From Hell To Breakfast: The Case Files Of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist, #8 3k494d

From Hell to Breakfast

Cynthia St. Aubin

For Team Crixus. The very fact that there is a Team Crixus makes me want to turn a cartwheel, eat cotton candy, and ride a purple llama. Don’t ask me why these seem like life-affirming activities.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Preview Unraveled

Cynthia St. Aubin

Other series by Cynthia St. Aubin:

About the Author

Acknowledgments

It’s a tricky business, making a reader fall in love with a character, and not a responsibility I take lightly. Do it well, and another human being now has a stake in this character’s future, and may or may not leap across the lunch table, threatening—in the kindest way possible—to throttle you to death if the ending you gave said character isn’t the one they wanted. (This is both the coolest and most frightening feeling ever, by the way). When I knew that giving Crixus an unhappy ending in Matilda’s story was the only way to begin writing his, I spent a week hiding under my desk, fearing the fallout. I wasn’t disappointed. There was no question I needed to engage some of my most ardent Team Crixus ers to ensure that I did our favorite demigod justice in From Hell to Breakfast. So, for Casey, Emily, and Kiki, beta readers extraordinaire…thank you for taking the time to make sure I didn’t cock this up. Wait, can I say the word “cock?” in an acknowledgement? Oh well. In for a penny. Cock, cock, cock! On with the show.

Prologue

It was a shame she had to kill him. Specimens like this one were rare. Beautiful, brilliant. Believing. Talent was one thing. Actors, musicians, writers, painters, poets—all the men she fed from had it to one degree or another. But this body…well. She wouldn’t soon forget the way he felt beneath her. Inside her. A rockstar in every sense of the word. Her hand tightened around his tattooed throat, his pulse a delicate throb beneath her fingers. With each beat, she took something new: his life force, his vitality, his creativity. They all belonged to her now. He filled her blood with songs the world would never hear. At last, he was hers alone to enjoy. She bent her mouth to his, tasting one last time the lips that sang the words she loved so well. He arched under her, electrified by the vision she gave him in return. Inspiration, the current ing between them. Her parting gift was the masterpiece he wouldn’t live to finish. His release and his death came together, a final burst of ecstasy swelling her veins with light. She kissed his cooling forehead and turned his face away before the eyes went dull. She wanted to him bright and full of promise. He had lasted longer than the others. Her purpose achieved, she unsheathed him from her, slid into her coat, and closed the door to his London flat. She was art.

She was love. She was the muse. And she would not be stopped.

1

Storming the gates of Hell wasn’t as difficult as it sounded…if you had the right equipment. Crixus—demigod, former gladiator, and supernatural bounty hunter, made a point of always having the right equipment. Today, it was a Le Creuset four-quart casserole and a bar of Valhrona baking chocolate. Odd items to bring to the realm of Hades, but perfectly suited to the entrance he had in mind. The accessory he hadn’t had in mind was the balding, middle-aged exant who had attached himself to Crixus’s side as he elbowed his way through the crowd of shrieking shades at the gateway to the Underworld. Crixus would have killed the pasty bastard, if he weren’t already dead. Not just dead, but newly dead, which is the most annoying kind. The kind where it’s all tears and denial and but the light was green. “Please.” The ant clasped his no longer corporeal hands in the universal gesture of pleading. “I beg you. I’ll give you anything. Just get me out of here. It wasn’t my time.” “Anything I want, I can get.” Crixus stepped over a crumpled figure in the throes of wailing and teeth gnashing that made the commute to Hell such a downer. “Your help is not necessary.” “My collection of first-edition Dickens’ illustration copperplates?” “Dickens,” Crixus laughed. “Good guy. Chuck and I used to have lunch. I have some hand-written manuscripts of his, as I .” “My firstborn son?”

“What the hell would I want with a kid?” “My wife? She was a gymnast.” “Marie.” A genuine smile of fondness lit the demigod’s face. “She says hi, by the way.” “What?” “Never mind.” Crixus came to an abrupt halt, possessed by the urge to scrape this guy off before he got to the next phase of his journey. “Look, even if I wanted to, I can’t help you.” “Why not?” “Because you’re dead. Zapping people back to Earth isn’t something I can do.” Granting spontaneous orgasms to your wife, however… “But you’re not like the others here. I can tell. You have a casserole. No one else got to take anything with them.” “That’s how it works. You’re human. When humans die, they come here to be processed. Trust me, you’ll get the hang of it. Why don’t you save yourself some time and get in that line over there?” Crixus pointed to a section of the gray expanse where the mood was calmer and the screams had quieted. A long phalanx of the dead who had finally schooled themselves into a line wound back from the dock where this depot met with the River Styx. The very place Crixus was bound with his goodies. The ant looked into the shifting mist with trepidation. “What about you? Are you getting in line?” “Lines aren’t my thing.” No. Where lines were concerned, Crixus had always been better at crossing them than staying in them, a fact he proved to himself now with the continuous shifting of his own motorcycle boots on the gravel. Funny how three minutes could seem like an eternity even to someone who’d been alive over two thousand years.

Immortal as he was, Crixus had not landed here after an unfortunate meeting with a wood chipper or by kissing the bumper of a semi-truck. He had been summoned, and summoned meant business. Business for Crixus meant a fat bounty and a rogue supernatural in need of persuasion. The sooner he found out who he would be hunting, the sooner the fun could begin. But the Lord of the Underworld was nothing if not patient. Methodical. Cautious. All qualities as foreign to Crixus as mortality. And monogamy. “What about a Lexus?” the ant offered. “I just bought a Lexus, and if you could—” “You’re dead, okay? Your body is in the county morgue, they hosed your brains from the street, your wife is already filing the life insurance paperwork and sizing up your gardener. Denial is not going to help you. It’s time for you to accept reality and move on with your life—er, afterlife.” The cadence of this lecture had entered his speech from another source, one Crixus could not think of without an attendant stab of pain. Matilda. Her name floated to him unbidden, and for a moment, Crixus wanted nothing more than to see the man she had married writhing in the mire with these wretches. Dead, and out of the picture. The demigod could make it happen in a million different ways, but all of them would bring her grief. The thought of her tears was ash in his mouth. “But—” “No buts. You’re dead. Deceased. Departed. End of story. Best of luck.” Crixus turned his boots toward the river of flame and shuffled on. “Silver! I have silver bars,” the ant called after him. “Had,” Crixus said. “Let it go.” Even as he said it, the demigod knew how unlikely this was. In his experience,

humans clung to cherished objects in their lives with a doomed tenacity he didn’t envy. Emperors of their own realm, convinced they had some control over what or who stayed with them. An elaborate show of self-delusion at best. Recent events had reminded Crixus of this only too well. He moved past the curious stares and hushed whispers of the souls awaiting judgment, brushing flakes of brimstone from his leather jacket as he approached the place where flames lapped at the gray shore. Luck was with him. The long, black boat was still anchored at the ancient dock, the cloaked figure at its helm checking names off a coiled scroll. “Hey, Bones. What’s shakin’?” The cloak’s wearer looked up from his list and smiled. At least, Crixus was pretty sure he smiled. Facial expressions are difficult to discern without the aid of muscle and flesh. Charon, ferryman of the dead, stowed his feathered quill between his clavicle and scapula and stretched out a skeletal hand. They bumped knuckles—Charon’s bleached white bones against Crixus’s battered skin. Scars were the one thing the demigod got to keep. “Crixus, old friend. What brings you to our humble realm?” “Business. Any chance I can hitch a ride?” Black eye sockets scanned the gathering crowd at Crixus’s back and lit on the enger who had seated himself on the bench at the opposite bow of the boat. “Business or no, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait your turn. You know the rules.” Rules. Rules fell into the same category as lines for Crixus, but he made a point of knowing them well enough to understand which ones he was breaking and why. Just as he made a point of knowing the currency of every realm he strayed through. Eternity attached to a rowboat of the damned had left the ferryman desperate for a hobby, and Crixus himself had once obliged by suggesting he take up baking.

That act had paid dividends ever since. “I thought you might say that.” Crixus brought the casserole out from under his arm and held it up for Charon to see. “Interested?” The tips of bony fingers wedged themselves between Charon’s exposed white teeth. “I…I couldn’t.” “Almost forgot.” Crixus dug into the pocket of his leather jacket and pulled out the bar of chocolate. The eye sockets widened. “Is that…Vahlrona baking chocolate?” “Seventy percent Guanaja, my friend. Extraordinary bitterness. But the warm notes are supposed to be exquisite.” Charon snatched the bar from Crixus’s hand and stuffed it down into his cloak. “I’m sorry, Mr. Horowitz,” he said, turning to the man seated on the bench. “There’s been a change in plans.” “But I’m next. It’s my turn. I’ve been waiting for six days.” “Never fear, Bernie.” Charon picked him up by the collar of the shirt he’d been buried in and marched him up the rickety ramp. “You’ll still be dead tomorrow.”

Everyone tells you to go toward the light. No one tells you it’s fluorescent. In Crixus’s experience, death was a disappointing endeavor for humans on a number of levels. All the imagined choirs of angels or imps with pitchforks gave way to a machine more like the governments they were used to. Even the buildings. Hades preferred the kind of classical architecture that brought Crixus back to his earliest memories of childhood. Dragged from his native Gaul to Rome as a slave, he had broken himself and others on similar imposing marble columns and entablatures. He had rolled down stone steps like these, bloodied by opponents in the gladiatorial ring. The chill these vast structures clung to even in this bleak place cooled Crixus’s perpetually heated blood. Sentinels stood at either side of heavy brass doors of this oversized mausoleum. Demigods like himself, clothed in black, faces blank. For him, the gates opened. He was expected. Claustrophobic silence descended as Crixus stepped into the atrium. Color had been leeched from this place. There was no sky overhead. No sun to light the marble courtyard. Only the great nothing hanging above him like frozen smoke. This space never ceased to pulse with the promise of oblivion. To Crixus, it felt like those last maddening seconds between a general’s raised arm and his order of attack. He cut through the tension with his own breach, pushing open the polished wooden doors to Hades’s office without knocking. The Lord of the Underworld looked like someone Crixus might have met in battle. Dark in a suit several centuries out of the current fashion, Hades sat ensconced in bookshelves whose endless tomes Crixus had the time but never the patience to read. Candelabra stretched their brassy arms toward the vaulted ceiling from every surface. Their flickering light made dancing shadows of the

room’s furniture, an attic jumble of pieces from all periods. Eyes stared down at Crixus from the paintings in heavy gilt frames, giving him the feeling of being watched whichever way he turned. Hades was a collector of more than just souls. “Crixus.” Hades did not rise behind his desk. He didn’t need to. Even seated, his hulking form promised retribution for any offense that required him to find his feet. He was not soft like Zeus, dulled by the penchant for pleasure and distraction. Hades’s eyes—a bright, pitiless blue—held none of the humor or capricious will that made some of his colleagues easier to manage. “You made good time.” Hades set aside his pen and steepled long fingers under his chin. “Have a seat.” “I’ll have two.” Crixus selected one of the brocade chairs in front of the desk and sat down, scooting its mate closer so he could prop his boots on it. “Who do you want and what’s in it for me?” “You always did have a delightful way of cutting straight to the point.” “Would we be having this conversation otherwise?” “I suspect not.” The sheet of stiff parchment whispered as Hades pulled it out of his drawer. He stared at it for a moment before sliding it across the desk. Crixus scanned the contract with his usual impatience for small print, which always looked to him like insects swarming a page. He got as far as the third paragraph, saw the name, and covered his crotch out of reflex. Lavinia. A.k.a. Vinnie, a.k.a. Levane—the last of the leannán sídhe. A hot-tempered Irish succubus muse who fed from the creative power of any artist she could lay her red-lacquered claws on. Like the muses of Crixus’s acquaintance, Levane granted her prey exquisite inspiration…only hers came with the unfortunate side effect of dooming the artist to madness and inevitable self-destruction. Last time they had crossed paths, Vinnie had driven her spiked heel into his groin and kicked him off the Eiffel Tower. He had been trying to pry her off

Vincent Van Gogh at the time, and the demigod was in no hurry for a repeat performance. Crixus set the paper back on the desk and rose to his feet. “Well, it’s been great talking to you. Give my love to Persephone.” “Not so fast, gladiator.” The candle flames guttered as Hades’s voice rumbled the room’s cathedral heights. “You haven’t even heard my .” “The don’t matter. No way am I going after that crazy bitch. Not again.” “Not even for…Matilda?” The Dark Lord had a smile that could peel paint. “What about her?” “Charming woman,” Hades said. “I rather enjoyed her company. I can see why you’re still so enamored. Even though she’ll soon give birth to another man’s child.” Acid ate its way up from Crixus’s gut and into his throat, the reaction an irritating reminder of the human side of his nature he couldn’t be rid of. Just as he couldn’t stop the hands tightening into fists at his side. “I’m aware.” Hades picked the pen up from its golden ferrule on his desk and tapped it against his lower lip. “What if I told you that the birth wouldn’t go well? That she was scheduled to return to me rather soon?” “I would tell you to go to Hell. Oh, wait…” “Your defiance, while amusing, doesn’t serve your cause at all. I have the schedule here if you’d care to peruse it.” Hades pulled one of the leather-bound tomes from the many shelves behind him and flipped through the gold-leafed pages. “Yes, here it is.” Crixus received the book with numb fingers. Its weight in his hands had a grim finality. Silvered script slid across the page before his eyes, new words appearing even now as seemingly unimportant decisions were made, outcomes affected, paths changed. The demigod slid his hand across the buttery parchment as he had Matilda’s cheek during so many stolen moments. She was one person, one gear in an infinite machine, a machine older than the world and vast beyond

measure. Every choice she made, no matter how insignificant, sent ripples through every other life it touched. Some of those ripples were too small to be felt. Some turned into tidal waves, leaving wreckage in their wake. “What will you do to change this?” Crixus asked. “It’s what you’ll do to change it that matters. Bring me Levane, and I will see that your Matilda is safe.” “How?” Hades took the book from Crixus’s hands, closing it with care. “Those details are better left unspoken.” “Levane has been causing havoc since time began. Why bring her in now?” “Her activities of late have been more…problematic.” “More problematic than Hemingway? And Van Gogh? And Keith Richards?” “I’m afraid so. She’s started taking her prey before their time. Sucking them dry and killing them outright. It’s created somewhat of a multi-agency issue for us. As she is a succubus, she falls within my jurisdiction, but now Calliope and Atropos are involved.” “Shit.” Crixus scrubbed his face with the roughened palm of his hand. “The Muses and the Fates?” “Calliope was never especially excited about a Celtic leannán sídhe dabbling where the Greek muses had once ruled. Given these recent developments, she’s become positively insistent that Levane be stopped.” Crixus had been around long enough to know that when Calliope, chief of the muses, was insistent, important ears had no choice but to listen. A verbal sparring match with the muse of eloquent speech was a surefire way to get your ass handed to you on a silver tray and your balls in a teacup on the side. “You can see why I am so eager for your assistance.” Hades pushed the contract

back across the desk with a single finger. “If I do this, what assurance do I have that Matilda won’t be harmed?” “Really, gladiator. You should make a habit of reading these things carefully. It’s all outlined here in clause A.7 of subsection three: Recovery agent payment pursuant to the surrender of fugitive. Would you prefer to look it over again before I sign?” Crixus put his hands on the desk, the contract pinned beneath his palm, and leaned close enough to whisper to the Lord of the Dead. “I would prefer that you look me over and decide if you really want to take a chance that you can’t deliver if I do.” The icy blue eyes didn’t blink. “Threats, Crixus?” “Vows, Hades. In anything happens to Matilda Schmidt, you will pray for mortality to end the suffering I will bring upon your head.” “She is mortal, Crixus. She will die. But you have my word that it will not be before she’s had a long, full life with her husband.” For how deeply this word wounded him, Crixus could have signed in blood. Hades picked up the pen, scribbled a signature across his appointed line, and angled it toward Crixus. “Do we have a deal?” In their time, Crixus’s hands held all manner of weapon, but none felt as deadly as the pen now clasped in his hand. With the last loop of his mark, the contract furled itself into a scroll and disappeared in a flash of flame and smoke. “Acta non verba,” Crixus said. Deeds. Not words.

