“She tried binding me to this realm. It was an impressive but clumsy attempt, and the execution was sloppy. I felt a tickle deep in my?—”
I held my hand up. “Nope.”
“Spine.”
Oh, that wasn’t too bad.
“Anyhow,” Lucifer went on. “I think I have more of a handle on what we are dealing with.”
“Good. Maybe we can draw this shitshow to a close,” Hudson said.
Lucifer’s gaze flicked to him, then back to me.Oh no.“Eloise has made a deal,” he said. She’s a political badass, emphasis on the bad—but that means deals aren’t unexpected.
“Who with?” I asked. “A demon? The president?” The latter made little sense. As far as I knew, he was human.
“No, Cora. Eloise has awakened Donn.”
I blinked, hoping for someone to wake me or, alternatively, for him to crack up laughing and then tell what my grandmother had actually done, because there was no freaking way she was this stupid.
Lucifer stared at me, and as the seconds slid by, my hope died.
“Who is Donn?” Sebastian asked.
“A god,” Lucifer answered.
“LiketheGod?”
Lucifer shook his head. “No, the God you are familiar with is a different entity. He exists in a different construct.”
“She cannot be this stupid,” I whispered.
“This isn’t a good thing?” Hudson asked. “Aren’t gods inherently good?”
I shook my head. “No. Just like humans, each god has different personality traits and flaws. There are just a lot more consequences when they throw a fit.”
“And Donn is?”
I closed my eyes as a shudder ran down my spine. “The Irish god of death.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
If you think ghosts are scary, now is the time to exit the story. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Throughout history, different cultures had worshiped thousands of gods. Some were as fantastical and real as Santa Claus, while others not prominent in our modern day world still existed.
Donn, the Irish god of death, was one such being. Rumored to have once been a mortal who pissed off the Goddess Ériu, she sent him to his watery grave at the bottom of the ocean and bound him to the house of Donn, where souls were collected. And so was born the god of death.
Nowadays the “one true God” idea dominated religion, but that didn’t mean the ancient gods had disappeared—they were effectively in retirement. They didn’t sully themselves with the squabbling of humanity these days. However, Donn being involved made sense, and it was bad news for us.
Celtic gods were brutal, powerful, and if memory serves, utterly nuts. Sitting alone in my office, I stared at the wall, tryingto understand how Eloise would have gotten a direct line to a god. The book.Dammit.The Red Dragon.
She’d tracked down the powerful grimoire in order to perform spells to drag demons from Hell and siphon their power. She must have stumbled upon something powerful that allowed her to contact a god who would normally obliterate her. Gods weren’t known for their patience, which meant he must have wanted something. To come back? Ugh, I had more questions, not less. I hated gods.Wait, no, not you, God. Just the other ones. Your god buddies.
And now I was speaking to a wall like it was the burning bush.
There was a clatter upstairs as my family prepared for our delayed Christmas dinner redo. I was semi regretting it, but our lives couldn’t be full of death and despair without a little light. We’d go as nuts as Donn, and then we’d all be doomed.
My office door swung open, and Dangerous Dave swept in, a storm of dark leather and brooding expression. Was it too much to ask to go back to a time when the worst we faced was a weird shifter death?
