“What is Vander to you?” Dagan asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
I pressed my lips together, exhaling slowly through my nose. “It’s complicated,” I confessed. “He’s an idiot. But I love him.”
“Whatever you have here, it’s not love.”
Indignation sprang up in my chest like a busted vat of acid. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“What you have is the beginnings of something. But it’s not yet love.”
He stepped through the portal.
I stood for another few seconds in Bram’s living room, looking at the big silvery patches Osenna had left on the priceless rugs. It was a lot of blood. Not as much as it could have been, way less than I’d seen before. But still.
This was… I fucked up.
I walked through the portal with blood on my face.
TWENTY-SIX
Quillan
I thought Dromir would be hot.
Active volcanoes spitting lava into a smoky red sky, dusty deserts stretching for hundreds of miles in every direction, maybe a gas geyser or something.
But it was cold. And it was snowing.
The wind had made deep-valley dunes out of the drifts, and the sky was that flat gray-white of a deep, unapologetic winter. We were standing in the middle of an enormous pine forest, all the treetops stretching way past the edge of the atmosphere. Their bark was smoky black, but it didn’t look natural. It was more like they’d been set on fire but hadn’t burned all the way.
“Does it always look like this?” I shoved my hands in my pockets, already shaking. “Snowy and cold?”
Dagan nodded. “Traditionally, yes.” He looked at me. “You were expecting something else?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Fire and brimstone.”
“How enlightened of you.” He turned to face us, his arms spread wide. “Welcome to Dromir!” He bowed with a carnival-barker flourish. “What do you think?”
I hugged my increasingly cold self and surveyed the big empty fishbowl of a world. Ice, ice, but no baby. Just a crazy demon, a brooding vampire, and a gaggle of federal agents.
“Charming,” drawled the brooding vampire.
“This is where Christmas goes to die,” I added.
“Better to presume it was never born,” countered Dagan.
I gave him a confused, Hades-please-lighten-the-fuck-up look. “What does that even mean?”
“That this has been a dull and upsetting world since its conception. Good things do not come here to die, they are denied entry.”
“Christmas is a good thing?”
“Yes. You do not think so?”
“I do, I just didn’t think you would.”
“Why wouldn’t I? I sell more gift cards right before Christmas.”
“Oh.” Then I paused, confused. “Wait, what do you mean, ‘gift cards?’”
He smiled instead of answering. Which was so much worse than if he’d just said, “Yes, Quillan, gift cards—Christmas sex gift cards, you want one?”
Dulcie stepped through the portal behind Dagan. Then Bram reached over, took the portal ripper from him, and did something to it that made the portal close with a wet zipping sound. Dulcie, meanwhile, had her arms crossed and was staring at the vast expanse of white like it owed her something.
“So, where are we going, exactly?” I asked.
“There.” Dagan pointed. I followed his hand, and through the trees, in a vast expanse of deadly white nothingness, was an enormous crystalline city surrounded by a big, none-shall-pass white wall.
“Oh,” I said sheepishly.
Dagan rolled his eyes. “There’s something about it that skates over the eye, isn’t there?”
“I mean, it’s glass.” Giant, shiny, evil-wizard-casting-curses-on-the-old-noble-families-that-scorned-him glass. “And we’re surrounded by trees.”
“That it is, and that we are,” Dagan confirmed. He sniffed the air and looked up. Thunder rolled across the sky, like Zeus had kicked a drummer down a staircase.
“Woah,” I breathed.
Dagan grabbed my arm and pulled me to the side.
“What—” I started, and there was a liquid-blue flash in the spot where I’d just been standing, mercury-explosion-in-a-stainless-steel-room blinding. The snow sizzled and popped like oil in a pan. Electric blue lines arced and burrowed into the snow, some of them curling around the trunks of trees and zapping the branches black. The light looked almost alive.
“Oh, wow,” murmured Christina.
