“You’re not the good guys, you know,” I called to him.
He shrugged again, looking back at me one more time. “Neither are you.”
Yesterday, we all sat around CJ’s kitchen table, discussing plans and realizing there were very few scenarios where I didn’t end up dead. No matter how you sliced it, I was going to be right up in Hades’s face, and from the brief glimpse we had of her, she seemed kind of murdery. But my conversation with Waring had made me realize something.
I turned over the missing page of the grimoire, showing the others where I translated the very beginning of the passage.
“The page Rook tore out of the codex didn’t just have the spell for banishment,” I said. “It also had the end of the resurrection spell.”
Tolliver took it from me, mouthing the words silently as he read the translation, then his eyes widened, and he looked at me as though he’d never seen me before.
“What?” Ezra asked. “Why do people keep reacting to things without explaining them to me?”
Tolliver read aloud:
“ ‘Yet hear well this singular exception: If you are a true scion of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, with her sacred gift of resurrection bestowed upon your very bones, then and then only may you dare complete this dark ritual.’ ”
Ezra gasped, then frowned. “Wait, what does ‘scion’ mean?”
“It’s like a poetic word for ‘descendant,’ ” I said.
“Ah!” Ezra said, then paused. “And what is the dark ritual it’s talking about?”
CJ groaned into their hands. “The resurrection spell.”
“So,” Ezra said slowly, “you have to be a descendant of Persephone to do the resurrection spell?”
I nodded.
Ezra blinked at me. “Butyoudid the resurrection spell.”
“Yup.” I grinned.
“And it was successful.”
“Yeah…”
“So that means…”
“Get there faster, Ezra. I know you’re smarter than this.”
Resurrection
Forty-One
Never die on a job.
Unless you’re, like, 90 percent sure you can resurrect yourself.
To be fair, I didn’t go into this planning to die, but:
Rule #2: Be prepared for everything.
“You knew,” I accuse Dante, his arms still around me. “You knew what we are.”
“I knew whatyouare,” he corrects.
His sandy blond hair is the way it was before Mom and Dad left, and he’s wearing the T-shirt of the band we’d made up to sell fake tickets for concerts that would never happen. He feels so real, and I feel so real. And we’re both Dead but soalive.
