Kevin narrowed his eyes. “Malek says there’s no letting involved. If he wants her, he’s gonna take her. She lied to him, abused his magic, and then she had the stones to attack him directly. She deserves whatever she gets.”
Whatever that was, it would be capital-U ugly. “I can’t argue with that. Harsh, but fair.”
Melody pleaded with her eyes.
“You think you deserve mercy?” I asked.
She didn’t hesitate. “No. I’ll take justice. Isn’t that what you promised?”
I turned to face Malek. “I did. I gave you my word.”
I remember, he signed.
“You still believe I’m good for it?”
If I didn’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all.
No, we wouldn’t. I’d be in the same place as the assassin. Food for crows. Even the thought of that should’ve squicked me beyond belief, but this was the world I chose to play in when I started training with Oscar.
I could be an apprentice for only so long before I had to take the reins as a seer. Power and responsibility. My word was my bond in every realm. I knew it. Malek knew it. So why had he come here?
“Did you think I’d hand her over to you?”
It was worth a shot.
Nice joke. Probably nobody else saw it that way. Maybe the Singer understood. A glance out of the corner of my eye brought her smile into focus. She seemed to have too many teeth one second, and looked human the next.
“What do you want, Malek?” I asked.
I want in.
‘In’ meant what? Hanging out? Figuring out? Running into disaster with us? “Keeping an eye on me? Making sure I follow through?”
Making sure she does.
“Okay.” I didn’t give the others a say. It wouldn’t matter what they thought, only what Malek did. They couldn’t stop him. None of them would try. “You riding with us, or did you bring your own transportation?”
He hooked a thumb over his shoulder at a shape I could just make out—a motorcycle parked twenty feet in front of the Explorer.
“Excellent,” I said. “We’re going back to Kevin’s. It’s our home base. The others should be there by now. You need directions?”
I’ll follow you.
“Wait,” Kevin said. “I want to ask about Amy.”
Malek nodded. I helped her.
“By working magic on her? Don’t you think we’ve got enough of that going around? You changed her.”
She asked me to.
“Don’t you need a better reason than that?”
Not in her case.
Kevin advanced on Malek. Didn’t stop until they were nose to nose. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Fear spiked the pit of my belly. At what Kev would do. At what Malek might do to him.
The god didn’t take the bait. She needed my help. She’s a part of this even though she shouldn’t be. I couldn’t refuse her.
Kevin drew back his hand. Slammed his palm against the car window so hard he rattled the glass. He stood rooted to the spot, bristling. Malek didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t even twitch.
“We should go,” I said.
Still, neither of them moved.
I scrubbed the top of my head with my cold hands. “Kev?”
He turned to look at me. “Yeah. Okay.”
I allowed myself to feel relieved for, like, ten seconds. All the time I was willing to take. “Everybody in the car. I’ll be a minute.”
I stepped behind the nearest tree to pee. Lucky me, no one saw. No cops, no hauling me off to jail for indecent exposure. As I zipped up I heard the slam of doors and slide of seatbelts and the panting dog.
I slid into the driver’s seat and turned the headlights on as soon as the engine gunned to life, just in time to see Malek slip on a helmet. Kind of funny, really. I mean, it was the law, but who’d be enforcing tonight? He didn’t need the protection. If he had to lay down the bike, he’d walk away with a scratch that would heal faster than we could get him bandaged up.
“This is so not awesome,” Beth said from the back seat.
The Singer sighed next to her. “I couldn’t agree more.”
I gazed into the rearview mirror. Beth had gathered her knees to her chest. The dog pressed up against her. Smudged her glasses with his wet nose. “Who is that guy?”
“You don’t want to know,” Kevin and the Singer said simultaneously.
In the front seat, Melody pulled her seatbelt wide and let it go. It snapped back against her chest. She did it over and over again.
“Quit sulking,” I said.
“That’s not the word I’d use.”
That was what it looked like to me. All the ways I could see. “Enlighten me.”
“The Singer’s right. I’m a screwup.”
“Like I said, sulking.”
She glared at me.
“Do all of us a favor,” I said. “Quit stalling and lying. Do something to help yourself. Do something to help everybody. Start with one small thing.”
She stopped popping the belt. “I can do that.”
“Show us.”
“And then what?” she asked.
“Do it again.”
Malek pulled away from the curb and I followed suit, hitting the gas to put us in front of him.
Kevin grabbed the back of my seat. “You realize what this means, don’t you?”
A thousand, million different craptastic things. I forced a sense of humor into the mix. “We’re bringing Malek to your house. Your dad is gonna freak out.”
He didn’t laugh. “He can get in line, man.”
I thought about it all over again. We were bringing Malek to his house. Who else would be there? The faery cops. Scott and Stacy. Possibly the Singer’s father. And Kevin’s girlfriend, who’d told us she was going to find Melody but rode her bike straight to Snake Bite for magic ink and heaven only knew what else.
I felt pretty sure about the what else. Malek could’ve opened up about his conversation with her, even with Kevin in his face. He could’ve calmed the sitch with a handful of words, but he’d chosen the opposite.
