Strength (Curse of the Gods #4)(36)

“I’ll try,” I replied, glancing at Emmy out of the corner of my eye to see just how far I would be allowed to push her before she exploded. “But I’m not sure how the collapsing wall is going to respond to our scheduling conflict.”

Coen and Aros were laughing, but Emmy was reaching for me—either to strangle me or to drag me out of the room, I wasn’t sure—when the wall suddenly collapsed inwards and a giant form passed through the rubble, forcing more of the wall to break off and tumble to the ground.

“Morning,” Rome muttered, passing through the destruction and strolling nonchalantly past us to the other wall, raising his fists.

“Um …” I struggled to form a coherent thought.

Emmy’s mouth dropped open and she turned to watch him. He smashed his fists into the wall, forcing it to collapse inwards. He had to do it in several places to get the whole wall down, and then he was passing through that one, as well.

“You know I have a door, right?” I heard Yael’s sardonic voice from within.

“You know what,” Emmy was shaking her head, reaching for me again, “I don’t even want to know. We don’t have time. Let’s go.”

“Meet you guys back here!” I yelled out, as she pulled me to the door. “Don’t crush anything I wouldn’t crush!”

Emmy almost pulled my arm out of its socket as she forced me down several stone hallways and out to the edge of the mountain. We hurried down several sets of natural stone steps curved to the shape of the mountain, and then through another hallway—this one several levels below the sol bedrooms. Finally, we reached a doorway. It was huge and circular, set into a hollow in the rock. She knocked once, and it swung open a moment later.

Cyrus was sitting at his desk, but his hand was raised, as though he had used some kind of Neutral power to open the door.

He glanced up from the scroll he had been writing on, a frown taking over his face. “Sit down,” he ordered, motioning to a chair in front of his desk.

I started to walk over to it, but before I had even taken my second step, the chair itself was moving. It slid backwards and then past me before reversing directions and swooping forward to catch me. I found myself seated right where he had indicated, my eyes wide.

He made another hand motion and the door slammed closed.

“What are you doing here?” he snapped at Emmy, who had moved to stand beside my chair.

“I’m Willa’s serving dweller,” she explained.

“Says who?” his eyebrows shot up. “You do realise that I’m the person in charge of this, don’t you, bug?”

“Bug?” I broke into their conversation, forcing Cyrus to falter in the intense stare-off he had going with Emmy.

“She’s an insect,” he told me, his lip curling up in disgust. “Annoying. She’s always there, always buzzing. She’s a bug.”

“You can’t talk about her like that,” I shot back, but apparently Emmy didn’t need me to defend her. She was already stepping up to Cyrus’s desk, her fists clenched again.

“And you are a … a … addicted to wine!” she shouted, apparently having trouble deciding on what she wanted to accuse him of.

“I feel like that was a poor choice of retorts,” I told her helpfully. She turned to glare at me.

“That’s ridiculous,” Cyrus sounded like he was laughing, but he was managing to keep the expression of amusement from his face by some miracle.

We both turned to him just in time to witness him pulling a small wine-skin from beneath his desk. He was in the process of raising it to his lips, the laughter finally creeping into his eyes, when he paused, realising what he was doing. He scowled, taking a quick swig before stashing it away again.

“I’m drinking because I’m bored,” he snarled at us. “And I’m bored because I’m babysitting insects.”

“Don’t want to be rude or anything,” I rushed out before the two of them could get into an all-out fighting match, with fists and magic and weird sexual chemistry. “But can we move on to the punishment portion of the meeting? I have to get back to the Abcurses before Rome tunnels right through the side of the mountain.”

“What?” Cyrus asked, apparently ignoring the practical part of my request and jumping straight to the unimportant part about Rome.

“The punishment,” I reminded him. “That’s why I’m here. Last night I made an accidental little fire and you seemed to be in a bad mood about it so you said I had to come here—”

“No, Willa.” He sighed dramatically. “Obviously I know why you’re here. I was asking about Rome tunnelling—ugh, you know what, never mind. Yes, let’s get on with the punishment.” He leaned back in his chair before continuing. “I’m going to need you to periodically return to Topia without getting caught, in order to carry out a few things that I am no longer able to do, since I’m stuck in this gods-forsaken hellhole. Understood?”

“Nope, not really,” I admitted easily. “That doesn’t so much sound like a punishment as it does you using me to do illegal things in Topia while you sit here at your desk, drinking and writing scrolls.”

“I wasn’t writing scrolls.” His lips curled in disgust again. He shoved the paper toward me. It had one word scrawled across it in cursive writing.