurt me, I’ll be fine.” I hoped.

“Dulcie, things tend to get much, much worse when you go missing.”

“Sis… ter…”

“Shut up,” I said to the ugly thing.

And then it was right on top of us.

It grabbed me by the shoulder, sinking its claws deep into me until it hit bone. I felt it for barely three seconds before my werewolf adrenaline kicked in. Then I got a shot of energy and stupid bravery that was strong enough to convince me I could eat the whole planet if I chose to. The pain ended abruptly like a bursting lightbulb.

I turned to the hideous thing, grabbed its wrist, and snapped my hand down hard enough to break the bone and rip the hand clean off.

“Bad puppy,” I said, looking at its distinctive, wolfish snout.

It howled and stumbled back, its black blood gushing from the stump at the end of its arm, but I doubted it could actually feel pain. Its howl was more like a reflex, left over from the various bodies that reacted to having a hand ripped off, which usually hurt. I looked down at my shoulder, which was covered in blood, both mine and the abomination’s. For one stupid adrenaline-high moment, I was enthralled by its shine.

“Fuck, are you okay?” Casey asked.

I nodded, feeling all giggly inside as a weird combination of bloodlust and hysteria overtook me. It was not much different from when I took a mandrake potion to stay awake during the dreamstalker ordeal.

“Hey, look,” I said, pointing to his shoulder and mine. It was my own blood, but fuck, it smelled good. “Twinsies.”

Casey only looked confused.

Suddenly, a wing came at him from out of nowhere that slapped him roughly aside. He hit the concrete hard enough to skin his cheek and took a sweet second getting up.

I turned to help him before I felt the remaining claw snatching my arm. It yanked me up to stare at the side of the abomination’s head, while trying to wrench its face around to look at me. However, there were too many bones in the way, and it only succeeded in getting itself stuck.

“Home,” it said much sharper this time. The look it gave me was almost friendly.

“Nope,” I said, my mouth stretching into a smile I couldn’t resist.

I twisted my arm so I could grab it instead, pulling it forward until it was standing with its back to me, its wings outstretched.

I dug my nails into the muscles on either side of its spine and raked them down as hard as I could. Its skin split open and thick, black blood came gushing out from between my fingers. It stained the back of my hand and matted the fur around the wounds, more than it lost in all the time we were inside. The smell was awful, and it was as cold as metal and wet, like slippery mud, reeking with decay, as if it were dead and buried in a swamp. The stench went straight to the back of my throat and I gagged, reeling back and letting go.

It started to turn towards me and I jumped on its back, holding my breath. It kicked and thrashed, flapping its wings and spattering the concrete with blood. I could feel it on my face and taste it on the edge of my lip, a harsh, bitter flavor like septic dirt and rotten fruit. Doing my best not to gag, I pulled myself up to its face, which was twisting almost all the way in my direction, and I dug my claws into its eyes. It reared its head back and opened its mouth, exposing three rows of mismatched teeth. Then it screamed the high, piercing shriek of a banshee.

I let go, fell, and rolled away, landing in a crouch. Casey was on his feet too now, doing his best to stay out of the way.

“Fuck,” he said, watching the abomination stumble and scream. He looked at me, seeing the blood on my hands, my face, my shirt, and my mouth with some of it slowly congealing in my hair. I probably looked like a monster from an eighties’ horror flick, heavy on the gore.

I heard Sam’s voice from the phone, sounding panicked now. “Casey, what the hell is going on?”

“It’s attacking us,” he said breathlessly.

“We’re almost back. Hang on.”

I laughed an hysterical, bubbly giggle as I looked at the monster. It was on all fours now, scuttling backwards like a frightened ape, looking left and right, and up and down, even though it couldn’t see a damn thing. It opened its mouth to hiss at me and a spray of blood spluttered out. It was bleeding from its gums and its teeth were bent and cracked, like it bit down hard enough to break them. It sort of resembled a dog’s discarded chew toy, all bent out of shape.

I remembered something about ripping out its heart and wondered if I should get on that.

Then the ground shook again, only harder this time. It was enough to make the buildings move and the broken concrete shift like turbulent waves. The abomination staggered backwards and fell, planting its ass into the crater from which it had risen. Casey and I dropped to the ground, crouching and looking at each other while trying to keep our footing.

“Can you feel that?” Casey shouted into the phone.

“Yes!” Sam’s voice was garbled and mostly static. I wondered if a cell tower went down somewhere.

Something in the air also changed. It was very cold, the same way it got when Meg’s dark magic was close, but this time, it was different. The cold had a smell, a slight underlying odor, sour and muddy, like a rotting corpse. It zapped me like electricity in the back of my throat, filling my lungs with a substance that felt similar to liquid lead. I couldn’t breathe without gagging.

“Dulcie!” said Casey, maybe feeling the same sensation. I looked over at him and saw him standing up before stumbling backwards over a rising cliff of concrete. Tree roots poked out from the bottom, raining down dirt. He pointed and I followed his hand.

Then the air split open.

Behind the abomination, quivering in the dark, was a thin, red line like a half-healed cut. Light spilled out of it in wispy coils like smoke. Its aura struck me as hard as a boulder in the face, very hot and empty, reminding me of the burning breath of a dragon. Underneath it, I saw something cold and blue like lightning mixed with Arctic water.

Knight.

Three things happened in quick synchronicity.

First, Casey fell. The concrete slab he was standing on fractured as he leapt forward, rolling when he hit the ground, and landing three feet away from the wailing monster.

Second, the red line widened, turning into an oval with sharpened points. Beyond it was a pale, red sky, swimming with dark clouds, and lit from within by crimson spiderwebs of lightning. The smell of sulphur and smoke poured out and settled on the ground as a thick mist.

Third, the abomination stood up. Bloody and stupid, it grabbed the closest thing to it—which was Casey—and dragged him backwards into the swirling, red scar. I heard the echo of the gong again and a voice: You will need each and every one. The scar grew larger and pulled open like an unhealed wound, exposing another swirl of smoke and darkness beyond it.

“No!” I shouted in violent protest.

On the ground, Sam’s voice crackled through his phone. “Casey?”

But he was already gone.

FIFTEEN

Bram

We arrived on the tails of our friends, the Feds. They came in bulky, black SUVs, wearing excessive gear that was specifically designed to thwart the less mundane side effects of offensive magic. They were expecting carnage, and that was exactly what they found: the street was torn up in a hundred pieces, scattered like a child’s building blocks, and deep lines etched the concrete from the monster’s claws. Dulcie stood in the center of it all, staring at a patch of empty air. She was panting.

The agents descended upon her bruised and bloodied form, swathing her with bandages and potions manufactured by government witches. She tried her best to tell them what she witnessed, but none of the medical personnel could be bothered to listen to her. That was someone else’s job.

That someone-else had plenty of questions for her. The kind that can only be asked in a dark room with a two-way mirror.

The abomination from Vander’s apartment was strapped on a table somewhere as people in HAZMAT suits dissected it with silver scalpels or chainsaws, whatever a paranoid human preferred to use to examine a distinctly evil animal conglomerate. I warned them of the extra hearts and a few other organs that a decrepit soul might choose to hide in. But they took my information with a grain of salt, hurrying off to seek more interesting conversations with more important people.

Dulcie, Sam, Quillan, and I were unceremoniously scooped up and carted off to their headquarters, where we were dumped abruptly into the various interrogation rooms. Expecting to be questioned and examined, as well as generally frowned upon, seeing all the cross expressions of the human faces, I guessed they were absolutely certain this latest crisis was all our fault.

“I will return,” said a man, rising and tapping his papers on the table to straighten them out. “Thank you for your patience.” He offered Dulcie an apologetic shrug, brimming with condescension, and left the room when I swept into it, just having ended my own interrogation. He looked between us and gave me a scalding look as he said, “Ten minutes and no more; I don’t expect to have any trouble getting you out when I return.”

“Perish the thought,” I icily responded.

The door shut with an unnecessarily loud bang as metal clanked against metal. Everything in this building was reminiscent of a swordfight. The people were on edge, peering over their shoulders, and walking on their toes. Every face was that of an enemy, every pair of eyes scanning for a way in, trying to break down your guard, straining to observe any shift in your balance, waiting for you to falter, poking and prodding through your mind with blunted foils.

Naturally, there was a camera in the corner of the room, one of those small, black spherical gadgets set to capture every inch of the space. We’d certainly been left alone for the express purpose of surveillance; and someone undoubtedly watched us on the other side of that camera, waiting to hear what we had to say to each other. I found the whole thing rather offensive. I had no illusions regarding the general opinion of my species and my standing with the human world as a whole, let alone, its bureaucracy. Dulcie, however, was infinitely nobler than I, and leaving her in a room with a suspected nefarious something-or-other, hoping she could inadvertently coax him into saying something incriminating, or worse, saying something to incriminate herself—offended me on her behalf. She’d certainly endured enough discomfort by now to warrant some kindness and common decency. She should have, for instance, been inside a room with a window overlooking a nice view, sipping a hot cup of tea. A sink in which to wash her bloody hands had not even been provided!

“Dude, are you okay to be in here?” she asked.

“Of course not,” I replied. “But I will vanish before anyone notices.”

She was in no mood to scold me. “I’ve never seen anything like that portal before.”

“But it felt like Meg?”

“It felt like Meg and a couple of other things,” she said. “Like…when you mix Play-Doh and it turns purple but you can still see traces of red and green in the purple?”

“I am not familiar with Play-Doh.”

“Of course you aren’t,” she muttered on an exhale.

“So it was mostly Darkness, and something else. Perhaps in the plural,” I tried to understand.

“Yeah, something like that.” She pressed her lips together and looked as though she had more to say; but I wasn’t the person she wanted to address anymore.

“I felt Knight too,” she added.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Knight,” she said. “I felt him through the portal. That red line in the air? I swear I could feel him on the other side of it.”

“Ah,” I responded coolly although I must admit, my contented frame of mind suffered a slap at hearing Vander’s name. That made it more than likely Meg’s monsters absconded with him as well. I did not want to voice my thoughts in case she had not already concluded the same unfortunate assumption. I did not want to worry her overmuch. She had so much to contend with already.

“Then perhaps Vander and Agent James will find each other and together, make their way back to us,” I said with a casual shrug.

Dulcie laughed without any mirth. She put her head in her hands and ran her fingers through her hair, the strands of liquid sunlight contrasting with dirt and bloody viscera. Broken and smeared like an old sword, but just as sharp and deadly, her relentless beauty never failed to impress me.

Always so beautiful.

“What the fuck did I ever do to the Universe?” she asked. She meant it in jest, I suppose, and her feeble smile said as much, but the words were genuine, and her question exasperating. Lately, the world at large, it seemed, had it in for Dulcie and everyone who cared about her.

Could it be retribution for your relation to Melchior? I wondered, but it would not have been a helpful thing to say. I pulled the interrogator’s chair—since this was ostensibly a debriefing, or so they kept saying although everyone knew why we were really here—around to Dulcie’s side of the metal table before sitting down beside her.

“Perhaps the Universe is jealous.”

“Of what?”

I shrugged. “Any number of things. Your steadfast friends? Your fiendish good looks?”

“Shut up, Bram.” She sighed, but for a moment, I thought I saw a smile. “Most everyone prefers to think Meg is dead.”

“I would like to think so as well, but collectively thinking that does not make her any less alive.”

“Hades, and they think he’s dead. They probably think I killed him.”

“Agent James?” I asked.

“Yeah.” It was her turn to sigh.

“Dulcie, he fell through a portal,” I affirmed. “Yes, it was a rather unfriendly looking portal, from what I’ve heard, but a portal nonetheless. Portals themselves cannot kill, and besides, you had nothing to do with its sudden appearance.” I glanced up just to make sure the cameras were listening.

Dulcie scoffed. “Nothing? I’m about ninety-nine thousand percent sure the portal appeared precisely because of me. It dragged Casey back through it, like it was sent to take him somewhere… maybe, to Meg, which, aagh, fuck.” She ran her hands over her face, stretching the skin on her temples. “The expression on Sam’s face…”

“Think not on it,” I said sternly. “For there is nothing we can do about the unfortunate circumstances now. Instead, we must put our heads together to devise a way to reach Meg and rescue your friends.”

“That’s the most sense you’ve made in I don’t know how long,” she said as she glanced up at me in surprise. “Still doesn’t change the fact that all of this happening is due to me.”

“Meg only remains alive because of me. If you would like to assign the blame, I am your most appropriate candidate.” I looked at the camera, imagining the flunky who was certainly taking copious notes on the other side. It didn’t matter. The bureau was already painfully familiar with the sordid history between Meg and me. It was the one and only parcel of information I afforded them before disappearing into the ether after Meg’s monstrous, little massacre at the capitol. Disappearing without a word would have looked more sinister than even I could abide. I often tread away from the straight and narrow, but an enemy of the state? That I am not.

“And,” I continued, “if we are speaking technically, this all boils down to your father and his proposal that he augment you.” After a moment of searching for a better word, and finding none, I did not intend to make Dulcie sound like a science experiment gone awry. In truth, however, she was.

“Augment me?” she repeated, spitting the word out like mud from her mouth. “Dear, old dad.”

“Dear, old dad,” I echoed. “Dulcie, I am afraid you are a victim of circumstance. You are central to a strategic plan that was decades in the making and not your fault. You are no more to blame than anyone else is in the world. Meg’s reach is vast and strong, so things would have eventually gone afoul between her people and the Earth, with or without you and your unique blood.” I blinked when I realized my hand was lying on her shoulder. I resisted any attempt at a reassuring squeeze, expecting it to provide no more comfort than a cold vise. “The shield does not beckon the sword; it simply rises in its own defense.”

She shrugged me off and I allowed my hand to fall away. I closed my fingers in an effort to capture her warmth in the palm of my hand, which actually lingered for one, two, three precious seconds! Then, the priceless warmth vanished.

Dulcie stared at the table with her arms crossed, seeing something between the folds of metal that warranted a smoldering glare.

“Agent James will be fine,” I said. “I am certain of it. I believe he is a Siphon, am I correct?”

“Yeah, but they’re totally fucking useless.”

“For their established purpose, perhaps they are; but I suspect he is capable of more than we could ever suppose.”

“What do you mean?”

I had her attention now. “Everyone we encountered was, once upon a time, utterly ordinary. However now, that the world is collapsing around us, and a mysterious Darkness is reaching through the walls of reality to wreak unholy havoc… Now we are different. We are much more than before. The world has a desperate need for us, I believe. Agent James would not still be here if he were not completely capable of caring for himself.”

Dulcie started frowning at me now. “What?”

“What?” I repeated.

“Don’t repeat my what, I meant, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Exactly what it sounds like,” I replied. “You felt the power Meg draws upon. It is evil, and very old. The kind of power that awakens dormant skills that would have remained hidden within us. We are here for what may or may not be the end of the world; and that means we matter.”

“I swear to Hades, Bram, if you say I’ve been chosen or something—”

“I would hardly venture that far,” I said. “My point is that Agent James was engaged in this conflict for a relatively short time, yes, and it did not kill him, at least, not yet. I doubt something as innocuous as a portal could be his undoing.”

“Because… why? Are you suggesting the Universe is ensuring his survival or something?”

I shrugged again. “Perhaps. Your fate has been pulled and stretched like taffy, more than any of ours; you should know better than any of us what it means to wind up being special. Agent James purposely ingrained himself in this war, and now has arguably survived the worst of it. His fate, whatever it may be, is tied inextricably with yours now, the same as all of ours. He will be fine.”

“Since when do you believe in fate?”

“Since it became a necessary fact of existence,” I replied.

She stopped talking and I took the sweet opportunity to stare at her. Her skin was translucent and pale, the light nearly shattering its smoothness. She was blessed with a flawlessly fair complexion. Her pale, honey-blond hair was more beautiful than it had to be, but I noticed a different air about her now. She was still as a statue or a mountain and as vast as the sky against which the clouds of all others were calculated and gauged. Her eyes were diamond-sharp, and they did not pierce mine when they looked at me. No, they scraped whatever they perceived, like jagged teeth being dragged across the soul. She might as well have been painted with unbridled passion in the colors the dusk turns the sand on the beach.

She was truly a vampire, and in a way I could never hope to be. Meg managed to turn Dulcie into something even more miraculous than the firebrand she already had been. Something eternally damned. It made them a family, in a way, a mother and daughter, but Dulcie and Meg could not have been more polarized. Meg was proud and fearless, lacking true understanding. Dulcie, contrastingly, was so brave, selfless, and brilliantly stupid when protecting the people she loved. Reckless and incompetent, like a meteor carving valleys through the sky, and burning everything in her path until it was no more than dust and cinders, the ashes from which no man could rise unscathed.

I never expected to be caught in her path.

She deserved much better than this. She deserved much better than me, certainly. That was news to no one. She deserved better than the world she was born into, and better than the bad hand of bloody cards she was dealt. Every year, it seemed as if she drew a new hand, yet her possibilities diminished to fewer and farther between. Increasingly, her cards seemed to always to catch on fire.

She stared at the corner of the table, where the metal was chipped and scratched, her expression fading as her thoughts spun round and round.

“It is none of my business,” I said slowly.

I waited a moment for her to stop me, expecting her to say something akin to “If it’s not your business, why are you asking?” But she remained deathly silent. She even stopped breathing. Perhaps she no longer needed to process oxygen.

I continued my thought. “But in the service of your general well-being, I feel I must ask.” I paused before inquiring, “How are you?”

She frowned, crinkling her brow, but still did not look at me. “In the service of my general well-being?” she repeated. My innocuous question seemed to perplex her.

“Yes,” I answered. “How are you… coping now … I mean, with everything that’s happened?” Coping seemed to be the right word. I failed to imagine any scenario in which Dulcie was completely fine, strong and fierce though she may have been. Her lifetime was not nearly as lengthy as mine, but tragically, vastly unfortunate. The questions on my tongue and in my mind were ones I had no right to ask but I wanted to ask them all the same. “I am referring to your vampirism and other new traits you’ve adopted, and your departure from the ANC. As well as the state of the union.” I swallowed audibly. “What about Vander?”

Dulcie stiffened.

I expected her to yell at or hit me. She could have shrunk into herself and said nothing at all. But instead, she turned to me with a blazing fire in her eyes, and her soul glistened like freshly fallen snow, the heart of a dying star, angry and broken, straining to extend its rapidly fading existence.

I took her hand without thinking and squeezed it gently. Her soft skin was so smooth, and pale as pearls in the darkness. She looked more like a vampire every day. That was the last thing she wanted to hear, of that I was certain, but every time I glimpsed her, she appeared infinitely more beautiful. Often, I dreamt of sculpting her flawless image in stone. I would replace all the lesser statues in my homes with effigies of the most perfect creature I ever encountered in all my four hundred years. The way she looked now, I knew there was no hope of that happening. No sculptor in the world could replicate what I saw now. Bronze and marble could never capture the shimmer in her eyes, or the sheen of her skin, or the reflection of orange light on her hair. No statue could emit her smell, her glowing aura, the light she carried with her into every room, a raging inferno one moment, a comforting hearth fire the next.

I once commissioned a portrait of her, which was now lying in a basement somewhere, which was solely painted from my description. She was daintier in the painting, with wider eyes, fully open lips, erect nipples and her blossoming breasts were scantily wrapped in sheer yellow gauze. She looked more pixie than fairy. I was so proud at its completion, I practically worshipped the artist in that sacred moment. At long last, I had my Dulcie, or so I had thought.

What a poor representation it turned out to be!

I looked into her eyes and glimpsed a sea of galaxies, feeling the cold air and the burning sunlight before I found my words.

“I am sorry,” I said. “The fault is all mine. I could have killed her, but my rage and my desire for revenge temporarily consumed me, and now we are here.” I squeezed her hand again, never blinking or avoiding her glacier-green eyes. “Forgive me, Dulcie.”

She pulled her hand away as if I burned her, and the movement was swift and reactionary. The glitter-and-gold sensation her proximity afforded me suddenly melted away like icy mist in the warm rays of dawn.

“There’s nothing to forgive,” she said solemnly. “I don’t blame you, Bram.”

I have not found it necessary to breathe oxygen in four hundred years, but at that moment, I perceived I was drowning.

The door opened and the interrogator strode back in.

“I am going,” I said before the interrogator could open his mouth. I stood up and swept past him, forcing myself to move slowly. If I allowed my raw emotions to carry me through the room, they wouldn’t have seen me leaving at all. I would have been no more than a vague black blur and a flickering light, causing a sudden coldness to fill the air as I moved through it.

Dulcie might have seen me, though. Perhaps her new blood had that power.

What else could she see in me? I thought. Rather than taunting myself with speculation, I nodded at her as I closed the door.

***

I was inextricably possessed of an anger I thought long-dead, and I went to the room where Quillan sat. His door opened when his interrogator left and as the man shut it again, I slipped inside, similarly as I did with Dulcie. This time, however, I made a more concerted effort to conceal myself. If, by some miracle, the human agent managed to see me, he gave no sign of it, and continued walking with his clipboard and stiff back.

I looked at Quillan, sitting with his hands folded together on the table like a good, little schoolboy, and waiting patiently for his interrogator to return.

He looked at me and I glared back. The air in the room turned cold, as though it were intimidated by the two of us.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked.

I shrugged as I leaned against the door. The atmosphere condensed around us, holding its breath on a dare. “Killing time,” I responded, which I found dry and funny, seeing as how I am already dead.

“Why kill it in here?”

I shrugged again. “Why not?”

The malice, I think, was audible in my voice. Or maybe he could tell I was imagining myself snapping his neck.

“We don’t have time for a disagreement,” he said, his face as stoic as ever; and he still remained more than amiable. Small wonder he deceived our poor, sweet-hearted Dulcie.

“You may not.” I put my hands into my pockets and leaned back slightly. “I have all the time in the world and an uncanny fondness for personal grudges.” I cocked my head and ran my tongue across my lips, trying to recall if I ever drank blood from an elf before. Yes, once. Melchior. His blood was certainly much sweeter than his soul. “And I also harbor a particular distaste for you.”

“I already made my peace with Dulcie,” he announced. “She forgave me.”

“She should not have.” She should have ripped out your heart and made you eat it, I thought. Or gutted you and strangled you with your own intestines. Not that Dulcie would ever resort to such vulgar, gratuitous violence, but still, it should have been an option.

“I know,” he said. “But it was her decision, not mine. And maybe she lied. Maybe she only said she forgave me to make me feel better.”

I could scarcely imagine that scenario. Dulcie would never be caught forgiving or being kind to someone who lied to her so blatantly. Then I considered Quillan, her old boss, an elf whom she loved dearly for so long… so perhaps it was not completely impossible.

“Perhaps,” I said, striding forward. “But Dulcie’s forgiveness is no longer something you need to concern yourself with.”

“I don’t care about nor do I need your forgiveness,” he said.

“That is a pity. I would so love to disappoint you.”

“Bram, you never fail to disappoint me.” He looked up at me, clasping his hands together in front of his face and resting his chin on his knuckles. “You’ve disappointed everyone for as long as we’ve known you.”

“It was never my goal to impress anyone.”

“Maybe not me, no. But Dulcie?”

I stiffened. Quillan blinked slowly and leaned towards me as he spoke softly. “You can’t possibly think I’m the only one who ever betrayed her,” he said. “Can you?”

I stood up a bit straighter and adjusted my collar. “I have never pretended to be anything more than what I am.”

“You don’t have to.”

“How many times have you nearly gotten Dulcie killed?” I replied, my tone of voice growing harsher.

He swallowed. “That was a long time ago.”

“Not so very long.”

He pressed his lips together, cocking his head to the right with unmasked irritation. “Like you have any room to talk!”

“I beg your pardon?’

Quillan turned to me and stood up. “You were in the smuggling game decades before I got involved,” he said. “And now you’re telling me it never occurred to you that Melchior and Dulcie were closely related?”

“It may have crossed my mind,” I responded. “I am sure it crossed yours. I was, however, under the impression Melchior thought his daughter was dead, or missing, but he simply did not care. It was never anything he confided to me on our rare and unpleasant visits. I did not betray Dulcie. She was never deceived about who or what I am. You? You were someone she trusted.” The word was ripe with bitterness, and sharp as a razor. It broke the mood like glass. Anger came with it, boiling up in the back of my throat hot as magma, an upheaval of sudden and unwarranted homicidal impulses.

I suppressed them and continued, clearing my throat. “You lied to her.”

“I lied only to protect her.”

“You lied only to protect yourself,” I corrected him. “I have always walked the line between your worlds and I believe that is why you never arrested me.” Quillan wanted to run me in me from the moment we first laid eyes on one another. Learning that I was useful, however, he apparently decided he had bigger fish to fry. “Dulcie always knew that. I am a gentleman and a criminal, I never pretended to be anything noble. You, on the other hand…” I trailed away, shaking my head.

A thick, uncomfortable silence filled the space between us, expanding like a virus and contaminating everything it touched. I found myself breathing again, a nervous habit I never fully managed to discard.

A question was hanging on the tip of my tongue. I opened my mouth to say it, expecting it to come out as a vague, grumbling noise, but instead, I managed to give it form.

“Do you know anything about Vander’s most recent transgression?”

Quillan looked up after staring down, as if he were examining an old memory he stumbled over while it was languishing in the far corner of his mind. His eyes snapped back to the present and narrowed at me. The scowl on his face extended to his voice, giving a sharp edge to all of his words. “No,” he said, “but I know you—”

“Please, just answer my question,” I interrupted hastily. My urgency and irritation surprised even me. I didn’t realize I was feeling that way. “What do you know?”

His expression shifted and he looked confused. It took him a long moment to find some less perilous words. “Not much,” he said as he shrugged. “Basically nothing. I know he and Dulcie broke up, or kind of. I heard Knight telling Casey as much when Casey asked him, but that was ages ago. I’m the last person besides maybe you that either of them would actually choose to discuss it with.” He shrugged again, as though the gesture were intended to take the sting out of that last bit. “What do you know?”

“Little more than that. Meg was involved, and it was a wretched thing, but no details.”

“Hmm.” Quillan nodded, chewing the inside of his cheek. I had seen Dulcie doing that before, a common tic, I supposed, but I wondered if she picked it up from him, or he from her? It was an irksome thought either way. “Why?”

“No reason.”

“She’s pretty shaken up,” said Quillan.

“Is she?” I asked. “And what, pray tell, gives you that idea?”

He scowled at me the way he might have toward a particularly stupid or vexing employee. Possibly at Dulcie in the beginning, when she was still new and even less cautious than she is now.

“More than usual,” he went on.

“I’ve noticed.”

“This is a lot.”

I scoffed, quite by accident, and rolled my eyes. “It is. But Dulcie can handle herself.”

“Can she?”

“Do you doubt her survival skills?”

“No,” he answered quickly. “But we’re all in a lot more danger now, and Dulcie often does really dumb things in her efforts to protect the people she cares about.”

I took a step forward and wrapped my fingers around the cold metal of the chair opposite Quillan. “Rather bold of you to assume you are on her list of people to worry about.”

“I shouldn’t be,” he said, raising his hands halfway up, “but I probably am, because that’s who Dulcie is. You probably are too,” he added. Was he trying to drive home the ridiculous notion that Dulcie could care a lick about either of us? If she fears burning candles, yes, she will most certainly be afraid of wildfires.

“Are you proposing a solution, or are we just making idle small talk?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied. His expression was blank and almost relaxed, but I could hear his heart pounding hard— fast even for an elf. “Any ideas?”

An image flashed through my mind’s eye of Quillan lying dead at Dulcie’s feet. “Nothing you would enjoy hearing about.”

“Because they involve killing me?”

“Ideally, they involve Dulcie killing you,” I said. “But I very much doubt I could persuade her to do that.”

Quillan leaned back in his chair. “Even though she should.”

“Even though she should,” I repeated coldly. In a perfect world, Dulcie would have killed the whole lot of us a long time ago.

I was about to say something more when we heard her screaming.

SIXTEEN

Knight

I was falling and the whole world turned bright red.

Crimson clouds filled my vision, streaks of lightning coursing through them like rushing water through pipes. I was falling through nothing but empty air and hearing the hissing warmth that comes from steam engines and sleeping dogs. The dense clouds were thick enough that I felt closed in. Like I was caught in quicksand, or drowning in mud.

I fell through a circle, a shimmering portal outlined in red, and hit the concrete. Hard.

I dropped, rolling to avoid some of the impact, and came up on one knee. Behind me, the portal I dropped through winnowed out to a single shining, red line. It shrank down to a tiny point before it disappeared altogether with a fire-white flash.

I looked around, seeing trees, hills, and a beach on the periphery of my vision. It was past a ruined highway and a handful of warehouses with crumbling roofs—the kind of place that was probably shattered to pieces long ago.

I recognized it at once. “We have arrived in Splendor,” I said.

Yes. Hades appeared in his customary rush of smoke.

“No pushing me into the ocean this time?”

There are many doors leading out, but none that lead in. Entering such a place without rending the various dimensions as Meg did requires the precise alignment of cosmic variables beyond your understanding.

“Gotcha. Where the hell is my army?” Fuck, that felt weird to say.

Where they must be.

“Which is where exactly?”

Scattered, said Hades, about the epicenter.

“The epicenter of what?”

“Mr. Vander, sir?” asked Henry. He slowly got to his feet a couple yards away, readjusting his glasses and shining like a fucking glowstick in a cave.

“You’re glowing,” I exclaimed.

Henry looked down. “Oh, hey, look at that!” He turned his eyes toward Hades and frowned with visible concern. “Um. Why am I glowing?”

The power that carved the Lokis from the bones of old mountains lives inside you now. You are a beacon, a light drawn backwards to the moth. Through this power, you will see what others cannot.

“Like that?” Henry asked as he pointed to something above the trees.

I looked and saw nothing but leaves and blank black sky. It was slowly surrendering to the burnt orange and grey of the dawn. Somewhere a dog started barking, and a car alarm was blaring, but other than that, it was eerily quiet even for this hour. There was absolutely nothing to see. “Like what?”

“Like that. The big, swirling, red thing way over there.”

“I don’t see any big, swirling, red thing.” I turned to Hades. “What’s the big, swirling, red thing?”

The epicenter.

Oh. “Meg.”

Precisely.

I was finally starting to catch up. “And Henry can see her from here?”

He can.

“And we’re positioned inside a shrinking spiral around Meg in order to kill and contain whatever she and the Darkness are spitting out of home base?”

Hmm, said Hades. He sounded like he was chuckling.

“What?” I demanded. When he didn’t answer right away, I asked again. “What?”

It seems you are not completely stupid after all.

“Great, thanks, how come Henry can see the red thing and I can’t?”

Do not whine, it is most unbecoming.

“For fuck’s sake, Hades.”

His skeleton grin seemed slightly more pronounced. The Sight is something a Loki cannot possess. Only an unclaimed soul, a clear soul, has the capacity to bear witness without going mad.

“Is that ‘sight’ with a capital S?”

Indeed.

“Of course it is.”

Would you prefer a more intricate or complex reason? Life will always be simpler and more complicated than you would like. Hades looked suddenly at the horizon. You are running out of time.

“You say that a lot.”

He didn’t acknowledge my comment. The ringing of the Burning Gong has given you access to the minds of those in your army. Reach for them, and they will answer. His tone turned darker.

“What, like telepathy?” I asked.

Yes. Give your army access to your mind in turn. Your maps, your memories, and your understanding to navigate Splendor and Meg herself. Hold nothing back; you do not have time to hide anything at this juncture.

“Are you actually helping me for once?”

He turned, but not to glare at me. His eyes, burning embers within the hollow sockets, were soft, almost gentle. Find the monsters. Burn their hearts in your hands. Do not allow the dark fire to touch you; they are the flames of madness, and they will unhinge your mind. Shadows emerged from the ground and wove around him, going up and up and up, cocooning him in red and black. I have done all I can for you now. Good luck.

He vanished in a plume of smoke.

“Well, he’s interesting,” said Henry. “Where’d he go?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. We have plenty of work to do.”

I reached out.

I’d done something similar with Dulcie once after Jax stole her from the ANC. My body had considered her mine, whatever that meant now, and even at such a crazy distance, I could still contact her. I remembered for a fleeting, worthless second, how relieved she sounded when she heard my voice in her head; and how panicked she felt when Jax discovered me and cut us off. I wondered if I could still reach her now… if I could only sneak into her head and apologize before she caught me and threw me out. I wondered if my eyes still glowed when I looked at her, or if she even wanted them to.

Focus, Knight. World to save, vampire to kill.

It didn’t take long to figure out. We Lokis always possessed telepathic capabilities between ourselves, but they were on a smaller scale. Now I had to try to communicate with them en masse, which I expected would be weird. To say the least. But also intuitive.

Lokis, engage, I thought. Which could have been overly formal and Power-Rangeresque, but whatever. It worked.

Gabe was the first to respond. Wassup, my dude?

The rest followed suit with what I can only describe as a mental ping. Without saying anything in particular, they made their presence known. Ten seconds later, we had a full hub.

Where the hell are we? asked Marco, the Spanish guy. He was taller than most of us with a heavy accent and I’d never met him before, but it seemed like I knew him all the same. My mind was filled with the information from the others now: names, origins and emotions were swarming like bees in a shed.

We’re in Knight’s head, Gabe answered. Your head, my head.

Not what I meant, jackass, Marco replied.

Splendor, I answered. I’m going to open my mind to you all completely. Hold nothing back, Hades had said. No time to put up walls. Reach into my mind and take what you need to get where you’re going.

And where are we going exactly? Gabe asked.

I looked at Henry. “Where are we going?”

“Toward the big, swirling, red thing, probably,” he answered, but he was frowning and chewing on the inside of his cheek.

“But?” I asked.

“But I’ve got a weird feeling,” he said as he pointed down the road. “It’s a warm feeling in that direction. I don’t know what it leads to, but I think we should go there first.”

I nodded because I figured Henry was like the chosen one so trusting his gut instincts was probably a good move. “One second, kid.”

Okay, everybody, think your locations at me, I said to the impatient legion. A mental image of whatever you’re looking at will be fine.

My mind was instantly flooded with pictures of buildings, new and old, decrepit and bright, illuminated by flickering street lights. I wondered if this was what it felt like to be a robot, tapping into surveillance cameras and sifting through entire databases in less than ten minutes.

Everyone was exactly as Hades said, within about a ten-mile radius of us. Henry and I were clearly on the western side of that perimeter. Fuck, this is weird.

You’re telling us, said Gabe. I just downloaded most of Splendor from your brain.

So you know where you are now? I asked.

Yup. Aw, man, you’ve got a Jamba Juice here?

Gabe. Priorities.

Right, sorry. So what’s the plan, Vander? This is your turf.

Fuck, what kind of monsters were we even looking for? I wanted to keep everybody right where they already were. That way, if a horde of big, angry whatevers suddenly came flooding out of Meg’s location, Splendor wouldn’t be caught totally defenseless. Can you all see where you are with regard to each other?

Resounding chorus of yeses. If necessary, I could think very hard about a specific person and get a general sense of where they were. A vague perception of warmth would point me in their direction.

Okay, we’re taking positions around a central point, I said. Henry says a big, red, swirling thing is there, which most definitely must be where Meg and the Darkness are.

And the Darkness? Gabe asked. Meg isn’t the Darkness?

The Darkness has possessed her. It’s like an angry Eldritch monster she’s using to get more power. We’re pretty sure it’s also driving her crazy.

I could feel him nodding, which was a bizarre sensation. Like somebody lifting your arm when your eyes are closed.

Sounds like fun, he said.

Loads. Start moving in a spiral towards it, I said. Keep on the lookout for monsters, especially anything you don’t recognize. It will probably be something dark, ugly, and conspicuously weird.

So, you? asked Gabe.

Could just as easily be you, thought Marco.

There was a hearty round of mental laughter. It petered out within two seconds as the severity of the morning settled over all of us—probably because someone realized what all of this meant, and the feeling bled into the rest of us.

So is this, like, the end of the world or something? asked a Loki named Nico.

Who the fuck knows, right? I answered.

Damn, said Nico. Pretty decent way to die.

Nobody’s dying today, I retorted. I’m going to follow Henry.

All hail the human flashlight, said Gabe.

Marco interjected, We’re all flashlights; take a look.

He was right. I looked at my hands, which were gleaming gold. I was casting a soft candle-like light across the street and the trees, brighter than I’d ever produced in the Netherworld. I imagined ripping out the hearts of the creatures we were searching for, and I saw their hearts crumbling like cigarette ash disturbed by a sudden gust of wind. This was Hades’ power. This was that manifestation of purpose he was talking about.

I’ll let you know where Henry takes us, I said. Keep your eyes open, we barely understand what we’re dealing with. Most of you are in law enforcement, and those of you who aren’t have at least seen enough to know how to be smart. Keep in touch, and use your best judgment.

And we’re on a mission to rip out hearts, asked Nico. Right? That sounded important.

Yeah, we’re ripping out hearts. It almost seemed karmic, or prophetic. One more thing that involved the Universe taking a long, hard look at my life choices and going out of its way to teach me by doing something ironic.

And burning them in our hands, added Marco.

“Detective Vander, sir, it’s getting bigger,” Henry interrupted as he watched the big, swirling, red thing. “And it’s moving faster now.”

I said the next bit out loud as well as in my head. “Then we’d better get moving. We’ve got a world to save.”

SEVENTEEN

Bram

We burst into Dulcie’s room just in time to see her setting the abomination on fire.

Its hand, long, slender and sharply-clawed, was wrapped around her throat and pressing her up against the wall, though clearly not with the intention of strangling her. One of its mouths was on the thin face of a drow that was mounted onto the body of something far larger and hairier which was attached to her ear. It whispered to her softly, running its free hand down her arm, as though it were trying to reassure her.

Despite being fully wreathed in fire, it did not seem to care.

“We,” said the abomination, its voice now smooth and steady, “are going home.” It sounded like a cracked perversion of Meg’s voice, braided with something darker and far less friendly.

“The hell we are,” Dulcie answered and reached upward. Perhaps she intended to break the thing’s wrist and wrench herself away. Before she was allowed the chance, something beside me went crack!

With a flash, the beast staggered a single step to the left. Black blood oozed from a small wound in its shoulder. It turned its multiple heads towards the source of the bullet, a fierce snarl coiling out of its throats like a cement mixer.

“Got it!” said a human officer standing near the door. He appeared absurdly pleased with himself. I spared the time to roll my eyes.

Dulcie took advantage of the abomination’s momentary distraction. She slammed her arm full force into its elbow. The creature’s arm bent ninety degrees in the wrong direction with a spectacular snapping sound before the skin ripped and the grey sheen of bone emerged beneath the burning light. The hand around Dulcie’s throat went slack, since all of the tendons were severed.

Dulcie darted away. The abomination turned back and swiped at her, grabbing her shirt and ripping through it, woefully ignorant of its own strength. Dulcie pulled herself free and bounded to her feet, her shirt dropping behind her like a flag cast from a burning ship. She was now left in a Nike sports bra, her midriff bare for all to see. Of course I tried not to pay much attention and found myself feeling increasingly ashamed that my attention should be riveted to the softness of her exposed skin during the most inopportune of moments.

As she moved, the fire leapt from the abomination to the grey carpet, and it, too began to burn. Alarms started to ring, glass-shattering shrieks accompanied by blinking, white lights. We heard the distant sounds of an urgent and very irritated evacuation.

None of us, of course, had any weapons. They’re not something you’re allowed to hold onto during an interrogation.

Quillan was looking at me. “Help her!” he said as we scrambled for the door. Perhaps he thought I was strong enough to simply lift the abomination away and hurl it into space.

“In case you failed to notice, it is on fire,” I answered. “Fire does not like me.” Similar to the way wood erodes under running water, fire is an element against which I simply have no defenses. But that did not mean I was not in the process of devising my own plan to help the unfortunate fairy.

A loud crash sounded behind us. When we turned around, the abomination was gone and Dulcie was crawling through the furthest hole in the wall that led to the outside. It was significantly larger than it was only thirteen seconds prior, and through it, we could faintly hear Dulcie cursing.

I did not wait for Quillan. I dematerialized and shadow-sped my way through the parts of the building that weren’t drowning in the vampire-consuming flames. I ran out of the building and around to the side where Dulcie and the abomination were now circling one another in the parking lot.

Before I say anything more about the abomination (which was still burning) or Dulcie (who was panting, which only caused her cleavage to further attract my attention), I am afraid I must pause here to describe the sky.

There was nothing inherently wrong with the sky, except that it seemed to vibrate, as the horizon might appear to vibrate on a very hot day. The cold wind was severe enough that even I could feel it, and those who were not already lacking proper body temperature were very likely shivering in their shoes. The darkness between the stars was steadily slinking away, revealing the dull, orange-grey of very early dawn, or so it seemed. When the first rays of glimmering bronze struck my skin, I flinched, but it was too late.

Yet I did not burn.

A cloud of something hung over us, shielding me from whatever bits of the sun were responsible for the burning of unholy things. As you can imagine, my feelings about this were mixed; I was safe, yes, but my safety from the sun’s rays also implied that something was intrinsically unnatural about the condition of the sky. I wondered if Meg played a part in its transformation.

In that pre-dawn moment, I stood perhaps less than seven strides from a burning abomination and a snarling Dulcie. The pair were now wrestling on the ground, and I had a thought that perhaps this was why Meg chose to join the Darkness in the first place. The promise of sunlight. That precious brightness was a luxury we had not enjoyed for hundreds of years. It was a change Meg could wring from the atmosphere itself, so we might never have to hide. And I must admit, watching the sunrise—or rather, what had become of the sunrise—I think I almost understood.

But I digress.

Dulcie was underneath the abomination now. It was a colossal creature with the heads (yes, in the plural) of the aforementioned drow and something very scaly with more teeth than I cared to count. Their necks were thankfully short, so there was no chance of one getting closer than the other as they snapped at Dulcie like rabid dogs. Two sharply pointed tails lashed back and forth as it struggled to keep Dulcie beneath it and away from its throat. She held both heads at bay in the place where their throats joined the rest of the body, raking her nails across their skin, ostensibly to carve the heads off their bodies so she could reach down and pull out their hearts.

I heard light, fast footsteps before Quillan was beside me, panting.

“What are you doing?” he demanded rather testily.

“Spectating,” I responded. I crossed my arms and tilted my head.

“Why aren’t you helping her?”

“Why are you not helping her?”

Quillan scowled and started to run forward but I caught him by the back of his shirt.

“Your gun cannot defend you. And perhaps I should point out that our dearest Dulcie, who is infinitely stronger than you could ever hope to be, is presently having enough of a challenge without you barreling in there and distracting her.” I paused for a moment. “I am helping my dear sweet by not helping her and you should do the same.”

Dulcie wrenched the abomination sideways and landed on top of it. She drove her hand into its throat with the adrenaline strength of an enraged werewolf on a mission, splattering her torso with black flecks. The expression on her face seemed somewhat frenzied. She was thrilling to observe.

“Give her a moment,” I said, and one moment was all she needed.

Dulcie, being more fairy than she was vampire, had no difficulty with the abomination’s current status as a living torch. The heads opened their mouths and we watched, utterly enthralled, as she pounded her fist into the face of one of them. Long and unnecessarily sharp teeth clattered to the ground. When all that remained were toothless gums and a writhing tongue, Dulcie thrust her hand down its throat, all the way up to her shoulder.

She was nothing short of spectacular.

The drow head sank its teeth into her shoulder and its claws into her arm, doing its damnedest to rip her arm off. Its left hand, the one Dulcie had broken already, was scrabbling on the ground, groping for purchase, and maybe trying to drag itself away. It left long, shallow grooves in its wake. The drow head began to chew.

“Oh, dear,” I said and took a step forward but Quillan’s hand on my arm prohibited me from moving closer.

“You’re right,” he said simply. “She can do this without us.”

I nodded and stepped back again, turning my attention back to Dulcie as I watched her fish inside the abomination’s body for barely three seconds before she found something. She ripped it out hard and fast enough to crack a bone in the abomination’s skull. The drow screamed. Dulcie flung a grey heart onto the concrete, where it shattered, exposing a clean grey interior.

Her arm was drenched in black and her fingers were curled into a dark, dripping fist as she punched the drow face squarely in its nose. I heard the cartilage crumple when the bone shattered and impaled its shards into whatever was left of its brain. If it were still alive conventionally speaking, her blow would have surely killed it.

Dulcie retrieved another heart. This one took a minute longer to find, spent fishing through the interminable number of organs Meg undoubtedly shoved inside. She probably wreathed each one with enchantments to stave off decay. A dark puddle of black and gold surrounded her. It was the abomination and fairy blood mixing, repelling each other like oil and water do. The blood glowed in the abomination’s fire.

Above us, the sky seemed to shiver.

“Bram,” said Quillan. He was looking at the rapidly spreading pools, now ponds, of Dulcie’s blood. The molten gold gleamed softly as the sun dragged itself over the horizon.

Sunlight touched my skin. Pale, clear, and warm. The sensation was bizarre.

“She is fine,” I replied. And of this fact, I was wholly convinced. If she were not, God himself would have had to intervene in stopping me from doing something, fire or no fire. “See?”

Dulcie pulled and something snapped inside the abomination. Whatever was physically anchoring the last heart to the rest of the body, when it snapped, she toppled backwards with the full momentum of her own weight. The abomination crumpled like a paper doll in the rain.

The heart fell to the concrete and broke apart. It was the last in the body and the shadows were still squirming inside when its grey skin burst, scattering everywhere like broken terra cotta pieces. Dulcie rolled until she was several yards away, then she sat up, panting, and striped with black and gold.

“Stand back,” I said. The abomination’s disappearance did not necessarily mean its death. But it was the most we could hope for until we could find some way to kill it properly. “It is going to burst into flames.”

And it did just that. Right At the same moment as the last of our intrepid party came streaming around the corner, like water over a broken dam, Samantha was upon the heart before she even realized what it was.

I called her name; but of course, I was too late.

The dark fire engulfed her completely. She collapsed to her knees. It swarmed all over her face, making her eyes shine darkly, if such a thing could be said of things that shine. She opened her mouth but did not scream. She had the same bizarre, starry look on her face that I saw in Knight’s apartment, when she stared through the flames to see the great, terrible fool responsible for them.

I stepped forward, unsure how I intended to help. The flames would vanish in another moment, but whatever they were doing to Samantha did not seem at all pleasant.

Then a figure appeared from nowhere, glowing gold, and he grabbed the burning heart.

He closed his fist tightly around the heart, which burst into flames—real ones—red and gold and white. The dark fire was instantly extinguished with a furious hiss. The heart spent another moment making an awful, whining sound before resigning itself to shimmering ash in short order.

“Ah, there you are,” I said, feigning a detachment I did not feel. “We have been looking for you.”

Vander did not share eye contact with me. Instead, he opened his hand. The ashes blew away, starry glitter sifting through his fingers like sand into the steadily brightening sky. I tried not to be impressed.

“Are you okay?” he asked, looking at Samantha. She was still staring at the ground and silent, but shaking.

“Yeah,” she said quietly. And then, “Fuck,” a sentiment we all shared.

“You can kill them,” Quillan announced, somewhat astonished. If Vander was surprised to see Quillan, he did not appear so.

I scoffed. “Stellar observation, sir. Tell me, what clued you in?”

“Shut up,” said Quillan, and then, to Vander, he asked, “How?”

“It’s a long story,” Vander replied, sounding beleaguered by the mere thought of it. He knelt by Samantha and placed a gleaming, golden hand on her shoulder. It was the glow that shines from a Loki in the Netherworld, lighting up his skin like fire. She calmed down at once.

“Loki thing. I’ll tell you about it when this is over,” he said.

Quillan nodded.

Vander looked up, perhaps to say more, but went statue-still. I followed his flaring, white-lit eyes across the bloody, black ground to Dulcie, who stood stiffly next to Henry. Pitch and gold dappled her skin, dripping down her fingers. The smell was most peculiar.

“Dulcie,” he said, and his voice was tight, as though some invisible force were doing me the great favor of strangling him. “I… Dulcie.” He said her name again and a flood of anger passed through me, like a spectral hand punching me in the gut with closed fingers of solid ice.

He swallowed, perhaps preparing to say something equally uninspired, but I could practically feel the numbness coming from his mouth. He blinked at her as one might blink at a UFO or a scantily-clad waitress.

Dulcie refused to look at him. Henry broke the silence before it could totally descend as he ran to Dulcie and threw his arms around her. She appeared quite surprised. Whether by Henry’s informality or the appearance of her estranged beau, I could not say.

“We should save the greetings as Dulcie is quite wounded,” I interrupted as I took a step toward her. But she held up her hand to ensure I remained where I currently was.

“I’m fine,” she said and her expression warned me not to argue with her. So I did not.

“Hi, Agent O’Neil!” Henry said, waving. “Sorry I’m late. I fell out of the sky and ran into Agent Vander in a volcano.”

That startled Dulcie out of her stiffness and rigidity. She blinked several times before she managed to reply. “You what?”

“It’s kind of a long story,” Henry answered, sounding suddenly rather sensible, and much older than he previously looked. “We should probably take care of all this before I tell you. But I will. It was interesting. Mr. Vander and I met Hades.”

“Hades?” Dulcie repeated, and I started nodding slowly. So that explained the vaguely dark but not inherently malicious presence I felt in Vander’s apartment. The god must have paid him a visit. Interesting…

Vander tore his gaze from Dulcie with considerable effort. “It’s just Knight, Henry. Don’t call me Agent Vander.”

“Right. Sorry, sir. Knight.”

I had a sudden vision of a small, blond child calling him “Sir Knight” and snorted. No one who heard me gave any comment.

“Don’t be. I’m just…” Vander swallowed as he cleared his throat. When he spoke, his eyes flitted restlessly between Henry and Dulcie. Eventually, they landed on her and remained there. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

Dulcie did not reply. She was stiff as a board and radiating the unbridled anger and discomfort of a werewolf trapped in a very small cage. For whatever reason, she looked at me to ask, “Is Sam okay?”

Samantha sucked in a long breath and nodded. “I saw her again.”

“Saw her?” said Vander. “What do you mean? Who?”

“I mean I saw her,” she repeated, only then realizing she was playing the pronoun game. “Meg. I glimpsed her through the smoke. Just now. I saw the same thing in your apartment too, when I was testing the smoke to see what it was.” She sucked in a short breath through an audibly constricted windpipe. “Meg’s on the other side of all the abominations, telling them where to go but…” She closed her eyes, perhaps in her effort to remember what exactly she saw, and grimaced as though it pained her to look. “But they aren’t listening. They are, but they aren’t, not all of them; they’re just off killing anything that moves. And she’s afraid…” She opened her eyes and frowned at nothing in particular.

“Of what?” I asked.

Samantha did not seem to hear. “It’s too much. Meg can’t see through them anymore and she doesn’t have enough bodies.”

“What do you mean?”

“The mist, the smoke, and the shadows! Meg was making bodies for them, but she doesn’t have enough bodies left. There weren’t supposed to be this many, and now The Darkness is getting impatient and angry and it’s becoming more than she can control. It wants something and she can’t stop it…” She trailed off, trembling, staring at the ground as though it could open up and swallow her.

“It is using her,” said a new voice, “to enter the world and devour it.”

We all turned as one to see a tall, remarkably unimpressed figure clad in a dress shirt and slacks, kneeling over the bodies. He was examining their faces and frowning deeply as though he knew some of them.

“Ezra,” I said.

Meg’s maker, my grandmaker. Easily more than eight hundred years old, and, consequently, infuriatingly patronizing. “How good of you to join us.” I certainly didn’t expect him to. He formerly asserted with some resolve that Meg was beyond saving. He insisted that it was our collective duty to end her unfortunate life for the betterment of existence as a whole. But he was also her maker, and they certainly must have shared a strong and ancient bond. I was not alone in assuming he would have preferred to leave this most unpleasant task to a younger, less involved generation.

“The power of the Darkness is consuming her,” Ezra explained without acknowledging me. He pushed up his sleeves, rolling them to his elbows. They were hideously stained with dust and blood. “She took the heart of the monster into her body to retake the Netherworld, and you,” he said to Dulcie. “But it was more than she bargained for. Obviously. She traded her spiritual autonomy for the right to draw on the considerable power of the Darkness, to build an army only the children of Hades could destroy. In doing so, she agreed, in practice if not in word, to act as its anchor and its future gate into the physical world.” He rolled his eyes, perhaps at himself, perhaps at Meg. “The Darkness does not make deals that are lucrative for its mortal party.”

“How do you know that?” Vander asked.

Ezra turned to him. “Which part?”

“The part about Hades’ children.”

Ezra shrugged. “I am very old,” he said. “I know many things.”

“Uh-huh,” said Vander, clearly unconvinced. “And where the hell have you been?”

“Following Meg, but very discreetly. I’ve been attempting to thwart her from behind the scenes. Perhaps I can convince her by way of her own spectacular failure to return to the land of common sense.”

“Is that where we are?” I asked, rolling my eyes. Ezra ignored me.

“But,” he said, “that, as you can imagine, has not worked out as I hoped. I have spent the better part of the last several months searching for the paltry remains of Meg’s coalition, but they are either very good at hiding or very dead. The dead most likely were killed in service to the Darkness, and the reckless manufacture of Meg’s abominations.” He shook his head, as though Meg were no more than an errant child being disciplined for breaking another child’s toy. “Meg has given herself over to the Darkness completely now, or perhaps it usurped her control and she cannot realize it. Regardless of how, she is an integral part of it now.”

“What happened to Meg being lost from the beginning?” I asked.

“I did not want to believe it, no more than you did. Perhaps I allowed myself to linger overlong in a state of profound denial, desperately hoping she could still be redeemed.” He gestured to the black rain falling all around us. “That is difficult to swallow in our current circumstances.”

“No kidding,” said Henry.

Ezra, for the first time, turned his eyes on the young human. “And may I ask the identity of our glowing human friend?”

“Henry,” said Henry. “Henry Cotton.”

“Henry Cotton,” Ezra said thoughtfully. “And what is your purpose here?”

“He’s our guide,” Vander answered.

“To what?”

“Meg, we hope.”

I frowned. “Do we?”

“There’s a big, red, tornado thing over that way,” Henry chimed in, pointing across the highway toward the old suburbs. His voice sounded so small and far away compared to the rest of us. “They can’t see it but I can because Hades pushed me inside a volcano.”

“Ah.” Ezra clasped his hands together and nodded as though Hades pushing Henry Cotton into a volcano made perfect sense. Then he cast his eyes around the group as if he were looking for something very valuable. “Well, then. We’ve no time to lose. Shall we?”

EIGHTEEN

Dulcie

Knight told us, well, he told Sam, (since he was giving me a wide berth), about Hades. He also told her about the Lokis, and how they were spread all around the “epicenter,” where Meg had holed herself up with the Darkness. That was where the abominations were almost definitely coming from. He described the mountains and the place with the red sky, and said that Casey had almost certainly passed through there on his way to wherever the abomination dragged him.

He further mentioned that Hades said we were running out of time.

All the while, I was busy healing myself after my run-in with the abomination, no thanks to Bram and Quillan who had both stood on the sidelines gawking at me. The stupid thing had done a pretty decent job of trying to tear my arm off. The good part about being so many different supernatural creatures, though, was that I could heal myself even faster than before.

Quillan stayed behind to give the FBI a general heads-up. If hearing a god telling us to get moving failed to convey that the shit was about to hit every fan in Splendor, nothing could have warned them. We intended to deal with the fallout of wrecked buildings and our elusion of federal custody when this was all over. Now was the time for action and bureaucracy was definitely going to interfere with that.

“There are abominations everywhere,” said Knight. We were still standing in the parking lot over the one I’d killed.

“How can you tell?” Sam asked.

“Loki neural network,” he answered, tapping his temple with his index finger. “I can see what they see if I look hard enough.”

“So, you mean they’re in your head?” asked Quillan.

Knight nodded.

Bram tsked and crossed his arms. “What an unfortunate place to be.”

Knight pointedly ignored him. “They’ve got the city covered, but they’re everywhere. In the streets mostly. And a few have gotten bolder, busting into shops and houses. We don’t have any soldiers to spare.”

“Soldiers?” Bram asked incredulously.

Henry shrugged. “I mean, it is an army.”

I was the first to catch what Knight meant. “So we’re on our own.”

He looked at me. His eyes of glacier blue were rimmed with pain which I could feel in the back of my throat. His eyes locked onto me and he nodded once. “We’re on our own.”

***

“We’re here,” said Henry. We stopped running, half of us were panting, and most of us sweating bullets. Henry stood perfectly still, as though we hadn’t just raced across the last twenty blocks, running like escaped convicts. “Are you guys okay?”

“Yeah,” I answered, breathing deeply as I looked up. The building in front of us sat in the middle of an old, largely abandoned suburb. It was promptly evacuated after the earthquakes I’d caused when I tried to kill Sam. Most of the foundations, as well as the fragile plumbing systems that ran through and around them, were hopelessly damaged beyond repair. Basically everybody in the neighborhood collectively decided it was better to move somewhere else. Splendor City Council kept promising to demolish and rebuild the city, but like most of their infrastructure projects, they still hadn’t “gotten around to it.” Even the walls of this house, though many of them still stood, were hanging at weird angles, propping up pieces of roof that was peppered with large holes.

It took me a lot longer than it should have to recognize it.

I almost laughed. Come home, the abomination had uttered.

Home.

This was my house, the place where I lived with mom until she died. I was home.

But Meg did something to it. A gnawing hunger hung like ghosts in the air, and the color of the house was different. The white walls were yellow, the ivy that customarily wreathed its windows was all wilted and mostly black, and the grass was dead. The stairs smelled like blood and the air stunk of rot. The windows were broken, and the door half unhinged.

Meg must have been here a while, and in that time, she’d been very busy. But I guess that should have been obvious.

“Meg’s in there?” asked Knight.

I found I couldn’t meet his eyes. I couldn’t even look at him. The pain I felt when I did was so much that it made it hard to breathe.

“Yeah,” Henry said.

“No question,” I added.

“Her presence is quite strong here,” Ezra agreed. His shoulders rose slowly with a breath he didn’t need to take, like he was bracing himself for whatever unpleasant thing we’d find inside.

The door creaked open in front of us. There was no wind, and no one on the other side who could have pulled it open. Maybe it wasn’t quite closed, or latched wrong, and the floor was slanted enough to let the forces of gravity do its thing. But still, it was creepy.

Cold air poured out of the doorway onto the porch. I tasted something sour in the back of my throat that reached all the way into my stomach, like something was rotting inside there.

We all looked at each other and nodded once, and the people who carried guns were poised and ready to shoot before we went in. What we found made me sick.

The walls were gone. The living room, the kitchen, and a dining room were once divided by soft green walls, but now they were missing. It was just one big, open, broken space. I saw furniture I didn’t recognize: a couch and a hideous matching pink armchair were torn in pieces, their stuffing ripped out and their wooden supports snapped in half. They stuck out like flagless masts on sinking ships. The refrigerator was lying on its side, its door torn clean off, the sterile white light casting long shadows across the floor. The cabinets were open, emptied, and looked as if they were busted apart with sledgehammers. Maybe it was by the fists of newly born monsters still struggling to get the hang of their hodgepodge bodies. The stair railing was half-gone too, and pieces of wood were carelessly strewn up and down the steps lined with torn carpet. Some of them appeared to have been chewed on. Two lightbulbs remained attached to the ceiling fan, one of them flickering weakly, the other humming incessantly with too much electricity.

A shadow was hunched at the end of the room. Muttering softly, and facing the wall, its dark, matted hair tumbled down its back to the floor. The whole house smelled like blood.

Dark lumps were piled all around the hunched figure—bodies, some still whole, some in pieces, but all in various states of decay. Some were creatures I’d never seen before; others were criminals I vaguely remembered arresting years ago for minor indiscretions; while still others were civilians whose faces I recognized from the passports they filed with us before they could travel to and from the Netherworld. I recognized a few people from Meg’s parties: the draconian and werewolf lords who were so excited about retaking the Netherworld from the ANC; and Sebastian, Meg’s vampiric manservant, the one I’d slept with so often when I was under Meg’s glamour and control.

At seeing Sebastian, I felt like I wanted to throw up and a host of memories of a time I wasn’t in control of my body suddenly wafted through my mind like the rotting smell of death.

And then I saw Casey, cold and still on the floor against one wall, dark blood either splattered across his mouth or dribbling out of it, I couldn’t tell. His arms were blue with the glyphs and lines of Siphon magic, and he was struggling to keep whatever Meg did to him from ripping him into pieces.

“She wants his heart,” Bram whispered next to me, quietly enough that only Meg and I could hear. “The mist is inside him, slowly turning him to stone. I do not know how long his government magic can resist and hold it off.”

Beside me, Sam sucked in a breath. She hadn’t heard us, but she saw Casey. Thankfully, she had the presence of mind not to move towards him. Clapping her hands over her mouth, she closed her eyes for a minute, as if she were trying not to scream. She was trying to get a hold of herself.

I looked at her and nodded, letting her know that it wouldn’t do any of us any good if she lost her shit. We had to do this right. Casey’s life obviously depended on it.

The shadow moved and giggled.

“Dulcie,” Meg said. But she wasn’t speaking to me. She had to know we were here, but the words came out more as a chant, or a prayer, the kind of thing you’d use to fend off evil spirits. “Dulcie, Dulcie, Dulcie…” She swayed back and forth, slouching over something big and grey. She lifted her hand, and a needle and steel thread flashed between her fingers. She gave it a sharp tug and the thread snapped.

“Breathe,” she said. The room got darker, a single light flickered, and the walls creaked and groaned like an old ship.

The thing in her lap gurgled.

A monstrous, silvery head lifted itself off the ground and peered around Meg with black eyes and black teeth. “Sister,” it said. This one had no trouble speaking. Apparently, Meg was getting much better at making them. “Sister is here.”

Meg stiffened and turned slowly to face us. Her smile split her face nearly in half. “Dulcie,” she said as she stood, the abomination standing with her, lumbering to its enormous clawed feet.

Meg was paper-pale and gaunt, horribly haunting in a way that suggested how pretty she might have been before. Veins pulsed and flickered under her skin like dark strips of sputtering neon, black as ink, spilling from the long, bleeding lines on her arms and face. It looked like she’d been scratching herself. Her hands went to her arms and she started smearing the blood with her palms. When they came away, they were black as pitch.

“Sweet Dulcie.” Meg’s words sounded like creaking metal, tinny and difficult to understand. She reached for me with both hands, her palms up, darkness falling from between her fingers like water. There was something wrong about her smile, not to mention, her whole face. Her bones were bent and crooked, as if she broke them and they healed the wrong way.

“You’ve come home,” she said again. “Home.”

“No,” I answered as I lifted my gun and fired. A second too late, I remembered that it wasn’t full of dragon’s blood anymore, but dragon saliva. If it couldn’t kill me, it definitely couldn’t kill a Dark-amped Meg.

The bullet struck her dead center in her forehead, and her head snapped back. She ever so slowly, lifted her head back up. Black blood rolled out from beneath the bullet hole in thin, glistening streams. Her smile was fixed, but her eyes were twitching now, and changing colors, but returning to black all the way through.

“Why…?” She cocked her head. “Would you do that?”

“Shit,” I answered.

Meg looked at the people behind me and seemed to see them for the first time. Her expression shrank from clinical joy to demonic fury. “Oh.” She waved her hand and stared at me, unblinking, but she wasn’t talking to me anymore. “Forgive me,” she said. “They are not ready, but I require your service.”

Of course I had no idea what she was talking about.

Black water and smoke crawled into the living room from the front door, the broken windows, and dripped down the holes in the ceiling, falling and fizzling into smoke. Drop by drop they filled the limp bodies in the room, and the bodies started to move.

Fuck.

the bodies clearly weren’t ready. These bodies were decaying, and whatever Meg did to the abomination I’d just fought with to stave off its decay she definitely hadn’t done to these. They were mostly in one piece and had at least one functioning heart, but there wasn’t much more to say in their favor. Their skin was grey, their stomachs bloated, their eyes yellow and vacant. Jaws hung limply, the nerves that commanded those muscles now rashly degraded beyond use.

Everyone took a small step backwards. Everyone but Knight and me, and we stepped forward, both of us breathtakingly furious.

The bodies that could speak opened their mouths and crooned, “Si…sss…ter…” None of them could completely get the word out.

Meg blinked at me and gestured broadly to her shambling army. “Kill all but your sister,” she said, clearly speaking to them and not to me. “Destroy them.” Her head twitched sharply at an angle and her smile returned full-force.

“Don’t worry, Dulcie,” she said, sweet as ashes and caramel. “Everything will be all right soon.”

Knight was the first to move. He tackled the abomination closest to Meg and they started rolling. Around me, everyone else scattered, taking up positions on the walls or, in Bram’s case, the middle of the room. I heard the sounds of shooting and breaking bones of the poorly animated bodies waddling towards us. The bodies weren’t preserved, and their exaggerated decay made it ridiculously easy for those with extreme strength to pull off their heads—but that was all Bram and Ezra could do unless they wanted to fill the whole house with that awful, cold fire.

Meg turned to Knight, baring her teeth with red eyes.

“Meg,” I said but I never moved.

She paused and turned to me just in time. My fist connected perfectly with her nose.

Anyone else would have broken a hand on her face, but she spent an inordinate amount of time and resources making me beyond powerful. Her bones cracked underneath my fist like papier-mache under a rock. Meg reeled backwards and screamed, putting her hands over her nose. She pulled them away to glare at me and snarl, and I saw a thin, black line trailing out from one nostril.

I closed my eyes, focusing for a second, and endured the cracking and bending in my bones and skin. When I opened them again, I was slightly taller. I could also feel my teeth which were sharper, my canines lengthened. My eyes were bigger and more yellow, casting a faintly sour light onto Meg’s face. I flexed my fingers and felt my nailbeds elongating into claws, which were long and sharp, glinting in the dim illumination. I didn’t go fully werewolf but this was the furthest into the transformation I ever ventured.

“Oh, Dulcie,” Meg said, and she relaxed a little and smiled at me with obvious pride. “Look at you.”

“Look at me,” I agreed. My voice sounded slightly off, like my vocal chords were being fed to a woodchipper.

I waited another second, expecting her to say something else, stalling. It required another god-level skeleton creature to defeat her last time, and now our only trump cards consisted of the werewolf-me and a Loki who could squish the Darkness out of existence. But he was a little busy just then.

So, my intention was to fend Meg off until Knight could pop into the fight and kill her properly. That was assuming her body now worked the same way her stupid shadows did. It was equally feasible that her body just couldn’t die now. Surrendering yourself to a cosmic violation like the Darkness had to have some physical perks, but it didn’t do any good to think about that right now. I decided to let Knight find out after he finished kicking abomination ass.

I had the thought, albeit brief and fleeting, like a flash of static on a television screen, that Knight might die in here. Hades, we all might. We’d danced with a lot of really unlikeable creatures ever since he came traipsing into Splendor all those years ago. However, this was bigger than smuggling potions and more unforgiving than my father. This was a big, angry, sludge monster that wanted the world to end immediately.

Happy thoughts, Dulcie, happy thoughts.

Step one: distract. That shouldn’t be too difficult, considering Meg’s nightmare obsession with me.

“Proud of your little monster?” I asked. Not the best opening line, but it was the first thing that came to my mind.

Meg smiled and took a few shaky steps towards me. She radiated icy cold. I expected my breath to mist in the air as she approached, but either my breath wasn’t warm enough or the cold itself wasn’t real, just another side effect of her proximity to the Dark, a Dementor sucking the life out of everything around it.

“Yes.” She reached up and I let her pet me as I stared at her with huge, unblinking eyes, noticing her face was jaundiced under the yellow light. The shadows beneath her cheekbones and her jaw were sharp, and her eyes seemed to sink deeply into her skull. The direct light made her gauntness less exaggerated, but she still looked like something you’d uncover in a haunted house after a fire. She was deliberately designed to be terrifying, awe-inspiring, and now she represented a whole cartload of sadness and heartbreak. Like a fighter jet half buried in sand, or a cruise liner at the bottom of the ocean. There were many stories in the deep lines of her face, all of them tragedies.

The abomination screeched behind her and Knight pressed his gun into its throat before he fired. Black water gushed in a fountain from the hole. And for just a split second, it felt like old times. Like it was just Knight and me, battling evil like we’d always done. Just a couple of the good guys kicking the bad guys’ asses.

But then I was brought back to the reality of where we really were and how it wasn’t the good ol’ days anymore.

I spared a look over Meg’s shoulder and found Knight all bloody and black, panting, glowing like a goddamn lightbulb. He dug through its newly inflicted wound, hunting for the heart. The abomination screamed and moaned.

Meg didn’t seem to hear them.

“My sweet child.” She stroked my face.

I shrugged. Keep her eyes on you, keep her eyes on you, I thought.

Her shoulders shook, and she made a thin, whistling sound, a piss-poor impersonation of a laugh. “You are my child.” She lifted her other hand and placed it on my other cheek. “And you are so. Much. More.”

We might have stayed like that for the rest of the fight: me standing there panting, Meg staring imagining me disemboweling every one of her enemies. And it would have been so—if Bram hadn’t body checked her from the side.

***

Immediately, Meg went from insane proud mother to insanely pissed-off creature of the night.

If Bram wanted to ram her at any other time, I don’t think he could have managed it. Meg wasn’t just significantly older than he was (and in possession of all the terrifying vampiric powers she received at the turn of every century), she was also infested with shadows that were bound and determined to keep their worldly anchors on her feet. Now she was staring at me, and totally checked out. So he must have caught her by surprise.

Color me impressed.

Even so, Bram barely affected her. She stumbled several steps to my right before attacking him and snarling. Her hand, bright white and skeletal, shot out suddenly and wrapped its fingers around his throat. Even against his skin, she was ghostly pale.

But that wasn’t the point. As Bram scuttled away—not very far, and not fast enough to matter—I caught a glimpse of the pointed wooden stake poking out of her chest. It came from a piece of busted furniture, and was not an officially authorized stake, but wood was wood, so it didn’t matter.

It shouldn’t have mattered.

Meg looked down and saw the stake. She pulled it out with a furious shriek. Mist coiled out of her wounds, shrouding them in black, and when it cleared, the wounds were gone. Her body spat out the splinters like sunflower seed husks.

Well, fuck.

“Mine!” she shouted as she looked at me. But before she could do anything more, I grabbed a fistful of her dark, thin hair. I wrenched her back and, without thinking, sank my teeth into her neck. In the back of my mind, I was vaguely hoping that drinking her body dry might kill her despite everything else.

I managed a single rapid swallow before I let go of her and stumbled back, gagging. The taste was a mixture of rancid cough medicine and spoiled milk. I doubled over. My stomach heaved, and I vomited up her blood. It was black and gummy like pulverized licorice.

I looked up with watery eyes just in time to see Meg lifting Bram clean off his feet and lobbing him across the room like a steel caber. I heard a squishy sound and a shout as he was ruthlessly impaled on a massive splinter of wood jutting out of an old couch. He shouted out his pain as Panic pounded through me in a sharp, rhythmic drumbeat at the thought that she’d just killed him.

“Bram!” I screamed but a second later, I was relieved to see the wood had impaled his shoulder, not his heart and he was fine. For now anyway.

Meg hissed something with a lot of sharp letters at him (“mine” was probably in there somewhere). She didn’t turn back to me but stayed where she was, her legs apart, watching him. She was no doubt waiting to see if he’d get up and try again. As well as defending her “daughter.”

Fuck, I needed for this to be over.

We both heard a ripping sound and turned to see Knight still wrestling with the first abomination. The grey mass of fur and teeth reared with him on its back, his hands under its chin, and Knight’s blood on its face and its hands. He gave its head a sharp twist. I heard the neck snap, and the whole vertebrae began breaking clean away, but he didn’t stop there. He twisted and twisted until the skin started to tear, and the head popped off like the cork from a bottle of champagne, rocketing across the room with the force of his pull. Its knees buckled underneath him and it fell forward.

Knight reached down its demolished throat, found its heart, and ripped it out. Apparently it only had the one, because it crumbled half a second after the heart exited the body. Knight crushed the heart in his hands in a glittery burst of light and sparkle.

Beside me, Meg gasped.

Her eyes were bugfuck-big. Her mouth popped open and she was taking small, unconscious steps away from Knight and her dead creation. Knight stood and wiped blood away from his mouth, leaving the black that coated his hands in its place. He cast his eyes around the room, breathing heavily. Eventually, he found Meg and me.

He looked at her, and she froze.

“You,” she said to Knight, balling up her fists.

I jumped on her back before she could do anything, digging my claws into her chest and her face. “Me,” I said in her ear.

She screamed and reached up, grasping for something, and eventually decided on my wrists. With a swift jump, she landed on top of me. I barely felt the blow (werewolf adrenaline does that), but the floor bent beneath me, breaking everything from the floorboards under the carpet to the concrete foundation.

She whipped herself around, grabbed my hands, and pinned them to the floor on either side of me, digging into the ground with her sharp nails. The smell of her blood raining down on me made me gag.

“They have hurt you,” she said, “they have warped your mind!”

Hades, that was almost funny.

“I can help you.” She took my chin in her hand. “Dulcie, let me—”

I opened my mouth, and white-hot fire poured from the back of my throat.

NINETEEN

Sam

I clung to the wall in one corner of the room, trying to make myself very small. Meg’s dark magic was everywhere, a thick, invisible mist that made it hard to do any magic of my own—not that there was much I could do. My prime offensive was fire, and unless I wanted to burn Bram and Ezra black as coal (as tempting as that sounded), burning the abominations was absolutely out of the question.

I saw Henry darting through the center of the room like a glowing mouse, flitting between bits of furniture, as if trying to hide from the walking corpses all around him. It either worked or they just didn’t care about him, because he made it all the way over to Casey without a hitch. Meg and Dulcie were going at it in the center of everything; Knight was dealing with the abomination; Bram was impaled on a spike, and Ezra was busy with the flailing mobs of dead adversaries. Anyone who did see Henry didn’t have enough time to do anything about it.

I watched Henry kneeling by Casey. He put his head near Casey’s mouth, listening for his breath. After a few seconds, his face scrunched up and he appeared not so much worried as confused. He put his fingers next to Casey’s throat, searching for a heartbeat, or anything else that would validate his existence.

I willed him to look at me so I could ask if Casey was breathing. He did—and Ezra chose that moment to rip out an abomination’s stomach. He tore a hole through its torso, spraying black blood before a grey heart came tumbling out. Black leaked from its calcified arteries and began to pulse, already unstable.

It rolled towards Henry.

Henry saw it coming barely a split second after I did. The twitching grew fevered, spastic, and the first fire licked around the edges of the heart. Henry, seemingly without thinking, slammed his hand down on it like he was crushing a bug.

It reacted by bursting open in a flutter of gold.

Henry’s eyes went wide and he spent a long second just staring at his hands. Something must have clicked to him, because his face was suddenly set and stony as he began moving with renewed purpose. He opened Casey’s mouth, inhaled a long breath, leaned down, and blew into Casey’s mouth with air that glowed.

Casey was on his side a second later, coughing up a nasty, black substance.

Relief wasn’t even the word for the way I felt.

***

Dulcie

Every fairy in the world can set things on fire, but I’d never done it with my mouth before. Turns out that shit burns. I might as well have been sucking on a red-hot branding iron like a fucking lollipop.

Meg was rolling around on the floor, chanting, “No, no, no, no, no!” as she desperately tried to put out her hair. She only succeeded in burning the carpet before an ugly grey recliner caught on fire.

I watched her, bleary-eyed, until my gaze drifted from her to the people behind and around her. Henry was patting Casey on the back as Casey hacked up black ink. Ezra was facing off with a draconian-werewolf abomination that hosted an array of lesser bodies, all missing limbs, and leaking black. I didn’t know what it took for something as ancient and powerful as Ezra to feel fatigue, but he seemed to be slowing down. Or maybe that was just a trick of the light.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t; Knight saw it, too. A body collapsed beside him, a golden haze slowly drifting away from his hand. He took one look at Ezra and started to run.

***

Knight

I didn’t get very far.

Taking a single step towards the abomination struggling with Ezra, I felt teeth sinking into my shoulder.

I turned my head and found a vampire abomination with his fangs buried into my skin. His eyes gazed vacantly at and through me before he started chewing. In the half-second I was distracted by the anomaly, two more slammed into me like sacks of potatoes, slumping against me, pulling their broken nails across my skin, most of them too dull to do any real damage.

I elbowed the one gnawing on my shoulder in the face, fracturing its teeth and bashing in its already glass-fragile skull. It crumpled to the ground like a ragdoll, and remained unmoving, at least for now. I took the undead draconian by its nose and twisted it until I heard a bone break; then I pressed hard into its face. It felt squishy when the shards penetrated what was left of its brain. Black oozed out of its nose and from half a hundred tiny rips in its skin. It fell sideways, landing on the chest of the one next to it, and they both dropped. I drove my heel into the face of the one still moving.

Their skin felt like wet paper. I barely had to touch the hearts before they burst apart. It was getting much easier to kill them. I hoped that was a good sign.

Not ten steps from me, another abomination screamed. Ezra threw two zombies off his back and turned before the abomination punched Ezra squarely in the face. Being so big, without any conscious mind to restrain it from the damaging levels of physical exertion, the abomination punched the six-hundred-plus-year-old vampire in the nose severely enough to knock Ezra off his feet.

That was saying something.

Then it turned to me and raised its fist. White knuckles broke through the skin, and looked wet as they shimmered in the firelight.

I heard Henry shouting.

***

Dulcie

Looking up at the sound, I saw a bright light leaping onto the abomination’s back.

Henry wrapped one arm around its neck, thrusting a small pocketknife into its throat. Black blood shot out like a geyser around the blade, dissolving when it touched Henry’s skin. When the abomination tried to scream, he thrust his knife even deeper, and the sound cut off abruptly, resorting to static.

“Just fucking die!” Henry shouted. The words sounded odd coming from his mouth. He just was usually so polite… and calm.

A massive, bleeding, black claw rose up and raked Henry across the face, carving a line into his eye and cheek. He gritted his teeth, wrenched the knife out of its neck, and plunged it deeply into the abomination’s eye. Then he slammed the handle down onto its nose so the skewered eyeball popped totally out of the socket. The abomination shrieked and flailed wildly, backhanding Knight and flinging him sideways, straight into Meg.

The two of them hit the wall very hard and slid to the ground. Knight pulled himself slowly to his feet, groaning.

Rather, he tried to pull himself to his feet. Meg sat up, blinked and recognized him, instantly pouncing on him like a jumping spider on a fly.

“You,” she hissed, black muck dripping from her mouth onto his face. “You hurt my baby.” She lifted Knight’s head and slammed it down hard enough to crack something—hopefully the floor boards.

“No!” I yelled.

She ignored me, or maybe she just didn’t hear my protest. “You,” she said again, glaring daggers into him as she hauled herself to her feet. Half her face was black and the other half was chalky white. She stepped towards him—a human step, that was angry, deliberate and furious. She wanted him to see her coming. Or maybe she was just too far gone to be any faster than she was.

“Leave him alone,” I screamed.

Meg looked at me with a sad, broken expression. Like something I’d never seen before. She stared blankly at me for a long time and blinked slowly. She appeared to be lost at sea and totally uncomprehending.

“He hurt you,” she hissed, getting close to tears. “He hurt you. The Darkness showed me. I know.” She paused. “I saw what he did to you. He hurt you.”

“No shit,” I replied. I thought Knight flinched when I glimpsed him from the corner of my eye, but I might have imagined it. I heard myself adding, “But you made him do it.”

“No, not me, not me,” Meg said, half laughing and half crying. “I had nothing to do with this.” Every third word came out as an animalistic snarl. Laughter made her form jitter and spark, like she was glitching out of existence.

“What are you talking about?” I screamed at her. I was in no mood for riddles.

“The darkness is all-knowing,” she responded. “And it has shown me all I need to see, my child.”

“Shown you what?” I spat through my teeth.

“What this… this hideous creature did to you, to my dear daughter. My dearest Dulcie.”

She smiled, lifting her hands to her mouth, and blew. The cold, black fire streamed out from between her fingers. Dividing itself into two bulbs of onyx flame, they both flew toward Bram and Knight, heading straight for their eyes. Knight collapsed, and Bram just writhed as he nursed his impaled shoulder. Both of them were screaming.

“For you,” she said to me. She lifted Sebastian’s decapitated head by his hair and flung it at me. It struck the ground and rolled like a bowling ball, coming to a stop at my feet. The empty sockets stared mournfully up at me.

“Justice. They will kill each other for you,” Meg ranted as she looked at Knight and Bram but her crazy ravings were completely lost on me now. “This is not my fight any longer. The conflict is between them now—he who seeks to protect you against he who harmed you.”

I clocked her hard across the face before she could finish.

***

Bram

Meg bared her teeth, every one of them needle-sharp and smeared with blood, most likely her own, as she laughed. She made a choking sound, a thin, rusty metallic noise like whirling pennies in a blender. She lifted her hands to her mouth and blew into her palms as though she were trying to warm herself. A fire appeared, thin, black and inky. It flew through the air towards us faster than even I could follow, first entering Vander’s eyes, then mine. He screamed, and I believe I probably did as well. The pain caused by the fire was not endured for any length of time by either of us. I was not conscious long enough to process it. The grey living room was consumed in darkness, and I went somewhere very far away.

As the darkness receded, I saw not ripped upholstery and black-bloodied walls, but a vast expanse of country and barbed wire fences, similar to those the human farmers put up to keep their cattle from roaming. A handful of trees were scattered about the landscape, half of them completely uprooted, torn out by earthquakes or cleaved by lightning. It was dark, and the moon was at its most distant apogee. The sounds of chirping crickets sang in the night air. The only light by which I could see any of this came from headlights. They belonged to a large, black SUV, upon which I suddenly realized Dulcie was leaning.

Her hands were pulled behind her back and she was a much younger Dulcie. She had not yet experienced the trauma produced by Meg. She also had not yet dethroned her father. How I knew all of this, I cannot explain. But I felt a solid understanding inside me all the same.

I blinked and saw another figure, which was much larger. After a few moments, I managed to recognize Vander’s face in the dark. I watched him lifting the much smaller Dulcie by her upper arms and jerking her forward, slamming the door of the vehicle behind her.

“Why are we stopping here?” Dulcie asked, her voice teetering with anxiety. Somehow, and it still remains unknown to me, I could see Vander's narrowed eyes boring into hers with heated fury.

“Why? Are you scared, Dulcie?” he asked. “Are you afraid I'm going to hurt you?” He leaned into her until less than two inches separated them. “Kind of like the way you hurt me?” he continued as he shook his head. “No, kind of like the way you devastated me?”

I failed to understand what I was witnessing. But something about the vision told me that it spoke the truth, and was an accurate portrayal from a long time past.

“Please don't hurt me,” Dulcie whispered, her expression turning frightened.

My fingernails dug into my palms as my hands fisted of their own accord.

“Knight,” Dulcie continued softly. “Please just let me explain. I can make you understand how wrong you are about everything.”

“No,” he said, slamming his hand against the door beside her head. Before she could respond, he gripped the back of her neck, wrenching her forward. A short breath later, his mouth was on hers as he snagged a fistful of her glorious hair.

Dulcie attempted to pull her head back to break the seal of their lips, but Vander’s fist at the nape of her neck held her firmly in place.

He pulled away from her and she glared at him. “I want you to stop,” she said in a small voice, her eyes begging him to keep away from her.

“Why, Dulcie? Would it upset Bram?” Vander asked in a lascivious tone, his eyes dancing with sadistic glee. “Have you sworn loyalty to him, just like you did to me?” Then he shook his head and chuckled. “The poor, stupid son of a bitch.”

I could not restrain my shock as Vander’s words coursed through me.

“You know that's a lie,” Dulcie retorted.

Vander shook his head but said nothing, his gaze traveling from her face down to her breasts. He stared at her unabashedly, as if he wanted to make her feel as uncomfortable as possible.

“Please don't do this,” she whispered.

“You know you want me to.”

I swallowed hard, suddenly afraid for where this scene might end. But there was nothing I could do to stop it. And, furthermore, I would not have stopped it even if I could have. I now believed this was something I needed to see. I had to understand how it really was between Vander and my Dulcie. I had to understand what had transpired between them.

“Please,” she said again.

Silently, Vander stared at her and she just watched him, her eyes growing wider.

“Knight,” she tried to say, but her voice faltered when he touched her stomach and traced the waistline of her pants. While keeping his gaze fixed on her, he looped his fingers beneath her pants and tugged on them, dragging them down her legs, and exposing every inch of her. She tried to shimmy away from him, but his hold on her pants was relentless and he simply reached down, slipping one sneaker off and pulling one pant leg free. With her arms cuffed behind her back, she was helpless to resist him.

“Knight, please stop,” she said again. “This isn’t the right place for this. I don't want ...”

“You don't want me?” he asked.

“I don't want to do this right now,” she stammered. “Not when things are this bad between us,” she added. Her tone of voice was so soft that it nearly disappeared on the slight breeze that wafted between them.

Vander chuckled acidly. “Things will never be good between us again, but that doesn't change the fact that I still want this.” With that, he grabbed her, pulling her against him.

She tried to push away from him, but didn't get far. He pressed her against the large, black vehicle again.

“I don't want to do this,” she whispered.

Vander didn't respond as he gripped her brassiere, using the strength inherent in his species. He simply tore it in half as she gasped. Her breasts bounced out and Vander's eyes narrowed as he stared at her, watching her breathing become vapid, shallow gasps. His eyes traveled down her face and remained on her bare breasts. He brought his fingers to one of them and pinched the nipple softly, rolling it between his fingers.

“Why,” she started. “Why are you doing this?”

He chuckled at that. “Why am I doing this?” he repeated, shaking his head as the smile vanished from his lips. “I'm doing this because I can.”

Thrusting his fingers inside her nether parts as if to prove his point, he lifted her against the vehicle before reaching down to unzip his pants. While staring at her, he freed himself and rubbed his hardness against her. Then he chuckled, and held on to both of her thighs as he stuffed himself inside her, as deeply as he could get. She screamed out against the sudden violation and bucked against him as he started to drive himself in and out of her mercilessly. Grasping a fistful of her hair, he held it tightly as he stared down at her.

“Lie to me, Dulcie,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “Lie to me and tell me you love me.”

“I love you,” she said softly but there was no lie in her eyes.

His thrusts gained momentum as he bit his lower lip, driving himself as hard as he could deep inside her. He clenched his eyes shut and moaned loudly when he climaxed, grinding his pelvis into hers. When he opened his eyes again, he didn't say anything, but pulled out and lifted her by her waist before setting her on the ground.

“This changes nothing between us,” he said.

TWENTY

Bram

The vision ended as quickly as it had begun. The country, the lights, the large, black automobile, and Vander’s pathetic, empty face simply vanished in a rush of darkness. I was in the living room once again, lying down as I was before, but with a noticeably tenser posture.

Across the room, Vander staggered to his feet. He looked up, his eyes glowing, but not with any light I had ever seen in them previously. This light was darker, if it could be such a thing, and colder. The glow came from dead stars and radiation, red dwarfs and supernovas, all the dead and poisoned beings, and stale rooms without any air. He bared his teeth, blood dripping from his lips. His expression seemed haunted, but by which one of his many ghosts? I could only make a highly educated guess.

I pulled myself free of the spike, feeling nothing when the thick splinters tore through the fragile network of tissue in my shoulder, and was on him before I could even think to stop myself. I placed my hand on his throat. I lifted him and slammed him into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster and the wooden beams beneath it. I heard a bone snap, but I could not tell which one or whose.

I slammed him against the wall again, hoping every crack I heard came from him.

“You bastard!” I yelled, and my voice dropped several octaves, taking on the slick, unctuous quality of creatures whose only skill is to cause cruel death by suffering. I could think of no word that properly encompassed his crime, so I said it again. “She trusted you!”

“Then you must have seen the same thing I just did,” Vander answered. He glared at me before his eyes flitted to Meg.

I squeezed his throat. He paled.

“It wasn’t like that,” he protested. “Meg made you see what she wanted you to see.”

“Was what I saw the truth?” I demanded as my fangs pierced my lower lip.

“Yes and no,” he responded before spluttering as I tightened my grip around his throat. “Meg conveniently left out a few things.”

If any of it were true, that was enough for me. “Do you remember Jax?” I asked, spitting in his face. “Have you any sense or recollection of what he did to her?” I dug my nails into his throat, watching five neat red lines stream downward into his shirt. His pulse pounded heavily beneath me, like the thundering gallop of a panicked horse.

I dropped him, and he fell into a puddle of pathetic regret on the floor. He was coughing and gasping. He had the kind of soul one abandons, leaving it to rot in forbidden forests and graveyards. He was the the kind of man one should bury alive under the cloak of darkness.

“You nearly killed her,” he sputtered and hacked, blood dripping from his mouth to the floor where it fizzed like hydrogen peroxide. No smell has ever repulsed me so severely. The sound he made next seemed to be amused, though there was a grim edge to it. Perhaps he realized a deeply unpleasant truth, the kind that drives people to madness. He attempted a laugh, or a sour perversion of a laugh. Hysteria wrapped itself around him like a security blanket.

“I awoke with her body in my lap, and her blood in my mouth,” I responded. “I was starving and out of my mind. I was tricked into the situation. I have an alibi but you…”

My hand rose on its own accord, and shadows leapt from beneath the contorted bodies. Bits of broken furniture soared at Vander like a handful of darts, slicing his skin and pinning him to the wall. They were not Meg’s shadows, but the kinds of shadows I used to dematerialize. They swept across him like ribbons, or smoke, or ink, and as my fingers curled into a fist, my nails drawing my own blood, they closed around him, choking him the way a boa constrictor suffocates a deer.

“You raped her,” I said sharply. “Admit it, Vander. I want to hear the fucking truth from your lips.”

A pause. The whole world was on its way to hell in a handbasket, crumbling all around us, and he pauses?

“No,” he argued as he shook his head. “You don’t understand what the circumstances were. Meg didn’t want you to see all of it.”

“What she showed me was plenty.”

He shook his head again. “I told Dulcie to tell me she didn’t want me to,” he insisted, his chest rising and falling with his rapid breathing.

“It did not appear that way.”

“Because Meg didn’t want it to appear any other way.”

“Dulcie refused you more than once.”

He took a deep breath. “I asked her if she wanted me to and she said yes.”

It was my turn to shake my head. “I don’t believe you.”

He looked up at me and snapped, “Then do it!” through a ring of red teeth.

He was not challenging or daring me, as one might expect from a creature of his caliber, but rather, his words were spoken in a forlorn and loathing tone. It was not a challenge at all, but an entreaty, as genuine as I found him to be.

I wondered if the moment Meg went to so much trouble to display for both of us in the smoke was the whole truth of it. Perhaps that was why Vander would not fight me? Certainly, it must have been the reason Meg was yelling at him that he had hurt her baby?

“Do it,” he said again.

“I saw it, Vander,” I replied. “Dulcie, pressed against your car, her hands bound behind her in the darkness. She was begging you to stop.”

His breath was raspy, clawing its way in and out of his lungs. The look he gave me was steeped in disgust and deprecation. It prickled my skin, and that was answer enough; he did it.

I would have killed him right there on the spot if Henry hadn’t come between us.

Henry swiftly knocked my hand away, and in that moment of hesitation, the shadows scattered. Vander slumped to the floor, his basic instinct making him gasp for breath he did not want to inhale. On the opposite side of the room from Henry, glowing in a golden heap beneath the collapsing fortress of broken wood, lay one of Meg’s grey creatures, its arm outstretched like a pitcher after a hard throw.

“I shall deal with you later,” I said to Vander as I charged the abomination instead.

***

Dulcie

Ooh, Meg was mad now. Real mad.

I took her by surprise, so she fell down and used her hands to lessen her impact on the floor. What was left of her hair draped over her face like a veil, the frayed edges of burnt strands dragged out into the wind. Cold air blew in shallow gusts through the open door, which creaked loudly on its hinges.

When she looked at me again, her eyes were black all the way through.

“Dulcie,” she said.

“Meg.”

“Mother,” she corrected me as she reached out and tried to smile. The air around her rippled, disturbed by a sudden rush of ice. “Mother.”

I stepped back, my brain fuzzing around the edges. The noise surrounded me, shouting, snapping, roaring, and crackling in and out of focus. “No.”

Her smile curdled like milk in vinegar. “Mother.”

“No.” My tongue went numb and I wanted to go home. I longed to crawl back into bed with Sebastian and forget about everything else. Everything.

No, not Sebastian. What was happening?

“Mother,” she said.

I bit my lip until it bled. I couldn’t look away. “No.”

She pried herself off the floor and stood on her feet, wobbling. The Darkness was certainly taking its toll, or maybe it had really been a long time since she last fed. Whatever the cause, she was weak, and seeing her weakness gave me an idea. Maybe she’d be susceptible, at last, to a glamour of my own. I had no idea if I could even do that yet, but it seemed reasonable to assume I could.

She opened her mouth to speak again but I cut her off. “No.”

Meg blinked. “Wh… what?”

“You,” I said, imagining my power saturating the words from everywhere in my body, “are not my mother.”

“No,” she said, “no, no, nonono!”

I took a step forward and repeated it. “You are not my mother.”

She screamed, clapping her hands over her ears. I wondered if that meant my plan was was working, or if she was simply resisting. Maybe this would be the straw that broke the demon-camel’s back, the last nail to shatter the mirror on the wall.

I said it again, only much louder this time. “You are not my mother.” Images of Sebastian and me and Meg and the mansion appeared before me and burned until they were all gone.

“NO!” The scream split the air, a substantial thunderclap of sound that snapped bones and broke teeth, scattering the fragments across the room. The house trembled. Cracks spread like spiderwebs across the ceiling, and entire sections fell in.

“NO! NO! NO!”

I put my hand on her shoulder and pinned her against the wall. Black blood crawled like slugs over my fingers. “You.” I said in barely a whisper now, seething, “Are. Not. My. Mother.”

She looked up.

I don’t know what she wanted at that moment. Maybe to drain me so I wouldn’t refuse her blood if she offered it to me. Maybe to taste her project and remind herself how much work went into the making of me. Maybe she intended to kill me, so no one could take me away again. Maybe she just longed to be close to me, one last time.

She sank her teeth into my throat and drank.

And drank.

And drank.

***

Knight

“Knight!”

I looked up. Sam was plastered to the wall, sweating bullets. She looked exhausted. Two undead had their teeth buried in her skin, through her leg and stomach, and she couldn’t pull away.

But she hadn’t called my name. Her eyes were closed, her jaw slack. I looked around and eventually found Casey on the ground behind a couch. Smears of black gunk streamed in stripes from his mouth.

He coughed, spewing black onto the carpet. “Help her!”

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even breathe. I stared at him without registering anything. The vision or memory Meg had imprinted on Bram and me played behind my eyes again and again, carving its image into my skull. Voices hammered in my head like kids inside an aquarium, walled off by thick glass. My former apathy and numbness remained static.

Vander?

He’s back. We’re close, this way!

“Knight!” Casey pulled himself forward, dragging his leg behind him. His knee was facing the wrong way. “Knight, for fuck’s sake!”

Here! In here!

I blinked and the walls burst open.

Gleaming bodies rushed in, latching onto abominations and dragging out their hearts, pulling them free as if they were merely eradicating the weeds from a cemetery. Two men pulled the corpses away from Sam while a third man caught her and lay her gently down.

“Knight!”

The Lokis fought. They stabbed, shot, tore and broke things. Ripping out the hearts of stone from monsters no worse than any of us, they burned them in their hands.

Someone knelt in front of me, and glowed. “Dude, you dropped off the map,” said Gabe, resting his hand on my shoulder. “Came running the second you went dark. We thought you were dead.”

“I should be,” I whispered.

I stared, barely seeing him. One thought kept circling in my head like a vulture or crows over a battlefield.

Why didn’t I stop?

***

Dulcie

Meg released my neck. I hit the wall and slid.

After a muted rumble and crash, at least twenty gold-skinned Lokis rushed into the house. They tore the bodies to pieces, and the room seemed to be filled with gold confetti as the nefarious shadows were squished out of existence. Bram was on top of one abomination, driving his hand down its throat. In one swift motion, he wrenched it sideways and twisted, using both hands until the head tore off. The body folded underneath him like a house of cards in a hurricane, instantly swarmed by Lokis. A moment later and after a burst of light, they scattered, searching for another heart to extract.

I sat with my back against the wall, my lungs rattling, watching it all happen like an intruder in a dream.

Meg’s shadow fell over me. She knelt as she took my face in her hands, and the black blood smeared across them felt as cold as ice. Reaching into me with dark tendrils of power I couldn’t see, she began searching for the blood inside me that was formerly hers. The parts of me she and Melchior cultivated personally—the fairy and the vampire, which were coincidentally my strongest powers. A light moved behind her. Maybe it was Knight or Henry. Maybe an abomination Sam set on fire.

“Mother,” said Meg, as if the word were clawing its way out of her throat. Blood dribbled down her chin. “Mother.”

I grabbed her wrists and tried to pull her away. “No!” I said.

“Mother,” she repeated, more frantically this time.

I spat in her face. “No. My mother is dead. You are… you’re fucking nothing to me!”

She flinched and tried to pretend I didn’t say anything. “They will die,” she warned. “All of them. They…” Her lip trembled. “They stole you from me.” Her mouth twisted like she was trying to smile. “Not again. I will keep you safe. My sweet, sweet Dulcie…”

Suddenly, Henry was behind her wielding a sharp, broken piece of wood in his hands.

“I’m sorry!” he screamed. Hades knows why.

He drove the stake through her back and straight into her heart.

Busting through Meg’s ribs and her breastplate with a force and fury I didn’t know he possessed, Henry proved his worth. The sound was like a storm pulling a tree out of the ground.

Meg’s eyes were wide and black-veined. Her mouth popped open as I staggered backwards and followed her with jerky, halting steps. A small, wooden point protruded from her chest, the blackish red spewing out from underneath it. There was blood, and a light, and the burning gold of whatever Henry carried within him now.

“Dul…cie…” she said.

I couldn’t open my mouth to reply. I stared at her, blinking slowly, the whole world a big, squinting blur. Around me, it was quiet. The Lokis thundered past me, destroying anything dead that still had the audacity to move, but I could barely hear them. I caught some unintelligible words, mutterings and murmurs. My ears rang with confusion.

Everything died. The abominations fell. My vision fuzzed over and the Lokis became as insubstantial as Christmas lights. One by one, they abandoned ship, slipping out the windows and the holes in the walls, chasing the ones smart enough to run. They hovered over Sam and Casey, along with the shadow fuming in the corner that must have been Bram. Knight was slumped against a wall and not listening to them. He wouldn’t move.

Then, out of the din, came footsteps. Slow, deliberate. “Meg?”

“Ezra,” she said as she reached for him.

He sat beside her and pulled her head into his lap, stroking her hair. Behind him, the house was in chaos, but among our circle of three, there was precious silence. He sighed. “Meg. My darling Meg… what has happened to you? To all of us?” The words sounded as though they were spoken under water, thick and hard to understand.

“Ezra,” she said, lifting her hand and brushing her fingers against his cheek. “Give yourself to me.” Dark water coiled out from her palm and traveled to his parted lips, going down his throat and into his body. “Give…”

Ezra twitched, and his eyes went fully black. Dark sludge oozed from his nose. It wasn’t blood, but the water itself, as if his body were rejecting it outright. Was it because he was the oldest vampire in the world? Maybe. He wasn’t trying to fight it though. Maybe because Meg was dying, and the Darkness was dying with her.

“Meg…” Black tears poured from his eyes, leaving long stripes on his cheeks as they fell. “This is all my fault. I failed you. I am so sorry.”

“Give yourself,” she crooned, “to me.” The voice wasn’t hers anymore. It was much darker now and sick, a terrible sound that produced shivers in your spine. She was no longer Meg anymore but the Darkness that saturated her body, desperate for a foothold in the world.

Ezra smiled, still perfectly calm. The smell of him changed, and my wolf’s nose could detect that from across the room. Blood that smelled sweet, despite being ancient, now smelled like rotting lemons and mud in your mouth.

“I cannot.”

Meg coughed, splattering Ezra’s face with black pitch. The shadows burrowed deeper into Ezra’s body, fighting for control over his blood, but his heart was already spoken for and there was no hollow place for them to hide.

“I should,” Meg said slowly and agonizingly, “have killed you.”

Ezra smiled grimly. “And I should have let you die.”

TWENTY-ONE

Dulcie

There was a brilliant flash of deep red light. When it cleared, they were gone.

“Dulcie,” someone said. I blinked a few times and the face of an olive-skinned Loki with longish dark hair swam into focus.

“Hi,” I said softly.

“My name is Marco,” he replied, holding up two fingers. “How many fingers do you see?”

“Two.”

“Good. You have wounds on your stomach. May I lift your shirt to check them?”

“Yeah, go for it.” Fuck, why did my tongue feel so heavy?

Henry came over to sit by me while Marco examined me. “We did it,” he said, wiping his nose on his sleeve. When I looked at him again, the weird light was all drained out of him. A long cut ran across one eye that was gushing blood.

“Fuck,” I said.

“What?”

“Your eye.”

“My eye?” He reached up to touch his clear eye and frowned.

“The other one,” I said dryly.

He palpated his wounded eye tentatively and nodded when it came away all red. “Oh. Huh.” He shrugged at me. “I didn’t notice it.”

I laughed, which hurt like hell. “Of course you didn’t.”

“Angelo!” called Marco and a pale, blond Loki appeared seemingly from nowhere. He was wielding bandages and rubbing alcohol as if they were holy artifacts. Marco pointed to Henry and his bleeding eye, and Angelo held up his supplies.

“Can I fix your face?” he asked.

Henry chuckled. “I think it’s probably a lost cause, but you can try.”

Angelo sat cross-legged beside us and poured a little alcohol onto a swath of gauze. “This will sting a bit,” he said as he patted Henry’s eye with it.

Henry did his best not to flinch. “Are you okay?” he asked me.

I nodded. “Fuckin’ rosy.”

Marco held out his arm to me. “Drink,” he said, “but slowly.”

I did. His blood tasted sweet. I still wasn’t used to drinking blood but I needed it. And there wasn’t anything quite so potent as Loki blood. It wasn’t lost on me that I was drinking from the wrong Loki but I shoved the thought away.

“Oh, good,” said Henry. “Did we really get rid of the Darkness?”

“I think so,” I said, releasing Marco’s arm and wiping my mouth.

“I think Meg was acting as an anchor or something, and without her, the Darkness doesn’t have anything to keep it from wandering. Or something like that,” I finished.

There was a loud crash on the other side of the room.

“You will pay for this,” said Bram, his voice dropping into thick, defensive octaves I’d never heard from him before.

“Bram, what the fuck?” said a Loki. It was Gabe, one of Knight’s oldest friends. He was on the ground, after being shoved roughly aside. Bram was kneeling in front of Knight, both hands around his throat and blood gushing over his fingers.

Knight wasn’t moving.

“Oh, fuck!” My heart was suddenly thundering in my throat. WTF had gotten into Bram?

Half the Lokis were outside, and half were still here. Everyone that wasn’t hovering over Casey and Sam was staring at Bram and Knight. Two of them surged forward to pull Bram away.

“No,” Knight snapped sharply, and they ceased, looking confused.

“He’s trying to kill you,” one said.

Knight stared Bram squarely in the face. “I know.”

Bram had a twisted smile.

“Bram,” Gabe said slowly as in a warning.

“Bram, what are you doing?” I demanded.

“I saw everything. I saw it all,” said Bram. He had his nails in Knight’s throat, pressing deeper and harder every second. The smell was enough to make me dizzy. “I saw what he did.”

Meg made them see something, I thought, remembering the fire she sent after them before they collapsed. “Bram,” I said slowly, “Whatever Meg showed you wasn’t real. Bram, look at me.”

His head snapped towards me, his eyes red, and his fangs dripping with Knight’s blood. Knight made no move to push him away. The Lokis eyed each other nervously, clearly wanting to jump in—but fearing Bram would rip Knight’s throat completely apart if they did.

“Bram,” I said again. “It’s over now. It. Wasn’t. Real.”

“No,” said Knight, his voice scratchy. “What he saw was real.”

I squinted at him. “What?”

Knight wouldn’t look at me, only at Bram. The former burning, visceral hatred filled every inch of his bloody face, yet he almost seemed to relax. “What happened that night wasn’t portrayed in its entirety but it was real enough. What you saw wasn’t fabricated even though Meg conveniently left out some of the details. But those details don’t matter anyway. What happened that night is something I’ve had to live with all this time. Something I’ve been living with.”

Bram’s eyes flared red, beacons in a cave, bright enough to light up Knight’s entire face. He knelt and grabbed Knight by the hair, slamming him hard into the wall. Knight made no move to stop him.

“Bram, what the hell are you doing?” I screamed at the vampire. I had no idea what Knight was going on about or what Meg had shown them both.

“Let me kill him,” Bram hissed. Knight was looking into Bram’s red eyes now, totally devoid of emotion, without fear or anger. “Let me avenge you, Dulcie. Let me end him before Hades can be bothered to try and stop me.”

Knight laughed, and it was tight and breathy. “Hades is long gone.” He grinned. “It’s just you and me now, buddy.”

“Avenge me?” I asked. Fuck, maybe he knows what happened with Meg and Knight. “Bram, that’s none of your business.”

Bram dug his nails into Knight’s skull, the fine, crimson lines instantly trailing down his scalp onto his cheeks. “Oh, but it is.” Bram turned to me and his expression softened. The color in his eyes dulled until they were more brown than bloody. “You are a treasure, Dulcie, one I have freely abused and deceived, sometimes even taken for granted, but I have not visited upon you a fraction”—he took his hand from Knight’s hair and wrapped his fingers around Knight’s throat again, squeezing it, until the blood poured over his knuckles—“of his rather spectacular failure.”

“It…” I wet my lips while taking a deep, shaky breath. My personal thoughts about Knight and Meg were mine alone, and now wasn’t the time to talk about them, not with Bram running in high gear on murder mode. “Knight was glamoured, Bram, it wasn’t his fault. Not…” completely, I almost said, but I caught myself. “It wasn’t his fault. Meg made him do what… he did.”

A soft, buoyant laughter bubbled out of Bram as he took Knight’s chin in his red hand and turned Knight around to face him. “Meg, she says. She thinks this is about Meg. Listen to that, Vander, she is defending you. What have you to say to that?”

“Bram, that’s enough,” I said.

Bram looked at me for a long moment, panting like an animal for my benefit, since he didn’t need to breathe and so angry that he was practically regressing to the human version of himself. He tightened his grip on Knight’s shirt, ripping the fabric. He inhaled slowly and exhaled, as if he simply lost his temper and hoped to regain it. Although in a body built for rage and violence, I could only wonder how much calmer it made him.

Eventually, he released Knight and took a single icy step backwards. He adjusted his shirt and spent a brief moment frowning over a missing button. Knight remained motionless against the wall. I couldn’t see the expression on his face.

“Fine,” Bram said and he disappeared in a rush of black smoke.

Knight dropped to the ground, panting.

One of the Lokis said, “Vander? You good, man?”

“Get back out there! Make sure they’re all gone,” Knight demanded.

“Dude, we already—”

“We have a world to protect,” Knight snapped. He didn’t look up. “We’re good here, Marco. There’s nothing more you can do. Take them and go.”

They did too. They picked up Sam and Casey and left through the holes in the walls. We were barely steps from the front door, but it hung open lamely, letting the cold, wet air sweep over the bodies—dead for good this time.

I remained silent for a minute before I said anything. “Knight?”

Knight didn’t move but stared at the floor the way a kid does after he’s broken something expensive. His fists clenched and unclenched, and every now and then, he flinched sharply.

“Knight. Look at me.”

He did and we stared at each other for a long, painful moment.

“Dulcie,” he said. The sound was vague and whispered, almost beyond human hearing. His heart was pounding in a slow, thundering way. I could feel the vibrations through the floor.

Henry coughed and looked between us, pursing his lips, sensing the awkwardness. “I’ll, um. Go.” He gestured toward the door before limping out of the room.

I don’t know what I thought I should say to Knight. It didn’t matter what he saw, I wasn’t about to say anything good. Nothing helpful or profound. Just something confused and dumb and angry. I wasn’t even sure I felt angry anymore about any of it. My heart was racing and after seeing my childhood home full of blood and smoke, I didn’t know what to feel about anything.

That didn’t matter. Before I could decide what to do, he started talking.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know that means jack shit, but I am sorry for everything. Not just for losing control with Meg, but for…” He wet his lips with his tongue and looked away, running his hands through his hair, and pulling hard. “For… fuck…” He forced his eyes back to mine, flinching, and nearly shaking, as if it physically pained him just to look at me.

“Knight, what did Bram see?”

Seven seconds or seven years might have passed before he answered. “The Denali. On the side of the road. After I arrested you when you returned from saving my goddamn life.”

“What…” I started to ask, but the pain seeped out of him and flowed into me, and I instantly knew what he was talking about. I swear, for a moment I could see what happened playing out again behind his eyes. My blood ran cold. “Oh. Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure that’s what Bram saw?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes, because I saw it too. Meg attacked us both with visions of the past because she knew what Bram would do if he knew. She wanted to turn us against each other so she wouldn’t have to fight us both.”

I swallowed hard. “But you said she didn’t show the entire situation?”

“She didn’t. She left out the part where you said you wanted me. She also omitted the parts where your body reacted to me… in good ways.”

I drew in a breath at hearing that but Knight shook his head.

“None of that matters now,” he said. “What she showed us was real and true; and it’s never stopped haunting me.”

“You never told me that,” I said.

He chuckled without mirth. “I could never find the words to bring it up. I wanted to but every time I tried, I got so ashamed that the words never came.”

“I don’t think about what happened the way Bram does,” I said softly. “I actually haven’t thought about it since.” And that was the truth. Funny how the thing that stung me the most, the thing I couldn’t get past, had nothing to do with that moment so many years ago.

Knight put his hands into his pockets and had to visibly force himself not to look away again. “I don’t… I can’t say anything else. Nothing can fix any of this, especially not…” He swallowed hard and finished, “Especially not that.” He took a deep breath and started to talk as he exhaled. “Toss in what happened between Meg and me, which you witnessed, and what happened between you and Sebastian. It really is just too much.”

I couldn’t argue with him so I didn’t. I just felt numb.

“I’m a fucking disaster, Dulcie,” he said. “I give Bram so much shit for the things he makes you do, but I’m no better than him. Not even a little. Hell, I’m worse because I didn’t realize it. Bram at least is aware of himself.”

I almost laughed, but “Um” was the only sound I could make. My heart was freezing from the inside out and my blood wasn’t moving anymore. I opened my mouth but couldn’t remember how to speak. “Um.”

“We can’t continue to do this,” he said as he frowned at me. “I can’t look at you without my guilt and anger overcoming me and I’m sure it’s the same for you.”

It was the same for me. Like taking a hammer in the gut. It took me another second to remember how to breathe. “Oh.”

“I’m so sorry for everything. For Meg. For what happened on the side of the road. For you. For me. For us. And what we’ve become.” He reached toward me, maybe out of habit more than anything else, and immediately snatched his hand back like I was on fire. “I’m so sorry, Dulcie.”

I couldn’t say anything. A lump the size of Splendor was lodged in my throat and I was doing a very bad job of trying to keep it down. I just stared at him as he looked at me. I’m not sure how long we both lasted like that.

“You deserve so much more than me,” he said on a soft voice. “You deserve the world and I wish I could have given it to you.”

I couldn’t say anything at all. I felt like my tongue was choking me and I couldn’t even utter a sound. After a long silence, Knight turned around and walked out the door, stepping over the burnt carpet and scorched hunks of fallen ceiling. His clothes were singed, his skin coated in smoke, and he resembled a corpse more than any cadaver I’d ever seen.

“Knight.” I took one step towards him. Just the one. “Please.”

He was gone before I could figure out what I wanted to ask him.

TWENTY-TWO

Dulcie

Bram was standing outside, staring at the puddles of rainwater that were now perfectly clear. Behind us, the house was burning. The tiny fires I set throughout the whole building were finally spreading and destroying the stupid house. The Darkness was gone, and even if the fire couldn’t keep it out for good, it felt like the right thing to do. The cathartic thing, anyway.

“Ezra thought he could save her.” Bram crossed his arms and looked away. “He told us she was lost, but I doubt he ever believed it.” He turned to me, a curious light in his eyes. “Pity. He seemed so interesting.”

Ezra. I crossed my arms. “Interesting? Excuse me, but when did that sad, little anthropologist in your heart suddenly emerge? Or are you just mad that you didn’t get to kill Ezra yourself?”

Bram scowled at me. “I simply mourn the loss of knowledge. Ezra understood many things, and now we will never discover what they were.”

“Right,” I said softly, staring at him, wondering if that were completely true. All at once, I realized since Meg and Ezra were both dead, Bram was the oldest living vampire in the world. A really lonely thing to be.

I took his hand without knowing it until Bram looked down in surprise and gave my hand a squeeze. Always before, his hands were so cold in comparison to mine. Now that we were of a kind, he didn’t feel so cold anymore. We stared at the rising fire, watching the stars appear in the smoke beyond it.

I sighed. “We did it,” I said. “Sort of.”

“Sort of,” Bram agreed. And there was a long, uninterrupted pause.

***

Bram

“I never told you,” I said, standing with Dulcie out there in the dark. “I never had occasion to tell you, but…”

“Spit it out, Bram. Bumbling around for words isn’t your style.”

“I was very impressed with you,” I said. “I taught you a little about resisting glamours before we parted ways—”

“Resisting glamours? Um, you glamoured me into making myself look like that fucking porn star Tinker Bell in your basement,” she said without sounding resentful. She was not amused either, certainly not! But neutral was much more than I could have hoped for after such a comment.

Somehow, that made me bolder. “Yes,” I said. “And you did well with that, remarkably well, but neither I could have prepared you to face Meg’s raw power, nor anyone else. You, alone, broke her hold over you. You escaped the labyrinth she wove inside your mind, and I…” Hades, I was flustered, just like I became in the car before Vander and I went after Dulcie and got caught. When he’d accused me of loving her.

“You… what?” said Dulcie, looking at me expectantly. Her eyes narrowed, but no more than usual.

I took a breath. “I was impressed,” I said after a long moment. “I am impressed. You impressed me, Dulce O’Neil. And you continue to. Very much so.”

“Oh,” she said as she smiled, but she looked a little confused. This was most likely already something she knew, but it seemed to catch her off guard all the same. “Bram, did you just give me an honest-to-Hades real compliment? Is that what just happened?”

“Yes, I believe I did.”

“Huh,” she said. “I’ll be damned.”

“I try. Sometimes.”

“Sometimes, you even succeed.”

“I do indeed.”

She was looking at me, and I at her. She blinked before searching my eyes, half in confusion, half in… something else. I couldn’t quite pin it down, and I must admit feeling slightly afraid to identify it in case I might be wrong. That peculiar, flustered condition, brimming with cosmic nausea that rang so pathetically human, swarmed into me again. It began turning my insides to slush, filling me with an uncomfortable heat from the inside out. Vampires have hearts and blood that circulates, but it flows so slowly that we scarcely have a pulse. In that moment, mine was racing the same as anyone else’s.

“I have not always been a worthy friend,” I said.

Dulcie snorted. “You don’t say?”

“I have only rarely been a worthy friend, and rarer still were my moments of… chivalry, shall I call it? I have subjected you to countless nefarious, demeaning dinners, knowing you needed my help and had no choice but to suffer through my games.” I sighed. “I have also been rather callous in my dealings with you, and I regret that profoundly. But my greatest regret, I believe, is…” The words caught in my throat, avoiding my tongue and rendering me, for a moment, completely mute. I blinked down at Dulcie, losing myself and my words in the smoothness of her skin, the curve of her lips, the metallic shine in her eyes, always so strong and bold and sure…

“Bram?” she asked softly.

I reached out and touched her face, cupping her cheek in my hand.

“I was not with you,” I said, “when you needed me most. When Vander violated you…” Anger swept through me again like a hot wind. I bit back the words that came next, waiting a fraction of a second to avoid accidentally screaming in Dulcie’s face. “I was not there. I was elsewhere, as I am always elsewhere.”

“Bram, that wasn’t exactly how things happened and don’t forget it was ages ago,” said Dulcie. I saw the coldness of the memory behind her eyes. She reached up, perhaps to remove my hand, and I dropped it before she could. “You don’t understand what was really going on.”

“Vander admitted that what I saw was the truth.”

“Yes, it was, but there were details Meg withheld. Pieces that would have softened the blow of what actually happened.” Explaining it didn’t really matter now because I had a sneaking hunch I wouldn’t see Knight again. “And Knight and I were in a weird place at the time.”

