“Calan” My mother tugged lightly on my arm, a silent plea for me to sit back down.
“You agree with him?” I asked, hearing the outrage in my own voice. If there had been one thing I could count on, it was Regina taking up arms against Ylang in almost every scenario. Of all times, she decided to hear him, it was to kill the Propheros. The one she and Phillip had kidnapped and tried to use for the Order of Veritas. Her colors were showing.
“Devotion to the Order before all things,” I said to her, not bothering to hide my disgust.
Regina’s words were quiet, measured, but I could detect the regret and distress in them. “You are asking us to choose Emma, or the world,” she repeated.
I looked her dead in the eye. “Without Emma there is no world worth saving.” Without another word I stepped away to create a portal and made my exit. I would not be a part of their plans to kill Emma. If I had to save the world again, I would do it on my own. Somehow.
21
“This is some kind of nightmare.” Krystan practically choked on the words.
After realizing the Orders would do nothing to help, I went to the people I knew who would. As she lightly bounced a crying Tristan on her shoulder, I felt her agitation and fear permeating through the dining room where we had gathered. The overhead light cast a warm light in the dining room, while the blue light of the muted TV flickered into the darkened, adjoining living room.
The moment Snarp saw me enter, he flew over from where he was perched on the top of his cage to land on my shoulder. He was oddly silent. I gave him some Twinkie, which he gulped down without a word.
Krystan paced with the baby. “She was so happy to get married. After all those silly romance novels she read, she was finally getting her happily ever after.”
An HEA. Emma had taught me about happily ever afters. I had never known what a fairytale was, but once she explained it to me, I told her I wanted that for us. I was never quite sure who was the hero and who was in distress in our story, but we saved each other enough times that it didn’t matter.
“How come I didn’t know?” Krystan asked setting down the baby in a mesh basinet adorned with skulls. Her hand closed around her own throat. “What the fuck good is a magical lie detector test if I can’t tell my own friend is lying?” Travis pulled her into a hug. He looked at me over her head, his face somber, cheeks more hollowed out than normal.
“Technically she wasn’t lying,” Travis said. “You never asked if she was possessed, so how could she lie about it?”
Krystan broke away, walking to the dining room to slam a fist into the table. Snarp let out a surprised squawk his wings beating against my head for a moment as he took flight. “I asked if she was okay, she wasn’t. I should have known.” The baby began to cry. Krystan sighed, her shoulders slumping as Travis went to pick up Tristan this time. Snarp landed on my other shoulder, farther away from Krystan.
Krystan collapsed into a chair before leaning over to rest her forehead on the table, her moment of anger passing quicker than I’d ever seen.
I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “I thought Othanos had possessed her when she absorbed his essence, but it looks as though the evil inside was feeding on every being of the Stygian she took. There was never any chance of exorcising her.”
Snarp squawked in a manner that resembled a laugh. “The mastersss are unlikely to be moved.”
I turned toward the parrot who had spent most of his time sleeping in the cage. Travis fed him too much sugar when he was in charge of the bird. After all, it was Travis who had gotten Snarp hooked on the junkfood in the first place.
But Snarp was awake now, head cocked to the side with his beady eye trained on me.
“What do you mean, masters?” I asked.
“The masterss, the mastersss that livesss inside Emma.”
“Hold up,” Krystan said, handing off baby Connor to Travis. Taking a few menacing steps toward Snarp, she said, “You knew Emma had something dark inside of her?”
The parrots head dramatically bobbed up and down. “Yessss of course. It’s easy to seesssss. She brought the Masterssss with her from homessss,” Snarp said as if he were stating an obvious fact.
“You knew?” Krystan yelled. Lunging for the bird with murder in her eyes, he flew off to the kitchen where he’d likely hide up on the tops of the kitchen cabinets where we couldn’t easily reach him.
A cracking sound brought my attention to the grip I had on the edge of the table. I was on the verge of breaking the wood in two to feel the satisfaction of crushing something even if I couldn’t reach that bird.
“Let’s calm down,” Travis said, his eyes jumping back and forth from me to Krystan. “Even if we’d known she’d come back with a bunch of ancient evil entities riding her body, what would we have done about it?”
“Something,” Krystan argued hotly, sending him a glare.
My jaw was clenched too hard for me to release and respond.
Dragging her hands down her face, Krystan said, “Great. This is all just great.” Pushing away from the table, she paced into the living room and back again. It was like she couldn’t settle on how she wanted to react to the situation. “We enabled her. We were so desperate to get Whack A Ghoul off the ground, we sacrificed my best friend because of her supernatural abilities turning her more toward the dark side every time.”
“Stop that,” Travis said, shooting Krytan a sharp look. “We had no idea it was hurting her and if we did, we would have put a stop to it.”
