Dark Legacies (Book Four in the Brenna Strachan Series) Read online

  “They are building our house now,” Penny told me.

  “I know, are you excited?” I asked, feeling lukewarm goo ooze down my hand. I resisted the urge to wipe it off. Babies seemed to drool a lot, and even though I didn’t know why, they all did it and you just had to learn to ignore it. Since I didn’t have children of my own, I was still struggling with getting used to it. Give me blood, guts and gore over drool and runny noses any day.

  “Yes,” Penny said and let go of my leg. “Let’s play a...” My niece was cut-off midsentence by a strange grumbling noise. She turned around, as we all did. West of us, the sky had turned black. Penny clamped back onto my leg. Spring-Heeled Jack began to giggle uncontrollably, which was a feat, since he giggled all the time anyway.

  “Is that?” Eli didn’t say the name.

  “I believe so,” I answered. “Maybe he just wants to check out what’s going on.”

  The mythic creatures that had surrounded us moved away. The ones that were more easily spooked, bolted. Several of the beings around us also darted towards the protective walls of the city. The ground beneath my feet shook and instinctively, I pulled Ginger in closer. She blew a spit bubble that popped on my cheek.

  The grumbling grew louder. The ground shook harder. The sky became darker.

  Cerebus appeared about three hundred yards away from us. One minute, we were staring at darkening woods, and the next, the giant beast dog was standing in front of us. I wondered if he clouded minds or if his appearance was just startling enough to create a gap in the memory. I would have to ask someone later.

  Once upon a time, Cerebus had just been a family pet. When he wasn’t behaving, he was the bane of everyone’s existence. However, now that he was semi-possessed by an evil, undead soul, behavior was subjective. I didn’t know the whole story, or why he had gone from being a single-headed dog to a three-headed dog that was larger than a blue whale with the cantankerous nature of a crocodile. I just knew that he had.

  His large black body rocked backwards and he sat down on his haunches. He stared at us, and we stared back. I knew I was too terrified to run away.

  Minutes passed without anyone moving. In fact, most of us were holding our breath. Ginger grabbed my nose and squealed with delight. Everyone’s gaze fell on me. I frowned.

  Ginger’s joyous utterance brought about a response from the other two babies, my nephew, Trent, and my sister, Amanda. They broke out into giggles. Ginger squealed again as she grabbed my nose.

  The hellhound got up, his heads bobbing as he walked and his damaged tail hung limply behind him.

  Ginger reached up and grabbed the lips on one of the heads and she squealed again. I jerked back, pulling her into my body, fully expecting both of us to be eaten.

  Cerebus blew out his lips, which made all three babies giggle harder. He stood over me for a few more seconds. One large tongue slapped against my body. As it reached Ginger, she gave another high-pitched squeal.

  The hellhound seemed to think about that for a second, before turning and ambling off into the woods. The darkness receded with the monstrous dog. I frowned at my niece, soaked in Cerebus saliva and baby drool.

  “You should collect that, it’s worth a ton,” Melody, the owner of the natural bath supplies shop told me.

  I considered that. Collecting the saliva of the hellhound might be easy at this point, but it was also incredibly gross. No amount of geld or bartered goods would take away my desperate need for a shower.

  “Did you do something to make him leave?” Anubis asked me.

  “No, I was expecting to be eaten,” I looked at the little winged half-breed in my hands. “I think it left because of Ginger, or possibly because of all the babies. Maybe babies don’t taste very good.”

  “Dragons will eat babies,” Melody said. She was standing very close to me.

  “Dragons will eat anything,” Pendragon said. “With this family, maybe there is something special about these three.”

  With that question completely unanswered, everyone went back to work. Penny let go of my jeans again. Blood soaked through the material and my leg suddenly hurt. Penny blushed, her color turning from copper to sparkling orange. Freckles appeared on her cheeks and her eyes glowed ever so lightly.

