“I guess you’ll have to wait and see.”
My legs were unsteady as I walked out.
I didn’t have much time. The destruction of the world waited.
Chapter Thirty-Four
I planned a little side trip before I ventured back into the underworld to free Hecate and destroy the world. Prophecy or not, I wasn’t going to go down without a fight. She was a goddess, but she was a minor one and she had weaknesses.
The only Fate I could track down was Nona, who was staring at the walls of her comfortable suburban home when I walked in.
“Don’t you have some flies to ensnare? Or some webs to spin?” I teased her.
It brought a ghost of a smile to her face. “The only spinning I do is at the gym.”
“That’s the spirit,” I said. “There’s probably a class starting up soon.”
“I miss Sawyer,” she said.
“What do you know about a red bead?” I asked. I’d left it safely hidden at home.
She turned dull eyes my way. A cold cup of coffee was beside her. “What?”
“Focus, Nona. It’s important.” I took her cup and dumped it out. Spiked. There was a full pot in the coffeemaker and it was still warm, so I reached over and refilled her drink.
“I want the good stuff,” she said.
“Drinking isn’t going to solve your problems,” I said.
“That’s rich coming from you.”
She put a hand up and pointed to a bottle of bourbon. I gave in and added a healthy shot and then handed it to her.
She took a sip and then said, “I thought you’d be happy that I was so miserable.”
“Honestly, I thought I would be, too,” I replied.
She barked out a laugh, but then sobered and stared at her coffee. “You’re so much like her.”
“Is that why you hate me so much?” Hatred between the sisters and my mother didn’t surprise me. They’d killed her, after all, just for defying them and protecting me.
She shook her head. “No, that’s why I love you.”
The words hurt me more than I had expected. “If you loved my mother so much, why did you kill her?”
She abandoned the coffee and went straight for the bottle. “Nyx, you won’t understand until you’re a Fate.”
“I’ll never be a Fate,” I said. “Besides, I thought you wanted to kill me, not join the family business.”
“The two are not mutually exclusive,” she replied. “We need you.”
“What happened to the third Fate-in-training?” I asked. Naomi was still learning, Claire had run away, but no one even mentioned the existence of a third Fate-in-training.
There had to be one. There were always three of them—always exceptionally powerful, always female, and always from our bloodline. They were down to one Fate-in-training, which explained why they were desperate enough to offer me a job. I met two of the three criteria. The fact that I wanted to kill them didn’t even make them bat a collective eyelash.
She avoided a direct answer. “We can be killed, you know. It’s not easy, but it can be done. Believe it or not, the job’s not all fun and games. There are people out there who don’t like how we do our jobs. Like you, for example.”
“I’d do a better job than you ever did,” I said.
It was a challenge, but she only sighed wearily and tossed back a shot. “You probably would.”
“Nona, it’s really important that I know what that bead does,” I said. “Can you tell me anything? Please?”
“The bead was Deci’s responsibility,” she replied. “When we took Hecate’s items of power, we each hid one item. She’d know.”
“So as Custos, she wrote everything down in the Book of Fates?”
“Yes,” Nona confirmed.
“She won’t let go of the book and she won’t tell me anything.”
Nona sighed wearily. “I’ll make the call.”
Not for the first time, I wanted to hug my aunt, but I repressed the emotion. She was a killer, just like her sisters.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Deci answered the door in a white summer dress more suited to a maiden than a crone.
“What do you want?” Her arms were wrapped around her chest protectively. She was playing the frail card, but there was a gleam in her eyes that told me she was gloating on the inside.
“Didn’t Nona call you?” I brushed past her.
“I don’t take orders from my sister,” Deci snapped. Her eyes gleamed with interest. “Why do you want to know about the bead, anyway?”
“None of your business.”
She ignored my snarky tone and led me into an old-fashioned parlor. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
She’d probably take a page out of Gaston’s book and slip some poison into it. “No, I want some answers.”
The walls were painted a dark red, which made me twitchier than I usually was when I had to talk to my aunt. The furniture was authentic to the era, which meant itchy, prissy, and covered in lace doilies.
“It looks like Queen Victoria threw up in here,” I commented.
“I like it,” she said. “It’s like fire.”
“Like the one you set at the theater?”
She smirked at me.
“We had a deal,” I said. “I was supposed to find Claire and you were supposed to leave me alone.”
“Deals are made to be broken,” she said.
“You’ve been scheming with Danvers,” I accused. “And your little pyromania problem is getting out of hand.”
The smirk never wavered. “So?”
“There’s no way Morta’s going to stand for you betraying her with Danvers. He’s a Hecate worshipper.”
“Morta, Morta, Morta,” she replied. “I’m not afraid of her.”
Deci really had middle-child syndrome.
“Maybe you should be.”
She snarled at me. “Maybe you should worry about your own problems.”
“Why did you do it?” I asked. It was a deliberately vague question. Deci had a lot of its.
“My sister had it all: good fortune, beauty, and love.”
“And you were jealous of her,” I said.
“She took the only man I ever loved,” Deci hissed, “and didn’t even notice the pain it caused me. But I made him pay. I made both of them pay.” Her brow contracted and her eyes gleamed crazily.
