Episode VII: Goblin Moon

I was shaking so hard I could barely stand. I stumbled into the street, throwing myself backward just in time to avoid becoming a smear on the pavement as a ground car swept past without slowing. I threw a finger up at the retreating bumper and shot a hasty glance over my shoulder.

Had I been seen? I had no way of knowing, but I was terrified by the possibility. Death stalked the park, and I had witnessed something so horrible my tiny heart had almost burst with the effort of restraining my cries of shock and terror.

The only things that moved at the edge of the park behind me were shadows of trees cast by the streetlights, but my imagination painted them as monstrous figures emerging from the depths to devour me whole.

My name is Vex, and I’m a goblin. Oh, I know someone might think, reading that, but goblins are stupid and illiterate. There’s no way the narrator of this tale could be one of those reviled creatures.

That’s where they’d be wrong. Not all of us are either of those things. A few of us, the elite among us, are as intelligent as a human being, and Kali, our Queen, made sure that those of us who could make use of it sought some sort of education.

Who knows where we’d be if not for Kali?

I sprinted across the street, jumping onto the sidewalk and glancing around again. Haight Street was vacant. Not a single ground car cruised down its length, not a single human being walked its sidewalks.

San Francisco never sleeps, but sometimes this neighborhood got in a few winks. All the big touristy places had their off times. One o-clock in the morning on a Sunday just happened to be Haight-Asbury’s time to drowse.

I padded down the sidewalk, watching for any sign of pursuit. Still nothing. Maybe the monster hadn’t seen me after all. Maybe I’d escaped its notice. I was, after all, only a goblin. Not large enough to pose a threat, and hardly someone or something the authorities were likely to believe.

I needed to get off the street.

Hadn’t I heard of a watering hole in this area with a reputation of being a sort of sanctuary? I seemed to remember…

The sound was my only warning—a muffled boom from overhead—and I dove into a doorway, feeling a great gust of wind rush past me. Shivering more from fear than from the cold, I peered around the building’s façade, trying to see something, anything, that may have caused that effect.

Whatever it was seemed to be gone. I breathed a sigh of relief, but didn’t feel safe venturing out of my hole just yet. Something that flew had just tried to snatch me up like a hawk might a field mouse, and I wasn’t about to step blithely back into danger.

But I’d suddenly acquired the feeling of being watched, and that was in its way more frightening than dodging large winged predators stooping out of the darkness at me. I shivered once again and, grabbing my nerve by the throat, crept out of the doorway, edging down the sidewalk scant inches from the front of the building.

Now where was that bar? I knew it was around here somewhere. If I could only find it, I would be safe for a little while. A brief respite might give me the chance to come up with some sort of plan. To escape, of course. It looked as though my residency in San Francisco had come to an abrupt end. I couldn’t live somewhere that harbored that sort of monster, particularly one that decided I’d make worthy prey.

I’d be no more than a bite-sized morsel to the creature I’d seen in the park, but its interest in me was obviously not that of a discriminating diner. I was a witness to something I didn’t quite understand, but I was a witness nonetheless. The creature had to know that there was at least a small chance someone in authority would listen to me.

Maybe it was afraid I’d tell Kali. Which I would, had she still been on Earth. She’d been gone for months now and we were alone for the second time in our existence, able to rely on no one but ourselves. And even that had limits. There were very few of my own kind I trusted, for example. Most goblins weren’t exactly the kind of people who inspired confidence.

Not that I blame them for being selfish, conniving, treacherous and deceitful. When you’re less than three feet tall in a world made for people twice your size and instantly recognizable as something inferior, you had to come up with some way to survive. For most of us, that meant either begging or stealing, or doing the jobs no human would deign to do.

“Goblins are wonderful. Everyone should own one or two.” As long as they keep them locked in the basement when they’re not working, that is.

Don’t mind my cynicism. It’s been hard-won. People tolerate goblins if we make ourselves useful, but they don’t have to like us.

