“I’m kicking Hermes in the balls when I see him next,” Wade said. He straightened up and pulled away, scrubbing a hand across his eyes.
“Brilliant plan. I’m all for it.”
Jono looked past Wade at the interior of the old fort they still stood in. Ethan’s body was in pieces, scattered across the broken pentagram. Jono thought he could still feel the remnants of a soul and a godhead between his teeth. Hannah’s body lay at the center of the inactive spellwork, gold glittering between her slightly parted lips. Jono didn’t let his attention linger long on her because the world was still cracking to bits around them.
“Sage!” Jono called out, staring across the way at where his dire was holding up Nadine.
She turned her head to look at him, letting out a raspy roar, but didn’t move from her protective stance. The ground around them was scorched from dragon fire, half the Dominion Sect magic users nothing more than blackened bodies. Wade had killed a good number of them, and the remaining survivors didn’t appear to be too much of a threat from where they lay curled in fetal positions around the courtyard.
“What’s wrong with them?” Jono asked.
“Backlash,” Spencer said tiredly as he jogged over. “The spell broke, and the power had to go somewhere without Ethan to suck it all up.”
“I could eat them,” Wade said with a hard glint in his eyes.
Jono shook his head. “That isn’t justice.”
“Sure it is.”
“No.”
“Fine. So what now?”
“Now the world forgets.”
The ghostly, echoing voice from above had Jono snapping his head back. He watched as Muninn and Huginn winged down in a spiral pattern to the courtyard, followed by hundreds of ravens and crows. The flock of corvids settled on the bodies, both living and dead, and began to peck at the skulls.
Jono stared at the way Huginn’s beak passed through flesh and bone to come away withsomethingheld between the raven’s beak. “What is that?”
“Memories,” Odin said from the fort’s entrance.
Jono narrowed his eyes against the downpour as Odin walked toward them, Gungnir held in one hand, the weapon back with its rightful owner. “Of what?”
Odin watched as his ravens accepted the memories from the other ravens and crows, his one good eye shining with the same glow. “We can make the world forget the path Ethan took to this travesty, but we did not want the world to forget a god. No mortal will ever know how Ethan and those that followed him and his ancestors came to this moment.”
“Why not just do that from the start?”
“Because Macaria would not have survived, and Persephone’s grief would have broken the Underworld. We could not risk a cascade into oblivion.”
“So you lot used Patrick to do your dirty work for you, is that it? Couldn’t get your own hands messy, yeah?”
Odin turned to look at him, a smile playing about his lips that Jono wanted to punch clean off. “What is a story without its hero?”
Jono shook his head, knowing just how much Patrick had never wanted any of this. “Is it over? Does this mean we won?”
Odin tapped the butt of Gungnir against the ground, the motion sending the ravens and crows darting into the air. Huginn and Muninn flew toward the Allfather, their forms seemingly shrinking until they were small enough to perch on Odon’s shoulders. The pair stuck their beaks, filled with all the memories of the past, into Odin’s skull, offering up stolen knowledge.
“For now,” the Allfather said.
Lucien and Carmen approached, the master vampire’s arm slung across her shoulders. Most of Carmen’s attention was on her lover, and Jono couldn’t hide his wince as he took in the burned half of Lucien’s face. The wound snaked down his neck and over his skull, the skin blistered and shockingly red against his normal paleness.
“You need a healer,” Jono said.
Lucien bared his fangs, half-burned lips splitting at one corner. “The government can pay for one.”
“We’re leaving,” Carmen said pointedly. “We need to get our people below to the subway.”
Lucien didn’t dig in his heels and let her lead him to the entrance, back the way they’d come who knew how long ago. Time was fucked all around them, as far as Jono could tell. Sage padded over with Nadine on her back, exhaustion in every line of the mage’s body.
