Page 92 of Fastest Kill

"It's still happening," Serapis replied. "But it doesn't care about you anymore."

Agrippa stumbled as decades disappeared in seconds, the flesh of his face drawing back from the bones beneath, his hands twisting into claws as they scratched at his neck.

He screamed in rage and denial, but not pain. He had built his entire existence on the certainty of his own exceptional nature and couldn't face that he had been ordinary all along. The centuries and his magic hadn't made him transcendent. He had simply been very good at refusing to die, and now the refusal had run out.

His body began to crumble as five hundred years of accumulated time and false belief folded down to nothing but dust.

His last sound was an enraged cry of defeat that echoed off the Roman columns, the vaulted ceiling, and the stones of the lararium niche with its faded ochre plaster.

The body settled on its knees on the planetary inlay in the floor, and didn't move again.

Around Frederica, people were still breathing, but all in shock. The disciples were huddled at the far end. The gūl had stopped when Agrippa stopped, dropping where they stood. The obsidian mirror between the columns shattered and fell to the floor in shards.

Frederica raised her gun, sighted on the crumbled matter that had been Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, and shot it. The skull exploded into a spray of ash across the planetary inlay. Every head in the chamber turned toward her.

"What?" she said, looking back at them all. "This mother fucker has necromancy magic, and I wanted to make sure."

Across the chamber, Dario caught her eye, and they both started laughing.

"Idioti," Despina said before she started laughing too.

40

Dario stood in front of the scattered remains of Agrippa, his dust in the grooves between the gold and copper wire, a fine gray coating over five centuries of meticulous preparation that had amounted, in the end, to this.

Around him, the aftermath of the fight organized itself the way it always did after the killing stopped. Rodrigo was directing the outer perimeter, and Giana was moving among the surviving disciples with calm words, having been a victim and knowing how to talk them down from hysteria.

They were alive, confused, shaking, some of them weeping, several unable to do anything except sit on the floor and stare at the place where their god had stood. They would need a great deal of work that Giana and Altun were already quietly organizing with the money Giana had siphoned from Agrippa's accounts.

Leo was crouched over one of the drained ones that had dropped when Agrippa had, examining it closely. Dante stood at his shoulder, not hovering, just present and ready in case the corpse decided to reanimate.

Silas was at the chamber entrance talking into his earpiece. Athena appeared beside him and said something that made him exhale slowly and nod.

Serapis hadn't moved. He was standing where Agrippa had been, not looking at the dust but past it at the shattered obsidian mirror. His hands were shaking a little at his sides.

Dario crossed to him. "You all right, Zio?"

Serapis murmured, "I didn't expect that."

"None of us did."

"No, I mean—" Serapis stopped. When he started again, it was a ramble, as if he were trying to work it out. "The bee was supposed to free the disciples. Strip the illusion from their eyes. That was its function. I never thought it would work on him in the same way. It stripped his absolute conviction that he was destined for apotheosis, for godhood, because he deserved it. That conviction was his power. He sustained himself through sheer force of will, the unshakeable certainty that he was exceptional, that death was beneath him, that the universe owed him transcendence. He made his own reality through the strength of his ego alone, and when the bee forced him to see the truth..."

"He was just an old man frightened of death," Dario finished for him.

Serapis nodded. "His reality collapsed. There was nothing left to sustain him." He shut his eyes for a moment and exhaled. "We make our own reality, Dario. Aggripa's simply failed him in the end."

Rodrigo appeared at his shoulder and looked Serapis and his brother over for any damage.

"It's over," he said, and Serapis opened his eyes again.

"Yes." He sounded so tired that Dario hoped he would be able to walk back out of the tunnels. "I… I don't know what to do now. I have never not been fighting him, or preparing to fight him, or recovering from fighting him. I don't know what comes next." He said it without self-pity, which somehow made it worse.

Leo stood up from where he had been crouching. "You could teach me about my magic." He gestured toward Kon and Athena. "And them too. They are extraordinary, and they possess power they don't fully understand, and you're the only person alive who can actually train them. You said you created them to fight Agrippa and those like him. That war is over for now, so help them become what they were always supposed to be beyond it."

"Our family is so fucked up," Athena said, looking around them. "We have a sorcerer who let our creator's mess with us for decades before he orchestrated their deaths. We have brothers who were raised by a mother who shot one of them and made their lives hell. We have an assassin with witch blood who will be related to all of us in some capacity, whether she likes it or not. I suppose, we'll just have to figure all of our bullshit out together."

Altun laughed softly. "Well said, Athena."