“Oh, come on,” said Reid. “Who’s up for Barley and Bells? They should be open for another hour or two. I’ll buy you all a round.”
“You should probably rest,” said Willoughby.
“Killjoy,” said Reid. He let Estelle lead him out of there, though, and he was leaning on her a little to stay upright. I hoped he was okay. Were we doing the right thing here? Maybe we should expose the fact that the treaty had been breached, damn the consequences. Because if there were renegade scribbly things out there, that could be bad for everyone.
I eyed Willoughby. “He really is okay, isn’t he? You said that the spell to turn me human again was dangerous, but you didn’t say anything about this.”
“That’s because it’s harmless,” said Willoughby. “I promise.”
He seemed pretty sure of that. He believed it, anyway. I hoped that meant it was true. When would he have ever done the spell before? We were the only primals on earth besides the babies that had just been born. He couldn’t know if it was safe or not.
But before I could bring any of that up, Logan was saying our goodbyes and steering me out of there.
We walked back to his place in the muggy August night. Even this late, it was still pretty warm outside.
“You don’t have to become human for me,” Logan said. “I thought I made that clear.”
“It’s not for you,” I said.
“You told Tatum that it was so that you could have children someday,” he said. “And I told you, I don’t need that from you.”
“Maybe I need it for me,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows. “What? It’s suddenly that important for you to have kids? Really? Because you’ve never said anything about that.”
“Aren’t you hot in that trenchcoat?”
“You know that gargoyles don’t really feel temperature like humans,” he said. “Don’t change the subject. It’s that important to you?”
I shrugged. “Well… I mean, I never had the greatest relationship with my own mom. It’s only now that we’re even really getting to know each other.” My mother’s brain had been scrambled by my father when he’d forced her to bear me, and she’d been sad and angry when I was small. I’d been able to remove the leach-like creature that attached to her brain last fall, and now my mother was whole again.
She and I were forming a relationship, but in a lot of ways, we felt more like friends than mother and daughter, because she’d never really been my caregiver. In a lot of ways, I’d been hers, fighting off skitters and creatures that would come through breaches in her bedroom and keeping her from harming herself.
“Anyway,” I continued, “maybe I want something different with my own kids is all.”
“But you don’t need to be human to have children.”
“I know,” I said. “What you said about adopting, I mean… I guess it’s selfish of me not to want to give a child who needs it a home. You probably hate me for that.”
“Petra, I could never hate you,” he said.
“It’s only that if I could have the chance to do it all for real—to have a little person growing inside me? Like, I want that.” I scuffed my foot on the sidewalk. “Not tomorrow or anything, but it’s something I want in the future.”
“You think about that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”
He reached out and seized my hand. “Me too. I mean, being physically related to someone is something I’ve only had with Henrik, and he’s gone.”
I squeezed his hand. “I know. I’m sorry.” I was glad he hadn’t been in the meeting with Norwood earlier, when Norwood had so casually talked about Logan’s brother’s death.
“If it could happen, with us,” he said, “that would make me happy. But I don’t need it to be happy.”
I leaned close to him as we walked. “I’m doing this for me. Not for you. There are other things too. I want to age normally. I want to grow old with you.”
He put his arm around me. “Yeah. I guess I didn’t think that far into the future.”
“Well, I did,” I said.
“I guess if your mind’s made up, there’s no way I’m going to stop you.”
I giggled. “You know me well.”
He chuckled softly. “I do know you. But, Petra, listen to me, if it does get really, really dangerous, we have to stop. Because I won’t lose you, not for this.”
“Hey, I’m invulnerable, remember?”
“You won’t be, not if we do this,” he said. “I have to admit that scares me.”
“You’re not invulnerable,” I said.
“No, I know,” he said. “But I’m strong. I heal fast. I’m impervious to flame.”
“Yeah, and even being human, I’ll have my primal magic,” I said. “I’m not going to suddenly be helpless.”
“No, I know,” he said. “But you don’t know what it was like for me when I thought you were dead. It was pretty awful.”
“I will do my best not to die,” I said, peering up at him.
He kissed my forehead. “I’m going to hold you to that.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Estelle
Estelle had not bothered to get dressed up for Reid’s Studio 54 party, much to his chagrin. They’d had an argument about it earlier. He had stood in the doorway to her bedroom and explained that Studio 54 was a very exclusive club in its time, and that people stood in line for hours to get inside, and that he wasn’t going to let anyone in who hadn’t put together a very excellent costume. If she was out of costume, then people were going to wonder why she had been allowed inside.
She told him that everyone coming to the party already knew them both, and they would know that Estelle freaking lived in the apartment.
This didn’t seem to satisfy him, so they argued for a while after that. With Reid, she could argue until she was blue in the face. They were twins. They had been fighting since they were in the womb.
