Chapter Forty
Forty
Three days ago, Poppy and I stood surrounded by syndicate members in the chapel of souls at the top of the tower at the center of Tartarus. I was yelling for my brother as she watched on impassively. If the people around her knew her better, they would have known something was off.
Poppy never does anything impassively.
“Dante!” I yelled. “Poppy! It’s Dante! Look, the soul! Do you see it? That’s Dante!”
Her eyes drifted to my hand as I opened and closed it three times. After a moment, I did it again, but the final time when I opened my hand, only three fingers were extended. Then my hand made the shape of an L.
Fifteen rows up, thirteenth soul on the left.
To anyone else, it just looked like I was fighting against my captors as I tried to pull free of the bonds.
Just spasms as my wrist snapped and my shoulder popped out of socket.
But Poppy knew better. There was always the chance of getting caught, so we needed someone on the inside, and Poppy had installed herself into the Phantoms a year ago, looking for a charm that would temporarily give CJ relief from their powers.
We never talked about it—it had to remain a secret—but I knew.
And Poppy knew that I knew. And I knew that Poppy knew that I knew.
It was Poppy who realized I was going to get caught. She turned me in herself so she could be there when it happened.
It was Poppy who kept her cover with the Phantoms, not meeting back up with us, so she could go back to Tartarus.
And then it was Poppy who went back for my brother’s soul.
Two days ago, the afternoon after we accidentally brought Hades back from the Dead, Adam Waring showed up at CJ’s apartment to hire me to steal back and destroy the grimoire. Negotiations went swiftly. Waring may be a politician, but apparently, I was his first and only choice for the job.
“Why me?” I asked once we had decided on terms.
Waring looked back toward the living room, as is if his gaze could see past the floral wallpaper and cursed dolls of CJ’s guest room. “Was that an undead crow I saw in the living room?”
“Yeah. She’s my familiar.” I crossed my arms defensively.
Waring shook his head. “That’s not your familiar.”
“Screw you,” I snapped back.
He gave me a patronizing look. “Don’t you find it strange that the only magic you’ve ever done is create a familiar?”
“I’ve done two spells now,” I mumbled.
“Exactly. And what do they have in common?” he prompted.
I wanted to tell him they had nothing in common. One of them didn’t even go right. I went out to get a living familiar and came back with a dead crow.
“Oh,” I whispered.
Waring did his best to cross his legs, sitting on the edge of CJ’s guest bed.
“When you resurrected Hades, you had a spell book and all the right materials and conditions. But before that, you were just acting on instinct. The magic worked through you, even if you didn’t understand at the time what you did to that crow. ”
“I resurrected her,” I breathed.
“Not very well. I mean, look at her.”
I felt itchy. Like my skin didn’t quite fit over my bones. Like this whole time, I’d been wearing someone else’s skin suit.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
The fake smile was back. “There are some things you have to discover for yourself.”
“That’s such a bullshit answer, and you know it.”
“Well,” Waring said, shrugging, “I’m a politician.”
He got up to leave. He’d almost reached the door when something dawned on me.
“You’re really Thanatos, aren’t you?”
He was still for a moment, then turned. “Unlike my counterparts, I like to…reinvent myself every few hundred years.”
Knowing it might be my only chance, I asked, “What’s the truth? Are you really the god of death? Or did you just name yourself after him?”
He cocked his head. “I’m not sure. All the stories seem to blur together after a while.”
I scoffed. “You don’t know?”
“Would you remember something that happened to you thousands of years ago?”
“No, but I’m not a god.”
Waring—Thanatos—raised his eyebrows, then turned to go.
“You’re not the good guys, you know,” I called to him.
He shrugged again, looking back at me one more time. “Neither are you.”
Yesterday, we all sat around CJ’s kitchen table, discussing plans and realizing there were very few scenarios where I didn’t end up dead.
No matter how you sliced it, I was going to be right up in Hades’s face, and from the brief glimpse we had of her, she seemed kind of murdery.
But my conversation with Waring had made me realize something.
I turned over the missing page of the grimoire, showing the others where I translated the very beginning of the passage.
“The page Rook tore out of the codex didn’t just have the spell for banishment,” I said. “It also had the end of the resurrection spell.”
Tolliver took it from me, mouthing the words silently as he read the translation, then his eyes widened, and he looked at me as though he’d never seen me before.
“What?” Ezra asked. “Why do people keep reacting to things without explaining them to me?”
Tolliver read aloud:
“ ‘Yet hear well this singular exception: If you are a true scion of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, with her sacred gift of resurrection bestowed upon your very bones, then and then only may you dare complete this dark ritual.’ ”
Ezra gasped, then frowned. “Wait, what does ‘scion’ mean?”
“It’s like a poetic word for ‘descendant,’ ” I said.
“Ah!” Ezra said, then paused. “And what is the dark ritual it’s talking about?”
CJ groaned into their hands. “The resurrection spell.”
“So,” Ezra said slowly, “you have to be a descendant of Persephone to do the resurrection spell?”
I nodded.
Ezra blinked at me. “But you did the resurrection spell.”
“Yup.” I grinned.
“And it was successful.”
“Yeah…”
“So that means…”
“Get there faster, Ezra. I know you’re smarter than this.”