Garden of Serpents (The Demon Queen Trials #3)(77)

I turned to see Shai and Legion stepping outside, hand in hand. “Meet you guys there in twenty.”

My wings burst from my back, and I raced into the sky, tasting the salty air. Exhilaration lit me from inside as I arced higher with the two incubi. It was so thrilling, all I could do was laugh wildly, and I could hear Sabazios and Orion doing the same. We’d all been missing this from our lives, and now that it was back, the thrill gave me life.

High up, I peered down at the City of Thorns, and it seemed to glow with gold in the night. The Lilu were free once more.

Maybe there’d come a time when we really did need to open the grimoire and free the demons completely. But for now, we had everything we needed here—and our little city was a light rising from the darkness again.





48





THIRTEEN YEARS LATER





I sensed him in the room, and when I opened my eyes, I saw him there—my little green-eyed boy, his eyes wide. I should be annoyed that he was waking me from the dead of sleep, but he was so ridiculously cute that it was hard to resent him here, even at this hour. Moonlight washed over him, and his auburn hair stuck up in all directions.

I glanced at Orion, who slept as still and immobile as a statue, not waking for any of this.

My little boy held one arm up. The other clutched his stuffed wolf, imaginatively named Wolfie. “I want snuggles,” he said in his small voice, waiting to be picked up.

He was wearing his pajamas with the cartoon octopus that said, “More arms for hugs.”

As I stared at him blearily, he reached out for the sheets and gripped them hard as he tried to pull himself up. Already, his bum was in the air, and he grunted with the effort.

I scooped under his bum to help him onto the bed. “Come on up here, sweet boy.”

He nestled in tightly, trying to get the covers over himself. He was getting as close as he possibly could, like he wanted to crawl back into the space in which he’d once lived.

I wrapped him in a hug and pulled him close against my enormous, round stomach. “Be careful, baby. Remember, Mommy has a baby in here.”

“Sorry, Mama,” Nico said as he nuzzled into me. “And sorry, baby,” he added as he reached down to pet my belly.

Nicodemus shoved the collar of his shirt in his mouth to chew on it, his favorite habit since we got rid of his pacifiers.

“The baby is fine,” I assured him, rubbing his head. “Just too big.”

“Hey, Nico.” Orion reached over me, touching Nico’s hair with sleepy fingers.

“Hi, Daddy,” Nico replied. “I need to be in the middle.” He climbed over me, carefully trying to avoid my stomach and stepping on my boobs instead. He settled in the gap, delighted to be between his two favorite people. “I’m the middle of the sandwich,” he declared in a voice too loud for the hour.

Given the size of my belly, rolling over wasn’t easy. But I flopped onto my back first until the lack of air from the baby made me shift again, and then I hoisted my large stomach over the other way. You’d think being a pregnant demon would be easier than being a pregnant mortal, but while I’d never experienced pregnancy as a mortal, I had a sneaking suspicion that this wasn’t really a better deal. When the gods had cursed women with this discomfort, it had applied to us all, demon and mortal alike.

My body finally relaxed when I was facing Nico and Orion, and I could breathe a little easier again. I slid my arm over Nico’s toddler belly. “Go back to sleep, sweetie.”

He furrowed his brow in deep thought before producing the question we’d come to expect on a nightly basis: “Are ghosts real?”

No need to ask what the bad dream was about. It was always the same.

And even though Orion and I knew firsthand that ghosts were real, and that they haunted the Asmodean Ward, I didn’t see any reason to fill Nico in just yet. If we did, we’d be sharing our bed with him until he was at least a teenager.

“I don’t believe they are,” said Orion. “And even if they were, so what? They can’t do anything. They’re just like fog. Maybe the fog is a little sad sometimes, but the fog can’t hurt us.”

Nico nodded.

“And let’s pretend,” Orion added, “just for fun, since none of this is real anyway, that a ghost managed to get past the magical wards and then somehow got into our palace. What do you suppose would happen to that ghost when Mommy got a hold of it?”

“No more ghost?” Nico asked.

“That’s right.” My eyes started to drift shut. “No more ghost.”

Of all the scary things in the world, especially in our world, my baby had, for some reason, glommed on to ghosts as being the worst kind of nightmare fuel. While I was no fan of hauntings, they posed no threat to any of us. Ghosts were insubstantial as smoke.

In any case, when it came to threats, our little Nico didn’t have much to worry about.

Not once we learned what the gods had bestowed upon him.





*



With a smile, I cracked another anzu egg into the bowl and whipped it. The scent of coffee filled the air, and sunlight streamed into our kitchen. Amon still came over for dinner in the evenings, but the mornings we had all to ourselves. At some point in the night, Orion had carried little Nico back to his room after he’d kicked us too many times in our sleep. Now Nico was slumbering away upstairs after an exhausting night of thinking about ghosts.