But he didn’t change her mind, and she didn’t change his. He went and got into his “excellent costume” which consisted of bell bottoms and a shirt with a wide collar, unbuttoned halfway down his chest to show off what little chest hair he actually had. Not that he looked bad or anything. Her brother was an attractive guy. She supposed that was why he’d had no problem working his way through most of the female population at Ravenridge when they first came to the school.
But there hadn’t been any women in his bed since Tatum, as far as Estelle could tell, anyway, not that they talked about it.
She was worried about her brother.
He was always like this—manic, making bad decisions, overusing intoxicants—but it seemed different lately. There was a desperate undercurrent to all of it. He was hurting.
She didn’t know how to help. She would want him to be still and have a night in. To eat ice cream and talk about it. Reid was incapable of that sort of thing. He always had to be moving, doing, acting.
She stayed in her room for most of the party. She thought that would be fine, except it was loud, and she couldn’t watch TV except with the subtitles on, and she couldn’t go to sleep, and eventually, disgusted, she left her room and wound through the bodies in her living room, looking for her brother.
“Hey, where’s your costume?” said someone.
“You’re not supposed to be allowed in without a costume,” said someone else.
“I live here,” said Estelle. “Have you seen my brother?”
“Who?”
“Reid,” she said. “The guy who threw this party?”
A shrug.
Actually, come to think of it, Estelle didn’t recognize the person she was talking to, and it wasn’t only because of their ridiculous seventies getup. There were people at this party who didn’t go to Ravenridge.
Geez, how many people were here?
Oh, God, she was going to have to clean all this up in the morning, and she wasn’t looking forward to it.
She pushed her way through a crush of bodies for nearly an
hour, looking for Reid. Finally, she found him in the master bathroom, doing lines of cocaine off the sink.
“What the hell are you doing?” She was appalled. It was one thing to get drunk. It was quite another to do hard drugs.
Reid grinned at her, eyes glittering. “It’s Studio 54, Estelle. There’s gotta be blow.”
“You know, if you want to get Tatum back—”
“This isn’t about Tatum,” he said, suddenly fierce. “Why would you fucking bring her up, anyway? And you should be in costume.”
On second thought, forget talking to Reid. It was a lost cause. She had thought maybe she could get him to consider shutting down the party or something, but that was obviously not going to happen.
Estelle went to get her purse and left.
She went walking. She walked by Ravenridge, but she didn’t go in. She could have maybe gone up to Petra’s and Tatum’s room, although Petra was probably at the Studio 54 party somewhere and Tatum was probably mad at Estelle by proxy for the dragon blood.
She walked by Barley and Bells. She thought about going in. It didn’t look too crowded, probably because everyone from Ravenridge, who usually populated the bar, were at Reid’s party. But she just kept walking.
Before she knew it, she was outside the apartment building where Logan lived.
She went in the door, trying to convince herself that she was going to see Logan, maybe see if Petra was there. Maybe ask Petra something about homework for their spellcraft class.
It wasn’t until she was standing outside Logan’s door that she admitted why she was really there.
She walked to the door across the hall, Fox’s apartment, raised her hand, and knocked.
Nothing.
She let out a strangled breath, partly in relief, partly in disappointment. She shut her eyes. Oh, God, what was she doing here?
The door opened.
Her eyes snapped open.
There was Fox, still in the remnants of his professorial outfit. No suit jacket anymore, his button-up shirt untucked and unbuttoned at the top, his feet bare. He adjusted his glasses and looked her over.
She sucked in a breath. “I came to talk to you about that spell you did on my brother.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You did?”
She nodded. “I want to know more about it. I want to know about side effects.”
“Listen, Estelle—”
“You going to let me in?”
He hesitated. And then he stepped aside from the door.
She marched inside.
He shut the door behind her. He leaned against it, slipping his hands into his pockets. “You noticing adverse affects with Reid?”
“No,” she said, hugging herself and turning in a circle. “No, it’s just I want to know what to look for. In case there are any.” His apartment was starting to come together. Nearly all the boxes had been unpacked, and it was tidy and neat and simply decorated. She liked it here, she realized. Something about the apartment seemed to have been infused with his presence, and his presence soothed her.
No, it inflamed her.
Whatever. It felt good.
“I don’t know of anything that could be a complication with the spell,” he said.
“Have you done it before?”
“Well, no,” he said. “I haven’t. But I understand the mechanism of it, and there’s no way—”
“So, how can you be sure?” she said.
“This is really why you’re here?”
She nodded.
He stepped away from the door and started toward her. “Listen, Estelle, whatever we did before, I think we both know that, uh, we can’t do it again.”
She took a step backwards. “I know that. I don’t even want that.”
“No?” He was coming closer.
She shook her head furiously. “Not at all.”
“Good,” he said, and he was still coming closer. “Then I think maybe you should go.”
“You haven’t explained to me about the spell.” Her voice was shaking.
He stopped moving, but that was only because there were inches between them now. He was close enough that she could smell him again. His scent… oh, the things it did to her.