I darted down the side of the building, racing for the next corner. My breath was coming in harsh pants and ice water ran through my veins. At any moment I expected to feel the claws of something large pierce my back and carry me into the sky. Winged death pursued me, and I knew escape was nearly impossible.

I felt the wind like a cold harbinger on my back and stumbled forward, a shrill scream rising in my throat. Out of the darkness ahead of me emerged a tall figure which stopped and glanced skyward. “By the Maker!” it cried in a deep male voice.

It rushed forward and snatched me up like a child, then spun, clearing the street in a single prodigious bound. Long legs ate distance like an Olympic speed-eater hunched over a plate of hot-dogs. He held me cradled against him and ran for all he was worth.

I couldn’t see anything but the leaden gray sky and glimpses of the man’s face and long hair blowing in the wind. Then I cried out as a huge saurian beast soared silently over us, its great whirling eyes staring down at us, shining with a pure dark malevolence.

My rescuer dodged sideways, underneath a large overhang, and I heard a shriek of anger as we broke through a door and into a room filled with smoke, the scent of alcohol, and the soft murmur of voices. I was carried up a ramp and deposited back on my feet. I stared up at my rescuer and felt my knees turn to liquid.

I staggered back, stumbling over someone’s foot, and sprawled unceremoniously on my back under a table that rose like a huge canopy above me. I scrambled into a sitting position with my back against the table’s center post.

One might wonder what had panicked me this time, considering the dragon was still somewhere outside, probably irritated and aggravated that I’d managed to escape. No, my problem this time was with my rescuer.

He was also my creator.

The immortal Hades, the mad scientist and mage who’d stolen human children and turned them into an inhuman army of short, squat, not particularly bright creatures he’d expected to use as shock troops against the invading Cen. Our Father. Our Destroyer.

Goblins make terrible soldiers. The majority are too stupid to remember what to do when combat’s necessary, and the rest of us are too smart not to run at the first sign of danger.

Yeah, we’re cowardly. At least the bright ones are. And that’s a good thing when you’re less than three feet tall. We’re tough for our size, but we’re completely outmatched by some of the monsters roaming around these days. Like dragons.

Of course, I’d never heard of dragons trolling the parks of San Francisco hoping to chomp down innocent tourists and goblins for dessert.

At the moment I actually feared the man crouching down to peer under the table at me more than I did the dragon. “I won’t hurt you,” he said.

Sure, I thought. Like you could do anything worse to me than you already have. This wasn’t strictly true, of course, but it wasn’t all that far off the mark. Sometime long ago I was a human child, and Hades’s mad ambition had changed me into this…thing…that I am now.

I recognized him, and remembered him from the lab and afterward, as he inspected his new army. I was one of those he intended to serve as an officer—smart enough to know the difference between an “attack” and a “retreat”. 

“What the hell is going on here?” asked a booming voice, and my shelter was abruptly yanked away from above me. I scuttled across the floor, only to be snatched up by a second dark figure, even larger and more imposing than Hades himself.

This man was also dark of complexion. Not the unearthly ebon color of Hades, but the dusky tone of what they used to refer to as “Black” or “African-American”. He was a veritable giant, and as soon as he touched me, I knew he wasn’t completely human himself. He lifted me up by the back of my jacket and inspected me disdainfully. “Now you’re bringing goblins into the Lounge, Hades? It ain’t enough that you brought them into existence in the first place?”

“Funny, Boneyard. Real funny.”

“Little bugger looks scared to death. Of course, looking at your mug, he would be, wouldn’t he?”

I caught a cold glare fired from Hades’s eyes that bounced off my captor without apparent effect. Personally it made me want to shrink into the tiniest ball and cease to exist.

That wasn’t going to happen. So I squirmed. “Let me go!” I shrieked.

In my twisting and turning I caught sight of the big man’s face, which was bent into an annoyed grimace. He gave me a quick shake. “Knock it off,” he growled like he meant it.

I knocked it off, hanging limply in his grasp. He made a noise somewhere between a sigh and a groan. “As if this place isn’t freaky enough,” he said irritably, “you had to bring a goblin?”