2

Vinnie was breaking her own rule. Never screw a man whose jeans are skinnier than yours. At this rate, she was going to need a crowbar and some axle grease to get this soporific poet out of his pants. And the pants weren’t the only problem. There was the paisley eternity scarf looped around his neck and a tragically hip cardigan covering his vintage t-shirt. All of which were useless to her. At least she could have used a traditional scarf to tie his hands to the bed, where they couldn’t keep reaching out to caress her cheek or gently tuck a stray hair behind her ear. “Vinnie,” he whispered. “I’ve never seen anything like you.” He was doing the thing again. Staring deep into her eyes, making comparisons about the sea after summer rain. Next it would be her skin, and the finest Delft porcelain and blah-de-fuckingblah. “They’re green,” Vinnie said. “So is grass. And horseshit.” For the third time in the course of this conversation, she extracted his hand from her thick, garnetcolored braid and placed it on her breast. Subtlety was lost on this one. “So, are we going to do this?” The poet yanked his hand back as if she’d just pressed it against a stove. “That isn’t—I’m not—you don’t think I brought you to my loft just to seduce you?” “Seduce me?” She laughed, a sudden sound that startled this delicate coffeehouse flower. “Cupcake, you couldn’t seduce me if you wrote those poems of yours with a ten-inch cock.” And he didn’t. He couldn’t. A fact that had been the sole reason for the inception of her skinny jeans rule: if it fits in there, I don’t want to see it.

“Well if that’s how you feel—” He started to rise, but Vinnie pulled him back down to his throw pillow-choked futon by one straining belt loop. “Relax, kid. That’s not why I’m here. That’s not why we’re here.” “It’s not?” Any minute, his black-rimmed glasses were going to fog over. “At that little café down there, you said you were blocked. I believe your exact words were, ‘I’d do anything just for a sip of inspiration.’ He’d also taken a demonstrative sip of his chai latte at that point, which memory almost killed Vinnie’s lady boner at the prospect of an afternoon snack. “I’m here to help.” “What are you?” the kid asked. “Some kind of writing teacher?” “I’m a teacher of many things.” Vinnie’s hand found the poet’s knobby knee, her fingers sliding suggestively over the muscles of his thigh. The kid watched her palm ride north toward his crotch with growing interest. “You are?” “I am.” She popped the button on his pants and guided the metallic teeth of his zipper open. They weren’t quite to that stage of the process yet, but Vinnie feared the kid might stroke out on her if his erection got stuck in these leg tourniquets. “But I—” “Shh….” The pad of Vinnie’s finger pressed against his lips. She dragged her red nail down the cleft of his chin and lowered her mouth to his. She took her first slow, silky sips of him. She tasted his words. Drinking them from his mind, letting them fill her blood with heavy, drugging sweetness. They assembled themselves into infinite poems within her. Everything he had yet written, all he would yet write without her help. He was better than she’d expected. Showed some real sensitivity. Then came the bitter lumps of his fear. His own terror of failure. Of mediocrity

and despair. More heat would be required to melt it. Vinnie’s fingers slid between them, expertly freeing him while drawing her own skirt up around her thighs. The poet’s body jerked from head to foot when she sank down onto him. His eyes widened with the imagery she returned to him now. His words, but reordered. Ideas coming in a rush from the pathways no longer choked by fear. She let him pull her deeper. He was beginning to understand. A deafening pop sat the poet up and would have tumbled Vinnie to the floor, if she were any mortal woman. It was not a sound made by any mortal man. “What the fuck—” The poet stared at something over her shoulder. Something Vinnie herself was in no hurry to see. Someone. She knew his face already. The arrogant angles, the damnable smirk. The sandy hair and sapphire eyes. The impossible height and weight of him. “If it isn’t the gladiator,” she said, not bothering to cease her hips’ rhythmic sway. Inside her, the poet was losing potency. “Come to watch?” “Levane—” “Bye-bye.” She glanced over her shoulder, kissed her palm, and blew it in the intruder’s direction. The resulting force knocked his broad body into the kitchen wall. Vinnie took a moment to relish the shock in those oceanic eyes before the kiss landed on his square jaw. The gladiator’s head exploded, filling the room with blinding light. When the flash died, the gladiator was gone, along with any evidence of his having come in the first place.

You had to love a man who cleaned up after himself. She supposed this might be the one saving grace of the demigods, creatures she found to be vapid, selfcentered, and about as useful as a three-legged centaur. Vinnie turned to her poet and commenced riding the life back into his wilting stalk. “Where were we?”

“Ow.” Crixus awoke with searing pain stabbing the backs of his eyeballs and something hard and cold pressing into the side of his face. Searing heat still lurked behind his eyelids. He opened them and saw nothing. His fingers crawled toward his jaw, which he was relieved to find he still had. He could feel, but not see, his hand. “I’m blind,” he said, stunned. “That bitch blinded me.” “You’re not blind.” Hades’s distinctive baritone rumbled through his ears. “But you might wish you were.” A heavy hand fell across Crixus’s forehead, and the image before him swam into focus. The curtain of fog rolling away. Upon closer inspection, he discovered he was lying facedown on a stone floor. Not just any stone floor. The stone floor in the office he’d just come from. In Hades’s office. She’d killed him. The crazy-ass Celtic bitch had killed him. Even for immortals, having your body destroyed bought you a ticket to the processing station. Fortunately for Crixus, his was a round-trip ticket. “Back so soon?” Hades was seated in a chair beside him, his silver-buckled shoes resting on the floor near Crixus’s head. “Shut up.” “No need to be ill-mannered just because you were bested so quickly.” Crixus rolled over to his back and tried not to groan. “I wasn’t bested. I was… surprised.” “Indeed. Having my head explode would surprise me as well.”

Hades offered a hand, which Crixus slapped away. “It’s a temporary setback. I have a plan.”

Pop. Vinnie rolled her eyes and hips simultaneously. He was back. “Did I blow your mind, pretty boy? Come back for sloppy seconds?” Beneath her, the poet bucked not out of surprise, but ecstasy. He was coming. Or soon would be. She could feel it building inside him. Ready to pour into her the heady draught she needed to survive. Only he didn’t. He didn’t, because he couldn’t. He couldn’t, because he had vanished. Evaporated from beneath her just as she could feel his imminent release. Disappointment and desolation became kindling in her belly. The demigod’s smirk was the match that set it aflame. Vinnie turned to him, anger climbing her spine like sparks up a fuse. “What did you do?” “I took away your toy, Levane.” “Then it’s only fair I take away yours.” Vinnie kissed her fingertip and flicked it at him, a gesture so quick, it could have happened in the space of a blink. “Don’t!” the demigod shouted as his hands clapped over his crotch. But he was too slow. Too young, too green to keep pace with the likes of her. The ball of flame blew the demigod in half, bisecting him messily right between his powerful thighs. A shame, really. The gladiator had an excellent cock.

Hades sucked air through his teeth and pressed a sympathetic hand to the front of his own tros. Crixus was back on the floor, face down and mumbling curses in time with his breath, ragged and torn as he felt. Panic seized the demigod and his hand went on a quest. He heaved a sigh of relief when all his parts had been ed for. “Kill her,” he groaned. This was the first thought that had brought him any comfort. “I’m going to kill her.” “Perhaps you better come up with a better plan, then. You’re nil for two. Well, three, depending on how you count—” “Shut. The fuck. Up.” “I’m beginning to think I might have called in the wrong man for this job, gladiator. Just how many more times will you have to die before you bring me what I want?” “I will deliver.” Crixus peeled his face from the floor and pushed himself to his knees. “I don’t care what it costs me.” “I have to hand it to you,” Hades said, seating himself behind his desk. “You have ballocks. Let’s hope Levane lets you keep them.”

Crixus arrived back in the poet’s neo-bohemian flat with his crotch burning and head buzzing like Hell’s own harmonica. The smell of brimstone still clung to him, as did the last flashing image of Lavinia, smiling as she blew him in half with a flick of her finger. The space was as empty of her as a discarded husk, the only evidence of her having been in residence was the note scrawled on the mirror in blood-red lipstick. She detailed for him, in several languages, no less, how many ways he could fuck himself. A couple were new to him. Crixus was beginning to feel something like hatred for her. Or iration. It was difficult to tell with his lower half impaired. The poet popped back from the closet where Crixus had temporarily stashed him. Bunched in a heap that looked like a hipster’s laundry pile, this kid was an amalgamation of textures and patterns that made Crixus’s face itch. Seeing Crixus, he crab-walked backward on the couch until his back was flush with the arm and held up one of the many pillows like a shield. His pants—if any respectable man could call them such—were still unzipped. “Don’t hurt me.” “Put that thing down, Slim. I’m not going to hurt you. In fact, I saved your life. A few minutes more, and that bitch would have sucked your soul out of your ass.” Confusion crinkled the kid’s face. “I don’t understand what’s happening here. First I was here with her. Then I was gone. Now I’m back again and she’s gone. And didn’t I see your head explode?” “Don’t think about it too hard.” Crixus ed a hand over the place on the couch where Lavinia’s knees had been dug in while she rode this twerp to Timbuktu. He felt no trace of her. “Wouldn’t want you to strain anything.” Watery eyes the color of weak coffee scanned the apartment. “What did you do to her?”

“Nothing,” Crixus said. “Yet.” “Where did she go?” There was a note of longing in his voice that told Crixus everything he needed to know. Warnings would do no good. Even knowing that Lavinia could have him drooling down his own chin in a coat that buckled up the back wouldn’t discourage the poet from letting her in. If she wanted this kid, he was toast. “Believe me when I say that I intend to find out as soon as possible.” “Will she come back?” Crixus walked over to the tangle of angry red smudges on the mirror, feeling for any lingering essence of her that might help his chase. Nothing. “Not if you’re lucky.” “But she was helping me with my poetry.” “You’d be better off getting a tutor. Tutors don’t eat people, as a general rule.” “Eat people?” The poet pulled his scarf away from his neck as if it were a noose, tightening. If Crixus had his way, this wouldn’t be far from the truth. “Not whole people. Only the useful parts. Where did you meet her?” Crixus’s nostrils flared as he searched the air for any lingering note of her signature scent: wild heather, rain, and sex. He found only patchouli and the distinctly musky note of trying too hard. He could guess where that was coming from. “At the coffee shop down the street.” Useful information, at least. Her habits hadn’t changed much in the centuries since their last meeting. In the last half of the nineteenth century, it had been Paris cafés she’d liked to haunt. Her red hair a flame shaming the jaundiced gas light. Cloaked when it was no longer fashionable to wear them, her face a jewel set in satin black as night. Even through the burning scrim of intense dislike coloring his vision, Crixus could see why Lavinia had snared everything from painters to poets, a

mysterious pale-skinned, emerald-eyed woman winding her way through time on canvases and the written page. You couldn’t throw a rock in the Louvre without hitting something she had inspired. She was infinitely fuckable, imminently destructive. And hungry. Crixus pulled out his cell phone—one of the few pieces of modern gadgetry he had willingly adopted over the millennia—and dialed a number without looking. When the feminine voice on the other end answered, Crixus spoke only four words. “I have a runner.” “Name?” “Lavinia.” Crixus felt the amusement emanating from the darkness over the line. The sound of a stifled laugh. “This didn’t end well for you last time.” “Spare me the lecture. I need eyes in every city with a major museum or accredited art school.” “That’s a lot of eyes. This is going to be expensive, you realize.” Crixus sat through an uncharacteristic silence. “Not as expensive as failing to bring her in.” “I’ll put the word out.” “Good.” “And Crixus?” “Yeah?” “Watch your ass.”

3

London was a city that knew its age and didn’t apologize. Vinnie loved this about the rain-soaked streets. Loved that she could walk past the trendy exterior of some new pâtisserie or gastro pub and run straight into a rough-hewn Roman wall. The old and the new juxtaposed on a canvas always changing with the shifting fog. Her past and her present sharing space. Her memories of this place were as stratified as the city itself, built layer on layer. She walked not through alleyways, but civilizations. All which was now bright and beautiful would age and crumble. The young voices spilling into the night would be silenced and the nubile bodies they came from would rot in the earth. She would still be here. Provided the gladiator didn’t get his way. Vinnie planned to make certain that he didn’t. One look into those arrogant eyes had assured her of what she already suspected. He didn’t . Oh, he knew her and knew of her. Their little run-in over Van Gogh had been enough to etch itself into his slippery memory. But he didn’t what he had done to her. What he had taken from her. Vinnie would remind him, but not until the moment was right. And in this case right meant as painful as possible. The memory of the surprise on his face before she had split his atoms like egg yolks brought her the first smile of this day. He would find her again. Of this she had no doubt. The gladiator was nothing if

not persistent when it came to hunting his quarry. She knew this much about his reputation in his current occupation, but could have predicted it by the young man she first saw among the glinting arcs of weaponry in the gladiatorial ring. She was younger then too. Naïve. Time had since purged her of such luxuries with the help of the gladiator, and men like him. Even those men were preferable to what the world offered her now. Shallow, vapid, superficial and distracted. About as nourishing as the hideous fast food drive-through fodder humans seemed obsessed with consuming. Gone were the days when all she need do was press her lips against the cool marble mouth of one of Michelangelo’s prophets, gritty from the chisel, and she could breathe for days. Never mind the artist himself, cantankerous lout that he was, who was grateful to have her alone nearby, whispering. Humans grew ever more shallow and the energy she could drink from them less satisfying with each ing century. She had come to Chelsea for this reason, she supposed. Wanting to catch some of the old scent. Life had once been good to her here. A hotbed of artists and writers in Queen Victoria’s day. She’d lingered in rooms filled with the scent of paint and cigar smoke, drunk on air saturated with ideas and inspiration. Her chest tightened as she neared Trite street, where she and Oscar Wilde—a name more apropos than most people knew—had spent so many nights playing with words together. Lingering over a little story called The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oy, look at this one. Lavinia heard the thought when she was yet a block away from the two men striding toward her. Saw both sets of eyes move down her body, barely concealed by the sundress she still wore. A remnant of her attempt to seduce the poet, who thought he liked his women tragically beautiful—which was to say

slutty and slightly damaged. She let her gaze roam over them in return and was pleased and surprised by what she found. Early twenties. Fashionably tattooed. Pierced, but not so much that she’d be picking buckshot from her teeth. The midsummer air sweetened in her nostrils, a heady combination of flowers and herbs from a nearby porch garden and the unmistakable scent of band boy. Best of all: faded work jeans. “Evening, lads,” she said, looking at them from beneath her lashes. “I wonder if you could help me.” They exchanged looks, which turned into mirrored grins that reduced their IQ by a score of points. “Hello, love.” The taller and broader of the two, the one she’d noticed first, had appointed himself their representative. “We can certainly try.” Oh, limey. You have no idea. “You don’t happen to be musicians of any kind, do you?” The smiles evolved into grins of the shit-eating variety. “Funny you should say that,” Tall and Tattooed answered. “We’re in a band together. Just on our way to rehearsal. Wasn’t we, Dave?” “We sure was.” Decent grammar was apparently too much to hope for. Vinnie consoled herself with a glance at their tros, which she noted were hiding some decent equipment. “If I had to lay a guess, I’d say I have the bass player and drummer before me.” “Cor!” Tall and Tattooed elbowed his neighbor. “How’d you know that?” Vinnie thumbed his lip ring. “Just a guess.”