“Oh wow?” I repeated, incredulous. “Your boyfriend almost got struck by demon-lightning and you say, ‘Oh, wow?’”
“Wowzers?” she corrected with a shrug and an apologetic smile. There was something about the way she was looking at me that was… off somehow.
“Why the hell,” said Knight, looking accusingly up at the sky, “is there lightning?”
“It’s lightning, dude,” I replied. “Clouds do that sometimes.”
“Yeah, fine, but it’s snowing.”
“There can be lightning when it snows,” I pointed out even though I wasn’t sure if that was actually true.
“Demon lightning, Quillan, that’s different,” Knight said.
“Maybe Hades is mad at you?” I asked with a shrug.
“Hades doesn’t fucking care.”
“Fine, maybe God is mad at you?” I said.
“God?” he echoed with a frown.
I shrugged. “Maybe Meg’s ghost is mad at you?”
Knight glared at me and I held up my hands.
“Joking,” I said. “Making a joke.”
“Not a good one.”
I nodded slowly. “This is true.”
He kept glaring, and a flash of fear charged through my muscles like I’d been shocked.
So, one of the things that sometimes happens when you travel between dimensions, especially for creatures of the boogedy-boogedy variety, is the Universe plays hacky-sack with your physical appearance. In the Netherworld, this means my ears get pointier, Dulcie gets wings and her magic doesn’t work, and Lokis glow like their veins are full of fairy lights.
In Dromir, land of the free, home of the demons, it’s a little different.
Here, I was hella pale. Like, day-one-of-the-zombie-apocalypse, body-in-the-morgue levels of paper white—white like dried glue. I turned my hands over and looked at my arms, which just about blended in with the snow. I was tempted to dive into one of the drifts just to see if I could totally disappear from sight.
Bram was cloaked in shadow. It was like he’d gotten sneezed on by a dragon, just totally covered in soot. His eyes were hangry-red and if I wasn’t looking at him straight on, he just looked like an ominous floating dust cloud.
Which was… kind of funny.
But Knight was… angry. I don’t know how else to describe him. It’s like somebody gave an underpaid artist a bunch of red crayons and a Red Bull at four o’clock in the morning and said, “you have ten minutes to make corporate feel seven different kinds of afraid.”
His skin had a gold tint, but it wasn’t sunlight gold, it was molten gold. It was the kind of gold that comes out of lava flows and burning houses. This was the version of Knight that maybe got along too well with Dagan.
Dagan didn’t look much different, actually, except his eyes had gone full-black. And the one that had been damaged beyond recognition was now healed. So there was that.
And Dulcie and Christina. Holy shit. Holy shit.
They had wings. Which, they’re fairies, so that’s normal, but they weren’t the normal Tinker-Bell, dragonfly wings. They kind of, like… didn’t exist? Almost? There was this really vague glitter-dust haze hanging in the air behind them, and it was moving fast, like wings. Their skin was glowing rose-gold, and their eyes, too, the light totally blotting out their irises. They looked a little possessed.
And they were both staring at all of us, smiling weird. Like, tongues-lolling-ou
t-of-their-mouths, I’m-being-watched-by-a-serial-killer-and-I-can-feel-the-murder-in-the-air weird. Except it wasn’t murder, it was less than murder, but they still clearly wanted something from everybody they were looking at. They looked hungry, the way mermaids look hungry when they drag sailors into the ocean.
“Oh,” I commented out loud, because they’re fairies and I’d just made a very stupid connection. “Oh, hell, no.”
“What’s the matter?” crooned Christina. Crooned was literally the only word for it. It almost sounded like she was mocking me, like she’d tripped me on the playground and was asking why I was crying.
She took five steps forward, putting herself in front of me. She touched my lips and let her finger trail down to my chest, pressing her body against mine, and honestly, all I could say was I was really glad Christina had gotten to me before Dulcie did.
Christina blinked and frowned. “Oh, Hades. This is not happening.” Clearly, she’d gotten control of herself for a second or so. But just as quickly, that second fled.
