Page 67 of Gate of Chaos


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“The fuck we don’t!” Hekon didnotget to usemysisters in his damnplan.

“Oh, hey,” Emily said, “Looks like that Hekon guy is texting. That your boss?”

“My boss.” Keon took the phone back.

“You okay, sis?” I teased to cover up my aggravation with Hekon and whatever thisplanwas.

“He have a brother?”

“Sorry, no, but about my friend—Keon?”

He had a frown on his face.

Abadfrown.

Eighteen

Time stretched, and the waves came steady and distinct, while I bobbed in the gap between them, but didn’t fall.

“Keon, no. No. Don’t—” I started to say, then I shut up. They wouldn’t press the button while we were topside.

Would they?

If Hekon’s window had closed…

The rushing feeling of the black dog flickering in and out of sight as I careened down the cosmic highway delivered light slaps to my brain.

I had to get the Gate open, and here I was, laughing it up with my family while I should be down in Lemuria, banging my head against that cave wall until I figured out a way to pry it open and shove all the dragons through to Homeworld.

“Hel, what’s wrong?” Becka asked gently.

I tried to shove my panic somewhere they wouldn’t see. “Wasn’t expecting Keon to break out the Love Math.”

Keon turned his back and he headed into a different room.

Okay. Focus on something else. Not the imminent toasting of all civilization. Like what to doiftoasting was imminent. There wouldn’t be a lot of time, so how did I get my family to head down into the hardened shelter? And how thehelldid we fit everyoneinthere? For even ten minutes?

I headed back outside into the sunlight. The black-dog feeling didn’t get better, and the startled jolts to the back of my brain continued like obnoxious finger flicks.

Time to hit some of that lemon bourbon cake. Auryn and Akoni were still making the rounds at the party. The cousins had convinced Akoni to play pin the tail on the donkey.

“Baby rabies,” Becka intoned.

“Don’t worry, Hel, it’s probably just work bullshit,” Emily said. “His boss probably just caught him passing around those equations, right?”

I tried not to flinch at my old nickname:Hel. Emily hadn’t been able to say my whole name when she’d been a little kid. We’d had a good laugh when we’d learned years later that Hel had been the Norse ruler of the realm of the dead, where everyone not cool enough to go to Valhalla ended up. She had been the mortal-ish daughter of Loki, the god of trickery and chaos, and been tossed into Helheim by Odin because of the role she (and her siblings Fenrir and Jörmungandr) would play in Ragnarök, and Odin wasn’t taking any chances. Fenrir got chained, Jörmungandr got tossed into the vast ocean, and Hel got assigned to reign over the unworthy dead.

Becka nudged Emily. “Why would you think his boss knew that?”

“Should have seen the phone’s OS,” Emily told Becka, “not standard. Custom fork, and probably spying on everything he does. Like some embedded biometric reader under the glass panel that detected an unknown fingerprint.”

In my family, that sort of thing wasn’t as outlandish a theory as it sounded.

Becka nudged me now. “Someone’s in trouble.”

“Then I better eat this cake.” There were still some crumbs of bourbon lemon cake and vodka lemon cake and lemon-lemon cake and lemon-orange-vodka cake.

My family firmly believed why drink your booze when you could bake it.

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