The Road to Helltown: An Urban Fantasy Thriller (Preternatural Affairs Book 9)

by SM Reine

  It didn’t matter where we ended up mooring the yacht. You can pick on me for being ridiculous if you want, but it felt like we were already home.

  Epilogue

  TWO MONTHS LATER.

  “Ridiculous isn’t exactly the word I’d use for it,” said Tate Peterson. “Cheesy, lame, totally pathetic, gayer than gay—”

  “Put the thesaurus away, Doogie,” Cèsar grumbled. “You don’t gotta rub it in. This is being recorded for posterity and I don’t need history knowing how boring the president finds me.”

  Tate cackled. “President!” He spun in his chair. “Can you even fucking believe it?”

  “No,” Cèsar said. “I really can’t.”

  Yet there they were in the Oval Office. It looked nothing like the photos Cèsar had seen from the Breaking. The Fissure had torn all the way up into Washington DC and reduced the White House to rubble.

  This Oval Office was pristine, as though apocalypse had never been anywhere near it. The presidential seal on the carpet was bright and clean. The heavy blue drapes didn’t have a speck of dust on them. The hidden door was propped open an inch.

  This room was identical to the office where earlier presidents had worked. The gods had seen fit to restore this building to historical accuracy.

  “To be fair,” Tate said, “I’m only acting president until we can get our shit together for a national election.” And he was only acting president because that was where he had spawned after Genesis, and finders really were keepers, and nobody else with any political clout had survived the rebirth of the world.

  “You’re president enough for me.” Cèsar shrugged. “How’s the recording?”

  Tate scooted back toward the desk to check his computer. “Good. All the sessions together ended up close to fifty hours. I’m surprised you still have a voice.”

  Cèsar had spent the last week giving testimony on events leading up to Genesis. He’d started with the case that had dumped Isobel Stonecrow into his lap and worked his way through the highlights.

  His first visit to fight the Apple in Reno. Isobel’s history with Ander. The whole thing with the Half Moon Bay Coven. And all the way forward into the Breaking. Even the part where he’d held hands with his kopis as San Francisco blew the fuck up.

  Cheesy, gayer than gay, whatever.

  “Should we talk Genesis now?” Cèsar’s mouth was dry, and not from how much time he’d spent talking this week. He didn’t like remembering the moment he’d died. Nobody did.

  “Probably,” Tate said.

  “Do I have to?”

  Tate reached over and hit a button on his keyboard. “Nope. I hope you’ll talk about it someday, though. The world deserves to have a complete story of what happened.”

  “Don’t think getting smashed by the void before we could make landfall in Tokyo is gonna add much to the complete story,” Cèsar said. “It’s the same story everyone’s got. The roaring of the darkness, the way it chewed through everything, and then…”

  “Sunrise,” Tate filled in with uncharacteristic seriousness.

  He gazed out the window at the White House lawn. With the spill of golden light over his handsome features, he looked like he might be presidential in twenty years or so. For now, he was still too much a goofy early-twenties flamboyant gay kid with one hell of a political legacy.

  But the future was there for him. It was out there somewhere.

  Until sunrise on Day Zero, Cèsar hadn’t been certain that anybody would have a future in anything. He’d resigned himself to the fact that he was spending his last days bobbing on the ocean in a yacht with his friends, and that it was going to be a better ending than ninety-nine percent of humans got.

  He’d survived.

  The world had survived.

  They’d done absolutely fucking nothing, and the gods had brought everything back anyway. It was weird, unexpected, and inexplicable. But there they were.

  Everybody had a future now.

  Those months in Breaking-darkened San Francisco felt like a surreal and distant nightmare.

  Cèsar stood up, straightened his tie. Tate did the same. His goofy expression drained away as he checked his reflection, making sure that he was as groomed as a man with an all-new White House staff could be. “What do you think?” Tate asked, facing Cèsar with his hands spread, offering himself for judgment.

  Cèsar tucked a piece of hair back so it wasn’t in Tate’s eyes. “I know if you run in the first election, I’m gonna vote for you.”

  “It’s the only vote I care about,” Tate said with a wink.

  They shook hands. A staff member opened the door for Cèsar, and he stepped out, leaving President Peterson to do whatever it was President Peterson needed to do.

  There was a hell of a lot of work to be done.

  The illusion of serenity in the Oval Office dissolved somewhat once Cèsar stepped outside. There was nothing serene about the volume of OPA staff protecting the new administration. They stood alongside a few members of the Secret Service, mostly indistinguishable from one another. Cèsar probably couldn’t have told them apart if he hadn’t personally hired most of the OPA staff protecting Fritz.

  It had been a busy couple of months since Genesis rebooted the world. From the moment that Cèsar had woken up on Day Zero at home with Fritz, Izzy, and Suze—their home in Beverly Hills, perfectly intact and restored as much as the Oval Office—he’d been running around to rebuild the agency.

  Most of the work was administrative and intensely boring. Setting up a new bureaucracy was about as much fun as writing a book about the different noises Cèsar made while sneezing.

  But some of it wasn’t so bad.

  Fritz Friederling turned from a cluster of Secret Service agents when Cèsar approached. He was in business mode, all seriousness, with his hair and suit in place, and a mask of severe concern on his features. But when his eyes fell on Cèsar, he managed a very brief, very warm smile.

  Then he returned his attention to the agents.

  “Yes, that will be fine,” Fritz said. “You can send them to my DC office tomorrow. Eight in the morning, sharp. We have a lot of work to do.”

  “Yes sir,” said one of the agents, giving him a nod.

  They left. Fritz fell into step alongside Cèsar as they headed to the nearest exit. They emerged into sunlight, warmth, and an unexpectedly welcoming summer.