She clenched her hands into fists.
He brought up his fingers and he feathered them over her jaw. “This is wrong.”
“It’s not wrong,” she said. “It’s not hurting anyone.”
His fingers danced over her neck, down to her shoulder. “Morally, to be involved with you, it confuses our professional relationship.”
The bottom had gone out of her voice. “I could drop the class.”
The whisper of his fingers over her collarbone. “You need to take spellcraft. I’m the only person teaching it.”
She sucked in a hiss of breath.
“Doesn’t matter, anyway,” he said. “No matter what, you’d still be a student.”
She felt tight and hot all over. “It’s only that I keep thinking about…”
“Why did you come here?”
“Kissing you,” she said. “The way it feels to kiss you. I just… I can’t…”
His voice was raw. “What do you want from me?”
She suddenly seized handfuls of his shirt and went up on her tiptoes. She pulled him against her, pressing her lips into his.
He grunted, resisting for a moment, and then his lips were moving against hers, his hands coming around her, splayed over the small of her back, pressing her tightly against him.
They kissed, and it was a hurricane—winds of passion whipping through them, destroying everything in its wake, churning something inside Estelle into a frenzy.
And then, she let go of her handfuls of his shirt and she pressed her palms into his chest. A caress—for a moment—then she pushed.
He stumbled back.
“Sorry,” she said. She was trembling. “I didn’t mean to do that.”
He took off his glasses and began to clean them. His hands were shaking too.
“You’re right,” she murmured. “We shouldn’t do that. I don’t know why I came.”
He put his glasses back on. “If things were different… if there was any way… I think about you too.”
That jolted through her, pleasant and unsettling. “But things aren’t different.”
“No,” he said.
She rushed at the door. “I’ll leave.”
“That would be good,” he said.
Her hand on the knob.
He stopped her. He pressed her into the corner, and his mouth was on hers again. It was urgent and scalding and it made things inside her surge and ebb and crest. She clung to him, and she did feel as if he was the only solid thing in the world, that everything around them was a stormy wind.
But then he stopped, backing away violently, thrusting his hands into his hair. “Go,” he bit out.
“Fox—”
“Go.”
She went.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“It’s a very complicated spell, with a lot of steps, and it’s not going to be easy,” Willoughby was saying. We were in a classroom at Ravenridge, the room where we usually met for my potions class. The far wall was covered in shelves full of cauldrons and various ingredients in dark brown glass bottles. Willoughby was perched on top of a desk.
Logan was standing next to the desk, and I was sitting down in a chair, tracing absently over a heart that someone had carved into the desk.
“Well,” said Logan, “why don’t we do a quick overview here, so that we have an idea of what we need to be prepared for.”
“It might be better to take it just a bit at a time,” said Willoughby. “First of all, something you’re going to have to understand is that we’re basically creating life here. That doesn’t happen easily, and it doesn’t come without a price. It takes life to create life.”
My fingers stopped moving over the carved heart. “What are you saying? We have to kill something?”
Willoughby
nodded. “That is exactly what I’m saying.”
“Like what?” I said. “Not a person. I’m not killing a person.”
“No, not a person,” said Willoughby. “But probably an animal.”
I made a face.
“Petra, we don’t have to do this,” said Logan. “I already said we don’t have to—”
“Not something cute, right?” I said. “And not a pet. I’m not killing a cat or a dog. And I know Tatum would tell me that chickens are really smart and they can do math and shit, but, like, I’m more in the chicken camp.”
Willoughby chuckled. “Actually, I think, uh, we’ll probably need something from the other world. The world of the scribbly things. That sort of power is what created you in the first place, so sacrificing something from there—”
“Like a skitter?” I said. “Because those are handy.”
“No, I’m thinking of something else,” said Willoughby. “It’s not the least bit cute, and it sort of manifests like a plant, so it shouldn’t be too difficult for you to use it in the spell.”
“Okay,” I said, confused.
“You’d have to cross over into the other world to get it,” said Willoughby. “Is that something you can do? Because if we need someone to create a breach between the worlds—”
“There’s a breach in the parking lot,” said Logan. “Malachi opened it up, and no one closed it.”
“Malachi,” said Willoughby.
I looked down. “My half brother. He died when we were fighting our father.”
“You mourn him?”
I looked up at Willoughby. “Well, he was… rough around the edges and he did kill Logan’s brother and impregnate a woman against her will, but she’s still in love with him, so I don’t know, I mean, I guess he wasn’t all bad. It’s complicated, I guess.”
“I would have thought you hated all the creatures from that world.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t. We have a treaty.”
Willoughby nodded slowly.
I narrowed my eyes. “Do you hate them? There’s something you’re not telling us, Professor. Some reason why they’re coming after you and why you don’t want to break the treaty.”
His eyes widened. “What do you mean?”
Logan turned to me. “Yeah, what do you mean?”
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