“She’s in London.” The chair fell back as Crixus shoved away from the table at Café Marley outside the Louvre where he’d been parked all afternoon. Guests at the tables on either side of him pressed their napkins to their faces in disdain. It took every ounce of restraint the demigod yet possessed not to show them what disdain really looked like. “How sure are you?” He was already marching toward a spot between buildings where he could materialize without drawing the attention of tourists. Even in Paris, disappearing in broad daylight was considered a faux pas at best. “My informant saw her heading to one of her known addresses with not one but two budding stars of the underground London punk scene.” “Two? Must be a slow afternoon.” “Do I detect a hint of jealousy?” Not for the first time, Crixus lamented the fact that the most connected supernatural in his network happened to be female. Rare was the occasion where she let him get away with anything. Frequent was the occasion when he had something to get away with. “I’m not jealous. I’ve just become more…selective these days.” A bark of laughter on the other end had Crixus’s teeth grinding together. “That sound you just heard? That would be the Earth’s female population all bursting into tears at once.” “Where in London?” Crixus asked, hoping to move this conversation onto territory that didn’t make him want to fold every ing motorist into a pretzel and use their blood to grease their own axles. “Chelsea. She has a flat in Glebe Place.”

“Got it.” “Please tell me you have a plan that doesn’t involve you getting blown up this time.” Crixus muttered a curse into the phone as he narrowly dodged a ing motorino. The driver honked and gave him the finger. “My plan is none of your concern.” “So you don’t have one?” “I do have one. I prefer not to discuss the details.” “One that doesn’t involve seduction, I mean,” the voice teased. “Not all my plans involve seduction.” Silence crackled over the phone between them. “They don’t,” Crixus insisted. “Assuming the seduction doesn’t work, what’s your plan B?” “Look, I really don’t have time to do this with you right now.” “When should we do it, then? You’ve been promising for ages.” The suggestion in her voice nearly ran him headfirst into a garbage dumpster. “How about when I’m not chasing a man-eating succubus muse from Hell through London.” “Fair enough.”

4

Vinnie had them naked. Now it was time to assemble her mise en place. First, she had to determine the proper seasoning for each. She approached the tall bass player lying across her bed, his cockstand all the more vibrant against the tapestry of ink dancing across his abdominal muscles. “Give me your hands,” she said. He held them above his head like a willing hostage. Vinnie traced their creases with a fortune-teller’s focus. This lad was lefthanded. Had a tendency to grip the neck of his instrument too tightly and knock his notes too fast. An excess of energy that would make him sloppy. He could do with a little patience and precision. Both could be taught. She brought his fingers to her lips and tongued the calluses on the third and fourth fingers of his right hand. Her eyes fell closed to savor the subtle notes sliding onto her palate, a culinary synesthesia of sound and flavor. Delicious. His band mate watched this from the end of the bed, where he had arranged himself in a contrived sexy sprawl. His lower lip caught between his teeth. “And you,” Vinnie said, turning to face him. “Let me see your arms, little drummer boy.” He flexed, the poor lamb, believing this had any effect whatsoever on what she was able to see. Vinnie ran her hands up the length of his forearms, appreciating the way his veins slid beneath her palms. His blood rushed under her touch, pulsing a primal throb through her.

He had been gifted with natural rhythm, yes. But was too fussy in its application. Perhaps she could impart to him some of the savage. Vinnie floated over to her well-stocked larder of goodies and consulted the shelves like a chef consults their pantry. She ran her fingertips across the strings of a lute. Its melancholy voice had last been evoked by celebrated lutenist Gaultier de Lyon in the mid 17 th century. Her mouth watered at the sound. Cradling the instrument like a newborn, she handed it over to the bass player, who received it with a furrowed brow. “You are some kind of wacky bird, you know that?” he said. “Don’t be cheeky,” she scolded, mimicking his south London dialect. “Or I won’t let you play the big boy instruments.” Her hand trailed the length of her braid and unfastened the band at the end. Waves the color of autumn-hued leaves tumbled free, falling well below her breasts. “Yes, mahm.” “Now for you…” Vinnie knelt and stretched into the bottom cupboard until her fingers slid over silky wood. Her ears echoed with the sound of a thousand heartbeats, moving together toward bliss. “Open your knees.” She walked the drum toward him, rolling it on the rim of its wooden base. He scooted to the edge of the bed and did as he was told. “Good boy. Now—” she lifted his hands off his thighs and placed them on the taut goat skin. “Play for me.” “But I haven’t banged bongos since I was a kid—” Vinnie pressed a finger to his lips. She had no use for his words. “It’s a djembe,

and it’s older than your fear. Play.” The order held more than one directive. Play was something most human adults had forgotten how to do, if they had ever learned properly in the first place. Only when their minds were free, their hearts light, their bodies loose could she really begin to work with them. And on them. His hand rubbed a slow circle over the drum that Vinnie felt in a sympathetic caress on her skin. It was a dry sound. Sand whispering on a hot desert wind. He moved slowly at first. Palms bouncing off the surface to release a vibration in the instrument’s hollow core. Her belly thrummed with every note, empty and open as the drum beneath his hands. “Come now. Don’t tickle it.” Vinnie eased herself onto the bed beside him and brushed her lips over his ear. “Make it thunder.” Vinnie watched his face tighten in concentration as he found a deeper beat. Sweat bloomed on his brow. The blows came faster and the rhythm found its way back into his body, tensing the muscles of his pectorals and biceps in time with his assault. She tasted her way down his smooth neck, filling the well inside her with the salty song on his skin. It formed the base note on her palate. She would build on it with her next course. Falling backward on the bed, she allowed the bass player to claim her mouth. He was young, and green, full of boyish enthusiasm for his childhood dream. Misery lived in him as well. She tasted dusk on the tongue that glided over hers to the sultry, building tension of the drum’s percussive seduction. When his hand found her breast, she guided it to the lute. “Pluck those strings well enough, and I’ll let you pluck mine.” He looked her in the eye as he brought his fingers to the lute’s neck. “Gently,” she advised. Her hand strayed up his thigh, where she gripped an instrument of her own. “You must learn when and how to apply pressure.” His breath deepened as she skimmed her hand down his length.

When his fingers moved this time, it was with a care and precision that matched her efforts. The contractions of his abdominal muscles became the metronome by which he steadied his tempo, slowing when she did, racing ahead when she tightened her grip. In the air beneath the bed’s canopy, drums and lute found each other, merging into a single song. Vinnie’s back arched, her body drinking the language of heaven through her pores and into the dull ache at her center. So ugly then, when the window to her bedroom shattered, shredding her carefully cultivated symphony with the cacophony of breaking glass. Both musicians halted and the notes did not carry. The sudden silence drove daggers through Vinnie’s bones. The gladiator dropped the rope in his hand and righted himself, brushing debris from his hair and the shoulders of his black T-shirt. “Drop the banjo, Crayola,” he said, pointing a finger at her bass player. “What the fuck are you?” the drummer stammered. “The fuckstick who keeps interrupting my lunch,” Vinnie answered for him. “Where would you like it this time? The chest? The ass? Judging from that entry, I’d say the boys are still a little sore.” “Look, I just want to talk, Lavinia.” The brute held his hands up in a display of trust. Unwise. “It’s Vinnie, Crixus Autem Servus.” “I am no one’s slave.” The gladiator’s jaw hardened around the word. “Once a slave, always a slave.” Vinnie yawned and stretched out on the bed, allowing her open sundress to expose her breasts. “Whose tunic are you kissing the back of these days? Zeus? Or is it Hera? She always was a jealous bitch.” Crixus’s hands clenched into fists at his sides. “I take the cases I want to take.”

“So I’m a case now, am I? I’m rather surprised they’re willing to keep paying you. You’re not very good at this.” “What the hell are they saying then?” the bass player whispered to his friend. “No one said you could talk.” Vinnie snapped her fingers and heard both jaws clack shut, where they would stay until she decided otherwise. “Still playing with your food, I see.” Motorcycle boots crunched over the broken glass as Crixus took a daring step toward her bed. “Nasty habit.” “So is banging everything with a warm hole. I’d say you’re not in the best position to judge.” “I’m not here to judge, Vinnie. I’m here to talk to you. That’s all.” Vinnie rolled her eyes—a facial expression she’d become exceptionally grateful for when the Egyptians invented it around 5,000 B.C.E. “You either need to start bedding smarter women or have a decent liar vet your pretenses before you bring them to me. I know what you do. And I have no intention of allowing you to do it to me.” “Vinnie—” “What do you say, boys? How should we dispose of our uninvited guest? Watching his head explode was rewarding, but he’s broken my window and ruined my favorite curtains.” “I was trying to come here without using magic,” Crixus said. He actually had the audacity to look her in the eye. “I came to lay my cards on the table.” “Oh, dear. Now he’s lying.” Vinnie wrapped one of the bass player’s curls around her finger. “I’ll bet he doesn’t realize I can hear his thoughts, and in that itsy bitsy brain of his, he thought he might be able to surprise me if he came in the old-fashioned way.” It was official. Vinnie couldn’t make his head explode now. The expression of panicked shock on Crixus’s face was entirely too precious. “But I—”

“I think something more…colorful might be called for, don’t you? Especially since he was just thinking about my tits even while I’m threatening him.” “Vinnie, I’m a man. You can’t just—” Vinnie held up her hand to silence him. In what might have been his first nonidiotic move of the day, Crixus actually shut his gob. Progress. “Maybe you can’t, gladiator. But I can, and will.” She squeezed her fingers into a fist and watched his body collapse into a ball. His scream of pain was satisfying if brief. “There now. Your head’s much closer to your ass. That seems appropriate for you somehow.” He might have muttered something like evil bitch, but it was difficult to make out with his esophagus tangled in his colon. “Send Hades my regards.” Vinnie thrust her fingers out, her fist exploding like a bomb, and the gladiator with it. When the last wisps of smoking demigod evaporated, she winked the window back into place and loosed her musician’s tongues. “Now,” she repeated for the second time that day. “Where were we?”

“You’re not very good at this.” The fractured slivers hovering above him assembled themselves into a face as the last dent in Crixus’s skull popped back into shape. He had meant to say fuck off, but it mostly emerged as a tortured groan welling up from his punctured lung, hissing through his still-fractured jaw. “Patience, Calliope.” Hades’s voice came from the shadows at his side. Crixus had not yet recovered peripheral vision. “His methods are unconventional.” The cracking sound of his ribs knitting together echoed through the office. “Very unconventional,” Hades added. “I thought you said he was the best.” The normally melodic sound of Calliope’s voice rasped against Crixus’s ears like a buzz saw across a cheese-grater. He wasn’t certain if this was a function of the darkly seductive words still slithering through his mind, or a byproduct of ruptured eardrums. “He is the best. Or was, until recently.” Breath filled his lungs, ushering in a brand new realm of pain. “She let me talk this time.” Crixus’s words came out of his mouth in a decibel Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hell, might have more easily heard. “Eleven whole sentences.” “Eleven,” Hades repeated, sarcasm dripping from his tone. “Well, we are making progress.” “Progress?” Calliope propped her hand on a hip Crixus couldn’t help but notice was a pale comparison to the dangerous curves hiding under Vinnie’s dress. “How many more of my artists have to die before you take this seriously?” “I am seriously going to kill that bitch,” Crixus croaked, dragging himself into a seated position. “All evidence to the contrary.” A shadow moved across the far wall. Hades with

his back turned to them, examining one of his many paintings—not one Vinnie had inspired. “Do you mean that sincerely?” The hem of Calliope’s gown fluttered on a breeze of her own making. “Seriously, sincerely, however fucking many adverbs you want to throw at it.” Crixus bent his head to one side, unleashing a series of pops in his neck. Calliope knelt and pressed a cool hand against his hot forehead. “I may have something that could help.” Crixus stared at the disk of matted fur in her hands and thought for a moment his vision might have been irreparably damaged. “How exactly is road kill going to help me?” “This is no road kill.” Calliope clasped the ball of fur to her chest. “This is the pelt of Moritasgus, the great healer.” The demigod blinked at the triangular face staring at him from Calliope’s bosom. The snout was sable, dissected down the center of the skull by a distinctive white stripe right between the eyes—whose empty sockets were now home to yellow diamonds. He would have said raccoon, or possum, were it not for the small, round ears set far back on its head. “This is a badger,” Crixus said. “This is a hat,” Calliope corrected. “This is a badger hat.” As usual, Hades had the final word in the matter. The candle flames flickered as he sat down behind his desk. “Okay,” Crixus conceded. “It’s a badger hat. How, exactly, is a badger hat going to help me take out Vinnie?” Calliope’s frustration was evident by her exasperated sigh. This was a noise Crixus had evoked from more than one woman in his lifetime. Sometimes from several women at once.

“Moritasgus was the Celtic god of healing,” she explained. As long as you’re wearing this hat, you will be protected from any power that Celtic whore unleashes upon you.” “I’m sorry.” Crixus twisted the tip of his finger into the ear closest to Calliope. “My hearing must not be fully recovered. I thought you said as long as I’m wearing this hat…” Hades and Calliope looked at him, neither speaking. The demigod pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger and shook his head. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” “Come on,” Calliope urged, waving the hat in front of his face. The beady diamond eyes seemed to wink as they caught the candle flame. “Just try it on.” Crixus swatted it away. “That thing smells like gerbils and ass.” Hades raised an eyebrow. “Trust me,” Crixus said. “You don’t want to know.” “You prefer the scent of failure?” Calliope petted the hat’s furry dome. “Or maybe you’re just not tired of dying hideously yet.” “Last time, she let me talk. This time will be even better. You have to trust me on this. If I know one thing, it’s women.” “She’s not exactly your average woman.” It was difficult to say how the Lord of the Underworld meant this. He thought he heard something like iration in the statement. “She’s not a woman at all.” Calliope, on the other hand, was as difficult to read as the front page of a tabloid. “She’s a predator. A vampire. A plague. A disease.” “And I’m the cure,” Crixus said, pushing himself to his feet. “This time, she’s mine.”

Precisely two minutes and thirty-seven seconds later by human measure, Crixus awoke with his face plastered to the stone floor in Hades’s office and his limbs tied into a boneless knot. His hand reattached itself at the wrist t and rotated the full 180 degrees to come back in line with his arm, which was still wrapped around his opposite leg like the stripes of a candy cane. Hades’s fingers drummed across the surface of his desk. As soon as Crixus was able to speak, he rolled his good eye to Calliope, who stood over him with the hat in her hand and a smug smile on her face. “If I wear this hat, will Vinnie be able to read my thoughts?” “No,” Calliope said. “But you still won’t be able to read hers.” Crixus held out his hand. “Give me the hat.”

