by Lish McBride
He gave me that patented that’s-not-funny-and-you-know-it look that every parent develops. Do they teach it in a class? Hand it out with the diapers?
“You have other options open to you—why this boy?”
If that question were a record, it would be one of Cade’s old 45 singles kept on repeat, the needle wearing through the vinyl. I crossed my arms. “Why not this boy?”
“It’s difficult for me to endorse any suitor you meet because he wandered into the bookstore while playing hooky.” He took off his glasses and rubbed a hand over his eyes. “Didn’t Lock ask you out to see a band or something?”
“So you’d rather I date the guy I met through my Coterie assassin gig than the one who was skipping school? That makes sense.”
He put his glasses back on. “Not the same thing: Lock made a responsible decision to protect his family; Ryan is a bored kid with too much time on his hands and not enough life skills to make good choices.”
“One class, Cade. Let’s not blow this out of proportion. As for Lock taking me to see a show, he’s my friend. Friends do things together. I know you’re a bit out of the loop, but I hear that’s how it’s been done for centuries.”
Cade sighed, and I could almost see him mentally throwing up his hands in frustration. He didn’t do it, though. Instead he got up and kissed me on the forehead. “Sometimes I forget how young and new to the world you are.”
Oooookay. “So … can I go?”
“Fine. Before you leave, call Sylvie and see if she can come in a little early today.”
“Will do, boss-man.” In the eyes of the law I was almost an adult, but neither Cade nor I cared about that. He knew I was capable of making my own decisions and blah blah blah-bity-blah, but that didn’t mean I’d ever stop seeking his approval. Cade was my only family, and when you only have one person chiming in on things, a negative vote hurts.
Ryan and I went to a deli down the street for lunch. I picked at my hot Italian sausage grinder, and I was too bummed out after my conversation with Cade to even make any innuendo-laden comments about it. Which is just sad. With “hot Italian sausage” in the name, the jokes practically write themselves. Maybe I was coming down with a cold. I needed to eat, but I didn’t have much of a stomach for it. Ryan didn’t seem to notice, babbling on about … well, I wasn’t really paying attention to what he was babbling about. I was eyeing my pickle and wondering how horrific my breath would be after I ate it, and then wondering why that made me want to eat it even more. Are teenagers naturally contrary and instigative, or was it just the firebug in me, drawn to friction and heat?
“So, do you wanna go?”
Ryan’s face was all pleading, hopeful puppy dog. I was tempted to just agree and figure it out later, but that could land me in something I hated or, worse, interfere with my Coterie life. How on earth did other people manage double lives? Batman must be tired all the damn time. Of course, Batman also had Alfred to keep his shit straight for him. I had a sudden image of Cade as Alfred and Sylvie as my hyperactive Robin, and almost choked on my soda.
I stabbed my sandwich with a sword-shaped toothpick. “Sorry, Ryan, I haven’t been paying attention. I guess I’m a poor lunch companion today.”
He grinned and swiped my pickle without asking. If it were anyone else, I’d have stabbed their hand with a fork—I like pickles. And manners.
Normal girls, however, do not stab their boyfriends with forks over a pickle—or cremate them with their supersecret mind powers, as I also considered doing—and since I was going for normal, no stabby-stabby or burny-burny. Some days are just no fun at all.
I made a mental note to tell Cade about this. I didn’t stab him when he stole my pickle! And you say I’m not gaga for him! On second thought, that might earn me a lecture on violence. Or pickles.
“I asked if you wanted to go into Boston this weekend. Then I said I had amazing things lined up guaranteed to knock your socks completely off. And yet here you sit, socks still firmly on and mind totally not blown.”
My immediate response wasn’t just no, it was hell, no. Extreme no. No ad infinitum, ad nauseam, with trained No! dancers doing a routine in sequins on top. If the Coterie were a human body, then Boston would be its whole central nervous system. That’s where Venus was based, for crying out loud. No way was I voluntarily going anywhere near her evil lair. I might not have had a choice in working for Venus, but that didn’t mean I had to spend my downtime hanging out around her and her flying monkeys. But again, since I was playing a normal girlfriend, I couldn’t just toss the table over and run screaming from the café. I would have to find something reasonable to calmly object to. What I needed was more information. Unfortunately Ryan didn’t seem to have anything else to say on the subject. I rolled my eyes. “To do what?”
