Fifty--Four
Antonio
I already know the answer, but I want her to tell me. I want her to take that first step in trusting me so I can get her off the V.
Siome needed to believe in something other than herself before she could take that first step towards recovery, so I will be Micha’s higher power.
I will be her safe corner.
Her savior.
The omniscient god she trusts without question.
Then I will use her to end the Shadow bloodline just like Sau did Siome’s.
She makes a noise of pain, not wanting to spill the secret of her dealer, still hoping he’ll be able to sneak her a dose behind my back.
The men tense beside me. They’re still here, having stood in silence all this time. They know better than to leave and make me have to hunt them down.
“Eduardo,” I say.
“I wouldn’t –”
the sniveling coward starts to say, begging for his life already.
“Take a bit of the V out of her.”
“No!”
She jerks on my shirt, trying to grab my attention. “Please, don’t,” she pleads as she faces me. Her head keeps jerking towards the witch though, able to hear his footsteps as he walks towards her. “Please.”
“Give me a name.”
“It was Bear,”
she says, blurting out the words.
But I know it fucking wasn’t.
Eduardo told me it was Tim when he teleported me in, but the fucker would blame anything on him. He wants him gone. But though Timothy often pushes his luck with me, he never crosses the line. He’d beat her face but not her belly. He’d piss and shit on her and degrade her in every way he could imagine, but he wouldn’t risk giving her V, wouldn’t risk terminating the pregnancy he knows I want. It doesn’t matter how defective the fetus is. As long as it survives, it will give me power when I eat it. As long as he doesn’t cross that line, he knows I don’t give a shit about what he does.
But Digby (Sunny) is too fucking dumb for his own good. He knows the only way out of Eduardo’s experiments is by getting her pregnant with a hybrid, and he can’t do that if she’s already carrying. Given Eduardo blamed Timothy for this mess, I know they were working together to set him up as the patsy – probably because Tim’s been torturing them in my absence.
But when I came into the room, Digby blamed Stephen instead, which means he has aligned himself with Tim now, cutting Eduardo out, always swapping teams to be on the winning side.
I glance at Stephen’s corpse. A pedophile who got what he deserved. He has all his clothes on, but the smell of syrup still lingers in the air. A child’s breakfast. Micha must have learned what he was, and that level of sadism has Timothy’s name all over it. Meaning all of these fuckers were in on it at one point or another, and all of them will pay.
“Why did Stephen – Bear,”
I say, using the name she knows, “give you the V?” I signal for Eduardo to wait. He stops beside Micha, his body drenched in sweat. He played his hand and lied to me, telling me it was Tim. He knows if she doesn’t tell me the same thing, he’s fucked.
I brought him in to make hybrids, but he’s failed at that, having only made chimeras. They are stronger and faster than a normal wolf, but I don’t need them to fight a war anymore, having lost most of my pack to the other two gangs and the police they used like puppets. His use to me has dropped. His teleportation network will stay up even after he’s dead, and I can find a merc to replace him easily enough.
“He wanted…”
She swallows, pain and disgust twisting her face. Oh, she knows what Stephen was, alright. I do not doubt that he wanted her to role play for him, but he was a coward through and through. He never would’ve disobeyed me. So I lift my hand to her chin and feather my thumb across her mouth.
“Lie to me,”
I murmur, “and I will leave your daughter where she is.” She shudders as tears fall down her cheeks. “Tell me the truth, and I will bring her home.”
Her lips wobble.
The last of her fight leaves, too beaten down by her hope that I can save her child.
“I gave her it,”
Timothy says, stepping forward, his words strong.
Digby’s head snaps to him in shock. Eduardo’s mouth drops open.
“I wanted to break her. The fighting was getting boring, and she just wouldn’t shut up.”
“Is that true?”
I ask her.
“Of course –”
Timothy cuts himself off when I look at him.
She trembles in my grip. Wets her lips. “Yes.”
