Epilogue
I woke up in bed to
find a vampire in my room.
He was sitting in the
chair in the corner, flipping through a newspaper. The front page
was turned to me, and the headline was a little hard to miss. One
word, in huge black letters: GODDESS.
I stared at it for a
long minute, feeling empty, feeling nothing. The vampire turned
over another page. “You’re not supposed to be here,” I told Marco
roughly.
A pair of bushy
eyebrows appeared over the paper. “You kicking me
out?”
“No,” I said. And
then I burst into tears.
He came over and
gathered me up. He was big and warm and smart enough not to say
anything. I cried his shirt wet. I was hard on his
shirts.
“I got more,” he told
me, and gave me a handkerchief. It was big, like everything about
him. I just held it.
I didn’t give a shit
what I looked like.
“What happened?” I
asked, after a while.
Marco’s big chest
rose and lowered in a sigh. “Well, as I understand it, you showed
up to your coronation naked, rolled around in some mud, dusted a
dragon and then made out with the mage. Nobody really knows what
happened, but it impressed the shit out of the senates. They signed
the alliance early this morning.”
“Okay.”
“Also, they caught
that thing that attacked you. You know, the Morrigan?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She claims she was
forced into it because the Green Fey invaded and kidnapped her
husband. Guess they’re working for the bad guys now, only nobody
seems to really know. Anyway, she said she’s willing to let bygones
be bygones if we help her get him back.”
“How
generous.”
“Yeah. That’s what I
said. But that Marsden guy is considering taking her up on the
offer.”
I tilted my head to
stare up at him. “Why?”
“He was here all
morning, reading your dad’s letters. It turns out that that spell
everybody’s been worried about—the one that keeps the so-called
gods out of here?”
“The
ouroboros?”
“Yeah, that’s the
one. Looks like it wasn’t linked to you at all. Even if that
Spartoi had killed you, it wouldn’t have done any
good.”
“But something is
keeping it active. And if my mother isn’t here—”
“I didn’t understand
everything the old man said,” Marco told me. “But it seems she did
something to merge her soul with your dad’s before she passed on—as
insurance, you know?”
I sat up and turned
to look at him. “But he died with her.”
“Yeah, but his soul
stayed here.”
It took me a moment
to get it. “Because Tony trapped it in his damned
paperweight.”
“Yeah. And it’s still
here. Or in Faerie, somewhere on this side of the spell. Anyway,
Marsden figures we got to find the fat little weasel before he
figures out what he’s got, and if he’s in Faerie, we’re gonna need
help.”
I nodded slowly, but
I wasn’t thinking about Tony. I just sat there for a moment, a
couple of dozen emotions washing through me. But the one I finally
settled on was pride—fierce and glowing.
She must have known
they would never stop coming for her, had to realize they would
find her, sooner or later. She was weak, possibly dying, because I
couldn’t see her going to the Pythian Court in less than dire need,
not knowing what stalked her. She’d had almost no one she could
trust, for even at court there were those like Myra who would have
sold her out. But still, she’d found a way. She’d found a way and
beaten them all.
I wiped my eyes, got
up and started going through my dresser.
“So Marsden said he
needs to know if you got any ideas where to start looking for the
paperweight,” Marco told me. “And there’s a lot more stuff in your
dad’s letters he wants to talk over with you. Plus, Pritkin hasn’t
checked in and he keeps asking if I’ve seen him. I told him what I
could, but it wasn’t—”
I looked up. “What
did you tell him?”
“That he came through
here last night, covered in blood and ranting like a madman. He
demanded to see you, and when I told him we thought you’d gone to
the coronation, he cursed at me, ran for the balcony and threw
himself into a ley line. That’s the last any of us saw of
him.”
I thought I could
fill in the rest. Niall had left Pritkin for dead, but he hadn’t
counted on his demon blood—or his sheer stubbornness. Pritkin’s
body had healed enough for him to swim back to consciousness, to
realize that the necklace was gone and to understand what that
meant. He’d come here looking for me, probably to warn me not to
shift, but I was already gone. So he’d gone after me.
He’d gone after me
and he’d saved me. He’d said he’d rather die than go back there,
into slavery, into his father’s tender care. But he’d saved me
anyway.
Like Mom, he’d found
a way.
I grabbed a tank top
and a pair of shorts and went to the bathroom.
“That was a couple of
minutes before the master popped back in,” Marco said. “Only
without you. Things got a little crazy after that, because nobody
knew where you’d ended up. And we couldn’t reach the house by phone
and we couldn’t even contact anybody mentally ’cause they were all
in that portal thing. But nobody’d seen you here, so we finally
went out there, only to find we’d missed all the
excitement.”
I ran a comb through
my hair and didn’t comment.
“The master wanted to
keep you at the estate, but Marsden threw a fit, so they
compromised and we brought you back here,” Marco continued. “The
master’ll be back as soon as he can shake the senators, and Marsden
said he’ll be checking in tonight. But he wanted to know if you
have any idea where Pritkin is.”
“Yes.” I scrubbed my
face and started to get dressed. Pritkin’s little talisman bumped
my skin as I pulled off the pajama top. I put a hand on it,
squeezing hard, and something greasy leaked through the material
and onto my palm. I didn’t wash it off.
There was no question
where he was, but Jonas couldn’t help him. As soon as he’d
exchanged energy with me, the thing that called itself his father
had jerked him back, “revoking his parole,” as Pritkin had put it.
And I didn’t think it was going to be easy to pry him loose. I
wasn’t sure it would even be possible. I didn’t understand much
about the demon realms, didn’t know what, if anything, could be
done.
But I knew who to
ask.
“By the way, your
dress arrived,” Marco told me.
“What
dress?”
“For the
coronation.”
I stuck my head out
the door. “We already had that.”
“No, you had a mud
bath. Seems they want to do it over, do it right, this coming
Saturday—”
“No.”
“It’s gonna be here,
instead of at the estate—”
“No.”
“It’s a nice
dress.”
I pulled on the
shorts and came out. Marco was standing by something that was a
little better than “a nice dress.” It was a delicate, shimmering
piece of art. A few crystalline lines sketched out the form here
and there, like the ones connecting stars in a constellation. They
delineated the soft drape of the skirt, the low-cut back, the
plunging neckline. And between those was . . . nothing. Or, at
least, what was there wasn’t cloth.
It was completely
transparent, with a faint tinge of teal, like a dress made out of
ice or glass—or the light that glimmered along fiber-optic
filaments one minute and was gone the next. It was suspended a few
feet off the floor and was slowly rotating, shedding softly glowing
particles as it went. They lingered for a moment after the dress
had turned, like a train of stars, before they
disappeared.
I’d have been a
little worried about the transparency thing if I didn’t think
Augustine had done some sort of trick, like with Francoise’s
ribbon. And if I hadn’t already gone full monty in front of most of
the leaders of the magical world. And if I planned to wear
it.
“It’s beautiful,” I
said honestly, and Marco sighed.
“You ain’t coming,
are you?”
“Let my double do it.
She’s probably better at these kinds of things
anyway.”
“And what are you
going to do?” he asked, watching with disapproval as I shoved my
feet into a pair of old sneakers.
“Raise some Hel,” I
told him. And shifted.