“He was being chased by a dragon,” Hades explained casually, as if that sort of thing happened all the time.

“A dragon? I thought they were all extinct.”

“Mostly,” Hades replied. “I only know of one living—in Oregon. This wasn’t him.”

“How do you know?”

“Believe me. I know. Actually, I’m wondering if we’re not getting immigrants.”

“Immigrant dragons from other Earths?” Another voice chimed in. “I suppose it’s possible.” This one was male as well and I turned my head to see a young, wraithlike human with pale skin and rusty blond hair approaching from somewhere out of view. He smelled like a mage. “Possible, unlikely and extremely unsettling.”

“Glad you think so, Kevin,” Hades told him tersely. “Freaks the shit out of me.”

“Could you please put me down,” I squeaked to the big lycanthrope. That’s what he was, of course. Some type of shapeshifter. Feline, if I had to guess.

Don’t ask how I know this stuff. It’s a talent. I can feel anything out of the ordinary in other creatures. Like I already knew the pale man, Kevin, was a mage. It’s an odd talent, perhaps, and one that seems generally useless for a creature as small and ineffectual as I am, but I’ve always found it worth having.

He peered at me curiously, gave a curt nod, and set me gently on the floor. I eyed Hades warily and edged my way around the big guy. “There was a dragon chasing me,” I said, unnecessarily. Hades had already told them that. Then again, I wasn’t sure how likely they were to believe him. The Sidhe had learned first-hand how deceptive he could be, and what he’d done to the goblins was nothing short of scandalous.

The evil bastard made me want to puke. Well, run and hide and puke. All at the same time.

I nearly shrieked as the front door exploded inward. I spun, rushing toward the horseshoe-shaped bar, and flung myself up one of the stools and across the polished wood. I was caught mid-flight by an average-sized human man who peered down at me in clear annoyance.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked in gruff tones.

“Hiding?” I squeaked. He looked down at me and let out a booming laugh.

“It’s not the dragon,” he told me, turning me to face the door. I spotted a couple of large humanoids—I hesitate to call them humans—standing at the bottom of the long ramp from the door to the main floor.

They were huge. Giants even in comparison to Hades and the lycanthrope. Their skin was as black as night and one of them seemed to furl great bat wings that were formed as much out of shadow as out of skin, bone and flesh. 

Fear gripped me like a hand fisted around my throat. They were going to kill me…I just knew it.

“Are all goblins such lily-livered cowards?” the man behind the bar asked, as he lifted me up and set me on the bar without even a word of apology.

Hades shrugged. “The smart ones are,” he said. “One of the reasons I abandoned the idea of using them as soldiers. The smart ones want no part of battle, and the dumb ones can’t be trusted not to do something remarkably stupid when the chips are down.”

This earned him dark looks from nearly every patron in the place, including the newcomers. “That’s cold, Hades,” the lycanthrope muttered, shaking his head. “You owe this creature.”

“I just saved his life,” the immortal objected.

“Which wouldn’t have even been an issue if he’d been left to pursue his own life as nature intended,” the other replied smartly.

Hades heaved a sigh as the bartender chuckled low close to my ear. He leaned forward and caught my gaze. “Are you hungry?” he asked me.

I blinked at him in astonishment. He was being remarkably nice for a human. And that’s all he was—a normal human. Nothing paranormal or preternatural about him at all. Most of his kind had as little to do with my kind as they could manage. We were good for domestic and janitorial work and little more. Or so they assumed.

For some reason, this guy was different. He was actually offering me food. “I don’t have any money.”

“That’s okay. You look like you could use a good meal and that’s payment enough for me.”

“Won’t your boss get upset?”

“I rather doubt it,” he answered with a quick grin. “This is my place and I’ll give free food to whoever I want.”

“Has he ever gotten free food?” I asked, stabbing a finger at Hades, who was engaged in a low, muttered conversation with the two huge newcomers.

“He can afford to pay. You can’t. Wait here.”