5

Vinnie knew what it meant to be a hunter. Sometimes the chase could eat through an entire day, and at the last second, your meal up and ran away. Sitting on the rumpled bed in her empty apartment, Vinnie pressed a hand on the warm spot the bass player had newly evacuated. She could still feel him there, could still smell him and taste him, but only just. The demigod had left her only crumbs. Her boys had escaped while she was busy twisting that troublesome sot into an immortal pretzel. Crixus. He was proving to be more of a problem than she’d first thought. Perhaps the centuries had given him a taste of the wisdom she’d had to drink from a fire hose. His thoughts certainly had more depth than the ones she ed sampling so long ago. Now he only thought about sex every third minute instead of every third second. Another two thousand years and he might almost be capable of conversation. If she decided to give him that long. He had robbed her of her meal twice today, and hunger churned into a gnawing ache. Her limbs were heavy with it. If she didn’t feed soon, she risked slipping into Annwyn. The great nothing that had consumed the last of her kin. Beings like herself who had been forced into obsolescence by Zeus and his pathetic pantheon of cronies. The Greek Olympiad had been so quick to make the Hell humans alone had created in exchange for their sacrifices and lip service. Their empty words and worship.

If she had her prerogative, Vinnie would remove this word from the human vocabulary altogether until they learned not just how to say it, but to do it. How little they knew about what it meant to worship. At least ten times a day she heard the word awesome uttered by lips that had never so much as experienced awe. Or reverence. Long before humans learned how to count time, Vinnie had laid herself on the altar of art and let it feed from her. She had given to this world something it couldn’t give back. And yet they had the audacity to hunt her. Vinnie’s blood was too thin to house proper rage. A correction she needed to make in short order. Comfort food was clearly called for. Something warm. Something substantial. Something Italian.

“Are we there yet?” Crixus exhaled through his nose and shoved his hands in his pockets to avoid punching himself in the head. Well, punching himself in the hat, to be more specific. Calliope had left out one tiny detail about the good ol’ pelt of Moritasgus. It talked. The fucking badger hat talked. No sooner than the demigod had slipped the abomination onto his head than it farted and asked for a cookie. For healing purposes, it said. “You ask me that one more time—” “You know, you might want to look into a shampoo without sulfates. Your scalp is really dry.” One of the hat’s shriveled claws scratched at Crixus’s forehead. “Touch me with your gnarly little rat paw again, and I’ll break it off, so help me gods.” “I can’t help it,” the hat whined. “Your hair is making me all itchy. You need better conditioner.” “Itchy? I have a zombie badger on my head, and you want to bitch about being itchy?” “I’m not a zombie. I am a sacred relic, you ignorant douchebag.” “So we’re calling names now, twat-waffle?” “Shit stain.” “Fuck nozzle.”

“Cock thistle.” “Shh!” Crixus pretended to lean against the corner of a building as coolly as any man wearing vermin headgear could. “People are staring.” “What do you expect?” the badger asked. “This is Italy, and your jacket doesn’t match your boots.” His pocket buzzed. Crixus pulled out his cell phone, saw the number and cursed. “Talk.” “What—” The voice broke off as it strained against a laugh “—in the name of all that’s unholy, is on your head?” The concrete alleyways gave way to the cobbled streets as Crixus crossed into the heart of old Florence. He paused to flatten himself against a wall when a flash of red hair caught his eye. The woman—not Vinnie—giggled into the sleeve of her sweater as she ed. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Crixus grumbled into the phone. “You look like Davey Crockett…from Hell.” “Did you call just to give me shit, or do you have information for me?” “Both,” she said. “I’m a multi-tasker.” “We can test that theory another time.” “He means he’d like to mate with all your holes,” the badger blurted. “He was thinking that just now.” Crixus reached up and twisted one of the ears until the hat squeaked. “Hey, be nice to that poor thing. I’ll call PETA on your ass,” she said. A group of tourists swarmed together across the street, and Crixus slid into their ranks, still a head too tall not to be noticed. “I don’t think it’s fair that you can see me, but I can’t see you.” “Those are the rules, Honeybuns. You know them as well as I do.”

“And not speaking your name aloud, is that one of the rules as well?” “That? Naw. Helps me maintain a sense of mystery. I am the night, ?” She laughed. The smoky sound of it warmed Crixus despite the growing irritation in his gut. “Let’s have that information.” “One of my guys saw Lavinia near the Palazzo Vecchio. She had collected some street musicians and was chatting up a mime.” “I’m on it.” “So what’s the plan? No, wait, let me guess. You’re going to basejump from the Campanile, blow her head off with a shotgun, shoot her body out of a cannon and bungee jump back to Hades.” “He’s going to throw a bag over her head and try not to get an erection while she struggles. Although now that he’s thinking of having sex with both of you at the same time, he’s getting hard already,” the badger reported. “A man of action, huh? I like that.” “The action I’m contemplating right now involves turning a certain hat into pillow stuffing.” “He’s lying about this too. He’s—” Crixus pinched the little mouth shut. “That’s more than enough out of you, Motley.” “Damn,” she said. “This was just getting interesting.” “If she’s on the move, I want to hear about it, okay?” “Of course. But will you do me a favor in the meantime?” “What’s that?”

“Try not to die.” Crixus slid his phone back into his pocket and gave a warning glare to the group of punks sizing him up from across the road. “Look, Motley. Let’s talk about how this is going to go down.” “If you keep calling me Motley, I’m going to tell Lavinia what you’re thinking. I don’t have to help you, you know.” “And I don’t have to leave you on my head. I could take you off and stuff you into a dumpster behind a restaurant.” “You could,” the badger taunted. “But you won’t. Without me, you’d just get blown up again, and Hades will let that woman you’re in love with die while she’s popping out her cub.” Crixus felt the simmering in his gut boil anger up into his chest. “Now would be a good time for you to stop talking.” “I can see why you’re so upset about it,” the badger continued. “I’d be pretty cheesed off if some skirt chose a human hit man from Las Vegas over me. Although he’s a pretty good-looking guy, if you’re ing him correctly.” “Matilda is not a skirt. And I don’t want to talk about this.” “You know, if you talked more often, you might not carry so much tension in your shoulders. You’re pretty stiff. I could heal that for you, you know.” Crixus flicked the tail off the nape of his neck. “I don’t need you to heal anything. And I handle my stress just fine.” “Bullshit,” the badger coughed. “Stop reading my thoughts, you mangy bastard.” “On one condition.” A bead of sweat ran into the demigod’s eyes from the fur pressing against his already sweltering forehead. Italy in July with a badger hat was beginning to make Hell look like the Hamptons. “What would that be?”

“Let’s talk about that cookie.”

6

In another life, Crixus could have watched Lavinia move through the piazza della Signoria for a hundred years and never tire of it. Her flaming hair was loose and long, soaking up the warm Tuscan sun like the carts of ripe tomatoes and peaches he had ed on his way to this broad courtyard. Gone was the sundress she’d only been half-wearing in London when he’d interrupted her latest party. She had traded this for a simple, boob-hugging white tank top and a flowing skirt of emerald green that swayed in time with her hips as she walked. She was a living rebuke to every cold marble statue around the perimeter of the square, though she easily could have stepped down from one of those marble plinths. For millennia, similar artists had been trying and failing to capture the very thing Crixus now witnessed: this creature, and the swath of untouchable beauty she cut in the world. “If I was human, I would hit those hindquarters like something humans hit very frequently.” The badger attempted to whistle, but sprayed saliva onto Crixus’s forehead. Crixus exhaled through his nose and wiped the spit away with the back of his hand. “Could you keep your bodily fluids, which, frankly I am distressed to find out you still have, to yourself?” “Isn’t this how males address females in this day? I’m just trying to blend in.” “You’re a talking animal hat, and I’m wearing you. I think our chances of blending are pretty much shot.” “Then how is this plan of your sneaking up on her supposed to work?” “I’m going to count on her entourage to keep her occupied.” Crixus eyed the crowd of horny satellites orbiting Vinnie. The desire to relieve them of their spines and piss in the trench it made was overwhelming. “Let’s move.”

They gave up their protected spot in the shadows beside the Uffizi museum and waded through the crowd. Among the small list of things Crixus could count to their benefit was the location where Vinnie had chosen to hunt. Where there were tourists, there was variety. Where there was variety, there was cover. Among the street performers and vendors, he still looked odd, but humans were generally willing to forgive the odd man out in places where the population converged on holiday. Crixus picked up a large map of the city from one of the display carts and tossed a wad of cash on the counter. The vendor was delighted enough not to ask questions. If he needed some impromptu cover, he could always hold the map to create a screen and feign a lack of direction. “We’re getting close,” the badger said. “I’m starting to hear her thoughts.” “She thinking about me?” Crixus asked. “Yes.” The demigod’s moment of triumph was short-lived. “Mostly how she wants to kill you next. Ooh! She just imagined your body engulfed in flames. Now you’re writhing on the ground and begging for death. She has quite a vivid imagination.” “Great,” Crixus said. “I don’t really need to hear any more.” “Not even about the spiked pole? Or the tongue forceps? She’s most inventive —” “No, I’m good.” Crixus brought the map up as Vinnie walked through the gap before him and caused a violin player to saw across his strings. The bewitched musician dumped his instrument into its coin-filled case, clamped it shut, and raced after her like she was some kind of Pied Piper for marginally talented performers. Once she had ed them, Crixus darted behind one of the broad columns in the Loggia dei Lanzi, and waited for her to come within the reach of his arm.

When he struck, it was fast and hard, forearm snaking around her waist and pulling her up against him in a fashion not unlike Giambologna’s sculpture of the Rape of the Sabine Women in the next archway. If Crixus had stuck a fork into a light socket, he might have felt less electricity course through him than the energy crackling through his every limb when their bodies met. Her soft, round buttocks pushed up against the muscle of his thighs. Her heart beat hard under his arm. Her head pressed back against his chest. His hand splayed against the flat of her stomach to keep her hips pinned against him. To any casual erby, they looked like nothing so much as lovers, embracing in a lazy lean against the shady space next to the column. But their bodies knew what the humans did not. That she fought him with every ounce of her strength. Even now, her slim wrists worked against his so she could get her hands behind her. Considering they fell at the height of Crixus’s most prized possession, allowing her to do this seemed like an infinitely bad idea. “Hold still, woman. I would take great pleasure in crushing you into pulp.” “Do not presume to command me, gladiator. I haven’t yet tired of watching you die.” “Try it,” Crixus challenged. He felt the breath catch in Lavinia’s chest. “Go ahead,” he urged. “I’ll wait.” He felt her body tense as she prepared to send a fuckload of murderous energy searing through him. When nothing happened, she squirmed within his grasp and tried to turn and see his face. He felt her exasperation in every taut muscle. “What did you do?” Her voice was cold and sharp as a blade. “You’ll find out soon enough.” Crixus and Motley had agreed in advance that the best way to remain a solid threat would be for Vinnie not to see him wearing a

badger hat right away. “Perhaps you better send your friends off.” Crixus lowered his mouth to her hair as if brushing a kiss there. “I would hate to have to permanently damage them in some way. Or in several ways.” Vinnie looked up and addressed the men who had stopped when Crixus had grabbed her. “Attendere per me presso l'appartamento.” Wait for me at the apartment. One of the few benefits of being a demigod Crixus found he could still actually enjoy in her presence. The ability to speak or understand any language uttered by the tongues of men. Lavinia’s tongue uttered this phrase with musical fluidity and a flavor that implied the wait would be entirely worth it. The violin player gripped the handle of his case tighter. A caricaturist pulled his folding easel up like a weapon. A mime wrapped his hands around an imaginary baseball bat. Or a tire iron. It was difficult to tell by the width. “Maybe she wasn’t clear,” Crixus said. “How about you all fuck off, or I’ll personally stomp a mud hole in each of your asses?” He saw by their faces they had taken his meaning even without the benefit of translation. They shuffled off grudgingly, casting many a disgruntled look over their shoulders. “There,” Crixus said. “Now I have you all to myself.” “Let. Me. Go.” Vinnie growled at him through clenched teeth, as primal as any she-wolf. Ready to claw, bite, and tear her way to freedom if need be. The thought did nothing to help the problem Crixus felt developing against her back. “Just relax, Vinnie. We’re only going to have a conversation.” “I have nothing to say to you.” “Oh, I don’t think that’s at all true.”

“You’re right. Eat shit and die, you incompetent asshat.” “Easy,” Crixus whispered against her ear. “The bounty on your head will be paid to me whether you are alive or dead. Seeing as you’ve created problems for me several times in a row now, I’m seriously considering the latter.” “Please,” Vinnie scoffed. “You kill me? I think we’ve already established how unlikely that prospect is.” “It’s more likely than you think. I have a weapon.” “You honestly think that gun in your pocket is going to protect you? So far I’ve blown you up twice, crushed you into a ball, and turned you into a pretzel. And you’re putting your money on a really fast piece of lead?” “What gun?” Crixus asked. Her back stiffened against him. “How pathetic,” Vinnie sighed. “I would have thought you had learned to control that thing by now.” “You’re one to talk. Your nipples are bruising my arm.” “Don’t flatter yourself, slave. You don’t excite me in the least.” “Is she lying?” Crixus asked. “Most certainly,” the badger reported. “She would very much like to see your manroot.” “Moritasgus,” Vinnie spat. “I might have known. Like does attract like, after all. Vermin belongs with vermin.” “Also, she is hoping that you can’t smell her arousal, because she is developing copious moisture in her netherparts. But she’s angry at herself as well since she vowed after what you did to her—” “Shut the fuck up you little rat!” Vinnie surged against him, but only succeeded in further wedging her ass against Crixus’s thigh.

“Thanks, Motley.” Crixus mined his pocket and handed a cookie up to the badger. A fine snowfall of powdered sugar dusted Vinnie’s shoulder as Moritasgus chewed noisily. “Traitor,” she muttered. “He bought me Italian wedding cookies,” the badger replied. “They’re so light and buttery!” Vinnie’s chest deflated in the circle of Crixus’s arms. “All right, gladiator. How do you plan on delivering me to Hades? I know damn well you’re not allowed to use whatever limited power you possess in the presence of humans. And if you think I am going anywhere willingly with you, you are severely deceived.” “Your willingness is not a requirement.” “What do you suppose would happen if I screamed?” “I would have no choice but to materialize you straight to Hades. Somehow I think he would be willing to overlook my infraction.” “Then why are we still here?” “Because I want to know what Motley was talking about. What did I ever do to you?” “I know!” The hat on Crixus’s head would have leapt, if the tendons required to do so were still intact. “Well, let’s have it.” “I would be happy to do so…for another cookie.” Crixus searched his pocket but only came away with powdered sugar on his hand. “You ate the last one just now.” “Oh dear,” Motley said. “Well, that is a shame, isn’t it?”

“No need to waste this, though.” Vinnie lowered her face and licked the sugar from his finger. For a moment, Crixus went utterly still, unsure that what he felt could be trusted as a reliable reflection of the events. “What are you doing?” “What can I say? I have a sweet tooth.” She slid her tongue along the crease between his thumb and palm, but it was his knees that suddenly felt lubricated and loose. “Stop doing that,” Crixus said, with not as much force as had been in his mind when the words stopped there only briefly. “Stop doing what?” Vinnie ground her ass against him, her hips arching upward to meet with the erection growing painful in his jeans. “That,” he gasped. People ed by them, taking their pictures, making their memories. Oblivious to the battle taking place between their world and a world older than comprehension. “No,” she said. The hands Vinnie had worked behind her made a discovery. She popped the button on his jeans and worked the zipper down. “Still going commando?” Still. This word ed in a part of Crixus’s mind that was no longer receiving the lion’s share of the blood supply. Her fingers skimmed downward against his naked flesh, and he briefly considered killing everything with a heart beat in a two-mile radius so he could fuck her unbothered on the warm cobblestones. Hearing her scream in a place where echoes played like children on the medieval buildings would be rewarding beyond measure. “Big boy,” Vinnie purred. “I would be lying if I said I didn’t find this refreshing.” “She is telling the truth,” the badger said. “Most the men she is mentally comparing you to at this moment were very disappointing in length and girth.”