“I know you care for him,” I said slowly. “And I know your relationship has been complicated. Full of snags and barbs and thorns, but Dulcie, every problem landed on you. Every action you ever took with Vander was to protect him, and how did he repay you? Forgive me,” I said a little softer, “I do not wish to turn you against him. Only to offer you something better.”

“What?” asked Dulcie in scarcely more than a whisper.

“My eternal loyalty and service,” I said. “I have always claimed to be your friend, but now, I simply hope you will allow me to be there for you… to…”

Suddenly, I was very close to her. For a moment, I did not touch her. Hovering a hair’s breadth from her body, my hands frozen, and still as stone, I was hesitating until the last possible second. I searched her eyes, green and glowing, brilliant and bright. She was staring at me with an expression I could not identify…

“To do what I can,” I said at last. They were not the words I intended to say, but the only ones I could allow myself to admit.

She was not ready to hear my true feelings for her. Not at this moment. Not after everything that had just transpired.

Dulcie looked back at the burning house and gave my hand a small, almost imperceptible squeeze. It was so faint that it may have been an accident. She seemed exhausted, sad and quiet. I wondered what thoughts were traveling through her mind although I had a very good idea that they centered on Vander.

The dregs of Meg’s power hung in the air like smoke after a forest fire. The taste of death and rotting bodies, as well as stale blood, steel and bone marrow was pervasive. The house was, of course, not alive, but the putrid song of something dying seemed to echo in its burnt rafters. Perhaps that should have been obvious. Spending the better part of the last several months constructing unholy monsters from the bodies of the dead, Meg’s special craft certainly reeked of death and rust.

But despite its proximity and undeniable intensity, I was calm. The night seemed to curl around Dulcie like a blanket, soft, warm and tender. The world smelled of death, yes, and decay and burnt things; but with Dulcie so near, it also smelled of flowers. I could not say what kind; only that the scent was very sweet, and also very welcome.

“I am sorry I did not kill Meg sooner, when fate gave me the opportunity,” I said.

Dulcie did not reply.

We stayed like that until the fire burned down to a few embers. The night it left behind was warm and still.

***

Knight

Dawn came, but very slowly. Bram disappeared, like always, and the rest of us were carted off to the nearest hospital, which seemed to be a new trend.

People came to visit us once we were stable. The FBI mostly, and some CIA agents asking cryptic questions about D.C. and the missing Secretary of State. The same questions they’d pulled from the ashes of a problem gone cold. I didn’t know the answers and quite frankly, I didn’t care.

There were IVs in my arm, bandages around my throat, and cold air tickling my nose through a cannula looped around my ears. Sunlight blared through the hospital window.

“You look like hell.”

I looked up. “Fuck you too, Gabe.”

He smiled and sat in the green plastic chair next to the bed. “We saved the world, dude! Smile a little.”

I beamed very badly.

“Hades, promise me never to do that again.”

I softened to a grin. “How you feeling?” I asked.

“Me? I’m fine. It’s all sunshine and daisies up here.” He drummed his fingers on the wooden arms and looked out the window. “You?”

“Decent,” I said. “At least, I’m not dead.”

“Not dead is good.”

“Yeah.”

Drum, drum, drum, now on his thighs. He pursed his lips, sighed through his nose, and looked up at me without lifting his head.

“So. You and Dulcie.”

I stiffened. “Not going there right now.”

He sighed again through his nose, louder, and leaned back in the chair. “Your mind was open, dude.”

I felt my heart sink. “Then everyone saw what Meg sent Bram and me?”

He shook his head. “No, so far as I can tell, you went dark for everyone else, but I could still see it. Maybe because I’ve known you so long, or because I was the closest person to you at the time you were broadcasting or… I don’t know.” He shrugged. “But that was fucking brutal.”

“Brutal,” I said, shaking my head slightly. “Is this what you came here to talk about? Really?”

“I came here to check on you. See how you’re doing. Ask if you need to talk.”

“About Dulcie.”

He shrugged. “This is heavy stuff.”

“Can we talk about anything else?”

“Well, yeah, but then it’ll just hang in the air like a bad smell and that’s not any better.”

He wasn’t wrong. “Are we talking about me and Meg? Or me and Dulcie?”

“The second one, but I saw that other stuff about you and Meg. It’s in your head too. You got some bad shit to work out.”

I almost laughed but swallowed the sound before it even made it into my mouth. “No fucking kidding.”

There was a long silence. People filled the hall like running water: nurses, doctors, custodians, and patients in wheelchairs. Everybody was either staring at the ground or the horizon as if they were seeking somebody they didn’t really want to find.

Hades, when did the world get so fucked up? It seemed like all we ever did now was search for things we weren't allowed to find. The only things we did find were specifically designed to destroy us by ripping us into little, bite-sized pieces.

Everybody was already shattered, like tiny splinters that got embedded into your skin, but we couldn’t get rid of each other.

“What are you gonna do?” asked Gabe.

I wanted to laugh, which seemed like the right thing to do just then, the appropriate thing. But laughing on top of the grave can't bring back the dead and laughing at the past can't rewrite it. All it does is convince the people around you that you’ve descended into a hysterical version of yourself, one that finds tragic things amusing.

“I’m gonna leave Dulcie the hell alone like I should have done a long time ago,” I stated. “And I plan to excel at my job as I move on with my life.”

“Probably for the best.”

“Probably.” I paused even though the words echoed in my head. I wanted to scream and cry and throw up all at the same time. “I think I’m gonna put in for a transfer.”

“Really?” he asked without sounding surprised.

“Yeah.”

“Back to the Netherworld?”

“Anywhere. As long as it isn’t here.”

“To start over for yourself, or just to avoid Dulcie?”

I glared at him wordlessly until he held up his hands in surrender.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he said, “but you need to forgive yourself for whatever baggage you’re holding onto.”

“Okay, Tony Robbins.”

He smiled. But half of his mouth was not committed to the expression. “I’m serious. If you’re gonna move on, that’s great; but make sure you do move on, you know? Don’t hold onto this shit because it’ll only fester and pretty soon, you’ll start hating yourself.”

“Too late for that. I already do.” We stared at each other for three very long seconds.

He nodded slowly. “Well. I’m gonna head out. People to see.”

“People to see,” I echoed.

He clapped me once on the shoulder, gripping it firmly. “Take care of yourself, Vander.”

“You too.”

He put his hands into his pockets and walked out of the room, whistling. The door clicked shut softly behind him. And I was left alone.

For like… five seconds.

You have done well.

My jaw instantly clenched as a reaction. Great.

Hades was standing at the foot of my bed, tapping on his staff. His robes moved in a soft wind that wasn’t even there. Early dawn light washed over his skeleton like wet paint.

“Thanks,” I said. “What are you doing here?” What else could he possibly want?

Thanking you.

“Wait, what?”

I came to thank you.

“Really?”

Yes. Is that so hard to believe?

“Yeah, it is, actually.”

Meg is dead. The Darkness is gone.

“And your dimension doesn’t have holes in it anymore?” I asked.

And yet you are still unhappy.

“Well, gee, mister, I wonder why.”

I expect it has something to do with the woman.

“Fuck you.” Anger emanated from me in blasts and waves. Getting pissed at Hades wouldn’t gain me any favors, but “repressing” it didn’t even begin to describe what I’d been doing all morning. “And since when do you care, anyway?”

You have only yourself to blame.

“I know that!” I shouted before I sighed and sat back, covering my eyes. “I know that.” I looked up. “I can’t do a damn thing about it. I made a stupid, idiotic mistake. Fuck, I’ve made so many stupid mistakes, so many inane choices, and now…” I gestured at nothing and everything before dropping my head in my hands. And now it’s over. And this time, it’s going to stay over.

I didn’t want that to be true, but I couldn’t think of any reason it would not be. There was no way to fix this. I looked into Dulcie’s eyes and saw how hollow they were. And the hollowness wasn’t the result of what happened on the side of the road. That might have been Bram’s beef with me but it wasn’t Dulcie’s. Why? Because she was there and knew what really happened. She wanted me as much as I wanted her. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t try to explain more to Bram, or to convince him of the real truth but I didn’t. Maybe because I knew Bram wouldn’t listen to reason. He was so in love with Dulcie and he always had been. He would have eagerly leapt at any chance to hate me and Meg had certainly given him that.

But, no, I knew the hollowness in Dulcie’s eyes had nothing to do with what happened all those years ago. No, it was more about what she witnessed between Meg and me. The toothpaste was already out of the tube and there was no way to put it back in again. We both saw and knew things about the other that were impossible to ignore.

But is that true? a voice inside me demanded. How can that be true? If we truly love each other, that should be enough and we should be able to overcome anything! If…

But I ordered the voice to shut the fuck up.

Sometimes, said Hades, reparation is not the answer.

“No shit.”

It is easier to build a new ship than to try and retrieve the one that sank to the bottom of the ocean.

“Great, and how does that translate in the real world?” I snapped but I already knew.

Go somewhere far away and begin again. Find the version of yourself that exists in tandem with this unfortunate reality.

“Why, because you need me for something else?” I asked. “And if I’m sad, I can’t be useful to you, since I’ll be distracted?”

Then Hades was right next to me. Staring at me with those little, red, pinprick eyes, he dressed me down all the way to my bones.

I cannot turn back time, but you are a beast of superior strength; you should have no trouble paying it forward. He paused. You will not see me again.

And poof! He was gone.

TWENTY-THREE

Dulcie

The grave was no more than a simple grey headstone, the name carved into it above the words: beloved friend. Flowers—some real, some fake, some in brightly colored vases, some in Styrofoam cups embedded in the ground—surrounded it. They appeared to be basking in the sun when it occasionally broke through the latticed branches of the willow above the plot. It didn’t feel like quite enough; but I was sure he wouldn’t have wanted anything more extravagant.

Sitting cross-legged in the grass, I was plucking the little green blades and pulling them apart like fraying strings. I had all the parts to make a flower crown, but I couldn’t begin to braid them together. I just plucked and pulled and plucked and pulled until I had a little pile of blades of grass in front of me. My pathetic little offering, full of grief and confusion for an old friend.

“I’m sorry.”

I looked back to find Henry standing with his hands in his pockets. He had a massive white bandage over one cheek and a patch over his eye that made me wince. His glasses were perched at a weird angle on his nose. His hair was clean, his skin was covered in bruises, and he was wearing a blue shirt, cargo shorts, and bright green tennis shoes.

“I’m surprised to see you,” I said. But I was also happy to see him. I couldn’t explain why.

He shrugged. “I was worried about you so I followed you here.”

He looked more like a little kid than an adult. I kept thinking he should be in a playground somewhere, and not inside a graveyard. “You did everything you could. Don’t be sorry,” I said, addressing his first statement.

“Oh, I wasn’t referring to that,” he answered, coming forward to sit next to me. “I meant, I am sorry, but I didn’t mean sorry sorry. I meant, I’m sorry.” He motioned toward the grave with his head. “I have my own people in the ground. I’m sorry you do, too.”

People in the ground. Not dead friends, just “people in the ground.” It sounded so wholesome. “It’s okay,” I said. “Not okay okay, but… you know what I mean.” Damn, the kid was rubbing off on me.

Henry smiled. He looked up through the willow branches, letting the stripes of sunlight fall across his face. “This is a peaceful place. It’s very pretty.”

“It is,” I said. “He would have liked it.”

“What was his name?”

I started to point to the grave before remembering his bout with the abominations; his eyes would still be fuzzy for a while yet. “Trey,” I said.

“Was he a good friend?”

“My best friend.” I reached out and ran my thumb along the cold marble headstone. “You two would have really liked each other.”

“You think so?”

“Oh, I’m positive,” I answered. “You’re both really… sweet.” And just a little bit irritating. I ruffled the hair on the unbandaged side of his head and he laughed.

“I’m glad you think I’m sweet,” he said.

“Really?” Sweet isn’t usually a word that thrills guys to hear when describing them.

“Yeah.” He smiled. “Usually, people tell me I’m irritating. Unless you think I’m sweet and irritating, which I guess is a possibility.”

“I don’t think you’re irritating.” Hey, it was just a white lie.

“Awesome.”

Pause. Cool wind enveloped us, carrying the smell of freshly mown grass and rich soil right up into the trees.

“The last twenty-four hours have been pretty crazy, huh?” he said. His eyes were still bright, and his tail very bushy. This kid was impossible to keep down.

I couldn’t help smiling at him, all the way up to my eyes. I laughed a little too; it came out as really more of a grunt, but it was there. I sighed, pushing my grass pile around with a finger. “Do you ever want to just… start over? Factory reset your whole life?”

“No,” Henry said, shrugging. “But I haven’t been alive very long. And nothing very interesting has ever really happened to me. Well, up until recently.”

I laughed louder this time. Everything has happened to me, I thought.

“But I know the feeling,” he continued. “I sometimes regret the small stuff, like snapping at my mom or forgetting someone’s birthday, so I guess it’s not so different. Wanting to relive the past to try and make certain parts of the world go away. It makes more sense for you though,” he added. “Your stuff is much more significant.”

“That’s one word for it.” I paused. “I think I’m gonna put in for a transfer.”

“Where to?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Los Angeles. Chicago. Wichita. Oklahoma City.” I put my hands over my face and inhaled deeply. “Pretty much anywhere that isn’t Splendor.” I had plenty of bad memories to leave behind, all up and down the coast. I’d already caused enough trouble for California as it was, and the scale of my latest fuckups seemed to be swelling like an overfilled water balloon. Besides, Henry would make a good cop, and he deserved a partner that wouldn’t totally stunt or sabotage his career.

“Cool. I’ll go with you.”

I peeked through my fingers. “What?”

“I said I’ll go with you. Just let me know where we’re going.”

“Even if I end up somewhere like, Kentucky?”

“Well, sure. I want you to have a friend wherever you go.”

I wanted to hug him. But I didn’t dare jostle him, lest I appear awkward. I was never really comfortable with imposing on people’s personal space. So I just nodded and smiled. “Where would you go, if you got to choose?”

“Hawaii would be nice.”

Classic answer. “Beaches and babes?”

“Fresh pineapple,” he corrected. “And a criminally underappreciated and capitalistically exploited culture.”

“Oh.” I blinked at him.

“And snorkeling.”

“You can snorkel here.”

“Hawaii has better reefs,” he said. “And pineapples. And Spam.” He feigned a shudder. “So much Spam.”

“Have you been there before?”

“Yeah. My dad programmed computers for the Army. We lived at the base on Honolulu for a while.”

“Oh, cool.”

“Pineapple and Spam are actually really good combined,” he added.

“Really? Cause they sound gross.”

“Yeah, I promise.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Ever been to a luau?”

He looked up suddenly and smiled as broadly as his bandages would allow. “Hawaii’s nice, but I’ll go wherever.”

“Wherever?”

“Yeah. Kentucky or anywhere else.”

“I’m not going to Kentucky so don’t worry.”

I picked a dandelion from the corner of Trey’s grave and spun it between my thumb and forefinger. The little, white tufts caught the sunlight and seemed to glow. I grinned at Henry. “Want to make a wish with me?”

“Sure.” He scooted forward in the grass and leaned in, adjusting his glasses as he looked at the little weedflower. “What are we wishing for?”

I held it between us and smiled. “Pineapples and spam.”

Henry laughed.

We made our wishes, and blew on it and the microscopic seeds whirled up and up and away.

TWENTY-FOUR

Sam

We were on my couch, watching a very bad movie. Snuggled up in our pajamas in the dark, we were watching underpaid actors with cheap props fight poorly constructed aliens that poured out of sloppy attempts to conceal their true identities: trash cans posing as space ships. The movie came out this year, but the whole thing reeked of the eighties, gratuitous gore and all.

My head was nestled on Casey’s chest, and I wasn’t really watching TV. Neither of us were. We just wanted the incessant white noise. I was close to falling asleep, listening to him breathe. I kept expecting to hear his lungs rattle, before he coughed up something gunky and black. A sign or clue that the Darkness wasn’t really gone after all—but he didn’t.

We were fine. Having been released from the hospital, we were out of the dark. The only light we had on was the lamp on the side table at the end of the couch. It cast a soft, yellow light across the living room and kitchen, with bright little tails streaming down the hall.

Cookies were in the oven, and the whole house smelled of dough and chocolate. We were baking a second batch after the only evidence of the first batch was a large plate of tiny crumbs on the coffee table.

It felt so strange. The silence, the movie, and the downright normalcy of the entire night. It almost seemed like a lie, a carefully crafted illusion spun to keep me from actually going insane. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop but it was still hanging ominously in the sky behind a cloud somewhere, waiting for the right, dramatic moment to emerge and turn everything upside-down again like a rampaging giant. The calm was infuriatingly fragile. I expected to see someone crashing through a window at any moment, or the house to catch fire, or an abomination, or a good old-fashioned zombie to start crawling through the TV, hell-bent on eating the parts of our brains that hadn’t been melted by the absurdity of it all.

But nothing happened. That’s because it was over, well and truly and honestly over. Another crisis would replace it eventually—our whole job was a never-ending Conga line of crises—but it wouldn’t be Meg. Or the Darkness. Or Melchior O’Neil. With any luck, it might be something really boring, like potion smuggling or tax evasion.

I’d love to arrest somebody for something as innocuous as tax evasion.

But it’s like taking a really long test before a million scantrons and small letters flash before your eyes every time you close them. I couldn’t quite convince myself it was all over.

I will admit it was getting easier, though. Every quiet, normal second I spent with Casey became a little more natural, and a little less like a crime against reality. I even felt safer.

I nestled down and closed my eyes. Half the movie was no more than a crappy action-shot blur.

“How would you feel about me living closer to you?” Casey asked suddenly.

I looked up and blinked slowly, a little too sleepy to reply right away. Nothing can lull you to sleep like eating thirteen cookies and breathing in the smell of your boyfriend.

“Huh?” I asked. I didn’t smack my lips, but I might as well have.

He cleared his throat, blushing furiously. “After everything that’s happened, I’m worried about you, and even though it’s still too soon for us to start living together, I want to be near enough that if something happens, I’m not over half an hour away, you know?”

“I do want you to live closer,” I said quickly. “That’s fine. That’s great! Fantastic even.”

His smiled relaxed, and he bent down to kiss me. It was just a peck at first, but when I leaned into it, a full minute passed before we stopped and remembered our conversation. When I came up for air, the cookies were already burning, and Casey was missing his shirt.

“Oh, hello,” I said, my eyes roving up and down his chest.

My pajama top had three buttons on the collar that didn’t even clear my collarbone. He reached up and undid one. “Hello, yourself.”

I undid the rest, baring the hollow of my throat as I traced a finger over my collarbone and batted my eyelashes at him. “Like what you see?”

It was kinda funny until he leaned down and kissed me there, and then on the side of my neck, beneath my ear.

“Of course,” he answered.

“I think we should take a vacation,” I said unexpectedly. “After all of this, we definitely deserve one.”

He nipped my ear, one hand rising to cup my face on the other side. The hand on my face dropped away, and I failed to see what he was doing with it until it was already inside my panties.

“Hmm, sounds like a good idea to me,” he answered. “Where do you want to go?”

“Um…” Hades, distracting me didn’t even begin to describe what he was doing. “Glacier National Park. Fort Lauderdale. Ontario. Albuquerque. Anywhere but here.”

He thrust his hand up suddenly and I gasped as he pulled me closer to him. With a big smile, he kissed my forehead, my nose, my lips, and the oh-so-exposed hollow of my throat.

My hands roamed all over his shoulders, feeling his muscles ripple as he moved and breathed. Lamplight and cheap explosions reflected off his glasses.

He pushed me gently onto the couch until I was lying flat on my back; then he hovered over me like a thundercloud. A trickster’s smile appeared on his face when he put his hands on my hips and slowly, carefully, started pulling my pants down and off me. I reached up and did the same for him.

Then he slid deep inside me. A single sharp thrust that made my breath catch in my throat.

“I’m game,” he answered.

TWENTY-FIVE

Bram

You know, I have always been a sentimental fool for nostalgia.

Every home I have ever owned features the old, English Gothic aesthetic: pillars, towers, spires, and black wrought-iron gates. Aesthetics of a time long since past but one that feels comfortable to me since it was the time period from which I came.

Mine is a world I promised myself in equal measure that I would forget and remember. It symbolizes a pathetic illusion I once believed, a version of the life I may have even enjoyed, every bit as affluent and upright and elite as I could ever dream.

Time freezes wherever I live. Just as I am frozen in time. Photographs of other photographs, printed on silver, and Victorian mirrors hanging on every wall allow me to safely remain utterly invisible; and the only creature privy to my existence is me.

This is the place where I seek sanctuary whenever I remember too much. When I see food and lack an appetite, or when I swallow water but lack the sensation of thirst, or when time and gravity collide and the crushing epiphanies of the world begin moving much too quickly or too slowly.

It is the place where I can pretend that nothing changed. I can lie in my bed and imagine I need to sleep, or walk down a hall of long windows, arranged to allow me to stand in the shadows and still feel the warmth of the sun. A place where I am free to remember, as well as forget.

The year is perpetually 1634 inside these walls. Cold and airless, it is without feeling, filled with old art and relics of the past, dust pans and gravy boats, inconsequential trinkets that came from a world that no longer exists. Only the mirrors are modern, absent the silver backing that erases the reflection of a vampire. In these mirrors, I can still admire my reflection. Young, brooding and arrogant, with my pockets full of coins, and my heart full of something slightly less honorable than high adventure.

In one room, something hangs on the far wall well above the floor: a crucifix. The last thing I forbade myself to remember. It represents the version of myself I once was, a version that was stolen from me.

My thoughts, as they often do, turn to Dulcie.

As all the people around her will continue to grow and change and breathe, they will also age and shrivel and fade, and yet she will remain the same. Standing in the middle of an old room filled with the things she refuses to forget: pictures, notebooks, gloves and old chargers; she will change only as the mountains change, by millennia, worn down by the onslaught of freezing winds, until only her bones and skin and the eternal sigh of Dulce O’Neil are all that remains.

I fear sounding melodramatic. There is no precedent for a creature like her, a fairy with the blood and spirit of every beast under the stars. Perhaps some of her blood could render her mortal. Perhaps she is not so different, nor as dangerous as we feared, and all will be well. Maybe her life will only be a touch longer than it would have been otherwise, and if she outlives her friends, it will happen naturally.

But when was the life of Dulcie O’Neil ever natural?

***

We sat, Quillan and I, like a couple of delinquent children being detained in private school. Slumped in our plastic chairs outside the principal’s office, we were waiting to answer for our heinous pedestrian crime. Vander was inside, explaining the long, sordid adventure he had with Hades.

The hall was empty. Vending machines made fresh coffee and a sterile white light reflected all the chips and fruit snacks behind the black windows.

“Did it never occur to you that the Darkness might actually be Meg?” asked Quillan.

The question was unprompted. I turned to him slowly, and gave him a quizzical expression, lifting my brows as high as I could. He was not looking at me but at the floor, or perhaps he just noticed the scuffed toe on his shoe.

“No,” I said coldly. “I thought she was dead.”

“You’ve been in the game a lot longer than I have,” he said, and his words sounded too familiar. That sentence made me stop and wonder how many times it had been said before; not many, I supposed, but enough to make me feel like we were talking in circles. “You never heard anything? Or saw anything that would made you have thought otherwise?”

I shook my head and turned away but my reflection glared back at me from the windows. My face was none the worse for wear, but my hair was all tangled, and the emptiness in my eyes conveyed an air of utter weariness.

“The Darkness was a name for a monster. It was nothing more to me than the Bogey Man is to human children,” I said. “It was a name you threatened your minions with when they disobeyed you. It was one way to convince them you were their best option. Stories abounded of the Darkness ripping the souls of monsters out of their skins, decapitating people and swallowing their headless bodies whole. That is what you deliberately led them to believe.” I looked at him with narrowing eyes. “And you? You spent the better half of your illustrious career working with Dulcie’s father. Never once did he mention dealing with the Darkness? Or his plans for his lovely daughter?”

Quillan tucked into himself a little more. “I worked for Melchior only because I had to.”

“Says the man who was in his innermost circle, his sanctum sanctorum.”

He failed to reply to that; at least, to me. It was a low blow, I readily admit that, but my patience for anyone who betrayed Dulcie, and there were more than a few, was wearing threadbare thin.

“He never said anything about the Darkness,” Quillan said.

“What about Meg?”

“Nothing. Not a word.”

The door to the office opened and a middle-aged woman with blond hair and round glasses popped her head out, smiling. “Quillan?” she asked kindly before gesturing for him to enter.

Quillan slapped his knees as he stood up and adjusted his tie. He entered the room without another word to me.

It would have been ironic, I suppose, if I were irritated that Quillan was deliberately hiding something from me. Our entire relationship, such as it was, relied exclusively on such quid pro quo: I will keep my secrets and you will keep yours. But I will help you catch less important bad guys if you will leave me alone. This time, however, it didn’t involve potions or permits, it was all about Dulcie, and that made it somehow more… vulgar.

I laughed quietly to myself; I was older than he could ever hope to be, yet there I was, arguing with him like two schoolboys over a soccer ball. I wondered about the other mundane things young human children might argue about.

Brrrr. My phone vibrated in my pocket. I took it out and frowned as I looked at the little screen. The number was not one I recognized. This number belonged to my more unconventional realm of work; and not a number someone might stumble across in a phone book. Computers for survey companies occasionally spat it out as a random number, but that was exceedingly rare. After the last time it happened, I performed a number of enchantments around the device itself to stave them off.

So I answered it. I flipped it open (ancient tech is much more secure than the smartphones the modern world seems so obsessed with) and said nothing.

“Bram?” The voice was female, soft and consciously sultry. “I hear you’ve had quite a day.”

“From whom did that rumor come?”

“People who keep their ears open.”

“Well, I should certainly hope their ears are not closed; that sounds remarkably uncomfortable.”

“Hmmm.” The sound was trite, in the shadow of a laugh. “Do you know who I am?”

I smirked. My contempt was squandered in the empty hall. It was the kind of question asked by insecure amateurs, testing the waters of their bravado, trying to sound as intimidating as they hope to be. A no might have implied my ignorance, but I certainly couldn’t say yes, even if I did recognize her. “Should I?”

After a brief, bristling pause, she replied, “Perhaps not, but you will. The whole world will know me and very soon.”

Oh, good, one of those. “Darling, I fear that if you seek my help, you are barking up the wrong tree. I have enjoyed my fill of the world, and trying to guess someone’s name is not high on my list of things I like to do. Good day.” I started to hang up.

“I’m not asking for your help,” she said. “On the contrary, I’m making you an offer.”

Interesting. “Of what kind?”

“The lucrative sort.”

“I bet you say that to all your pretty business prospects.”

“Don’t try to be cute.”

“Regrettably, that is all I know how to be.” I scowled in the general direction of the office door. “Do you know where I am right now?”

“Alone.”

“Yes, in front of the office of the Director of the FBI.” No reason she needed to know it was only a temporary office. I preferred to let her believe I was in Washington D.C.

“Getting perilously close to the short arm of the law, aren’t we?” she asked.

“If cheap leather chairs in a dark hallway count as getting perilously close, then yes, certainly. Now make your offer or hang up; there is an interesting wall I would like to continue staring at.”

If that gibed her, I couldn’t tell. After two seconds, she gathered her thoughts, such as they were, and replied, “Do you remember someone named Jax?”

“Jax?” I repeated, clicking my tongue. Ah, so we were playing a game. Of course, I knew who Jax was. “Jax, Jax, Jax…” I mumbled as I snapped my fingers. “Ah! Yes, the Loki.” Just saying his name left a foul taste in my mouth.

“The Loki who knows where Meg hid her invisible drug.”

I blinked. “Her what?”

I could feel her smiling through the phone, condescendingly and arrogant. “Dulcie did not tell you?”

“If Jax told her anything of interest, I regret we have been very busy since their last meeting,” I responded. “Speak quickly, I am rapidly growing bored with you.”

“Meg and Melchior manufactured a drug with no negative side effects. No effects at all, actually, but also fiendishly addictive, providing the usual symptoms of withdrawal when people try to kick it.”

“In other words, there are negative side effects,” I said blithely.

She ignored that. “The drug is inexpensive to make with a sustainable consumer base.”

“You mean a drug that does not cause people to overdose in ditches or steal money from their grandmothers to feed their cravings.”

“I mean the kind that doesn’t make people die. At least, not as quickly.”

“And Jax knows where this drug is.” I said.

“And how to make more of it.”

“Interesting,” I said. “And you expect me, dare I say, to distribute it?”

“Melchior and Meg are dead. You are the best option we have.”

“Do try to contain your enthusiasm.”

“Meg tried to take over the world the hard way,” she said, her tone suddenly much more severe. “But the world cannot be burnt into submission, it must be… coerced.

“And you think this new drug is the best way to do that,” I asked.

“I don’t think so. I know.”

The door opened and Quillan came striding out, readjusting his coat.

“Yes, well. I just wanted to apologize if I made you feel uncomfortable at all.”

“What?” she retorted.

Quillan pointed to the phone and mouthed, “Who is that?”

I mouthed back “Dulcie” as I said to the woman, “I know, my apologies are no more than sand in the desert, but I hope to instill it as a habit from here forward. Perhaps as you grow accustomed to hearing them, they will gain traction in the realm of your trust.”

“Bram, do not make an enemy of me.”

“I must go. I’ve a pressing date to keep.”

I hung up and stood. “You are finished, then?” I asked Quillan as I gestured toward the open door.

“Yeah, you’re up next.” Quillan was frowning at me, and the confusion was practically written across his forehead by a Sharpie. “Did you just…?”

“Apologize?” I finished for him, adjusting my cufflinks although they did not require adjusting. “Yes, I did.”

“But you… are…”

“Full of surprises.” I flashed him a grin, and he was too bewildered to recoil. “Excuse me.”

With a smile, I strode into the temporary office of the Director of the FBI.

The End

VANITY SCARE

Dulcie O’Neil #11

by

H.P. Mallory

Vanity Scare

Copyright © 2019 by H.P Mallory

All rights reserved.

Ebook Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Vanity Scare

PROLOGUE

Dulcie

I was running.

My footsteps were the only sound against the asphalt. Otherwise, the night air was still and silent with the exception of the doleful call of an owl nearby and the chirping of crickets.

The night had a certain chill to it, something cold at the moment, but as soon as my blood started pumping, I’d welcome the coolness.

I picked up my pace, enjoying the fact that I seemed to be the only person awake at this hour. I started up the base of a large hill, looking forward to cresting the top.

Gritting my teeth, I closed my eyes and pushed my legs into the ground. The asphalt leveled off and my muscles relaxed. I opened my eyes with a grin. But as soon as I focused on what lay ahead, my smile faded.

A man stood directly in front of me—maybe ten feet away.

I stopped in my tracks, panting as my heart pounded.

He was dressed in black. His hooded sweatshirt hung low over his face. He dropped the hood, and in the moonlight, I recognized the broad build, the raven black hair and the glowing blue eyes as belonging to only one person.

“Knight.”

I sucked in a breath.

He was just as beautiful as he’d ever been. The moonlight heightened the angular planes of his face, throwing shadows beneath his cheeks and the square lines of his jaw.

“Dulcie.”

Neither of us said anything for a long time. Instead, we both just stood there, staring at each other like nervous high school kids at a formal dance.

“Let me guess,” I started, needing to break the silence. I fought to catch my breath, “I’m asleep?”

He chuckled and the sound was deep and rich. It made me want to close my eyes and return to a time when things weren’t what they were now, a time before the proverbial shit had hit the fan. A time when Knight and I were in love and things weren’t complicated. A time before we’d broken up.

“You’re asleep,” he admitted.

As a Loki, a magical creature, Knight had the ability to interrupt my sleep by thrusting himself into my dreams. And for some reason, he’d chosen to recreate in dreamscape the first time we’d ever met. I’d been jogging on this exact road and I’d come across him the same way I just had. He’d been standing in the middle of the road, wearing a dark, hooded sweatshirt and I’d thought he was there to attack me.

“Fancy meeting you here?” I asked, feeling awkward again. I wasn’t sure what else to say. The only other alternative I had was to say nothing at all but the silence between us was overwhelming.

“I thought this was poetic,” he answered and glanced around himself, taking in his surroundings before he faced me again. There was another long stretch of uncomfortable silence.

“The first time we met,” I started but he interrupted me.

“Was right here.”

“So am I supposed to freeze you with my fairy dust?” I asked sheepishly, hating how completely idiotic I felt.

“That didn’t exactly work the way you hoped last time, did it?” he chuckled. The sound of his laugh suddenly reminded me of how things used to be. How carefree we used to be. It was the sound of nostalgia, of moments spent in loving exploration. It was the sound of an innocence that had been trampled to death before being strangled.

But going back to Knight’s comment, no, my attempts to freeze him with my fairy dust hadn’t exactly worked. He’d shaken off my Mr. Freeze impersonation as easy as you please.

“Then I’m supposed to zap you with a lightning bolt?” I continued.

“Please don’t.”

I smiled but suddenly felt like there was an anvil sitting in my stomach.

“Why did you contact me like this?” I asked, finally needing to cut to the chase.

He nodded as though he’d expected this question. Then he smiled again but it was a smile that was self-conscious. A smile that was heavy with the understanding of how things used to be compared to how they were now. “In honor of the past, can we go somewhere more private?”

It was the same question he’d asked me all those years ago and the realization brought tears to my eyes. They burned in the cold night air.

“The park up the street?” I asked, clearing my throat so my voice wouldn’t crack.

He smiled and the gesture crushed me, made me lose my breath. I wanted to scream or cry. Maybe both.

“Lead the way.”

We walked in silence, side by side, until we reached the park. Of course it was desolate at this time of night. I didn’t say anything as I started for the swing set. Knight followed me. We both took a seat and began to sway softly. I stared down at the gravel beneath my feet and wondered how it was that we’d gotten to this point.

“So much has happened,” Knight said softly.

“So much.” I took a deep breath and looked at him, immediately regretting it. “Why are you here, Knight?”

He nodded and grew quiet again.

“Knight,” I said, my voice sounding hollow. “Why are you here?”

He looked at me and it took all my strength not to break his gaze.

“I don’t know,” he said finally and shook his head. “I just… felt like I had to… see you.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t and I don’t like the way things ended.”

I didn’t like the way things ended either. Considering everything we’d been through and how close I thought we were, the way things ended hadn’t provided me any closure and I was pretty sure the same went for Knight.

“There wasn’t exactly any closure for either of us.”

He swallowed hard. “I’m sorry for the way I ended things… so abruptly.”

I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting but it wasn’t this. Maybe I’d hoped this visit would have been along the lines of something more… positive? There was something deep down inside me that was disappointed. That something had expected more from him, had wanted more from him. Maybe the truth was that I’d wanted Knight to fight for this, for us. I’d wanted him to champion me and our tattered relationship.

But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, I told myself. Because there was no way you could just go back to how things were. Not after you witnessed what happened between Knight and Meg…

And that was the truth. Every time I remembered the visual of Knight having sex with Meg, the woman who had fucked up my life, I felt sick to my stomach. And, yes, I realized that during that time, I’d also been magically coerced into having sex with someone else but the difference was that Knight had never had to witness it. He’d never had to see it with his own two eyes. And even though we were both basically guilty of the same crime, I couldn’t wash the visual away. I couldn’t just turn a blind eye to the memory of my boyfriend inside that…

“If you’re here because you feel guilty, don’t,” I said, my voice coming out more harshly than I intended. “Things are what they are. Things happened and those things were impossible for us to overcome.”

He nodded and shuffled his feet in the gravel. “I didn’t want us to ever end up here… for what it’s worth.”

“Neither did I.”

He was quiet again for a few seconds, dropping his gaze to his feet. When he looked at me again, his eyes were heavy. “I considered moving away so I could just… get away from it all and start over somewhere else.”

I laughed. “So did I.”

“Yet, here we both are.”

“Yet, here we both are.”

He nodded and inhaled deeply. “Are things going to continue to feel like this between us?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Time’s supposed to heal all wounds, right?” he asked, sounding hopeful but sad all the same.

“That’s what they say, right?”

But I didn’t want to think about time healing all wounds. I wanted a fat, little fairy godmother with a sweet smile and a perfectly appointed bun to pop out of the ether with her full emerald ball gown and her matching green wand. And with a bibbidi bobbidi boo, I wanted her to simply erase everything that had happened over the last few months.

But, of course that was never going to happen.

“Things are what they are, Knight,” I said as I stopped swinging and stood up. “And whatever happens from here on out, it has to get easier. I mean, it can’t get any harder right?”

He stopped swinging. “Right.”

“So we just do what adults do and we face… whatever this is that we’re facing and we smile during the hard parts and we… just survive.”

“That’s a good way to put it,” he said and grew quiet again. The expression on his face said he wasn’t content with this conversation just as I wasn’t.

“Take care of yourself, Knight Vander,” I said with a small smile.

He looked up at me like he was surprised I was ending the conversation. Rather than saying anything, though, he just nodded sadly.

I didn’t wait for a response but turned around and started walking back towards the road, leaving the man I still loved in the darkness of the park.

When I woke up, there were tears streaming down my cheeks.

ONE

Quillan

“It’s just… so much,” I said.

“I know,” answered Christina.

There were flowers everywhere. Everywhere. Not like, “wow, this garden is so pretty, there’s flowers everywhere,” but like an “it’s the end of the world and the flowers have finally risen up and defeated mankind in a blaze of pollen and glory” kind of everywhere.

The floor. The ceiling. The walls. Busting up through the tiles, curling out of the air vents, lifting the refrigerator a few inches off the ground. Hopefully, it was still plugged in.

“It just kind of happened,” Christina continued, walking into the center of the room. She ran her hand along a very large, pulsating green vine that had draped itself over the island and out the open window. At least it had had the decency not to break the glass.

“I was trying to help Timothy grow”—Timothy being a rather stubborn tomato plant Christina kept insisting was supposed to be growing strawberries—“and fairies don’t do spells, we just kind of feel our way through our magic, you know, so I did, and now…” She gestured helplessly around the room and clasped her hands together. I couldn’t tell if she was excited or panicking.

“Now this.” I crossed my arms, shifted my weight, and just kind of stared at it all. “Huh.”

“Yeah.” Christina bit her lip.

“I mean.” I lifted one hand and waved it lamely. “Do we… leave it here?” It was clearly alive, and not in the way all plants are alive: the way rabbits and dogs and bears are alive. Which was to say it probably wouldn’t kill us if we left it alone, but it was in our goddamn kitchen, so leaving it alone was going to become a problem very shortly.

And I still hadn’t had my coffee.

“We can.” Christina gave the large vine a pat and it moved a little closer to her, humming from an orifice it didn’t fucking have. “He’s still super sweet, and he’s trying so hard.”

“He’s… wait, hold up—is this all Timothy?” I gestured to the impossibly large vine.

“Yep.”

“Oh, dear God.” This, this was one plant. One single, not-tomato-definitely-strawberries-I-promise plant. “Christina, I don’t even… can you make him smaller? At all?”

“Nope.”

So matter-of-fact. Like I’d asked if it was cloudy outside. Like there wasn’t a hungry plant monster getting its leaves all up in our pantry.

Christina squealed and nearly scared the life out of me as she ran across the room, vaulting over green stems and ducking under leaves the size of umbrellas. “Look! He did it!”

There was a soft popping sound, and she turned around holding the biggest goddamn strawberry I’d ever seen.

“It worked?” I asked helplessly. Incredulously

“Yes!” She hugged the strawberry to her chest and rocked it back and forth like a baby. It was still a little green at the top.

The plant gurgled around us, and I didn’t want to know how. But it was almost like it was purring.

“Christina, can we… it…”

“Him,” she corrected me.

“Him… I don’t know, can we move him to the yard at least?”

The stems moved out of Christina’s way so she could set the strawberry on the counter by the sink. Flower petals reached out to pet her arms, which wasn’t creepy at all.

“Sure, totally.”

“Great,” I said.

She turned to the sink and washed the strawberry. Then, she whistled and patted the plant. And, um, didn’t move it to the backyard.

And I just kind of stood there.

I turned to the nearest leaf and nodded like it was a colleague. “Nice weather, right?”

The plant gurgled again, but the gurgling probably wasn’t for me. Christina was drying off the strawberry with a towel and telling Timothy what a good job he’d done in growing it. “I’m so proud of you, Tim.”

I shook my head.

Christina talks to plants. All fairies can, I guess, but Christina has an especially green thumb. Plants like her. She has whole conversations with the trees and the flowers in the backyard, all the time, and she tries to get me to do it, too. And it’s fine. But it’s like trying to talk to somebody’s work friends when their job is medical bioengineering and yours is, like, tech support, not even. It’s a whole different world, different protocols. Like overalls vs. black ties.

What the hell is the polite thing to say to the plant your girlfriend just supersized?

“Nice strawberry,” I commented. And I got backhanded by a giant leaf.

“See? He likes you,” said Christina reassuringly, but she wasn’t looking at me. So maybe Timothy said something?

“I, um,” I started. “I like Timothy, too.” Seemed like a decent response. I turned to the nearest leaf and tried to pat it affectionately, imagining I looked like a robot trying to figure out how love works. The leaf shied away.

“Yeah, that’s fair,” I muttered, and I stuck my hands in my pockets.

The doorbell rang.

“Hey, can you get that?” Christina asked, tying on her apron and the gloves she’d used the first time she repotted Timothy; Hades only knew what her plan was now.

“Sure,” I said. “Please don’t hurt yourself moving Timothy.”

“I won’t.”

The doorbell rang again. I opened it smiling, or trying to smile, at least. My face was probably closer to “run, the end is nigh” than “welcome to my home; can I get you some coffee?”

“Hello,” said the woman who’d been ringing the bell.

And I just. Wow.

It was one word, one word, and I felt myself melt like the incompetent pile of butter I was. My tongue flubbed in my open mouth. I wasn’t totally sure I had hands anymore. Or legs. Or anything.

She was beautiful.

Striking, actually; the kind of beauty that jumps out of a magazine cover and punches you in the face.

Small, Asian, long black hair, pretty eyes. White sun dress, Spartan sandals.

A belt of very nice throwing knives.

And something else that made her very clearly not just a pretty Asian girl with knives. I didn’t know what that something else was, but it gave me a heebie-jeebie feeling like wind howling through the pipes.

“My name is Osenna Warkley,” she said. Her voice was all chocolate and honey and every other dumb, cliché thing anybody’s ever said about sexy voices. “Are you Quillan Carter?”

“Uh,” I managed, which was about as eloquent as I was going to get.

“Good. You’re going to help me.” She smiled and stepped into the house. I didn’t realize I’d moved out of the doorway until she disappeared around the corner into the living room.

“Um.” I swallowed hard and snapped back into myself. “I, um. Hey, wait!”

I ran awkwardly into the living room behind her, feeling like all my muscles had turned to molasses. They weren’t working right, and with every step I took, I thought I was going to buckle and fall over. Like, puppet-with-all-the-strings-tangled-up-in-a-squirrel-that’s-having-a-lot-of-trouble-getting-down-from-this-tree levels of stumbling.

I braced myself on the back of the couch. Woozy, kinda sweaty for some reason. The room was spinning like a damn carousel. What the fuck?

“I’m Osenna,” Osenna was saying to Christina.

Christina was in the living room now, covered in dirt and water and smiling as she removed her gloves.

“Hi, I’m Christina. And I guess you know Quillan?” She extended her hand.

Osenna took it. Her head bobbed as she looked Christina up and down, and I don’t know what face she was making, but it was enough to make Christina raise her eyebrows.

“You’re going to help me find Dagan,” announced Osenna in such a way that brooked no arguments.

“Um,” said Christina, and she looked at me. “We are?” Her frown suddenly deepened and she added, “Wait, what do you mean find Dagan?”

“I mean, find Dagan,” said Osenna. She walked over to me and sat down on the couch, touching my hand as she turned back to Christina, and I swear it was like being struck by lightning—no exaggeration. Touch, zap, gone. It was all I could do to stay standing.

“Quill, are you okay?” asked Christina.

“Yeah, fine,” I replied. But the words came out more like, “hmmyemafmm.” Like a whimpering puppy. Absolutely pathetic. I cleared my throat and clicked my tongue and tried again. “Um. Yes.” If I said it slowly, it almost made sense.

“Babe, you should sit down.” Then Christina was at my arm, guiding me across the room to a chair far away from Osenna. Her hand was warm, and the skin she was touching was warm, and that warmth was spreading like water over cold tile.

I plopped down into the chair like a ragdoll. The world wasn’t spinning so much anymore.

“You have a last name, sweetie?” asked Christina.

“Carter,” I mumbled. I honestly wasn’t sure if that was the right answer, though. I have a last name, right?

“Not you, honey.” She patted my shoulder and kept her hand close to my neck. I reached up to grab it, missed, tried again, and nearly slapped myself full in the face. What the fuck was wrong with me? Christina took the hand herself and squeezed it.

It was so weird. I felt kind of drunk. The feeling was fading a little, but still. I looked up at Christina and thought, my girlfriend is so pretty.

“Were you talking to me?” Osenna asked innocently, but not real “innocently.” It was the kind of “innocent” voice people use when they’re guilty and only acting innocent; the “little ole me” kind of innocent.

“Innocently” was starting to sound funny. Like it wasn’t a real word.

“Inn-o-cent-ly,” I said, rolling my tongue over the word.

I lied. Whatever was going on with me was getting so much worse.

Christina leaned down and whispered in my ear, “Keep breathing, honey. She’s a siren.”

Ooooooh.

I heard myself reply, “But she didn’t sing.”

“I don’t have to,” explained Osenna. She crossed her legs and leaned forward a bit, just a bit, and it looked like she was pulling her arms together to push out her boobs. Not that I was looking. I wasn’t looking.

“I’m not looking,” I told her.

Osenna’s smile was as captivating as it was creepy. Like if cotton candy had teeth. “Of course you aren’t, sweetie.”

That felt weird. “Sweetie” is just a word, but it’s Christina’s word. For me.

Osenna was staring at me. But not just staring. Leering, that’s the word. Leering with, like, twenty e’s.

“Leeeeeeriiiiiing,” I whispered. The word tasted wrong. Like, sprinkles-in-pasta wrong, weird wrong.

“So!” Christina clapped her hands together once, really loudly. Louder than she meant to, probably. Christina’s bubbly, but they’re quiet bubbles. Champagne, fountain-in-a-rooftop-garden bubbles. “Dagan. Finding Dagan.” She leaned forward a little, putting more of her weight on me. I squeezed her hand. She’s so warm all the time, it’s amazing.

“Dagan.” Osenna pulled the word out of her mouth like a magician’s scarves. Slowly, and like she was just trying to confuse the rest of us. She sighed dramatically. “He’s disappeared.”

“Okay,” said Christina. She looked at me, probably asking a question with her eyes, but they were so damn green, I couldn’t read them.

“Your eyes are really green,” I told her. “Like, the greenest green that ever greened.”

She made that little half-quirk smile and patted my face. “Thanks, babe.” Back to Osenna. “Where did you see him last?”

“Pain.”

Dagan’s night club. His, ah, sex club. There’s isn’t a better word for it.

“His erotic lounge, downtown,” Osenna continued, sounding bored.

“Right, I know where it is. When?” asked Christina.

“Hmm…” Osenna leaned back and twirled a thick strand of black, black hair around her finger, bobbing her foot up and down, up and down. Her sandals looked expensive. If she was in personally with Dagan, they probably cost something obscene.

“Four days ago.” She cocked her head at Christina and ran her tongue over her lips. “Have you been there?”

“On business,” Christina said.

“Never pleasure?”

“No.”

“Oh. Pity. I’d love to see you there sometime.”

Christina didn’t look bothered, but I could feel my face going rutabaga-red. I looked down, thinking, are rutabagas even red?

“Maybe,” Christina replied, totally flat, like Osenna had just recommended a new coffee shop or salon or something. “So, Dagan disappeared four days ago?”

“Yes,” answered Osenna.

“And you’re sure he’s not just out doing something… somewhere? Dagan definitely seems like the kind of guy who just disappears randomly.”

“He is that type of guy,” Osenna responded, “but he’d never disappear without saying something to me.”

Christina and I looked at each other. We weren’t even close to close with Dagan, but if he’d ever had a dedicated girlfriend, that seemed like the kind of thing we would know. Somehow, though, “he never mentioned you” didn’t seem like the appropriate thing to say.

“Are you two together?” asked Christina, doing her best to hide her confusion. She didn’t do a very good job.

Osenna’s face… it didn’t light up the way most people’s faces light up. It was like she suddenly had a flashlight under her chin, and she was about to tell us a really scary story. She looked evil and smug.

“Yes,” she said. Then she shrugged. “And no.”

“But mostly yes?” clarified Christina.

Osenna nodded. She released the strand of hair from her finger and sat up a little straighter—boobs first, not that I was looking.

“She really can’t help it,” Christina whispered to me. But Osenna was looking right at me, so she had to know what she was doing. I’d never met a siren, but there was no way passive magic could make me feel… this… um…

The material of her dress was a lot thinner than it looked.

Beside me, Christina giggled and closed my mouth with her hand. My teeth clicked together.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Osenna. She said everything slowly, with a lilt, and she drew out her vowels. Like she was trying to talk to whales but just couldn’t get her heart into it.

She was pointing at me. Her skin seemed to glow in the dark. Even though it wasn’t… dark.

“No magical defenses,” said Christina. “Whatsoever.” I couldn’t get a read on her voice. Either we’d laugh about this later, or she’d laugh about it alone as she buried me in the backyard under Timothy.

“Do you know where Dagan lives?” asked Christina.

TWO

Quillan

“Yes,” Osenna crooned. Her voice pulled on something in the pit of my stomach, like I’d swallowed a fucking hook, and she was tug-tug-tugging with every word.

It was so weird though, because it wasn’t like with fairies in the Netherworld where you saw them and your brain shrank back into that primal “I must fuck it or die” place; it was like a moth-flame situation. I didn’t want to do anything, and I didn’t want her to do anything—I just wanted to get closer. I wanted to hear that bizarre wind-chime voice jangling in my ears like steel keys. I wanted to feel her breath move the air around my face. I wanted her the way a kleptomaniac suddenly wants a shiny rock or a stapler or a bowl of plastic vampire teeth.

I needed her.

“Sit down, sweetie,” said Christina, and she pushed me back down into the chair with an unceremonious fwoomping sound.

“What?” I asked. My whole body was dream-numb, like I was sleepwalking. I probably had been, sort of.

Christina patted my shoulder and gave me a “bless your heart” smile that could crack glass. I looked at my shoes, feeling very small and very stupid.

“I’m sorry,” said Christina, turning back to Osenna, “I know this is going to sound stupid, but have you checked his apartment? Or his house, or wherever?”

“No.”

Christina and I blinked at her in joint confusion. We looked at each other briefly, though the uncertainty on her face was definitely more coherent than mine. I couldn’t tell what my eyes were doing, and there was a decent chance my tongue was sticking out.

“You have… look… live… where… hooooooo,” I said, embarrassingly.

“You haven’t checked where he lives?” Christina translated.

Osenna slowly flattened her skirt and placed her hands in her lap. The movements had an odd fluidity to them, like all her base motions were scripted. Like these were pre-programmed idle animations.

She smiled. Hades, that fucking smile. Like the sting of something sour in your jaw.

“No,” she said, sweetly, sweetly, sweetly. I swallowed the sound and swear I felt something gooey and gloppy drop into my stomach. It sat there like a hunk of caramelized maple syrup and I made this pathetic whining sound.

“Why?” asked Christina. I tried to nod to show I shared the question. It didn’t work even a little.

Osenna shrugged, as though it was obvious. “I didn’t have to check his place because he hasn’t been at the club.”

“I’m not following,” Christina said and frowned.

Osenna huffed out a breath of indignation but then explained. “If Dagan was home after all this time, it means something is very wrong. And whatever that wrong is, it could still be at his house and could be dangerous, and, well, look at me.” She spread her arms wide, elbows bent, to show her tiny body. “I wouldn’t stand a chance against whatever that wrong thing could be.”

I wanted to say I’d protect her. I didn’t really want to protect her, but I really, really wanted to say I would. I wanted to sit at her feet and promise her that nothing would ever hurt her, ever. But if saving her involved going literally anywhere else but the couch she was sitting on? Nopety-nope, I lived there now.

You live here, anyway, with this couch and with Christina… your girlfriend. Remember? pointed out some vaguely sober part of me that was becoming more and more disgusted and amazed by the thoughts I was having.

“Plus, I really don’t want to be the one to find his body if that’s what’s happened,” Osenna continued and then inspected her nails for a few seconds.

“So, you want us to go to his place and make sure there’s nothing nasty going on there?” Christina asked.

“Oh, I do hope something nasty’s going on.” Osenna leaned forward, lips slightly, slightly puckered. My vision was going all wavy, and she kind of looked like she’d been stung by, like, twenty bees. “But I’m talking about the right kind of nasty.”

Christina didn’t flinch. “He’s been gone four days?”

“Four days,” answered Osenna.

“Okay,” said Christina. “We’ll go look in on him. Do a wellness check.”

A wellness check, I thought. A wellness check for motherfucking Dagan.

“Brilliant.” Osenna stood and clapped her hands together. “Let’s go.”

“Woah, honey, hold your horses.” Christina took a few steps towards her and away from me.

I reached for her feebly. Really, it was more of a flail. Like a Barbie limb, it just kinda… flung itself forward and stayed there.

“You want to go right now?” she continued. She had her mom voice on, and she was doing that thing where she raises one eyebrow and kind of cocks her head, like, “really?”

She’s gonna make a really stellar mom, guys. Best in the world.

Osenna laughed. “No. I want you to go right now. Like I said. It could be dangerous.”

“We’ll go later,” Christina assured her. “There are things we have to do first.”

Osenna looked between me and Christina with snake eyes. Lots and lots of snake eyes, like Medusa, all the little green heads ducking and peering and looking just a little too hard.

“Oh?” she asked. “What things? Perhaps I can… assist.”

Heh. Ass-ist.

Fuck, I am not okay, I thought.

“Gardening things,” Christina answered. No venom, like she was talking to her sister. Like Osenna hadn’t just kind-of-not-really asked if we were gonna have an open-invitation orgy, which sounded like a bad idea for more reasons than I currently had brain cells. I was all melted wires and googly eyes on the inside. Coherent thoughts were for suckers.

“Pity,” said Osenna. She stood, slowly, and smoothed out her dress, slowly, and turned to walk towards the door. And she walked. Slowly. I think “sashay” is the right word. She was doing this really deliberate hip swing and it was like one of those spinning black and white illusion things. I couldn’t stop… staring… at…

“Wait, how did you find out where we live?” Christina called after her.

But she never responded. The front door snapped closed, and I was catapulted back into my body from somewhere very far away.

I turned to Christina immediately. “I am so sorry, I don’t… I mean, she just, and I don’t even think she’s that pretty, but I felt so weird—”

Christina kissed my lips, quickly, disappearing before I could kiss her back.

“Um,” I said.

She laughed, the kind of high-pitched, giddy laugh that happens when you’re shivering. “It’s okay, Quill—she’s a siren. It’s magic, and it’s not like you did anything.”

I pushed myself out of the chair and followed her into the kitchen. “I’m really sorry.”

“Babe, it isn’t your fault. It’s like, the longer you’re around a demon, the angrier you get. Sometimes, there’s just a thing creatures do to the air in a room, you know?”

“I’m sorry. I love you. You’re the prettiest thing in the world, no exceptions.”

“I know how you feel about me, silly,” she said reassuringly, smiling—not smug, but maybe enjoying herself a little too much. She touched my cheek and patted my face. “Now, to Dagan’s.” She walked around me and put on her coat, grabbing her gun from the drawer in the little table by the front door.

“To Dagan’s,” I repeated. “Really?”

She strapped on her holster and slid her Op-7 neatly into it. There were stickers all over it, vector ice-cream illustrations and some pudgy gray cat from the internet. “Well, to the store first, and then back here, but yes, really.”

“Um, no?”

“What?” she asked. “The siren needs our help, so we should help her.”

“We should first decide if this could be… definitely, one hundred percent, a trap.”

She raised an eyebrow at me and crossed her arms. She smirked. Hades, it killed me when she smirked. “A trap?”

“Yes!”

“Why would she want trap us?”

“I don’t know, maybe Dagan’s up to something,” I answered with a shrug. “Maybe he wants to trap us.”

“Dagan wants to trap us?”

“Yes, what’s so crazy about that?” I threw my hands into the air like I was trying to flip a table. “He’s a demon, Christina, and he’s an asshole!”

“We don’t not help people just because they’re an asshole or a demon or both,” she said. “Are you sure you’re not just feeling self-conscious about helping the girl who just spent ten minutes melting your brain with her boobs?”

“I. Um. Well.” Fuck. “We need to see if Osenna really is who she says she is. Just, you know, so we don’t do something completely, totally, and impossibly stupid.”

“Oh?” She turned to me slowly, and her words came out like snapping turtles. “You think I’m going to do something stupid, Quillan? Something completely totally, and impossibly stupid?”

Fuck.

“No, no, absolutely not,” I corrected. “I just, you’re so eager to help people and sometimes you can be a little too… trusting, and I just don’t want something bad to happen to you. Because you’re amazing.”

I was about to continue rambling, but then I saw her smiling.

“You’re not stupid, and I didn’t think you were about to do something stupid,” I said. “Not even close. You’re… the opposite of stupid. You’re un-stupid.”

“Thanks, babe,” she said, opening the door, keys in her hand. Like I hadn’t just said the dumbest sweet thing in the world. Probably for the best, honestly, that really didn’t deserve a fun response. “I need to get some fertilizer. We’ll swing by the garden place around the corner and by the time Patty’s done telling me about her hydrangeas, we’ll have the report back.”

I followed her out to the driveway. “Hydrangeas?” I repeated, trying to remember who the hell Patty was. Probably whoever owned the garden place around the corner. Christina had mentioned Patty a few times. I think. Maybe. “Wait, hang on. The report?”

“Yeah.” She opened the door to her Jeep Wrangler and leaned on the frame, waiting for me to get in the other side.

“What report?”

“The report Knight will have for us by the time we’re out of the garden place.”

“What? Wait, when did you—”

“I texted him the second Osenna said her name.” She smirked at me over her shoulder. “Or were you too busy to notice?”

I could feel the color in my face. It wasn’t even hot—it was tingly, like I’d been slapped. Self-conscious wasn’t the word. Mortified might be more accurate. “Shut up.”

She got in the Jeep, making this soft little tutting noise. “Okay, sweetie.”

I climbed in sheepishly as she closed her door and started the engine.

“Going back to your point about this being a trap,” she started as she smiled over at me. “It’s Dagan.” She was trying to reassure me, I guess. “He doesn’t care enough to trap anything. Too much work. And anyway, he’s actually really big on consent, so I don’t think a trap is really his thing.” She shrugged.

“Yeah.” I paused. “Wait. Why do you know he’s big on consent?”

She adjusted the rearview mirror. She smiled. Said nothing.

I swallowed. “Hey, Christina, honey, why do you know that?”

“To the plant store!” she announced, giggling. Like, old-school fairies-in-the-woods-are-trying-to-lure-me-to-my-death giggling. “Onward!”

***

So many bags of dirt. So many.

We dumped the last of them into the plot in the middle of the backyard around the towering not-strawberry monstrosity that was Timothy. The stalk swayed like grass in a field and there was this weird, deep gurgling noise that sounded like it was coming out of the ground. Like planting Timothy had woken up something ancient and unfriendly deep underneath Splendor. The flowers on his leaves vibrated.

They looked bigger now.

“How’s, um, Timothy liking the dirt?” Hades, I sounded like the world’s shittiest drug dealer. Like an undercover cop talking to a bunch of high schoolers about taking “Mary Jane” to the “smoke-zone.”

Honestly, talking to criminals was easier than talking to plants. Or talking to your girlfriend when she’s talking to a plant that doesn’t seem to like you very much. Timothy probably had a good reason, but I didn’t know what it was. Maybe I’d watered him too much at some point.

But Christina wasn’t listening to me, anyway. She was patting a really big leaf with garden-gloved hands, smiling and whispering something to Timothy. Rumbly sounds came from the plant and the stem vibrated.

My phone rang, and I pulled it out of my pocket and answered. I didn’t look at the caller ID; I never do.

“Quillan,” I said.

“Christina isn’t answering her phone.”

I didn’t expect my blood to go cold. But it did. Skating-rink cold, Arctic-glacier-dropping-out-of-the-sky cold. And not because I was dreading talking to him or anything, just…it was Knight.

Not exactly the guy I wanted to talk to at the moment.

THREE

Quillan

Dulcie and Knight had broken up. Again. For real this time, supposedly. At least, that was what everybody who knew anything had been saying. Whatever had happened was F5-tornado bad, burning-disaster-relief-tent-cities bad. Nobody would tell me what it was, and that was fine—it wasn’t mine to know.

Sam said even she didn’t know, or at least she didn’t know everything. Which was… weird.

And I’d never liked Knight to start with. Always had a bad feeling about him.

Which is really fucking rich, coming from me, but whatever. Takes an ass to know an ass, I guess.

“What do you got?” I asked, all business.

There was a tiny pause. Maybe he could feel the coldness coming from me. Or maybe he was just scrolling through paperwork, I didn’t know.

“I’m responding to Christina’s text,” he answered, giving me the same business tone I’d just given him.

“Okay.”

He cleared his throat. “Osenna Warkley is a legal Splendor resident, but according to any and all documents in Splendor and the Netherworld, she’s only existed for the past six years.”

“Great, of course she has,” I said.

“She’s got one recorded year of living in the Netherworld, and information from her immigration up to the present, but before that? Nothing. Nothing’s redacted, nothing’s been sealed, there just isn’t anything else to find. For all intents and purposes, it’s like she was born six years ago.”

“She definitely didn’t have the body of a six-year-old,” I said without realizing what I was saying. Knight just chuckled on the other line, which probably meant he knew what she looked like.

“Is she here under, like, political asylum or something?” I asked quickly, trying to cover my idiotic comment.

“No.”

“Any official name changes?”

“Nope. And no formal declaration of absent or lost records, either.”

“So her information isn’t something we lost when the ANC went down?” I asked.

“No, we had everything backed up, so we didn’t actually lose anything. If she had a birth certificate or anything in the system ever, I’d be able to see it, and there’s nothing here.”

Fan-fucking-tastic. “Then her name’s definitely not Osenna Warkely.”

“Probably not. New identity then?”

“Yeah,” I said. It’s why I’d asked about political asylum in the first place—if we were shielding her from something, it was totally plausible that we just hadn’t been able to access whatever records her old world or country had.

But it looked more like she’d changed her name—and done a really bad job of it. All the normal paperwork (birth certificate, etc.) would be filed under her birth name, but whatever fuckwit had given her a new identity hadn’t bothered making her an origin story, I guessed. Sloppy work, but six years ago would have been in the middle of the Melchior years, so it honestly didn’t surprise me that she’d skated by with as little documentation as she clearly had.

“Christina said she was Dagan’s girlfriend?” Knight asked.

I shrugged, realized Knight couldn’t see me, and directed the gesture to the plant. It rustled a little in my general direction, which was nice. “I don’t know. Christina says she’s Dagan’s something.”

I chewed on that for a second. Dagan didn’t have many clean friends, in any sense of the word. If Osenna needed to change her name and smuggle herself out of the Netherworld, Dagan would definitely be on the list of people who could do it. He wouldn’t be able to skip past all the paperwork-y red tape, but he probably knew somebody who could.

Fuck, if Melchior had been in charge at the time, rushing Osenna’s immigration might have been a favor to somebody down the corporate ladder. “Anything bad on the records we do have?” I asked.

“Parking tickets and a domestic disturbance, but not really. She hasn’t been arrested for anything.”

That didn’t mean much. Melchior had never been arrested, either.

“Anything that proves she and Dagan are actually involved?”

“Yeah,” Knight answered as the sound of rustling papers ensued. “The domestic disturbance was at his apartment.”

Okay, well. That proved Dagan and Osenna knew each other, but it didn’t prove they were involved in something longer-term than a single domestic disturbance. “So, final verdict—is she dangerous?”

“If she’s Dagan’s anything, then yeah, of course she’s dangerous.”

Shit dog, you right. Anybody who could not only survive Dagan, but actively come back looking for more of that sweet, sweet demon action was either out of options or clinically insane. Or both.

Probably both.

“Hey, what’s she on record as?” I asked.

“Like, physical classification?”

“Yeah.”

“Siren.” I didn’t say anything, so he continued. “Why?”

“No reason,” I said, a little too quickly. Way too quickly. I cleared my throat. “Any chance she’s from the demonic plane? Somebody Dagan brought with him?” The absent paperwork would make more sense then. The demon plane had an iron-curtain policy on sharing records, even and especially for people trying to leave the dimension.

“Maybe. Demons can come and go whenever, but since she isn’t a demon, then yeah, she’d have to leave via portal or something.”

“And Osenna isn’t,” I added. “A demon, I mean. Christina checked.” One of the quirks of being a fairy is being able to identify supernatural species. And sure, Knight checked, too, but some part of me really wanted to drive home how not-completely-my-fault all that siren stuff was.

“Right,” Knight agreed. “Not a demon.”

“Hang on, wait, I’m an idiot.” I shook my head, wondering where my brain had been. Actually, I knew exactly where it had been. Trying to fight off the call of a siren, something which had royally screwed it up. “Check when Dagan came to Splendor.”

“Alright, hang on.” Pause. “Uh, ten years ago?”

Fuck, nevermind.

“Wait,” he said.

“Wait, what?”

“Dagan only went back to the Netherworld twice,” said Knight. “There’s a retroactive report about him taking Sam and Casey’s team to the Netherworld’s Los Angeles, and a formal request for re-entrance… five years ago.”

“To the Netherworld?” I asked. “From where?”

“Splendor, California. A week and a half before Osenna came here.” Pause. “They came back on the same day. Within minutes of each other.”

“Okay, so he definitely brought her with him.”

“Yeah, no question.” He was quiet then and I could hear him thinking. “Then Osenna’s year living in the Netherworld is probably fake. I bet Dagan had somebody smuggle her out of Dromir and into the Netherworld. Then, he went to the Netherworld to get her.”

Dromir was the demon plane.

“And to pay whoever forged everything,” I added. Back then, it would have been way safer to pay somebody in cash on the other side. Melchior wouldn’t have cared, but the ANC in Splendor would have, if we’d found out. “That it?”

“So far.”

“Cool, thanks.”

I wanted to hang up on Knight without saying anything else, so I did. It felt kinda childish, but whatever.

“Who’s a good boy?” asked Christina. At first, I thought she was talking to me and I was about to respond with an equal amount of flirtation, but then I pouted when I realized she was talking to Timothy. She patted his stem. “Who’s the goodest boy in the whole wide world?”

Timothy made a soft rumbling noise that probably meant something sideways of “it is me, I am the goodest boy.”

“Yes, you are,” she cooed. She took off her gardening gloves and turned to me. Dirt was smeared across her face, in little blackish stripes like war paint. Timothy’s shadow swayed back and forth across her.

“Okay, so Osenna’s just barely real,” I explained.

“That was Knight?” She pointed to my phone.

“Yup.”

She made a face. “Did he sound… okay?” I figured she was referring to the fact that Knight and Dulcie had broken up, and pretty obviously. Like, everyone knew about it, even if we didn’t know the exact reasons why.

“I mean, yeah, but whatever. The important information is that Osenna isn’t a legal person. All our combined records—okay, is there another word for records? Because I’ve said it like five times in the last ten minutes and it’s starting to sound like a fake word.”

“Chronicles?” asked Christina. “Accounts? Archives?”

“Yeah, sure, chronicles.”

“Okay, so all our combined chronicles?” she encouraged me.

“All our combined chronicles only have six years of anything for Osenna at all. She lived in the Netherworld for one year, came here legally, and she’s been here since.”

“Presumably fucking Dagan,” Christina added casually.

“Gross, but yes,” I said. “At least once; she was part of a domestic disturbance at his apartment.”

“Violent disturbance?” she asked.

“I don’t know, I didn’t ask.”

“Hmm. Okay, maybe she’s scared of Dagan.”

“Scared?”

“Yeah, like, if she left something in his apartment and needed to get it, but she was scared he’d be there? Like she tried to break up with him and it didn’t go well.”

“Why lie about that, though?”

“I don’t know. Dagan’s lied about dumber things.” She shrugged. “Okay, chronicles. What else you got?”

“Okay, so before the one year in the Netherworld, we’ve got a whole lot of nothing. No birth certificate, no formal declaration of spontaneous creation, no requests for transformation, nothing. She’s a ghost.”

“She’s a siren.”

“Hardy-har, you know what I mean.”

Christina smiled and sighed. “So, maybe Dagan brought her over with him?”

“He did,” I answered. “We’re pretty sure he went to the Netherworld to get her. Then he paid somebody to get her out of Dromir, and to also make the two of them new identities before he brought her back here. Which means she’s running from something so dangerous that she had to change her name. Sounds like she could have been running from something like the law.”

“She could be a fugitive.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “From the law.”

“Or from somewhere like the demon plane that doesn’t share resources. If she was running from their government, we might have granted her asylum and changed her name without bothering to make up the rest of her paperwork.”

“Christina, I don’t believe for a second that Dagan and Osenna had to get out of Dromir because they were being persecuted. If they had to leave, it’s because they did something illegal.”

“Maybe,” she said, shrugging, still on the asylum thing I figured. “Or maybe it was dangerous because Melchior was still in charge at the time.”

“Or maybe Melchior helped pushed Osenna through because she’s evil and he was evil. Shit, for all we know, Osenna could have been working for Melchior.”

Christina kissed Timothy’s leaf and it curled around her like it was trying to give her a hug. “Or maybe not.” She grinned and started walking into the house. She tapped my shoulder as she passed me and gave it a little squeeze, like an explosion of warmth and niceness. Like if honey was a feeling, you know?

“I’m gonna get cleaned up and then we’ll head over to Dagan’s, okay?” she asked.

“Okay.” Pause. Processing. “Wait, what?” I followed her inside. “What do you mean? We’re going over there?”

“Yes.”

“Christina, Osenna is lying!”

Christina went to the sink to wash her hands. “Isn’t everybody?”

“Chris—”

“Quill, no matter what is true right now, something is up.” She turned suddenly and her hands were on my arms, gentle and soft and shush-honey-I’m-talking-now. “Right?”

“…Yes?”

“Yes, because if she’s lying about Dagan, it means she has a reason to lie about Dagan.”

“…Yeah?”

She rolled her eyes. “Look, all we really know right now is that Dagan is missing and somebody important to him is asking for our help. What do we do when somebody asks for our help, Quill?”

“We help them,” I muttered.

“Yes. Because that’s our job, right?” She put my phone in my hand. It had been in my pocket before, and I hadn’t felt her take it out.

“Yes, that’s our job,” I grumbled. Then I glanced down at my phone. “Why did you just hand me this?”

“Because you’re going to call Casey and let him know where we’re going. Ask for backup if you’re that nervous. And tell him if he hasn’t heard from us by midnight, we’re both probably dead.” She chewed on her cheek for a minute before facing me. “And then ask him if he’ll adopt Timothy.”

“For fuck’s sake,” I started.

She took my face in her hands. Small hands, soft hands. Garden-strong, tomato-wrangling hands. She was so warm.

“Just because somebody lies doesn’t mean they’re evil, Quill,” she pointed out. “You know?”

The air around Christina always tastes a little sweeter. Like when somebody has one of those waxy plug-in air freshener things. Sometimes it’s soil and grass, sometimes it’s coconut shampoo, sometimes it’s the sweat of a long run. And sometimes it’s just Christina, sweet and warm. Not like cookies, but a smell that makes you feel like you’re smelling cookies. Something safe. Something trustworthy.

Like someone that knows exactly what they’re talking about right now.

The keys were behind her on the counter. I moved forward until she was leaning back against the counter and I was right over her. Then I reached down and scooped up the keys—and I hugged her. She was snug and warm and perfect.

“I know,” I said. I let go and backed up, and I did that thing where you push somebody’s hair back from their face just because you want to touch their cheek. “Okay. Let’s go save motherfucking Dagan.”

FOUR

Quillan

Dagan’s apartment was… Dagan’s apartment.

It was part of this enormous luxury-condo complex. He was only on the third floor—not rich enough to spring for a penthouse, I guessed—but everything about the building was suspiciously chic and strangely normal. Christina flashed her badge to get us into the elevator, saying we were doing a wellness check on a federal employee. Which was at least partly true.

When we got to his door, I noticed it wasn’t any different from the other doors, except for a red X sticker about the size of my palm stuck under the peephole.

“Gross,” I said.

“Why?” asked Christina. “Does it mean something?”

“Definitely.”

“Okay, what’s it mean?”

“Dagan lives here, and he makes bad decisions,” I told her, and opened the door into the living room. It wasn’t much of an answer and I was well aware of that, but at the moment, my mind wasn’t on Dagan and his bad decisions. Instead, I was taking in the scenery around me and wondering if we were about to walk into a less-than-pleasant situation.

There was a big, black leather couch sitting atop deep red squish-plush carpet, and a huge, awful white crystal chandelier hanging over everything. A shiny coffee table, also black, sat in the middle of the room, filled with weirdly normal magazines, coasters with little roosters on them, and—yeah, there it was. An enormously thick book with a fully naked woman on the front, covered by big blocky letters that just said Fever. Little white letters at the bottom said it was a catalogue.

Honestly, I didn’t want to know what in the hell it sold. But this was Dagan we were talking about, so I could make some assumptions.

We walked into the kitchen and turned on the lights. Black cabinets, white marble countertops, and a small shiny black dining room table with some suspiciously handcuff-looking augmentations attached to it. There was a stainless-steel toaster still plugged into the wall, and the whole place smelled like burning chocolate. Which probably had something to do with the suspicious table, but I cannot express how much I didn’t want to know how or why.

I unplugged the toaster and picked it up, looking it over for… I didn’t know. Something weird and gut-twisting, I guessed. Anything from bloodstains to lewd stickers. Maybe something that implied Dagan was using it for something other than making toast.

“Okay,” I began. “This is… normal. Kind of. Mostly.”

Christina cleared her throat and pointed. I looked.

A piñata of a nude woman in a black harness with a whip in her mouth leaned dejectedly against the lower cabinets, its side busted open. Condoms, ball gags, and papier-mâché hearts poured out in unfriendly numbers.

“Okay, nope,” I said, and immediately walked back into the living room, taking the toaster with me. I heard Christina laughing behind me.

“What did you think his apartment was going to look like?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” I stared at everything, toaster in my hands. “I didn’t want to think about it.” Parts of the place were totally normal—like, there wasn’t anything super weird about the coffee table—but this was definitely not the kind of room you wanted to subject to a black light. Not unless you wanted to have lots and lots of really specific nightmares.

“It doesn’t look lived in,” I announced. It came out as a really disconcerted mutter. The kind of whispering you do in a haunted house when you’re only twenty percent sure ghosts aren’t real. I fully expected Dagan to drop naked and erect out of the ceiling with a rose in his mouth.

Going to stop thinking about that now…

“No, it doesn’t look lived in,” Christina agreed. She walked into the living room and gently took the toaster out of my hands. I felt a sudden dumb urge to snatch it back and hiss, “precious.”

“But Dagan probably doesn’t spend a whole lot of time here,” she finished.

“Do demons sleep?” I asked, realizing that I didn’t actually know. Maybe Dagan only had a bed for, like, the really obvious things you use beds for when you’re not sleeping in them.

“Rarely,” Christina told me. She set the toaster on the coffee table and started pacing over the plush red carpet, eyes roving over the furniture. “When they need to commune.”

“Commune?”

“With their home dimension, the demon plane.” She turned on a lamp, which cast an unpleasantly eerie red light over the already unsettling space. “If demons go to sleep, it’s compulsory.”

“That sucks,” I said. I couldn’t imagine Dagan getting along with his relatives, if he even had relatives. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all to learn that he’d killed them all for kicks. But maybe that was unfair.

“Come on,” Christina suggested. “Let’s check the bedroom.”

I got this close to saying, “Do we have to?” in my best whiny-ten-year-old-on-a-road-trip voice. Dagan’s actual bedroom was the last place in the whole universe I wanted to check. And remember that Bram’s bedroom is also on that list.

Christina grabbed my wrist and led me in. And then she stopped walking. A light was on, a lamp by the window, next to an armchair and a small bedside table.

“Federal agents,” she said. Not to me.

There was a guy. Older, forties maybe, with dark hair pale skin. Suit and vest and tie, coat on the bed. Sitting in a chair by the bed like he was waiting for someone. Blue plastic container of bubbles in one hand, bubble wand in the other. And he was just… he was just chilling there. Blowing bubbles.

And fuck, I had so many questions.

Since he was sitting there, blowing bubbles, I figured he’d been there for a hot minute. So, either he was waiting around for Dagan, got bored, and found bubbles somewhere in Dagan’s apartment—which meant Dagan just randomly had bubbles—or the dude knew he’d be waiting here for a while and brought his own bubbles with him?

Honestly? I didn’t know which was weirder.

When he saw us, he stopped blowing bubbles and stood up. He didn’t look embarrassed at all.

“I’m looking for Dagan Halsir,” he said, and he leered.

“Halsir,” I repeated, realizing I’d never actually heard Dagan’s last name. Actually, I hadn’t even realized demons had last names. I’d only met one, Dagan, and he just went by Dagan, like Madonna. Or Cher. Or the artist formerly known as Prince. Not that Dagan was as amazing as the artist formerly known as Prince, or Madonna, or Cher, for that matter.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Someone who’s looking for Dagan Halsir.”

Great. He was going to be difficult.

“Sir, you’re trespassing on private property,” Christina told him.

He spread his hands wide. “Can you prove I’m not allowed to be here?”

She frowned for a moment. “Why are you here to see Dagan?” she asked, putting her badge away.

The man laughed darkly, a sound that reminded me of the gurgle of ink being poured from a bottle. He definitely seemed like Dagan’s kind of guy. “Believe me when I say, sweet lady, that I don’t want to see him. In fact, I should very much like never to see him again.”

He sat down again and held the bubble blower to his face, blowing softly. Two bubbles appear in the air, and the third popped before it got free. He scowled at the wand and replaced it in the blue plastic container. “But he has something of mine and I’d very dearly like it back.”

“We haven’t seen him,” I said. I sounded like a lying five-year-old.

“What did he take from you?’ asked Christina.

“What did he steal,” the man spat, lacing his fingers together in the kind of way that basically screamed please-don’t-trust-me-I’m-evil.

“Okay, what did he steal?” Christina corrected herself, mimicking his inflection. It seemed to amuse him.

“Something very precious to me.”

“Great, that narrows it down,” Christina muttered. “Well, we haven’t seen him.”

“But you’re looking for him as well,” he said. “Which means perhaps he’s taken something from you also?”

“We were doing a wellness check,” I explained. “Nobody’s heard from him for a while.”

“A wellness check,” he repeated. “On behalf of someone else, I expect? A woman who asked you to check up on him, perhaps?”

Christina frowned again, crossing her arms. “What makes you think that?”

“You don’t seem to be the kind of worldly beasts Dagan keeps in his employ, and I suspect you’re not, in fact, his friends.” He chuckled again. “Dagan doesn’t have those in excess.”

Okay, true enough. Christina didn’t stop frowning. “We’re just doing our job, sir.”

“Hmm.” The man looked her up and down with the kind of oily eyes that get your teeth kicked in. I took a step forward without realizing it, but Christina put her hand on my arm.

“There’s much goodness in you,” he said. “A purity of heart, a sacred valor unknown in my world.”

“And where would that world be, exactly?” Christina asked.

He set his bubbles down on the side table and stood with a flourish. “You would do well to abandon this wellness check of yours altogether, before Mr. Halsir drags you into something you don’t want to be dragged into.”

“What exactly did he steal from you?” I demanded. I really didn’t like the way he was looking at Christina.

He rolled his eyes. “A scarf.” He smiled, like it was funny.

“A… a scarf,” I asked incredulously.

“A scarf. It’s very important.” He screwed the lid onto the bubbles and picked up his coat, fussing with his hair before putting the container of bubbles into his coat pocket very carefully. So, he’d brought them—or now he was stealing them.

And he took something else out of his other pocket. A wallet. Small, black, thin.

“Dagan dropped this, by the way,” he said, setting it down on the bedside table. There was a weird smug-pretentious-bastard thing going on with his voice. “Perhaps you can get it back to him.”

“Woah, wait,” said Christina. “Dagan dropped this where? Where did you see him last?”

He smiled. “Do tell me if you come across the scarf,” he said. Then he nodded at Christina and approached me. Before I could figure out what the hell he was doing, he reached out, threw his arms around me and… gave me a hug? Then he pulled away, nodded succinctly, and disappeared. The air sizzled like it was burping after swallowing him.

“Um… what was that?” I asked after he’d done his disappearing act and left us standing there for at least five seconds in complete and total bewildered silence.

“Maybe it’s his way of saying goodbye?” Christina answered with a shrug.

“Maybe. Weird. I feel dirty now. Like I need to take a shower.” She frowned at me. “Hey, you’re not the one he hugged!” Then I shook my head. “I wonder who the hell he was, anyway?”

“Somebody else who was looking for Dagan,” she answered. “Great.” She sighed.

“What?” I asked, because the sigh sounded very content-specific. “What are you thinking?”

“Well, what do we know about Dagan, exactly?” she asked.

I shrugged. “We know he’s from the demon plane. We know he’s a sadistic son of a bitch and he’s rude. He’s also nowhere near as funny as he thinks he is, and…”

“Thanks, Quill, but that wasn’t what I meant.” She smiled at me. “What do we know about his family? People he would have known in Dromir?”

I shrugged. “Nothing specific.”

“But you know something?”

“Just that he really didn’t want to go home. Apparently, that was why he helped Sam in the first place, so Splendor wouldn’t get eaten by darkness or whatever and he’d have someplace to keep living.”

Christina nodded slowly. “I think we just met the man he was running from.” She pulled her phone out of her pocket, unlocked it, and made a call.

“Knight,” she said a few seconds later. “Yes, we’re fine. Listen, there was somebody here, a demon. No, he’s gone now, but he was looking for Dagan.”

“Demon?” I whispered. She held up her hand and walked over to the window as I thought about the fact that the guy was a demon. As a fairy, Christina could read what type of classification a creature was, so that wasn’t the weird part. The weird part was that I hadn’t really gotten a demon read from him. More like a thug from a Dick Tracy-esque movie.

“Yeah,” she said. “Mmhmm. I don’t know. It doesn’t look like Dagan’s been here for a while, but that might not be anything out of the ordinary for him. …Yeah. Okay. We’ll stay until they get here. Yeah. Okay, bye. Thanks.” She hung up and looked at me. “Okay, so we’re waiting here for the crime scene guys just in case there’s blood or something we can’t see.”

There were a lot of things in here that we couldn’t see, I was sure of it. Most of them were bodily fluids, and seeing as how it was Dagan’s apartment, there was also blood, probably. He was into pain-type shit. Or so I’d been told.

I nodded and looked around for something safe to sit on.

“Maybe we should just wait for them outside?” asked Christina.

“Yeah, definitely,” I answered.

“I don’t want to be in here when the black light comes out.”

“Fuck, me neither.”

FIVE

Quillan

After a couple of hours of explaining just what had happened at Dagan’s, we were excused by the crime scene investigators. When we got home, we found Timothy in a state.

Like, rumbling and twitching and twisting like he was trying to get himself out of the dirt to go for a walk. Timothy had broken down the back door and was reaching around with a leafy vine, like when your phone skids under the couch and you just start flailing around until you knock your hand into it.

“Timothy!” Christina could tell something was wrong the second we pulled up. She ripped the keys out of the ignition and ran into the house like something was on fire, leaving the front door wide open.

I followed her in, picked her keys up off the floor, locked the Jeep and the front door, and hustled my ass into the kitchen after her. There were lots of growly noises coming from the kitchen. And thumping. Like that refrigerator ca-chunk-thud-hmmmmmm noise, but it was way louder. And angrier. So, either Timothy was having a day, or our fridge was alive and ready to bust some heads.

But it wasn’t the fridge (good). It was Timothy, sweeping his little green tentacles through what was left of the dining room table (bad), through piles of broken glass (very bad), and what was definitely blood (significantly worse).

“What the hell?” I said, running forward.

“Timothy, it’s me, it’s me,” Christina cooed to the plant. Then she touched the flailing green vine thing and it stopped freaking out, like she’d pulled a plug somewhere. The cosmic-horror-from-the-edge-of-space roaring stopped. Timothy’s vine pulled into the backyard with a sad little rumble that I think might have been strawberry-not-tomato-plant for “shit, my bad.”

“It’s okay,” Christina said reassuringly. She walked into the backyard. The only light was coming through the hole in the wall that used to be a door from the kitchen, and only the light over the sink was on. So Timothy was lit from underneath like something out of Are You Afraid of the Dark.

Timothy gurgled and squirmed.

“Tell me what happened, honey,” encouraged Christina.

So she and the plant had a conversation while I got a broom and just kinda swept awkwardly behind them. I felt like I was eavesdropping on somebody in the high school counselor’s office. Except one of them was speaking Spanish. Or, like, Portuguese, I guessed, because I knew a little Spanish. Actually, this was more like sign language.

“What did the bad man say?” asked Christina. Which is among the literal worst things you can overhear in a one-sided conversation with the bloody, thrashing plant monster that lives in your yard.

Timothy gurgled and rumbled and made these weird sweeping movements with his stem-things that might have been hand gestures? Like, maybe he was pantomiming something. Or maybe it was just windy?

Christina came back in eventually, and I’d gotten most of the glass and wood splinters cleaned up and put into industrial-strength garbage bags nested in seven other industrial-strength garbage bags.

“Okay, so the guy from Dagan’s apartment was here,” she said, and she looked pissed.

“When?”

“Like ten minutes ago.”

“Fuck,” I said. “Did he follow us?”

“No.” Christina fished something out of her back pocket, a little brown folded-over square that looked like it had been swallowed and regurgitated by a giant bird. One that wasn’t very good at regurgitating things.

“Oh, hell,” I said, recognizing the disgusting square. I took it from her and unfolded it, and yep. My face. My ID, all scratched up.

“I guess he palmed it when he was feeling you up,” said Christina.

I grimaced. “Can you find literally any other way to say that?”

“Probably. Manhandled?”

“That’s worse.”

“Assaulted?”

“There you go.” I turned the wallet over in my hands and saw what was left of my insurance card. Part of the address had been ripped off, either in whatever scuffle Timothy had with the guy or just because Timothy found my wallet and was feeling vindictive. But you could still see most of it, and it probably wasn’t ripped when the demon dude was looking at it. “Fuck.”

“Yup.” Christina nodded, hands on her hips. She didn’t look rattled, just kind of pensive. Like she was three thoughts away from something that was bothering her, but she couldn’t get her mind to switch tracks.

“What’cha thinking?” I asked.

Christina continued to stare at the wall, the corner of her mouth rising and falling like a deflating balloon. She chewed on the inside of her cheek and surveyed our demoed kitchen. It looked like an octopus had taken seven sledgehammers and a chainsaw to everything but the microwave.

“We need to get Osenna’s home address, or wherever the hell she’s staying,” she said.

“You think that demon guy knows Osenna came here before we left to go check on Dagan?” I asked.

She shrugged. “What other reason would he have had to come here and do this?” she asked, glancing around at the destruction.

“And he stole my wallet,” I added.

“Did he take any cash or credit cards out of it?”

I checked and glanced up at her. “No.”

“So, he was looking for our address.”

“Why? Did he think we were hiding Dagan or something?”

Christina shook her head—not at me, at herself, like she was shuffling through thoughts in her brain and throwing them out as she went. “I mean, maybe, but then why would we have been looking for Dagan at his apartment?”

I crossed my arms and shrugged. “Getting something Dagan left behind? Checking to see if the place was empty, because Dagan might have warned us this guy was coming?”

Christina nodded and started to pace. “Okay, yeah, maybe… hmmm.” She stopped pacing and turned to face me. “I’ll call Knight. I mean, he should know about this anyway, because now, whoever that guy is, he broke into Dagan’s apartment and he’s also broken into our house, so that’s two counts of trespassing even if he isn’t doing anything else illegal.”

“Which I’m sure he is,” I added quickly.

“I mean, yeah, definitely,” she agreed. She scratched her head and left her hand there.

“Did Timothy see what that demon guy was doing in here?” I asked. Then I remembered that Timothy didn’t have eyes. “I mean, could he tell what the guy was doing here… somehow?”

“No.”

Timothy made a bubbly growling noise from the backyard.

“What?” asked Christina, like she hadn’t heard him right the first time.

He burbled in response.

“Oh, shit, okay,” she said. She turned to me. “Timothy felt somebody else leaving when the demon came in.”

“Leaving?” I asked. “Like, somebody else was already here before the demon guy showed up?”

“No, this other person was outside. Timothy says someone walked up, saw the demon bust his way in, and then they ran off. Like, really fast.”

“Huh,” I said. “Okay, could have been anybody.”

“Anybody?”

“Yeah, like, Mrs. Wiggins out for a walk or something. Or another one of our nosy neighbors.”

“At eleven o’clock at night,” Christina pointed out, raising her eyebrows.

“…Okay, maybe not. Maybe somebody else is looking for Dagan. Or maybe somebody was scoping our house to break in and steal something?”

“…Or Osenna came back here.”

“Osenna?”

“Yeah. She seemed really worried about Dagan.”

Did she? I thought she’d seemed a little more preoccupied with making me as uncomfortable as magically possible. Which I supposed also meant I was the last person in the room who would have noticed if she was worried about anything or not.

“So, she came back here to see if we’d found anything?” I asked.

“Maybe. Or maybe something else happened and she came to tell us.”

“That’s not good,” I replied, which was about as helpful as I was going to be until I got some sleep. I never did get my coffee. Except then I had a thought. “Hey, Christina?”

“Yeah?’

“What are the odds that the demon is lying to us?”

“High,” she answered. “What about, though?”

“What he came to Splendor for.”

“Dagan?” she asked.

“No, the scarf.”

Christina tilted her head at me. “You think he’s lying about the scarf?”

“Do you think he could be here for Osenna instead?” I asked.

She blinked a few times, thinking about it.

“He said Dagan stole something from him,” I continued. “And we think Dagan’s the one who got Osenna out of Dromir, right?”

Christina nodded. “Yeah, demon guy could have been lying about the scarf, then, for sure. And that might explain why Osenna didn’t want to go to Dagan’s apartment to look for him. Maybe she was worried the demon guy would be there.”

“So, there’s stuff she’s not telling us,” I said.

“Yep,” answered Christina, pulling out her phone. “Lots of stuff.”

She dialed and put it to her ear, doing that disappointed-mom head-shake thing. There were a couple seconds of silence.

“Knight. Yeah, we talked to the investigators on scene and got booted. Then we got home and the demon we were talking about was here… no, he was gone when we got here, but he stole Quillan’s wallet and didn’t take any cash or cards, so I think he was just looking for… yeah, exactly. Yep. Uh-huh. No, yeah, and we’re pretty sure Osenna knows this guy, whoever he is, so we need to find her. Do we have an address on file?” She pinched her nose. “Of course we don’t. Fan-fizzing-tastic. Okay, yeah. I’ll call you in the morning, okay? I know, I know. Just, we might have a hostile demon roaming around Splendor, and that’s… no, I get it, I know… yeah. No, I’ll keep looking. Okay, thanks. Later.”

She hung up, sat down hard on the floor, and let out this big foghorn sigh.

“Keep looking for what?” I asked.

“Osenna’s records,” she said, folding over into her knees and groaning. “I’m HR, so I have access to all the…” She made a rolling motion with her hand.

“Chronicles?”

“Yeah, those.” She groaned again. Not angry, just tired and peeved. Like when you keep lending somebody your pens and they keep losing them. Like, you’re not pissed about the pens, but goddamn, how hard is it to keep track of a pen?

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” She looked up and pulled her hand down her face, squishing her nose and her cheeks, stretching her lips. “Okay, so Knight told me that Casey said I can keep looking into this Dagan disappearance thing as long as it doesn’t get in the way of anything else I have going on. And I guess Knight had to argue it over with Casey because, right now, we super don’t have enough evidence to turn this into a federal case. We can put, like, two guys on finding Osenna if we want to accuse her of falsifying an identity or something, but everything else is circumstantial.”

That was true enough. Two break-ins, a missing demon, and a questionable siren was a recipe for something, but it wasn’t necessarily disaster.

“But Casey’s still gonna let you look into it,” I confirmed.

“Yeah, I guess so. Knight said he was able to convince Casey to be concerned about it. Dagan’s the only demon in California, so whoever was in his bedroom is either”—she took a deep, tired breath through her nose and sighed it out again—“here from out of state or he’s not legally here at all, you know?”

I nodded.

“Is Casey sending somebody out here?”

“Yep. They should be twenty minutes out, I think? Maybe more.”

I looked sheepishly at the broom I was holding. “Okay. So maybe sweeping up the evidence wasn’t the best idea.”

“Maybe not.”

“Fuck.”

“It’s fine. They’ll take the demon’s blood and see if they can get a hit on anything in our system, but honestly, I seriously doubt he’s a legal resident.”

“Because he knows Dagan?”

“Yeah. And because I’ve just got a bad feeling, you know?”

I nodded.

“But if he’s here illegally, we’ll find out and… arrest him, I guess?” she asked. “Not that he’s going to say anything about Dagan if we do, he’ll probably just”—she sighed again—“say it’s demonic custom not to knock or something when you’re returning somebody’s wallet.”

I shrugged. “Maybe. But I think whatever is happening, Osenna’s in danger. She might have run off just because she saw someone breaking into our house or into Dagan’s place, but if she recognized the guy and ran, it’s because she knew him.”

“That’s usually how recognizing somebody works, Quill.”

“Hardy-har, you know what I mean,” I said.

Christina smiled, but just for a second. “Yeah. We need to find her.”

“Before bubble demon does.”

“So, we’re running with the demon-is-here-for-Osenna-and-Dagan-is-probably-dead thing?” she clarified. “And is this guy’s official title ‘bubble demon?’”

“I think bubble demon is pretty fitting,” I answered with a shrug. “And as to your other question… I mean, I think it’s the worst-case scenario. But also probable.”

“The worst-case scenario is a bunch of demons rallying to bring Meg back from the dead,” said Christina. She looked at me. “So where do you think Osenna went?”

SIX

Bram

It was several hours past full-dark when a servant informed me that a smallish, pale siren was wandering the seedier parts of Splendor proper, inquiring after me.

“She is here, then?” I asked. My servant would not have informed me of this news if the siren had not already been apprehended. Or perhaps he had failed to apprehend her…

My servant—Gerard, a butler I had acquired in 1875 at an English academy where such paltry trades are learned—nodded.

I sighed, closed the book I was reading, and sat up straight in my chair. “Show her in.”

Gerard nodded again, then disappeared. When he reappeared in the drawing room, he was accompanied by a mousey little thing whom I recognized immediately as Osenna Warkley.

“Osenna,” I said in way of greeting without actually greeting her. Sometimes, one lacks time for such silly trifles.

She looked around with her arms wrapped about herself, feigning cold and trying her damnedest to look lost. She scuffed at the carpet with the toe of her sandal.

It is quite difficult, however, to make oneself appear unassuming when one is positively radiating sexual tension.

“No games, my dear,” I admonished her.

She lifted her face and looked me square in the eyes. “Darion,” she said. “Darion is here.”

Vampires are a stiff kind of creature no matter what one does to assuage one’s ever-tightening muscles, but at the mention of the illustrious Darion Halsir, I felt myself go quite a bit stiffer.

And I was not the only one who was vexed by this information. Only twice before had I seen proper fear cross Osenna’s face, and each time, it had been tied to that exact name.

However, I could not muster much in the way of sympathy. If Darion had found Osenna at last, it was because she—or Dagan—had done something stupid.

“Sit,” I instructed. She did not sit so much as float, draping herself over the chair in the way of silk curtains thrown askew by the wind. “Gerard, some tea for the lady.” Osenna was hardly a lady, but perhaps that was beside the point.

He nodded and dispensed with himself.

The only lights in the room, for the moment, were the lamp under which I had been reading and the steady, muffled glow of the fireplace. The light itself was not at all flattering, but Osenna, true to form, rendered herself immaculate within it, nonetheless.

“How or why is Darion here?” I asked.

“Dagan got caught.”

“Caught,” I repeated slowly. “Caught doing what?”

Osenna bit her lip and pushed a bare shoulder forward into the light, where it glistened. “Well. We were playing a game, Dagan and I...”

She sighed, I supposed to add extra drama to her story.

I cared little for drama. “Do continue, my dear—time is a luxury I’m not interested in granting you.”

She stuck her tongue out at me, then took a moment to pull it across her knuckles before replacing it in her mouth. In Osenna, fear manifested as silence, and the kind of lazy seduction one might have expected in a Victorian smoking room or a restaurant attached to a speakeasy.

“Hades, Osenna, get on with it,” I said. Darion’s was not a name that invoked a great deal of patience in me.

“Hmm,” she pouted. “Mad you weren’t invited? You know you’re always welcome, Bram.” She looked me up and down then as if she meant to strip away my clothing with her teeth. Perhaps I would have taken her up on her offer a long time ago. A very long time ago.

“Osenna. What game were you playing with Dagan? I don’t care for your showmanship, as I’m a very busy man.”

She frowned, because it was quite clear I was in the midst of my repose. Then she sighed. “Just prior to our game, Dagan asked me a very important question. And I told him I would give him an answer if he…” She smiled. “Did something for me.”

“And what was he meant to do for you, hmm?”

Osenna blinked languidly and eased herself into the chair as if hoping to draw some type of reaction from me.

“Osenna,” I pressed.

“Yes?”

“Sweet angel of the sea, darling mine—please pay attention to the conversation. What did you demand of Dagan?”

Osenna ran her fingers through her hair, which trailed slowly across her throat. She looked into the fire for a moment, keeping her face downcast.

Ah. “Where did you demand Dagan to go?” I asked, realizing I’d been asking her the wrong question all along.

She looked up. She blinked. “Home.”

“Home, to Dromir? To the demon plane?” I said, perfectly livid. She nodded. “Of course, you did.”

Gerard returned with a steaming cup of tea. Osenna brought herself forward with a flourish of hair, hips, and fabric, accepting the tea with a nod. I found my attention riveted to the cup of tea for a moment.

Blood is a surprisingly versatile flavor, but there is something about tea that one cannot ever truly replace, even when one’s organs no longer know how to process it. It was a shame I could no longer partake. I did so miss it.

My servant stood rooted to the carpet, staring openly at Osenna. She sat with her chest forward, pretending not to notice.

“Gerard,” I said sharply, flicking my wrist and pouring a not-inconsiderable amount of glamour-esque magic into the words to counteract Osenna’s presence, “off with you.”

He nodded curtly and staggered away. A moment later, there was a thump in the hallway as he fell over. By the silence that followed, he apparently decided the ground was the safest place to be. Although he was a vampire by my making, he was still a young one and, thus, not immune to the lady’s charm. Pity.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Osenna, as though she did not already know.

I allowed her a moment to sip her Earl Grey and contemplate the posh furnishings while I attempted to calm myself.

I had gone to considerable lengths to conceal the pair of them, Osenna and Dagan. In Melchior’s time, the manufacture of false names was quite commonplace—but actually needing to hide Osenna and Dagan physically from Darion had been among my more taxing endeavors. To find that Osenna had taken a sledgehammer to all that toil and trouble by sending Dagan back to the demon plane to satisfy some ridiculous game was… irksome. To say the very least.

“Your ceilings are higher,” commented Osenna.

“Yes,” I responded, cracking my knuckles one by one. “I have grown rather disenchanted with the feeling of being… crowded.”

“So you had your roof line raised?”

I shrugged. “If one possesses the means, one can do whatever one chooses.”

“Hmmm. Whatever happened to your club?”

“Sweet Osenna, has it been so long since you have visited me?”

She took another sip of her tea and smiled at me over the rim of the porcelain. Her eyes caught what little fire remained in the hearth and flung it at me as an assassin might fling a dagger.

“I sold the club,” I answered.

“Why?”

“The property no longer suited me. I grew bored with it.” I sat up straight and implored myself not to scowl. “But we are not talking about me, are we? Why don’t you tell me more about how you, in your vast and interminable wisdom, sent Dagan back to Dromir?”

Osenna gave me a withering look. She set her tea down on the table beside her chair, slouching forward enough to expose most of her breasts. I made a point to look her in the eye; nothing is so offensive to a siren as the disregarding of her personal assets.

“Mother had a scarf,” she explained. “Gaudy red thing, silk, I think, terribly expensive—”

“No, no, no. Not why did you send him back to Dromir. How?” Quite frankly, if it was a scarf for which Osenna had sent Dagan back into the lion’s maw, I did not want to hear it.

You see, demons are not from the Netherworld; they hail from a world completely their own, and as such are not beholden to our rather more stringent laws regarding dimensional borders. They can come and go as they please, at will.

Dagan, being a demon, could travel between here and the demon world whenever he wanted.

Provided he had not been banished from the dimension entirely. Which he had been.

So, if Dagan was suicidal enough to return, he had to do so the old-fashioned way: via portal, which was quite a troublesome thing to do, seeing as Dromir only had one working portal and it had been closed for longer than I had been dead. And that was a long blasted time.

Osenna twirled her hair around her index finger and looked down into her lap. Unless I wanted to spend the remainder of the night prying it out of her, this was an answer I would not receive.

Fine. A problem for a later date. “What question was so important that you, however the hell you managed it, thought sending Dagan back to Dromir was a dandy idea?”

The hair twirling stopped abruptly. A peculiar mischief swept across her face. The siren’s ghostly glow came to her eyes, and when she spoke, her teeth seemed a touch sharper.

“He asked if I could be persuaded to marry him,” she said. After a brief pause, she laughed, as though it were a joke. “So I told him if he retrieved my scarf, maybe I could be persuaded.”

“And the scarf was in Dromir?”

“It was.” She giggled.

“Osenna,” I said, “my dear, sweet, seductive little flower.”

“Yes?” she asked, eyelashes fluttering.

“You are completely stupid.”

The light in her eyes died, and her smile became a challenge. “And yet.”

“And yet,” I echoed. And yet I would help her regardless, because her stupidity had placed my life and my assets at great risk. I sighed aloud and slouched back into my chair, one hand on the side table, fingers drumming irritably.

Then it dawned on me.

“Dagan has my portal ripper.”

Osenna pursed her lips and did not look at me. “Maybe.”

“And where, pray tell, did he obtain that?”

She shrugged, pretending to drink from the china we both knew was now empty.

“Osenna,” I warned.

“Hmm?”

“I cannot help you if you refuse to answer me.”

She put the teacup down. “Then try again, but ask me something else.”

“That is not how this works.”

She sighed rather huffily and crossed her arms over her ample bosom. I had known very few sirens in my time, but all those I had ever met oscillated wildly between mysterious seductress and petulant child.

She blew her hair out of her face with a raspberry sound and stared glumly into the carpet. “You’re no fun anymore, Bram.”

“Fun is not something one has in excess when dealing with demonic sociopaths.”

“Dagan’s not so bad,” she crooned, though the statement hardly called for crooning.

“Dagan is not a sociopath, my dear. A masochist, yes, and perhaps a sadist, but not a sociopath. I was speaking of Darion.”

The name sobered her instantly. “He’s here.”

“And Dagan is not.”

She nodded. “But Darion came to Dagan’s apartment, looking for him.”

“Thus, Darion knows Dagan’s personal information.” The story was becoming even better.

“I’m worried Dagan’s dead,” Osenna admitted quietly.

“Perhaps he is,” I answered. “But I think not, not yet—if only because Darion is still searching for him and, by connection, searching for you.”

Osenna bit her lip, looking like a child detained in the principal’s office.

“But he will not find you,” I continued. I sighed, less because I felt the need and more to convey my weariness. “But only if you answer my questions.”

“Fine!”

“How do you know Darion is here?” I asked slowly.

She basked, craning her neck left and then right with an irksome slowness. “I saw him.”

“You… saw him.”

She nodded. “At Quillan’s house.”

“Quillan’s…” I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, and clasped my hands together like the annoyed dean of a private school. “Why were you at Quillan’s?”

“Dagan was missing,” she said simply. “I needed help.”

“But why go to them?”

She shrugged.

I bit back an encumbering sigh. “And I don’t suppose you told Quillan where he might expect to find Dagan?”

“What do you think?”

“A yes or a no will suffice, Miss Warkley.”

“I knew Quillan and Christina would go to Dagan’s apartment for me.”

While it was still not a yes or no, the answer was mostly straight, which was more than one could traditionally expect of a siren—even one whose life depended upon the accuracy of her answers. Bloody nuisance.

“Does Darion know your current name?”

Osenna shimmied slowly in her chair as though being tugged at by lazy but persistent waves. “I don’t think so.”

“Did he attempt to follow you?”

“No.” She smiled, but some of that seductive venom so peculiar to sirens had drained out of it. “I left before he noticed me.”

I nodded. “You will stay here,” I announced in a tone that brooked no argument, even from her. “I will see what I can discover about Dagan.”

“My hero,” Osenna said breathily, draping herself over the back of her chair.

“Stop that,” I said.

“Stop what?”

It was the behavior of creatures like Osenna Warkley that made one wonder how in holy hell the demonic plane maintained any semblance of administrative power without simply devolving into the crazed sex-cult the rest of the world believed it to be. Demons are either the most brilliant liars in all of creation, or the most brilliantly stupid creatures ever to walk the earth. In either case, their survival appears to rely almost entirely on luck.

“I am not your hero.”

She frowned. “Well, you’re helping me, aren’t you?”

I shook my head. “I am not helping you,” I clarified. “I am acting with what we call a sense of self-preservation. Something the pair of you should look into.”

Osenna smirked. “We’re lucky to have you as a friend, Bram.”

Dagan was the furthest possible thing from a friend of mine; in fact, both Osenna and Dagan were active liabilities. But six years ago, they were rich liabilities, both of whom were more than happy to pay their way into new names and new lives in the scenic locale of Splendor, California. They were a business transaction, smuggled goods. They were no more or less risky than anything else I have spent the last four hundred years doing.

But, you see, they were running from something. Or rather, from someone: Darion Halsir, the merchant lord of Dromir. A very rich, very pompous, very touchy demon king. I had been assured by multiple parties that he would not come after them. Dagan and Osenna only had something to fear from him if they returned to Dromir—which, of course, they had no reason in all the world to do. No reasonable reason, at least. But expecting Dagan and Osenna to be reasonable, as I recently discovered, was a rather tall order.

And now, because self-control is apparently for suckers, Darion was here. If Darion found them—either one of them, if he had not apprehended Dagan already—my involvement in their disappearance would not remain a secret for long. And from there it was a hop, skip, and a slit-throat away from Darion exacting his vengeance on all contributing parties, yours truly being the primary culprit.

It would be a remarkably unpleasant evening for everyone involved, no matter who survived the inevitable altercation. If I managed, somehow, to kill Darion, it would bring down upon me the wrath of an entire dimension’s worth of demons with the general disposition of hormonal teenagers left in the woods to die; if Darion killed me, then I would, of course, be dead.

And who wants that?

SEVEN

Bram

Agent James walked from his office building to his vehicle. I emerged from the shadows surrounding his vehicle in what I hoped was a severe, placating manner.

“Agent James,” I said, clasping my hands together in front of me. I could not help but leer; something about lurking lends itself so perfectly to unfortunate facial expressions. “You have a moment, don’t you?”

He did not appear especially surprised to see me as he hooked the thumb of his free hand into the pocket of his jeans and regarded me coolly. With the other hand, he held the strap of a large backpack that smelled heavily of cologne.

“No, actually,” he said, “I don’t.”

“It is important, I assure you. I would not be here otherwise.”

“I know you wouldn’t, but I have a date.”

It took me a moment to recall. “Ah, yes, you are involved with Miss White,” I said. “She is a lovely woman.”

“She is. And she’s waiting for me. So, unless somebody’s life is at stake—”

I smiled. “Interesting choice of words, agent.” He did not respond, so I continued. “As it so happens, someone’s life is at stake. A civilian’s life,” I added, hoping such information would endear him more to me and to the topic of the conversation.

He sighed—but he did appear as if he might pause in his hurry to meet Samantha, if only for a moment.

“Okay, talk fast.” The tone of voice was that of a man on a mission. I suddenly had every suspicion that Samantha was baking something for him, her affinity towards baked goods known near and far. Furthermore, I imagined she was likely doing so wearing nothing more than an apron and perhaps a sensible pair of house shoes.

That type of urgency I could well understand.

“I will be brief,” I said. “A previous client of mine is in danger of being discovered by someone from whom I helped her escape six years ago.”

Understanding dawned on his face. “This is the girl Quillan was talking about.”

Well, so much for containing the problem. Although I supposed it was only natural for the elf to go to his superior concerning Dagan’s disappearance. It didn’t exactly cross state lines, but it was increasingly the case that anything supernatural fell under the purview of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, simply because no one else wanted to deal with it. The popular consensus was “magic equals bad,” and there was little more to be said of it.

“The girl is one and the same,” I confirmed.

“So you know Dagan is missing?”

“I am aware.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Yes,” I said, and now, the agent gave me his complete attention. “He is in Dromir attempting to retrieve a scarf.”

Agent James appeared confused, not that I blamed him. “You’re telling me that Dagan went back to Dromir to get a scarf?”

The scarf was a bizarre detail that had the unfortunate effect of derailing the conversation. Dagan returning to the dreaded demon plane in order to retrieve a scarf was so absurdly peculiar, even to the point of sounding erroneous. “Yes.”

Agent James frowned, looking wholly disbelieving. “And, in doing so, Dagan risked running into whoever you helped Osenna escape from in the first place?”

“Precisely.”

He sighed and then shook his head in such a manner that revealed the fact that my story was so absurd as to be completely believable.

“Okay, we can take steps to protect Osenna here, but Dromir is about as far outside FBI jurisdiction as far gets. Dagan went there of his own free will, so he’s on his own.” He looked at me flatly. “I have to admit, I don’t really care much about what happens to Dagan… in general.”

I had no way to express exactly how little I cared for the well-being of Dagan, either. But perhaps it went without saying. “I am not worried for the girl. I can take care of Osenna. My concern is Darion himself.”

“Darion?”

“The man Osenna is hiding from.”

“If he compromises her safety in any way, we can and will intervene,” Agent James assured me, “but if the Bureau doesn’t have any reason to believe Darion is actively dangerous, we can’t do anything.”

“He broke into Dagan’s apartment, did he not?”

“Yes, he did, and the local police are looking into that. So is Quillan, because Christina wants to be involved, I guess.” He shrugged, as if realizing he’d just told me too much. “At this point, there isn’t much we can do.”

“You can do nothing then?”

“Yeah. Sorry, man.” He did seem genuinely apologetic, for whatever that was worth.

“But the lovely head of HR is looking into Darion’s whereabouts?” I pressed.

“Yeah, Christina is looking into Darion’s location as long as it doesn’t get in the way of her other work.”

“And she has the full backing of the FBI in her search?”

“I mean, nobody has full backing,” he was quick to point out, “but she has my permission to use our computers and access our databases, if that’s what you mean.”

I nodded. I decided then and there that I would go and speak to Christina regarding the whole affair. She had already proven sympathetic to Osenna; I imagined it would not be difficult to convince her to tell me what she knew of Darion and his whereabouts. Particularly so if I said such information was in service of Osenna’s protection—and even, perhaps, Dagan’s. Though implying I intended to protect the demon would be wholly untrue.

Agent James squinted at me. “Christina can’t call in the cavalry, if that’s what you want. Nobody’s invading Dromir for you. Or for Dagan. Or for a stupid scarf.”

“Believe me, Agent James, invading Dromir is the last thing I want. Frankly, if I did not believe Dagan’s presence there would compromise my involvement in Osenna’s and his initial disappearance, I would leave him there.”

“Great,” he said, adjusting his grip on the strap of his bag.

“Do keep me informed,” I replied. “I would hate for something to happen to my client because you failed to warn me of nefarious activity.”

“I’ll let you know if we find anything.”

“See that you do.” Perhaps my response was a tad more assertive than Agent James deserved—he was being helpful, all things considered—but I had no intention of thanking him.

At the ringing of his mobile phone, he pressed the screen and held the device to his ear. “Hey, Christina,” he said, and then paled. “Oh, Jesus. Are you hurt? … okay, good. Is he still there? Okay, I’ll send someone over.”

He looked at me and held his hand over the receiver. “I think your friend just broke into Christina’s house and got his ass beat by… a plant.”

“I assure you, he is not my friend,” I said in an irritated manner. In general, I was not foolish enough to call any demon friend. In fact, the only person to which I readily gave that noble moniker was Dulcie O’Neil. But I was not certain whether she would return it. Most probably she would not.

“Right,” he said. “I’ll uh, let you know what’s up.” He returned to speaking into his mobile. “No, Bram is here. I’ll send you a memo—right now, let’s just focus on you and the demon that broke into your house.”

I nodded once, which was the closest to overt thanks he was ever going to get from me. The air around us grew uncomfortably cold even for me, and I vanished in a rush of smoke with a sound like the screeching of a poorly-oiled door hinge.

The look on Agent James’ face as I departed was one of a man thoroughly unamused.

***

The offices of the FBI, most especially the newer ones, employ a number of creatures formerly belonging to the Association of Netherworld Creatures—the organization that had shipwrecked itself on the shores of Meg’s ambition not a year prior to the construction of this building. As the bureau adjusted to its new and quite peculiar employees, it realized certain changes had to be enforced in order to accommodate the needs of different arcane species.

For instance: vampires and sunlight, as a rule, do not much get along. As such, for those vampires who stay late into the morning, there is a special parking lot attached to the building that does not allow light to pierce its stucco walls. And within the building itself, all of the windows are shielded or blacked out.

As it happens—and I find this quite fascinating—there has been invented a new type of glass able to filter out the specific rays from the sun that scorch the skin of beasts like myself. Such glass is in the process of being retrofitted throughout the building. In translation, this means the offices are flooded with completely harmless early morning light and vampires are able to walk by the windows without fear of bursting into mounds of ash.

At first, I found this quite… disconcerting, but in a way I was not prepared for. The look of the room, open and cluttered and swarming with bored federal agents, was bright. Naturally bright. I had not been in a room lit by anything other than florescent bulbs, LEDs, or, at its most romantic, candles in near four hundred years.

As to the question of how I arrived at the FBI office when the sun was in control of the sky… I required my driver, a most hairy man of the lycanthrope persuasion, to deliver me via hearse. And, yes, I have found coffins to be the safest mode of travel for the vampire, and I am quite aware of the cliché of that statement.

Time marches on, and technology with it, I supposed. But there was something about the vampires walking blithely through shafts of sunlight that made my skin crawl. As I passed through the building, I did my best to skirt the bright patches.

Christina was now the head of an alchemical department responsible for the invention, installation, and maintenance of assets such as the vampire-friendly windows. This information was relayed to me by way of a large name plaque hanging on the wall outside of her office door:

We of the newly-formed Innovations branch of the Humane Resources Department are proud to support, etc. etc.

Although with respect to the non-human sector of the workforce, the word “human” had been corrected to “humane” resources—which was rather inelegant, as far as inclusion was concerned. But I had to admit it was a miracle someone had thought to change it at all.

Christina’s workspace was small, but well-maintained. She sat at a desk on which several stacks of papers and folders were organized and labeled with brightly colored notes. Flowers and succulents sat on her windowsill in small terra-cotta pots.

She looked up as I walked in, and she stopped typing.

“Bram, hi!” she said, seeming inordinately pleased to see me. I was surprised. I can say, as a general rule, most people are not pleased to see me.

“Forgive the absence of pleasantries, but the sun is up and I should not like to tarry longer than I must,” I grumbled, strangely feeling out of sorts by her cheerfulness. “I am here to discuss the sudden appearance of one Darion Halsir, the bubble-blowing demon with whom you interacted in Dagan’s apartment.”

“Darion…? Oh! That’s his name?”

“It is.”

She made a quick note in a small floral notebook that sat open before her. Her computer was making the most unfortunate humming sound, or perhaps it was the vents; Christina did not seem bothered by the sound, but the electric whirring of whatever was not working properly was enough to set my ears ringing.

Christina looked up at me. “Are you okay, Bram?”

“Your devices are hissing at me,” I responded irritably.

“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” She gave something under her desk a solid kick, and the noise mostly ceased. “My computer is super old. I need to get it replaced, it’s bothering everybody, and I work in HR. So, you know, this is supposed to be a welcoming environment, Deborah.” This last bit was directed at the ceiling, presumably to a superior on the second floor with whom Christina was having difficulties.

“If not for the offending sound, your office is quite welcoming,” I offered, perhaps in response for the fact that she had seemed so pleased to see me.

