“Your uncle looks a lot like you, you know,” she said with a cheeky grin.
“You know what I mean.”
Rollar found my uncle’s shriveled head about a hundred yards outside the temple.
“Lord Vance!” he roared. “Catch!”
I looked up and saw the head, with Grave Oath still embedded in the eyeball, spinning through the air toward me. I caught it by its beard and plucked the dagger out. My uncle’s face was twisted into a grimace of agony. He had died in extreme pain, and while I had been denied the pleasure of looking into his eyes as Grave Oath had sucked his soul out, I was okay with that. Justice had been served in a deliciously poetic fashion when he had been ripped apart like a chicken drumstick in a drunk barbarian’s hands, by the very demon he’d spent all these years trying to summon.
“I’ll travel to the Sea of Souls, Rodrick,” I said, looking coldly into the dead eyes of the severed head. “There, I’ll find your soul and stuff it into a cockroach’s body. And then I’ll step on you and grind you into paste underneath my heel…and then I’ll repeat the process, over and over and over.”
I tied the head to my belt, using the long beard to make a knot; I wasn’t quite finished with my uncle, not just yet. By this time, the rest of my party had started trickling into what was left of the inner sanctum of the Temple of Blood.
“You have won a great victory!” Friya exclaimed, beaming. “It is as I foresaw in my dreams. You, Raiser of the Dead, were able to defeat the minions of the Blood God, and prevent the Demogorgon from permanently materializing in this world. We are safe! The world is safe!”
I shook my head. “Not yet it isn’t. There’s another one of these motherfuckers out there, someone like my uncle. Someone even more powerful than him, someone who’s also working for the Blood God. He recognized me too—and I think I know who he might be.”
I hadn’t gotten a look at his face, but the way he had addressed me had rung a bell. The beggar…
“What happened to him in the explosion?” Friya asked.
“He escaped through a portal long before that,” I said. “We might have won this battle, but I don’t think the war is won yet—not by a long shot, actually. I have a feeling that big red fuck is going to be surfacing again, somewhere in Prand.”
Elyse walked up to me with a look of fierce determination on her face. “Even if that’s the case, there’s one thing I’m sure of,” she said. “We can prevent that from ever happening here again. Use the Lord’s tear, Vance. Destroy this evil place forever.”
“We have to get these captives out of here first,” I said. “No one among us is sure what the Lord’s tear will do.”
My party and I freed the captives from the cages and we untied and ungagged them. They were all peasants, abducted by Rodrick and his army from the various villages they had sacked on the way here.
“Who are you, my lord?” a young man asked when I pulled the gag out of his mouth. “You bloody saved all our lives, you did! We was going to be slaughtered like pigs, like the rest o‘ them!”
“I’m Vance Chauzec, the God of Death,” I answered.
The young man dropped to his knees and bowed his head. “I will worship you from now on, Lord of Death,” he said. “I ain’t going to bother with that useless Lord of Light no more! He didn’t do nothing for my village or the others when these bastards came, and he didn’t answer any of their prayers when they was strung up from the ceiling of this vile place and had their throats slit. Fuck him! You’re my god now—you’re the god of all of us. You actually saved us, unlike that soulless bastard! Isn’t that right, everyone?”
The freed peasants let out a resounding cheer and dropped to their knees. “To Vance Chauzec, God of Death!” they roared in unison.
Getting a bunch of new followers was a welcome bonus after everything I’d done. Still, I wasn’t quite finished yet. There were two more things I needed to do, and the first of them came running up to me in the form of a slender, long-legged, dark-haired stunner. Her eyes were not on me, though, but on the corpse of the Charm Goddess on the ground.
“No! Lucielle, no!” Anna cried, tears streaming down her cheeks as she collapsed into my arms. “I came all this way, Vance, I came all this way, and, and…and she died before, before…”
“Before what, Anna?”
“Before I could become Fated,” she whimpered. “That was all I wanted, to become Fated. I did all of this, and now that chance has been taken away from me forever.”
I tilted her face up so that I could look into her eyes. She was surprised to see a broad smile on my face, I was sure.
“Why are you smiling?” she asked.
“Screw being Fated. How would like something way better than that?”
“Better than being Fated? What do you mean?”
“A goddess, Anna—being a living goddess. How does that sound?”
Her eyes shone with fresh hope, and a certain greed, and her frown turned upside down, turning into a wide grin. “Yes! Yes, I’d do anything, I’d give anything for that! Anything!”
“Are you sure about that? Absolutely anything?”
“Anything. I swear it.”
“All right. Be warned though, this will hurt a little. You’ll feel pretty great afterwards though.”
“What?”
The first time I’d resurrected a goddess, it had been very difficult. Now, though, I was a lot stronger than I was then, and Lucielle had died very recently. Her soul would still be very strong, even though her body was dead. Despite the fact that I had expended a