“Most?” Crixus asked. “Yes, well. She was once acquainted with this hit man—” “Shut the fuck up!” Crixus and Vinnie said in unison. Vinnie’s grip on him tightened as she slid upward with a potter’s precision. The demigod’s fingers dug into the flesh covering her hips. He found no evidence of underwear beneath. “Looks like I’m not the only one who prefers commando.” He brought his hand around to cup the curve of her ass. “Why put an extra obstacle between me and what I want?” Crixus’s head fell backward against the stone column as Vinnie’s other hand glided over the head of his sex. “Ow!” the badger squawked. “Just because this succubus grabs the head of your mutton dagger does not mean you may neglect my presence.” But Crixus couldn’t be bothered. His hand ached with the need to pull her skirt up her back so he could take her from behind. He could be inside her in the space it took a human to blink. “Gladiator?” Vinnie asked, her voice heavy with sex. “Yes.” “Open your eyes.” Crixus had not realized his lids had fallen closed until he lifted them and saw the sword arcing straight toward his head.

Vinnie’s plan had not included collapsing into a puddle of hysterics the same second she freed herself from the demigod. But that man…in that hat. She couldn’t contain herself, and the more she tried, the harder she laughed. Under normal circumstances, Crixus would have made short work of the army of mimes who had converged upon him like a pack of rabid zebras. But it was proving exceptionally difficult for him to fend off the black and white-striped bodies when both of his hands were engaged in clutching the badger hat to his head. His current strategy involved a lot of running and shin-kicking. Vinnie had to bend at the waist and rest her hands on her knees to catch her breath. She pressed a hand against her abdominals. How long had it been since she laughed this hard? Decades? Centuries? “That’s right,” she gasped between spasms. “You show them, gladiator.” “Laugh it up, soul-sucker. When I get rid of these mute bastards, I’m going to finish what you started.” “Whatever you say, Davey Crockett.” A circle widened around him as the tourists decided what they were witnessing must be part of some elaborate show, despite Crixus’s attempts to convince them otherwise. Somehow, the bronzed, beautiful man clutching his fur hat and screaming for help while being chased by mob of mimes failed to arouse the genuine concern required to bring him aid. The angrier he became, the more the spectators applauded. “I’m a demigod!” Crixus having to scream this robbed the declaration of some of its cachet. “I fought in the Battle of Antioch! And Carthage!” Vinnie whistled and the sea of painted faces turned in her direction.

“Cinquecento euro e un pompino per l'uomo che ottiene il suo cappello.” Five hundred euro and a blowjob to the man who gets his hat. “Bitch!” the demigod shouted. It was the last word he managed before his howls of rage were muffled by a pile of bodies. First the mimes, then men from the crowd, then the women attempting to drag their men out of the heap. Despite the growing ache in her stomach and the lingering weakness in her limbs, Vinnie felt something like delight. The memory of his body pressed against her back. His cock stiff as her spine, silky in her hands. The feeling of arms around her, holding her against her will. His arrogance and ignorance. Nothing in her memory had ever been so enraging. Or erotic. Never, in all her long years, had she been overpowered. Not once. Not by anyone. When her painted savior had arrived, souvenir sword in hand, Vinnie’s first thought had been to incinerate him on the spot. She had wanted Crixus to take her. In front of all those people whose faces she would have liked to fill with shock when she finally broke him and he drove into her with mindless abandon. As they made the world their own. But it was an idle fantasy. The kind of thing she had learned long ago not to think about. This world wasn’t for her. It never had been. Only stubborn pride and a damnable need to keep drawing breath kept her here. She could still amuse herself. She had not yet become bored and sadistic the way she had seen so many before her go. Tired of this planet and the life forms they shared it with. Frustrated that they were not given to rule creatures they considered nothing more than playmates and playthings even on the best of days.

Vinnie had never found them to be either. Her never-ending string of companions could sate the hunger, but not the ache. The bone-ache of loneliness she had never really learned to live with. She was a permanent fixture in this temporary world. She had been old long before the buildings in this vast stone courtyard rose to the sky. Crixus had felt more solid than any of it. More solid than the brick streets beneath her sandals. More real than the marble columns or concrete walls. More alive than the thousands of bodies milling around her in mindless pursuit of their brief lives. For this, she hated him twice as much. Not for robbing her of her lifeblood, or for the threats he made or his insistence on delivering her to imprisonment or torment, but for being there and making her believe. He had awakened something long dormant. Something she had burned, and buried, and killed and culled in a thousand different ways. He had made her feel seen, and known. Just as he had the first time. This made his current undoing all the more delicious. A triumphant shout arose from the pile of bodies as a hand held the badger hat aloft like a revolutionary’s flag. “Ce l’ho! Ce l’ho!’ I have it! I have it! Not one of the mimes, of course, who even in the course of this fray had only mouthed strong words. Other hands snatched the hat and the phrase was repeated by a different voice, who also failed to keep hold of the prize for long. This part of the game was immaterial to Vinnie, who only waited for any part of the demigod’s body to become visible. It wasn’t long before a brawl broke out and people scattered in all directions.

She locked eyes with Crixus across the chaotic sea, and gave him a little finger wave. Taking a cue from her silent, striped allies, she said not a word this time. Only smiled, and scattered his atoms on the summer air. For extra effect, she conjured an explosion of gold glitter confetti, hoping at least some of it would cling to the demigod when he reassembled himself in Hell. She curtsied to the crowd, now rabid with excitement at what they considered to be the grand finale to a damn good show. Vinnie couldn’t bring herself to disagree.

7

As one who couldn’t die, Crixus hadn’t given much thought to what his personal vision of Hell might look like until he awoke and found himself in it. Glitter all over his body and a shrill female voice puncturing his eardrum. He recognized the voice as Calliope’s long before he could bring himself to meet her eyes, glowing like pale blue chips of ice in a face made red by rage. Sweat plastered her blond ringlets to her cheeks. Muses almost never sweat. Grabbing someone by the throat and pounding their head against the floor was also unprecedented for the Greek muse of eloquence and epic poetry as far as Crixus knew. “Use your words,” he grunted as his skull connected with the floor of Hades’s office. “You’re supposed to be good with them, aren’t you?” “I’ll tear that flippant tongue from your mouth, you useless swine! How could you lose Moritasgus! Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” “Having ideas would be easier without your claws choking off the blood flow to my brain.” “I’m surprised you have any left to supply that meager instrument in your head with as much attention as you pay to the meat in your pants.” “Children.” Hades’s voice was the auditory equivalent of flicking the light off to get the room’s attention. “Perhaps our energies could be better spent devising a solution to the quandary we find ourselves in.” “He’s the problem,” Calliope accused. “I provided him with the perfect tool and the perfect opportunity to take this whore out once and for all, and instead, he lets her rob him of his sense and his gift.”

“Have you ever had your fingers chewed off by a mime?” Crixus peeled the muse’s hands from his neck and met her glare with one of his own. “The mimes wouldn’t have been an issue if you had been concentrating on the task at hand instead of allowing Lavinia to play with your…porridge gun.” “Porridge gun? Maybe you’d be better off leaving the poets to Lavinia after all.” Calliope’s eyes darkened with anger as Crixus felt a charge building in the air around him. The books threatened to leap from their shelves while the painting frames rattled against the walls. “Enough.” Hades’s command rolled through the office like thunder. The quiet that followed left Crixus uneasy, as silences often did. “Calliope, Lavinia is a succubus, which classifies her as a demon within our realm. As Lord of the Underworld, demons and how they shall be dealt with is strictly a matter for my decision. I have given this task to Crixus and determined the price and parameters.” Hades opened his desk drawer and produced the document Crixus had signed. It unfurled across the desk’s surface like something much heavier than the paper it was written on. “If he fails to complete his assignment, someone dear to him will die. And not pleasantly. I am certain he would not allow his libido, legendary though it is, to get in the way of his responsibilities.” Crixus wasn’t certain if this was a vote of confidence, or a reminder. Either way, his next action became clear in his mind. “Are we finished here?” Hades looked at him through eyes both deep and wise, rose from his seat, and walked over to an antique buffet table covered in flickering candles. From the polished surface, he lifted a gilded box and handed it to Crixus. “You might want to take this, gladiator.” The lid was heavy in the demigod’s hands and gave way with a creak of hinges. He saw the contents and didn’t know whether to smile or vomit. It was the badger hat, only bearing a fresh set of tire tracks and with empty black sockets where its diamond eyes used to be.

“Moritasgus!” Calliope cried. “How did you get him back?” “Believe me,” Hades said, appropriating Crixus’s earlier statement. “You don’t want to know.”

The beams climbing the columns of the Temple of Saturn from the floodlights below gave Rome the appearance of burning in perpetuity. Sitting high above the old Roman Forum on the Palatine Hill, Vinnie could choose to see the city this way, or as it had been in its glory. She could envision the vegetable vendors with their bounty of produce, smell the spice agents, feel the silks and rough cloth, the entire place a feast for her senses. In her mind, steam still curled from pots of mulled wine made long before humans figured out brewing an acidic beverage in a lead vessel might not be the best idea. Her gaze strayed over the Umbilicus Urbis Romae, the navel of the city, the point from which and to which all roads in the Roman Empire were measured. She much preferred contemplating this belly button, having none of her own to speak of. Unlike the demigod, she had not been born of woman. Hadn’t been born at all, really. She had always just been. Never a child. Never anything other than what she was. The existential questions of Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? constantly brooded over by humans had nothing to do with her. She, and her life’s purpose, had always been present, had always been clear. What’s for breakfast? was more Vinnie’s speed. Or who, for that matter. Answer: no one. Not if Crixus continued to chase off even the chance of an appetizer. The hunger had long since ceased to be a sweet ache in her gut. It had teeth now. It gnawed. It ate her hollow. She could sit here on stones still warm from the sun and let it finish her. The heat spreading into the soles of her bare feet was waning now. Maybe she would wane with it. She took no pride in leeching what little nourishment she could get from the ruins—the architectural equivalent of boiled soup bones. “I always liked this spot.” Vinnie didn’t have the energy to be startled, a fact for which she was grateful. It would have pleased Crixus to see her jump, to know he’d successfully snuck up on her. By her count, he’d had entirely too much pleasure already.

“I liked it better when you weren’t in it,” she said. The gladiator seated himself next to her without being invited, his long legs stretching out in their faded jeans, his worn motorcycle boots extending far past her own feet. He leaned back on one elbow, the curve of his bicep as prominent in her peripheral vision as the outline of that wretched badger hat perched on the demigod’s golden head. Only the subtle twinkle of glitter still stuck to Crixus’s skin teased a smirk to Vinnie’s lips. “Mimes?” The demigod floated the word over to her like an icebreaker at a cocktail party. Vinnie shrugged. “Beggars can’t be choosers.” “But what I don’t understand is why the mimes were necessary. I thought we were having a civilized conversation.” “You call holding me against my will civilized?” “Compared to what you’ve inflicted on me over the last twenty-four hours, you bet your ass it is. And that’s saying nothing about what happened to poor, poor Moritasgus.” “Mmmph!” the hat squeaked. Vinnie looked over to see that a silver band of duct tape had been wrapped around the badger’s maw. She raised an eyebrow at Crixus. “I ran out of cookies.” “You could always take the hat off,” Vinnie suggested. “I have a feeling that would not end well for me.” “Well what do you know?” Vinnie aimed a smile at him. “It can be taught. Now if you could learn how to stay dead or fuck off, we’d really have something here.”

Crixus grinned back at her, all teeth and megawatt charm. “Or you could quit playing this bitchy little game and tell me why you’re pissed at me.” What little energy Vinnie had left condensed into a flame in her chest. Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. She snapped it shut before one of the ing moths could swoop in and further shit on her evaporating dignity. The demigod took her silence as a sign of encouragement and rattled on. “Whatever it was, can’t we put it behind us and talk about this like mature immortals?” “Whatever it was?” Vinnie repeated. “Whatever it was?” She looked into those bluer-than-the-sky eyes and saw that he really, truly, had no idea what she was talking about. He was lying there, smug as you please, not ing the events that even now unfolded in her mind with fresh, stinging clarity. The warmth of Crixus’s arm burned her skin, and she could no longer share the space he occupied. She found her feet and walked away, arms hugging her torso. “75 B.C.E.?” Vinnie prompted. “The Festival of Saturnalia?” “Come on.” Crixus scraped to his feet and towered behind her, a living, breathing shadow. “No one re anything from a Saturnalia festival. That’s kind of the point.” “Not even when your record as an undefeated gladiator came to a pale, pathetic end?” His eyes darkened. Good. “What the hell does that have to do with you?” “What indeed?” Vinnie paced a circle around the demigod. He turned within it like the spoke of a wagon wheel, never giving her his back. “What did you do the night before that fateful fight?” Watching him scour the banks of that foggy memory was nothing short of hilarious. A look of concentration was as at home on his arrogant face as the

dead animal hat was on his head. Vinnie indulged in an exasperated sigh. “The orgy?” “Yeah, but which one?” Vinnie’s eyes rolled heavenward toward a power she no longer believed in for strength it would not provide her. “The one where you found a woman with long red hair sitting alone and convinced her to come to your quarters?” Crixus’s forehead creased. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Vinnie groaned. “It happened right down there! In the Basilica Julia! I told you what I was, and that I’d never slept with an immortal before, and you told me it would change my life, and I told you I didn’t want my life changed, and you told me that you were kidding, and mostly you just meant that your cock was huge, and—” “Holy shit. That was you?” Recognition spread across his features like the first fingers of dawn, quickly chased by clouds of irritation. “You drained me! You were the one who lost me that match!” Three more sips of the awful violin player, and Vinnie might have had the strength to slap him. “After what you did, you’re honestly going to stand here and bitch about a little gladiatorial match?” “What do you mean, after what I did? Those weren’t sounds of protest you were making when I fucked your brains out, as I .” “You soulmated me, you son of a bitch!” The accusation echoed through the Forum’s empty streets louder than Vinnie would have liked. A ghost cry among ghost buildings. The ission of her wounded pride. “I did what?” The look of genuine confusion and shock on his face drained a measure of poison from the pocket brewing in Vinnie’s chest. “You soulmated me. Imprinted me. Scarred me. Lit the twin flames. Took part of me and left part of you.”

“I don’t understand.” Crixus lifted his hand as if to scratch his head, felt the hat, and shuddered. Moritasgus squeaked a muffled protest. “You want a visual aid? I’m sure I could scare up a couple mimes to act it out for you.” Crixus sat down hard. “That’s not possible. I’ve been with thousands of immortals. Tens of thousands—” “Shockingly, this line of defense is not helping me hate you less.” “I didn’t even know soulmating was a thing.” “That’s because you come from a line of self-indulgent, hedonistic bastard offspring who are scarcely worthy to be described as gods. They hold nothing sacred save their own pleasure.” “And you wonder why they don’t like you.” “I don’t wonder,” Vinnie said. “I don’t care.” Crixus looked up at her from his seat in the grass. “Self-deception doesn’t look good on you, Vinnie.” “Big words for a man wearing a badger hat.” “A badger hat I have to wear to keep you from blowing me the fuck up.” “Excuse me for being a little peeved about having my soul torn in half for the last two thousand years.” “But I didn’t even know that I had done it,” Crixus insisted. “And that’s supposed to comfort me?” Vinnie could feel the last of her strength surging upward, flooding her limbs in a heady rush. She should stop. But these words had waited for too long. They had gathered the strength of a biblical plague, rising to blot out the sky with a black rage borne of ages. “You stole a piece of my soul. You made a void in me and took from me the only thing that

could fill it. You altered my destiny. You changed me. And you nothing!” Crickets chirred into the silence left by the absence of her voice. “I’m sorry,” he said. “No,” Vinnie said. “You’re not. You don’t even know what that word means. You’ve plowed your way through life’s field one ass at a time while I watched my kind fade into nothing. You’ve laughed while I wept and played God while I created. So don’t tell me you’re sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I met you. I’m sorry your deluded superiors think that I have something to answer for in the world they’ve driven to ruin. But most of all, I’m sorry I look at your face and still see something I—” She fell. The ground did not rush up to meet her in a last embrace. It had been blocked by Crixus, whose arms caught her. Held her. Lowered her gently to the warm earth. “Vinnie?” The frantic note in his voice was a cool salve for a wound too large to heal. “What’s wrong? What happened?” “You,” she whispered. Her eyelids lowered, a shroud of black silk descending over this loud world full of empty people. Oblivion arrived with the easy smile of an old friend.

