“Here?”
“Your… tomb.”
He tilts his head at me. “Does this look like a tomb?”
“No. But”—I shrug—“the hallways do weird shit. I figured that’s what’s happening here. The hallways.”
He leans over, presses a button on his desk phone, and says, “Miss Vita is done. I’m sending her down. Can you meet us at the elevator?”
“Yes, sir,” Luciano responds.
Tarq looks back at me. “Your world sounds… intriguing. But since you’re on a tight timeline, we can discuss the rest at a later date. Sound good?”
I nod enthusiastically. I just want to get the fuck out of here.
“I’ll walk you to the elevator.” He walks up to me and extends his arm.
I do not want to take his arm. Like… I cannot even stress how much I do not want to touch this monster. But there is no polite way to avoid his offer. So I place my hand on his muscled forearm and let him guide me down the hallways.
Everything is different this time, though. Luciano and I did not come up in an elevator. But Tarq leads me to one, and when the doors open, there Luciano is. Waiting for me.
I start to enter the elevator, but Tarq grabs my hand before I can fully remove it from his arm, and I have to stop and look at him.
He studies me for several long, awkward moments. Then he brings my hand up to his lips and kisses my knuckles, just like Luciano did down in the lower hall. Tarq’s eyes never leave mine as he does this. And I suddenly feel faint. Like, I’m one hundred percent certain that I am about to fall over.
But then Tarq lets go and I’m free and my head clears immediately. “Until next time, Miss Vita.”
“Yep. Thank you so much. Pell and I really appreciate this.” I hold up the page. Then I turn and make my escape.
Luciano says nothing as we descend, but I can feel his smile.
Delightful. They think I’m delightful.
And there are definitely worse things to be, but I get the feeling that ‘delightful’ is Tarq’s replacement for Pell’s ‘naïve.’
Luciano walks me out into the lower hall, which is now empty of people and looks very much the way I would expect it to look if I were back in my own sanctuary.
We stop at the large glass doors that now lead out into the cemetery.
“Thank you,” I tell him.
“It was our pleasure to help you today, Miss Vita.”
I don’t let him take my hand because I know he’s going to kiss my knuckles and I just can’t do it again. So I wave. Then turn to the glass door, open them, and…
… walk out of the tomb I entered earlier.
I’m very disoriented when this change happens and I have to look up the hill at the cathedral to get my bearings. But when I look back at the tomb, there is no door. Just that giant statue of Tarq.
Which, now that I’ve met him, doesn’t even begin to do him justice.
But then I look down and see hooves.
Not black hooves. Not Tarq’s hooves.
My hooves.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - PELL
“You’re lying.” I say this to Grant with conviction because I don’t believe him. “You’ve been lying since the day you arrived here.”
Grant—Saturn—whoever the fuck he is—smiles up at me. “You never had a chance, Pell. You’ve been here for two thousand years. This isn’t a curse. It’s fate. You’re never getting out. Pie works for me, Tarq works for me—”
I turn away. I will not listen to his lies. I will not let him poison my mind with this shit. He told Pie a whole bunch of things in town too. And that was bullshit.
She’s not his. She’s real. We did the phone call. She talked to her friend. We have already proved this.
The moment I realize that, I feel… not defeated. Not better, either. There is still a bunch of shit happening that I don’t understand. And I don’t really know which part of what he’s saying is true or false, but that doesn’t matter. He can’t be trusted. He’s lying about something. And if he needs to lie, that means he has a weakness.
I will find that weakness and I will destroy this god, once and for all.
I go outside and start hoofing it up the hill.
Grant calls after me from the other side of the gate. “You know I’m right! You know there’s something wrong with her!”
But he can’t get in. When he walked out, he forfeited his right to enter Saint Mark’s Sanctuary.
I’m almost at the top of the hill when Pie steps out from between some tombs. I am so stunned by her appearance, I stop in my tracks.
Behind me, Grant cackles. “See!” he yells. “See! Look at her! Look at her! She is a creature of magic. She is a creature of me!”