Chapter Thirty-Six #2
Waring’s smile is now a few centimeters away from a sneer. “I’ll cut right to the chase. Hades will be coming after Ms. Fields. If you want to keep her safe, you’ll let me speak to her. Alone.”
Tolliver opens his mouth to argue, but I place a hand on his arm. “It’s fine. I think I know where this is headed.”
After a tense stare-down, CJ leads Waring and me to their guest room.
It’s very floral, and there’s far too much potpourri.
I’m so busy adjusting my understanding of CJ that I almost miss the chance to take the rose-colored armchair in the corner.
I slide in front of Waring just in time and take the seat, forcing him to sit on the flowery bedspread.
It clearly irritates him, and that gives me just the kick of dopamine I need for this meeting.
“So, you were conned,” he says.
And there goes the dopamine.
I put up a finger. “To be fair, Rook was a thousands-of-years-old demon working for the lord of hell, so. Barely my fault.”
Waring ignores me. “I’m not going to waste time saying I told you so, as much as I’d like to. What we need to focus on now is where to go from here.”
“Which is?”
He tries to do that thing where politicians sit forward and look you in the eye so they appear more relatable, but the bed is too high and bouncy for the move to work. I purse my lips together to keep from laughing.
“You need to get the grimoire back,” he says.
I let my head fall back and groan. “Oh god, this again.”
“Hades will raise an army with—”
“Yeah, she told me.”
Waring jerks in surprise. “She?”
“Yeah, she’s in a new body. It was a whole thing. I don’t know what happened to her old one.”
Waring’s jaw flexes, his face tense as he considers something. Finally, he says, “We destroyed it with hellfire until there was nothing but ash and then scattered it to the four corners of the earth.”
I raise an eyebrow. “The earth doesn’t have corners.”
He clears his throat. “The point is, Hades cannot be allowed to have the grimoire. Even…” He pauses, then sighs in resignation. “Even if that means destroying it.”
Oh wow. Things must be bad if the syndicates are willing to let go of this much power.
I sit forward on the rose-colored chair, doing the I’m relatable move much better than Waring ever could. “So you want me, a teenage girl, to go up against the lord of darkness?”
He takes a deep breath, clenching his teeth. “It is your fault that Hades is loose upon the world, so you may consider taking some responsibility.”
“Never,” I quip. “Why don’t you and your Titan buddies do it? You’re all so much more powerful than me, and you’re not even offering to help?”
He shifts uncomfortably and clears his throat. “We do have…one piece of Hades’s original body. It may be useful in neutralizing them.”
After a moment of hesitation, he opens his briefcase and pulls out a large bone.
My eyes widen. “That’s a human femur.”
He nods.
“You kept Hades’s femur? It just hangs out in your briefcase?”
“Bones have magic—”
“You want me to take Hades’s femur, which has been chilling in your briefcase for millennia, into the Afterlife so someone can possess her?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “That won’t work for many reasons. The rules are different now that Hades is in a different body.”
“So what do you want me to do with it?”
“As I was saying,” he says pointedly, “bones have magic. Many kinds of magic. It’s possible, with the right rune, this bone could be used to control Hades in some way.”
“But you just said she’s in a new body.”
“The bone will remember the soul. The connection is still there. Do you have a rune witch on your crew?”
Neither CJ nor I can do rune magic. Tolliver is uninterested in anything but alchemy. I guess Ezra is going to be learning magic after all.
I think of Poppy and how this would pretty much be her dream job.
“We can figure it out,” I say grimly. “Let’s talk numbers.”
Waring, predictably, does not stay to help. Though, on the way out, he does remind CJ that Melinoe is expecting them by the end of the month.
“You didn’t have to make that deal, you know,” I say once he’s gone.
CJ shrugs stiffly. “It’s done.”
Their expression is no grumpier that normal, but there’s an air of sadness around them that wasn’t there before. If we survive this job, I’ll figure out a way to get them out of the deal. I have no clue how, but that’s Future Elle’s problem.
“So do we have a heist to plan?” Tolliver asks.
Apparently, they had all been listening in on the conversation with Waring, so they know the deal.
“First things first,” I say, sitting at CJ’s kitchen table. “We need to take stock of our assets.”
The others gather around. Tolliver has already made popcorn, and Crowlene has her head in the bowl, flicking kernels left and right. CJ hands me their tablet, notes app open. I grab the stylus and twirl it around my fingers.
“Asset Number One: Tolliver’s alchemy.”
“Asset Number Two,” Ezra says. “My new magic!”
I write it down. “Yeah, about that. We’re going to see if you can learn advanced runic magic in a couple of days.”
He deflates. “Great,” he says flatly. “I hope the entire plan hinges on my ability to master it.”
“Asset Three,” I say. “CJ’s…” I look at them questioningly.
They watch me for a tense moment and then give the smallest of nods.
“Yes!” I hiss. “Asset Three: CJ’s telempathy.”
“Asset Number Four,” Tolliver says. “Elle’s leadership.”
I bite back a grin, certain a blush is spreading across my cheeks.
“And my accents,” I say.
CJ snorts. “I’ll give you fifty bucks if you don’t do a single accent on this job.”
“What? The accents are the best part!”
Crowlene cackles and ruffles her feathers, and I choose to believe she’s agreeing with me.
CJ pulls a fifty out of their wallet and snaps it taut a few times.
I sigh and reach into my own pocket, and frown.
My hand has reached a folded-up piece of paper. It takes me a moment to place it: the paper I pulled from Rook’s pocket when I was trying to grab his mask. With everything else going on, I’d forgotten about it.
I pull it free and open it. My eyes go wide, and I can’t even speak. A first, I know. But all I can do is lay the page out flat on the table for the others to see.
Tolliver gasps. CJ’s eyes widen. Ezra stares slack-jawed.
It’s the missing page of the grimoire.