I did, and fifteen minutes later I was chomping into one of the best chicken sandwiches I’d ever had, along with a huge fizzy drink he identified as his own creation. It was a complex mix of tastes, including cranberry, lemonade, and some tingly sensations I just couldn’t quite identify.

I dipped a French fry in a puddle of ketchup and stuck it in my mouth just in time to nearly swallow it whole as the door banged open once again.

A woman swept into the room, wrapped in a cloak of haughty, and climbed the ramp to the main floor all the while managing to look as though she were looking down her nose at us all. She was strikingly beautiful, I decided, but the arrogance with which she surveyed the room stole a lot of its impact. Whoever she was, she wasn’t a nice person.

Her eyes, so pale as to be almost colorless, fell upon me and I felt myself shiver. My appetite vanished and I set the fry back on my plate. She took one step toward me and found her path barred by both the giants, the lycanthrope and Hades himself.

“Don’t even think about it,” Hades murmured, just loud enough for us to hear. He rolled up his sleeves and the silver-blue tattoos emblazoned on his black skin writhed like entwined serpents. “Who are you?”

She turned her gaze to him, eyes flicking down to his arms, and twitched her lips into the tiniest imitation of a smile. “You know who I am,” she said.

“No,” he replied, “I know what you are, but that’s hardly the same thing now, is it?”

“Perhaps. So who, and what, are you?”

“My name is Hades. I would suspect that means nothing to you, but that’s only because I haven’t kicked your ass yet.”

Her smile grew a little wider. “You think you can, little man?”

He shrugged “Maybe not by myself, but—well—I’m not by myself, am I?”

Her gaze scraped the room and she nodded slowly. “Interesting company you keep.”

“Yeah, ain’t it? What do you want with the goblin?”

“What, are you his daddy?”

“In a way, yes. Answer the fucking question.”

She thought about this for a moment. “He saw something he shouldn’t have.”

Hades smirked. “Too bad for you. Why’d you do it?”

She gave him a look as though she thought he was stupid. “There are things no female should have to tolerate.”

“I’m pretty sure I’d agree with you, but I’m not sure eating the perpetrator is the best possible solution to the problem. We do have laws, you know.”

“So do I. And one of my laws says that I should consume the terminally malignant.”

“Draconian arrogance,” Hades snorted. “At least the one dragon left here on Prime isn’t prone to that sort of thing.”

“One dragon?” she echoed, looking scandalized.

He shrugged. “The rest of them were killed off a long time ago. I was right, wasn’t I? You’re not from our Earth, are you?”

“You’re not distracting me,” she said, shifting her gaze to me once again. She took a step forward and he moved to block her path.

“Leave the goblin be. He won’t say anything to anyone.”

“He told you, didn’t he?”

“I saved his life. And I saw you.” Hades gave her an evil grin. “I’m a much more dangerous witness than a goblin is. People will listen to me.”

She paused and cocked her head, peering at him with a mixture of curiosity and annoyance. Her gaze made another quick sweep of the room. Disdainfully. “I do not fear your rabble here. Or your police.”

The one called Boneyard let out a harsh, barking laugh. “Oh, you don’t need to worry about the munies—the municipal police—they can barely handle mundane crooks. No, you’re preternatural, which means you’re an Adjuster’s Office problem. And believe me, they’ve tackled bigger trouble than a rogue dragon before.”

“I’m not a rogue,” she spat angrily, eyes flashing with an inner fire.

“Could’ve fooled me,” the mage cut in.

I was amazed how little fear they were showing. This was a dragon! I could almost see Hades’s reason for being so cavalier—he was an immortal, and, as such, notoriously hard to kill. But the rest of them were mere mortals. Superhuman, perhaps, but still ultimately vulnerable.

Apparently sensing my trepidation, the bartender leaned toward me once again and whispered, “Don’t worry. Help is on the way.”

“What kind of help? Did you call the Adjuster’s Office?”

