by Angie Fox
That did it. The biker witches paraded into the villa with the couth of a gaggle of five-year-olds on a field trip. I almost wished Dimitri had thrown them a picnic outside. Ant Eater tested out the banister on the main staircase and I cringed. Those snarling griffins carved into the ends had withstood decades of Dimitri’s family’s trauma. But surviving Ant Eater would be another challenge entirely.
“Stay away,” I told her, just as Frieda bumped a pink leather-clad hip against the potted fig by the doorway, sending it crashing to the floor.
Dimitri kissed me on the top of the head. “I love you,” he whispered, his breath tickling my ear.
“Why?” I asked him. We’d only known each other for a few months. I had a longer relationship with my sneakers, and now my whacked-out family was about to destroy the home he’d fought so hard to preserve.
He was a sacrificing individual, loyal to a fault. So far, I’d tainted his royal blood, replaced his steadfast griffin fiancée, whose family could no doubt help him through this crisis better than I could, and now Battina the witch was sliding down the banister of the grand staircase.
“Stop! Watch the—!” Too late. My head pounded as the moment seemed to freeze in time. Battina decapitated an antique griffin hand-carved by none other than Sir Nikkos Kallinikos. “Oh my God.” I buried my face in my hands. “Dimitri, I—”
“We’ll fix it,” he said, leading me and my nutso family deeper into his home. He deposited them in the dining room, where they feasted on MoonPies, Mountain Dew and pork rinds. Don’t ask me where Dimitri found it all.
“I’m so sorry,” I said as we watched Jan the Library Hag spit Mountain Dew out of her nose. “I was thinking of myself when I invited them here.”
I’d been thinking of myself way too much lately. I needed protection. I needed training. This man had given those things to me and I still wanted more.
My fingers found the emerald at my neck. It had become so much a part of me that I’d barely noticed it unless I wanted its protection. I was taking Dimitri—and everything else he’d given me—for granted.
The worst thing was, I had no idea what to do about it.
Ant Eater’s voice dragged me out of my thoughts. “Hey!” she called from the gardens. “I think I found a spot.”
We piled outside to find her pointing to a stone building beyond the rose garden. I’d barely noticed it before, as it was covered in vines. The building was made of the white stone common on the estate, with bronzed accents that had turned green with age.
Dimitri cleared his throat. “That’s the original house.”
“It’s nice,” Grandma murmured.
“No one has lived there in years,” Dimitri said, as the witches began milling around the building. “Half the rooms are underground, it has no kitchen and it’s most likely infested with brownies.”
“It sounds perfect!” Frieda squealed. She clapped her hands together as Grandma and Ant Eater started clearing vines away from the door.
“If you think this will work for you,” Dimitri said, helping them, “I have the key inside. We’ve been using this to store our family weapons arsenal.”
Ant Eater grinned. “This keeps getting better and better.”
Sidecar Bob piloted his wheelchair past me, with Pirate on his lap. “Come on, this’ll be like Sturgis in ’83.”
Pirate danced on his front paws. “I’ve never eaten Sturgis!”
“Do you really want to let them in there?” I asked, following Dimitri as he headed back to the house.
“They’re family,” he said, meaning tingeing his every word. “I have a responsibility.”
“Responsibility my foot,” I said as I watched him go.
He was about to have a garden full of holes.
I crossed my arms over my chest. Was that what I was to him as well? A responsibility?
Come to think of it, most of our relationship had been based on a certain tit for tat. He needed me to help his sisters, and I had. Now he owed it to me to find the dark-haired woman. Give some here, take some there.
But what about after that? Did we have anything else in common?
As if proving my point, a half dozen biker witches stomped through the rosebushes with Amara hot on their tail. I admired her dedication.
Somebody had to keep this estate in one piece.
“You’re right,” Ant Eater said to the three witches behind her. “There doesn’t seem to be any reason for it.”
