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Kase came up beside me, as though he’d spotted my pause and wanted to check in. When he saw the skull, he frowned. “And?”
“Nope.” I shook my head, crossing my arms.
“Nope?” Troy walked up alongside the others until all of us stood in a circle, even Hunter, who usually disappeared for long periods of time.
“That’s right. Nope. Not doing it.”
“Doing what?” Grant asked.
“There is a skull in the road like it’s nothing. It’s too much. This is stupid, all of it.” I gestured at the skull, then around us. “There shouldn’t be random skulls just chilling in the middle of the road. I don’t care that this is hell, I don’t care what is normal here, this is ridiculous.”
The men all looked at me as if I had lost my mind, which annoyed me evenmore.How was I the unreasonable one when my complaint was corpse parts just hanging around. That was a basic boundary for most people, right?
Hunter answered carefully. “You’ve seen plenty of bodies before.”
“Yes, but they’re notin the middle of the road.They’re in shallow-dug graves like decent dead bodies should be. This thing has been run over for years and no one cares. Do you not understand how fucked-up that is? What sort of place do you have to be in for people to just ignore the skull in the middle of the path?”
“Ava,” Kase started to say, but I lifted my hand toward him.
“No. I’m done.”
“You can’t bedone,” Grant said. “We’re stuck here until we see Lucifer, in case you’ve forgotten. It isn’t the sort of thing you get to be done with just because you feel like it.”
I walked away and yelled over my shoulder, “Done!”
Okay, so I wasn’t done forever, but I needed a moment. I needed a chance to reset again, to take back my own sense of normalcy. Damn it, I needed to feel like I was in control, even if it was just of this hissy fit.
“Ava,” Troy called out, hislet’s be reasonablevoice. It seemed that my hissy fit was enough for him to talk to me.
I turned and stomped my foot on the ground. “No more. No more blood mist, no more weird drugs, no brimstone or wardens or anything else.”
The men stared at me, their eyes widening, and for a moment I thought they’d taken me seriously.
Then their gaze moved up, above my head, and I realized…shit.
I turned to find a large, misshapen figure behind me. He was huge, easily eight feet tall, with fangs that dropped below his chin and skin covered in burn scars.
So I shouldn’t have walked away from the men. I remembered one of my foster mothers telling me that having tantrums never made anything better.
One point for her…
The man lifted an orb, then slammed it down, the ground disappearing beneath me as I fell into a darkness that swallowed me up, and the sounds of familiar roars distanced, grew fainter, until everything went black.
