Monica raised her head with a touch of smug triumph. “Then you’re already one step ahead of me. As for what curse I’m planning to put on her, that’s none of your business. Leave that between me and my abuela.” She sat forward suddenly, the humor draining from her face, her eyes gone hard. “I will warn you, though. No matter how you acquire this hair, Leonora will know. She will find out. And she will come find you, hound you to the ends of the earth. So I strongly recommend that you come directly to me, just as soon as you acquire a sample.”
I tutted, chewing on my bottom lip as I considered. “She’s going to be super pissed, isn’t she? Probably going to be firing spells at us while we run.”
“Oh, for sure. She’s very sprightly for her age. But I’ll make it worth your while.”
“How much?” I asked, keeping my wits about me, especially glad that I hadn’t mentioned any numbers at the beginning of our conversation.
“Hmm.” Monica pursed her lips, her eyes scanning the ceiling as she counted off the reward in her head. “How does twenty thousand sound?”
23
Florian’s eyes were huge when he heard the news. “Twenty thousand whole dollars?”
“Yeah.”
“Twenty thousand American dollars?”
“Oh my God, yes. What other kind would they be?” I threw myself onto my mat
tress, the bedsprings squeaking as I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes. “That would be enough to cover living expenses for a long time, plus get me the cloaking enchantment I need from Beatrice.” Florian didn’t answer. When I lifted my head to check, he was leaning against the wall, picking at his fingernails. I frowned. “What?”
He shrugged, his lip turned up. “I just thought that you would have asked me to come and help out, you know? Kind of weird that you didn’t tell me about all this.”
I stretched myself out along the bed and sighed. “I didn’t want to get you involved, okay? It’s bad enough that I keep getting people into trouble. You don’t need to be roped into all that, too.”
“Hey. We’re roommates. And we’re friends, aren’t we? You shouldn’t be afraid to ask. And what’s with all this crap about getting people into trouble, anyway? You talk about this stuff like it’s the end of the world. I don’t get it.”
The bedsprings squeaked again as I pushed myself up to sit, poking through the flimsy mattress into my butt and thighs. “I had friends, back then. They live in this place called the Boneyard, right here in Valero. They were there for me when I couldn’t understand what I’d become, when I couldn’t figure out what the sigils on my skin even meant.”
“It’s something to do with your father, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “Right. They helped me piece things together. My father sacrificed himself to save one of the Boneyard’s boys, this guy named Dustin Graves. Samyaza – Dad – he used his actual blood to heal Dustin, to bring him back from the brink of death. And when my father died, all the divine power locked in his body came rushing to me.” I waved a hand around myself. “That’s how this all started. Samyaza died, Dustin came back to life, and I came to Valero, following the scent of fallen angel blood.”
Florian had parked himself in the one rickety chair I kept in the bedroom, dragging it closer to the edge of my bed, his brows furrowed as he listened intently. “And this Dustin guy. Where is he now?”
I shook my head. “That’s the thing. He was the key to stopping the apocalypse, and to acquire enough magical power to do that, he needed to perform a ritual, one that would remove him from our reality for – God, I don’t know how long. And that ritual needed five enchanted swords to happen. And you know what? It worked. Dust saved the world. The apocalypse came and went, and no one even noticed.”
Florian stared at me for a few more silent seconds, like he was waiting for me to continue. “So what’s the problem, then? We’re all alive. The world is well.”
I bit my bottom lip, sighing. “Dustin vanished. The price of the ritual was for him to be erased from reality. He’s supposed to come back, but when that’s going to be is anyone’s guess. The problem is that those five swords vanished, too. Scattered to the winds, basically. And, well, I’m sort of responsible for at least two of them. The things that own them are going to come looking for the swords, and they’re not going to be very happy. I had to leave the Boneyard to keep everyone safe.”
Florian’s eyes flitted to either side of him, like he was scanning the inside of his mind for the right words to say. “Is that why you owe Belphegor a favor, then?”
“That’s part of it. He stole the sword from another demon prince, which is its own can of infernal worms. Sooner or later, Mammon is going to come knocking. The Prince of Greed is very, very possessive.”
“I’m almost afraid to ask about the other sword.”
My breath rushed into me with a long hiss, like my body was already wincing from the pain it hadn’t yet experienced. “The whole point of the ritual was to use swords from different spheres of the supernatural. One from the gods of earth, one from the demons, that sort of thing. And they needed one from the angels, too.”
I held out my hand, watching as the tip, then the entire blade of a golden sword emerged from my palm, summoned from the Vestments. My fingers clasped around its hilt as it fully materialized. “I knew that just any plain old sword from the Vestments wasn’t going to cut it. We needed something powerful for the ritual, so that was what I asked for. And the thing that showed up in my hands, it was bigger than what I’m used to receiving from the Vestments. Also, it was on fire.”
Florian’s mouth was shaped like a huge, open circle. So were his eyes. You could have heard a pin drop.
I released the sword, watching it dissipate into puffs of glitter as it returned to heaven. “The sword I borrowed – it belonged to an archangel.”
Florian slapped his forehead.
“It checks out with all the lore,” I said. “Flaming swords aren’t common up there. And I knew just by having it in my hands that the sword was different, you know? But yeah. It went missing, just like the others, when Dustin completed his ritual. But that doesn’t matter to the entities who owned those blades. They’re going to come looking. And that archangel – well, it’s only a matter of time.”