“There’s a theater doing a foreign horror movie marathon. Totally blood, guts, and gore, but with subtitles so we can pretend to be highbrow.” His grin was all boyish charm, and he grabbed one of my hands with both of his. My heart gave a dramatic little swoon. My brain rolled its eyes in disgust. It was like my hormones wanted me to gush all my feelings for Ryan in some ridiculously overblown Bollywood-style dance montage, while my brain was leaning toward black-and-white art cinema. Problem.
I didn’t know all of Boston, but I knew the area around the Inferno pretty well, and that was usually where Venus lounged about while she managed operations. It was a Coterie-owned, money laundering, restaurant/dance club that also served as Venus’s evil lair. To my knowledge, there were no movie theaters in the vicinity. As long as we didn’t wander around the city, Ryan’s outing might be safe. I still didn’t want to go, but he’d get suspicious if I passed on it. That movie marathon had my name all over it.
“Well, you had me at blood, guts, and gore, but I have to check with Cade. What’s our timeline look like?”
Ryan’s face lit up in his trademark grin, the one that had most of the teenage girls in Currant swooning. I couldn’t say no to someone so swoonworthy, right? Based on all the literature I’d consumed, girls swoon. Usually because of too-tight corsets or the sight of Elvis’s gyrating hips, but it did happen.
“I’ll pick you up, say, six on Friday? Bring you home Saturday morning?” I raised an eyebrow at that and received an overly innocent expression from Ryan in return. “The marathon runs late, so we can either stay the night in Boston and drive home in the morning, or, if that raises old Cadey’s hackles, I can bring you home straightaway. But it will still be in the early hours of Saturday morning.”
I hated it when Ryan called him Cadey. “I’ll ask and let you know, okay?”
Ryan nodded and ate the last chip on his plate. He cast a hopeful glance at mine. “You going to eat that?” He pulled the rest of my sandwich toward him while I scowled.
He grabbed my hand and gave my fingertips a quick kiss. “You’re cute when you do the mock-pissed thing.” Then he started devouring my sandwich. I wasn’t doing mock anything, of course. My hand twitched for my fork, and the corner of the paper napkin in mylap burst into flames. I knocked it to the floor and stomped it out with my boot.
“Do you smell something burning?” Ryan asked, taking a brief break from destroying my sandwich.
“Nope.” I smiled tightly at him and shoved my hands into my warded pockets.
3
ESCAPADES IN FOWLNESS
AFTER MY LUNCH with Ryan, Lock and Ezra picked me up for another Coterie mission, at Venus’s command. The boys showed me their wards automatically, knowing I wouldn’t get into the car unless they had them on. It only took Ezra forgetting his once before that became standard practice. He’d had to go to a Coterie witch to get her to grow back his eyebrows for him, which had cost him a pretty penny—meaning Ezra had to go out and steal more to get the cash back. He loves stealing, but hates extra work, and when he has to do it, suddenly it’s work, and repugnant to him in every way. Ezra’s mind is complicated.
So now Ezra and Lock hold out their chains a
nd I make sure I see the rune for fire etched into the silver ward around their necks before we go anywhere. Though Ezra’s only looked silver. Were-foxes weren’t exempt from the silver sensitivity that plagued most of the were community. So his was made out of platinum.
We drove for forty-five minutes before we reached our target.
“What is it?” Ezra asked, his head tilted to the side. The implied follow-up being: “… and can I steal it?”
“No,” Lock said.
“It’s a Baba Yaga house.” I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice. I’d read about them, but I’d never actually seen one. A Baba Yaga house is a cabinlike structure situated on some big-ass chicken legs. It’s like the architectural version of a mermaid, but instead of a woman/fish combo, it’s a house/chicken combo.