  A helicopter waited for them on the lawn. It was old OPA equipment. Someone had stuck a big White House decal on the side too.

  “That’s not for us, is it?” Cèsar asked.

  “No, POTUS has appointments elsewhere,” Fritz said. “I thought we’d make sure he boarded safely before we head off. Unless you’re in a hurry?”

  Cèsar was exactly where he wanted to be. “Sounds good.”

  They stood together on the sidewalk in comfortable quiet, shoulder to shoulder, watching the bustle around the White House.

  It all looked so normal.

  There were fewer people around than there used to be. Less press, fewer aides, more security. The city beyond looked normal at this distance, though. If Cèsar squinted his eyes, he could almost forget how much everything had changed.

  “Feeling all right?” Fritz asked.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “You’re squinting.”

  Cèsar hadn’t realized he was actually doing that. He stopped. “No, yeah, I’m fine. Not about to go all…you know, whoosh.” He held his hands out like he was casting a spell. He’d been casting a lot of spells lately, completely on accident. It was hard adjusting to his new powers after Genesis.

  “Just making sure. It’s strange not being able to tell how you feel.” Fritz was leaning heavily on his cane, one shoulder ratcheted up to his ear, and a crooked smile on his lined face. The sunlight tinted his hair luminous gold. He was broken, but whole—no longer a kopis. There were no kopides after Genesis.

  Cèsar had come back with some rather unexpected magical powers, and Fritz had come back w
ith nothing at all. He was a mundane. Mortal. Not even a hint of preternatural strength.

  Their bond had vanished, too. If there was no kopis, there was no aspis. No need for the two of them to spend the rest of their lives together, in fact.

  “So you’re starting the OPA officially tomorrow,” Cèsar said. “You’ll be the secretary again. Publicly this time.”

  “Yes, I am indeed that stupid,” Fritz said.

  “Foolhardy, maybe. I dunno about stupid.” Cèsar stuffed his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. The president had emerged from the White House, surrounded by Secret Service, and he waved at the paltry cluster of reporters by the trees on his way to the chopper. “I finished giving testimony about all the pre-Genesis stuff today, so I don’t need to be in DC anymore.”

  “Ah. Very good.” Fritz cleared his throat, and drummed his fingers on the head of his cane. He needed a cane all the time now that his strength was gone. His leg bothered him. “Then…what’s your plan?”

  “I was thinking of eloping with Suzy,” Cèsar said.

  Fritz lifted an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “Only thinking about it. She says she’s not getting married to me because it’s a patriarchal system and her vagina has better things to do than become permanently tethered to my dick.”

  “Is that how marriage works?” Fritz asked. “I missed that.”

  Cèsar shrugged. “Anyway, she said no eloping. So I guess my schedule is free for the next”—he glanced at his wrist—“always.”

  “You seem calm about how little Suzy needs you in her life,” Fritz said.

  “Suzy’ll be back once she gets bored making trouble in Dilmun. Just don’t know when that’ll be.”

  “Hmm. Isobel seems rather busy too. She doesn’t seem inclined to leave California now that she has a whole passel of necro-witches to nurture.” Fritz shot a sideways look at him. “I could use company in DC.”

  That sounded too much like the job offer that Fritz had given Cèsar so many years ago, back on that beach in California. “I don’t wanna work for the OPA permanently.”

  “You don’t need to. In fact, you don’t need to do anything.” He said it lightly, but Cèsar now realized that was how Fritz talked when he was worried about something.

  Cèsar had fulfilled his bureaucratic obligations, given his testimony, and was no longer Fritz’s aspis. He didn’t have to stick around. Not in DC, and not with Fritz.

  “Do you have a sofa bed for me?” Cèsar asked. “Rent’s gonna get real expensive around here once the world has, you know, economies and stuff again.”

  That warm smile returned, blooming slowly over Fritz’s features. “I’m sure I can find a sofa bed somewhere. A thrift store, maybe.”

  “Cool,” Cèsar said. “Great. Then it’s set. Roommates?”

  “Sure,” Fritz said.

  President Peterson climbed into the helicopter. It ascended into a clear blue sky slashed by sunlight, and the wind smelled like apples.

  “I don’t need to get in to work for another sixteen hours, though,” Fritz said. “What do you want to do until then?”

  Cèsar rocked back on his heels, hands in his pockets, teeth bared in a grin. “I say we explore the new world. Get drinks somewhere crazy, harass some demons, kick a little ass. Sounds good?”

  “With you? Absolutely,” Fritz said.

  He took Cèsar’s hand.

  Cèsar took his necklace off over the top of his head, and his glamour fell away.

  He didn’t have a mirror to check, but he knew that his skin turned to diamonds, his hair to slate, his eyes to tourmaline. The gods had seen fit to bring Cèsar back to life as a sidhe. One of the most powerful gaean races, which hadn’t existed before Genesis. It was a weird thing to be. He still didn’t know the limits of his powers, nor did he know exactly how he fit into the design of the world.

  There were a lot of things Cèsar didn’t know, and very few things that he did.

  He did know he liked the way that Fritz fit at his side, metaphorically and literally. He knew that he loved Fritz’s awed laugh at the sight of Cèsar’s too-beautiful sidhe form. And he loved getting to pull Fritz through the ley lines into the Middle Worlds, planeswalking the two of them out of reality, away from responsibility, and into whatever infinite future they chose to share.

  A Fistful of Daggers Book 1

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  Dear reader,

  Although this is the end of Preternatural Affairs, it’s not the end of the world! Not permanently. Genesis has come and gone, and if you’re curious to see how that falls out, you should pick up my War of the Alphas series next!

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