Byron walked into the foyer and looked up at me, where I was currently wearing a mask to protect my lungs from potential lead and standing on a ladder scraping and scraping.
“I really wish I could help you with that,” he said.
“Me too.”
“Are you feeling cross, my angel?”
“No, I just—” I pulled the mask around my neck. “I’m freaking out. It’s Billie’s house but my money is on the line. More importantly, your life is on the line, right? And the whole magical world? And I have no idea what we’re doing. We haven’t found your body. We haven’t found Deveraux’s diaries. There are monster-killing swans in the backyard. We’re not working as a team. And we’re running behind. Oh, and Billie might sacrifice herself for the cause, but I’m not even sure what the cause is! I just have to trust you that it’s a good idea.”
“And do you trust me?” He walked up to the bottom of the ladder. His beautiful eyes were about level with my ass but instead they swiveled up to my sweaty brow and flyaway strands of hair. He smiled, and I could tell the sight of me made him happy. I wasn’t used to anyone looking at me like that. “Do you trust that whatever happens, I would never want to hurt you? That I believe in your strength?”
I swallowed. “I want to, Byron.”
But who are you? I thought.
“You need to learn to work as a team,” he said. “It will serve you well.”
“I’m trying to work as a team! I work well with Jake and Jasper. But I never asked for Billie to buy the house.”
“I didn’t expect her either, but…is she useful? Yes.”
“Is she, though?”
“Have you ever met a faery?” Byron asked.
“I mean…yes. I’ve met a faery.”
“You don’t know what faeries like in a house,” he said.
“Neither does she!”
“But you must admit you’re trying to take control of the house.”
“You’re not winning any points here, buddy,” I grumbled. I turned back to my work, scraping with all my might.
“I’m not trying to win points,” he said. “I’m trying to save this hot ass.” He gave my jeans a little slap. “Teamwork helps for flipping houses and going into battle. And if you trust me—as I pray you do—your battles aren’t over. But you will win them. And then you’ll have what you really want.”
“I don’t really want anything!”
“Oh? Well. I guess I read you wrongly, angel.” He stepped back into the wall as the door creaked open.
Chapter Seventeen
Jasper
My leg was killing me and my face was a grimace of frustration, but I tried my damnedest to hide it when I saw Helena working hard on the walls.
She caught it anyway. “Jasper? You okay?” Her boots thumped down the ladder rungs.
“It’s nothing.” I shook my head. “I’m just pissed off. I was so useless in that fight. Jake’s worried about me, wanting to take it easy, and I don’t have the time or the interest in taking it easy.”
“He has a point,” she said. “You don’t want to hinder the healing process. Have you been sleeping with a poultice? Taking a bone tonic?”
“Yeah. It just takes time. That fucking guy snapped my leg in half, if you remember.”
“I definitely…remember.” She bit her lip. “I could never forget.”
“I don’t want you to feel bad about it,” I said, feeling I’d sent her down the wrong track. “You defended us. We don’t forget that sort of thing. And you saved me today, too. I’m just annoyed that I need any saving.”
“You helped me with my broken ankle before,” she said. “So…we’re even, that’s all.”
She was looking up at me with troubled eyes, like she had something on her mind. Her cheeks were flushed, her shirt sticking to her skin with the sweat of her labors. Her hair was pulled into a loose ponytail, blonde strands flying everywhere and specks of dust and paint sticking to her arms and cheeks.
I’d never seen anyone so beautiful as this girl. She wasn’t as magazine perfect as many witches, and I knew why—she never used any illusion to make herself look more perfect. To me, that just made her more perfect. More real.
“Is this job starting to get to you?” I asked.
“Get to me? What? Why would it?”
“Well…” I put my hands in my pockets, although what I really wanted to do was slip my arms around her, feel her warmth, lick the sweat and grime right off her like the beast I was. “I don’t know what we’re doing, exactly, but to me and Jake, this is personal. Werewolves have been treated badly forever. If I have a chance to take back our power, it’s hard to resist, even if there’s danger involved. Like, my parents would still be proud of us if they found out we were killed trying to destroy the Ethereal council. I actually wrote them a letter and I gave it to a good friend back home, said to only send it to them if something happened to us.”
“Oh…really? He didn’t think that was a strange thing for you to do when you’re supposed to just be contractors?”
“Hel, we know there is always danger for wolves in this world. Wizards have a habit of blaming us for stuff we didn’t do and killing us for things we don’t deserve. And we’re buying their houses. They don’t always like that, so the job isn’t always safe.”
“Oh. I see…”
I could see this task was starting to eat at her. We didn’t really know what we were doing, but the rest of us understood the core of it better. A wealthy girl like Hel was just thinking about her own escape at first, her own problems. But the fact that she was still here showed that she wasn’t just working for her own pride, her own life. “I guess I knew that,” she said. “But somehow I never quite thought about it either.”
“It’s fine. I’m just glad you’re here now. How about we reward you when you’re done painting this wall?”
“Reward me?” She laughed. “Okay.”
