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Rosie got to her feet and roared like a lion. Fire spat from her mouth and her eyes. I fell back. “Whoa!”
“Oops,” Ixtab said. “She’s trained to go into hellhound mode on the command dead.
“Steak!” Ixtab commanded, holding up her hand. Rosie settled back into her non-demon mode.
“Steak is the command for stop?” I asked.
“Unless you want her to rip your enemy to shreds before she barbecues them.”
“You said something about my playing d—” I looked at Rosie. “You-know-what?” I said, getting back on topic.
“You can’t go home.”
“Why not?”
“First, because it’s no longer there. Had to sort of destroy everything in a huge flood, a good excuse for why you all had to leave so suddenly.”
The room spun. “Where am I supposed to go, then?”
“You’ll see. But I’ve cloaked you with powerful shadow magic so the gods can’t detect you. It’s quite perfect, if I do say so myself.”
“But what if… what if the gods come knocking on the underworld’s door and I’m not here?”
“Remember the demons I sent that looked exactly like you?”
I couldn’t help it. I smiled. She was a serious mastermind! “And what about my mom and Hondo and…”
“They’re waiting for you.”
Relief spread through me. “Where?”
“You’ll see.”
“But it’s not like some deserted, awful place with no internet or tacos, right?”
“Tacos you can get. Internet? Maybe not. And under no circumstances can you use your powers outside the shielded place I’m sending you to. If you do, the gods will pick it up on their radar, and they’ll hunt you down and murder you in your sleep. Do you understand?”
I really didn’t want to think about getting murdered in my sleep. “Wait a sec. What am I supposed to do with my powers? Don’t I need some kind of training?”
She shook her head. “Too dangerous. Go to the movies. Eat tacos. Read books. Do what humans do. Live a normal life.”
“Normal? I’m not normal!”
Wow! Before, all I’d ever wished was to be like everyone else, and now? I actually liked the way those words made me feel.
I didn’t even mind the fact that I still had one shorter leg. Yeah, Sparkstriker’s lightning-bolt surgery hadn’t permanently fixed it. I kind of thought my limp would have disappeared now that I was a claimed godborn who could control fire, but I guess magic doesn’t work that way. Still, it didn’t bother me. It didn’t seem like a weakness anymore, just part of who I was. And besides, it connected me to my dad, ole One Leg.
That reminded me. “What about Hurakan?” I asked Ixtab. “Can he come, too? I can’t let him rot in prison.”
“Don’t worry about him. He’ll be fine. He’s suffered much worse, believe me,” Ixtab said. “Now, do you want to see your human family or not?” She looked at her watch. “Hurry, we have a cab to catch.”
“There’s cab service from Xib’alb’a?”
“Of course. At least until I can get Uber to negotiate with me.”
POST POSTSCRIPT
The cabdriver was a skeleton decked out like Elvis in a white jumpsuit, sideburns, and all, and he belted out “Jailhouse Rock” the entire ten-minute drive. We couldn’t take any roads—especially the heavily watched cosmic ones. So we only had one option: we cruised the ocean. Under the waves, that is. Thanks to Pacific speeding up time for us, it was like being on a roller-coaster submarine, which meant everything whizzed by in a blur. Although I’m pretty sure I saw a two-headed shark.