Ezra scoffed. “As safe houses go, that’s not the best choice. It looks like an avant-garde nightmare.” He stepped forward. “Let’s get this over with. What a waste of perfectly good nap time.” He reached for the gate, and Lock and I both jumped forward at the same time, but we were too late. When Ezra opened the gate, it creaked. Loudly.
The house shuddered, its feathers ruffling as it lifted up from the ground. Dust and the occasional feather floated on the breeze as the house raised itself to its full height, revealing some really orange, somewhat bedraggled chicken legs. I swear, in the silence that followed, I heard a faint “Bu-kaw!”
Lock grabbed Ezra’s shoulder and mine, holding us firmly in place. “At least it doesn’t know we’re here and we haven’t spooked it or anything,” he said. His words were even, but the expression he turned on Ezra was 100 percent sarcasm.
A man’s cracking voice drifted down to us. “Tell Venus she’ll get her money! I just need more time.”
Now it was Lock’s turn to scoff. “He must be new,” Lock said to Ezra and me. “More time? Yeah, because the Coterie is in the kittens and hand-holding business.”
I cupped my hands to my mouth as an impromptu megaphone. “I’m sure we can reach some sort of agreement, Mr. Monticello, but you have to tell your house to sit so we can talk it out like civilized—” That’s as far as I got before he screeched. The house did an about-face and started loping through the woods. “Damn.”
Ezra took off his shirt, folding it neatly before he draped it on the fence. “I’ve got this.” After he finished stripping down, Ez shifted. I’ve never seen anyone else shift, but from what I’ve heard, fox shifters aren’t the norm. Like the creature they turn into, their shift is quick and graceful. In a few steps, Ezra went from a human Adonis to a russet-colored fox. If I’d blinked, I might have missed it.
Ezra’s amber eyes shone in the light as he hopped on his little black feet in front of us.
“Don’t get distracted,” Lock told him, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Now get going. We’ll catch up in the car. If you can, steer him deeper into the woods.” Ezra bounded off after the crashing sounds the Baba Yaga house made as it moved through the dense thickets of spruce and pine.
“How does he get so small?” I asked as I climbed into the passenger seat.
“Out of all the things we just saw, that’s the one that your brain won’t accept? Not the giant chicken house, but the size of our friend when he’s a fox?”
I clicked my seat belt as Lock jerked the wheel and punched the gas. We tore off down the street.
“Sylvie explained conservation of mass to me, and it just doesn’t make sense. How does he get smaller?”
“It’s magic, cupcake, not science.”
“But—”
“Science would also tell us that we couldn’t possibly be chasing a house on chicken legs, you couldn’t be a firebug, and I couldn’t talk to trees, but we both know that all those things happen.” Lock turned abruptly down a side road. “Now be quiet. I need to listen, and it’s difficult from a moving vehicle.”
We tracked the house using Lock’s intel from the trees and Ezra’s yips and barks. It got to the point where we couldn’t drive anymore and we had to get out. Then we tracked it by the giant mounds of chicken poo. Lock stopped at one big pile and what was clearly a beanstalk growing out of it.
“The moron is feeding it magic beans.”
“He’s afraid,” I said. Lock squeezed my hand. Fear of the Coterie, of Venus, was something we both knew well.
“You’re going to have to burn these,” he said after we’d had our moment. “They’re an invasive species.”
We heard what sounded like a woman screaming. No matter how many times I heard Ez make that sound, it gave me the willies. But it was a sound that carried well, so we used it as one of our signals.
Lock ran ahead to help him while I stopped at each beanstalk, put my hands on it, and vaporized it back into the ether. By the time I caught up, Lock had the house bound in a cage made of twisted tree limbs, a living chicken coop. Ezra was running around the house’s feet, yipping excitedly. Everything is one big game to a fox. Lock was sweating from holding the house in place. Since the rest of my team was occupied, that left me to do the fun part. Venus didn’t want a crispy fried-chicken house, so I couldn’t burn it down, and Mr. Monticello was clearly not coming out. I buried my exasperation—before I accidentally started a forest fire—and got ready to climb. Lock took my jacket and handed me my warded gloves. I slipped them on and began my ascent.