“Sit down,” she invited, and I obliged. Two chairs faced her desk at angles. They were those odd, square wooden things with gray-green cushions of surprising plushness.

“So, how do you know Darion?” Christina asked conversationally, as if Darion and I were old school mates.

“Dagan paid me a significant sum of money to smuggle himself and Osenna out of Dromir.”

“Osenna,” Christina repeated, sounding only slightly surprised.

“Has Agent James spoken with you today?” I asked.

“No. He sent me an email, but I haven’t opened it yet. You ran into Casey last night?”

“I did, and I spoke to him a bit regarding this… mess. The email might contain the small bit I shared with him.”

“Well why don’t you share it all with me, just so I have it right from the horse’s mouth.”

Christina, Christina. So infuriatingly efficient. “This is why Melchior was so fond of you,’ I said.

If that comment smarted at all, she did not allow it to show. Instead, she turned a page in her notebook and poised her pen over the paper. “Please, tell me what you told Casey.”

I sighed inwardly. I had half a mind to abandon this visit entirely and strike out to find Darion on my own—but ever since Meg’s little detour in Washington D.C., my network of underworld colleagues had grown somewhat slim. Frankly, allowing Christina to find Darion would be less trouble.

And she had seemed pleased to see me...

“Here is the abridged version,” I began. “I smuggled Dagan and Osenna out of Dromir six years ago.”

She raised an eyebrow. “That was very kind of you, Bram.”

Quickly, I shook my head. “Kindness was not a motivation. Payment was.”

EIGHT

Bram

Christina frowned but returned to scribbling in her journal, probably pronouncing me as quite the selfish cock. Which was mostly correct.

“Three weeks ago, Dagan returned to Dromir in order to retrieve a scarf,” I told her. “He has not yet returned. Osenna—”

“Wait,” she interrupted, gazing at me with confusion. “What?”

“Yes, you heard me correctly.”

“A scarf?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “Why would Dagan risk his life by going back to Dromir for a scarf?”

“Why does Dagan do half of the things Dagan does?” I asked rhetorically. “Because he’s a twat.”

“Language, Bram,” Christina reprimanded me and frowned.

“Apologies,” I said with a huff, sincerely hoping she was still pleased to see me.

“Okay, keep going.”

I nodded. “Where was I?”

“Three weeks ago, Dagan went to Dromir for a scarf. He’s still there and Osenna...”

“Oh, right,” I continued. “Osenna found you, and then she came to see me when she learned Darion was here, and that he had broken into Dagan’s home.” I paused for a moment to allow her scribbling to catch up. “Osenna is now under my protection, because, quite frankly, I do not trust you to contain her.”

“Because she’s a siren?”

“Precisely.”

Christina dropped her pen on her notebook and studied me with interest. “And you can resist her?”

I smiled, pleased with myself. “I am four hundred years old, Miss Sabbiondo. Osenna is not yet thirty.”

“Yeah, but she’s still a siren.”

I glanced at my fingernails and appeared wholly unimpressed. Then I sighed before returning my gaze to her. “A siren is no threat to a vampire of my advanced age. In fact, there is hardly a creature who can compete with the level of power I possess. Unless, of course, said creature is a demon king from Dromir.” I sighed again and returned my attention to my fingernails as I shook my head. “This is quite the situation.”

“You’re so dramatic, Bram; you should have been an actor.” She did not wait for my response, but turned to her notebook and jotted something down before looking back up at me. “This is probably obvious, but I have to ask for the record: did you have a previously established relationship with either Osenna or Dagan? Or was the nature of your relationship exclusively that of criminal and client?”

I was stunned into silence for a moment. “Are you inquiring as to whether my relationship with Osenna and/or Dagan was of a sexual nature?”

She colored a bit and appeared slightly embarrassed. “Yes.”

“Perhaps I am not offended by your question regarding my… history with Osenna,” I began, glaring at her. “But Dagan?” I made a face of disgust. “How is such even a consideration!” I could not help the rise in my tone.

“I’m not trying to offend you, Bram. I’m just doing my job.”

“You really imagine that I… I could have a… a sexual relationship with Dagan?! With that… dimwitted outcast of society? That… paragon of sexual perversion?!” I was so outraged, I found myself standing up.

“Sit back down. I’m only asking you because I have to.” She faced me squarely and the smile toying with the corners of her lips was impossible not to notice.

“I shall do no such thing for I am thoroughly offended!”

She started to laugh and hid it behind her hand. It took her a moment or two to regain control of herself. “Look, Bram, I know you aren’t… involved with Dagan. I’m just asking because I’ve gotta check off the boxes. Will you please sit?”

I sat back down and huffed in indignation, crossing one leg over the other at the knee before I realized the action might look… affected. Therefore, I very quickly uncrossed them. “I did not know either Dagan or Osenna prior to our arrangement,” I spat out. “And our arrangement was strictly business.”

“Then you were compensated for your assistance.”

“Compensated at the highest degree,” I responded with a clipped nod. “Minus any… bodily favors, mind you.”

Christina hid another smile.

The amount of money Dagan had been willing to pay me while begging for my services was truly absurd. When I had added two more zeroes, I’d expected him to spend the better part of the evening negotiating the fee back down again, but he had agreed at once. “Dagan was quite willing to pay anything to avoid a physical altercation with his brother.”

Christina’s eye widened a smidgeon as her expression revealed her confusion. “His brother?”

“Yes.”

“And who would his brother be?”

“Dagan and Darion Halsir are brothers,” I explained, surprised she did not already know this.

“Holy shit,” she said, and wrote something down.

“That was not very HR of you,” I grumbled.

“What wasn’t?”

“Holy shit.”

“Oh, sorry. Yeah, not very HR of me,” she responded though she was busily scribbling and I doubted she was paying me much attention.

“Dagan was not always his name,” I continued.

Christina stopped her scribbles and faced me with wide eyes. “What was it before?”

“Rogan,” I said, “but the only place you will find that name is in Dromir itself—and I suspect the government in Dromir, if such is what you care to call them, are not keen to share whatever meager archives they have with the Bureau.”

Christina sighed wearily. “No, they’re not. Did Osenna have a different name, too?”

“Yes. Jadra.”

I did not suppose that revealing Dagan and Osenna’s true names would endanger them any more than they had already endangered themselves.

“Do you know why Dagan and Osenna needed to be smuggled out? I mean, did Darion threaten them?” Christina asked.

“One can assume,” I answered drolly. “I was told only that they needed to keep themselves hidden from Darion. So that is exactly what I did.”

“Like they were war criminals or something?”

“Perhaps. Though Dagan was even more cowardly then than he is now; if he compromised his government in any way, it was likely in the vein of a whistleblower or an internal saboteur.” For all Dagan’s machismo banter and the acts one could observe in his odious club, Dagan was a remarkably squishy creature. The ones who make a show of themselves usually are.

“And you don’t know what kind of ‘physical altercation’ Dagan was trying to avoid with Darion?” Christina asked me as she bobbed her writing implement on her lips and studied me with interest. She was undoubtedly an attractive woman. If I were not so completely taken with Dulcie, I would have certainly considered this fetching little biscuit.

“Bram?”

“Excuse me, what was the question?” I asked.

“What kind of physical altercation was Dagan trying to avoid?”

“Ah, yes,” I answered with a brief nod. “Dagan said only that he wished to avoid all further interaction with his brother. I did not ask many questions.”

“Hmm…”

“Owing to the sheer animal terror that underscored the entire conversation, I assumed Dagan was fleeing some type of family violence.”

Christina nodded and continued to write—cursive, but all of her letters were perfectly vertical. Eventually, she stopped, in the middle of a sentence, and she looked up at me, some new and troubling thought screwing her lips into the corner of her mouth.

“Yes?” I prompted when she kept her silence.

“…Okay,” she said, “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way…”

“Good God, are you going to offend me again by hinting to a potential homosexual relationship with a lunatic?”

She giggled, and it was a bright and lovely sound. “No, I promise I won’t offend you like that again.”

“Very well, proceed.”

She eyed me knowingly. “I was just wondering…”

“Wondering what?”

“Why are you so interested in finding out where Darion is?”

I smiled at her with understanding. “Very good question to ask, my dear.” She grinned broadly, as if appreciating my praise. “Because if Darion discovers that I assisted Dagan and Osenna in their attempt to flee him, Darion will attempt to kill me and will most probably succeed,” I explained. “Such would be a terrible inconvenience.”

“And that’s it?”

I squinted and tilted my head at her. “And that… is it.”

She pursed her lips.

“You appear unconvinced.”

“No…” she started, then trailed off.

“Are you accusing me of something else?”

“No, no,” she interjected quickly, “I just, I’m surprised you came here to tell me all this. This doesn’t really seem like something you would just… help out with, I guess.”

There was a question she was not asking beneath the surface of her comment. “What exactly do you think I am here for, Miss Sabbiondo?”

She sighed, but then apparently decided to simply come out with it. “Okay, I kinda… sorta… might be wondering if you’re here for Dulcie?”

I was unprepared for the sudden stab of irritation and embarrassment that swept through me. If the donated blood flowing through my veins were moving quickly enough to facilitate a blush, Christina did not comment on it.

“For Dulcie?” I repeated with a frown. My words were noticeably clipped. I swallowed against the childish urge to set her stacks of paper on fire.

“Yeah.”

“Dulcie plays no part in my motivation for being here, I can assure you,” I insisted. “I am here for a former client, for whose incompetence I will have to suffer if Darion Halsir learns the name of the man who assisted Dagan and Osenna in escaping Dromir.” The words ran more smoothly, but the answer itself was clinical. And Christina could tell.

“Sure, you are,” she said, smiling in the way of mothers who think they know best.

“I assure you—”

“Yeah, yeah,” she waved me away with an unconcerned hand. “You already assured me.”

“Then perhaps you should believe me?”

She looked at me more closely. “Regardless, just so you know, Dulcie is in kind of a sticky spot right now.”

“Sticky spot?” I repeated and leaned forward. “Is she in trouble?”

Christina shook her head. “No, no. I meant a sticky spot… emotionally.”

I scoffed—though, with the abruptness and intensity of the noise, it was really more of a snort. “I am well aware,” I said, my voice dropping into an octave that was rather more threatening than Christina deserved.

“Okay, then you know that trying to… date her right now is probably a bad idea.”

“Who says I am trying to date Dulcie?” I asked, sounding quite blown away by the very notion.

Christina shrugged. “Aren’t you always trying to date Dulcie? I thought that was, like, a known thing?” I simply glared at her. She laughed. “Don’t get mad. I’m just giving you a word of advice.”

“Miss Sabbiondo, I am not a child.”

“I know you’re not,” she replied. “But I also know that you… you know…”

“No. Please enlighten me.”

“I know that you… have the hots for Dulcie and you guys have known each other for a long time, and she and Knight just broke up so you’re probably figuring now might be a good time to… try your luck.”

“To try my luck?”

She shrugged and folded her hands together on the table, looking very much like a school counselor. She lacked only the glasses, and perhaps the tight bun at the nape of her neck.

“And I’m pretty aware that when you want something, you tend to go for it, no matter what the consequences are for everyone involved.”

For a moment, I said nothing.

“Including Dulcie,” she added, nodding a little.

“Including Dulcie,” I echoed.

“I just want to remind you to think about what’s best for Dulcie right now.”

What I said next was not intentional. It spilled out of me like water from a broken dam—or perhaps a volcanic eruption would be a more apt analogy. “Miss Sabbiondo, if you intend to lecture someone about catering to Dulcie’s needs, it should not be me.”

Christina sat up a little straighter and leaned forward, just enough to show that she was ready to listen. She heard the unspoken accusation in my words.

“Okay,” she said. “Who should I be lecturing?”

I had no reason in the world to conceal the answer. If anyone in Dulcie’s world should know about what had happened to her, it should be the head of Human Resources—er, Humane Resources. “Mr. Vander.”

“Knight?” she asked, repeating his name back to me like an answer on a flashcard. She drew a line beneath the notes she had taken about Darion and began scrawling something else. “Why him?”

The moment of reckoning was upon me and I was quiet for a few seconds. There did not exist within me the struggle over whether to admit this information or not. My silence was reserved for the fact of how best to relay such… sensitive material.

“Bram?”

“Vander forced himself on Dulcie.”

Christina froze. She looked for a moment as though she hadn’t heard me, or had immediately forgotten what I’d just said. Then she inhaled and exhaled very quietly. Her expression was perfectly placid, that of one who has mastered the art of listening without judgment.

But she could not stop herself from asking, “He what?”

I felt myself smile. “Oh, did Vander fail to mention that?” I laughed. “Perhaps because he did not want you to know the event took place in a company-issued vehicle and on company time, while he was acting as Head of the ANC and Dulcie was his subordinate.”

“How do you know this?” she asked, eyeing me narrowly as her expression turned angry. “If this is some gossip you heard or if you’re making it up, Bram…”

“It is true.”

“How do you know?” she repeated.

“I saw it,” I informed her. “And Vander admitted as much.”

“You saw it. As in, you were there when it happened?”

“Not exactly.”

“Explain.”

I nodded as I recalled the instance when I learned the truth about Vander’s character and the crime he committed. “When we were pitted against Meg most recently, whilst we were in Dulcie’s childhood home, Meg afflicted Vander and me with a vision. This vision was a retelling of the night Vander forced himself upon Dulcie.”

“Meg could have just made the whole thing up… just to pit you against Knight to give herself the advantage.”

I shook my head. “The same thought occurred to me. But in the aftermath of Meg’s defeat, Vander confirmed that the unfortunate event had indeed occurred as we both witnessed according to the vision sent us by Meg.”

Christina swallowed. “Can you tell me what you saw in the vision?”

The details as she required them were specific and unpleasant. Yes, Dulcie had been in Vander’s custody as an apprehended criminal at the time. Yes, the attack had occurred on the way to whatever hastily constructed building the ANC was using to house their ramshackle armies just before the death of Melchior. Yes, Dulcie had been handcuffed. Yes, she had told Vander to stop. Yes, multiple times.

No. He did not stop.

Christina stared at her notebook for a long while after I finished my account. She sighed quietly into the air and stared at the ceiling as she bounced her pen against her lips.

“Oof,” she said, to herself more than to me. But she faced me all the same.

“Oof?”

“Yeah.” She sat up perfectly straight. “This is… kind of enormous. Forcing himself on a coworker, on his subordinate…” Her voice trailed away until I realized she was talking to herself. “Even if they were dating…” As she placed her hand over her mouth, she appeared, for all her quivering, remarkably professional. “Dulcie was in his custody. As an officer of the law. This… Hades, if this is true, it’s going to be a disaster.” She made a face. “If it’s true, it’s already a disaster.”

“If it’s true,” I repeated, scrutinizing her carefully. “Then you do not believe me?”

“I’m not fully convinced,” Christina admitted, not unkindly. “I’ll definitely investigate it, though. Just because it sounds unlikely doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

“How delightfully unbiased of you.”

“I’m definitely biased where you’re concerned, but that doesn’t mean I won’t look into it. For once, I really, really hope you’re lying to me.”

“That is everyone’s fondest hope, is it not?”

Christina smiled. “Well, thanks for coming in, Bram. If there isn’t anything else, I have a lot of work I need to do.” She looked at the stacks of folders, then back at her notebook, and sighed through her nose. “A lot,” she muttered.

“That is all, for now.” I stood. “Thank you for your time, Miss Sabbiondo.” I nodded to her once and started to leave.

“Hey, Bram?”

I stopped and turned around. “Yes?”

“Why did you tell me that?”

I was quiet for a moment. “Because it was the right thing to do.”

“But it wasn’t your business.”

I shrugged. “As strange as it may sound to you, I consider Dulcie to be my only friend.”

She did not appear surprised. “Go on.”

“I feel as if I am doing right by Dulcie in admitting this to you. I would hate for the same situation to befall her again.”

“You’re trying to protect her?”

I nodded briefly. “Good day to you,” I said as I turned and faced the door.

“It’s okay that you’re in love with her but don’t forget what’s best for her, Bram.”

I was not certain how to respond, and I did not appreciate the conversation. My feelings for Dulcie were complicated enough. I did not care to have them broadcasted.

I could not argue with her. “Your point?”

“Just, um, just go easy on Dulcie, okay?”

I made a guttural snorting noise in the back of my throat.

There was a beat of strange silence.

Christina’s shoulder dropped a bit as she exhaled. “Anyway, I’ll call you when I learn anything about Darion. Okay?”

I nodded and left.

NINE

Dulcie

I was covered in coffee.

Cheap, brown breakroom coffee, with that weird iron-y smell and no creamer, and it was everywhere. On my shirt, my papers, my goddamn computer, seeping into my drawers. This was going to be a disaster and a half to clean up.

I looked up at the brilliant fuckwad who’d spilled the coffee on me in the first place. Some little intern-looking kid, except they don’t have interns at the FBI, they have new guys with no sense of direction or self-preservation.

“Um,” he said, holding a now-empty coffee mug that had FBI stamped on it in thick black letters. “I, um. I’m sorry.”

I inhaled slowly through my nose and spent three full seconds on the exhale, trying not to sound like a huffing dragon or something else that was about to commit coffee-stain-related murder. “It’s fine,” I said finally. “Just, go get some paper towels or something.”

He blinked at me. “Oh. Oh!” And scuttled away like a frightened crab.

I looked at the dripping pool on my desk. This mess was going to get into the carpet, too. Hades, that smell. Everyone else said the coffee smelled fine, maybe it was just a werewolf thing, but to me it smelled like rust… and ass, no matter how much creamer you added to it.

“Great,” I muttered, “fan-fucking-tastic.”

The not-an-intern came back with an entire roll of paper towels and a blue bottle of what looked like glass cleaner and dropped to his knees, mopping up the biggest spots on the floor.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he kept repeating, and he wouldn’t look at me. He looked a little pathetic. Actually, a lot pathetic.

I sighed and ripped off a paper towel. It wasn’t going to be enough to save my keyboard, but I wasn’t just going to let the ass-coffee pool there.

“Oof. What happened here?”

I looked up and found Henry, smiling, still with a little wad of cotton over one eye. He stood over the not-an-intern with his arms crossed.

“Hurricane,” I answered.

Henry Cotton was my partner, and exactly as young on the inside as he was on the outside—like, twenty-two, maybe. He’d been assigned to me—he’d asked to be assigned to me; did I mention Henry was certifiably insane? Okay, not really, but sometimes I wondered.

We’d been partners for the three-ish days I’d spent working for the Splendor police department, since the ANC wasn’t a thing anymore. I’d been moved into the FBI proper because, well, nobody really wanted to work with me except the people I’d been working with when I was an ANC Regulator.

They’d let Henry tag along because… well, probably because he’d requested to, and everyone was so shocked, they’d just agreed.

It was a further commute here than it was to the office in Splendor, but that was fine. At least people here didn’t worry that I was going to decapitate everyone in their sleep.

“You want some help?” asked Henry.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “I don’t know what good it’s gonna do, though. Keyboard’s probably toast.”

“I am so sorry, Agent O’Neil, I’ll replace it!” said the not-intern.

“What’s your name again?” I asked.

“William Peterson, detective,” he replied.

“Okay, Will,” I said. “It’s fine. Really. It’s a cheap keyboard, we’ve got ‘em in spades in a closet somewhere.”

He looked a little relieved, but not completely. I still had coffee all down my front. And, yes, my shirt was white, or had been about five minutes ago. Couldn’t he have missed me? Just a little? The sleeves were the only thing that had kind of escaped the brown liquid, and even then, not really. There were little splatters everywhere, like I’d axe-murdered a Keurig.

“Alright?” I said. “Breathe, kid, it’s okay.”

“You gotta stop calling us ‘kid,’” Henry said. “We aren’t that much younger than you are.”

While that might have been true—I wasn’t even thirty yet—it didn’t change the fact that I felt like the old guy. You know, the guys you see in those buddy-cop movies—the one with a cigarette and Stalin’s mustache.

“Duly noted,” I grumbled.

Will nodded and took a deep, shaky breath. He was super pale, no blood in his face. Fuck, it was probably his first day, and he spilled coffee on Dulcie O’Neil, the crazy fairy-vampire lady who’d killed the other crazy vampire lady, Meg. So, he saw me, had a heart attack, spilled his coffee all over me, and then had an aneurism.

Shit, my bad.

I put my hand on his shoulder and he flinched a little. “Hey, don’t worry about it,” I said. “Really. It’s just coffee, and it’s just a keyboard.” And a monitor, a computer, whatever is in my drawers, and my entire fucking shirt, I added silently. “Okay?”

He nodded. “Okay.”

I took my hand off his shoulder. “Great. So, we cleaned up most of it, but we’re gonna need a janitor up here to get the rest—especially whatever is soaking into the carpet.”

“Yeah,” he said absently.

I pursed my lips so I didn’t groan in his face. “Will?”

“Yeah?”

“Go get a janitor.”

“Yeah. Oh, yeah! Yes, sorry, yes, ma’am.” He scrambled to his feet and ran like I’d put a scorpion down his shirt.

“Huh,” said Henry. “He’s… spirited, I guess.”

I faced him. “Hopefully that spirit dies a quick death, so my desk and I don’t end up covered in coffee every day.”

Henry laughed, then looked down at my shirt and frowned. “Um. Your shirt.”

“I am well aware,” I informed him.

“Do you want mine?” He gestured to his button-up.

“Do you have another one?”

“No.”

“Henry, you can’t just walk around the office shirtless.”

“Sure, I can—I’m a guy.”

“That is so not the point.”

Henry smiled. Curly brown-ish hair, big honking coke-bottle glasses—he looked like his mom pulled him out of school and dropped him off here for the day. “I could go buy you a shirt from the gift shop.”

I raised my eyebrows. “We have a gift shop?”

“I think so. Or there’s a Sephora, like, two streets over.”

“Sephora is makeup, Henry.”

“Oh. Sorry,” he replied sheepishly. When we first met, everything Henry said was sheepish, but he was getting over that, one sarcastic comment at a time. “Wal-Mart?”

“I can just run home and change at some point,” I assured him. Not right now. I had paperwork that needed to be rescued and hopefully salvaged from the coffee.

“I’m totally comfortable just giving you my shirt,” said Henry.

“I’m starting to think you just want to strip.”

“What? No!” Henry squeaked, loud enough to make people at other desks turn their heads. Henry wasn’t a strong blusher, but his cheeks turned just a little bit pink. “I’m just trying to help.”

“I know,” I said, laughing. “Sorry. I’m just messing with you.”

Henry smiled and spent a couple seconds appraising my shirt. The fabric was clinging to my stomach like its life depended on it. The lines of my bra were super obvious, to the point that the little lacey flower patterns on it were visible, if you looked closely enough.

He pulled his rolling chair over from his desk and sat on it backwards. “So. How was your weekend?”

“Don’t you have work to do?”

“Nope. I finished all the witness testimony stuff for Agent Welch’s homicide case yesterday.”

“Of course, you did,” I said.

Henry was a grown-up version of the Advanced Placement kid who smiled too much and spent Friday evenings gleefully doing his homework. But the stuff that made you an irredeemable nerd in high school makes you completely irreplaceable in the real world.

I looked at the dark circle of coffee between my feet, and while I was looking down, someone started unpacking a box a few cubicles over. These cubicles were Plexiglas from the third-quarter up, so if I wanted to, I could look over and see whoever the newbie was. I wasn’t that interested, though. For now, the person was just background noise: the clunk of a stapler being shoved into a metal drawer, the shuffle of papers falling out of a folder that wasn’t made to get so thick, the whirring of an ancient computer booting itself up.

But I was listening to those boring sounds for some reason, really listening to them. Henry was saying something, but my ears were across the room, obsessed with the newbie’s stapler and folder and everything else that was coming out of the box.

This was part of the weird aura-sensing-thing that came with the powers Meg gave me: sometimes, I could tell when something was about to go wrong.

“What’s up?” asked Henry. I was probably snarling or something.

“I don’t know,” I said, thinking, the newbie’s got a bomb, or he’s gonna shoot someone, or he’s a terrorist. “Hang on.”

I looked over. An electric shock of panic shot through my body when I recognized him.

Knight.

He stopped unpacking his box. And he just stood there. Then he looked at me and I looked back at him, and I could tell we were both suffering from the exact same reaction. And I had to wonder if he was thinking about the fact that a few nights ago he’d visited me in my dreams. Because that’s exactly what I was thinking about.

Then the smell got to me. A very specific cologne, masking a very specific cocktail of sweat and testosterone. The panic sloughed off me like a heavy coat.

Okay. No bomb, no gun, no terrorists.

Just Knight.

Great.

Hades, I felt like a fucking teenager. I was a grown-ass woman, and the second my ex so much as looked at me, I slid straight into crisis mode.

What the hell, Dulcie? I thought. Get your shit together! I had this mental image of the ducks I was supposed to have in a row running wildly around the office, screaming.

Knight was unpacking a box into one of seven empty desks still in the open office. He was looking around nervously now, because he’d seen me, and I think maybe he was trying to find somebody to talk to or look at instead of me so it wouldn’t be so obvious that he was avoiding me.

“Oh,” said Henry. He was looking at Knight now, too. He scowled in Knight’s general direction, then turned back to me, put his head on his crossed arms on the back of the chair, and whispered, “You okay?”

“Why is his desk out there? With the rest of us?” I asked, absently.

“What do you mean?”

“Knight was the Head of the ANC.”

He glanced over at the man in question and nodded. “Not anymore.”

“Not anymore,” I repeated.

“Want me to follow him around and make beeping noises?” Henry asked me and I stared at him in total and complete bafflement.

“What? Why?”

Henry shrugged. “Because it’s annoying.”

I started ugly laughing. Not super loudly, I was keeping most of it in my mouth, but you know how when you’re really freaked out and somebody makes a joke, it’s way easier to start giddy-laughing like you’re on every drug known to man? Yeah, it was like that. Except worse, because I was also trying not to laugh.

Nobody would have even noticed if I’d completely lost my shit and started cackling, anyway—Agent Marlowe was cursing up a thunderstorm in the corner—but I didn’t want to bring Knight’s attention back to me.

Okay, let me make one thing clear. I wasn’t avoiding him. I’m not a child. I just wasn’t sure how I was supposed to interact with him after everything we’d been through. I mean, the first time we met I tried to set him on fire, then we were in prison and I thought he was going to die, then everything with Melchior happened, and then Meg right after, and—honestly, we hadn’t had a moment to catch up since before Melchior had him arrested. And how long ago was that?

Fuck, how long had it been since our relationship was based on anything but the fact that we were all going to die?

It just… seeing Knight reminded me of a million-billion things I wasn’t prepared to think about. And then, before I could stop him, Henry was walking in Knight’s direction—and his stride was purposeful.

When he reached Knight’s desk, he cleared his throat and Knight looked up from his unpacking. I just stood there, maybe ten feet away, and I was pretty sure my eyes betrayed my complete shock.

“Um,” Henry said, “sir, you really shouldn’t be over here. Probably better you stick to your cubicle.”

“Sir?” Knight repeated, and made the fakest, most forced laughing noise I’d ever heard. “Just call me Knight, man.”

Henry’s expression was stone-cold. “I’d rather not.”

I wanted to bury my face in my hands. I really wanted to crawl under the table and wait for both of them to go away. But that was really fucking dumb, and cowardly. And now Knight was looking at me and, crap, walking toward me. I stared him dead in the eye and felt my stomach drop. His eyes were glowing. The Loki’s biological response to someone strong enough to be their “mate.” Seeing that again made my stomach twist. I wanted to cry, scream, and curl up into a ball until I stopped existing.

“How have you been?” he asked.

Great, so we’re doing this, I thought. The awkward small-talk of the recently broken-up. Alright, come at me.

“Fine,” I said.

It came out more clipped than I’d meant it to, but I really didn’t care. The longer I looked at him, the more I noticed the subtle differences—his hair was longer, there were bags under his eyes, his shoulder clicked when he moved like he’d dislocated it or something. And then I started to get angry. I felt it building in my lungs like a sickness, like I was going to vomit any second.

When I finally said, “You?” it sounded like an accusation.

Knight pressed his lips together. He did that when he was trying to keep his temper in check. What the hell did he have to be angry about?

“Fine,” he answered, and it was even more clipped. He took a deep breath through his nose, trying not to make it obvious. “What happened to your shirt?”

“Nothing,” I said quickly.

“Doesn’t look like nothing.”

“New guy spilled his coffee on me.”

“That sucks.”

“Right?”

Except the word came out with the same acidity as if I’d told him to go fuck himself. Hades, I did not expect to be this pissed. I’d thought seeing Knight for the first time since all of this shit went down would just make me vaguely upset, or sad, or irritated, but this was “angry” in big red fire letters. This was “angry” with a bullhorn in the middle of Times Square.

My whole body felt spring-loaded, like I was going to snap forward and demolish him any second. Yes, I was still angry that he’d basically dumped me because neither one of us knew how to pick up the pieces after everything had happened with Meg. But this… this anger was off the charts, and it surprised me.

Henry was glaring daggers into Knight. I didn’t know if he was trying to intimidate him or just show that he was definitely on my side, but Henry has the intimidation factor of a bunny—whatever he was doing, it wasn’t working, not even a little. Knight was having a hard time not looking at him, though. His eyes kept skating past me to the very conspicuously peeved one-eyed Henry Cotton.

“I mean, no wonder he spilled it. It’s not exactly choice coffee, is it?” Knight asked with a forced smile.

It sounded like he was trying to make a joke. Lighten the mood, maybe even make me smile.

Why did that make me want to hit him?

“Detective Vander, Agent O’Neil and I have work we’ve got to get back to,” Henry interjected coldly. “For the Bureau.”

Knight’s jaw visibly tightened. He looked at Henry like he wanted to push him off a cliff.

There was a really, really long silence.

“Right,” Knight said finally, swallowing hard. “Me, too.” And he looked at me and added, “See you later.”

“Probably not,” I retorted. I didn’t mean to say it out loud, but there it was. Oops.

I couldn’t read the expression on his face, but it definitely wasn’t happy. He looked at Henry one more time before walking away, looking… almost betrayed. Like he thought Henry was replacing him as my big scary protector or something. Which was more than a little funny, but I couldn’t get myself to laugh.

I exhaled the tank of air I’d apparently been bottling up in my lungs for the past two minutes. “Hades,” I groaned.

“Sorry, Dulcie,” said Henry.

“For what?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. That he exists?”

I snorted.

“You looked really angry,” Henry added.

“Did I?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s obviously an uncomfortable situation, especially now that he’s working here, too.” And he gave me this sad little smile.

“Well, thanks,” I said. I put my elbows on the desk before remembering that it was sticky with shit coffee. “Hades fucking dammit,” I muttered, and full-scooted away from it in my rolling chair.

“Want me to go check on that janitor?” asked Henry.

“Yeah. Please.”

He nodded, patted my arm, and stood to go find not-an-intern Will and the janitor he was supposedly retrieving to clean up his mess.

Knight was getting in the elevator. When he saw Henry coming his way, he turned around and went for the stairs instead. I couldn’t tell if he was being noble or childish.

I sat there, stewing in my own pissed-off energy, for a full five minutes. I couldn’t help thinking that something about the interaction was righteously unfair, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

He was still him. After all of this, after dumping me because he couldn’t figure out how to recover from everything that happened.

Being pissed about anything specific felt wrong, though. Everything I could point at and be like, “this is the thing he did that made me want to pulverize him” felt… almost petty. It was like I was skating around whatever the hell the real answer was supposed to be. And the answer wasn’t what had happened on the side of the road when he’d had me in his custody. Yes, it was wrong and no, it shouldn’t have happened, but I couldn’t argue the fact that I had wanted it. I’d wanted him. So, even though Bram might have considered Knight to be the bad guy in that scenario, I didn’t. Not fully.

Truth be told, I was more pissed off that Knight had given up on us, that he’d broken up with me without even putting up a fight. But then, I was also mad at myself that I hadn’t fought for us, either. We both had basically just thrown in the towel and not really even tried to make things right.

So, really, did I even have the right to be mad at him?

And now? What was making me so upset now? I didn’t know. Maybe I just wanted him to man up, to apologize. Or maybe I just wanted him to shut up and pretend like neither one of us knew the other, so we could continue on in a shared existence of total denial.

Will appeared in front of my desk. “Janitor is on his way,” he said breathlessly. “Sorry again, agent.”

“Great,” I said thinly. “Thanks.”

Hades, at this point, I just wanted to not smell like break-room coffee.

TEN

Quillan

Christina grabbed me as I was walking by her office the next morning carrying two cups of coffee, each dangerously close to overflowing.

“Hey!” I said, and nearly spilled coffee all over myself. Good, real coffee, not that muck-and-sludge nonsense they kept in the break room.

“Sorry,” she whispered. But it was Christina, so really she was stage-whispering, and she wasn’t doing it very well.

“You’re fine,” I assured her. Then I noticed the look on her face, like she’d just guzzled an entire gallon of straight lemon juice. “What’s the matter?”

Her hair was up in a ponytail, and she was wearing black slacks and a really attractive white button-up, with the sleeves rolled up.

Even though she looked beautiful, the expression on her face made her kind of look like she’d watched a puppy get drop-kicked over a fence.

“Christina?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she answered quickly, then sighed. “No, that’s a lie—lots of things are wrong, but I can’t tell you about all of them yet.” She pursed her lips, like she wanted to say something else.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “And?”

She sighed heavier. “Just, heads up, Bram is here.”

“Bram?”

“Yeah. Osenna went to see him last night.”

“To see Bram.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Apparently, he’s the one who helped Osenna and Dagan escape Dromir,” she explained, and then she started barreling through her words like they were rolling down a hill and she had to chase after them. “And you were right, Osenna did have a different identity before, and I was kind of right because she was running from something, just not something that would have granted her political asylum—which, you know, is why she and Dagan needed Bram in the first place.”

“Okay, babe?” I interjected, gesturing with the two paper coffee cups in my hands. “That should have been, like, five different sentences, and it was maybe two. Or one with a semi-colon somewhere.”

Christina sighed again, a thin stream of air puffing through her lips. “Sorry. Bram just dropped a bunch of stuff on me this morning that I super wasn’t ready for.” She took her coffee and drank deep. For several seconds, she stood there with her eyes closed. “Hades bless caffeine.”

“Does Hades bless things?”

“Sure. Actually, I don’t know.” She paused, frowned. “Can I ask you a favor?”

“Always.” I leaned with one hand against the door, standing over her. Not in a looming way, but like a willow hangs over a river. Or like a boyfriend hangs over his girlfriend to remind himself he’s still taller, even when she’s in heels.

“Um. Okay, this is gonna sound weird, alright?”

I laughed a little. “Alright. What’s up?”

“Knight,” she said. “I need you to talk to him for me.”

I felt my eyes narrow and I stood up a little straighter. “Um. Okay. Did he do something he shouldn’t have?”

“Yes. I mean, maybe. I mean… I don’t know.” She took a small, almost self-conscious sip of her coffee. “I need to know why he and Dulcie broke up.”

I frowned, my brow furrowing hard enough to jumpstart a headache. “Christina, am I snooping for you?”

“Kind of. I swear it’s important,” she added quickly. “I just… I can’t tell you why it’s important.”

I sighed. “What makes you think he’ll talk to me? It’s not like he and I are friends, by any stretch.”

“I don’t know, you’re guys. Guys talk about this kind of stuff with each other, right?”

“No,” I told her. “No, we don’t. Ever. Especially when we’re barely acquaintances, and super especially when we don’t like each other.”

“Not even in a weird bro way?” Christina asked.

“We men prefer to stuff our emotions into glass bottles and chuck them into the ocean for people on different continents to deal with.”

“Bottles?”

“Yeah. Like treasure maps of sadness.”

“Treasure maps of sadness,” she repeated, nodding. “I like that. Hallmark should buy that one from you.”

“Thanks,” I replied with a cheeky smile. “Point is—it’s bro code. It’s just how it goes.”

Christina scowled into the wall for a second. “Okay, just, if you get a chance to bring it up with Knight, will you? Naturally?”

I quirked an eyebrow at her.

“What?” she asked.

“Christina, literally no conversation I will ever have with Knight is going to be natural. Especially not one about Dulcie.”

“Please?”

“Why do you need to know?”

She bit the inside of her lip and looked down, then forced herself to look back up, like there was something she really, absolutely wanted to tell me but couldn’t… most probably for legal reasons.

“Something Bram told me,” she informed me vaguely. “Just, I need to verify it, but I don’t want to launch a formal inquiry until I know a little more.” She sighed. “And I can’t just go up to Knight and ask because I’m sure he won’t tell me since I’m… HR, you know?” She took a breath. “And I can’t really go to Dulcie and ask her because she and I don’t have that sort of relationship.”

“Okay, it’s touchy then.”

“Yeah, really touchy. But I’m also wondering if it’s even true. Because, you know, it’s Bram, and he hates Knight. He’d say anything to get Knight into trouble, wouldn’t he?”

I mean, yes, but this was such a weird way to do it. If Bram wanted to get Knight in “trouble,” he’d just drop Knight into one of his private portals into some place in the Netherworld. Bram wouldn’t go tattling to Humane Resources. But maybe he was feeling pettier than usual, I didn’t know. He’d done weirder things for dumber reasons.

“I guess,” I said.

“So, you’ll try?”

I nodded. “I’ll do my best, babe.”

Christina stood up on her tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek. “Thanks, honey,” she said. “Okay, I have work to do, and so do you. Oh, I’ll send you the case file I have going for Osenna when I’ve updated it with all the junk Bram just told me.”

“Okay.” I lifted my hand, wrapped my fingers around the back of her neck, and pulled her to me so I could really kiss her. Her hair was so soft, and the light was falling easy and making everything glow. Or maybe that was just her. “You know, we could just go home for the day.”

She turned her head to reply, and I kissed my way down her throat. “Patience, silly. We’ll see each other after work. Plenty of time for naughty stuff later.”

“Says you.”

She laughed, pulling me close, and gave me this outside-in-the-dark-after-prom kiss that made me dizzy. I thought I was going to collapse right there.

When she pulled away, the first thing to spill out of my mouth was, “Wait, no, come back.”

She smiled and kissed my nose. “I’ll see you later.”

“Um. Yeah.” They were the only words I could get myself to say. Christina had a way of making my jaw go slack.

She smiled at me, like she knew exactly what she was doing, then kissed me on the cheek again and closed her office door.

***

Knight was in the printer room, printing something. I was pretty sure he wasn’t used to having to print his own shit, owing to the fact that, once upon a time, he’d been the head of the Splendor division of the ANC.

“Need help working that?” I asked. He was looking at the printer like it was a Rubik’s Cube he was trying to solve.

It had only been like ten, fifteen minutes since I’d left Christina, but I’d kind of forgotten about talking to him. Mostly because I didn’t want to.

“No, I’m cool,” he said, without looking back at me.

I watched him press a few buttons and then curse under his breath.

“You sure?” I asked.

He sighed and looked over his shoulder and kind of nodded at me. “How do I work the fucking thing?”

We were off to a great start.

“Put your paper under there,” I pointed as I spoke. “Then press that button.”

“I need it to copy front and back.”

“Okay, hit that button.”

“Thanks.”

Okay, so Knight and I went back further than I liked to admit. I knew him way before he knew me, because I was working with Melchior when Melchior was still king of the castle, and Knight was one of the only ANC employees—one of the only anybody, actually—brave enough and dumb enough to challenge Melchior openly. Melchior had dragged both of us into his office (not at the same time) and told us everything about his crime-lording ways, and then it was either work for him or die. I decided I’d rather work for him.

Knight decided he’d rather die.

So, from the very beginning, Knight was on higher ground than I was.

Every time we talked, I felt like some dirty street urchin talking to the chief of police, except the chief of police didn’t know I was a dirty street urchin. At the time, he had been a constant reminder that I was lying to literally everyone in my life. Especially Dulcie, because the second he showed up in Splendor, he was all over her.

And then, you know, they got together, and it was kind of hard to watch—especially after Dulcie outed me and I had to leave the ANC. I became the rogue and the outlaw and the Jackass Who Lied to Literally Everyone, and Knight got to be in charge. And he got to be with Dulcie. I mean, he’d earned it, but still. It hurts to get your dreams stomped into oblivion. Even if you did most of the stomping yourself.

Dulcie kept the dog I gave her, though. That had to mean something.

Point was, Knight was everything I should have been, but wasn’t. So prying into their relationship just felt really out-of-bounds for me. Like, whatever went wrong between them wasn’t something I was supposed to know, and it wasn’t something I should get to know.

I was on the outside of all of that now. I’d had my chance to take care of Dulcie, and I blew it—if they were having problems, I was sure they could work them out. Asking Knight about it would almost be an accusation. Or it would sound like I was asking so I could give him advice, which wasn’t any better. Maybe it would have been worse, actually.

But Christina asked me. So… fine.

Okay, there was absolutely no way to bring this up organically. Instead, I just jumped in. Conversational cannonball.

Sorry, Knight, I thought. I’m about to be just as uncomfortable as you.

“So, what happened with you and Dulcie?” I started.

Knight paused. He looked down at his papers, and it was like all the words came off them at once and crammed themselves into his mouth. He inhaled through his teeth, a thin whistling sound like he wasn’t getting any air. His fists clenched. The machine started shaking and I realized he was bouncing his leg against the side of it.

He scoffed, and made this strangled, hyena-laughing noise. I thought it was the printer for a second, like it was choking on ink cartridges or something.

“I mean,” I continued, “it’s none of my business, obviously. Just, if you want to… you know… talk to somebody who’s definitely done worse.” I shrugged. “I’m here, I guess.”

You could say I was extending the olive branch.

It was a courtesy. I was sure we’d never be friends, but at this point, hating each other just seemed like a waste of energy. We’d all been through so much. I’d loved Dulcie once, and Dulcie had loved me, but now they loved each other, even if they’d hit a bump. At the least, we could be civil colleagues even if we couldn’t be friends.

I wanted to try a little, you know? See if I couldn’t actually help with whatever was going wrong with them, or at least get him to talk to Christina about it. I wanted to build a bridge. Or at least, like, a zipline. Maybe a catapult.

The hyena sound cut off like something had died. Knight stood up a little straighter, looking stiff. And weirdly, dramatically determined. He had this Tom-Cruise-the-martyr scowl thing going on, and he was shaking his head.

“Why are you asking?”

I shrugged. “I thought you looked like you could use a fr… someone to talk to.”

He chuckled. “Am I that obvious?”

I was surprised. In all my experiences with Knight, he’d never shown me a particularly sensitive side. That had to mean he was hurting even worse than he was letting on. I felt sorry for him.

“Yeah, I guess you are that obvious,” I admitted with a shrug. “What’s going on?”

He nodded and was quiet for a few seconds. “This breakup has been hard.”

“I’m sure,” I said with a nod.

“And I’m pretty sure it’s all my fault,” he continued.

“So, why don’t you apologize and make things better?” I frowned. “I mean, that’s what most people do when they care about the person they’re with.”

“I care about Dulcie,” he insisted with a nod. “I mean… I love Dulcie.”

“So…”

“It’s not that simple.” He looked at me, meeting my eyes for the first time since we’d started this conversation. “Fucking Christ, I can’t believe I’m talking to you about this.”

“Am I so bad?”

“No. It’s just… I never thought in a million years we’d be doing… this.”

“Then you’re obviously in the dumps, man.”

“Yeah.”

“So, again, why not just apologize for whatever the fuck you did and figure things out?”

He shook his head. “It’s not about apologizing.”

“Have you tried?”

“Yes and no.” He let out a pent-up breath of frustration and then ran a hand through his hair, which looked like it hadn’t been cut in months. “Do you remember… after I arrested Dulcie?” he started.

There was something in the words. Something heavy. Lead heavy, glacier heavy, buried-alive-in-the-desert heavy.

It took me a second. “When she was working with Melchior?”

He nodded. Silence swept through the room like a cold wind. Seconds and seconds and seconds passed, nothing happening. It looked like he wasn’t breathing.

“I…” He trailed, but not off, just to one side. He had the look of somebody who wanted to talk exactly as much as he didn’t, but he’d started now and it was too late to turn back. The words bubbled up in his mouth. Water in a geyser, pressure rising. Steam hissing through cracks in the ground.

He sighed. “I picked her up.” He shook his head, hard. Like, worryingly hard. “No. No, I arrested her. I handcuffed her and I put her in the car. And.” He ran a single hand over his face. Like he was trying to scrape something off. A memory, a feeling, an itch you can’t scratch because it isn’t real. Trying to shed a coat he wasn’t even wearing anymore.

I crossed my arms. Stood up a little straighter, and I felt my face go stony. “…Yeah?”

“I… I was so angry,” he confessed. He was staring at the carpet. His voice sounded like he was going to burst out laughing any second. But if he did, it wouldn’t be funny—it would be manic. It would be the sound of something broken, something that couldn’t figure out how to scream.

The air in the room got colder. Like it could feel the tension building, the awkwardness mounting like sand in an hourglass.

I said nothing.

ELEVEN

Quillan

Knight was blinking a lot, and he was smiling, but in a way that suggested he didn’t know it. Like he’d totally forgotten that he even had teeth. He was smiling like his tongue was bleeding, like he couldn’t remember how to breathe.

“I thought… at the time I’d thought that Dulcie was working for Melchior the whole time. Like, since the beginning,” he said. “I’d thought she’d been playing me all along.”

I nodded a little. It felt like the right gesture for the moment.

“I didn’t…” He shook his head and inhaled deeply. Dropping his eyes to the ground, he was quiet for a few seconds, his jaw tight. When he looked at me again, his eyes were heavy. “Dulcie tried to tell me the truth… but I was convinced she was lying to me…”

And that heaviness in the air was getting heavier and heavier. Like if you know there’s a bear in your hallway and you’re trying to work up the courage to do something about it. Sneak around it, call somebody, climb out the window, anything—but there’s a bear in your house, and that knowledge and that feeling is paralyzing. And the longer you sit there trying not to think about the bear, the worse it gets.

“I pulled over,” said Knight, and then the words just started pouring out of him. “I pulled over and I got out of the car and she got out of the car. And I was yelling and Dulcie was crying and … and I…” He squeezed his eyes closed. The words caught visibly in his throat, like fishhooks. “I couldn’t stop myself. I had to… have her at least one more time.”

“You…” I caught up with him three seconds too late. “Oh. Oh, my God.”

He flinched a little. Not much, just enough. He didn’t say anything else.

So, that’s… holy shit, that was the reason why they broke up. But they’d only been apart apart for a couple of weeks, and the thing he was talking about happened upwards of two years ago. It was more than enough reason for Dulcie to break up with him, but why was this only coming up now? Why did it take so long to get between them?

Maybe he did it again, I thought, which made my stomach do really awful twisty things.

Hades, Knight was supposed to be the good guy—the Superman to my reformed Penguin. I wasn’t supposed to have the moral high ground here, or anywhere else, for that matter. I didn’t know what to do with it.

“Why?” It was a colossally stupid question, but I felt compelled to ask it. Just to see what he’d say, if he even knew the answer.

He gave his head an almost imperceptible shake. “I don’t know. I just… fuck, I was angry. I was tired. I was… scared… and I still loved her, but I believed she’d deceived me. And even though I hated myself for it, I wanted to hurt her the way she was hurting me. But, at the same time, it wasn’t just about hurting her. It was about… being close to her.” He shook his head harder. “I know this sounds totally fucking stupid.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I said, because I could understand what he was talking about. I could understand why he would have felt the way he did. “Not that it not sounding stupid makes it okay.”

“I know it’s not okay,” he told me quickly.

I nodded. Is that how you’re supposed to cope with your fear of losing her, dude? Was that plan A? Was having a conversation with her before he started making firecracker choices on the side of the road totally out of the question?

I mean, I got it, sort of. The fear part, the need to be close to her part, not any of the rest of it though. That kind of betrayal hits like an asteroid up the ass.

Except, I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to fix that by one-upping the betrayer. And that’s what he did. She hurt him, so he decided to hurt her back.

There was a popping sound in the walls, then a dull hum as the vents kicked on. I exhaled with the noise. I felt frozen in amber, in ice, in a photograph taken at exactly the wrong moment.

Knight turned all the way around until our bodies were parallel, and he just stared at me. His hands clenched and unclenched, and his knuckles were white.

What the hell was I supposed to say? Everybody makes mistakes works for bad arguments and car wrecks, but not here. Not for this. Everything I could say either felt like too little or too much.

I might have walked out then. Just turned, left, slammed the door, and let him stew for however long it took him to get his ass back in gear. I probably would have turned out the lights just to be an ass, because honestly, I didn’t know what else I could do, or should do. But there was more to this story that I wanted to understand.

“That was over two years ago,” I started, my voice sounding strangely foreign. “But you guys just… broke up recently?”

He nodded. “Believe it or not, we got past it. I don’t know how the fuck we did, but we did. Or, we both pretended we did. I could never get past it, though, and I’m pretty sure Dulcie didn’t, either. We just never talked about it.”

“So… what happened?”

He shrugged. “Meg is what ultimately got between us.”

“Meg?”

He nodded. “She glamoured me and, while I was under her influence, I did things with her that I shouldn’t have. And Dulcie was forced to watch.”

“But you were glamoured?” I argued the obvious.

“You know as well as I do that glamour only truly works if the victim is open to the glamour in the first place.”

“Then you wanted Meg?”

“No,” he insisted. “But I guess I didn’t not want her enough.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, that about sums it up,” he answered and frowned. “After that, Dulcie and I both knew there was no coming back. You don’t just witness something like that and say, ‘It’s cool, we’re cool.’ Plus, there was everything that happened two years ago that was still haunting us.”

“Going back to what happened two years ago,” I replied, because that was the sticking point for me. Whatever happened with Meg was… whatever. But what he’d done to Dulcie when she was in his custody… that was more.

Knight took a breath. “It sucks, I know it sucks, I know. It wasn’t a choice I made, it just happened! I couldn’t stop myself.”

My eye twitched. “You… couldn’t…”

“Couldn’t.” Not “wouldn’t,” not even “didn’t want to,” just couldn’t. As if he’d been possessed, or hexed, or blackmailed.

“What do you mean, you ‘couldn’t’ stop yourself?”

“I mean it… I don’t know, it was like I was watching somebody else using my body and I couldn’t get back in control of myself.”

“Do you really believe that?”

He looked away, which meant no, he didn’t believe it. Not even a little. It was just a lie he’d been feeding himself to rationalize his fucked-up actions.

“It didn’t. Just. Happen. Knight. Nothing you do just happens. These are choices you make, man.”

“I couldn’t stop—”

“So, what, you were glamoured into raping her?”

I don’t know why that was what sobered him. Maybe finally hearing the word out loud. But he looked at me as if he was in shock, his eyes wide.

“The people we know,” I said, because calling them ‘our friends’ created a connection between us that I just couldn’t stomach, “are way, way more forgiving than either us of deserve. They have given us chance after chance to redeem ourselves, and I always thought with you and Dulcie, you and your girlfriend… I thought you were a better man than me and, dammit, she deserved that. She deserved someone noble, someone good.”

My fingers curled and clenched, the kind of slow-closing fist that happens when your whole body is shaking with the kind of ungodly rage that bursts arteries.

I thought of Dulcie discovering me in that house years ago, finding out that I’d been working against the ANC since before we’d ever met. She’d looked so defeated, like I’d pulled the rug out from under her whole fucking world. If I’d been honest before that—if I’d told her I was under duress, that it wasn’t my choice, before she found out the hard way, the awful way—she might have understood. She might have helped me to help myself. I don’t know how she could have, but it was stupid of me to believe that nobody could have saved me.

Especially Dulcie.

She’d been in love with me then. I’d known, and I knew now. And I’d loved her just as much. We’d had so much potential, but I’d pounded that potential into the mud because I was afraid. Fear made you do stupid things.

Not that I regretted my life now. I was happier than I believed I had a right to be. And even though I had loved Dulcie in another life, that life was over. I was in love with Christina and I was happy with her, happy with us. It was just sometimes difficult to think back on my decisions and realize where I’d gone so terribly wrong.

“Someone,” I continued at last, “that she could trust.”

Knight flinched. A whole-body, lightning-rod flinch, a sobbing flinch, an I-swallowed-a-needle-and-now-it’s-sticking-out-of-my-stomach flinch.

“Meg was one thing,” I said, forcing myself to sound calm, to be calm. “That was as much a violation for you as it was for Dulcie. That was something neither of you were ready to control, and it sure as hell isn’t something any of us would have had the will to resist—not from someone that powerful and that… determined.”

He didn’t move, he didn’t look at me. He was breathing very slowly.

“But this?” I went on. “This is a choice you made. Nobody glamoured you. Nobody tricked you.”

“I thought—”

“That Dulcie was working for Melchior?” I interrupted, a mad, murderous, Joker-on-the-brink laugh clawing its way out of my throat. “Dude, even if she was, you can’t possibly believe that would make what you did any better. You raped your girlfriend while she was in your professional custody,” I hissed, the words whistling sharply out of my mouth like hot steam. “After she sacrificed her morality to save your life.”

Melchior hadn’t thought it was a sacrifice; he’d thought his daughter had finally come around. He’d thought Dulcie would be happy to help him. He was so proud of her when she agreed, so deliriously, stupidly happy when she came to that first meeting.

I didn’t know why I was suddenly thinking about this. Maybe I was trying to escape the truth that was facing me.

Knight wouldn’t look at me. He wasn’t really looking at anything; his eyes were everywhere and his breathing had picked up. This close, I could hear his heartbeat, ramped up like a jackhammer on a mission.

“She should have told me the position her father had forced her into,” he said quietly.

“What, so you could do something stupid and heroic that would have gotten you killed?”

He said nothing. I stepped away and just… looked at him.

And Hades, he was so pathetic.

“You were supposed to keep her safe,” I pointed out. From Melchior, from Jack. From me. I clenched my teeth until my jaw started to throb. “How she still loves you is beyond me.”

That pulled him up short. I wondered if it really hadn’t occurred to him that Dulcie just wasn’t capable of hating him.

“She doesn’t still love me.”

“Are you stupid?” I demanded angrily.

“She doesn’t even want to look at me.”

“And do you blame her?” I shook my head. “The crazy part is that after all of this, she does still love you. It’s obvious.”

He made this quiet, wordless growling noise and didn’t look up.

I ran out of things to say. A minute or so passed, and I was going to just leave. Say something like, “I’m just gonna walk away now,” and jump ship, but I didn’t have to—my phone rang.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Quill?” Christina. Sweet, sweet angel of the office. She always called, never texted unless she had to. Something about it being more personable. “Report is on your desk when you want to look at it.”

“Great,” I said. “On my way.”

“You don’t have to right now.”

“Oh, believe me, I do,” I assured her.

When I hung up, I looked at Knight, but he didn’t look at me.

“I’ll understand if you try to take action against me for… what happened,” he said in a deep voice.

I was surprised. Surprised he’d admitted any of it, all the while knowing that the department might press charges against him. Shit, maybe that’s what he wanted to happen—the only way he was going to come to terms with himself.

Maybe getting stripped of his position and possibly doing jail time was the only way Knight could wipe his slate clean? The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I hadn’t had to push him much at all and yet he’d opened up to me—someone he barely even considered an acquaintance. The truth of it was that I’d played into his plan perfectly.

“That’s entirely up to Dulcie, as you know,” I replied.

He just nodded and didn’t say anything more.

“Later, dude,” I said, and walked out.

I never said I was good at this.

TWELVE

Quillan

Five minutes later, I was sitting in the break room, staring at the table. It smelled like coffee, which smelled like gasoline, which meant nobody was in here for any longer than they had to be. People walked in and out, looking through folders, talking on their phones. Just totally absorbed in their own work. Which was nice, because it meant no one was bothering me.

I was brooding. I could see myself from the outside, tapping my fingers against my leg and scowling at nothing, looking like I’d just lost an arm-wrestling match with a ghost. I felt numb.

Christina sat down next to me, holding an open Tupperware container full of fruit and a criminal amount of sugar.

“Hey, Quill,” she chirped, and kissed my cheek. I barely felt it.

“Hey,” I said quietly.

She got out of the car, Knight said. But she was handcuffed. Which meant she didn’t get out; he dragged her out.

“Did you get a chance to look at the case file?” Christina asked, all smiles and rosy cheeks and glittering eyes.

Couldn’t stop himself…

It was the kind of sentence that made you want to break someone’s fingers, but damn me… it seemed like he was scared of himself when he said it. Had Dulcie been scared? Hurt? Emotionally, no doubt, but what about physically?

“Quill?”

“Hmm?”

Christina put her fork down and turned in her chair to face me. She laid her hand on my arm, and suddenly, I had feeling again. But only right where she was touching me. “Babe, what’s eating you?”

She was in his custody, for fuck’s sake—that’s a felony. That’s a badge-revoking, career-burning, you’re-fucked felony.

“Quillan?” She put her hand on my forehead. “Are you feeling alright? Do you need to go home?”

I shook myself out of whatever funk had settled over me and tried to smile at her. I couldn’t manage it. “No, sorry. I’m fine. Really.”

“Okay, then, what’s up?”

“…I talked to Knight.”

Her smile dropped. “Oh? What did he say?”

This must have been what Bram was talking about. And Christina was hoping I’d tell her Bram was a liar and we needed to set his pants on fire. Because she, like every other rational person, assumed that Knightley fucking Vander could never, ever do something so horrible.

I tried to answer. But I hesitated. My mouth popped open and closed like a bass on a wall.

And she knew.

“Oh, God,” she breathed. “Something did happen? Bram wasn’t full of shit?”

I nodded. There weren’t words. I mean, there were plenty of them, but they weren’t words I could use. They didn’t fit right in my mouth. They didn’t feel like lies—they felt like delusions, bad dreams, acid trips.

But strip away all the anger, the confusion, the pain, and what was left was the truth. So I just said that, instead.

“Knight took her against her will,” I explained, and the words stuck to my tongue like a needle. It was the nicest way I could say it, and then I wasn’t even sure why I was being nice about it, anyway.

Christina was suddenly very pale. “He what?”

“He raped her,” I clarified, the words catching in my throat.

Christina didn’t change her posture. She didn’t change expressions, but there was a shift, something soft, like the click of a television turning on. Like a wire sparking and starting a fire in another room. The sound of something dormant waking up.

“Bram was right,” she whispered. “Knight…” She put her hand over her mouth. “I’m going to kill him.”

“Chris—” I started.

“I’m going to kill him.” Christina closed her eyes and inhaled slowly. She clenched her fists, and her joints popped with a sound like gunshots.

And seeing the anger bubbling up in the head of Humane Resources made something click in my own brain. Some of the red drained out of my vision. Something in the backwaters of my mind said, “Wait,” and it felt like the kind of voice people listen to when they don’t want to end the world.

I took her by the shoulders, gently, and I looked at her. Level, pouring myself into her eyes, water gushing into a desert. She was furious, almost vibrating.

“Christina, he’s already killing himself,” I told her. And fuck, it had to be true. The sudden confessional dump onto me, of all people—he knew exactly what he’d done. Knightley Vander wasn’t stupid. He was broken and he was out to get himself, or so it seemed. The more I thought about it, the more I realized he wanted to expose himself, and I’d provided him with the perfect vehicle. Obviously, he was aware that Christina was my girlfriend, so who better to tell than the boyfriend of HR? But then, I had to ask myself, why? Why did he want to crucify himself? Was it to show Dulcie how truly sorry he was? Maybe he was the type of guy who just couldn’t apologize, so this was his roundabout way of doing so?

Christina blinked. Once, sharply, and there were whole paragraphs of text inside it.

“He’s an ass,” I said, “irredeemably, and he’s stupid, yes, and he betrayed her in the worst way anyone can, and there’s nothing we can do to change it. You can’t fix this, I can’t fix this, he can’t fix this. He can either man up, accept it, and move the fuck on to be a better person, or he can let it destroy him and he’ll be awful for the rest of his miserable life. But that’s not a transformation anyone can force on him.”

“We could pursue this. He could lose his position. He could—”

“We can’t do anything without Dulcie’s approval,” I interrupted. “And everything points to the fact that she wants to let sleeping dogs lie.”

“What?!”

“This happened two years ago, Christina,” I explained, when she appeared to be unconvinced. “Don’t you think Dulcie would have pursued it if she’d wanted to? She’s a cop, for Christ’s sake, she knows what the laws are. But she didn’t, and that means we shouldn’t, either.”

“How can you think that?”

“Because this is her business, not ours. Of course, if she wanted to pursue it now, I would support her. But this is her decision. It happened to her; not us. And for whatever reason, she’s decided not to pursue it. And that’s her right.”

She nodded. “I guess that makes sense.”

“If Dulcie wanted Knight to suffer or to pay for what happened, she would have pursued it herself.”

Christina blinked twice. Soft blinks, sad blinks. The blinking that happens right before tears, and I realized I’d never really seen her cry. “Maybe she was afraid or ashamed? Maybe she was too embarrassed to go after him?”

“Maybe, but that doesn’t sound like Dulcie. Besides, this happened two years ago, and they got back together after it happened. That tells me there must be more to the story. There is—there’s Dulcie’s side.”

“If Knight admitted it…”

“Yes, he did. But even though it happened, we’ve only heard his side. We haven’t heard Dulcie’s, and we owe her the right to make her own decision on whether or not she wants to go after him for it.”

“Maybe we should give her the option?”

I sighed. Long and hard. “I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want to pursue this.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know Dulcie. And if she’d wanted to pursue it, she would have. Shit, if she knew Bram was spreading all of this, I’m sure she’d be furious with him. Dulcie isn’t the type of person who wants her business aired for everyone to see.”

“It seems unfair that Knight’s just getting away with it,” Christina said.

I shook my head and started to shake my left leg like I did when I was nervous. This conversation didn’t exactly make me comfortable. “He’s not getting away with it. At all. He knows what he did. He struggles with it every day. He said as much. And it’s a big part of why they aren’t together anymore.” I took a deep breath. “Just… I don’t know, give him a chance to try to fix it himself so he can grow, or something.”

She pulled away and looked at me incredulously. Like I’d slapped her and then told her violence was never the answer. “Grow?” she repeated, but really, she spat the word at me. “Grow?”

“He either gets better,” I clarified, “or he doesn’t. I don’t know.”

“I’m kind of amazed to hear you say that.”

“It’s not our decision, Christina. It’s Dulcie’s.”

And that was enough to stop her. Not to calm her down—she was still in high-noon murder mode—but she wasn’t actively trying to leave the room to go on a good, old-fashioned manhunt.

She nodded. Inhaled, exhaled, head cocked to one side. Sharp, like she was trying to snap her own neck.

“I need a minute,” she told me.

I nodded. “Okay.”

She stormed coolly out of the room—back straight, expression mostly blank—and turned left, towards the gym. Maybe looking for the punching bag, or for someone to suplex on the mat. Maybe she was hoping Knight would be there, so she would have a reason to kick his ass without letting him know that she knew and that she wanted him to suffer for it.

Or maybe that’s just what I wanted to do.

I didn’t know why I had jumped to his defense. Maybe I felt bad for him. Maybe I thought, if I could recover, he could, too. Maybe I was trying to pay something forward.

Or maybe I just didn’t want Christina to get herself in trouble with Dulcie. Maybe I didn’t want Dulcie to have to relive the events again, because I was more than sure she’d buried them for a reason.

***

Ten minutes later, Christina returned.

“You better?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“Where’d you go?”

She sighed. “I walked around the courtyard a couple of times.”

Before either one of us could say anything more, Dulcie poked her head in. Christina’s expression dropped and her face turned white. She swallowed hard. I felt my own heartrate increasing and sorely wished we weren’t reacting this way, because Dulcie would definitely notice.

“Hey,” she said. “I heard about the whole Dagan thing; what the hell is going on?”

Christina stood up and walked over to Dulcie. Then she paused for a second before she threw her arms around her friend and hugged her tight. Really tight.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

Dulcie hesitated. When she looked at me, I felt my mouth pop open, my shoulders rising in a really pathetic sorry-I-can’t-keep-secrets-that-don’t-belong-to-me shrug.

“You’re sorry?” Dulcie repeated, frowning once Christina pulled away.

“About what happened,” Christina said, and nodded. “Between you and Knight.”

Dulcie’s eyes dropped before she glanced up at Christina again, as if forcing herself to be strong. But she also looked confused. “You mean, how we ran into each other earlier?”

“No,” Christina said.

Dulcie nodded slowly, chewing on her lower lip. “You’re talking about what happened with Meg…”

“Um,” Christina looked at me questioningly before facing Dulcie again. “No.”

“So that leaves only one other subject you’d be sorry for.” Dulcie sighed deeply. “Who told you?”

“I wrangled it out of Quillan,” she explained, “who wrangled it out of Knight.”

“No wrangling necessary,” I clarified, hands in my pockets. “It just kind of spilled out of him, like he was waiting for someone to ask.” As though I’d asked him what kind of coffee he was drinking, and he tripped and dumped it all over me because answering would have taken too many words. “And then it just kind of spilled out of me.” I frowned. “I’m sorry.”

I wasn’t sure why Christina hadn’t mentioned Bram, since he was the first one who’d mentioned it to any of us. Maybe she was protecting him? It was an odd thought.

“Oh,” said Dulcie and she crossed her arms. “And why would Quill think to ask Knight about it?” Her gaze speared between Christina and me.

“Bram,” answered Christina. So she wasn’t protecting him. I wasn’t sure why, but that tidbit made me feel lots better. Bram didn’t deserve anyone’s protection.

“Bram?” Dulcie repeated as her cheeks colored.

“Yeah, I think he’s on team ‘let’s stuff and mount Vander on a wall somewhere,’” Christina said.

“Not that it was Bram’s place to tell anyone anything,” Dulcie pointed out, then pursed her lips as she glanced down, looking generally like she didn’t want to say anything ever again.

“It wasn’t your fault, you know,” Christina told her kindly.

Dulcie shook her head. “I, uh, I can’t do this. Not right now and not… ever. Whatever Bram told you and whatever Knight told Quill… it wasn’t exactly how things went down. I’ve told Bram that repeatedly, and I’m getting sick of listening to myself explain.”

“Then you don’t want to press charges?” Christina asked.

Dulcie looked surprised. “Press charges? No! I want everyone and everything to go back to normal so my life can feel like mine again.”

Christina grimaced and looked like she was going to say something unpleasant—not to Dulcie, specifically, just in general—but she sighed and shook her head instead. “Fine. But if you’re ever in the market for a Netherworldian necktie, let me know.”

Dulcie cracked a smile, but I could tell she wasn’t feeling it. I’d already known what her feelings were on this subject without her having to express them, but Christina was the head of HR—this was her turf. She was just doing her job. And I understood that, too.

THIRTEEN

Bram

Vander did not make it out of the printer room.

Quillan stormed out in rather a state, shoving his phone into his pocket and generally looking as though he would very much like to set the entire city on fire. I stood with my arms crossed, watching from around a corner. I waited until he disappeared before entering the printing room, myself.

You see, I had been listening.

“It’s all yours,” said Vander, taking a sheaf of papers from the printing tray. Then he turned around and realized exactly with whom he was sharing the room. There was a brief, disgusted pause. “What do you want?”

I surged forward, grabbed him by the throat, and pushed him back against the machine. The plastic cracked beneath him.

“Nothing in particular,” I said. “Some pleasant weather, better business prospects, and perhaps your head in a nice wooden box.” I squeezed. “Something I can put on the mantle and show to relatives at parties.”

He rolled his eyes, or perhaps he was running out of oxygen quicker than I had anticipated. “This again, Bram? You had your chance to kill me and you haven’t taken it. This shit is getting old.”

“Yes, I’m well aware. Perhaps that is why I am back now.”

“Make up your fucking mind.”

It was strange. The rage swelling within me was not of the white-hot variety to which I was accustomed, nor was it the cold and calculating red of a sociopath with a branding iron. This, whatever it was, had a different color to it, something gold and green and furious for reasons most of my body could hardly comprehend.

I did not want something from him, nor was I the same kind of angry I might have been had he meddled in my professional affairs and bungled an important deal. No, I wanted to hurt him, more than I had ever wanted to hurt anyone. I did not want him to learn a lesson. I did not want him to beg. I did not want him to admit guilt. I did not even want to kill him. I wanted to inflict such pain upon him that his screams could be heard dimensions away, that Dagan himself would look upon my work and cringe and wonder what in the hell could possibly be wrong with me, to do such a grisly thing?

I lifted him up and slammed him into the printer, hard enough to fully dent its weak plastic exterior. It looked as though a comet had come screaming through the ceiling and bashed itself into the paper tray.

He began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” I hissed, teeth clenched. The blood of Lokis was bitter indeed, but I could stomach it. I might be sick for days, but not near so sick as I felt when I looked upon him, watching that stupid smile peel across his face as though consequences were an antiquated concept.

Knight laughed. “You can’t do it,” he said as his eyes narrowed. “Because you know Dulcie would never forgive you.”

A red wash covered the world. Something in my head began to throb, a stinging sensation I felt all the way into my gut. My hunger swelled. This was not my common thirst, but a desperate need to spill his blood, to extinguish the life from his body.

“Dulcie would come to understand in time.”

“You and I both know that’s a lie. And yet, when you’re alone, you keep talking yourself into killing me again. Then you get here, and reason sets in and you find yourself immobilized.”

There was truth to his words, though I would not admit as much to him.

“Make a fucking decision, man,” he continued. “I’m sick of having you randomly appearing in my life like you’re some kind of fucking superhero.”

“I am hardly a hero.”

“Then act like the fucking villain and let’s get on with it!”

A growl, deliciously inhuman, curled out of my throat. “With pleasure,” I replied. Once I was through with him, it would look like an entire pack of werewolves had broken in and shredded Vander like cheap curtains.

I dropped him; or rather, I threw him to the ground like a bag of venomous snakes.

I tugged at my cufflinks, simply because the gesture seemed to fit the moment, conveyed the proper amount of disgust and nonchalance.

I picked Vander up again and drove him firmly into the printer, deepening the already unfortunately prominent dent. I was a bit surprised that he did not do anything to protect himself. It was as though he wanted me to rough him up. Bizarre, indeed.

“I am going to enjoy this,” I informed him, “far more than I should.”

There was a clicking sound as the door opened. Someone gasped.

Vander and I turned to look.

A spindly little pseudo-man stood in the doorway, gaping at us.

“Who are you?” I demanded, finding it difficult to enunciate because my fangs were fully elongated.

“Um, I’m the intern.”

Yes, he played the part well in his white polo and khakis. He adjusted his glasses and looked away, blushing. “Um. Sorry. I… um.” He held papers in his hands, something he clearly needed to copy.

And it occurred to me that if I killed Vander here, I would have to kill this boy, as well—or risk him telling Dulcie what had happened. She would not understand, she was not yet ready to reign down proper vengeance on Vander’s head. This was ultimately something I would have to do for her, and she would thank me eventually. But not today. Not while she was still love-blind to Vander’s mounting atrocities.

I realized, perhaps ten seconds too late, that Vander and I were in a rather compromising position there against the printer: my mouth close to his ear, one hand around his throat and the other braced against the machine itself, perhaps in service of some unsavory action that required bracing.

“Bloody fuck,” I muttered, quickly releasing him and jumping back, putting as much space between us as the narrow room allowed.

The intern’s blush deepened. I very much doubted that I had succeeded in convincing him that he had not just interrupted such carnal activities.

“Um,” the intern said.

“This is not as it might appear,” I responded. I resisted the urge to dust off the parts of myself that had touched Vander.

“Exactly,” Vander added stiffly, glaring at me but saying nothing else; as much as he didn’t want someone thinking he’d gone skinny dipping in the ink wells with me, perhaps he wanted people knowing I’d actively threatened him even less. Or else he was simply too flustered to form a proper rebuttal.

“I was simply threatening to kill him on behalf of his ex-girlfriend,” I explained.

To this, Vander made no reply.

“Ooooh.” The young man nodded, completely satisfied. “Can I get around you?” He lifted the papers he intended to copy, a stack of the kind of short-order forms that go in suggestion boxes. “They’re for Agent Ramsey.”

“Ah, yes, of course.” I stepped out of the way and gestured to the machine. “Carry on.”

The intern smiled and skirted around Vander and me. “Oh, jeez,” he groaned, noticing the admittedly considerable dent I had put in the machine’s face.

“Apologies,” I responded. “I do hope it still works as it should.”

The intern sighed, but not heavily—as though finding the printer in such dramatic disrepair was just the order of the day. “Whatever, it’s not like it works right anyway.”

When he started pressing buttons, the printer whirred and hissed and made an awful clanking noise as it rattled against the wall, like a cat trapped in a filing cabinet. The intern kicked it absently and the clanking mostly stopped.

“One would think that a federal institution such as this would be able to afford something more functional,” I offered.

“Right?” the intern replied.

“Quite right,” I said.

Vander said nothing.

“Dammit,” said the intern, and he sighed, taking his papers and exiting from whence he’d come.

“Well, then,” I said to Vander. “Good day to you.”

Before I could leave, however, something tore a very large hole in the middle of the room.

***

The portal—for it was indeed a portal, of the mostly-invisible air-rippling sort—shimmered for a moment. Sounds poured through it: screaming, pounding feet, and a distant metallic clanking.

“What…” started Vander as his eyes widened.

We heard running sounds. Panting. And shouting, lots of it. A whole army of mouths. They did not sound happy.

Then, two bodies came tumbling through the shimmering air.

The first was a shortish man of obvious Asian descent holding a rolling pin, shouting obscenities.

The second was… Dagan.

The elderly Asian man, upon catching up with Dagan, hit him over the head rather hard with the rolling pin.

Vander looked at me and I at him.

The Asian man, whom I was fairly sure was Chinese, yelled something sharp and unpleasant, whacking Dagan in the nose with the pin with surprising strength and dexterity. Dagan covered his nose, which was distinctly broken—though not, it appeared, as a result of the rolling pin—and attempted to get away. There was blood covering the lower half of his face, ostensibly from the broken nose, and both of his eyes were black and blue. For whatever reason, Dagan was having an enormous amount of trouble dislodging his rather small assailant.

Eventually, Dagan saw us, whilst he was tumbling on the ground with the man.

“Bram!” he said conversationally, then ducked another blow of the rolling pin which could have been quite severe across his forehead. He backed up to the other side of the room and caught his breath. He did not have a long respite for the man was on him an instant later.

“Dagan,” I responded, crossing my arms. “Your girlfriend has been looking for you.”

“Osenna?” He and the man rolled sideways, the rolling pin coming out on top.

“He a friend of yours?” I asked, pointing to the angry senior citizen.

“Not exactly,” said Dagan.

“Pig! Pig! Pig, pig, pig!” shouted the man.

“Only English he knows,” Dagan explained, almost apologetically. He threw off the little man and hauled himself to his feet with exaggerated effort. His clothes were scorched as though someone had tried to set him on fire, an event I deeply regretted not being present for.

“Pig,” I repeated, and nodded my approval. If one needed to find a single word in the English language to describe Dagan, “pig” would certainly do. In the event “disreputable” and “lecher” proved too difficult to pronounce.

“So, then,” I said. “Who is your not-friend?”

“The cook. Zhe Ping.”

“Pig!” shrieked Zhe Ping, and he truly was shrieking now. But he was also panting and trying to catch his breath, giving Dagan another respite.

“And he is hitting you with a rolling pin because…?” I prompted. Vander just continued to stand there as if in disbelief.

“He thinks I slept with his daughter.”

“Ah.”

Dagan stood there, in the corner of the room, with his arms outstretched towards Zhe Ping as if in supplication. Luckily for him, the elderly man appeared quite exhausted and did not immediately rekindle his attack.

“In the middle of the market square fountain.”

Vander made an unsettled choking noise in the back of his throat. I was, as might be expected, utterly unmoved.

“Did you?” I asked.

“Yes.” Dagan shrugged, pulling his sleeves down to his wrists. “It was all perfectly consensual, of course. I can’t imagine what he’s so upset about.”

“Of course, you can’t,” I muttered.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing.”

Dagan gave me a leery once over, perhaps wondering what type of unholy sensations a vampire-demon coupling might produce, and then looked away in that rather abrupt and dismissive way of his. A lesser creature might have felt a sudden need to regain his attention.

Something flashed in his hand as I looked away from him, and when I looked back, I discovered a scarf dangling from his hand, wrapped upwards of five times around his wrist.

“And what, pray tell, is that?” I asked.

“Not a damn thing,” replied Dagan, grinning at the wall.

“Is it, perhaps, the type of thing someone from your homeland might kill to retrieve?”

“Definitely.”

“Fantastic.” I looked at Vander, who was funneling all of his mounting irritation into a rather spectacular glare aimed at Dagan.

The door squealed open behind us.

FOURTEEN

Bram

A man with a toolbox entered the room and then stopped midstride once he got a glimpse of what was going on.

“I’ve got other shit to fix in this building. I don’t have time for this,” he grumbled, dismissing Dagan and Zhe Ping as though they were nothing out of the ordinary. Might I remind you that Zhe Ping was still holding his rolling pin in quite a strident manner and Dagan was quite nearly covered in his own blood.

“I can’t just keep coming up here,” the repairman continued.

Before facing me, he took a deep breath and sighed as heavily as any human ever has.

“What is it this time?” he asked.

Clearly, I appeared to be the one most in charge. “Dimensional rift,” I said casually. Dagan nodded.

The man with the toolbox was unperturbed. “With the printer, jackass! What’s wrong with the printer?”

“Pig,” muttered Zhe Ping.

“Yes, ‘pig,’ indeed,” I agreed, and I gave the repairman what I dearly hoped was a sincere and imploring look. “Give us another moment?”

“I just want to fix the printer and get to my next job, man.”

“Perhaps you can fix it tomorrow.”

“Can’t. I’ve got calls the rest of the week.”

I laid a hand on his shoulder and smiled; from his sharp flinch, I imagined I was not a pleasant sight. I closed my mouth and cleared my throat.

“I’m afraid we need the room for now,” I informed him and, for good measure, I fished whatever cash I had out of my wallet—two hundred dollars exactly, though I couldn’t guarantee it was in a currency he could use. “The printer will not be any less broken when you return, I assure you.”

If anything, it would likely be in even grander disrepair, but there was hardly a need to say as much out loud.

The repairman eyed the money, decided its denomination was acceptable (or perhaps he was persuaded by my fangs), took it, and nodded.

“Right. Well, then. Have a nice day.” He tipped his hat down at the grumbling Zhe Ping and left the room, whistling. The door snapped closed behind him.

Behind us, the printer whirred indignantly.

“So,” I said, turning to Dagan. “Where is it?”

“Where is what?”

“My portal ripper.” I held out one hand, fingers twitching. “The one you stole from me.”

Dagan put a hand over his heart, widened his eyes, and said, “Moi?”

“Oui, toi,” I said, with the most abominable French accent ever to be heard in a printing room. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

“To be completely fair,” he said, producing the can opener from his person while he eyed Zhe Ping, who stood in the corner and glared at him. “I acquired it from Meg.”

“Who acquired it from me.”

I took the can opener from him and turned it over in my hand. It was completely done over with scratches, dents, and an inky red substance I was reasonably certain was blood—that of demons, judging by its rather earthy smell.

“I do not appreciate it when thieves bleed on my equipment,” I said testily; though one could argue that everything I said to Dagan was testy.

“I didn’t.”

I held up the can opener to the light for him to see. “Then what, pray tell, is this?”

“Not mine.”

I suppressed a groan and examined the dials for his previous destination. He had, in fact, come from the demon plane.

“Dagan,” I said.

Perhaps he had followed my line of thought, for he was suddenly grinning very widely. “Yes, Brrrram?”

He spent a long moment rolling the r, seemingly for no reason other than to irritate me.

I ground my teeth and cocked my head to the side, looking at the scarf dangling from his hand, soft and glaringly crimson. “Dagan. Stupid, stupid Dagan. Is there any chance your petty theft is about to bring your angry demonic relations down upon our heads?”

“What are you going on about?” Vander demanded as he speared me and then Dagan with an inquiring expression.

“Not now, Vander, I can no longer be bothered with you,” I held up my hand before returning to question Dagan.

“Angry, demonic relations as in… besides Darion?” Dagan asked.

“Yes.”

“Um… maybe. Probably. Mostly yes.”

Splendid. Always new friends to be made, and subsequently murdered.

I picked up Zhe Ping by the back of his shirt. He kicked feebly and waved his rolling pin in Dagan’s general direction. “Pig, pig! Pig!”

“Believe me, Mr. Zhe, we are quite aware,” I said, holding him at arm’s length. For me, he weighed no more than a disgruntled feather, a fact which appeared to cause him a good deal of stress. “So, Dagan, perhaps you’d like to tell me why in Hades’ red hell you decided to take a long walk off such a short pier?”

“What?” Dagan barked.

I rolled my eyes. “Why the hell did you go back to Dromir?”

“Oh, yeah. That. It was Osenna’s idea.”

“Then that ridiculous story was true,” I said thoughtfully.

“She told you?”

“As much as one can expect Osenna to tell,” I admitted. “But why don’t you tell me everything from the beginning, just for kicks?”

Dagan opened his mouth, likely to say something obscene, but the door behind us burst open. There was a cacophony of clicking sounds as the safeties of guns were clicked off and raised into the air. I turned to find said guns aimed at Dagan, myself, and Zhe Ping, who stopped kicking and screaming when he saw our company.

“Officers,” I said congenially. “And agents. Good morning to you all. It would appear we have an intruder.”

There were perhaps nine of them, all attempting to crowd their way into the little room. Among them were Quillan and Agent James, who, to their credit, had their guns trained firmly on Dagan.

“So it would seem,” said Quillan, who seemed the most relaxed of the group. “We got the alert when somebody busted through our transportation guards.”

Transportation guards that were warded against magical transportation of any kind within the building. I nodded. “Yes, well, traditionally, Dagan is somewhat of a rule-breaker.” I held the portal ripper for them to see. Quillan, at least, recognized it from the war against Melchior O’Neil, during which I had lent the item to Dulcie to facilitate the travel of her surprisingly large army of discontented magical creatures.

“Yeah, that’ll do it,” said Agent James.

“Oh, shit,” Quillan said.

“Indeed,” I responded.

“Stand down,” commanded Agent James, and the officers lowered their weapons, however reluctantly. “Dagan,” he continued, “you need to come with me.”

“Oh, goody,” said Dagan. Perhaps he was worried several of his other screaming pursuers would find a way to follow him, and thought the FBI was as good a place to cower as any.

Agent James led Dagan from the room, the crowd of officers parting as they passed. Vander followed after them, presumably to avoid the combined wrath of myself and Quillan. I cannot vouch for Quillan’s intimidation factor, but there is no world in which Vander could tarry with us both and live to tell the tale.

Quillan and I, therefore, were left alone in the printer room with nothing but that persistent and unfortunate whirring sound to keep us company.

“Perhaps we should fetch Christina?” I asked.

“We will,” said Quillan. “And you should stick around, since you apparently know so much about this Darion guy.”

“I have already told your lovely girlfriend everything I know.”

“Yeah, but you can tell us if Dagan is making stuff up,” Quillan replied, and he shrugged. “And I’m not gonna lie, I think you’re definitely holding something back.”

It was a reasonable assumption. “You’ll forgive me if I do not follow you into the interrogation room.” There was something about their magically-neutral shadowbox rooms that I found most unpleasant.

“You can’t leave, Bram.”

“And if I prove otherwise?”

Quillan shrugged again. “Then we’ll have to take Dagan at his word until we can find another way to verify what he’s told us, and we’ll be a lot slower finding Darion and protecting Osenna. And your interests, whatever that means.”

A fair assessment. “Very well. I will remain.”

“Great. And we aren’t headed to the interrogation room. We’re going to Christina’s office,” he informed me. “She thinks Dagan will be more willing to talk if he’s comfortable.”

“That will only empower him, I believe.”

“Yeah, exactly,” agreed Quillan. “Christina doesn’t want him to get cagey. Or, cagier than he’d be anywhere else, you know?”

“That is ill-advised.”

“I know. But Christina says it’s her preference, and I don’t want to argue with her.” This last bit was delivered with an air of affectionate weariness.

You never were much for conflict, I thought, but I bit my tongue. The mentioning of our days with Melchior would do neither of us any grand favors.

Besides, with regards to Vander, Quillan and I were of a single mind. Perhaps, in service of his demise, we might learn to better tolerate one another.

“Bringing an intruding demon into one’s personal office only by merit of ‘it is her preference’ seems to me the kind of thing Fate might be tempted to unravel in a hurry,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, no kidding. Which is why I’m going to be standing right beside Christina,” said Quillan, hand on his gun. He was, admittedly, rather a good shot. He turned to leave and added, “Dagan isn’t going to try anything,” in as threatening a voice as he could muster. His expression was stony and determined. I rather suspected a part of him wanted Dagan to do something unsavory, that Quillan might have a palatable excuse to put a bullet in Dagan’s head.

Not that I blamed him.

I scowled as I followed him out of the room. “It is not Dagan with whom I am concerned.”

“Darion?”

“Darion knows Dagan’s address, and yours. If Darion was paying attention, he will be aware of the opening of Dagan’s portal. Darion will not be long in his discovery.”

“And he’ll be outnumbered if he decides to do anything about it.”

“Agent Carter, with all due respect, I do not think that will matter.”

Quillan paused. “Why?”

“Darion Halsir is a demon prince,” I explained, “one of whom Dagan and Osenna and myself have a profound fear. He is not a creature to be trifled with, or hidden from, and his vengeance upon us will be catastrophic.”

“‘Us’ being?”

“Myself, Dagan, Osenna, and anyone else who happens to know our names.”

“Ah. So, everyone.”

“Quite right.”

As we walked to Christina’s office—rather, as Quillan strode in that irritated way of agents at work and I skulked in an effort to shirk the sunlight, however harmless—I felt a pair of eyes upon my back.

When I turned, I saw Dulcie standing at a desk in the middle of the room. Her shirt was a mess of brown and white, as though something had been spilled upon her, and it clung deliciously to her perfect form. Face framed by honey-gold, eyes of summer green, blood swimming with the ichor of every creature ever crafted in hell… I had no breath, but if I had it would have been hers for the taking.

She appeared confused to see me here, or perturbed, or perhaps she was staring straight through me and saw nothing, lost deep in thought—but there was something intense about her expression, something that simmered and popped like oil in a pan.

I maintained a similar air of intensity as I appraised her, suddenly desperate to appear as though I was here to achieve my own ends, and not to see her. The urge to smile, or perhaps to wink, swelled within me, and I suppressed it with an effort. It occurred to me, eventually, to look elsewhere.

A lesser creature might describe this as overcompensation; but you, I am sure, know better.

FIFTEEN

Bram

The lot of us piled into Christina’s office quite like a school of overcurious sardines. I found myself growing quite twitchy and altogether grouchy the longer we stood in its confines, feeling quite like the walls were literally closing in upon me.

I had developed a knack for convincing myself of the invading closeness of spaces and unyielding walls—after four hundred years of rejecting the affections of the sun, it is strange how claustrophobic one feels in the light.

The door clicked shut behind me, as I was the last to enter. I did not bother to lock it. If Dagan managed to get past myself, Quillan, Christina, Vander, and Agent James, a locked door would hardly stop him.

Quillan and I occupied the wall to the right of the door, and Vander took up residence across from us. Agent James leaned against the wall behind and beside Christina, while Christina sat behind her desk. All of us wore grim, irritated expressions.

Across from Christina, Dagan sat, smiling and leering in the way only Dagan Halsir can smile and leer. He had perfected his smirk unto an art; though at the moment, the smirk seemed to lack vigor. Running from Zhe Ping and Hades only knew what else had clearly taken the pep out of his step. Perhaps his considerable stamina was not as infinite as advertised, after all.

Not that anyone in this room would be surprised, with the obvious exception of Dagan. He was a man of many carefully crafted lies, most of which he told himself. I suspected he was in the process of deciding which ones he would try on the goodly Humane Resources Director. It did not matter, of course, as none of them would work. Melchior was so perfectly fond of Sabbiondo for two reasons: her charm, and her uncanny ability to detect and decimate even the most thoughtfully constructed lie.

“So, Dagan,” Christina started cheerfully. I had known her as something less than cheerful only twice in my existence, and on both occasions, there had been considerable stress upon the welfare of the world as a whole. Very few things were capable of rattling her cage, so to speak.

“Why don’t you tell me everything you can about your brother?” she continued, sounding more like a psychotherapist than the head of HR.

This was a calculated approach. Christina watched Dagan twitch and sit up a little straighter, trying to reassure himself of his own modest height, telling her that which both of us already knew: that Darion was, in fact, Dagan’s brother, and that their relationship was not one to be envied.

“Bram tells me you two don’t get along,” she added after a protracted silence.

Dagan chuckled bitterly. It was a sound that bubbled and burst like boiling tar, gurgling forth from a crack in the earth. But he smiled, as though the thought amused him, all the same.

“No. We don’t,” he agreed, seeming to drag his voice out from the dirt and shake it off. His words rang like a thing dug out of a time capsule, or perhaps an unmarked grave.

“Would you like to tell us why that is?”

When Dagan smiled, there was a sting of fear behind the smirk that I cannot properly describe.

“Not really, no,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t need to know why we don’t get along,” he responded with a shrug. “Why do you want to know, anyway?”

“Because you broke into a sealed federal building from a walled-off dimension, and Bram,” Christina replied, glancing in my direction, “tells us that Darion is part of the reason you went back in the first place.”

Dagan looked over his shoulder at me. “Now, why would Bram go and tell you a silly thing like that?” The look he gave me, scalding and accusatory, asked why I’d bothered to rat him out.

“Because it is true,” I pointed out with a frank shrug. “And because Osenna was worried about you.”

“And you care because?” he asked incredulously.

“I do not care in the slightest,” I responded, smiling at Christina with what I hoped was appropriate coldness for her earlier accusation regarding my alleged motivations for being here—that I was seeking out Dulcie. But the smile she returned was one full of warmth and parental amusement. “But I’m afraid our colleagues must have context.”

“Colleagues?” laughed Vander, at whom I spent a long moment glaring. He did not match my stare, but the uncomfortable shift of his shoulders told me he felt my gaze like a sunburn on the side of his face.

“Have you switched teams, vampire?’ asked Dagan, and now he seemed on the verge of laughter. None of his expressions, though, seemed to make it to his eyes. “Has our most beloved creature of the night fallen so far that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is your first call?” He pouted slightly. “Did you make fwends with the powice while I was away?”

I could feel Christina suppressing a grin, though nothing in her expression seemed to give the same impression.

So, to spite them both, I said, “Perhaps I am simply here to bother someone,” shellacking on as much venom and sarcasm as I could muster.

The answer seemed to satisfy Dagan, whose entire existence centered around bothering people, and, as a bonus, Vander stiffened, developing a sudden imperfect tension strong enough to make Quillan and Agent James reconsider their proximity to him. I could not resist looking Vander in the eye and grinning.

“Dagan, you can either tell us what you were doing up until you broke into our office,” said Christina, “or we can wait for a translator to get Zhe Ping’s side of the story.” She shrugged, a gesture of practiced nonchalance. “And we’ll just have to assume whatever he’s telling us is the complete, unadulterated truth.”

This was not strictly true, but it was enough to make Dagan look away in consternation.

“Christina knows a good portion of everything already, Dagan,” I informed him. “There is little you can tell her for which she does not already have at least a wisp of context.”

“Great,” he said, with little vigor.

“We want to help you,” put in Agent James.

“We want to prevent Darion from finding you,” I added, slightly quieter. “And, as you are well aware, I have my own reasons for wanting to avoid your brother.”

Agent James gave me a reproving look and continued, “And this will be a lot easier for all of us if we don’t have to arrest you.”

Dagan was silent for a long while. Whether he was weighing his options or picturing the majority of the room in naked and compromising positions was anyone’s guess.

“We can protect you,” said Christina.

“That,” said Dagan, leaning forward, “is the funniest thing I’ve heard all day.”

“And I expect you’ve spent the majority of your day fielding funny things,” I retorted, and I gave a rather theatrical sigh. My impatience was building, and the dam which held it back was riddling itself with cracks. I was tired of playing the proverbial nice guy. I narrowed my eyes at him.

“Dagan, your stupidity has put me, in particular, in a more than modest amount of danger. I need to know exactly what you did when you, in your infinite wisdom, decided to go gallivanting about the one place in existence from which you are actively banished, and from which you paid me to retrieve you and your lady friend.” I further glared at him. “And, of course, a marriage you could not terminate by conventional means.”

Dagan ground his teeth.

There was a beat of silence. Christina’s computer made its awful buzzing noise and she kicked the machine under the table. The sound eased, but did not stop.

“Marriage?” Christina repeated, looking first at me and then at the demon. “Dagan?” she asked slowly, the way one might speak when approaching a child abandoned in the woods. “What is Bram talking about?”

Dagan shifted his gaze to me, then back at Christina, and then apparently decided he’d rather the story come from him than from myself or Zhe Ping.

Christina waited patiently.

“They were married,” he said at last, which glossed over more of the situation than War and Peace had words to rectify.

“They?” Christina asked.

“Osenna and Darion, my brother,” Dagan explained. He took a deep breath. “And later, Darion became abusive.”

“Abusive? I thought you guys liked that sort of thing,” said Agent James.

The look Dagan gave him could have bored holes through glass. Christina’s accompanying glare was fit to match.

“Not like this,” said Dagan, and Christina kicked Agent James where he stood behind her desk. Kicking things that made unfortunate noises seemed to be the order of the day.

“Ow!” Agent James held up his hands as though he were in submission.

“So, when you say abusive, do you mean physically?” Christina asked Dagan.

Dagan nodded. “Physically, verbally, emotionally, psychologically.”

“Examples?” Quillan asked.

Dagan shrugged. “Locking her in a room for days without food, destroying her things and claiming she lost them, physically beating her…” he paused, eyeing Agent James. “And not in a good way.” Agent James’ eyebrows reached for the ceiling as Dagan continued.

“Darion would lie to her but insist he was telling the truth. He’d manipulate her.” He took a moment to collect himself from a rage that made the air around him shimmer. “The list goes on. It drove her crazy, or nearly did.”

“So, then,” said Christina, lacing her fingers together under her chin, “you rescued her.”

Dagan scoffed. “You make it sound so romantic. No, I absconded with her. I ran. I picked her up like a bag of stolen goods and I ran.” He shook his head, likely at himself, and almost laughed. “Or rather, I paid him to do the picking up for me.” And he glared at me.

Now did not seem a good time to clarify that I, in turn, had paid someone else to do the actual absconding. As a rule, I do not care to get my hands dirty. Unless, of course, a certain little fairy is concerned.

“That sounds like the wisest thing, if Darion is as bad as you say.” Christina had clearly picked up the strange lilt of Dagan’s speech; perhaps one of her many new psychological tricks.

“He is.” Dagan looked at the ceiling and found something funny there, because he began to laugh. “But my running away wasn’t wise, it was cowardly,” he added, looking back down at her, “and I’ll be the first to admit it. Darion is a piece of work, but so was I. And maybe I could have taken him, if I’d tried.”

“Not likely,” I said, crossing my arms. We both were familiar enough with Darion to know such was not the case. Even if Dagan had succeeded, it was extremely likely he would have died in the process.

Dagan chuckled. “I’m a lot of things, Christina, but stupid isn’t one of them.”

“Are you quite certain of that?” I asked.

Dagan appraised me over his shoulder, teeth flashing in a poor man’s reconstruction of a smile. “There are a number of things you can’t do when you’re dead,” he said. “My priorities are exactly in order.”

“So, you ran,” Christina prompted. “And Bram brought you here, fixed you both up with fake IDs and… that was all she wrote?”

“Yes,” said Dagan, and the smile became a jackal’s grin.

“Okay, obvious question: Why go back to Dromir?” she continued.

Dagan took the kind of breath one indulges in before saying something they find terribly amusing—in large part because it will confuse the people around them.

“I forgot something,” he answered with a shrug.

“In Dromir,” clarified Christina.

“Yes.”

“And you went back to get it five years later,” said Agent James, sounding thoroughly unamused, which seemed to amuse Dagan to no end.

SIXTEEN

Bram

Dagan beamed at Agent James. “Couldn’t find the time to go back to Dromir until recently.”

“And the thing you forgot,” Christina went on, holding up the scarf she had confiscated from him. “You brought it here to hide it, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Originally.”

“Originally?” Christina asked. “Did something change?”

“Yes.” Dagan considered himself for a moment, then apparently decided not to complete the thought because he said nothing more.

Christina continued in his silence. “Okay. So, why risk everything for a scarf?”

“It’s not just a scarf.”

“It looks like a scarf to me,” she argued.

“It’s a magic scarf.”

Christina raised her eyebrows. “A magic scarf.”

“Yes,” said Dagan. “Put it on.”

“Why?” Quillan suddenly interjected. “Why do you want her to put it on?” And the expression he gave Christina told her not to do so.

Christina looked dubiously at the scarf, then back at Dagan with the same expression.

Dagan sighed theatrically. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and dragged his hand up Christina’s arm to the scarf in her hand, where he wrapped the silk around his fingers. Quillan reached forward and pushed Dagan away from her, but Christina glanced up at him and shook her head, as though to let him know she could fend for herself.

“What’s the matter?” Dagan asked, looking her up and down, shoulders back, poised like a tiger in the underbrush. “Don’t you want to experience the feeling of disappearing?”

Christina, completely unfazed, stared Dagan down as a matador stares down the nose of a snorting bull.

Quillan looked very much like he wanted to pop Dagan’s head off like a bad bulb on a rosebush. Agent James held him back.

Christina smiled. “Is that what the scarf does? Makes you invisible?”

“Completely,” Dagan crooned. “Think, sweet lady, of all the terrible, wonderful things you could do with this in… more favorable circumstances.” He squeezed her hand and started to pull himself closer, onto the desk. “You can pretend I’m anyone in the world, sweetheart. Better than having the lights off.”

Agent James very suddenly let go of Quillan, who surged forward, grabbed Dagan, and pushed him forcefully back into his chair. Christina mouthed a thank you.

Dagan laughed.

“Hey, easy,” he said, and he beamed up at Quillan. “It’s open invitation. All you had to do was ask.”

“I’m not going to punch you because we’re in a professional environment, and I don’t want to lose my job over you,” growled Quillan, “but know that, if I could, I’d break your fucking teeth.”

“Don’t threaten me with a good time.”

“Quill, it’s okay,” said Christina. “He was just fooling around. Weren’t you, Dagan?”

Dagan spread his arms wide, gesturing to himself. “Am I capable of anything else?”

“Definitely not,” replied Christina, who was making a grand charade of enjoying the conversation. I could sense the tension and discomfort radiating from her like heat off the horizon, but Dagan gave no sign that he could tell. If he could, perhaps he was trying to manipulate it, or was simply basking in the energy of her unease.

“The scarf makes you invisible, then,” she stated, returning to her more business-like tone.

Dagan looked wistfully at the scarf in her hand. “Indeed, it does.”

“You went back for a fancy toy?” asked Agent James. He looked sideways at Christina, who shrugged back at him.

“I went back,” said Dagan, slowly, “for an edge.”

The room indulged in a moment of contemplative silence.

“A question, if you would,” I began.

Dagan turned in his chair and mimed a bow without standing up. “But of course.”

“The scarf renders one invisible,” I confirmed.

“That is not a question.”

“It is an established fact I would like to check.”

Dagan rolled his eyes and slouched a bit, deciding, apparently, that the question was no longer interesting enough to hold his attention. “Yes, it renders one invisible,” he said, in a poor man’s mockery of my accent.

“Invisible,” I said, “in what capacities? Invisible to audio detection as well as visual detection?”

Dagan paused. Then, he smiled. “In all capacities.”

Darion, you see, was a remarkably perceptive man. Even conventional invisibility could only carry one so far; but a device such as this, capable of concealing one in every detectable way—by shadows, sounds, auras, et cetera—would rupture the entire game.

I could not help but smile back, though mine was dripping with irritation and sarcasm.

“You intended to sneak up on Darion,” I said, and I tutted. “Very brave.”

“On the contrary, it’s exactly as cowardly a move as you’ve come to expect from me.” He shrugged, still smiling. “Darion was going to find Osenna and me, eventually. I felt I was ready for an altercation, provided I could obtain a particular advantage.” He gestured to the scarf.

“So, you went back to Dromir to try to kill your brother?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“I suppose that didn’t go as well as you’d hoped?” I pressed.

“Oh, it would have,” Dagan said, draping an ankle across his other knee and bobbing his foot, “were it not for a… let’s say… detour I had to take on my way to finding him.”

“Detour,” repeated Christina dubiously, because Dagan suddenly seemed unreasonably pleased with himself. “What kind of detour?”

“A little reunion with an old friend,” he said.

“An old friend?”

“Indeed.”

“And what was the nature of this reunion?” I asked.

Dagan examined his nails. “Carnal.” When no one responded, he looked up. “What? Is there any other kind reunion?”

“You said you slept with Zhe Ping’s daughter?” I said.

Dagan rolled his eyes as though it were painfully obvious. “I did.”

“In a public fountain,” added Agent James.

Dagan laughed. “Quite right.” He nodded, chewing on his lip. “And, oh, she was incredible.”

“And does she have a name?” I asked.

“Mingmei,” Dagan answered. “Very lucky, running into her like that.”

“Like what, exactly?” I frowned at him.

Dagan sprawled back over his chair like a cat basking in the sun and looked languidly up at me as though I were a part of some delightful dream.

“Did Mingmei catch you stealing the scarf?” I asked.

“Yes, actually,” he answered. “Only because I let her catch me, of course. She came into the room to clean something, or to steal something of her own, who knows.”

“How did you know one another?” Christina asked.

Dagan nodded. “We knew each other from way back when, and it occurred to me that I was two for three with Osenna this week and that I… had a little time to kill.”

“Little time to kill in a dimension where someone apparently wanted you dead?” asked Vander, but that was not the part of the sentence that irked me.

“Two for three,” I said. It was not a question; I was reasonably certain I knew what Dagan meant.

Quillan, though, was foolish enough to ask. “What are you talking about?”

Oh, Dagan reveled in the opportunity to answer. “Osenna and I,” he said slowly, tasting every word like a fine wine he already knew the rest of us despised, “have a little game we play.”

“Oh, Jesus,” muttered Agent James, who by now had caught on.

“We find people who accommodate our tastes, and we fuck them in new and exciting ways, in the newest and most exciting places we can devise.”

“Gross,” Christina muttered.

Dagan laced his fingers together and clucked his tongue. “The rules—or rather, the singular rule—is that the fucking must be in public.” He bobbed his head left and right, then took on the expression of one who has just recalled something. “One other… opportunity for bonus points is that the sex must be loud.”

“So, you stopped escaping,” started Agent James, “even though you had the scarf?”

“Yes.”

“So, you didn’t leave with the scarf, even though you realized the danger you were facing, because you wanted to have sex with this girl?”

“Yes.”

“With the express purpose of being as loud and obnoxious as possible?” Quillan added.

“Well, I don’t know about obnoxious… but yes to the rest.”

“In public,” put in Agent James.

“Yes, in public. In a public fountain, specifically. The locale is very important to our game.”

Agent James turned away and pinched his nose. “What the actual fuck, Dagan…”

“The water was absolutely frigid,” Dagan informed us, clearly thoroughly delighted by the memory. He feigned a shiver and shrugged at us helplessly. “Osenna was ahead by one person. I did not want to lose.”

“What happens if you win?” asked Quillan.

Dagan grinned at him, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Do you really want to know?”

Quillan pursed his lips, reddened slightly, and did his damnedest not to look away. “Not really, no.”

“Maybe Osenna and I could show you sometime,” suggested Dagan, his grin widening like oil spreading across the surface of the sea. “We’re always happy to accommodate.”

“Why not put on the scarf to get away?” Christina cut in before Quillan could make an attempt at a reply. “Become invisible and disappear.”

“I did. I was wearing the scarf the moment Mingmei walked in, looking infinitely more beautiful than I ever remember her being, and so I took everything off. And after we joined bodies,” he added with a smile. “I completely forgot the scarf was in my hand.”

“You forgot,” I repeated dubiously, “a scarf which makes you invisible to all eyes, magical or otherwise, while you were being pursued, presumably by people who were not especially concerned with your well-being.”

“Completely forgot,” replied Dagan, almost cheerfully. Too cheerfully, perhaps. “Just at the moment that I was giving Mingmei a earth-shattering orgasm, her father came into the courtyard, saw me with Mingmei, and…” He gestured vaguely to the room. “Well, here we are.”

“How the fuck are you still alive?” Quillan asked.

“Sheer dumb luck, I expect,” said Dagan.

This was a fair estimate; he had been making decisions of the most precarious sort for as long as I had known him. Most of these decisions, had they been made by anyone else, would have resulted in, at least, numerous broken bones and a fair amount of bloodshed. The list of places Dagan should have died was quite long.

“But,” he continued, “I made it back with the scarf, so I suppose I’ll just have to make what use of the scarf I can.” He leered at Christina. Only a stern look from her prevented Quillan from lurching forward and attempting to strangle the demon with his bare hands—less, I think, because she was worried about Dagan and more because she did not want Quillan to have his ass handed to him in front of Vander, Agent James, and especially me.

Quillan settled for a glare.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” I said, which was as complete a lie as ever I have told, “but Darion is here.”

And Dagan paled.

“What?” he asked, and every shred of his former contented mood was now nowhere to be found.

“He was in your apartment,” explained Quillan. “And he was at our house, getting his ass reamed by Timothy. We think he was looking for Osenna, but obviously, we can’t be sure.”

“Timothy?” Agent James repeated, but Quillan shook his head.

“Long story,” he said.

“Darion’s here,” Dagan breathed, and all the lechery drained from his body. He sat erect in his chair, as frightened as ever I had seen him—and perhaps not legitimately erect for the first time in his adult life. “In Splendor.”

“Yes,” I said. I would have been lying, had I said I was not enjoying this. “Strutting about as though he owns the place.”

Dagan swallowed audibly. He seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. “How?”

“Inhale, Dagan,” I said. “You do still need to breathe, do you not?”

“How?” he said again, more fervently.

“You dropped your wallet somewhere,” Christina told him. “In Dromir, I guess, before you returned here.”

“He had bubbles,” added Quillan.

“Bubbles?” asked Dagan.

“Yeah.”

“My bubbles?” he asked, offended.

“Really?” Quillan asked. “How the fuck should I know?”

Something occurred to Dagan and the question evaporated before him. “Where is Darion now?”

Before anyone could answer, a popping sound emanated from the center of the room. A split second later, Darion appeared. Without a sound. It was as though—pop—he was there, when only a second earlier he wasn’t.

Darion was smiling, and looked so disturbingly similar to Dagan that, for a moment, I thought him a poorly maintained duplicate.

Darion put his hands on his brother’s shoulders and squeezed. “As always, my timing is impeccable.” He beamed at us. “Oh, my apologies, friends. Am I interrupting?”

SEVENTEEN

Quillan

Something happened to the air in the room when Darion appeared.

You know that clingy, wet feeling you get when it’s foggy and cold outside, and it’s nighttime and probably Halloween, and you’re almost definitely being followed by a clown that wants to murder you? Yeah, that was the feeling that hung in the air like overpowering cologne.

Dagan didn’t say anything. His hands curled around the arms of the chair, and he squeezed until I thought he was gonna break the arms off.

“So, you did find him after all, how splendid,” Darion said, shaking Dagan’s shoulders. He smiled at Christina. “Wherever on Earth was the little rascal, hmm? Wasting away in a small room full of chains somewhere, I expect.” He chuckled. “You never were very imaginative, were you, Dagan?”

“Mr. Halsir, this is a private meeting,” Christina interjected, talking like her teeth had turned to ice. The smile she gave him was furious, powerful, but frozen. She blinked, and had to fight to get her eyes back open. Clearly, something was overcoming her. And I had a feeling that something was Darion. “I’m afraid… I’m going to have to ask…” She sucked in a breath. “…you to leave.”

“Christina?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

But she wouldn’t or couldn’t look at me. Instead, her gaze was pasted on Darion.

“Oh, I’ll only be a moment, darling.” He leaned against her desk and crossed his arms, facing Dagan. He looked like the dad from The Brady Bunch getting ready to tell Bobby why Jesse James isn’t a good role model. “I have a number of questions for brother dearest.”

We all had our guns out, obviously, pointing at the second guy this morning to magick himself into a warded federal building—but our silent alarms weren’t going off. We have these little buzzers on our belts that go bzz whenever someone who isn’t supposed to be in the vicinity suddenly appears without using the front door. But for some reason, they weren’t working.

I looked at Casey and Knight, and they looked at me and each other, and we all decided together that this was a very bad situation.

Casey made for the door.

There was a little click noise as it locked itself, and Casey started blinking a lot. He swayed, then fell back against the wall and slid to the floor, putting one hand to his head. Grimacing, he clenched his teeth.

A ringing started up in my ears. Like a repressed memory of a fire alarm.

My heart started pounding and a rush of blood made me suddenly feel like I was going to pass out.

“You have not been excused,” said Darion, tutting. And Hades, that smile. It was volcanic. It glowed like something that would crawl out of a mountain when the world was supposed to end.

Casey’s hand went to his belt, to the buzzer, and he pressed the fuck-me-sideways-with-a-blender panic button. It took him a disturbingly long time to get there.

I guess Darion heard the tiny, tiny click, because he looked up and around very suddenly. His eyes stopped on Knight, then Bram, then Casey. All of them stood stock-still. Bram was the only one who could look Darion in the eye, but he wasn’t moving, either. He had his arms crossed, and his jaw was tight. Clearly, he was under Darion’s power just as much as we all were.

Darion smiled at him. “Long time, no see, Bram. How have you been?”

Bram didn’t say anything.

“You know, I always wondered why you stopped coming to visit us,” Darion continued. “I’d assumed it meant you’d finally gone under.”

Bram made this deep, pissed-off, freak-out animal growling noise, but it wasn’t very loud.

Darion’s smile got wider. He looked around the rest of the room until, eventually, his gaze landed on me.

“I see you’ve made some interesting friends,” he commented, still talking to Bram. His eyes flashed red.

A distant, fire-alarm-in-a-pillow-fort ringing popped into my ears.

I wanted to collapse. Just close my eyes and go to sleep and let everybody else deal with this. Like those dreams where you’re running from something and you can feel your muscles telling you to fuck off, and you wonder if anything bad would really happen if you just stopped and let whoever was chasing you catch up.

My gun drooped in my hands, and I heard myself go thunk against the wall. Thoughts came slowly, as if I were pulling every word out of old honey with one of those claw-grabber things you see in arcades.

I stayed standing. Barely.

Over in his chair, Dagan twitched. He was either trying to shrug or there was enough electricity stampeding through him to make him jump like a squirrel on a live wire. Darion leaned forward. He reached out and took Dagan’s chin in his hand like he was going to kiss him, and he did that awful demon-with-a-secret-that’s-definitely-going-to-get-all-of-us-killed smile.

“Do you know how long,” said Darion, “I have been looking for you, Rogan?”

Dagan opened his mouth. Something in the back of his throat was glowing. His chest spasmed like he was trying to breathe, but he couldn’t get anything in or out.

Somebody knocked on the door. Darion didn’t appear to hear it.

“You’ve made me look silly.” Darion paced around the chair, hand trailing behind him. “Disappearing with Jadra like you did. How very brave of you, to make off together in the middle of the night. And on my birthday, no less.” He tutted, and I got the feeling he was saying a lot of this for our benefit.

Darion’s lip pouted. “How very rude of you. You might have at least said goodbye.”

None of us could move. I didn’t feel frozen, just lethargic. Like when you first wake up and you can’t get your eyes to open. Like I hadn’t put anything in my stomach besides alcohol and Benadryl for three days. Glancing around the room, I noticed everyone else pretty much looked the same as I felt.

“Now, I’m going to ask you this once,” Darion continued, “and I really hope you’ll make me ask you again, because this is no fun otherwise.” He stopped pacing and stood in front of Dagan, then drew a nail across Dagan’s face, pulling blood that steamed. I’d never seen Dagan’s blood steam before. Which probably meant it wasn’t supposed to.

“Where, oh where, is my sweet Jadra?”

The doorknob jiggled. Once, twice, then a third time, a little more insistently. Darion kept staring at Dagan like he hadn’t noticed it.

Dagan swallowed, visibly steeled himself, and spat in Darion’s face.

“Mine, now,” said Dagan. Maybe he was trying to sneer, but only half his mouth was listening to him.

Darion’s smile curled into a snarl. “Jadra is mine. Your theft of her was petty and childish. It was a piece of a game you never learned how to play.” His nose twitched. “But it is a transgression I could be persuaded to forgive… if only you would return to me my most precious possession.”

“Sorry,” retorted Dagan, fighting for a decent inhale. “No returns… without a… receipt.”

Darion snorted, and Dagan devolved into a fit of coughing and hacking and other medically concerning noises.

“Christina?” said whoever was out in the hallway. It took my muddled brain another second to recognize the voice as belonging to Dulcie. “Christina, open the door.” The doorknob jiggled again, and this time, the wood creaked like Dulcie was trying to pull it off its hinges.

Darion wiped his face clean. “I,” he said, wearing a smile he’d stolen from some poor, unfortunate shark, “am going to have an unhealthy amount of fun dismantling you.” He poked Dagan on the nose.

The doorknob creaked and groaned and splintered. “Christina.”

Knight took half a step forward, looking like he was about to do something dumb and heroic. Dagan’s gurgling grew more frantic. Christina shot Knight a look, but it didn’t matter, because Knight dropped to the ground a second later, mouth open in a noiseless howl of pain.

I tried to move, but I had to haul myself kicking and screaming out of whatever haze had dropped over us. My gun was pointed at the floor, and I couldn’t get my arms to move up. My finger hung lax beside the trigger. I fought to keep my eyes open.

And Dulcie kicked the door in.

Darion stood up, taking his hand off Dagan, who still couldn’t breathe. His eyes roved up and over Dulcie and he looked a little stiffer, less relaxed. Less “no, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die,” and more, “and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids and your dumb dog.”

“And who might you be?” Darion asked with a broad smile.

Dulcie stood there, a silhouette of pissed-off, early-morning energy. Her shirt was plastered to her skin and covered with breakroom motor-oil coffee I could smell across the room.

She glared at Darion, looked around the room, and settled into the obvious realization that Darion was being the murderous kind of mean.

“Dulcie O’Neil,” she replied, unholstering her gun.

Darion froze—he didn’t look scared, though, just surprised.

Dagan started hacking and coughing, and he lurched out of his chair onto the floor, shaking but breathing a little easier.

Darion folded his hands in front of him. “Ah, yes,” he said, and he was way quieter now. Like when the librarian comes by and tells you to shush, and suddenly, you’re testing all your words in your mouth before they can get to your teeth.

He got tense. “I know you, I think. The fairy, the vampire. The everything-monster, aren’t you?” He paused. “Meg’s girl.”

Dulcie bristled. “I’m not Meg’s anything,” she countered, and she fired at him.

I had to give it to her—Dulcie didn’t exactly wait for invitations.

The bullet struck him hard in the shoulder and stuck in his bone. He flinched. The hole sizzled and popped as the dragon saliva wound its way through him.

Some invisible hand slapped me in the face, and the sleepiness evaporated the way a hangover gets bulldozed by panic. My whole body seized for a second, and Knight’s, and Casey’s, and Christina’s. We all looked like we were being electrocuted.

When Darion moaned, the animal fear settled back in.

He touched his shoulder and brought his bloody hand to his lips, licking the red off his fingers like frosting. “Oh, yes,” he said, “do it again, beautiful.”

Dulcie rolled her eyes and shifted her grip on her gun. “Use dragon saliva, they said, it’ll be less lethal, they said.” She took two steps forward, pulled her arm back and punched Darion in the face. “It’ll be fine, they said.”

He didn’t go down, but there was this awful cracking sound as his jaw decided that it and the rest of his skull should really see other people. He lifted his hand to his cheek, then brought it back to his mouth. Blood flowed out of a busted lip and probably some broken teeth.

“Huh,” he said, a hollow, gauze-in-your-cheeks sound. He grabbed his jaw with both hands and forced it back into place with an even worse cracking sound. “Well,” he said. “That wasn’t very nice.”

My muscles went slack, and I crumpled to the floor.

“Sorry, my demon-slaying etiquette is a little rusty,” Dulcie answered. “Did you want more foreplay, or should I have just killed you as soon as I walked in?”

“Is that what we’re doing here?” Darion inhaled slowly. “Now, if you really thought you could kill me, I’d already be dead, wouldn’t I?”

“Who says I’m not being nice?” asked Dulcie, and she shot him again, apparently just because she wanted to. The bullet dug itself into Darion’s other shoulder with a satisfied hissing noise. He sucked in air through his teeth.

“In my… experience…” he began, dragging the words out of his mouth like bodies from their graves, “kindness is merely the lesser man’s word for weakness.”

