Gypsy Truths (All The Pretty Monsters #6)- Kristy Cunning Page 0,154

to make peace with the darkest wishes they have becoming a reality at their hand. Nor can they make peace with a monster living inside them.”

“Theon’s altar didn’t work. It couldn’t have. It cracked. If it cracks, it means the spell didn’t take,” I argue, remembering that much from our own past.

All that other shit sounds like an entirely new world of problems that I’m most certainly not in the mood to face.

“It worked well enough. Hyde’s like the bloody errant, malfunctioning Jack-in-the-Box that people unknowingly wind up every time they go seeking immortality. It pops out like the devious, deranged spirit it is, and it leeches onto the first host it likes. When Vance killed ‘Jack,’ Hyde skipped into the ghost plane and stalked its next opportunity with an unnerving amount of calculated patience. It hates the box. It’s a terribly tenacious, impatient, and competitive monster,” Talbot continues. “Violet was both perfect and all wrong for it—a constant, cosmic coin toss. But I’d tried everything else, so I figured, why the hell not? Then I got drunk for a while. End of story.”

He throws his hands up like he’s exhausted and tired of all my questions.

This is the worst beta I’ve ever had.

“And you don’t know if Violet can kill Idun without destroying half the town in the process? Also, let’s be outrageously open-minded and say you’re right and Hyde is a match for Idun’s monster…will Violet be able to push Hyde back after a fight of this magnitude?” I ask him.

I don’t like the way he shuts down all his expressions. It makes it too obvious that he doesn’t want to give anything away. He’s too suspicious as it bloody is.

“I’m afraid I have no personal attachment to these people or this place. There is no box anymore. That mark latched onto me in the dead of night, during one of the rare occasions I managed to sleep.”

His hand makes a seemingly unconscious move to rub the spot over his chest.

“What I’m telling you is that I’m here to handle Hyde.”

That doesn’t really answer my question.

I scrub a hand through my hair, glaring over at him, while ignoring my vibrating phone.

“My monster stayed in control of me for the first half of a century after that first battle,” I tell him, giving him a dead stare.

I try not to revisit the early days of immortality, because I was barely a passenger in my mind during those days.

“A weak-blooded Portocale fell in love with an old-blood Neopry Simpleton descendent, giving life to a girl who struggles to stay angry, in a world that never stops being angry, and she became the most powerful monster of them all,” he says very coldly. “A misfit monster found a misfit girl, who could make the monster immortal at last.”

He really does like pausing. I’m starting to notice his annoying tendency to constantly fuel the drama of a situation that is far too tense already.

“I feel like Violet was handpicked by the universe to right a wrong, and with a century of training, she may have been able to pull it off. But not this soon. Not this young. Not this new.”

“Stop leading me to the answer and just shoot it to me straight,” I demand with fraying patience.

“Long after a botched immortality ceremony, a cosmic storm rained across a full nation on the night of a full moon. A Portocale was struck dead. An immortal Portocale gypsy hopped to this dead body, after said immortal gypsy cheated her usual lengthy departure. And somewhere mixed in with all that, the babe survived even after the womb around her died.”

I say nothing, and simply stare at him, waiting for him to hurry this along.

“The Simpleton’s tainted their hope for the first time since eternity started for them,” he tells me. “Yet another cosmic storm, caused by an unnatural child’s birth. The girl was always going to be a monster. Her natural monster would have been useless, and as the first of its kind, would have been ripped apart by the devious, powerful betas. The monster inside her now is about to rule the world with uncontested power.”

He’s done all he can to freak me the fuck out and confuse the shit out of me at the same time, since it all sounds like make-believe. However, he’s yet to answer my question.

“None of this makes sense. Not for the first time, I bloody sympathize with how hard this must have been for Violet when she