Rolf asked, “The battle cat that follows you around like a kitten? My buddy?”
“The one who wants to eat you, you mean,” Khent said dryly.
“Yeah, her.”
“Well, where is it then?” Mormo asked.
“I can tell you it’s not on Tiger Mountain.” Onvyr tugged his arm from Mormo’s clutches and rubbed it. “Well, not anymore.”
“What?”
Rolf gave a subtle nod to Khent, who quickly eased away while Mormo interrogated Onvyr.
Speeding from the kitchen downstairs to the basement, Rolf asked, “What do you think you met on that mountain? What happened exactly?”
They moved into Khent’s lab as Khent went over what happened. Rolf looked thoughtful, and Khent asked, “What about you? What did you learn about this Staff of Blight that went missing?”
“Stolen from the bazaar?” At Khent’s nod, Rolf continued, “I learned a lot, as a matter of fact. Yes, it did supposedly belong to Nergal, our Mesopotamian asshole god of ghosts, pestilence, and chaos. But not the good kind of chaos. The nasty kind.”
“Chaos is a lack of order, and thus it’s all bad, Rolf.”
“No way. My kind of chaos makes life worth living. You never know what’s going to happen.” Rolf’s expression soured. “But you leave Nergal in charge and suddenly everyone’s rotting away, and there’s no one left to torture.”
“Ah, well then. You make a good point.”
“Right? Looks like we’re going to have to take out another god. That should be a good thing. A fun thing. But this dickhead has a habit of melting vampires.”
“I’m sorry. Melting?”
Rolf made a face. “Like with acid and sunlight. The kind you don’t recover from no matter who you are. Master or not. I know people. I have friends. None of them like Nergal at all.”
Khent rubbed his chin in thought. “What are the odds of him caring about finding the last Bloode Stone? Vampire concerns shouldn’t matter to a god.”
“Unless he’s in league with Hecate’s threat of the big bad Darkness with a capital D.” Rolf sounded glum.
Khent found this side of Rolf interesting. Nothing seemed to ever get Rolf down. The dirtier and more dangerous the fight, the better. What did Rolf know that Khent didn’t?
Khent studied his kin. “What do you think will happen if Nergal gets the Bloode Stone before we do?”
“Nothing good.”
And for Rolf, that was saying a lot.
The draugr thrived on disorder—thegoodkind.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Deepin the endless cavern of Irkalla, the only underworld that mattered, Nergal, god of death, sighed with disappointment. Just moments before, he’d gotten a taste of humanity with its bold colors, crisp sounds, and tasty flavors of life and even richer death. Experiencing the decimation of so many, when he’d let the four-eyes explode, had been a remarkable experience.
So many magical creatures, his for the taking.
Until that fucking vampire had ruined his fun.
Ah, but the human woman, the necromancer. She’d felt different. Tempting. And she’d mentioned the stone…
A pall settled over the abyss in which he rested, his raised throne a bland conglomeration of bones held together by desperation and hopelessness. Everything around him was some shade of gray, shadows upon shadows, bathed in gloom.