“Sure, fine,” Dulcie agreed sharply, and her eyes were glowing. Deep, vampiric red, lava red. “But in about thirty seconds, everyone in this building is going to come crashing into this room with guns, stunners, and a whole lot of other nasty toys they can use to put you down.”

“Oh, will they?” he asked. “I do hope that’s a promise.”

“Just let my colleagues go, and you won’t have to find out,” she told him, and I realized what we must have looked like. For all we knew, any attempt Dulcie made to actually kill him would kill the rest of us, too.

Great. I loved hostage situations.

“I am begging you to try to kill me, little one.”

“Okay, you know what? Fine.” Dulcie holstered her gun. I had a feeling she took offense to being called little one. “Let the record show I fucking tried.”

And she started to get big. Like. Really big.

Her skin stretched, her bones popped, yada-yada-yada. If I said werewolf and slid you a notecard that said, “Tim Burton is having a stroke,” whatever image that combination planted in your brain was probably about an eighth as disturbing as actually watching Dulcie transform. She made a strangled half-scream, half-howling noise and did this violent get-me-the-hell-out-of-this-cocoon wriggle as claws and fangs and fur and really big ears sprang up and started swiveling.

Dagan paled. Knight paled, Casey paled, everyone paled.

Except Darion. Instead, Darion was watching with resigned fascination, nodding like he was grading her metamorphosis.

“Very impressive,” he said when she was finished, and gave one more quick nod. He had a mild beard, and he clearly considered stroking it. But apparently the crossed arms, crossed ankles, I’m-barely-awake-enough-to-care stance was way more important. “I like the eyes, especially. Very particular shade of yellow you’ve found there. Gives the form more pizzazz.”

Dulcie lunged forward—claws swiping, mouth open. Something hot and red glowed behind her teeth.

Darion moved to the left, but he wasn’t fast enough. Dulcie raked her claws across him, scoring his chest like a prison wall. She grabbed for him with both hands and he reached up, blocked her, and said something in a language I didn’t know.

Fire leapt up around Dulcie, curling in like a punch of pissed-off flower petals. It blasted the room with bonfire heat. The flames crackled and snapped, and the rest of us really didn’t like it.

Dulcie gave exactly zero fucks.

She pushed Darion back, hard, and he was surprised enough by Dulcie not giving any fucks about the fire to go careening into the wall.

“You are brilliant,” Darion growled, licking his newly busted lip and openly admiring her.

She started forward again. Darion’s blood dripped down her hand—her paw, I guess—and pooled on the carpet. There was a lot of it. Enough to almost reflect the ceiling fan.

“But I’m afraid I don’t have the time or the patience to tarry with you any longer, my beautiful monster,” Darion said. He snapped his fingers.

Dagan gurgled. He choked, then hacked and heaved and strained. He scrabbled at the air, like he could catch it by fistfuls and force it into his lungs the hard way.

“O’Neil,” said Casey, a warning. He looked between the monster-steroid queen and Dagan, who was clearly on his way to dying. “Don’t.”

“… can’t kill Dagan if Darion’s dead,” said Dulcie in this weird growl-voice.

Darion grinned. “Are you sure about that?”

She hesitated.

“A formal introduction,” Darion said, and he gestured to Dagan on the floor. “This is Mr. Rogan Halsir. He is a thief and a scoundrel, one who is not very good at thieving and scoundreling.”

He reached down and picked Dagan up by the back of his neck, one-handed, and held him like a prize at a cheap auction. “And he is going to die a very slow and painful death…” He brought Dagan down to eye-level, staring at him like a bug under glass. “…if he does not answer my astoundingly polite questions.”

EIGHTEEN

Quillan

“Magic eight… ball says… try again later,” retorted Dulcie, all growly and wrong.

I felt the need to remind her that this was now officially a hostage crisis, but something about a bottle-brushed wolf tail and safety-yellow eyes made me think now wasn’t the best time to bring it up.

“I’m asking you so nicely, Dagan,” said Darion, ignoring Dulcie. “I can’t understand why you’re being so difficult. Mother would be mortified; you know she would.”

“Fuck…” Dagan’s words crawled out from between impounded vocal cords. “…you.”

Darion rolled his eyes. “Priorities, Dagan, we’re trying to have a conversation here.”

Dulcie approached him, and he glanced over at her. In one split-second, she went flying into the far wall and collapsed onto the ground. She began to change back into her human shape, but it almost looked like it was happening against her will, like Darion was forcing the shift on her.

And then she was lying there, completely naked. Clearly, the metamorphosis had done a number on her clothing. I did my best not to look at her. I think all the men in the room did their best not to look at her—something which seemed to be exceedingly hard on Knight and Bram. Then, once they spotted the other spotting her, they exchanged a glare before pretending extreme interest in the carpet.

Darion approached Dulcie with a smile twisting his mouth. “You are quite the beauty,” he said, leaning down on his thighs and running his index finger down the line of her body. “Next time, don’t fuck with me… unless we’re doing a different type of fucking altogether.”

She didn’t respond. Probably because she couldn’t respond. He stood up and laughed.

Footsteps sounded down the hall, approaching rapidly, thundering like zebras on the savanna. Darion looked at the door and frowned, apparently deciding that meeting those zebras was something he really wanted to avoid.

His eyes narrowed and Dagan’s choking noises got more insistent, like Darion had turned up the volume.

“I’ll take that,” said Darion, holding out his hand to Christina. He didn’t look at her.

Christina hesitated. She swallowed audibly, visibly, and her shoulders moved a little as her fists clenched around the scarf in her lap.

Let him have the scarf, Christina, I thought to myself, at the same time hoping she could somehow hear me. I was worried Darion was going to hurt her if she didn’t release it.

He sighed and relaxed his posture a little. “Unless you really want Dagan to die on your floor.” He shrugged. “I would understand, of course.”

Christina looked at Dagan.

“The scarf, madam,” insisted Darion, now more impatient. “If you please.” Dagan sputtered and coughed, and something blackish-red that was probably supposed to be blood came bubbling out of him. “You could always die with him.”

“Go on,” said Casey, thank Hades because I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even move.

Christina grimaced, but she nodded and handed over the scarf. The movement was staccato, broken up, like when an animation is missing frames. As if she could barely get her arm to move at all.

Darion snatched the scarf from her and pressed it to his nose, smelling it and staining it with the blood coming out of all the new holes in his body.

“Thank you, m’lady.” He bowed to her. “Dagan, sweet brother, we will meet again. Do be in better spirits when I return; you’re really killing my mood.” He got right up next to Dagan’s ear and stage-whispered, because he wanted us all to hear: “I’d hate to have to return the favor.”

And then, poof, he was gone.

No noise, no smoke, nothing, just there one minute and gone the next. Like he’d been cut out of a picture. Like God had photoshopped him out of the universe.

Dagan collapsed into a puddle in front of the chair.

And then—then the reinforcements came storming in. Guns raised, shouting their credentials, trying to flood the already crowded room.

Bram looked like he was having a lot of trouble with the lack of space.

For a second, none of us moved. Dagan curled into himself, sucking in air.

We stood. Slowly, like we’d broken every bone in our bodies and had only just gotten our casts taken off.

“Christina,” I started as I looked at her.

She held up her hand. “I’m fine,” she said.

I felt stiff and wobbly. It was less somebody-cut-the-strings-on-the-puppet and more somebody-strapped-the-puppet-to-the-electric-chair. I wanted to dig a hole, fill it with pillows, and sleep until the end of the world. I wanted to build a fort out of couch cushions and make a sign that said “no demons allowed” with cheap markers and cardstock to post in front of it.

The agents who crowded in—three humans I didn’t know personally and Henry, who was holding a t-shirt from the gift shop instead of his gun—blinked at Dulcie in abject confusion. Why? Because she was lying on the floor, dazed and completely naked.

“Dulcie?’ said Henry, and he held up the shirt, walking forward with the material in front of his face so he couldn’t see her in her birthday suit. “Looks like you need this now even more than you did before. I didn’t know what size you were, so I got a large. I hope that’s okay. Probably should be, because now you can wear it as a dress.” Henry was clearly super uncomfortable that his partner was bare-ass naked because the words were coming out of his mouth like water from a faucet.

Dulcie reached for the shirt, and I noticed Bram and Knight continued to watch her with open admiration.

“Thanks,” she said to Henry. Her hand was still dripping with Darion’s blood.

When they recognized her, the agents lowered their weapons, but they didn’t totally relax until Casey got up.

“Stand down, he’s gone,” he instructed. Then, he herded everyone but Henry back out into the hall, like a drunk preschool teacher shepherding a group of trigger-happy three-year-olds.

Henry looked around the room and nodded at the pool of blood. “What happened?”

“Dagan’s brother was being an ass,” explained Dulcie, who was now drowning in the T-shirt.

“Gotcha,” said Henry. “Did we kill him?”

“No, but we’re working on it.”

The oversized shirt hung down nearly to Dulcie’s knees. She and Henry looked at it. She pursed her lips and nodded.

“Maybe it can be a sleep shirt,” he suggested.

Dulcie snorted. “Yeah. How much was this?” she asked.

“Thirty dollars.”

“Are you shitting me?”

He shook his head. “Nope.”

“This is worth, like, three dollars at best.” She pulled the shirt out to get a better look at the printed letters across the front, which read FBI. “I’ll pay you back.”

Henry smiled and put his hands in his pockets. “Don’t worry about it.”

Dulcie pushed a mass of now very tangled hair out of her face and surveyed the room. “Okay, guys, how we doing?”

“Oh, fantastic,” I replied.

Casey reentered the room, leaving the door halfway open. “Paramedics are on their way. So just, nobody move too much, got it?”

We all nodded. Those of us who were standing slid to the floor again and sighed, because everything hurt. I had that stinging-muscle sensation that happens when you have a fever and brush up on cold metal.

“Anybody know what Darion did to us?” I asked when I could finally find my voice.

Christina pushed her chair back from her desk and stood on shaky legs. “No. Some weird paralytic thing, I guess, but I’ve never felt that shit before.” She ran her hands over her face, then saw Dagan on the floor. “Oh, Hades, hang on.” She started to move around her desk toward him, but she was having a lot of trouble staying upright.

I went to help Dagan up before Christina could—mostly because I didn’t want Dagan looking for comfort from her.

“I got him, babe,” I said. She sat back down without looking at me, nodded, and put her head in her hands.

“I need a drink,” she muttered.

Dagan wasn’t doing much better. He was way worse, actually.

His body was curled up on the floor, like he’d tried to get into the fetal position and hadn’t made it all the way, like all his muscles had just gone slack. He was staring at some liminal space in between death and the carpet, looking like a hurricane full of chainsaws had come here to have a word with him specifically about some homework he’d forgotten to turn in back in the third grade. And he was shaking. Like a leaf with a high fever. He wouldn’t look at me; he didn’t seem to be looking at anything. His conscious perception of the office seemed to have been knocked clean out of the ballpark.

And I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. It was the first time I'd ever seen him look like he was actually… scared. He looked like he’d jump at his own reflection. Like his shadow would be scared of itself.

I scanned the room to find Knight’s attention fixed on me. Not glaring daggers or anything, just with a purpose I couldn’t pin down. I didn’t know why he would be staring at me, especially when all of us were just kind of standing around, like awkward teenagers in the middle of PE.

“Fuck,” I said.

Everyone was looking at each other, trading glances that had ‘fuck if I know’ written all over them. I could see all of us forgetting to breathe, and I wondered if that was part of Darion’s magic go-the-fuck-to-sleep thing. Maybe if he’d kept it up, we’d have stopped breathing completely and asphyxiated. And maybe everyone else was thinking the same thing, because they all had the same haunted, pissed-off look on their faces that I probably had on mine.

Except Dulcie.

Dulcie was tapping her fingers on her arm and considering the spot where Darion had been standing. She pursed her lips and looked at Dagan.

“He seems nice,” she commented.

I expected Dagan to scoff. Or snort, or just make some vague and dismissive noise at her. But he didn’t. Instead, he made this awful, toddler-lost-in-a-supermarket whimpering sound.

None of us knew what to do with it.

Christina gave Dulcie a sideways ‘that super isn’t helping, please stop’ look, but she didn’t say anything.

Dagan opened his mouth, and we all kinda held our breath. I didn’t know what we expected him to say, but it wasn’t gonna be good.

And he laughed.

“Oh, he’s the best, isn’t he?” he said, and everything coming out of his mouth was drowning in hysteria. “Life of the whole party.”

“And the death of everyone who was not invited,” added Bram.

Hades, you could have carved the silence that followed into an ice sculpture. The fans in the computer tried to kick on, failed, and started making that awful whirring noise that happens when the heat is rising and resistance is twenty miles past futile.

Dagan kept laughing. The silence around him stretched and stretched until he stopped.

“It was not a… paralytic,” Dagan explained after a minute. “It was an illusion.” He waved vaguely at his head. “A trick of the mind.”

“Illusion,” Christina echoed. “So, none of that actually happened?”

“For all practical purposes, yes, it did. But doctors won’t find anything wrong with you, because nothing’s wrong with you.” Dagan shrugged. “I… didn’t think Darion knew where I was.”

He swallowed and coughed wetly. “This,” continued Dagan once he was able to speak again, “is what makes him so dangerous.”

“What?” I asked.

Dagan faced me. “Darion convinces you of a certain truth, in this case that your body is shutting down. Your mind, your body… they make it a reality that’s impossible to overcome.”

He didn’t sound like he was explaining this for our benefit, though. It felt closer to a justification, like he was reassuring himself that something he felt or did or couldn’t do wasn’t his fault. There was something specific crawling around the landfill of his brain, and it was something he felt he needed to defend before we ever heard what it was.

I chewed on that for a minute.

Casey took a breath. “So, we have a problem,” he said.

“No shit,” said Christina, but it wasn’t mean. More ‘you said it, girlfriend’ than ‘what gave it away?’ Everyone else nodded sagely.

“Osenna,” Dagan muttered. He said her name, then he registered what he’d said and his eyes went bug-fuck-big. “Osenna!”

He tried to stand, bungled it, and tried again, this time bracing himself on the desk. His hands were red and the desk was glowing—some enchantment Christina or one of the department witches had cast to keep emotional creatures from burning holes in her stuff. I don’t think Dagan realized he was doing it, but something in the back of his brain was trying to set everything on fire.

“Osenna is safe,” said Bram.

“Safe?” Dulcie scoffed. “With you?”

She was in a weird, bad-posture, fuck-the-police-even-though-I-am-the-police mood. I wondered what had happened. Then I remembered that Knight was in the room and slapped myself internally for being so goddamn oblivious.

“We need to take Osenna into custody,” Casey said.

Bram scoffed. “Not bloody likely. She’ll be far safer with me than she will be with any of you.”

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually heard Bram use the word “bloody.” It was weird. Kind of felt like a bad omen.

Lots of those going around today.

He continued. “Darion has no idea where I might be holding her, but if he can figure out how to use the internet, he can find any and every FBI building.”

“Holding?” asked Knight sharply. “You make it sound like you’re keeping her prisoner.”

Bram glared at him and Knight glared right back. The two hated each other more now than they ever had in the past. And, of course, that had everything to do with Dulcie.

And the fact that they were both in love with her.

NINETEEN

Quillan

“I am keeping Osenna prisoner, I suppose you could say. For her own good.” Bram shrugged. “It is no different than what you would do were Osenna in your protective custody.” Then he glanced over at Dulcie before facing Knight again. “Or perhaps it is quite different than what you would do if she were in your protective custody.”

“Fuck off, Bram,” Knight responded.

Christina quickly butted in with a soft, sweet little sentence directed at Dagan. “So, Darion wasn’t here for the scarf,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Of course he wasn’t,” replied Dagan, looking at Christina with a bizarre intensity. “He wanted the scarf back, yes, but that’s because he knows what it’s capable of, and what I intended to do with it.”

“Darion knows you want to kill him?” she continued.

“He would be stupid to assume anything else. When I stole Osenna, I was openly challenging his marriage and, by association, his right to rule—though ruling is not quite what he does.” Dagan paused. “I declared war to help her escape him, and I did it gladly.”

“Darion said you made him look silly,” I put in.

“I made him look weak, is what I did,” Dagan said. “He didn’t and doesn’t love her, but escaping with her has given him great cause to despise me. She’s a possession to him, and her disappearance made him angry because it called his security into question. Not unlike what the royal family might endure, should the royal jewels go missing.” He paused to lick his lips, apparently lost in thought. “Retrieving Osenna will salve his wounds, so to speak. Put his pride at ease.”

“You fucked with his honor,” said Dulcie.

Dagan nodded. “That I did. And it is a slight he apparently never got around to forgetting.”

“So this, then,” clarified Christina, “is less about killing you than it is about overcoming you/”

“Darion wishes to declare dominance,” Bram finished for her.

“In a perfect world, all he’d have to do is ask,” Dagan said in the fakest wistful voice I’d ever heard. “But no. If Darion left me alive, it’s because he wants me to see something, or he has some specific and terrible plan for dispatching me once I’m done watching him rip me apart with his teeth. Metaphorically speaking.” He looked at Dulcie suddenly. “He is afraid of you, though.”

Dulcie frowned. “Why?”

He raised his eyebrows. “You’re many terrible things. You’re strong, fast, and magically gifted. You’re capable in more ways than even a demon of his caliber could ever hope to be.” Dagan squinted, and his hand went to his mouth like he was having the kinds of thoughts that could get us all killed. Or at least something that would get him slapped.

Not that he ever had literally any other kind of thought.

“You were immune to his illusions, Agent O’Neil,” he added. “A product of the experimentation you recently endured?”

Dulcie shrugged, but her nonchalance was clearly fake. The blandness in her voice was forced, and she was glaring at the table like she wanted to kill its family. “Probably.”

He nodded. “You have the potential to unmake him.”

“Yet he threw me across the room with just a thought,” she pointed out. “And I could barely move. Still can barely move.”

“You weren’t paying attention,” Dagan answered. “Darion wouldn’t have been able to do what he did unless you put your guard down.”

She frowned, but it appeared she had let her guard down because she didn’t argue.

“As I said,” Dagan continued, spearing Dulcie with the intensity of his expression. “You could unmake him.”

“I’m not killing your brother for you,” she answered.

“Not even for a Scooby Snack?” Dagan quipped, batting his eyelashes at her. He had weirdly long eyelashes, actually.

“Dude, seriously?” she asked.

“I’m prepared to pay you, of course,” he told her. “Handsomely. More than you could ever hope to make here, I’m certain.”

“No.”

“Dulcie is not interested in your offers,” Bram interjected. Knight glared at him just as openly as Dulcie did.

“I can fight my own battles, Bram, for fuck’s sake!” she spat at him. Then, she faced Dagan. “I’m not interested.”

“Are you sure? I could find other ways to thank you, you know.” Dagan’s tongue skated across his lips. “Find a more creative form of payment.”

“That’s enough,” Knight railed at the demon before Casey interrupted him.

“Dagan,” said Casey, reaching for his belt. “You’ve been here for less than an hour, and I’m ready to shoot you myself. Please don’t make me arrest you for harassment.”

“And conspiracy to hire a hitman,” I added.

“But that sounds like so much fun.”

As Casey stood, his eyes flashed with that weird blue glow-stick light that happens when a siphon is having homicidal thoughts, and the air around him crackled with a vague blue-ish electricity. Like those deep-sea jellyfish that glow in the dark, except the jellyfish is also charging you with a really big hammer. He looked a lot taller than he actually was.

I tensed up. We all did. It was that awful, suction-cupped, airless feeling that happens when your friend’s mom starts yelling at you during a sleepover.

“Dagan,” said Casey. “Enough. You and your idiot girlfriend brought that”—he pointed to the spot where Darion had been standing—“into my fucking city, and we’re apparently lucky Darion’s not crazy enough to kill all of us.” He pursed his lips and closed his eyes, looking approximately eight seconds away from ripping Dagan’s lungs out through his eyes. “Meg is dead, and I do not have the patience to deal with another interdimensional sociopath trying to take over the world.”

A freezer-burned silence settled over the room.

“Oh, fine,” replied Dagan. “I did have noble intentions, for whatever it’s worth.”

“Did you?” Casey snapped.

Dagan nodded, pointedly not looking at him. “Yes, I did. I went back in a vain attempt to reclaim a courage I never possessed.”

“And to sleep with an old friend in a public fountain,” added Bram.

“That, too.” He shook his head. “But I had every intention of besting Darion myself, even if the means are not exactly… honorable. Osenna would never have forgiven me otherwise.”

Bram snorted. “Osenna would never forgive you if it was honorable.”

Dagan made a pursed-lips-nodding face that said he agreed, at least mostly. “Yes, well. Perhaps I ought to castrate myself before Darion and do battle the old-fashioned way.”

Everyone looked at one another in complete and total confusion.

“…You mean ‘prostrate?’” asked Casey. “Prostrate yourself before him.”

Dagan pinched his nose and squeezed his eyes shut, like he was fending off a headache. “Yes, that,” he said. “The day’s been long and unpleasant, and I left my words in a box at home.” He dropped his hand. “But castration would be one way to make a statement, wouldn’t it?” He frowned. “Although I’m not sure what that statement would be…”

Dagan tutted and shook his head, a lurid, porn-star-teacher-who’s-about-to-ask-you-for-a-favor-in-exchange-for-a-passing-grade sneer pulling itself onto his face. He was moving weirdly slow, like an old animatronic with a low battery.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to see Osenna now,” Dagan announced.

“No,” said Bram.

“I have to see her.” Hades, he sounded so desperate. I almost felt sorry for him. For everything that made Dagan the worst person in the history of people, he was still just some guy who wanted to see his girl.

“I cannot rely on the pair of you not to make another equally catastrophic decision on behalf of everyone who is now in express danger from your brother,” Bram explained.

“I need to see her,” Dagan insisted.

“I cannot be persuaded otherwise. I do not care where you go, but you absolutely cannot see Osenna, under any circumstances,” Bram insisted.

“Bold of you to assume you can stop me.”

“Bold of you to assume I will be the only one to try.”

“Hey, um,” Christina put in. “Dagan? I think Bram is right.”

He whirled on her. “And who asked you?”

“You know Darion’s not just here for the scarf. He’s here for Osenna.”

Dagan pressed his lips together and glared at Bram. Bram glared back. I kept waiting for one of them to stick out their tongue or just flip each other off, or do the little head-swaggle that goes with “I know you are but what am I?” Ultimately, they were both two flagrant assholes trying to protect their assets, but there was something so juvenile about the whole thing. It was almost funny.

“He’s here to take Osenna back home,” Christina continued.

“He is,” said Dagan.

She sighed, reached out, and took Dagan’s hand. He seemed surprised by the gesture. He didn’t even leer. It was weird seeing his eyes do anything else.

“Dagan?” Christina said. “Darion will be aware of where you are now. He’s probably hoping you’ll lead him right to Osenna, and that’s not what any of us wants, right?”

“Right,” he admitted, sounding like a disappointed child.

“It’s not safe for you to see Osenna then, do you understand,” Christina finished.

Dagan ground his teeth. He didn’t say anything.

Christina smiled. “We’re going to help you. We’ll find Darion and arrest him, or banish him, or even kill him, if that’s what has to happen.”

She sounded like she was talking to a little kid. Like a social worker swearing to protect him from a violent parent or sibling. And it was working. Dagan looked at her with eyes that were suddenly much softer than they’d been before. He was… okay, more human isn’t exactly right, but he was more real. More like an actual living person with feelings and fears and bad memories and everything. It was so easy to look at Dagan and see a caricature of sex, vulgarity, and bad late-night TV, but I guess that’s a little true of everybody.

“I don’t know your brother super well, obviously,” Christina added, squeezing his hand. In a moment of child-like vulnerability, Dagan squeezed back. He didn’t seem to realize he was doing it. “But I think it’s a fair bet that Darion’s not just here to take back what you stole. He’s here to hurt you.”

Dagan’s eyes glazed over. Not a milky-white, oracle-having-a-vision glaze, not a deep-in-thought glaze, but a sharp, metallic, war-never-changes glaze. He knew this already. He was terrified of it.

“What would be the easiest way to hurt you?” she pressed.

We all knew the answer to that. Dagan and everybody in his little sphere of nymphomaniacs loved classic pain: blood and bruises and bites and, sometimes, broken bones. But this was a different kind of hurt. This was a new kind of internal bleeding.

Dagan swallowed.

“Osenna,” Christina finished. “You said Darion was abusive?”

Dagan nodded. He swallowed harder this time—gulped, even.

“Then he isn’t going to find her and leave,” she pointed out. “Darion is going to find her, and he’s going to actively use her to hurt you. And I’m sure you don’t want that.”

Dagan shook his head. Christina looked ready to say more, but she didn’t have to. He was visibly shaken, probably less by the hypothetical and more by memories of what Darion had actually done to Osenna already.

“What is your… recommendation, then?” he asked her eventually.

“Stay here. Try and be patient, which I know is hard.” Christina shrugged. “But it’s really the best you can do right now. If Darion’s scared of Dulcie, she can protect you here.”

“And who will protect Osenna?” Dagan demanded.

Christina looked at Bram.

“Provided you do not go hunting for her, Osenna is perfectly safe where she is,” said Bram.

“Hiding won’t be enough,” Dagan argued. “She can’t be left alone.”

“She won’t be.”

“She’s alone right now,” Dagan argued, his eyes going wide.

“Right,” Christina said but then quickly added. “But Bram is going to leave right now to go be with her.”

Bram looked between Christina and Dagan like she’d asked the two of them to kiss. “I will what?”

“You will go home,” instructed Christina firmly. “Check on Osenna and make sure she’s okay.”

“We’ll send someone with you,” added Casey, who really didn’t want to let Bram go gallivanting off into the early afternoon without a babysitter. Not that anybody else did, for that matter.

“Bram won’t be enough,” Dagan started.

“Excuse me,” Bram began but Dagan interrupted.

“Darion,” Dagan said slowly, “is a monster. Most of the people I knew in Dromir are monsters.” He paused. “And now Darion’s here. And he wants to drag Osenna back into the frozen hellscape we spent our entire lives trying to escape.”

Christina watched him, listening patiently.

Dagan exhaled like he was reminding himself how to breathe. “Don’t make me leave her alone for this.”

Christina nodded. “We’ll figure something out, okay? Everybody, take ten, get some water.” She pushed her chair back and stood uncertainly. “Get your brains back together.”

“Yes, ma’am,” confirmed Casey, and that was everyone else’s signal to take Christina’s words as an order.

She looked at Dagan. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he assured her. He sounded almost naked without the god-put-me-on-this-earth-specifically-to-fuck-anything-that-moves lilt in his voice.

“Osenna will still be wherever she is once we’ve figured this out,” Christina reminded him.

“But of course.”

“I mean it,” she said. “You can wait anywhere on this floor, but do not leave the building.” She pursed her lips and gave him a levelling stare. “I don’t want Osenna to die because you love her too much, okay?”

It’s a really good thing Christina is on our side. Sometimes, the way she manipulates people into not being total morons is a little scary. I’m sure she does it to me all the time.

Dagan didn’t look entirely sobered, but he nodded. “Yes, Mistress Sabbiondo,” he said, and he bowed.

It was such a weird feeling, being sorry for somebody so blatantly vulgar. Not that a bow is vulgar. Bowing is fine. It’s literally everything else about Dagan that gives me the heebie-jeebies.

TWENTY

Bram

Before I was able to leave to check on Osenna, we were seen by medical personnel, magical and otherwise. It was determined that, yes, we had been subjected to an especially powerful and invasive illusion. Specifically of the fear-inducing variety, which I found especially vexing. I had not been properly afraid of anything since before my death, and I had not missed the feeling.

Christina and Agent James disappeared in order to organize the search for Darion, a brief and twisting maze of red tape that apparently had to be navigated from the seventh floor. Dagan was taken to a room from which he could be monitored, and Quillan departed for the interrogation room in which Zhe Ping was currently residing. They did not expect Zhe Ping to tell them anything of special importance, but it was agreed that it would be foolish not to ask.

I listened outside the door for several minutes to see if anything interesting was being said. Zhe Ping was cursing up a veritable maelstrom of obscenities in a language that was not quite Mandarin, but not quite anything else, either.

“No, but what’s he saying?” Quillan was saying to an already frazzled translator.

“Oh. Um. Hmm.” She listened and started deadpan rattling off his insults. “He says he wants to gouge out your eyes, pickle them, and make your grandchildren eat them… he’s going to gut you like a whale, I think? Or he wants to feed you to a whale… uh, he’s going to chop off your testicles and feed them to a llama? Or maybe a group of llamas?”

“Llamas?”

“I don’t know.” She paused. “Do you want me to keep going?”

“No, thanks, I think I got the gist.”

“Great.”

Clearly, grand progress was being made. It is moments such as this in which I am especially glad that I do not pay taxes.

The plan, as I understood it, was to interrogate Dagan and Zhe Ping and attempt to find Darion using the many resources the FBI had at its disposal. I had as much faith in this plan as I did in the smoldering ruins of the Association of Netherworld Creatures and the rotting corpse of Melchior O’Neil. I would do better searching for Darion myself. But I would not. Even if I were so inclined, it was midday. And though the sunlight penetrating the building could not harm me, it was still not my friend.

Standing along the far wall of the vast room crammed with old metal desks and gray rolling chairs and cheap monitors, I wasn’t in a space that was especially bright. Many of the windows had the blinds at least partially drawn to kill the glare on several outward-facing computer screens.

But to me, it was near blinding. The contrast between the suffused light of an early Californian afternoon and the yellowish haze of even the softest lightbulbs was… astounding.

No, astounding is the wrong word. Something that astounds does so with vibrancy and gusto. This was softer. This was the angelic whisper of a violin in a marble music hall, or the gradual appreciation one develops while assessing a large and vibrant painting.

I stood not far from one of the windows, this one with no obstructions. Light poured through it like breath. Creatures, humans, selkies, trolls and vampires, strode through it without a glance. They did not burn. They did not flinch.

I reached for it.

Slowly, carefully.

I stepped into the sun.

And Hades. It was breathtaking.

Outside the window was Splendor, spread out to the horizon like a deck of cards spilled across a table. Whatever it was about sunlight that so offended creatures of the dark was trapped on the other side of the window; the heat, though, remained. It warmed my skin in a way the fires of a hearth are incapable. It was a gentle warmth, a caress from the hand of someone who could never be properly erased from one’s memory. It was the touch of a dream, long locked away.

It was real, alive in ways the night cannot match.

I found myself wondering what the sea looked like at this time of day, and what the sand might feel like, hot and powdery, under my feet. I remembered the disparity of noises from night to day, the kinds of sounds that populated the brilliant streets and darkened corners of the world. The screams of sunlight and moonlight were very different things—one of joy, one of primal, animal terror.

“Bram?” said Dulcie, interrupting my reverie.

I turned, smile at the ready, and was met with a hand across my face. A quite brazen hand.

Her slap rang like a tinny bell in a small room. My own hand instinctively rose to rub the spot on my cheek.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she demanded in that fiery way of hers. All the furies of war and death and petty theft were carved into her face. Her mouth was partly open, braced for a snarl. Rarely had I seen her so incensed.

She was the epitome of beauty.

I wanted nothing more than to take her in my arms and taste those sweet, snarling lips. “Hello, my sweet, lovely to see you as well,” I responded, dropping my hand and appraising her.

“Don’t you fucking start,” she retorted, glaring at me. One might believe she actually hated me. “Don’t you fucking start that with me.”

“Start what?” I asked, bewildered.

“Don’t pretend like you don’t fucking know what I’m talking about!”

“Know what?”

“Bram, I swear to Hades.”

“My dear Ms. O’Neil, I swear to you, I haven’t the foggiest notion of what you’re going on about.”

“Oh, really? So, you didn’t tell Christina what Meg showed you in that… that fucking vision?”

Ah, this. And here I thought something bad had happened.

“I am sorry for any… trouble my accusation has caused you,” I assured her. For good measure, I added, “Perhaps it was not my news to impart, after all.” Though I did not believe such in the slightest. If Dulcie was not going to say something, someone had to, and it might as well have been me. I had no friends among Vander’s colleagues.

“Bram, of course it wasn’t your news to tell! Why the fuck would you think it was? This is my business, not yours!” She drew her hands down hard over her face, leaving thin red lines of pressure in the wake of her fingers. She groaned, and she did not look at me.

I had never seen her bathed in sunlight before. I suppose there is nothing special about the way light reflects off one’s eyes and makes the irises shimmer and shine not unlike precious stones; but there was something divine about the color of her eyes in the light. It was the green of emeralds in the crown of a goddess, of the trees and hills of Ireland. The light seemed to reach out to her, drawing long cotton fingers across her face as a lover might do.

“You are beautiful,” I said, without thinking. This was not exactly a ripe moment for the dispensation of compliments.

Dulcie groaned and covered her face. “I don’t even know why I try,” she grumbled.

I frowned, turning myself to regard her fully. “Do you not believe me?”

She dropped her hands. “That’s beside the point.” Her words were tossed out like incriminating pictures, like proof of infidelity.

“Your beauty is beside the point?”

“Yes!” she railed at me. “And I’m sick of hearing about it!”

“I’m afraid I do not understand.”

“No, of course you don’t!” Dulcie continued, belting out her anger as if she were a tea kettle on full boil. “I don’t care what I look like!”

“Now that can hardly be called a true statement.”

“I would love it if you, for once, would stop paying attention to the outside of me like it’s the only thing that’s important.”

I grimaced. “What is it, exactly, that you are accusing me of?”

I did not realize how foolish the question was until it was already out of my mouth.

But Dulcie did not seem to hear me—or, if she did, she did not care to respond. “I just, I want somebody to look at me and tell me literally anything else besides, ‘you’re pretty,’ and ‘I’m sorry your life sucks so much,’ and ‘here, let me solve your problems without fucking asking if it’s okay with you because apparently I know what’s best.’”

“Yes, well, I was just on my way to check on Osenna,” I started.

She sucked in a breath through her teeth, making a thin whistling sound, then looked directly at me. “You know I’m a capable person, right? I’m not just a pair of boobs with legs, Bram. I’m not a damsel in distress, I’m not a walking sex bot. I can make my own goddamn decisions, and I can solve my own fucking problems. I don’t need you butting in all the damn time!”

“Of course,” I agreed, thoroughly horrified by the idea of a walking sex robot. There was something so cold about dolls. “I am very much aware.”

“Are you?”

“Yes. I would never think so little of you.”

Dulcie snorted, loudly and forcefully enough to jerk her entire torso forward. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I am not. You are, in fact, more than your breasts and your legs.”

A deep growl curled out of her throat. “Really? So, if I woke up one morning and I’d had my whole face melted off, you’d still spend all your free time stalking me and harassing my friends?”

“Hmm, that is a difficult question. Not only for me to answer, but I imagine it would be a difficult question for anyone tasked with it.”

She looked at me in an odd manner.

“Would you mind if I got back to you?” I asked cautiously. “I am afraid I have places to go and people to see.”

She was shaking. No, not shaking—twitching, as though she had spilled water on some critical internal circuit. The color was no longer present in her skin; instead, it was covered with a sheen of sweat. She appeared, for all intents and purposes, quite ill.

“Are you alright?” I asked. Again, she did not appear to hear me.

“Yes!” she yelled after a moment. “I’m fine!” I was taken aback by the vitriol in her tone. And perhaps more so by the surprise in her expression. Whatever was happening to her was frightening her. I could see as much in her wide eyes.

“Well, for what it is worth, my fine friend, I do not believe you are simply a pretty face and body.”

“Really?” She glared at me.

“Really.”

“Because you’ve got a bullshit painting in your basement that says otherwise,” she pointed out, coming closer to me with her index finger outstretched, then poking it into my chest. “I think I know exactly how you feel about me!’

“And how would that be?”

“You wish I was easy, that I’d just have sex with you. You wish I’d stop being so difficult all the time and let you do whatever you want with me, don’t you?”

I looked at her briefly, examining her face. A peculiar numbness was working its way through my body, beginning somewhere behind my heart and ending in my eyes. I had to remind myself to blink. Something about this conversation made me want to jump out the window and throw myself at the mercy of the sun.

“Did something happen, my sweet?” I asked. “You are in particularly bad spirits this day.”

“Hades, stop calling me that!” she snapped. “I’m not your goddamn sweet! I’m my own fucking person, Bram, and I’m sick of watching you act like you’re somehow entitled to me just because you want to get inside my pants!”

“Goodness!” I said, in a great deal of shock by her allegations. “I did not mean to imply any such…”

“Oh, sure you didn’t.”

“I am sorry. I assure you, I feel no sense of entitlement where you are concerned.”

She laughed. It was not a human sound, it was the scattered trilling of a coyote. “You’re sorry. Right,” she said. “Are you literally sorry, at all? Do you even know what you should be apologizing for? Do you even know what it means to apologize?”

In the years of our acquaintance, Dulcie and I had certainly had some blowouts, but I was quite surprised by this one. In my own mind, we had become friends of a sort, so this tirade of hers seemed as though it had come directly from left field. I was left wondering what in the blazes I had done to be on the receiving end.

“Yes, I am quite aware of what it means to apologize,” I countered coldly. “Perhaps we should cut right to the chase, as the saying goes. What did I do, Miss O’Neil, that has so greatly offended you?”

“What did you do? What did you do?”

“Yes. What, pray tell, did I do?”

“You assaulted Knight in the printer room, that’s what you fucking did! And you’ve been going around spouting off about my business to anyone who will listen!”

“That is not entirely true,” I started, extending my hands in a placating manner. She slapped them both down.

“It’s completely true!”

She was shouting now, and people were looking, but I had no reason to care what they thought. It was highly unlikely any of them knew who I was in the first place. But I found myself feeling concerned on Dulcie’s behalf. The last thing she needed was more rumors circulating about her around the office.

“Would you rather I had assaulted Vander somewhere else?” I asked.

“No!” She shook her head. “You just don’t get it!”

“Get what, my dear?”

She shook her head again. “Uh, I don’t want you assaulting him at all, Bram! I don’t want you assaulting anybody on my behalf!” Her footsteps paced an earthquake across the floor. The walls trembled.

“What he did to you—”

“Is none of your fucking business!” she railed at me. “I don’t belong to you. I’m not a child, and I’m not your responsibility! I can take care of myself!”

“I would never assume otherwise—”

“That’s literally all you do!” she interrupted, throwing her arms up in the air. There was something wrong with her veins; they were darker and more prominent. “That’s why you do everything you’ve ever done to me! You ask me for these lewd fucking favors when you know my back is to the wall and I can’t say no! You make oil-paint porn out of me, and now you’re attacking my ex like you’re some kind of knight in shining armor, which is such bullshit!”

She stopped. She seemed on the verge of tears but she would not look at me, so for all I knew, she was already crying.

“Dulcie,” I started and reached out to her, but she pulled away from me.

“I’m not your girlfriend,” she said. “I’m not your anything, and you keep doing this thing where you pretend that we’re… that we’re something but we aren’t!”

She swallowed visibly, audibly.

I felt my eyes turn to steel. “Dulcie, I attacked him, I defended you, because I care for your well-being, and he, apparently, does not. And I have never pretended we were anything other than friends… something which I ardently hope we still are.”

“We aren’t friends and we never were, Bram,” she told me, with narrowed eyes.

I felt my stomach drop to my toes and found I could no longer meet her gaze. I just… could not believe she’d said those words.

“I have never considered you to be the unkind type,” I said stonily. But then I saw something in her eyes that hinted at the regret she must have been feeling, owing to the callousness of her previous statement.

I do not know why I did it, but I reached for her, as though collecting her in my arms would help to heal the anger and the pain I sensed rampaging through her body.

At the precise moment I touched her, she pushed me backwards against the glass so hard, I heard it crack. Sunlight seeped through the break in the wards and seared the back of my neck. I jumped forward immediately, and that was when I noticed her hands and arms.

She was bleeding. How or why I did not know? I glanced back at the window but found none of the glass had shattered. It was cracked, yes, but still intact.

“You don’t care about anyone but yourself, Bram,” she hissed. In her eyes, I saw the blind fury of one who suddenly knows more than they can stand. “So stop. Pretending. To care about me.”

Without further ceremony, she pushed me with such extreme strength, I fell to the ground. The carpet and the metal framework of the floor bent beneath me as the back of my head smashed against the windowpane. My vision rent itself askew. Black spots danced across the ceiling, chased by jagged lines of vague, water-washed color.

“Leave me alone and stay out of my life!” she screamed, but her voice was no longer hers.

Onlookers were now gathered around us, witnessing the spectacle with open mouths and wide eyes. She pushed past them and the crowd opened to grant her exit. All I could focus upon was the blood on her forearms, dripping down to cover her hands.

I pushed myself up to my elbows, and that, for a moment, was all I could ask of my body. I watched Dulcie disappear around a corner and into a room full of people.

I shouted the first name that came to mind—the first that did not make me nauseous to say.

“Miss Sabbiondo!” I called out. Rolling sideways, I pushed myself up—first to my hands and knees, then back on my heels, until I was standing with a wobble and toppling into the broken window. I caught myself flat-palmed on the glass, and thin red lines of phantom sunlight etched themselves into my skin. “Someone retrieve Miss Sabbiondo!”

Two people on whom I could not focus helped me to stand, and I instinctively shook them off, staggering forward.

“Dulcie…” I started weakly.

“Someone’s gone to get Christina, okay? Please sit down,” said someone.

But I did not, because Dulcie was changing in ways she could not control. Dulcie was carving mazes into herself, labyrinths with ends but no distinct beginnings.

Dulcie was hurting herself. That much was obvious.

She was bleeding.

And her blood was red.

TWENTY-ONE

Quillan

“Quill?” called Christina from the other side of the door. I was sitting in a conference room with Zhe Ping and a translator, questioning the former as to his association with Dagan.

Christina sounded scared, like something was chasing her.

I popped out of my chair and ran to the door.

“What?” I said, pulling it open. “What happened?”

“Bram. Dulcie. Breakroom. Now.” And she sprinted off down the hall.

I ran out of the room.

***

Dulcie was on all fours on the floor of an emptied-out breakroom. The gift-shop t-shirt was wadded up on the ground, and Henry, Christina, and Sam were on the ground next to her, encouraging her to breathe. Sam had a travel poultice set out on the slick gray floor, and shovel-sized fistfuls of the tile had been gouged out. Tables, chairs, and everything else had been thrown helter-skelter across the room, fracturing the window-wall between the breakroom and the office. Everything smelled like rosemary and something sideways of a cluster-bombed graveyard.

Bram was lurking in a corner, biting his knuckle. Just staring at her.

She was fighting convulsions. Her arms were wrapped around her stomach, her hands in tight, dripping fists, and she was rocking back and forth. She was spitting up red and black bile and what looked like pieces of her stomach lining. Her knuckles, her nails, her claws, were bloody and bruised. Long, red lines tally-marked their way down her sides.

I felt like I’d swallowed an ice cube.

Dulcie’s a fairy. Her blood is gold—it’s supposed to be gold.

“What in the literal fuck,” I murmured.

“Help now, questions later.” Sam held up a phial of something glowy and violently purple. “Hold this.”

I rolled up my sleeves and took it, and immediately almost dropped it. The glass was frostbite levels of cold.

“Shit,” I said.

“Not with your hands,” said Sam, not looking at me.

“Okay, with what?”

“Literally anything else.”

I took off my jacket and wrapped it around the phial. The hand I’d touched it with throbbed. Like hands do when you squeeze frostbite-cold phials of purple danger goo.

“What is this stuff?” I asked, holding up the purple danger goo.

“It’s… stuff,” Sam offered, clearly distracted.

Dulcie was breathing like the air was trying to get away from her. Her eyes were squeezed closed. Her grayed skin seemed stretched, cracked like clay in the desert. The red lines grew thicker.

Shit, that’s a lot of blood.

Unless it wasn’t blood. Unless it was something worse.

It’s red. Why the fuck is it red?

Casey ran into the room and knelt in front of Sam. He watched her silently, waiting.

Sam held out a stone mortar, caught Dulcie’s blood, and started mashing it together with something grayish-green. Ten seconds later, she had a thick paste, and began using a popsicle stick to smear it onto Dulcie’s skin. Casey and Christina held her arms to keep her still, to keep her from clawing her insides into cheap frosting.

“What is that?” I asked, and realized I was being super unhelpful, but I couldn’t stop myself. Asking questions felt like participating. I wanted to feel included in the making-sure-Dulcie-doesn’t-rocket-launch-herself-into-the-next-life club.

“Shh-shh-shuushhh,” hushed Sam. When all the red was covered, she dropped everything and turned to me.

“Line down her back,” she directed.

“Um,” I stammered, and didn’t move.

“Quillan,” she snapped, “drip it in a line down her back.”

“With the danger goo?”

“Trace her spine.”

“Oh. Oh.” I started at the base of Dulcie’s neck and globbed the purple goop all down her back. It formed itself into a straight line, turned white, and then made ribcage-shaped beelines for the green paste. When it touched the green stuff, they merged and changed color again into a muddy brown. And then, it started to smoke.

Dulcie screamed.

Casey and Sam grabbed her by the arms. “I know,” Sam said encouragingly, “I know, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, honey. It’s gonna be okay, just breathe. Just breathe.”

I wasn’t sure if it was going to be okay, because Dulcie kept bleeding. And it kept coming out red.

It took a long time for it to stop. And it took me, Casey, Henry, and Christina combined to keep her from digging her nails into her ribs, her throat, her eyes. She was screaming and crying and thrashing, but whatever was in the paste was getting into her blood, and it sapped all the energy out of her a few minutes later.

She sagged. She whimpered. She got quiet and still, breathing like something half-drowned.

“Fucking fuck,” she sobbed.

“Shit,” I said, “are you okay?” Yes, it was a stupid question.

She coughed wetly. “No.” She swiped at her eyes with bloody hands.

I repeated my question quieter. “…Are you okay?”

Sam muttered something to us about giving her space, and everybody scooted away. A thin, crimson sheen covered all of us, creating false red gloves up to our elbows. Dulcie’s blood, on our hands, our shirts, our faces. Soaking our knees as the pool beneath her spread. We looked like field surgeons. Like painters.

“Dulcie, sweetie?” said Sam gently. Dulcie collapsed slowly into her, curling up with her head in Sam’s lap. She’d torn her own clothing near to shreds, and only her bra and part of her jeans were left. And they were some of the reddest things in the room.

Dulcie blinked. A weird, dull brownish color drained out of her eyes and the green came back. Frantically, she looked around the room, breathing heavily through her mouth.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“You’re in the breakroom,” explained Sam. “I’m here, and Casey’s here, and Henry and Quill are here.”

She didn’t mention that Bram was here too, and I had to figure that was intentional. I was kind of confused as to why Bram was here in the first place.

Dulcie stared at the floor, just breathing. “Hades, what… what the hell… what did I do?”

“You hurt yourself,” Sam told her. “But not anybody else.”

“Fuck,” Dulcie muttered, relieved.

I knelt in front of her, trying to give her plenty of space. I figured Sam would give me a look if I got too close. “What happened?”

“I. Um.” She pressed her lips together and squeezed her eyes shut, looking down and away before turning back to me when she’d gotten herself just slightly more together. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” I echoed.

“This isn’t nothing,” observed Christina.

Dulcie hesitated. She sniffed and coughed and exhaled hotly through her mouth. “…Nothing.”

In the corner, Bram grumbled wordlessly. He stood stone still, watching, waiting for something.

I looked between them. “Knight?”

Dulcie twitched like she’d been stung by something and Sam gave me the look I’d been expecting. Not a mean one, just a concerned, motherly, maybe-talk-about-literally-anything-else-for-a-few-minutes pursed-lip stare.

“Do you want me to go arrest him for something?” I asked.

“For what?” Sam asked back.

“Harassment.”

“Harassment?” Christina frowned.

“If he jumpstarted this,” I began, but Dulcie stopped me before I could continue.

“He didn’t,” she asserted. “I don’t know what happened. One second, I was talking to Bram, and then I was just so… angry.”

“Well, that’s usually what happens when you find yourself in a conversation with Bram,” Sam grumbled under her breath. If it had been any other situation, I might have actually laughed.

She continued petting Dulcie’s hair. The blonde was matted with sweat and blood.

“I’m losing it,” Dulcie said softly.

“No, honey, no, you’re not,” Sam assured her.

“I am,” Dulcie retorted bitterly.

She lifted her hand to her mouth and lurched a little, like she was trying not to vomit. And then, for the first time, she noticed the red on her hands.

Her eyes went wide, and her voice got higher. “What… is that?”

“Um,” stammered Sam. “Blood.”

Horrified, Dulcie stared at Sam, tears carving clear lines through all the blood she’d just smeared on her face. “Who did… what did I… Hades… Did I kill Bram?”

“Unfortunately no,” Sam said and took her gently by the shoulders. “It’s your blood, Dulce.”

“No, mine’s gold, this is red. This is somebody else’s—”

“It’s your blood,” Sam insisted, nodding at Dulcie’s confused expression. “I know. Something is definitely wrong, but you didn’t hurt anybody but yourself. I promise.”

“But… why…” Dulcie looked at her hands.

Then, we heard the sound of someone running just beyond the conference room, followed by a deep voice, both frantic and freaked out.

“Where is she? What happened, is she okay?”

Dulcie froze. She held her breath.

Henry was the first one to get up. He stormed over to the breakroom door, where Knight was leaning against the frame, panting.

“You need to leave,” Henry informed him, voice hyper-cold and ready to rumble.

Knight looked over Henry’s shoulder to where Dulcie was lying on the floor, and went ghost-pale when he saw the blood. And the tiger-stripe scratches, the drying witch-paste, and Bram, hovering in the shadows like the spirit of a murdered Victorian child.

“Dulcie.” His voice was kind of breathless as he tried to push past Henry. “If he fucking hurt her,” he started, glaring at Bram.

“I didn’t do this,” Bram said, facing Knight.

Henry put an arm up on the door frame, blocking Knight’s way in. “She’ll be fine. Just… go.”

“I need…” Knight looked at Dulcie again and clenched his jaw. By now, me, Sam, Christina, and Bram were all glaring daggers into him—I think Christina’s expression was more pity-the-sinner than the death-to-all-tyrants face I was throwing at him. Either way, he could tell he wasn’t wanted.

Which is honestly kind of terrible.

“She needs her space,” added Henry. He clenched his fists and leaned forward a little. He wasn’t much shorter than Knight, but he looked kinda silly squaring up against him.

Christina looked up. “That’s a good idea, Henry. Can everybody please clear out of the room? Dulcie needs some air.”

Knight swallowed, and Henry was still mizzenmast-stiff, but it was the perfect way to defuse the tension in the room.

“Yes, ma’am,” agreed Casey. He stood and shepherded everyone but me and Sam out of the room, since we were the only ones actually doing the magic-medicine stuff.

Bram was in a corner, out of shepherding range, and he didn’t move.

Christina stopped at the door. “Bram?”

He didn’t respond other than to look up at her.

“That means you, too.”

He scowled and pushed up off the wall. “Of course. My most sincere apologies.”

Christina glowered at him. “Don’t you take that tone with me.”

Bram rolled his eyes and skulked past her. Like a grounded kid sent off to his room.

“Yeesh,” I groaned.

“Yeah,” agreed Christina. She looked over at Sam. “You got this?”

“Sure.” Sam sounded a bit like her stomach had been steamrolled. Quieter, she added, “Why not?”

Christina nodded. “I’m gonna go see where we’re at with the medics.”

Sam sucked on her lip, staring at Dulcie. She didn’t say anything.

I gave Christina a look I hoped she’d interpret as don’t-worry-babe-I-got-this, and she smiled before she walked off.

Shifting my gaze to Sam, I whispered, “Why is it red?”

Her face was stretched thin, and this crumpled, paper-airplane-in-a-rain-gutter haze hung over her eyes.

“I don’t know,” she admitted.

“Is all of it red?”

“I don’t know.”

“We need to test for that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Because that’s definitely bad.”

Sam nodded once, tersely. She bit her lip again. “I don’t know.”

“Did we call a medic?” I pressed.

“I am the medic,” Sam pointed out.

“Right, sorry.”

“An ambulance is on the way, though. For like, actual hospital stuff.”

“Like blood tests?” I asked.

“Yeah.” She made this avalanche of a sigh and slumped, hands covering her face. “Hades.”

“You know, I can hear you guys,” said Dulcie. She was breathing a little easier.

“Crap,” Sam cursed. “I’m sorry, Dulce.”

“It’s fine.” Dulcie held up her hand. “My blood is red, Sam, I know that’s not good.”

Sam pursed her lips but didn’t say anything more.

The bleeding had mostly stopped, and Dulcie wasn’t fighting convulsions anymore, but she was still half-naked and caked in crimson.

“So, I’m going to a doctor?” she asked.

“Yeah. We, um, I don’t have the equipment here to run any of the tests we need.”

“What kind of tests?”

Biting her lip, Sam looked at me for help, and I shrugged, feeling useless.

Dulcie spent a minute solid just breathing, which was good.

“Hey, Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“This hurts. A lot.”

“I know. I’m sorry, honey. Where does it hurt?”

“Everywhere,” she admitted. “It’s like I have a fever, but I’m not sweating or anything, I’m just cold.” When she scratched her neck, she left half-dried flecks of red behind.

“You think whatever is happening to me is going to kill me?” Dulcie asked.

Sam shook her head. “No, honey.”

“You’re gonna be fine,” I said.

There had to be some truth to that. Dulcie was a powerhouse. Even before she’d gotten the power-ups from hell, she was Odysseus-on-the-run-from-a-bunch-of-angry-gods levels of pissed, smart, and ready to throw hands. She was absolutely fucking fearless.

Which is what made looking at her now—pale and red-bloody and lost-in-the-Arctic shiver-scared—something like a bad trip. Like I’d driven off the road and woken up in a hospital in the wrong dimension.

“We got you,” I assured her.

TWENTY-TWO

Bram

It became suddenly clear to me that I did not want to be in this building any longer and there still existed the need to check on Osenna.

But, as this was a professionally warded building in which several of my associates were charitably employed, I could not simply become a wave of shadow, slipping through the cracks in the floor. Here, I had to take the elevator like any common man.

And such was where I now found myself. With a jarring motion, the elevator stopped on the third floor. The doors slid open, and the sounds of an active office surged in like water through a hole in a boat.

A man stepped into the elevator before the doors closed and we continued downward. He was young, with curly brown hair, glasses, and a thin cottony patch over one eye. He looked familiar, but I could not seem to place him—and my memory is not a thing to be trifled with. I did recognize him as the man who had told Vander to get lost while Dulcie was having her fit. For that, I already liked him.

“Hi, Mr. Bram.” The young man sounded glum.

“Hello,” I responded cautiously. I had never been good with children.

He pressed the button for the fifth floor, which I had just left. He would have to ride all the way down before the elevator crawled back up again. I wondered why he hadn’t taken the stairs.

“How are you?” he asked.

“I’m as good as can be expected,” I answered as I continued to try to place him. Henry, I thought, Henry Cotton. Dulcie’s partner, the walking flashlight that led us to Meg. Of course.

When he wasn’t glowing in the dark, Henry was a spectacularly unremarkable person.

He kept his body pointed at the doors as the elevator descended slowly, giving me a strange, apprehensive side-eye.

“I saw you and Dulcie arguing,” he mentioned. “Before she, you know… whatever she did.” He gestured vaguely at the walls.

“Yes, indeed,” I confirmed.

“Can I ask what it was about?”

“I am not quite certain myself.”

“What do you mean?” he asked. “You can’t have an argument if you don’t know what you’re arguing about, can you?”

“You cannot,” I agreed. “But you can be slapped and yelled at, which looks much the same at a distance.”

“Oh. Do you know what made Dulcie want to slap and yell at you?”

“Any number of things,” I theorized. “But I suspect something else set her off and I was the unfortunate scapegoat.”

Henry nodded sagely. “Yeah. Sam says temporary psychosis is a side-effect of all the different blood mixing in Dulcie’s system. She’s a fairy, so she’s a universal receiver, but some of the individual bloods don’t mix well with each other.”

“Do you know much about that?”

“Not really. Something about antigens, I think. If you do a blood transfusion with the wrong type of blood, people can die.”

“I was referring to Dulcie’s mixed blood.”

“I don’t know much about what’s going on with her. She doesn’t like to talk about it.” He paused. A pensive air overtook him. “Sir?”

“What?”

“Dulcie’s blood isn’t supposed to be red, is it?”

“No, it is not. Fairy blood is gold.”

“So, why is hers red?”

“I do not know,” I admitted with a shrug. “It undoubtedly has something to do with Meg’s experimentation.”

“…Is it poisoning her?”

What an astute and unpleasant question. “Yes. At least, I suspect as much.”

He sighed heavily. We reached the bottom floor and the elevator doors pried themselves open. Together, we stepped into the lobby and both began the descent into the parking garage.

“Where are you off to?” I asked.

He held up a set of keys. “I’m going to Dulcie’s house to get her a change of clothes.”

“Ah.”

We passed through the sliding doors that led into the parking complex proper. Henry chewed on his tongue, scowling at the concrete.

“You were quite strong with Vander back in the conference room,” I told him, wanting to break the silence—and snooping, as was my custom.

“Agent Vander was bothering Dulcie,” he said. “They broke up and I guess it didn’t go over so well, but he’s still all up in her business even though he shouldn’t be.” He made a frustrated grumbling noise somewhere in the back of his closed mouth.

“You did well.”

“Dulcie says I’m supposed to ignore him.”

I chuckled. There was a soft, metallic echo in this space. “Is Dulcie your mother?”

“She’s like my work mom.”

Oh, what a phrase. I wondered how Dulcie would react to hearing her partner refer to her as “mom.”

“So, you do whatever she says?” I asked.

“I try, sir.”

How perfectly innocent; and how refreshing. At least I would not have to add Henry Cotton to the list I was compiling of people for whom an excess of pain had become necessary. Dulcie deserved someone who would respect her boundaries.

That rules you out, some small voice in the back of my head pointed out in an infuriatingly righteous tone. I rolled my eyes at myself and sighed.

“Is something bothering you, sir?”

“Something is always bothering me, Mr. Cotton,” I acknowledged tiredly. “I was never fond of Vander, and recent events have only compounded my dislike for him.”

“Yeah. Dulcie said he broke up with her, and she still feels weird about it.”

“Is that all she told you?”

“Mmhmm.” He shrugged. “I know there’s more, but I guess she’ll tell me when she’s ready.”

There is so much more, I thought, but telling him did not seem wise. Henry Cotton was the embodiment of idealism; he might well take it into his head to kill Vander himself. And as thoroughly amusing as I would find that, Vander’s death was not a table set for two, and if anyone was going to end his miserable existence, it was going to be me.

Or perhaps that was why I was so reluctant now to tell Cotton about the reasons I so despised Vander. Christina, I knew, would investigate quietly, and she was far too ethical a creature to ever dream of sharing what I had told her with anyone who did not already know.

Quillan would not kill Vander. Christina would not kill Vander. And Christina would not tell anyone else who might kill Vander.

As of this moment, the only one at the killing table was me. And some childish, vengeful part of me wanted to keep it that way.

“I will be going now,” I announced, feeling the need to form a polite goodbye.

“Um, sir?”

“Yes?”

“Is Dulcie going to die?”

It was such an innocent, childish question. And it struck within me a solemn chord of fear. “She has died once before,” I replied, the memory of said occasion coming back to haunt me with a vengeance. “Perhaps she is quite like a cat and still has eight lives remaining.”

Cotton nodded, mostly satisfied with the answer. “Okay, then. Um. I’ll see you later. Or not. Have a good day.” He held out his hand.

I stared at it for a moment before taking it and giving it a gentle shake. He did not visibly react to the coldness of my skin.

He simply nodded once and began to walk away.

“Mr. Cotton?” I said.

“Yes, sir?”

Such a dutiful boy. Dulcie was lucky to have him. Even if I very much would have liked to throw him out the window for sounding like a boy scout from a WWII propaganda film.

“Keep Vander away from Dulcie, would you?”

The look that crept across his one working eye was diabolical. It did not fit the rest of him—evoking a feeling similar to how one might react if a small duckling suddenly pulled out a gun and suggested a game of Russian roulette—but it was perfectly sincere. If he ever outgrew the boy scout routine, he would cut quite an intimidating figure.

“Already on it, sir,” he promised.

I could not help but smile.

***

The windows of the hearse were tinted, black near to the point that I could not see through them. I lay in my casket, with only a tiny gap allowing me to take in my surroundings. No shadows fell across the seats as my driver drove us back home. Even the heat of midday could not penetrate the willful energy of the air conditioning.

Of all the long and boring days I have endured in my undeath, this drive was among the most emotionally taxing. I stared out the window, catching vague shapes and trying to decide where, exactly, I was.

The answer was nowhere. I was somewhere between Dulcie’s office and my home, but I felt very strongly as though I had fallen through the walls that divide the worlds into someplace where time did not exist and pain was a commodity few could afford.

The numbness that had come upon me during Dulcie’s tirade had fully settled in and made itself comfortable in the recesses of my body. It nestled into the places between muscles and bones like birds in the large blocked letters of abandoned storefront signs. I could move if the urge truly struck, but I found myself instead just blinking slowly and thinking very little.

A skilled psychologist might have pointed out that this was something one did when one fell into shock. It was also something one did when one was trying very hard not to process something.

Dulcie was angry with me for accosting Vander. My poor, sweet Dulcie, so stupid and loyal and conflict-averse in moments when conflict was precisely the needed thing.

Perhaps I had embarrassed her. Perhaps she simply did not want to seem complicit in the accosting—though, if such was the case, she could have been less personal about it.

Dulcie’s face continued to glower at me in my mind’s eyes. Her mouth moved, but her words were lost to a wind I could not feel. A sense of anger blossomed somewhere deep within me, indignation of the melted-metallic variety, the kind which stung and rang like a gong in a well.

“More than boobs with legs,” I muttered bitterly.

How could she think such a thing?

After everything I had done for her. After attacking her attacker, leaping forward to defend her honor and the sanctity of her person from the unclean likes of Knightley Vander.

I don’t belong to you, she had said. As though she belonged to someone else, to him.

The anger rose and boiled within me. It caught in my throat and swelled like a balloon.

I felt a most confounding urge to laugh, loudly and bawdily, and could not fathom why.

***

I stood before the painting in the basement of my home. The floor was carpeted in beige, the furniture black and bland, the lamps and potted plants lifted from some tawdry suburban magazine. I had intended this room to be lacking, that the color and the virility of the painting might strike the viewer first and foremost.

And it was indeed striking.

The image—Dulcie, in the sheerest gown one could imagine—had been painted by an old master with whom I had long been acquainted. Through my descriptions—my soliloquys, he liked to call them—he used oil to forge the image of a woman. Pointed ears poking through her blond hair, flushed cheeks, lips pursed and open ever so slightly, her breasts pushed together, nipples straining against the feeble fabric.

More than boobs with legs, I thought. How could she accuse me of something so pitifully shallow?

I looked at the painting.

And somewhere, deep within the ancient machinations of my eternally distracted mind, some forgotten cog clicked itself back into place—or, perhaps, it was never in place to begin with. Perhaps this was a new machine, with new and glorious and hitherto unprecedented purpose.

I started laughing.

“How indeed,” I said out loud.

The painting was a worthless representation.

It was not only a pathetic physical rendering, it was a disturbing, insulting reflection. Dulcie had looked upon this painting in the nights before she vanished, and she’d seen herself through my eyes as an ivory body standing demure and vulnerable on a swath of soft green grass.

This was not what Dulcie was.

Was this truly all I had seen in her?

What had I been looking for, when I commissioned this monstrosity, this façade of the truth? What had I been hoping to accomplish?

The answer, of course, was simple and lurid.

This was the version of Dulcie that was not trying to get away from me.

But this was not Dulcie. This was everyone I had ever been with except Dulcie. This was a woman full of sexual energy, begging to be taken and used however I pleased.

What had Dulcie seen, when she’d looked upon this painting for the first time? What was it about her that I worshipped through this craven image? For craven, it was; a coward’s rendering of that which was too beautiful to comprehend.

I had robbed her of complexity, of bravery and wit, and boiled her down to her component elements—and from these, I had taken what suited me.

I was lying, you see, when I said I was not pretending to be more to her than a mere friend. When I leapt to her defense, in any capacity, some part of me always imagined myself to be her conquering shadow, her silent protector. Yes, I played pretend. Yes, I wished that she would thank me, for once, rather than admonish me for a dozen other, lesser actions.

But I must confess something strange.

In these moments, I was not imagining myself to be the kind of conquering hero for whom his princess waits patiently at home. Rather, in my heart of hearts, I was a defender of the very concept of what it meant to be Dulcie O’Neil.

“The Buddha’s name was Prince Gautama,” I told Gerard as he entered the room with a heated water bottle to wrap around the back of my neck. “Did you know that?”

“No, sir.”

“Prince Gautama grew up in a pleasure palace, constructed by his father, that he might never know the miseries of the outside world. There was food and wine and music and dancing. Life was frivolous and grand. And, ultimately, pointless.”

Gerard nodded. “Indeed, sir.”

“But he left,” I went on, as I continued to study the portrait of a woman who was decidedly not Dulcie. The heat from the water bottle felt wonderful on my cold skin. “The curiosity of all mankind beset him, and he peered into the world outside and was horrified. He saw, for the first time, death, sickness, and old age.” The false Dulcie’s eyes stared out and over me at some place no one but her would ever see. Her face was vacant, open. Easy. “And when Prince Gautama returned to the palace, everything he saw there disgusted him.”

Gerard clearly did not know what to say, so he said nothing at all.

“Thus, he left. He shaved his head and put on the robes of a peasant, and he went out into the world to find the truth in all of it. He sat under a tree, determined to die or to know. And by dawn, he knew.”

And so, with this pinprick of enlightenment niggling in the back of my mind, I had a choice to make. I could remain, like Prince Gautama, in the pleasure palace forever. I could immerse myself in blood and sex and wealth, in petty manipulations and grossly idealized women, until the death of the sun itself, turning my face from the windows that led out into the world. I could pretend that my realm of comforts was all that needed to exist.

Or.

“I think,” I said slowly, “that it is time for me to go.”

“Sir?”

I turned to face him and nodded in the direction of the painting. “Dispose of it.”

Gerard’s brow furrowed. He looked between me and the pixie whore on which I had spent so much time and money. “I beg your pardon, sir?’

“Take it down and burn it,” I suggested. “Until nothing remains, if you please.”

Gerard offered me a rather confused bow and scuttled off, presumably to acquire hands to carry the painting to a better ventilated room.

I approached the painting and reached up to touch the grass, to run my hand along the voluptuous breasts of this woman who existed somewhere throughout time. This woman who was beautiful, who looked like a sister of Dulcie’s, but who was not Dulcie in every conceivable way.

And my memory returned to the question Dulcie had asked me most recently.

If her face melted away, what would I do? If I had to close my eyes forever—if I had to erase from my memory her every feature—would I still love her? If my lesser functions ceased to be, could I still want her in a way that mattered?

I dug my fingers into the canvas and ripped it, making four long gashes through the face that belonged to no one.

Of course I would.

What a stupid question.

And it was perhaps even more stupid that I had not been capable of answering the question right there, on the spot.

I had known the answer even then.

But Dulcie frightened me.

Not owing to her bizarre episode. But, in general. She always had.

Dulcie was reality, something from the realm of the substantial and complex, and I did not want to wake up. I had painted over her truth with a dream, something simple and vulgar, something I did not have to look in the eye and consider for what it was. I had forced upon her the image of something I might find in the pleasure palace, something simple and beautiful. And utterly mundane, that I might not have to venture outside the painting’s walls to confront the truth of who Dulcie O’Neil really was.

How long had I spent skating around this complete and impossible truth? How many years had I spent in the company of Dulcie O’Neil, pretending she was something less, that I might not have to attempt to be something more?

How many years? How many months? How many days?

All of them. Every last one. Every day, to the hour, to the minute, missing what was really there.

But I was ready now.

I was as awake as I had ever been.

My eyes burned with a child’s desire to see everything, to comprehend every color, every shadow, every trembling leaf and errant strand of hair. Every mortal thump of the heart. Every tremor of the soul.

Gerard returned with another of my men, whose name escaped me. Together, they hauled the enormous painting away. As a vampire, of course, Gerard could have carried the bloody thing away himself. I had a feeling he’d retrieved this other man simply to allow me enough time to change my mind, if such was what I was wont to do.

But I had not changed my mind.

And I watched them depart with the painting, feeling some relief.

“I am,” I declared aloud, “awake.”

It was as though I had returned from a place of deep slumber, awakened such as the Princess Aurora had awakened. Except the dragon had yet to be slain, and the fair maiden still needed rescuing.

The story was beginning in earnest, and I was just in time for the interesting bits.

And, yet, that story was yet to be unveiled.

For as I had departed the FBI building, Dagan had followed me.

And Darion had followed him.

I did not know there were intruders in my home, however, until I heard Osenna scream.

TWENTY-THREE

Dulcie

The ambulance was twelve-ish minutes out and I was sitting on a table in what was basically the nurse’s office, letting Sam play doctor. Quillan was perched awkwardly in a chair in the corner, elbows on his knees, watching.

“Does this hurt?” asked Sam.

“Yes,” I admitted, because everything hurt.

“This?”

“Yeah.”

She pinched the outside of my arm, but not with her nails. “Okay, this?”

“Sam, literally everything hurts. I am a walking, talking ball of hurt.”

“You shouldn’t be walking, then.”

“Okay, then, I’m a hobbling, bitching ball of hurt.” I wrinkled my nose. “Hades, that’s fucking awful.”

“What is?”

“Dagan,” I answered.

“You can smell him?”

“Yeah.” I fought the urge to gag.

I couldn’t just smell Dagan; I could smell the very specific cocktail of hormones Dagan’s body was pumping into the atmosphere like a factory churning out smog. It was this weird combination of heat, sweat, sugar, ass, and cigarette smoke, and it was clogging up my nose like I’d snorted wet gunpowder.

“What’s he smell like?”

“I can’t begin to explain it.”

“That bad, huh?”

“The actual worst.” And it was getting stronger, too. He’d smelled like that since he’d gotten here, but it was just this vague undertone of “shut up and fuck me.” Now, it was a fucking tidal wave of animal desperation, like somebody had emptied an entire aisle of Axe into the ventilation system.

“What are the odds he’s masturbating in the interrogation room?” I asked.

“Pretty high, honestly,” ventured Quill.

“Is somebody with him right now?” I continued.

“There are people watching the door,” Sam answered.

“Anybody behind the glass?”

“Probably.”

We didn’t get paid enough for this.

Sam reached up and pushed at the lymph nodes under my jaw. “Does this sting at all?”

I flinched away before she could put much pressure on them. “Yes.” I put my hand up to the place she’d touched, which was now throbbing like I’d been punched.

Sam screwed her mouth up to one side. “Dulcie, I’m sorry, but I really am just trying to help.”

Ah, hell. “Sorry. Just—”

“Everything hurts?” she finished for me.

“Literally everything. All of the things.”

Sam nodded and started rifling around in one of the drawers. The room was set up like your typical doctor’s-office closet-space with that little plush-cloth table thing, except without the paper, bland gray cabinets, and a hook-nose faucet spitting the coldest water known to man.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“Something metal,” she answered. “Just a sec...”

She pulled out a little metal scalpel-looking thing and turned to me.

“Um,” I blurted.

“Relax, I’m just gonna touch it to your skin.” She held out her hand and I gave her my wrist. Turning my arm over, she gently pressed the not-sharp end of the scalpel against the crook in my elbow.

“Ah, fuck!” I cried, resisting the urge to pull back. Sam lifted the scalpel.

“What did that feel like?”

“Like really bad stinging,” I confessed.

Sam nodded and made this world-weary sighing sound, like that confirmed something I wasn’t going to like.

“What?” I asked.

“Just, hypersensitivity to cold, swollen nodes, bloodshot eyes, dry mouth, fever.” She trailed off, looking down into the corner where Quillan was sitting. He was watching her expectantly, worriedly looking back and forth between the two of us.

“What?” he asked, a split second before I could.

“Um. Okay, so I’m not that kind of doctor,” Sam stressed. “I mean, I’m not any kind of doctor.”

“Sam,” said Quill.

“And I have no way to actually diagnose this here, or at all, we need legit witch doctors for this—”

“Sam,” I said this time.

“—and I don’t want to freak you out, because I could totally be wrong.”

“Wrong about what?”

“Um.” She looked at me, then at Quill, then back at me again. “Okay. Basically, you’re having an allergic reaction to your own blood… I think.”

“I’m what?”

“I think that’s the problem. Since, you know, you’re bleeding red, and it looks mostly normal red, not like it mixed with the gold, so I’m kind of wondering if there’s some antigen or parasite or disease or whatever in some of the blood Meg used in her transfusions that’s… um…”

“Eating my actual blood.”

“…Kind of.”

“Son of a bitch,” I grumbled, slumping over and putting my face in my hands. “Now my actual body is trying to kill me.”

“…Yeah, I think it is,” Sam answered.

“Okay, so what do we do?” asked Quill. I heard the little squeak of plastic on tile as he stood up too fast out of his chair.

“There’s a couple of things we can try,” ventured Sam. The way she said it, though, didn’t inspire much in the way of optimism.

I groaned, really loud and long. I was just so sick of literally everything in the universe conspiring to kill me. It was one thing when people I’d put in jail came back looking for vengeance; it was something else entirely when my actual blood wouldn’t jive with the rest of my body.

What would it feel like, to die of blood poisoning? I kind of had an idea. My father had shot me in his library with a bullet full of dragon’s blood, and that wasn’t a fun feeling. But I also hadn’t died, or I didn’t stay dead, anyway, and I honestly wasn’t conscious long enough to really feel the dragon’s blood. Maybe it burned. Maybe it was really, really cold. Maybe it stung like I’d mainlined lemon-juice and cocaine.

It stung right now.

I felt like every single one of my cells had a tiny fever. I imagined white blood cells in old nurse’s hats, handing out bowls of soup and warm blankets to red blood cells in sick bays.

It sounded like a slow way to die.

“Dulcie, are you okay?” worried Sam.

“Fine,” I replied. “Just over here having death thoughts, nothing to worry about.”

And then I realized Dagan’s “shut up and fuck me” smell was gone.

“Crap,” I muttered.

“The ambulance is on its way,” said Sam. “We’ll get you to the witch wing and figure this out, okay?”

“We don’t have time for a hospital.” I was already pulling my bloody clothes back on.

“Wait, woah, hold up,” objected Quill. “Dulcie, you just about bled out on the breakroom floor, you can’t—”

“Dagan’s gone.” I hopped off the table, wavered like a spinning top for three really awful seconds, and started walking towards the door.

“What do you mean?” said Quillan.

“I mean, he’s gone.”

“Yeah, I got that, but how do you know?”

“I can’t smell him anymore.”

“So?’

“Quill, I have no way to explain to you how not okay a horny demon smells.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. If I can’t smell him, that means he’s nowhere near the building.”

We all went out into the hallway—a wide-ish space with tiny doctor-patient rooms lined up on either wall.

“Okay, well, where did he go?” asked Sam. “Can you pick up a trail or something?”

“Maybe.”

We ran, booking it down the hallway and into the interrogation room where Dagan was supposed to be.

One agent with a gun was leaning against the wall by the door.

“Where’s Dagan?” I demanded.

“Bathroom,” she replied.

“Did somebody go with him?”

“Yeah, Michael.”

“How long have they been gone?”

“Um, like ten minutes, maybe?”

“Fuck.” I started running again.

Thirty seconds of scrambling later and we were standing over the mostly unconscious body of Agent Michael Paul, who was groaning on the floor of the men’s bathroom.

“Of course,” I snorted, “of fucking course.”

“Hey, Dulcie?” said Sam gently. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you really, really probably need to keep your blood pressure down.”

“Or what, I’ll explode?”

“That’s honestly not out of the question.”

She was right, I could feel it. Just that little spike of irritation was enough to make me feel a whole ten degrees warmer. It was the same way I’d felt when Bram had super pissed me off and my body had basically turned on itself, leaving me in the state I was in now.

I took a deep breath and exhaled as slowly as I could.

“Can you smell him?” asked Quill. “Dagan, I mean?”

I sniffed the air. Dagan’s smell had mostly skated away on the very soft current coming out of the vents, but yeah, I still could.

Groaning, I left the bathroom. “I swear to Hades, if Dagan just walked out the front door...”

I followed the trail, and everybody followed me. And yes, Dagan had just walked out the front door. So much for security.

“Okay, road trip,” I announced.

Christina came running out of the building just then, panting. “What’s happening out here?”

“Dagan’s gone,” I told her.

“Do we know where he went?”

“No, but he left a pretty strong smell behind him, and I think I can follow it if we drive with the windows down.”

Christina nodded and held up her keys. “I’ll drive?”

“Works for me.”

***

The trail led us to a really nice house.

Like, weirdly nice.

It was the kind of place rich people build on cheap land in Oklahoma. In the better part of Splendor, in one of the neighborhoods still being rebuilt from that one time I had decimated everything trying to kill Sam, and that one other time Meg set an army of super-dead things on the city.

Dark wood, three stories, with wrought iron detailing everywhere. It had the look of a French chateau, except it was the wrong color and it had some weird points and angles in its architecture that made it almost look gothic.

Somewhere inside, we heard a woman screaming.

“Osenna,” I guessed, and I threw open my door.

“Then this is Bram’s house?” Quill asked.

“One of them,” I answered as I took the place in again. I hadn’t seen this particular home of Bram’s, but I wasn’t surprised. I had a feeling he owned a lot of real estate.

The more I considered the situation facing us, the more the pieces started to fall into place. Bram must have left the office and gone home to check on Osenna, under Christina’s orders, and Dagan fucking followed him.

Bram should have known better.

I ran up to the double front doors, which appeared to be made of heavy, dark mahogany. I took a breath, pulled my right leg back, and then kicked with as much gusto as I could muster. Not only did I manage to take down the door, but it flew all the way down the hall, where it burst into pieces against the far wall.

Osenna screamed again, but this time the sound was sharply cut off.

“In here,” I called out to Quill and Christina, but by now we could all tell where everyone was.

I busted down the door at the very end of the hall, stepping over the splinters of the first one, and we found ourselves in a massive living room. Fancy red furniture, blackout curtains over every window, big hearth in the middle of one wall. The ceiling went all the way up to the second story.

“Dagan, Dagan, Dagan,” Darion was saying, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. “Still so predictable.”

“Let her go,” hissed Dagan. He was in the middle of the living room, head cranked upward, spinning in circles, searching for Osenna.

“Whatever do you mean?” asked Darion. “She’s right here, come and get her!”

Wind rushed in the room and Dagan toppled sideways, still spinning.

I took a step forward, but Quill reached out and grabbed my arm. Bram was nowhere to be seen. Which was just as well, because he was still on my shit list.

“Dulcie, we can’t see him,” Quill pointed out.

“Yeah, but I can hear him.” I drew my gun.

“You can’t just start shooting holes in the walls, hoping you’ll hit something,” Christina said.

“I can hear him!”

I aimed at a general spot on the wall and fired.

“Dulcie, may I remind you that you are in my home,” cautioned Bram, appearing from nowhere to stand in front of me, regarding me with arms crossed and a furrowed brow.

TWENTY-FOUR

Dulcie

I didn’t say anything, but I glared back up at him while I fired three more times into a few pieces of really expensive-looking furniture. Just because I wanted to. Bram frowned at me and arched one of his eyebrows.

“Sorry?” I asked with a little grin.

“Dulcie,” said Christina.

“Dagan, your friends have come to rescue you!” roared Darion from somewhere up high. “How charming.”

Darion was moving fast through the room, flying, and Osenna was with him, muffled. Like she’d been gagged or paralyzed, or something worse.

“Shall I eat them, Dagan?” Darion continued, sounding like he was having the time of his life. “Dice them up and stew them like mother used to?”

Dagan picked up a chair and hurled it at nothing in particular. The legs broke when they hit the wall. I heard a swoosh in the air, so I aimed and fired again.

“Would now be a good time to remind you that bullets will not work on Darion?” asked Bram, eyeing me with eyebrows drawn. “All they are doing is destroying the beauty of this room.”

“Will you shut up?” I responded.

To his credit, he did. Everybody did.

A thick cloud of terror fell over the room like a blanket, and everyone crumpled inwards like we were a house of cards in the rain. Clearly, Darion was up to his old ways.

“It’s almost insulting how easy this is,” he crowed from somewhere above me.

“Fuck you,” I spat. “Darion…”

Before I finished my sentence, a strong hand—presumably Darion’s—grabbed me by the shirt and hoisted me up into the air. My legs dangled underneath me, and I fought against his hold, trying to twist my way free.

Darion made this deep-throated cackling noise, like he was trying to scare me. It didn’t work, though, and now I knew exactly where he was. I grabbed at the area where he was holding me, pried a finger loose, and snapped it backwards as hard as I could. Even demons have bones that break, and he screamed like the four horsemen were coming specifically for him.

This gave me a pretty good idea of where his mouth was.

I flexed my hand and, as I watched, my nails curved into claws. Then I reached up, hooked my fingers around his lips, and pulled down. Blood sprayed me in the face, hot and swampy.

I didn’t know if Darion just wasn’t expecting me to react like the feral animal I was, but whatever I’d done to him was enough to make him release me. I flailed, grabbing onto his ankle on my way down. I was hovering about ten feet in the air. And the last thing I wanted to do was break a leg; then we’d all be as good as dead. Darion tried his damnedest to kick me loose and managed to nail me square in the face with the toe of his boot. And that hurt like a bitch.

I released him and fell, landing flat on my back on the hard wood floor.

The wind took a hint and bailed out of my lungs like it was being chased, and I spent the next minute staring at the ceiling, trying to remember how to breathe.

“Stop it!” shouted a woman I couldn’t see. Probably Osenna, who was, no doubt, being carried around by the invisible Darion.

So she was with him. Got it.

I got to my feet, morphing the rest of the way into werewolf mode. The change cleared the pain in my head, just like I’d known it would. Lately, it seemed that changing into my werewolf shape was lots easier than attempting anything vampire-related. Maybe it was owing to the fact that I wouldn’t drink blood. I was staunchly opposed to it, because it was… gross. There was also something so carnally satisfying about ripping something to pieces with doggy teeth and claws.

Darion laughed, and his voice bounced around the room in ways the walls shouldn’t have allowed even a little.

Something cold pressed against my throat. A knife. I grabbed it by the blade, which was really stupid but whatever, and pulled down hard, leaning forward so Darion rolled over me and hit the floor with a nice, big oomph. I didn’t feel the blade cut into my hand, but I felt the sudden wash of warmth as I started to bleed. No matter—I could heal myself later. Well, if there was a later.

“Oh, dear,” jeered Darion, a little breathless. Then, from slightly farther away, “That doesn’t look good.”

I jumped forward, hands outstretched, and felt my fingers close around an arm and a throat. I tackled him forward and started to press. Blood I couldn’t see welled up under my palms.

Darion tutted. “Careful,” he warned. “You break her, you buy her.”

Osenna made a choking noise.

“Oh, shit.” I rolled backwards off her. Osenna coughed and hacked and tried to breathe.

Darion was staring at me, totally wordless. That was when I realized that I could now see him. The scarf had come undone around his neck.

“You are such a peculiar creature,” he observed. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

Only everyone I’ve ever met and their mother, I thought. “No, actually, everybody I know thinks I’m stark-raving normal.”

“I cannot touch you,” Darion continued, musing, more to himself than me. “Your mind is… inaccessible to me.” Re-wrapping the scarf around his neck, he blinked back into obscurity yet again.

“Sucks to be you,” I said.

“On the contrary, I find you completely fascinating. I have never met a beast I could not burden.”

“Oh, believe me, you’re a burden.”

There, to my left.

I leapt in that direction and collided with Darion and Osenna, and this time I made damn sure I was trying to rip out the right person’s vocal cords. I found Osenna by her hair, pushed her aside, and threw my fist into the air to her left, my right. There was nothing there.

Darion laughed. I reached around, behind Osenna, and grabbed him by the hair, wrenching his head back.

If he hadn’t curled back with the momentum of the wrenching, I would have snapped his neck like a fucking toothpick. But he threw himself down, turning a backflip in the air. I heard the swoosh of his wings beating madly.

I still had him by the hair, and there was something hungry about the way I was holding on to him now. Something red and angry and incoherent inside me that wasn’t paying attention anymore. I heard myself growling, and suddenly, it was the only noise I could make.

I put my hand over Darion’s face to force his head back. I could feel his smile and I could hear his cackle.

“Checkmate, darling,” he said.

I lunged for his throat, mouth open, teeth longer and sharper than I’d ever been able to make them. I sank them into his skin and began ripping and tearing, shaking my head back and forth like a dog after it’s caught something.

Osenna screamed.

Darion’s laugh got louder, arrogant, victorious. Vicious. Gleeful.

But nothing occurred to me until five full seconds later, when my mouth was full of something silvery-bitter and rotten-sweet. Blood. But it wasn’t Darion’s blood.

“Yes, beastie, feast,” Darion encouraged, laughing, almost hysterically now. While I was still staring at the carpet, he backhanded me off him. I fell, a rain of blood following close behind me.

I rolled into a crouch and cast my eyes wildly around the room. A murderous rage was doing its best to rampage through me; all I could think about was killing him.

I looked down at my hand. Still red, still pouring out like I was trying to show a waterfall who was in charge. Silver now, too, sticking to me like spray paint.

Again, I’d hurt the wrong person.

“I’d love to stay and play, but I’m afraid I have a previous engagement,” said Darion. He was close enough to Dagan that Dagan flinched.

Then, for half a second, I saw Darion again: the scarf draped around his shoulders, but not tied in front, though there was a knot where it clearly had been connected a second before. His arm was wrapped tightly around Osenna. She had a gag around her neck, which was clearly meant to be around her mouth but she’d managed to wriggle out of it. Her hands were tied behind her back. There was a huge bite mark on her shoulder, and silver drops of blood were emptying from it.

I’d never seen somebody look so afraid.

I only saw them for that half-second, though. Then, there was a flash of vibrant blue light, and they were gone.

***

When they say an emotion is coursing through you, they mean it’s like somebody filled a needle with liquid piss-off energy and shot it between your toes. At least, that’s what it felt like to me.

Anger moved through my body like a bad drug, an actual rushing sensation I could feel from my eyes to my fingertips to the balls of my feet.

Dagan was still sprawled in the center of the room, blood pouring out of his eye. I could only hope the eyeball was still intact. There was so much blood, though, I wasn’t sure. He didn’t look like he was breathing. I could hear his heart beating, hellishly fast, so he was alive, but he was barely moving. He stared at the ceiling like it was about to cave in on him, and he couldn’t be bothered to get out of the way.

Fear, and resignation puffed out of him in tiny hormonal clouds.

I heard grunting behind me, and remembered very suddenly that we weren’t the only two people in the room.

I turned around and started walking toward the rest of my group, all of whom were staring at me with wide eyes and a few open mouths. Clearly, I’d put on a show.

“Are you guys okay?” I asked, then remembered I was completely naked. That was the one drawback of turning into a wolf.

“Dulcie,” Bram said as he unbuttoned the final button on his dress shirt and tossed it to me. It took him a long few seconds to do so owing to whatever power Darion had over him. Points for Bram that he kept his attention riveted to my face. I caught the shirt with a nod and threw it over my shoulders, turning my back to everyone as I buttoned the rest of it. I rolled up the arms and faced the group again.

The berserker rage inside of me was falling away, but slowly, like the tide pulling out.

Everyone else in the room wasn’t okay. They were pushing themselves up against the wall, groaning and panting, sweating, pale as ghosts that had seen other, way more disturbing ghosts. Quill was helping Christina to her feet, Bram was trying to push his way off the wall, and Knight was just standing there.

Knight was just standing there.

“When did you get here?” I demanded, shock and something else taking turns attacking me.

“I’ve been here.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but I didn’t care to ask. However he’d gotten here, he was here now and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. And he looked just as out of his mind as everyone else did.

He was leaning against the wall, panting.

And he was staring at me. He looked scared. He looked terrified. Like I’d ripped somebody’s heart out with my teeth and still had it, beating, in my mouth.

I stopped walking. “What?” I snapped.

He scoffed. “You can’t be serious.”

“About what?”

He pushed himself off the wall and ambled forward, visibly furious, even if his body was still trying to shake off Darion’s power. “That was reckless.”

“Which part?”

“All of it!” he yelled, gesturing to the totally demolished living room. “Shooting at an invisible flying demon with a hostage. Biting somebody you couldn’t fucking see!”

“I didn’t see you jumping in to help.”

“Because I couldn’t!” he railed at me, and then shook his head. He walked over and knelt beside Dagan. “You okay, man?”

Dagan didn’t answer. He sat up with Knight’s help, slowly, and looked at me.

“What,” Dagan said slowly, “the hell.”

I realized that my mouth was, in fact, drenched silver with siren blood. It had a really nasty taste, especially the longer it sat on my tongue. I spat out what I could and ran the already blood-soaked shirt sleeve over my mouth.

Some emotionally-sober part of me thought, that isn’t good. But mostly I was mad I hadn’t gotten Darion to bleed more.

“What the hell was your plan?” Dagan demanded. He cupped his hand over his eye and gritted his teeth. His heart rate wasn’t slowing down; I could hear it.

Neither was mine. Actually, I think it was getting faster.

“Kill Darion,” I retorted. “Did you have something else in mind?”

“Not almost killing Osenna!” Dagan yelled at me.

Yeah, well, that was fair.

“She’s fine,” I said defensively.

“Dulcie?” Quill put in from behind me. “Osenna’s literally missing an entire piece of her arm.” He pointed to a lump on the floor, which I now realized was about the volume-size of my entire mouth.

“Fuck,” I swore, but I really didn’t sound like I cared. Which was disconcerting, because I did care. I think. Somewhere deep down.

Dagan apparently decided I wasn’t worth talking to anymore, and he charged—or maybe scrambled is the better word—over to Bram, panic and fury stretching his features thin. “I need the portal ripper.”

“How unfortunate for you,” countered Bram.

“Listen to me, you fuck,” started Dagan. He was trying to sound authoritative, but his voice was trembling, breaking like he’d been roundhouse kicked in the dick. He swallowed hard enough to rattle his whole body.

“I’m sorry, are you addressing me?” Bram glared at him.

“Yes, I am, now give me the goddamn portal ripper!”

Bram laughed. “Absolutely not.”

Dagan was already a staggeringly pale person, so when all the blood drained out of his face, he looked like some dead thing you’d pull out of a reservoir.

“Darion is already gone. Ergo, my investment in your problem is null and void,” Bram continued.

“Darion will be back; you know he’ll be back.” Dagan sounded close to something deeper and louder than tears. Like he was straining to hold back a scream, like his skin was too tight.

“He has already won, Dagan—he’s humiliated you and taken back his lady love. There is nothing more for him to do here.”

“Then why say, ‘be seeing you?’” asked Christina as she shook her head and crossed her arms against her chest, glaring at Bram.

“Because the game isn’t over yet,” Dagan responded, spearing Bram with a determined expression.

“Isn’t it?” Bram shook his head. “It seems quite over to me. I suspect the final image of Darion spiriting away your girlfriend will linger for many years to come,” added Bram with complete disinterest.

“You don’t understand,” Dagan protested, desperation pouring out of him in a thick black cloud. “Nothing has happened yet!”

“I would not characterize what we just witnessed as nothing,” Bram argued.

Dagan shook his head emphatically. “Darion’s barely done anything, compared to the things he inflicted on us in Dromir. Leaving with Osenna won’t satisfy his vendetta against me. There will be something more, something bigger.”

“Did he not make you squirm to your satisfaction?” Bram loomed over Dagan like an obelisk, casting a long shadow over him. “Did you find the experience lacking in some way? Because I, for one, did not!” His eyes narrowed, and anger took hold of his features. “Your incompetence invited a being of supreme power and instability into our world and our city, and put all of us in mortal danger. Forgive me if your desire for a more dramatic conclusion does not inspire me to endanger us further.”

“Bram,” Christina started softly, eyeing Dagan as though she believed what he was saying.

“I don’t want Darion coming back! That’s why you have to give me the portal ripper so I can go after him!” Dagan made a grab for Bram’s pants pocket.

Bram sidestepped him easily. Dagan was flailing, totally graceless. He almost looked drunk.

“I cannot help but disagree.”

“Bram, for fuck’s sake,” I grumbled. “Can you be a human fucking being for literally two seconds?”

He crossed his arms, glaring at me. “No, actually. I am physically incapable of being human.”

“Oh, fuck off, you know what I meant.”

“No, I do not.”

I glared at him. “You’ve really got no fucking empathy in you, do you?”

“I absolutely have empathy.”

I shook my head. “The only person you care about is yourself.”

“What gave him away?” Knight muttered, and honestly, I was angry enough to agree with him.

“I have little patience,” explained Bram, “for incompetence. And I no longer have any real reason to care what happens to Dagan or Osenna. Darion is no longer my concern.”

“And I have zero patience for selfish fucks like you.” I spat in his face, not on purpose—but I was completely livid. Here I was, trying my damnedest to feel literally anything besides skin-tearing rage, and Bram decides that caring is too much work? That he doesn’t need to give a shit anymore because Darion isn’t trying to kill him, specifically?

“Selfish?” he repeated, as if the word were unfamiliar to him.

“The world has already gone to hell, everything we’ve ever known has been fucked sideways!” I yelled at him, feeling my heart rate escalating. “So, can you stop pretending like any of your fucking business prospects even matter anymore? Because they don’t!” I continued, hating him with every fiber of my being. “Meg almost ended the world! We’ve all been to hell and back! And yet you can’t be bothered to send Dagan after the one person he might love? Do you have priorities at all? Or is your life really so sad and pointless that your goddamn night club or whatever the fuck keeps you busy is literally the most important thing to you?”

Bram blinked at me, totally uncomprehending. The vague dying light of the setting sun on the other side of the fluttering blackout curtains flickered across his face, making him look pensive. He took a step back so as not to be within the sun’s direct path, dying though it was.

“I no longer own the nightclub,” he replied staunchly.

“Really? After everything I just said, that’s what stood out to you?” I shook my head and felt like slapping him. “Aside from your business transactions, what do you really have? What gives you a reason to wake up every goddamn morning? Is there anything you even still care about, anymore?” I heard myself say. I was rolling downhill in a barrel—there was no stopping me now.

The world tipped over and I slipped sideways onto Christina. She caught me, and between her and Quill, they got me standing again.

“Do you need to lie down?” Quill asked, concern in his tone. “Remember what Sam said—you can’t get too worked up, Dulce.”

“I’m fine.”

“You need to go lie down,” advised Christina.

“No, I’m fine.” I shook them off and took a deep breath while I waited for the gray to phase out of my vision. “Get off me, I’m fine.”

“I do,” said Bram.

I squinted at him. “Do what?”

“I do still care about something.”

“Money!” I yelled at him.

“No,” he started, and shook his head as he handed the portal ripper to me.

TWENTY-FIVE

Dulcie

I narrowed my eyes at Bram. “Dagan’s got something to live for,” I pointed out. “And she just got yoinked into a whole other dimension. And she’s probably getting her ass handed to her right now.”

Behind me, Dagan made a whimpering puppy noise.

Bram and Knight were both staring at me blankly. So were Quill and Christina.

“You know what? Fine. Dagan and I will go alone.” Tossing the portal ripper to Dagan, I looked around at the group. “You guys are more than welcome to tag along, but if you’ve got better things to do, that’s fine, I guess.”

Knight nodded. “I’m not letting you go there alone.”

“Letting me?” I fumed, crossing my arms. “What does that mean? That I’m incapable of handling shit myself?”

“Dammit, Dulcie, you know that’s not what I meant.”

“It looks like I’m the only one who’s handled a fucking thing here!” I railed, anger overcoming me again.

“Calm down, Dulce,” Quill warned and even though he was annoying, he was also right. I needed to get control of myself.

“Can you stop being difficult for ten fucking seconds so I can help you?” Knight asked. I turned to face him and watched hurt and confusion fall over his face like the shadows of a sunset.

“Being difficult?” I repeated. “Really?” I stepped closer to him. It had been a while since I’d been less than ten feet away from him, and I’d forgotten how tall he was.

Whatever. I could still kick his ass.

“Look, I don’t care if you hate me,” explained Knight, “but I’m sick of you treating me like I’ve got the fucking plague.”

He tried to grab my hands and I pulled them away.

“Dulcie, I’m sorry,” he continued.

“No,” I said and shook my head. “We aren’t doing this right now.”

“Yes, we are,” he insisted. “This is something you need to hear.”

“No, it isn’t.”

He took a step closer. “I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry I didn’t stop myself when Meg glamoured me, I’m sorry I was an ass when you went undercover with Melchior to save my life, and I’m more sorry than anything for assaulting you after I arrested you.”

I took a deep breath and felt everyone’s eyes on me. “I don’t want to do this right now,” I said to Knight.

But he was wearing his stubborn expression which meant he wasn’t going to listen to me. “I’m so sorry I didn’t just shut my damn mouth and listen.”

He closed his eyes. Just for a second, clearly gathering himself.

“But I can fix it,” he added. “I can find a way to make this right, I know I can.” He took me by the shoulders, gently, and the feel of his hands on my body made some forgotten part of me crumble like a sandcastle.

“You can’t fix it,” I whispered but I didn’t pull away from him.

“Maybe not but I want to try,” he said.

I swallowed hard. “There’s nothing left to fix.”

“I love you, Dulcie,” he said and the words caused me to catch my breath. I closed my eyes, willing the tears back. The last thing I wanted to do was cry right here, with everyone watching us.

“Please stop,” I said.

But he wouldn’t stop. “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone or anything. And I’m the first to admit that I’ve fucked up. But, dammit, I’m in love with you and I’m not just gonna let that disappear.”

Rage swelled up inside me, right behind the invading sense of sorrow, sucking everything down like a whirlpool. I pushed his hands away, way harder than I intended to. “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe this isn’t something you can just say you’re sorry for?”

“Dulcie—”

I let out a long, deeply unpleasant laugh. “If everybody can just stop apologizing to me for ten seconds, that would be fucking stellar.”

“Why are you so angry?” Knight demanded, glaring at me like he was pissed his confession had just fallen on deaf ears.

“Angry?” I repeated.

“Is this about Bram telling Christina what happened between us?” Knight asked.

“Knight, for shit’s sake, I don’t care,” I screamed at him, shaking my head. “I don’t fucking care! I don’t care that Bram told Christina, I don’t care that you fucked Meg, I don’t care that you raped me, I don’t care that we never fucking talked about it! What I do care about is that you didn’t trust me!”

Silence. I was tangentially aware of everybody else in the room going stiff and looking away, but I forced myself to ignore them.

I don’t care, I thought. I’m done caring. About Knight. About everyone and everything.

“What do you mean, I didn’t trust you?” Knight asked, in a small voice.

“You just immediately assumed that I was working with Melchior and that I was fucking happy about it,” I said. “It never occurred to you that I was part of the reason the deal at the docks fell apart, or that something had gone horribly wrong and I was being held against my will, or that you’d been lied to by whoever first told you I was up to something. You heard I’d gone bad and you bought it hook, line and sinker. And all the while, I was dragging my conscience through the mud to save your life.” I took a breath. “And don’t you dare say I should have told you the truth, because we both know that—”

“That I would have done something stupid and heroic and gotten us both killed, I know,” Knight finished. I was surprised by the admission.

“Right,” I said.

“I know,” he continued. “But you should have told me the truth anyway, and you shouldn’t have fucking broken up with me.”

“Are you serious?”

“Breaking up with me didn’t exactly make you look innocent.”

I frowned at him. “What, you thought because I dumped you, I had to be guilty?”

“I think breaking up with me made it easier for you to lie to me.”

I felt like I’d been sucker-punched by a lightning bolt. I shrugged away from his hold and pushed him, hard. “Fuck you!”

“I didn’t understand why you did it!” His voice was almost a yell. “I still don’t understand.”

I glared at him. “You know why I broke up with you back then? Because I couldn’t look you in the eye and do what I had to do! I did it because I wanted to keep you safe!”

Fuck. I was crying now, big, ugly, gasping tears.

“You should have been honest with me,” Knight insisted.

When I pushed him again, he stumbled back against the wall. “You’re an idiot if you think breaking up with you made any of this easier.”

“Maybe you’re both idiots.”

We turned and gaped at Dagan. He was standing with a sad, disappointed expression, one hand covering the eye that was still bleeding whole rivers down his face.

“Fuck off, Dagan,” spat Knight.

“I was trying to save your fucking life,” I repeated, still facing Knight.

“You talk about me not trusting you,” Knight said, shaking his head. “But you didn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth. You thought I couldn’t handle it or that I’d do something stupid.”

My heart, honest to Hades, felt like it was going to explode. And not in a good way. “Yeah,” I admitted.

“I would have listened to you,” Knight continued.

“Would you? Would you really have listened?” Dagan asked, clearly butting in but somehow I didn’t care. “You don’t seem the listening sort.”

“Mind your own fucking business,” Knight growled at him.

“Unfortunately, you have made this little shit show all of our business,” Dagan responded with a shrug.

Silence.

“What the hell was I supposed to do?” I demanded.

“You should have trusted each other,” Dagan retorted. “You should have told him you were being blackmailed, and you, Vander, should have listened to her when she tried to explain herself.” He fixed each of us with an annoyed scowl. “It’s really quite obvious.”

Knight looked at me. I looked at Knight. The air between us went stone-cold.

I loved him. I did, I loved him more than anything, but there was this awful distance there, too, underlying everything. Like the quiet rumbling of an engine in a factory. You always know it’s there, but you stop noticing after a while. It just becomes part of the atmosphere.

But that couldn’t be right; Dagan being right felt wrong. Dagan being right felt like I’d clipped through the map into some alternate dimension.

“This, coming from the guy that runs Pain,” said Knight, but I could hear it in his voice. He felt it, too. The weirdness, the discomfort. The vacuum sucking all the air out of the room. Dagan was right and we both knew it.

Dagan glared needles into both of us. “Do you know how I run my establishment? Why people come to me to do terrible things to one another, instead of doing those terrible things at home?”

I paused. I… actually hadn’t ever thought about it before.

“Because Pain is safe,” he explained. “Pain is a place of sanctuary for people who are learning to trust one another in new and dangerous ways. Even if only for the night. The rules are strict and firm in the rendering of that trust, that vulnerability.”

“What the fuck is he talking about?” Knight growled.

I held up my hand and interrupted him. “Just listen. He’s got a point.”

Dagan continued. “Osenna trusts me to stop when she wants me to, and I trust her to tell me if something is too much. Everything is an agreement, a contract. A promise to trust, and to be trusted.”

Knight scoffed.

“This isn’t a game of chess; you aren’t at war with one another,” Dagan continued. “Currently, you are searching through the rubble for reasons to be right, and that,” he went on, looking at me, “is not the point.

I wanted to look at Knight. I wanted to throw myself into his arms and sob until I couldn’t breathe. I wanted him to hold me until the sun came up and went back down again.

But I also wanted to hit him. I wanted to scream in his face and make him understand how much he’d hurt me. I wanted him to feel the ache in my heart the way I felt it, the way I’d been feeling it.

Knight reached for my hand, and I flinched away.

“And so, I have said my piece.” Dagan sighed in my direction. “Let him come with us. I wish to recover my lady love, and the truth is that we need as much help as we can get.”

I swallowed and didn’t say anything. My eyes weren’t sitting right in my skull. I couldn’t figure out where to look.

Bram cleared his throat, reminding me that he was still there. “One can never have too much in the way of cannon fodder.”

The sound of his voice was off—it was icy to the point of emotionless. And the expression on his face matched. Obviously he’d just witnessed everything that had passed between Knight and me and Bram didn’t like it. But I didn’t care anymore, I was well past that point.

“Fine,” I said. I felt cold inside. “Let’s go.”

Dagan opened the portal. The vague, mostly invisible shape hung in the air like a mirror. Knight passed through first, then Bram.

“We don’t have to do this,” Quill reminded Christina in a soft voice.

But she shook her head. “Yes, we do.”

He nodded and followed her through the portal. I watched them go.

“Dagan?” I said before he could step through. He paused and turned around to face me.

“Yes?”

“Stupid question, but how do you… fix something like this?” It felt weird asking a demon for advice, especially this demon—but the weirdness came mainly from the fact that I was, for this one second, totally comfortable asking him.

“How does one cultivate trust in barren soil?”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

I couldn’t read the look he gave me. Something amused, admonishing, a little sad. It was the kind of look my mom gave me when I was a kid and she got called up to school because I’d done something I shouldn’t have.

“What is Vander to you?” Dagan asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

I pressed my lips together, exhaling slowly through my nose. “It’s complicated,” I confessed. “He’s an idiot. But I love him.”

“Whatever you have here, it’s not love.”

Indignation sprang up in my chest like a busted vat of acid. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“What you have is the beginnings of something. But it’s not yet love.”

He stepped through the portal.

I stood for another few seconds in Bram’s living room, looking at the big silvery patches Osenna had left on the priceless rugs. It was a lot of blood. Not as much as it could have been, way less than I’d seen before. But still.

This was… I fucked up.

I walked through the portal with blood on my face.

TWENTY-SIX

Quillan

I thought Dromir would be hot.

Active volcanoes spitting lava into a smoky red sky, dusty deserts stretching for hundreds of miles in every direction, maybe a gas geyser or something.

But it was cold. And it was snowing.

The wind had made deep-valley dunes out of the drifts, and the sky was that flat gray-white of a deep, unapologetic winter. We were standing in the middle of an enormous pine forest, all the treetops stretching way past the edge of the atmosphere. Their bark was smoky black, but it didn’t look natural. It was more like they’d been set on fire but hadn’t burned all the way.

“Does it always look like this?” I shoved my hands in my pockets, already shaking. “Snowy and cold?”

Dagan nodded. “Traditionally, yes.” He looked at me. “You were expecting something else?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Fire and brimstone.”

“How enlightened of you.” He turned to face us, his arms spread wide. “Welcome to Dromir!” He bowed with a carnival-barker flourish. “What do you think?”

I hugged my increasingly cold self and surveyed the big empty fishbowl of a world. Ice, ice, but no baby. Just a crazy demon, a brooding vampire, and a gaggle of federal agents.

“Charming,” drawled the brooding vampire.

“This is where Christmas goes to die,” I added.

“Better to presume it was never born,” countered Dagan.

I gave him a confused, Hades-please-lighten-the-fuck-up look. “What does that even mean?”

“That this has been a dull and upsetting world since its conception. Good things do not come here to die, they are denied entry.”

“Christmas is a good thing?”

“Yes. You do not think so?”

“I do, I just didn’t think you would.”

“Why wouldn’t I? I sell more gift cards right before Christmas.”

“Oh.” Then I paused, confused. “Wait, what do you mean, ‘gift cards?’”

He smiled instead of answering. Which was so much worse than if he’d just said, “Yes, Quillan, gift cards—Christmas sex gift cards, you want one?”

Dulcie stepped through the portal behind Dagan. Then Bram reached over, took the portal ripper from him, and did something to it that made the portal close with a wet zipping sound. Dulcie, meanwhile, had her arms crossed and was staring at the vast expanse of white like it owed her something.

“So, where are we going, exactly?” I asked.

“There.” Dagan pointed. I followed his hand, and through the trees, in a vast expanse of deadly white nothingness, was an enormous crystalline city surrounded by a big, none-shall-pass white wall.

“Oh,” I said sheepishly.

Dagan rolled his eyes. “There’s something about it that skates over the eye, isn’t there?”

“I mean, it’s glass.” Giant, shiny, evil-wizard-casting-curses-on-the-old-noble-families-that-scorned-him glass. “And we’re surrounded by trees.”

“That it is, and that we are,” Dagan confirmed. He sniffed the air and looked up. Thunder rolled across the sky, like Zeus had kicked a drummer down a staircase.

“Woah,” I breathed.

Dagan grabbed my arm and pulled me to the side.

“What—” I started, and there was a liquid-blue flash in the spot where I’d just been standing, mercury-explosion-in-a-stainless-steel-room blinding. The snow sizzled and popped like oil in a pan. Electric blue lines arced and burrowed into the snow, some of them curling around the trunks of trees and zapping the branches black. The light looked almost alive.

“Oh, wow,” murmured Christina.

“Oh wow?” I repeated, incredulous. “Your boyfriend almost got struck by demon-lightning and you say, ‘Oh, wow?’”

“Wowzers?” she corrected with a shrug and an apologetic smile. There was something about the way she was looking at me that was… off somehow.

“Why the hell,” said Knight, looking accusingly up at the sky, “is there lightning?”

“It’s lightning, dude,” I replied. “Clouds do that sometimes.”

“Yeah, fine, but it’s snowing.”

“There can be lightning when it snows,” I pointed out even though I wasn’t sure if that was actually true.

“Demon lightning, Quillan, that’s different,” Knight said.

“Maybe Hades is mad at you?” I asked with a shrug.

“Hades doesn’t fucking care.”

“Fine, maybe God is mad at you?” I said.

“God?” he echoed with a frown.

I shrugged. “Maybe Meg’s ghost is mad at you?”

Knight glared at me and I held up my hands.

“Joking,” I said. “Making a joke.”

“Not a good one.”

I nodded slowly. “This is true.”

He kept glaring, and a flash of fear charged through my muscles like I’d been shocked.

So, one of the things that sometimes happens when you travel between dimensions, especially for creatures of the boogedy-boogedy variety, is the Universe plays hacky-sack with your physical appearance. In the Netherworld, this means my ears get pointier, Dulcie gets wings and her magic doesn’t work, and Lokis glow like their veins are full of fairy lights.

In Dromir, land of the free, home of the demons, it’s a little different.

Here, I was hella pale. Like, day-one-of-the-zombie-apocalypse, body-in-the-morgue levels of paper white—white like dried glue. I turned my hands over and looked at my arms, which just about blended in with the snow. I was tempted to dive into one of the drifts just to see if I could totally disappear from sight.

Bram was cloaked in shadow. It was like he’d gotten sneezed on by a dragon, just totally covered in soot. His eyes were hangry-red and if I wasn’t looking at him straight on, he just looked like an ominous floating dust cloud.

Which was… kind of funny.

But Knight was… angry. I don’t know how else to describe him. It’s like somebody gave an underpaid artist a bunch of red crayons and a Red Bull at four o’clock in the morning and said, “you have ten minutes to make corporate feel seven different kinds of afraid.”

His skin had a gold tint, but it wasn’t sunlight gold, it was molten gold. It was the kind of gold that comes out of lava flows and burning houses. This was the version of Knight that maybe got along too well with Dagan.

Dagan didn’t look much different, actually, except his eyes had gone full-black. And the one that had been damaged beyond recognition was now healed. So there was that.

And Dulcie and Christina. Holy shit. Holy shit.

They had wings. Which, they’re fairies, so that’s normal, but they weren’t the normal Tinker-Bell, dragonfly wings. They kind of, like… didn’t exist? Almost? There was this really vague glitter-dust haze hanging in the air behind them, and it was moving fast, like wings. Their skin was glowing rose-gold, and their eyes, too, the light totally blotting out their irises. They looked a little possessed.

And they were both staring at all of us, smiling weird. Like, tongues-lolling-out-of-their-mouths, I’m-being-watched-by-a-serial-killer-and-I-can-feel-the-murder-in-the-air weird. Except it wasn’t murder, it was less than murder, but they still clearly wanted something from everybody they were looking at. They looked hungry, the way mermaids look hungry when they drag sailors into the ocean.

“Oh,” I commented out loud, because they’re fairies and I’d just made a very stupid connection. “Oh, hell, no.”

“What’s the matter?” crooned Christina. Crooned was literally the only word for it. It almost sounded like she was mocking me, like she’d tripped me on the playground and was asking why I was crying.

She took five steps forward, putting herself in front of me. She touched my lips and let her finger trail down to my chest, pressing her body against mine, and honestly, all I could say was I was really glad Christina had gotten to me before Dulcie did.

Christina blinked and frowned. “Oh, Hades. This is not happening.” Clearly, she’d gotten control of herself for a second or so. But just as quickly, that second fled.

“…Hey, stay close to me, okay?”

“Yeah, good plan.” Her eyes roved over my body. She leaned against me with most of her bodyweight, which wasn’t much. “Really good plan. I like this plan.”

Something fucked up happens to fairies in the Netherworld. They get wings, their magic stops working, their skin glows a little, yada-yada-yada, but there’s more. Maybe it’s because they’re rare, or maybe there’s something way far back in their lore that we just don’t know anymore to explain it away, but fairies get sexy in a weird way. Not airbrushed-model-on-the-front-of-Sports-Weekly sexy, they don’t look any different than they do on Earth. But something changes in the air they touch. It goes nuclear, passing like a wave through everybody that might have a reason to find them conventionally attractive, and those poor suckers melt like butter in a volcano. Like sirens—like the weird gobbeldy-gook, drunk-college-student shenaniganry that happened when Osenna was in my living room. It just takes over. Except with fairies, it isn’t blehh, it’s oh, yeah, give it to me, mama.

In Dromir, it had to be different. We didn’t have the fuck-it-or-die flu. They did.

Great. Fucking superb.

So Christina was all over me, which would have been fine, except that we were in the snowy hell dimension that spat Dagan out into Splendor like rotten candy. I held onto her, mostly to keep her from getting bored with me and accosting someone else. She was trying to kiss my throat and kept missing, almost like she was drunk.

“Not here, babe,” I discouraged her gently.

“Aww, why?” she asked, and her smile was like a millipede crawling across her face. Inexplicable and completely disturbing. “Are you nervous?”

“Yes, one hundred percent,” I confirmed. “Can’t get it up when people are watching, sucks for us.”

“You haven’t even tried.”

“And I don’t want to.”

“We could go hide somewhere. No one will care. We won’t be gone long.”

“Or we could just not do this in Dro-fucking-mir, of all places.”

“What’s wrong with Dromir?”

“So far, literally everything,” I acknowledged. I grabbed her hands. “Later, okay? I promise.”

“Super-duper promise?”

I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes. “Yes, I super-duper promise. Now, can you chill for ten seconds?”

She pouted, bottom lip out, and crossed her arms, slinking backwards into the snow. “Fiiiine,” she whined. Like a twelve-year-old being forced to make something for the science fair with the dweeby new kid.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t thank me yet,” she countered, and she winked.

Okay, I’m not gonna lie. It was taking most of my self-control not to just take her right there in front of everybody.

No, bad Quillan, I admonished myself.

Dulcie, though.

No matter who sex-drunk Dulcie stumbled over to, it wouldn’t be good. Her options were me, Bram, Knight, Dagan, and Christina, and Christina and I were occupied—Christina trying to stick her hand down my pants, me trying to keep her hands where everyone could see them.

Knight was a bad idea. Bram was somehow worse.

Dagan stepped forward, slogging through the snow towards Dulcie, who was looking at all of us like we were birthday cake dripping with frosting.

“Dulcie?” He put his hands gently on her shoulders and smiled at her.

“Yes?” She stepped closer to him, then put her hands on his waist and squeezed.

“You seem distracted. Are you distracted, sweet Dulcie?’

“Very.”

“Perhaps, in service of our greater agenda, you and I should step away and exorcise this distraction from your body, hmm?”

Dulcie leaned up and tried to kiss him. I turned to shoot Bram a look and noticed he was already on his way towards them, his eyes narrowed on the demon. But, suddenly, Knight was on Dagan before either of us could get a word out.

He grabbed Dagan by the scruff of his black leather pimp-jacket and threw him backwards. He didn’t aim at anything, but Dagan caught himself in the gut with one of the trees. He made this airless whoomping sound and fell into the snow in a bright puff of white.

Seconds later, Dagan’s head popped up from the drift, looking like he’d enjoyed that a little too much.

“Oh,” mused Dagan, eyes wrapping around Knight and squeezing like cobras. He looked at Knight, then the girls, then back at Knight, and there was a plan forming behind his eyes.

I did not like this plan.

“I rather like this. Dromir looks good on you, dear friend,” he said.

Knight glared at the demon. Murder was coming off him in slow waves, like how lava flows. “Dear what?”

“Okay, guys?” I got in between them and waved my hands. “Osenna? Darion? Crazy magic psychopath that kidnapped your girlfriend?”

“Yes, yes, priorities,” Dagan affirmed. He hauled himself out of the snow and sighed his disappointment.

“Can you seriously not keep your dick sober for more than five minutes?” Knight groaned.

“No, actually,” Dagan retorted. “I think I would become physically ill.”

This was Dagan we were talking about. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” announced Bram. He’d been standing quietly off to one side this whole time, looking anywhere but at us. “And Vander. We have company.”

