by Lish McBride
“That’s a turnip,” Cade said, reaching for his wine. “Counterargument: It’s not fun if you or your friends are injured at the end of it.”
Oh, the temptation to roll my eyes. “Point, but you could say that about anything. I could walk down the street tomorrow and get hit by a bus. Does that mean I shouldn’t walk anywhere?”
“Faulty argument. You’re taking something that is extremely likely—Venus discovering you—and comparing it to something very unlikely—getting hit by a bus in a town that does not have a bus system. Try again.”
“I want to do something normal,” I whispered, suddenly tired and overwhelmed by a feeling of hopelessness. “If we went to school together, I’d have pictures of him in my locker. We’d hold hands while we walked down the hallway. I’d ask him to the Sadie Hawkins dance, and then we’d blow it off to go to the movies.” I slumped in my chair. My next argument was going to hit a spot Cade felt bad about—me having to be homeschooled—but I used it anyway. Sometimes I am a grade-A jerk-a-tron. “I don’t get to go to school, though. No walking hallways and no locker so covered in photos of us that students gag themselves with their fingers and pretend to vomit when they see it.” I straightened up, suddenly angry. “I have dreamed of envy-induced vomit pantomimes, Cade. I want them. I deserve them.”
Cade looked at me over the rims of his glasses. “If you went to high school, you’d be the one pantomiming vomit at the girls who wallpapered their lockers with pictures of their boyfriends. You’d tell them you didn’t like the idea of giving over your personhood and identity to the worship of some high school mouth-breather. Then you’d probably ditch class to go get coffee with a college boy in a leather jacket who writes bad poetry and loves Hemingway. If you were going for a cliché, that’s what you would go for.”
Gah, Cade knew me so well. It wasn’t fair. “So I buy Ryan a leather jacket and we’re almost there.” I slumped even farther into my chair. “I don’t even like Hemingway,” I grumbled. “And maybe just once I want the normal girl cliché.” I waved him off before he got into his “What is normal?” diatribe. Because it doesn’t really matter. No matter what Cade would say next, we both understand that I’ll never really know.
Well, I might have been missing out on the American teen experience, but I still got to kiss Ryan’s lips, and that was nothing to complain about, let me tell you. There were a few other trade-offs as well. No curfew, a long leash, and I never needed a bonfire to make s’mores. It wasn’t all a crap parade.
Cade wiped his mouth with his napkin before straightening the cloth and setting it back in his lap. “I won’t lose you just so you can feel like every other girl on the planet. You aren’t normal, Ava. You’re special. Not because of what you can do, but because you’re my little girl.”
Ugh, how do you argue with that? This is why I always lost our debates. Cade was one of those guys who could talk about his feelings to no end, while just the mention of anything mushy made me squirm. Sometimes, when we were watching a movie and it got really emotional, I would go to the kitchen for a glass of water, even if I wasn’t thirsty. That’s how uncomfortable I got. But I wasn’t going to fold this time. I steeled myself and brought out the big gun.
“Please. I don’t ask for much, and you know it.”
Cade studied me, and I could see him beginning to cave.
“I’ll keep my phone on and check in every hour. I’ll be careful.” He grimaced and stared at his plate, and I knew that I’d won.
“All right,” he said. “Every hour on the hour. And don’t just be careful, Rat. Be smart.”
I clapped my hands. “I will,” I said. We spent the rest of the meal discussing what we were reading and changes we were thinking about making to the bookstore. Happy thoughts. If only I were Peter Pan and happy thoughts were enough to help me fly away from the Coterie. Lock would have made an excellent Tinker Bell.
After dishes were washed and put away, we got into our pajamas and Cade made popcorn on the stove. It was movie night, and it was Cade’s turn to pick. He used his turns to educate me, so the film was usually black and white—occasionally colorized—but always good.
I curled up in my favorite spot on the couch and snuggled deep down into an afghan. Cade brought me my own bowl of popcorn so I didn’t steal all of his—not that it stopped me poaching from his bowl anyway—and we settled in for that night’s selection, Key Largo. Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall … I mean, what’s not to love? All in all it was a pleasant evening, and I’m glad, because my evenings were about to get a whole lot more uncomfortable.
