Page 100 of Monstrous Travels as Wicked as Sin

“And what are the ethics of that?” Giordano wondered aloud.

“Necrophilia?” Joe hissed.

“Don’t kink shame, handsome,” said Percy. “Plus, he’s walking around. It’s not the same thing at all.”

“If you’re quite done?” Molly called up. The small group shuffled themselves into a more serious-looking formation to listen. “I tried to be nice, Percy. We could have done this the easy way. The pleasant way. You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble. But you are stubborn. Which is why I’ve given up trying to reason with you. Joe?”

Joe said nothing, thrown to hear his name on her lips, such an inconsequential player in the whole game as he’d always thought he was. He watched her walk a few short paces to her left, where she stopped at the body of a woman lying prone on the ground. She kicked it softly, and with that one small indicator, Tareq and Waleed immediately pulled the unconscious woman to her feet.

“Joe,” she continued, “it’s my understanding that you’re not quite so fond of bloodshed as your fiancé is. That you have a littlemore sense and sensibility. That you understand, whatever I’m going to do with the sheath won’t be half as bad as what I’ll do if you piss me off.”

Molly pulled up the long sleeve of her dress, flicked her wrist back, and released a small dagger. Tareq’s hands wrenched back the head of the woman he held, and as Joe’s eyes flitted to the bare skin, to the flash of the blade, he yelled, “Stop! Stop it! We’ll get the sheath. We’ll get it now. Stop!”

Percy already had his hand on his own dagger. The group parted by instinct to give him space. But all were too intent on the drama below to notice that his movements were a little less fluid than usual. That his reactions were a little slower. Off balance. And none of it paused the sickening show playing out before Joe’s eyes.

Molly’s knife slid across the woman’s throat, and she must have been alive, because the blood spurted free and plentiful from her freshly slit artery. Molly cupped the back of the woman’s neck, and as though nothing in the presence of the harrowed onlookers worried her in the least, she dipped her lips to the scarlet fissure and drank.

“Holy fuck,” Althea whispered, turning to Leo, whose pale face watched on as he ran his arms around her. Joe reeled a step back from the window, dizzy at the spectacle. Percy, who for reasons none of them could understand, still hadn’t thrown the dagger, stumbled. Never off-balance, he staggered against the windowsill. The dagger clattered to the floor, drawing the attention of the entire group. With visible effort, he seemed to get his bearings, grasped the weapon, stood tall, ready to make the attempt again, even as the room swayed away from him.

“Percy!” Joe was in front of him, two hands on his cheeks, trying to look into the eyes that clouded over, unfocused.

“Joe. I need…” A stark confusion overtook him, and he blinked back at Joe, his full weight shifting forward into Joe’s arms.

Joe, holding tight to Percy, yelled down at Molly. “What are you doing to him? Stop. Please!”

All bloody lips and chin sparkling in the street lights, she called up, “If you want him back, you bring me the sheath. Montmartre Cemetery. And be quick. He won’t survive long without you where I’m taking him.”

Percy dropped, Joe’s knees smashing to the floor by his as he tried to brace his fall. “Percy!”

“Joe…” He blinked again, this time long and slow and fading.

“Percy, wake up!” He slapped Percy’s cheeks, but the face he adored fell forward onto his chest, eyes closed, gone. “Baby, no. Don’t do that. Percy, don’t.”

In a slow, strange nightmare, Leo stumbled a step back and fell, Althea’s long hair sliding across his arm as she fell down upon him, followed by Giordano, dropping against the wall, and down to the floor.

Joe, in some desperate act of hopeful defiance, took Percy’s dagger and slid it into the inside pocket of his vest. He wrapped both arms around him, and pulled him with all his strength away from the window, intent on locking him away somewhere, as though the tiny latch on the bathroom door would provide some sort of obstacle to a witch as powerful as Molly Tulloch.

But he wasn’t thinking straight. Because Joe’s world had begun to fade in the same undeniable way an anaesthetic takes the mind. Fight, fight, but there is always the darkness, and it came for Joe callously, no matter how desperately he clung to Percy’s unconscious body, trying to save him.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

A CRUEL AWAKENING

Joe didn’t wake measure by measure, grasping his way out of the fog that had downed him. He felt the rough and wet tug of Moxie’s tongue on his cheek, and he was bolt upright, searching for Percy. Fruitlessly, stupidly searching, because even before he opened his eyes, he knew the warmth was gone. His heart, his existence, his reason for living, taken while he slept.

The others roused, one by one, due to his shouts, his feet on the floorboards as he pounded through the apartment, as though Percy might have wandered off to another room and left them all there, passed out on the floor. It was an agony of fast-paced slow motion—an everything and a nothing that flung Joe from one room to another in a frenzy, some counter in his mind taking stock of his options. Whatever weapons Percy might have once had would have been taken or destroyed when the apartment was ransacked. But he would find something to use. He would get him.

Leo was up now, beside himself with the loss, Althea close, reassuring him that if it had been anyone else, they might have been in trouble. But not Percy. Percy was indestructible, and Leo knew that. Just as well as she knew that.

Giordano was staggering to his feet, listening, trying to piece it all together, and Joe let Althea take over, filling Giordano in on every detail, recounting every pinprick in the map that Percy and Joe had been over together. Every twist and turn, like it was a story to be easily recounted—a tale with a start and an end—not life itself; not a moment in time before which nothing existed, after which all was void.

A sharp metallic twang sounded as he pulled the still-wet chopping knife from the dish rack, barely cool from Percy’s beautiful fingers having last touched it. He searched over the counter tops and found Giordano’s gun. So small. It didn’t look like it could do a thing to help him, but he turned, half distraction, to Giordano, and asked, “Bullets? More bullets?”

Giordano looked regretfully at the gun. “That’s it. That’s all I brought.”

Joe shoved it into his pocket and wrenched the kitchen drawer open with a clatter. “Where is everything, Leo?”

Leo, in tears, knew exactly what he meant. “There’s nothing. There is nothing. You saw what happened to the place.”

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