by K. C. Cross
Tarq is silent for a moment. Then he leans back and sits on the edge of his massive desk and crosses his arms. I don’t like this posture. He’s thinking, I can tell. His mind is a whirlwind of possibilities. And he’s a little bit frowny. Finally, he says, “I can’t give you the book.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t just hand over the source code, Pie. It’s… the fucking source code. It’s the secrets of the universe.”
“Oh.” I feel defeated.
“But I can give you the page you need.”
“Oh!” This time it’s brighter. “Thank you.”
“It is my pleasure. Any girl of Pell’s is a girl of mine.” His smile is wide. Like… big bad wolf wide.
“Mmm-hmm. I’m not sure about that last part there, but thank you again for the page. And I don’t want to appear ungrateful, but—”
“Oh, let me stop you there.” He puts up a hand. “You don’t need to be grateful, Pie.”
“No?” I swallow again. Because here it comes. The catch.
“No. It all evens out in the wash.” He winks at me.
I suck in a deep breath. “It can. Even out in the wash, that is. But I’m still very grateful.”
He just looks at me for a moment, still smiling. “I’m sure you are. Well.” He stands up, rubs his hands together, and looks over at a bookshelf. “Let’s find that book, shall we?”
I don’t move. But Tarq walks over to the bookshelf. There are no books on it, so for a moment, I’m confused. But he does something. I can’t see what, because his massive, sexy, muscled back is in my way. And damn. This monster here has some breeding behind him. Like his genetic stock is top-notch.
He chuckles from across the room, and then the bookcase begins to turn on a pivot point, leading to a chamber on the other side. Tarq glances over his shoulder at me. “I’ll be right back. Don’t you go anywhere, Pie Vita.”
I can’t even talk at this point. So I just nod.
He’s gone for several minutes. I want to walk over there and peek inside that chamber. Kinda get a feel for what he’s up to. But I don’t dare. I feel the need to be on the other side of the room when he comes back out.
And just a few seconds later, out he comes. Holding a page.
It’s a very pretty page. Like this page belongs in the Vatican library or something. It’s all handwritten calligraphy with gold foil illumination along the edges. It’s even got an illustration. He brings it over to his desk and puts it down. Then he points. “This is the side you want here. Banishing. The other side is something else.” He makes a point to look me in the eyes for this next part. “I would not mess with that side.”
“OK. But… should you have ripped it out of the book? I mean, maybe you should just make a copy of it. I’m not the most responsible person, ya know? I’m probably gonna ruin that page. It’s practically inevitable.”
He chuckles. “I like you.”
“Good.” I try to smile.
“But the pages regenerate. I made sure it duplicated before I came back. This one is yours to keep. You have your own book?”
“My own book? Of… spells? No. I’m new.”
He laughs again. “OK. And you’re honest. I like that. So you’re gonna wanna start a book. Keep all your spells in one place.”
“Oh. Like Grant did.”
“Grant.” His voice lowers a little. It’s almost growly.
“He was Pell’s last caretaker. I’m his replacement. He kept lots of books. But he took the good ones with him when he left. And all the shit he left me is stupid. Like… backwards-working love charm stupid.”
Tarq blinks at me. “Hmm. I have to say, Pie, this is the most interesting day I’ve had in almost two thousand years.”
“Um. Thanks. I think.”
“At any rate, the page is yours. Keep it safe, use it well, and…” He pauses to smile. “Tell Pell that now that I know where he is, I’ll come visit.”
“Wait. You can do that? Just… leave here?”
“Here?”
“Your… tomb.”
He tilts his head at me. “Does this look like a tomb?”
“No. But”—I shrug—“the hallways do weird shit. I figured that’s what’s happening here. The hallways.”
He leans over, presses a button on his desk phone, and says, “Miss Vita is done. I’m sending her down. Can you meet us at the elevator?”
“Yes, sir,” Luciano responds.