“Uh-uh,” he said quietly. “Kevin is right. Handling the preternatural and paranormal end of things is their job and they manage well enough. But tackling a dragon is a pretty big order, and I think we need to bring in the heavy artillery.”

“Which is?”

“You’re a curious little monkey, aren’t you?” he asked with a chuckle.

I could have taken offense to the “monkey” line, but what would have been the point? As descriptions went, I’d heard much worse. Regularly. “Are you going to answer the question, or just laugh at me?”

Sometimes I surprise myself. That was a rather bold question and bold wasn’t exactly part of my makeup.

If anything, his grin grew wider. “I sent a quick vid-message to someone I know in Oregon. He’s exactly the person you’d want if you had to find someone to go up against a dragon.”

This, of course, made me curious, but I didn’t ask. I was far more interested in what was going on in front of me at this point. Our lady dragon was up to something, but I couldn’t tell what it was. I could sense a gathering of something around her and I stiffened in response to what I was feeling.

The bartender cocked his head at me. “What?”

“She’s doing something,” I told him, and wondered if she was planning to change shape right where she was.

“Not in my fucking place,” he growled, and vaulted the bar.

The air around her was starting to shimmer and growing hazier by the second. The mage had taken a few steps back and seemed to be staring at something we couldn’t see.

The bartender strode right up to the dragon woman and punched her full out in the side of the face as everyone else looked on in shock.

Whatever she was doing stopped instantly as she rocked back on her heels and almost fell over. He must have struck her pretty hard, I thought.

She whirled back on him, eyes blazing. “How dare you?”

He hit her again, this time a wicked driving punch straight between her breasts. The air exploded from her lungs and she sat down, hard. He stepped back and kicked her in the forehead. She went over as if she’d been clubbed with a ponderosa.

I was apparently not the only one stunned by his actions. Every other patron in the bar was staring at him as if he’d suddenly donned a tutu and started singing “It’s a Small World After All”.

The dragon lay on the floor, groaning and holding her face. “In human form they’re about as vulnerable as most mortals. It’s the best time to take them down,” he told us.

“Then what?” asked Hades with a wicked grin. “She’s not going to be too happy with you when she comes to her senses, Jack.” 

“By that time Bigby should be here,” Jack told him with a casual shrug. I noticed his eyes did not, however, stray from the supine dragon woman. He wasn’t as confident as he appeared. Not by a long shot.

Hades nodded thoughtfully, as if he knew who—or what—Bigby was. That put him ahead of me, and, by the looks of things, everyone else in the place.

“Who the hell is Bigby?” The male giant asked, looking slightly annoyed as he walked forward and stood over the incapacitated woman. His companion came up beside him and stared down at the woman herself, frowning.

She was remarkably beautiful, if totally alien. I knew what she was, of course. Another experiment like myself—an Abyssian. Hades had created the winged humanoids as another type of soldier, only to find that they weren’t interested in fighting his battles. Or any battles, for that matter. Abyssians could fight, but they didn’t like to. I wouldn’t call them pacifists, but the majority of them seemed to look upon violence as some kind of sin.

Rather weird, considering how freaking scary they looked when they chose.

In the end the Abyssians had betrayed him, allowing the last pureblood Sidhe, Carth, to put a blade in his back in retaliation for what he’d done to all of them. Carth had been the progenitor of the Abyssians, his DNA modified by Hades to create them. They were half Sidhe, and half a lot of different other things.

I found it surprising that she could be in the same room with Hades, much less converse with him. Which, in fact, she was doing now in tones too low for me to catch. He nodded and patted her shoulder, though he had to reach up a ways to do it, and treaded down the ramp to the front door. He threw it open and a bulky figure entered.

I couldn’t make out many details, as the light up here interfered with my ability to see clearly in the relative dimness of the entryway. But I didn’t have to wait long. The figure strolled up the ramp with Hades in tow and stopped on the dance floor several feet away from the draconic woman.

