I chuckle, taking a few steps toward her. “I’m not here to kill you at all.”
Some people wouldn’t consider that a lie on a technicality. I mean, I’m not here tokillher, I’m here to banish her to hell. Big difference. But I think we’ve established that I have no problem with lying.
“Then why are you here?” Hades seems to be losing patience. That was quick.
I smile. “I’m here to accept your offer.”
“Oh?” she says, unconvinced. “You’ve suddenly had a change of heart?”
“Not so much a change of heart as a realization.”
I catch sight of the grimoire. It’s displayed on a tall, thin podium on the other side of Hades’s throne.
She raises an eyebrow.
“I hate you,” I say.
Rook stiffens beside me, the mood of the room going suddenly tense.
“But I need the grimoire,” I continue. “And you have the grimoire. You want something from me? I want something in return.”
“And what is that?”
“My brother.”
She shakes her head, shrugging. “And who is your brother? Someone important?”
“He is to me. Let me use the grimoire to resurrect him, and I’ll bring back as many people as you want.”
Her eyes narrow. “This sounds like a trick. Do you even have a brother?”
I grit my teeth, reluctantly nodding toward Rook. “Ask him. The entire reason he was able to”—I swallow—“con me was because he knew I wanted the resurrection spell just as much as he did. Only, instead of resurrecting a dark lord of the underworld, I just want my brother back. That’s why he told me you were his sister. Exploiting the bonds of common trauma. Textbook con artistry.”
Hades gives Rook a questioning look. He nods once, expression blank.
After a tense moment, Hades turns back to me. “Fine.”
I step closer, and now I can fully see the podium holding the grimoire. But I can also finally see the source of the smell.
At the base of the podium is a corpse.
It’s barely a body, just a rotting husk. “Late-stage decay” doesn’t begin to cover it. And it’s not even in a coffin or on some kind of platform. It’s just lying there. On the parquet floor.
I bite back the urge to vomit.
“Ah, I see you’ve noticed our visitor,” Hades says. “He’s to be the first of my new army. Unfortunately, we’ve yet to resurrect him.”
She looks over the frozen audience of demons, a sneer on her face. I guess this is what they’ve been doing each midnight. A little drink, a little dance, a little failed necromancy.
“Why don’t you show them how it’s done?” Hades gestures to the podium.
The entire room seems to be holding its breath. The podium is carved with grotesque figures into a dark marble. On it lies the grimoire, the yellow pages dull in the cold light.
“I can’t,” I say.
Hades rises from her throne with slow, deliberate grace, the glint of anger in her eyes. “If you want your brother, you’ll do as I say.”
“No, I mean Ican’t. The spell isn’t the entire ritual. You have to reunite the soul with a piece of bone, and then there’s a whole potion to make.”