Tarq looks back at me. “Your world sounds… intriguing. But since you’re on a tight timeline, we can discuss the rest at a later date. Sound good?”
I nod enthusiastically. I just want to get the fuck out of here.
“I’ll walk you to the elevator.” He walks up to me and extends his arm.
I do not want to take his arm. Like… I cannot even stress how much I do not want to touch this monster. But there is no polite way to avoid his offer. So I place my hand on his muscled forearm and let him guide me down the hallways.
Everything is different this time, though. Luciano and I did not come up in an elevator. But Tarq leads me to one, and when the doors open, there Luciano is. Waiting for me.
I start to enter the elevator, but Tarq grabs my hand before I can fully remove it from his arm, and I have to stop and look at him.
He studies me for several long, awkward moments. Then he brings my hand up to his lips and kisses my knuckles, just like Luciano did down in the lower hall. Tarq’s eyes never leave mine as he does this. And I suddenly feel faint. Like, I’m one hundred percent certain that I am about to fall over.
But then Tarq lets go and I’m free and my head clears immediately. “Until next time, Miss Vita.”
“Yep. Thank you so much. Pell and I really appreciate this.” I hold up the page. Then I turn and make my escape.
Luciano says nothing as we descend, but I can feel his smile.
Delightful. They think I’m delightful.
And there are definitely worse things to be, but I get the feeling that ‘delightful’ is Tarq’s replacement for Pell’s ‘naïve.’
Luciano walks me out into the lower hall, which is now empty of people and looks very much the way I would expect it to look if I were back in my own sanctuary.
We stop at the large glass doors that now lead out into the cemetery.
“Thank you,” I tell him.
“It was our pleasure to help you today, Miss Vita.”
I don’t let him take my hand because I know he’s going to kiss my knuckles and I just can’t do it again. So I wave. Then turn to the glass door, open them, and…
… walk out of the tomb I entered earlier.
I’m very disoriented when this change happens and I have to look up the hill at the cathedral to get my bearings. But when I look back at the tomb, there is no door. Just that giant statue of Tarq.
Which, now that I’ve met him, doesn’t even begin to do him justice.
But then I look down and see hooves.
Not black hooves. Not Tarq’s hooves.
My hooves.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - PELL
“You’re lying.” I say this to Grant with conviction because I don’t believe him. “You’ve been lying since the day you arrived here.”
Grant—Saturn—whoever the fuck he is—smiles up at me. “You never had a chance, Pell. You’ve been here for two thousand years. This isn’t a curse. It’s fate. You’re never getting out. Pie works for me, Tarq works for me—”
I turn away. I will not listen to his lies. I will not let him poison my mind with this shit. He told Pie a whole bunch of things in town too. And that was bullshit.
She’s not his. She’s real. We did the phone call. She talked to her friend. We have already proved this.
The moment I realize that, I feel… not defeated. Not better, either. There is still a bunch of shit happening that I don’t understand. And I don’t really know which part of what he’s saying is true or false, but that doesn’t matter. He can’t be trusted.
He’s lying about something. And if he needs to lie, that means he has a weakness.
I will find that weakness and I will destroy this god, once and for all.
I go outside and start hoofing it up the hill.
Grant calls after me from the other side of the gate. “You know I’m right! You know there’s something wrong with her!”
But he can’t get in. When he walked out, he forfeited his right to enter Saint Mark’s Sanctuary.
I’m almost at the top of the hill when Pie steps out from between some tombs. I am so stunned by her appearance, I stop in my tracks.
Behind me, Grant cackles. “See!” he yells. “See! Look at her! Look at her! She is a creature of magic. She is a creature of me!”
Pie is crying. Shaking her head, and pointing to her feet, and trying to cover herself with crossed arms, because she’s naked.
Well, she’s got fur, so not really. But she feels naked. I don’t know what just happened inside that tomb, but it doesn’t matter. I walk up to her, put my arms around her and hold her close. “It’s OK,” I murmur. “It’s going to be OK.”
