Page 155 of Incoronate
Anita’s mouth curved, just slightly. “It means, Your Highness, that you don’t have an army anymore. You are the army.” She tilted her head. “Every demon, every Dark Caster, every hellhound, every creature in any Realm that owes its existence to Hades, just felt the line of succession close. You’re at the top of it now. They’ll come when you call. They’ll come when you don’t, if they think you might want them. They’ll fight for you. Die for you, if such a thing applied.”
“They serve you, and only you,” supplied Annabelle helpfully.
“Serve me?” I made a face before I could stop myself.
“Sworn their allegiance, then.” Annabelle shrugged. “Call it what makes you feel better, sweetheart, but the math doesn’t change.”
“And tell her about the Realm of Hades!” chimed Arianna, like this was some luxury cruise I just won.
“What about the Realm?” asked Trace, his hand finding the small of my back, grounding me.
“She can move through it. At will!” answered Arianna, her amber eyes never leaving mine.
Anita nodded that it was true. “The dominion is absolute within Hades and considerable even beyond it. There hasn’t been a Daughter on that throne in over six hundred years. The Legion has been waiting.” She paused. “Some of them rather impatiently.”
“Speaking of which,” cut in Annabelle, glancing toward the front window where the rain hammered against the glass. “You might want to brace yourself. They don’t all have great manners.”
“What? Wait.” I held up a hand. “Stop. Just. Stop.”
All three of them looked at me.
“I didn’t do this for any of that,” I said, my voice coming out clearer than it had any right to be. “I don’t care about the throne. I don’t care about being called Queen. I don’t care about the Realms or the Legions or who bows when I walk into a room.”
Annabelle’s brow lifted. “Way to be a bore about it.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “Look, I did this for one reason. To raise the army I need to bring the Order to its knees. To make them answer for every life they’ve taken. For my father. For Ares. For the future that none of us are going to get to haveif we don’t find a way to stop them.” My voice didn’t break. The hum wouldn’t let it. “I did this so William Thompson and every last one of his Council goes into the ground tonight, and stays there. And so that nobody who shares my blood ever has to look over their shoulder for the Order again.”
Anita’s eyes held mine for a long, considering beat. Then her expression shifted into something I hadn’t seen on her face before. Something almost like respect.
“Well,” she said softly. “Why didn’t you say so.”
Behind her, Arianna’s amber eyes flickered with something old, and her lips parted, and she whispered three words that traveled through the room like a knell.
“They’re already coming.”
50. THE LONG ROPE
When I said I wanted an army, I should have specified I didn’t want said army inside my house. All at once. With the doorbell apparently optional.
The first ones arrived within minutes. By the time I’d made it back upstairs with Anita to the study to figure out what came next, the rain had thickened into something biblical, and the front lawn of the Blackburn Estate was no longer the front lawn of the Blackburn Estate. Through the window, in the gray-black wash of the storm, I could see them gathering. Dozens of them. Then more. Figures cloaked and hooded in the drowning rain, standing in loose formations along the property line, unmoving and patient as the water sluiced down around them.
Dark Casters. I could feel them through the new hum at the base of my spine, the way I might feel light against my skin without looking at it. The powerful ones, the older ones, the ones who’d been alive long enough to know what it meant when the Hadean line of succession closed.
Then the demons came.
They didn’t walk through the front door. They simply were, suddenly, where they hadn’t been a second before. High Demons mostly, judging by the way they took up space, the way the air around them seemed to bend a fraction to accommodate them. Tall, narrow figures with skin the color of burnt parchment, and eyes that didn’t quite hold light the way human eyes did. Two of them stationed themselves at the foot of the stairs, and three more along the corridor outside the study. They didn’t speak. They didn’t acknowledge anyone butme, dropping their heads in slow, respectful bows every time I walked past them.
And then there were the hellhounds.
At least nine of them that I’d counted, every one of them appearing the same way the demons had. Standing where nothing had been standing a second before.
Three followed me everywhere I went, padding silently at my heels with their massive heads tracking every step I took. Three more lined the upstairs hallway, and three at the base of the staircase, sitting upright on their muscled hind legs, those sinewy hunches rising almost as high as their heads. Coarse, oil-black fur slick with rainwater, as though they’d carried the storm in with them.
Every time Trace or Dominic moved within a few feet of me, one of them would rise just enough off its haunches to make the threat clear, a low growl rolling out of its chest like a warning that hadn’t bothered to finish forming.
“Tell your dogs to stand down, angel,” said Dominic dryly the third time it happened. “They appear to be under the impression that I might double as an appetizer.”
I lifted a hand without looking. “He’s mine,” I said, my voice carrying further than I intended it to. “They both are. Anyone who touches them touches me.”