“After all, the houses aren’t the prize to me,” I said, getting close enough to her that I could smell every distinct layer of scent on her body. “And neither is Pandora’s Box. There’s one reason Jake and I drove all the way to Louisiana.”
She looked at me, her weariness not enough to hide her desire. Her pheromones teased at my wolfish nose and made me want to take her right then and there.
At least that full lower lip was worth claiming. I kissed her.
“But I’m so dirty!” She tried to protest and was ignored.
I ran my tongue along that lip before slipping it into her mouth, tasting her deeply. Her breath hitched and then steadied. This was our second kiss and her surprise was short-lived. She knew my kisses were worth having.
“Jasper…”
“I’m up two over Jake now,” I said. “I’ll have to tell him. He’s going to want to catch up.”
She was wide-eyed for a moment, touching her lips. She was one of the most competent women I’d ever met but it was also just too easy to bring out her adorable naïveté. “Am I really this exciting?”
“Get used to it,” I said.
Chapter Eighteen
Byron
“All right, dear sister. I never asked to be your pet sitter. Call your swans home, please. They’re shitting on the grave stones.”
Marisa started laughing, and there really is nothing more enjoyable than making an Ethereal laugh. Usually, they were regal, and if I had never known her, I wouldn’t have known they still enjoyed teasing, just like the lower life forms.
“Byron! What makes you think I would send you swans? They could belong to anyone. My pets never ‘shit’.”
“Sometimes I just know.” I put my hands on the invisible barrier between worlds that kept us apart. “You couldn’t resist keeping an eye on our exploits. But everyone is disturbed by them, and Helena plans to sell the house to the faeries.”
“They keep the Sinistrals away.” She twirled a little, playing the part of starlight made flesh, but basically she was just messing with me. “I
sent them to help you.”
My sister had to be one of the most calculating Ethereals in the realm. An angel on the verge of a fall. High Ethereals were truly the most enlightened and good of all the beings in the magical realms. But with their enlightenment often came blindness. They kept their eyes above them and never saw the trouble brewing beneath them.
I snapped my fingers. “Send them away or I’ll strangle them.”
She stopped abruptly. “What an awful thing to say! And I don’t think you could do it, either. You have a soft spot for animals.”
“Every reasonable person does, but I also know those things aren’t ordinary animals. You’re up to something.”
Her skirts stopped fluttering, her willowy immortality frozen, and her eyes looked thousands of years older than mine. She had seen so much. The first time I was murdered, and the fall of our house, and then the second time…
I really caused her a lot of trouble.
“Once Pandora’s Box is open, you won’t be able to close it,” she said. “You won’t be able to turn back and when you say Helena is the one to be at your side, I believe you, but…I will test her.”
“Test her? What kind of test?”
“It’s better to know now,” Marisa said, “what she is willing to do. How far she is willing to go. And that goes for all your new friends. If they don’t survive my test, it’s better to know now.”
“But then I would have to start over and find someone else, and it will be too late. The council is hunting us down. The Sons of Pandora are dead and dying. They can’t protect the maps anymore. Marisa, there will be no others.”
“If you believe that, you might as well give up, come home, and haunt me,” she said.
“You have no right to test the people I’ve chosen to trust.”
“I gave you a second life and you trusted the wrong people,” she said.
“Did I?” I didn’t like to be challenged this way. Yes, it was true. Forty-five years ago, the Sons of Pandora turned out not to be the men I thought they were. But as they aged, they changed, the way people do at their best. I had forgiven them, but Marisa was the one who made sacrifices to bring me back to life as an incubus.
“I claim the right to test them,” she said. “And you won’t be able to say a word.”
That stung.”Do you realize how painful it is that I can’t tell Helena the truth? ”
“I’m sorry. I can imagine. But I’m still your big sister, and if Helena passes the test, I will welcome her with open arms. But…what about the other girl? Billie? She seems much more willing to do what needs to be done.”
“I don’t love Billie.”
“Why not?”
“Why not!? I just don’t. I was already falling for Helena.”
“I gave you the life of an incubus so you wouldn’t fall for one person!”
“You’re starting to sound more like a puppet master than a loving sister.”
“Well, you know that’s not what I want, but…I’m worried you’re losing your resolve now. I can’t hold back.”
“That’s just…cruel,” I said, trying to keep my cool. “But you won’t actually hurt Helena. Even if she fails, I mean…you won’t… It’s too soon.”
“Our entire world is at stake, Byron! There is far more for me to worry about than your feelings for the girl! She must be willing to take this to the end or all the centuries of my life are for nothing. Too soon? What do you think ‘too soon’ for a human life means to me?”
Anger seared through me. “Am I your brother or your tool?”
“Maybe you just have to be both!” Her hands curled into fists that she slowly worked back open again. “I didn’t create you. I just…saved your life. I don’t always know if it was right, but…I did it. I still think it was right. I have to see it through.”
“It’s still my life.”
“Not when you’re a god,” she whispered.
