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“Be back in a jiff,” Scrimshaw said, shortly before vanishing in a puff of farts.
As an imp, Scrimshaw was technically a demon, but I trusted him enough to do his job and complete his end of the bargain. The problem with commissioning entities and supernatural creatures to gather intel was that there was no telling when they would come back with results.
I packed up the rest of the leftovers, and after turning down the kitchen, we each of us headed to our separate bedrooms for the night. And Carver headed to – well, wherever it was he sat to stare out into empty space while the rest of us got our sleep.
And I truly did believe that I was going to get a good, solid eight hours for once, which I knew I’d need for the challenges that were inevitably going to come. I stripped down to my boxers, brushed my teeth, then slammed myself into bed, getting nice and warm under the covers.
From an adjacent room – Sterling’s, specifically – I heard the muffled strains of characters in a telenovela arguing passionately in Spanish. But Sterling was at least polite about that, keeping things at a volume that made it impossible to make out what anyone was really saying, a low enough level that it nearly passed for my own personal white noise machine.
I couldn’t tell you when I drifted off, exactly, only that I dreamed in Spanish. A woman with heart-shaped lips and an hourglass figure huffed, then slapped a leanly muscled man, striking him across cheekbones sharp enough to cut diamonds. “Hijo de puta,” she screamed, shortly before he grabbed her by the back of her head and began passionately kissing her full on the mouth.
Then the two ridiculously beautiful actors slowly morphed into Prudence and Gil, and my odd, relatively pleasant dream gradually transformed into a nightmare. Not that there’s anything wrong with them kissing, exactly, but who wants to watch their friends make out?
The scene shifted, and suddenly Prudence was carrying a baby. A really ugly one, with a hooked nose, metallic skin that shone like copper, and for some reason, a pair of horns growing out of its head. The baby stared directly at me, and with a frown, it said “Get up, loser.”
And it wouldn’t stop. I sputtered and scratched at my cheeks, annoyed by something that seemed to be fluttering there, which was when I finally realized that I wasn’t dreaming anymore. I opened one eye, staring blearily out of it at Scrimshaw, who was standing triumphantly on my pillow and nudging my cheek.
“Get up, loser,” he said, for maybe the fifth time.
“Jesus, Scrimshaw, I get it,” I moaned, ruffling my hair, hating to be woken up so soon. “What time is it?”
“Doesn’t matter. What matters is that I found the source of the spell.”
I sat bolt upright. Well. That woke me up.
“You did? So quickly?”
“I know, right?” Scrimshaw chuckled, his hands pushed into his waist, his little chest thrust out with pride. He handed me a tiny scroll of parchment that he’d seemingly produced out of nowhere. I took it warily, once again trying my hardest to overlook the fact that he had no pockets or pants to keep things in.
I delicately grasped each end of the scroll between thumb and forefinger and unfurled it. Written in shockingly beautiful cursive script was an address that identified the ritual’s origins as somewhere in the Gridiron, the city of Valero’s industrial district. But something else about the address seemed familiar. I blinked my eyes rapidly, and as the haze of sleep completely wore off, it began to dawn on me.
“Wait. I know this place.”
Chapter 10
Asher narrowed his eyes, his expression twisting into a scowl as he looked up at the house. “We all know this place. It’s the Viridian Dawn.”
It hadn’t taken long for me to round up the rest of the boys. We hopped into a car and headed straight for the Gridiron, all the while arguing that it simply made no sense. The Viridian Dawn couldn’t possibly have gotten back together again, and worse, moved back into the same damn house.
“Why,” Sterling said, rubbing his temples. “And I mean, why would these idiots come back to occupy the same house we raided them in before?”
“Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice, maybe?” I shrugged. “Criminals don’t go back to the scene of the crime? Maybe they figured no one would come looking if they moved back in.”
“In a contemptuously idiotic way, it somehow makes sense.” Carver sneered, like he’d just caught a whiff of something that came out of a dog’s backside. “Pitiful miscreants. Who knew that they even possessed enough discipline or magical prowess to perform a ritual to the Eldest?”
I slapped myself in the forehead. “Oh my God. Now it makes sense. Remember, the Lorica arrested their leader, Deirdre. But most of her followers scattered. And remember, she managed to outfit her little army with a bunch of wands and crappy magical devices. Who’s to say she didn’t leave any grimoires lying around?”
A chorus of groans sounded from our strike team. They knew I was right. Deirdre Calloway was the druidic master of the Viridian Dawn, a doomsday cult with a very unusual and very specific objective. They’d originally located and picked Asher up off the street around the time his powers manifested, then kept him locked up in the house that was designated as the Viridian Dawn’s headquarters.
The plan was to use his necromantic power to trigger an overgrowth of vegetation so abrupt and intense that it would choke the very life out of Valero, and turn it into a massive living forest. We managed to stop the Dawn through the combined efforts of the Boneyard and the Lorica. I had the strangest feeling that we would be working with the Lorica very closely for the foreseeable future, and not just to shut down cults composed mostly out of idiot college kids with delusions of grandeur and way too much free time.
“That’s why these losers came back.” It was hard to keep my voice down, but I was getting riled up. “They must have known where Deirdre was keeping her toys. They didn’t need their leader, they just wanted any semblance of power that magic cou
ld give them.”
Gil cracked his knuckles. “So we move in. Smash some heads. We did it once, so we do it again.”
Asher lurched forward, his momentum only stopped when Sterling grabbed the back of his jacket and held on tight. “Let go,” Asher grunted. “Let me at ’em.”