The weight of Vinnie’s head was heavy in Crixus’s hand, heavier than the leaden lump dead center in his chest. What had he done? This was not a question he would have asked himself even six months ago, and never in the thousands of years that preceded it. There was only what he wanted, and how to get it. The means didn’t matter to him nearly as much as the end. And the end had always been for his benefit. But that had been before. Before Matilda, whose tears stung him like acid, and whose rejection had cracked open his ribs and left his heart a bleeding target. It was a pain altogether new to him, much like the sensation he experienced looking down into Lavinia’s face, her lips blanched pale. “What’s happening to her?” Crixus repeated the question several times before ing that the badger would be unable to answer. He tore off the strip of tape to the protest of a startled howl. “My snout has been denuded,” Moritasgus whined. “I can’t possibly answer questions when I look so ridiculous.” “You’re a badger hat! You’ve never not looked ridiculous!” “Oh sure, rub it in. If I still had vertebrae, I would—” “Just tell me what’s wrong with her, you little shit!” “Now we’re back to the name-calling? My motivation to assist you is decreasing at a most rapid rate, turd-pig.” “Cookies!” Crixus shouted. “I will get you a whole Girl Scout troop worth of cookies if you help me.” “As long as they are not of the variety that is both thin and flavored of mint.

They are offensive to my sight.” “Yes, fine, whatever you want. Just tell me what’s wrong with her.” “She’s starving, of course. Weakened to the point of fading. You could take her to Hades right now, if you wish. She can no longer fight you. And with what Calliope has planned for her, that is probably for the best.” “What does Calliope have planned?” “Gladiator, there aren’t enough cookies in the world for you to buy this information from me. Let me just say that being made into a hat is a fate many would have envied me.” Crixus eased Vinnie’s head onto his lap and looked down at the dark lashes feathered against her creamy cheeks. He pressed his hand against the swell of her breasts and felt the dulling pulse of her immortal heart recede from his palm. Life was leaving her. He couldn’t bear the thought of the flame in her eyes dying away. All that vibrant energy winking out without a whisper. “Do something,” Crixus ordered. “Heal her.” “Ahh, but it is not I who must heal her, but you.” The tiny points of one claw tapped Crixus between the eyes. He resisted the urge to tear the hat from his head and stomp it down to Hades. “How?” “Feed her.” A ragged breath filled Crixus’s lungs. He leaned close enough to feel the cool silk of her forehead beneath his lips. “You’ll have to take me off for this bit,” the badger said. “She can’t drain your energy through me.” The demigod closed his eyes and let ed shouts from the Coliseum fill his ears. He had been a warrior once, and willing to die a warrior’s death. He advanced to the sword and the spear with metal in his spine and fire in his heart.

The sand would be wet with blood at the close of every day, either his or his opponent’s. Never had this knowledge kept him cowering behind the gate. He would not cower now. Night air was cold on Crixus’s forehead where the fur had made him sweat. The hat fell away, tossed from arm’s reach with the bravery of the damned. An equally reckless advance brought his lips to hers. Crixus would have sooner believed one of Zeus’s errant lightning bolts had split his head wide open than a kiss would be capable of producing this. He ed. As clearly as if the Fates had wound his long life back onto the spool, and he was within his first thirty years on Earth. Aware of what he was, but too ignorant to know what it meant. Unbeatable. Unbeaten. Unstoppable. Yet for all that had changed, the sensation remained constant. Lust then. Lust now. Innocence he had thought feigned. Just another coquettish ploy designed to spark the desire that needed no assistance to burn beyond his control. Her laugh skipping through the courtyard as she ran and he gave chase. Her mouth yielding to his hungry exploration, her back against the marble. How she had dissolved like sugar in his arms when the mid-December rain pounded down on their naked, chilled skin. The smell of her arousal mixed with the wet concrete. His knees going weak as she sheathed him in silk. The same electric ebb and flow crackled between them on the summer air, fusing their lips with heat. Vinnie’s body jerked under his touch, rising beneath his palms like they were the paddles of a defibrillator. Her hands swung up and gripped his hair, pulling him closer as she drank from him. Slowly at first, then in hungry, urgent strokes, she tasted him, teased him, tempted him.

She broke the kiss long before he was ready. Her hands planted on his chest, shoving him away from her. The storm inside him ceased as quickly as it had begun. He was in the eye of a tornado and filled with the unnatural, thick calm of impending destruction. “No,” she growled. She got as far as an old tree by the older brick palace wall, still weak, half walking, half leaning. Crixus spun her around to face him. “I don’t want this.” She tried, and failed, to slip around him. “I don’t want you.” “Liar,” he said. Her hand flew to slap his face, but he caught her by the wrist and pressed the flat of her palm against his chest. Her touch was cold through the fabric of his shirt. Fingers laced with hers, he drove her hand down. Down the ridges of his abdominal muscles. Down to the hem of his T-shirt. He lifted it, never breaking eye , and placed her chilly hand on his bare skin. “Take what you need,” he said. She snatched her hand away. “I need nothing from you.” Crixus took a step toward her, backing her into the tree. “I’m not a painter. I don’t sculpt stone, or sing songs, or pluck strings. But what I have to give is yours to take.” He took her cupped palm and pressed it against his blood-heavy cock. “All of it.” “Oh, please.” Vinnie wiped her hand on her skirt. “Vitamin D is vitamin D. You can find it in any old mackerel.” “Vitamin what?” “Dick. It’s painfully easy to come by. Just like arrogant demigods. Keep it in your pants, Junior.” She patted the front of his jeans. “I’ll .” Any one of a thousand things could have changed, and what happened next might not have happened at all.

If she hadn’t been wearing a skirt. If she hadn’t been barefoot. If she hadn’t driven her knee into his groin. If she hadn’t missed. The shearing pain doubled Crixus over in a reflexive jerk and they head-butted each other with staggering force. They both dropped to the ground at the base of the tree, swearing. And Vinnie tried to run.

8

Vinnie should have seen it coming, she supposed. When a lion is in the bushes, common sense recommended pretty much any other path than the one she had chosen. Which is to say, poking a stick in the lion’s eye and blowing a raspberry. No sooner had she scrambled to her feet when the demigod’s hand closed over her ankle. She went to the ground in a heap of skirts with one effortless tug. His full weight came down upon her back, pinning her to the earth, grass itchy and damp with dew beneath her cheek. “Let me go!” The more she squirmed, the more insistent the throbbing heat pressed against the small of her back became. What little energy she had drained from him surged through her veins as rage. “No.” Crixus’s voice was hot in her ear. His hands clamped down on her wrists, forcing them away from her body, but more important, from his. Dirt collected under her fingernails as she clawed the earth for leverage. Her traitorous body undulated against his sex, wringing a strangled cry from him. His grip tightened on her as he grunted a curse into her hair. “I wonder if you still fuck as hard as you fight,” Vinnie purred. An invitation. He parted her thighs with his knee and forced them apart, pushing his sex against her upturned ass. “Harder.” “Prove it.” The dare produced the desired effect. He released her hands and seized his zipper, giving her just enough time to roll beneath him and kick out hard. She made it to her knees this time. Unfortunately, they were the first things to go when Crixus pulled them out from under her in a swift takedown befitting the Circus in the city sparkling below.

“Fucking gladiators,” she snarled. She lunged for his neck, but only caught handfuls of his T-shirt. When he tore her fists away, the shirt ripped straight down the middle, revealing the bronze expanse of his pectoral and abdominal muscles. Vinnie swallowed a sudden rush of saliva that seemed to liquefy at her center and reappear between her legs. His chest rose and fell with rapid breaths from their struggle. And Vinnie knew she wanted to see him breathe harder. Wanted to see that body covered in sweat, shaking with the need for release. Wanted to feel her name echo through that chest as she bled him of stamina. She wanted to hear him scream. Cry. Beg. “Fuck me,” she demanded, shucking the remnants of his shirt from his broad shoulders. Her mouth found his neck, biting, licking, sucking the smooth, salty skin. His breath came in gasps. “I feel like…this is a trap.” Working quickly, she freed him from his jeans and wrapped her fingers around the satin and steel she discovered. “The only thing I want to trap is this cock inside my hot, wet—” The growl that erupted from his throat was something between a warning and a promise. Crixus grabbed her skirt and tore it straight up the middle. The sound of it yielding to him leveled Vinnie with a wave of dizzying lust that ended with the demigod inside her. Vinnie’s back bowed from the pleasure. A line of pure, ecstatic heat beginning at the base of her spine and sweeping upward to burst from her mouth as a note of pleading. Life, his life, singing through her veins in a draught so pure, so primal, she nearly wept with the savage beauty of it.

His hands pushed beneath her tank top, exposing her breasts to the night air. He filled his palms with them, brushed his thumbs over her stiff, aching nipples, then lowered his mouth to take first one, then the other between his lips. She threaded her fingers into his hair as his tongue worked around the tight bud. Vinnie knew he could make her come this way—with only the pressure of him inside her and that wicked mouth on her. But she wasn’t ready. Not yet. “Enough,” she gasped. He sucked harder, nipping the tender flesh with his teeth. Her fingers fisted in his hair and she jerked hard enough to bring the gladiator’s head upright. Teeth clenched, Crixus drove himself deeper in reply. Vinnie’s torso bucked from the ground and he captured her neck, hand clasped below her chin, fingers digging into her jaw. “It’s enough when I say it’s enough,” the gladiator said. He kissed her then, as much as an act so invasive could be called a kiss. His tongue slid between her lips, claiming her mouth with bruising force. His hand slipped behind her head to tangle in her hair, pulling her head back as she had his, opening her mouth to him. Vinnie bit down on his tongue. His anger and ardor mixed like jet fuel in her blood. The more she took in, the more she wanted. He was filling her with a power only equaled by her need for it. And he wanted to give it to her. She drank the knowledge from his thoughts. The undercurrent of violence in him. His need for action without consequence. Delicious force tinged with the sour taint of fear. His fear of hurting her. His fear of loving and losing. Again.

It was the again she took issue with. That a mortal woman dared stray into his thoughts while he yet swelled inside her. That he held back because of fear bred into him by the loss. Vinnie would not have it. It was unwise to expend the energy she’d taken from him, but necessary to make her point. She fell backward, dragging him on top of her, swinging her legs up and wrapping them around his waist. Brief triumph flashed across his face but vanished as she squeezed the breath from his chest with the grip of her thighs. He coughed once, twice. His fingers worked at her long, lean muscles. As much as it pained her, she pushed him backward, out of her. “What are you doing?” he rasped. She squeezed hard enough to hear something pop. “Keep your cock until you’ve dried your tears, Junior.”

Crixus looked into Vinnie’s blazing emerald eyes and felt the strange displacement of meeting an unexpected mirror. That split second of recognition before the mind acknowledges the face it belongs to. She reflected back to him a fierceness and brutality he had never seen outside the battlefield. A warrior’s lust. Parting his flesh from hers came with a physical pain. And not just the crushing sensation in his ribs. This was new. And disconcerting. At that moment, he would have mortgaged his soul—assuming he had one—if it meant he could take every breath with his cock inside Lavinia’s body. The entire world could have rolled in ecstasy at his feet, and still he wanted to be only here. With her. The corners of her mouth curved upward. Not so much a smile as a challenge. What now, Snookums? She had invaded his head. Thoughts arose. Plans. Ideas. But Vinnie’s voice was there, batting them away as quickly as they arrived. She picked through his mind like a landfill, discarding most of what she found. Try again. That the best you’ve got? Give me a break. Please tell me you can do better than that. He felt her pleasure growing in equal proportion with his irritation. Blood burned below his skin, throwing up a red wall that blocked any remaining

thought. Adrenaline replaced it. His muscles flooded by the drug of lower animals. Crixus surged forward with Vinnie’s legs still clasped about him. The shock was enough to distract her busy brain for the instant required to impale her. He did not intend to give her the time required to come up with a counter-attack. Quite the opposite. He intended to fuck her witless. Vinnie had awoken the old madness with her skillful touch and unleashed it with her words. Now it drove him into her like a doomed man to his gallows. And he was doomed. He had sealed his own fate millennia ago by binding himself to her. To this. Her fingernails scored his back and rounded over his buttocks, allowing him no other option than to plunge into her with reckless abandon. She would take nothing less. She drank everything he could give and still demanded more. She demanded all. He could feel it moving away from him as her body tensed. The unbearable tightness of her. The sway of her breasts. The wildfire of her hair spreading through the grass. Past and future both paled in comparison to the rhythmic pulling of her core around him. “Teacht, bean!” A command in her native language. Come, woman. Her reply was nothing less than he should have expected. “Tá tú ar dtús, daor.” You first, slave.

The terrible pressure building within him detonated and he spilled into her. Control escaped him along with the grasp of all human language as bliss rushed through him in a riotous wave. And another. And another. Vinnie’s hand closed over his throat as another part of her contracted around him. Her thumb grazed over his throbbing jugular vein as her fingertips traced his lips. “I’m not finished with you.” She used the leverage to throw him off balance, rolling his body under her. Her hips moved, or the world did. Crixus couldn’t be sure. The friction tossed a new spark on the already smoldering pyre between them. Vinnie hauled him up by his hair, pressing his face into her breasts. “Suck me,” she ordered. This was one command Crixus had neither the will nor the desire to disobey. She was velvet and cream in his mouth and molten around his cock. He risked whatever punishment she might have stored up for him, pushing upward, into her, toward a sky pinwheeling with stars. He felt the disbelief on his own face as the warm swell of another tide found him and he was coming again. Her carnal cry was a hymn under the vault of heaven and he worshipped there as long as she let him. Vinnie collapsed over him in wordless exhaustion. Their hearts beat against each other in one of the many patterns that would fill the long watches of this night. “Was that…how that felt…is it because we’re soul mates?” Crixus asked. “Yes.” She nodded lazily against his chest. “So is this.” And his head exploded.