Mr. Monticello decided to take the express elevator down before I made it to the top. I can’t say I blame him. The wet sound he made when he landed will show up in my nightmares for a long time.
I had to burn the clothes when we were done. The smell of charcoal and the eye-watering, acrid reek of chicken poop was never going to come out. I kept the warded gloves. They were too expensive to toss. Lock called Venus, and we had to wait until a recovery team came for the house. It was a long hike back to the car and a longer drive to the fence where Ez had left his clothes. Since he was the least exhausted, Ezra drove while Lock curled up in the back and I napped in the passenger seat. I was really looking forward to a hot shower.
THE BOYS dropped me off at home, and I took the longest shower in the history of long showers. Once I was clean and dressed, I sat down for dinner and asked Cade about Ryan’s proposed road trip. Cade was less than enthused. Not for the reasons that most people raising a teenage girl would have—Cade trusted me and had no delusions in that arena. We’d always been honest with each other. Lock and Ezra stayed over all the time, and though Cade knew we were just friends, a lot of other parents would have said no. I’d brought that up once, and he’d laughed.
“My parents had that rule, and I’ve always thought that was funny,” he’d said. “Like teenagers can only have sex at night in someone’s house. If you were really dead set on it, I couldn’t stop you. It certainly didn’t stop me.”
“Ew.” I pretended to gag.
“Your face could freeze like that, you know.”
“Totally worth it.”
He rested his chin in his hand, an amused twist to his lips. “Despite current evidence to the contrary, I prefer to believe that I’ve raised you right and know where you are at night.” He’d earned a hug for that.
So it wasn’t illicit behavior that Cade was worried about. And he certainly wasn’t worried about Ryan doing anything harmful toward my person. When your little princess can scorch an entire city block with her mind, you just don’t have those kinds of fears. No, Cade had the same worries I’d had.
“Isn’t that tempting fate?” he asked. “Might as well strap pork chops to your body and run into the lion’s den.” We were eating dinner at home. Cade had cooked, so my steak was tender and well-marinated and sitting next to some tasty roasted root veggies.
I can cook, since I’d been on my own with my mom for years and it wasn’t a skill I could live without, but unlike Cade I tended to cook in a very utilitarian fashion. I eat so I don’t die, and I can’t seem to get beyond that. I created fuel. Cade created a meal. I went for quantity, while he stressed quality
. No one would starve in my presence, but I’m not a chef. Cade, though, was a foodie. He liked smelly cheeses and fresh herbs and shuddered at my idea of cooking.
Firebugs have to be careful about two things: calories and potassium levels. We burn through both like mad when we light fires. Both are easy to maintain—eat a lot of bananas and make sure to keep electrolyte supplements handy. But I was seriously getting tired of bananas. There’s really only so much you can do with them. When Cade’s not around, I eat them plain and bitch a lot. When he is around, he bakes them into things, slices them into oatmeal, and sneaks them into desserts. I glanced at the counter. Yup, a banana pie for dessert. I was starting to have an ingrained response to the color yellow. When I saw it, I wanted to vomit and light things on fire.
I sliced into my steak. “I realize that it’s Venus’s turf, but what am I supposed to tell him? He thinks I go to Boston all the time, so I can’t say I don’t like the city. Besides, I don’t think there are any theaters around there, and it’s not as if Venus and her crew are the art house theater types.”
Cade had given up eating for the moment, focusing on the conversation at hand, his fork and knife held loosely in his fists. “Boston isn’t that big—you might run into her or one of her minions … or some as-yet-unforeseen third misfortune.” With me there always seemed to be an as-yet-unforeseen misfortune around the corner.
I stabbed a chunk of sweet potato with my fork, giving it the eye before I took a bite. Last time we’d had sweet potatoes, Cade had snuck plantains into the dish to get my potassium up.
“No plantains, Rat.”
Says the plantain man. It could be a trap. I brought my glass of milk closer, just in case. I’d chug it if I hit plantain.
“Can you remember the last time I went out and did normal-teen activities? When I went to Boston to do something fun? Not work, fun.” I squished an errant chunk of what looked suspiciously like plantain with the tines of my fork.