Amara dug a rock from her sandal, her cheeks pink from exertion. “It’s a sundial fountain, symbolizing the marriage of sun and sea.” She pointed to a bronze, sixteenpointed sun at the top of the fountain. “The sun of Vergina is for the virgin goddess Athena, pure until she mates for life. The trident,” she said, dipping her fingers into the bowl at the base of the fountain, “is for the sea god Poseidon. He was one of the original caretakers of the oracle at Delphi, and hence, many sea griffins possess psychic abilities.”
Amara might as well have been speaking Chinese.
Ant Eater shook her head. “It’ll have to go.”
That’s when I noticed Amara’s dress was still snagged on her pink bra. Her black hair frizzed around her face and she looked about as on edge as I felt.
Amara drew up to her full height. “This was an engagement gift from my family.”
Ant Eater shrugged. “It’s also in the way.”
“Of what?” she pleaded.
“Demon slayer training,” Ant Eater said proudly.
Oh no. We did not need to train in roses that had been here since Jason got together with the Argonauts.
“This is the perfect spot,” Ant Eater said, yanking on the pergola. “What is this? Twelve feet?”
“You can’t tear that down,” I protested.
The witch looked at me like I was the crazy one. “Of course not. This is where you learn how to pass your levitation test.”
She had to be kidding. “I’m not getting up on top of that.”
“Well, not right now.” Ant Eater shrugged.
“Look at this!” Grandma emerged from the stone house with a medieval battle-ax. She gave it a swing, taking out the tops of two rosebushes and nearly blowing Sidecar Bob’s tire. “Isn’t she a beaut?”
No. This was getting out of control. “You could chop an arm off with that thing!”
“Oh, more than that.” Ant Eater grinned, her gold tooth glinting in the sun.
“And how did you get in?”
“Magic.”
“You should have waited for the key. This is Dimitri’s home.” This was his life. He’d risked everything to make a place for himself here.
I glanced back at the porch door. Just where is Dimitri, anyway? It couldn’t take him that long to find the key. He was probably hiding the breakables, stowing the liquor and wondering what the heck he was thinking by bringing us here.
I stalked down the porch and through the rose garden, determined to save as much of the place as I could.
“Well geez, Lizzie. Don’t you want to be trained?” Grandma asked.
“Yes,” I said. Of course. I needed all of the control I could get right now. Still, I didn’t think we needed to tear apart the estate. “We need to put this back in—oh Sheboygan.” I ducked into the white stone house and found an arsenal.
A huge wooden rack of sabers, war hammers and swords lined one wall, with another entire wall for shields and armor. I sneezed. The place reeked of metal and dust.
Scale armor lay in heaps on the floor next to immense bronze breastplates and leg plates. No doubt they’d been meant for griffins. I also counted two catapults, a war scythe the size of an ox and even a battered iron cage. And that’s only what I could see. There were hardly any windows in the place.
Ant Eater slapped me on the back. “Isn’t it great? There’s more downstairs.”
“You can’t train me here.” We wouldn’t make it a day without someone impaling themself, losing an eye or chopping their head off—hopefully not
all three.
“Why not?” Grandma asked. “This place is secure.” She gave it a once-over as if she were a decorator approaching a particularly challenging job. “It’ll be even better once we set the booby traps. Plus, there’s no question about it,” she said, pointing a stubby finger at my chest. “You need training.”
“I know that.” I’d been trying to figure out what I was doing from the moment I became the Demon Slayer of Dalea. Talk about a surprise—locked in my bathroom, needing to get to my thirtieth-birthday party, having no idea this was in store.
And now, with part of myself gone, death threats breathing down my back and the wards on the estate weakening, well, let’s just say I needed all the help I could get.
Focus on the problem at hand.
I rubbed a hand over my face. Because even if I trained to be the perfect slayer, I’d never be a griffin and never be what Dimitri needed to make his family whole.
“Rachmort will be here tomorrow,” Grandma said. “He’s already instructed two generations of our family.”
