Page 82 of Dropping Like Flies

“What’s your success rate?” Cade asked.

“Slightly above the national average.”

“Which is?” Cade prompted.

“Seventy-five percent.”

Cade nodded. “What’s Calisto’s success rate?”

“How the hell should I know? We never work together.”

Cade left a deliberate pause. “Ninety-five percent.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Isn’t it?”

I thought about what he’d said for a moment. “He must be fabricating his numbers. Is that what you’re getting at?”

“He isn’t. I checked, and then I got someone else to check. Everyone he said he brought back, was.”

“Then…” I had nothing, settling for a nonplused shake of my head instead.

Cade drifted over to the window to stare out of it. “There’s a war coming, Griffin, and we’re going to need Calisto on our side when it gets here. That’s all I can say at the moment.”

Epilogue

Ben

Nerves had me pulling at the collar of my shirt as I paced the pavement in front of the registry office, even though Griffin wasn’t late yet. Yet! What if he didn’t turn up? He’d dumped me once. Who was to say he wouldn’t do it again? It had seemed romantic when he’d suggested spending the night before our marriage apart and meeting here. Now, it just seemed stupid. An opportunity for Griffin to change his mind and not show up. He could be on a plane halfway across the Atlantic for all I knew.

Given what Cade had told us about trouble looming on the horizon, I wasn’t sure I’d blame him. Even days later, some parts of the discussion still seemed too fantastical to be true. A dead man who was no longer dead. A mask that could conjure up miracles. Weaponizing a graveyard of ancient skeletons against O’Reilly. Maybe it would be best to leave getting married for a while.

“Hi.”

I whipped round to find Griffin standing there. Not the Griffin I was used to seeing, though. “Fuck!” The word was out before I could stop it.

He grimaced. “That bad, hey?”

I laughed at the conclusion he’d jumped to. “No. The opposite. You look…”

When I trailed off, he raised an eyebrow. “I look…”

“Good. You look good.” He did. He’d had a haircut and was freshly shaven. And he wore a gray suit that, if I hadn’t known it was impossible given the time-scale, I would have assumed someone had made to measure. He was handsome enough that he took my breath away. And here I was, still with a black eye, and although the bandage had gone, the stitches hadn’t, the cut across my brow not looking great when I’d studied my reflection that morning while getting ready.

Griffin stepped closer, his brown eyes full of heat as he gave me a once-over. “You don’t look too bad yourself.”

“I look like roadkill in a fancy suit.”

“You really don’t.”

“I do. I—”

He laid a finger across my lips to silence me. “You look gorgeous. You always look gorgeous. Do you know what I see when I look at your injuries?” He waited for me to shake my head. “Someone who survived something terrible. And I’m ecstatically happy about that.”

“You! Ecstatically happy?”

He brushed a finger across my cheek, stopping where I knew the bruising began. “Yeah, me. I hide it well.”

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