Page 112 of Monstrous Travels as Wicked as Sin

“You were the one who wanted to get rid of her!”

“Details. Anyway, there’s something else I should probably tell you, and it’s nothing to worry about. We’re in a graveyard full of reanimated skeletons, after all, so what’s one more?” Still he walked, but suddenly he gave Joe the impression he was trying to get away from more than skeletons.

Joe stumbled forward to keep up and to read his expression. “I’m sorry? What do you mean?”

“It’s more of a philosophical question at this stage,” Percy waffled, eyes ahead. “I would need you to consider art, and the question of what art is. Is it in the eye of the creator? The beholder? And you know, if we took all the dead-inside pricks out of the art world, just kept the virtuous, can you imagine the saccharine array of utter bullshit we’d be left with?”

Joe slipped under a branch that Percy held back for him. “What are you talking about?”

Percy paused there, hands expressing whatever he wasn’t quite coming to. “I’m just saying that if I’d done a thing?—”

“A thing?”

“An art project?—”

“Is this important right now?”

“No.” Because how could it be? Right here, this second, chasing a witch, the dead rising around them… “No, it’s nothing,” Percy agreed, relieved. “All that matters is we’re here together, and we’re going to end this now. Even if I don’t know how. Maybe I can appeal to her hatred of the Church and general misanthropy? I feel like we identify somewhat?—”

“Or maybe not?” Joe suggested.

“When we find her, let me do the talking.”

“I’m not sure that’s a great idea.”

“Trust me, handsome. How about we find her, tie her up, take her back to the apartment, and we’ll work at it until she sees things our way and gives Cleo her body back? I’ve done it once before, you know.”

Joe laughed. “That’s true. You did well.”

Percy took a hand to Joe’s cheek and kissed him. “We’ll be fine. The important thing is that she never got her hands on the sheath.” As the words shot a shard of ice into Joe’s veins, Percy chuckled out, “Because in that case, we’d have been royally fucked.”

“H-how fucked, exactly?” The two stepped out of the trees into the scant moonlight of a small clearing—a circle of grass, surrounded on all sides by tall and teetering graves. “It’s useless without the Spear of Destiny, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But if I were Molly…” Percy gave brief hesitation, but must have decided it wasn’t worth troubling Joe about what he would have done if he was a powerful witch with a four-hundred-year vendetta against mankind. “Well, it doesn’t matter. I knew you’d never give over that kind of power, even for me. Because you have the heart of a saint, handsome. The biggerpicture, humanity, that sort of thing comes first. You’re just not the sort to risk all of human existence for?—”

“Percy!” Leo’s shout across the small clearing cut into Joe like a knife. He, Althea, and Giordano tumbled out of the darkness, Leo beaming at Percy, running, until he threw himself into his arms, knocking him back several steps.

“Leo?” Percy wrapped his arms around him, disbelieving, but still he kissed the top of his head, and though smiling, said harshly, “What the fuck are you doing here? You need to leave, all of you.”

“But we got it,” said Althea, smile just as wide and proud as Leo’s. “The sheath. It’s right here, just like Joe said.”

Giordano’s strong arms lifted the box. He offered a nod and a grin, and Percy’s eyes turned on Joe. It was but one short, shocked, unreadable moment before Molly’s voice sang around the open space. “Finally.”

She stood atop one of the higher-set graves, bloody, beautiful, and with Percy’s ancient and rusted Spear of Destiny turning over and over in two hands.

Percy’s eyes locked onto it with sickened recognition. “Fuck.”

Tareq and Waleed stood on either side of Molly’s grisly stage. Waleed’s entrails dragged along behind him, and Tareq’s naked chest was awash with blood that still gushed endlessly, relentlessly, from the gash Percy had made in his neck.

But for all this show of gory power and intimidation, Percy’s eyes flitted uncontrollably to Joe once, again, and on the third with a grin that was both sly and deeply adoring. “You really do love me, don’t you?”

Joe, always and again, on that edge of whether to cry or laugh, gave into the latter, with the helpless admission, “I do, Percy.”

Percy yanked him close, leaned closer still, and said, “I guess we’d better save the world, then.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

MURDER IN MONTMARTRE

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