Circe muttered a curse under her breath, eliciting a spell that lifted Gladas and threw him into a cement wall twenty feet away, sending a spiderweb of cracks outward from his impact. Slowly, he stood and fumed at Circe. Dashing toward him, she shot a bolt of red energy from her palm and it pierced through Gladas’s body like a spear, pinning him to the wall.
“You stupid man,” she said, her voice thick with emotion—it sounded like she might cry. Then I remembered that she loved him, she’d sacrificed her Nephil power so that they could be together. “Why must you continue to hurt me? Over and over again.”
Blood spilled from Gladas’s mouth. His jaw was set tight to his face. He had no intention of responding. She must have understood—she drew a dagger from the folds of her lab coat and drew it across his stomach, opening him so his innards splashed onto the floor.
Annie screamed and rushed toward him. She held his ashen face in her small hands and spoke between sobs. I couldn’t make our her words. After a second, she whirled around and faced Circe. “Kill me!” she screamed. “Kill me, too!” She pounded Circe’s chest with her fists.
The Demi woman grinned. “No. You’ll continue to live with the pain I have felt every day for the past ten years—a pain that exists from a life without him.”
Knowing she couldn’t harm Circe, Annie fell to the ground and wailed.
The Demi returned her attention to me. “Now, it’s your turn to die.”
“Wait,” I said, feeling a heavy headache forming from dangling upside down all this time. My tongue felt good with all the free blood to wet it, though. “If I asked you some questions, would you answer them? Seeing that I’m going to die and all, and you already spilled the beans about the Apocalypse. It’s just meaningless stuff I’ve never been able to find answers to.”
“You get three questions,” Circe said.
“That’s not fair.” I cleared my throat, knowing she wouldn’t change her mind. “Question one, where could a guy like me find Hecate? I mean, just pretend I lived after this incident, and I wanted to kill her for orchestrating the murder of my wife and daughter. Where would I find her?”
Circe fiddled with the chain that held me up. It loosened, and I fell hard on my head. Stars exploded behind my eyes as I rolled over, lying on my back and staring at the beaming fluorescent lights.
“I’ve never enjoyed killing trapped prey,” she said, circling me like a lioness. “‘Anywhere’ is the answer to your first question. She has a key that allows her to travel from Olympus to this world to the Underworld to wherever else she desires. Though, she spends most of her time in the realm of Hades.”
My feet and arms were still shackled, so I rolled back on my stomach. “You should take these restraints off me… I mean, since you hate killing trapped prey and all. Technically, I’m still trapped. Also, that wasn’t a question.”
Circe knelt over me and unclasped my restraints, moving away to continue her circling.
I sat upright and rotated my wrists to stretch them out. “Question two. Why did Gladas keep saying I have the power of a demon? I’m no scholar, but even I know that the Demon Princes and their Fallen Angels were destroyed thousands of years ago, which led to the Nephil controlling magic and creating pacts and blah, blah, blah.”
Circe smirked. “You have demonic power, Joseph Hunter, because you have the blood of a Fallen Angel flowing through your veins. Did Medea not tell you?”
Huh. Medea had mentioned something similar. Circe’s confirmation added a little more weight to the claim. These batty women wouldn’t go through the trouble of making up such a ridiculous thing, capturing Callie, Mel, and me, and using my blood if it wasn’t true.
I stood on weak legs, struggling to stay upright for a second. When I found my balance, I said, “Question three.” I paused, glancing at Annabel sobbing beside Gladas’s pinned corpse. If I asked for a recipe to cure the Scylla curse, would she offer it? What would that solve? I bit my lip, severing that question from leaking forth. If anyone could find a cure for her, it would be MIS and their rehabilitation program. “How would a person stop the apocalypse from happening? For example—hypothetically—if I lived through this ordeal, how would I stop the world from ending?” I bet on her Nephil pride to answer my question. She’d labelled me dead, so in her mind, dead I was. What would spilling a few beans hurt beyond a bad odor?
“Hypothetically,” she said, stepping toward me and inspecting her dagger’s blade, “if you were to live, you’d have to find a way into the Underworld. While there, you’d not only have to kill Hecate, Persephone, and Hades,” Circe grinned with as much pride as a proud mother, “but Melanie, too. You see, Joseph Hunter, she no longer belongs to this world.” Circe cackled laughter as she repeated Medea’s words to me before murdering Mel.
I grinned right back at her, shifting my attention to Xander. He stared at me with knowing eyes and nodded.
The side of Circe’s head exploded into a mist of blood and bone fragment. She staggered sideways, righted herself, and collapsed.
The half-dozen men surrounding Xander at gunpoint became hamburger meat as a hail of bullets ripped them apart. Cement chips and dust and blood slowly cleared the air, revealing an unharmed Xander, his crazed eyes a pure white among the dark red that coated his face. He burst out laughing like a maniac.
Standing near Gladas’s car, Dakota held a smoking assault rifle—most likely looted from one of the fallen guards I’d killed earlier. I fell onto my back and joined in Xander’s raucous chorus. Or maybe we cried. It was really just the same, in the