  “Sorry,” she hid her hands. Demonlings weren’t as good about controlling the physical changes that occurred in high stress situations as full-grown demons. On really stressful occasions, they could lose complete control of their magic. Luckily, demon’s innate magic was healing power.

  “I understand,” I smiled at the small girl. Ginger grabbed my ear and tugged with all her tiny might. “What?” I turned and asked her. I don’t know what I expected to get as a response, but it wasn’t her spitting up on me.

  “Help!” Penny yelled. I turned my attention back to the older girl. Spit up had landed on her and she was trying to shake it off as if it was a horrific bug sent to devour her. Despite myself, I laughed. Hannah rushed over to us, took Penny and made me follow her into the house.

  Inside, she began washing Penny’s arm. The girl was visibly relieved to have the baby yuck gone from her. I could sympathize, because I was covered in baby yuck and Cerebus yuck. I really wanted a shower.

  Hannah took Ginger from me. She sat the baby in a high chair and locked her in. Once secure, Hannah turned her attention to me.

  To my horror, Hannah began scraping off the drying Cerebus saliva. Only after she had collected it in a vial, did she start helping me clean up the baby yuck.

  “Go take a shower, you’ll feel better,” she said, handing me the vial. “And guard this with your life. The value is about a million geld.”

  “That’s a lot,” I turned the figure over in my head. I knew everyone around me was rich, except me. I made decent money, but it was nothing compared to the savings and hoardings of those around me. The thought of holding something worth a million geld was mind-boggling.

  “Bren, go shower,” Hannah shoved me down the hall.

  Chapter Six

  “Now, about my crazy as a bedbug sister?” I asked. The apartments had been assembled and everyone was currently fussing to move into them, everyone except my parents, who were sitting in my living room. My mother was drinking a glass of milk and my father was sipping scotch. He and the four Overlords in my life were all enjoying a very old bottle. A bottle that looked like it might have been fermented around the first ice age. There wasn’t a label and the bottle was a strange amber color that made me think it might be carved from amber.

  “We are proactively taking precautions and that’s all we can do,” my mother told me.

  “That really sucks,” I responded.

  “Yes, it does, not nearly as much as being forced to drink another glass of milk though.” My mother’s gaze fell not on me, but on the soda can in my hand. “Or being forced to eat for two again, already. My body is not a baby factory, but it seems to think it is. I want free time between children. I have centuries, no, millennia to create children. But no, my body thinks we need to spit them out one right after the other.”

  My mother continued her rant for a good five minutes. By the time she was done, we were all staring at her. She blushed.

  “You’re pregnant? Again?” I asked.

  “Three months,” my mother sighed.

  “When were you going to tell me I had another sibling on the way?”

  “When we had a moment,” she sat the empty glass down. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to breed demons? I have to eat three times more food than when I’m not pregnant and I always have heartburn. At some point, if this one has horns, they will puncture something and I’ll have to be healed. That brings its own set of challenges. Not to mention the enormous size. Demonlings may sound tiny, but they aren’t.”

  “Mom?” I asked, trying to stop her from having a meltdown.

  “And I had to do a lot of magic today and that just sucked. I’m so tired that I can’t even walk to our new apartment. And what the hell am
I doing living in an apartment with three children and a fourth on the way? We need more room than this. We need special rooms for the babies. Amanda is already burping magic and casting spells when she sleeps. This boy is going to be just as powerful, I already feel it. Good grief,” she slumped in her chair.

  “Um,” I looked at my father. He shrugged. “Mom?” I said it quietly, gently.

  “I’m sorry, Bren, I didn’t mean to unload on you. It’s the hormones and they always throw me out of whack.”

  “Don’t apologize,” I said feeling confused.

  “Now, about you,” my mother gave me a knowing smile.

  “My crazy sister is trying to kill us, we are not talking about my sex life,” I told her and felt myself blush.

