“Of course I am.” I snatched the ring off its pedestal. “Cute and badass.”
“You know, badass, one of these days, you’re going to meet an enemy that you can’t one-hit,” he warned me.
I laughed. “That hasn’t happened yet.”
He rolled his eyes at me. “Do you ever get sick of being so perfect?”
“Nope.” I pointed at his boots. “You might want to take care of that.”
He looked down to discover that his shoelaces were on fire. He quickly stomped out the flames. “How did that happen?”
“It happened when you were throwing fire potions around with reckless abandon,” I told him. “You should try showing off a little less.”
For some reason, my statement made him laugh.
I frowned. “What?”
“You’re hilarious, Sierra.”
The heavy stone treasury door creaked open, and we prepared to leave. But a team of soldiers marched into the vault, barring the way. They were gods.
“What are you doing here?” I asked Stash, my mom’s cousin.
“We’re here to escort you home.”
I sighed. Of course they were.
“You guys couldn’t find the vault before. So how did you find us now?” I asked.
“We followed the trail of dead monsters,” Punch said with glee.
They were all here, all my mom’s friends from Heaven’s Army: Stash, Patch, Punch, Devlin, Arabelle, Octavian, and Theon.
“You’re even more trouble than your mother,” Octavian observed, and he too looked quite pleased with the notion.
My mom had weird friends.
Then again, my dad’s friends were weird too. His friend Harker enjoyed doing wing pushups. His friend Li had his entire bookcase sorted by color. And General Silverstar ironed his shoelaces and ate the same three meals every day. Ok, so technically General Silverstar was Dad’s grandfather, but still. He was the weirdest one of all.
“What are you doing here?” Stash demanded.
The question wasn’t directed at me. It was for the new arrivals, a team of demon soldiers.
“Grace sent us,” said Aerilyn, the notorious dark angel trickster.
She was another one of my mom’s cousins.
“Well, Faris sent us,” Stash told her.
Aerilyn’s brows lifted slightly. “To find Sierra?”
“Yes.”
She smiled. “Same.”
Great. So my parents had asked the King of the Gods and the Queen of the Demons to send their armies to come find me. The armies of heaven and hell were out searching for me like I was some kind of lost puppy. How embarrassing.
The gods and demons spent the next fifteen minutes alternatively glaring at one another and fighting over who got to drag me home kicking and screaming. And all the while, they were blocking the way out.