Now I could see him clearly, I wasn’t sure what to think. Though large and bulky, he didn’t look like anything particularly special. An ordinary guy wearing a gray cowboy hat and a thick blue jacket with a kind of five-pointed star embedded on one breast. I knew I’d seen that insignia somewhere before but it took me a minute to recognize it for what it was.

He was a cop. A sheriff, to be exact. He didn’t really look like my ideal picture of a sheriff, being rather rotund and his face, but for the jutting beak of a nose, was mostly obscured by the unkempt salt and pepper beard that framed his face.

The woman groaned and stared up at him. “Who the fuck are you?” she asked, pushing herself up into a sitting position.

“The guy you’ve been waiting a lifetime to meet,” he answered in a thick, bass voice. It sounded like a stupid come-on line, but somehow he made it work for him. It meant a lot more than it seemed the way he said it.

She didn’t seem nearly as impressed as I felt. She levered herself to her feet and glared at Jack, who stood a few yards back, arms folded across his chest. I would have expected him to look scared, or at least a bit nervous, but he didn’t seem in the least bit worried.

She threw back her head and laughed suddenly and everyone jumped. “You’ve got some serious balls,” she told Jack, shaking her head. Then she appeared to dismiss him completely, turning her full attention on the newcomer. “And you are?”

He smiled. Or, at least I think he smiled. It was hard to tell through his beard. “The name’s Bigby.”

Her gaze flicked to his jacket and she frowned. “Are you some sort of police officer?”

He nodded curtly. “Yeah, but I’m way out of my jurisdiction here. So what’s this all about? Did you really eat someone in the park?”

She shrugged. “What if I did?”

He chuckled. “Well, I can’t say I’ve never done that. I once ate a National Guard Colonel.”

I nearly fell off my bar-stool. That was one hell of an admission. I wondered if it were true or if he was just trying to find common ground with her.

He was another dragon, of course. Different from her in more ways than gender, but I didn’t know enough about dragons to say how. I will go so far as to say she seemed somehow fascinated by him, and he by her. There was an instant connection I could sense even from across the bar. “You want to talk about it?”

“He was a serial rapist, a clever bastard who was using an unlicensed stunner to render the victims unconscious, then dragging them off into the woods to get his jollies. He was damn slick about it and most of the victims never understood enough what had happened to them to even report it to your police.”

She didn’t mention that despite several hundred years of progression, rape was still vastly under-reported and very hard to prove. And, from what I understood, there was still some tendency to blame the victim, which made it doubly hard for a person to convince herself to come forward after an assault.

The men all shifted uncomfortably. Except Hades. He affixed her with a bland stare and nodded. “What you did to him was far more merciful than what would have happened if he attracted the attention of the Lady of Blades,” he said.

I shuddered. Even I had heard that name. Urban legend said that if you’d been wronged in such a way and went in front of a mirror and chanted those three words over and over again, a woman would appear and deliver justice. If what Hades was saying was true, it was more than just urban legend.

“So—are you going to leave the goblin be?” Hades asked her.

She turned her gaze on me for a long, discomfiting moment. “I will. He poses no threat to me.”

“Good.” Hades stepped forward and extended his hand to Bigby. “Thank you for coming,” he said.

The big man frowned, I think, but took his hand and pumped it twice before releasing it again. “You’re welcome.” He glanced back at the woman. “What’s your name?” he asked her.

She considered the question for what I took to be a rather long time before answering. “Kaleel,” she said finally. “At least,” she added, mostly for our benefit, “that’s the short, humanized version of my name.”

Jack looked a bit abashed as he approached her again. “I’m sorry I hit you,” he said, sounding as if he meant it. “It was the only way I could think of to keep you from tearing my place apart.”

There was no overt sign of hostility in her nearly colorless eyes as she turned her attention to him. “Apology accepted. I wouldn’t recommend you do anything like that in the future, though.”

Bigby guffawed and slapped Jack on the back with just enough force to knock him slightly off-balance. “You haven’t changed, Jack. You’re still one of the craziest mortals I’ve ever met.”

Jack’s face broke into a wide grin. “You’re just saying that because of what I was doing the first time we ran across one another.”