She lets out a long breath. “I don’t understand what’s happening.” Then she pulls back. Grant is still screaming at us from outside the walls, so she’s momentarily distracted by this. “Why’s he here?”
“It doesn’t matter. He can’t get in.”
Pie looks up at me. She doesn’t have a book, but she is holding a page that looks like it came out of the book I’m looking for. “Things are getting weird, Pell.” She looks over her shoulder in the direction of Tarq’s tomb, then back at me. “That was not what I expected.”
“Did you get the spell?”
She holds up the page. “He said this is it. And he said to tell you hi. But…” She waves a hand in the air. “What do we do now?” She looks down at herself. “I need a shirt, I guess. But I don’t want to go down to the cottage. So. Whatever.”
I arrange her hair so she’s properly covered. “I promise not to look.”
This makes her smile, at least. “It’s not like you haven’t seen it all before.” She pauses to sigh heavily. “Well. Should we go do this spell and get rid of that jerk?” She nods her head in the direction of still-screaming Grant. “I just want the outside world to go away for a little bit. I need to think.”
I want the outside world to go away as well. Because I’m starting to worry that Grant might not have been lying about all of it.
Pie made the phone call. That’s our proof she had a real life outside of Saint Mark’s.
But something else is going on here too. Obviously. Since she has horns and hooves right now.
I take her hand. “Yeah, let’s do it.”
We go inside and up to the apothecary. Pie sets the page down on the alchemy bench and then smiles. “Holy shit. My flannel.” She walks over to a table on the far side of the room and picks up the flannel she was wearing the day she arrived. She holds it up. “It’s a little bit bloody and it’s ripped down the back. Remember? I fell out of your freeze and hit my nose.”
“Oh. Shit. I feel terrible about that.”
“Don’t. That was like… lifetimes ago. Bygones.” She slips the flannel on with a sigh. And even though she’s still a wood nymph chimera, and nothing about this day is normal, I can tell this one piece of clothing from her past is enough to ground her for now. “OK. Let’s do this shit.”
I shouldn’t say anything. I should just let it go. But I can’t help myself. “You’re handling this whole thing”—I move a finger up and down in her direction to indicate her body—“very calmly.”
Pie shrugs. “What can I do about it?” Then she looks down at herself. “I mean, I hope I don’t stay like this forever, but I’m not going to worry about it.” Her eyes meet mine and they are suddenly serious. “Now we’re the same.” She grins at me. “Now I’m your dream girl.”
“I actually… love that. But.” I hold up a finger. “If there’s a way to get you back to your natural body, I’ll do everything I can to make it happen. If that’s what you want.”
“We’ll see.” She sighs. “One thing at a time.”
“Agreed. Let’s take a look at that spell.”
“It’s this side,” Pie says.
I take the page from her and start reading, then frown. “What the fuck?”
“What’s wrong?”
“This can’t be it.”
“Why not?”
“It’s the same spell we just did to get you in the tomb.” I turn it over, checking the back of the page, just in case Pie got them mixed up. But the back says something about wings. So that’s not it.
“What’s wrong?” Pie comes over to me and her new wood nymph scent comes with her. It’s intoxicating. But not in a magical, bad way. A good way. She smells like the forest. She smells like home. She takes the page and looks at it. “Hmm. You’re right. Only two ingredients. Bloodhorn and a dragon scale.”
“Hey, what happened to your dragon scale?”
“It disappeared when I went through the tomb door. We have a lot to unpack about that trip, but let’s just do this spell first.”
“What’s there to do? It’s the same ingredients. How can it banish something? There aren’t even magic words. It’s a fucking amulet.”
“Stupid amulets. That’s what got us into this trouble, ya know.”
I walk over to the bench I was working at earlier. There’s a vial of bloodhorn and the two remaining scales. I paint some oil on the scale with a brush, then hold it up and shrug. “There. It’s done.”
“How would we even know if it works?”
