“I need to speak with Ms.Fields. Alone.”
Tolliver stands suddenly, putting himself between me and Waring, followed quickly by CJ. Crowlene flies over and lands on Tolliver’s shoulder. She lets out acawthat seems to surprise her. Ezra pushes her intestines back in.
Waring takes in the scene and heaves a long-suffering sigh. “Ms.Fields made a mistake, and it’s up to her to rectify it.”
“On that we agree,” CJ says. “Why do you need to speak with her alone?”
Waring’s smile remains in place. “She has nothing to fear from me. She never has.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “I have nothing to fear from you? I was in your little prison and your boss had me tortured.”
Everyone’s heads snap toward me.
“It’s fine.” I wave them off. “It was just light torture.”
“Nyx isn’t my boss,” Waring says, his smile starting to slip.
“I guess that’s Thanatos, right? You’re all working together now so it’s hard to keep track of alliances.”
Waring’s smile is now a few centimeters away from a sneer. “I’ll cut right to the chase. Hades will be coming after Ms.Fields. If you want to keep her safe, you’ll let me speak to her. Alone.”
Tolliver opens his mouth to argue, but I place a hand on his arm. “It’s fine. I think I know where this is headed.”
After a tense stare-down, CJ leads Waring and me to their guest room. It’s very floral, and there’s far too much potpourri. I’m so busy adjusting my understanding of CJ that I almost miss the chance to take the rose-colored armchair in the corner. I slide in front of Waring just in time and take the seat, forcing him to sit on the flowery bedspread. It clearly irritates him, and that gives me just the kick of dopamine I need for this meeting.
“So, you were conned,” he says.
And there goes the dopamine.
I put up a finger. “To be fair, Rook was a thousands-of-years-old demon working for the lord of hell, so. Barely my fault.”
Waring ignores me. “I’m not going to waste time saying I told you so, as much as I’d like to. What we need to focus on now is where to go from here.”
“Which is?”
He tries to do that thing where politicians sit forward and look you in the eye so they appear more relatable, but the bed is too high and bouncy for the move to work. I purse my lips together to keep from laughing.
“You need to get the grimoire back,” he says.
I let my head fall back and groan. “Oh god, this again.”
“Hades will raise an army with—”
“Yeah, she told me.”
Waring jerks in surprise. “She?”
“Yeah, she’s in a new body. It was a whole thing. I don’t know what happened to her old one.”
Waring’s jaw flexes, his face tense as he considers something. Finally, he says, “We destroyed it with hellfire until there was nothing but ash and then scattered it to the four corners of the earth.”
I raise an eyebrow. “The earth doesn’t have corners.”
He clears his throat. “The point is, Hades cannot be allowed to have the grimoire. Even…” He pauses, then sighs in resignation. “Even if that means destroying it.”
Oh wow. Things must be bad if the syndicates are willing to let go of this much power.
I sit forward on the rose-colored chair, doing theI’m relatablemove much better than Waring ever could. “So you want me, a teenage girl, to go up against the lord of darkness?”