There was a rustly, bad-guys-in-the-underbrush sound as half a dozen demons stepped out from behind trees and popped out of snowdrifts like daisies. They were all in this white metal-mesh armor with long white capes, and very few of them actually looked anything like Dagan. Most of them had fair-ish hair, and the ones that didn’t had hyper-dark skin. All of their eyes were black; all of them had that icy blue glow coursing through their muscles. They were tall. All of them. Like, really tall. Tall to the point that Dagan, who wasn’t much shorter than me, looked itty-bitty by comparison.

Oh my god, I thought, Dagan is the angry short guy. He’s pissy and he’s little, that’s fucking hysterical.

I don’t know, it just felt like that explained 99.999 percent of who Dagan was as a person.

I smiled, starting to laugh. A hard look from a blond demon with a big sharp, blue-crackling spear thing shut me down quickly, though.

“By order of Lord Halsir,” declared one of them in a really stuffy, official voice. “You are under arrest.”

Bram’s shadow pulsed, grew, shrank. “Are we?”

More demons stepped out from the trees. Way more. With guns. Big ones.

So, yeah, I think we were.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Bram

Say what you will about demons, but they come prepared.

The blue lightning coursing through the sky was something for which there was no name. It was an ancient thing which had powered the magic of this world since time immemorial. In ages past, it had been worshipped as a god, or sometimes a series of gods, based on the severity of the storms that accompanied the flashing.

It was this same lightning which was captured in the demon’s spears.

If one found themselves in the unfortunate position of being touched by one of these sparking implements, one would experience a violent series of twists, spasms, and jolts throughout one’s body. One would jerk about like a puppet having a severe and unpleasant reaction to LSD. One’s blood vessels, particularly those in the immediate vicinity of the point of contact, would rupture, and blood would pour out from one’s mouth, nose, and—if one was especially unlucky—one’s eyes. None of this was any different than the symptoms one might encounter in an aggressive tasing; but this was magical electricity, so the symptoms were amplified to something akin to the fifty-thousandth power.

This is why, when presented with a bouquet of sparking blue weapons wielded by unwieldy demons covered in snow, this four-hundred-year-old vampire held up his hands and went away with them quietly.

There is a fine line between pragmatism and cowardice. I will readily admit to straddling this line.

Dulcie was in rather a state as we were arrested. Christina as well, though the effect of Dromir’s atmosphere on her person was less pronounced. Both ladies had a sudden yearning for sex of any variety—and any quality, as evidenced by Christina’s interest in Quillan—but Christina seemed more reserved. Perhaps this was because she had a designated other with whom to attempt to copulate, or perhaps Christina simply had more self-discipline. While Christina was making eyes at Quillan and asking the officers if they cared to join in, Dulcie was attempting to bite the soldiers’ throats out with manic glee.

That, or she was trying to kiss them and was making a hack job of it.

And, yes, I admit I was quite jealous. What of it?

The men and women—there were more women among the demons than men, as it happened—were enamored with her. The woman cuffing her smiled and giggled and even allowed Dulcie to lick the side of her throat.

“Settle down,” commanded a woman whose uniform was slightly more embellished than the others. A captain, I supposed, or something to that effect. She sounded irritated, though whether her annoyance was with her subordinate or with the fact that she could not join in, I could hardly say. It had been some time since I had been to Dromir, and my experience with its people was stunted by my need to escape. I could not say if Dagan, his brother, this woman, and Osenna were the sex-crazed norm or the sex-crazed exception to an otherwise chaste and pious nation. Repression would certainly explain a thing or two about Dagan himself…

We were led through the snow along a stone path—one buried to the knee in powdery white that the demons likely knew only by memory—and through the wall surrounding the city by way of what I can only describe as a back door. It blended thoroughly into the rest of the wall, appearing only when tapped with one of their electric barbs.

The door swung outward into the snow, exposing a dark tunnel within. The wall did not seem as thick as this tunnel would imply; but, as has been mentioned already, demons are rather fond of illusions. If they were not so keen on killing every non-demonic thing to happen across their dimensional borders, Dromir could make a worthy go as a tourist town.

The tunnel—a pervasive darkness which could only have been achieved through a heavily micromanaged spell—led forward for sixty seconds of brisk walking, then turned to the left and began a troubling descent into the frozen earth.

And all around us was lava.

“Okay, how… how does this work?” asked Quillan.

“Lava,” replied Vander. “That’s lava.”

“Why, yes, yes it is,” I said. “Bravo, good sir. What would we do without you?” I pretended to consider a moment. “Oh, yes, throw confetti in the air and celebrate your merciful absence.”

“We are in the lava-filled bowels of an actual dungeon,” Quillan pointed out. “Can we please skip the dick-measuring contests?”

I smiled at Vander and spread my hands. “I believe I have already won that competition.”

“Move, or it’s the lava for all of you!” ordered the demon in charge, with the cadence of a C-list actress who knows she has been handed an irredeemably terrible script and is trying desperately to rescue the dialogue from itself. I suspected it was, in fact, a scripted line, undoubtedly written by some proxy government intern to service the dungeon’s aesthetic.

You see, if one were to dip a toe into the magma, one would discover two things: firstly, that it was incredibly hot; and secondly, that their toe was still firmly attached to the rest of their foot. There was likely something genuinely corrosive underneath it all, but the lava in these dungeons—and truly, these were the stone cells of ancient and merciless kings—was not, in fact, lava. It was one of perhaps a thousand cleverly crafted illusions clinging to the walls and floor of the place to frighten incoming prisoners. If it had been anything else, the heat would have collapsed the lungs of those among us who needed to be concerned with such things, and I myself would have been severely uncomfortable.

Vander, being a Loki, might have survived. A disheartening thought, indeed.

We were herded—through a series of pokes, prods, and vulgarities—into cells of stone and something the illusionists had fashioned to resemble rusted iron. The stone walls were, to the naked eye, worn and scorched dry, supposedly by the heat of the imaginary lava; but underneath the illusion, the stones were new, the mortar fresh, and everything had a vague plasticky smell. These facilities were new, and they reeked of mass production.

The locks, to credit the aesthetics, were good, old-fashioned padlocks. Laced through with various enchantments, obviously, to ward against any lock-picking, lock-destroying, or otherwise lock-tampering magic.

Each cell was meant to house one or two persons for an extended period of time. There was a bed—or rather, a cot of straw and cotton masquerading as the great-great grandchild of something that was perhaps a mattress in another life—a small table (absent of a chair), and the kind of questionably-stained porcelain toilet one might find at a rest stop along the highways of middle-America. The ceiling was perhaps an inch too high to touch without jumping. A false window was embedded in the far wall, through which I could see shadows with many eyes and hear the distant but grating screams of what sounded like small children.

Quaint.

“Homey,” I commented. I turned a circle in the center of the space and grinned at the demoness in the door. “Needs a little something, though.” I bobbed my fingers against my lips. “Perhaps one of those motivational posters to encourage one to believe in themselves enough to break free of this odious prison?”

Her expression remained impassive as she slammed the door. It clanged shut with a calculated echo, one that repeated and multiplied down the line in every other cell. The last of the clangs was preceded by a sharp electric buzzing, and the gritted-teeth groaning of someone being thoroughly zapped. Dagan, I suspected.

“Get the fuck off me,” the zappee sputtered.

Vander. Even better.

There was a grunt and a thud as he was thrown to the ground, and the closing of his door was like a bullet ricocheting around the inside of a nuclear reactor. The noise bounced and crashed against every surface that would receive it. My bones vibrated—or rather, a clever, if juvenile, illusion convinced my body that a sound that did not exist was passing through me with such intensity that my very marrow was quaking in its shoes.

The cells, so far as I could gather from the unhappy mutterings of the people now inside them, were laid out in a hallway, seven across from seven. Our merry band was all on the same side, peering across a raised red sidewalk and two lanes of impressive false magma. The cells across the lane appeared at first glance to be empty; but on further examination, there was something held within each. Masses of shadows, humanoid and clumped in the corners, stared out at nothing in particular with glowing red eyes. They made soft whimpering noises that carried despite their distance. If I did not look at them directly, they seemed to be burning, as though hot coals were being rolled across their skin.

Delightful.

The demons assembled single-file and marched away. The fire reached up as though to caress them, and they passed through it unharmed. Most likely a tactic to dissuade prisoners from attempting the return journey themselves. Clever, and irredeemably tacky.

“Come back for me,” suggested Dulcie to the last demoness in line. The creature blew a kiss over her shoulder and winked, drawing an uncannily long tongue across her lips.

I had to admit, I was quite pleased Dulcie was in a cell of her own and not within reach of Vander. And, on the contrary, I was disappointed she was not sharing a cell with me, as I believed the two of us could make our time here pass quite enjoyably.

“Well,” remarked Dagan. I could hear the grin in his voice. “That went well.”

“Did it?” I asked. “Did it really?”

“We’re in, aren’t we?”

“In, yes, but we’re in cages,” Quillan continued.

“Cells, Quillan, cells. There are only bars on the one wall.”

I appraised the space and nodded once. “So there are. But the sentiment stands. We are in confined spaces in which there is no ready exit. I would hardly consider this as going well.”

“You say potato and I say pah-tat-oh,” Dagan replied, rather annoyingly.

“So, what now?” asked Quillan.

“Now?” repeated Dagan, as though the thought had simply not occurred to him.

“Yes, now. How do we bust out?” Quillan continued.

“Bust out?” Dagan echoed, and he laughed. “Oh, we don’t.”

There was a pause. “What do you mean, we don’t?” said Quillan.

“I mean, we don’t bust out. You don’t bust out. I don’t bust out. He, she, and it doesn’t bust out,” Dagan elaborated.

“Okay! I fucking get it!” Quillan roared at him.

“There is simply no way to escape the dungeons of Dromir,” the highly vexing demon finished.

“No way at all?” Quillan pressed.

“Well, they wouldn’t be very convincing dungeons if you could just get out of them, would they?” Dagan pointed out.

There was a thunk as Quillan, or perhaps someone else, dropped his or her forehead hard on the bars. “No. They wouldn’t.”

“So, what, we just wait?” asked Vander, in a voice that suggested he detested the very thought. Not that I was especially keen on spending much more time in the Motel Demonio, myself. Of course, I had an answer up my sleeves but I decided to allow my compatriots ample time to stew in their own concern.

Regardless, Vander’s voice unruffled my feathers. The sound of it was most irksome. It was bad enough that I could not wipe clean from my memory the image of Dulcie and Vander discussing their… relationship, for lack of a better word. Vander’s admission to his love for her had been nothing less than cringe-worthy. I was pleased she had not allowed him re-entry into her heart. He did not deserve it.

“We could play guessing games,” ventured Dagan.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” responded Quillan.

“Dagan, don’t tell me that you dragged us all here to save the alleged love of your life with no semblance of a plan?” Vander asked.

Dagan made a high, disinterested popping sound with his mouth.

“Well?” Vander demanded.

“You said not to tell you.”

“Oh, for the love of all that is unholy,” I muttered.

“And, for the record, I dragged you nowhere. Dulcie did that part for me—thank you, love.”

“Sure, honey,” crooned Dulcie, speaking with the cadence of a Hollywood prostitute from a bad eighties movie.

“And I didn’t see any of you leaping forward with a plan?” Dagan added.

“So, what do you recommend?” Vander asked.

“Die before they come back, I suppose.”

I laughed for it was a humorous response.

“You must be joking,” Quillan said.

“Hardly. There is no fate Darion can visit upon me that I would prefer to death.”

“Even in service of saving Osenna?” I asked.

“How would giving myself over to the nightmarish fantasies of my brother service Osenna?”

“That depends,” I answered. “What are his fantasies?”

“Bram, dude,” interjected Quillan. “Not cool.”

“Yes, because that is what we should be concerning ourselves with now,” I retorted, mostly to myself. “Being cool.”

“How about being fucking civil?” Vander demanded. “And, Dagan, what was the point of coming over here to save Osenna when you knew we’d just wind up in prison?”

“I didn’t know. This has taken me by surprise as much as it has you.”

“I can’t say I’m that surprised,” Vander grumbled.

“I need…” Dulcie suddenly cried out. “I need… I need a man. Now.”

Dagan sighed. “Ah, my dear, you must be patient, for none of us are able to service you at present.”

“Ever,” I corrected him. Then I sighed. “I suppose now the only thing left to us is just to lean back against these most comfortable stones and wait for eternity to pass us by.”

“Bram, for the love of fuck, this isn’t helping,” Quillan groaned. I had a feeling his constant whining would begin to grate on my nerves quite soon. It was a good thing I had a way out of this most discouraging of situations. For now, though, I was immensely enjoying everyone’s discomfort.

“It was not my intention to be helpful,” I replied.

“Then why did you come?” Vander demanded.

“To keep Dulcie safe,” I responded.

“I could have kept her safe,” Vander said.

“Great job you have done so far.”

“Guys,” Quillan warned.

“Great job you’ve done so far!” Vander railed at me.

“We need to put our heads together and figure a way out of this!” Quillan continued, carrying on as if he were Captain America.

“I am all ears.”

“Don’t you want to get out of here?” he continued.

“I’m quite enjoying the ambiance.”

“For fuck’s sake!” he railed at me. “We’ve literally been locked up in a volcano and you still can’t be serious?”

“No, we haven’t been locked up in a volcano,” I explained. “The lava isn’t real. Everything in this place is an elaborate illusion, with the exception of the walls, the bars, and the existence of the floor.”

“Very good, Bram,” said Dagan.

Quillan was quiet for a few seconds. “So, we could just walk through it if we could get the doors open?”

“Possibly, though I suspect there is something genuinely dangerous under the false lava. Acid, perhaps, or spikes.”

“Spikes?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me, actually,” agreed Dagan. “Darion is a fan of the classics.”

“Darion built this prison?” I asked.

“Darion amended this prison,” Dagan corrected me. “The foundation is old but Darion just keeps making it bigger. And worse.”

“Via illusions.”

“Illusions are cheaper than full-scale underground renovations.”

“Fair enough,” I concurred.

“So, what’s the plan?” Quillan pressed. “We’ve got nothing, let’s get something. What do we do?”

“We could persuade the ladies to do something,” ventured Dagan.

“What kind of something?” I asked.

“Something with lots of grunting and touching. They could give us a play-by-play.”

“How thoroughly vulgar,” I remarked, almost wistfully. I had to admit, though, that the idea of watching Dulcie with one of the demon women was growing on me. Perhaps it was a close second to seeing myself with her.

Vander snorted.

“Is something funny?” I asked, irritated at the disruption of my visual of Dulcie one-on-one with another woman.

Vander remained silent, and I was almost disappointed. I would have loved a good verbal row just then. Something to ease the tension.

“What’s the matter, Vander?” I asked, leaning against the bars and resting one arm on the cross-brace that ran at chest-level across them. “Did Dagan’s idea assault your sense of chivalry?”

“Fuck you, Bram.”

“The only person I am interested in fucking happens to be imprisoned between us,” I responded and motioned to Dulcie.

There was a harsh rattling noise as Vander threw his fists against his cage, like the thrashing of a wild dog in a trap, snapping its fury at a trapper just out of reach.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” I cautioned with a laugh.

“You know what? I’m sick and tired of listening to you pretend you’re better than me.”

“Oh, but I am better than you,” I insisted. “You raped your girlfriend on the side of the road in the dark. I don’t know what on Earth you think I could do to top that.”

“I didn’t know what I was doing!” Vander insisted.

“Please,” I scoffed. “You knew. Even in the throes of a violent glamour, some part of you knows; sober you has no excuse.”

“Neither does sober you.”

“No, I am sure sober me does not, either,” I agreed. “But I believe I have had this conversation with Quillan already. Something about—” I waved my hand absently “—my inherent lack of morality or my innate depravity or something similar.”

“Something similar, yeah,” said Quillan.

“I am slightly self-aware, you know,” I continued.

Vander spat his laugh against the wall. “Are you?”

“In small bursts, yes,” I replied. “There is nothing of which you can accuse me that I do not already know.”

“Taking advantage of Dulcie?”

“Of course, often and with fervor but never to the extent that you took advantage of her. I have only ever taken advantage of her time and her kindness. You took advantage of her body and her trust.”

“Nothing changes the fact that you’re the scum of the Earth,” Vander continued.

“I take great pride in such title, actually. I think I have one of those little plastic trophies titled ‘World’s Best Scum’ sitting atop my fireplace mantle in one of my many chateaus. Or perhaps there is one sitting atop each mantle in all of my chateaus.”

“Can we maybe focus on getting out of here and finding the hostage we’re here to rescue?” chided Quillan.

“Yeah, great, break out, why didn’t I think of that?” Vander snapped. “I was just gonna sit here and listen to Bram whine for the rest of my life, that sounds way more fun.”

“I do not whine,” I argued through my teeth. “If anyone here is being self-indulgent, it is you.”

“Knight, for fuck’s sake, can you be professional for ten seconds?” barked Quillan. “Now is not the time. At all.”

“What good is being professional going to do us down here?” countered Vander, voice ringing like a struck gong. “What do you mean, be professional—we’re in a dungeon in Dro-fucking-mir. What do you think they’re gonna do? Call our parents?”

“Knight, dude, take a breath—” Quillan continued.

“I don’t need to take a breath! They’re gonna come back down here with fire pokers and needles and bone saws, and being professional isn’t going to stop them.”

“That’s not what I meant,” huffed Quillan. For all his faults, the little elf-man was exercising commendable patience. Vander was no longer his direct superior; in theory, nothing was stopping Quillan from saying anything that came to mind, however scalding.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Bram

“You just want me to shut my mouth and behave, because I’m the fucking Devil, aren’t I,” Vander continued, his tone of voice raised and angry. “But Bram is just fine, isn’t he, perfect upstanding citizen!”

“I am guilty of many things, but my numerous crimes pale in comparison to your one,” I replied. “Congratulations, Vander, you have outdone yourself and me at once.”

“Can you both just shut up?” Quillan asked.

“All you want to do is accuse and, yes, Dulcie is the victim here,” Vander continued, presumably speaking to me. “I’m the asshole, and I fully admit that but it doesn’t mean I can’t make up for it!”

“You cannot make up for it. There is no making up for what you did,” I said.

“According to you,” he spat the words out. “But you aren’t Dulcie, and she’s the only one who matters here.”

“Perhaps you should be less worried about how Dulcie perceives you and more worried about Dulcie in general?” I started.

“I am worried about Dulcie! I’m always worried about Dulcie; don’t you get how fucking paralyzing that is? I’m a hundred yards away on a good day, and I can’t fix anything because she won’t even look at me!”

He was getting very fired up, which pleased me because an emotional man is not a logically thinking man.

“Why should she?” I asked.

“I don’t know, because that’s what you do when your friends fuck up—you forgive them and you let them try and make it up to you!”

“Knight, this isn’t the kind of thing you can just do over,” Quillan said, bless his heart.

“I know!” Vander threw something against the bars. We spent a long thirty seconds waiting for the illusory echo to abate.

“I know,” he said again, softer. “Dammit, I know. Dulcie, I’m sorry. You have to believe me.”

“Mmm,” Dulcie murmured, a sound like melting sugar.

Vander struck the bars again. “You never have to look at me again, I’ll leave the goddamn country if you want, but please, believe me that I regret everything that happened between us.”

Dulcie huffed loudly from her cell. “This is boring, I want to fuck something.”

I nearly choked on the air.

Well, I thought, laughing. Points for frankness, I suppose. Dulcie never was a subtle creature, I couldn’t imagine being in Dromir was helping that at all.

“Dulcie, Hades,” said Quillan.

“I do not suppose you can get ahold of yourself, my dear?” I asked.

“No,” she answered. “I want you to get ahold of me, Bram.”

“Don’t even fucking think about it,” Vander warned me.

“It is simply the prison walls that are keeping me away from her,” I responded calmly. “Certainly not your idiotic threats.”

The growling noise he made in reply was most gratifying.

“If we stay here, Darion will kill us,” reiterated Dagan.

“We must find a way out, now.” The urgency in Quillan’s tone was growing.

“Must we? I’m rather enjoying the view,” I replied. Across the way, a largish black mass stirred and rumbled. Something oil-brown and viscous oozed between the bars and into the lava, where it hissed and steamed.

“Bram. Please,” Quillan whined.

I put my hands in my pockets and sighed with all the drama I could muster. “Right, yes, we’ve all got places to be, I suppose.” I appraised the locked door in front of me. “Anyone have any bright ideas?”

Clang, clang, clang went something metal against something stone as someone attempted to bully the door into opening. It stopped, and Vander made a most distasteful growling noise.

“No luck?” I surmised.

“Just shut up and try to bust yours.”

“Bust my what, Vander?”

“Just fucking do it!”

I grabbed the bars and gave them a vigorous shake. They barely moved, certainly not enough to warrant the stony rattling that followed. I could not say I was surprised.

“No luck?” asked Vander, without much venom.

“No.”

“Okay, what do the locks look like?” he pressed.

“Hmm.” There was a shuffling noise, perhaps Quillan situating himself by the door to examine the lock. It was a ghastly red steel thing with a comically large keyhole just begging to be picked. “Christina, do you have a hair pin or something?”

The sound she made in reply was not encouraging.

“Christina? Babe?” Quillan hesitated.

The sound repeated itself, louder this time. It was then that we realized it was coming from Dulcie’s cell.

“Is she…?” he started, then trailed off.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think she is.”

We spent an awkward moment standing stock-still, listening to Dulcie as she brought herself to climax. It was taking some time, but she seemed to be enjoying every moment of it. How sorely I wished I could be assisting her.

“Well, at least someone’s having fun,” I quipped.

Quillan groaned. “Bram. For the love of Hades. Locks, doors, murderous demons. Try… I don’t know, blast the lock, or pull it loose or something.”

Vander made an attempt, throwing a ball of fire at the unfortunate lock, and someone else, likely Quillan, was making a lot of jangling sounds as though trying to pry it off with his bare hands.

I did nothing. I had a different plan.

Do you recall what I said about demons being prepared? While their fore-planning is a monumental sight, their moment-to-moment perception is rather more constrained.

You see, what the demons, in all their performed extravagance, had somehow neglected to do was pat us down.

“Well,” I announced, taking the portal ripper out of my pocket. “I think now I am thoroughly fed up with the view. Everything appeared so much cozier in the brochure.” I spun the dial, listening to the steady click-click-click of the magic in its gears reaching through the dimensions. “Shall we take the party elsewhere?”

“Oh my God, you still have the portal ripper,” realized Quillan.

“That I do.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I was enjoying listening to the rest of you fling yourselves at the walls looking for an alternative solution.”

“Haha, yes, very funny. Can we go, please?” Vander was using a tone of voice that makes one think of weary detectives massaging their temples.

“Temper, temper,” I scolded.

I opened a door between the inside and the outside of my cell and stepped through it, into the fiery hallway. The heat, however imagined, was nigh unbearable. The fire reached for me as I walked the length of the hall, popping in and out of cells.

Dulcie first. I was not in her cell for more than a moment before her hands were all over me.

“Bram,” she cooed, wrapping her arms around me and looking up at me from where our chests met. “I need you inside me.”

“I would love to appease you, my dear. But the sad truth is that we must go.”

“Please?” Her voice was seductive and persuasive. “It won’t take long.”

“Hades,” muttered Quillan. “Bram, come on.”

“It’ll only take a minute,” Dulcie purred, hands on my face, body pressed firmly against mine. The sensation of her fingers on my throat was among the simplest yet most titillating feelings I have ever experienced.

“Dulcie, my heart,” I said. I took her by the wrists, enjoying the softness of her skin, observing the strange glow that hung about her. Her wings fluttered madly behind her, but did not lift her off the ground. “Anything I would do with you would take far more than a minute.”

“Get the fuck moving!” Vander groaned.

That only made me stall longer.

“Then let’s take more than a minute.” Dulcie slid her hand down my bare chest, tracing the lines of my abdomen, pressing her thumb into the divot below my ribs. “Lots and lots more.”

“Oh, my dear,” I moaned as I cupped her bottom beneath my button-down she was still wearing.

“Leave her alone,” warned Vander, lingering on each word as though putting spaces between them would force me to pay attention.

I clucked my tongue at him. “Someone’s rather growly today, aren’t they?” I remarked to Dulcie, pulling her as close to me as was physically possible, a growing bulge in my pants practically begging for entrance into her body. Her eyes fluttered closed and she inhaled sharply.

“Bram,” urged Quillan. “Get moving. Demons could be back any minute.”

“Make me growl, Bram,” begged Dulcie. “Make me hiss.”

“You’re really not very good at this, are you?” I asked. I pushed her hair out of her face, my hand lingering behind her head. She took my hand and forced it between her thighs. All my awareness was centered on her lips, her tongue, her breasts, her legs, and the impossibly warm, throbbing space between them.

She lifted herself up on her toes and pressed her lips next to my ear, brushing them softly against my stubble. She looked up at me, or perhaps gazed is a more appropriate word, and bit her lip with dastardly purpose. “Tie me up, Bram.”

Most of me froze solid. Other parts of me demanded the remainder of my largely stagnate blood supply immediately.

I frowned at her, not sure I had heard correctly. “I beg your pardon?”

She undid my belt and slid it out of the loops until it hung limp in her hand. The light in her eyes went out and replaced itself with a most peculiar, mischievous darkness.

“You heard me.”

“So I did,” I agreed, very quietly. “So I did.”

“What’s the matter? Don’t you want me?”

I grabbed her hair, pulled her head back, and kissed her throat with a vigor I had not known I possessed. The taste of her in my mouth was the sound of wolves in the night, the flavor of sugar in a chaser, the smell of rain on the sea. The belt dropped to the floor, forgotten.

When I spoke, I was breathless. “What a stupid question.” I turned us around so her back was against the wall and lifted her up. She wrapped her legs around me and gasped as I returned my lips to her neck, sucking at her skin, losing myself in her completely.

“Bram! Leave her the fuck alone!” Vander yelled. “She’s not in her right mind!”

“Not fair,” whined Christina, “I want to play.”

It is important to note that, while Dromir makes fairies uncontrollably horny, it does not make them clever.

“Bram, Knight’s right. She’s not in her right mind,” said Quillan, attempting to reason with me.

“Don’t listen to him,” pleaded Dulcie.

“Bram,” said Quillan again, more insistently. “You know she wouldn’t let you do this in any other situation, you know she wouldn’t.”

“I’m letting you do it here,” promised Dulcie alluringly. “Isn’t that what’s important? I want you, Bram.”

Yes, cried the voices within me, breathless and insistent, hungry. I was a man lost in the desert, being led to the oasis by an angel of my wildest imaginings, a glittering star fallen from the sky to bend to my every whim. Every instinct pulled me toward her, dragging me into the gravity well of her eyes, her hips, her hands, all of her bright and bloody and brilliant. Such power, such raw energy, fire fit to level cities, to rend continents.

She was asking me to taste her. To feel her. She was insisting.

She ground harder against me, fumbling with the zipper of my trousers. “I want to feel you inside me, Bram,” she continued. “Right here. Right now.”

“Bram! I will fucking kill you!” Vander continued, his voice buzzing about my head like a determined mosquito.

I sighed, then put her down. I pushed her gently away. “The elf is correct, you know.”

She growled, a sound stolen from lions and thunder and jilted exes the world over. “No, he’s not. I want you! I need you! Please!”

“I must ask you to forgive me for touching you at all.” I kissed her nose. “Perhaps we shall continue this later, yes? When you are in your right mind.”

She stomped her foot without vigor. “Braaaaaam.”

“If you will not want it later, you do not truly want it now.”

“What if I want it now and later?” she whined.

Dulcie, my darling, do not test me, I thought. It was taking every ounce of my self-control to keep myself in check as it was. “Then we shall have our way later. In a cleaner locale. Perhaps in a bed.”

“What’s wrong with the floor?”

“Everything, Dulcie. Everything is wrong with the floor.”

She pushed at her bottom lip with her thumb. “We don’t have to lie down, you know,” she persisted. “There’s a perfectly good wall right there.”

Keep it together, keep it together, I told myself.

Never before had I been so vexed by my own mind. On any other day, in any other place, under any other circumstances, nothing but Dulcie herself could have stopped me from doing unspeakable things to her. Temptation was not something I had made a habit of resisting. “If it means so much to you, we can go home and have all the sex you want on the kitchen floor, instead.”

Even her pout was bewitching. “I don’t wanna wait.”

Neither did I, but we rarely get what we want, do we? “I shall make it up to you tenfold.”

“…Promise?”

I took her hand and drew an X across my chest with her finger. “Cross my heart, hope to die.”

“But you’re already dead.”

“Indeed, I am,” I agreed. The fairy-lust of Dromir, I was rapidly learning, made one horny, whiny, and completely stupid. “Why don’t you go ahead and think of some interesting ways to make me feel more alive, hmm?” My hand dropped until my thumb circled her nipple, squeezing it gently. To convince her, of course.

She giggled. “Oh, fine.”

I motioned to the portal. “Off you go.”

She gave me a hungry once-over before walking through it, and I snapped it shut behind her.

Hades, Hades, Hades, I thought, trying to calm myself, but the want she had stirred up within me was that of a wildfire on a windy plain—the moment you think it is gone, there comes another gust and the fire starts anew.

“Bram,” called Quillan.

I popped into his cell. “Do stop addressing me like a child.”

Quillan opened his mouth to reply, then seemed to remember that I was his only way out of this hideous place and that offending me would not be in his best interests. “Right, sorry. Let’s go.”

I cut a portal into the air and motioned to it where it was trembling before me, and he disappeared through it. I closed it behind him.

Christina, when I came into her cell, was sitting on the ground, clutching at the bars with one hand and clutching at herself with the other.

“Oh, hey,” she said, languidly, in the dulcet tones of someone thoroughly drunk.

“Hey,” I replied, and the word felt wrong in my mouth. “It is time for us to leave, Miss Sabbiondo. I don’t suppose I can persuade you to come with me?”

She looked me up and down, which was apparently the only way either she or Dulcie could contrive to seduce me from a distance. “What’s in it for me?”

“Sex,” I promised wearily. “Sex, sex, all the sex you could possibly desire. But only if you get up now and start moving.”

She rose to her feet, pulling herself up breasts first. Squinting up at me, she mumbled to herself, “You know, I don’t think I want to have sex with you.”

Ouch.

“Nothing personal,” she added. “You’re pretty, but I don’t give my milk out to just any farmer, you know?”

“People cannot possibly still be using that metaphor,” I said.

“They are.”

Christina blinked as though waking from a most confusing dream. “Oh, Hades. I’m going to regret so many things when we get back, aren’t I?”

“Yes, I daresay you are,” I confirmed. “But I applaud your self-control. That you are lucid here at all is a testament to something, I am sure.”

“Thanks.” The thirsty air of the place seemed to descend upon her all over again, and she stumbled back like she was trying to get away from it. A smile slipped across her face and fell to the floor almost at once.

“Perhaps you should go, before you do something we will both regret,” I advised. Nothing against Christina, of course, she was as lovely as ever; but there is something inherently less sexy about someone to whom you have been giving your false paperwork for half a decade. I don’t know what all the fuss with secretaries is about. Must be the glasses.

Christina walked towards the portal, patting me on the chest as she passed. “Great idea.”

She stepped through, and I closed it.

I stood before Vander’s cell. I waited. And I smiled.

“Well. That was fun, was it not?” I asked.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Not in the slightest,” I responded. “In fact, I find this whole endeavor quite serious. Were you paying attention?”

“To what?”

“To Dulcie and myself.”

“You’re a sick fuck, you know that?”

“So I’ve been told. Answer my question, please.”

“Why the hell does it matter?”

“Because I am trying to give you an object lesson in self-control. Look me in the eye, Knightly Vander. If I, of all creatures in the world, could stop myself from ravishing Dulcie when she wanted it with the fervency of a drowning man scrabbling for the surface, how could you, of all people, continue when she so vehemently asked you to stop?”

He threw himself full-force against the bars. They rattled with an exaggerated clanging sound.

“Careful, friend,” warned Dagan. “He’s baiting you.”

“Yeah, I can fucking see that.”

“Can you? Because it looks an awful lot as though you’re rising to it.”

“I’m not.”

“Throwing yourself at the door isn’t rising to his bait?” Dagan asked, the disbelief evident in his tone.

“Okay, you know what?” railed Vander. “I don’t need to hear about self-control from a vampire and a goddamn demon.”

“Do as I say, not as I do,” Dagan said dismissively. I could not see him, but I imagined him leaning up against a wall, examining his nails with affected nonchalance.

“You have not answered my question,” I pointed out.

“What question?” demanded Vander.

“How did this vampire,” I said, “manage to stop himself from fucking the brains out of the object of his every fantasy when you, yourself, could not? What do I have that you apparently lack?”

“A superiority complex,” he retorted quickly.

I tutted again. If I was hesitant about this plan before, I was stone-certain now. “Dear me, what an awful lot of growing up you have to do. Such a pity you won’t get the chance,” I said. I clicked the portal ripper’s dial forward, back, forward a little more.

Knight watched me with apprehension. “What are you doing?”

I could not have stopped myself smiling if I tried, and I had no intention of trying. “No one will miss you if you are gone. Least of all me. Perhaps Dulcie will, in the beginning, but time will pass and she will come to understand that all of this really was for the best.”

“What are you talking about? What are you going to do to her?”

Honestly, such a cliché thing to ask me. As though he was truly too stupid to figure it out. “To her?” I echoed. “Not a thing. I will continue to protect her as I have always done.”

He shook his head at me in abject confusion.

I smiled. “Alas, poor Vander,” I said. “I hardly knew thee.”

Vander’s eyes widened. “Bram.”

The portal opened behind me, a vague, watery circle hanging in the air. Practically invisible, but Vander could still see it.

“Bram, no.”

“Bram, yes,” I corrected.

The fear swept visibly across his face. The brightness in his skin, the peculiar redness in his eyes, flashed with the light of a distant explosion. He glanced at Dagan before he looked back at me again. “You can’t leave us here, they’ll kill us.”

I chuckled.

You know, the word chuckle is so overused, I think it has lost its original luster. It is a sound like gurgling water in the pitch darkness of a cave, of an oil slick boiling up from a ruptured pipe. It is the sound of the night sky distilled, a barrel of abandoned wine bobbing in a thunderstruck sea. It is a sound reserved for the dark, the uncaring, the stark and the malicious. It is a sound of unapologetic glee, of primordial sarcasm.

This, my friends, is the sound I made in that burning hallway.

“Why, yes,” I agreed. “Yes, they will.”

“No,” shouted Vander, clutching at the bars. His voice echoed back at him as a ghostly taunt. “No! Bram, don’t you fucking dare!”

I waggled my fingers at him. “Now you’ll never be able to harm a hair on her beautiful head ever again.”

With a single step back, I let the portal swallow me. The dungeon blurred and disappeared, and Vander’s screaming cut off with a bright popping sound as the door closed in front of me.

What a stunningly productive day this was turning out to be.

The End

THE GHOULS OF WRATH

Dulcie O’Neil #12

By

H.P. Mallory

The Ghouls of Wrath

Copyright © 2020 by H.P Mallory

All rights reserved.

Ebook Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

ONE

Dulcie

I closed the portal behind me before anyone could follow.

I was in a different spot in Dromir this time. There were no trees and no snow, only great hulking masses of glittery black stone. The walls to my left and right, imperfectly carved away to expand the space, were an entire football field apart. Dripping water and scuttling bugs were the only sounds, and they echoed like the footsteps of a giant. The ground was covered in sand—fine grain, still warm somehow, despite being as deep underground as this place felt. The ceiling disappeared into a vault of black nothingness, and the only light came from patches of very industrious glow worms.

Hooray for vampire vision.

I looked down at the portal ripper, now just a colorless shape in my hand. I waited to feel panic—some urgent need to open the door and let everyone through—but something inside me said no. Specifically, it said don’t bother.

Anger blossomed in my stomach. I clenched my jaw and stuffed the portal ripper into the pocket of my jeans. They were women’s pants, so the pockets were thin and small and pathetic, but they were just deep enough to make sure the portal ripper wouldn’t squeeze its way out when I inevitably had to run from something. It bulged against my thigh, stupidly noticeable, but it would work. I wouldn’t drop it, at least.

Hades, Christina was going to kill me when I finally got back to Splendor. So would Bram and everyone else, for that matter. But Christina was the one I really needed to worry about. She was the head of Humane Resources. She could totally suspend me for this.

“This” meaning stealing the portal ripper and slingshotting myself back into the fuck-it-or-die dimension to rescue a masochistic demon and my ex-boyfriend—and doing all of the above alone.

What a goddamn sentence.

I could feel the atmosphere taking me over now. It wasn’t possession—there weren’t ghosts hanging around waiting for sweet, sweet fairy bodies to steal—but it was like hotboxing in a very small car, only you’re not one of the people smoking.

It settled over me like a misting rain. I felt it first on my skin, a prickling sensation, the sudden rush of cold like coming out of the water into a stiff breeze. Then, in my throat, there was a sudden urge to swallow, and a thin, hollow clanging in my stomach. A shiver ran through me, sharp as lightning. My whole body contorted with it. Honestly, “writhed” is probably the best word. It bounced around my body like a penny in a light socket, from my toes to my eyes to the more problematic places.

And then the bad stuff settled in.

I wanted to touch myself. Like, urgently. I desperately needed to just drop everything, strip naked, and go to town in this pissy little cave. It didn’t matter that it was totally unsanitary, or that there were little bugs and growly things scurrying around in the dark, or that I might not be completely alone down here, or that I was definitely running out of time to save Dagan and Knight.

I wanted it. I wanted it bad. I wanted sex like a spoiled child wants a limited edition Pokémon card. It was stupid and totally unnecessary, but dammit, it was right there. And it would be so nice to have, wouldn’t it?

Okay, so, funny thing about fairies in Dromir: In the Netherworld, everyone wants to fuck us; in Dromir, we want to fuck everyone.

And I mean everyone. I just about threw myself at Dagan the first time we came here, which is something I will never live down. Like ever.

Ever.

But I wasn’t going to puss out on Knight and Dagan just because I couldn’t handle being a little horny. Okay, a lot horny.

I knew this was going to happen. I’d known my desire was going to be strong and distracting when I came back here. Christina spent a hot minute yelling about it before I said, “fuck it” and went through the portal without her. Not that she would have come, anyway. She didn’t like what the atmosphere did to her brain.

I didn’t like it either, but I wasn’t going to puss out on Knight and Dagan just because I couldn’t handle being a little horny. Okay, a lot horny.

Maybe you could take care of yourself for just for a second? Just one little, silly second that won’t matter.

I clenched my fist. Or maybe zero seconds, because I don’t have the fucking time for this. I’ve got a stupid ex, a siren, and her very stupid demon boyfriend to save.

I crossed my arms and started stalking forward, scowling at the floor, pouting like a toddler.

Okay. Deep breaths, Dulcie.

I could do this. I could totally do this.

But that damn need wasn’t going away any time soon and the longer it stayed, the more it nagged at me.

Maybe I could just chill here for, like, five minutes. You know, just to get this need out of my system.

Something gurgled off to my left. It might have been water, it might have been rocks, or it might have been a pissed off animal, but it made me jump—which was good, because my hand was halfway to my pants already. I pulled my hand away and crossed my arms again, digging my nails into my skin to try and keep them there. I heard zipper noises in my head.

This was going to suck so fucking bad.

Honestly, the fuck-impulse wasn’t even the worst part of my plan.

Just walk, Dulcie.

The longer I walked, though, the more the smell of the place started to strike me. Wet stone, but also urine, shit, and fur—not super strong, but the stench was everywhere. The smell of smoke came drifting out of nowhere, warm and damp, like when they burn out the grass on the side of the road, slightly sweet.

I wondered what kind of furry animals Darion might keep in a place like this. The obvious answer in a cave was bears, but that didn’t seem like Darion’s style, unless he’d figured out how to make them breathe fire or something. Giant bats, maybe—Melchior had liked those. Or maybe just really big dogs.

Or spiders. Caverns full of webs and big Shelob things, twisting up animals and drinking their insides.

Magic eight-ball says, “outlook not so good,” I thought.

I walked. For a bit.

And then things started… malfunctioning.

My throat closed.

I dropped, skinning my knees on the stone floor, grabbing my throat because that’s what you do when you can’t breathe. My bones were… fuck, it felt like they were stretching. Nothing was happening physically, nothing visible anyway.

It was like when you’re dizzy and the room seems to spin, but it never actually makes a full revolution. It tilts and then resets itself, and then the same thing happens again and again and again and again.

It felt like something deep in my muscles was pulling and tugging and squeezing itself back together. Like my bones had a heartbeat. Like something was stuck inside me and was trying to push itself out.

My stomach gurgled, lurched. A gag rippled through my whole body. My mouth filled with something slimy, and when I opened it, a gooey splat of blood dropped out.

Ten, eleven, thirteen seconds. It didn’t last long.

I collapsed sideways. All my muscles were screaming, but I tried to convince myself I was okay.

Like the dog in the burning house.

This is fine.

The blood, though. The gob of it I’d spat out of my mouth was inches from my face, and something was wrong with it. It was red, which was already bad, but there were specks of black floating in it.

Thump, thump, thump.

A noise, thick and loud, came from inside the walls. Something was doing a lot of wriggling in the rock face.

The wall bulged and collapsed outward, revealing a large red nose. It sniffed the air, and something very big crawled into the body of the cave.

A crocodile.

Twenty feet long, smoky red. Steam puffing from its nostrils. Big scaly boy, scuffling around in the sand like it was looking for something. I watched its head arc from the wrong end of the cave all the way back over to me, and its eyes flashed blue.

“Fuck,” I muttered.

The crocodile sat up on its hind legs and roared at me: a big, echoey sound that I was reasonably sure crocodiles shouldn’t be able to make.

I snapped my fingers and flung a fireball at its face.

Except I didn’t, because it didn’t work.

I looked at my hand and snapped again. There was a fizzling spark, but no fire.

Alarms were going off in my head. Something wasn’t connecting. My blood was red and black and now something wasn’t connecting so I couldn’t—

Okay, just breathe.

I snapped again. And again. Frantically, glaring at my hand and breathing faster than was probably healthy.

The crocodile closed its mouth and scuttled across the ground at me, almost faster than my eyes could follow. Pain blossomed in my stomach and I fell back, rolling away.

My muscles went to jelly, slick and watery and useless. I braced myself on the wall, tried to stand, and fell, slicing my hand open on the way down.

More red and black blood. Fantastic. Just fucking superb.

I felt around my belt and my pockets for my gun—which was somehow still there, clipped into its little holster. I drew, aimed (poorly), and fired.

I hit it square in the eye—I was going for its throat, so yay for small miracles—and it lurched, screaming, but it didn’t seem hurt so much as slightly annoyed.

“Motherfucker,” I said. Eloquent as ever.

Then there was something else in the cave with me—a presence, oppressive, sucking all the air out of the room.

Let me help you, someone said.

Oily, a sound like ink sliding down your throat. The same voice that talked to me when I nearly force-choked Bram into the next life.

“Who’s there?” I asked, looking around.

Shadows curled out of my fingertips in a freezing mist. I felt dizzy, nauseous, like I’d been yanked out of the timestream. I was moving too fast and too slow at the same time.

“Who’s there?” I said, louder this time.

Who do you think?

“This isn’t funny. Where are you?”

Where I have been placed—within you.

I went cold all over. “…What?”

That’s right, we never got a chance to tell you. Greetings, little blonde one. I am that which Meg called—

“No,” I said.

I stepped backwards, not really going anywhere. Just completely wigged. “No, no-no-no, that’s impossible.”

Well, nothing’s impossible, really.

“Get out,” I said, shaky, determined. “Get out, right now.”

Let me help you.

“No.”

I can help you. I can make everything easy.

This isn’t happening. “Get out of my head!”

I will help you kill the crocodile. It will be painless for the beast. Quick, simple, clean. All things should be clean, shouldn’t they?

“Just shut up.”

Please. Let me do this for you.

“Fat chance.”

This wasn’t happening. This was not happening.

You will run yourself clean of bullets trying to kill it. Let me help you, Dulcie.

“Stop talking to me.”

I fired again. The crocodile twitched backwards, roaring in pain, then came charging straight at me.

That will not hurt it, Dulcie, the voice said irritably.

I fired again. And again. The crocodile kept coming. It was very fast.

Cold crept into my hands. Shadows bled out of my fingertips.

Fight it, it said. Fight it. Take my power and fight it.

“No.”

The crocodile kept coming, and then I was out of ammo.

I ran.

***

Through the caves, through thin tunnels and over boulders, under a half-collapsed ceiling. All around me, things glowed, letters I couldn’t read etched into the walls, holes that might have been windows or doors. Old parts of the dungeon, maybe, holding cells that had fallen out of use.

That was foolish of you.

“Will you just…go…away?” I asked, panting. I’d put some distance between me and the crocodile, so I stopped, leaning against the wall. Breathing was taking way more effort than it should have.

Let me help you.

“No.”

You need me, Dulcie. I can be very generous with my power. … Don’t you miss being a Regulator?

I blinked. I said nothing.

You were so good at it, too. It’s such a shame about the agency.

“First… of all… bitch… you made me do that,” I gasped.

No, my darling, Meg made you do that. I would never have asked you to do something so terrible.

“Sure you wouldn’t,” I said. I stood, locking my fingers behind my head. I couldn’t have been running for more than thirty seconds, but I felt like I was going to collapse. And I was weirdly dizzy.

Are you all right? Asked the voice. Asked the goddamn Darkness. It sounded genuinely concerned.

“I’m fine,” I said, “and fuck you for asking.”

Are you certain? You are bleeding.

I looked down. Yeah, right there, across the front of my stomach—a thick, leaking red line. I was solid red from there to my knees.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

Allow me, said the Darkness.

Shadows appeared around the wound, crowding in until I couldn’t see it anymore. There was a needle-stab of pain. When the clouds cleared, the line was gone. So was any blood I’d lost.

“Holy shit,” I said. Magical healing wasn’t weird. Magical self-healing was very weird; using your own magic, your own energy stores, to heal yourself was a very robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul way to solve your problem. The pain, the wound, whatever was wrong, just migrates to somewhere else in your body. Closing a tear in your stomach might give you the grandmother of all migraines, that kind of thing.

You see?

“How the fuck,” I said.

I can help you. I can make you stronger, so you never have to worry about your friends again. With me, you will be able to protect them from anything in the world. Even Hades will fear you.

“Sorry, not listening to the evil voice in my head telling me to take over the world.”

I said nothing of the kind. I can give you power. What you do with this power is up to you.

I snorted and slowly started walking again. “What a fucking trap.”

It didn’t say anything for a second, but I could feel it suppressing something—a sigh, a groan, maybe a curse. I believe we have gotten off on the wrong foot. I am what remains of that which Meg referred to as the Darkness. I am your friend. I am here to help.

I laughed out loud. “Sure you are, sweetie.”

I am not the monster you think I am. I am here to render aid in whatever capacity you wish.

“That sounds like a ‘you’ problem, not a ‘Dulcie’ problem,” I said.

Come now, wouldn’t you like to be able to tell such a careless, apathetic god to screw off? Would it not have been cathartic to tell Hades to go fuck himself?

That didn’t sound bad, actually. So much went wrong so often in my life, having an easy out would be fucking amazing. And Hades was kind of a prick, so that did sound nice, I had to admit.

Darkness equals world-ending fuck-you Evil, so, no thanks. I would not partake of the cursed goodie bag.

“Stop pretending you want to help me,” I said. “What do you really want?”

I do want to help you.

“Bitch, what did I just fucking say?”

It sighed. Fine. As much as I do want to help you, I also want a host body, through which I can see and experience the world.

“A host body?” I repeated. “A host body? You realize how shady that sounds, right?”

It is not what you think. I am simply curious about the world.

“Curious? Really?”

Yes.

“You just want to go to Disney World and Glacier Park.”

I have heard interesting things about Great Wolf Lodge.

WTF? “Is that all you wanted from Meg? To go sightseeing? Is that what the literal goddamn zombies were for?”

Yes. Not the zombies; Meg went mad with her love for you—that was her own doing, not mine. It paused. I am sorry I could not save her. She was obsessed. I was not prepared for that.

“Save her?”

She could have been good for you, in another life. But she caved to the wants and fears of a desperate mother. I was powerless to stop her.

“Mother of all war crimes, maybe,” I muttered.

Forgive me.

“Hades will fear me, but you can’t stop a single vampire from raising an army of homebrew zombies in my own fucking house?”

It was Meg’s will. I could not violate that.

“…Her will,” I repeated slowly.

Yes. The will of all creatures is not mine to take. The body, perhaps, but not the mind. I despised the glamor Meg imposed on you, but it was what she wanted, and I could not persuade her otherwise. For this, I am deeply sorry.

“Yeah, no… magic eight-ball calls bullshit.”

I understand your anger and your distrust. Meg was a poor choice for a host. I did not realize this until it was too late to choose another. Though I did convince her to prepare you for me, for when you inevitably killed her.

I froze. I swallowed. Hard.

“Prepared me?” I said, voice cracking. “Are you kidding me? What does that even mean?”

But I knew. I fucking knew.

Did you think your strange blood was an accident? An experiment? Meg, I realized, was not strong enough to carry me, but perhaps you would be, with some alterations.

I turned my hands over. My fingertips were black and absolutely freezing, the weird fog dancing around them in ribbons. I still felt like I was going to vomit. “Well, those alterations are killing me, so thanks for nothing.”

Only because you are fighting me. Submit, and I will bring balance to your body.

“Oh my God, what a shady thing to say.”

On my honor.

“Your honor? You don’t have any honor.”

On my honor as a god and as one who relies upon the wellbeing of your body for my continued existence in this world.

“Fix it now, and maybe I’ll have a tiny, tiny, tiny reason to trust you.”

I cannot fix anything until you accept me into you.

“You literally just closed up my stomach like twenty seconds ago.”

This is different. This is an internal equilibrium, one of the mind, the body, and the soul. It is not as simple as sewing something shut. I cannot bring about this balance until you give me access to you.

“Can’t or won’t?”

Hmm… I confess, it is both. I want you to allow me to stay.

“So I can kick you out if I want?”

It is not so simple as that. I am a part of you now, woven into your blood by your predecessor. I can no more be removed from you than your heart or your lungs. Remove me, and you would likely die.

“Great thanks,” I said. “And Meg is not my predecessor.”

In me, she was. Not a good one, obviously, but she came before you, though she failed. You will not fail. You will be strong and wise, and you will use my power to do great things in the world. Pause. You could rebuild the Association of Netherworld Creatures.

“With what, zombies?”

With influence. With shadow workers that do not tire. With strength and coercion. With infinite time. It would be a small matter. A drop in the ocean of your legacy.

“I don’t want a legacy.”

It does not matter. You already have one. Whether it begins or ends with the death of the Association in Splendor is up to you.

“Fuck to the no, my dude.”

You hate the FBI, it said. The offices are cramped and full of humans who do not understand you. It is not their fault, but working with them is difficult, isn’t it? A reminder of everything you have lost. Of how little support your kind has in the world at large.

I grimaced. Magical creatures lived in sanctuary cities like Splendor and Estuary for a reason. We weren’t wanted anywhere else, and nothing had ever made that more clear to me than trying to work with a bunch of humans with guns. Friendly faces were few and far between.

I could earn you those friends. I could teach them to fear and love you the way the Pharaohs were feared and loved.

I felt cobwebs of complacency settling over my shoulders and shook them off, walking briskly into the dark. Even my combined vampire-werewolf-etc. eyes were having trouble making out the walls. “Yeah, I’m not looking to dominate the world, okay? So shelve the evil mastermind stuff.”

If all you want is the ANC, that is all I shall give you. I am simply laying out your options.

“My options?” I said. “Since when were you giving me options? I haven’t been able to make my own goddamn choices since before Knight got arrested, you fucking prick, okay? So don’t pretend to give me options.”

Fuck, now I was crying. Not heavily, just little, angry tears. I swiped at my eyes and huffed as I walked.

But you do have options—many of them. Thousands of paths lay before you. It paused. Through me, you can do everything.

“…Everything,” I said. “Everything everything? Infinite cotton candy everything?”

Yes, of course. The laws of your world are easy to manipulate. Whatever you want is yours to take, by whatever means you wish, legal or otherwise.

“Whatever the hell I want?”

Whatever the hell you want.

“Anything?”

Anything at all.

“You not being in my body anymore anything?”

It sighed. Anything but that.

“Didn’t think so.”

But then. Then I had a thought. A stupid, childish thought, but I had it, and the Darkness heard.

Yes, I can. It will take time, but I can do this thing for you.

I swallowed. “No, you can’t.”

I can. Why would I lie? I have much more to gain by being honest with you. Telling you “no” would not harm our relationship as it stands.

“Which is where, exactly?”

Tentative. Budding, I hope.

Budding. A budding friendship with a literal anti-god. One who was making me a lot of hollow promises. “That’s not fucking possible.”

Says who? You have died before, haven’t you? You have seen the other side and returned. It is not such a difficult place to come back from.

“That was different.”

Why?

“My mother was there.” I wasn’t pulled back, I was pushed. And I hadn’t been dead for very long. “I think she helped me.”

Hmm. Perhaps she lingers at the edge of the world, waiting for you to come into your power and bring her back to you.

“No.” Absolutely fucking not. Mom wouldn’t have anything to do with the Darkness. She’d die first.

Or perhaps not. I did not mean to offend.

“No, I mean, no, you can’t. You just can’t, okay? That’s not something people can just do.”

But it is something I can do.

Yeah, no. Mom would not be okay with this. Mom would skin me alive for even considering it.

She would forgive you. I am sure she misses you dearly.

“Shut up,” I said. “You don’t know anything about it.”

Don’t I? I can feel your pain, Dulcie. I am within you. I am a piece of you. I am held in the same sacred place as your memories, as your soul. I am integral to that which anchors your body to this life and that which will carry it to the next. Your pain is my pain, sweet child. I would alleviate it wherever I could, if only you would allow me.

“But you need something from me,” I said angrily. “To do what you’re saying, you’re not just gonna bring her back because you can. You want something. You always want something.”

The more you do for me, the more power I can give you, said the Darkness.

And theeeeere it was, folks.

“Yeah, we’re done here,” I said, tears streaming down my cheeks. I climbed over a rockfall like I was storming out of a room. Which didn’t work because the conversation I wanted to leave was in my head, but it still felt good. I wished I had a door to slam.

I could make you a door.

“What, just to pretend to slam it in your face?”

If that would make you feel better, then of course. Your wellbeing is my wellbeing.

“And what do I have to do in exchange for a door?” I asked. “Lose a body part? Kill an animal? A person? How am I paying for this shit? Blood? My soul?”

Don’t be so dramatic. All I desire is friendship.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

I have no reason to kid. The more you trust me, the more I can help you.

“Yeah, that is not what you said before.”

Of course, I will want favors, said the Darkness. I want to see the ocean, and to climb mountains through you.

“And not to, say, take over the planet and kill everyone on it?”

Why would I want to do that? It sounded like it was laughing. What could I possibly want with a world like this?

I turned sideways to get between a boulder and the wall. I had so much sand in my shoes already. “It’s what you were trying to do with Meg, isn’t it? Use her as a door or something, squeeze into the world and make it your bitch?”

No one is my “bitch,” said the Darkness haughtily. I am not a master, only a guide and a servant.

“Then what was happening there?”

Meg was losing control. She wanted to find you and used the power I had already given her to do terrible things. She lost hold of me, and I began to slip through. This was not my intention.

“Sure it wasn’t.”

I promise you, such is the truth.

Yes, because I’m gonna bank on the pinkie promise of the Darkness. “And I guess you didn’t want to kill the president either?”

No, I did. Meg, in her previous state, would have done a marvelous job running the nation, especially on behalf of your kind.

I pushed a rock out of my way, sending it and twenty others clattering down. “My kind? As in… Magic-kind.”

Precisely. Then she lost her marbles, and I was stuck in a defunct body. It was most inconvenient.

Oh my fucking god. “Yeah, I’m really sorry if Meg trying to kill us all was an inconvenience to you,” I said bitterly.

I regret very much the things she used my power to accomplish. I would like to make it up to you.

It paused, almost like it was inhaling. I could help you locate Knight.

TWO

Dulcie

I raised my eyebrow at nothing. “Really?”

Yes.

I gathered up all my hair in my hands and let it fall behind me. “How? How would you find him?”

I know many things, Dulcie. Many wonderful things.

“Like where my ex-boyfriend is.”

Precisely.

“Really? That’s on your list of ‘wonderful things’? Seriously?”

If not wonderful, then helpful.

“Yeah, I don’t need your help.”

Suit yourself. I am here if you change your mind.

“Not gonna happen.”

I think it will. But it is your choice, always.

“Can you just shut up? Please? I’m trying to think.”

Of course.

And then it was quiet. Really, almost unpleasantly quiet.

We had only been talking for like ten minutes, but already, the silence felt weird. I kept waiting for it to say something else, to ask me a question or make some vaguely snide comment.

Hades, that was a really bad sign. There was no universe where I wanted to get comfortable with the Darkness having a running commentary in my head. I wondered if mental Stockholm Syndrome was a thing.

I didn’t care how disastrously big this dungeon was. I would find Knight on my own, and fuck the Darkness and any help it wanted to give me. I didn’t trust it in Meg, and I sure as hell didn’t trust it in me. Meg and the Darkness were bitches.

But still, if what it said was true—if it could do the impossible, bullshit, stupid thing I was asking for—what would that be worth to me, really? What would I be willing to give up? I threw out all my fucking morals when I worked with Melchior to protect Knight, why shouldn’t I do the same thing again?

Mom would understand. Eventually.

The Darkness said it couldn’t do anything without my permission, which was something. I had free will, and the Darkness supposedly couldn’t violate that—supposedly being the operative word. And maybe it was telling the truth; maybe Meg was just plain old, garden variety crazy, and the Darkness was just along for the ride? Maybe it really had been trying to help her, in the beginning. Maybe it had nothing to do with the zombies or the weird sky or the glamour Meg had cast on me that made me have really disappointing sex with Sebastian.

Maybe the Darkness was innocent. Maybe we were all wrong.

It sure wouldn’t be the first time that had happened. I could count on one hand the number of times we hadn’t missed something.

I kept walking, ducking, and climbing, not really seeing anything around me. Just thinking. Turning it over and over in my head, staring at the concept. Wondering.

The light changed around me, going from pitch dark to a vague, unsettling redness, filtering in from cracks in the floor—maybe lava, maybe lightbulbs from somewhere, who fucking knew? The walls were closer now, the ceiling maybe ten, fifteen feet over my head. Chalky white marks peered through a film of dust and dirt that could have been deliberate drawings or writings or maybe just a different kind of rock. Except that a few of them kind of looked like little spiders. Like, the way a toddler would draw a spider, with one big circle for the body and eight unjointed legs poking out from it like flower petals.

Then my foot hit something.

I tripped, falling flat onto something big and round and weirdly smooth.

I pushed myself up.

I was sitting on a massive stone circle, sunk halfway into the sand, right in the middle of this tunnel/hallway/room. It met the wall at its far side. To either side of it, the wall was a mess of jagged edges and loose stones, but the very back had been pressed totally flat.

And there was this giant fucking sun in the middle of it. Something like twenty feet in diameter, a sunburst stretching from floor to ceiling—and in the middle of the sun, a white spider. Bigger, but not much more detailed than the little ones. The paint had almost all flaked off, but pieces of it still remained: bright red and gold, icy white. Desert colors, fire colors.

And lots and lots of those little toddler-style spiders. Everywhere. If I squinted, they almost looked like snowflakes.

An altar, said the Darkness, and it didn’t sound pleased.

An altar.

It didn’t look like an altar.

There were still candles on it, melted almost completely into the stone, and a cracked hand mirror on its side, but nothing else to suggest a place of worship. Just a table and an old picture. It could have been somebody’s vanity, though why such a thing would be down here, I had no fucking clue.

But it felt important. Just a table, just some candles, just a really big picture of a spider, but there was a heaviness draped across it, I couldn’t ignore, so it couldn’t just be anything.

Like white sheets in old houses, covering antique furniture so they don’t dust over, there was the implication of a thing left behind. And I couldn’t stop staring at the spider itself. There was a sadness hanging on it, on everything, but especially there, thick, liquid, like mud. Like it had been abandoned in a hurry. Like a shirt on a clothesline, or a cold cup of tea. Like it had been readied and never used.

That wasn’t just a feeling, either. That was the blood of an empath giving me the power to pick up on the emotions of other people—and sometimes, of places. I wondered who, or what, had left this sadness here.

A grieving mother, perhaps, said the Darkness. Or a lonely daughter. We should leave it alone.

The sun, though. The longer I looked at it, the more it seemed to glow, like there was something underneath the stone that was trying to get out. I took a step towards it, thinking maybe this whole thing was a holy object, wanting to feel more of the people who were here before.

And when I got a little closer, I saw something else by the candles—a small white statue. Another spider, carved out of something white and vaguely transparent. It was upside down, and split down the middle as though it had been dropped. Broken completely in half.

When I looked at it, I felt a pang of fear.

I reached for it.

You know, said the Darkness, speaking quickly, you are right. Knight is a small and stupid thing to offer you.

There was a sharp pain in my ears. I flinched, reaching up to cover them, but by the time I’d reacted, the pain was gone.

“What the fuck was that?”

A gift, it said. From me to my dear friend Dulcie.

“What the fuck was that?”

Red light glinted off the broken mirror. Bits of glass were scattered on the wood around it; only half of its face remained.

See for yourself.

A subtle dread settled over me—the feeling of a little kid going to confess something to their parents, the stab of panic that happens as you round that last corner to talk to them.

You will like it, I promise. Do not be afraid.

I made it to the mirror. Tiny steps, and yeah, I was afraid to look. I didn’t know why, but I felt like looking would represent something for me—like this was the point of no return, though I wasn’t even sure what there was to return from. Seeing this, accepting it, would be the thing that sank me in the river of terrible ideas.

But that was stupid. I was being paranoid. The Darkness couldn’t turn me into some terrible monster without totally tanking any chance it thought it had of getting my help.

It had to be fine. This was fine.

I picked up the mirror. It was on a stand, a thing of silver and gold and plastered with red gems of all sizes, some small enough that they almost qualified as glitter.

“All right, what am I looking at?” I was snippy, panicked. An agonized irritation swept through me like a rush of cold water.

Your hair, it said. Move it back.

I reached up with one hand and bunched my hair up in my fist.

And dropped the mirror.

My hands went to my mouth, stifling a choking sound I couldn’t even identify. My heart thundered in my chest, and suddenly I had fever-shakes, rattling me like a china shop in an earthquake.

What do you think?

“I…um…”

I picked the mirror up out of the sand. Taking a deep breath, I held it up and pushed my hair back again, this time tucking it behind my ears.

My ears.

My perfectly round, perfectly human ears.

I reached up to touch them. I ran my fingers along the curve, over and over again, every time expecting to feel that stupid, awful point that all fairies have, but I didn’t. It was gone. Totally, completely, forever gone. And all it took was two seconds and a little sting in my ears.

Something I’d wanted to do for as long as I could remember.

“How did you even know?” I asked.

I looked into your memories, sweet child. This has dogged you for a long time, hasn’t it?

“I mean, yeah.”

Sam was very supportive. She always thought you were beautiful, but she would have supported you, had you gone through with the surgery. I am glad you have such loving friends.

I nodded, putting the mirror back down in the sand. It was really warm in the cavern. Pleasant, like those dumb paintings of cats in blankets in front of fireplaces.

This, though, was probably safer than human anesthetics.

That had been the biggest thing keeping me from getting the damn surgery in the first place—and also why it wasn’t classified as a “procedure.” Magical creatures reacted unpredictably to cosmetic surgery. There was every chance the drugs they’d use to dull the pain would kill me, or that shaving off my ears would send me into some full-body shock and that would kill me.

But now.

In the bowels of a literal demon dungeon, possessed by a weirdly polite evil spirit—now, the tips of my ears were gone. Now they were perfectly round.

I couldn’t drop my hand. I ran my fingers over the edges again and again and again.

This was unreal. This wasn’t happening, it couldn’t be. I’d caught shit about my ears since kindergarten. In third grade, some jackass slipped a note into my backpack that said, “knife ears,” with a drawing of me with actual knives for ears. High school me didn’t wear ponytails without ballcaps until the end of senior year.

I’d spent my entire life trying not to catch myself in mirrors. I’d never felt ugly, but I went to a mostly human school; people gave me crazy looks, like I’d walked in wearing a tinfoil hat and oven mitts. Like I was completely, irrevocably crazy. It was just one of those things that made me stand out in all the wrong ways. Especially after Mom died.

Mom would hate this. Mom would give me that look—not mad, not disappointed, just an expression of vague sadness, settling over the entire room.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

Come now. Look at yourself. You are beautiful.

I spent a minute just breathing and calming myself down. I pushed my hair behind my ears and stared at them. They were real.

They were perfect.

There. All better.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. I pushed myself to my feet, swaying a little.

Dulcie?

“What?” I said.

We have company.

I looked up. Coming around the wall, the sun, the altar, was a crocodile—and this one was much, much bigger than the one I’d met before.

“Oh, Hades,” I said. I stood, slowly, agonizingly. I was still in a monstrous amount of pain.

It saw me and opened its mouth. Lighting crackled across a lapping blue tongue.

Let me help you, Dulcie, said the Darkness. Let me share my power with you.

I looked at the mirror, even though it was angled away and I couldn’t see my reflection anymore.

Was this what it was like for Meg? Giving herself away, caving to little demands in exchange for strength and speed and a poker face until she was in too deep to turn back?

“Do it,” I said.

I could feel the Darkness smiling inside me. Excellent. This will be fun. Come, I will show you the ways of the shadows.

I lifted my hand. Shadows coiled out of my palm, like smoke from the end of a cigarette, and solidified into a long, heavy spear.

This will pierce any armor, said the Darkness. And any living creature struck with it will know immense pain.

“I don’t think I want to hurt it,” I said, but I couldn’t get my heart into the sentence.

The beast will know not to trouble you in the future, should you come across it again.

My grip tightened on the spear. It was cold, ice cold, the kind of cold that should sting and turn your fingers blue, but I was fine. I was great. I was fucking amazing.

Try it. See if you like it. We can make something else if the spear is not to your liking.

The crocodile looked at me hungrily. Its mouth was open, and its teeth were huge, sharp and yellow, black in the gums. Its tongue was electric blue, glowing in the almost total dark.

It charged, mouth open. I thrust the spear into its throat.

It reeled back, shrieking. I yanked the spear back, taking a hunk of muscle with me. It dripped a vaguely luminescent red blood.

The crocodile disappeared into the darkness, whimpering like a puppy.

I smiled. I laughed. Quietly at first, then full-on mad scientist cackling.

So, do you enjoy this one?

“Oh, hell yes,” I said.

Keep it, then. Pause. Knight is still in the dungeons, by the way.

“Where?”

To your left. I do not know the lay of this place, but he is to your left a good distance.

I looked at the altar again. There was nothing there I needed, but I felt like I was being pulled towards it.

The sadness, the pulsing pain in the sunburst, waned, painted over with “eggshell-doesn’t-give-a-damn” white. I stared at it for another second before giving up and turning around. Whatever this place was, it was abandoned, and the people who had abandoned it were obviously long gone, so it wasn’t like there was anything I could do about it. Except maybe break the sunburst, but that felt like burning down a building because your neighbor is crying too loudly.

We should hurry.

I turned fully away from the altar. “Which way?”

I saw a flash of purple off to one side. I heard footsteps and a finger-tap metallic clicking, muffled by walls on walls of stone.

There.

Shadows coiled around my feet, a cold black mist full of something that screamed go.

Quickly now.

We ran.

THREE

Quillan

The portal closed, and Dulcie was gone.

We were all left just standing there, staring at the air. Bram was on the ground, still holding his jaw. Dulcie had socked him hard before she left, and he went down like a sandcastle in a wave.

And now it was quiet.

Christina said, “What just happened?”

“Dulcie just…” I stared dumbly at the spot where she’d been standing just seconds before, holding the portal ripper and yelling at us. Begging us to come with her, then stepping through on her own when we told her to stay behind. I frowned. “She’s gone.”

Honestly, I don’t know what I expected.

“Yes, yes she is, very good Quillan,” Christina said. She looked pissed, but not at me. “And what, tell me, what the actual hell did she take with her?”

“The portal ripper,” I said.

“Yes!” Christina threw her hands in the air. “She took. The mother. Fucking. Portal ripper.” She dropped to the floor, cross-legged, and put her face in her hands. “She took the fucking portal ripper with her.”

“So we cannot follow,” said Bram, standing slowly. His voice was ice cold. “Expressly to prevent us from following her.”

“Yes, the poison specifically for Kuzco, Kuzco’s poison, we got it,” Christina snapped. She didn’t look up. Her shoulders were shaking.

I dropped to the ground beside her and said quietly, “Hug?”

She nodded. I wrapped my arms around her and squeezed.

“What the hell, Dulcie?” she said. “What the actual hell?” She looked up, first at the wall and then at me. Her eyes were watery. “What is she thinking? She’s gonna get herself killed! She’s…” Her lip trembled and she trailed off, putting her hand over her mouth. “Quillan.”

“I know.”

“We have to—we have to go after her.”

“I know.”

“Fuck,” she said. “Fucking hell, Dulcie.” She bunched up her hair in her hands and pulled, not hard. I took her wrists and led them back down to her lap. “She’s going to die,” she whispered.

I’d never seen her like this before. Not in all our time working with Melchior, the literal drug king of the Netherworld, had I seen her like this—so completely afraid.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said. “Look at me. It’s going to be okay.”

“Is it?” she asked, desperate, shaking.

I squeezed her hands and looked at Bram. “You don’t have another one of those, do you?”

Bram looked at me. “Do you have any idea how illegal portal rippers are?”

“That’s never stopped you before.”

Bram scoffed. “Very illegal.” He straightened his collar and tried to fix his hair, black and rowdy and all over the place. He looked like a dandelion. “And consequently, very expensive. Even for me.”

“Dammit, okay,” I said. “Would any of your secret portals be able to get us into Dromir?”

He looked flatly at me. “What secret portals?”

I looked back, equally flat. “Bram. For fuck’s sake.”

He sighed. “No, they would not. The portal ripper only works because it is literally tearing holes in the walls that bar worlds from each other. Any stationary portals on our end— government, independent, or otherwise—will reject the very notion of entering Dromir, to a violent degree.”

“Earthspeak, please?” I asked.

Bram leveled his gaze at me like an IT guy trying to explain the “on” button to a sixty-year-old Russian woman. “They will encounter profound interference and the building may explode.”

I did my best sagely Babushka nod. “Ah.”

Christina looked between us. “Where can we get another portal ripper? Who do we have to call?”

“The man from whom I purchased mine is not a mechanic,” said Bram disdainfully. “He does not take calls.”

“Then how do you get a hold of him?” Christina stood up, growing frantic. “Letters, carrier pigeon, what? Where is he?”

“He moves, but it does not matter, because this is not the kind of tool he keeps on hand,” said Bram. “They are made to order.”

Christina started to pace. I tried to grab her arm, keep her stationary, but she ripped her hand out of mine and paced anyway. “We can’t…we can’t just leave her there! There has to be a way…there has to be a way to get in without the portal ripper?” She looked at Bram, hugging herself.

“Chris, hey,” I said, touching her shoulders, not grabbing. She stopped and looked at me, eyes wide, expression liquid.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said. “She’s going to be okay. This is Dulcie we’re talking about. She’s handled way worse, right?”

Christina nodded, staring at the carpet. She sniffled.

“And Knight will find her and they’ll protect each other, right?”

She nodded again.

“We’ll figure out a way to help them. We will. I promise.”

Then I realized Bram still hadn’t answered her question.

I turned to look at him. “…Bram?”

“Hmm?”

“Something you’d like to share with the class?”

“Not particularly, no.”

I turned fully towards him, arms crossed. “You sure about that?”

“Entirely.”

Christina blew past me, walking up on Bram like a Crip walks up on a Blood. “Bram, I swear to every god that’s ever been worshipped by anyone, if you know something and you don’t tell us, I will rip out your eyes and skin you alive, do you fucking understand me? I AM ALL OUT OF PATIENCE!”

Bram was unfazed—not because Christina didn’t scare him, but because he wasn’t paying attention. He had his fist to his mouth, staring at the carpet, lost in thought. Or maybe he was just doing his best rendition of “Thinking Man.”

He looked at her. “Hmm?”

“Is there another way to get Dulcie back?” she said, loud, panicked.

“Christina,” I said, taking a step towards her.

She took a deep breath, getting ready to yell at one or both of us.

“There is,” said Bram.

We both stared at him. He looked up from the carpet without moving his head. “There is,” he said again, “but it is dangerous and stupid.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Christina. “It doesn’t matter, we have to go after her, if we don’t, she’s going to die—”

“Miss Sabbiondo, I am keenly aware!” Bram snapped.

Christina only glared at him. “What. Do. We. Do?”

Bram sighed. “There is one working portal in Dromir,” he said slowly.

“And?” I asked.

“And it can only be opened from the inside.”

“Except?”

Bram made a popping noise with his mouth and shook his head. He spoke through gritted teeth. “Except when they can be opened from the outside.”

“Great, how?” I asked.

“By powerful magic,” he answered with a shrug. “Ancient magic. Magic belonging to things not of this or any world.”

“Okay, so we’re summoning something?” I asked.

“Not we,” said Bram.

“You are not going alone,” Christina said.

“Nor did I expect to,” he said. “I meant that we cannot perform the necessary spell. This is not a magic any witch you know can perform. Violation of the worldly wards in which Dromir has shrouded itself is a deeply unpleasant art lost to all surviving teachers of the craft.”

“But…?” I said, making a rolling motion with my hand.

He sighed. “But I know someone who can.”

“And this isn’t someone you want to talk to.”

“Not in the slightest.”

“What’s her name?” Christina muttered.

Bram glared at her. “Who said it was a woman?”

“Shot in the dark,” she answered, shrugging.

“Where is she?” I asked. “How do we find her?”

Bram ground his teeth. “She lives in the desert. The magic in which she has steeped her soul cannot be performed in populous areas. She requires lands untouched by man and beast alike, an unblemished atmosphere.”

“So, she lives alone?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Bram, clearly irritated. “Does it matter?”

“No, just painting a picture here.”

“What desert?” asked Christina.

“The Mojave,” said Bram.

“Where in the Mojave?”

“In the middle.”

“Do you know how to get there?” I asked.

“Of course I do.”

“You’ve got an address?” Christina asked.

“There is no address. I will have to show you.” He walked briskly away, out of the room and into the hallway.

Sunlight was streaming through breaks in the curtains. Christina and I exchanged a look before following him. “Um, Bram?”

“What?”

“It’s the middle of the day, are you sure you shouldn’t just… stay here?”

We got into the hallway and saw Bram near the front door, rifling through a small coat closet; all we could see was his ass sticking out from behind the door, wiggling as he looked for something. I took this moment to appreciate that Bram has a very small ass.

“No,” he said.

“You’re a vampire, Bram,” I said. “And if we’re going into the desert, then coming with us is a colossally bad idea. There is literally no cover in the desert. That’s why it’s a desert.”

“I am well aware, Quillan.” He emerged from the coat closet with a poncho, hot pink and sized for a panda. I decided not to ask. “But you do not know where you are going, and time is of the essence. I will show you the way.”

“Yeah, and you’ll die doing it—”

I blinked, felt a weird pressure around my throat, and realized Bram had me pinned to the wall, lifting me fully off the floor. Christina gasped.

“I am going after her,” he said—growled—squeezing. His eyes were the reddest I’d ever seen them. “Feel free to stand in my way.”

There was a split second of petrifying silence.

“Bram,” Christina said sternly. He snarled wordlessly at me and put me down. I bent over, hands on my knees, gasping.

“I am going with you. This,” he said, “is non-negotiable.”

I looked at Christina, hand at my throat. I was honestly lucky he hadn’t crushed my windpipe. “Okay, if Bram wants to fry himself in the desert, that’s up to him.” I stood up and swallowed painfully. “How are we doing this? I would really love it if you didn’t burst into flames in my car.”

He smiled—but any time Bram smiles, it’s really more of a leer, no matter what he’s looking at. The red never leaves his eyes. “I will not. I have this.” He unrolled the pink poncho. The pink was broken on the chest by a giant unicorn with sunglasses drinking a rainbow slushie. Underneath it, in bubble letters were the words, “Majestic AF.” It looked homemade.

I stared at him. “Why… why the fuck do you have that?” I wasn’t going to ask. I really wasn’t, but then I just couldn’t help myself.

Bram sniffed and turned to the door, pulling up his hood and wrapping a scarf around his face. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Now I couldn’t stop smiling. “Bram, why do you have a unicorn poncho? A pink unicorn poncho?”

“It is not important.”

“Oh, I think it is.”

He opened the door and made a beeline for my car—which was to say, the door opened, and a black shadow went whoosh and ended up by the passenger door, frantically pulling on the handle. Guess he really didn’t want to talk about it.

I pulled out my keys. “Stop pulling on it. I can’t unlock it if you’re pulling on it.”

Christina touched my arm. I looked at her. She was staring at the ground, sucking on her lip. Quill, I’m sorry.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” I said. “You’re worried—we all are. That’s okay.”

“I know. I just… Dulcie’s all alone, and if she isn’t, then she’s with Dagan and Knight, and they’re not going to help if she can’t control herself.” She was talking too fast. She stopped herself and took a deep, slow breath. “I’m sorry. It’s just a scary thought, you know?”

“I do,” I said.

“Quillan!” Bram shouted. “The door is still locked!”

I groaned and pressed the button again. “Stop pulling on it and maybe it’ll unlock!”

I rolled my eyes at Christina, and she smiled.

“I would like to get out of the sun, if it’s all the same to you!” Bram called irritably.

“Then this means we’re babysitting Bram?” I asked.

She looked out to where Bram was standing, still pulling on the goddamn door. At least he hadn’t ripped it clean off. “I think we’re babysitting Bram.”

“We should get him one of those backpack leashes,” I said with a chuckle, because as weird as the image of walking Bram on a backpack leash was, it still wasn’t as weird as witnessing Bram wearing a bright pink poncho with a unicorn.

Christina walked out the door and I followed, closing it behind me.

“I should get all of you backpack leashes,” she said, slapping my ass as she walked by.

“Is that a promise?”

She squinted at me. “Quill, did you just ask me to host a backpack leash orgy?”

“Maybe.” I waggled my eyebrows at her. “Hell of a team-building exercise.”

“Hades,” she said, and she went to the car. I unlocked it again. Christina, graciously sitting in the back, opened her door without any problem. Bram, still trying to open it when I unlocked it, glared at her and then at me.

“Any day now,” he said.

I walked over, pushed him aside, and opened his door for him. Bram got in without a word.

I got in the driver’s seat and started the car. “So. To the Mojave, I guess?”

Bram nodded, staring at the road in consternation. “To the Mojave.”

FOUR

Quillan

The Mojave, for anyone who hasn’t been, is full of shrubs. More shrubs than have any right to be in a desert. Just these tiny little hedgehog-looking bushes and stumpy tuber trees.

For miles. Sometimes there’s a hill.

I drove, staring at the empty desert and watching Bram cower under his unicorn poncho out of the corner of my eye. Every now and then he would move wrong, stick his arm out too far, and his skin would sizzle.

“You doing okay over there?” I asked.

“Just drive,” he said.

“Straight?” I pointed.

“As opposed to?”

“Into the unforgiving wilderness.”

Bram growled something unintelligible and said, “Go straight.”

“How far out?”

“In the middle,” said Bram.

“How far into the middle?”

“I do not know exactly. I just know how to get there.”

“Ballpark it for me.”

Bram growled again. “We will get there when we get there.”

I shrugged my best “geez, okay” and kept going straight.

“How do you know this witch, anyway?” I asked.

“She is not a witch,” said Bram. “She is something far older.”

“Witchcraft is pretty old,” I said.

“So am I,” he said, “but I am the origin of nothing.”

Christina leaned forward. “Is she the origin of something?”

“She is connected to the origins of everything.”

“What does that mean?”

Bram was quiet for a second. He looked out the window, hunkering under his hood. “Many things.”

“Dude, just say you don’t know,” I said.

He groaned. Clearly, he didn’t want to talk to us right now, but the drive was long, and we needed to know what we were driving an hour and half to get ourselves into.

“I do know,” he said.

“Then stop talking to me like you’re in a gothic horror novel and answer the question.”

Growly sounds. Lots and lots of growly sounds.

“Fine, don’t tell us,” I said. “We’ll just ask her when we get there. We’ll have a nice long conversation about exactly how you know each other.”

Bram shrank into himself a little—less like he was nervous and way more like he was trying to keep himself from killing me.

“I bet she’s got some really good stories. When was the last time you talked to her?”

Bram didn’t answer.

“How old is she?”

“Old,” he said. “Older than death.”

“Nice. When was the last time you talked?”

“It does not matter,” he growled. Lots of growling happening in this vehicle.

“Okay, rephrase: Is she or is she not going to try to kill us the second she sees you?”

Bram hesitated.

“Yeah, okay, that’s what I thought,” I said. I looked at Christina in the rearview mirror. She looked from Bram to me and shrugged.

We drove and drove and drove, and eventually, we saw something besides bushes and stumpy trees and sometimes hills.

A tent. A big, patched up, heavily leaning tent. Square body, flap doors pinned open. Purple and blue and black and green, a mess of different colors and fabrics.

“That her?” I asked, looking at Bram.

“Yes.”

“In the tent?”

He glared at me. “Yes.”

We looked at each other for a minute. I tapped the wheel.

“So,” I said, “want to pop out and say hello?”

“No,” said Bram, and he threw open the door.

I turned to Christina. “Should we wait a second, or…?”

She looked over my shoulder. I followed her gaze, and we watched Bram barrel full tilt into the tent to get out of the sun. He was smoking just a little bit.

Why the fuck do vampires live in California?

“Maybe we should wait just a second, yeah,” Christina said with a frown, like she wasn’t sure if Bram was going to survive this meeting.

“Keep the car running?”

“Oh, definitely.”

You know. Just in case Bram got murdered by his primordial ex-girlfriend.

“Is this humane?” I asked. “Like, can you get in trouble if Bram gets himself killed?”

Christina quirked an eyebrow at me. “Why, you snitching?”

“No.” I shook my head. “Cross my heart, hope to die.”

When a minute had passed and Bram didn’t come tearing out of the tent, we figured everything was mostly okay.

Mostly. Hopefully.

Or he was dead.

“Okay, let’s go,” said Christina.

We got out of the car and started walking toward the tent. It was the middle of the day, so it was blisteringly hot, but a cold air was coming out of it. Like, freakishly cold. It was totally quiet.

“Think he bit it?” I whispered.

“Hopefully not.”

We stepped into the tent. It was dark and, somehow, freezing—less like there was blasting AC and more like we’d just dipped into an actual freezer.

“Bram?” asked Christina.

“Are you still alive… for a vampire?” I asked.

I blinked until my eyes adjusted, and two silhouettes swam into focus on the other side of the room, standing on either side of a small desk. One of them was short and a little stout. The other was clearly a very grumpy Bram.

There was a scritchy-scratchy sound, and the woman put something down—a pen. A whole ass feather pen, just a goddamn feather in a tiny pot of black ink. She was writing in an enormous book.

“We’ll get to that,” she was saying. “First, I want to talk to your new friends.”

She put everything down and strolled towards us. Long, curly silver hair, pale skin, printed skirt. Bare feet. Not as many wrinkles as I expected. She was old, but she didn’t look “older than death”. She couldn’t have been more than fifty, but Bram still looked twenty, so who fucking knew in this crazy town?

She held out her hand and smiled. I took it and shook it.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m Grenwal.”

I felt very small all of a sudden. When I touched her, I got a strong impression that something very big and very powerful was wearing this woman as a mask. So that was fun.

“…Hi,” I said, weirdly breathless. Grenwal let go of my hand, and it was like falling out of a dream.

I looked to Christina to ask her what kind of creature Grenwal was—fairies can always tell—and found her staring, wide-eyed, shock-tailed, straight at her. Christina didn’t look afraid, just… struck. Which was a really bad sign.

“Um,” she said, and then she collected herself. She slipped into her Humane Resources skin and strode confidently over to Grenwal, holding out her hand, beaming. “Lovely to meet you. Bram hasn’t told us a thing about you.”

Grenwal stared at us with eyes like glaciers. A shiver coiled down my spine and stuck to my bones.

“Quillan,” she said, ignoring Christina, smiling. “A pleasure.”

Christina put her hand down, confused.

“Um.” I looked at Christina, and she gestured for me to keep talking. “We need your help.”

“I know.”

I assumed Bram told her everything, but he had this intense, scowly look on his face that made me think otherwise.

“You are in quite a bit of trouble, young man,” said Grenwal, looking at Bram. “What on Earth were you thinking?”

Bram growled wordlessly.

Grenwal turned around and had this grandmother-oracle smile on her face, like we were all keeping some epic secret together. “You need a door,” she said.

“Yes,” I answered.

“You need a door very badly.”

“We do.”

“How badly, do you think?”

“Um.” Christina and I looked at each other. Bram, skulking at the edge of the shadows, squinted at Grenwal.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” I said.

“But you think you might,” she said.

Fuck, I really hoped I didn’t—the way she was smiling, it really sounded like she was… coming onto me?

“You’re not doing this out of the goodness of your heart,” I said carefully. “You want something.”

Grenwal smiled. “Of course, doesn’t everyone?”

She was a friend of Bram’s. I really shouldn’t have expected anything less. “Okay, what do you want?”

She looked at Bram. “You.”

Oh, thank Hades! This wasn’t my problem, after all. Relief, thick and sweet, flowed through me. That was quickly followed with amusement as soon as I caught Bram’s expression.

He glared at her. “Me?”

She nodded. “You.”

“In what… capacity?”

What capacity indeed? I wondered if Bram would be willing to have ultimate cougar sex to save Dulcie’s life. Not even cougar sex… GILF sex. What a weird moment of truth.

Grenwal pointed at him and then herself. “You, me, and a very short dress.”

“If you feel so moved,” said Bram, sounding very… out of sorts.

“The dress is for you.”

Bram blinked. “…What?”

“Mid-thigh, at the lowest.”

“Grenwal, I don’t think—”

“Bright pink.”

“Grenwal—”

“Sequins. Lots of them.” She beamed. “Or you can get your door somewhere else.”

I whistled. “Oh, how the tables have turned.”

“Quiet,” Bram hissed as he turned a rabid glare on me. “Fine. It is a date.”

Grenwal looked surprised. “Sequins and all?”

“Sequins and all,” he said through gritted teeth.

“That was fast.”

“I do not have time to argue with you.”

Her face fell. “No, you really don’t.”

“You know something,” said Bram.

She flicked her finger under his chin, smiling. “I always know something.”

“Care to share?” he continued.

“There’s nothing you need to know.”

“Typical,” Bram muttered.

I leaned over to Christina. “What is she?”

Christina’s face was all scrunched up as she studied the old woman who was about to have some sort of strange liaison with Bram involving pink sequins, if I got it right. “I have no idea.”

Baaaaaad sign. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I have absolutely no idea.”

“Like… is she blocking your abilities or something?”

“No, I just… I can’t tell what she is.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea, and it’s freaking me out.”

“And that’s never happened before?”

“Nope.”

Well. How deeply disconcerting.

Then Grenwal was suddenly behind us, sticking her face between our shoulders. “Did you say something?”

I just about jumped out of my skin, but mercifully, I didn’t scream. “No.”

“You’re a bad liar, Quillan.” She smiled. “That’s good. Nobody liked you much when you were good at it.”

She had to be talking about Melchior. I swallowed hard. That wasn’t something many people knew. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say.

“No, they didn’t,” I said eventually.

“You cleaned up nice, though.”

“Thanks?”

“Thank yourself.” She pushed past us, back to where Bram was standing. “You need to get moving.”

“I would love to, if you would stop toying with my associates and do your damned job,” he said.

“This is not my job. This is a favor I am performing for a very desperate friend.” She strolled over to the table and flipped open a different, much larger and older book. The cover had the kind of wear and tear that happens to paperbacks that live in the backpacks of college students, and the paper was slightly yellow. So either she had never opened the thing, or the paper itself was just that old. “One for which I presume you will be very grateful.” She gave him a sharp look.

Bram stood up a little straighter and visibly resisted the urge to cross his arms. He put his hands on his hips instead. His jaw went wire-tight. “Exceedingly,” he said. “Though I regret to say we do not have the luxury of time, so patience is off the table.”

“Of course it is,” she said. “I would never expect something so vulgar from you.”

“Patience is vulgar?” Christina asked.

“It is to him,” said Grenwal, scanning down a page in her book with one finger. She clicked her tongue and tapped the paper. “Here we are.”

“You wrote it down?” asked Bram, walking over to her table. He reached for her book, and she slapped his hand away.

“Of course. Somebody’s got to,” she said.

“No, somebody does not.”

“Somebody does,” said Grenwal, tapping the book again. “This is quality reading material.”

“Who, exactly, are you expecting to read this?” He gestured to the book—to the several books, actually, all of them as thick as double-spaced dictionaries.

“Someone will stumble across them after I’m gone.”

“You intend to just leave all of this out here for anyone to find?” Bram asked incredulously, his face taking on an expression of supreme irritation. Actually it was the same expression he’d been wearing since he first put on that ridiculous poncho. “What else have you written in these?”

“Lots of things.”

“Such as?”

She grinned at him, looking smug. “Everything you’ve ever seen me do and more.”

“We do have the Kama Sutra, Grenwal,” Bram muttered, rolling his eyes. “I do not think your book is necessary.”

I made an involuntary gagging noise. Grenwal looked at me and chuckled and I’m fairly sure her chin hairs grew another centimeter. She looked like the kind of woman who either chuckled or cackled and never did anything in between.

“That’s where the ‘and more’ comes in, sweetheart,” she said.

“The ‘and more’ doesn’t happen to include the whisperings of the damned, does it?” Bram asked, like the conversation was one they’d had before.

“Yes,” she said, grinning. This was bothering Bram immensely, and Grenwal was living for it. “And they don’t whisper, they mutter. There’s a difference.”

“That is hardly the point. This information—assuming it’s worth anything and you aren’t certifiably insane—is incredibly dangerous! You can’t just leave it here!”

“Thank you, Bram, for being less concerned with my death than you are with my body of work.”

“You’re welcome.”

“What’s in then?” I asked.

Grenwal looked at me. Her smile softened from one hundred percent smug to ninety-eight percent smug. “All the secrets of the universe.”

I looked at the open page.

“Don’t bother, you can’t read it,” she said, and yeah, I couldn’t.

“What language is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know, I don’t speak it. Doesn’t look human, that’s for sure. Might be Sanskrit, but that’s pushing it, don’t you think?” she asked.

I took a closer look, leaning over the absurdly big book. She’d written everything in thick, blocky letters—or maybe “symbols” was a better word. It definitely wasn’t in the Latin alphabet. It did kind of have the Sanskrit-wedge thing going on, but it also looked vaguely like kanji, and pieces of it kind of resembled hieroglyphs, but it wasn’t a bunch of languages cut-and-pasted together. The language, whatever it was, looked cohesive. I just couldn’t read any of it.

There were drawings, though, and those were pretty straightforward. Stick figures with swords and fire coming out of their little stick hands, a white spider biting somebody’s head off and turning red, a giant fish with no eyes and a glowy rock in its stomach. There was another white spider in the middle of the opposite page, taking up almost half the available space, surrounded by circles and snowflake-shaped glyphs that reminded me of a summoning circle. This had “virgin sacrifice” written all over it.

And there was a little green checkmark in the bottom corner, in a box next to a snowflake with an angry face drawn on it in Sharpie ink. Weird.

“Might be Sanskrit,” I agreed, but Grenwal was right—it looked wrong even for that. “But it isn’t, is it?”

“Of course not. That’d be too easy,” she said.

“Too easy?”

“Well, yeah. Can’t have just anybody coming in here and translating these. This is high literature,” she said, thumping her palm on a stack of equally large books. The same kinds of symbols had been painted onto their spines. I wondered which way was supposed to be up.

I flipped open the book she’d been writing in when we entered the tent. Same as the rest, minus the page on the right. This one, and only this one, had a bunch of notes written in English around a drawing of a big, drippy-black shadow labeled Volpin. Dead bodies surrounded it, bloody and mangled, leaking a red smoke that the shadow seemed to be drawing into itself. In the lower left corner was that white spider again—and it did not look happy.

Grenwal slammed the book and glowered at me.

“This one’s not done yet,” she said.

“I could read it,” I said, dumbfounded.

She rolled her eyes and walked away from me. “That’s because it’s not done yet, sweetheart. Why do you think I’m all the way out here, writing these, a hundred miles from the closest Starbucks? If they could encrypt themselves, I wouldn’t have to hide them in-progress.”

“Oh,” I said.

Bram groaned off in the shadows. “The door, please?”

Grenwal leaned on the table with one hand. “What’s the magic word?”

“I said ‘please.’”

“Can you say it on your knees?”

Bram blinked at her. “You must be joking.”

“Oh, I am. This is going to be hilarious.” She gestured to the ground and crossed her arms, waiting.

Bram muttered something under his breath. “You are a hag and a scoundrel. Did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t. I’ll be sure to write it down.” She smiled wide, clearly enjoying herself. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“I do have some dignity I would like to preserve.”

“At Dulcie’s expense?” asked Grenwal. I had to admit, I wanted to see Bram drop down to his knees in front of her, as well. Bram could certainly use a little humbling.

Bram’s eyes flashed an angry red. He swished the back of his large pink parka and dropped to one knee in front of her. He clasped his hands together and looked up at her from beneath a tangled disaster of black hair. He normally looked so put together.

“There, knee in the sand,” he said. “Please open the door.”

“Call me ‘my lady.’”

“For hell’s sake, why?”

She shrugged. “I want to see how it sounds.”

Bram groaned loudly. “My lady, my sovereign queen, most odious of oracles, please, for the love of all that is decent and good in this deplorable world, open the damned door.”

Grenwal nodded. “That’ll do, thank you.” She snapped at him to stand up. “Move to the walls, please.”

Bram got back to his feet. He looked over at me, and then Christina and glared at us. I pressed my lips together to keep the laugh from leaving my throat and stepped back against the cloth wall with Christina.

Grenwal moved into the middle of the room and snapped her fingers. White light shot out from the place she was standing, sketching a massive circle in the sand. An icy breeze blew my hair into my face.

“Who is going?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at us.

I raised my hand.

“I am,” said Bram.

“And you?” asked Grenwal to Christina.

“No. I, um… I think I would just distract everyone.”

Grenwal just nodded. “Very well.” She pointed to us and then at the ground on either side of her. “Stand here.”

Bram and I took up positions to her right and left. She raised both hands. “Look at me and hold very still,” she said.

We did. The tips of her fingers glowed.

“This will hurt,” she added.

She touched our foreheads, and I felt like I’d been stabbed. Her fingers were like ice, sticking to my skin and stinging—almost burning. She drew one quick, straight line and put her hands down.

“What the hell?” I asked, reaching up to touch the spot. It radiated cold.

“Doors need keys, gentlemen,” Grenwal explained.

“It’s not a portal?” I asked. I’d assumed she had some big fancy illegal portal-something out here, like one of Bram’s secret portals or the actual portal ripper, but this looked like straight-up, untethered magic. Like how you might have made portals back in the olden days.

“It’s a door,” she said, “and if you don’t want it to eat you, it needs a key.”

“… Eat me?”

Grenwal smiled. “The breaks in the universe are mouths, and it is hungry.”

“Oh, I hate that,” I said. I looked over at Bram and saw a horizontal line on his forehead, white and bright like a glowstick.

She grinned. “Step into the circle. Hold very, very still.”

We did. She closed her eyes and held out her hands, palms down. The white circle glowed brighter, and my forehead tingled.

Bram and I looked at each other. Christina stood pensively at the wall, watching.

“Don’t touch the ice,” Grenwal said, eye closed. “It’s cursed.”

“It’s what?” I asked.

She chuckled. “Good luck.”

And poof, we were gone.

FIVE

Knight

By the time I’d blinked away the fuzziness, Dagan and the shadow-gang were half gone. The thunderclap footsteps echoing over everything were dim, and getting dimmer. I sat up and felt something warm curl over my lip—blood, pouring out of my nose like a busted water fountain.

My ears started ringing.

All the sound had evaporated. The clanking, the moaning, the gurgle of fake lava oozing over the rock, all gone. I couldn’t tell if it was the illusions trying to make me feel hyper-isolated, or if I’d been zapped into what was hopefully temporary deafness. Star-specks popped in and out of my vision, dancing around the edges. They spun like tops, like a Christmas tree getting dropped down an elevator shaft.

Fuck, that hurt.

I sat up as slowly as I could manage, my body making some spectacularly bad popping noises. Little explosions were going off in all my joints—tiny, tiny gunshots between all of my most offended bones.

I felt jittery.

If I moved too quickly—if I looked too quickly, in any direction—I was pretty sure I would throw up. I saw the room through those blue and red paper 3D glasses; everything was jumping straight to the back of my brain. Light and shapes bounced against the inside of my skull and stuck in the backs of my eyes, thick like the needles they use for spinal taps. I spent a good two minutes trying not to think, because every time I formed a coherent thought, my head felt like it was going to explode—like some synapse would spark wrong and blow my brains out through my face.

I’d been tased before—you have to get tased before they let you carry a taser—and this was nothing close to being tased. This was being laser-injected with typhoid fever and the existential dread of a really bad high. This was what meteors felt like when they hit the ground and realized they’d just killed most of the dinosaurs.

Whatever the demons had in their zappy-staffs, it wasn’t just lightning. It was something different, something stronger. It looked like the lightning that struck the snow outside and didn’t melt it even a little, just kind of burrowed into the ground and disappeared. I didn’t want to say it was cursed just because it kicked my ass, but it left a sour taste in the back of my throat that made me wonder how they’d gotten a hold of it.

Dagan couldn’t do anything like that, not even close. It was definitely magic, but they clearly needed tools to be able to use it safely. They had gloves and everything.

Granted, the sour taste might have just been blood in my mouth, but still, I had a bad feeling.

Not that my feelings were anything to swear by. Getting all butthurt for being zapped wasn’t the sturdiest leg to stand on. All I really had was conjecture and a wrist I hoped was just sprained.

It wasn’t swelling, but it stung like the caterwauling of a hundred PTA moms throwing down at a bake sale. It throbbed and ebbed, and it wouldn’t shut up. I held my wounded left wrist with my right, trying to keep the bruised pieces in place, and the muscles in my hand spasmed, clenching tight around my wrist.

I heard something pop—not a snap, thank Hades—and screamed.

I let myself be loud. It wasn’t not like there was anyone who could hear me. My voice echoed and echoed and echoed.

The reality of the silence swam into my consciousness, slow and muffled as voices in the water. I was alone down here. As isolated as I’d ever been. Totally, completely stuck. Righteously screwed.

This wasn’t the first time I’d thought I was going to die, but it was the first time I’d ever thought I might die alone.

Happier thoughts, Knight. Think about literally anything else. Or maybe just don’t think at all.

I dragged myself by inches to the wall and hauled myself into a sitting position. I immediately regretted it and just laid back down on the floor, panting.

Fuck moving.

Fuck bodies, fuck bones, fuck muscles.

Fuck all the little neurons that just have to tell me my insides are on fire.

I stared at the ceiling, head lolling from one side to the other. The stone had all these weird shadowy patterns running across it. Not on purpose—it was just flawed stone—but the way the lava light fell across it was making stars and mountains and faces in the depressions. That one might have been a dragon. That one could have been a rocking chair, or a spaceship. That one was a dog, definitely.

That one. That one was Dulcie.

Okay. I knew what I did. I mean really, really knew. I’d known since the moment it happened, even when I thought Dulcie was still guilty of working for her father and pulling the wool over all of our eyes.

I knew before, I knew during, I knew after. At the time, I thought it was like being possessed. It was like my body was acting without me, plowing through the worst decision of my life on autopilot. Like I’d been glamored by something ancient and angry that ruined people’s relationships for fun.

But then I was actually glamored by Meg, and I really, completely lost control.

Turns out there’s a pretty sharp difference between a five-hundred-plus-year-old vampire’s magic forcing you into the sack, and getting so angry at the girl who tanked her morals to save your life that you pull over and force yourself on her on the side of some dinky country road.

The girl you love, too. The girl you’re gonna fucking marry someday.

Dulcie wrote a book, I thought. Did I know that? I think I knew that. I think maybe she told me once, or I saw her working on it, or I heard somebody else ask her how it was going.

I think. Maybe.

I can’t believe I’m about to say this. It’s a little unreal.

Dagan was right when he said I didn’t know Dulcie the way I should have.

What did I know about her? I mean, really know?

I knew she was beautiful. I knew she was dedicated to her job. I knew she was smart, but what did smart even mean? Was she smart? There was a lot of luck and a lot of spite in the way she solved problems. She was like a mech—she just threw herself at the problem until it wasn’t a problem anymore.

I knew her mom was dead. She died when Dulcie was a teenager. I don’t remember what from though—some sickness, something chronic. Maybe cancer. Maybe Dulcie never told me. Maybe she did and I wasn’t listening, or maybe I forgot. Maybe I only did anything for her because I wanted to get into her pants.

Okay, come on, that’s not true, it’s just not, I thought. I was slightly delirious now. Dulcie’s face was all over the ceiling, smiling at me, scowling, shouting, sobbing.

I love her, I thought. I love her, I love her.

It felt true. Like the coldness of air in your lungs, it felt real. Close and simple and clean. Like the only true thing in the world.

I knew she’d do literally anything to protect me. To protect all of us. I knew she had no sense of self-preservation. I knew she was good at keeping secrets.

Okay, that’s not fair; I knew she hated keeping secrets. I knew keeping secrets was literally the worst thing in the world for Dulcie O’Neil, but she was willing to do it anyway to keep my sorry ass from getting killed by her dad.

Hades, I’m such an asshole.

RAWWWWWWWWWWR.

I looked up and found myself staring into a very large mouth.

This mouth belonged to something with teeth that glowed. Its saliva steamed loudly when it hit the ground. It was in the middle of roaring, and I’d somehow missed the beginning of the noise. Either I was just so enamored with the idea of being the worst person on Earth that I just hadn’t fucking heard it, or it had magicked itself into existence halfway through the sound. Or I was hallucinating. I jumped to my feet anyway.

I say jumped, but I mean scrabbled, grabbed, and wobbled until I was mostly-kind-of standing.

The glowing teeth dug into the bars. The animal shook its head, ripped them free of the stone, and threw them over its shoulder into the opposing wall. It hit hard enough to get stuck in the spaces between the doors.

The sad prisoner blobs flattened themselves on the floors of their cells and keened like ghosts at a rally.

I could still be hallucinating.

The air got hot—lava-blasting, sun-scorching, flash-dehydrating hot. The big glowing mouth closed to reveal big glowing eyes. Three sets of them, electric blue and crackling. Steam hissed out of its ears and nose. It was covered in thin black fur, matted, bloody—dog-shaped. I was looking at a thirty-foot-tall angry dog.

Okay. Could just be a really vivid hallucination.

Then it lunged into the cell and bit the shit out of my arm. So, no, the disaster dog was real.

I pulled back instinctively, which was stupid, because all it did was rip my skin even worse. I opened the hand now deep in its mouth and let go a flare-gun flash of fire. The heat was nothing compared to what the animal was giving off on its own, but there’s something about having a stranger shoot fire into your face holes that is universally unpleasant.

It opened its mouth and screamed like a train on ice, banging its head on the ceiling of the cell. Something cracked that wasn’t stone, and gooey red blood leaked down all over its face.

I dove underneath it, rolled out the door, and slammed face-first into its leg—the first of six, all stupidly big with claws the size of my arm. I dragged myself sideways, scrabbling along a weirdly cold stone floor. A big fuck-off tail was pendulum swinging behind it, raking through the fake lava and kicking up whatever was actually underneath it. Dirt and red sparks geysered out of the ground.

The dog—the furry bastard dinosaur in a Goodwill dog costume—yanked its head out of the cell, spraying freezing gray stone across the hall. But now that I could see the whole body, it was less a dog and more a coyote—thin, slavering, and completely wild. It wasn’t as big as I thought it was at first—dire-wolf sized, not a literal fucking kaiju. But it was still big, and it was still spitting fire and lightning, and it still looked really hungry, so I didn’t know how that helped anything.

It screamed, slamming its tail full force into the ground. The stone cracked, and the crack shot forward along the walkway, splitting it in half. Bright orange light shined out of it from somewhere far below. The ground was shaking, hard enough to knock me flat.

I rolled with it. Jagged rocks dug into my back, some of them icy, some of them stupid hot. Smoke came bat-outta-hell hurtling from the split in the ground. My arm brushed against the clouds, and I almost screamed—the skin came away scalded and red. When I touched it, the cloud grew a face, teeth, tongue, everything, and tried to bite me.

Fuck this dungeon. Fuck all of this dungeon.

I pushed myself up, holding my arm to my stomach. It looked rough, the way an armadillo looks rough after getting plowed over by a semi-truck. There was blood everywhere, way more than there should have been. Maybe I ruptured an important artery, maybe it was a trick of the dungeon, but Hades, it was like a crime scene photo.

No time to keep staring at it, though.

The Demon Dog was hungry, and now the fucking thing was mad.

He shook the rocks off his head, thick black hunks of slippery-shiny stone, screamed at me, and charged. It was eight feet tall, slamming its claws into the ground hard enough to shake dust from the ceiling way, way above us. It was mostly coyote, but a coyote if you stretched it out and photoshopped an extra pair of legs onto the middle. Long, gangly, hulking in some places, wiry-thin in others. Plus, it was wreathed completely in blue light. And I was fairly sure that was the exact opposite of a good sign.

I started running.

Even on a good day, Demon Dog was definitely faster than I was. Today, which was not a good day, he was faster than God.

I was running on lightning-limp legs with a shock-fuzzed brain, holding a mostly liquid arm that was lucky to still be attached to my body. Everything in me wanted to collapse and go to sleep. The hallway—the passage, the massive cavern, lined and stacked with empty cells and ghostly groans—slipped and tilted under me.

My eyes kept going out of focus, so there’d be one cavern, then two, then four. Patches of blackness flashed in and out of the world, swallowing up what little light there was. I told myself it was just the illusions, just the theatrics of demon dungeon builders, but come on. I knew better. I was falling the fuck apart.

I tripped over nothing and planted my face into the floor. Something snapped in my nose, and pain lanced through my eyes and into my throat. I rolled over on my back, breathing through my mouth. The ceiling curved and flexed like rubber in the wind, bulging like the dungeon was breathing.

Something narrow and sharp pushed into my stomach—not hard enough to break my sweatshirt, but enough to tug the skin—and pulled me down like a soul trying to crawl out of hell. The dog’s face loomed over me, the hulking head of a parade dragon, listing back and forth. Fire poured out of its mouth and over me. It was harmless, but the heat was excruciating. I held my breath until it passed. My outsides were fireproof, my insides, not so much.

It closed its mouth and was visibly surprised that I wasn’t a mass of charred black flesh. It dug all its claws into my chest, pressing down hard. My ribs bowed, but they didn’t break, not yet.

The image of the dog strafed above me, lines of totally meaningless color. I felt nausea in every part of my body. Steely panic radiated out from the pit of my stomach, making my bones vibrate. Breathing wasn’t an option anymore. Fuck, it’s hot in here.

I blinked, and then I saw teeth.

For a second—just for a second—I wasn’t scared. Not because I was suddenly at peace; all the fear just got washed away. It was like the whole world had inhaled at once, sucking all the fog out of the mirror. My reflection stared back at me, small, naked, and broken.

This was it. This was the end.

I was going to die staring at the ridges in the mouth of an evil coyote, with Dulcie hating me because I’d run out of time to fix anything. Good job, Knight. Bra-fucking-vo. I hope you’re proud of yourself.

So, teeth. Big, shiny, yellow teeth. Last thing I’d ever see. Fine. I probably had it coming.

Then the dog got tackled sideways by something ever so slightly bigger, and all the fear came rushing back.

The dog and its tackler hit the wall and slid to the floor, both of them making these inhuman, metallic screeching noises. Things were scraped, bitten, and ripped clean off, thrown full across the hall until it disappeared into the now encroaching darkness. I could only see either of them because various parts of them were glowing in the dark. The lava light flickered, either because the dog was fucking with the illusion or because the illusion thought dramatic lighting was exactly what we needed right now.

There was a loud thump, and the dog ran off into the darkness, making this weird, whimpery hissing noise. The light faded a little more as it got further away, leaving only the flashing red eyes of the thing that did the tackling.

I looked at it.

Where the dog had been standing was now a white, looming, fuck-all spider.

And this spider was big. Like, Aragog-thinks-this-spider-is-thiccck-with-three-c’s big. God-scrambling-for-the-flyswatter big. This was the second cousin of the things that get locked up in labyrinths so they stop fucking with ancient Greek and Roman city-sates.

“Oh fuck,” I said.

The spider skittered forward, legs clicking against the floor like steel on glass. Something like ten thousand eyes blinked down at me in a glowing red wave. I don’t think spiders have tongues, but everything about this thing screamed “salivating.” Its mandibles went click-click-click in an “mmm, sweet, delicious man flesh” way that I did not like even a little bit.

So I ran for about twenty steps before I fell off a ledge.

I landed in sand. Lots of it—a whole piece of the desert, soft and bright. I was so fucking dizzy, for half a second I thought I was in a literal sandbox on a playground somewhere, and the last twenty-five years were just a badly written dream.

I rolled to my knees, and fuck, everything hurt.

Muscles you don’t even know you have. The sand was a weird mix of gritty and powdery soft. There was a hole above me, not a ledge. Red light was bleeding through it—the lava, I guessed. Now I was staring down the throat of a bullet-shaped cavern almost low enough for me to touch.

But it was still big enough for the spider that just nixed Clifford the Big Red Demon to get through, so staying put was probably a bad idea.

I started hobbling. I felt like the guy at the beginning of the horror movie, the one where you jump in halfway through his murder. At some point, I was going to come to a dead end. The camera would zoom in on my face and either go black or cut away to the rest of the dungeon, and my scream would echo into outer fucking space.

Forever.

I heard a crash behind me, followed by frantic skitters. I hobbled faster. Every time I moved or breathed, the muscles around whatever was bleeding squeezed, and blood poured out of me in uneven spurts. The tunnel opened up ahead of me into a room with massive holes in its walls. There were mounds, big rocks I could maybe climb or hide behind. Just a couple more steps and maybe I could find some place to stash my bleeding self.

And then. I fucking. Tripped. Again.

Out of the tunnel and into the room. I hit the ground, and the pain ripped straight through me. Moving was no longer an option. Seeing straight was off the table. I rolled over and looked at the ceiling. But there was no ceiling. Only mandibles, click-clack-clacking away.

Dying alone it is, then, I thought. In my head, the thought was laced with sarcasm, but it didn’t take. I looked at the spider, and the spider looked at me. This was the last face, the last eyes, the last hulking nightmare shadow I’d ever get to see. This was the final shot, the last picture of my life.

People have died in worse ways than this—horrible ways; longer, tortured ways—but you never think it’s going to happen to you until you’re staring it in the throat. And having taken a thirty-second break from thinking I was going to die, and then coming back to it, I wasn’t on board anymore.

I put my better hand up on reflex. It wasn’t going to help, but it was better than doing nothing.

The spider leaned down. It gurgled as it breathed. Red light poured out of its eyes.

It inhaled, hissing. It lifted a foreleg, massive and sharp.

And it waved.

“Hiya!” it said.

I blinked. All the dark-of-the-woods terror launched out of me and splatted against the wall like a body from a crashing car. “W… what?”

The spider looked at me expectantly.

“… Hi?” I said slowly.

It lifted another foreleg and waved again. It—she—smiled with her many, many deeply disconcerting eyes.

“I’m Joanne,” she said. She sounded like one of those singing dolls with buttons on their backs. “What’s your name?”

A spider named Joanne? What the fuck was going on right now? Obviously, I’d died and now was in some parallel dimension somewhere with talking spiders.

I swallowed. She was basically on top of me, smiling. My one hand was still in the air. I put it down very slowly. My bad arm wasn’t moving, but it squealed in protest anyway.

“… Knight,” I said.

“Knight like ‘night’ or Knight like ‘knight’?”

“What?” The adrenaline of self-reflection was totally gone, and I felt like I’d been roundhouse kicked in the stomach.

“I mean, Knight like ‘sleep time’ or Knight like ‘hi-ho, adventure awaits’?”

“Um…” I pushed myself into what somebody, at a glance, might call a sitting position. My body made lots of clicking noises as I did. “’Hi-ho adventure,’ I guess?”

“Cool!” She reared up like a horse and came down hard enough to punch bite-size craters into the floor. “Why were you running?”

“… Because you were chasing me?”

“Oh. Oops. I’m Joanne.”

I squinted at her. “You said that already.”

“Oh.” She giggled. The sound echoed like there were twenty of her. I wondered if that was her, the illusions in the dungeon, or me. I didn’t like any of those answers. “Sorry. My bad. I do that a lot.”

“Do what a lot?” I asked.

“Say things.”

I stared, blinking. I was doing a lot of blinking just then. I was reasonably sure that if I blinked enough times, Joanne the talking white spider would disappear. “Just in general, or…?”

“So what are you doing down here?” she asked, ignoring me.

“Uh… sightseeing,” I answered, still wondering how it was that I was having such a completely vivid trip right now. If this wasn’t death, because it actually didn’t feel like I was dead, then what was it?

She nodded sagely. “Gotcha. Not a whole lot to see anymore.”

“Anymore?”

“Yeah. All the interesting things are dead.”

Wow, what a deeply unpleasant thing for a giant lady spider to say.

“Still got me, though,” she said cheerfully. “Where are you from?”

“Um,” I started.

“Um,” Joanne repeated. “Most of the dead ones were from there. Except this one guy from Um-Um-Um, and this other guy from some really long screaming word I couldn’t pronounce. Must have been German.”

“… Sure.” Definitely not some poor bastard screaming bloody murder into the face of a giant, if very polite, spider. I wondered how the rest of those conversations had gone.

Joanne looked around. “Are you lost? You look super lost.”

“I am.” Mentally, physically, the works.

“Does anyone know you’re here?”

What a haunting sentence. “Yeah, but I don’t think they care.”

“Oh. So if I ate you, someone would miss you?” She sounded kind of sad about it.

But… wow.

I stared at this enormous, glowing spider, clicking her mandibles patiently at me, and I felt something sink through my stomach and into the floor. A cold nausea clung to my skin. It filled my mouth, like a dead man at the bottom of a river, swallowing mouthfuls of mud and algae.

No. No, I didn’t think anybody would.

But that seemed like a counterproductive thing to say, so instead I said, “I’d really rather you didn’t.”

Joanne waved her little arms. “No, no, no, I don’t want to eat you!”

“Then why… ask?”

“I don’t know. It’s nice to be missed, isn’t it?”

“… I guess,” I answered. What a weird metric for finding out if I had loved ones back home.

Then she said, “Hold still,” turned around, and laced up my side with webbing. I tried to jump away, but she was fucking fast, and before I could blink, my shirt and my arm were plastered to my skin with sticky whitish strings. It stung like liquor on a papercut for five agonizing seconds, and then I lost all feeling.

“What,” I said quietly, “the fuck.”

“There,” Joanne said, turning around. “Better?”

“Um,” I started as I looked down. One entire pant leg was soaked through with blood. “I mean, yeah.”

She nodded, clearly pleased with herself. She skittered back and forth on her legs like a waddling toddler. “So, what are you gonna do?”

I stood, slowly, fighting the static-y feeling in my muscles that made me want to collapse into a puddle of goo. I felt like I’d just lost a fight with a bulldozer and a baby elephant.

“I’m gonna get out of here.” I almost added, “I guess”, but I bit it back. Tacking “I guess” onto anything right now felt like I was fly-fishing for options in a kiddie pool.

Sure. I might as well get out of here. It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

“Can you?” asked Joanne. “Get out of here, I mean.”

“I can figure it out.” I turned to look at the room for the first time. The ceiling arced high above us, maybe two stories, and the walls were a lot closer than I’d thought. Red light was coming from somewhere further off—probably lava. The sand had been pounded mostly flat, like this was an area that received a lot of traffic.

There were a couple ways forward, the most notable of which was a giant hole in the wall to our left.

I started walking towards it. And by walking, I mean hobbling and sometimes flailing. I couldn’t feel it, but I saw the webbing bulge as my hand spasmed underneath it, and other parts of me were fighting the same impulse. It was like when you’re about to fall asleep and you randomly twitch or kick or feel like you’re falling.

Joanne skitter-pivoted to keep me in sight. “I need to come with you.”

I looked over my shoulder at her. “Why?”

“So you don’t die.”

“Because of the monsters.”

“Mmm hmm.”

“Are there more spiders like you?”

“No, just me. I’m special.”

“Then what else is down here?”