“…Hey, stay close to me, okay?”
“Yeah, good plan.” Her eyes roved over my body. She leaned against me with most of her bodyweight, which wasn’t much. “Really good plan. I like this plan.”
Something fucked up happens to fairies in the Netherworld. They get wings, their magic stops working, their skin glows a little, yada-yada-yada, but there’s more. Maybe it’s because they’re rare, or maybe there’s something way far back in their lore that we just don’t know anymore to explain it away, but fairies get sexy in a weird way. Not airbrushed-model-on-the-front-of-Sports-Weekly sexy, they don’t look any different than they do on Earth. But something changes in the air they touch. It goes nuclear, passing like a wave through everybody that might have a reason to find them conventionally attractive, and those poor suckers melt like butter in a volcano. Like sirens—like the weird gobbeldy-gook, drunk-college-student shenaniganry that happened when Osenna was in my living room. It just takes over. Except with fairies, it isn’t blehh, it’s oh, yeah, give it to me, mama.
In Dromir, it had to be different. We didn’t have the fuck-it-or-die flu. They did.
Great. Fucking superb.
So Christina was all over me, which would have been fine, except that we were in the snowy hell dimension that spat Dagan out into Splendor like rotten candy. I held onto her, mostly to keep her from getting bored with me and accosting someone else. She was trying to kiss my throat and kept missing, almost like she was drunk.
“Not here, babe,” I discouraged her gently.
“Aww, why?” she asked, and her smile was like a millipede crawling across her face. Inexplicable and completely disturbing. “Are you nervous?”
“Yes, one hundred percent,” I confirmed. “Can’t get it up when people are watching, sucks for us.”
“You haven’t even tried.”
“And I don’t want to.”
“We could go hide somewhere. No one will care. We won’t be gone long.”
“Or we could just not do this in Dro-fucking-mir, of all places.”
“What’s wrong with Dromir?”
“So far, literally everything,” I acknowledged. I grabbed her hands. “Later, okay? I promise.”
“Super-duper promise?”
I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes. “Yes, I super-duper promise. Now, can you chill for ten seconds?”
She pouted, bottom lip out, and crossed her arms, slinking backwards into the snow. “Fiiiine,” she whined. Like a twelve-year-old being forced to make something for the science fair with the dweeby new kid.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t thank me yet,” she countered, and she winked.
Okay, I’m not gonna lie. It was taking most of my self-control not to just take her right there in front of everybody.
No, bad Quillan, I admonished myself.
Dulcie, though.
No matter who sex-drunk Dulcie stumbled over to, it wouldn’t be good. Her options were me, Bram, Knight, Dagan, and Christina, and Christina and I were occupied—Christina trying to stick her hand down my pants, me trying to keep her hands where everyone could see them.
Knight was a bad idea. Bram was somehow worse.
Dagan stepped forward, slogging through the snow towards Dulcie, who was looking at all of us like we were birthday cake dripping with frosting.
“Dulcie?” He put his hands gently on her shoulders and smiled at her.
“Yes?” She stepped closer to him, then put her hands on his waist and squeezed.
“You seem distracted. Are you distracted, sweet Dulcie?’
“Very.”
“Perhaps, in service of our greater agenda, you and I should step away and exorcise this distraction from your body, hmm?”
Dulcie leaned up and tried to kiss him. I turned to shoot Bram a look and noticed he was already on his way towards them, his eyes narrowed on the demon. But, suddenly, Knight was on Dagan before either of us could get a word out.
He grabbed Dagan by the scruff of his black leather pimp-jacket and threw him backwards. He didn’t aim at anything, but Dagan caught himself in the gut with one of the trees. He made this airless whoomping sound and fell into the snow in a bright puff of white.
Seconds later, Dagan’s head popped up from the drift, looking like he’d enjoyed that a little too much.