“Demigod. What does it even matter,” I growled. “What does that even mean? I love her. You gave me this life and now you can just let me figure it out.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I knew I couldn’t budge an immortal.
I was getting an idea for what this meant. If I found a woman to love, and even a bond-mate or three, I might also lead them to their deaths. And I couldn’t tell them the choice they were making. They were starting to figure it out. Billie had some idea of the danger already. But that didn’t do me any good. It wasn’t Billie I wanted.
“Do you have the medicine?” I said, just wanting to leave.
“Always.” She said softly, “I am so sorry. I wish I could have just left you in the library…believe me…I wish it.”
Sam was the last of them now. As long as he was alive, his wards kept the final piece of the box, the final map, safe and sound…at least, as safe and sound as anything could be in this world.
While Fiore and Deveraux remained sharp to the end, Sam no longer remembered who the hell I was. He just knew I was the person who forced medicine down his throat.
“Sam, listen to me. You have to live. Just a little bit longer.”
“Boy, I’m ready to go, just leave me the hell alone! Hannah! Hannah, the—” I muffled him before he could yell for his human nursemaid.
Hannah came anyway and I had to hide the medicine with a spell and melt into the wall while she adjusted his blanket. “No one’s here.”
“The ghost was here again, damnit.”
“I don’t see any ghosts!” She rustled the curtains and peered in the closets to indulge him.
“He’s hiding. You can’t sense him because you’re a human!”
“I’ll try to learn witchcraft next time, Mr. Levin.” She laughed. “I need to finish your grilled cheese, okay? It’s probably burning.”
“I like it burned. Don’t leave me alone with the ghost.”
“I’ll be right back.”
Ironically, if Sam could have hired a witch nursemaid she’d find me in a second, but he hired Hannah because the struggling actress worked for cheap and was also hot. At this point he was too old to realize his mistake and I think his eyes were too bad to appreciate how hot she was either.
It didn’t hit me very often that if I’d lived, I’d be ninety years old, but trying to stay corporeal long enough to wrestle with Sam and his cane while he told me to get out of his house and I mixed the medicine with gin, club soda and bitters, I kept thinking, Fuck, I’m old. All my friends are almost dead.
“We used to be best friends,” I told him.
“I don’t think so. I never saw you before in my life.”
“Sam…I know this means nothing to you anymore, but it’s working out. The box is safe. Graham has friends and they’re protecting it.”
For a minute, I saw a spark of his old self. He actually finished the glass. “Good.”
I felt like a monster. Sam should have died ten years ago, but the Sons of Pandora had told me years ago to keep them alive until Graham was old enough to handle the responsibility of their treasures. They knew they were too old and were sitting on land mines, but they also had no one to pass the potent treasure to. Even Graham was a terrible choice, having been raised a human, and they all worried over what would come of him.
The depressing thing was that Graham was actually rising to the occasion after all and none of them would live to see it.
The things I do for destiny…
“Hey, Byron.”
When I returned to Greenwood Manor, strolling the grounds for some fresh evening air, Gaston was trimming the flowers between the house and the outdoor kitchen. He beckoned me with a finger. The life of a vampire and living for three hundred years had a potent lack of appeal to me just now.
“Good evening,” I said. I knew the vampire worked on the grounds and Deveraux had a good relationship with all his household staff, but that was about it.
“Who the hell are you, really?” Gaston asked, as if I hadn’t known Deveraux forever. He was dr
essed in a very vampire sort of way, wearing a brown brimmed hat and brown corduroy pants tucked into boots with a long-sleeved thermal shirt. They were work clothes that were not exactly Victorian but not exactly modern either.
“I’m Deveraux’s friend,” I said. “And an incubus.”
“A dead incubus?”
“Pretty much.”
“A pretty much dead incubus. Well. He was my friend too.”
“I’m sorry for our loss,” I said, unsure why he seemed confrontational.
Unless…
“Did Deveraux say something about me?” I asked. Deveraux always had this soft spot for vampires. I guess I should be glad more of them weren’t prowling around, but vampires usually tended to leave once their mortal friends got uncomfortably old. Come to think of it, Gaston seemed to be the only one left. “You’re looking at me like you don’t trust me.”
“I knew you were friends,” Gaston said. “Back in the day. He didn’t really tell me what you were up to. But…you have some new toadies to enact your plan with now, eh?” He fired up a weed whacker and started working the weeds right at my feet, blowing stuff right through my body.
I waited. “As much as I can appreciate a good passive-aggressive weed whacking—”
“It’s purely aggressive,” Gaston said. “I’m going to tell these girls who you really are.”
“Who do you think I really am?”
“I think you’re insane and you’re putting all these people in danger. I know Deveraux tried to stop you and instead you haunted him.”
“He didn’t tell you that.” I moved close to the vampire, walking right through his weed whacker. “You read his diaries, I’ll bet. And if you did, you know how he felt as he got older.”
“I don’t care what he thought at the end of his life when he was a senile old man who had been haunted by a seductive ghost for fifty years! You should have just left the Greenwood family alone, in peace.”
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