“Lots of things.”

“Like?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Growly things. Hungry things. Like that ugly beast you met earlier.”

“What are they?”

“Monsters, I guess. Big ones.”

“Great, but what are we looking at? Snakes? Dragons? Bears?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen most of the big ones. They’re really good at hiding. Especially Wilson. You kind of have to be. You know how it is.”

No, I didn’t know how it was, but I wasn’t going to ask.

She drummed her legs like you’d drum your fingers on a table. “What’s a bear?”

“You don’t know what a bear is?” I asked. But no, that made sense. If she lived down here, she’d have no reason at all to know what a bear was supposed to look like. And there probably weren’t bears in the dungeon; bears weren’t Darion’s style.

Unless he’d figured out how to make them breath fire or shit bombs or something. Then, sure, bring on the bears.

“Never mind,” I said. “Thanks for not eating me, but I’m gonna go.”

I turned and started walking. Behind me, I heard skittering. It sounded almost metallic, on the sand, which was unnerving.

I stopped and looked at her. “What are you doing?”

“Following you.” She smiled, as much as a giant spider can smile. “You’re headed for a dead end.” Then she shrugged—I think. “I thought you said you knew how to get out of here.”

“I didn’t say I knew, I said I could figure it out.”

“Is this what figuring it out looks like? Just wobbling around the dungeon until you find the way out?”

“Trial and error,” I answered. “And I am not wobbling.”

I was worse than wobbling. “Wobbling” was a generous estimate of the thing I was doing with my legs. I started wobbling forward again.

Joanne climbed up the wall and started walking along it like it was the floor, keeping pace with me at a perfect angle.

She zoomed ahead of me and cut me off. “Mom says I need to help you escape,” she said sternly. “She says it’s time.”

“… Mom?”

“Yeah, my mom. She says it’s super important.”

“I thought you said you were the only spider,” I said.

“I am. Mom’s not here.”

“Then where is she?”

“Dead.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” said Joanne. “But she also says we don’t have a lot of time, so we should get moving.”

“Right. When did your mom tell you this?”

“Just now.”

I looked around. “But she isn’t… here. You said she was dead.”

“She is. I hear her voice in my head.”

“Oh.” Well, okay, not the weirdest thing I’d ever heard. Dulcie supposedly met her mom when she died in Melchior’s library, so sure, why not? The spider could talk to her dead mom. Shrug.

“Okay,” I said. “Sure, fine. Lead the way.”

Joanne clapped her little arms together. “We can be dungeon buddies!”

I stared at her. “Please don’t call me your dungeon buddy.”

“Why not? We’re in a dungeon. You’re my buddy. What am I missing?”

A whole lot of sexual context, but I wasn’t going to be the one to explain that to her. “I, um. I don’t like dungeons.”

“Okay, what about prison pal?”

I almost choked. “That, no, that’s worse.”

“Dungeon buddy it is, then.”

“Dungeon buddy it is.”

“This way,” said Joanne.

And away we went.

SIX

Knight

Joanne, the enormous yet friendly spider, and I started skittering/ hobbling down a different, slightly smaller tunnel, broken up by lava flows which were our only source of light—parts of me were glowing, and Joanne’s eyes were fairly bright, but neither of us was doing much better than a cheap glow stick.

“Almost there,” said Joanne.

The tunnel opened up into a wide, long space the size of a football field. The ceiling here was lower, and there were no cells—just holes in the wall, surrounded by uniform depressions. They almost looked like doors.

The dizziness wasn’t going away. The room and its many, many holes tilted and dropped out from under me, probably because I kept forgetting to breathe. I blinked and found myself leaning against Joanne, muttering something even I couldn’t understand.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “Do you need to lie down for a second?”

“I. Um.”

“Because we can wait. I’m not in any hurry. And I would really like it if you didn’t die.” She sighed. I think. “I haven’t had a friend for a long time. It would really be a shame to meet you and then have you die now.”

I blinked. Deep breathing just made my head hurt, so I tried to exhale deeply instead. That worked a little. The room slowly came back into focus.

This wasn’t just some dinky little sand cave. These were buildings. This was a whole fucking neighborhood. The longer I looked, the more I was sure of it: These were buildings, plural, beaten out of the stone. They were huge, elaborate, carved up with faces and statues and letters that might have meant anything. There were windows, stairs buried in the sand. Roman-style statues of people with huge eyes and wide smiles crouched on every corner. A road that started underneath a cave-in to our right ran through the middle, patches of stone lying exposed. Half of the first floor had been swallowed up, but these were ruins. These were homes.

“Hey, Joanne?” I asked.

“Yeah?”

“Did people used to live down here?”

Parts of the architecture—arches and what were probably defunct fountains—made me think it might even be a temple district. The stuff above us had felt like a science fair project, but this… something about it felt sacred. Maybe that was the blood loss talking.

“I don’t know,” Joanne answered. “Maybe. I’ve never thought about it.”

“Why did you think all of these statues were here?”

“I didn’t.”

“Ah.”

We came through a covered archway—a hole in a wall, chiseled until it looked like pillars and a keystone—and on the other side was ice. It spread out before us in vast sheets, broken by tendrils of sand. Icicles hung from the ceiling and stuck up from the ground. Parts of the ground were almost sheer; darkness yawned beneath it. If I stepped wrong and fell through, I didn’t think I’d ever stop falling.

And right beside the ice—running through it, sometimes—was lava.

“Is that…” Okay, this was stupid, real lava would have melted the ice a long time ago. “That’s not real, is it?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“The lava upstairs is an illusion.”

“But we’re not upstairs.”

“No, I guess we’re not.” I looked at the lava. “So that’s actual lava?”

“Yep.”

“Just casually flowing around the ice.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Great, great. Why isn’t it melting?”

Joanne looked at me. “The lava?”

“No, the ice.”

“Easy, Snippy McSnipperton.”

“I’m not snippy, I’m looking at lava, and it somehow is not melting the frozen water right the fuck next to it. Sorry if I’m having a little trouble processing that.” Maybe I was Snippy McSnipperton. “Besides, I’m nearly dead from blood loss so I’m not in a good mood.”

“I could leave you here, you know.”

I took a deep breath, teeth clenched. “Yeah, you could.” I sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

“I know you didn’t.”

I put my hands in my pockets and leaned against the pillars. They were almost as thick around as Joanne. “So why isn’t the ice melting?”

I had my answer a few seconds later. There was a crashing noise, a puff of sand, and a smallish red crocodile came careening out of a brand-new hole in the wall on the other side of the cavern. It shook its head and scuttled down the dune.

Then it tripped on something and fell onto the ice.

It didn’t have time to get up. The ice came alive, growing around it, into it, and freezing it solid.

“Because it’s cursed,” said Joanne.

And I just said, “Oh.”

We stared at the crocodile-pop for a while. I whistled.

“So, don’t touch the ice,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Got it. So how do we get through without getting frozen?”

Joanne started forward slowly. “Very carefully.”

I pressed my lips together. “Great, thanks. I love this plan.”

We walked on the sand. Very carefully.

The cavern was weird, though. There’d be a blast of cold air, then heat, then a weird middle place, but the temperature changed almost every time I took a step. Rivers of lava boiled around us. Bubbles popped and splashed onto the ice, and then nothing happened. The lava gathered itself up like oil and just sat there until it naturally cooled. It was slightly reassuring that the magic ice couldn’t freeze literal molten rock, but I’d only jumped into a volcano once, and that was with Hades’ blessing or whatever. We hadn’t parted on good terms, so swimming in it didn’t seem like the best idea.

“How much of this stuff is there?” I asked.

“What stuff?” Joanne whispered, like she was worried the ice would hear us.

“The ice,” I whispered back.

“Why are you whispering?” she whispered.

“Because you are!”

“Oh. Right. My bad.” She smiled broadly. I think. “The ice is everywhere down here.”

I looked at the football fields of slick white. At the right angle, it almost looked like glass, glowing orange in the lava-light. “Define ‘everywhere.’”

“I mean everywhere,” she said. “Some rooms are clear, but low down they’re rare.”

“How thick is it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything break it.”

“Ever seen anything not get frozen by it?”

“The lava.”

Great.

My mind started to drift, and I was thinking of Dulcie again. Nothing new, nothing groundbreaking. Just about her face—soft pink cheeks, sparkling green eyes. I knew everybody’s eyes technically sparkled—that’s what happened when wet things caught the light—but when Dulcie smiled, it was different. It wasn’t a reflection, it was like literal stars. And when she was mad, it was like all those stars had gone out at once. It was like having a vision of the inevitable heat death of the universe.

“What’s the matter with you?” Joanne asked, nudging me. I’d been so engrossed in my own head, I almost fell over onto the ice.

“Be careful,” she said.

“Nothing’s the matter.”

“It’s not nothing, you’re pouting.”

“Maybe that’s just my face,” I said indignantly.

“It isn’t, though.”

“It’s been ten minutes. How do you know what my face is supposed to look like?” I demanded.

“Woman’s intuition.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t ask for your opinion, okay?”

“Hey, no need to get snippy with me, Mr. Snippy McSnipperton,” she said. “I’m helping you.”

“I’m not snippy,” I snipped.

“You are,” she said, “and it’s fine, because you’re definitely sad, but it’s still rude. So, for the next thirty seconds, I’m going to pretend you don’t exist to make you feel bad about being snippy with me.”

“I’m sorry,” I started.

She looked up and around at the cavern walls. We were close enough now to see our reflections in the climbing ice. “Did I hear something? Wind in the tunnels? A ghost, mayhaps?”

“Joanne, for fuck’s sake.”

“Tra-la-la, mi-mi-mi, lo-lo-li.”

“Come on, you can’t be serious—”

“Oh, what do we do with a drunken sailor, what do we do with a drunken sailor!” Her voice echoed in the cavern.

How the hell did she even know “Drunken Sailor”?

“Hades, okay,” I muttered. I stuck my hands in my pockets and stared at the ground, kicking up sand. “Quiet as a mouse.”

Ten seconds later, she looked at me and did the eye-smiling thing. “Okay, time’s up. Did it work? Do you feel bad?”

“A little,” I said.

“Good, then we can talk again.”

“… Silent treatment,” I said. “What are you, twelve?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably.”

I looked at her. “You don’t even know how old you are?”

“Nope.”

“Not even a guess?”

“Well,” she said, “I’m older than one and less than a hundred. But only maybe.”

“Only maybe,” I said as I shook my head and took in a deep breath. “So for all you know, you’re a hundred years old?”

“Probably not, but I might be. I can’t count anymore.”

“Can’t?”

She nodded—which, for a spider, meant the whole front of her body dipped down and back up a couple of times. More undulating than nodding. “Mister Dagan brought me presents twice—when I was born, and on my first birthday. When he stopped, I couldn’t count anymore.”

Made sense, if she’d been down here this whole time. It looked like they’d gone to a lot of trouble to make sure you couldn’t measure time in the bowels of the Dungeon of Nightmares and Sadness Blobs.

Hang on. “Wait, Dagan brought you presents?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Dagan Halsir.”

“Yeah.”

Wow. Dagan was the one who taught her Drunken Sailor. Weird, but better than most of the stuff he played in his club. Dagan’s playlists weren’t exactly kid friendly.

“Presents like what?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine Dagan bringing cake and Legos to a baby spider-queen.

“Dead things mostly,” she said happily. “Lots and lots of yummy dead things.”

Thaaaaaat’s more like it. “Like… people dead things?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, but it was more than a little offhand—so the answer was “almost definitely people dead things.”

“… Hey,” I said. “Do you know Dagan’s brother? Darion?”

Joanne stopped walking completely. Just for a second, like her walking animation had glitched or something. “Darion,” she said, cold and quiet.

“Yeah.”

She turned to look at me. The air around us went solid. I breathed it in and immediately felt like the air was trying to get out before my blood could get a hold of the oxygen.

“Darion,” she repeated.

“You know him,” I said.

“We all know him.” Her voice had taken on this weirdly mature and haunted quality. It was like she wasn’t seeing me anymore, like she was looking straight through me into a memory from a war.

“All?” I asked.

“Every monster in this place,” she hissed, getting up in my face. I stumbled back a bit. “Every one of us knows him.”

“And you don’t like him.”

Obviously…

The hissing sound she made was like a steamboat being dropped from orbit. “He is horrible!” she said. “Darion is the only truly guilty person ever to come down here.”

“What did he do to you?”

She shuddered. When she spoke again, she was on the verge of tears. “He made Dagan go away.”

Oh shit, okay. “What do you mean?”

“Darion was mean to his wife,” Joanne said. “Dagan wanted to help her, but they couldn’t stay here.”

“How do you know this?”

“Dagan came to say goodbye. He brought me more dead things and said he’d probably never see me again.” She took a deep, whistling breath and steadied herself. She was composed after all of three seconds. “They got away, and that’s good. But they shouldn’t have had to go anywhere.”

“I know,” I said. “I mean, I know they got away. I know them both.”

“Really? Where did they go?”

“A different dimension. Earth.”

“Do they like it there?”

“They like it way better than they ever liked it here,” I said with a shrug. I wondered if that would be true if Darion wasn’t in the picture. Did Dagan and Osenna have any kind of attachment to this world? Did they love Dromir the way Dulcie loved Splendor? Or did they hate it all along, and Darion being the worst was just the final straw?

It was cold, and the whole place was under a seemingly permanent blanket of snow, so I’d guess not. You didn’t kick yourself out of an ice world and into Southern California because you hated the heat. But even if they hated the weather more than anything, maybe they missed it? Maybe the people were charming, maybe the food was great, maybe the architecture was pretty. Maybe Dromir had that weird, cityscape-hometown charm people have about small neighborhoods in New York.

“That’s good,” said Joanne. “I miss them.”

I thought about telling her that they were both here. But if I did, she’d ask why they came back, and I’d either have to lie or tell her that Darion had dragged Osenna kicking and screaming out of Splendor, and that Dagan had hauled me and a now incommunicado group of professional pushovers to help get her back. None of that seemed like things Joanne would be happy to hear.

So I didn’t tell her anything.

“Did Osenna come down and see you, too?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. She was the sweetest. She had bruises all the time, though, and she didn’t like to talk about them near the end. Which was weird, because the first time I met her, she was pointing them out and telling stories about how she’d gotten them. It seemed like fun.”

Hades, did I even want to ask this? “Where did she get them?”

“Dagan. They were having sex.”

A laugh exploded out of me. Joanne looked at me sideways.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing, just… I thought you’d dance around the word a little more. Say something else, you know?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that they were playing a game.”

“Like Scrabble?”

“No, not like Scrabble.” And then something occurred to me as I turned to look at her. “How do you know about Scrabble but not about bears?”

“Osenna played scrabble with me a few times. She let me win. It was nice.”

That was such a weird thought. It was such a weird cluster of thoughts, imagining Osenna and Dagan sneaking away from whatever they were supposed to be doing to play board games with the resident junior. Kaiju. Even before Darion started taking asshole pills. They weren’t trying to escape anything, or at least nothing actively dangerous. Maybe they were bored. Or maybe they just really would rather be down in the dungeons with the spider than anywhere else, tanking Scrabble and telling sex stories.

What a weird, disconcertingly sweet thing for Dagan to do. It made sense for Osenna, but now that I thought about it, I only assumed as much because Osenna was a girl with alleged maternal instincts. If I stopped being sexist for two seconds, I realized it was weird for both of them to be fraternizing with a gigantic, talking spider. Weird and nice and bizarrely human.

Human in the ways that matter, Dagan had said. I think I actually understood what he meant by that now.

“How old are you?” Joanne asked suddenly.

“Thirty,” I said.

“What did you get for your birthday?”

“What did I get?”

“Yeah. You know, what present?”

“Who would give me a present?” I asked—which was heavier than I wanted to get, but sure, fine. Johnny Raincloud had yeeted himself off the platform and under the Martyr Train. Choo-choo, bitches.

“Anyone,” she said. “Anyone, anywhere.”

Somehow, broadening my prospects to the entire fucking world and still coming up zero didn’t make me feel any better. “I didn’t get anything.”

“Nothing?” she asked in obvious shock. “Are your friends mad at you?”

Yes, I thought. But I said, “I don’t have any friends.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Oh. That’s sad.”

“Don’t I know it.” I tried to play it off, but I just sounded so completely depressed. I was the word “glum” in jeans and an old hoodie.

“Are they mad at you?” asked Joanne.

“Are who mad? I just told you I don’t have friends.”

“But you said it like you used to have them, and you just don’t anymore because something happened,” she said.

“…I did.”

“What did you do?”

I sighed. “A couple of things.” I sighed again. “Really just one big thing.” And then a bunch of little things mostly consisting of me being an ass about the one big thing.

“Did you kill someone?” she asked conversationally.

“What? No!”

“Did you forget to get someone a birthday present?”

“No.” I hesitated. “I mean. Yeah, actually.” I hadn’t gotten Dulcie anything this year. Or last year, either. It had just kind of slipped away.

I stopped walking.

When even is Dulcie’s birthday?

“I don’t know when Dulcie’s birthday is,” I whispered, horrified. Then, quieter, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Who’s Dulcie?” asked Joanne.

“My girlfriend,” I answered, and immediately felt like I’d been sucker punched by God. “I mean, my, um…” I couldn’t say it. Grown-ass man can’t say the word ex-girlfriend. That’s a new kind of pathetic, Knight. “We’re not together anymore.”

“Aww. Did she make you mad?”

I swallowed. For the first time since I thought Dulcie was dead in Melchior’s library, I thought I was going to cry. “Yes. She didn’t do it on purpose. If I’d just listened to her, it wouldn’t have happened.” My eyes watered. I swiped at them with the heel of my hand.

“Did you make her mad?”

Did I make her mad? What a fucking question.

“Yeah. I did. Really mad,” I said, sniffling and trying to get a hold of myself. “But I deserved it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, go make her not mad,” Joanne said, like there was a button I needed to push to repair my tattered relationship.

“I can’t.”

“Is she dead?”

“Fuck, I really hope not.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

The problem. As though there was only the one, and if we could solve that, everything would be okay again. “She hates me.”

“Then make her not hate you.”

“She should hate me. And you can’t just make someone stop hating you.”

“Noone should hate anyone. Except Darion. Everyone should hate him. He’s mean.”

“Yeah, well.” I cleared my throat. “I’m like Darion. I was mean. I was worse than mean.” I didn’t like how much I meant that.

“But you’re not anymore. And you probably never were.” It wasn’t a suggestion, she said it like a statement of fact. Like it should have been obvious, and would have been if I weren’t a complete dolt.

“No, I was, and I still am. That’s the problem.”

“But… you’re not, though?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Are you sure? Because Darion kills things,” she said. “Darion hurts people and makes them hate themselves. And he has fun hurting people. He loves making things die, on the inside and on the outside. Do you?”

“No,” I said. “No, I just… Hades, but I did, for a second I did.”

“Why are you crying,” she said.

I dried my eyes again hurriedly. “I’m not.”

“Oh.” She paused. “So did you hurt Dulcie?”

I nodded and put my hand in my pocket. “Yeah. Yeah, I hurt Dulcie.”

“Why?”

“Because I was angry.” Because I was stupid and blind and childish and angry.

“So not because you were happy?”

I looked at her, confused. “What?”

“Did you hurt Dulcie because you were happy?”

“No!” I said. The word ricocheted off the walls like a bullet on a mission. I felt the kind of sick little kids get when a doctor comes out with a huge needle. “No, no, Hades, never.” There was a seventy-five percent chance I was gonna hurl.

Joanne nodded thoughtfully. “Darion is happy when he hurts people. You aren’t like Darion if hurting your girlfriend didn’t make you happy.”

“But I wanted it,” I said.

“Because it would make you happy, or because it would let her know you were angry?”

“I…” I tried to breathe. It didn’t go well. “It didn’t make me happy.”

“Well, there you go.”

And it was weird, but I felt a little better. Not perfect, not good, not even neutral. I’d gone from a negative thirty to a negative twenty-nine, but that wasn’t nothing.

I was still wrong. It was still the level-worst thing I’d ever done and ever would do. Dulcie should still hate me for it forever, everyone should, I should, and I probably would.

But this was something. This was a start.

“Stop!” Joanne hissed. I stopped and listened. We were in a new hallway-corridor thing, and it seemingly went on forever in every direction.

After a few seconds, I whispered, “What?” and she shushed me.

“Don’t. Move.”

I wanted to ask “Why?”, but I wasn’t a fucking idiot. I shut my mouth and waited.

Nothing happened. Nothing kept happening for a while.

Then Joanne said, “Run.”

And something burst out of the wall in front of us.

Black rock, sand, and steel bars exploded outward. Something enormous—something scaly and really fucking mad—reared up and slammed itself down hard, shaking the ground and filling the air with a fantastic roar. It swished its tail and the dust cleared, and I saw the head of the biggest fuck-off crocodile I’d ever fucking seen. Pulsing red dots were scattered across pitch black skin. Its eyes were glowing, sparking in the air around them.

And it had the demon dog in its mouth.

The dog demon was super dead. There was blood everywhere, in its fur, on the crocodile’s teeth. Its eyes were open, and all the weird crackling light had gone out of them.

The crocodile looked at us and chomped down on the body. Bones cracked. The head fell clean away and rolled onto the ice, where it froze over immediately.

“What is that?” I whispered.

“That’s Wilson,” Joanne whispered back.

Wilson dropped the dog and screamed at us.

“He’s not much of a people person,” she said.

Wilson rotated his enormous body towards us on weirdly limber lizard legs, using his tail to keep purchase on the floor.

A bulb of fire sprung to life in my hand. It was probably useless, but it made me feel less exposed.

“Can we fight it?” I asked. Joanne would know better than me what this thing was capable of.

She lowered herself very slowly to the ground. “Climb aboard.”

“So that’s a no.” I braced myself on one of her legs and swung up onto her abdomen. Her body—her carapace, I guess—was tough, faceted like broken onyx.

“Hold on,” she said. “Very tightly.”

Wilson lunged at us, and Joanne scurried up vertically along the wall. I clung to her with my legs and my one good hand. Wilson shrieked, spitting fire and kicking the fake lava out of its trenches.

Hi-ho adventure indeed.

SEVEN

Knight

We ran. Real fucking fast.

Wilson was barreling though the icy cavern after us, and Joanne was barreling slightly faster. She skittered around and over thick patches of the cursed ice, way too close for comfort—either she was trying to trick Wilson into icing himself, or she’d immediately forgotten that I was A.) on her back and B.) down an entire webby arm.

Joanne got a running start and vaulted over a whole river of the evil ice, and this bitch almost slipped off and turned himself into a goddamn popsicle.

I almost told her to slow down, but somehow that seemed like an even worse idea.

“Can you lose him?” I shouted. It was a stupid thing to say, but it was the closest I could get to telling Joanne to hurry up without actually saying it and sounding like an asshole.

She either didn’t hear me or didn’t care. Or maybe she was just distracted by the monstrous kaiju-dile moving along at a cool fuck-tillion miles per hour behind us.

Wilson stopped for half a second, crouched, and pounced with his very long, distinctly not-crocodile-like leggies.

“Joanne!” I shouted.

Joanne’s abdomen quivered. A long white string shot out and covered Wilson’s face, webbing his mouth closed. Blue light shone out from the gaps as he tried to shock his way out of it.

And he did. Five seconds of blue buzzing later, and the web exploded off him—and onto me. It was very warm and crackly.

I did not like this.

We scuttled around one patch of ice, two patches, three, five, traveling across the apparently endless cave. The far wall never seemed to get any closer—which was maybe a good thing, because I couldn’t see any tunnels from here that Joanne would fit through without a fight.

Then there was a grunty growling sound as something came running out of a smallish hole in the floor and tackled Wilson all the way into the ceiling.

The ceiling was a long way up. A very long way up. So whatever did the tackling this time was something fast, strong, and probably in a terrible mood.

“What was that?” asked Joanne.

“No idea. Just keep running.”

But Joanne didn’t keep running. She came to a screeching halt that almost threw me full into the ice again and turned to look at whatever had just shot the crocodile into orbit.

“What is that?” asked Joanne.

The crocodile was falling now, surrounded by a thick, glittery black fog, trailing out behind them as they came rocketing down.

The crocodile hit the ground in a mushroom-cloud puff of sand. Joanne and I closed our eyes, and when we opened them, coughing and waving away the dust in the air in front of us, the crocodile was being held above a comparatively tiny head by equally tiny arms. The tiny arms heaved and threw the crocodile into the ice—hard enough to break it with a sound like thunder. The crocodile wriggled for a second before becoming encased in silvery-blue.

We watched it bob up and down for a second before we turned to the shadow person.

“Friend of yours?” I asked.

“Not yet,” said Joanne. She lifted one short foreleg and waved. “Hiya!”

The shadow person looked at us, shoulders heaving, breathing heavily, angrily. Its posture had “Who’s next?” written all over it in a glow-in-the-dark Sharpie.

“We need to go,” I said. “Now.”

“Why? They helped us—that means whoever it is, they’re our friends!”

“They launched a crocodile into the sky. I really don’t want to stick around to find out if that was a one-time thing.”

“Maybe they could launch other crocodiles for us?”

“Or maybe they’ll launch us. Let’s go.”

In the time it took me to have this conversation and blink, the shadow moved.

I was tackled full force off Joanne and into the sand, landing with my head inches above the ice. Small hands, Arctic cold and leaking black mist, held me down with absurd strength and tried to press me down into it. I couldn’t force them off me, so I twisted sideways, but that only made the hands clamp down harder.

I opened my mouth, ready to spit fire or scream, and that’s when I got a good look at the shadow’s face for the first time.

And I froze solid. Not literally, just… holy shit.

“Dulcie?”

The shadow stopped moving.

Solid black eyes blinked down at me, squinting, leaning forward.

There was a long silence.

“Knight?” Oh, that was not what Dulcie was supposed to sound like.

I nodded, half numb. Panic and relief snapped at each other’s throats somewhere in my stomach.

Dulcie sat up, still straddling me. Still squinting, almost glaring.

“Holy shit,” I said. “Are you okay?”

Then I realized that Dulcie was back here, in Dromir, alone, and the implications of that came swimming in. I stared at her. “You came back for me.”

She stood, clapping sand from her knees, and offered me her hand, smiling. “Where’s Dagan?”

“I don’t know.”

“You got out, how did he?”

“He was taken somewhere by like a hundred guards.”

“Oh, shit. And they just left you behind?”

“Yeah. Then I was attacked by a demon dog.”

She looked at Joanne. “And rescued by a demon spider?”

“Yeah, actually. This is Joanne.”

Joanne waved. “Hiya!”

“Hiya,” said Dulcie. She spent a moment looking at Joanne before turning back to me. “Do you know how to get out of here?”

“No,” I said.

“Does she know how to get out of here?”

“Sort of,” I said. “But not really.”

“So the plan was just to wander around until you found a door?”

“Basically.”

“Fucking brilliant.”

Irritation exploded inside me. “Do you have a better idea?”

“Yeah, actually.”

“Great, so what’s the plan? Ask for directions? Google Maps?”

Dulcie smiled, and my blood ran cold.

Same smile. Same teeth—still weird and sharp—but her eyes weren’t smiling with her. I was looking at a lake in a Minnesota winter, frozen and snowed over, dull and cold and lonely.

Black smoke leaked out through her teeth.

I heard myself ask, “Are you okay?” Softer than I normally spoke, the way I would have asked her three years ago. The way I always wanted to ask her but couldn’t bring myself to anymore.

I had a sudden mental picture of Dulcie and me sitting on the couch, doing nothing in particular. The TV was on and she had her legs curled up, and she was leaning into me. I had my arm around her. I kissed her forehead and she snuggled into me, burying her face in my shirt.

I wasn’t even sure if that had ever happened. But I wanted it more than anything. I’d stay in this stupid evil ice dungeon for the rest of my life just for a minute of the way things used to be with Dulcie.

“What are you doing?” Dulcie asked suddenly. I shook my head as I realized I was very close to her face. I was leaning in. Why the hell was I leaning in?

“I. Um.” I didn’t get flustered, but I couldn’t get a word out. It was like there was a tiny stomach-goblin trying to shot-put the words out of my mouth and into the air, and he kept missing and hitting the back of my eyes instead.

“Earth to Knight,” said Dulcie, waving her hand in front of my face. She snapped a few times before I clicked back into existence. “Hellooooo? Hades, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said abruptly. “Don’t worry about it.”

She pursed her lips and nodded. “Great. Good talk.”

I swallowed. “Did you want to talk?”

“About what?” Dulcie smiled at me. Smiled like nothing was wrong, like we’d never had a fight in our lives. My stupid little pre-teen heart skipped a whole minute of beats. It was like Hades had taken a bucket of good memories and dumped it over my head. I stood there, soaking wet and shivering and wishing I had more than a waterlogged coat to show for everything we’d been through.

Because come on. We all know why I was leaning in.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Climate change.”

Yes, Knight, take this opportunity to be a sarcastic fuck. This will have no negative consequences ever.

“Do you want to talk about climate change?” she asked. “Because I have some opinions.”

No, I really, really didn’t. My life sucked enough ass without thinking about an angry god setting the rainforest on fire. “Dulcie, are you absolutely sure you’re okay?” I asked.

She beamed. “Never better.”

“So what’s all… this?” I gestured to the mist still curling out of her mouth.

Dulcie looked down as though seeing it for the first time. She blew it out through her lips like cigarette smoke and considered it for a second. “Huh. I don’t know.” She smiled at me again. She was smiling a lot. “Something about the dungeons, maybe.”

“Maybe,” I said absently.

Maybe Dromir was different from the Netherworld, but physical changes to magical creatures in different dimensions tended to be the same throughout that dimension. Going underground shouldn’t have changed the way she looked any more than going from Splendor to Mexico should have. Eyes going from emerald to literal abyssal-black felt like a very bad and very specific thing. I wasn’t prepared to write that off as “IDK, Dromir’s a wacky place.”

There was no delicate way to ask this. “Okay, don’t take this the wrong way, but why are you so cheerful?”

She shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

Because we had a huge fight and Bram was all over you less than an hour ago, I thought. And now you’re talking to me and somehow that isn’t totally ruining your life. “You’ve had a hard day. Like, seven hundred hard days.”

She scoffed. “No kidding.”

“So did something happen, or are you just magically happier now?”

“Why does something need to happen for me to be happy?” She smiled, squinting at me, like I was silly for asking. “I can’t just be happy? Do I need your permission?”

“No, of course you don’t, but you weren’t doing so hot the last time I saw you,” I said. “I just want to make sure you’re actually okay.”

She laughed, but the sound was hollow. “I’m actually okay. Okay? Totally grand.” She rolled her eyes at me. “And I think I’ve got a pretty decent idea of where we should be going.” She beamed and beamed and beamed. “Shall we?” She pushed her hair back, just for a second.

And then I noticed. Her ears.

“Dulcie, what the hell?”

“What?”

I pushed her hair aside to look at them. Round, perfectly round. The fairy points were gone.

“Mother of fucking hell,” I said. “What happened?”

She laughed, pushing my hand away. “What do you mean, ‘what happened’?”

“Your ears, Dulcie,” I said. “What happened to your ears?”

There was a long pause. “Oh, that,” she said. She dropped her hair back over them.

“Yeah, that,” I said, frowning. “What the hell is that?”

This definitely wasn’t a hazard of Dulcie being in Dromir. Her body had undergone a lot of weird changes, just like when magical creatures went back into the Netherworld—hazy, glittery wings that apparently couldn’t actually lift her off the ground, rose red eyes, and hornier than the first sailor ever to fuck a manatee—but her ears hadn’t been like that when we’d first come through. I would have noticed. Someone would have noticed. “What did you do?”

“What do you mean ‘what did I do’? They’re my fucking ears, what about them?” She crossed her arms, still smiling.

“What happened to your ears, Dulcie?” I asked, getting right up in her face. Hades, I’d forgotten how much shorter than me she was.

She quirked her eyebrow at me. “Nothing. They make me happy, isn’t that the important thing?”

“I mean, yes, but it’s weird, and you shouldn’t have been able to do it and that worries me.”

“I’m fine, Knight, I promise. It’s just… something I figured out how to do. It’s fine.”

A mental picture. Sudden, unprompted, vivid.

Dulcie on a motorcycle. Dulcie on her back on a blanket. Dulcie taking off her shirt, sliding her pants down. Dulcie moaning underneath me, smiling, sunlight incarnate. Feeling so proud of making her climax, so weirdly humbled by the way she trusted me to move, to touch her where it mattered.

My mouth moved. “I love you.”

The Dulcie in my mind evaporated as the Dulcie in front of me recoiled.

“Um,” she said. She nodded. “That’s, uh. Good for you.”

“Um,” I said, wetting my lips. I thought I knew what your mouth going dry was supposed to feel like, but this was different than any other “fuck me running” moment I’d ever experienced; it didn’t go dry, it melted and stuck to my teeth like old gum.

“I didn’t mean…” I said, and trailed off like an absolute moron. I meant it, but somehow I thought saying “I didn’t mean to say it” would just make everything worse. “Maybe we should just keep moving,” I said quickly.

“Maybe,” said Dulcie. But now she was looking at me like I couldn’t read—confused and fascinated.

“Are you one hundred percent sure you’re okay?” I asked for the nth time. It felt like the words were literally sliding out of my mouth, like they were too slick to hold in. Words weren’t passing through my brain and into my mouth before I could stop them—they were manifesting in my mouth and just going blaaarrgghh into the worryingly round ears of my girlfriend.

My ex. My ex-girlfriend. Goddammit Knight.

“Yes, I am.”

“Are you sure?” The words kept coming. I didn’t know what I was going to say until they were already out.

“Do you think I’m lying?”

“I don’t know. You do that sometimes.”

Dulcie stared at me. “Oh, okay. So that’s how it is.”

Shit. “I just meant that sometimes you lie to protect me, but I can take care of myself. You can tell me anything.”

Dulcie swallowed hard. Her smile didn’t falter, but something in her eyes did. “No, I can’t.”

“Why?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

“I don’t know—the last time I tried to talk to you was when you arrested me, and we all remember how well that went.”

“I know. Dulcie, don’t you think I—”

“It doesn’t matter! Hades, will you stop touching me?” she said. “Stop it! Get off!”

I’d only been touching her shoulder, and just barely. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“I can’t deal with this right now,” she said, standing and stomping away.

“Dulcie?”

“No, no, no, we’re not doing this.” It sounded like she was talking more to herself now than me.

“Not doing what?”

“We are not fucking. We’re just not.”

And I laughed. I couldn’t stop myself. It wasn’t a humor laugh; the sound I was making was desperate and hysterical. “Um. No, no we’re not.” I put my hand in my pocket and looked at her. “Sorry if my shoulder-touching came on a little too strong.” Okay, now I was just being an ass.

“No, that’s not… you’re not… ugh.” She groaned and ran her hands over her face, pulling on her cheeks so her eyes stretched down. “I just… I’m here. I’m in Dromir, and Dromir doesn’t like me.”

Oh.

Oh, Hades.

Now I was full-on belly laughing because I finally understood what the fuck she was going on about. “Oh my god. Oh my god.”

“Shut up. This isn’t funny.”

“Are you sure?”

She glared at me. “I’m completely fucking positive. I don’t understand why you think it’s so funny.”

“No, I just…” I had to wipe tears out of my eyes. “It’s…” I wheezed. “It’s fucking ridiculous.”

Dulcie squinted at me. “Ridiculous?”

“Oh my god, yes, yes, it is,” I said. “This is absolutely hilarious, Dulcie. We… we, you and me,” I said, breathless and cackling, “we’re in the demon world, underground, surrounded by evil ice, you’ve been possessed, your ears are fucked, you just threw an entire crocodile into the sky, and…” Oof. Breathing was not a thing I got to do today. “And this is still, still about how much we want to fuck each other.” I threw my arms out wide. “Are you having fun, Universe? Are you still getting a kick out of me and Dulcie trying to figure out how to share an entire goddamn planet? Is it still funny up there? Because it’s funny down here!”

I may have gone slightly insane.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” asked Dulcie. Clearly, she agreed.

“Everything,” I said, smiling like the crazy bastard I was. “Everything is wrong with me. You’re missing buttons, and I’ve lost the whole goddamn coat.”

“Apparently,” she said.

I looked at her, trying to get a hold of myself. “Do you remember the first case we were on together?”

“… Yeah?”

“Remember how I put that monster blood in my mouth?”

She smiled a little. “I remember.” She smiled a little more. “I remember trying to keep you from fondling yourself on a stakeout.”

“In the middle of the night,” I said, “hiding in the bushes, trying to get you to pinch me harder.”

She beamed. A real, genuine Dulcie smile covered her face in sunlight. She wasn’t holding herself so tightly anymore. She relaxed. She went from granite back to cotton, the rigor mortis draining out of her so all her muscles could move again, so she could smile the right way.

I grinned back at her. For a few seconds, it felt like we were back on the couch in my living room, or half naked on the cliff, together and alone and completely okay.

Then something clamped shut inside her, and all the color bleached away.

“We need to keep moving,” she said abruptly. The rose light went dark, like a curtain had fallen over her eyes.

Calling her on it felt dangerous. Bringing it up seemed to piss off whatever was riding shotgun in her brain—but leaving the change there to rot didn’t feel a whole lot better. What if I stopped pulling her out of it? What if the thing inside her stopped losing control and she got stuck in Nightmare Dulcie mode forever?

“What does it want from you?” I asked.

“What does what want from me?”

And then I knew. It popped into my head from nowhere, like the image of Dulcie and me at home, like the vision of us together before everything went wrong. “The Darkness. What does it want from you?”

Dulcie’s mouth smiled, but the smile didn’t belong to her. I realized I wasn’t looking at Dulcie O’Neil anymore—I was looking at the Darkness, wearing her face. Her eyes were dark again, full dark, and her skin went paper grey.

She spoke, and her voice coiled in the air like snakes. “Nothing,” she said, “that I do not already have. Be a good boy and leave us to our business.”

She turned sharply over one shoulder and started walking away.

“Come on,” she said. Back to normal, but with the cadence of someone who isn’t getting paid enough to babysit me. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

“You won’t get away with this,” I said.

“Get away with what?” she asked.

“I’m not talking to you.” I walked up to her and held her face with my one good hand, looking her directly in the eyes. “I’m talking to it.”

Dulcie’s voice changed. “How rude.”

I glared at it, at the pulsing blackness swimming like smoke in her eyes. “I see you,” I said. “I know you. And I will not let you hurt Dulcie.”

“She’s a big girl. She can take care of herself.”

“Leave now and maybe it’ll hurt less.”

The Darkness smiled. “Hmm.” She grabbed my hand and twisted. I fell to my knees. The Darkness put her mouth to my ear. “Make me.”

“I will.”

She increased the pressure until I was bent almost to the ground. “You do not know how.”

I looked at her over my shoulder. “But someone does.”

“Then go find them.” She let go, pushing me forward. “We have work to do.”

She blinked. The black faded from her eyes and she frowned at me.

The Darkness wasn’t just inside her. It was taking over.

“We should get moving,” she said in her normal voice. She was shivering and wasn’t looking me in the eye. “I don’t want to be down here any longer than I have to.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me neither.” Calling it out again right now wouldn’t do either of us any good—if anything, it might just make the Darkness angry, and it might hurt Dulcie just to spite me.

So I did nothing.

Joanne sidled up to me as we started walking. We kept behind Dulcie, and I watched her with the twitchy eye of someone who’s realizing that passing out and sleeping are apparently two very different things.

“Question,” Joanne said.

“Answer.”

“When you were looking at Dulcie…”

“Yeah?”

“Why were your eyes glowing?”

I felt a pang in my chest—a sorrow the likes of which I hadn’t felt in a long fucking time. Swallowing hard, I said, “It’s nothing. Just something that happens sometimes.”

“Oh. Okay.”

We kept walking.

EIGHT

Henry

Sam was staring down the barrel of a microscope, cursing quietly.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Everything,” she said. She turned sharply away and put her hands over her face. “I don’t know what this even is.”

“Hey, they’re working on it,” I said slowly. “They” meaning a gaggle of federal doctors we’d called in shortly after Dulcie, Bram, Quillan, and Christina had run off. They’d taken a cursory look at the sample, muttering ominously to themselves, and then disappeared with most of it to… run tests, I guess. This wasn’t really my purview.

“Yeah, that’s the problem. If this was something we knew how to fix, it wouldn’t take us this long to identify it.”

“That’s not true.”

“Isn’t it?” she snapped. I didn’t say anything about it. She was having a historically bad day.

She sat down hard on one of the little black plush plastic chairs against the wall. “There’s nothing I can do with this. Nothing. It’s just this vague, dark, evil something, but light and sun spells don’t do anything to it and it’s separating from her blood but her body is probably still going to treat it like blood, and that’s really, really bad.”

Sam sniffled, gasped, and then she started sobbing.

It took me another second to realize she really, genuinely thought her best friend was going to die.

I pushed myself off the exam table and went to sit beside her. I put my hand on her back and moved it in slow circles. “It’s gonna be okay.”

I clucked my tongue softly, and my hand started to glow.

Peace and calm flowed into her through a literal, almost liquid light seeping from me through her clothes and skin. Her breathing slowed.

“It’s gonna be okay,” I said. “I promise.”

“You don’t know that.”

Actually, I did, but I couldn’t tell her that yet.

She took a deep breath and sat up a little straighter. I dropped my hand. “Any better?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Since when can you do that?”

She looked at me. Already her tears were starting to dry.

Honestly, I should have known she’d be able to tell. “Since always, I guess.”

“Huh. Who’d you learn it from?”

“Who says I learned it from anybody?”

“If your magic was inherent, it would mean you weren’t human, and Christina or Dulcie would have been able to tell. So, you learned it, like me. Probably.”

“Oh. Um. I learned it from my mom.”

“Was she a witch?”

“She had magic,” I said. It was close enough to the truth to pass go. I didn’t like lying to Sam—she was so sweet, and it made me feel twitchy and gross all over.

Perhaps we should tell her, Elaine said in my head.

It’s not time, I said. Is it?

It is. Dulcie is in Dromir. Joanne has found Knight.

Oh, God. Then it’s starting. Like, for real, right now.

It is.

How long do we have? I said.

Until the end of the day. Tomorrow, at the latest, but I doubt it.

That’s not enough time!

… It is if we tell her.

Two people knowing is too many, I said. The more people who knew, the more likely the Darkness would realize something was up.

Dulcie has to die in Dromir. You are not strong enough to reach that far. You need an anchor.

I sighed. One day wasn’t enough to tell Sam everything, so… here was the Cliff’s Notes version.

“Sam,” I started. “I, um.” There was no pleasant way to say this. “Something really terrible has happened to Dulcie.

“I know,” she said. “Maybe can we just… not talk about it?”

“Not really.”

Sam squinted at me. “Why? What’s wrong?”

I swallowed. “That stuff in her blood? It’s a side-effect of her passenger.”

“Her passenger? What are you talking about?”

“Dulcie has been possessed.”

Panic folded open on her face.

“Possessed?” Her eyes were frantic, searching. “By whom?”

I grabbed her by the shoulders and looked her in the eye. “Possessed by the Darkness.”

“Oh, Hades,” said Sam, words running together. “Meg.”

I took a breath and nodded. “Yes. Meg.”

Her forehead creased. She stammered, “But—that—it’s not—Dulcie or Christina or Bram, even, someone would have seen it, someone would have been able to tell.”

“The Darkness is an old god. They couldn’t tell.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” She hesitated. “What do you mean, ‘old god’?”

I meant the Darkness was a god and it was very old, but now didn’t seem like a great time to get into that.

“Sam, look at me,” I started, not even sure how I should explain all of this. “Good. The Darkness is in Dulcie—stay with me,” I added as her expression crumpled. “It’s going to be okay. Something bad is going to happen to Dulcie, but it’s something we can fix, okay? I promise. We have a plan to fix it.”

“No, we don’t,” said Sam. “That’s our entire problem, Henry, we have literally nothing.”

Okay, not we as in us, but a different “we”. “We do. Now, I’m not supposed to tell you this, okay? But it’s important, and I think you can help me.”

Just spit it out! said Elaine.

Shush, I thought. Let me handle this.

Sam nodded. “Okay, what?”

“It’s really important you don’t tell anyone else, okay, Sam?”

“Okay?”

“This is a spell. A really important spell.” Maybe this was a bad idea.

We need her, Henry.

“I’m good at keeping secrets,” Sam insisted.

It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her, I just… so much was at stake. “It’s kind of illegal.” And that.

There was this flash in her eyes. Mischief, maybe? It could just as easily have been panic. One way to find out. Deep breaths, Henry.

“What is it, Henry?” Sam demanded.

I nodded. “I need you to help me bring Dulcie back from the dead.”

***

My apartment was clean by college dorm standards, but even that was pushing it. Nothing traditionally messy was happening—no laundry or dishes or anything—just a lot of… components, I guess. Spell stuff. Really conspicuously after-market spell stuff.

There were black candles made from the wax of this really specific and endangered kind of Netherworldian bee, bone chalk, vials of different kinds of blood, skulls that didn’t look human, skulls that were definitely human, a gold mallet, ritual masks—just a lot of generally upsetting stuff.

Sam gawked at it.

“Is there a reason you have all these super illegal magic things just lying around?” She picked up one of the candles, handling it like someone on fire handles a bomb. “Hades, where did you even get this?”

Right, about that. “So, I’ve kind of had this ready for a while,” I said.

“How?” asked Sam.

“I was told.”

“Told what? By whom?” She scrunched her mouth up to one side.

“Um.” I ran a hand through my hair. This was the weird part. “I was told Dulcie was going to die.” I pursed my lips. “By her mother.”

Sam stared at me, her eyebrows meeting in the middle of her face. “Dulcie’s mom is dead.”

I nodded slowly and put my hands in my back pockets. I kind of rocked forward on my feet. “Yeah. Uh, she is. That’s true.” I kept nodding. I couldn’t seem to stop.

“… That’s the ‘we,’ isn’t it?” Sam asked.

“It is.”

“You’ve been communicating with Dulcie’s dead mom?”

“Sort of.”

“And she can… what, see the future?”

I inhaled deeply. “Not exactly? She just knows more than we do. And she’s smarter than me, so most of the time she can tell what’s coming.” I tried to remember the analogy Elaine had used to explain it to me. “Like if there’s a toddler, a gallon of paint, and a white couch in a room, she can tell you the toddler is about to get paint on his hands and face and rub it all over the couch. You and me just, uh, can’t see the toddler.” I thought for a second. “Or the paint. I guess it depends on where you’re standing.”

Sam put the candle back down on the shelf and wiped her hand on her skirt. She was nodding, lips pressed together in a line.

Sam was nodding, lips pressed together in a line. “Why have you been communicating with Dulcie’s mom?”

“Technically, Dulcie’s mom has been communicating with me.”

“What does that mean?”

“She started it.”

“…Why?”

This was too much to drop on Sam all at once. She was already on the edge of not believing me. Maybe it was time to start lying again.

Then there was a breeze (indoors) and a tingly feeling in my chest. Which basically meant “go for it.” Or maybe “stop being such a huge baby.”

I’m working on it, I thought.

They will learn of the seal very soon. We don’t have much time.

Okay, okay.

“So,” I said, “Dulcie’s not exactly human.”

“Well, yeah, she’s a fairy.”

“I mean, she’s not that, either. She’s not… anything normal.”

Sam just stared at me for a second. “Normal?”

“Like, biologically normal. She’s got something in her that isn’t… from here.”

“The Darkness,” said Sam, nodding like she understood.

But she didn’t. “No. I mean, yes, that too, but… there’s something else.”

“Something else? Like?”

I sighed. “Look, Sam, you know as well as anyone that Dulcie shouldn’t have survived all of those transfusions. Meg didn’t care about blood type or species type or anything. Dulcie should be dead.”

Sam was totally stone-faced. “Yeah?”

“So, how did she survive?”

“… Are you about to tell me her mom saved her?” She was squinting at me, but she didn’t sound skeptical, exactly. Just cautious.

“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m about to tell you. What I am telling you. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds, I promise.”

“No, Elaine’s saved her before. Dulcie said she died in Melchior’s library and when she did, she saw her mom. I just assumed she’d lost consciousness and was dreaming.” She paused. “She… that was dragon’s blood that killed her. She shouldn’t have survived that, either.”

Yup. Here we go. “Exactly.”

“Her mom saved her?”

“She did.”

“How?” Sam gestured to the menagerie of nightmare tools around us. “Necromancy? Was Dulcie’s mom a necromancer?” She frowned at the floor. “I feel like I would have known that.”

“No, she’s not a necromancer,” I said.

“Then what?” she asked. “I believe you, but dead people don’t get magical powers just for being dead. That’s not how this works. Is it?”

“It isn’t.”

She crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. “What aren’t you telling me?” She paused for a second longer and added, “Why did you request to work with Dulcie?”

Um. About that.

“Her mom asked me to.” I took a deep breath. “So, you know how Dulcie didn’t die with Meg, and she didn’t die when she was shot, and she does that thing where she can just… make things out of thin air?”

Sam grimaced. “Yeah. I thought it was a fairy thing, but Christina can’t do that. That’s something Meg’s… experiments, I guess, gave her.”

“No, it isn’t. Dulcie’s had that for as long as she’s been alive. And, you know, for all the time she’s spent being dead.”

“… Henry, I think it’s time for you to convince me to help you.”

“Oh, yeah. Definitely.”

“Start from the bottom. What’s the spell?”

“It’s a, um. Transfer.”

“Transfer?”

“It’s soul magic. The idea is to catch Dulcie’s soul before it can make the full transition to the other side.”

“Why?”

“Well, we can’t separate the Darkness from her right now without killing her, and if they die while they’re sharing a body… the Darkness has a very specific place it’s going to go when it dies.”

“Oh shit,” said Sam.

“Yeah,” I responded. “If Dulcie dies with the Darkness, it’ll drag her down with it. And that’s not a place we can get her back from. Ever.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know. Her mom says it’s some pocket dimension somewhere. The Darkness was there until someone pulled it back out into the world. She says Dulcie’s going to die pretty soon, and if we can catch her soul in transit, we can use this spell and her mom’s magic to separate Dulcie from the Darkness before they get all the way there. And if we time it right, the Darkness will be too overwhelmed to stop us.”

Breaking the seal. We really needed that to be enough.

“But, uh. We’re gonna need help. From Dulcie’s mom.”

Sam frowned. “What can she do? She’s dead. And you just told me she’s not a necromancer.”

I grimaced. Bringing Dulcie back from the dead? Fine. Talking to Dulcie’s dead mom? Totally kosher. What I was about to say would take me from mad scientist up to deranged cultist.

But here goes.

“So, uh,” I said. “What do you actually know about gods?”

NINE

Dulcie

“Um,” said Joanne. “I’m stuck.”

The hole we’d attempted to bust in the hollow wall—which the Darkness insisted led to the surface—wasn’t big enough for her. Her abdomen and four of her legs stuck out and wiggled awkwardly.

“Well, fuck,” I said.

Knight was staring at me, not the spider, which was both stupid and awkward.

“Nah,” I said aloud. I grabbed Joanne by the abdomen. “I’m gonna push and you’re gonna scrabble, okay?”

“Scrabble?” She was slightly muffled by half a ton of bricks and dirt.

“Move forward,” I said, louder. “On three, okay? One… two… three!”

I pushed. Joanne didn’t get the chance to scrabble.

She crashed through the wall with a metallic clatter and a whiny little scream. Dust fell in clouds all around her.

“There,” I said, clapping dirt off my hands. I started walking, realized Knight was standing still, and turned to look at him. “Come on.”

He blinked and hauled himself through the hole without really responding. Rude.

I started to follow, and the Darkness went totally rigid inside me.

Do not enter there.

You said it led to the surface, I responded.

I did, but I could not sense what lay within.

…Monsters? I said slowly, not really caring. What could possibly be in there that we couldn’t handle?

Something ancient and unkind, it said. Find another way.

Stop being such a fucking pansy, I said, and crawled through.

Into… a church. Full of people gawping at the very big spider.

It was a massive structure. High white walls, red banners hanging from bronze rods, rows on rows of dark wooden pews. Thin windows looked out onto a dark, snow-capped city. Skyscrapers loomed over us, all of them shot through with blinking neon signs and the snaking white trails of elevated trains. A red carpet stretched from here—the very back wall of a crowded sanctuary—all the way down the aisle.

And at the very end of the aisle. Up on the altar. A very big, lovingly rendered painting of a spider. A white spider.

How ‘bout that.

Around us, the room went deadly quiet.

Everyone was frozen. Very young, very frazzled priests held candelabras and chairs over their heads. Little kids, maybe initiates, poked their heads out from under tables. Nuns gaped, knives in their hands.

You’re scared, I whispered, of… altar boys.

You are a fool if you go further.

Whatever.

Then one guy—old, wrinkled, gray hair, milky and unfocused eyes—entered the room. Came from a little pointed door off to one side.

“What’s all the noise?” he asked, leaning against a tall black walking stick. He looked around. His eyes skated straight over us.

“Father Demick,” said someone holding a chair. “It’s—”

“Snow-killer, I know.” Father Demick chuckled. “Snow-killer and friends.”

He walked down the bunched up red carpet toward us. “Put down your chairs, fellows. These are friends, our friends.” He chuckled in that grandfatherly way only the very old and smug can really pull off.

Knight and Joanne looked at each other. I didn’t look away from the Father. “Snow-killer?”

“Indeed,” he said. He reached forward and touched my face, looking at me but not seeing me. It didn’t seem like he was seeing anything. I flinched away reflexively.

“Good at last has been done through great evil,” he said. He dropped his hand. He looked incredibly sad. “Your name is Dulcie, correct?”

I stiffened. Strange men knowing your name is on the list of Top Five Really Bad Signs. “Yes. How did you—”

“Daneira told me.” He gestured to the wall, where a giant white spider was pictured with the silhouette of a woman on fire. Their goddess, I guessed. Weird. It had never occurred to me that Hades might not be the only god out there.

“Mom!” said Joanne.

Knight and I gaped at her. “Mom?”

“You have nothing to fear from Daneira,” said the Father, pointing to me. “She is your friend most of all.”

“Most of all? Why me most of all? What did I do?”

His brow scrunched up for a second, then flattened out. He inhaled, and his voice lost some of its depth—less like something was wrong with him and more like I’d just caught a five-year-old in a lie. “Yes, well, you’ve brought us the spider and you plan to rid us of Darion once and for all. This grants you her favor.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. Not that I wouldn’t try to kill Darion if I saw him, especially if he started a fight (which he would if he saw me first), but I kind of just wanted to get Dagan and Osenna and go take a bath. “Then you know why we’re here.”

“Yes.” He shrugged, his voice deep again. “And no. Daneira knows many things, but she does not know all.”

“… So why do you think we’re here?” asked Knight.

Father Demick didn’t look away from me. “To save us,” he said.

“We’re just here to collect someone,” I said.

“And in that collection, you have awakened our friend here.” He gestured to Joanne. “It is an honor to meet you, White Spider.”

“I’m Joanne,” said Joanne. She waved.

“And I am your humble servant, Father Demick.” He bowed to her, arms out. He looked at me. “And yours, dear friends.”

“Thanks,” I said.

You must flee this place, said the Darkness, frantic. Quickly.

Fuck. Off, I muttered.

Father Demick blinked at me for a second. “But we must hurry,” he continued, “if you are indeed here for what I think you are. Come, come.” He turned and started walking back up the carpet. “Follow me. We haven’t much time.”

Down the carpet, past gaggles of acolytes or monks or whatever else they were called, still holding candles and chairs and very large books. They blinked at us in confusion as we passed. Several of them held tiny white spider pendants in their hands, and were whispering things over them with their eyes half closed.

Joanne muttered apologies whenever she bumped into anyone or anything, which was fairly often, despite how completely fucknormous this building was—it was just that pews and things were scattered all over the place. Uniform, but cluttered. I wondered how many people routinely came here to worship.

He led us to a small-ish office, into which Joanne obviously wouldn’t fit. The carpet here was white, and the furniture was this deep blackish-red wood (mahogany? Like I know anything about it); pictures of people dressed like the Father—probably his predecessors—were hanging on the back wall between bookshelves, all of them sitting with their hands folded in their laps, looking incredibly severe. In the middle of everything was this huge fuck-off lawyer’s desk.

Father Demick got into one of the top drawers, pulled out a small, purple drawstring bag, and dumped something out of it into his hand.

“This,” he said, handing it to me, “is for the um…” He thought for a second. “Friend of the goddess.”

Weird inflection, but okay. He dropped it in my hand. It was a key, small and white, with a ruby on the flat end. “It is a skeleton key for the Halsir mansion,” he said. “It will open every door you come across.”

“Great,” I said. “Why do you have this?”

“Do you really care to know?”

“Yes.”

He leaned in and whispered conspiratorially. “So Joanne can save the world.”

Joanne pushed her face in through the door. It almost worked. “Hiya.”

“Hello,” Father Demick said, smiling patiently.

“And what is she going to do, exactly?” said Knight.

Father Demick shrugged. “Who knows? You should get going and find out. One of the acolytes will show you the way.”

“Not to look a gift skeleton key in the teeth,” I said, “but how do we know we can trust you?”

He shrugged. “You are a giant spider, a Loki, and a possessed fairy. If we betray you, you can kill us.”

Then it struck me hard that he could tell the Darkness was inside me.

“Wait, wait, wait. You…” I changed to whispering. “You can see it?”

He chuckled that Southern grandfather chuckle again. “Yes. We all can. It is among our gifts.” He gestured to Knight. “Hades lives in him, your passenger is in you, and Daneira lives in us all.” He spread his arms to indicate the entire church.

The Darkness bristled inside me.

“Sure,” I said.

“Hades does not live in me,” Knight said.

Father Demick opened his mouth and closed it. “Yes, well,” he said, with the cadence of somebody deciding it just wasn’t worth arguing about.

Then Father Demick put his hand on my shoulder and squared his eyes with mine. “It will grow stronger in you before this is done, and it will not be pleasant. Push through. We have great need of you, and of it, though it will not tell you so.”

Well I don’t think he’s very pleasant, the Darkness grumbled.

“You don’t think anyone is very pleasant,” I said quietly, not realizing I was speaking out loud until it was too late.

Father Demick laughed. “No, it does not.” He stopped laughing and stared at me. “It has cursed you with gifts of false design. Heed yourself before you heed the Darkness; the lie will become clear very soon, and you must be ready to combat it.”

“What lie?”

“The lie of your passenger and what it wants.”

He is lying, said the Darkness. He is a demon. When have you ever known a demon to speak the truth?

Well, no, I hadn’t, so technically, the Darkness wasn’t wrong, but I’d also only ever known one demon, and that demon was Dagan Halsir who ran a sex club and could be persuaded to tell the truth if you threatened to cut off his dick.

We could threaten to cut off the Father’s dick.

Maybe not, I said.

Beside me, Knight was stiff as a board.

Father Demick looked ceilingward suddenly and sighed. “I must go,” he said. He snapped his fingers and a priest with dark skin and solid black eyes ran up to us.

“Sevrex will show you the way,” said Father Demick.

Sevrex looked nervously up at Joanne. She waved. He gave her a very small, very freaked out wave in return.

“Um. Uh.” He swallowed hard. “This, um, this-this way. Ma’am, Miss Snow-killer, can you, perhaps, um, back up? A bit? Please?”

“Sure!” Joanne wiggled herself free of the door and skittered backwards. We all filed out.

“Be careful,” said Father Demick behind us.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I answered with a smile.

Sevrex walked over to a wall to the right of the office, covered with paintings and tiny relief sculptures of spiders and a woman who was probably Daneira, and pressed against one of the bricks. There was a groaning sound and a puff of dust, and the wall swung inward to reveal a startlingly well-maintained dirt tunnel. It was only just big enough for Joanne to squeeze through.

“Come on,” he said.

Sevrex went first, followed by Joanne, followed by Knight, followed by me. Behind us, Father Demick whispered to another of the acolytes, one just as young and just as frazzled as poor Sevrex.

“To the mansion,” he said. “In the rose room. Quickly, Bastiok. They will be found.”

The acolyte nodded and ran off, and the wall closed behind us.

***

The tunnel was very dark, and it took us maybe ten seconds longer than it should have to realize that Lokis can’t see in the dark. Knight bumped hard into Sevrex and said “Fuck” loudly enough to echo down the whole tunnel. Even with vampire, werewolf, and Darkness night-vision, I could only see silhouettes and a few shades of gray. I just hadn’t thought anything of it.

“Motherfucker,” he muttered.

“Language,” said Sevrex, like he thought we might be overheard.

I couldn’t see him, but I guarantee you Knight rolled his eyes. He snapped his fingers and a bulb of fire appeared in his hand. The light was orange and flickery and cast long shadows on the walls.

Sevrex was glaring at him. Waiting for an apology, I guess. He was trying really hard to look angry, but he wasn’t quite managing it. Something about the wide eyes and knocking knees.

“Sorry,” Knight said sheepishly.

Sevrex nodded and walked away very quickly. “This way,” he said.

“Don’t scare him,” I said, punching Knight lightly in the arm. I thought it was light, anyway, but it sent him hard into the wall. He glared at me as he recovered.

“Shit, my bad,” I said.

“Your bad?” said Knight, rubbing his arm where he’d impacted—the one wrapped all in spiderwebs. It was probably broken under there. If it hadn’t been before, it definitely was now.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry. Really, it wasn’t on purpose.”

“Oh, wasn’t it?” he said. There wasn’t real venom in his words, just a vague grumpiness.

“Yes, it was,” I said. Geez. “How much sleep have you gotten lately?”

“Absolutely fucking none, why do you ask?”

I held up my hands. “Nothing, chill. Just wondering.”

He glared at me and kept walking.

Well, that was rude, said the Darkness.

I didn’t do it on purpose, I said.

Not you, him. Why is he behaving so… crankily?

I think he just doesn’t like you.

He does not appear to like anyone.

Ain’t that the truth.

Is he always like this?

Mmm, kind of. Lately. I don’t see him much anymore, though.

Was he like this when you were together?

My mind flashed back to the night Knight arrested me. I shook myself until the image went away. Not always.

The Darkness saw it, too. But sometimes.

Everyone’s cranky sometimes.

Yes, but not everyone chooses such… inopportune moments to display it.

He’s very stressed.

And he is behaving like a prick.

You haven’t been all peaches and daisies either today.

You should kill him.

Sure, whatever. I rolled my eyes. Who knew the Darkness was such a drama queen? Are we heading in the right direction?

I do not know.

What do you mean, you don’t know? You knew where Knight was. Where’s Dagan?

You lack a connection with Dagan. There is no cosmic pull I can manipulate.

I blinked fast a few times. I’m sorry, there’s no what?

Cosmic pull. What did you think I said?

Nothing, I just… This was not a pleasant feeling. What do you mean ‘cosmic pull’?

It means exactly what it sounds like it means. You and Vander have an intrinsic connection—a thread of fate runs between you of such strength that I, even from within the confines of your body, can follow it to him. I believe he has used this to find you before, when Jax absconded with you through the wormhole. Pause. Though it was not precisely a wormhole, was it? Just a very hungry portal.

Yeah, I remember, I said. The two of us—Knight and me—had broken a lot of magical rules together, actually. Like, a lot. I’d never thought anything of it—I wasn’t a “but whyyyyyy did we win?” kinda girl—but this would explain a couple of things. More than a couple of things.

Which I guess meant we’d had this goddam connection since the very beginning.

Great. Stellar. Fan-fucking-tizzity-tastic.

Is something the matter?

What? No, of course not. I just I have a cosmic pull with my ex-boyfriend, that’s all.

This never seemed to end—the Universe ramming us together at warp speed and praying we’d get back together, or something like it, was watching us on reality TV. Didn’t the stars have anything better to do? Wasn’t there someone else they could use to put on their puppet shows?

I didn’t like it. I didn’t want there to be something tying me to Knight that I had no control over. I got to decide who I tied myself to. Nobody got to permanently slot me into their OTP with a magic spirit cord.

Is there any way to… sever that connection? I asked.

OTP?

Um. One True Pairing. It’s a…fandom thing. Oh, the things you get to know when you’re a writer. Or just anyone who’s ever been on the internet. God and the Devil were going to have to fight for custody of Tumblr when it died.

Ah. Pause. We could kill him. It is not as though he does not deserve it.

Okay, chill, I don’t hate him that much, I said. But I wasn’t sure that was totally true.

See, I’d been in a really, really good mood since the Darkness made over my ears. Like, a good enough mood that basically nothing Knight could do right now could make me angry enough to kill him. Unless he killed someone else, but at that point it wouldn’t be personal anymore. But everything I looked at was just glowing and happy and totally, one hundred percent not my problem. It was a great feeling.

Maybe if I were in a worse mood, I’d remember to hate Knight. I certainly wouldn’t be struggling not to fuck him blind—at least, not as much.

Killing him will solve both of these problems.

So will getting out of here as fast as humanly possible, I said. Is one of us dying seriously the only way?

It is, at least that I am aware of, but I should tell you that I am not certain the connection would not resume once the other party is also dead, or that the powers that forged this connection would not persuade it to endure despite the new distance of your souls.

But it might work.

It might.

What else might work?

There is likely a spell your witch friend could perform to sever the connection, or to block its link to you. Pause. Or we could just kill him. You could always perform such spells after he is dead.

Yeah, let’s call that plan Z, okay?

If you wish.

I was quiet for a second, chewing on my lip. Then: What kind of person could make a connection like that? Who even has that power? It’s not a spell, is it?

Hmm. If it is a spell, it is an ancient one, but more creatures are capable of it than you would think. How many creatures know they are capable of it is another question entirely. But it would have to be someone with access to both of your souls. Hades, perhaps?

How would Hades have access to my soul?

I do not know. There may be another power of which you have no knowledge. Someone to whom your mother answered, perhaps.

I twitched. Mom didn’t answer to anyone. And she’d never do that to me.

The Darkness took a moment to answer. You are right. Whoever made this link between you and the Loki had no consideration for your future feelings. It was callous of them. I will do everything in my power to help you undo it.

Thanks. Hey, this is kind of a late question, but is there something I can call you besides ‘the Darkness’? It’s kind of got a nasty connotation. You sound a little too much like a ‘60s Batman villain, you know what I mean?

The Darkness laughed. I do indeed. Pause. Hmmm. It is not a name I have used in a long time, but…perhaps you can call me Volpin.

Volpin, I said. Okay, cool. Much better. Maybe not much-much better—there was something about names that started with letters from the end of the alphabet that just screamed villainy—but it wasn’t the Darkness anymore. Very few names wouldn’t be better for PR than the Darkness. And what are you, exactly?

I am that which hungers.

See, stuff like that is why everybody thinks you’re a serial killer.

It loses something in translation.

What’s it supposed to mean?

I thirst for knowledge. I have a hollow in my mind which must be filled with all of creation.

That doesn’t sound a whole lot better.

With the vision of all of creation. How’s that?

Better. Marginally.

Splendid.

Pause. Pause. Pause.

I really think we should kill him.

Your brain is really on the murder train today, isn’t it? I said.

There was a feeling of grumbling and head scratching. Listen to me. He knows I am here.

Yeah, and?

And he will tell everyone. He will tell your friends.

So? I thought of my ears, and of Sam, and reached up to touch them. I couldn’t wait to show her.

So, said Volpin, they will not understand.

And we’ll figure it out. I’ll talk them through it. Relax.

Their hurt is fresh. They think I am a thing of evil and of pain.

You mean when Meg tried to murder all of us with Frankensteined zombies?

Yes.

Yeah, that was not a great day. Fuck. They were all probably still upset about that. I mean, I got it, it was my house that got Wastelanded, but the Darkness—Volpin—was a pretty swell dude. Meg was the asshole.

I kept thinking about my ears. So smooth and round and oh, Hades, I was in love with them. Evil overlords just didn’t do things like that.

Yes, you know. I have made you beautiful. I have given you great power with which you can defend yourself. The Loki, though, does not see me as I am. He believes I am a threat to you, and to everyone. Pause. Pause. I worry they will think I have overtaken you, and that they will hurt you to kill me.

Oh, come on, they would never, I said.

I want to believe that, Dulcie, truly I do, but I am afraid for you.

I sighed. Maybe I can talk him down before we go back. You know, make him see you’re not the reason Meg went psycho.

He must not tell anyone.

And we can work that out. They’re just freaked out about Meg, like you said. I can make sure Knight doesn’t tell anyone until we’re ready.

And I was positive I could. I hadn’t felt this confident ever. I was looking at Volpin the way you look at a baby dolphin wearing a bonnet—this was the nicest, cutest, least threatening thing on the face of the Earth.

Everyone just needed a minute to get over Meg and they’d be fine.

You cannot promise me this. The Loki is volatile. What if he does not listen to you? He has always believed himself to be the prime authority, even in absence of evidence.

The image came back: Knight and me on the side of the road, me in handcuffs, Knight moving in and out of me with a snarl strapped to his face. I blinked, and it went away.

He will think I am Meg, and nothing you can say will convince him otherwise.

He’ll listen, I said. Just don’t make me eat a puppy and we’ll be fine.

Pause. You wish to protect him, said the Darkness. I understand that. But there are things afoot bigger than you and me, bigger than him.

Bigger? I said. What happened to you not wanting to take over the world?

Something came over Volpin, like a cold wave washes over rocks. The world will not need to be taken. It will give itself to you, and it will be glad of it. But none of the things I have promised you can transpire if you are killed.

My friends wouldn’t kill me.

But I felt the sudden, stupid urge to look behind me, like I thought we were being followed. Like I’d look back and catch Sam coming at me with a piano wire or something.

The Loki is worried. He repeatedly questions you because he is uncertain of you, of your new and glorious self.

Questioning me, I said, nodding. I scoffed. Not the first fucking time he’s done that. Uncertainty was the sweet, candy-coated core of our whole relationship—everything from Knight arresting me all the way back to when I broke up with him after he beat my ex-boyfriend Jack into the next generation.

And then I thought, but he was never uncertain of us.

Warmth blossomed in my chest like fire in a bank of snow. I remembered the night before he was supposed to be executed, sitting in that awful gunky cell, crying and holding each other. I remembered, fuzzily, Knight and Bram breaking into Meg’s house to come save me.

And to be totally fair, I was working for Melchior when Knight arrested me. That wasn’t a lie. Knight still dropped a hydrogen bomb on me without a fair trial, but it’s not like he didn’t have a reason to think I was guilty.

Maybe, for once, Knight was asking the right questions. Maybe he had a right to be uncertain.

Maybe this was the literal goddamn Darkness and I was just letting it parade around in my body and expecting nothing to go wrong.

Do you want to see your mother again? it asked.

I did.

Then we must be given time to prepare, time in which we are not being hunted and maimed by your well-meaning friends. We must remain hidden until they are ready, truly ready, to receive you. Can you do this? Can you hide for me, for us?

I could.

Excellent. Then kill him.

I stopped moving. A sick, gurgly-green feeling crept under my skin.

It does not have to hurt him.

…No, I said. The word came slowly. We could talk this out. Knight just couldn’t see Volpin like I could. We could do this peacefully.

It is necessary, Dulcie. To protect you. This must be done.

I …don’t… My tongue felt thick in my mouth. The walls of my throat stuck together. I don’t… want… um…

Something was happening.

Do not worry. We will kill the boy and spider, give you some appropriate cuts and bruises. We will say they attacked us, and that the Loki did not survive. No one will think anything of it.

I took a deep breath. Thith ithn’t…ith…thith…tha…

My vision fuzzed. My hand moved on its own, twitchily.

Shh, said the Darkness. I will end it quickly. They will not feel a thing.

It took a step forward with my body.

If you will not protect us, then I will, it said, soft and cajoling, like someone talking to a baby. To someone who would understand, one day.

Panic was building inside me. I felt dizzy. I couldn’t tell if I was still breathing, or if Volpin was remembering to breathe for me.

N…Kni… My mouth, my tongue, my teeth didn’t belong to me. I was living one of those nightmares where something is chasing you and running is like pushing through concrete walls. “Knight.” His name was barely a whisper.

Miracle of miracles, Knight heard me. He looked back.

“Dulcie?” he said.

One word, but saying it was like chewing on steel. “Run.”

My knees buckled. My head hit the hard stone floor at warp speed. I blinked and found Knight above me, his face close.

“Dulcie?” he said. “Dulcie, can you hear me?”

I could. Barely. Like he was shouting through water.

My fingers went cold. I could feel the soft, feathery touch of shadows as they curled around my hand, pressing themselves into something sharp.

I clenched my fist around it. The shadow blade sliced my palm. The smell of my blood was sour like dead animals.

He will be the death of you, said Volpin.

I thought, No. The blade dissolved. My blood flowed and flowed and flowed.

If you revoke my control, I cannot help you.

I thought, Then I don’t want your help.

I pushed against it. I fought to move in any direction it didn’t want to go. Its grip on me slipped, and my arm shot out to the wall. I split my knuckles on the stone.

Knight was staring at me. He reached for my arm and tried to pin it down, then stopped. He didn’t know what to do.

“What’s going on?” asked Sevrex, worried, looming over us.

“I don’t know,” said Knight. His voice caught.

My left hand rose, reaching for his throat. I dragged it to my stomach and dug my nails into my skin. God, this was so much blood, so much blood, the smell was overwhelming.

“Dulcie, stop!” said Knight.

He tried to grab my hand. Volpin dug my fingers into his palm. It took everything I had in me to flatten my fingers, to keep my nails from carving the veins out of his wrist.

When did this happen to Meg? I wondered. Did she give herself over to the Darkness, or did it take her like this?

“That’s insane,” Knight said suddenly.

“What is?” said Sevrex.

“Hades,” said Knight. “He’s telling me to try something, but it makes no sense.”

“I thought you said he didn’t live within you.”

“Apparently, I lied.”

I felt Volpin go stiff inside me. No. Stop him!

“Then try it!” said Sevrex.

Knight pursed his lips. He stared at me for two seconds, breathing, pain dragging itself down his face.

His eyes were burning white, brighter than I’d ever seen them.

Do not let him!

I thought, Why?

Knight kissed me.

Volpin screamed.

TEN

Dulcie

I didn’t know what it was. Maybe it was just having him close, maybe I was pulling on his power, or maybe kisses really are magic. It didn’t matter. But something surged forward within me, something bright and hot and angry, and the Darkness lost its hold completely.

The light faded a second later. Knight blinked and seemed to come back into himself.

“Dulcie?” he said. His hand was on my face. I didn’t push it away. He was so warm. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, but a second later I realized I really, really, wasn’t. My stomach was rolling. I felt nauseous, and I was shivering.

“Oh, fuck,” I said. I slumped into Knight, and he caught me.

Let me in, said Volpin.

…No, I said.

I cannot help you if you do not let me in.

…No. I wasn’t exactly at the top of my comeback game, but “no” got the point across. Magic eight-ball would have something to say about it later.

Knight was pressing me to his chest. I smelled blood—not just mine—and realized he’d ripped his way through the webbing and freed his arm. He unzipped his sweatshirt, took it off, and laid it over me.

“She’s burning up,” he said. I shivered violently.

“Dulcie? We need to get you home, okay?”

“No… I’m not… I’m not leaving you here,” I said, kind of slurring.

“I’ll be fine. I have Joanne and Sevrex. I’ll be careful, but you’re bleeding and you’re sick.”

“So are you,” I said, gesturing to his blood-soaked shirt.

He grimaced. “I’m fine, I promise. Dulcie, if you pass out, I’ll have to carry you, and then if we’re attacked we’ll be in even more danger.”

He reached into my jean pocket to get the portal ripper. His hand lingered for a moment against my thigh—probably just because the pocket was small and he was stuck, but…

He wiggled the portal ripper free and started fidgeting with the dials.

“No.” I tried to swat it out of his hands, but he evaded me easily. I was having trouble staying upright and I wasn’t even on my feet. Bad sign.

I cannot settle the imbalances in your body from here. Let me back in.

The shivers were getting worse, more spastic twitching than shivering. I was devolving very quickly. No, I said.

Knight will die if you leave him here alone. Darion will find him, and he will kill him. It will be a long and painful death.

No…no…

Yes.

You’ll… You’ll kill him, I thought. If Darion doesn’t kill him, you will.

If that is what it takes to regain your body

My… body? I said. Are you fucking serious?

Volpin made a grumbly, pissy-teenager sound. Let me in.

I thought, you want my body.

To see the world through your body.

I thought, you can see.

Just let me in.

I curled into Knight’s chest. He wrapped his arms around me and squeezed gently. Something in his arm clicked—definitely broken.

“It’s okay,” he whispered. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

“What’s wrong with her?” asked Joanne. She sounded so small, so worried, like a little kid asking about their sick mom at the beginning of a fairy tale.

“I don’t know,” said Knight. “But she’s going to be fine.” He looked down at me. “You’re gonna be fine.” He rubbed my shoulder, up and down, up and down. “You’re gonna be fine.”

A compromise, said Volpin. You allow me to stabilize your body, so that you can stay here and protect Knight.

I thought, In exchange for…?

Let me in. Only a little.

I thought, That’s not how this works. It was a trick. This was an all-or-nothing deal now, no halfsies here.

Then Sevrex started stammering. “You can’t… she can’t leave, she hasn’t done her part.”

“She doesn’t have a part,” said Knight. “She’s sick, and she needs to go home.”

“She needs to be here,” Sevrex said frantically.

“Why?”

“She’s the Great Shadow!”

This again, said Volpin.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” said Knight.

“It means everything!” said Sevrex. When Knight didn’t respond, he grabbed the portal ripper away from him and ran to stand by Joanne.

I felt Knight go stiff. Very slowly, carefully, he put me down and stood. His bones clicked as he moved. “Give that back,” he said.

Sevrex was shaking. He tried to make himself look big and sound bigger, but what he said came out squeaking. “No.” he swallowed, cleared his throat, and tried again. His voice cracked harder. “No. If she—”

Knight lunged at him. Sevrex bolted between Joanne’s legs. She tried to close up on him to get him to stop moving, but in doing that, she stopped Knight from getting to him. She moved out of his way, latching herself vertically onto the wall.

She wavered. Everyone went in and out of focus like a broken camera lens. The edges fuzzed and stayed that way. My temples pressed in on my brain like my skull was getting ready to collapse itself.

Sevrex tried to jump out of the way as Joanne moved her legs, but Knight was faster by miles. He tackled Sevrex to the floor and tried to wrestle the portal ripper away from him, but Sevrex was a lot stronger than he looked. Or maybe just more desperate.

“No!” he shouted, spitting the word in Knight’s face. “If she leaves, we’re all doomed.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Knight. “Look at her!”

Sevrex did, for a split second. Knight tried to wrench the portal ripper out of his hand, and Sevrex rolled over onto his stomach, hiding it underneath himself.

Knight grabbed his hair and pulled him up to make him look at me again. Their expressions were lost in the growing blur, but Sevrex made a choking sound that made me think he wasn’t happy.

“Does she look like she’s in any state to help you? She can’t walk, you fucking moron. What do you think she’s gonna do?”

Sevrex threw his elbow up, and Knight caught it easily, slamming it to the ground. “That is not mine to know!” He sounded like he might cry. “The prophecy only says—”

Knight started laughing. He let go of Sevrex and cackled like this was the funniest thing anyone had ever told him or would ever tell him again. He almost fell over.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

Oh, that, said Volpin.

I thought, What?

Nothing. Just the nonsense premonitions of an oracle from before the ice age.

For a second I thought it meant Earth’s Ice Age, but then I caught up. The sand. The ice creeping into the dungeons from above, flash-freezing anything that moved.

Yes. That.

That didn’t seem like a nonsense premonition to me.

She did not predict the ice, but rather its end. She believed that it involved me. I remember hearing this the last time I occupied someone, from a demon fleeing the growing cold.

Occupied. Great word choice. I thought, does that mean it’s spreading?

What do you think? Curses are not stagnant things. They are hungry. They grow, they feast. They are ever searching, insatiable.

Well, that just sounded like oodles of fun.

As I was having this charming conversation, Knight was still laughing. Hysterically.

“What’s so funny?” asked Sevrex. He’d made it mostly back to his feet, and he said it like this was the tenth or eleventh time he’d asked and he still hadn’t gotten a response.

This was the second time today that Knight had gone completely bonkers. This was starting to look like genuine hysteria.

Which was great, because I knew literally nothing about how to fix that.

“What is so funny?”

“Prophecy,” Knight said, gasping. “Fucking prophecy. Of course there’s a prophecy, why wouldn’t there be a goddamn prophecy? Of course someone else wants Dulcie to drop everything and save the fucking world, hell or high water, and look at all this hell and all this high water.” He was pointing at me now, pointing and laughing, but not at me. Laughing through a haze of panic and numb awe, I could feel it coming off him in waves.

“She is necessary for the… the saving of the world!” Sevrex said, stammering a little like he wasn’t totally sure.

“Why? What can she do that nobody else can? Why can’t you save your goddamn selves for once?”

“She was summoned here! I know it!” Sevrex took a step forward like he was trying to get up in Knight’s face, but he chickened out at the last second. Which was fair—Lokis looked pretty gnarly in Dromir. Black eyes, vague glowy skin, prominent veins. Knight looked like something that would climb out of a volcano to demand virgin sacrifices.

“No, she wasn’t. We came here to save our idiot friend,” Knight continued.

“She was meant to come here,” Sevrex argued.

Knight shook his head. “Listen, kid. I’ve been summoned by gods before, I’ve been actively called to save the world, and that isn’t what’s fucking happening here. There was no summons, no demand, no post-it note on a bathroom mirror that said we needed to get our asses to Dromir, fucking nothing, okay.”

“Well, the goddess didn’t summon you,” Sevrex said.

“She didn’t summon Dulcie, either!” Knight was shouting now, pointing and flailing. I felt like if someone poked me a little too hard, I would go poof into a cloud of fairy dust.

Let me back in and I can restore your health.

You’re the reason I have spirit cancer in the first place, dipshit, I said.

That blame lies with Meg.

And you.

… And me, but I was never meant to be absent from your body by the time it reached this point. I am supposed to be within you, maintaining the new and glorious body we have—

Say glorious one more fucking time. My teeth chattered. Shivers wracked my whole body. I thought I might go into fits at any second.

But it is. You are glorious. You are beautiful and powerful and magnificent as only a daughter of the gods can be.

I’m not your fucking daughter.

Volpin hesitated. There was a feeling like someone swallowing after asking an overweight woman if she’s pregnant. No. You are not. But we are one, and this makes us something akin to family, yes?

Melchior was family. That didn’t go so well.

Melchior was a selfish fool.

Not wrong, but still, fuck you.

Knight was talking with Sevrex, a little quieter now. Not normal talking, but more like a pissed off principal than a hysterical and maybe homicidal maniac.

“I don’t care,” he was saying, “she’s not just sick, she’s falling apart. She’s been possessed by the actual goddamn Darkness, and her body isn’t handling it well because it’s the goddamn Darkness.”

The words “the Darkness” didn’t seem to mean anything to Sevrex. “The Great Shadow is a taxing presence, I’m sure, but if she leaves, we will be doomed.”

“Define ‘doomed’ for me, please, and I’m not asking for a fucking synonym.”

“The ice,” said Sevrex. “The ice will spread and overtake us. It will swallow the city whole, and everyone in it.

What is he talking about? I said to Volpin.

How should I know?

Come the fuck on, we both know you know. Just tell me what you know about the curse.

The curse was meant to build upon itself. Perhaps we are near its apex.

Which means? I asked.

That Sevrex is correct, and the city may soon be overtaken by the ice we encountered in the dungeon.

Which, those of you playing along at home will note, wasn’t something anyone was going to survive.

And we’re supposed to help with that, I said.

Perhaps. I have many powers. Perhaps there is something we could do together to assuage the curse.

Or break it?

I do not know. Pause. Like, an upsettingly long, letting-it-hang-there pause. But it is not something I can do without your assistance. And it is not something you can do without mine.

You just tried to take over my whole fucking body to kill my boyfriend. You’re lucky we’re even on speaking terms right now.

Ex.

What?

Your ex-boyfriend.

That’s what I said.

No, it is not.

“Yes, it is!” I yelled. Out loud.

Knight and Sevrex looked over at me in surprise. I was shouting, seemingly at nothing.

“You see?” Sevrex said after a moment. I guess he thought I was agreeing with him.

“She’s not thinking straight,” Knight said.

I bristled. “How the fuck would you know?”

Knight didn’t say anything. He just stared at me like I was an idiot. Which, I mean, yeah, but also, rude.

I looked at Sevrex. “Okay, in theory, what do you need me to do?”

Sevrex cast a furtive, almost frightened glance at Knight. “Um…”

Okay, different question. “How much do you know about the curse? I mean, like, how it actually works?” I leaned heavily against the wall. Every breath I took was long and gravelly. It wasn’t blood, but I was coughing up a brownish mucus that probably had no business being in my lungs.

This, Sevrex knew. Or at least he perked up like he knew. “The witch woman had a great battle with Daneira, and she sealed the great goddess away, burying the sun and wrapping the land in the swaddling cloth of winter.”

“Okay, minus the swaddling winter whatever, what does that actually mean?”

He sighed his frustration. I guess he was used to people just knowing what he meant when he said “prophecy.”

“An angry witch cast a winter spell over Dromir and sealed away Daneira so she couldn’t do anything about it. Our priests have been doing their best to hold it off, but… we’re nearing the end of our power.” He swallowed. “Please. There is nowhere left for us to run.”

The sadness, his sadness, ripped through me. I had the molecular integrity of a sandcastle, but I couldn’t leave. Of course I couldn’t.

I looked at Knight, and he knew there was no arguing with me.

He reached out his hand. I took it. Together, we got me standing again.

“This is a bad idea,” he said. He was very close to me, close enough to feel his breath on my face.

“Everything we do is a bad idea,” I answered. I wobbled and he caught me. Hades, he was strong.

“Not everything,” he said. His eyes flashed white.

We looked at each other. We looked for a while.

This was stupid. Why was I stopping myself?

I pushed myself up on my toes, and I kissed him.

He sank into it immediately. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close, squeezing gently, lifting me off the floor.

Sevrex started to say something, but Joanne kicked him into the wall. Like, hard enough that he made a dust cloud. He groaned softly.

“Shh!” she said.

Knight pulled back. He looked at me, cupped my face in his hands. Eyes glowing and glowing and glowing. If I looked for too long, I thought I might go blind, but I couldn’t look anywhere else. The rest of the world faded to black, and it was just us. Just Knight and me as we stood under a spotlight centerstage.

“I missed you. I missed you so much, Dulcie. Fuck.”

Me too sounded trite, but so did everything else.

This was just…warm and good.

This is dangerous, said the Darkness.

I ignored it.

Knight smirked. “You don’t have to say anything.”

“Good. I’m not good at saying things.”

He smiled more broadly. “I know.”

“I can’t leave, Knight,” I continued, spearing him with a serious expression.

He nodded. “I know.”

“Then we’re going to do this… together?”

He nodded again. “Yes.”

Sevrex looked over at us, one hand on his head, visibly dazed. “Wait, what’s happening?”

“They’re gonna help us save Mom,” said Joanne.

“Oh,” Sevrex said weakly. “About time.”

ELEVEN

Quillan

We landed mostly on our feet in the middle of a massive bedroom. Red carpet, pale red walls, golden comforter on a super-mega-king-sized four-poster bed. It had been used recently and wasn’t made. Gaudy paintings of naked people doing naked things on rocks hung from every wall. A gold chandelier dangled from the ceiling at an angle, like someone had tried swinging from it and realized, too late, it wouldn’t hold their weight. Half the bulbs were broken, and the remaining four cast uneven stripes of light across the room.

“Charming,” said Bram.

Behind us, there was a groan.

We spun around and saw a lump in the corner of the room. Slumped, wrists chained to the wall, arms out. Red leaking out from behind a cloth gag staining the carpet. Pale skin, black hair. More scars than I’d thought he had.

“Dagan?” I whispered.

The lump looked up at us, not moving his head. His nose was definitely broken. Thin red lines glistened across his chest and back. He moved—barely—and the light fell square across his face. One eye was shot through with red. The other was gone. A gushing, purply-red socket stared back at me.

“Oh, that’s fucked,” I said.

Bram crossed his arms. A frown curled across his lips. “Are we having fun?” he said to Dagan.

“Can you not be completely worthless for ten fucking seconds?”

“I could, but this is more fun.”

Hades, I was irritated with Dagan, too, but that was uncalled for. Most things Bram did were uncalled for.

I groaned and walked over to Dagan. He made an urgent grunting sound and I stopped.

“What?” I said. “What’s the matter?” Everything was the matter, but I meant what specifically right that second.

Then I looked a little closer, and I saw them. Pins, thin silver pins, positioned throughout his body in… seemingly odd places until I remembered where pressure points were supposed to be. One in his neck, his wrists, right above his knees.

And one in his eye, stuck through the lid. He looked down, and it pulled itself out slightly; he looked up, and it went back in. The other pin—and his other eye—were on the floor in front of him, the pin stuck all the way through it like a pike through a fish.

“Holy mother of fuck,” I said quietly. Pins at his fingers, his throat, his elbows. Pins that would cut him to pieces if he moved too much.

I looked at Bram. “Any bright ideas?”

I honestly expected him to say something prickish like “fuck this guy, let’s go find Dulcie,” but he didn’t. Instead, he strode forward and crouched in front of Dagan. He scratched his chin and appraised the pins and chains and blood and the loose eyeball just hanging out on the carpet, saying, “Hmmm.”

“How does it work?” I said.

“I haven’t the foggiest idea.” Bram reached forward, slowly, and pulled Dagan’s gag out of his mouth. He spat a wad of red and spent a second just breathing. His teeth were red.

“Don’t move me,” said Dagan, rasping.

“We will not. What happens if we touch the pins?” asked Bram.

“They will press themselves deep into my body,” said Dagan, “and I will die. Slowly.”

“This is a spell, I take it?”

“Yes.” Dagan swallowed hard. “Very basic. Mechanical.” He sounded like he’d swallowed razor blades. “How are you even here?”

“… Friend of mine,” Bram said.

Dagan made a vague and disgusted noise. “Not that bitch in the desert?”

Bram pursed his lips. “Grenwal, yes.”

“God dammit, Bram.”

“You’re welcome.”

“How does he know her?” I asked Bram.

Bram gave me a withering look. “Does it matter?”

I nodded slowly, then shook my head. “No, not really.” I had a pretty solid guess, though. Grenwal was wound tighter than Odysseus’s bow. There was more than one way to relieve that pressure. Dagan owned a whole club dedicated to the one that wasn’t early morning jogging.

“Then hush. I am going to try something. Hold very still, Dagan.”

Dagan laughed and winced. “As opposed to?” And then he seemed to take notice of Bram’s outfit. “What the fuck are you wearing?”

Bram scowled at him, then closed his eyes and held out his hands.

It had been a very long time since I’d seen Bram do any actual magic. Mostly, he was fast, strong, and literally bloodthirsty—just the classic vampire stuff. I knew tangentially that he had “shadow magic,” whatever that meant, but he’d never used it in a way that didn’t just augment his speed, strength, or bloodthirstiness.

Now, though, the pins glowed, vaguely purple. Lines appeared between them, linking them to each other, to the ceiling, and to a series of strands placed like tripwires between Dagan and Bram on the floor. All the lines were pulled taut, running through his body, not around it—so straining against them pulled the pins further into him.

Very basic. This could have been done with normal pins and strings, though much less cleanly. Driving holes through Dagan to attach the strings to the floor on the other side of him might have killed him outright, which I didn’t think was what Darion wanted.

One pin—the one stuck in his eye—trembled. Its anchor point in the floor trembled. Five tense seconds passed, and its anchor came loose.

The air went out of Bram like he’d been holding his breath. “That is one.”

“Out of…” I counted. “Thirteen.”

“Fourteen,” said Dagan.

I counted again and frowned. “Where’s the other one?”

Now that the pin in his eye was gone, Dagan could move his head. He raised his eyebrows at me.

“Oh, hell no,” I said.

He nodded. “Indeed.”

I was going to say more, but Bram grabbed my arm and shushed me.

“Someone is coming,” he said. Half a second later, I heard heavy footfalls.

“Shit.” I looked around for a place to hide, but I didn’t need to. Bram stuffed the gage back into Dagan’s mouth, grabbed me, ducked into a darkish corner, and pulled up a shadow around us. Looking through it was like staring through inky water. Everything was blurry.

The door to the room opened and closed, and the offending feet came tramping down to the end of the bed where Dagan was all laced up. It was just a blob of a person, but a fraction of a second after we saw him, the fear came swimming in—that paralyzing, night-terror panic we’d all felt in Christina’s office. I couldn’t move, and I didn’t think Bram could, either. I tried to breathe slowly. Breathing at all wasn’t easy.

“How are we feeling?” asked Darion. His blob crouched in front of Dagan. He reached out and picked something off the ground—Dagan’s eye, probably. “Oh dear. Did we lose something?”

There was a pause while he waited for Dagan to respond.

“I can try to put it back, if you like. There must be some super glue around here somewhere.” He laughed. Darion laughed like a psychopath at a corporate Christmas party.

Dagan, predictably, was silent.

Darion reached forward and pulled at something on Dagan’s face. For one horrifying second, I thought he was going for Dagan’s other eye—but then there was the sound of coughing and Dagan spitting up blood. The gag. Thank Hades.

“Don’t you have anything to say to your brother?” asked Darion.

Dagan didn’t say anything, but his lungs were making some disturbing noises. Darion tossed the eye in the air and caught it. “You’re no fun anymore.” He stood and paced back towards the bed.

“I asked Osenna if she wanted to come and see you. She said she’d rather not. Said the sight of you might make her queasier than she already was, and she’s been rather queasy lately. Must have been something she ate. Or someone she fucked.” Canned laughter. “I’m still too much man for her, I think.”

“I’m gonna rip off your fucking dick,” Dagan said.

“Ah, there he is.” Darion spun around. “Still kicking. That’s the spirit. Well, it’s right here, if you would like to come and get it.”

Dagan didn’t move. Darion waited for a full ten seconds.

“Come on, you were doing so well. You are going to rip off my fucking dick, and…?” Pause. “Oh, come on, this entire rig was built for pointless struggling! What fun are all these pins and needles if you never move?” He crouched in front of Dagan and lifted his chin, forcing Dagan to look at him.

“What if I go make Osenna move, hmm?” he said. “What if I get her some pins and needles of her own and do things to make her squirm? Does that sound like fun?”

“Squirming and escaping are two very different things,” said Dagan.

Darion’s face was too blurry to see, but I swear I could hear his expression curdling.

“You know, if you’d listened to mother, none of this would be happening.” Darion slammed his fist into the wall hard enough to make Dagan jump. Dagan moved sharply, and the pins dug into him everywhere. I don’t know how in the hell he managed not to scream.

Darion got right up in Dagan’s face. He laughed, a low, gurgling, Disney villain sound.

“Know. Your. Place,” he hissed. There was a long silence.

Then.

“Now, now,” said Darion. He grabbed Dagan’s head and jerked it to the side. “Where’s this one?”

He found the missing pin.

Shit.

I started to move forward out of the shadow—or tried to, at least, moving wasn’t going much better than breathing—but then:

“Sir!”

Someone was at the door. Darion turned around and said, very amiably, “Yes, what is it?”

“The fairy has escaped.”

“Really?” Darion tutted. “My, my, my. I wonder how she managed that.” He stood. “Catch you later, old boy. I’m going to go find and utterly destroy your friend.” He patted Dagan on the head. On his way out, he stopped the person who called him.

“He’s missing the pin in his eye, could you fix that for me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re a darling.”

Step, step, step, slam. The paralyzing fear fell clean away.

The person at the door ran down the short length of the room. He dropped to his knees in front of Dagan. We stood stone still, waiting to see what he would do.

“My name is Bastiok. I don’t work for Darion, I’m with Miss Dulcie and her friend. They have the White Spider with them.”

Dagan looked up, visibly reeling. “They what?”

Bastiok—he couldn’t have been more than fifteen, sixteen at best—nodded. “Yes, I know! It’s time!” He looked around the room. “I, um. Was told other friends of yours would be here.”

Bram dropped the shadow and rushed at him. My hand went immediately to my gun.

“We are,” he said.

Bastiok fell back, startled. He was short, bald, and wearing long red robes with gold trim. “Fuck! Um, yes, hello. They said you would…” He got to his feet, held out his hand. His smile was a little disconcerting, like a Ken doll trying way too hard to make a good impression. “I’m Bastiok! Of the house of Daneira.”

“Oh, good god,” Bram muttered, relaxing. Like someone had just told him the chess club president was here to save him.

I walked over and shook Bastiok’s hand, my other hand still firmly on my gun. “Quillan,” I said. “This is Bram. Not that we’re ungrateful for the distraction, but why are you here?”

“Oh! Yes, of course. I was sent by Father Demick to find you before you got caught. Now that’s done, so I presume I’m supposed to help you escape.”

“Before we got caught,” I said. “How did he even know we were here?” Even we didn’t know where Grenwal’s portal would drop us.

“Father Demick knows a lot of things. Daneira tells him.”

Bram scoffed but didn’t say anything. Bastiok squinted at him, and more pointedly, his pink poncho, before continuing.

“She said you would be coming, and I had to get moving if I wanted to keep you from being killed.” He beamed. “Her timing was impeccable.”

“And Daneira is?” Maybe a witch with foresight or something.

“The lady of Dromir, the fire-kissed, mother of the White Spider,” said Bastiok reverently.

“Um,” I said.

He sighed. “She’s our goddess.”

Great. More gods. I loved those.

I suppressed the urge to groan. “You said you knew Dulcie?”

Bastiok beamed. “Yes, yes, the fairy!”

“Blonde, small, pointy ears, glowing kind of pink?”

Bastiok frowned. “Yes, yes, no, and definitely not, but people keep telling me I’m colorblind, so don’t swear by that.”

I remembered Dulcie vomiting up black sludge in the break room and had a horrible thought. “She wasn’t black or smoking, was she?”

“Yes, she was. Her eyes were all black. Is that not normal?”

“Not, it’s not.” I just hoped she wasn’t getting worse. “Do you know where she is?”

“Yes!” said Bastiok. Then he paused. “Well, not precisely, no. She and the Loki went off into the tunnels to find Darion.”

“But… Darion is here.”

“And they’re on their way here,” Bastiok said.

“Why didn’t they come with you?”

“I travel faster alone, and you were going to die if I didn’t hurry. That’s what Father Demick said, anyway, and Father Demick is never wrong. Or rather, Daneira is never wrong, and Father Demick is very good at listening to her. They should be here in, ah…” He moved the long sleeve of his robe to look at a clunky black digital watch. “…Ten minutes, give or take? They’ll let out somewhere below us, or so I’ve been told.”

“Tunnels, likely,” Dagan said. “Loads of those under the house.”

“Like… subway tunnels?” I asked. Because that and mining are the only two things the city boy could possibly conceive of as being reasons for tunnels to exist.

“No, snow worms. Back when we had snow worms.”

Okay, so we’re not going to think about that for any longer than was absolutely necessary. “If we can find Osenna and get down there,” I said, “we can meet up with them and get out of here before anyone is the wiser.”

“Assuming she has not lost the portal ripper,” Bram muttered.

Bastiok’s face fell. “Well, yes, in theory, but they’ve got other things they need to do.”

I squinted at him. “Such as?”

He rolled his eyes. “I don’t know, exactly. But they’re the Great Shadow and the White Spider, there has to be more than this! This… this can’t all be for some escape.”

“Great Shadow?” I said.

“White Spider?” said Bram.

“Escape?” said Dagan.

“It’s a very old story,” said Bastiok, “but it’s true, and she’s here, and it’s almost over.”

“Right, yes, the giant spider and the fairy have come to save us all.” Bram rolled his eyes.

Bastiok stiffened. “It’s true! She’s here, I saw her!”

“I’m sure you did.” He looked at me. “Bunch of religious hogwash. Pay it no mind.”

“Hogwash?” I said.

“Hogwash?” said Bastiok.

“Yes, regulation wishful thinking burned into the minds of naïve children, a practice and a people for which, and for whom, I have no patience. Can we perhaps get a move on? This room reeks of kinks and desperation,” Bram finished.

“It’s genetic,” said Dagan, shrugging, then flinching—pins.

Bastiok stood and got right up in Bram’s face. Brave and stupid. I decided I liked him. “I won’t have you disrespect—”

“Oh, won’t you?” The light around Bram, and only Bram, dimmed as shadows swam up from around his feet. His eyes went red. His pupils shrank. He was an unnerving person in general, but the tiny pupils made it so much worse.

“Whoa, okay. Bram?” I said softly. I stepped between him and Bastiok, pushing the kid out of the way. Bastiok was a full head shorter than me at least. “We need to get moving. Just… chill. Let him be an idiot, and if you really want to, you can kill him later. Okay?”

“Hey!” Bastiok said behind me.

I looked at him. “Who’s the one in the pink unicorn sweater, huh?”

Bastiok backed down then and gave me a quick nod.

Bram glared at him over my shoulder. “Save your fairy tales for someone who cares, boy.”

“They are not fairy tales—they are the truth!” Bastiok tried to step around me and I pushed him back again.

“Yeah, okay, whatever, can we get Dagan and leave?” I said. “Please?”

“Your friends are with her!” said Bastiok. “Dulcie and Knight are with her. They’re the ones who found her.”

Bram sighed deeply. “Bastiok—sweet and foolish Bastiok—I have no doubt there is, in fact, literally a giant white spider cavorting about the city right now with my friend Dulcie and her parasitic acquaintance Vander, but I can assure you this spider is not here to save you from anything.”

“Bram,” I said. “Priorities. Dagan, Osenna. Getting the fuck out of here before Darion comes back.” I almost said, “Be the bigger person,” but I held it back. Christina was rubbing off on me.

Bram stared at Bastiok for a long, thick second. “Yes. Of course.”

Bastiok pushed past us to get to Dagan.

“I can handle that,” said Bram.

Bastiok waved his hand, and a pin wriggled free of Dagan’s throat. “By the good grace of Daneira,” he said sharply, “I can handle it faster.”

Bram’s eyes flashed laser-pointer red. “Oh, Hades, fine,” said Bram, turning his back on Bastiok. Bastiok cracked his knuckles and got to work, muttering ominously to himself. The threads glowed, the needles glowed, and one by one they came loose.

While Bastiok worked, I turned to Bram. “Okay, why are you being such a dick about this?” I fought the urge to pull him aside and whisper to him like a child. Bram wouldn’t like it if I tried to manhandle him, especially if I followed it up with a Teachable Moment. “Why do you keep looking at this kid like he invented cancer?”

“Because I am coming to the grossly uncomfortable realization that Dagan Halsir is the most intelligent demon you or I will ever have the misfortune of meeting.” Bram glared at Bastiok, who graciously ignored him.

“That seems like a bit much, but okay,” I said. “Bastiok seems like a pretty sharp kid to me. And Dagan is… I mean, he’s Dagan. No offense, but the bar for demonic behavior is pretty low already.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” said Dagan.

Bram grumbled wordlessly to himself for a second before replying, “Dagan is a leach, but he is not a fool.”

Dagan snorted.

Bram ignored him and continued. “He never believed anyone was coming to save him.”

“And yet here we are,” I said. “Coming to save him.” I gestured to the chains and the pins and the whole-ass demon dimension we were in.

Bram’s face melted like wax and solidified into a nasty scowl. “We came here for Dulcie. I was not sent by some distant and unhelpful goddess to magically solve his problems.”

“Daneira knew we were coming. That’s something.”

“Yes, but—”

“Bram, I get it. Hades is a dick. I’m not exactly primed to like this, either. But it also kind of doesn’t matter, because anything they think we’re here to do, we were probably going to do anyway.”

He didn’t like that even a little bit. He crossed his arms and looked down his nose at me. Bram was way taller than I’d ever given him credit for. “We are finding Dulcie, and we are leaving.”

“You seriously think Dulcie’s gonna look at Darion and just leave him here to keep being a dick? Have you met her? She makes everything her problem!”

Bram gave Dagan a hard look. “You cannot be implying that Dulcie will remain here just to overthrow a government under which she does not live.”

“Yes, I am because that’s exactly what she’s going to do.” I sighed. “So maybe lay off the kid? Just a little?”

“Because perhaps his goddess has sent us and a giant white spider to save the day?”

“Weirder things have already happened. So yeah, perhaps. I don’t fucking know, but neither do you.”

“I am four hundred years old. I know more than you will ever have the chance to forget.”

“Then start acting like it. He’s, what, fifteen? If he’s an idiot, let him be an idiot. If he hurts somebody, you can eat him and then we won’t have a problem anymore. Okay?”

“Why do you think I want to eat him?”

“I don’t know, it’s that or pinning him to a wall by his throat. That’s, like, the only two ways I’ve ever seen you solve a problem.” I thought for a second. “Or paying it to go away.”

“He is an irksome child.”

“Great. Then shut up about him.”

“Done!” said Bastiok. Dagan slung his arm around Bastiok’s neck and, slowly, Bastiok helped him to his feet. Fuck, that was a lot of blood.

“We should leave,” Dagan said. “Quickly.”

“Are you sure?” asked Bram. “I thought we’d lounge around a bit, ruffle the covers, raid Darion’s mini fridge. Maybe read his diary.”

Oh, for shit’s sake. “Where’s Osenna?” I asked, ignoring him.

“I don’t know. I have not seen her since...” Dagan coughed and hacked, spraying blood from his mouth onto Bastiok’s face. “My apologies.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Bastiok but he looked pretty squeamish all the same.

“Haven’t seen her since when?” I asked Dagan.

“Since Darion dragged her in here and…” He gestured to the unmade bed.

Okay, forget Dulcie. Now I wanted to stick around to kill Darion.

“I do not know where he took her after that,” said Dagan.

“You lived here once,” said Bram. “Where do you think she is? Where would Darion keep her?”

Dagan shook his head. “His bedroom, but we are in it now, and she isn’t here.” He thought for a second, screwing up his face. Or maybe it just looked like that now. “The throne room, perhaps.”

“You have a throne room?” I asked.

Dagan’s empty eye socket was red and black and just generally upsetting to look at. “We are princes,” he said. “And Darion has a complex to indulge.”

I sighed and nodded, chewing on my lip. “Great, where is it?”

“The middle.”

“And how do we get to the middle?”

“Presumably we walk,” Dagan said, and he cracked a cherry red smile.

“Okay, what’s the over-under on getting Dagan to the basement while one or two of us go after Osenna?

“I will not… stand… idly by like some damsel in distress,” said Dagan, hella breathless, “while you boys… go off… and have… all the fun.”

“You can’t even stand on your own right now,” I pointed out.

Dagan pushed himself off Bastiok and managed to keep himself upright for a full two seconds. Then he collapsed back onto Bastiok’s shoulder.

“Osenna is my responsibility,” he growled.

“And now you are our responsibility,” I said. “This will all go a lot faster if you’re not with us.”

Dagan’s eyes narrowed like he was trying to burn a hole in my skull. “And it will go much slower… if we continue… to argue about this. I am coming with you…. and nothing you… can say… will convince me otherwise.”

And with that, Dagan collapsed against the wall and slid to the floor. Bastiok couldn’t keep him on his feet.

I grimaced. The plaster behind Dagan was a solid brick of red, like someone had taken a bloody paint roller to him and then the wall. If he came with us like this, he was going to leave a hell of a trail.

“We’re gonna get caught,” I said. “Somebody will see all that blood.”

“It’s okay,” said Bastiok. He was crouched on the ground with his hand on Dagan’s shoulder. “Half the people in here are with us.”

“Us?” I repeated.

Bastiok reached into his shirt and pulled out a necklace, a black chord on which was dangling a white spider. “Daneira’s people.”

“Oh,” said Bram, sounding thoroughly disheartened. “More altar boys. Marvelous.”

Bastiok looked like he was going to say something, but he was interrupted by something exploding out of the wall.

TWELVE

Quillan

But not exploding, exactly—there was a door I hadn’t seen, the kind with no obvious knob or handle that blends in with the rest of the wall. It burst open and four people came streaming out of it, three following a fourth who was listing every curse word he could think of under his breath.

“Dick, fuck, shit, bitch, who the fuck does he think he is,” he said. “My son, my son, thinks he can just up and leave to—to sing showtunes? Fucking showtunes, Carl.”

He was complaining about a family thing. I suddenly felt like the boyfriend who got invited to the funeral.

One of the demons—presumably Carl—behind him rolled his eyes. “Let’s just get Captain Leather and go, okay? He’ll be back by sunrise, guaranteed.”

“I don’t know…” He sounded so sad.

None of us had time to react, so when the father of the demon who left to sing showtunes finally looked up, we were all still standing in the middle of the room like deer in a floodlight.

“Hello,” Bastiok said, smiling. “I think you should encourage him to follow his dreams.”

“You think?” said the dad demon. “Because I worry he’s only doing this to spite his mother—” he stopped, and his eyes got wide. He pointed at Bastiok accusingly. “You’re not supposed to be in here! This is a private residence!”

Bastiok scoffed. “No, it isn’t. This is the Halsir house.”

The dad demon scowled. “This room is off limits.” He tried to make his voice boom, but his heart clearly wasn’t in it. This whole showtunes thing must have hit him hard.

Bastiok held up his hands. “Oh gosh. We didn’t know. We were just looking for a place to get kinky, and this was the first bed we came across.” He was standing in front of Dagan, who was stuck halfway between standing and squishing himself into a puddle of goo on the floor.

“We’ll go find somewhere else,” said Bastiok. He looked at me and Bram and winked, spinning a shadow over Dagan with his hand behind his back. “Come on, boys.”

He stepped away, gesturing with the hand the demons couldn’t see in Dagan’s direction—probably hoping one of us would grab him. I nudged Bram and looking meaningfully at Dagan before stepping in front of them to distract the demons.

“We’re really sorry; it won’t happen again,” I said, bowing and generally making an ass out of myself.

The demon who’d rolled his eyes squinted at Bram as he ambled away, dragging the shadow behind him while I tried, badly, to keep between them. He closed the space between himself and Bram and stuck out his leg. Bram tripped over it, pulling the shadow with him and exposing Dagan.

Which meant Bastiok had made a real candy-ass shadow if it could be ripped off physically, but that wasn’t the biggest problem here.

The four demons looked from Bram to Dagan, then back at the rest of us. They took short black rods from their belts and snapped them like whips, and the whips extended into long, crackling blue spears.

“Hoo, that’s not ideal.” Bastiok held out the spider on his necklace. “I am of the House of Daneira, and these people are under her divine protection. The White Spider and the Great Shadow are here. It is time.” He paused for effect. But the demons in the room just looked confused.

“This doesn’t have to end badly,” Bastiok continued. “Darion’s final hour is nigh. Join us, and help us bring about the new kingdom, Daneira’s revolution.”

Instead of saying anything, they just ran at us with zappy spears. Which I guess meant “hard pass.”

“Fools, all,” Bastiok muttered, in a way that sounded less like a kid bemoaning an ambush and more like a monk reciting the closest thing his holy book had to a curse word. “Alright, come on. One at a time.”

Dad Demon went charging at Bastiok. Two of the others went for Bram, apparently deciding he was the most dangerous out of us all—which stung a little, but okay, whatever. The last one twirled his spear in one hand and advanced on me.

I grabbed the body of the spear and tried to twist it out of his hand. He twisted right back, and we danced down the hall, grabbing and pulling at each other, the end of the spear crackling ominously.

Bram picked up one of the demons attacking him and threw him onto the bed. He rolled to the floor, groaning, and tried to run up and stab me with his own spear. I swung the blue point of ours down into his stomach, and he collapsed with a groan.

The one holding the spear with me stopped moving and kicked me in the stomach. I stumbled back, but manage to keep my hands on it. I pulled hard as I fell back, trying to use the momentum to pull him forward with me, and I pulled hard enough that when I hit the floor, I sent him flying over me into the wall. He didn’t let go, but he landed flat on his back. He made a woosh-y coughing sound as all the air went out of him.

I yanked the spear fully out of his hands and jabbed it into his face. It went into his mouth, and he spasmed violently until I remembered to pull it out.

His eyes closed, but he was still breathing. He groaned and tried to roll over, and I jabbed him again. He stopped moving after that. Still breathing, though. He was probably fine. Not that I really had time to care.

Sorry, dude. You started it.

Across the room, Bram was breaking the legs of his attacker, while Bastiok had Dad Demon stuck in the corner with all of Dagan’s blood. Bastiok threw a punch and Dad Demon ducked, slipping in the blood and landing hard on his ass. Dad Demon pushed himself to his knees and stood up hard and fast, driving his shoulder into Bastiok’s stomach. Bastiok wasn’t ready and fell on his back next to the demon with the broken legs, who was also lying on his back and doing a lot of screaming.

Bram rolled his eyes. “You will live.”

Bastiok grabbed Dad Demon by the shoulders and rolled over so he was on top. Dad Demon just lay there, looking up at Bastiok as the latter adjusted his position on top of Dad Demon and placed his hands around Dad Demon’s throat. “I’m going to choke you until you pass out, and when you wake up, you’re going to go home and have a good, long talk with your son about what he wants. And you’re going to be a very good listener, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am,” said Dad Demon. He held out his hand. “Thank you, priest.”

“Technically, I’m a monk,” said Bastiok, shaking Dad Demon’s hand. “Do come to the church to tell us how everything went. We’ll keep you in our thoughts, won’t we, gentlemen?”

Bram and I didn’t respond. Bastiok smiled at Dad Demon.

“Best of luck to you all.” His eyes stopped on Bram. He squinted. “Is that a unicorn?”

Bram just sighed.

“Alright, now hold still.” Bastiok squeezed—not tightly, not even tightly enough to get him to stop breathing. Just enough to clog the arteries on either side of his throat, to stop the blood from getting to his brain. After five-ish seconds, Dad Demon lost consciousness.

Bastiok stood and brushed imaginary dust off his knees. He gave Bram a withering look.

“Altar boys indeed,” he said. He tucked the spider necklace back into his shirt and went over to Dagan, still slumped against the wall, and gestured to me to help get him up. I did, and came away slick and red.

“He’s lost a lot of blood,” I said.

“I know,” said Bastiok.

“We need to get him to a healer or a doctor or witch doctor or whatever the hell you have here.”

Bastiok frowned. “A witch doctor?”

I shrugged. “Hey, I’m new here.”

“We need to find one of my brothers,” Bastiok said. “They can take him while we look for Osenna. Come on.”

Dagan swatted him away. “I am not going anywhere.” He took a deep breath. “Not until we find Osenna.”

“You’re right, you’re not,” I said.

Dagan glared at me. “You know what I mean. I am staying with you until we find Osenna.”

I sighed and looked at Bastiok, hands on my hips. “How far is the basement?”

“Six inches, if you’re willing to break through the floor,” he said.

Well, we weren’t, but I guess somebody else was.

THIRTEEN

Henry

“No.”

“Sam—”

“That’s not possible.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s not a thing gods do, okay, they don’t just have kids with random abusive elves.”

“You haven’t read many books lately, have you?” I argued. “That’s exactly what they do! And Melchior wasn’t abusive in the beginning.”

They never were. That was the problem.

Sam was pacing around the very small space, taking care to stay out of the pentagram I’d burned into the floor. She’d been doing this for a while. I took the opportunity to set up candles at every point and started chalking in the runes we’d need for the heavier parts of the spell.

“This makes no sense. If Dulcie’s mom was a goddess—”

“Is a goddess.”

“Right. Is.” Her face bunched up a little. “Is a goddess. Sure. Fine. But she was married to Melchior, Melchior O-fucking-Neil, and he was horrible to her and he tried to kill Dulcie, and he tried to kill her boyfriend, and her mom just sat back and was going to let it happen?”

“No, of course not.” I tested the lighter, but I didn’t light any of the candles yet. They would only burn properly once, and then they’d just kind of… stop existing. Making a body was weird. “Look, each god can do, like, three things, it’s not like she wasn’t trying.”

“Meg? The transfusions?”

“Dulcie survived, her mom knew she would.”

“And if she hadn’t?”

“She’d push her back again.”

“How many times is she even allowed to do that?”

“There’s not really a number. Normal people, usually three, because after that the body you’re pushing them back into gives out, but Dulcie is a demigod, so… I don’t know, more, I guess.”

Sam crossed her arms and leaned against the one spot of wall that wasn’t a door or an overloaded shelf. The lantern light swung in little circles overhead—she kept knocking into it as she was moving, and when she wasn’t knocking into it, I was. I’d drawn the curtains over the window, so it was the only light in the room. If I kept the electric light on during the ritual—which really did sound more Hollywood cultish than it was, I promise—Elaine’s presence would short them out and they’d probably never work again. Gods were kind of overpowering that way, especially her, since she was a giver of power, not a taker like Hades and a lot of the others.

“This place is so small.”

“I thought it was cute,” I said, but mostly it was just inexpensive.