I DON’T know why I thought Ryan and I would be going by ourselves. When Friday night rolled around, I found myself squeezed into a Volvo with Brittany and her latest conquest. After a few minutes of stunted conversation, I fervently wished she’d remove his tags and release him back into the wild. Maybe if I’d tried harder we’d have had loads to discuss. Like when he was talking about Robbie’s bitchin’ party last week, I could have snuck in some charming anecdotes about how I burn creatures to death for a living.
The closest specimen in my life of what normal teen behavior might look like is Sylvie, and she likes kaiju movie marathons and cosplaying as obscure anime characters. I’m fairly sure she mastered Elvish and Klingon before she got her braces on, and she likes to read old chemistry books that come into the store. I’m afraid that if we were to leave her alone in the shop too long with normal household cleaners, she’d build a bomb. Or a spaceship. Or Godzilla. Any of those options seem equally likely. I might not know normal, but I’m certain that Sylvie is not the best barometer for it. Which just made Ryan’s friends that much more perplexing. Surely they couldn’t all be jerks, right?
“Interesting ensemble,” Brittany said when I climbed in the car, her tone slow and lazy. “I hear hobo chic is really in this year. Wherever did you get such a lovely … shirt?”
She made the last word a question, obviously pointing out to the others that my shirt was of dubious origin and quality. I did most of my shopping at thrift stores, something Brittany would obviously never do. But my clothes got scorched, ripped, scuffed, and stained on a regular basis because of my job. It wasn’t worth buying new stuff, especially since Cade was footing the bill.
What I wouldn’t give to be able to tell Brittany about the chicken house. Instead I had to smile and tell her I got my clothes at the thrift store. She smirked as if she’d scored a major point somehow. Like Ryan gave a crap where my clothes came from. “Besides, I just read an article saying something like eighty percent of designer clothing is made by children in sweatshops. Small fingers make tiny stitches.” She frowned at me, and I saw her unconsciously reach out and trace the seam on her jacket. I had no idea if what I’d just said was remotely true, but she didn’t know that. I nodded sagely at her—a sort of trust me expression on my face. She looked away first.
Ryan turned his head so she wouldn’t see his grin. “Play nice,” he said when he got his expression back under control. “Don’t make me turn this car around.”
I was glad when Ryan cranked the music up too loud for any of us to try to talk. Brittany started sucking her boyfriend’s face at some point, and after that I kept an eye on the scenery outside the window, thankful for the pounding music that most likely drowned out any slurping noises that might accompany the happy couple. I never thought I would be grateful to have my ears assaulted by uninspired whiny alterna-pop, so already the evening was bringing about more surprises than I cared for.
We stopped to get gas halfway through our drive.
“Does anyone want anything?” I asked, because that was how Cade had raised me, even though Brittany didn’t deserve my good manners.
“Just a bottle of water. A girl’s got to watch her figure,” she replied, not-so-subtly eyeing my waistline.
“With that comment alone, you’ve set feminism back twenty years. Well done, Brittany.” I needed to get away from the gas pumps before anything unfortunate happened.
> I probably weighed a good twenty pounds more than she did, most of it muscle. If only she knew that I would kill for a muffin top. She might be aiming for anorexic, but I desperately needed the reserve those few extra pounds of fat could give me. My metabolism becomes turbocharged when I light fires. It’s not safe being a skeleton in those situations. There’d been some nights when my fat ass had saved my ass (ba-dum-tsh).
Ryan snagged my belt loop and pulled me into him as we walked through the chiming doors. “Wow, she really doesn’t like you.”
“Remind me why you’re friends with that rabid show poodle?”
Ryan grabbed a soda and some chips. “Our parents are friends. She’s not that bad when you get to know her, really.”
“She’s not too bad when you get to know her. When I get to know her, the hate grows exponentially.”
He laughed and went to pay for the gas while I grabbed some beef jerky and something to drink. I considered poisoning Brittany’s water, but I was fresh out of arsenic.
And the evening had only just begun.
An hour later, as we closed in on Boston, my mantra had become, At least we can’t talk in the theater. Wait a minute. I surveyed my fellow passengers as Ryan looked for parking. This was not a subtitle crowd, even if half-naked girls and gore were involved.
I tapped Ryan’s shoulder. He turned the music down so he could hear me.
“We’re not going to a movie, are we.”
Brittany made some noise between a scoff and a snort. It was a biological miracle. Human throats shouldn’t be able to make that sound. She had to be an alien, or a genetic experiment that had gone horribly, terribly wrong.