“You’ve just lost your daughter.”
“No!”
she screams as she starts thrashing in my hands. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I lied! He told me I had to agree with him. But he didn’t do it. Sunny did. Sunny –”
I throw her at the bed as Timothy lunges for me. The fool was hoping I’d be too slow with her in my arms. She hits the mattress and bounces off it. Eduardo darts back, out of the way as a glint of silver arcs through the air, aiming for my heart. I pivot to the side. Timothy twists the knife to cut at me again. Digby –Sunny as she calls him– rushes at me from the other side, with a knife of his own, and Eduardo, the coward, waits to see whose side he will take.
Perhaps if he joined them now, they could get in a few good shots. I might have a natural resistance to magic, but he could still blind me with a flash that fills the room. Still disorientate me with an ear-bleeding noise. Then again, he never learned combat magic outside of the basic red ball of energy.
A pathetic fool.
I dodge out of the way of Timothy’s attack. Grabbing Digby’s knife arm, I kick Tim in the chest. As he flies back unconscious, I yank Digby to me. My body shifts into that of my wolf from the waist up. He screams. My mouth closes over his head. My teeth crunch through his skull, and the knife he holds drops to the floor. Fucking pathetic.
I take another bite, consuming the left side of his face, eating his life and his power.
Tossing him at Eduardo, I shift back into my human form. “Strip him,”
I say before my attention to Micha, who kneels on the bed, sobbing and begging for forgiveness.
“Please,”
she cries. “Give me another chance. I won’t lie to you again. I promise. Just please. I want my little girl.”
I walk over to her as she shakes.
“Please… Please… I’ll do anything.”
I grab her face, pulling her up to her knees, then release her. “Give birth to the pup inside you.”
She flinches. Pain rips across her snot-covered face, but she doesn’t deny me.
“And help me kill the Shadow line.”
Her throat works hard as she caves in on herself, warring with the choice to help me get her daughter back at the cost of the rest of the people she loves.
“Just them?”
she asks eventually. “Not the whole gang?”
She doesn’t give me the names of those she wants saved, doesn’t trust me enough. Yet. But she will give them to me eventually. I don’t have any need for them. My goal isn’t to hurt her; it’s to hurt Varius through her, but she will tell me who they are simply because I will become her god.
Because she will give me all her hopes and dreams.
She will turn to me with all her prayers.
And I will give them to her.
I will turn her into a dog who crawls at my heel.
The perfect little sleeper agent once I let Varius “save”
her and take her home. She’ll lie in wait until I’m ready for the next part of my plan.
Because I know now what they’ve tried to hide from me. What Varius tried hard to portray in our initial video call. And he succeeded too, had me believing he didn’t give a shit about her.
I thought he was callous enough to have given up on her in this life, planning to just collect her in the next. After all, I am not a god. If I kill her, she won’t die permanently. The true death can only come from the gods, a godslayer, or one of the families that stop the dead from escaping the three underworlds. So she will come back to him, her soul pulled to his as soon as she’s reborn.
And I hate them for that. Envy them. Why should they get to have something I cannot?
Only witches can create blood bonds. It defies the wishes of the gods. It isn’t right. It isn’t natural.
My hands clench as I stare at her, waiting for her answer even though it doesn’t really matter.
Because in the end, I will kill her regardless of what she does for me. It is impossible to bring back her baby anyway, so she will probably thank me for ending her grief.
“I’ll do it,”
Micha says, her words so broken and quiet. “Just bring her back.”
“As long as you obey me,”
I say. Dismissing her, I turn to Eduardo. Timothy groans against the wall, finally regaining consciousness. The silver knife he tried to stab me with lies close beside him. I don’t bother to kick it away from him. If he tries again, it’s no energy to stop him.
Shifting fully into my wolf, I drop onto all fours and start eating the rest of Digby’s corpse. His bones crunch beneath my teeth. His flesh tears. His blood sprays free. And his power seeps through me, a hot burn that flushes through my skin.