My visionary skill set still left a lot to be desired. I didn’t know how many things I’d missed when I followed that thread and saw Amy with Malek. But I knew them both. And that scared the hell out of me.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Amy waited for us on the porch. She’d leaned the bike against the side of the dark house and sat cross-legged on the concrete, grease all over her pink T-shirt. The overhead light buzzed and flickered. Moths circled, battered their winged bodies against the glass to find a way in. Instinct could kill.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
She looked up. Furrowed her brow. “An hour? Maybe two.”
A long time. “You didn’t ring the bell?”
“It’s the middle of the night, Rude. I don’t have a key and I didn’t want to wake anybody. Besides, I didn’t see your car yet. I figured you’d be back soon.” She studied her nails. Eight out of ten had been bitten to the quick. She went to work on number nine.
I’d never seen her do that before. Even in the thick of trouble, I’d never seen her that nervous.
Kevin stepped around me and hunkered down beside her. He folded his wings tight against his back until he mostly looked like himself. “Are you all right?”
She peeled off the end of her fingernail with her teeth. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
He took her face in his hands. “I need you to tell me.”
“I guess it won’t do any harm now, but can we have the conversation indoors?”
She let him help her up and stood behind him while he unlocked the door.
The squeal of the hinges sounded extra-loud in the silence of the entry. So did the squeak of the floorboards under our feet. A towering shape popped up from the sofa in the living room. A hand reached from it to the table lamp. Flicked on the light.
Scott. He was an inch shorter than my six-three, less Hawa
iian-shirt-wearing party dude and more black-and-white-rugby-shirt-wearing jock. His jeans had permanent grass marks at the knees from the pickup football games he played. His sneakers were scuffed from contact with the concrete basketball court behind the school. A shock of his blond hair stuck up at a weird angle in the back.
I pointed that out with a passing glance. He smoothed it out with a big hand.
“I had second watch,” he said.
“Good job falling asleep.” I grinned at him.
“Ugh. Just don’t do that, okay?”
“What?”
“Smile. You have any idea how terrible you look?”
“That’s your best adjective?” I asked.
“Class clown. Hopeless.” He rolled his eyes. “Hey, Kev? Your dad went to sleep. Actually, I carried him to his bed and put him in it after he fell asleep. He wanted to see you get home. Lame, I know.”
“He’s my dad,” Kevin said. “Thanks, man.”
“No worries.”
Kevin took off down the hall toward his dad’s room.
“What time is it?” Scott reached for a puddle of silver links on the table beneath the lamp. His watch. “3:30. Nice.”
“We got sidetracked,” I said.
“Always. Listen, those cops are sacked out at the breakfast table and Stacy’s in Kevin’s room. They couldn’t find Mr. Nance. I should say we couldn’t find him. We tried.” He met the Singer’s gaze. “Sorry—oh, right. You guys don’t get along.”
“That’s an oversimplification,” the Singer said.
“Whatever. We need information, all of us. You pick some up in your travels?” he asked.
I nodded. “None of it good.”
“As usual.” He slipped his watch onto his wrist. “I’m going to go make some coffee. You assemble the team?”
Stacy had slept in her clothes. Her long purple skirt tangled up with her legs, her black tee rumpled. Her long, brown curls fanned across the pillow. She opened her eyes before I touched her shoulder. They were startlingly clear. Then she yawned with sound effects.
“We need a better plan next time,” she said. “Too much time twiddling our thumbs until you got back. Okay?”
“Okay.” I found her Birkenstocks on the rug near the foot of the bed.
I handed them to her so she could slip them on. “Hippy.”
“That’s Goth hippy to you.” She’d wiggled her toes. She’d painted the nails black.
She followed me into the kitchen. We were the last to arrive. The darkness outside, the early morning stillness—the only sounds were quiet conversation and the burbling of the coffee maker.
The cops had been roused at the table. Impressions from the placemats marked their cheeks.
“That’s a good look for you two,” I said.
Officer Burns scowled. “Piss off, Davies.”
Scott had made sure everybody who wanted a cup had one in hand. Mr. Landon sipped from a cracked, economy-sized mug. A piece of tissue stuck to the stubble on his face. Beside him, Kevin leaned against the wall with Amy in his arms. She fidgeted as my gaze passed over her. Not because of me—not that I could tell, anyway. Kevin seemed to be holding onto her more tightly than she’d like.
The Singer sat on the counter next to Malek with the book in her lap. From the smell, they’d spiked their coffee with whisky.
Melody and Beth sat on the floor at their feet. Beth took off her glasses, huffed moisture on the lenses, and wiped them with the hem of her shirt. Melody picked at a weak spot in the tile floor, on her way to making a decent-sized hole.
Stacy and I took up position on either side of Scott near the coffee maker. I drank the muddy dregs of the pot and brought everyone up to speed with help from Kev and the Singer.
I choked on the last sip. Pounded my chest with my fist. “So that’s where we’re at.”
Mr. Landon shook his head. “This is crazy.”
Kevin closed his eyes. “Dad—”
“I’m not planning to skip out on you, so quit worrying about that. I just don’t know what I can do. I don’t have the resources you people have. I’m just a guy.”