9

Hades’s head—which to Crixus’s knowledge had never exploded— did something else he suspected it had never done: thumped repeatedly on his desk. The action was more appropriate to a corporate underling in the twelfth hour of an investigative audit than to the Lord of the Underworld, keeper of the dead and bargainer of souls. It was even more impressive in the triple vision Crixus couldn’t condense into one consistent figure. When Hades lifted his eyes, he revealed a round, red spot that had formed in the center of his forehead. The indentation of a paperclip had pressed itself between his brows like the marking of a tribe whose ancestral gods had sprung from an office supply store. “Let me see if I can accurately reconstruct the events of this evening.” His voice was calm. Dangerously calm. Surface of the lake before a hockey-masked murderer leapt up toward the dock calm. “That’s really not necessary. I plenty well.” Crixus struggled to his feet and tried to figure out which of the three swaying chairs in front of him was real enough to hold his weight. He got it right on the second try. Not a great average, but at least Calliope wasn’t there to abuse him in triplicate. “Forgive me for doubting the capacity of recollection within a mind that has been blown to smithereens four. Fucking. Times.” “Technically only twice,” Crixus said. “The other times—” “I don’t give a flying fuck about the other times.” Books rattled on their shelves as the candle flames danced in the sudden breeze. “You had weakened Lavinia to the point of starvation. She couldn’t read your thoughts. Couldn’t fight you. Couldn’t run. Victory was within your grasp. And what do you do?” Crixus looked at his lap and tried not to think of Vinnie in it. When Hades didn’t continue, he glanced up into the uncomfortable silence. “That was a rhetorical

question, right? You don’t actually want me to—” “You fuck her! That’s what.” Hades came out of his chair and planted his hands on the desk between them. “You allow her to drain your energy until she’s not only not incapacitated, she’s twice as powerful as she was before!” “The twice as powerful thing was more of an accident, really. You see—” “An accident?” The Dark Lord’s laugh conveyed more in the way of orphans’ tears and kicked puppies than actual levity. “Do tell. I am positively ravenous for this explanation.” He eased back into his chair with much more grace than Crixus himself had brought to the task. “It happened a long time ago. I mean, I was just a kid, really. I didn’t know any better. There was this Saturnalia festival, and tits and ass were flying at me from all directions, and in that kind of chaos you can’t really—” “Spit it out!” Hades slapped down an open palm. The sound filled the room like a gunshot. “I soulmated her.” “You did what?” “I know, right?” Crixus leaned his elbows on the desk like it was a bar, and this exchange nothing more than a lusty tale shared in the spirit of alcohol-induced fraternal solidarity. “Who even knew soulmating was a thing?” “I knew,” Hades said, nudging Crixus’s elbow off his desk. “And Lavinia knew. And there’s an undead rat living in my portmanteau and I would wager that he knows as well. In fact, there’s a decent chance the undead rat relieves himself of scat that’s smarter than you.” Mixed hungers warred for control of Crixus’s mind. On the one hand, he dearly wanted to grab one of the candles from their fancy silver holders and shove the lit end up Hades’s ass. On the other hand, Hades could in all likelihood curse him to an eternity of the same. With bigger candles. He resorted to the tactic that had always served him well—arrogance. Leaning back in his chair, Crixus a boot directly in front of Hades’s face.

“I got to be honest with you, bro. I feel like you might be insulting my intelligence right now.” Hades pressed two fingers into his temple and rubbed a slow circle. “You are your father’s son.” “Leave him out of this.” “I’d like to, but you don’t present me with much choice. I offered this contract to you with the hopes that it could be mutually beneficial. Failure may be an option for you, but it isn’t for me. Three new bodies have been discovered in Rome. Calliope is there now. The Fates are bellowing for blood. My willingness to intercede with them on Matilda’s behalf was dependent upon your ability to deliver my price.” “Was?” Three letters. One small word capable of delivering infinite despair. “Matilda is approaching the time for her labor, even as we speak. Once it begins —” he shrugged “—I am powerless to affect the outcome.” “I have work to do.” The chair tipped over as Crixus shoved out of it and strode toward the door. Hades’s voice stopped him before he reached it. “Perhaps I haven’t been clear.” He walked around his desk and placed himself directly in the demigod’s path. He was one of the few beings whose size could still be described as imposing in Crixus’s presence. “This time is the last time.” Crixus nodded, the knowledge of where he must go next solid in his mind. “Understood.”

Las Vegas boasted thousands of places open at 2:00 a.m. Only one of them was a psychologist’s office. The odd hours were due in most part to the odd clientele, a result of Crixus’s own involvement in the life of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist. When he had first met her, she had been uptight, in her early thirties, still a virgin, and locked into a life whose most exciting component was a weekly trip to the dessert aisle at Whole Foods. Under his tutelage, Matilda had thawed out, loosened up, and learned a little about pleasure. Then chosen to give hers to another man—Liam. Crixus couldn’t even think the name without a craving for violence. Only fair, considering violence was Liam’s stock in trade. He was a hit man. And the father of Matilda’s soon-to-be delivered offspring. Crixus stood outside her door, listening to her thoughts as Vinnie had so easily listened to his. Her baby. Her husband. Her next client. Chocolate-dipped potato chips and onion dip. He guessed the last items on the list had everything to do with the first. His name was conspicuously absent from them, a fact that both pleased and tormented him in equal measure. In previous days, he would have replied to her thoughts directly, letting his voice echo inside her head uninvited. He’d recently gained a new appreciation for how that pretty much sucked ass. Still, the temptation lingered as a bittersweet ache. Her mind had been like the well-ordered parlor of a vacation home he would have loved to live in but could only visit in dreams. A place not unlike the tidy shelves of books he knew he

would find on the other side of this door. What he did instead was as unprecedented for him as finding a soulmate and having his head blown off by her several times in a row. He knocked. “Coming,” Matilda’s familiar voice sang. He wished. The door swung open, and there she stood. Matilda Schmidt with a sweet, expectant smile frozen on her face. A face that was rounder than Crixus ed, and flushed with the rosy glow of the heavily knocked-up. But she didn’t look knocked-up. Not to Crixus. With her ballooning belly and swelling breasts, she looked…ripe. Her hazel eyes blinked at him from behind the black-rimmed cat-eye glasses that never ceased to make him want to fog them over. “Crixus?” It had been long enough that his name had become a question. What he would have given to hear her ask it over and over again. Matilda tucked a stray chestnut lock back into the knot at the nape of her neck and smoothed a button-up maternity blouse over the globe of her belly. Nervous gestures Crixus found endearing to the point of madness. “What are you doing here?” What was he doing here? He had asked himself the same question at least a dozen times while his knuckles hovered mid-knock outside the door. His feet answered for him. He shuffled past her to the same leather couch where he had deposited so many rogue supernaturals in need of a mental goosing and flopped onto it.

Face down. “Bad day?” she asked. Crixus pulled one of the many decorative pillows over his head and grunted. This was why he had come. To see her face. To know she was still alive. To believe he hadn’t yet failed. And having done so, to fall apart in the safety of that cool, clinical voice. Her hand pressed against his shoulder blade. “What’s wrong?” “I think I’m in love.” His ission was muffled by the leather cushion pressed against his cheek, and Crixus was glad Matilda could not see his face. Were he less exhausted, shock might have been written there. He would not have been capable of confessing this to any creature save the woman had loved and lost. Matilda alone could absolve him of the growing feelings he had not yet acknowledged to himself. “Crixus—” “No.” There had been pity in the way she spoke his name, and he couldn’t bear to hear her finish the remainder of that sentence. He could not abide another onition against his coming uninvited to Matilda’s door. “That’s not why I came here. Her name’s Lavinia. She’s a succubus. She kills people.” “You make that sound like a bad thing.” Not Matilda’s voice. Crixus looked out from under his pillow like a rattlesnake under a rock. Liam. The hit man. Matilda’s husband, paper bags in hand. Even amid husbandly errands, the man looked anything but domesticated. Crixus had secretly been hoping for the development of a wedded bliss-induced paunch or some indication of a receding hairline. No such luck. They had traded more than words in their mutual pursuit of Matilda, and Crixus knew from experience that Liam was lean and uncommonly strong beneath his tailored black suit, possessed of a confidence not just resulting from the Smith &

Wesson 1911 concealed in a holster under his arm. He would have made a worthy opponent in the gladiatorial ring. “Chocolate-dipped potato chips and onion dip?” Crixus asked. “Yeah.” Liam set the bags down on Matilda’s desk and opened them, carefully setting out the containers. “Who’s killing people?” “Lavinia,” Matilda answered. “The succubus Crixus thinks he may be in love with.” Clever of her, Crixus thought, sharing the piece of information that would let her husband know he was no longer a threat. “You’re either in love or you aren’t,” Liam said, presenting the food to his wife. “There’s no maybe about it.” “What makes you think you’re in love, specifically?” Matilda scraped a chocolate-dipped potato chip across the tub of dip and popped it into her mouth. Bastard that he was, this only served to remind him of other things that mouth had done. “My hands won’t stop sweating. My head is spinning. My heart pounds every time I think of her. Though, to be fair, all those things could be because she’s killed me four times in the last twenty-four hours.” “Or syphilis.” Liam came around behind Matilda’s chair and squeezed her shoulders. Matilda sat bolt upright and gasped, her hand flying to her middle. Crixus witnessed the hit man’s instincts slide into high alert. “You okay, Lady? Is it—” “No.” She shook her head. “I’m not in labor. But someone just sucker-punched my bladder.” Matilda guided Liam’s hand down to a bump moving alien-like across the swell of her belly. “You feel that?”

Liam’s face was still for a moment, then lit up in a moment of unguarded, boyish joy. “He has my reflexes.” Crixus ceased to exist in that moment. For Matilda, whose inner eye was focused on the lambent new life within her. For Liam, bending to plant a kiss atop his wife’s head as their son moved beneath his palm. For himself, intruder that he was, invading a moment as intimate as the one that had brought this life into existence. Long years had granted him no shortage of with gravid women. They had only been of interest to him before or after they had delivered their young. Never during. Radical tenderness swept through him, banishing any lingering traces of jealousy. A taste of the miraculous in the everyday world. He had never taken the time to think about the bravery required to voluntarily give your body over for the benefit of another life. A decision that in Matilda’s case, could prove fatal. A decision that would prove fatal if he failed. In days past, he would have used this as an opportunity to wrench the focus back onto himself, to make sure they both knew all he had sacrificed, all he had suffered for their benefit. Now, dividing the burden of his knowledge between them was not an option. He could no more steal the happiness of this moment than he could disperse the growing well of loneliness flooding his chest. If he succeeded, neither Matilda nor Liam would ever know what he knew. One look into their shining eyes spoke the only truth he needed. Worth it. All of it. Liam swiped at his cheek and cleared his throat, providing Crixus the opportunity to play a role that could rescue him from the tidal wave of emotion threatening to capsize his teetering vessel. His port in many a storm—insensitive asshole. “Dude.” Crixus asked. “Are you crying?” “You got a problem with that, Crickets?” Liam challenged.

“No. No problem. But if you could dry it up so we can get back to what really matters here, I’d appreciate it.” “And that would be?” Liam asked. Crixus propped his boots on the coffee table and folded his hands behind his head. “Me, of course.” “No wonder that succubus blew you up four times,” Liam muttered. “I’d have done worse.” “Shit. Five. I forgot about the mimes.” “Five times,” Liam repeated. “What the hell did you do to this chick anyway?” “It’s a long story.” Crixus snagged gazes with Matilda, whose ability to hone in on a defense mechanism from forty paces left him feeling naked and raw. Her eyes softened and the thoughts behind them came to him without effort. I don’t know why you’re really here, but I know whatever you’re doing, you’re doing for me. Crixus could not bring himself to lie. Not to her. Yes. A single fat tear spilled down her cheek. Thank you. The whole exchange was over by the time Liam had unbuttoned his coat. “I’m afraid we don’t have time for long stories.” Matilda’s tone held just the right amount of harried efficiency. She glanced at the clock on the wall behind the couch, dabbing at her cheek with a tissue plucked from the box at her elbow. “My next client will be here any minute.” Crixus took a deep breath and forced himself into a seated position. “I accidentally made Lavinia my soul mate two thousand years ago and didn’t

know about it until I signed a contract with Hades to bring her in because she’s killing a shit-ton of artists and the Muses and Fates are all kinds of butt-hurt about it.” “Jesus.” Liam shook his head. “You’re fucked.” “Wait a minute.” Matilda deposited her chips and dip on the end table and swept crumbs from her skirt. “You have a soul mate?” “Apparently.” “You mean, you didn’t know?” Matilda asked. A crowbar would have come in handy to pry the next word from his mouth. He already knew where she was going with this, and would have preferred to go anywhere else. “No.” Matilda leaned forward in her seat, a satisfied smile spreading across her face. “I thought you knew everything.” “So did I. While we’re on the topic of shit I don’t know, how do I make her stop hating me?” “Be someone else,” Liam suggested. “Last time I checked, your wife was the therapist.” Crixus turned to Matilda, who cleared her throat and pushed her glasses up her nose. Not a good sign. “I hate to say this, but Liam may have a point.” “Be someone else,” Crixus repeated. “That’s your professional advice?” “It’s just that, sometimes when you’re threatened, you can come off a little…” She trailed off, searching the air for a kind way to say an unkind thing. “Douchey,” Liam finished for her. “Overconfident,” Matilda restated. “Or insincere. Or superficial. Or—”

“I think I preferred douchey,” Crixus said. “Look, Crickets, it’s really simple.” The man who was more used to disposing of bodies busied himself disposing the remnants of Matilda’s snack. “Next time you’re having a conversation with—what’s her name?” “Your mother.” Liam paused with his hands hovering over the trashcan. “Now, see? That right there is a perfect example. Because instead of helping you find a solution to your problem, I’d like to rip your intestines from your ass and use you as a skipping rope.” Crixus felt a brief burst of gratitude that this option had not yet occurred to Vinnie. “I think what Liam means is,” Matilda began delicately, “maybe you should take the first thing that comes to mind, and say the opposite. Or nothing. Saying nothing is always a viable option.” “Am I really that bad?” He didn’t want the answer to this question, but it was out of his mouth before he could call it back. Something to consider. Matilda consulted the carpet like it was the Delphic oracle but said nothing. Crixus found this infinitely worse. A knock on the door provided welcome absolution. “I’ll get it.” Liam was across the office before Matilda could attempt to lever her body out of the chair. The kid was leaning on the doorframe when it opened, looking like the human equivalent of an empty juice carton. Drained, translucent, and in imminent danger of collapsing. “Casey?” Matilda asked. “Come in, I’ve been expecting you.” “Hey. Sorry I’m late. Band practice went long. Been up for five days straight working on this new sooo…”

Liam had alarmingly fast reflexes for a human. He caught the kid just as his knees gave out but before he could crumple to the ground. “Jesus. You okay?” Casey looked up at them from a pale face sheened with sweat. “Yeah. I’m great. I’ve been on this creative high, but I feel like I might be…you know.” His finger circled his ear. Crixus felt the fine hairs on the back of his neck rise. “You have a girlfriend?” “Do I ever. I met a muse, man. Like, a real muse. She’s been helping me with my songs. But…I think I’m losing it. Last night, I dreamed she was like, fucking me to death.” Liam and Crixus exchanged a look of the kind only hunters knew. In that moment of shared understanding, a revelation came: his need and Liam’s need was the same. To see Matilda safe. They were bound by their love for her. He could not allow them to be bound by their grief. Casey took Liam’s offered hand and shuffled over to the couch Crixus had vacated. “How long have you been together?” Crixus asked. “Just a couple weeks. I met her at this gig we were doing at Frankie’s Tiki Room. She followed me off stage and stuck her hand down my pants.” A sympathetic pain arose in the crotch of Crixus’s jeans. The pattern struck him as familiar. “When did you last see her?” The kid scratched the spider web of tattoos on his neck. “Like, two minutes ago. She likes to be in the studio when we play.” “Where?” “Brickhouse Recording Studios. Just off 19 th.”

The demigod was on his feet and angling for the door but stopped just inside the frame. Crixus was not, had never been, a man who looked back. His past was a cavern beyond all reckoning, a swath of time and experience too large to consider. Standing on the precipice came with the vertigo that had warned him away from the edge. Looking forward, into battle, Crixus would take with him only the image of the woman he had loved, her belly full of life and her cheeks pink with hope. She would be his standard. The image he would have laid across his coffin if he failed. Because if he failed…he would find a way to die. “Stay with her,” Crixus said over his shoulder without turning. “I will.”