The scorched man’s face flashed in my mind. “Elizabeth wasn’t the first time you used fire as a weapon.”
She chuckled and the sound sent a chill through me. “Nobody ever notices me. They never did. Morta and Nona are blind to my faults.”
I didn’t break it to her that her sisters were no longer blind, if they ever had been. Maybe the two other Fates were playing a deep game, one that I wasn’t able to figure out. But I would.
“What was my father’s name?” I asked. “Where’s the book? Maybe if I read about the prophecy, I can stop Hecate.”
She snorted with laughter. “It’s too late to stop it,” she said. “Especially since I’ve been helping things along.” She was practically crowing about it.
“Why?”
“It was easy enough to do, for the Custos. You don’t think me capable of such a thing?”
“Capable, yes, but that insane, no.” I couldn’t believe that even my aunt would stoop to such depths. “Why?” I repeated.
“Revenge. My sister was pregnant by the man I loved. I wanted to punish them. Nothing hurts worse than the loss of a child.”
The rage and sadness in her eyes convinced me. She’d experienced a similar loss, which explained why there was no Fate-in-training for Deci.
“That enlightens me about why you wanted to kill me when my mother was still alive,” I replied. “But why do you still want to kill me?”
She smiled mirthlessly. “Don’t take it personally, son of Fortuna,” she said. “I still have a score to settle with your father.”
“He’s alive?”
“And in
Minneapolis,” she replied.
She watched my face as I added it up.
“Doc,” I finally said. “Doc is my father.”
“Wake up, Nyx.” Sawyer’s voice came from somewhere very far away. “Look around you.”
There was a strange smell in the air—dark magic and blood. I heard a creak somewhere behind me. I turned in time to see at least twenty wraiths streaming into the room.
“It was you,” I said. “You sent the wraiths.”
She drew out a dainty little knife from her dress pocket and ran it across her hand. Blood dripped from where she’d sliced open her palm. Deci stood in the middle of the room as the wraiths streamed past her to get to me. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear her. The wail of the wraiths drowned out the sound.
There were too many to fight. They moved as one, obeying her command.
I took out my athame anyway. A wraith bit me in the forearm. I slashed its throat, but another took its place. Another gnawed my calf until white bone showed through the red meat.
I’d live through the attack, but if I didn’t do something, there wouldn’t much of me left. The flesh was being torn from my body, strip by agonizing strip.
All I wanted was for the pain to stop. I gripped the handle of my knife. It was slippery with blood and gore.
I locked eyes with my aunt. It was me or her. The triumph in her eyes didn’t fade, not until my athame had hit its target and sunk into her chest.
The wraiths ceased shredding my body parts. Then I collapsed.
Where was I? The house was silent as it came back to me. I stood slowly and held my head in my hands. It helped to stop the ringing in my ears. I’d been lying in a pool of my own blood. I finally remembered a healing spell and whispered it through a tight throat.
The wraiths had returned to their graves, sleeping until they heard another call of dark magic.
Where was Deci? She was lying in a heap on her floral carpet. Blood had seeped through her clothing and stained her white dress. My athame was still embedded in her chest. It was a mortal wound, but she was still breathing.
“Let me get help,” I said. “Stay still.” I took a shallow breath and pulled out my knife.
She reached out a bloody hand and touched my cheek. “You can’t save everyone, Nyx.”
I used her house phone to dial nine-one-one. As I looked around for something to staunch the bleeding, I saw a leather-bound book about the size of a daily planner. It was unmarked on the face and spine. Could it be the Book of Fates? Next to it was a frilly cotton doily. I pocketed the book and then used the doily to press against the wound.
“The Book of Fates,” she gasped. “I transfer its keeping to you, son of Fortuna.” Then, “Auribus teneo lupum.” Holding the wolf by the ears. Meaning her choices were both dangerous ones. What was she talking about?
Morta appeared, golden scissors in hand. Her cold eyes were shiny, overlarge, like she’d forbidden her tear ducts to open.
I’d hated her all my life, but in that instant, I felt sorry for her. The scissors moved, making a sharp sound in the silence. Then Deci wheezed her last breath.
Morta’s face changed when she saw my knife. The coldness that seemed to make up her very fiber was gone, engulfed in a conflagration of rage. She burned with it, incandescent where she’d been ice.
I was the cause of her sister’s demise. I knew what she’d do when she found my thread. It wouldn’t be swift and it wouldn’t be pretty, but she’d end my life.
I dropped the bloody cloth and ran. My aunts wouldn’t believe that it had been self-defense. Two people my aunts had loved had died by my athame since I’d come to Minneapolis. They weren’t going to wait to see if there would be a third.
Chapter Thirty-Six
I pounded on Talbot’s door. “We need to talk,” I said.
He held the door open and made a sweeping gesture for me to come in.
He and Ambrose had been playing a board game in the living room. I plunked down next to Ambrose.
Ambrose frowned when he noticed the blood on my shirt. “What happened to you?”
I didn’t have time to soften the blow. “I was at Deci’s house. She’s dead. I’m the one who killed her,” I replied.