“I’ll go look for Grant and see, but I’m not feeling hopeful.”
She shoots me a look that says she’s not either.
I carry the anointed dragon scale out to the great hall with me and I’m just about to turn towards the stairs when I glance at the front windows and see Grant on the other side of the gate. “Well.” I huff. “Obviously, it doesn’t work. He’s right fucking there.”
Pie comes out and joins me. And we both watch as Grant paces back and forth. Pie tsks her tongue. “Yeah, this spell sucks. I don’t think we did it right.”
“What are we missing? I mean, it’s two ingredients. Bloodhorn and a dragon scale.”
“Maybe it’s not the oil? Maybe you need the actual flower?”
“No. That’s not how it works. The flower is OK, but the oil is the essence. It’s way more powerful.”
“But it’s not working, so…?”
I’m just about to open my mouth to agree when flashing lights appear outside.
“Oh. Shit,” Pie says. “I really hope you have another idea about this spell, because we’re about to be fucked. Russ Roth is here and he’s going to let Grant in.”
She’s right. We are fucked. A whole scenario plays out in my head whereby Russ lets Grant in, the entire world finds out about this place, and then Saint Mark’s stops being a sanctuary and starts being a lab where we are kept in cages like rats while some opportunistic corporate asshole sells tickets to our upstairs hallways like this place is an amusement park.
Pie must see the same thing in her mind, because she turns to me, clutching my arm, her eyes filled with panic. Maybe before today she wouldn’t have fared so bad if we were ever discovered. Her magic, up until now, has been invisible. But there is no way to hide… this. She is not an insane human with a personal hallucination. She is not even an eros from the caretaker bloodline. She is a wood nymph chimera.
“What do we do, Pell? Should we go upstairs and hide in the hallways?”
I consider it, but reject it. “No. That won’t work. They’ll just come in after us eventually and it’s more likely than not they’ll find us. Just like Tomas found us. And anyway, the hallways will just spit us out at some point. These people must not enter Saint Mark’s. They must not come in here.”
“So what do we do?”
“We’re missing something. This bloodhorn, I think. Because drag
on scales, they’re not complicated. We have dragon scales. But bloodhorn—”
I stop.
“Bloodhorn what?” Pie is shaking me.
I point to my horns. “This is a bloodhorn too.”
“What?”
“My horns. Remember when you were massaging them and they got hot? That’s the blood in them.”
“We have to cut off our horns?” She touches hers gingerly. Like this is akin to shaving her head bald.
“Not yours. Mine.” And suddenly, I know this is the way forward. This is what I was missing. This is the actual fucking secret to everything. And all this time, it was inside me. I have been carrying the magic ingredient in my fucking horns! “I need a saw and I need it right now!”
Pie shoots me another frantic look. “Where do you keep the saws? I don’t know where we keep saws! Do we even have saws? Why would we need a saw?”
“Firewood! There’s an ax outside the kitchen for the firewood.”
“Ax?”
I grab her hand and start pulling her towards the kitchen. We weave through the hallways and as we pass the one that leads down into the dungeon, we must disturb Tomas the dragon, because there is a deep moaning beneath our feet.
We ignore that. There is no time to worry about Tomas right now. He’s obviously not in any position to help us.
I drag Pie outside the kitchen to the pile of firewood. Grant was into firewood. He was always out here chopping wood for fires. Not to cook, obviously, since all his food was poison magic. That still pisses me off. But I don’t have time to care what he was doing with the firewood. I just need the ax and I’m glad it’s here.
I grab it and hold it out for Pie.
She looks appalled. “Why are you handing it to me?”
“I can’t chop off my own horns, Pie. You need to—”
“Nope. No way. I’m not chopping off your horns with a fucking ax! That’s crazy! I’ve never even held an ax! I will chop off your head!”
“I’m immortal, who cares? As long as you get the horn.”
“First of all, I care! And second, I can’t do this spell! You have to do it!”