Page 76 of The Malevolent Eight

Galass, Aradeus, Shame, Alice and Temper all piled through the now ruined doorway after Corrigan. Temper, hopping around the low-ceilinged room, kept thumping his head on the wooden beams. At the foot of my bed stood a rat on its hind legs, watching me. My brain was still a little foggy, so it took a moment to figure out why I was so pissed off at the rat.

‘Huzzah,’ said Aradeus, somehow managing to draw his rapier in the cramped room without stabbing anyone. ‘En guarde, villains, for none who dare torment our comrade shall leave this room alive!’ He caught sight of me for the first time since entering the room and asked, ‘Are you badly injured, Brother Cade? Did those miscreants who kidnapped you shatter your spine, thus explaining why you’re still lying there in that bed?’ He peered closer. ‘And what vile creature lurks beneath the covers? Some sort of gigantic bone-eating slug that assails you even now?’

‘Heh,’ Corrigan chuckled. ‘Bone-eating.’

This latest in a long career of lousy jokes prompted Temper to stop hopping and instead enact what I had to presume was a piece of performance theatre taught to him by Corrigan which involved miming a series of lewd sexual acts. A few of them were surprisingly accurate. Since I was inured by now to these types of antics, my attention remained focused on a more pernicious prankster.

‘Aradeus?’ I asked, still watching the rat at the foot of my bed.

‘Yes, Brother Cade?’

‘Can I presume that Galass used her blood magic to track me to this region and then you summoned the local rats to narrow my location down to this inn?’

‘Indeed!’ he replied, evidently pleased with himself.

I pointed to the rat at the end of the bed. ‘This is the little fucker who informed you I was here?’

Aradeus frowned. ‘A callous slight, Brother Cade, for the noble creature who risked fur and tail to find you.’

‘Uh huh. Right. Only, since my rodent saviour here was capable of relaying my location to you, is there any particular reason why he didn’t mention that I wasn’t, in fact, held captive any longer, or that what lurks beneath the covers right now is not, in fact, a giant bone-eating slug?’

The rat, his beady eyes never leaving mine, twitched his head several times in a gesture which I distinctly understood to mean he was laughing at me.

‘In addition to their daring, courage and cunning, rats do have a rather legendary sense of humour,’ Aradeus confessed.

‘You know I could transform you into a human-sized, rat-headed servant creature if I wanted to, right?’ I asked the rat.

My future rodent valet scurried away.

Alice approached and pointed to the covers. ‘If there is no giant bone-eating slug hiding there, what does lurk beneath your bedding?’

At first, I presumed this was one of those amusing moments of unexpected prudishness in which Eliva’ren was mortified at being caught in bed with the man she still intended to kill before helping to destroy my entire world. But prudishness wasn’t really her style, so I worried she’d made her exit while I was sleeping and some kind of vile giant bone-eating slug really had crept under the covers with me. Possibly made from a swarm of insects. I carefully lifted the cover and discovered neither hypothesis was correct.

‘Seriously?’ I asked, seeing her sprawled unconscious under the covers and, now that the cacophony of Corrigan’s entrance had died down, hearing she was quietly snoring. ‘You slept through all that?’

Eliva’ren roused, first wiping at her lips, because it turned out she was a drooler when she slept. She smiled sleepily at me, only then finally noticing the smell of charred wood left behind by Corrigan’s temporal blast. She grinned. ‘Oops. I didn’t mean to sleep so late.’ She crawled out from beneath the covers, clearly untroubled by being naked in front of. . . well, if not exactly strangers, at least people she’d once killed, even if she had brought them back to life. She yawned, nestled herself against my shoulder and asked, ‘Has the world ended yet?’

Which brought us to the second thing she hadn’t warned me about.

Chapter 43

Even Ruder Awakenings

There are sights one really does not expect to see whilst standing around naked and looking out at the early morning sky from the second-floor window of a friendly little inn. One of those unanticipated sights is the entire fucking sky burning gold and red. Seriously, there were actual flames raging towards us, scattering clouds and filling the air with the screams of those who’d just woken up to the end of the world.

‘Stop screaming,’ Alice said. ‘It’s annoying.’

‘What the fuck happened while I was being incarcerated, tortured and interrogated?’ I demanded.

‘How was it?’ Corrigan asked, sad eyes almost soulful as he gazed down at me.

Watching what must be the cataclysmic supernatural effects of the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish marching their armies towards this benighted little town hardly felt like the right time for unburdening my emotional trauma on my best friend. Still, it was nice of him to ask.

‘Honestly? I’d place the experience somewhere between that time we got arrested by that mob of wonderist hunters and our more recent encounter with the Lords Devilish.’

‘Oh, no, I don’t give a shit about that.’ Corrigan poked me in the ribs with his elbow and nodded not at all inconspicuously to the other side of the room where Eliva’ren was still reclining on the bed. ‘I mean, how was it withher?’

His casual attitude was a clue to just how screwed we were. Corrigan’s no fool, no matter how convincingly he plays the part. If he thought there was any action we could possibly take to prevent the apocalypse coming our way, or even for us to escape, he would’ve been the first person to start stomping about and shouting orders. Instead, he was making salacious jokes, which, as he’s made clear many times, is one of the only two ways he wants to die. The other. . . well, that should be obvious by now too.

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