New Olympus Saga (Book 4): The Ragnarok Alternative (26 page)

Freedom Island, August 5, 2014

“Done and Donner!”

She closed the file, e-mailed it to every recipient, and leaned back on her office chair. All her paperwork was finished, finally.

Mark said.

It doesn’t matter how fast you can fly; if you don’t want to smash through a dozen walls, it still will take you a good five, ten minutes to make it from your office to your home. Mark was waiting patiently, paper plates and plastic utensils at the ready. The two pizza pies smelled great.

A kiss and a hug, and some good eating followed. Sometimes life could be good.

“So everything’s squared away?” Mark asked her. He sounded nonchalant, but there was something else going on with him. She hoped it was nothing.

“Pretty much,” she said. “They wanted chapter and verse on the Outsiders, and the Cosmic Nerds, and everything else I could, might or will remember. So nosy.”

“And?”

“Well, I tried my best. I ended up making up a lot of crap. There’s stuff I can’t explain, mainly because I can’t grasp it myself. I think a lot of what we saw at the end was more like metaphors than anything real.”

“But we did kill her, right?”

“That was tots real. And I don’t think her soul can get back from there to here, either. And Chastity Baal found the Hades-Slaughter Resurrection Engine they were using. Empty. Looks she couldn’t figure out how to make a new clone and prep the device, not without Daedalus Smith. Who’s also officially dead.”

“So that’s that,” Mark said around a mouthful of pizza.

“Hopefully. Not going to stop worrying about it, though.”

“Paranoia is an occupational hazard in this line of work. It’s also good common sense.”

“Guess so.”

“How’s Ultimate? Not that I give a shit, but I’m curious.”

“John is recovering just fine. Got the last bits of Outsider stuff out of him this morning, just before I went to tackle the final report. He’s transferring to the Pacific headquarters, just like he promised.”

“And he still feels..?”

“I got a good empathy read off him while I finished the procedure. I guess his experience with my evil twin kinda ruined his feelings for me. Killing her didn’t help, although he’s happy he actually accomplished something, even if I did help him break out from under her mind control.”

“So he doesn’t love you anymore?”

“Not even a little bit. Every time he sees my face he gets flashbacks of me turning into her. Let’s just say he, uh, he isn’t feeling it anymore when it comes to me.”

She actually felt a bit miffed about that, which was cray, but that’s how she rolled.

“I can sympathize,” Mark said. “I only got one good look at her, and that was enough. She looked like shit.”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say.”

“And her outfit made her look fat.”

“Now you’re just making up crap.”

They laughed together. Kind of a horrible thing to laugh about, a dead woman, but in their line of work you had to laugh at that sort of thing, or lose your ever-loving mind. She didn’t know if she was turning into a horrible person, but the guilt was beginning to fade away. A little. She would never forget the things she’d done. But she thought she might forgive herself. A little.

“Feel like dessert?” Mark asked her.

“Always.”

“How about this?”

An emotional spike from him warned her something was up, but it only became clear when he got down on one knee. Surprise achieved.

“Oh, Mark…”

“I love you. Will you marry me? Binary solution set: yes or no?”

The speech kinda sucked. The waves of emotion washing over her most certainly did not.

Her eyes stung. She went down on her knees and hugged him.

“Yes. Conditionally.”

A wave of relief and joy from him. “Anything.”

“I want to go home first. I want to see my mother. My live, real mother.”

“Then we’ll do that first.”

And that led to a happy ending, in several senses of the word.

If you want to hear about our new releases before anyone else, join our
Mailing List
. We’ll only send you notices about new book releases, nothing more, nothing less. We hate spam as much as you do. For more news and information, check out our website:
www.cjcarella.com

THE END