The Brickhouse Recording Studio was neither brick, nor a house. A cheap stuccoed shoebox squatting under a row of palm trees provided a stark contrast to the lofty Italianate architecture Crixus had chased Vinnie through over the past day. Red terracotta roof tiles still clung to the merciless Vegas heat and radiated warmth into a night made muddy by distant neon lights. Crixus could not imagine her in this place. Not Vinnie, who wandered the streets of old London with a sigh on her lips and a song in her heart. Vegas was too crass, too loud. The very air screamed with desperation—an emotion he had only understood in theory until meeting Matilda. He thought he had wanted her for his own as much as he could want anything. Each step toward the place that might end them both echoed back the untruth of this. He wanted her happiness more. He wanted her the way he had seen her today: warm and alive. Two elements that were now entirely dependent upon his plan, itself born of desperation. If success demanded that he be someone he had never been, then he would have to do something he had never done. He was going to beg. Muffled music floated out to him when a couple of leather-wearing punks pushed the door open for a smoke. Crixus walked past them, paying no attention to their ‘can I help yous’ and ‘where do you think you’re goings.’ Best to save up every ounce of courtesy he could muster for the task ahead. The reception desk was unmanned at this hour, leaving the long hallway to the sound booths unguarded. Not that it would have mattered. Receptionists were a particular specialty of his. Matilda had never appreciated this fact for reasons he was beginning to understand. Seeing Vinnie tangled on

the bed with those two pale boy band rejects in London was enough to make Crixus want to skin them alive and make himself a pair of rockabilly boots. And that was before he’d fucked her. Or she fucked him. Crixus couldn’t quite figure out which description better suited their last meeting. Perhaps a couple more rounds would assist him in finding the right words. Kicking the door to the studio down was the second most satisfying thing he’d done all week. Watching the band scatter and the wide-eyed technicians behind the glass duck under their instrument when Crixus bared his teeth was a close third. When the human debris had vacated, the demigod turned his attention to the curtained booth in the corner. Two pairs of feet were visible beneath the curtain’s hem. One set clad in snakeskin boots with toes pointy enough to double as suppositories if Crixus was feeling creative, and the other, delicate sandals and slim ankles. Crixus reached in and grabbed the headphone-wearing singer out by his Vnecked shirt and thrust him toward the door. “Get gone, or they’ll use this recording to dub over a horror movie after what I do to you.” The singer fell over a drum kit in his haste to beat a path out of the studio. The upended cymbals heralding his departure like an orchestral climax. A fitting tribute for the moment Crixus dropped to his knees before the curtain with Vinnie still behind it. “Vinnie, before you come out of there, there’s something I need to say. Will you just give me two minutes? After that, if you still want to kill me again, you can.” Silence. Good enough. “I’ve thought a lot about what you said in Rome, and I just wanted to tell you that you’re right. I’m wrong. I’m not sorry. Not sorry enough, anyway. I can’t even begin to appreciate the pain my actions caused you. I was young and stupid. Okay, I’m still no scholar, I think we both know that, but I will try to

make it right. Whatever vengeance you need to exact upon me, I will gladly accept. I deserve that.” The sandals turned to face him and Crixus braced for the killing blow. It didn’t come. He talked on. “But Vinnie, I need your help. There’s a woman, a human woman, who deserves to draw breath in a way I never will. She’s good, and kind, and there is no price I wouldn’t pay for her. She’s the reason I can understand now how I’ve wronged you.” More silence. His head not exploding had to be a good sign, right? “Vinnie, I’m begging you. On my knees. Come with me to Hades. He’s reasonable. I know we can work something out. Do this, and I will be your… slave. My life is yours to do with what you will. But please. Please, help me save Matilda.” The silence gave way at last, but to a sound Crixus had not expected. Applause. The curtain parting. A face emerging from between the velvet s. Not Lavinia’s face. “Calliope?” Her blue eyes were hard and cold as diamonds within the moonlit oval of her face, her blond hair released from its gilded bands to drape her shoulders in waves of corn silk. Her slim body was wrapped in a short jean skirt and leather bustier. “Bravo, gladiator. I wouldn’t have thought you capable of silver-tongued flattery. At least, not without my help.” “But Hades said you were in Rome.” “Was in Rome, yes. And in London. And in Florence. So were you. What’s your point?”

Crixus’s mouth opened, ready to spill forth the questions gathering like steam in his chest. He tried to push to his feet but collapsed as a wave of agony spiked into his limbs. The muse’s cold finger fell across his lips. “Sit tight, beefcake. I can make this so much worse for you. You are only a demigod, after all. Impure. Contaminated by human frailty. That whore might have killed you. But I…I can destroy you.” Pain stole the breath from his lungs. Every word she spoke was a wound. “Bitch,” he growled. She held up a finger in a tisk-tisk gesture. “And just when you were doing so well with your words. I suppose I can’t fault you for that. Must be hard to watch the woman you love die because you couldn’t get the job done. Isn’t it, gladiator?” she cooed in a syrupy poor baby tone. “Fuck you.” An invisible blast knocked him onto his back. He was unable to writhe as the searing flames in his body demanded. Calliope crawled up his legs, lithe as a snow leopard, and straddled his hips. “You know, I almost wish you had. I’ll it to being just the tiniest bit jealous.” Her hips rode in a brazen circle over Crixus’s crotch. “You certainly seem to be gifted in that capacity.” “I’d rather my dick rotted off.” Her lips were soft and feather-light as they skimmed over his. “That can be arranged.” Claustrophobia took him. This was the polar opposite of every battle he’d ever fought, when life or death was determined by the strength of his arm and the speed of his sword. He needed to fight. To sweat. To bleed. He could do nothing.

“Still, you’ve played your part perfectly,” Calliope purred. “I commend you for that. But I’m afraid you’ve outlived your usefulness. After this failure, Hades will have no choice but to turn Lavinia’s capture over to me. You’ll just be one more notch in mean old Vinnie’s score card. A regrettable casualty.” “You…killed them?” Calliope slithered around behind him, her fingers trailing across his broad shoulders. “It was painfully simple, really. People are willing to believe just about anything of a creature like her. The human deaths were worrying, yes. Plenty to stir Olympus to my side. But your death. Now that will be poetic.” “Why?” The muse sighed, bored of this question. “Because I am sick of going to museums and seeing her face. Her body. Of reading books about her. Poems to her beauty. She refused to go quietly like the others. She defied me. Me, the greatest of all muses.” Torment redoubled itself as night crept into the edges of his vision. He willed death to find him, and quickly. Coward was a mantel he was no longer too proud to wear. He had failed. Matilda would die. Heaven was not being alive to witness it.

10

Oh hell , no. Vinnie stood in the doorway to the recording studio watching Calliope straddling her soul mate and contemplated torture. And murder. And maiming. And lunch. In her defense, the demigod had been a little like Chinese food. Once Crixus filled her, she wanted him to do it again an hour later. She’d come hungry, and she was not about to let this insipid, scheming twat make off with her meal. “Hey, cockmuppet!” Vinnie threw her weapon, and hard. Calliope’s blond head jerked up at the precise moment Moritasgus connected with her face. She shrieked as his patchy maw clamped onto her perfectlyupturned nose. “Ged hib off!” she howled. “Ged hib off!” “There’s only room for one homicidal sex-goddess in Crixus’s life. And trust me, you can’t fill my shoes, much less my bra.” A welcome surge of anger swelled from Vinnie’s stomach up through her chest, tingling down her arms and out the palms of her hands. She felt it surround the Greek goddess, who was not as young as Crixus, but scarcely mature by Vinnie’s standards. Calliope curled up like a worm and rolled onto her side. “Please!” she begged. “We’re muses. Sisters.” “You dare beg my mercy after what you did to him?” It was difficult not to look at Crixus, flat on his back, his chest rising ragged. She knew better than to give him her attention. Not yet. Not while she needed to

focus. “But he’s…a .” Calliope’s voice had gone thin and reedy. “A lascivious… womanizer.” “You make that sound like a bad thing,” she said, repeating words she’d heard earlier that evening from an altogether different source. “I’ll call off Hades,” Calliope groaned. “Oh don’t you worry about that. He and I have already had ourselves a nice, long chat.” Warmth bloomed in her cheeks and traveled downward with the memory. Truthfully, Vinnie wouldn’t have minded if they had done more than talk. She’d always had a taste for those dark, tortured souls. It didn’t get much darker than the Dark Lord. She could spend a century or two exorcising his demons, easy. “No,” she gasped. “I didn’t mean—” “Tell it to the judge, sister.” Vinnie clenched her hand into a fist and felt the same satisfaction all those granolas must get when they crush a can and lob it into the recycling bin. Calliope would awake in Hades’s office with some heavy explaining to do and an eternity to do it. Vinnie sauntered over to the felled gladiator, arms folded across her breasts. “You look like shit.” He wrapped his hand around her ankle and squeezed. “So.” Vinnie swung her leg over Crixus and sat down hard on his hips. His grunt was somewhere between pleasure and suffocation. “I guess this makes you my slave.” “How do you figure?” She could hear the lingering discomfort thick in his words. “Vinnie, I’m begging you,’” she quoted. “On my knees. Come with me to Hades. He’s reasonable. I know we can work something out. Do this, and I will be your slave. My life is yours to do with what you will, blah blah blah. Please, help me save Matilda, yada yada, more emotional crap…’ Matilda is safe. Calliope has been delivered. Your contract is complete. The way I see it, you owe me.”

His head cocked to the side, endearing befuddlement widening his eyes. “But, you weren’t…how did you—” “I heard you composing that lame-ass speech all the way over to the recording studio,” Vinnie said. “I followed you, genius.” “How did you know where to find me?” “You’re not the only one with a Girl Friday, cupcake. You’re not so hard to track. You don’t blend, in case you haven’t noticed.” “I’ve noticed.” “Anyway.” Vinnie leaned over, her elbows resting on his pectoral muscles and her hands propped under her chin. “I caught the squeal that you were in Vegas and decided maybe I’d hit the Crixus buffet and have myself some seconds. But I saw you wander into a therapist’s office and thought well this is going to be good.” “You listened?” “You’re damn right I did. Your thoughts are about as hard to read as a picture book. Boning a pregnant lady? Really?” He shrugged beneath her. “I’ve never fucked a pregnant woman before. I like to keep my horizons broad.” “How about that. We have something in common after all. Beside an intense dislike for Calliope, that is.” “Did you know it was her?” Crixus asked. “Killing the artists?” “I knew it wasn’t me.” “You could have mentioned that.” “You didn’t ask. And, though perceptivity is clearly not one of the abilities you enjoy in excess as a demigod, I was reasonably certain you would figure it out, and I could address it when you did. Why waste my energy when I could waste yours?”

Vinnie walked two fingers up his chest and tapped his chin. “Also, I caught Calliope lurking in Rome after our last encounter and decided it was time I spoke with Hades. He was kind enough to intercede with the Fates and Muses. I imagine she will answer to them in due time.” “About these encounters…” Crixus took a lock of her hair between his fingers and tugged, a sensory reminder of when he had done the same with less restraint. “It’s not that I don’t enjoy them, but I would prefer if you could kindly quit killing me.” “Oh, I don’t know.” Vinnie kicked her sandals off and slid her thighs onto his, pedaling her feet in the air like an illustration of some dreamy, malt-shop teenager on the phone. She loved lying against him this way. Letting him be the intercessor between her and the earth. Of the two, the gladiator’s body felt more stable. “Are you going to behave yourself?” She could feel his muscles tighten as soon as the word behave had left her lips. “Give me some credit, kiddo. I’m not interested in some neutered, spineless sucker. I’m talking about laying down some ground rules and seeing if we can share the same planet without wanting to kill each other constantly.” “I’m listening,” Crixus said. For once, Vinnie had the odd feeling that he was. “I don’t think either one of us is what you would call relationship material.” Crixus did not disagree. “Trouble is,” Vinnie continued, “if you fuck another woman, I’m going to want to kill her hideously and make you scream apologies.” “And I can’t promise not to throttle every painter and poet you pick up,” he said. “Fair enough?” Vinnie considered this. “At the risk of sounding hypocritical, sex isn’t just a hobby for me. I fuck, or I fade. It’s that simple.”

“You could fuck me,” Crixus offered. “It’s the least I can do.” “How very altruistic of you to offer what already belongs to me.” Vinnie traced the curve of his strangely small, perfectly-formed ear. “You’re my slave now, ? I own you.” He seized her hand and held it to her chest. “I’m being sincere, Lavinia. I’m trying to apologize.” Vinnie allowed herself an eye roll. “I’m a succubus, for the gods’ sake. Apologize with a stiff drink and a hard cock.” Crixus’s fingers rested on her hips as he shifted her weight. “I could arrange half of that right now.” The truth of his words pressed against her through his jeans. “Did you mean what you said?” she asked. “Which part?” I think I’m in love. Lavinia’s mind was a jewelry box, and this phrase, the little tune that played every time she opened the lid. She had opened it again and again since he’d spoken those words. She didn’t know if she believed them yet. Time would tell, and they had plenty of it. “About you being wrong?” she said. The relief was visible on his face. “Yes.” He paused a moment longer than she thought necessary. “I’m…an impulsive, arrogant, self-serving asshole who’s spent his whole life seeking his own pleasure with…little or no thought for the feelings of others.” “You looked like you had to think about that.” “Because I did. I am under the care of a psychologist who suggested I think more and speak less.” “You are Crixus, right?” she quizzed. “Roman gladiator? Asshole demigod?” “Do I feel like Crixus?” His forearm snaked up her spine, his hand at the nape of

her neck, drawing her face downward. “I’m afraid I’ll have to sample for myself.” Vinnie lowered her mouth to his and knew with irritating certainty that nothing, no one, had ever tasted this good. He had been written on her. In her. His lips, his tongue, his skin. Every curve and angle of him felt like an extension of the home she had always been meant to have. And she knew him. The way a flower knows to turn its face to the sun, or a leaf to bleed gold into its green veins. He pulled back only when both their lungs screamed for air and their blood pounded with the shared rush of intoxicating desire. “What now?” he asked. “What next?” Her lips grazed across his ear as her fingers curled around the living iron between them. “How about breakfast?”

<<<>>>

Preview Unraveled

Cynthia St. Aubin

Other series by Cynthia St. Aubin:

Tails from the Alpha Art Gallery

Love Bites

Love Sucks

Love Lies

The Witches of Port Townsend

Which Witch Is Which?

Which Witch Is Wicked?

Which Witch is Wild?

Which Witch is Willing?

The Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist

Unlovable

Unlucky

Unhoppy

Unbearable

Unassailable

Undeadly

Unexpecting

From Hell to Breakfast

Unraveled

Also available as Box Sets…

Disordered

Dysfunctional

&

The Complete Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt

Volume I

Volume II

Volume III

Jane Avery Mysteries

Private Lies

Lying Low

About the Author

Bestselling author Cynthia St. Aubin wrote her first play at age eight and made her brothers perform it for the ission price of gum wrappers. A steal, considering she provided the wrappers in advance. Though her early work debuted to mixed reviews, she never quite gave up on the writing thing, even while earning a mostly useless master's degree in art history and taking her turn as a cube monkey in the corporate warren. Because the voices in her head kept talking to her, and they discourage drinking at work, she started publishing books instead. When she's not standing in front of the fridge eating cheese, she's hard at work figuring out which mythological, art historical, or paranormal friends to play with next. She lives in Texas with a handsome musician and one surly cat.

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