  “Well, at least you did the deed. We’ll talk about it later, without the men,” she winked at me. I wasn’t going to argue with her right now, but I did not intend to talk about it later. As a matter of fact, I was pretty sure I was never going to talk about it with anyone, ever.

  “Now, what else can we do to track down Jasmine?” Suddenly, I realized I was going to have to throw out my dragon’s milk soap. It was jasmine scented. I bought it the day before I entered the aether. My mind wandered a little further and began to contemplate what other scents I could get in my dragon’s milk soap. One more step down the road, I realized I had never used the dragon’s milk soap and didn’t know how good it was or wasn’t, but that it had cost me some horn the last time I had bought it. I needed geld. I shook myself and looked around the room. “Did anyone else just have anything weird happen to them?”

  “Like?” Elise asked.

  “Like, I completely blanked my own thoughts. I asked what we should do about Jasmine and suddenly, I was thinking about geld and soap. My thoughts aren’t exactly coherent all the time, but they aren’t normally that scrambled,” I answered.

  “You’re tired, you have a brand new body and you’ve been slammed by things today. You come back from the aether, your brothers give you a new body, then you suddenly have to move all of us to the island,” Elise shrugged. “It’s been a long day, so why don’t you go to bed.”

  “Really?” I asked my mother. “You think I’m tired and that’s why my thoughts just went all wonky?”

  “Yes dear,” my mother told me. “Have a glass of warm milk and get some sleep.”

  “Uh, yeah,” I got up and went into the kitchen. Inside the room, I wondered what the hell I was doing there. This scared the hell out of me. Was I losing my mind? I walked back into the living room. Milk. My brain suddenly kicked in. I went back into the kitchen, poured a glass of milk and carried it out to my mother. She stared at me as if I held a basket full of sea serpents.

  “I’ve had plenty,” she frowned at me.

  “You wanted a glass of milk,” I told her. “I went to get it.”

  “No, I told you to have a glass of milk and go to bed,” my mother looked concerned.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Yes,” my mother stood up. She took the glass from me. Wrapping her arms in mine, she guided me down the hallway and into my bedroom. The blank walls glared at me. Instantly, pictures began to form on them. Blessedly, they weren’t the pornographic retelling of my encounter with Anubis earlier in the day. However, pictures of babies didn’t really seem like my style either. The walls were covered in different colored children of different breeds. I recognized a few of them, but not all of them. My mind seemed to be regurgitating the likeness of every child I had ever seen on the walls.

  “Interesting choice,” my mother frowned harder.

  “Stop frowning, it freaks me out. Am I going crazy?” I asked.

  “No, I think you are just tired,” my mother assured me.

  “I hope you’re right,” I climbed into bed fully dressed. “What about Jasmine?”

  “I don’t know, Bren. I can’t track her, but I’ve been trying. I think we’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “What about her beasties?” I asked.

  “Those were unexpected,” my mother’s face became pinched. “I think she has more up her sleeve. With any luck, she’ll have used Cerebus to create all of them. That way, we don’t have to worry about them, because the hellhound will take care of them for us.”

  “Cheery,” I sighed.

  There was a loud boom. I was falling. I grabbed hold of my mother and encircled her within me. The bed crashed down on top of us as we landed on the wall, or what should have been the wall of my bedroom. The dresser smashed into the bed with a strangled cry. Ezra, my spell book, Ezra, landed next to me. I reached out and grabbed it, pulling it under the protection of the bed. More furniture tumbled onto the wall, some of it smashing as it hit the stone and silver, others giving cries as the souls trapped inside reacted to the jumbling.

  “Bren?” My mother’s voice sounded muffled. The noises stopped. Outside the cocoon of the bed, I could hear Ba’al shouting.

  The house groaned and everything flopped again. This time, my bed ended up on top of most of the furniture. Mom and I ended up on top of the bed. Ba’al crashed into the ceiling next to us.

  He gave a loud sigh as Ezra hit him in the head. I grabbed for Ezra again, tucking it into the bed covers. The next second, I threw up a protection spell around the three of us. Unfortunately, Ba’al was outside the circle. He stood up and shook himself off.