“You’re not,” Kevin said. “You’ve seen things.”
“Things I’d prefer not to remember.”
“You can keep holding down the fort, then.”
Mr. Landon buried his face in his mug.
I cleared my throat. “Melody, you said before that the spell had to be completed within seventy-two hours.”
She sighed. “If we don’t finish it in time, that’s it. All this was for nothing.”
Scott snorted. “Please tell me you’re not after sympathy.”
She ignored him. “There are three more steps. And thirty-six hours.”
The Singer flipped open the book to the spell. She blinked immediately. “Wow.”
“Sleepy, right?” Beth asked.
The Singer popped Beth in the back of the shoulder with the tip of her boot.
Beth swatted at her.
The Singer bent closer to the book. “Invoke the Demon. That’s next.”
“Does it say how?” I asked.
“In detail. We’ll need some supplies. They’ll have to be gathered from all over town.”
I wanted the list, but I also wanted to know what to expect. “Luckily, we have a lot of hands on deck. What’s after that?”
“Build the gate. Prepare the way with the blood of the guilty.”
My turn to blink. “Seriously?”
“That’s what it says.”
Gates, I knew a lot about. Blood, not so much. “Does it say whose blood?”
The Singer shook her head. “Just that they have to be guilty of something. Weird, isn’t it? Usually it’s the blood of the innocent.”
Mr. Landon let out a shaky breath. “I really don’t like this.”
“Neither do we,” Burns said. “Going ahead with this spell tips the balance of things further. It makes things more dangerous for the people in the faery realm. If the Demon is summoned and not defeated, we could end up in the same circumstances as before. There will be war. Atrocities. No way out.”
Malek snapped his fingers. Got everyone’s attention. He signed.
Kevin spoke the words out loud for those of us who didn’t know ASL. “You got another suggestion?”
Burns frowned. “Unfortunately, not.”
“Then stop wasting time,” Kevin translated. “If it was up to me, I’d have killed the stupid bitch and been done with it. If I’d done that, we’d never know what she did or how to put things back how they were. I’m here to keep an eye on her. I’m here to help. You’re smart, you’ll do the same.”
Reid folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t like you talking to us like that.”
“I look like I care?” Kevin said for Malek.
Reid pushed his chair back, scraping the legs on the tile with a sound like nails on a chalkboard.
I interrupted whatever he was about to say. “Not all of us like each other. Captain Obvious, reporting for duty. We have a goal. We have a way to get there. What we don’t have are choices. Either we do it or we don’t. We succeed or we fail. For sure we fail if we sit here arguing about it.”
Reid settled down. Looked away from me. “What do you want us to do?”
“I think we have to start with the summoning. That’s next. Singer, give us the list of stuff we need to get.”
“Blood of the summoner,” she said.
“More blood?”
Malek signed. Blood is life. Blood is every relative who ever lived before a midwife or a doc pulled you out of your mother’s womb. Without them, you wouldn’t exist. If the spell calls for blood, it calls on the power of the summoner—Melody. And the power of all those people, too.
That made the kind of sense that forced me to lean against the counter for balance. “This just gets better and better, doesn’t it? What else?”
The Singer read from the list. “Earth from where the willow tree used to be. Living fire
. River water. Breath of the Singer. Shit.”
No kidding. “That book’s old. Older than you are. How can it talk about you like that? Who would’ve known about you?”
She bit her lip. “I’m not the first Singer, Rude. I’m not even the only Singer, though I’m probably the only one close to here. And by close, I mean in the country, maybe even all of North America. When I die—and I will, even if I go back to being one–hundred-percent faery, because we’re really long-lived but not immortal—another one will be born. Who knows if they’ll be human or not. Could be a baby girl or a baby boy. But there’ll for sure be one.”
“It’s like a rule?”
“It’s a thing, yeah,” she said.
Amy moved Kevin’s hands and leveraged herself upright. “So you’re not that special.”
The Singer favored her with a sympathetic smile. “My secret’s out.”
Amy cocked her head. Not the answer she expected. Then again, I had to remember she hadn’t spent that much time around the Singer. She only knew what Kevin told her, which wouldn’t have been a lot. Or whatever she made up on her own steam. Amy had a vivid imagination. She’d spun herself a good story about the mysterious, beautiful faery woman who loved her boyfriend.
The Singer took a deep breath. “This basically calls for the magical elements. Earth, air, fire, water, spirit.”
“Spirit?” Amy asked.
The Singer nodded. “The blood.”
Stacy stretched her arms overhead. When she dropped them down again, she began to braid her unruly curls. “Who gets what?”
“The blood’s mine,” Melody said. “I’ll collect it myself.”
Malek signed. Sure you don’t want help?
She met his gaze. “You can watch if that’s what gets you off.”
I so didn’t want to know what got Malek off.
I looked at Kevin. “I can take the earth from the park. I have this feeling the spell’s not calling for run-of-the-mill dirt. Which means looking sideways again.”
“You should take Scott with. You need someone to watch your back. The safest place for him is with—”
Scott broke in. “—with somebody who has superpowers, because I’m power-free.”
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