Page 71 of Hateful Prince
“Meaning?” Tor asked.
“There was still a viable spirit in a live vessel,” Cain explained. “This time, the dead body corrupted the soul, eating away at it until nothing remained except the magic. This isn’t Nautica anymore. She’s nothing more than a soul-sucking ghoul.”
The ghoul crawled up the shore, reaching for any of us she could get. She moved inhumanly fast, her skeletal body slithering up the bank with ease.
“How do we put her back?” I asked, stumbling away from her.
“It’s too late for that, baby doll. That’s why I warned you not to push her too hard. The only thing that creature is concerned with now is replacing the soul it lost by any means necessary. Namely, eating ours.”
Fuck. I’d done this to her? Once again, my ignorance put all of us at risk. Why did Masterson keep asking me to do things so clearly out of my league?
“Okay, so how do we stop her?” I asked, my voice trembling with my guilt.
“This is beyond the scope of our powers. We deal in souls, not the soulless.”
We couldn’t just let a ghoul run around Blackwood. I needed a weapon, some way to stop her. But before I could even scan our surroundings, a blast of dragon fire engulfed the ghoul, leaving her screaming until she was nothing but a pile of dust.
All of us stopped, turning to look at Kai, who stood to the side, heaving, his eyes glowing purple with reptilian slits for pupils. Black scales decorated his cheekbones and temples, and a coronet of small horns sat at his hairline. He was more dragon than I’d ever seen him.
“Kai,” I whispered, awestruck.
“I’m done waiting for permission, gem. I willnae risk yer soul.” Kai’s voice was all gravel and rasp, and I knew it was the dragon speaking to me. “It belongs to me.”
“That’s a lot more fun to watch when you aren’t aiming it at me,” Tor said, giving Kai an approving slap on the shoulder.
“Are we all going to ignore what just happened?” Caspian asked.
“That I can apparently raise the dead?”
“No. That was a neat trick, but I mean what she said about the Ripper.”
“She didn’t say anything we didn’t already know.”
“Yes she did, love.” We all waited for Cas to illuminate us. “Blond, American, male. There’s only one of them on Blackwood’s grounds.”
“Oh my God,” I whispered. “Taylor Swift is the Ripper.”
Chapter
Twenty-Three
HADES
I’ve never been so excited to tear a soul from a body as I was right fucking now.
“I should’ve known it was him. He was the problem. Never trust a man whose name is the same as a pop icon. Never.” Asshole pranced alongside me, head held high. “Let’s go show him exactly what it’s like to come up against the antihero.”
“I’m not an antihero. I’m the motherfuckin’ villain.”
“Someone is feeling himself right now,” Dahlia muttered, giving me a healthy dose of side-eye.
“You said so yourself, baby doll.”
“Yeah, but usually you don’t look quite so murdery when you say it.”
“Does it scare you? The truth about who I am and what I do?”
She squirmed, cheeks going pink. “Nope.”