I couldn’t manage even a few false words of regret, even though she had been my mother’s sister.
Ambrose said. “Nyx, what have you done?”
“I didn’t mean to kill her. I went to Deci’s for answers.”
“What kind of answers?” Talbot asked.
“I wanted to talk to her about the fire,” I hedged. “And how the Fates trapped Hecate.” I relayed what had happened, but left out the part about the bead.
I laid the book I’d found at Deci’s on the table. “Maybe this can tell us something.”
“How did you get that?” Ambrose’s voice was sharp.
“Deci gave it to me,” I told him.
Ambrose said, “What did she say? Tell me the exact words she used.”
I stared at him. “I don’t remember,” I said. “She’d called wraiths, a lot of them. They just kept coming. They would have eaten me alive, so I threw my athame at her. It was self-defense.”
“It was?” Talbot asked. Our eyes locked and then he gave a little nod. “Now what?”
“Just trying to figure out my next move,” I replied.
“Why don’t you try to get some sleep?” Ambrose suggested. “Maybe you should stay here tonight.”
“Sleep? I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to sleep again.”
“This might help,” he told me. He slid a bottle of absinthe across the table and then got out two glasses.
“You’re joining me?” I was startled. Talbot didn’t like the green fairy. In fact, he usually barely managed to conceal his disapproval whenever I broke it out.
He nodded. “It’s been a hell of a day.”
He was right. Jenny was dead, Baxter was missing, and I’d killed one of the Fates.
He held up the bottle to the rest of the group. “Anybody else?”
Ambrose reached for a glass.
We each chugged a shot of absinthe, and then I nudged Talbot. “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s get started.”
“Never mind that,” Ambrose said. “Try to remember what Deci said.”
“Something about giving me the Book of Fates,” I said. I thought about what she’d said as she lay dying. “‘I transfer its keeping to you.’”
“She actually said that?” Ambrose asked. “Nyx Fortuna, you are the new Custos, the keeper of the Book of Fates.”
“But I don’t want to be,” I said. “Here, you take it.” I tried to hand the book to him, but he wouldn’t touch it.
“It doesn’t work like that,” he explained. “It’s yours until you die. There’s usually a big ritual when the book passes from one generation to another, but all she really needed was to say the words and to have you take the book.”
The Book of Fates’ cover had been encrusted with jewels, but a few had been pried out or were missing. Other than that, it looked like somebody’s planner until I looked closely and realized the leather was soaked in blood and tears.
“Why would she give it to Nyx?” Talbot asked. “She hated him.”
“For once, I was the lesser of two evils,” I said. “What would happen if she died before the book was transferred?”
“That’s never happened,” Ambrose said solemnly.
“Or maybe she just wanted to saddle me with something she knew I wouldn’t want,” I said.
“Maybe she did it to help defeat Hecate,” Talbot said. “The Fates would be weakened without a Custos.”
“She was working with Danvers,” Ambrose pointed out. “I doubt she had the Fates’ best interest in mind.”
Talbot crossed his arms. “Maybe Deci had a change of heart. Or maybe she didn’t want Hecate to win, in the end.”
“If the Fates couldn’t kill her, I doubt we can,” I said. “So we have to get her back into her underworld
prison.”
“How are we going to do that?” Talbot asked.
“The book holds all the secrets of the Wyrd family,” Ambrose said. “The secrets of the Fates.”
No wonder Deci had said something about two dangerous choices. She was right.
I didn’t want to open the book that held all my family secrets. I wanted to throw it in the fire and walk away.
Instead, I opened the book and began to read. “Let’s see if it will tell us any of Hecate’s secrets.”
Ambrose and Talbot peered over my shoulder.
“I gave her the harpies,” I said. “That was one of the things she needed to reverse the spell binding her in the underworld.”
Ambrose cleared his throat. “It’s certainly a shame that you and your aunts couldn’t have found common ground. Enough to share information, at least.”
“Common ground?” I said bitterly. “The best I could do was to tolerate them long enough to keep Elizabeth safe. And even that didn’t work out so well.”
“Nonetheless, better communication on both ends could have prevented Hecate’s escape.”
“Escape? I practically handed her the key to her jail.”
“What else?” Talbot asked. “The harpies are magical, but they can be killed, as Nyx proved.”
“Killed but resurrected,” I reminded him.
“Yes, but the Fates wouldn’t rely on the just the harpies,” he replied. “And they gave them to Gaston. I don’t think it was the harpies.”
“Then what was it?” I turned my attention back to my reading. My eyes began to blur, so I handed the book to Talbot.
There was silence for several minutes. I closed my eyes and tried to blot out the image of Deci with my knife in her chest.
Ambrose said mildly, “Keep reading. Is there anything else about Hecate’s Eye?”
“It was originally found in India,” I continued. “That’s all it says.” But something about the passage made me uneasy.
I looked up and caught Talbot and Ambrose exchanging glances. “Spit it out.”
“The peacock feather,” Ambrose said. “When you came back, something was clutched in your hand. What was it?”
“A bead,” I said. “Just a trinket. Something you could buy anywhere.”