I stood a bit taller. “He trained my mom?”
“Nope. Your Great-great-great-aunt Evie.”
She was the greatest slayer of all. “And you just tracked him down now?”
Grandma looked quite pleased with herself. “Do you know how hard it is to get on his schedule?”
I had no idea. “There can’t be that many slayers.” The power ran in a very select, distressingly small number of families. Every third generation, these families would produce a pair of slayer twins.
Demon slayers were treasured, trained, given every advantage. Of course, my mother had used her knowledge and gifts to foist off her destiny on me before she dropped me at the adoption agency.
I was the accidental demon slayer. The clueless one. I’d never even known we existed until I stumbled into my powers—and what remained of my family. I’d never met another one of my kind.
“Listen to Rachmort,” Grandma said, accepting a war hammer from Ant Eater. The thing was immense, with a sharp pick on one end and a blunt crushing plate on the other. “He’s the best. And don’t get on him for being late. Most families search for an instructor as soon as they learn they’re going to have twins. That’s what we did with your mom and your aunt, God rest her soul.”
Well of course, but, “You have to admit I could have used a little help before now.”
Grandma hefted the hammer and I took three steps back. “Zebediah Rachmort usually gets five years, nine months’ notice. So I think it’s pretty good that he dropped everything to see you in a few months. Anyways, he was in purgatory with the Department of Intramagical Matters’ Lost Souls Outreach program. Took a while to track him down.”
“Lost Souls Outreach?” I’d never heard of such a thing. “What does he do?”
“He’s a necromancer.” Grandma rested the weapon on her shoulder like a baseball bat. “He spends half the year in purgatory and the rest in Boca Raton.”
I stared at her.
“You wouldn’t believe how out of hand purgatory has gotten. There’s no law. Demons walking around all glamored up, tricking people into hell. Rachmort finds people. He helps them remember their goodness so they can rise up out of there.”
I shook my head. “I had no idea.”
Grandma shot me a conspiratorial grin. “Personally, I think he’s also there to keep an ear to the ground. Rumor has it, there’s something brewing in hell. Worse than usual.”
“Lovely.”
“He’s the best, Lizzie.”
“Good. Because there’s something you need to know.”
Grandma’s eyes widened as I told her about the attack on me, and the green sky.
She planted her war hammer into the ground. “Pea green?”
I nodded.
“And you say it burned you?” She scrubbed a hand across her face.
“It stole a piece of me.”
“And a green sky means something evil has been created.”
I told her about the dark-haired woman—how I’d felt the hate rolling off of her, how she’d touched me and disappeared.
Grandma planted her hands on her hips, the jelly jars on her leather-studded belt clanking together as she looked to the sky. “I’m getting too old for this.”
“Really?”
“No.”
“Well, I’ve had enough. Between stolen magic, death prophecies and cursed imps—”
“Hold it!” she threw a hand up. “Cursed imps?”
She wasn’t going to believe it. “They fly and throw these cursed arrows and—”
“I know what they do,” she said, her voice going cold. “Those are Vald’s.”
Impossible.
“Vald is dead,” I reminded her. I’d killed him myself.
“You kill all his little friends too?” she asked. “That demon liked to experiment. Cursed imps are his creation, part of his personal army.”
“Why didn’t Dimitri know about this?”
“Lover boy didn’t have Vald chasing him for thirty years. My coven has seen enough to make the Odyssey look like a three-hour tour. No question about it, Lizzie. The demon might be dead, but that doesn’t mean his followers aren’t bent on revenge.” She stopped cold. “Or perhaps they want a demon slayer of their own.”
Holy Hades.
“I’m strong,” I told her.
She looked me up and down, clearly worried. “You’ll be even stronger after Rachmort trains you. Listen to him, Lizzie. You’re in more danger than we ever imagined.”
