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Mason shoots him a glare that, if it were a bomb, would level the entire county.
Then he turns back to me. “Why do you think it wasn’t his fault?”
“Cops didn’t stay. They had a report ready to go. Some of them were definitely cops, but the other ones might not have been. They might have been…working for somebody else.”
“Who?”
“My grandfather.”
Lily’s voice is a genuine surprise. I don’t know where I thought she’d be. Out in the woods, maybe, crying and wringing her hands for a few minutes, then doing her avenging angel thing, if she could find out where the cops and fake-cops took me.
It doesn’t seem like there’s enough time for her to have gotten here.
Hallucination?
I turn my head like it’s made of glass, or something more breakable than my skull, and there she is, in her hot criminal-mastermind-sidekick clothes, leaning against the opposite wall with Snowball’s cage in her hands.
He hops up and down like he’s going to throw hands, tweeting his ass off. I don’t know how I didn’t hear him before.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” I tell both of them.
“You think?” Lily says, her voice shaking.
That heavy doorbangs open again, which is like getting an axe to the brain, and then there is more shouting.
“—mindset issue,” a guy is saying. A guy with a strangely familiar voice. The voice makes me think of a fancy party. A real banger with tiny foods on silver trays. “We could come back tomorrow and bring Persephone. You know how she loves wearing black and haunting people’s dreams. If you were a devoted husband—”
There’s athunk, like a hand hitting ribs or a torso at high speed, and then aslap, and then anotherthunk, and a sound like two people hissing in each other’s faces, and then some breaking glass.
“Iama devoted husband,” another guy says, and his voice is like ice in the dead of night. A loudthump-thump-thumpsays he’s pounding a fist on the desk out there. “Does anyonestaffthis place?” He doesn’t shout, but his voice carries, crisp through the building. “How long do I have to stand here waiting to file a report for trespassing? I canassureyou that you’re going to need the extra time for investigating an extra-legal gang of officers assaulting people on my property without a fucking warrant.”
Hold on.
I know that voice.
I swivel my head back toward Mason. My lips want to laugh, but my gut wants to die, so I end up with what’s probably a goofy grin on my fucked-up face. “Isn’t that your buddy? Your friend. Your best friend. You love him.”
Past Mason’s head, Theme-Park takes a step back, his face white.
More footsteps mean I have to turn my head again to stay apprised of the situation, but it’s worth it, because two guys come down the hall, one of them in gray sweatpants and a blue crewneck and the other the kind of all-black no-brand-name fancy shit you see in paparazzi photos of people who have enough money to buy Australia.
I burst out laughing.
It hurts so bad.
“Hades, man. How did you come to be involved in this?”
He looks at me, his weird black eyes narrowed. “It’s funny, Jameson. I was wondering how you came to be taking a nature hike on one of my properties.”
“Ourproperties,” the other guy says. It’s his brother. They’re not DNA brothers. Not genetic brothers. They don’t have the same parents, is what I mean, and it’s obvious, because Zeus has this golden, sun-kissed thing going on, with dancing golden eyes, and Hades looks…
Like he doesnotgo in the sun.
“Shut the fuck up, Zeus,” Hades says.
“I heard something shady was going on,” I put in, since he asked me a question. “Post on a message board.”
Hades looks at Zeus with a flat expression. Zeus shakes his head slowly, like they’re constantly plagued by message boards.
