My eyes flitted to meet his, and I nodded.
“It was a little different back then, huh? Okay, a lot different. You were pretty distrustful, but hey, that comes with meeting your first god.” He flexed his arm and chuckled. “But yeah. You were still doing that thing where you’d borrow stuff from the people upstairs. Remember that?”
“The Vestments?” I nodded again. “Had to stop doing it. They were charging me for every rental.” I wiped a hand across my cheek, sniffing. “Can you believe that?”
Apollo laughed again. “It is how it is. But now you’re doing all this insane stuff, making shit out of thin air, flying through the sky. That’s incredible. You’ve worked a whole lot to become the man you are now.” He slapped me on the back, just hard enough to make it feel friendly and reassuring. “Don’t ruin it all because you can’t handle something as fleeting as your temper.”
Sighing, I stretched my legs out and planted my hands in the grass, mirroring his pose. “I know, I know. It was dumb and impulsive. Guess I just felt helpless, especially knowing that I couldn’t really get going on my own. I mean, I still need help from all of you guys just to see things out there, and it feels shitty somehow, like I’m helpless.”
His face went serious. “I’d think that by now you would’ve acknowledged that it’s okay to ask for help from people who consider themselves your friends.” He grinned again, winking, pointing a finger up at the clouds. “And sometimes, it’s okay to quietly borrow from others, too.”
My forehead creased and I squinted at him. “I’m not sure I get what you mean.”
“Just saying that maybe there’s a loophole around all this Vestment stuff, you know? That maybe it could be worth it to sneak around and take something when you really, absolutely need it. Fuck the debt and what they charge you.”
I shuddered, remembering the last time I did just that. “Um, you haven’t forgotten, have you? That one time I randomly reached out to the Vestments to just sort of borrow an archangel’s sword, and I ended up with one that belonged to the most dangerous archangel of them all?”
He shuddered, too. “Lucifer. Big yikes. Okay, so maybe I’m wrong. All I’m saying is, it’s cool that you can actually manifest things with your creatio stuff, but don’t forget about the basics. You’re a creative guy, Mason. It’s in your name. Surely there’s other uses for the Vestments. What if it wasn’t just weapons and armor? What if there was other stuff you could filch from the high heavens?” He winked again, the gold in his eye flickering.
Something electric sizzled up my spine – did he mean borrowing something that wasn’t from the armories? But I stowed the idea away for later.
“This is all well and good, but speaking of the high heavens, we gotta talk about your literal eye in the sky. Did you see anything out there?”
He patted at his cheek self-consciously, like he’d somehow forgotten about the fact that he could, you know, see through the sun. “Almost forgot about that. Yes, yes I did.” He patted at his pants pocket and pulled out a sheet of creased yellow paper, holding it out to me triumphantly. “We’ve got some Hunger jerks right here in town.”
My hands shook with excitement as I unfolded the makeshift map the twins had effectively drawn together. I scanned the scrawls of Apollo’s awful handwriting, frowning when I grasped the vile, horrific irony of it all.
“They’re based out of a meat freezer.”
16
Apollo had to tackle me to the ground to stop me from acting that same night. And the next day, when we explained his findings to the others, Samyaza very pedantically suggested that the Hunger using a meat freezer as a base of operations was more of a grotesque coincidence than anything truly ironic. Technically, he was probably right, but I still rolled my eyes at him, because that’s what a son is supposed to do.
It all just struck me as so sick. The Hunger wasn’t supposed to be an organization, and yet enough people adhered to the idea that it had become its own burgeoning little industry. This was illegal and unethical on all fronts. Did human authorities even know about all this? Surely they had some idea, were watching closely.
And yet ultimately, if Beelzebub really was involved in this massive mess, what could the normals do against an actual demon prince? It boiled my blood. Apollo had been right to stop me from running straight out of Paradise again, but I could barely sleep, knowing that our enemies were so close. We had to do this. Following the Hunger was going to lead me back to Beelzebub – to my mother.
It was afternoon out in Paradise when Samyaza suggested that we try his trick with the coins again. It was his idea to collaborate with Apollo, using his map to determine the location of the next nearest nephilim. Start local, they said, start small, and that was exactly what we were going to do. This time it was up to me to create the fool’s gold for him. If Raziel was out there doing his part to locate and protect the other nephilim, then I was more than happy to have him sit this one out.
Everyone in Paradise, with the exception of the animals, naturally, gathered in its approximate geographic center. We needed a game plan, and sketching out the Hunger’s movements before we swooped in on their local base and burned it to the ground seemed prudent. I knelt in the grass, cupping my hands together the way I’d seen Raziel do so many times. Warmth
