CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

PERCY AND JOE REGROUP

T o say Percy was shell-shocked would be an understatement. He’d thought of Joe the whole time he was trapped—been desperate to get to him—but he never once imagined he’d come across the sight he had. The revulsion of knowing what Molly was doing to him, the thought of his screams, the deep-seated hatred he felt for himself that he wasn’t there. As though he could have fought whatever spell put them all to sleep. As though he could have broken down a solid iron door with his bare hands. But that failing sat deep in his gut, regardless.

Then he’d killed Cleo. Maybe she wasn’t dead, and maybe she wasn’t Cleo, but he’d killed her. Sunk a blade into her heart as though she was nothing, and he felt it, the blood still sticky on his fingers, a constant reminder of his coldness. His inhumanity. When even Joe had found it in himself to try to stop him.

“Are you all right?” The hand that tugged at his lifted him, just like it always did, from the muck and filth of his regret, and there he was. Joe. Beautiful, vital, alive.

Percy clasped his hand tighter, escaping with him into a tuft of trees, one of the few spots they could find away from the erupting graves. Rather than worry him even more with his dark thoughts, he said only, “I don’t know how to kill her.” Because even if bile swam in his throat at the idea, he knew he had little choice but to do it again.

“She’s mad,” said Joe. “Completely mad. She wanted me here alone. She set this trap. It’s some kind of, well, I guess you’d call it religious trauma, but of a pretty significant magnitude.”

“She’s got a good motive,” Percy conceded, meaning it more as a discussion of what they were up against than any sort of forgiveness.

Even so, Percy could feel the searing heat in Joe’s eyes, which he refused to meet when Joe snapped, “They were Protestants!”

“Totally different, I know. Nothing like the Catholics burning witches on the continent.” Joe took a breath to interrupt. Percy didn’t let him finish. “For the record, I don’t think it’s okay that she tried to burn you.”

“Thank you!” Joe replied, about as sarcastically as he’d ever said anything.

“But now we know what we’re dealing with. Somewhat. Someone who has a very good and very strong reason for wanting to see you dead.”

“I didn’t do anything to her!” Joe vomited out.

“I’m not saying you did. I don’t want you dead.”

“Well, thank you very much, Percy, that makes me feel so much better.”

“I’m just saying I understand why she would want to kill you.”

“For fucks’s sake.” But as always, it was said with all the warmth and humour Percy’s ridiculous outbursts always brought about in Joe.

“And now we’re getting somewhere. So she has a vendetta against you, the Church?—”

“And humanity, in general, by the sounds of it,” Joe hurriedly explained, checking over his shoulder to see if any skeletons had managed to dig themselves fully out of their graves to give chase. “She has some plan, that if she can get the sheath and the spear together, she’ll destroy everything. Tear society apart and rebuild it, which is obviously a bit outlandish.”

“Not at all. Not if the mythology around those artefacts holds true, the power she would wield is beyond anything we could imagine.”

“That’s worrying.”

“That’s an understatement.”

“And she remembers everything. She remembers dying, she remembers being trapped in that skull, but more than that, she remembers everything Cleo remembers. And I know you said she’d had a hard time. And that seems to be what Molly’s zeroed in on. Had she taken someone else, someone with no problems and an easy life, someone who thought the best of people and the world?—”

“The type of person who would never have been drawn to Barmiston Hall the way Cleo was.” A very matter-of-fact statement that carried an air of melancholy, and Joe knew what Percy was thinking. And just then, he loved him even more for it. Joe squeezed his hand. “We were just friends,” Percy added, as though he were a doll and Joe had just pushed the voice activation button.

“I know.” Joe’s smile was hidden in the dark as they trudged on, silent and moss-covered graves almost black around them. “But that explains why she didn’t kill you. I really believe she never thought you’d do it. She thought she was some kind of safe with you.”

“Well, she’ll be pissed off now.”

“Big time.”

“She did try to have me killed, though. In a roundabout way.”

“What happened? Where were you?”

“She stuck me in a coffin with a zombie.”

Joe stopped, spun Percy around, examining him all over. “You didn't get bitten, did you?”

“No, I took his teeth out.” Joe wondered at the averted gaze, the almost guilty look that came over him when he said it. “And he was very dried out. No saliva. I’m guessing that’s how it spreads.”

“I never thought about that. Does it have to be a fresh zombie? Can they even turn us?”

“I don’t know.”