Timothy lifts his head as his eyes open, and I catch his stare as I swallow Digby’s heart. His ugly face pales, and he pushes to his feet. I growl low, a warning, but he doesn’t stop. Howling, he picks up the knife and lunges for me.
“What’d you do to my brother?”
he screams.
I lunge forward, jumping over Digby’s corpse, grab hold of his arm with the knife and snap it at the shoulder. He screams, the blade drops. I catch it out of the air and stab it into his chest. Shifting back into human form, I throw his body at Eduardo. “Keep him alive for his sperm. I don’t care what else you do to him.”
I glance at Digby’s and Stephen’s bodies. “And put those two on ice. I’ll finish them when I’m back.”
“You’re leaving again?”
Eduardo asks, his voice shaky.
I turn to face him fully. He’s already tried to kill me once with his teleportation circles. To send something through them, thousands upon thousands of threads snake out from the destination circle and latch onto the traveler. If any of those threads cross, the person’s body will be reshaped. If any of them break, they’ll lose whatever part of their body that was attached to it.
And if they all are corrupted in order to tear apart in the middle, the person will be killed.
If Eduardo had tried that when I first met him, he would have succeeded in killing me. But by the time he’d grown the balls, I’d grown too strong, and my resistance to magic allowed me to step out between the circles. Oh, I had taken damage – a lot, and I’d ended up in the middle of a random family’s home and had to kill them to leave no witnesses, but I survived.
I killed all of his precious little experiments –he has an unhealthy attachment to them– then nearly killed him. He’s never gone against me since.
Perhaps he needs another reminder of what I can do.
His eyes widen, and he damn well trips over his words. “I’m only asking because I need a bit of time to recuperate.”
He’s used a lot of magic recently.
“How long?”
“A week – three or four days,”
he hurriedly corrects.
My jaw tightens.
I’m so close to being able to head into the Underworld and bring Siome home. When I sought out a way how to, I was told by ancient scholars it was impossible for a mere wolf to venture into the deep as Hades’ domain will poison all that lives. An Earth human does not have enough magic in their veins to spend more than a minute or so there. A demigod could spend a couple months, and it will take me at least three weeks to travel through all the check points, longer still to get an audience with Hades and Persephone.
Refusing to give up on Siome though, I found a way to increase my magic. My family has always eaten our dead as a way to gain a bit of their power. So I expanded the Death Hunt Family and bred all the women until I found those who could birth hybrids. Then I ate their babies, taking their power as mine. Another two or three fetuses, and I will be able to spend six weeks in the afterlife before it kills me.
But first, I have to make it through the Lesser Eleusinian Mysteries. That will cleanse my blood-stained soul so I can enter the Greater Mysteries, where I will learn how to split my soul from my body without it killing me. Then I’ll just need to call forth a keres, a reaper of the dead, and bribe my way to Hades’ throne room.
The Lesser Mysteries open in the spring of next year, giving me only months to find the rest of the bribes. I have been growing my collection of cheesy, one-off romances for Hades, a lover of books, for the past few years. I have just been to Blo?dyrio?, where I commissioned a special music box for one of Cerberus’ heads. I have four more “gifts”
left to sort: two for his other heads; one for Charon, the ferryman who’ll take me across the river splitting the living from the dead; and Persephone.
I can feel the pressure of my deadline, but three more days will not matter. Besides, I can use the time to research who holds the recipe for Byzantine fire – a green mythical fire that spreads on water. Persephone likes explosives, and I am certain she will love it.
“Three days,”
I say, and Eduardo bows his head. There is a sickly smell coming from him, and I do not doubt he needs more time to fully recover, but I don’t like him that much. If he dies, he dies.