I chewed at my lip. If Vald’s followers were behind this attack on me, then it stood to reason they wanted Dimitri’s sisters too. We needed to know more. “We need to go into the cave of visions.”
Grandma’s eyes narrowed.
My previous experiences with a cave of visions involved a Dumpster and a covered wagon in a replica Wild West town. Neither had been pleasant. Then again, I knew the magic worked.
“I’m not tied to this,” she warned.
“I know.” I cringed.
“That means I can’t go in there with you.”
“I know.” I avoided her gaze. I knew what she was thinking. The last time I’d gone to the cave of visions, I’d landed right in a demon’s trap. It could easily happen again. “Maybe Rachmort can help me prepare.”
“I don’t like it.”
“You?” She was the one who’d rushed into the cave of visions—right before it sent her to the second level of hell.
“Believe it or not, I learn from my mistakes.”
“You know we have to do it.”
She eyed me. “Then we do it my way. You give me and my witches the time we need to prepare the cave right.”
“Agreed.”
“In the meantime, you listen to Rachmort,” Grandma ordered. “Learn,” she said, as if ordering could make it so.
“Grandma…” I began. I knew the risk I was taking. Besides, I’d learned a lot since my showdown with the Vegas demons.
She looked past me, lost in thought. “We’ll build it for you as soon as we get settled here.”
“Where will it be?” I asked. Hopefully not in Dimitri’s living room.
“Leave that to me.”
I didn’t press. “What’s Rachmort like?” I asked.
“Tough,” she said, with uncharacteristic brevity.
Never mind. I’d find out soon enough.
Besides, tough was good. I needed it. I’d craved it since I first gained my powers.
“You’ll need your mother’s training bar,” Grandma said as we headed back out into the gardens.
“Anything else?” I asked, watching the witches roll a sundial past a shrieking Amara.
“Oh yeah,” Grandma said, thumbs dug into her belt as she looked me up and down. “Every ounce of courage you’ve got.”
Chapter Twelve
Two hours, eighteen new weapons and a decimated rose garden later, a hand touched me on the shoulder.
I nearly jumped a foot.
“Relax, Lizzie. It’s me.” Dimitri stood behind me, looking all studly in a black T-shirt and jeans, his black hair damp and curling at the ends. He was a six-foot-six reminder of everything that was good in the world.
“Where have you been?” I could tell there was something big on his mind.
“I’ve been making inquiries. We have an issue,” he said, his gaze darting to Grandma, who was sitting on the ground in front of the stone house, mashing leaves with a mortar and pestle. “Do you have things handled on your end, Gertie?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Can’t you smell the turtle knees toasting?”
He looked at her like he didn’t quite have an answer for that one. I knew the feeling. “Do whatever it takes,” he said, and turned back to me. “Lizzie, I need a word.”
“Good,” I replied. It seemed he’d taken to heart our conversation at the ruins. If we were going to make it as a couple, we needed to be honest with each other, even when it wasn’t happy and fun. “So tell me. What’s going on?”
He took my hand. “Come with me. We need more privacy than we’re going to get here.”
Could he have been referring to Sidecar Bob, who was fashioning a barbecue pit out of the bottom half of a wine cask, or Frieda, who was mixing spells in the other half?
“You can go on into the house. Don’t mind that,” Grandma said, pointing to the pinkish haze around the stone armory. “A couple of the brownies got into Battina’s instant-evaporation spells. They’ll be okay once we put them back together.”
“Thank you for the offer. I know how busy you are,” Dimitri said. “But I have a place where Lizzie and I can talk in private.”
We headed up the gray slate steps to the villa. “Don’t apologize,” he said when he saw my mouth open. “I understood the consequences when I invited them in. Frankly, after all that’s happened, I’m glad for the extra support.”
“We are talking about the Red Skulls,” I said, recalling his less-than-cordial relationship with them in the past.
“I love you, and therefore I must love your clan. It is the griffin way.”
I had a feeling I’d be counting on that a lot in the future.
