Dulcie nodded, drying her eyes on her sleeve. She smiled at me and looked at the floor.
“Um. About shooting yourself in the head,” I started.
Dulcie laughed. “Right. I didn’t really. I just needed to scare Meg. I magicked myself into making the noise.” She opened her mouth and a soft bang rang through the room—a perfect mimicry of a gunshot. Sound replication was something draconians could do. “I heard the dragon and I thought I could sense Knight nearby or something. And I knew she was going to kill you …” Dulcie shrugged. “I gambled. I made a bang noise and fell and I hoped that would be enough.”
“Wow,” I said—more concerned with the sound she made than anything else. “That’s …”
“Scary,” she said. “Yeah. I’ve, uh … probably got a lot more skills now.”
A lot more power too. And a lot scarier things she shouldn’t have been able to do. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out.” I grinned. “Maybe you can test some of them out on Dagan.”
“I thought he was helping you?”
“It’s Dagan,” I said. “By helping, he just means he wasn’t actively trying to kill us. I’m fully expecting a bill from him. In some form or another.”
Dulcie nodded and laughed. There was a long silence.
And then.
“He, uh. He had sex with her,” she said.
My heart stopped. “What? Who?”
“Knight,” she said. “He slept with Meg. She glamoured him, and I had to … watch … and now, I can’t …”
Oh, Hades, I thought. Not for the first time, I wondered why Knight was naked when he left Meg’s house. Now it all made sense—but a horrible, terrible, awful sense. Dulcie started to cry. I pulled her against me, hugging her, letting her tears soak my smoke-stained shoulder. Stroking her hair, I kept telling her it was all right to cry, and let it all out.
We stayed there a long time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Knight
I sat on the curb around the corner, listening. Not quite ready to face Odyssey again, or explain to her why I lost contact. I had no excuse for chasing after my girlfriend, or leaving my post totally unattended. My single, stupid decision nearly toppled an entire country.
Instead, I just listened to the sounds of the city around me. Cold gusts of wind, car horns, sirens, the spiral and splash of fire hoses. The hissing and pops of bending spacetime.
Hades materialized beside me. Sitting on the curb, resting his wrists on his knees, he was staring out at DC and watching the last of the smoke drift away.
That went well, he said.
I scoffed.
Problem?
I scoffed again, louder this time—if only to convey my disbelief, shock, and wonder. That went well. Like the dragon was his backup plan, or a lucky contingency, like we’d had the power inside us all along! Easiest thing in the world. “You almost got everybody killed.”
Really? How so?
“Your stupid dragon died,” said Knight. “Meg popped up with her shadows and it was just …” I snapped. “Gone like that.”
Yet here you are. Alive, if not slightly unscathed. I wonder how on Earth that happened?
His voice was laced with sarcasm. I frowned at him. “You knew about Rowena.”
Hades nodded. I did. The entity she carries is an old friend of mine.
“Old friend?” I asked incredulously as I shook my head.
Is it so hard to believe I have friends?
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it is.”
Hades sighed. I knew about Rowena’s abilities … and that she would not summon her spirit unless all other avenues had been exhausted.
Unless we could scare the Darkness into playing her power card by setting her on fire ourselves, and proving once and for all there was nothing anybody else could do. We had to cash in as a last resort.
By killing a dragon.
“Seems excessive.”
Hades shrugged, his bones clicking. Her passenger is vast and immovable—painful and dangerous to call on. Anything less spectacular, and Rowena would have hesitated long enough for all of you to die.
I nodded slowly. For a minute, we were silent, listening to the white noise of a slow recovery.
If you’re finished here, Hades said at last, you have a contract yet to honor.
“An army I must collect?”
Yes. And an absolute Darkness to vanquish. You saw what Meg is capable of. The powers she calls on are darkness beyond the darkness, and evil of the worst caliber. The Darkness of the Abyss lives inside her—and it must be undone.
Darkness? Abyss? I thought he wanted me to kill Meg, not to send me gallivanting off into the ether to look for ancient monsters …
Oh.
I scoffed. “You’re here because Meg’s tapped into something big, bad, and off limits,” I said.
She has opened a gate to the Abyss, yes, said Hades. That gate needs to be closed, or it will swallow this world and all of the rest.
Not because the lives of Odyssey or Dulcie were in danger, I thought, not because Meg was going to take over the world. Just because she left a fucking door open!
Yes, he said. In a sense. I forgot that he could read my mind.
“So you never gave a damn about the fate of the nation or all the people that died today,” I said through my clenched teeth.
As I’ve said. Those were not conflicts that concerned me.
I turned away. Glaring at nothing and hoping if I looked at something else for long enough, he would just disappear. For a while, he didn’t say anything.
“And I’ll need the Lokis in order to do this,” I said. “To close the gate to the Abyss?”
Yes.
I sighed. A long, heavy sigh. I was dreading what came next.
But it wasn’t like I had anything keeping me here—not as long as Dulcie needed space away from me.
“So how do I locate this mountain?”
To Be Continued….
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The Ice Wolf Series (Co-Authored with
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H. P. Mallory is a New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author who started as a self-published author.
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H.P. Mallory, Pride and Poltergeists
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