75. Xander

Chapter 75

Xander

P eople call after Snake Spawn as she rushes out of the hall long after Scumbag King is gone. Sitting in the corner, watching the hall, I'd heard the entire septic conversation while everyone else was caught up in their own.

I stalk her because she is likely to do something extremely stupid that might endanger us all. She is volatile. Dangerously stupid. Stupidly dangerous.

Patting the kangaroo joey as it squirms in its sack around my neck, I stride across the lawn. She doesn't even notice me, so caught up in her own selfish melodrama. She's headed right into the anima dorms, and to my surprise, when I broach the entrance moments after, Christine the gargoyle lets me in with an irritatingly chirpy, "Good day, my lord." I think I'm in her good books because of that one time I stopped Savage from trying to behead her.

Spawn heads exactly where I guess—to the anima hideout they'd used during her period of rabidity, the place Minnie calls ‘The Phantom of the Opera dungeon'. Through the old dragon painting, down the spiral stone staircase and into the watery canal she goes, and I follow her like one of Scythe's phantoms.

I just need to swap my joey for a mask like Ghoul has to complete the look.

By the time I step off the black stone staircase, she's splashed into the glowing blue water, leaving only her clothes in a messy pile by the old dinghy.

Frowning, I crouch by the dinghy, scanning the water, straining my ears. Her energy is not fiery and furious like it was that day we rescued Athena Boneweaver. It's the opposite.

She's dropped in temperature, her breathing stopped completely. Eerily, it reminds me of the way Scythe goes cold when he drops into his Great White.

Suddenly, there's a strange sound and a massive grey fin pierces the water, headed down the canal away from me. For the first time in what feels like eons, my interest is piqued.

No wonder Scythe is besotted. She's seduced him with a Great White shark form.

The fact that he still wants to have her is madness. Probably a bad use of the word, but I'd always wondered if his land psychosis had ever involved more than the auditory and visual hallucinations. Sometimes the psychosis involved delusions as well. Both things are the hallmarks of psychosis. But Scythe had never believed in anything that wasn't real. He was only as paranoid as any underworld don should be. Delusions had never been his thing. Savage put that advantage down to their shared wolf father stabilising him.

But ever since we'd come across Spawn, the psychosis has gotten worse.

Everything has been made worse.

She is a curse upon us all and none of the others realise it. Perhaps that is the delusion after all. Perhaps they are all just unwell.

"Does your dad hate you as much as mine hates me?" Her raspy voice echoing around us shakes me out of my reverie. My eyes focus to see her human head and neck bobbing in the water, dark hair streaming about her shoulders and pooling around her, blue eyes blinking wide at me like a mermaid from a fairytale.

"Darkness comes naturally to serpents," I snap. "Our kind are nothing alike."

"I wasn't talking about our orders," she says softly, her lips parted as she sucks in a breath. A bead of water trickles over her top lip. "I was talking about our fathers."

Gods, I hate her more and more as each day passes.

"My father doesn't hate me," I say. "You're alone on that one."

She wades closer, never taking her wretched, gem-like eyes from me. Her skin is devoid of any jewellery, making her look incomplete. Savage had given her some. I don't know why she didn't respect it and?—

"I saw the way he looked at you," she continues. "At the gates when they all came for Lyle. He's a real piece of work."

She's prying for information, using the worst technique in the book. Trying to make us look alike . Trying to make me feel understood. But she doesn't deserve to know what happened to me. She would never earn that right. "Mind your own business," I say. "You need to worry about your own slithering worm."

"Scythe says we don't react, we respond," she says. After what her father told her, I don't know how she's so calm. Probably has the same sociopathic gene as her father. "I…" She hesitates, dipping her mouth below the water as if she's not sure if she wants to reveal this. It leaves her big saucer-like eyes peering at me in the most vile way. "Never mind."

Now I have to deal with this awful image being stuck in my mind for the rest of the day. "I don't have time for this. I only came here to make sure you weren't going to smash any more windows and got subjected to an interrogation instead." I rise and turn, striding back to the stairs.

I'm halfway up the staircase when she says, "No windows will be smashed, but I think my heart will be."

My dragon threatens to set fire to the stone around us and turn it into an obsidian slide. "I hope it is," I say to him. "For what she's done to us, I hope her heart is smashed to a pulp."