“… So one of the things Dulcie’s mom can do is… resurrection?” Sam asked.

“Kind of? That’s not the right word.”

“What is?”

“Um. It’s more like… I don’t know, loading from a previous save. She can sort of pull the version of you with the least amount of problems out of the universe and stick your soul back inside it. Or just push you back in if your body hasn’t completely gone to hell.”

“Wait, so we’re not just pushing Dulcie back in?”

“We are, we’re just also… um…”

“Loading from a previous save.”

“Yeah.”

“Because her body’s gone to hell.”

“Basically. It’s like we’re merging two versions of the same Word document—the new one that’s all messed up, and an older version where nothing’s wrong.”

“So Dulcie is going to die in Dromir and we’re going to load her body from a previous save by… lighting candles in your living room?”

“Well. Um. Yeah. It’s complicated.”

“Clearly.” She paused and looked at the pentacle. “So why do you need my help?”

“This is happening sooner than we thought it would. We’re not ready, we thought we had more time, but Dulcie’s been giving in to the Darkness and letting it do things to her body. She’s degrading a lot faster.”

“None of those words are fun.”

“I know.”

“So what am I doing, exactly?”

I handed her a candle—melted onto the top of a distinctly human skull—and a lighter. Into the purple wax, I’d carved a tiny flower.

“You’re gonna help me channel Elaine,” I said.

“Like… a séance?”

“Sort of, except she’s not dead, and she’s waiting for the call, so she won’t be as hard to get a hold of. And then she’ll lend us the power we need to… build a better Dulcie, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“About the better Dulcie part, yeah. The rest I know for sure.”

“And by build a better Dulcie, you mean…”

“Build a better Dulcie. Or, um. A new Dulcie. Out of an old Dulcie. Her old body, anyway. Elaine is the only one who knows what that looks like inside and out, so basically, she’s going to feed me her power so I don’t die doing this.”

This was literally a god-tier spell. Trying to do it on my own wouldn’t just kill me, it would rip me apart spiritually. As in, no afterlife for Henry. “And you’re gonna keep my body stable while I do it.” If we’d had more time—me and Elaine—we could have built up my strength so I could handle her independently.

She was already in me in a pretty strong way—a “lighting the way to the heart of an army of zombies” kind of way—but I was Not Ready to house an entire goddess for longer than three seconds. This was going to take several minutes, and that was if we were fast and sloppy. The best version of this spell, according to Elaine, took upwards of an hour.

But I was sure we’d be fine.

“Like Hades using Knight for… whatever he used him for,” said Sam.

“Kind of. I guess.” Basically, but I felt Elaine bristle at the comparison. Hades, by her estimation, was a very bad god. They could only do so much, even the really big scary ones who didn’t care about consequences, but even by divine standards, Hades was a very hands-off god. She looked at him like a bad parent, an absentee father. Which, I mean, yeah, kind of.

“And when do we need to start this?” asked Sam.

“Soon.”

“How soon is soon?”

“Like, in the next ten minutes soon.”

Sam paled as she realized what I was implying. “Dulcie’s going to die in the next ten minutes?”

“Maybe. Hopefully not. We have to be ready to catch her as she dies, so the spell needs to already be in progress when she does. I need you to sit here,” I said, pointing to the top of the star. Sam plunked herself down, sitting on her heels and holding the candle like she thought she might break it if she moved too quickly.

“And you will be…?” she asked.

“Here.” I sat across from her, also on my heels, because the symmetry of the thing was very important. This would have worked better if I’d had a twin.

“Is this really all we need?” she asked, eyeing the candle skeptically.

“Yes. Just give me a second.”

“What if this doesn’t work but Dulcie still dies in Dromir?”

“Then… that’s it.”

“That’s it as in?”

“As in, that’s it. She won’t be coming back.”

“I’m so overwhelmed by all of this, I haven’t even digested the fact that my best friend could die and never come back.”

“Well, if we do this right, that won’t be an outcome you even need to consider.”

Sam glanced down and I could see she was overwhelmed. “Right.”

I reached into my head and said, Whenever you’re ready.

And there she was.

Flowers blossomed out of the carpet, out of the eyes of skulls, consuming the chalk in which I’d drawn the circle, taking on its pallid blue color, and growing to the size of my face. Their petals were so soft, and the smell was like Easter and waterfalls and Febreze. Sam gasped. Grass grew underneath them, through the carpet, up over the furniture. Ivy climbed the walls. The light in the room got stronger, brighter, but soft. I heard birds chirping, water running, a creek bubbling up out of the ground somewhere very close by, even though we were on the third floor in an apartment building in the middle of the city. Everything smelled like fruit and lemonade and fresh laundry. It was beautiful.

Sam was staring at me, slack-jawed, wide-eyed, like I’d grown a second head. Light was coming from somewhere and bathing the flowers, somewhere that wasn’t outside, obviously—it took me three seconds to realize the light was me, falling out of my mouth and eyes like water, half-liquid.

“Woah,” she said.

Elaine spoke, and it was like I had rainbows in my mouth. “Hello, Sam.”

Sam swallowed. “Holy shit.”

Elaine laughed. “Indeed.”

The presence of anything divine was always super strong, but highly variant. Hades inspired fear and irritation. Elaine inspired peace and love and awe. She was a bunny rabbit and a typhoon, a bouquet and a wildfire, birth and decay, ceaseless and wonderful and totally merciless.

“Hi,” said Sam, squeakily.

Elaine laughed. The feeling was like bubbles, like sugar. “I’m sorry to bother you with this.”

Sam shook her head. “Not a problem.”

“Thank you for always taking care of Dulcie. You’re a good friend, Sam.”

“I haven’t… um…” Sam was staring. She was forgetting to blink. “I...” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them again. “I don’t know that I’ve done much.”

“You have done more than you will ever know. One day, we will meet properly, and I will thank you again.”

Which basically translated to, “One day you’ll die, and we’ll have tea and you’ll tell me all about your day,” but we didn’t have time to worry about that right now.

“You’re Dulcie’s mom,” said Sam, kind of disbelieving.

“And you’re Dulcie’s friend,” said Elaine. “And together, we’re going to save her life.”

Sam nodded. I was starting to shake already. Bad sign. I’d start breaking down like Dulcie if we went on like this too long.

“Sam, I need you to stabilize Henry for me.”

Sam nodded again, more urgently, and did some muttering over her candle. Mine sprung to life in front of me, unlit before, and the flame shot into the air. Just for a second, before both of the candles settled back down, glowing an unearthly green.

The shaking got better. It didn’t stop, but it wasn’t so pronounced. That was good. Now it just needed to stay good for the next hour and a half so we could do this thing.

“How is this going to work?” asked Sam.

“I’m going to do something we don’t have time to explain,” said Elaine. “You are going to keep me from killing Henry. And we will pray we can complete it all in time.”

Elaine set my hands on my knees. She snapped, and there was a sound like a hammer on a metal bell.

Sam asked, “Who does a goddess pray to?”

And Elaine said, “Anyone who will listen.”

FOURTEEN

Dulcie

“Here,” said Sevrex.

We were in the middle of the tunnel. It wasn’t a dead end, and there wasn’t anything that made it look like there was a secret door anywhere.

“Where?” I asked.

“Um.” Sevrex looked at the ceiling and spun around in a little circle, looking for something. “Well. It was here before.”

“What was here before?” asked Knight.

“The door.”

“Like… a trap door?”

“No, like a door.”

“Doors don’t usually go in ceilings.”

“Yes, but they do sometimes go in floors.”

“That’s why I said trap door,” Knight muttered.

The ceiling, like literally every other part of the tunnel, was sort of round, but a little bit flat at the very top. I looked for lines or cracks that might indicate the door Sevrex was referring to. There were small cracks I didn’t see anywhere else, and the longer I looked, the more I could pick out the faint outline of a little wooden door covered with dirt.

“Boost me up,” I said.

“What? No!” said Knight.

“I’m fine.” I gestured to Sevrex. “I can see the handle.”

Knight put his hand on my shoulder. “Dulcie, you’re in no shape to… you’ll fall.”

I took his hand and gently pushed it away. “I’m fine. Just stop fussing.”

He held up his hands. “I’m not fussing!”

“You’re fussing.”

“And you’re kind of… dying.”

“You chill,” I said.

Sevrex laced his fingers together and crouched. I stepped up and, with surprising strength, Sevrex lifted me towards the little door.

“Can you open it?” he asked.

“No, I just came up here to stare at it and draw dicks in the dirt.” I rolled my eyes and pulled on the handle.

And ripped it off.

“Oops.”

“What?”

“There’s not a handle anymore.”

“Dammit,” muttered Sevrex. “Well, um. Can you break through?”

“Dulcie, don’t,” said Knight. “If you push yourself too hard, we’re all going to regret it,” he finished with his dad voice.

“Relax, I won’t,” I said. I was having enough trouble staying upright as it was.

Joanne lifted her little arm and said, “Um. Maybe I could try?”

Sevrex put me down. I stumbled for a second. Knight rushed forward, but I held out my hand to stop him, steadying myself on Sevrex’s shoulder. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” he said.

Okay, ignoring him. “What do you want to try, Joanne?” I asked.

“Well.” She skittered up the wall until she was on top of—or under, I guess?—the door. “Maybe if I just hit it really hard…”

She lifted her leg, white and glassy, and slammed it into the wood as hard as she could.

The door shattered upwards into whatever room we were invading. Pallid red light came leaking down into the tunnel. A number of people, all guys, made very unmanly noises of surprise.

“Someone’s up there!” Sevrex whispered.

“No shit,” I whispered back.

Above us, someone whispered very loudly, “Someone’s down there!”

And two very familiar, pissed-off voices whispered back, “No shit.”

Knight and I locked eyes, both of us frowning. The word “fuck” passed silently between us.

“… Quillan?” I said.

“Dulcie!” said two voices. Quillan and Bram. At the same time.

“Who’s with you?” I called.

“Bram, Dagan, and Bastiok.”

Bastiok—aka the monk Father Demick had sent after them. Guess he made it. “I’ve got Knight, Sevrex, and a giant spider. Want to trade?”

A voice I didn’t recognize—probably Bastiok—said, “I told you,” and Bram made a deeply unpleasant noise.

Joanne came back down to our level and propped herself against the wall so we could climb up her back. “Well done, Joanne,” I said. And I think she smiled. Because she was a spider, it was hard to tell.

“We’re coming up,” called Knight. He stood at the base of Joanne’s back and looked at her for a second, chewing on his lip. He rolled his busted arm in its socket and winced when something clicked.

“You good?” I asked.

“Definitely not,” he answered, grinning. “You?”

“Absolutely hellish, thank you for asking.”

Hades, it felt so good to be back in the thick of this. Of us. To be able to joke around again like everything that had passed between us never had. Like it was old times. Maybe we’d get home and it would all fall to pieces again, but honestly, fuck that noise. I was happy for the moment, leave me alone.

It was kind of tricky getting all of us up there. Sevrex was a terrible climber, Knight’s arm was broken, and I was still going through sporadic anti-Volpin fever shocks that made climbing not a great idea. I ended up on Knight’s back with my arms wrapped around his neck as he pulled himself up with one arm. Gotta tell you, it was a very sexy, if unorthodox, display. New kink: one-armed spider-climbing.

We finally managed to climb up with everyone else, and fuck, this room was not big enough for all of us. I didn’t think it was big enough for Joanne on her own, even if there wasn’t a big fuck-off canopy bed in the middle of everything, so she stayed down in the tunnel for now, poking her head through the trap door and smiling at all of us. I think.

The smell of blood smacked me in the face, and I gagged a little. Demon blood was to vampires what haggis was to humans. Someone was probably into it, but the general verdict was “well, that can fuck right off.”

“How did you even get here?” I asked, not talking to any one of them in particular. They all looked surprised to see us—which I guess was more about the fact that we’d busted up from the floor than just the fact that we were here—and they were covered in blood. And sand, for some reason. And there was a spider head poking through the floor. An enormous one.

Bram was the first to respond. “Oh, you mean since you stole my portal ripper, the only means of travel between this place and home? Are you wondering, perhaps, how we came to be in such a place without my portal ripper?”

“Oooooh, Bram, just answer the—” I stopped. I bit back a laugh. “Bram. What… what is that?”

“What is what?”

“Your… that’s…” I touched the slick pink material of the parka and snorted. “That’s a unicorn. On a parka. You’re wearing a unicorn parka?”

He sighed. Deeply. “So it would seem.”

“Why the actual fuck are you wearing a unicorn parka?”

“I hardly think that matters right now.”

“It does.”

“Really? Tell me, is it more or less important than your theft of my device?”

“Hey, bucko, I wouldn’t have had to steal it if you’d just brought Dagan and Knight back with us.” I glared at him. Really glared at him.

Bram looked like he was about to say something stupid, but then Quillan butted in between us and said, “Bram has a witch friend out in the desert who opened a portal for us. I don’t know how she did it, but right now that doesn’t matter. We just need to find Osenna and get out of here before, um…” He looked down at Joanne.

“Hiya!” she said, sticking her little arms through the hole to wave.

Quillan waved back hesitantly as he sighed—like this was just another day and another gigantic, talking spider. “Before we’re caught,” he said, a little quieter than before. Then he glanced at Joanne again. “So that’s the White Spider?”

Bastiok was standing in total rapture, staring at Joanne, visibly fighting the urge to fall to his knees.

“That’s the White Spider,” he said. In awe.

Then Dagan, delirious and bloody and three-quarters out of his mind, finally saw her. And I finally saw his eye… missing eye. Jesus.

“Joanne!” he said. “Holy fuck, I should have known.” He almost sounded drunk.

Joanne saw him and jumped with giddiness which meant she thrust her legs up a little higher through the hole in the floor.

“Dagan!” she said, practically shrieking. She forced herself through the smallish hole and then pulled herself up as everyone scooted back to make room. Then she skittered over to him, leaned down, and picked him up with her tiny forearms, squishing him against her abdomen in what was probably supposed to be a hug. “You’re alive! I missed you so much!”

“I missed you, too, bug.” Dagan reached up and patted her gently. Not that he really had the energy to be anything but gentle. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

“But you’re glad to see me, right?”

“Of course I am.”

“What happened to your eye?” Joanne asked.

“Darion,” Dagan answered unpleasantly.

I crossed my arms and drummed my fingers, glaring at Bram.

“It does not matter how we got here,” he said. He held out his hand. “Only that we are about to go back.”

Right, the portal ripper. Knight still had it. I probably should have gotten it back when we were kissing. He was probably going to try to convince me to leave right this second, since there were so many other people here who could do the searching in my stead. He didn’t bring the portal ripper out immediately, though, so points for him. “Where is Osenna?” I demanded.

“We are working on it.” Bram dropped his hand. “Please open a portal so that we may send the wounded people somewhere else.”

“Including you,” said Knight to me.

Theeeeeere it was. Points withdrawn.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, but even I knew that was dumb. I was bleeding, I was sleep deprived, and I was possessed by the Darkness, who really, really wanted Knight dead. I didn’t know if I could push it down if it tried to take me over again.

But Father Demick made it sound like I was supposed to be here for something, and somehow, I didn’t think that something was this. It felt bigger.

I cannot force you, the Darkness said. It sounded farther away now, like it was talking to me from inside a very sturdy pillow fort.

I said, You already tried.

I said I was sorry.

“Dulcie,” said Knight. When he took my hand, and when I didn’t immediately flinch away or hit him or threaten to rip out his throat with my teeth, everyone made a different face. “Please.”

I should have. I really, really should have. I was in no state to be doing anything heroic. But Father Demick made it sound like I was supposed to be here for something, and somehow, I didn’t think that something boiled down to getting Dagan back to Splendor. Not that that wasn’t important, but whatever Father Demick needed me for… it just felt bigger than Dagan.

“Where did you go?” Joanne was asking Dagan.

“California.”

“Why didn’t you take me?”

Dagan smiled. “There wasn’t time, bug. I’m sorry. I really am. You can come back with us this time, though.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

I wondered absently what the pet size restrictions were in Dagan’s apartment building. Usually, they topped out at Chihuahuas.

“You,” I said, pointing to the demon in red robes I hadn’t met yet. “If I say prophecy, do you know what I’m talking about?”

“The concept or something specific?”

“Dulcie, this isn’t important enough to risk your life,” said Knight softly. He was running his thumb across the top of my hand, over and over again, almost compulsively. There was nothing inherently sexual about it, but it was very distracting.

“Um.” Focus, Dulcie. “Something specific. The thing about me and the White Spider.”

Bastiok frowned. “Father Demick did not tell you?”

“He did, but we didn’t get into the details. I want specifics.”

“Such as?”

“Well, do you know what the prophecy actually says? Verbatim?”

“Of course.” He cleared his throat and stood up a little straighter, trying to make himself look big. He succeeded, but only until you looked at Bram. “The Great Shadow and the White Spider will rise from beneath the snow,” he said, “and they will unmake this eternal winter. The Witch’s Seal shall be broken, and the sun will shine again.”

“The witch’s seal?” said Quillan suddenly. He uncrossed his arms and looked around at us. His eyes were wide.

I looked at him. “Yeah, why?”

He glanced at Bram before he kept talking. “Bram’s friend Grenwal is the one who brought us—”

At the same time, Sevrex and the other priest slammed their fists into their palms. They bowed their heads, scrunching up their faces, and muttered something in a language I didn’t understand. Which means it could have been literally anything that wasn’t English and maybe ten words of Dora-taught Spanish, but it was probably in whatever language demons spoke.

“…Oookayyy,” I said, watching them. Quillan and I looked at each other.

“That bitch,” said Sevrex.

“Oh, you know her?” Bram asked casually.

Quillan said, “oh” quietly, and then, louder for the rest of us, “She cursed Dromir, didn’t she?”

Sevrex and Bastiok gave him a murderous look that said, “She sure fucking did.”

“That bitch,” Sevrex said again, “tore the sun out of the sky and buried us in the ice.” He lost himself to a kind of angry, half-reverent trance. “It thirsts for all things that move, it hungers for all things that breathe. It siphons the heat from the world and exhales the fog of cold death upon unburied bodies.”

He stopped and looked around the room. Quillan shuffled his feet. Knight coughed.

“I’ve seen it—the ice you’re talking about,” I said.

I expected that announcement to illicit some kind of reaction, but Sevrex just laughed. “Of course you have!” he said, but it sounded less like he meant everyone had seen it and more like he’d suspected this was coming all along. He put his hand over his mouth and smiled to himself, but it wasn’t a happy smile. He looked more than a little crazy. Something on the inside had cracked just now. “Then we’re done for.”

“The ice was in the dungeons.”

“It made it to the old city?” said Bastiok, horrified.

“The old city?” said Bram.

“Vastok is built on the bones of the city the witch knew,” said Sevrex.

Vastok. Alright, the city had a name. I’d just kind of assumed everything was called Dromir.

“I saw some of the city,” said Knight. “Buildings and fountains.”

“And how close was the ice?” asked Sevrex.

“Right up on it.”

“Dammit!” Sevrex pulled his hands through his sleeves and walked himself in a circle. He was breathing through his mouth, and way too fast. “No, no, we can’t be too late, we can’t!”

Bastiok grabbed him by the shoulders. “We aren’t. That’s why they’re here, isn’t it? This is the golden hour, the moment of utmost truth. They are here just at the edge of the last of her curse.”

“At the eleventh fucking hour?” said Sevrex, shoving him off. He looked back at Knight. “How fast was it moving?”

“I didn’t think it was,” said Knight.

“Maybe it’s slowing down,” said Bastiok. “Maybe we have more time than you think.”

“We don’t, we don’t, it’s coming!” Sevrex was crying now, sobbing and shaking. He sank to the floor and Bastiok sank with him, whispering to him and trying to calm him down.

I touched Quillan on the shoulder to get his attention and pulled him aside. “What were you gonna say before? About Grenwal?”

Quillan chewed on his lip. “I don’t think…” He sighed. “Grenwal has books. I don’t know what’s in most of them, but there was a picture.”

“Quillan,” Bram said, a warning.

Quill ignored him. “It was labeled. Uh, Vorpus. No!” He snapped and pointed at me. “Volpin! Volpin.”

“Volpin?” I said, frowning.

Volpin said, Oh dear.

“Yeah, there, ah,” he kept snapping, trying to remember, “I was only looking at it for a second, but there was a snowflake, and it was eating a person.”

“What did it look like, exactly?” I asked.

He shrugged,and shook his head. “Big shadowy mass, kind of person-shaped but not really, big glowing white eyes, but no mouth.”

“Then how was it eating a person?”

“It was siphoning something off a body. A lot of bodies. Red, like blood. Like it was drinking blood through a bunch of straws.”

I thought, Is that a thing you do?

And Volpin said, Not traditionally, no. But there was a hitch in its voice. The no landed a little too hard.

“Then what’s her book talking about?” I asked. Quillan started to ask who I was talking to, but I shushed him.

It hesitated.

The souls of the wicked, it said, very slowly. They are my sustenance.

Since when do you need sustenance?

Everything does that seeks to take a shape in this world. It is a hazard of having a physical form.

“A hazard,” I said. “You realize how incredibly shady that sounds?”

“What is it saying?” asked Knight, looking like I’d murdered his mother. I had to remind myself the look was for the Darkness, not me.

Hades, what must this be like for him, looking the thing that hurt me in the eyes, my eyes, and being totally unable to do anything about it? That had to suck.

“What is what saying?” asked Quillan.

“You know that black stuff in her blood?” asked Knight.

“Yeah?”

“Knight,” I hissed, panic sweeping over me, but not my panic, and not my voice.

“What?” said Quillan, looking between us in confusion. “The black stuff, what about it?”

Knight narrowed his eyes in my direction, looking straight through me and into the Darkness under my skin.

“It’s the Darkness.”

No one gasped. Quillan pursed his lips and crossed his arms. Bram cursed under his breath.

Bram sidled over to Knight and whispered in his ear, “Does she know?”

Knight leaned away from him, mouth popping open. “Why would I say that out loud if she didn’t know?”

“You are a very stupid person.”

“Thanks.”

“Or perhaps you were accusing her.”

Knight glared at him. “She knows.”

Bram pulled himself up to his full height. “And how do you know this?”

“Which part?”

Bram raised his eyebrows at me. “I don’t suppose you just volunteered this information to him? No,” he continued, staring at me,“you did something, didn’t you? You attacked something, or perhaps you attacked him, and you used that ghastly black smog to strangle him.” He glared down at me. “A shame you didn’t succeed,” he breathed, mostly to himself.

Knight spun Bram around by his shoulder. “Wait, you knew the Darkness was inside her?”

“I had my suspicions.”

“Bram knew,” I said. I don’t know why. Maybe I was just feeling antagonistic.

No, they are antagonistic, said Volpin. The blood of empaths runs through you, do you not recall? Their irritation is yours by proxy.

“The blood of a lot of things runs, through me,” I said, loudly, but now Knight and Bram were full-scale screaming at each other, so no one heard me.

“You didn’t tell us the Darkness was inside her,” Knight said, aghast.

“No, I did not,” said Bram, “why should I have? What could you possibly have done?”

“We didn’t know what we were looking for! If you’d told Sam anything—”

“She’d what, Vander? Miss White is a gifted witch, but this is the Darkness of which we speak. There is nothing for us to find.”

Knight got right up into Bram’s face—Bram was taller, but not by as much as I’d thought—and raised his fist. He just barely kept himself from clocking Bram as hard as he could—not that it would have done much.

“You don’t know that.” He lowered his fist, but he was getting louder. “You can’t fucking know that, Bram!”

Louder. Louder. Louder.

Noise is a terrible thing.

I felt Volpin breathing within me. The inhale and the exhale of something pretending to have lungs. Isn’t the noise terrible? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could just… turn it off?

And the room went totally quiet.

Knight was red in the face. Bram was rolling his eyes and leaning forward, pointing at Knight and flicking his nose. Knight looked ready to throttle him and the whole rest of the planet. Quillan and the priests stood back with Dagan, watching it happen.

Just… make the noise go away?

Silence. Like a snowfall.

But that’s not enough, is it?

It wasn’t.

You can feel the noise, can’t you?

I could.

Close your eyes, Dulcie. Is it still there?

“Yes.” Tendrils of sound, drums and thunder cracking my skull. Trying to get in.

We can make it go away. We can return the world to the peace and quiet of the very beginning.

The air was red. I was vibrating. Their voices, silent, ripped through me like the reverb on a bass, like thunder, like watching someone jump off a building and hit the ground. I clamped my hands over my ears, but the noise was deeper than that. It was inside me, moving things around, jangling my organs like keys. My ears rang. I heard a high whine, cutting through the imaginary silence, getting louder and shriller, making my molars ache.

I watched myself drop to the floor and scream, “STOP!”

They did.

Sound, real sound, came swimming back. Their breathing. My breathing, shallow and too fast. Dagan swallowing mouthfuls of his own blood.

“Dulcie?” someone said.

I didn’t look up. I crouched there with my hands still covering my ears, staring at the carpet. Fuck, that was a lot of blood. Most of it was dry. Dagan had been in here bleeding for a hot minute. I focused on that. I had this insane mental image of me trying to suck the dried blood out of the floor, but honestly, if I wanted to drink his blood that badly, all I had to do was ask. Not that I ever would.

No one was saying anything.

The silence calls to me, said Volpin. It calls to all of us. The noise of existence is a pox on the universe.

“Then go somewhere quiet.”

Trees make noise when they fall in the forest. We must get rid of the trees.

I had a horrible feeling. I said, “Why are we here?”

To rescue Dagan, I thought, it said.

“No, I mean you and me. Why are we here?” I paused. “Why are you here? To end the noise? Is that it?”

“What’s happening?” asked Dagan.

“She’s talking to it,” said Knight, biting off the end of every word.

Volpin didn’t answer.

“Volpin?” I said.

Quillan said, “That’s—”

“We know.” Bram said, sounding very tired.

“Answer me, jackass,” I said.

Volpin sighed. Not to end the noise. To end the long snow, I suspect. I suggest we do it quickly, though. You and I have business back on Earth. Pause. And it is hardly civil to call your body mate unpleasant names.

“Oh, I hate that,” I said. But I went back on topic. “Give me specifics. Why you? Why does it have to be the Great Shadow or whatever?”

…Oh.

“Oh?” I said.

“Oh?” said Knight, Quillan, and just about everyone else.

The ice is approaching. It was slow when we saw it, but if we are near the apex of the spell, perhaps it is gaining speed. I could feel it nodding, thinking to itself, piecing something together. Yes, yes, of course. Grenwal would have encased the thing itself to prevent tampering…

“Something you’d like to share with the class?” I asked. Everyone was looking at me expectantly. I made a point not to look back at them and tried not to think about how certifiably insane I looked.

The ice freezes anything it touches instantly, yes? Within seconds.

“Yeah, genius, that’s what instantly means.”

It sighed. So, what a very useful thing in which to hide the source of a curse. Like a seal.

“It’s… the seal is in the ice?”

It is in ice somewhere. Perhaps not in the ice we saw. No, this curse was deeply personal. She would have left it somewhere everyone in this world could have seen. Somewhere incredibly public or important.

“Sevrex,” I said, “where is the seal?”

Sevrex looked around at all of us, like he thought he was going to get yelled at. Bastiok had talked him down, it looked like, but he was still shaking.

“Seal?” said Knight.

“Um.” Sevrex swiped at his nose with the sleeve of his cassock. “Here, I think.”

“Like, in the house?” I asked.

All heads swiveled to Dagan.

“What?” he said.

“Is the seal in the building?” I asked. “This building?”

“Not… strictly speaking.”

“What seal?” asked Knight.

“The seal of the curse from Grenwal,” I answered quickly, in an irritated way. Then I faced Dagan again. “But?”

“But, yes, technically. The temple Grenwal placed the seal in is connected to the house. It has, ah, been under the protection of the Halsirs since its creation.”

“Protection?” asked Knight.

“We have been trying to find a way to break it,” Dagan answered. “But, as most of you know and have seen, we cannot touch the ice that surrounds the seal. We have contained it—it is why, I think, the ice has spread so slowly, though I was never involved in the process; too academic for my blood.”

“Until you,” Bastiok said softly, puppy-dog acolyte eyes boring straight down to my soul. He was looking at a vessel for a savior, not a fairy carting around a pissed-off anti-god. But if we were here to help, I guessed there wasn’t a difference.

I realized I was still crouching on the ground like a little kid at a party full of adults and stood up, dusting off my knees—less because I had anything to dust off them and way more because I super didn’t want to make eye contact with anyone right now. It was the weirdest sensation, but still, I felt like I could hear everything, and it was too much. Less too much than before, like metal music playing quietly in a car, furious but far away. I could hear their heartbeats in my stomach, their breathing in the palms of my hands, their shuffling feet and coughing and cursing as a line of nausea running down my throat.

I worried if I looked at them, I’d start feeling more. Which would be no bueno. Mucho mal. Hyper-mega super not okie dokie.

“Wait,” I said, finally catching up to the rest of the conversation. “Then…”

“The power you host is ancient and unknown,” said Sevrex, “older even than the witch who put on the curse in the first place—Grenwal. This power will not be ruled by the laws of her magic.”

“So you hope,” muttered Bram.

Sevrex threw him a look. Bram returned it, and Sevrex’s scowl caved in.

“You want me to touch the demon ice,” I said.

“We want you to break it,” said Bastiok. He took a tiny step forward, trying not to look at Bram. “That is why you’re here. It was written in the prophecy, foretold!”

“Don’t get all excited, we are not going to be here any longer than we have to,” said Bram, glaring at him. Bastiok managed not to melt into a puddle.

I knelt in front of Dagan and held up his chin so he could look at me. I tried to ignore his missing eye. “Where’s the temple?”

“What did I just say?” asked Bram.

I shot him a look over my shoulder. “Dagan? Where’s the temple?”

“Then you’ll help us?” asked Bastiok excitedly. Sevrex shushed him and pulled urgently on his arm, like Bastiok might spook me and I’d run off into the snowy wilderness, never to be seen again.

“I can show you,” Dagan said.

“No, you can’t,” said Bram. “You, sir, are dying.”

“I’m fine.” Dagan reached for me. “Help me up, darling.”

I took his hands and hauled him to his feet. He wobbled for a second, but was mostly okay. He looked a little dizzy, but he wasn’t bleeding as much as he had been before.

“Dulcie, no,” said Knight.

“You can’t stop me,” I said, almost reflexively.

“No, I can’t, but I don’t think I’m gonna have to if you keep going like this.”

“I kicked Volpin out when he tried to take over my soul. It’s fine.”

“Then you’ll freeze when you touch the ice!”

I crossed my arms. “Do you want me to let the Darkness back in?”

“No! No, that’s the point, anything you have to do to help these people is not worth it if it involves giving yourself over to the literal Darkness, Dulcie!”

I said, If I touch the ice without letting you back in to take me over, will the ice freeze me?

Volpin replied, obviously, with Yes.

I said, You could be lying to me. Trying to trick me into giving you access to all of me.

I could be. But you are not that stupid.

And then Sevrex was in front of me, looking small and afraid and pathetic, like a puppy left out in the rain.

“Please,” he said. His hands were clasped together under his sleeves, but there was something in his voice that spoke to a little kid pulling on my shirt. “Please. Just come and see it. Be in the room with the thing and see what you can do.”

It was a reasonable request. I looked around the room and couldn’t find anyone willing to stop me.

So I said, “Let’s go.”

FIFTEEN

Dulcie

The hallways leading out of Darion’s room were ostentatiously and stupidly large, so Joanne fit through them no problem. One wall was entirely glass, arcing up and over us until it connected with the rest of the building, and it looked out on the city from the top of a massive cliff.

Snow fell between skyscrapers, sticking to the windows in thick ashy patches. We were higher than any other building in sight, but only marginally. Every light was on, every street was crowded with bikes and motorcycles. No cars anyway, nothing parked. Far below us, demons mingled like ants on an industrial hill, little black spots going in and out of shop fronts and dragging each other into alleys for a quick fuck.

Seriously, there was nothing else those two dots could possibly be doing. Dancing, maybe, but come on. Dagan was Dagan for a reason.

“So this is Vastok,” I said. I guess I’d been expecting something… eviler. More dungeons, more fire, more red. But it was just a city. Just a bunch of skyscrapers full of people doing people things for people reasons.

“Beautiful, is it not?” said Dagan. “You should have seen it when the sun was still here. Everything glowed.”

“That is generally how sunlight works,” said Bram.

“And you would know.”

Bram didn’t respond.

“So where are we going?” I asked.

“To the chapel,” said Dagan.

“Chapel?”

“Well, no longer a chapel, but it was before all of this.” He gestured vaguely to the sky, slate-gray and billowing. “It is where Grenwal placed the seal, in Daneira’s highest place of worship.”

So not only did Grenwal curse Dromir and then lock away Daneira, but she then placed the seal in Daneira’s temple...  Wow. “Rude,” I said.

“Very,” Dagan agreed.

“Will we be able to get in? Like, is there a lock?” I thought of the key, pressed tightly against my thigh in my pants pocket, wondering if this was what it was for.

Dagan cursed. “Yes, there is. I am sure our friends here can figure out some way to open it, though.”

I fished the key out of my pocket and held it up. “Will this work?”

Dagan’s mouth popped open. “I… where did you get that?”

“A friend of mine.”

“A… a friend of yours just happens to have the key to the chapel in which the heart of our demise is kept and guarded?”

“A friend named Father Demick?”

“Ah, that makes more sense now,” Dagan finished.

“So, there’s guards?” asked Knight.

“Yes. Big, scary ones with sticks.”

“Lightning sticks?”

“What else?”

***

The door in question was exactly what you would think. Huge, metal, elaborate, lots of twisty bronze bits, snakes and leaves and sunbursts and, of course, spiders. Spiders galore. One really, really big one was worked into the middle, legs reaching, digging themselves into the wall on either side of the door, presumably to keep it closed. Whatever they’d used to paint it white had oxidized, so most of it was now this off-yellow brownish color. Tiny metal spiders ran up and down the big one’s legs, with four medium-sized spiders in every corner, their medium spider mouths open to receive the tiny offerings in the mouths of the itsy-bitsy spiders.

“Hey, I heard you like spiders, so I put more spiders in your spider,” I said. Seriously, they were everywhere. Knight chuckled.

The lock wasn’t in the normal place—it was in the middle of the spider’s back. Aesthetically, there wasn’t really a better place for it, but there was no way anyone was tall enough to just reach up and unlock it. Maybe they had a little fold-up step stool somewhere so people could get in—a white metal thing with red plastic steps.

“Give it to me,” said Knight, holding his hand out for the key.

“I don’t think so. Bastiok, boost me up again,” I said.

“What? Why?” asked Knight.

“Because if I give it to you, you’re not going to open it until I go home or something, and that’s not happening.”

“Now why would I do a thing like that?”

“Because I’m a self-destructive, possessed fairy with a hero complex and also I’m a really bad listener.”

“By Hades, she can be taught.”

Bastiok knelt, hands together, and held me up while I turned the key in the lock. There was a thunderous clicking sound, and the doors rumbled their way open, groaning like teenagers.

“We’re just looking,” I said to Knight. Which was a bald-faced lie, obviously, and it didn’t seem to make him feel better because he could tell, but I felt obliged to say it at least once. Just to keep the pretense going.

He grabbed my arm, not hard, and looked at me. The doors—two of them, as it turned out, fitted together like puzzle pieces down the middle—were taking their sweet time prying themselves apart, so we had a second.

“Just looking,” he said. “Looking, and then leaving. I’m serious.”

“Looking and leaving,” I said, nodding. “Got it.”

He shook me a little. “And nothing in between.”

“Right.”

“Dulcie, please. I can’t lose you again.” He touched my face. “Please.”

My heart dropped its sheet music and missed a couple measures. I swallowed. “You won’t.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“I promise, I’ll be careful.”

“You’re never careful.”

“I’m always careful.”

“That’s not making me feel any better, Dulcie.”

The doors stopped. We looked inside.

I mean, it definitely looked like the epicenter of a massive, evil ice-themed curse.

Big circular room, domed ceiling, Greek pillars at the edges. Like the rotunda in a capital building. Joanne skittered up to the top of the dome, so she’d be out of everyone’s way. If you didn’t know better, you’d say she was just part of the architecture. Shiny metallic spider hanging upside down in the sky.

There was a seal in the middle of the floor—and by “seal,” I mean a massive circle with intricately knotted, loopy designs spinning through the whole thing and glowing more than a little. It took up most of the floor space, with enough left on the outside to walk around it without worrying too much that you were going to slip and fall face-first onto the glimmering blue and white glacier sheen of ice covering the entire thing like a lens cap.

There were long, purple lines stretched over it, little magic ropes, like they were holding it down. They flickered and sparked. There must have been a hundred of them. And at every one, kneeling and praying, was a monk.

As we watched, one of the ropes trembled and snapped in half with a vicious thundering noise. The monks on either end of the string collapsed.

One of the monks standing by the wall jumped to attention. He knelt at one end of the broken rope and bowed his head, while another monk did the same thing on the other side. They muttered and prayed and did whatever else magic monks do, and the rope very slowly knitted itself back together.

The monks who passed out were brought around and escorted to a room in the back. I could see lots of beds in there, most of them occupied, with monks in different colors—doctors, maybe—fussing over them and making faces.

“So this is the famous seal,” said Bram. He nodded at Dagan. “Impressive work.”

“None of it mine.”

“I would never have thought so.”

Dagan ignored that. “We need to break it.”

Bram rolled his eyes. “Yes, thank, you Dagan, where would we be without you?”

“She needs to break it,” said Bastiok. He and Sevrex were staring at me intently, their hands clasped together, mostly covered by their enormous sleeves.

“Is that even something we can do?” I asked.

It is something I can do.

I snarled. I couldn’t help it. The sound bounced around the room like a bullet in a steel box.

“You want access.” I was past the point of trying to keep my conversations with Volpin just in my mind. Everyone knew the Darkness was inside me so if I randomly started spouting out a bitchy statement, I figured they knew to whom I was addressing it.

I want what I have been asking for since the beginning. A vessel. A body. A friend.

“We’re not fucking friends.”

“Dulcie,” said Knight. “Careful.”

I looked at him, maybe too fast. Quillan and the monks both flinched on either side of him, but whatever I looked like, Knight wasn’t bothered by it.

“Don’t give it anything for this,” he said. “If we can’t help them on our own, we can’t help them at all.”

Somewhere in the shallows of my brain, I thought this was absolutely hysterical. Knight, trying to appeal to my better nature. Pulling on my moral heartstrings. But the rest of me wasn’t laughing.

I moved towards the seal. It wasn’t super far from the door, but it felt like it was taking me forever to get there. Gentle waves of panic moved through me.

Perhaps your ex-boyfriend is right. This is too dangerous for you, and perhaps I am only saying we can help to persuade you to let me back in. We should leave.

“Wait, what? What’s the matter with you?” I asked.

This place is dangerous.

“You said we could help.”

I said I could help, and I thought this to be true, but now I see there is nothing here for us to do that will not result in your immediate death. It was talking really fast. Volpin didn’t breathe, but it sounded breathless. We should leave.

“Why?” One more step. My stomach rolled.

We must leave this place.

I looked at the ice—shining blue like a backlit gem, like neon bar signs and anime water. I was pretty sure I could break it. This close to the ropes, I could feel the pulsing thing they were containing, and it was strong—but it wasn’t stronger than me.

If you touch it, you will die.

“Sucks to suck,” I said. Just look and leave, look and leave. But this close, there was something more. A warmth. A gentle hum, pulling me in. Coaxing me, gentle as a warm bath.

I could do this. Like, really. I could totally break this curse.

You must not break that ice!

“Why? Were you in on this?” I asked, gesturing to the seal. “Am I about to trash your science project or something? What’s the problem?”

No, no, it is not mine, but you will not survive its breaking.

“You said I would be fine.”

I said no such thing.

I lowered my hand. “You said we could help.”

“What is happening?”asked Bastiok.

“Give her a moment,” said Sevrex. “She negotiates with the Great Shadow.”

Perhaps I am not the Great Shadow after all. Perhaps there is another being of darkness less like myself for which they wait. We should leave and give their proper hero a chance to arrive and save the day. I would hate to have ripped someone else’s prophecy out from under them, wouldn’t you? It would be terribly rude, I think.

“Since when were you such a fucking coward? Why does this scare you so much?” I asked. Then I had a thought. “What’s under here?”

A spell of great power from which I cannot protect you if you breach the ice! Volume in your head kind of stayed the same no matter what, but Volpin shouting from between my ears was like swallowing a nuclear-powered industrial vibrator.

I reached for the ice. The purple light from the strings lit up my skin. It felt weirdly warm on my face. “Okay, so if I touch it—”

No!

“I’m gonna touch it—”

Shadows swept over my hand, encasing it like a glove.

“Alright, listen up, you little bitch,” I said quietly. I could do this. I could one hundred percent do this and not die. “I’m gonna punch the shit out of the evil ice, and you are going to keep it from freezing me over, or we are both going to die. Sound good?”

I cannot help you if you do not let me—

And I punched the shit out of the evil ice.

It cracked under my knuckles, and fuck it was cold. A dry, shivery feeling shot up my arm and into every part of my body.

But hey, I didn’t freeze. So that was neat.

“You were saying?” I said.

The monks against the walls leapt forward—not to do anything, just to gawk in indignant confusion. The monks on the floor didn’t react at all. Their brows creased and their heads cocked a little, tilting like they were listening.

“What is the meaning of this?” asked the monk standing closest to us. Then I guess he saw Joanne, because he made this bubbly noise of panic and very loudly fell over.

“Hiya,” said Joanne. “We’re here to help. I think. We’re here to help, right?”

“Of course we are, bug,” said Dagan.

There was a scuffle, a grunt from Knight, and Sevrex said excitedly, “Look. She has touched it! She is fine! I beg you, let her complete her work.”

“This isn’t her work,” said Knight.

It will kill you, said Volpin.

“Mmm, I’m pretty sure it’ll kill you.” I hit the ice again, harder this time, and I split the whole thing nearly in half. The cracking sound was one of the most satisfying things I’d ever heard.

Buckets of nausea poured themselves down my throat. I’d been sweating before, but I was practically raining now. The evil ice felt really nice, actually.

You need my help.

“Then give it to me.” Again, I hit the ice harder, but I slipped. I made a small crack, but now I was on the floor. I rolled over on my back and pushed myself up.

“Shit, I knew this was a bad idea,” someone said, and then there were hands on my shoulders, strong ones. Knight’s.

I brushed him off. “I’m fine, it’s just being a little bitch.”

“No, you’re not.” He took a deep breath and shook his head. “You’re hurt, Dulcie.”

“Hades, get off me!” I pushed him away. I wasn’t feeble, but my muscles and jello were about to have a lot of things in common. “I’m fine.”

“Fine” was a relative word. I wasn’t unconscious. Volpin wasn’t using my hands for me. I could still see straight, that wasn’t nothing. And Knight and I seemed to be… getting along.

“What happened to looking and leaving?” Knight asked.

“I’m getting there.”

“No, you’re not. You’re killing yourself.”

I cannot help you unless you let me in, and if you do not let me in, you will die.

“It’s not the ice that’s draining me, it’s him—Volpin,” I said.

“That’s not better, Dulcie. We need to leave. Now.”

Let. Me. In. We can finish what you have begun. We can save this world from a terrible fate! We can be heroes, together.

“If I let you in, you’ll kill him,” I said. I tried to say it quietly, but I don’t think I managed it, because Knight definitely heard me.

He grabbed me by the shoulders—and I mean grabbed, like he was about to turn me upside down and shake my lunch money out of my pockets—and said, “Don’t you fucking dare let the fucking Darkness in, Dulcie, don’t you fucking dare. Bram, get the portal ripper. We’re getting out of here.” I don’t even think Knight realized I was referencing him when I said the Darkness would kill “him.”

I pushed him off again. “We aren’t done here yet.” I pushed myself onto my knees, braced myself on the ice, and punched it again. Ah, that glorious cracking.

Knight tried to haul me up by the arm. “No, we are leaving.”

“Don’t you fucking tell me what to do!” I said, throwing true anger at him.

“Hades, okay. Dulcie? I am asking you, very nicely, to please go home before you do something to yourself that Sam can’t fix.” Knight’s eyes were pleading.

“I’m sorry that I have a major problem leaving an entire dimension to get eaten by a glacier.”

“You can’t help them if you’re dead!”

“And I can’t help them if I leave!” I went to punch the glacier and Knight grabbed a hold of my wrist—but I was way stronger than he was now, so all that did was send him face-first into the ice.

I heard myself shout, “No!” and twisted myself under him to keep him from touching it.

I caught him with one hand by the chest. His arms flailed for half a second, and he narrowly avoided grazing the ice—which would definitely have been enough to freeze him and maybe the rest of the room totally solid.

“Knight,” I said. “You fucking idiot, please—”

“No,” he said, voice tight, electric with panic. “No. This is not how you die.”

Oh Hades. “Knight—”

And he kissed me. Gently, carefully, lit blue from beneath, keeping his hands away from the ice.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Bram. Dagan tried to whistle, but his lip was busted, so it sounded like a deflating balloon.

And then…

“Oh dear. I do hope I’m not interrupting something?”

We all looked at the door. And there was Darion, flanked by something like fifty demons in full plate armor—which felt a little behind the times, but whatever, I didn’t come here to judge—smiling and drumming his fingers together in the proper supervillain fashion.

SIXTEEN

Dulcie

Knight pushed himself off me and stood to face Darion, arm out. Protecting me.

I stood with him, putting my hand on his shoulder. “Knight, wait.”

Too late. I felt Darion’s power settle over the room like a cloud of gas—a thick, cold, invisible fog of fear. Everyone inhaled it—they couldn’t help it—and then no one could move. Knight stared at Darion, stone-still, clearly trying to pull himself forward, but he couldn’t manage it. His muscles were in lockdown. His brain was rebooting in safe mode. Nothing was working.

There was nothing we could have done about it, anyway.

Darion was walking—sauntering, honestly—towards us. This man had some hips. Left, right, left, right. Like a pendulum.

Behind him, praise Hades, was Osenna. Perfect. That would save us a trip after we’d killed Darion. If we killed Darion.

“It looks like we’re just in time to interrupt a most terrific party,” Darion said.

“Your standards have dropped, mate,” said Dagan.

Darion whirled on him, spinning like a goddamn ballerina. Like the evil disowned cousin in a soap opera, back for revenge at three in the afternoon.

“You aren’t looking so well,” he said. “Can I get you something to drink?”

Darion’s eyes flashed, the fog grew stronger, and Dagan shut his mouth. That was when Osenna noticed Dagan’s eye and she swallowed hard, her eyes clouding with sadness. She clenched them shut tightly, I imagine so she wouldn’t cry.

“No? Shame. We have some of the best brandy this side of the ice.” He chuckled.

Dagan managed to roll his eyes. Darion looked around the room like he was expecting some kind of reaction, but obviously no one had enough agency to give him one. He smiled, though, so maybe that was the point.

His eyes stopped on Bram. “Is that… is that a unicorn?” he said, and he looked at Dagan. “Is this what people are wearing in Splendor nowadays? Dagan, my darling, how do you put up with it? Even you must think this is completely deplorable.”

“Fuck… off,” said Bram.

Darion held up his hands. “Of course, my apologies, wear what you like. Far be it from me to keep you from traipsing about looking like a three-year-old girl.” He clasped his hands together imploringly. “Speaking of traipsing, I’m going to have to ask you and your merry band to vacate the premises immediately. This is very delicate work, and we can’t have anyone disrupting it, can we?” He looked pointedly at me when he said this last bit.

“Dulcie’s trying to help us, dipshit,” said Dagan, om-nom-nomming on every one of his words like he had a face full of Novocain.

“Help you, perhaps.”

“She can break the ice.”

“Well, that’s very rude of her. We spend all this time making this thing just so, only for the first girl you bring home to blow it all to hell. Do you have any idea how high our insurance premiums will be if I let her destroy this?”

“You insured Grenwal’s curse on this place?” I asked. “Since when can you insure curses?”

Darion twitched. “You can’t. It was a joke.”

“I don’t get it or maybe it just wasn’t very funny.”

He glared at me.

I said, “Wait, why don’t you want us to break the ice and the curse? I know you’re an evil prick, but this seems kind of like it exists in direct contrast to a version of the world where you don’t die. This ice will literally kill everyone it touches—including you.”

Darion strode over to the ice and laid his hand flat against it. It sparked and stuttered.

But he didn’t freeze.

He smiled.

“Is it going to kill me?”

Well, shit.

Dagan got there a fraction of a second ahead of everyone else. “Oh, Hades. You are the insurance.”

“What?” said Dulcie the Dumbass, not getting with the program.

Darion made this tuttering little giggling sound and smiled. “Oh, I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” He put his hand to his chest and made himself look pompously innocent. He fluttered his eyelashes and I wanted to punch him now more than ever before.

“What did Grenwal give you?” asked Dagan. He was doing a damn good job combatting the magic fear. I never thought I’d say or think the words “I was impressed with Dagan,” but there it was, I guess.

“Who?”

“The witch, Darion, the fucking witch who put an evil ice curse on us. What did she give you?”

“Why would she have given me anything?”

Dagan just looked at him.

Darion smiled, sighing dramatically. “Oh, very well. Killjoy.” He spread his arms wide. “Everything.” And the power in the room grew stronger, and stronger still.

But the question Dagan didn’t ask was the one that really mattered.

“What did you give her?” I asked. But the second the words were out, I knew, and honestly, it was so simple and stupid that I felt like a moron for even asking.

“Access,” said Darion, throwing his arms wide and spinning in a circle, gesturing to the whole temple space, to the seal, the monks, the nightmare ice, everything. Proud of this, of his ultimate betrayal, of allowing the thing that was eating his nation alive to take root right in the fucking middle. “To this stupid, hungry world.”

“You fucking bastard,” said Dagan. “You’re orchestrating the destruction of your own home!”

Darion smiled and smiled. “Indeed.”

“Just let me fix it and no one has to get eaten by the ice,” I said.

“Can’t do that, I’m afraid.”

He will lose the power Grenwal gave him if the seal is broken. It was placed here so Darion would protect it. I should have seen this.

“Shut up,” I whispered. Then, to Darion, “Okay, maybe let me rephrase. I’m gonna break the ice, you’re gonna stand there and watch, we’re gonna make the curse stop existing so no one, including you, freezes to death, and then we’re gonna go home and you guys can do whatever the fuck you want with what’s left.”

“Dulcie,” said Knight, squeezing the word out between his teeth. “No.”

Sevrex crumpled a little at this. Did he think I was going to stay here to start a revolution? I guess it wasn’t like I didn’t have a long history of telling evil empires to go fuck themselves, but honey, they were lucky I was still here to do this.

Darion took a longer look at me. His expression changed. Recognition dawned. “You.”

He knows I am here.

“Probably,” I said. Everyone and their grandmother could tell. Hyper-pale, bleeding smoke. I’d gone totally grayscale. I looked like I’d explode into a pile of blood and goth confetti any second. All I was missing was a spiked baseball bat and Doc Martens. Maybe a leather jacket.

But whatever Darion was seeing was out of focus. He was squinting at me, cocking his head like he wasn’t totally sure what he was looking at.

“See anything you like?” I asked. Knight bristled behind me.

Darion didn’t rise to it. But he gave up on figuring out what was hitching a ride inside of me, if that was even what he was looking for, and he said, “I am going to have to ask you to leave.”

Because he thought I could actually give him a run for his money? That was a good sign. Scaredy-cat bad guys were always promising. “Magic eight-ball says absolutely fucking not.”

He smiled. Something in his eyes flickered and died. “You and I are not so different, you know.”

“Wow, you’re right,” I said, clapping once. “No one’s ever noticed how badly I want to be an ego-maniacal evil overlord before, thank you, for finally seeing my potential. What gave me away? The smoke? It was the smoke, wasn’t it?”

“Probably the eyes,” Dagan said.

“Really?”

“Yeah. They’re black, but also… glowing. Highly unnerving.”

“How disconcerting. Thank you, Dagan.” I put my hands on my hips and smiled at Darion.

Darion shrugged. “Haven’t you?”

“Haven’t I what?”

“Wanted to be an overlord. A queen. A goddess.”

“Oh, so this is the part where you tell me we should join forces and take over the world.” I yawned on purpose. “Sorry, but I’ve already been promised that option.”

Darion shrugged. I could hear his blood rushing in his veins, like running water. Like cold rivers cutting through sand. His eyes were narrow. “Then your answer?” Behind him, his guards adjusted their grips on their spears, shifting their weight from foot to foot like they were about to start running. Osenna, hands bound behind her, glared at him from under tangled black hair, matted with sweat.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” I said. “Ruling the world sounds like a lot of work.”

“But it is work for which you, dearest Dulcie, would be well suited. Think what you could accomplish for your people.”

“This from the guy nixing his own people for the power to make vampires shit their pants.”

“You have been gifted with the ultimate power of the Great Shadow. Together,” he said, “perhaps, we could—”

“Can you just shut up? Please?” I said. I sat on the ice, leaning back on my hands. Something about Darion being here, something about the ice and the cold and the fever and the dusty sweat, something about the blister-blue glow—something about something was making me feel a special kind of brave. Fearless. “I’m bored.”

Stop touching it, said Volpin.

“You know, I don’t think I will,” I said. I felt righteous, untouchable.

Darion strode forward. This was a man who never walked, only strode, sauntered, glided. “Dromir will fall within… oh, a week, I’d say, at the outset. All of this will be gone, and I will be free to go wherever I please…” Hand on my face, behind my head, head tilted. Staring at my lips like he was waiting for something to crawl out of them. “Do… whatever I please.”

He leaned down and before I could stop him, Darion clamped his mouth on mine, and I mean, he was just an astonishingly bad kisser. All teeth and suction, no class.

He looked at me expectantly when he was done. Waiting for me to swoon or something.

“Oh,” I said. “So you’re compensating.”

“I compensate for nothing,” he hissed. Like, through his teeth, tongue half out like a fucking snake. Who did he think he was?

He has the power to cow the nations, said Volpin. This would be a most useful alliance.

At the expense of millions of potentially innocent strangers and listening to Volpin. Sorry, no dice.

Millions of strangers you do not know. What do you owe these people? Certainly not your life. Not such unending devotion. Surely these things are reserved for places of greater import.

I mean, Darion was also going to kill everyone here, with maybe-maybe-maybe the exception of me and probably Osenna, assuming he could still get off with her once Dagan wasn’t around to be against it. Demon city excluded, there were at least three people here who would really bum me out if they died.

So why hadn’t Darion killed them already? He wasn’t offering me their lives in exchange for an alliance. He wasn’t really offering me anything. He just didn’t want me to break his precious curse.

He swallowed, hard. His heartbeat thundered somewhere under his skin. Scared shitless. Talking and talking and talking because the second he tried anything else, he knew I’d rip his fucking head off.

“You’re nothing without Grenwal,” I said. “You realize that, don’t you? Nothing.”

“I am not nothing now.” He made a sweeping gesture towards Knight, Bram, Dagan, Quillan, Osenna, Sevrex, Bastiok, all the monks, even his own guards, all of them trembling, eyes taped open, glued to the floor.

“Oh, but you were, weren’t you?” The warmth behind me was growing, creeping inwards. There was a feeling like a colonel on the field, just before his reinforcements round the corner. That smug little smile you get to wear. “Darion wasn’t anything special, was he? Darion was quiet. Darion was scared and stupid and flat. Darion kissed a girl and she laughed at him.”

He didn’t move. He stared at me, gawking, eyes wide as windows. How long had it been since someone had spoken this candidly to him? Who was the last person to stand up against his gale-force fear?

His mouth popped open like a PEZ dispenser. I reached up and pushed it shut.

Something hot and red and urgent was spinning through me, fire through the brush, lightning breaking trees down the middle. A primal, hungry thing was rising up on the inside, chewing its way through my heart.

Volpin felt it and changed its tune.

You are a force unto yourself. You are the fear Zeus struck in the hearts of the Titans. You are the rocks upon which the errant ship must break. What need have you of this creature, small and needy?

None.

Who is he, to ask such things of you?

No one.

I leaned into Darion’s ear. I whispered: “Now would be a good time to beg for mercy.”

My hand darted forward, blindingly fast, grabbed his shirt, spun and pressed him into the ice. My other hand clamped around his throat in a vengeful, vice-like grip. There was a dull, muted crack. The ice split open under his head, its edges digging into his skull. His blood fell through the opening and didn’t freeze.

Shadows fired themselves from my body like comets. All the color bleached out of the world. Darion and everyone else, every living thing, started glowing white—except Joanne above, who was a sharp, blistery red, and Knight, who was orange like fire. The world fuzzed and wavered in front of me.

I glared at Darion, and the façade fell away. He was terrified. His eyes were wide, and he looked so incredibly small.

“Dulcie,” someone said, maybe more than one someone. Every sound in the world was coming at me from a million miles away, through concrete walls and water.

“You’re going to be quiet now. Okay?” I said. “So very quiet.”

My hand glowed. I smelled burning skin.

Darion nodded frantically. He was making so much noise. His heart was pounding, blood rushing, and Hades, his breathing, echoing through him like an anchor hitting the bottom of the harbor.

Around me, people stared, stepped back, even in their fogged-up fearful stupor, something told them to get away. I wondered what I could possibly have looked like to inspire a fear stronger than Darion’s. Bigger than the magic he got from a woman older and crazier than magic itself.

Thirty seconds ago, I’d been Dulcie and the Darkness. Now, I was something new. Something special. Something impatient.

Kill him.

That was all the excuse I needed.

I put my finger, my other hand, to my lips. “Shh. It’s all right. Hold still.”

Darion screamed.

Not an unwarranted sound. I plunged my hand into his chest, breaking his ribs, tearing through his muscles—I don’t know why, but the instinct was too strong not to obey. I reached and searched until I found his heart, a small, thumping, warm thing hammering away in the dark. This was where his white glow, everyone’s white glow, was coming from. The heart, this heart, its beating growing louder and louder until the thunder of it was insufferable. A carnal hunger infested me, a wave of starvation surging through every part of my body.

His heart beat and beat and beat. Pulsing. Calling me, quietly, to sate myself.

I ripped it from his chest. Broke his ribs and pulled it out. I squeezed it. I bit into it like an apple, and blood gushed out from inside.

And something else happened. The white glow abandoned Darion’s body and his heart, and it flowed into me. It curled like smoke through the air, tiny whirlwinds, and fed into my mouth, down my throat, through my body. Drinking the noise. Energy poured in with it—like a sugar rush, like being suddenly and aggressively drunk—and I felt a smile unfold across my face.

I stepped away, looking at him.

Darion stared at me. His heart and his body were dark, silhouetted against the ice glowing behind him. He fell to his knees, then onto his face. He didn’t get back up.

Yes. Good.

The shadows—long, black, smoky tendrils—got bigger. They solidified, becoming dripping black masses instead of smoke, rubbery, half-melted tentacles sweeping across the room, grabbing demons and slamming them into the ground with absurd strength. Every thud, every vibration in the floor as I drove bones and bodies into it, was like laughter in a bottle, and I was giggle-drunk.

The fear-fog broke like a fever. I heard a voice, lots of voices, but none of them were saying anything important.

Break them. Temper the blade of your power in their blood. Test yourself here. Find the edges of your strength.

Hands on me, and a blast of force driving them away. I saw Knight’s body flying through the air, hitting the ground, rolling, and I couldn’t imagine who’d done that.

“Knight!” someone called, and it wasn’t me, it was Joanne, dropping onto the ice, untouched.

Knight lifted his head.

“Help me get Mom!” Joanne said.

A shutter fell across the world, like the gods were taking a picture. I blinked, everything blinked. People ran and screamed, and long, dark strands of power drove themselves through the chests of those who weren’t fast enough, and no one was fast enough. Demons in armor had their sparking staffs wrenched away from them and pushed into their mouths. The zip-zap-zop sound of loose lightning filled the room. White light streamed out of the dead and into me, filling me up with this impossible ecstasy, charging me like a battery. The tendrils, the long hands of the Darkness, grew thicker and longer and stronger, and all the time I wanted more, more, more, but there were only so many people here who were allowed to die.

You must stop them.

“Stop who?” Not my voice, Volpin’s voice, tearing out of my throat like thunder from a storm.

Knight and Joanne glowed in the middle of the room. Their lights were strong, so impossibly strong. I couldn’t look at them. I couldn’t look away.

Joanne was driving her leg into the seal again, again, again, bringing herself a little closer to me, and a wave of heat smashed into me, like a bomb had gone off.

Inside me, Volpin hissed.

Light poured out of the cracks beneath Joanne—magic, pure and uncut, spurting from the seal like blood. Anger came out with it, righteous fury and a deep, pervasive sadness. The feeling of the caster, when they laid down the spell—or of the thing itself that got sealed away?

The metallic tinging of Joanne’s legs on the floor rang through the air like a hundred bells, like gongs in a cave, all being struck at once. It hammered on my ears with a feeling like an actual goddamn hammer. Like an ogre was clapping cymbals on my head.

I pressed my hands over my ears and shrank to the ground, knees to my chest.

Look at them. Look at their hearts, hear their infernal thumping. This is the sound that has plagued me since the dawn of time.

Thump, thump, thump. The sound of bodies being thrown into a mass grave, one after another. Funny that a heartbeat should sound like death. The noise grated, scraping against the underside of my skull, and now it sounded like it was inside me. I was empty but for the echo.

Silence them. Quiet their hearts, and the world will be at peace.

At peace. Peace, peace, peace, isn’t that all you’re ever supposed to want? Peace? Just a little peace and quiet, peace and quiet, that’s all. That’s all.

Wouldn’t it be nice for everything to be quiet again? it said. For everyone to go to sleep and to have pleasant dreams?

That’s what it wanted. Not domination, it didn’t want to rule over anyone. It wanted to empty out the world. That’s what Meg was for, it’s what I was for, and it’s what someone else down the line would be for if I couldn’t stop this thing.

The world is such a terrible, noisy place. We can change this. We can fix this for everyone. No more pain. No more suffering.

“Pain and suffering are synonyms,” I said.

The world could be better if it was but a little quieter.

“You want me to kill everything that makes noise.”

I want to end all things which disturb the quiet of the void. You can feel it, can you not? The pull to end the noise?

I could. All the beating hearts, the voices, the stamping feet, the shattered-glass sounds of Joanne pounding the seal into dust. I just wanted it all to stop. I wanted to grab the whole world by the throat and snap its neck. Wipe it out, press a button, make it all disappear, go away, just go away.

Press the button. Make it stop.

Rip their hearts from their chests. Drain the blood from their bodies. Snap their necks, toss them from cliffs, smother them with pillows. It does not matter. But the world must be made quiet.

This was it. A cold, vast, empty feeling welled up inside me. My mind went numb. The tentacles of darkness still reached and killed around me, crushing the life out of demons who were just doing their jobs.

Darion was dead.

The seal was breaking, which I supposed was what Sevrex and everyone was so excited about. The important part was over, and somewhere, Knight had the portal ripper. We’d done what we came here to do. We could just go home now and go to sleep.

There is noise even in slumber, Dulcie. You dream, and your dreams infect me. There is no true escape from the noise within.

I was so tired. My hands were moving without me, my legs unfolding themselves, trying to force me to stand. I watched with bleary eyes as the tendrils lifted bodies and dropped them from the ceiling, ripped stones from the walls and threw them at demons and out windows—no, there were no windows. Just holes in the wall, holes I’d made with people. People with names and hobbies and kids and dogs.

One of the tendrils reached for Knight, and a big honking fuck-all wave of “don’t you fucking dare” came careening out of me like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.

The tendril stopped dead. So did the rest of them, so abruptly that everyone stopped moving to look at me.

“Stop,” I said, but it was only loud enough for me to hear. Me, and maybe Bram. Vampire ears.

The Loki is holding you back from your greatest self.

“No,” I said, louder. “You are.”

The tendrils burst apart, exploding into dust.

What are you doing? Panic, panic, panic, coming off Volpin in waves.

“Dulcie!”

I looked. Joanne, standing on the seal.

“It won’t break!” said Joanne.

I looked at her. I looked at the seal. Split all the way down the middle, broken into bits, but those bits wouldn’t be moved. Anchored to the spot, determined to protect the stupid fucking spell beneath. I looked at it. I wondered.

And I felt something funny.

It was like… like falling asleep. Soft and yellow and lemony. Clean and sweet, like blankets in winter and cool breezes in summer.

No, said the Darkness.

“Yes,” I said. But it wasn’t just my voice—it was overlaid with another. My voice was unchanged, but it wasn’t alone.

The Darkness shrank back inside me, as though it could hide from whoever was speaking with me.

No! Damn you, Elaine!

I laughed, and the second voice laughed with me. We smiled together. I knew her, this being. This second voice. But I wasn’t sure how or why. But she felt warm. She felt like home.

“Something the matter?” we said.

The Darkness was furious. You abandoned your mortal form. You have no business being here!

“And you do?”

You have worn out your welcome in this world.

“But I’ve only just arrived!” I spread my arms wide. “And I’m having so much fun.”

I felt so warm. So safe. The color was coming back into my hands, into my vision. People stopped glowing white, and Joanne and Knight glowed gold.

“… Dulcie?” said Knight. His voice cut through the din of everything else.

Hades was inside him, watching this, and he was seeing the same thing I was. I was sure of it.

“Yeah,” I said. I giggled, the kind of giggling that makes you shiver.

Joanne’s light was getting brighter. It seeped out from the cracks in the seal and gathered around her in a halo. Something was down there.

The new voice, the one sharing mine, reached deep down inside me, grabbed the Darkness by the dick, and squeezed. The tendrils reformed, but now they were white and shining like glowsticks at a rave.

“We need to borrow these,” the voice said.

We moved the tendrils with a practiced ease I definitely was not supposed to have, maneuvering them through the splits in the floor and pulling hard. It cracked like an eggshell and flew upwards, sticking in the ceiling like knives. Light flooded out from under us. We ripped and tore. Joanne lifted one of her legs and drove it hard into the floor. White frost spread out around her, piling over itself until it was ice, thick and blue and looking like it was full of white smoke.

One of the demons didn’t stop himself in time. He put his foot down onto the ice. It ran up one leg, down the other, up his torso, up and over everything until he looked less like a demon and more like a shitty sculpture of a demon.

She did it again. And again. And again. Taking back the power that was supposed to be hers, hers and no other’s.

And the seal split open beneath us.

SEVENTEEN

Dulcie

Heat blasted out of the floor. I felt like my skin was being ripped off my body. Like someone was coming at me with a vegetable peeler and just going to town. Volpin screamed like nothing else, screamed until it was the only thing left to hear.

We said, “You’re done here, Volpin.”

Volpin kept screaming.

We said—she said, her presence fading, “Don’t be scared, honey. We’ll catch you. You won’t feel a thing. It’s gonna be fine.”

The seal was broken. It cracked like an egg, and then something crawled out of it. Something liquid and bright, orange like magma, burning like hot steel under my feet.

Volpin said, Run.

Squeaked it. Practically squealed, and he was so quiet now. So incredibly far away.

Somewhere off in the corner, Sevrex and Bastiok were cheering. The monks were staring at this bright spot in the center of the seal, and something big was clawing its way out of it, like a spider out of an egg. Everyone was losing their minds over it. No one at all was paying attention to Darion’s dead body, still bleeding and heaped on the floor like old laundry, vacant eyes pointing directly at me.

I felt this distant pang of regret, but it was brief. He fucking started it.

Then a hand, taller than Knight, reached out of the seal, grabbed the edge, and pushed. The floor split down the middle, and the two halves of the temple were pushed to either side like sliding doors.

She pulled herself out of the place where she had been imprisoned so long ago, vast and beautiful and impossible.

Dagan fell to his knees. He whispered, “Daneira.”

She smiled down at me. Hades, she was enormous. Black hair, dark skin, bright red gem flashing in the hollow of her throat. I could see myself in it, this vague, warped reflection that rippled when she moved.

“Thank you,” she said, with this deep, echoing valley of a voice. “We’ll take it from here.”

I nodded numbly.

And Daneira set the room on fire.

The ice melted underneath her. Turned to slush and drained away into grates put there probably just for this purpose, just in case they could ever figure out how to make it happen. The monks stood back from the wash, anchoring themselves on pillars. The water whirlpooled down the drains, trying to pull our legs out from under us—and riding on top of it, glittering orange, was a metric fuckton of fire that didn’t seem to care about all this water.

The flames lapped at my legs. Wrapped around my arms in long, snaking orange tendrils. My skin was starting to smoke, but I couldn’t feel it. I was burning, and I couldn’t feel it.

We said, “Now, Henry! Pull!”

Volpin said, Move!

And I couldn’t. I was rooted to the spot, melting into the tiles. Surrounded by demons for whom this was nothing, this was everything, this was the great return of their goddess. A wave of heat blasted all the windows to pieces and tore through the city beyond, out past the walls, and I could hear the steaming hiss of snow being ripped out of the world.

Demons were fireproof. Lokis were fireproof.

Elves, vampires, sirens, and fairies (oh my)? Not fireproof. Not even slightly.

“Dulcie!”

I looked. The portal was open, a vague shimmering thing against the wall, almost lost in all the new shadows. Quillan was standing next to it, waving everyone over, portal ripper still in his hands.

Dagan and Osenna, standing over Darion’s body, looking at it. The world popped in and out of focus, going black, going white, phasing back in, and Osenna had gouged Darion’s dead eyes out of their sockets.

“Dagan, Osenna, let’s go!” Quill yelled.

“Wait,” said Dagan, pulling on the scarf around Darion’s neck. The invisible scarf. It was knotted badly and was too tight to slip off.

“Dagan, you have got to be kidding me,” Quill continued.

“This will only take a second.”

“Dagan, for the love of fuck, leave it.”

“Just wait.” He tried pulling it up over Darion’s head, failed, and growled like an animal before giving up and cutting it free. There was a spark and a sizzling noise. All the color went out of it.

Dagan held it for a second, looking morose. Osenna laid a consoling hand on his arm. “Sorry, Mom,” he said, stuffing the scarf into a pocket he somehow had in his extremely shiny leather pants. The bulge it made on his hip was… interesting.

He looked to Joanne. “You’ll be alright?”

Joanne was on fire, but she seemed to be enjoying it. Daneira was petting her abdomen, and Joanne was making this trilled purring sound.

“I’ll be fine. Mom’s here now.”

Dagan nodded. “I’ll come back to see you when this is all over, love.” Back to Quillan. “Alright, let’s go.”

“Bye!” said Joanne, waving with her little glassy arms. “Be safe!”

“I will, bug.”

“Take care, sweet one,” said Osenna, blowing Joanne a kiss. “We’ll be back.”

“I know,” said Joanne.

Then, gone. Too fast, too slow. The world came at me in fits and starts, like a bad video, like it was missing frames. I felt myself fall. The floor was colder than I thought it would be, with all this fire.

“Just let it happen, Dulcie,” we said.

Something in Volpin seized up. No.

Lotta fire. I watched it catch on my arm, melt my skin. Like watching a candle burn, feeling nothing.

Dulcie, she is killing you.

Distantly, so distantly, I heard Henry’s voice. Not saying anything—just a wordless, pressing yell.

Volpin, liquid fear spilling out of it, like the spraying of a skunk, defensive and afraid. Dulcie. Dulcie, you must leave this place.

“You can’t run from me,” we said. She said, hardly me at all.

I can, it said. A murmur now, a hum. And I shall.

A rising feeling, a thickness in my throat. My breathing went bad, like pushing your back against a concrete wall, and all the air was on the other side.

My nails were black. The shadows died, fizzled and faded like smoke from a bad fog machine. My skin grayed, going translucent, until I could see every single vein. I was shaking, jittery. Everything was out of focus.

I will not be defied.

Tired. So very… would it be the worst thing ever, to just… go to sleep? Right here? Not the worst place for a nap. Kind of warm. Cold floor, not the best for sleeping, but moving was just… I couldn’t.

A jolt, a sting, a viper in my stomach. Twitch, spasm.

Move.

“Go away.”

You cannot escape me, Dulcie O’Neil. I am not of you, I am you.

“Get away from me.”

This is not possible.

“Stop it. Stop it.” Pain, liquid and cold, where was it coming from? “Stop it, you’re hurting me!”

Do you want to see your mother again?

“Go to hell.”

If I go, you go with me. If we die, we die together. We die as one. I will not depart this place alone.

“Yes,” she said. “You will.”

I felt like a billion itty bitty needles were being pushed slowly into my throat, my eyes, my stomach, my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. I could barely think. Dizzy, it wouldn’t stop spinning.

Get. Up.

“It hurts.”

Then move.

It twisted something deep inside me, and I screamed.

***

Bram

I watched it happen as if from another world. The goddess, the ribbon spans of shadow going white, the ice breaking, the spitting light. The world shook, rattled by something with hands like planets, and I could not see it, for I was watching another sort of thing unfold.

“We need to go,” he said. A creature out of hell, eyes of ink and gold-plated skin, reaching for her. Knightly Vander in all his absurd glory, speaking so softly even I could barely hear.

“No. No, no.” She shook him off. Eyes wide and black, seeing hell or nothing.

“Dulcie,” said Vander. He touched her chin and lifted her face. What granted him this calm, I wondered? “Look at me.”

Dulcie looked at him then. Liquid darkness sparked about her as electricity from a chewed wire. She rattled, convulsed.

“Your name is Dulcie O’Neil,” he said. “You are an officer of the law. You’re a fairy. You’re in Dromir, with the demons, and with me, and you’re coming home. Can you come home, Dulcie?”

She breathed in shakily. Tears streamed down her face, some of them water, some of them inky and black.

“Let’s go home,” said Knight. “You’re hurt. I’m gonna pick you up, okay?” He slid his arms behind her back and under her knees and stood.

And I wanted to interfere, to insist he did not deserve the honor of carrying her, of playing the part of the hero. That role was meant to be mine.

But, somehow, I could not interrupt. As I watched them together, Dulcie battling her own death, I could not intervene.

I simply stood there, staring after them.

“It’s alright,” Vander said quietly, walking calmly towards the portal. “Breathe, Dulcie, it’s alright. It’s gonna be okay.”

Dulcie flinched. “No,” she muttered. Speaking not to him, I gathered, not to him at all, but to her passenger.

“I promise,” he said. “Now would be a really stupid time to lie to you.”

“No,” she said again. Dulcie’s voice and another’s, braided together, singing like a tuning fork. “No, no, no, no… you can’t… you can’t…” Begging him to leave her, let her burn, but why?

Around us, the world burned and crumbled and screamed. Vander, poised, calm—how on Earth? “Dulcie, look at me. You can look at me, can’t you?”

She could. She did.

“You’re safe with me. It won’t hurt you while I’m here, I promise.”

There was no way it could be true, but he said it with such sheer conviction that I almost believed him.

She stared at him, breathing shakily, bleeding inky black from her ears, her eyes, and her mouth. “She has… to die…”

Knight’s expression hardened. “You don’t get to fucking decide that.”

“No, I’m… not… she’s not… we’re… Henry…”

Knight held her close, shushing her, and walked calmly through the portal.

***

Dulcie

A desert. Night bleeding across it like ink, blue and dark and shining. Knight laid me down in the sand, shushing me, and calling for someone. Grenwal.

But I couldn’t pay attention to anything other than the feeling of warmth that continued to flow through me. I knew that feeling. I knew that person.

I said, “Mom?”

A smile blossomed through my whole body. Yes

Bitch, said Volpin.

Hush now, said Mom, patient, sweet, but afraid.

“She’s not breathing.”

My lungs felt tight. I inhaled, barely. It was agony.

“Holy fuck,” someone muttered, a new voice. Grenwal, it had to be. She leaned over me, touched my forehead. Power radiated from her like heat from an overcharged lightbulb.

You, said Volpin.

Mom said, I’m going to pull you out of your body, okay, Dulcie?

You can do that? I was surprised, confused.

Hold still.

Why?

We just need you to leave your body for a second so we can fix you, Dulcie. Don’t worry.

Don’t worry… but there was a nagging feeling, a sense like she’d missed something, like she was already too late.

Elaine, said Volpin, tremulous. You cannot believe it will be that easy.

“Get back!” said Grenwal.

And Mom started pulling.

I felt myself pop off the ground, darkness exploding out of me. Thunk, thunk, thunk as other bodies hit the ground, blasted away by whatever I’d just done. The black fog streamed out of my nose and out from between my lips, from the tips of my fingers and out of my palm. Everything was so incredibly cold.

“It hurts,” I said, though I doubt I managed to say it out loud.

It’s okay. Just breathe.

Breathing wasn’t going so well.

“What’s wrong with her?” Knight asked.

“The Darkness,” Grenwal said. “It is claiming her body.”

“For what?”

“It cannot work its magic in this world alone. It requires a host.” There was a tight pause. “Willing or unwilling.”

Knight was frantic. “I’ve seen this before. She can fight it.”

“Not this time.”

Hold on, honey, said Mom.

There was an explosion of light inside me, a sunburst of smiles and cookies and spring wind. Volpin squealed like a pig, lost its hold. But only for a second.

No!

Not shadows now, but sludge, black bubbling tar clogging my throat, coming out of my ears, draining thickly from my eyes.

I will not be defied!

Mom said, Yes, you fucking will.

A yank, an invisible hand trying to pull my stomach out through my back. The sand was so cold. Volpin gathered it up in my hands, dropped it, let it sift away through my fingers.

This place will be mine, said Volpin, and it will be no more.

And visions. Pictures of the world as Volpin was going to make it, sweeping through my mind. Pools of darkness, half-liquid and moving, growing mouths and teeth and tongues. Trees and grass turning black at its touch, withering, disintegrating, dust on the wind.

Sam, choking on it.

Knight, sucked dry of color, a skeletal thing crawling slowly away, but of course he wasn’t fast enough, nothing was fast enough.

Bram disappearing in a sheet of dust, ash.

Trees fell in the forest, and they all made a sound. So you burn the forest, but fire crackles, too—what do you do? Not enough, never enough.

“Dulcie?” said Knight, hand on my back.

Get away, get away, it’ll kill you, stupid motherfucker, run.

“Dulcie, can you hear me?” To someone else: “Call Sam.”

“She’s not picking up.”

“There is nothing anyone can do,” said Grenwal, so quietly, I think I was the only one who could hear her.

Volpin stood. It clawed at the sand until I was on my hands and knees. It tottered to my feet, flimsy as paper. The desert was a wash of black and creeping nothingness, spotted by the white glow of beating hearts and the blistering gold of Hades within Knight.

“Dulcie?” said Knight, thinking maybe I’d taken back control.

Don’t be stupid, Knight, get out of here.

Quiet, said Volpin, cajoling, still trying to convince me everything was perfectly alright. So quiet. I saw a picture of me from the outside, black and purple, eyes glowing, hair on fire, commanding the shadows as they rose over the world. A goddess of death. A harbinger of the end of everything that ever was. It twisted through my body, wresting control, searching for this version of me.

Shhh.

Seconds and more seconds ticked by, slowly, but there weren’t many of them left. Volpin took my body, and it was over, for everyone. No limits, darkness unfolding like a wet blanket over everything. Unhindered access to the whole, loud world. Nothing between Volpin and the apocalypse but me.

Just me.

I looked at Bram, at Quillan, at Knight. None of them would do it. None of them would stop me, and I couldn’t do it myself. My hands, my teeth, none of it was mine anymore. The Darkness would take this from me. Even if it meant my body couldn’t walk or see, it would drag itself blindly through parks and neighborhoods and backyard playdates anyway, using my hands to choke the life out of everything that moved, and no one would be able to stop me.

They’d try, and they would fail. They would die, and it would hurt worse than anything.

But Grenwal.

I looked at her, hardened my eyes. She was the closest. She was holding a knife ready, something glowing with a spell that banished things from worlds forever. She came prepared. She knew this was coming, but how? Older than magic itself, said Bram, Grenwal was older than magic itself. Older than the Darkness. Much older.

Mom said, No, but she wasn’t going to get me out in time. Volpin would break her hold, and then everything would go tits up. There would be no getting me back.

I looked at her. Grenwal, old and quiet, the only unmoving thing. I said, spitting the word, “Please,” praying she knew what I meant.

She did.

A slicing pain. Something warm on my throat, pouring down the front of my shirt. I reached up, but the flow would not be stemmed.

She said, “I am sorry, Elaine. You are out of time.”

From within me, Mom screamed, What have you done?

“What was necessary.”

Grenwal stood in front of me. Old and silver, frowning, a knife in her hand, dripping red and black, red and black.

I thought, It’s okay, Mom. I’ll be fine.

I wouldn’t, but that was beside the point now.

To Grenwal: “Thanks.”

She nodded at me, just the once. There were tears in her eyes. She dropped the knife into the sand, dropped herself to her knees as I fell, and looked into my eyes as I died.

I felt Volpin’s soul, its essence, whatever made it up, being dragged out of my body into someplace far away, someplace with locks and no keys. A spiritual black site.

He dug in his claws. He ripped me away from my heart, my hands, my eyes. The world grew darker, darker, darker.

No! Mom, screaming, and another voice. Henry. No, hold on, hold on, please, please.

Too late. At least they tried.

Knight. Knight was standing over me now, saying my name, over and over and over again, so fast, and it was raining, no, he was crying, sobbing, begging me to stay, but that wasn’t my decision anymore.

I reached up and touched his face. He pressed my hand to his cheek. He said, “Don’t go, please, Dulcie.”

I said, “I love you.”

Kinda lame as last words go—but you couldn’t have paid me to say anything else.

EIGHTEEN

Henry

Sam looked at me, pleading silently, waiting for me to sigh with relief and flop back onto the carpet.

But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

I said, “Oh, God.”

“What? What ‘oh God?’ What happened, where is she? What’s next?”

What’s next.

I let Elaine go. She slipped out of my body and back into the place beyond the sky, saying, I’m sorry. Sam’s stabilizing spells caught me like a net and I sank into them, exhausted.

She held them up, but they frayed. Lines snapped and jumped back at her.

“Henry, what happened? What do we do next?” Sam demanded.

Silence, pulling itself like taffy.

“Where’s Dulcie?” asked Sam.

Where’s Dulcie?

“Henry? What do we do?’

I heard myself say, “Nothing.”

She blinked. She frowned, made a panicked little half-laughing sound. “… What do you mean nothing? Where’s Dulcie?”

Don’t make me say it, I thought.

Then she got very quiet. She unraveled the spell, taking the threads back into her person, setting me gently down into my body. Anchoring me there, retying all the knots that pin the soul to its bones. She stared at the carpet, at the chalk. At the flowers blooming and glittering all around us.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

Sam nodded. Her eyes glittered. “Then we missed her.”

“We did.”

Blink, blink, tears crawling down her face. “What happened?”

“Knight took her out of Dromir before we could get her. And Grenwal.”

Sam frowned. “Grenwal?”

“A woman older than the concept of witchcraft,” I said. “She, um.”

I’d seen it happen, watched through Elaine’s eyes as Dulcie drained away down the wrong side of the sink.

“Grenwal had a knife. She banished the Darkness. She saw it in Dulcie and decided it needed to die.”

“It did,” Sam said, slowly, nosing her way through whatever I was implying.

Silence, stretching, folding.

“Grenwal saw the Darkness,” Sam said slowly. “And she killed it.”

“Yes.”

“Where is Grenwal?” Sam was on her feet, eyes wild, fire in her hands. The carpet was black where she’d been sitting, where her hands had pressed hard into the floor.

“Dulcie asked her to get rid of the Darkness,” I said. Asked was the wrong word, everything was the wrong word. “I mean, not asked, but. I mean. Fuck.” I put my face in my hands, elbows on my knees. Like if I just didn’t look at it for long enough, the whole world would disappear and none of this would be happening. “It was doing something. It got stronger in the last second, or Dulcie got weaker, or something, I don’t know. I don’t know.” Tears pressed themselves between my cheeks and the palms of my hands. “I don’t know.”

I didn’t know.

***

Knight

We were so, so quiet.

Grenwal stood slowly, staring at me. Staring at Dulcie, seeing straight through her to the sand.

“Rain check on our date,” she said, looking at Bram. She smiled. “Sequins and all.”

Bram didn’t say a word. He was at her in a smeary rush of black smoke and then he opened his mouth and he howled out a sound that was the definition of pain. His hands closed on empty air. Gone. Grenwal, the tent, any trace of her. Vanished.

Bram was then quiet. Fist in the air, closed around her throat, or where it would have been. He looked at me, at Dulcie in my arms. Blood was still gushing from her throat.

I didn’t think vampires had working tear ducts. But I guess they do.

Christina and Quillan stood a ways off behind him, staring. Startled into silence.

“No,” Christina whispered. “No.”

Quillan held her close. Neither of them could look away from Dulcie, from me. Her red blood flowed like water, and something black oozed out of her like tar. Thick and sticking to everything, clotting between my fingers.

“No. No, no. No.” Christina kept saying it. She was very quiet, Like Dulcie was going to wake up any second. Like she would gasp and cough and all of us would breathe a huge sigh of relief. Christina would tell her not to scare us like that again. Bram would smile wordlessly from behind everyone else. Dulcie would make some lame joke about death not liking her very much, and we’d all laugh and the credits would roll as we kissed.

We waited. She didn’t move.

She was still as a statue, eyes still open. Glazed and sightless, blooming with the dustiness of death.

Because that’s what was happening. No, that was what had already happened.

Dulcie was dead.

Dulcie was dead.

“No,” said Christina. She was growing louder and more frantic. She clung to Quillan, and Quillan clung to her, like at any second the desert was going to be ripped out from under them like a rug. “No, no, no!”

No.

“I am sorry,” Bram said. “I should have known.”

I set Dulcie down in the sand. She slid out of my hands, limp as a doll. I closed her eyes, leaving two streaky black lines across her lids.

I stood. “Yes. You should have.”

I turned and punched him in the face. He stumbled back. There was no expression there, nothing telling in his eyes. I advanced on him, hitting him in the nose, the gut, the temple. I was watching myself move from somewhere else. This didn’t feel like my body. It belonged to something white hot and angry, an anger that burned everything else inside me out of existence.

I hit him. Again. Again. Again. He retreated under the assault, always facing me, never making a run for it, never hitting me back. I broke his nose, the skin on his cheek. Blood bubbled out of his mouth.

And he just kept looking at me. Reflecting back the misery and anger that I was more than sure was stemming out of my own face.

Again. Faster. Behind me, Christina was yelling for me to stop, and Quillan was audibly holding her back.

My vision blurred. Hot tears washed down my face. The sky and the horizon ran together like wet paint. Bram was a faceless mass in the blueness of the night, blood that looked black in the dark.

I made a wordless animal noise, screaming, and my fists glowed red. Fire bloomed out of my knuckles. I scraped the embers across his face. He sucked in a breath, but he made no move to run.

I blasted him in the face. I lit up the desert and the tent with blinding red. He fell into the sand, glowing.

I heard footsteps, and then Quillan was kneeling over him, smothering the fire with his coat. I moved forward to rip Quillan away.

And I felt a hand on my shoulder. Soft and small and pale. Pulling on me, making me spin.

The fire died in my hands. I turned.

Christina.

She looked at me with a steely rain in her eyes. She dropped her hand. “That’s enough.”

It was like my stomach had turned to stone. It was bouncing around my insides like a ping pong ball. I looked at Christina, and suddenly I was one giant walking bruise. The desert was colder at night than you’d ever believe, and I told myself that was why I was shivering.

We sat, in the dark, in the sand, under the most stars I had ever seen in one place. Dulcie in the dust, clogged black and bloody.

“We need…” I started. We needed to move her body. But I couldn’t say it yet.

So we sat there, for hours, and we didn’t say a word.

***

Dawn broke. First a little stripe of orange, then growing, chasing all the stars away. Like firelight seeping under a door.

It was time.

I stuck the words together clumsily in my mouth and opened it, letting them fall out, one by one, splatting onto the sand.

“We need to move her body.”

Christina nodded. Quillan nodded.

Christina was the first to stand, scraping the sand off her knees with her hands. It was so early, but already the chill was starting to disappear. Everyone was dawn-cold, bathed in gray and blue.

Bram didn’t move.

“Leave me be,” he said, staring at a spot in the sand, a pool of blood. It would dry out within the hour. I took Dulcie in my arms, her body limp and cold and growing rigid, and he stared at her blood like it was all that was left of her.

“She’d kill me if I did,” I said.

He scoffed, or chuckled, or sniffed, I don’t know. “She is not here.”

I laid Dulcie in the back of the car, folded her hands over her chest—that’s what you were supposed to do, right? Close their eyes, fold their hands, pretend they’re asleep and they’ll wake up when this is all over for good—and went back to Bram. I grabbed him by the arm and hauled him to his feet.

I expected him to resist me, but he lifted off the ground like he weighed nothing at all. I wondered numbly how long it would take Quillan to get the bloodstains out of his upholstery. It might be better just to burn the car.

“We’re going home,” I said, softly, like I was talking to a child.

“I think I should rather die,” he said. So matter-of-fact.

“You can die later.”

Christina and Quillan exchanged a look, and she went over to him, crouching, knees to her chest. She didn’t touch him. “Bram. Please.”

He huffed at her.

Christina sucked in her lip. “Dulcie wouldn’t want you dead.”

“Good for Dulcie.”

“We need to go, Bram. Please.”

“Then go.”

“Not without you.”

He shot her a look. “Why?”

“You’re our friend.”

He scoffed. “Some friend I am.”

“‘Some friend’ we all are,” she snapped. “You’re not the only one who failed her tonight.”

For a full ten seconds, he didn’t say anything. Christina sighed and stood up, crossing her arms. She looked at him, then gave up and walked back over to the car, shrugging.

Then, very slowly, Bram got to his feet, unicorn parka crinkling. He pulled up the hood, letting it fall almost all the way over his face. Pink, lit by the orange sunrise, and shadowed in a cold blue.

He got in the car, and we drove home.

Not home. To the morgue. Where even was the morgue?

“Call Sam,” I said.

Quillan pulled out his phone. I never appreciated how level-headed he could be. I guess he got away with working for Melchior for so long for a reason.

When Sam picked up, she was already crying.

***

Sam

One Week Later

I sat on the bed, face in my hands. Casey held me, rubbed my back, kissed the top of my head.

“It’s okay, baby,” he said. “It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.”

I wanted to say, “It’s not,” but he was trying. I didn’t want to make him feel terrible, too.

Incense burning, charmed necklaces and bracelets all over me, spells over the room, the bed, my fucking shirt, but none of it was enough. Grief was pervasive, infectious. It ate through walls and carpets like rust eats iron pillars, busting cables and supports, collapsing the whole world in on itself.

It was everywhere. Everywhere was not a place you could get away from.

Dressing up for the funeral felt wrong. Dressing casual felt wrong. Business casual felt wrong, Halloween costumes felt wrong—prom dress, little black dress, slacks and a nice hat, everything was too little or too much. If I wore jeans I wasn’t taking it seriously, and if I wore a pretty black dress and makeup I was getting dressed up for the death of my closest friend and that looked like I was celebrating and I just—

Breathe.

I heard myself muttering, “We were too late, we were too late, we were too late.” An accusation, a consolation. An absolution, and the crime itself. Too late, too late, we were too late. There was nothing we could do. There should have been something we could do. There was something we could have done, if we’d gotten there in time.

But we were too late.

“You did everything you could,” Casey said. He glowed a little, that lacing blue of a Siphon, and I felt a little warmer inside.

We didn’t, I thought. And then, But we did. What else could we have done? And then, Why didn’t we do it?

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

I’d never know.

***

Bram

Someone lacking a horse in the race might have said the service was “lovely.” They always say that. You recite a few lines from the book of your choosing, spend four hundred dollars on lilies and carnations, and quietly hug your way around the circle of the bereaved, and that is enough to call it “lovely.”

They held Dulcie’s funeral in a field full of flowers, far from any church for those of us who churches find detestable. Her body was expertly preserved. Looking upon her, one would think she were merely sleeping, and never dream that once, only a week before, she had been occupied by that which brings the darkness to the world.

No shadows clung to her fingers, no smoke came from her ears, no black tears fell from her eyes. Her skin was pristine, her hair a wash of honey and sunlight.

I stood in a pool of yellow flowers, watching the masses circle the casket, kiss her cheeks, and stumble away, weeping. The stars seemed to dim above us—not for respect, I thought, but the way a child shrinks into the walls of a party of strangers, trying to remain unseen. The world around me was stilted and awkward. The trees leaned away, making small talk. The grass allowed itself to be quietly crushed beneath dress shoes and ballet flats. Heels sank into the mud. Everything was quiet, reveling in the pointlessness of this death.

A night funeral. For me and me alone, I suspected. There were nocturnal beasts among us, people Dulcie had saved in the course of her career, but none like me.

I did not want this. I did not want to be accounted for.

Her dog, Blue, sniffed at the edge of her casket, recognizing her even under the musk of preservatives. He whined, pawing at the wood. Vander took him by the collar and led him gently away. He would not look at anyone.

But he looked at me, and something unsaid passed between us, some intrinsic understanding of what it was to be among the mourners. Feeling as though we should not be here, as though we should have been barred at the door. It was a strange moment.

I resisted the urge to pull up my hood and loiter in the shadows of nearby trees. Lights had been brought out, electric lamps hanging from black metal poles leaning in the mud. It was all so terribly exposed.

“I am sorry,” I said, to no one in particular.

A single flower bloomed at my feet. Not one I recognized. It sprang up from nowhere, spanning weeks of growth as I watched. The petals were long and numerous, yellow and white and pink. Bright against the mud-dark ground.

As though the world was saying, I know.

NINETEEN

Knight

One Year Later

I sat in my office. The office. The same spot, the same style of building.

My nametag said: Lead Regulator Knightly Vander. My badge bore the letters A-N-C.

I wished Dulcie were here to see it. I wished that about everything, all the time. I wished she was here to see us cut the stupid ribbon on the new building, I wished she was here for the long and boring ceremony where the president gave the ANC her official blessing, I wished Dulcie was here for Christina and Quillan’s wedding and Quillan’s cringey two-step. I wished she were here for me.

Blue whined at me from under the desk. He had his own little badge, too, and a vest. We’d been meaning to train him to be a proper police dog for ages now. You were supposed to start them as puppies, but Blue was smarter than your average dog. He could sniff out anything now. Bombs, potions, human narcotics, dead bodies, living people caught under rubble.

“Good boy,” I said, scratching him between the ears. Every time I came home, he got excited, and then he looked behind me, waiting for Mom to come running in behind me to hug him. Dulcie had been gone for long stretches of time before, but she’d always come home. Mom was just off on some other adventure. He was still waiting for her.

Fuck, so was I.

A year was not a long time. Long enough to rebuild an organization, if you were quick about it; long enough to bury someone, to have replaced the flowers on their grave a hundred thousand times. But not long enough to forget.

We made her a statue.

Put it out in front of the ANC, labeled it “in loving memory.” Listed everything she did for the bureau, the things she endured. How she killed Meg, how she died and ripped the Darkness out of the world as she went, saving us all from whatever it might have wanted.

So fucking stupid. As if there was anything, anything they could have put on that stupid plaque that would have made it okay.

Her book was sitting on my desk. Finished, read and re-read, over and over again until I’d destroyed the spine and stained half the pages with coffee and tears. It wasn’t moving, not like a piece of music was moving. It was a smutty vampire book about a pirate captain who was clearly supposed to be Quillan. But every now and then there was a line, something that threw me completely out of the story because it sounded too much like her, and I was moved.

And I couldn’t put the stupid thing down. I slept with it under my pillow, for fuck’s sake. Like, it wasn’t just something she had, it was something she made, and… I don’t know. I couldn’t part with it. And I’d tried. It just made her feel more real than one of her sweaters. She was more a part of the words she’d written on the page.

Everyone saw it on my desk. They looked at it, sometimes made an involuntary face, but no one ever said anything. Sam had lingered on it for a while, once she saw Dulcie’s name in that ugly red spiked print across the front. A picture of a man’s shirtless torso blazed across the front of it, sword at his hip, leather pants and a beach behind him. Not something I would have expected of Dulcie, and yet… exactly what I should have expected of Dulcie.

Not a whole lot else on my desk, honestly. Nameplate, book, stapler that I literally never used, staple remover that I routinely held up to the window pretending it was eating other buildings, closed laptop, coffee mug.

And I had one of those things. A magic eight-ball with the ink and the dice inside it.

I picked it up, hefted it. They were heavier than you’d think. I asked it a stupid question and shook it.

The magic eight-ball said: It is certain.

I snorted and put it down.

If only.

Outside, the light was failing. It was now or never, unless I just wanted to skip her anniversary. Which I didn’t. I couldn’t.

I pushed myself out of my chair and into the hall. Blue followed at my heels. “Sam, I’m heading out.”

Sam looked up and nodded. “You want me to go with you?”

“No.”

“You sure you should be alone?”

“I have Blue.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You keep telling me to cry, and I can’t cry if you’re staring at me.”

She laughed lightly. “Okay, fair enough. Don’t stay too late. Get some sleep, okay?”

“You too. Big day.”

She smiled. “Medium day. Next day is the big day.”

“The biggest.” I put my hands in my pockets and started out. “See you then.”

“Don’t be late.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Promise you’ll cry?”

It was a joke. Sort of. “I promise.”

***

Dulcie

I woke up, which was neat.

I’d died before. I didn’t want to leave life—I wanted to go back, obviously, I had shit I still wanted to do— but I wasn’t scared of death. I’d just wake up and see my mom and she’d give me her sad, “Well, you tried, and that’s what counts” smile, and we’d go hang out in the Valley of Peace until Knight died and I could see him again. Sad, but, you know, it could be worse.

It could be this.

No body. No eyes, no ears, no tongue. No way to move, or breathe, but I didn’t need to—no lungs. I just was—in this vast, unending expanse of nothing. Darkness and silence.

I called out, Mom? A question from the mind, I guess, or the soul, whatever part of me was still in here kicking around.

She didn’t answer.

Mom?

Silence.

Hello? Anybody?

Silence. Silence and silence and silence, stretching to the ends of the Earth. Except this wasn’t Earth. This wasn’t within twenty miles of Earth.

And then I was answered.

You… are awake, someone said.

Yeah? I said. Um. Sorry?

Things do not wake here. This is a slumbering place. A quiet place.

Volpin must be happy, I thought, which was as good as speech.

Volpin sleeps, as it slept before. As you should sleep. Pause. But you do not sleep.

Sure fucking don’t, I said. Are you here to put me to sleep?

No. You were not born in this place as we were, and so your… awakeness is not mine to change. You slept a while, and have woken. This is… odd.

Yikes. What’s your name?

I am that which guards the forgotten. That which must be dead but cannot die.

I felt sick to a stomach I didn’t have. Am I… can I not die?

No. Perhaps it is why you wake. Or perhaps… it is not. There was a long silence, and a humming, like it was thinking. It has been separated from you. The sleep, at last, has torn you two apart.

Volpin?

Yes. You were not meant for this sleep. Be gone from this place.

How?

Answer that which calls you, to that which has awakened you. You are tethered yet to the world you left. Find the tether, and pull.

Tether? What tether? What are you talking about?

If you do not know, it said, I cannot help you.

Gee, thanks, mister.

You should hurry. The sleep will pull you under in time.

What tether?

But they were gone.

What fucking tether?

“That which calls you?” I’d been ripped out of my body and banished with the Darkness to this void by Grenwal. There was literally nothing left on the planet I could be anchored to.

Then it clicked.

I imagined myself closing my eyes, and I started thinking about him very loudly.

In the total nothingness of the void, something glowed.

***

Knight

Flowers blooming on her grave. Hundreds of them, a rainbow of colors, orange lilies and pink katydids and red begonias, flower upon flower upon flower.

Henry said Dulcie’s mom was some kind of goddess. This was the anniversary, a year to the day, almost to the hour.

I said out loud, “Why didn’t you save her? If you’re a goddess, why didn’t you fucking save her?”

Dulcie’s mother had done it before. What was different this time?

She didn’t answer me. Obviously.

I’d promised Sam I would cry, and I thought I would. I didn’t think I’d be able to take it, coming back here in the dark, alone except for the dog. That was the point. But there were no tears. Just this vast and pressing ache in my chest, and a bad taste in my mouth. I felt like if I breathed on the flowers, they’d shrivel up and die.

Blue sat patiently in the grass, panting in the heat of the night. He looked at me with big, forlorn black eyes.

“I know, buddy,” I said, scratching his head.

And then, from nowhere and everywhere, a sound. One long note, and then silence. A vibration, like the scraping of a cargo ship as it crashes into the pier. Like grinding metal. Like an earthquake.

I went numb. I felt like all of my organs were failing at once. Hold the power button until the whole thing goes dark.

Hades, maybe coming here alone was a bad idea. Maybe I was going crazy. Maybe I was hearing things like Bram.

Except Blue was whining. Pawing at his ears like he’d heard it, too.

The sound came again. Closer this time, or maybe just louder. It sang and cut off.

“Motherfucker,” I said. I touched my ears, expecting blood. Nothing. I heard a ringing.

Blue started barking. He spun in little circles, looking for something, nose pointed at the sky.

Maybe I should call Sam, I thought. I mean, this couldn’t be a good thing.

Then something pulled at my chest. I looked down, but I couldn’t see anything—until I could. A flash of blue, a line stretching forward and into the air, disappearing. It pulled itself taut. I touched it, and it shocked me.

“What the hell…?”

Hades’ voice bubbled up inside of me. I hadn’t heard him for months. His presence slammed into me like a meteor. The world fuzzed and grayed.

Concentrate.

“What do you want?”

Nothing. Just concentrate.

“Go away. I’m having a breakdown.”

I will leave when the thing is done. You foolish boy, concentrate.

I made a growly groaning sound. “On what?”

I felt Hades roll his eyes. What do you think?

I looked at the cord. I stared at it. It glowed a little brighter. I smelled summer wind and sweat and shampoo. I saw something startlingly green. I felt a pressure on my face, as though someone was touching me, but there was no one there.

I was yanked forward, nearly off my feet. It was like someone had snagged a million tiny hooks on my ribs, and now everyone I’d ever met was trying to break me open.

Focus.

I stared at the line. I gave in to the colors and the smells, the images of couches and down comforters, the feel of the slick, ugly floor of the prison, the pattern on the quilt from the cliff, the sour gasoline smell of the motorcycles, the blood of her ex on my knuckles… the night we met, sitting on the swings in the dark, with no idea what we were about to set in motion.

There was no way. No way in the world.

Don’t say I never did anything for you.

Hades left.

A hand reached out from the emptiness.

The string pulled and pulled. The glow was like blood under a blacklight.

I grabbed the hand. I pulled, too hard.

And Dulcie came rocketing out.

***

Dulcie

I fell on him. Hard.

We landed on the ground. Together.

The air pressed in on me. Every part of my body felt wrong, my skin sticking to my muscles like wet jeans.

Inhale, exhale. I did that a couple of times. The world spun, teetered, and righted itself.

“Knight,” I said, giddy, breathless.

He opened his mouth to speak but no words came out. His eyes were huge, his mouth pumping up and down like a fish out of water. Finally, tears released from his eyes as a smile broke across his face. His eyes glowed white, burned with it. Them and a streetlight, the only lights out here in the dark.

Then a dog—my dog, my sweet baby Blue—was licking my face like his life depended on it.

I hugged him and petted him and baby-talked into his ear, and he bounced up and down, tail wagging like mad.

And behind him, inches away, was Knight.

“Am I dead?” he asked, the confusion still riding his eyes.

“No, you’re not dead,” I said with a laugh. But I didn’t understand what was happening any more than he did.

“You’re here? Are you really here, Dulce?”

“I… think so?” I reached down and pinched myself. I felt the pain and I felt the wholeness of my arm. And then I noticed I was completely and utterly naked and as soon as that realization dawned on me, goosebumps covered the entirety of my body.

Blue got down, planting himself in the grass, pressing his furry body against me. Knight and I looked at each other. There was this beat of bewildered silence and then his hands were all over me, his lips were all over my face as we both cried and held each other. He pulled me into him so hard, I couldn’t breathe.

He put his hand on my face and tilted it upward and for a few seconds we were lost in each other’s eyes. “I don’t know how this is possible or how the fuck this happened,” he started. “But you need to know something…” He cleared his throat and rubbed his arm across his eyes. He took a deep breath and focused on me. “I love you,” he said. “Dulcie, I love you so fucking much.”

He pulled me in, and he kissed me like it was the last thing he’d ever be allowed to do. His hands were on my back, my stomach, grasping at my skin, trying to convince himself I was real. His lips and his tongue and his hands in my hair were the goodbye we were denied. When he finally freed me, I just stared up at him.

“I love you too, Knight,” I whispered.

Blue pushed his nose in between us, whimpering like he thought something was wrong.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay buddy, it’s okay,” I said. I kept petting him until he calmed down.

“What happened?” Knight asked breathlessly. “How the fuck are you here?”

I was giggling. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I have no fucking idea.”

But I did. We both did, because we could still see it between us, glowing, this pulsating white-blue cord drawn from my heart to his.

A line between us. A cosmic connection. A glowing string, reaching from what remained of me out into the darkness and beyond. And on the other side of it, Knightly Vander, calling me back into the world.

No one made this connection. No one ordained it, this thing inside us. We built it ourselves.

“How long?” I asked. “How long has it been since…”

“A year.”

I felt my eyes go wide. “Fuck,” I muttered. A year? A whole fucking year?

I noticed for the first time that we were in a graveyard, surrounded by flowers, next to a headstone.

Knight took off his hoodie and wrapped me in it. I reveled in the plushness and the smell of him. Too big by far, but that was fine—it would help to keep me warm.

My eyes adjusted to the light, and I saw the name scratched into the stone. Started with a D, but I couldn’t read the rest…

“Oh,” I said. I put my hands over my mouth.

I cannot begin to express to you how weird it feels to nakedly make out with your ex-boyfriend who is now most probably your boyfriend again—on your own grave. In the dark. Completely naked.

Knight followed my gaze, grimaced, nodded. “Yeah.” All the air fell out of him. “Yeah.”

A year. A whole year, thinking I was gone and there was no getting me back. That… that had to suck.

“Sam,” I said suddenly. And Quillan and Bram and Christina everyone, but holy shit, Sam.

“We’ll call her,” said Knight.

“Yeah.” Just showing up on her doorstep might actually give her a heart attack. Fuck, it might actually give me a heart attack. “Maybe tell Casey first.”

“Yeah. Yeah, definitely.” Knight took out his phone, dialed, put it to his ear. He stared at me. He was shaking. He kept my hand firmly in his. I’d never seen his eyes glow so brightly, so fiercely. I didn’t know they could.

“Casey?” He smiled, and he laughed as he spoke. His eyes glistened, and a second later he was crying.

“Knight?” I heard Casey’s voice on the other line.

“I need you to tell Sam...” Knight’s voice died. And he took a deep breath. “Dulcie’s… she’s alive. She’s back.”

I heard Casey sigh and say, groggily, “Where are you?” Skeptical, as he should be. Probably thinking Knight was having a mental breakdown.

“The graveyard. Her grave. I’m at her grave.”

“Five minutes. Don’t move.”

“Okay.” He hung up. Stared at me. He put his hand on my cheek and ran his thumb across my face, slowly. His hand moved up, and he pushed back my hair. Touched my ears. Sharp as ever. Exactly the way they should be.

“He doesn’t believe you,” I said with a smile.

Knight laughed. “He doesn’t believe me.”

“Guess the joke will be on him?”

“If you’re really here and I’m not just imagining this whole fucking thing, yes the joke will be on him,” Knight answered.

He kissed me again, and the taste of him on my mouth, the noise of his breathing, it was perfect. It was everything.

TWENTY

Dulcie

“It’s really you,” Knight said.

I put my hand over his, kissing him again. I never wanted to stop. “It’s me.”

He laughed and put his hand to his mouth. “You’re really here.”

Wait.

“Do you have a knife or a box cutter on you or something?” I asked.

He frowned, searching my face. “What? Why?”

“I just need to, like, prick my finger or something.”

He followed the thought a second later. “Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah, hang on.” He pulled out a little pocketknife and flicked it open.

“Here,” he said, reaching for me. I gave him my hand, palm up. Very carefully, he pressed the point of the blade into the pad of my pointer finger. Blood welled up. Liquid gold.

The relief came out of me in a breathy, stuttering laugh. “Holy shit. Holy shit.” And then I cried. I sobbed. I hyperventilated almost.

Because as incredible a gift as Knight was—this was even better. Liquid gold blood meant one thing—I was me. No Darkness. No Meg. No influence from a ton of other creatures polluting my blood. Just me. Just fairy. Just Dulcie.

Five minutes passed. Five minutes of touching and holding and kissing and breathing and gasping and laughing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Knight cry, and certainly never like this. I tried to control myself. I felt ridiculous and weirdly embarrassed, crying half-naked in the dark—but I couldn’t do it. I kept laughing, and the tears just kept on flowing.

A car door slammed. Heavy footsteps crunched across the stale grass, shadowed with blue.

Casey, in jeans, sneakers, and a yellow t-shirt. When he saw me, he stopped walking abruptly. It was like he’d hit a wall. He just stared at us. At me. His eyes were wide. “Oh my God.”

“I guess the joke’s on him,” Knight whispered and I’d never seen him smile like that.

“Yeah,” I said as I faced Casey. “Hi.”

“She’s here,” said Knight. “She’s really here.” He wouldn’t stop staring at me, and honestly? Ditto.

“Dulcie,” said Casey. His eyes were narrow, and he said it like a question.

I nodded, swiping at my eyes with my sleeve. Knight’s sleeve. He smelled so nice. “The one and only.” I smiled really big.

Casey knelt in front of me in the grass, the flowers. A spring wind blew my hair into my face, sent the smell of grass and dust into the air. Nothing in the world existed except the three of us, hanging out on my grave.

“Dulcie O’Neil,” he said flatly.

“That’s me.” Everything I was saying was so asinine, so totally meaningless, but I couldn’t find anything else to say. Nothing felt right. Not “It’s good to be back,” not “What did I miss?” Just my name and a nod, smiling, crying.

Casey smiled. He put his hand over his mouth, drew it down to his chin, and suddenly he was crying, too. “How is it even possible?” he started.

“We don’t know,” I answered even though it wasn’t entirely true. Knight and I knew—it was our connection. But it wasn’t like we could use that esoteric crap as a reason to explain this to everyone else. ‘I don’t know’ was just easier. So we stuck with it.

“Sam… she’s going to be so… fucking happy,” Casey said, laughing.

“Sam,” I repeated her name and more tears flooded my eyes.

“Holy shit, come here,” Casey said, and he wrapped me in this enormous hug. I hugged him back, obviously. He smelled like aftershave, a lot of it.

He put me down and dried his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Okay, um. Fuck.” He blinked and looked around the graveyard. “We should.” He looked at me, laughing through his nose. “We should get you some clothes.”

I laughed, loudly and suddenly. Everything was funny. “Yeah.”

Knight put his chin on my shoulder and wrapped his arms around me. “I mean, we don’t have to…” He rocked me back and forth.

I giggled and hugged his arms to my stomach. “Kniiiiiiight.” He pressed his nose into me and kissed my neck.

Casey sat down in the grass, cross-legged. He clasped his hands together and hid his mouth behind them, but I could tell he was smiling.

“There’s no rush,” he said. “Just let me know when you want to tell Sam.”

“Not yet,” I answered. I just wanted to sit here. I just wanted to sit here and inhale the scent of the damp night air and I wanted to feel what it was like to be alive again.

“Do you want me to go?” Casey asked.

“No,” I said and shook my head. “I want you to stay. I just want to listen to you talk and Knight talk and I want to run my fingers through the grass,” I said as I glanced down and then felt Blue’s cold, wet nose on my hand. “I just want to feel… normal.”

Knight pulled me into his lap. Blue paced around us urgently, whining until one of us gave in and petted him. “We can do whatever you want to do, Dulce.”

I didn’t know how long we stayed like that, but it was wonderful. Until sunrise, or nearly. Orange spilled over the trees like paint. Shadows formed and grew long, arching, daggering across the grass, checkering out faces through the leaves.

We’d talked. The three of us. We talked for a long time. Knight caught me up on what had been happening for the last year and Casey added to his stories and we laughed and we cried and there were times when we were purely silent.

I sighed and leaned back into Knight, looking at him over my shoulder. “We should go.”

“Whenever you’re ready.”

I gave him a quick kiss and levered myself to my feet. Knight stood, back popping.

“My stuff’s probably all gone, right?” I asked and I felt weird asking and they both probably felt even weirder answering. They both dropped their heads and nodded.

“Most of it,” Casey admitted. “You and Sam are about the same size, though.”

“Um, I’m like two feet shorter than Sam,” I said with a laugh and then Casey looked at me and he laughed and Knight laughed and we all laughed. And it felt so fucking good.

I nodded, and this pang of nervousness hit me in the chest. I swallowed and smiled through it. “To Sam.”

Casey clapped once. He had the same giddy, anxious energy I did. “To Sam’s.”

To Sam’s.

***

We rang the doorbell. It was something like seven in the morning. Early for me, but not for Sam. She was a morning person.

As I stood there, I was nervous. I didn’t know why. But my heart was pounding and I was having trouble catching my breath.

She opened the door, still in her pajamas, holding a mug of coffee and yawning. “Casey?” she asked as she looked at him. Knight and I were standing off to the side a bit and out of her immediate line of sight, so I wouldn’t give her a heart attack. “Oh my God, what time is it? How long have you been gone? It’s daylight already? I must have lost track of time when you left.” She paused. “Is Knight okay?”

Casey immediately grabbed the coffee. “Sam. Something’s happened and you should… probably be sitting.”

The yawn died in her mouth. “What kind of something?” That’s when Knight walked into her line of sight. She stood up a little straighter. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

Casey shrugged. “Well… brace yourself.” He and Knight stepped to either side, and Casey faced me with a nod. I stepped out from the blind side of the doorway and smiled at her.

Knight’s hoodie hung halfway down my thighs, no pants, no shoes. Bare feet pressing into the concrete steps.

“Hi,” I said sheepishly. I wanted to hug her but I didn’t want to freak her out. And based on her expression, she was freaked out.

She froze like a deer in the headlights. She stopped breathing.

“D…Dulc…” She couldn’t even speak.

“It’s me,” I said, suddenly desperate to fill the silence.

She looked at Casey and Knight, and they nodded. Yes, I was really here. Yes, this was happening.

And then she cried out and started sobbing as she jumped forward and then tackled me in a hug, almost knocking the both of us clean off the porch. She was crying big, blubbery tears. I hugged her back, and then I was crying, too, loud and just as blubbery.

“You’re here,” she said. “You’re here, you’re here, you’re real, oh my god, oh my god! How is this…”

“It just is, we aren’t sure how,” I interrupted.

It was the longest hug I’d ever experienced. Sam had always been huggier than me, and this was a year’s worth of pent-up best friend hugs all smushed together into one Ultra Mega Hug. The huggiest hug that ever hugged.

“Oh, Hades, um, come in, come in.” She dried her eyes, not that it was doing her any good as she glanced down at me and took in my outfit, or lack thereof, for the first time. “You must be freezing.”

We maneuvered into the living room and Knight closed the door behind him.

“Can she have something to wear of yours?” he asked Sam.

She nodded and then nodded some more and then remembered herself and disappeared into her room. She came back with a folded outfit that looked like blue jeans and her favorite blue and white striped cotton shirt. I accepted the clothes with a smile and held them up to my nose. They smelled like her.

“Let her dress,” she said to the boys and sent them out to the back porch rather than sending me to the bathroom or her bedroom.

So I dressed and Sam just continued making all these chirpy sounds between her tears and I could tell she was trying to figure out how all of this had happened but she was coming up empty. Once I was dressed, Sam and I sat on the couch next to each other and she waved at Knight and he opened the slider. The boys stood between us and the open kitchen. Blue plunked himself down on the hardwood and stared at us.

“How?” Sam said. Her eyes were red. “How?”

I looked furtively at Knight, and he smiled.

“You were dead,” Sam said, never taking her eyes off me.

“Yeah. I know.”

“You died.”

“I know, Sam.”

“What the hell happened?”

“I don’t really know,” I said. “It’s… complicated. But Knight was involved.”

She beamed through big, honking bubble tears. She dried her eyes, laughing. It was such a good sound.

I looked around the living room and kitchen. “Nothing’s changed.”

“Not really, no,” she said.

But there was an altar in a little alcove behind her. That was new. Sam was a witch more in practice than in faith. Magic was almost a science; altars were spiritual.

“How long has that been here?” I asked.

“Um. A year.”

Ah. Of course.

“Can I look at it?”

“Sure. Yeah, definitely.”