  “I think it’s done,” he told me.

  “What’s done?” I asked suspiciously.

  “The house decided to redecorate,” Ba’al answered. “I was trying to get back here to warn you, when it suddenly flipped up on its side. Since we are now on the ceiling, I’m guessing the house has flipped over onto its roof.”

  “Why is my house flipping over?” I asked.

  “Beats me,” Ba’al said.

  “Elise!” My father’s voice reached us.

  “I’m fine, Luc,” my mother shouted back. A very pissed off demon entered the bedroom. He didn’t stop to think, he charged forward, hit the protection spell and shot backwards. His body slammed into the wall, creating a crater in the silver and stone. As he lay on the floor, trying to catch his breath, the crater started pushing itself back out. By the time he could stand, you couldn’t even tell the one-ton demon Overlord had slammed into the wall.

  “What was that?” Anubis asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  “It’s your magic,” Anubis said.

  “Well, theoretically, it’s my magic, but it isn’t my island. Maybe there was something with Pendragon’s magic and my magic and the house just toppled over.” Saying the words out loud made the idea seem dumber than it had in my head. Maybe my brain was rotting inside my skull, making me insane. Maybe my brothers’ newest creation was infected with E-coli or some other bacteria found in the earth that was deadly to humans. I would need geld to get medicine to fix it. I didn’t have any of the currency of the island. I did have Cerebus saliva though. I shook my head.

  “What?” Anubis asked.

  “My mind just did it again. I was thinking about the house and somehow I started thinking about geld and Cerebus goo. It worries me,” I admitted.

  “Maybe it has something to do with the house flipping over,” my father offered.

  “My mind isn’t linked to the house. It is almost as much of a living being as you and I. It has its own emotional system and brain-like processors or some such thing. I can’t control this house any more than you can control the rotation of the earth. Maybe it decided it was tired and needed a nap. It had a long day too. Maybe I should buy it a housewarming present. Wonder what you get a magical fortress. How much geld do you think I would need to get...” I stopped. “Oh, my God! It did it again.”

  “Okay, that’s random, even for you,” Ba’al answered.

  “Thanks,” I said. “So there is something wrong with my brain and the house. I don’t think the two are related, but I’ve been known to be wrong in the past. Is the weird, rectangular basement s
itting on top of the house or did it stay in the ground?”

  “I don’t know,” Anubis answered.

  “Well, if the basement stayed in the ground, maybe it’s the house. If the basement toppled with the house, maybe it’s the ground. Maybe we need to offer something to the earth before we can put the house here. Maybe it wants a present. What do you buy earth as a gift? Goldschlager?”

  “What the fuc...” Lucifer started. He started before the word slipped from his mouth. My mother did not approve of the word.

  “Okay, so she’s obsessed with presents and gold,” Ba’al said. “That seems like progress.”

  “Progress?” I gave him a look.

  “Progress,” he answered. “Maybe we should stay in the hotel tonight.”

  “That will cost geld and I don’t have any. I need to get some. Only I don’t know how because all my money is tied up in banks on the mainland. Do they do wire transfers to the island? Is there a banking infrastructure for that? What’s the conversion rate?”

  “Bren, stop talking,” Anubis said to me.

  “Where are Gabriel and Fenrir?” I asked.

  “They are off checking on everyone else,” Lucifer answered.

  “Oh, okay,” I sat still. “We should ask Nick and Daniel if they enhanced anything else.”

  Chapter Seven

  Dawn was coming. My connection with the Overlords had been restored. My body tingled in anticipation of the rising fiery orb. All of the Overlords bound to me were somehow tied to the sun and moon. I could feel both the sun and moon rise.

  We were standing outside my house, watching it bury itself into the dirt. The basement had become the second floor and the steep gabled roof was disappearing. The house shook like a dog as it burrowed down deeper.