“But where were you? How’d you get out?”

Percy’s face softened with a sheepish grin. “It was Moxie. She used her powers to let me out. I don’t know where she is now. I heard you call, and I ran as fast as I could to get to you. I’m sure she’s around here somewhere.” He recommenced their walk, saying, “I’m just glad I didn’t let you get rid of her.”

“You were the one who wanted to get rid of her!”

“Details. Anyway, there’s something else I should probably tell you, and it’s nothing to worry about. We’re in a graveyard full of reanimated skeletons, after all, so what’s one more?” Still he walked, but suddenly he gave Joe the impression he was trying to get away from more than skeletons.

Joe stumbled forward to keep up and to read his expression. “I’m sorry? What do you mean?”

“It’s more of a philosophical question at this stage,” Percy waffled, eyes ahead. “I would need you to consider art, and the question of what art is. Is it in the eye of the creator? The beholder? And you know, if we took all the dead-inside pricks out of the art world, just kept the virtuous, can you imagine the saccharine array of utter bullshit we’d be left with?”

Joe slipped under a branch that Percy held back for him. “What are you talking about?”

Percy paused there, hands expressing whatever he wasn’t quite coming to. “I’m just saying that if I’d done a thing?—”

“A thing?”

“An art project?—”

“Is this important right now?”

“No.” Because how could it be? Right here, this second, chasing a witch, the dead rising around them… “No, it’s nothing,” Percy agreed, relieved. “All that matters is we’re here together, and we’re going to end this now. Even if I don’t know how. Maybe I can appeal to her hatred of the Church and general misanthropy? I feel like we identify somewhat?—”

“Or maybe not?” Joe suggested.

“When we find her, let me do the talking.”

“I’m not sure that’s a great idea.”

“Trust me, handsome. How about we find her, tie her up, take her back to the apartment, and we’ll work at it until she sees things our way and gives Cleo her body back? I’ve done it once before, you know.”

Joe laughed. “That’s true. You did well.”

Percy took a hand to Joe’s cheek and kissed him. “We’ll be fine. The important thing is that she never got her hands on the sheath.” As the words shot a shard of ice into Joe’s veins, Percy chuckled out, “Because in that case, we’d have been royally fucked.”

“H-how fucked, exactly?” The two stepped out of the trees into the scant moonlight of a small clearing—a circle of grass, surrounded on all sides by tall and teetering graves. “It’s useless without the Spear of Destiny, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But if I were Molly…” Percy gave brief hesitation, but must have decided it wasn’t worth troubling Joe about what he would have done if he was a powerful witch with a four-hundred-year vendetta against mankind. “Well, it doesn’t matter. I knew you’d never give over that kind of power, even for me. Because you have the heart of a saint, handsome. The bigger picture, humanity, that sort of thing comes first. You’re just not the sort to risk all of human existence for?—”

“Percy!” Leo’s shout across the small clearing cut into Joe like a knife. He, Althea, and Giordano tumbled out of the darkness, Leo beaming at Percy, running, until he threw himself into his arms, knocking him back several steps.

“Leo?” Percy wrapped his arms around him, disbelieving, but still he kissed the top of his head, and though smiling, said harshly, “What the fuck are you doing here? You need to leave, all of you.”

“But we got it,” said Althea, smile just as wide and proud as Leo’s. “The sheath. It’s right here, just like Joe said.”

Giordano’s strong arms lifted the box. He offered a nod and a grin, and Percy’s eyes turned on Joe. It was but one short, shocked, unreadable moment before Molly’s voice sang around the open space. “Finally.”

She stood atop one of the higher-set graves, bloody, beautiful, and with Percy’s ancient and rusted Spear of Destiny turning over and over in two hands.

Percy’s eyes locked onto it with sickened recognition. “Fuck.”

Tareq and Waleed stood on either side of Molly’s grisly stage. Waleed’s entrails dragged along behind him, and Tareq’s naked chest was awash with blood that still gushed endlessly, relentlessly, from the gash Percy had made in his neck.

But for all this show of gory power and intimidation, Percy’s eyes flitted uncontrollably to Joe once, again, and on the third with a grin that was both sly and deeply adoring. “You really do love me, don’t you?”

Joe, always and again, on that edge of whether to cry or laugh, gave into the latter, with the helpless admission, “I do, Percy.”

Percy yanked him close, leaned closer still, and said, “I guess we’d better save the world, then.”