We rose, walked over to it. The whole thing was set on a purple velvet cloth. I recognized some of the things on it: Pretty rocks, tarot cards, a necklace from her grandmother. And a picture of me, in a little black frame. Not just me, though, but me with Knight. It was a sunny day behind us, and we were laughing, and his eyes were closed. He was smushing his cheek into mine. A window, and a couch—Sam’s couch. When did we even take that? What day could that possibly have been? I could almost remember. Almost.

I picked up the picture and stared at it for a second. A window into a world that felt so incredibly far away, even though I was right on top of it.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

“Dying.”

She laughed. “That’s not your fault, hun.”

But it had been my decision to die, right?

Sam smiled. She took the picture from me and put it down, adjusting it a little on the purple cloth. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” Sam said. “You’re back now, and you’re staying back, and it doesn’t matter why or how or any of it.”

She said the words with such determination, like she was ready fight the first person who said otherwise. And honestly, she would. She put her hands in her pockets. Something glinted on her finger.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold the fuck up, Sam.” I grabbed her wrist and pulled it back out again. Something like fifty thousand itty-bitty diamonds winked around her finger. The finger. “When did this happen?”

“Um.” Sam’s face went completely red. Some people barely blushed, got a little pink in the cheeks, but when you caught Sam with the right thing, it was in her whole face. “About a month ago?”

“And you didn’t lead with this?” I looked over at Casey and he just shrugged like this was Sam’s story to tell.

“Dulcie, this isn’t about me, you’re home and that’s more important—”

“Than my best friend getting engaged?” More tears blinded me. “How did he ask you?” I pulled her back to the couch and sat down. Casey grinned at Knight. Knight grinned back.

“Um, well, he, uh.” Her hair was already behind her ears, but she pushed it back anyway. She was smiling so big, and trying not to.

“Sam, for fuck’s sake, I am begging you to make this about something besides me. Just pretend I never left and tell me what happened.”

Casey said, “We went to the beach.”

“Not you,” I said.

“At sunset,” answered Sam, laughing.

“Sunset?”

“Yeah, what’s wrong with sunset?”

“Nothing, just everyone and their grandmother proposes in California on the beach at sunset.”

“We have pictures?” said Sam.

I squeezed her hands. “Give them to me.”

She looked at Casey and motioned with her head to the bedroom. He left, fumbled around for a minute (very loudly) and came back with his phone. He opened an album titled, appropriately and disgustingly, “Best day ever,” and it was so adorable I almost vomited on the spot.

“This is so fucking cute,” I said, scrolling through them. Casey and Sam were silhouetted against an orange sky, big yellow sun staring down their engagement like a great unblinking eye. One photo with Casey on his knees, Sam’s hands clearly over her mouth; one blurry as he stood up and she jumped into his arms; one only slightly blurry as he spun her around. Even blurry, though, they were incredible. Sam was wearing this blue dress with a sheer overskirt, and every time she moved, it flared out and changed the color of the sky. “Who took these?”

“Christina,” said Sam.

“Damn,” I said, swiping through them. There were close to a hundred, Christina just clicking away as they walked down to the beach, as Casey knelt, as they both freaked out when she said yes and then collapsed into the sand when Casey tripped on Sam’s dress. Then there was one really close to their faces as they kissed, not just a silhouette but their faces, smiling, sand stuck to their skin. The last two were of Sam putting her hand in front of the camera, laughing.

I realized the room had gotten really quiet. I kept staring at the phone, swiping backwards through the pictures. I didn’t know what to say next. I was becoming increasingly aware of Knight across the room, staring at me.

“You guys are gonna be great,” I said eventually.

Her smile split the room in half. “Thanks. I mean, I know, but…” She looked at Casey and just melted. “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Casey said. He was melting, too. Just a couple of candles over there.

“When’s the wedding?” I asked.

“Um. Actually, it’s…” Sam looked at Casey, and Casey looked at her.

“Oh, fuck, did I miss it?” I asked.

“No, no,” said Sam. “It’s tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” I said, eyes going wide. “Oh Hades, I—Sam, I am so sorry.”

“Wait, why? Why on Earth would you be sorry?”

Well, gee, Sam, maybe it’s because all three people who know I’m not dead are in this room and if I go, the happiest day of your life is going to become a giant “Dulcie’s alive” parade of confused adults in tuxedos.

But hell, even pointing that out felt selfish. Like I thought I was some big celebrity. “I mean, I just—I don’t want to make it a big deal of me being back, you know?”

Sam frowned, smiling her confusion. “… It’s a wedding, Dulcie. It’s… it is a big deal. That’s the whole point.”

“No, not for you. I mean, yes, for you, but like, no one else knows I’m back, and I don’t want your wedding to be… I don’t want to distract everyone, you know? I don’t want to be a big deal. Like… hey isn’t that Dulcie? Wasn’t Dulcie dead?”

Sam put her hand on my knee and squeezed. “It’s okay, Dulcie! You are a big deal. You… honey, you were dead, and now you’re not, and that’s not nothing.”

“Not being dead’s not nothing,” I said. It sounded so perfectly ridiculous.

“Well, yeah. Of course. Actually, um... I kind of don’t have a maid of honor?”

“What? Why?”

“You were gone. And I didn’t want anyone else up there with me.” She took a breath. “I was going to read a poem in your honor and I was going to tell everyone that you were my maid of honor in spirit.” She took another breath. “But now you can do it in person.” But then her face dropped. “You’re staying back, right? This isn’t just a… like, a visit?”

She held my hands tight, really tight, and the looks on their faces—all three of them were thinking it. I mean, it was fair—that was exactly the kind of thing I would lie about so they wouldn’t worry.

“I’m back for good,” I said. “Until something else kills me, anyway.” I mean, I was fairly sure I was back for good. I wasn’t sure where else I would go if not here.

Casey gave this awkward little half-laugh, Sam tried to smile, and Knight just pursed his lips and looked like he wanted to hit something. Maybe it was still a little too soon for gallows humor. If that even counted as gallows humor. Everyone dies though, right?

Just not today. And ideally, not tomorrow, either.

“So you’ll do it?” asked Sam.

“Do what?”

“You’ll be my maid of honor.”

“Oh, of course! Obviously!” I said, and then had to backtrack just a little—because Hades, literally no one else on the face of this planet knew I was here. Putting me front and left-of-center would drag all the attention away from the bride, which was kind of the whole point of a wedding. “I mean, if you’re okay with that.”

“If I’m okay with it? Are you insane? Of course I’m okay with it! Dulcie, I’m asking you.”

“Yeah, but it’s your wedding, and everyone who’s going to be there thinks I’m dead, and I don’t want to distract everyone from…” I gestured to the two of them. “You know, this hot action.”

Sam leaned forward just a little. Her eyes went steely. “Dulcie. You are coming to my wedding, and you are going to be my maid of honor if I have to drag you down the aisle kicking and screaming.” She smiled. “Okay?”

“…Okay.” Jeepers creepers. “I really don’t want it to be a big deal, though.”

I didn’t want my resurrection to be a big deal. Hades.

“Then I guess you have some people you need to go see before tomorrow, don’t you?” she said, patting my leg.

Like it was so simple.

“I guess,” I said. And I wasn’t expecting it, but even without thinking about anyone in particular, I was super nervous to talk to anyone and everyone. I felt like I’d run out on an argument and now I had to go crawling back to apologize. Coming back from the dead had its own kind of special awkwardness.

“Knight?” said Sam.

“What?”

“Dulcie has people she needs to see.” Then she smiled. “And she has a maid of honor dress she has to pick out.”

“Not to mention other… clothes,” I added.

Knight smiled and nodded. “I can’t wait.”

And then I realized I had to pee. It was a weird feeling but a nagging one, all the same. “I, uh, I think I have to pee,” I said and excused myself to the bathroom.

“Oh,” Sam said as I heard her ask Knight, “Do you think she’s hungry?”

“Oh,” Knight said in the same surprised tone. “Yeah. Probably.”

“Okay, I’ll whip something up.”

I closed the door and paused with my hand on the knob as I listened to the three of them laughing and talking.

Hades, it felt good to just be me again.

I did my business and walked back out, hair brushed, wearing clothes like a normal person—even borrowed some of Sam’s makeup, eyeliner, mascara, and a bright ruby red lipstick.

Knight was talking to Casey when I came out of the bathroom. He dropped off in the middle of a sentence when he saw me.

“Hang on,” he said to Casey, and he strode over and wrapped his arms around me, hoisting me off the ground and he kissed me, hard, and I thanked the gods of makeup that LipSense existed. Porn star approved. Nothing takes that shit off.

Casey whistled. I went to stick my tongue out at him, but Knight’s response was to dip me, kissing me more.

“Get a room!” said Casey.

“We can just leave, if you need a minute,” said Sam. I couldn’t tell if she was kidding.

We stopped eventually, and we were breathless. He stood me up and looked over his shoulder.

“Casey, can we borrow your car? Left my bike at the graveyard.”

“Sure.” He tossed Knight the keys.

“We’ll be back,” said Knight, and he looked at me, squeezing my hand. “You ready?”

I nodded wordlessly. The anxiety was back, tight as a wire. I wanted to just crawl under the couch and go to sleep.

But I had people to see. Not for me, for Sam. Totally not for me.

We left Blue with them, just for now. Sam hugged me, we said a moderately tearful goodbye, and Knight and I got in the car. Knight started it and drummed on the wheel. “Where to?”

I thought about it. I thought for a while.

Eventually, I asked, “Do we know where Bram is?”

Knight looked surprised. “Yeah, actually. Is that where we’re going?”

I nodded, staring straight forward. “It is.”

He nodded. “Okay then.”

I tried to just breathe.

TWENTY-ONE

Dulcie

We pulled up in front of Bram’s house in Casey’s car. Knight drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

“Bram lives here?” I asked, surprised.

We were in the suburbs. Nice suburbs, but still. Suburbs.

“Yeah,” Knight said.

“…Why?” It was so unlike literally everywhere else Bram had ever lived, at least since I’d known him.

Knight hesitated. “He couldn’t stay at the old place.”

“Bram has a lot of old places, Knight.”

“Not anymore.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “He said they were too big.”

I nodded, wondering. Clubs, castles, cottages. All top-tier, hyper expensive places. Never the ‘burbs. What the fuck was Bram doing in the ‘burbs?

“So,” said Knight. “Warning.”

“Okay.” I rotated in my seat so I was facing him.

“You died a year ago, last night. Bram knows that. Everyone… knows that.”

“Yeah. So…?”

“So, he’s probably not having a great day.”

“Ah. How bad has it been… for him?”

Knight squeezed the steering wheel. “Worse than most.”

“Even you?”

“Not harder than it’s been for me,” he answered, his lips tight. “But we all handle grief in different ways.”

“Shit. What happened?”

“You died.”

“Nothing else?’

Knight stared at me. “Do we need something else?”

“No. Sorry, I just. I don’t know.” I ran my hands over my face and sighed. “I’m sorry. This all feels really weird.”

“You’re telling me.” He tried to smile, but he didn’t quite make it.

Knight opened his door, but I stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“I need go alone.” I started to get out of the car.

He touched my arm. “Wait.”

“What?”

He hesitated. “Bram killed Grenwal.”

That didn’t surprise me. “Okay. Why does that matter?”

“Because she cursed him.”

Oh shit. “Like, ice-is-gonna-swallow-the-world cursed, or…?”

“No.” Pause. “He sees you. Everywhere. All the time.”

“How literal is that?”

“Extremely.”

“… How long has this been going on?”

“About six months. It took him a while to find her.”

“Ah. So, I’m gonna go in there…”

“And he’s going to think you’re not real.”

“Why didn’t you open with that?”

“Because I knew you’d blame yourself.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

He gave me a withering look.

“Okay, fine, I am,” I conceded. “Maybe you should come in with me.”

“Yeah. I think I should.”

In we went.

It was a big house. The wooden door had a patterned oval of clear glass in the center, but there was a curtain over it on the inside. Tiny porch—really just a big step, not a porch at all—with a little bench off to one side. There were flowers under the window, presumably maintained by somebody who wasn’t Bram.

The door was unlocked. Bad sign number one.

The living room was a disaster. You could see directly into the kitchen; nothing had been left untouched. Tables broken, long lines carved through the paint on the walls, windows cracked, curtains pulled down, a standing lamp smashed, books lying with their spines up on the carpet, their pages bent and folded beneath them. There was a small gas fire in the little hearth, flickering, turning the beige carpet orange and black.

My hand went to a gun I didn’t have, but Knight seemed very nonplussed by the scene.

“What the fuck happened in here?” I said.

“Bram,” answered Knight.

I walked in. Further, shoes pressing into the plush carpet. There was noise from a hallway to my right.

Bram didn’t even blink when he came around the corner and saw me.

He sighed. “Not now.”

“Bram, it’s me,” I said slowly. “I mean, the real me.”

“Yes, yes the real you,” he said, meandering through the room, aimless. His eyes had a glazed, wild quality to them. “You are always here.”

“Not like this.” I walked up to him, slowly. Knight stayed put at the door, watching. Bram didn’t notice him.

“Look at me,” I said. “Look, really close. Bram. It’s me.”

His eyes skated across my face, barely seeing me. But he didn’t look away. It didn’t seem like he could.

I pursed my lips, thinking. “When you turned four hundred years old, you came to my house and picked me up in a limo, and you showed off your new shadow speed by teleporting around the cabin and generally being a lech,” I said. “I’m not part of her spell. Grenwal couldn’t know that.”

“Grenwal knew many things,” he said quietly, but the sentence trailed away. He swallowed.

“Not that.” It felt like the right thing to say. Stabilizing.

Bram walked up to me, haltingly. He touched my face, ran his thumb over my chin. His eyes flickered, searching mine for some sign that I wasn’t real. He ran his fingers through my hair, touched my nose, my lips, and—for maybe the first time ever—there was nothing lewd happening. I let him feel his away across my face, like a blind man who has no reason to trust this new thing he’s touching.

“Dulcie?” he said.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Is this another example of Grenwal’s magic?”

“No, it’s me, Bram.”

“That’s impossible,” he said as he shook his head. “You’ve been dead. You are dead.”

“No… not anymore.”

“Where have you been?” Every word sounded more uncertain than the last.

“I’m not sure. Just somewhere dark.”

“And now you are here.”

“Yeah, I am.”

He shook his head, slowly, an agonized motion. “This is not possible.” He sucked in his lip and bit it until he bled. His hand dropped from my face, and he stepped back. “This is not possible. You are not here.”

Dammit. “Bram—”

“No, enough. Enough of this.” He took stumbling steps back, until he made it to a chair. A big, plush red thing with a high back and small arms. Even in a house in the suburbs, some things just didn’t change.

He fell back into it, staring, tense, poised like he was waiting for me to pounce on him. His eyes glistened. “Please. I am finished now. I have seen the last of her, I know. Please.” He closed his eyes. “Let it be over now.”

I took a few steps forward. “Bram, I know what you’re thinking, but—”

“No!” He held out his hand, voice cracking. “Please. Enough. Be gone, specter! You have had your fun, be gone.”

“I’m not a fucking specter. I’m not part of Grenwal’s curse. I’m me. I’m really here.”

A laugh curled out of him, cold and deranged. “You are never here, Dulcie.”

I went to him, lifted his face up, made him look at me. “Bram, I’m here. I’m here, I’m alive, I don’t know how or why or fucking anything but I’m me. Look at me.”

His mouth twitched into a smile, but it didn’t hold. It broke like water over the rocks. “Dulcie. I am older than I have any right to be. And I am tired.” He took my hand in both of his and kissed it. His tears slicked my fingers, got between his palms and my hand. “Would that I could have told you… so many things…”

He put his forehead to my hands, face down. He was shaking. “I am so sorry. I was not fast enough. I should have known, I should have seen…”

“There wasn’t anything you could have done,” I said. I didn’t think there was, anyway. And besides, I asked Grenwal to kill me. Banishing me with the Darkness to the void was a shit thing to do, but probably necessary. Like she said, we were out of time.

Very suddenly, he tensed. “No!” he shrieked, and he pushed me away. I hit the fireplace hard. Knight took a step forward but I held him back with a hand in the air.

“No, no, no, no, you are not here, you are not real.” He bared his fangs, eyes like embers, alight. He advanced.

And then Knight was there, between us, arms crossed.

“She’s real, Bram,” he said. “I promise.”

Bram picked up a chair and tried to break it over Knight’s head. Knight caught it and deflected it, sending it into the floor. His expression didn’t change.

“You!” Bram shrieked. He moved towards Knight, hobbling like he had a limp. His eyes were wild, but his super speed was nowhere to be found. “You!”

“Yes, me,” Knight said, sounding strangely calm. He held his hands out, palms forward, towards Bram. “Talk to me, Bram.”

Tears were pouring down Bram’s face, shiny stripes in the firelight. He reached Knight. For a second, he didn’t move. Just stared.

“Vander.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “It is happening again.”

I stood, slowly. Knight laid his hands on Bram’s shoulders. “It’s alright, Bram.”

Bram clung to Knight’s arms like driftwood, breathing like he was afraid of the air in his lungs. “She is here. She is… I see her.” He opened his eyes, only just, and looked at me through the crook of Knight’s arm. “She is there, watching us.”

“Yes, she is—”

“Vander, I see her—”

“Because she’s really there,” Knight said, talking fast. “Bram, Dulcie is alive. I went to her grave last night and I can’t explain how or why, but she’s come back. Dulcie is here. Look at me. Look at me, Bram.”

But he couldn’t. He was staring at me. Panic became confusion. His breathing got a little slower. “What?”

“She’s here. Look.” Knight picked up a glass paperweight from the table next to the chair and tossed it at me. I caught it.

Bram’s eyes were wide, unhinged. “It cannot be.”

“It is. She’s real. She’s here. She’s alive. This is not a vision, this is Dulcie.” Knight turned to me and held out his hand. I took it, and he slowly placed my hand in Bram’s.

“See? She’s warm.”

Bram ripped his hand out of mine. “She is always warm.”

“I can see her, too. She’s right here.”

“She is not!” Bram threw him off, violently. Knight crashed into a chair, breaking it. I looked at the other chairs, most of them in pieces, and wondered how many of them had been broken the same way. How many of these were replacements, suffering the fate of the first.

Six months of this.

“You,” said Bram, pointing to Knight. “You, too, are an apparition. Convincing me she is here.” He laughed darkly. “Clever, clever Grenwal.” He threw back his head. “Is this what you want, witch?” He spun, hurling his words at the ceiling. “Has this made you happy? Has my suffering brought you peace? Was I not good enough to be my own tormentor?

“Bram, listen to me. We’re here. You can call anyone and they’ll show up and tell you the same thing. We’re real,” said Knight.

“And they would be real as well, yes? As real as you.”

Bram stood next to a table, on which were books and wine glasses and dust-yellow papers. A dark, bubbling chuckle fell from his mouth to the floor, and then he wasn’t talking to us anymore.

“I chased you as the Wild Hunt chases the errant deer, as the jealous princes of England chase their fathers, I rode you down on a misty bank and drank until you were dry, but you were cursed, you were cursed!” He picked up a glass and threw it at the wall, where it shattered. He put his hands flat on the table, and his hair hung in his face. He got very quiet. “But you have not won!” He clenched his fists. “You have accomplished nothing. I am no madder and no more lost than I was before. You have brought no fury upon me I would not have brought upon myself.”

“Is he always like this?” I asked quietly.

“Not always, but mostly.”

Bram was muttering to himself. I heard him say Grenwal’s name. Then mine.

“Dulcie.” Knight had a sour look on his face. “I think you need to kiss him.”

I squinted at him. I almost laughed. “I beg your fucking pardon?”

Knight sighed. “The first time I saw him like this, he was trying to kiss the apparitions.”

“That sounds like him.”

“No, I mean, like, he was desperate. He was asking you—them—to release him.”

The little loading rainbow spun in circles in my head. “Oh. You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“You think Grenwal made it so that the only way to break this curse is if I kissed him? Knowing all along I was… dead?”

“I think that’s exactly what she did.”

“That’s… that’s fucked up.”

“It is.”

We looked at Bram, his chest heaving.

“True love’s kiss,” Knight said, unbelievingly.

“He’s not my true love,” I said even as the words pained me. I’d never wanted to hurt Bram. And maybe in another life, a life where Knight hadn’t existed… maybe Bram and I could have been something.

But we existed in this life and that was something that could never happen.

“I know.” Knight looked at me. There was a strange light in his eyes, a pain answering to Bram’s. “But you’re his.”

I swallowed. My heart was hammering.

I mean, I guess I’d known. Somewhere down inside. Or I’d wondered how true Bram’s love for me could have really been. And now I understood. It was always true and it was always real. Bram had always loved me.

This vampire, this man who said he’d only help me navigate the Netherworld if I stripped for him, who laid out skimpy dresses for me to wear when we had dinner, who dealt illicit potions and Hades knew what else—strange, to think he could really love me.

Love me enough to break a curse, no less. Uncanny. Ridiculous.

But I believed it.

“Are you sure?” I said. I didn’t know why I was asking.

Knight gave me this curt little nod. He was sure, but that didn’t mean he liked it.

I nodded back. “Okay.”

I strode up to Bram and touched his back. I expected him to slap my hand away, but he didn’t. He stood upright and looked down at me, eyes red, bloodshot and exhausted. The redness in his pupils disappeared when he saw me.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I was too late.”

You and everyone. “It’s okay, Bram. I forgive you.” Slowly, carefully, I took his face in my hands. I guided him gently to my face till our noses were touching, foreheads together. He had to stoop.

“I’m sorry you had to wait this long,” I said.

And I kissed him.

There was a moment of hesitation, then he sank into it, mouth opening, taking me in his arms and breathing me in. His tongue snaked into my mouth, searched, retreated, returned. He was so cold, but cold like lake water in July.

“Dulcie,” he moaned.

There was a rush of warm wind, a light, a feeling like a wall coming down, and when I pulled back from Bram, he was laughing, sad and smiling.

“Bram?” I asked. I felt Knight’s eyes on me, wondering what he was thinking. That wasn’t just a kiss, that was a kiss.

“You are real,” Bram said softly.

“I am.”

“You’re here.”

I nodded and felt the tears bubbling up in my own eyes. There was something between Bram and me. There always had been. No, it was never strong enough to rival the love between Knight and me, but it was there all the same.

“Thank you, Bram,” I whispered. He seemed surprised and I answered his unasked question. “For everything.”

Bram studied my face for a while until Knight cleared his throat. Bram then looked at Knight, as if seeing him for the first time. “She’s real.”

“She is. I couldn’t believe it, either.” Knight was smiling at me, not looking at Bram.

Bram chuckled and sighed. “Oh, Dulcie, my darling,” he said, touching my hair. “What am I going to do without you?”

“Without me? I’m here. I’m real. Where do you think I’m going?”

He gave me this little knowing smile. “Where he is going.” He looked at Knight over my shoulder, waving, smiling even, and I briefly followed his gaze. Knight shrugged and smiled back. What a strange year they must have had together, fielding intangible Dulcies.

Bram pulled his face back to mine. “I love you, Dulcie O’Neil. And it has been thrilling to know you. Let no one ever tell you otherwise.”

“You’re not dying, are you?”

“Hardly.”

“Really? Because this sounds like the beginning of an ‘it’s been an honor’ speech.”

“It has. Am I not allowed to say such things?”

“I mean, I guess.”

There was a beat of silence. He smiled, laughing through his nose, just the one little blip of a sound.

“Thank you, my love, for freeing me from your ghost.”

I felt more tears streaming down my face. “You’re welcome, Bram.”

There was a long, liquid silence.

Knight put his hand on my shoulder. “We should go.”

“You have places to be, then,” said Bram, sighing.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sam’s wedding is tomorrow. I don’t want to just… show up and give everyone a heart attack, you know?”

“You sure? Could be fun.”

“Bram. No.” I wiped my eyes. “And I have to get something to wear.”

“You will never get another chance like this. Imagine the look on Quillan’s face.”

“No.”

“Perhaps you could jump out of the cake. We could give you a glitter bomb. Or a trumpet.”

“Absolutely not,” I said, but I was laughing, and now, so was he. Laughing and crying all together. “Are you not going to be there?”

“It is in the middle of the day, and I could hardly ask Samantha to move such an occasion for the likes of me.”

“What?” said Bram, and I realized I was staring at him.

“Nothing,” I said. If I pointed it out, the whole thing might fall apart, whatever it was. “We’ll see you later, then?”

Bram smirked and flourished a bow. “But of course, ours is not a friendship so easily undone.” He leaned in a little closer, stage-whispering, “Do come and find me when you tire of the Loki. It should not take long.”

Knight chuckled behind me.

“Will do,” I said.

Bram stood, popped the collar of his shirt, and smiled. He took my hand and kissed it. “Au revoir, my sweet. Until we meet again.”

“Bram?”

He looked at me.

“I missed you,” I finished.

He just smiled as the shadows coiled up around him, and he disappeared.

Knight blinked at the carpet. “Did he just…?”

“Leave us alone in his house so he could make a dramatic exit?” I said. “Yes, he did.”

Knight nodded. “Alright then.”

It was daytime, which meant he hadn’t even left the house—just the room. Even in shadow-cloud form, sunlight was a no-no.

Knight and I looked at each other.

“Quillan?” he asked. “And Christina?”

I nodded. “Quillan and Christina.”

And we left.

TWENTY-TWO

Knight

I knocked on the door. “Quillan?”

“Yeah?” From the kitchen. The clinking and clanking of dishes in the sink, and the rattling hush of something bubbling on the stove. I walked in and stood at the edge of the tile. Quillan was boiling noodles for something, and Christina was in the backyard with her giant plant monster, making kissy noises. It gurgled at her in return. Timothy, I think its name was.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

“Sure, come on in.” Quillan was drying his hands. The wedding band glinted.

“No. Outside.”

He frowned at me. Summer heat was curling through the open back door in waves. “Why? What’s happened?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I mean, nothing bad. But I need you to…” I scratched my chin, thinking. “I don’t know how to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Tell you something really weird.”

He dropped the towel onto the counter and laughed. “What kind of weird?”

“Supernatural weird.”

“That doesn’t narrow it down, my dude.”

“I know, but I mean, even for us it’s supernatural weird.”

He crossed his arms and leaned his back against one side of the door. “Did you do something?”

“Fair question, but no, I didn’t. I mean, technically, but it’s nothing bad.”

“Just spit it out, Knight. Waiting isn’t going to make it any—”

“Dulcie’s alive.”

He froze. Blinked. “…What?”

“See what I mean? There’s no easy way to say this,” I said. “Dulcie’s alive.”

“How? What? Are you okay, Knight?”

“I’m fine,” I answered with a sigh. “And I don’t want to get into the how or why. You’ll see her for yourself in a minute.”

Quillan glanced behind me at the front hall. Quietly, he asked, “Is she here?”

“Outside.”

“Waiting.”

“Yeah.”

“For you to… tell me and make sure I handled it okay?”

“Exactly. And for you to…” I gestured to Christina in the yard. “You know, help me with her.”

Quillan looked at her and nodded, biting his lip. “She’s gonna flip,” he said without looking back at me.

“I know.”

“Who else knows?”

“Casey. Sam. Bram.”

“Bram?”

“It’s where she wanted to go after Sam.”

Quillan chewed on that for a second. “Why?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Did she kiss him?”

I swallowed. “Yes.”

I thought it was bugging him that she saw Bram before she came here, but then he said, “How do you feel about that?”

“Me?”

“Yeah.”

“About what?”

“Dulcie and Bram. The kiss, the curse. Dulcie being Bram’s true love.”

“It was just part of the spell. Something Grenwal did.”

“Was it?”

I looked at the floor. I clenched my teeth until it stung in my jaw. No. Of course it wasn’t.

“Why does it matter?” I asked.

“Because neither of you left on great terms with Dulcie. It’s complicated.”

“Of course it’s fucking complicated.”

Quillan held up his hands. “I’m just worried about you, man.”

“I don’t…” Need you to worry about me. But I didn’t finish the thought. A year of no Dulcie taught me to fucking listen when my friends wanted to help me—but the second Quillan said her and Bram’s names together, I was back on the Edgy Express. Just breathe, Knight. It’s fine. “I know, and I appreciate it.”

Quillan nodded. “Are you two…ogether?”

“I think so.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“We made out on her grave, but we haven’t had an actual conversation.”

Quillan snorted. “I’m sorry, you what?”

“It’s not as weird as it sounds.”

“It is exactly as weird as it sounds.” Quillan put his hand over his mouth for a second, thinking. “So, like, did she crawl up out of her grave?”

“No. She’s not a fucking zombie.”

“Well, I don’t fucking know!” he nearly yelled. “Then what?”

“She fell out of the sky.”

“She fell…? She was in the ground, Knight.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“And it’s really her?”

“I mean, she broke the curse. It has to be.” Plus, there was a cosmic magical line running between our hearts, but we weren’t going to talk about that. Not yet. For now, that was just for Dulcie and me to know.

Quillan bit his lip. “So, is her body still down there, in the dirt?”

“I don’t know. But whatever was wrong with her old body isn’t wrong with this one. The Darkness is gone, she bleeds gold, her ears have points, everything. All back to normal.”

“Normal?” He grinned.

“You know what I mean.”

Quillan was just nodding and nodding. “Do we know how it happened? How she made it back, I mean.”

“Not really. She just kind of… appeared.”

“… Okay then.” He pushed himself off the frame and walked past me.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“To see Dulcie,” he said, pushing open the front door. “And to make sure you’re not hallucinating.”

“That’s Bram’s thing,” I muttered, following him out.

I realized there was really no way you could ever prepare someone for this kind of thing. There was nothing I could have said that would have made coming out here feel any less like a punch to the gut.

Quillan stood there, staring at her, jaw swinging freely from the rest of his face.

“Dulcie,” he said.

Dulcie put her hands in her pockets and shrugged at him, smiling. Who knew coming back from the dead could be so awkward? “Hey, Quill. Miss me?”

He hugged her, almost knocking them both flat on the lawn. They squeezed each other, and then Quillan was crying, and so was Dulcie, both of them babbling wordlessly. I guess besides Sam, Dulcie had known Quillan the longest. They’d been through some crazy stuff together. You could say that about all of us, but there was something about being blackmailed by a magical kingpin that just really brought people together.

“I missed you,” he said. “I missed you so fucking much.” He laughed, sounding hysterical.

Dulcie was giggling. “I missed you, too.”

“Where were you?”

“I don’t know. Hell, maybe.”

“I knew you’d be back.”

“Bullshit,” she said.

“No, really. We had money on it.”

Quillan laughed, Dulcie laughed. It was an amazing sound.

“I want a cut,” she said, beaming.

“Thirty percent.”

“For coming back from the dead? You’re lucky I don’t get all of it.”

“Sixty-forty.”

“Do I mean so little to you?” she asked, affecting an accent.

It was supposed to be a joke, but Quillan got this steel-set thing going on his face. He squeezed her shoulder and, after a long pause, said, “No. Of course not.”

“Quill, you’re being weird.”

“You’re being weird.”

“Of course I’m being weird. I’ve been dead for a while.”

You know, you do a lot of staring when you see someone like this. The first stage of grief is denial; it’s the part where you keep expecting them to walk around the corner and tell you it was all a huge misunderstanding. Even after the truth sinks in, the shock part never really goes away. There’s always something inside you saying, “Maybe it was just a dream. Maybe today’s the day you wake up.”

And then she walks around the corner, and you don’t believe it. You can’t believe it. It’s been too long, and you’ve spent too much money paying therapists to tell you how to pretend this new world will feel normal. There’s a lot of emotional code you have to unwrite, and you’ve got maybe ten seconds to do it before the staring gets awkward for everyone, but no one’s that fast.

So you stare and you stare and you stare. And every inch of them clicks back into the world, all the fuzziness of their memory evaporates, and you start to wonder if maybe this whole awful year was a dream after all. It has to have been.

“Quillan? Where’d you go?”

Christina stepped out of the house.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my… oh my God, Dulcie!”

Hugs and tears and questions. So many questions, but Christina was never quiet long enough to hear any of the answers.

***

And we did it again. And again and again and again. Everyone with whom Dulcie had even a passingly pleasant relationship, everyone on Sam’s guest list, everyone got a visit. It was a long and emotional day.

Then she asked me, “Where’s Henry?”

Right. That. “He transferred out. He couldn’t handle it.”

Dulcie grimaced. “Okay, but where is he?”

“Sacramento, I think?”

“So, he’s still in California.”

“Unless they moved Sacramento out of California, then yes, he’s still in California.”

She got this look on her face. I sighed and tossed the keys up, caught them. The light was already failing, going dusty orange. Sacramento was all the way up the goddamn state.

“Get in the car,” I said.

***

Traffic roared on the highway behind us. Henry lived in a gray apartment complex—gray like it might once have been a less depressing color. Cheap plastic blinds hung askew in all the windows. The back ends of space heaters jutted out from walls. Weeds poked up through cracks in the sidewalks that ran between buildings.

Dulcie sucked in her lip.

“It could be worse,” I said. “He could be living in Oakland.”

Dulcie snorted. She was quiet for a while.

“He moved all the way out here?”

I nodded. “He stayed in California. That’s something.”

“Did he almost not?”

“…Yeah. He almost went all the way to New York.”

“Clear to the other side of the continent? That’s how bad this was?”

“Yeah.” I paused. “Dulcie. He blames himself for your death.”

“What? What the fuck, why?”

“He was too late.”

Dulcie sighed. She crossed her arms and regarded the buildings coldly. “It wasn’t his fault.”

“I know.”

“What happened? Like, when did he leave?”

“Day after the funeral. Left his letter of resignation on the desk. Sam caught him at his house, still packing.”

“Resignation? He’s not a cop anymore?”

“No.”

“What’s he been doing all this time?”

“I don’t know. I think he’s doing people’s taxes now.”

“Hades.”

“Yeah.”

“Has he talked to anyone? Since then, I mean?”

I pursed my lips. “I come up here when I can.”

“But?”

“He doesn’t want to see anyone.”

“Will he see us?”

“He’ll open the door.”

Dulcie nodded, exhaling slowly. “Okay. Let’s go.”

His apartment was on the ground floor. I knocked. When he didn’t answer, I knocked louder.

The door creaked open, barely. Henry squinted out at me and opened the door the rest of the way, sliding his gun into the back of his pajama pants. All the lights in his house were off.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” he asked groggily. “Do you know what time it is?”

“It’s important.”

“Of course it is,” said Henry. He stepped aside and motioned for me to come in.

I didn’t move. “Henry, I need you to brace yourself.”

Henry’s hand moved back towards his gun. “For what?”

“Dulcie. She’s alive.”

Henry blinked. Laughed, stopped.

“You can’t be serious.”

“It’s three o’clock in the fucking morning, I wouldn’t drive all the way to Sacra-fucking-mento just to fuck with you.”

Henry wasn’t listening. “You woke me up,” he said, a little hysterical, “for…? No. No, no, no. Fuck you, Vander.” He started closing the door.

“Henry.” I stopped it with one hand. “I wouldn’t be here if I couldn’t prove it.”

“Knight,” said Henry, leaning hard against the door. “I love you, man, but I can’t do this again. Okay? I don’t care what you think you found. It’s done, there’s nothing else we can do.”

“I mean it this time. I didn’t find anything. Look.” I looked at Dulcie and motioned for her to come over. She did.

Henry looked so tired. “Knight, for fuck’s sake.” He ran his hand over his face, pinching the bridge of his nose.

When he looked back up, there she was.

He froze.

“Hi, Henry,” she said. “Um. I can explain.”

“You,” Henry whispered.

“Me,” said Dulcie. “Can I come in?’

Henry inhaled sharply. He looked from Dulcie to me and back again. “Yeah. Yes. Um. Come on in.”

We went into his living room. We didn’t bother to turn on the lights; the streetlights were enough. Solid orange lines carved color into the hazy blueness of the room.

Henry plunked himself down on the couch, right in the middle, stiff and visibly shaking. Dulcie sat down in an old, scratchy floral chair, hands clasped together, elbows on her knees. This was old hat by now.

Henry wouldn’t look at her.

His knee bounced up and down, up and down. He was fixated on a small brownish spot on the carpet.

“It wasn’t your fault,” said Dulcie.

“It was,” said Henry, almost reflexively.

“It wasn’t. We ran out of time.”

“Because we weren’t ready.”

Dulcie pursed her lips. “I don’t blame you, Henry.” She paused. “Neither does my mom.”

Henry squeezed his eyes shut. “You should.”

Dulcie inhaled deeply, sighed. She got up and sat by Henry on the couch. He flinched away when she touched him, but not far. Henry’s shoulders trembled. Henry exhaled. Long, shaky as a toothpick tower.

“I’m sorry.” Thick blue tears came bubbling out of his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said again.

“It was.”

Dulcie hesitated. He’d been having this conversation with himself for a year. After a certain point, what do you say? “Does it matter? Everything’s fine now.”

“Does it matter?” He tried to steady himself. Breathing was like an Olympic sport. “Yes. Yes, it fucking matters.” He put his face in his hands, staring through his fingers at the floor.

“Look at me, Henry. Look at me.” Dulcie grabbed his wrist and pulled. He let her move him. His eyes and nose were swollen and red.

“You did everything you could. Do you understand me? There’s no such thing as a perfect run, okay, not in real life. Hindsight is twenty-twenty.” She put her hands on his shoulders and smiled. “You did everything you could. I know you did. I was there, for fuck’s sake.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I love you, Henry. I love you and I missed you and it’s okay. Everything that happened is okay. We have to let it go, okay?”

He collapsed into her arms, hugging her. She hugged him back.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.” She rested her chin on top of his head. “It’s okay. It’s all okay.”

She let him cry himself out. I don’t know how long it took. Maybe twenty minutes, maybe an hour. Time kind of stutters when your friend is having a moment. A serious moment.

Then Dulcie took a breath. “I want you to come back with us, Henry.”

“I can’t.” He shook his head, sniffling.

“You can and you will. I need you. I need my partner back.”

He stared at the floor, silent, but clearly listening.

“Let’s go, Henry. Let’s get back to work,” she said. “There’s no one I’d rather have at my back.”

“Back to work,” he said. He swiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand and nodded. “Back to work.” He looked at her again. “I’m so sorry, Dulcie.”

“It wasn’t—”

“It was.”

“Okay, you know what? It was. And it wasn’t.”

Henry squinted at her in confusion.

“It was a lot of things, okay?” she said. “You think you were one of those things, sure. And that’s okay. You were part of it, you didn’t do everything right, and that’s just what happened. It happens, Henry, and it happened to you. I love you and I forgive you.”

He looked at me, and I watched all our conversations finally kick in. Hundreds of late nights on his scratchy couch watching TV, talking at the half-open front door. Half a million “thanks, but I’m not going back”s and the thunk of him locking the door behind me.

He gave me the tiniest nod, a flicker of a smile.

“It’s over, kid,” I said. “For real this time.”

He kept nodding, kept drying his eyes.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

“Okay?” I repeated.

“Okay.” He looked at Dulcie. “Let’s get back to work.”

TWENTY-THREE

Knight

Weddings are boring. They’re sweet, and the procession is fun to watch, but there’s this giant gap in the middle where the priest just talks and talks and talks. The photographer was off in the corner, painting the room with little white flashes and scuttling around behind the altar, trying to find the money shot.

I’m sure you’ve heard this, but when the bride finally comes in and everyone looks at her, you’re supposed to look at the groom. Watch him see his long-time girlfriend in a big poofy white princess dress and expensive hair and shiny jewelry. In theory you wouldn’t think this would be such a crazy moment. It’s just a dress. It’s just a church. It’s just some random guy at a piano singing them into a different tax bracket.

But Casey. The door swung open, and there was Sam in this gorgeous mermaid dress, a hundred miles of lace stretching out behind her, and I looked at Casey—and it was like he’d been struck by lightning.

I watched him mouth, “Holy shit,” and stumble back a little. I’d never seen him smile so big.

I know the feeling, man.

We made it to the reception, and everyone was gathered in a little huddle around Sam and Casey. Including Bram, who had shown up after all, wearing his now infamous daytime protection gear.

Dia, standing next to (and openly groping) Gabe, made an incredulous face. “Is that a unicorn?”

“I think that’s a unicorn,” said Gabe.

“Motherfucking unicorn,” said Casey, whistling.

“…It is,” Bram said tiredly. “How astute of you to notice.”

“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you still have this,” said Sam, pulling at the parka to get a better look at the aforementioned unicorn.

Me, Dulcie, Quillan, and everyone else who’d seen the parka in action did a double take.

“Wait, wait, wait. Sam gave it to you?” I asked.

Bram sighed, closing his eyes.

“Well, yeah. Where did you think he got it? Sorry, was that a secret?” Sam squinted at him. “Is this really the only anti-sun thing you own? You know I bought it as a joke and then I charmed it with a protection spell.”

Bram smiled at her. “I always liked your jokes.”

She raised her eyebrows at him. “Did you?”

“No. But I liked this one. You were not incorrect; I am, in fact, ‘majestic AF.’”

Laughter rippled through the group. She punched him playfully on the shoulder.

Bram laughed. Bram laughed and meant it.

What a fucking day.

***

Dulcie

“It’s just so weird,” I said. “Being back.”

“Back alive, or back in the building?”

“Both. But I mean, the building.”

The building. The Association of Netherworld Creatures, rebuilt in exactly the same spot where it had gone up in very colorful smoke. Not remotely the same style of building, or the same floorplan. The parking lot still looked like the parking lot, though. We walked by windows, big ones, and I stared out of them, thinking they were probably a security hazard.

It was several stories high, and all white and blue and gray, and everything was shiny. I could see other people’s reflections in the floor as they walked.

“It looks…” I said.

Knight laughed. “Nothing like it used to.”

“Yeah,” I said. “How many people are working here now?”

“Fifty. We’re still filling slots. Construction wrapped up… a month ago, maybe?”

“Wow. Rush job.”

“I know.”

Someone whistled.

“Jesus Christ,” said Henry, looking at everything. “This is huge.”

I grinned. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

Henry walked up to us. Knight extended his hand and Henry took it, shaking it firmly.

“Good to have you back, man,” said Knight.

“Good to be back.” Henry stuck his hands in his pockets and looked around again, nodding. “This is impressive. It almost looks like we have funding.”

“We do have funding.”

“Well that’s just neat. Who’s funding us?”

“Preternatural Division. Eventually, we’ll be an independent organization like the FBI, but it’s gonna take us a second to get there.”

“Really,” said Henry. “What’s oversight gonna look like?”

“Same as everywhere else. Routine checks. I think we have a resident accountant who’s supposed to make sure we’re not spending all of our money on hookers.”

“Cool, cool.” Henry looked at me, still a little sheepish. “Are you back, too? Here, I mean. In the office.”

“I want to be,” I said.

“You’ll have to get recertified. Both of you.” Knight frowned at me. “Where is your gun?”

“I don’t know. It was on my body when I left it,” I said.

Henry snorted loudly. Knight smiled at him.

“Probably in evidence, then,” said Henry.

Knight nodded. “We should just… get you a new one.”

“Yes. Excellent. Give me guns,” I said.

“Just the one gun.”

“No. Many guns. All guns.”

“No.”

“You can’t stop me.”

“It is literally my job to stop you, Dulcie.”

“Viva la revolution,” I said, completely deadpan.

Knight and Henry grinned at me. It wasn’t even that things had gone back to normal—this had never been our normal; Knight and I had been on the fritz since before I ever even met Henry—this was a new normal. This was the kind of thing I’d been missing out on this whole time. Friends being friends. Guys being pals. People just acting like people who didn’t secretly want to murder each other. It was nice.

“So how do we do this, boss?” asked Henry.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

“What?”

“Knight’s my boss.”

“So?” Knight demanded with a smile. And it was a super sexy smile. One that reminded me we still hadn’t had sex. Yes, I’d been staying at his house, but I hadn’t gotten to the point yet where I felt like I was ready to have sex with him. I can’t really explain why. Maybe it was owing to the fact that there was so much to take care of during the day, with visits and explanations and clothes buying and setting up accounts etc. etc. that by the time night came around, I was exhausted.

Or maybe it was more than that. Either way, Knight was completely understanding. He didn’t push me. He didn’t even bring it up. He just continued to sleep beside me, offering me my space, even with his raging erection each morning.

“So, I can’t work here,” I said with a laugh.

Henry was confused, but Knight had the biggest, cheesiest grin on his face.

“What’s up with you?” I said.

“Actually, we took care of that.”

“Took care of what?” asked Henry.

“The thing where coworkers can’t date.”

Dating. I was dating Knightly Vander. Again.

Fucking finally.

“How?” I asked, heart thumping.

“Well, it’s our organization now,” he said with a shrug. “Like, properly. And I’m kind of in charge of literally everything.”

“Oh, Hades, who did that?”

“Casey’s mom.”

“I feel like should be cheating.”

“She’s the head of the Preternatural Division of the FBI, and she was tasked with overseeing the reconstruction of the ANC. She spoke on our behalf to… whoever is actually supposed to be in charge of all this, and they gave me the reigns.” His grin widened. “So I made some changes.”

“I feel like you have a conflict of interest,” I said.

“Oh, I definitely do. I have the sexiest conflict of interest known to man.” He shrugged. “And I’m also not the only one who wanted to change the rule. We always worked well together. Separating people just means they now have to work with some random person, and they might hate each other, and that compromises the investigation in a totally different way. Maybe a worse way.”

“So I can totally date my boss now?”

“Why, yes. Yes, you can.” He tilted his head. “Why do you ask?”

I punched him playfully in the shoulder. He barely moved, and the movement was only because he saw me coming. That part was going to be the strangest, not being stupidly strong anymore.

“There’s some paperwork we need to fill out, though. Christina will have it.”

“Christina is here?”

“Yeah. Director of Humane Resources.”

“Cool. What kind of paperwork?”

“Just promising we won’t sue the ANC if we break up, not letting ourselves be biased, that kind of thing.”

“Biased against what?”

“Like if one of us committed a crime.”

“So, like, I promise to turn in my boyfriend if he takes all the staplers in the building.”

“Basically.”

I thought of Quillan, catching him in that house in the middle of nowhere… That felt like a lifetime ago and I supposed it was.

“Henry, why don’t you head on over to Christina?” said Knight. “I’m gonna show Dulcie around. Walk her through the building.” He threw me this weird, twisty little smile.

“Is that what they’re calling it now?” said Henry.

Knight chuckled. “Fuck off, Henry.”

Henry nodded, raising his hands. “Fucking off. See you later.”

Henry stuck his hands in his pockets and plodded off down the hall. Nowhere in a building this big and echoey was anyone ever truly out of earshot, but after he got about halfway down the giant white hallway, Knight whispered, “Do you wanna see my office?”

Like a high school kid who snuck his hamster to school in his backpack. “Yes, I want to see your office.”

***

“So this is your office,” I said inanely.

“It is.” He leaned against the front of his desk—a big flat rectangle of metal with a wood top pretending to be chic—and crossed his arms, watching me looking at everything for the first time.

“Are the big windows such a good idea?” I said, knocking on them.

“They’re bulletproof.”

“Yeah, so’s concrete, and it’s less expensive.”

“Casey’s mom said it would be better for morale.”

I quirked an eyebrow at him. “Morale?”

He shrugged. “I like it.”

“I don’t not like it, I just wonder. For, like, security purposes, maybe a big glass building isn’t the best plan?”

“We could knock it all down. Try again.”

“Yeah, no thanks.”

“Big pissed-off looking concrete box. Everyone can drive bad-guy SUVs and wear sunglasses indoors.”

“Okay, I get it,” I said, laughing. I gave him a thumbs-up. “Windows good.” I looked at all the stuff on his desk—stapler, magic eight-ball, laptop. And I stopped. “What the fuck?”

“What?”

I picked up the book. My book, the one I’d written about the pirate that was definitely totally not supposed to be Quillan. Captain Slade’s motherfucking Bounty. I’d forgotten it even existed. “Why do you have this?”

He grinned at me.

“Holy shit, you read it.”

“Of course I did. A few times. A bunch of times. More times than I should probably admit.”

“… And?”

“And it’s one hundred percent about Quillan.”

I felt myself go red. “Is not.”

“Oh, it so fucking is. Here, look.” He snatched the book out of my hand and started flipping through it with intent. Like he knew what page the thing he was looking for was on. “‘Captain Slade’s blond hair glistening against the sky like a sun,’” he read, smiling at me as I blushed crimson. “Hmm, who do we know who’s blond?”

“Plenty of people are blond. It’s just a fucking hair color.” I grabbed at it and he lifted it higher. “Christina’s blonde, for fuck’s sake.”

“Wow, were you this short before you died?” He didn’t move as I jumped at it.

“Fuck you.”

“Oh, look, and Captain Slade has amber eyes, who does that sound like?”

“For fuck’s sake, it’s not Quillan!”

“Oh, really?” he said. “Because I have a first edition, and your precious find and replace didn’t catch everything.”

I stopped cold. “What?”

Knight cleared his throat. “‘Captain Quillan reached out to Clementine and grabbed her by the bodice,’” he read. “Bodice. That’s just a girly shirt, right?”

“Okay, that’s enough,” I said, but I was laughing as I made another lunge for the book. “We’re burning it. We’re burning it right now.”

“Mmm, I think not. I think I’m going to keep this forever.”

“Like hell you are.”

“You don’t want to set off the smoke detectors, do you?”

I jabbed him in the gut, and he doubled over—not completely, but enough for me to get a hold of the book. I pulled, but his grip was iron. He grabbed it with both hands, and then I grabbed it with both hands, and then we were playing tug-of-war with Captain Slade’s Bounty, of all things, and honestly, I didn’t know how to feel about that.

He gave it a really firm tug. I didn’t let go, so it pulled me into him. I thudded into his chest like a car into a brick wall.

We looked at each other. We blinked.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” he said.

We dropped the book.

And it was in that moment that I realized I was ready. It was no longer about everyone else—no longer about explanations. Now it was finally just Knight and me. And I was ready.

“Knight?”

“Yeah?”

I swallowed hard. “I’m ready.”

And the pants were off.

There was no time for a striptease, no buildup. Foreplay was a game, and we were already winning. I pulled my shirt over my head, threw it aside, got Knight out of his, and Hades, the shape of him—the sculpted muscles, the scars, the gentle bronze caress of the California sun scoring his skin.

It was him, all of him, parts of him I hadn’t seen or touched in so long, too long. His mouth was on mine, teeth plucking at my lips like strings on a guitar. His tongue, seeking, finding, lolling. His hair, soft, just the slightest bit of sweat, gathered up in my fingers, pulled softly, barely. He kissed his way down my face, my jaw, my throat. Further, further. Between my boobs, to the place where my breastbone dipped.

“Are we about to fuck in your office?” I asked breathlessly.

He flashed me a villainous grin. “No, Dulcie, we’re about to make love in my office.”

“Oh my God, you always were the romantic,” I answered with a smile of my own.

As regards the office, it seemed like the best place for us to fuck. The only place really. Because this was where everything had started—Knight as my boss. Knight as my partner. Knight.

He lifted me up, and I wrapped my legs around his middle, squeezing, feeling the bulge in his boxers, straining against the fabric. In my heart, there was a drummer, and he was high on every upper known to man.

Blood surged south, my vagina relaxing, softening, lubrication slicking the insides. It had been way too long, and it was ready and raring to go. He stopped, kicked off his boxers. He knelt on the rough gray carpet, gently set me down, and pulled off my panties, slowly, staring at me. He wouldn’t look away. I couldn’t look away. There was a laser line of love pulled taut between us, getting shorter, dragging us closer.

Then he was on top of me, looming like a mountain, the shadow of a beard on his face. His eyes were bright as burning magnesium in the dark, flashing like neon. Animal eyes. He was so much bigger than I remembered, bigger all the way down. He cupped my face in one hand, pushed back my hair on one side so it splayed out on the floor. He ran his fingers up and down the points of my ear. He stayed there for just a moment, staring, a silhouette with stars for eyes, backlit by the universe. Somewhere, there was the sound of a door slamming.

He was right at my opening, hovering. Lock meets key. It had been so long since this door was opened. Open it, open it, open it. I waited for the click.

“Dulcie,” he said, already panting, exhilarated.

“Knight,” I said. I reached up and touched his face. He put his hand over mine.

We clicked together. Lock in key.

He thrust himself into me, and gasp is barely the right word. My lungs weren’t big enough for all the air I needed. My hands were on his chest, feeling my way through the map of him, the rivers, the mountain of his chest, the valley of his collarbone. He ran his own hand over my stomach, up to my breasts, touching them, squeezing, moving across me like water over stones. Waves of movement, strong and deliberate, the feeling of him rock-hard inside me.

And then an explosion, a firework, strings of bright orange electricity rocketing through me. My whole body wriggled with it, and he smiled. He saw it, and he swelled with pride. My back arched, my knees bent, my hips rose to meet him with a new urgency. He met the new pulsing in my body with stronger thrusts, and I don’t know how the hell he timed it so well, but they were in sync, throb and thrust driving my body to the cliff and dangling me over the edge.

Tremble, bubble, burst.

Again. And again. And again.

After a certain point, he was just showing off.

We rolled, and then I was on top of him.

“Your turn,” I said.

He held me, and he ran his hand down my back, halting at my butt and squeezing gently. I pressed myself into him, legs wrapping around his middle, pulling him towards that impossible place between him and my navel that needed him desperately.

The hunger was a thick, pulsating fire, a ball of magma squeezing itself out from between cracks in the earth. He found it, ground against it, and it spurted, sparking, little red droplets landing and diffusing on flat beds of black volcanic rock. He closed his eyes, finding the safe, warm place inside me. I moved on top of him, and together, we brought him to the edge.

I watched him climax, all the tension going out of him. I lay down on him then and felt his heart beating in his chest, gently thrumming, racing and steadily slowing.

Breathing. Just breathing.

He wrapped his arms around me and just held me and I held him back.

“Fuck, I missed you,” he said in a soft voice. “I missed you so fucking much, Dulce. There were times… times when I didn’t even know how to get through the day and how to get through the day after that.”

“Well, now we can answer those questions together,” I said and I could feel the smile in my voice.

“I haven’t stopped smiling since you came back. I keep wondering when the dream is going to shatter, when the balloon is going to pop.”

“Hopefully not until we both are old and gray and it’s our time to go. Our right time.”

He nodded and we both grew quiet for a while. Just listened to each other’s breathing.

After a while, he asked, “Where did you go? Really?”

“I don’t know,” I answered in a soft voice. “Hell, maybe. It was dark.”

“Was the Darkness there with you?”

“Yeah. But some voice told me it was asleep.”

“Asleep?”

“Yeah. It said Volpin couldn’t die. And that I didn’t belong there because I could die and because I’d awakened.”

“So that’s why it sent you back? Because you woke up?”

“I think so?”

He pulled me a little closer. I lay my head on his chest. He wanted to say something else, I could feel it. No empathy magic, just… that feeling you get about people you know.

“Penny for your thoughts?” I asked.

“… Did I save you?” he asked. Kinda quiet, like he felt weird asking. “From Hell, I mean.”

I pushed myself up a little so I could look at him. “Actually it’s weird you say that because when I woke up, I thought of you and this… connection we have. This connection we’ve always had. How did you know?”

He didn’t look at me, but he was smiling so big. He sighed, squeezed me. Rolled over and wrapped both his arms around me. “No reason.”

He was quiet for a second. I listened to him breathe, felt his chest rise and fall against me.

“I love, you Dulcie.”

“I love you, too.”

“No, really.” He sat up, and I rolled onto my back so I could look at him. Eyes still glowing. He looked so determined. “I mean it. I love you. I am in love with you, Dulcie. I can’t stand to be away from you. I would kill for you, I would die for you.” He paused as he seemed to be searching for the right words. “I thought these feelings would go away after we’d worked together long enough, I thought they’d go away after you dumped me, or after I…” His fists clenched. He closed his eyes for a second and took a deep breath. “After everything. But they never did. Even after I knew you were gone… the feelings wouldn’t stop. It never got easier with time. It was like there was this huge, gaping hole inside me and it kept getting bigger.”

I sat up. I put one arm around his back, put the other hand on his face, and pulled him down to me. We kissed, and a feeling swept over me. A feeling of euphoria so profound, I can’t even describe it.

He stopped, our foreheads pressed together, his hand on my face, mine on his. The rest of the world was gone; this was all the space that remained, here between us, perched on our noses. The sound of us breathing, the noise of the world. This was it. This was all that mattered. This was everything.

“Knightly O’Neil,” I said.

He laughed. “Dulcie Vander.”

“Dulcie Vander-O’Neil?”

“Sounds kind of pretentious. Like your family made a billion dollars hawking shoe polish a hundred years ago.”

“Shoe polish?”

“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “Shoe polish sounds like an old-money thing.”

“It does? Maybe an old-man thing.”

He chuckled. “They still used shoe polish in the twenties, right?”

“We still use shoe polish now.”

“See, this is the kind of thing you would know if your family made a billion dollars hawking shoe polish.”

“So my ancestors were shoe polish hawkers?”

“Hey, maybe.”

I pushed him, giggling. Then I reached up and laced my fingers through his reaching hand. He brought it slowly down to his mouth like he was going to kiss it, then pulled me down hard on top of him.

“Hey!”

“Hey, yourself,” he said. He wrapped his arms around me tightly. Really tightly.

“I’m stuck,” I said.

“That’s the idea.”

I wiggled for a second. Knight lay his head back on the carpet.

“Resistance is futile,” he said.

I stopped moving and looked at him. His eyes were closed now, and he had the softest smile on his face. I pulled my arms out from under his, and he let me, resting his hands on my bare waist. I crossed my arms and rested my head on them, watching him. And this. The feel of him breathing under me. The warmth of his whole body pressed against mine. That little smile, joy slathered across the both of us, thick as sunlight.

“Can I ask you something?” he asked.

“Always.”

He swallowed hard. “Did you… ever have feelings for Bram?”

“Yes,” I said, figuring there was no reason to lie to him. “But they were always confusing feelings. It was like I would start to like him and then he’d do something that would make me not like him again.”

Knight nodded with a smile. “Do you think you could have… been happy with him?”

“I have no idea!” I said with a play swat to his arm. “I never could have even given him the chance to make me happy,” I continued.

“Why?”

“Because you were always in the picture. And everyone else was always in your shadow.”

“Even after… everything happened. All the bad shit?”

“Even then.”

He propped himself up on one elbow and pulled me in with his other hand. Kissed me like a sunrise kisses the sea. His eyes flashed white. When a Loki does that, it means he’s found someone strong enough to carry his kids. Hooray for me and my super-powered womb.

“Man, your body really wants me to have your babies,” I said.

He laughed. “What?”

“Your eyes.”

“Oh.” He sucked in his lip. “Dulcie, I have to confess something.”

“What did you do now?”

He grinned. “Nothing, nothing. I just… that was a lie. Sort of.”

“What do you mean?”

He thought for a second. “I told you that night in your kitchen that when a Loki’s eyes glow, it means he’s found a ‘mate.’ Someone strong enough to bear his seed.”

“Yeah? And?”

“That part’s true.”

“Okay. What’s the lie?”

“That’s not all it means.” He sat up, taking me with him. He laughed at himself. “It’s a love thing.”

“A love thing,” I echoed.

“Like. It happens when you’re in love.”

“Thank you, Knight, I never would have gotten there on my own if you hadn’t told me,” I said with a laugh. “Even so… why didn’t you just tell me that?”

“I was embarrassed. We were super early into the relationship, and I didn’t know if you felt the same way. And it kind of freaked me out. It hadn’t ever happened to me before.”

“Wow. What a virgin-y thing to say.”

“Shut up, you know what I mean,” he said, smiling. “Seriously, it was ridiculous. I honestly didn’t know what to make of it.” His eyes softened. “No one’s ever caught me off guard the way you have.”

I kissed him again, long and languid. His lips were warm.

“Me neither,” I said.

He laughed. “Our kids are gonna be such a fucking disaster.”

Bubbles of laughter, popping on our skin. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, they are.” I swallowed. “Are we having kids?”

He frowned at me. “Fuck yes, we’re having kids. A whole litter of them.”

“Oh my God.”

“Like five or six.”

“Um, who is the one who’s going to be birthing these children again?”

Somebody knocked on the office door. Which wasn’t locked.

“We’re busy,” Knight called, at the same time that I yelled, “Don’t come in, we’re… having a meeting.”

“Having a meeting?” said Knight.

“It’s not a lie.”

There was a shhh-shhh-ing sound as someone slid two thin packets of paper under the door. I rolled all the way over and grabbed them.

Paperwork. The relationship thing. One had my name already written on it in blue ink. The other, of course, had Knight’s.

“... Thanks, Christina,” I called.

“I’ll wait,” came her muffled reply.

Knight and I looked at each other.

“Think Henry ratted us out?” he asked.

“Oh, definitely.”

He looked from me to the papers. His eyes flickered across my body, landing on my face. “…We’re really doing this,” he said.

“Well, yeah. I didn’t haul ass all the way back from Hell just to break up with you again.”

He grinned. “Excellent.” He pointed to his desk. “Hand me a pen, will you?”

I grabbed two, and we nakedly filled out our “yes, Knight/Dulcie is allowed to randomly slap my ass in the office” forms. I’m paraphrasing, of course.

We slid them back under the door.

“Thank you,” said Christina. “I’ll be back in ten minutes, and you’d better be decent.”

“Yes, Mom,” I said. Knight laughed.

She and her heels clicked away somewhere down the hall. A distant door opened and closed.

Knight looked at me. We both laughed, giddy like teenagers caught making out in the locker room.

He ran his hand up and down the inside of my thigh, lingering at the top. I pulsed.

“So. What do you think you’ll do now?” he asked.

I sighed dramatically. “Get dressed, I guess.”

“I mean after that.”

“… I’m working here, aren’t I?”

“You are. But the last time I checked…” He trailed his hand up higher and found the spot, pressing, just barely. “You don’t have an apartment anymore.”

“I could… get one,” I said. I was going to say more, but he pressed harder, twitched his finger sideways, and I let out a very undignified, squeaking gasp. Very distracting, this one.

“With all that money you have in a savings account that got closed when you died?”

“Oh, shit. Yeah. Where did…” He was making little circles now. “Where did that money go?”

“The state.”

“Mother. Fucker.” I groaned. “How long before my first paycheck?”

“A month. Same as everyone else.”

God fucking dammit. “I guess I could stay with Sam.”

Knight quirked his eyebrows at me. “Sam and Casey are not going to want you to live with them.”

“What?” I frowned. “Why? I’m fun to live with.”

“That’s why I want you to live with me.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“That’s kind of a big step.”

He cocked an eyebrow at me. “So is having five kids.”

I just shook my head. He ran his finger back and forth across that little nub, and I melted. “Also,” he continued, “I’d really love to be able to make love to you after work without having to drive an extra twenty minutes.”

“We could just fuck here.”

“I said after work.”

“I could drive to you.”

“You don’t have a car.”

“Well, it stands to reason that I should probably get one like really soon.”

“Buuuuuut, what if… hear me out…” He got up on all fours and loomed over me. He slid himself inside me, perfectly slowly, never breaking eye contact, watching the way it changed my breathing. He drew himself forward, back, forward, nudging little thrusts, coaxing, plaintive. He leaned down and whispered in my ear. “What if you didn’t have to?” He kissed my cheek, my nose, and pressed his mouth against mine. Once, twice, feather-light.

Between kisses, I said, “This is… a very… unfair… negotiation.”

“Ooh, does that mean I’m winning?” Forward again, and harder.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe’s good. I can work with maybe.”

“Oh, can you?”

“Tell you what,” he said. “You come and stay the weekend with me. And if you want to murder me by Monday, we’ll find you your own place. Okay?”

“With what money?”

“Money your perfect, amazing boyfriend is graciously going to give you.”

“Oh, good, so now I’m a sugar baby.”

“Only if you call me sugar daddy.”

“Absolutely fucking not.” I pushed him, and he rolled off me, lying on his back at my side. He rested his hand on his stomach and looked at me. I climbed on top of him but didn’t sink his erection inside me. Not yet.

“I would love to take our relationship to the next level, Dulce,” he said, all seriousness in his tone. “If you felt the same…”

“I do.”

“Then you’ll try it? You’ll move in with me?”

I took his hand and squeezed. “I will try it. But if I need my space...”

“I’ll get the fuck out, promise. I’ll go for a run with Blue, or I’ll go get you ice cream, or I’ll…”

“Shhh,” I said with a laugh as I brought my fingers to his mouth to shut him up.

He looked down, running his thumb across the back of my hand. He laced his fingers through mine. He sighed.

“Thank you,” he said. “For coming back for me.”

I shrugged. “You always come back for me—no matter where I am.”

“Of course.” He pulled me down and then rolled us so we were facing each other, on our sides. His lips brushed against mine, soft as sunlight, tongue rolling like waves.

Knightly Vander, bronze and warm and glowing. Eyes white as starlight.

He smiled. “Dulcie O’Neil. I will always come back for you.”

The End

The Dulcie O’Neil Series is complete so what will you read next?

If you enjoyed this series, I recommend the following:

The Underworld Series

The Lily Harper Series

The Haven Hollow Series

Also Available:

Better Off Dead

Lily Harper #1

by

H.P. Mallory

(read on for a sample)

Better Off Dead

“Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, For the straight foreward pathway had been lost.”

– Dante’s Inferno

ONE

The rain pelted the windshield relentlessly. Drops like little daggers assaulted the glass, only to be swept away by the frantic motion of the wipers. The scenery outside my window melted into dripping blobs of color through a screen of gray. I took my foot off the accelerator and slowed to forty miles an hour, focusing on the blurry yellow lines in the road.

Lightning stabbed the gray skies. A roar of thunder followed and the rain came down heavier, as if having been reprimanded for not falling hard enough.

“This rain is gonna keep on comin’, folks,” the radio meteorologist announced. Annoyed, I changed the station and resettled myself into my seat to the sound of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons, Summer.” Ha, Summer …

The rain morphed into hail. The visibility was slightly better, but now I was under a barrage of machine-gunned ice. I took a deep breath and tried to imagine myself on a sunny beach, sipping a strawberry margarita with a well-endowed man wearing nothing but a banana hammock and a smile.

In reality, I was as far from a cocktail on a sunny beach with Sven, the lust god, as possible. Nope, I was trapped in Colorado Springs in the middle of winter. If that weren’t bad enough, I was late to work. To make matters worse? Today was not only my yearly review but I also had to give a presentation to the CEO, defending my decision to move forward with a risky and expensive marketing campaign. So, yes, being late didn’t exactly figure into my plans.

With a sigh, I turned on my seat heater and tried to enact the presentation in my head, tried to remember the slides from my PowerPoint and each of the topics I needed to broach. I held my chin up high and cleared my throat, reminding myself to look the CEO and the board of directors in the eyes and not to say “um.”

“Choc-o-late cake,” I said out loud, opening my mouth wide and then bringing my teeth together again in an exaggerated way. “Choc-o-late cake.” It was a good way to warm up my voice and to remind myself to pronounce every syllable of every word. And, perhaps the most important point to keep in mind—not to rush.

This whole being late thing wasn’t exactly good timing, considering I was going to ask for a raise. With my heart rate increasing, I remembered the words of Jack Canfield, one of the many motivational speakers whose advice I followed like the Bible.

“῾When you’ve figured out what you want to ask for,’ Lily, ‘do it with certainty, boldness and confidence,’” I quoted, taking a deep breath and holding it for a count of three before I released it for another count of three. “Certainty, boldness and confidence,” I repeated to myself. “Choc-o-late cake.”

Feeling my heart rate decreasing, I focused on counting the stacks of chicken coops in the truck ahead of me—five up and four across. Each coop was maybe a foot by a foot, barely enough room for the chickens to breathe. White feathers decorated the wire and contrasted against the bright blue of a plastic tarp that covered the top layer of coops. The tarp was held in place by a brown rope that wove in and around the coops like spaghetti. I couldn’t help but feel guilty about the chicken salad sandwich currently residing in my lunch sack but then I remembered I had more important things to think about.

“Choc-o-late cake.”

The truck’s brake lights suddenly flashed red. The chicken coops rattled against one another as the truck lurched to a stop. A vindictive gust of wind caught the edge of the blue tarp and tore it halfway off the coops. As if heading for certain slaughter wasn’t bad enough, the chickens now had to freeze en route. My concern for the birds was suddenly interrupted by another flash of the truck’s brake lights.

Then I heard the sound of my cell phone ringing from my purse, which happened to be behind my seat. I reached behind myself, while still trying to pay attention to the road, and felt around for my purse. I only ended up ramming my hand into the cardboard box which held my velvet and brocade gown. The dress had taken me two months to make and was as historically accurate to the gothic period of the middle ages as was possible.

I finally reached my purse and then fingered my cell phone, pulling it out as I noticed Miranda’s name on the caller ID.

“Hi,” I said.

“I’m just calling to make sure you didn’t forget your dress,” Miranda said in her high pitch, nasally voice which sounded like a five-year-old with a cold.

“Forget it?” I scoffed, shaking my head at the very idea. “Are you kidding? This is only one of the most important evenings of our lives!” Yes, tonight would mark the night that, if successful, Miranda and I would be allowed to move up the hierarchical chain of our medieval reenactment club. We’d started as lowly peasants and had worked our way up to the merchant class and now we sought to be allowed entrance into the world of the knights.

“Can you imagine finally being able to enter the class of the knights?” Miranda continued. Even though I obviously couldn’t see her, I could just imagine her pushing her Coke-bottle glasses back up to the bridge of her nose as she gazed longingly at the empire-waisted, fur trimmed gown (also historically accurate!) that I’d made for her birthday present.

“Yeah, instead of burlap, we can wear silk!” I chirped as I nodded and thought about how expensive it was going to be to costume ourselves if we actually did get admitted into the class of the knights.

“And maybe Albert will finally want to talk to me,” Miranda continued, again in that dreamy voice.

I didn’t think becoming a knight’s lady would make Albert any more likely to talk to Miranda, but I didn’t say anything. If the truth be told, Albert was far more interested in the knights than he ever was in their ladies.

“Okay, Miranda, I gotta go. I’m almost at work,” I said and then heard the beep on the other line which meant someone else was trying to call me. I pulled the phone away from my ear and after quickly glancing at the road, I tried to answer my other call. That was when I heard the sound of brakes screeching.

I felt like I was swimming through the images that met me next—my phone landing on my lap as I dropped it, my hands gripping the wheel until my knuckles turned white, the pull of the car skidding on the slick asphalt, and the tail end of the truck in front of me, up close and personal. I braced myself for the inevitable impact.

Even though I had my seatbelt on, the jolt was immense. I was suddenly thrown forward only to be wrenched backwards again, as if by the invisible hands of some monstrous Titan. Tiny threads of anguish weaved up my spine until they became an aching symphony that spanned the back of my neck.

The sound of my windshield shattering pulled my thoughts from the pain. I opened my right eye—since the left appeared to be sealed shut—to find my face buried against the steering wheel.

I couldn’t feel anything. The searing pain in my neck was soon a fading memory and nothing but the void of numbness reigned over the rest of my body. As if someone had turned on a switch in my ears, a sudden screeching met me like an enemy. The more I listened, the louder it got—a high-pitched wailing. It took me a second to realize it was the horn of my car.

My vision grew cloudy as I focused on the white of the feathers that danced through the air like winter fairies, only to land against the shattered windshield and drown in a deluge of red. Sunlight suddenly filtered through the car until it was so bright, I had to close my good eye.

And then there was nothing at all.

***

“Number three million, seven hundred fifty thousand forty-five.”

I shook my head as I opened my eyes, blinking a few times as the scratchy voice droned in my ears. Not knowing where I was, or what was happening, I glanced around nervously, absorbing the nondescript beige of the walls. Plastic, multicolored chairs littered the room like discarded toys. What seemed like hundreds of people dotted the landscape of chairs in the stadium-sized room. Next to me, though, was only an old man. Glancing at me, he frowned. I fixed my attention on the snarly looking employees trapped inside multiple rows of cubicles. Choosing not to focus on them, I honed in on an electric board above me that read: Number 3,750,045.

The fluorescent green of the board flashed and twittered as if it had just zapped an unfortunate insect. I shook my head again, hoping to remember how the heck I’d gotten here. My last memory was in my car, driving in the rain as I chatted with Miranda. Then there was that truck with all the chickens. An accident—I’d gotten into an accident. After that, my thoughts blurred into each other. But nothing could explain why I was suddenly at the DMV.

Maybe I was dreaming. And it just happened to be the most lucid, real dream I’d ever had and the only time I’d ever realized I was dreaming while dreaming. Hey, stranger things have happened, right?

I glanced around again, taking in the low ceiling. There weren’t any windows in the dreary room. Instead, posters with vibrant colors decorated the walls, looking like circus banners. The one closest to me read: Smoking kills. A picture of a skeleton in cowboy gear, atop an Appaloosa further emphasized the point. Someone had scribbled “ha ha” in the lower corner.

“Three million, seven hundred fifty thousand forty-five!”

Turning toward the voice, I realized it belonged to an old woman with orange hair, and 1950’s-style rhinestone glasses on a string. A line of twelve or so porcelain cat statues, playing various instruments, decorated the ledge of her cubicle. What was it about old women and cats?

The cat lady scanned the room, peering over the ridiculous glasses and tapping her outlandishly long, red fingernails against the ledge. Her mouth was so tight, it swallowed her lips. As her narrowed gaze met mine, I flushed and averted my eyes to my lap, where I noticed a white piece of paper clutched in my right hand. I stared at the black numbers before the realization dawned on me.

Three million, seven hundred fifty thousand forty-five. She was calling my number! Without hesitation, I jumped up.

“That’s me!” I announced, feeling embarrassed as the old man glared at me. “Sorry.”

“Come on then,” the woman interrupted. “I don’t have all day.”

Approaching her desk, I thought this dream couldn’t get much weirder—I mean, I was number three million or something and yet there were only a few hundred people in the room? I handed the woman my ticket. She scowled at me, her scarlet lips so raw and wet that her mouth looked like a piece of talking sushi. She rolled the ticket into a little ball and flung it behind her. It landed squarely in her wastebasket, vanishing amid a sea of other white, scrunched paper balls.

“Name?” she asked as she worked a huge wad of pink gum between her clicking jaws.

“Um, Lily,” I said with a pause, feigning interest in a cat playing a violin. It wore an obscene smile and appeared to be dancing, one chubby little leg lifted in the semblance of a jig. I touched the cold statue and ran the pad of my index finger along the ridges of his fur. I was beginning to think this might not be a dream, because I could clearly touch and feel things. But if this weren’t a dream, how did I get here? It was like I’d just popped up out of nowhere.

“Last name?”

I faced the woman again. “Um, Harper.”

The woman simply nodded, continuing to chomp on her gum like a cow chewing its cud. “Harper … Harper … Harper,” she said as she stared at the computer screen in front of her.

“Um, could you, uh, tell me why I’m here?” My voice sounded weak and thin. I had to remind myself that I was the master of my own destiny and needed to act like it. And that was when I remembered my presentation. A feeling of complete panic overwhelmed me as I searched the wall for a clock so I could figure out how much time remained before I was due to sway a panel of mostly unenlightened penny-pinchers on why we needed to invest nearly a quarter of a million in advertising. “What time is it?” I demanded.

“Time?” the woman repeated and then frowned at me. “Not my concern.”

I felt my eyebrows knot in the middle as I glanced behind me, wondering if there was a clock to be found anywhere. The blank of the walls was answer enough. I faced forward again, now more nervous than before and still at a complete loss as to where I was or why. “Um, what am I doing here?” I repeated, not meaning to sound so … stupid.

The woman’s wrinkled mouth stretched into a smile, which looked even scarier than all the grimaces she’d given me earlier. She turned to the computer and typed something, her talon-like fingernails covering the keyboard with exaggerated flourishes. She hit “enter” and turned the screen to face me.

“You’re here because you’re dead.”

“What?” It was all I could say as I felt the bottom of my stomach give way, my figurative guts spilling all over my feet. “You’re joking.”

She wasn’t laughing though. Instead, she sighed like I was taking up too much of her time. She flicked her computer screen with the long, scarlet fingernail of her index finger. The tap against the screen reverberated through my head like the blade of a dull axe.

“Watch.”

With my heart pounding in my chest, I glanced at the screen, and saw what looked like the opening of a low-budget film. Rain spattered the camera lens, making it difficult to decipher the scene beyond. One thing I could make out was the bumper-to-bumper traffic. It appeared to be a traffic cam in real time.

“I don’t know what this has to do …”

She chomped louder, her jaw clicking with the effort, sounding like it was mere seconds from breaking. “Just watch it.”

I crossed my arms against my flat chest and stared at the screen again. An old, Chevy truck came rumbling down the freeway, stopping and starting as the traffic dictated. The camera angle panned toward the back of the truck. I recognized the load of chicken coops piled atop one another. Like déjà vu, the camera lens zoomed in on the blue tarp covering the chickens. It was just a matter of time before the wind would yank the tarp up and over the coops, leaving the chickens exposed to the elements.

Realization stirred in my gut like acid reflux. I dropped my arms and leaned closer to the screen, still wishing this was a dream, but somehow knowing it wasn’t. The camera was now leaving the rear of the truck and it started panning behind the truck, to a white Volvo S40. My white Volvo.

I braced myself against the idea that this could be happening—that I was about to see my car accident. Who the heck was filming? And moreover, where in the heck were they? This looked like it’d been filmed by more than one cameraman, with multiple angles, impossible for just one photographer.

I heard the sound of wheels squealing, knowing only too well what would happen next. I forced my attention back to the strange woman who was now curling her hair around her index finger, making the Cheeto-colored lock look edible.

“So someone videotaped my accident, what does that have to do with why I’m here?” I asked in an unsteady voice, afraid for her answer. “And you should also know that I’m incredibly late to work and I’m due to give a presentation not only to the CEO but also the board of directors.”

She shook her head. “You really don’t get it, do you?”

“I don’t think you get it,” I snapped. The woman grumbled something unintelligible and turned the computer monitor back towards her, then opened a manila file sitting on her desk. She rummaged through the papers until she found what she was looking for and started scanning the sheet, using her fingernail to guide her.

“Ah, no wonder,” she said, snapping her wad of gum. She sighed as her triangular eyebrows reached for the ceiling. “He is not going to be happy.”

I leaned on the counter, wishing I knew what was going on so I could get the heck out of here and on with my life. “No wonder what?”

She shook her head. “Not for me to explain. Gotta get the manager.”

Picking up the phone, she punched in an extension, then turned around and spoke in a muffled tone. The fact that I wasn’t privy to whatever she was discussing even though it involved me was annoying, to say the least. A few minutes later, she ended her cocooned conversation and pointed to the pastel chairs behind me.

“Have a seat. The manager will be with you in a minute.”

“I don’t have time for this,” I said gruffly, trying to act out a charade of the fact that I was the master of my own destiny. “Didn’t you hear me? I have to give a presentation!”

“The manager will be with you in a minute,” she repeated in the same droll tone and then faced her screen again as if to say our conversation was over.

With hollow resignation, I threw my hands up in the air, but returned to the seat I’d hoped to vacate permanently. The plastic felt cold and unwelcoming. It creaked and groaned as if taunting me about my weight. I didn’t need a stupid chair to remind me I was fat. I melted into the L-shaped seat and stretched my short legs out before me, trying to relax, and not to cry. I closed my eyes and breathed in for three seconds and out for three seconds.

Lily, stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness, I told myself, quoting one of my favorite self-help gurus, Richard Carlson. And you aren’t mentally ill, are you?

No, but I might be dead! I railed back at myself. But if you really were dead, why don’t you feel like it? I reached down to pinch myself, just to check if it would hurt and, what-do-you-know? It did … So, really, I can’t be dead. And furthermore, if I were dead, where in the heck am I now? I can’t imagine the DMV exists anywhere near heaven. If I’d gone south instead … oh jeez …

Don’t be ridiculous, Lily Harper! This is nothing more than some sort of bad dream, courtesy of your subconscious because you’re nervous about your presentation and your review.

I closed my eyes and willed myself to stop thinking about the what ifs. I wasn’t dead. It was a joke. Heck, the woman was weird—anyone with musician cat statues couldn’t be all there. And once I met with this manager of hers, I’d be sure to express my dissatisfaction.

You are the master of your own destiny, I told myself again.

I opened my eyes and watched the woman click her fingernails against the keyboard. The sound of a door opening caught my attention and I glanced up to find a very tall, thin man coming toward the orange-haired demon. He glanced at me, then headed toward the woman, who leaned in and whispered something in his ear. His eyes went wide; then his eyebrows knitted in the middle.

It didn’t look good.

He nodded three, four times then cleared his throat, ran his hands down his suit jacket and approached me.

“Ms. Harper,” he started and I raised my head. “Will you please come with me?”

I stood up and the chair underneath me sighed with relief. I ignored it and followed the man through the maze of cubicles into his office.

“Please have a seat,” he said, peering down his long nose at me. He closed the door behind us, and in two brief strides, reached his desk and took a seat.

I didn’t say anything, but sat across from him. He reached a long, spindly finger toward his business card holder and produced a white, nondescript card. It read:

Jason Streethorn

Manager

AfterLife Enterprises

“We need to make this quick,” I started. “I’m late to work and I have to give a presentation. Can we discuss whatever damages you want to collect from the insurance companies of the other vehicles involved in the accident over the phone?” I paused for a second as I recalled the accident. “Actually, I think I was at fault.”

“I see,” he said and then sighed.

I didn’t know what to say, so I just looked at him dumbly, ramming the sharp corners of the business card into the fleshy part of my index finger until it left a purple indentation in my skin.

The man cleared his throat. He looked like a skeleton.

“Ms. Harper, it seems we’re in a bit of a pickle.”

“A pickle?”

Jason Streethorn nodded and diverted his eyes. That’s when I knew I wasn’t going to like whatever came out of his mouth next. It’s never good when people refuse to make eye contact with you.

“Yes, as I learned from my secretary, Hilda, you don’t know why you’re here.”

“Right. And just so you know, Hilda wasn’t very helpful,” I said purposefully.

“Yes, she preferred I handle this.”

“Handle this?” I repeated, my voice cracking. “What’s going on?”

He nodded again and then took a deep breath. “Well, you see, Ms. Harper, you died in a car accident this afternoon. But the problem is: you weren’t supposed to.”

I was quiet for exactly four seconds. “Is this some sort of joke?” I sputtered finally while still trying to regain my composure.

He shook his head and glanced at me. “I’m afraid not.”

His shoulders slumped as another deep sigh escaped his lips. He seemed defeated, more exhausted than sad. Even though my inner soul was starting to believe him—that didn’t mean my intellect was prepared to accept it. Then something occurred to me and I glanced up at him, irritated.

“If I’m going to be on some stupid reality show, and this whole thing is a setup, you better tell me now because I’ve had enough,” I said, scouring the small office for some telltale sign of A/V equipment. Or failing that, Ashton Kutcher. “And, furthermore, my boss and the board of directors aren’t going to react well at all.” I took a deep breath.

“Ms. Harper, I know you’re confused, but I assure you, this isn’t a joke.” He paused and inhaled as deeply as I just had. “I’m sure this is hard for you to conceptualize. Usually, when it’s a person’s time to go, their guardian angel walks them through the process and accompanies them toward the light. Sometimes a relative or two might even attend.” His voice trailed until the air swallowed it entirely.

Somehow, the last hour of my life, which made no sense, was now making sense. I guess dying was a confusing experience.

He jumped up, as if the proverbial lightbulb had gone off over his head. Then, throwing himself back into his chair, he spun around, faced his computer and began to type. Sighing, I glanced around, taking in his office for the first time.

Like the waiting room, there weren’t any windows, just white walls without a mark on them. The air was still and although there wasn’t anything offensive about the odor, it was stagnant, like it wouldn’t know what to do if it met fresh air. The furniture consisted of Jason’s desk, his chair and the two chairs across from him, one of which I occupied. All the furniture appeared to be made of cheap pine, like what you’d find at IKEA. Other than the nondescript furniture, there was a computer and beside that, a long, plastic tube about nine inches in diameter, that disappeared into the ceiling. It looked like some sort of suction device.

With a self-satisfied smile, he faced me again. “We have your whole life in our database.”

He pointed toward the computer screen. “My whole life in his database” amounted to a word document with a humble blue border and my name scrawled across the top in Monotype Corsiva. It looked like a fifth grader’s book report.

He eyed the document and moved his head from right to left with such vigor, he reminded me of a cartoon character eating corn. Then I realized he was scanning through the Lily Harper book report. With an enthusiastic nod, he turned toward me.

“Looks like you lost your first tooth at age six. Um … In school, you were a year younger than everyone else, but smarter than the majority of your class. You double majored in English and Political Science. You were a director of marketing for a prestigious bank.”

“‘Were’ is a fitting word because after this, I’m sure I’ll be fired,” I grumbled.

The man paused, his eyes still on his computer. “When you were eighteen, you had a crush on your best friend and when you tried to kiss him, he pushed you away and told you he was gay.”

I stood up so fast, my chair bucked. “Okay, I’ve heard enough.”

The part about Matt rebuffing my kiss was something I’d never told anyone. I’d been too mortified. Guess the Word document was better than I thought.

“It’s all there,” Jason said as he turned to regard me with something that resembled sympathy.

“I don’t understand …” I started.

He nodded, as though satisfied we’d moved beyond the “you’re dead” conversation and into the “why you’re dead” conversation. He pulled open his top desk drawer and produced a spongy stress ball—the kind you work in your palm. The ball flattened and popped back into shape under the tensile strength of his skeletal fingers.

“I’m afraid your guardian angel wasn’t doing his job. This was supposed to be a minor accident—just to teach you not to text and drive, especially in the rain.”

“I wasn’t texting,” I ground out.

Jason shrugged as if whatever I was doing was trivial and beside the point. “Unfortunately, your angel was MIA and now here you are.”

I leaned forward, not quite believing my ears. “I have an angel?”

Jason nodded. “Everyone does. Some are just a little better than others.”

I shook my head, wondering if there was a limit to how much information my small brain could process before it went on overload. “So, let me understand this, not only do I have a guardian angel, but mine isn’t a very good one?”

“That about sums it up. Your angel …” He paused. “His name is Bill, by the way.”

“Bill?”

“He’s been on probation for … failing to do his duties for you and a few others.”

My hands tightened on the arms of my chair as I wondered at what point my non-comprehending brain would simply implode with all this ridiculousness. “Probation?”

He nodded. “Yes, it seems he’s had a bit of trouble with alcohol recently.”

“My angel is an alcoholic?” I slouched into my chair, the words “angel” and “alcoholic” swimming through the air as I began to doubt my sanity.

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

Jason parted his thin lips, but that exhausted look resurrected itself on his face. I was quick to interrupt, shock and anger suddenly warring within me until I couldn’t contain them any longer. “This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard! Alcoholic angels? I didn’t even know they could drink!”

“They can do everything humans can,” he said in an affronted tone, like he was annoyed that I was annoyed.

I sat back into my chair, not feeling any better with the situation, but also figuring my outbursts were finished for the immediate future. Well, until I could come to terms with what was really going on. But flipping out wasn’t going to do me any good. I needed to stay in control of myself and in control of my emotions. Wayne Dyer’s words, “it makes no sense to worry about things you have no control over because there's nothing you can do about them,” floated through my head as I tried to prepare myself for whatever I had coming.

Jason Streethorn, the office manager of death, folded his hands in his lap and leaned forward. “Since your angel, our employee, failed you, we do have an offer of restitution.”

Apparently, this was where the business side of our conversation began. “Restitution?”

“Yes, because this oversight is our fault, I’d like to offer you the chance to live again.”

I had to suspend my disbelief of being dead in the first place and just play along with him, figuring at some point I’d wake up and Jason Streethorn, the orange-haired woman and this DMV-like place would be nothing more than the aftermath of a cheese pizza and Coke eaten too close to bedtime. “Okay, that sounds good. What do I …”

He rebuffed me with his raised hand. “However, if you accept this offer, you’ll have to be employed by AfterLife Enterprises.”

I sank back into my chair, suddenly wanting nothing more than to pull my hair out. “What does that mean?”

He sighed, as though the explanation would take a while. “Unfortunately, AfterLife Enterprises is a bit on the unorganized side of late. When the computer system switched from 1999 to 2000, we weren’t prepared, and a computer glitch resulted in thousands of souls getting misplaced.”

The fact that death relied on a computer system which wasn’t even as good as Windows XP was too much. “The Y2K bug didn’t affect anyone.”

Jason worked the stress ball between his emaciated fingers, making multiple knuckles crack, the sound imbedding itself in my psyche. “On Earth, it didn’t affect anything, but such was not the case with the AfterLife.” He exhaled like he was trying to expel all the air from his lungs. “Unfortunately, we were affected and it’s a problem we’ve been trying to sort out ever since.” He paused and shook his head like it was a great, big shame. Then he apparently remembered he had the recently dead to contend with and faced me again. “As I said before, due to this glitch, we’ve had souls sent to the Kingdom who should’ve gone to the Underground City. And vice versa.” He paused. “And some souls are locked on the earthly plane as well. It’s been a big nightmare, to say the least.”

My mouth was still hanging open. “The Kingdom and the Underground City? Is that like heaven and hell?” Why did I have the sudden feeling he was going to start the Dungeons and Dragons lingo?

“Similar.”

I rubbed my tired eyes and let it all sink in. So, not only were there bad dead people in heaven, aka the Kingdom, but there were good dead people in hell, aka the Underground City? And to make things even more complicated, there were bad and good dead people stuck on Earth?

“Is that still happening now? Or did you fix the computer glitch?” I asked, wondering if maybe I’d been sent to the wrong place. I thought this place seemed like hell from the get-go. And though I was never a church-goer, I definitely wasn’t destined for the South Pole.

“We fixed the glitch, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are still thousands of misplaced souls. And the longer those souls who should be in the Kingdom are left in the Underground City, or on the earthly plain, the bigger the chances of lawsuits against AfterLife Enterprises. We’ve already had a host of them and we can’t afford anymore.”

I didn’t have the wherewithal to contemplate AfterLife lawsuits, so I focused on the other details. “So how are you going to get all those people, er souls, back where they belong?”

“That’s where you would come in, should you accept this job offer.”

“I would bring the spirits back?” I asked, aghast. “I’d be a ghost hunter or something?”

He laughed; it was the first time he seemed warm and, well, alive. Funny what a laugh will do for you.

“Yes, your title would be ‘Retriever’ and we have hundreds who, like you, are currently retrieving souls.”

An image of the Ghostbusters jumped into my mind and I had to shake it free. Whatever this job entailed, I doubted it included slaying Slimer. “And if I don’t agree?”

Jason shrugged and turned to the computer again. After a few clicks, he faced me with a frown. “Looks like you’ll be on the waiting list for the Kingdom.”

“The waiting list?” I asked, shocked. “I think I’ve led a pretty decent life!”

He shook his head and faced the computer again. “I show three accounts of thievery—when you were six, nine and eleven.”

“I was just a kid!”

He cleared his throat and returned his attention to the Word doc. “I also show multiple accounts of cheating when you were in university.”

Affronted, I launched myself from the chair. “I’ve never cheated in my life!”

He frowned, looking anything but amused. “No, but you aided a certain Jordan Summers by giving him the answers in your Biology class and I show that happened over the course of the semester.”

I sat back down and folded my arms against my chest. “I would think helping someone wouldn’t slate me for a waiting list!”

“Cheating takes more than one form.” He glanced at the screen again. “Shall I go on?”

“No.” I frowned. “So how long will I be on the waiting list?”

He leaned back in his chair and resumed working the stress ball. “You’re fairly close to the top of the list since your offenses are only minor. I’d say about one hundred years.”

“One hundred years!” I bit my lip to keep it from quivering. When I felt I could rationally conduct myself again, I faced Jason. “So where would I be for the next one hundred years?”

“In Shade.”

I frowned. “And what is that? Like Limbo?”

“Yes, close to it.”

“What would I do there?”

He shrugged. “Nothing, really. Shade exists merely as a loading dock for those who are awaiting the Kingdom … or the Underground City.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “What’s it like?”

“There is neither light nor dark, everything exists in gray. There’s nothing good to look forward to, nor anything bad. You just exist.”

“But if those people who are going to hell,” I started.

“The Underground City,” he corrected me. “Those destined for the Underground are kept separate from those destined for the Kingdom,” he finished, answering my question before I even asked it.

I felt tears stinging my eyes. “Shade sounds like my idea of hell.”

Jason shook his head while a wry chuckle escaped him. “Oh, no. The Underground City is much worse.” He paused. “The good news is that if you do become a Retriever and you relocate ten souls, you can then go directly to the Kingdom and bypass Shade altogether.”

“So I wouldn’t have to go to Shade at all?”

“As long as you relocate ten souls, you bypass Shade,” he repeated, nodding as if to make it obvious that this was the choice I should make.

“What does retrieving these souls mean?”

He started rolling the stress ball against his desk. “We’d start you with one assignment, or one soul. With the help of a guide, you’d go after that soul and retrieve it.” He paused. “Are you interested?”

I exhaled. Did I want to die and live the next century in Shade? The short answer was no. Did I want to be a soul-retriever? Not really, but I guessed it was better than dying.

“Okay, I guess so.”

“We could start you out and see how you do. You can always decide not to do it.”

“But then I’d die?”

“I’m afraid that’s the alternative.”

“Why can’t you let me go back to my old life?”

He shook his head. “It’s not possible. Your soul has already left your body. Once the soul departs, the body goes bad within three seconds. Unfortunately, you are way past your three seconds. That and the coroners have already pronounced you dead and the newspapers are preparing your obituary. Your mother was notified, as well.”

Mom has been notified … Something hollow and dreadful stirred in my gut and started climbing up my throat. I gulped it down, hell-bent on not getting hysterical. Tears welled up in my eyes and I furiously batted them away.

“I never got to say good-bye,” I managed as I tried to rack my brain to remember the last conversation I’d had with my mother, the only person (besides Miranda) with whom I was close. Truly, my mother and Miranda were my best friends. And right about now, both of them had to be traumatized.

Jason nodded, but it wasn’t a nod that said he was sympathizing. It was a hurried nod. “I’m sorry; but you need to make a decision soon. Time is of the essence and Shade will be calling soon to find out if you’re joining them.”

I forced my tears aside and focused on his angular face, trying to ignore my grief so I could come to a decision which would completely change the course of my life … or AfterLife. “So, if I take this job and choose to live, I can’t do so in my own body?”

It wasn’t like I was thrilled with my appearance: I was short, overweight and plain. I was the woman whom no one ever noticed—the one always behind the scenes. I’d had one major boyfriend in my life and that had lasted all of two months. Yep, anyway I looked at it, I was basically hopeless—a twenty-two-year-old workaholic virgin with nothing but the redundancy of a stress-inducing job to force me to wake up each morning. But, I was me, and the idea of coming back in another body left me cold. No pun intended.

“You would not be able to come back as yourself,” Jason said. “You’d have to come back in another body.”

I glanced down at myself. As far as I could tell, I still looked the same. “But, I’m in my body now.”

“You’re here in spirit only.”

The phone on his desk rang and he faced me with impatience etched in his eyes and mouth. “That’s probably Shade calling.”

He picked up the phone. “Jason Streethorn, AfterLife Enterprises, how can I help you?

After a few nods, he glanced at me. “Yes, she’s here. She’s just deciding what she wants to do. Yes, I understand it’s been over an hour.”

He muffled the end of the phone with his palm and faced me again. “You need to decide now.” He faced the phone again. “Yes, I’ve informed her. You’re going to send someone over within the hour?”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “Tell them I’ll take the job. I want to live.”

“So bitter is it, death is little more."

—  Dante’s Inferno

TWO

Jason Streethorn hung up the phone and gave me a big smile. I figured he wanted me to make this decision—to become an employee of AfterLife Enterprises. And me? Well, even though the words just sort of vomited from my mouth, I wasn’t sure I’d made the right decision. Frankly, I’d just come to terms with the idea that I was dead, and this wasn’t some prolonged and awful dream. And then there was the part about my mom having just been notified of her only child’s demise.

More than anything else, I wanted to tell her how much I loved her. Reassure her that I was going to be fine …

I turned away from Jason, feeling tears welling in my eyes. I focused on the pristine white of the office walls, trying to talk my tears into retreating. The fact that there were no pictures, no smudges or spots of any kind to interrupt the milky white of the walls suddenly infuriated me. How could someone spend the majority of his time in a room that looked this unlived in? I scanned the wall, searching for some sort of flaw—an insect, a scratch, anything! But there was nothing.

Jason clapped his hands together and I begrudgingly faced him again.

“We have much to do,” he said, spearing his tongue against his teeth a few times like he was trying to suck out something left over from lunch.

“Did you have a will?” he asked.

“No,” I said with a shrug. “All I ever owned was my car.” And I think I was overdrawn in my bank account. Overdraft charges? Ha! I got the last laugh on them.

Jason nodded. “Okay, then that makes things a bit easier. We’ll just open you a new account.”

“A new account?”

“Yep,” he nodded emphatically. “This is the best part … the benefits for working for AfterLife Enterprises. You’ll get company housing, a company car, a company credit card and company allowance.”

Wow, this wasn’t sounding half bad … well, if I could get past the being dead part.

“First things first, we need to find you a new name.” He turned to his computer and started typing like a madman. I watched the screen as a database of names popped up. He moused through them so quickly, I felt like I was reading a book on fast forward.

“A new name? Why can’t I …” I didn’t finish my sentence before realizing the answer. Lily Harper was dead. Lily Harper was dead.

I felt a pang of nausea churn my gut. It makes no sense to worry about things you have no control over because there's nothing you can do about them, I told myself, recalling Wayne Dyer’s advice again. There’s nothing you can do about them …

“You can keep your first name, but as for your second…” Jason’s voice grew quiet as he hit “enter” and the database stopped spinning. One name was highlighted among the rest.

“O’Shaughnessey,” Jason announced.

“What? I’m Irish now?”

He laughed. “Well, your name is.”

“Lily O’Shaughnessey,” I said, trying out the flavor on my tongue. “I guess it sort of has a nice ring to it.”

“Hilda will take care of your new legal documents while we finish up the rest of this. By the time we’re done here, you’ll have a new birth certificate, social security card, driver’s license, passport and green card, if you require one.” He paused and glanced at me. “But more on that later.”

I’d never had a passport before. That was sort of cool. But as to the green card …

“Okay,” Jason said, turning to face me again. “Now, where you’re going to live … We have corporate housing all over the world.”

“I want to live abroad,” I said quickly, suddenly wanting this new life of mine to be totally new. If I was going to start fresh, I didn’t want any reminders of my old life. I didn’t think I had the emotional strength to handle it. Instead, I wanted to embark on a completely new voyage, leaving everything I knew far far behind.

“Okay,” he said as he brought up what looked like a real estate multiple listings page.

“So, how does this corporate housing work? Do I have to pay rent?”

Jason didn’t turn around, but continued searching through the listings. “No, we cover your room and board. We give you whatever you require, and in return, you work a few jobs during the year for us.”

“A few jobs during the year?” I argued. “At that rate, it will take me years to relocate the ten souls!”

Jason shrugged. “So take on more jobs.” Then he glanced over at me again. “Besides, you won’t age.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so chose not to respond, instead turning to other questions swarming my mind. “So I don’t get a salary?”

He shook his head, still intently scanning through the house listings. “You’ll get an allowance, but not a salary. The allowance is to cover things you can’t use a credit card for. Just think of it as a bank account that maintains a high balance.”

Hmm … a consistently full bank account didn’t sound half bad. Sort of like repeatedly passing “Go” in Monopoly. “So, do I use a debit card?”

He nodded. “Yes, and you also get a corporate credit card. Whatever you need, you can use one or the other, though we prefer you use the credit card—it’s easier to sort out any fraudulent charges.” Jason stopped typing and turned back to me, shifting the screen so we both could view it. “Okay, looks like we’ve got several properties available. We’ve got a penthouse in Barcelona, Spain; a cabin in Quebec, Canada; and an elaborate apartment in Edinburgh, Scotland; just to list the first three …” he started scrolling for more listings, but my mind froze on the apartment.

“This one in Scotland,” I started.

Jason clicked and pulled up the listing. I’m not sure the word “apartment” did it justice. From what I could see, it was at the top of a four- or five-story brick building, overlooking a vast sea of green grass, scored by walking paths. Hugging both sides of the paths were mature and densely foliated trees that acted as umbrellas over the walkways.

“A charming apartment facing the Meadows of Edinburgh,” Jason read. “Conveniently located near the city center, the Meadows is one of the nicer areas of Edinburgh. Enjoy free golf,” he glanced up at me, adding, “apparently, you just bring your own clubs and balls.” Then he looked at the listing again. “With views of the Edinburgh Castle and Arthur’s Seat.”

“What’s Arthur’s Seat?” I asked.

Jason shrugged and read through the rest of the listing himself before facing me again. “Apparently, it’s a well-known mountain that you can also hike.”

“Oh,” I said as I started fidgeting. The weight of this decision suddenly dawned on me. Was I really going to move so far away? To another country? Granted, Scotland wouldn’t be too bad a location—I mean, they did speak English there, and I had to admit I was fond of men in kilts. Plus, Braveheart was my all-time favorite movie …

“As to the apartment, itself,” Jason continued, “it is two bedrooms, two bathrooms, has a view of the Meadows; and apparently, each unit has its own private garden. It features: wood floors, high ceilings with crown molding, fireplaces in the living room and the master bedroom, tile in the kitchen and bathrooms ...” He paused for a moment or two. “You know, you don’t have to live in an apartment. We have homes available as well.”

But I didn’t need a lot of space. I had no interest in pomp and circumstance. “The apartment sounds perfect,” I said in a small voice.

Jason glanced at me. “Want it?”

I nodded dumbly and he clicked a red button that said “reserve.” Then he exited the webpage. He leaned back in his chair and gave me a smile, as if waiting for something. Suddenly, what sounded like a vacuum emanated from the top of the long, plastic tube beside his computer. Before I had time to take another breath, something metallic dropped down the tube, landing on Jason’s desk.

“Two sets of house keys,” he said, handing them to me.

I just stared at the gold keys in my open palm, wondering if I was going to wake up. This was just too … unbelievable.

“Now, we have some corporate cars available, if you’re interested. Or you can simply go out and buy your own.”

“What have you got?” I asked, feeling more like I was asking what flavors of ice cream he had available, not what vehicles he had in his fleet.

He pulled up another webpage and pored through a long list. It looked like the pages of Autotrader. “We have quite a selection. What do you like?”

I shrugged as I remembered my reliable Volvo. If only it could see me now. “Maybe an Audi?” I shrugged, hoping it wasn’t too much to ask for; then something dawned on me. “Don’t they drive on the other side of the road in Scotland?”

Jason glanced at me quickly. “Yes, but it won’t take you long to get used to it. Those damned roundabouts, though, now they’re another story.” Then he chuckled at his own joke, which wasn’t funny at all.

“Okay,” I said with a hesitant smile.

“We have eighty Audis on file with the steering wheel on the right-hand side. Can you be more exact as to which model you’d prefer?”

Hmm, I didn’t know anything about cars. All I knew was Audis were nice, but as far as models? I was clueless. “Um, I don’t really know. I’m not much of a car person.”

He smiled and shook his head, like it was a shame. “Okay, SUV?”

I did like SUVs. They were big … and safe. And safety was suddenly more important to me now than it ever had been before. “Yeah, an SUV sounds perfect.”

He hit “enter” and a list of SUVs popped up. “How about the first one?” Jason asked. “It’s not too big to maneuver, and lots of women buy them.”

Jason clicked and a silver Audi popped up. I read the headline: “Audi Q5” and paused to consider it. It wasn’t too boxy or overpowering. “I like it.”

He clicked “reserve” then waited for the keys to pop out of the plastic tube. Once they arrived, he handed them to me.

“Now comes the truly fun part,” he said with a grin that reminded me of the Cheshire cat. “You get to choose your new body.”

Despite Jason’s apparent delight, this was the part I liked least—it just seemed so weird, to be picking someone else’s body, to suddenly look like someone else.

“Now, this is going to be tougher than choosing the car or the house because you’ll have exactly three seconds to make your decision.”

“Three seconds?” I repeated, my voice laced with doubt. I’d never been good with deadlines.

Jason nodded. “Yes, all the pictures you’re about to see are people who are going to die within seconds. The body, once the soul leaves it, remains inhabitable for about three seconds; so you’ll have to act quickly. Then once you decide, we have about two seconds to give you the animation shot. After that, you’ll be good to go.”

“Okay, hold it,” I started, my stomach feeling as if it just dropped to my toes. “The animation shot?”

Jason nodded. “Yes, when the body you choose dies, it has a couple of seconds before it arrives at our morgue unit here. We’ll take your soul into a syringe and then inject it into the body before it starts to deteriorate.”

I could feel my brain starting to pound … sort of like an ice cream headache. “But the body is still on Earth, right?”

Jason nodded. “A clone. It would be a very difficult thing if the body disappeared from the scene of its death altogether. So we just replace the real body with a fake one—it looks exactly the same as the original, made of flesh and blood.”

“You replace it? And no one suspects anything? Don’t they see you replacing it?”

Jason shook his head. “No, they see nothing. It happens in a split second, like magic, I guess you could say.”

I couldn’t seem to get past the fact that my entire identity could be sucked up into a little vial. That, plus I was never good around needles. “Okay, let’s go back to the part about sucking up my soul into a syringe and then injecting it into the new body … You haven’t ever screwed this part up in the past, I hope?” I could just see myself coming back as a chimp.

“It’s virtually mistake-free. No need to worry,” he said with what I hoped was a genuine smile. “Now, time’s wasting. Let’s see what bodies are available for you.”

I shook my head and narrowed my gaze on his screen, trying not to quantify the words “virtually mistake-free.”

“How tall do you want to be?”

Okay, so I could kinda, sorta see how he could describe this part as fun. I mean, when did you ever get to build the perfect you? I turned my thoughts to the height question, but didn’t have to ponder it long. I was short, so I wanted to be tall. “Um, how about five foot eight, with long legs?”

“Okay, let’s give you a thirty-two-inch inseam.” He entered my desired height into the proper field and made a note about my inseam. “Great. Now, how much do you want to weigh?”

Well, not as much as I did now, that was for sure. But I also didn’t want to be stick thin. “How about one hundred forty?”

Jason nodded. “Okay, what size breasts do you want?”

Where my bust was concerned, all I could think about was the fact that throughout high school, the boys called me Billy instead of Lily. I wanted some serious boobs. “How about a thirty-six, D?”

Jason gave me a smile. “Okay, done. What hair and eye color do you want?”

And suddenly it occurred to me that there had to be something about the new me that resembled the old me. “Let’s do dark red hair and green eyes.”

“And age?”

That was easy. I didn’t want to be any older than I already was. “Twenty-two.”

Jason entered my final specification and clicked “submit.” Instantly, about three hundred thumbnail-sized photos of women sprouted up.

“Okay, now scan through these profiles and decide which one you like,” he ordered.

He stood up and motioned for me to take his seat. I did so and grabbed the mouse with a trembling hand. “This is final, right? I mean, I can’t change my mind later?”

He nodded and leaned against his desk. “Yeah, no changing your mind. And once you click on a profile, you have a few seconds to make your decision.”

Phew. That was a lot of pressure.

“Okay,” I said as I started scanning. Waves of faces danced before me and all I could do was quickly focus on each one, trying to decide if it was a face that I wanted to replace my own. If I hoped my specifications would only yield attractive people, I was wrong. I was introduced to buck teeth, wall-eyes, voluminous noses and ski-jump chins. I gulped, thinking I could end up less attractive than I already was.

That’s when I saw a face that truly could have launched a thousand ships.

“Wow, she’s beautiful,” I whispered, even though the image on her profile only revealed her head and shoulders. She had long, dark red hair and large, round, green eyes with a fringe of thick, dark eyelashes. Her eyebrows, which appeared to be natural, were narrow and perfectly arched in the middle. Her nose was pert and upturned, like something you’d imagine finding on a pixie. She was smiling in the photo and her smile revealed pouty lips and perfectly white, straight teeth. I eyed the red “reserve” button up above her smiling face with apprehension.

There was no going back if I clicked that button.

“Two seconds remaining.”

It was like slow motion as I moved the mouse to the red button and clicked.

Then, before I could register what was happening, the tiny pinch of a pin-prick stung my arm. I glanced down to find Jason stabbing me with a syringe. My heart sped up as I watched the five-inch vial fill with blood.

Suddenly I felt faint, really faint.

“You’re going to be fine, Lily. This is all going to seem like a dream to you.”

“How do I get out of here?” I started, bracing myself against the desk in an effort to stand. Suddenly, the room was spinning and the white walls seemed to be breathing, pushing out against me only to suck themselves back in again.

“Everything will be taken care of for you.” Jason’s voice sounded distant, like he was whispering.

I wanted to say something. I had so many questions swimming through my brain, but all I could think about was closing my eyes.

I was suddenly so tired.

***

Something cold and hard pressed against my cheek. I opened my eyes to find myself lying on a hardwood floor. Pushing up on my hands and knees, I focused on the lines in the floor, which were knotted and hinted at pine or rustic maple. Hmm, since my apartment in Colorado Springs was lavishly adorned with wall-to-wall, shaggy brown carpet, I couldn’t have been home.

Wondering if I were still asleep, I glanced around myself. Apparently, my brain hadn’t yet woken up, because I didn’t feel any panic at the sight of an unfurnished room dominated by a brick fireplace. To my left was a bay window that revealed acres of verdant grassland, bisected by paths and tall trees.

I had the feeling I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, much less Colorado.

Like a bitter aftertaste, images of a white office with cheap furniture kept haunting my mind. My heart started throbbing as I stood up: the blood rushing from my head and shooting stars in my eyes. I stumbled like a drunken college student and closed my eyes against another vision—that of a waiting room with an angry, old man.

Leaning against the whitewashed wall of the living room, my parched throat ached with the need for water. Glancing around, I spied the kitchen and made my way toward the sparkling marble countertops. My heart felt like it was climbing into my throat, and I had to swallow it down.

I turned on the faucet and cupped my hands under the ice blue flow, gulping the water like a thirsty dog. Then, hoping it might wake me up, I splashed my face with the freezing cold water. That was when I realized I didn’t have a towel. Oh, well, my shirt would have to do.

Glancing down at myself, the image of white terry short-shorts, a pink tube top and black high-heeled sandals met my delirious eyes. I never wore pink, since it clashed with my naturally red hair. But what floored me even more than the pink top were my legs. They were as long as flagpoles, long and skinny. Not my legs at all.

I felt a scream rising from my throat and collapsed against the marble countertop, smearing it with my sweaty palms. Flashes of miniature cat statues with musical instruments bounced through my head until it was all I could do to squeeze my eyes shut and hope the images disappeared.

“Adopting the right attitude can convert a negative stress into a positive one,” I said out loud, repeating Hans Selye’s mantra.

I forced my eyes open again and noticed a large, padded manila envelope lying on the counter before me. In scrawled, cursive writing, my first name was displayed like it was an invitation to Prince Charming’s ball. I tore into the package, hoping it held answers for me, hoping a conversation with a guy named Jason was merely the fabric of my dreams. I gripped the spine of what felt like a book, and pulling it out, noticed it was a copy of Dante’s Inferno. Not knowing what to make of the book, I set it on the counter beside the envelope and thrust my hand inside the package again. This time, I felt the thin edges of a piece of paper. I pulled it out and read:

Dear Lily,

I hope you like your new home. Please feel free to furnish it anyway you wish. Also, I forgot to mention that any contact with relatives only leads to complications. It’s for this reason that we strictly prohibit any of our employees from contacting former family members or close friends. As far as your previous possessions, they have all been surrendered to your former mother and your old apartment is empty.

As you have agreed to take up the position of Retriever for AfterLife Enterprises, I searched our databases for openings, and found we are in desperate need of Retrievers in the Underground City. Before you worry yourself unnecessarily, you will be provided with a guide who will not only lead you through the City, but will also act as your guard. I’ve included a handbook to the Underground City which you might find useful.

I glanced at Dante’s Inferno and had the sudden heart-wrenching suspicion that Jason must have made a mistake and sent me the wrong book. My heart started palpitating at the very thought of becoming a Retriever in what basically amounted to hell; and now it seemed I was even missing the proper guidebook. I glanced at the letter again, hoping Jason left some form of contact information.

The handbook, as you will find, is Dante’s Inferno. AfterLife Enterprises hired Mr. Alighieri back in the fourteenth century to chart a guide to the Underground City. While you will find many of his references and his writing, in general, a bit outdated, the book should certainly help you navigate your way throughout the levels of the Underground City.

Should you have any questions, please contact me at the number below. It was a pleasure meeting you and I am very happy to welcome you to the AfterLife Enterprises team. We’re all pleased to have you on board.

Warm Regards,

Jason Streethorn

Manager, AfterLife Enterprises

111-111-1111

I dropped the letter as if it burned me.

So it was true! Everything that seemed like a disturbing dream was reality. And a reality that meant I couldn’t ever see my mother or Miranda again. I’d already assumed such was the case, but to see it in writing drilled the fact home even more. I couldn’t even contemplate the idea that I was going to be soul retrieving in hell. No, as soon as I could collect my wits, I was going to call Jason and demand he find me a more suitable, not to mention safer, career.

As for now, I wouldn’t allow myself to wallow in my own grief—I wouldn’t allow myself to worry over the fact that I was now in a foreign country and thousands of miles from Colorado Springs. No, I would not give myself a pity party. Not if this was going to be my new life.

My new life … I lurched forward, in search of a full-length mirror. The hallway off the kitchen led into a bedroom and I galloped down the hall like a newly born foal, feeling completely unaccustomed to my legs. Losing my balance, I careened into the wall and paced myself the rest of the way.

Not finding a mirror in the bedroom, I continued into the en-suite and was rewarded with an expanse of mirror above the dual sinks. Anxiety waged a destructive path from my gut to my head as I beheld the image reflecting back at me.

I was beautiful. Approaching the mirror tentatively, I couldn’t stop my hands from exploring my face like a blind person. Gone were my flared-nostrils and pig-like nose. In its place was something that would make Nicole Kidman envious. My once smallish eyes had become orbs of green, fringed by extraordinarily long, black lashes. My cheekbones looked like they’d been sculpted by Da Vinci himself. My face was undeniably beautiful, waves of natural auburn hair rippling around it, reaching the tops of my boobs. My boobs … I pulled my tank top forward and glanced down. I couldn’t help gasping. I finally had boobs and they were in a word … exquisite. I squeezed them to ascertain if they were real, and when the tensile spring of true flesh met my fingers, I couldn’t stop smiling.

But just as quickly, the smile dropped right off my lips as the gravity of everything I’d just been through—the accident; knowing I’d never see my mother again; dying … mingled into a tempest and beat down on me. I couldn’t bear to watch my tears falling from alien green eyes, coursing down a perfectly sculpted cheek. Instead, I collapsed into a heap on the floor.

I wanted to fight against the sadness, but I wasn’t strong enough. I wasn’t even me! The tears didn’t let up and I rocked back and forth, huddled into a little ball, amid a vacuous room that offered no solace.

A melodic harmony interrupted my breakdown session and I cocked my head to my right side, trying to decipher where it was coming from. It repeated, sounding like notes being plucked on a harp. I stood up and glanced around, seeking the source. A strident knock at the front door alerted me that someone was outside. The symphony of notes? Just my doorbell.

On unstable legs, I reached the front door and opened it while castigating myself for not checking the peephole first.

“It’s about freakin’, deakin’ time.”

The little man frowned and strode inside as I stood there, gaping at him. He threw his hands on his hips—spinning around as he surveyed the room with blatant approval. He was maybe five foot five, with a circular little body that made him look like an animated apple. His hair was thick and dark brown and looked as if it hadn’t seen a shampoo bottle in weeks. He faced me again, a smile on a face so round, you could’ve bounced it. He was maybe in his early thirties.

“Nice digs. Where’s all your furniture, though … yo?” His voice sounded much too deep for such a squat little thing—like Danny DeVito lip-synching Barry White. I did, however, manage to find some semblance of comfort in his American accent. He was American, I was American. At least we had that in common.

A gust of cold, Scottish air wrapped itself around my legs, and I realized I hadn’t shut the front door. Never taking my eyes off my pudgy guest, even though I couldn’t say he seemed in the least bit alarming, I closed the door behind us.

“Um, who are you?” I asked, finally finding myself.

They were the first words I’d spoken since occupying my new body, and my voice wasn’t familiar. It was lighter and more sing-song than my old voice could ever hope to sound.

The man nodded, as if my question were reasonable and extended a pudgy hand with fingers that looked like white baby carrots. “I’m Bill, your guardian angel.”

Better Off Dead

is available at:

AMAZON KINDLE

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About the Author:

H. P. Mallory is a New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author who started as a self-published author.

She lives in Southern California with her son and two cranky cats, where she’s at work on her next book.

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Website: www.hpmallory.com

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