“Running from a posse? Yeah. You’ve got to be the worst rider I’ve ever seen. I was tempted to change and eat you just to save your poor horse from any more abuse.”

They both laughed at that, which led me to the thought that dragons and humans were equally insane. How would considering making a meal out of someone be in the least bit amusing? Baffling, really. And it made me curious as well. What kind of history did they have and how was it that Jack was running from a posse?

I knew what a posse was, but I didn’t think they’d had those things in a long, long time. Since the early twentieth century, at least. There was no way Jack was over two hundred years old, much less nearly three.

“Take your lady friend home now, Bigby. And see what you can do about putting her on a human-free diet, will ya?”

They both laughed again and even the woman chimed in this time.

I was so rapt on what was going on between the three of them I neglected to notice Hades approaching until he was within a couple of feet of me. I shot upright and stared at him, doing what had to be a reasonable imitation of a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. “Gack,” I think I said.

“What’s your name?” he asked me.

I didn’t want to tell him. Not really. But it tumbled out before I could stop myself. “Vex.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “I think I remember you,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry.”

“For what?” I managed to squeak.

“For doing what I did to you. To all of you. My regret won’t change anything…I realize that. But I wish I’d never done it. I don’t think there’s anything I’ll ever do that could possibly make up for the evil I perpetrated against you all.”

Near as I could tell, he meant every word of it. “I can’t tell you that your apology means anything to me,” I told him. “As restitution goes, it’s pretty sparse

“I realize that. But if there’s anything else I can do, just name it. I mean it. The debt I owe you goblins can’t be repaid. But I’m willing to do whatever I can. No strings.”

This was the devil Hades? The mad immortal who’d twisted us into these obscene mockeries of human children that we’d become? It seemed impossible. “Why?”

I wasn’t certain what question I was actually asking here. Why had he done it? Or why did he regret it now? I couldn’t be sure. Maybe I meant it both ways.

“Because I was out of my mind, warped with pride and envy. And ambition. It’s not much of an explanation, I realize, but it’s the only one I have.”

I saw that he meant it and I actually found myself feeling pity for him. He’d done this to us, but now he carried a burden of guilt far heavier than I could ever imagine carrying.

Before I could say anything, he continued. “I don’t expect forgiveness. I have no right to it. But I’d like you to accept that the person who did this to you no longer exists and the person I am today would like very much to make it up to you.”

“You already said that.” Not in so many words, exactly, but close enough. “I’m not sure you can.”

“But I can try. Do you need a place to stay? How about any of your brethren? I have a nice place I’m willing to share. No strings. No rent, though I’d ask you to clean up after yourself. I live modestly and don’t have a housekeeping staff.”

I blinked at him. Was he actually offering me a place to live? With him? I was both frightened and captivated by the thought. “Can I think about it?”

“Please do. If you decide to take me up on the offer, just tell Jack. He’ll make sure you can find the place. For now I’ve got some things to do, so I’ll be leaving. Just think about it.”

I noticed the two dragons had already gone. I watched him walk slowly toward the door and vanish into the night without another word.

A place to live? I’d never had that, unless you considered the encampment my fellows and I had erected in the city’s storm sewers to be a home. I had, at one time, but wasn’t sure I could now.

“He means it, you know,” Jack told me, appearing behind the bar once again. “He’s a changed man.”

“Is he?” I sighed. “Should I do it? I don’t really have anywhere else to go. I can’t stand the company of most of my kind, awful as that sounds. I don’t really belong among them any more than I belong among ordinary humans.”

“That’s up to you. If I were you, I’d seriously think about it.”

“Believe me,” I replied. “I am.”

Truth be told, I did end up moving in with Hades. And I discovered that we had it within us to become friends. Isn’t that just too weird? I remember the Hades that was and I still hate that person with every fiber of my being. But the Hades that is now? I like him. He’s a bit like a father and a big brother all rolled into one.

It’s almost like being a real kid with a real family.

Almost.