Page 81 of Grave Curse

The little flag that symbolized Ginger’s phone appeared, and for a second I stared at it, uncomprehending. The app said her phone was right there in Vixen’s Den. Jesus, did that mean she dropped it? Or maybe she was made to drop it…

Wait.

No.

Her phone wasn’t at this address. It was at the address next door.

What the fuck?

As I watched, the little flag blinked out of existence from its location next door, and reappeared in the dry cleaners store at the end of the strip mall.

She was on the move.

Or at least her phone was.

“Close it down,now!” My bellow overrode the music, the laughter, the world. “Close the perimeter down, nobody gets in or out as of now, until I say so. Hades ishere.”

*

Ginger

Very carefully, I cracked an eye open.

Red Flag hadn’t hit me.

Rage twisted his shadowed face and his hand was still raised in a fist that was as big as my head. But…

He hadn’t hit me.

Huh.

How very un-Hades of him.

“Four teeth.” The words barely managed to squeeze out. Damn it, my stupid throat had almost closed up. To make any noise around a predator was to make yourself an easy meal. His daddy had taught me that.

He stared at me like I had lost my mind. “What?”

“Four teeth. That’s how many teeth Hades has knocked out of my head. The first two were to teach Tyr a lesson, or so Hades said. I’d been doing my homework at the time. The other two teeth left one at a time, for similar so-calledreasons, each while I was just minding my own business. I don’t remember a lot of details around them, though, because each punch I took came with a concussion. I can only remember pain. Pain, and humiliation.”

He seemed to draw back. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing—”

“It’s not a game. It’s me showing you who your father is, through every hurt he gave me. But even more than the hurt, it’s the humiliation he gave me that poisoned me all the way to my soul, Red. Can you even understand that? Being so big and powerful, you probably can’t, so let me school you on what it’s like to be beaten on.”

“Don’t—”

“It’s just so humiliating, you see, to be reduced to nothing more important than a punching bag. That’s what your father made me into while I was growing up—a punching bag. A toothless, broken, concussed, wishing-for-death punching bag.” Slowly, because my muscles couldn’t seem to uncramp from the protective ball they’d tried to curl me into, I straightened to look up at his fist as if mesmerized. “Why aren’t you like him?”

He looked at his fist, too, before lowering it. “I don’t hit women.”

“You just hold guns on them.”

“God, you’ve really got a mouth on you.” Moving just as slowly as I was, he grabbed my arm to pull me into a smaller room behind the counter, where I could just see a human-sized hole had been made in the wall. “You lying about your teeth?”

I gave him a funny look as he pushed me through the hole to the next shop over. “No. Why would I?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because your man and my old man are enemies.”

“I’m Hades’s enemy too.” I looked around and saw we were now in the back room of the dry cleaners, the faint greenish light of the shop’s neon logo behind the service counter giving everything a surreal quality. “Isn’t this clever. All eyes are on my front door, yet here we are a good seventy feet away. Anyone casually leaving this store, even after hours, won’t even be noticed.”

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