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“I’ll introduce you later. It’s this whole thing.”
“You know, I met my own demon prince. Back in Humpuck.”
I chuckled. “Humpuck? What the hell is that?”
“Town I’m from, few hundred miles from here. Don’t ask, it’s terrible. I call it Bumfuck.”
I laughed. Not a bad sense of humor on this kid, if I was being honest.
“Anyway, my demon prince was Beelzebub. Demon prince of gluttony.”
I leaned forward, suddenly so interested. “And lord of the flies. Holy shit. What was Beelzebub like?”
But before Mason could answer, Sterling cut in from behind us.
“Finally, some action around here.” I turned to him, frowning. He was leering at me and Mason – more specifically, at the fact that Mason still had his top off.
Gil blinked. “What happened to your shirt, Mason?”
Asher stood with his arms folded. “So, the two of you seem to be getting a little more comfy with each other.”
Herald nudged his glasses up his nose, grinning as he looked between the two of us. “I mean, I’m not mad about it.”
Mason cocked his hip and spread his arms out, flexing, wearing a shit-eating grin of his own. “A little boning at the Boneyard, finally?”
I clenched my fists, struggling to hide how flustered I was getting. “He was showing me the markings on his body,” I said. “You’re all disgusting. He’s practically my son.”
“Call him Daddy,” Sterling stage-whispered. “Do it. Do it for Uncle Sterling.”
Mason shrugged his shirt back on, laughing from deep inside his chest. It was nice to see everyone getting along, but still.
“Perverts,” I said. “Every last one of you.”
Chapter 23
“This has to be some kind of joke,” I said, staring at the enormous pack of cheesy snacks cradled like a baby in Sterling’s arms.
“I’m telling you, I did my homework, and everything points to this stuff,” Gil said. “She’s not one to stick to tradition.”
Sterling peeled out a couple of bills then handed them, grinning and winking, to the cashier. “And a pack of cigs. No, no, those over there.” The cashier giggled, making what seemed like intentional mistakes as she hunted down Sterling’s cigarettes of choice. Sterling’s grin stayed on his lips, and his eyes just kept on wandering. He certainly didn’t seem to mind.
“I just find it hard to believe that Artemis wants a jumbo bag of Snacky Yum-Yums as an offering,” I said.
They were cheese snacks, the kind that left orange powder on your fingers. The similarity in name to Puppy Yum dog biscuits isn’t lost on me. A quick look at the packaging would tell you that they were owned by the same company. It was Happy, Inc., the mega-corporation behind Happy Boba, Happy Cow, and all those other food franchises I’d grudgingly come to love and crave at odd hours of the night. I had to wonder if Puppy Yum and Snacky Yum-Yums shared certain common ingredients. I tried not to gag.
Gil shrugged. “Times have changed. The entities have different tastes now. You saw Amaterasu’s cellphone, remember? And I don’t mean to pull any cards here, but I’m a werewolf.” He rolled his shoulders, pouting a little, pretending to look hurt. “I mean, I know one or two things about moon gods. Give me some credit.”
I patted him on the shoulder. “I believe you, big guy. It’s just – it sounds ridiculous, is all. But entities are entities, right? I believe you.”
Sterling kicked and hissed as we dragged him out of the convenience store and away from his cashier crush, but what else was new? I was so close to asking Gil to just pick him up by the scruff and carry him out. He wouldn’t drop the Snacky Yum-Yums.
Artemis’s tether – her place of power, or more accurately, the gateway to her domicile – was apparently in the Nicola Arboretum, the biggest, prettiest botanical garden in Valero. Our last visit there must have been that time we had to fight the giant beanstalk from hell that Thea had called from out of the earth.
My heart pounded a little faster as we entered the garden, and I had to silently reassure myself. It was going to be fine. No hell-stalks this time. Thea was dead. We were just there to deliver a huge bag of salty processed snacks to an ancient goddess, then ask for her help in identifying what, exactly, Banjo was supposed to be.
Oh, did I not mention Banjo? He had to come along, naturally. Whole point of the expedition, in fact. But we couldn’t take anyone else from the Boneyard with us, so it was just the original three amigos, avec Welsh corgi. Carver said as much.
We weren’t going to do well lugging around an empowered nephilim, something he described as even rarer than a necromancer. Mason, in a sense, was Asher version 2.0. Incidentally, Carver had been on the verge of allowing Asher to come with us this time, except he figured that Mason could use some company back in the Boneyard.