Turning from the room, I head down the hall, then up the stairs to the second floor. The yacht rocks in the waves but barely enough to notice due to its size. Everyone on board rotates being captain, steering us away from any storms – though mostly, they just leave it to drift. There’s an app that will tell them if they’re in the way of another boat, but with the size of the ocean, they’ll only see someone every month or so.
I head towards Rudy’s room. There isn’t a ward outside his door. There aren’t any guards to stop him from leaving. There’s simply an explosive collar around the necks of the girl and dog he tried so desperately to save. He gets to see them every so often to remember why he does what he’s told. If he even tries to get down to the lower level or to reach out to Micha at all, they will detonate.
He is far enough away from her to not hear her though. If he could, I don’t trust him not to break. When people are put into impossible corners, you never know which way they’ll go. But if he can’t see her pain, he will tell himself what he needs to in order to justify his decision.
Just like I did when I sent Siome away, believing I was doing the right thing. Instead, I lost eighty-six years with her. Lost the chance to have a family. And I destroyed her life. My choice led her to the dark depths of V, and it took over a year to bring her out.
A year of her promising to get clean, only to relapse over and over again. One day, I’d leave to go get food as I’d done many times before, only to come back and find her gone. Find her in some alley getting railed just to score. It didn’t matter how many people I killed in warning. How many examples I made. Neither an addict nor a dealer has much thought to the consequences of their actions.
My chest tight, I hug the memory of her, then let her go.
But I would take decades of the bad just to have her back in my arms.
Opening Rudy’s room, I step inside.
He’s being fucked by one of the female wolves. She’s riding him as he lies on his back in bed. She’s cupping her own breasts, and the place smells of smoky vetiver with an underlying base of tobacco. The Ricks they’re using increase sperm count and allow the taker to ejaculate multiple times in a row.
“Have any of you succeeded?”
I ask as I walk over to the bed. She turns her head, her ass still bouncing up and down. There is a pillow over Rudy’s head. I don’t know which one of them put it there.
“No,” she says.
“Leave us.”
She gets off him instantly, then grabs her robe off the floor. Given our kind is comfortable naked and her purpose here is to breed, that seems out of place, so I ask her the question with my eyes.
She ducks her head. “He feels too innocent.”
I’m taken by surprise, but I don’t say anything, and she leaves, closing the door behind us. Rudy sits up, letting the pillow fall into his lap, hiding his pierced erection. His eyes are haggard, but they still hold a sharp intelligence.
Another surprise.
While I was on Blo?dyrio?, I heard rumors about someone targeting teleporters. Hushed whispers in taverns warning witches not to go out alone. My gut told me that was Varius searching for a way to sneak onboard so he could save his wife. I thought Rudy was too much of an embarrassment for him to bother with as he was a Shadow who couldn’t kill. He was a traitor who’d given up his Boss’ wife, his brother’s wife in order to save some random child and mutt. Pathetic.
But looking into Rudy’s eyes, knowing the suffering he’s gone through –Timothy not caring about the gender of his victims, and Eduardo excited to dissect his powers– I’m not so sure if the reason he was never seen on a mission before was because he was too weak to join his brothers.
There is a strength within him, and his eyes look too damn old. Like he has seen too much misery.
“How are they?”
he asks, mouthing the words. I learned to read lips a long time ago, when I watched Siome from the shadows, not wanting to infect her with my curse.
But I’m not here to talk to him.
I’m here to cut off a bit of him to send to Sau. I need her angry at me, shaking with fury as she vows to kill me herself. Because to get to the River of Styx, which splits the living world from the dead, I need to catch a ride with a reaper of death. But keres only come to collect those who’ve been brutally killed on their path of vengeance.
So Sau will be that someone.
It’s the only reason I’ve allowed her to live. Once I kill all of her kids, I will beat her to death inside a binding circle, temporarily tying our souls together. Then I will use her to catch a ride to the Underworld. She took my mate from me. It is only fitting that she be the sacrifice that lets me get her back.
Stepping up to Rudy, I shift the nails of my right hand into five lethal claws.