“Oh,” mused Dagan, eyes wrapping around Knight and squeezing like cobras. He looked at Knight, then the girls, then back at Knight, and there was a plan forming behind his eyes.
I did not like this plan.
“I rather like this. Dromir looks good on you, dear friend,” he said.
Knight glared at the demon. Murder was coming off him in slow waves, like how lava flows. “Dear what?”
“Okay, guys?” I got in between them and waved my hands. “Osenna? Darion? Crazy magic psychopath that kidnapped your girlfriend?”
“Yes, yes, priorities,” Dagan affirmed. He hauled himself out of the snow and sighed his disappointment.
“Can you seriously not keep your dick sober for more than five minutes?” Knight groaned.
“No, actually,” Dagan retorted. “I think I would become physically ill.”
This was Dagan we were talking about. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” announced Bram. He’d been standing quietly off to one side this whole time, looking anywhere but at us. “And Vander. We have company.”
There was a rustly, bad-guys-in-the-underbrush sound as half a dozen demons stepped out from behind trees and popped out of snowdrifts like daisies. They were all in this white metal-mesh armor with long white capes, and very few of them actually looked anything like Dagan. Most of them had fair-ish hair, and the ones that didn’t had hyper-dark skin. All of their eyes were black; all of them had that icy blue glow coursing through their muscles. They were tall. All of them. Like, really tall. Tall to the point that Dagan, who wasn’t much shorter than me, looked itty-bitty by comparison.
Oh my god, I thought, Dagan is the angry short guy. He’s pissy and he’s little, that’s fucking hysterical.
I don’t know, it just felt like that explained 99.999 percent of who Dagan was as a person.
I smiled, starting to laugh. A hard look from a blond demon with a big sharp, blue-crackling spear thing shut me down quickly, though.
“By order of Lord Halsir,” declared one of them in a really stuffy, official voice. “You are under arrest.”
Bram’s shadow pulsed, grew, shrank. “Are we?”
More demons stepped out from the trees. Way more. With guns. Big ones.
So, yeah, I think we were.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Bram
Say what you will about demons, but they come prepared.
The blue lightning coursing through the sky was something for which there was no name. It was an ancient thing which had powered the magic of this world since time immemorial. In ages past, it had been worshipped as a g
od, or sometimes a series of gods, based on the severity of the storms that accompanied the flashing.
It was this same lightning which was captured in the demon’s spears.
If one found themselves in the unfortunate position of being touched by one of these sparking implements, one would experience a violent series of twists, spasms, and jolts throughout one’s body. One would jerk about like a puppet having a severe and unpleasant reaction to LSD. One’s blood vessels, particularly those in the immediate vicinity of the point of contact, would rupture, and blood would pour out from one’s mouth, nose, and—if one was especially unlucky—one’s eyes. None of this was any different than the symptoms one might encounter in an aggressive tasing; but this was magical electricity, so the symptoms were amplified to something akin to the fifty-thousandth power.
This is why, when presented with a bouquet of sparking blue weapons wielded by unwieldy demons covered in snow, this four-hundred-year-old vampire held up his hands and went away with them quietly.
There is a fine line between pragmatism and cowardice. I will readily admit to straddling this line.
Dulcie was in rather a state as we were arrested. Christina as well, though the effect of Dromir’s atmosphere on her person was less pronounced. Both ladies had a sudden yearning for sex of any variety—and any quality, as evidenced by Christina’s interest in Quillan—but Christina seemed more reserved. Perhaps this was because she had a designated other with whom to attempt to copulate, or perhaps Christina simply had more self-discipline. While Christina was making eyes at Quillan and asking the officers if they cared to join in, Dulcie was attempting to bite the soldiers’ throats out with manic glee.
That, or she was trying to kiss them and was making a hack job of it.
And, yes, I admit I was quite jealous. What of it?
The men and women—there were more women among the demons than men, as it happened—were enamored with her. The woman cuffing her smiled and giggled and even allowed Dulcie to lick the side of her throat.
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