Chosen - Kiersten White Page 0,39
Your job is to kill him, if you want to see your little demon pet again. You’ll have a ten-minute head start over the other hunters. They’ll be hunting the werewolf … and anyone in the woods before them.” He smiles, his veneers catching the light to show the ghosts of his tiny gray teeth behind them. “Kill the werewolf and make it out alive, you’ll win a prize and get your demon back. If not, well, can you really call yourself a Slayer?”
I can’t believe my mother considers this man an ally. He’s like the veneer over his teeth—wealth and privilege covering up rotting waste. He thinks he understands what Slayers are? He has no idea. None of them do. No one gets to threaten my friends. No one gets to make decisions that are mine.
Something in my expression must reveal my thoughts, because he smiles sharply. “Before you do anything rash, remember that I have your friends. If you harm me now, none of them make it out alive.”
“Can’t wait for my prize.” I smile at him with such blankly intense cheer that he finally shudders and calls for Jeeves to return me to my cell until the game.
ARTEMIS
HONORA PULLS ARTEMIS INTO AN abandoned side hall. The basement level of the shiny building is far less shiny. Their failure to snag more than a handful of demons at the convention means that they’ll have to go hunting instead of buying in bulk. Sean has some leads—he always does—but it’s dirty, dangerous, aggravating work.
And Artemis doesn’t want to be far away from the Sleeping One. She needs to be close to him, watching. Ready. Nothing can be done now, but when it happens, she’ll be there.
Honora checks up and down the hallway, drained of life by the flickering fluorescent lights above them. When she’s certain they’re alone, she turns and folds her arms. “I read the book.”
Artemis has pored over the book of the Sleeping One. Maybe Honora found something she missed. “Most of it is incomprehensible, right? But he has to go through three forms, and the third and final form will be the most powerful. Like, all shall love me and despair levels of powerful, minus being as hot as Galadriel. Also probably minus the love and plus a whole lot of despair.” Artemis is rambling, she knows she is, but she can’t focus. She paces. Seeing Nina threw her off. She keeps remembering the look on Nina’s face, the shock and betrayal and hurt. Artemis was never the person who put hurt on Nina’s face. She was the one who protected her sister from it. She shakes her head, trying to move past it.
“Right,” Honora says. “So my question is, why are we waiting? We’ve got a hellgod here. He’s not at full power, or even close if his ramblings about the cruel ravages of time are any indication. And he can’t juice up until he finds the right battery size of demon. So I say we make with the stabbing and end it before things get precarious.”
“No!” Artemis backtracks from the force of her exclamation. “No. You saw him stick a knife all the way into his brain and not even bat an eye. How do you propose we kill that?”
“I mean, hard to recover from a decapitation.”
“But not demonically unprecedented. And what happens if we don’t get him on the first strike? Once he knows we’re attacking, that’s it.”
“So what, we help him get what he needs to find his third form? It will be a lot harder to defeat him when he’s at full power.”
“We’ll never let him get there. But we need his guard all the way down. That’s the perfect moment. He’s going to be so focused on changing that he won’t see us coming. And by the time he realizes what we’re doing, it’ll be too late.”
“And what, exactly, are we doing?” Honora frowns, searching Artemis’s face.
Artemis hasn’t exactly told Honora this part yet. Honora has been operating under the assumption they were here to assassinate the hellgod. But they’re a team. Honora needs to know. “We’re stealing it. The hellgod’s power.”
Honora’s eyes go wide. “Moon. Baby. Why?”
“If there’s power up for grabs, we should be the ones who get it! Aren’t you tired of being powerless?”
Honora’s face shifts, becoming fierce. Her eyes narrow. “No one gets to make me feel powerless without my permission. Not ever again. I’m not powerless, and neither are you.”
This is so much harder than