Page 83 of Grave Curse

At that, his pale brown eyes flashed back to me. “Be careful with your words, woman. I’m no one’s puppet.”

“Prove it. Let me go. If you don’t, and you bring me to your daddy now that I’ve told you the truth, you really are no better than he is.”

“Enough.” He bared his teeth at me, and for a moment I was sure he was once again on the verge of hitting me. Then he tucked his gun into the back of his jeans and shoved me toward the front parking lot. “Go. Just… go. Get back to your birthday party.”

I was so dumbfounded I couldn’t move. “What?”

“You heard me. Get the hell out of here. Happy birthday, by the way.”

“Thanks.” I took a few steps backward toward the corner of the building before I paused. “Come with me, Red. Don’t go back to him, please. Life with Hades is hell.”

“I’m not going back to Hades. I’m fucking done with that asshole, and Chicago. I never should’ve left Tex—”

A man streaked out of the hedges, a blacker-than-shadow blur that leaped on top of Red Flag and began savaging him like an animal.

Oh, God.

Pirahna.

“No!” My voice was still only a shadow of itself, but inside I screamed with everything in me. Oblivious to my useless protest, Red Flag went down and all I could see in the dark was Pirahna going after Red’s neck and face, wherever skin was bared. I had to stop this, I had to—

“Pirahna, you dumb shit, leave that traitor be and get that bitch before she rabbits out of here. We get her, we’ll have Tyr by the short hairs.”

I froze, and my throat clenched so hard I could barely breathe.

No.

I said the word, but no sound came out. Not so much as a whisper. I couldn’t even move, because…

He was here.

Hades.

My monster was here.

With a rustle of leaves that seemed loud in the night, Hades emerged from the hedges, his honey-colored eyes locked on me so intensely I forgot how to breathe.

Help me. God, please, someone help me.

I’d seen Hades briefly at the beginning of the year, in broad daylight, surrounded by the safety of friends, Tyr, and all of his mighty Gravediggers. It hadn’t mattered. My blood still ran coldat the sight of him. He was my nightmare, my personal demon, the ruiner of life itself. I’d always marveled that so much evil could be packed into one human being. Maybe that was why his frame was so huge.

Though oddly enough, that wasn’t really the case anymore. Somehow Hades appeared smaller since I’d lived in his house. He was a Colgrave, so he couldn’t help but cut an impressive figure with his long legs, broad shoulders, chiseled Nordic features and hair caught in a ponytail that had once been as blonde as Tyr’s, but now looked silvery gray. That hair also looked thinner than I remembered, and his forehead was now much larger than it had been in his youth. The leather jacket he wore bearing the patches he’d earned—President of the Chicago Gravediggers and the “1%” patch on the front, to the three-patch design generally known as the Outlaw Patches on the back—hung more loosely off his body than I remembered.

He wasn’t the man in his prime that lived in my memory, but that didn’t matter. There was enough evil and cunning in that bastard to more than make up for any physical deficit age might have given him.

Right now that evil looked at me like I was the answer to all his diabolical prayers.

“No.” God, I was souseless. I could only mouth the word. I couldn’t even yell to warn Tyr that his uncle was here.

Pathetic. I was so pathetic.

Pirahna, almost bald except for a fringe of bristle-like hair over his ears and around the back of his skull, rose over the moaning mess that was Red Flag. Blood, tarry black in the darkness, glistened off this mouth and chin, and the way he worked his jaw it was obvious he was still…chewingon what he’d taken from Red Flag.

“You’re old now.” Pirahna’s voice was breathless, whether from exertion or excitement, I couldn’t tell which. “So ugly andold. I remember how you always thought you were so superior, so much better than everyone else when you were a kid. What are you now?”

A goddess.

The words whispered through me, I wasn’t sure from where. But they were so calm, soreal, they stilled the panic as he approached, evaporating it as if it had never been. With a flash of clarity, I realized I had this. I knew exactly what I had to do.

---