AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Grant continued to work, his hands sliding along the string, braiding and tying it as he spoke. “You’re mortal, so let’s say you’re an electric car. Hell, it runs on gas.”
“Wouldn’t that mean I’d get tired faster? Since I couldn’t recharge?”
“No, because the only way you move here is essentially hitching a ride on a gas truck. You’re using very little of your own power. That’s why we have to hide your scent, because others here would love to get a look at your…battery.” He chuckled softly at his own joke.
I nodded at the string. “What’s that?”
Grant held his arm out, the mark he’d had on the small bare area of his forearm gone. “When we’re here, my tracking spell doesn’t work. Spells don’t transfer because they use power from the living realm.”
“So stalking me becomes harder? Poor man.”
He added another knot to the string, whispering a few words beneath his breath. “The keys for the rooms gave me an idea.”
“To give up magic and become a jeweler? Not sure there’s a market in hell, but I appreciate the hustle.”
Grant stopped and reached toward me. He fastened the string around my throat, so it fit like a choker, whispering a few more words as he did before explaining, “Magic doesn’t work quite like it does in the living realm, but this connects here.” He held up another string with a bone tied to the end, one that didn’t hang down but arced toward me. When I shifted side to side, it followed. “I’ll be able to follow you. It isn’t quite as nice as my old one, but it’ll work.”
I frowned as I thought about something else. “The guy outside the bar noticed me. Jerrod did, but he followed the scent. Shouldn’t my tattoos have made it so the guy ignored me?”
“Those tattoos weren’t done in hell. They were made to work in the living world, to keep you hidden from things there. It’s like having desert camouflage and going into the jungle.”
I blew out a breath. “Just great. I finally accept that my parents put something useful on me and it stops working.”
“I doubt they’ll even blast someone anymore. Sorry, you’re as visible and vulnerable as the next person now. Unfortunate, since you ended up in so much trouble evenwiththe spell before.”
I offered him a half-hearted glare before kicking a rock from the road. It sailed to the side, into a field, and the same response as the last time happened.
At least this time it wasn’t as scary.
“So you really think we can make it to the Court?”
He lifted his dark eyebrow, as if the question surprised him. “You having doubts now?”
“It just seems like everything I see, everything that happens, all just ups the ante. I feel like we’re betting too much.”
“Maybe,” he agreed, “but we don’t have much of a choice. I wouldn’t have suggested hell as a vacation spot for you, but as long as Lucifer’s markers are on you, we’re stuck.” When I huffed, unconvinced, he kicked a rock as I had before. “I learned something when I was young, a lesson I’ve never forgotten. It’s easy to obsess about options and choices when you have them, right? If you have cake and brownies, you can spend forever deciding which one is best. If all you have is cake, however, the fact that cake isn’t your favorite doesn’t matter. Worrying about it, hating it, none of that changes what is. One you get pushed out of an airplane, the time to wonder if you should jump is over.”
I cast a side eye at him, the words strange from him. He was the ‘I can do anything’ man. He was the one who could create things from nothing, manipulate the laws of physics, and he was lecturing me on what a person could and couldn’t do?
“What do you know about that? It seems like you can do about anything.” Then his story about the council also hit me. “Besides, your father was the Magistrate, wasn’t he? Doesn’t that make you some sort of legacy? I doubt you know much about not getting what you want.”
Grant’s demeanor changed, just the barest tensing as if the conversation had turned into dangerous territory. “Not exactly,” he said, but didn’t elaborate. “I’m just saying that we’ve got one choice, Ava. Forward. Wasting energy wondering if we can climb this cliff isn’t going to change that we have to.”
The advice made sense, in the way good advice always did. It sounded so easy and yet was rarely simple to apply.
Still, arguing with good advice never got anyone anywhere, either, so I curled my shoulders in and kept moving forward.
I was tired of getting answers that didn’t help. It wasn’t like before, when I didn’t want to know. I asked questions, and I understood what I was told. Vampires died when someone stabbed them. Werewolves didn’t like silver. Poltergeists liked to strangle the shit out of me. Those were basics that I knew.
Now, however, every question I asked had some open-ended answer that meant nothing to me, that left me no better off after hearing.You’re mortal so you don’t get tired for some complicated reason that makes no sense.
My foot caught something, pitching me forward when I was too distracted by my frustration to notice the rock buried in the road.
Wait…It wasn’t a rock.
A skull stared up at me, buried partly in the road and cracked at the top, as if heavy things had stepped on it for years. The eye sockets were large and empty, and it mocked me.
“There’s a skull,” I said, voice flat.