“Does this look like a movie-theater outfit to you?” She opened her jacket to reveal a tiny skirt, heels, and what was either a sparkly handkerchief or a shirt. I honestly wasn’t sure which one it was.
“Yes?” I crossed my arms and sank into my seat. As far as I could tell, Brittany dressed like that all the time. What, exactly, made this outfit a non-movie-theater outfit? The hoop earrings? The body glitter? Did she wear less or more to the movies? Was this her version of understated? It wasn’t that warm yet. She was going to either get hypothermia or die of exposure. You kind of had to admire her commitment. I shrugged. “How should I know?”
She made that weird noise again and looked away from me, like I was dismissed from her presence. “Silly of me to ask as if you would.”
That seemed to be as close to an apology as Brittany ever got. I glared at Ryan’s profile. “Then where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise.”
Have I mentioned how much I love surprises? As Ryan backed into a spot, I really took in my surroundings. I have to admit I’d been too distracted to pay attention until then. Imagine my dismay when I recognized the streets around the Inferno, Venus’s club I desperately hoped there were other restaurants in that section of town. Boston is a big city. He wouldn’t pick the one place in the great state of Massachusetts that I wanted to avoid, would he? I crossed my fingers and prayed that we were going anywhere else.
My silent entreaties belly flopped as soon as we walked around a corner and saw the neon-red sign. I’d waltzed straight into Cade’s as-yet-unforeseen third misfortune. Neither of us had thought Ryan would actually take me directly into the lion’s den.
As it was Friday night, the line twisted around the corner of the building. Not that there wasn’t a line every night. There were three levels in the Inferno. The top floor, or Heaven, was a dance club and bar. I was only seventeen, so no Heaven for me, which suited me just fine. At ground level, Purgatory, a maître d’ is there to take your name and seat you, whether you’re in a nice suit or ripped jeans. You could get surf ’n’ turf or a fancy burger in a nice candlelit atmosphere. Most places can’t pull it off, but the restaurant managed to be fairly high end without being snooty. If the place had belonged to anyone but Venus, I would have loved it.
Below, as you might have guessed, was Hell, and while Purgatory was open to the general public, Heaven and Hell were VIP. It’s easiest to think of the Coterie as a mob family, except what mattered was that you weren’t human. Whether you had joined up through coercion (like Lock, Ezra, and me) or by choice, the one unifying factor of the Coterie was that back in your bloodline, something grew fangs, talked to trees, or had the ability to start fires, and those genes bred true. If you were in a Coterie establishment and you were human, odds were you were someone’s sack lunch. Or Venus’s juice box.
Duncan had once told me that some cities have a Council, a ruling body that kept this kind of thing from happening. Boston had one a long time ago, but not anymore. Maybe Venus ate them. So, personal reasons aside, I didn’t exactly want to bring Venus three boxes of human takeout. Okay, fine, she could have Brittany and her paramour, but I wasn’t handing over Ryan.
I couldn’t think of a way to derail this train, though. Fake vomit? They’d probably just go in without me. That was even worse. Ryan grabbed my hand and tugged me to his side. Since he was unsure as to whether the line was for the dance club or just to get in, Ryan led us to the front of the building.
I had to try something. “You know, I don’t feel well, and this place looks really busy. I bet it’s not up to code. Didn’t I read somewhere that they were shut down for rats? And cockroaches. And cockroaches riding rats, like a rodeo. It’s a bad scene.”
“I’m sure if we slip them a twenty or something, Ava, they’ll overlook you.” Brittany examined me as she wrapped her boyfriend around her like a stole. “Maybe a fifty.”
Ryan dropped my hand and made his way to one of the bouncers, but the bouncer didn’t look like he was listening. His eyes tracked the crowd as Ryan talked, and he gave no indication that he was hearing any of it. The bouncer raised up his hands in an “I can’t help you” gesture, and my heart did the there’s-hope dance. Then the bouncer looked over, and realization hit as he saw my face. I gave him a minute head shake, hoping he’d understand that I didn’t want to be recognized. Amazingly, he got it, because without a twitch in my direction, he suddenly lifted the rope and motioned us in. What I really wanted to do was seize Ryan and his ridiculous friends and shove them down the sidewalk. I needed to take them somewhere safe—like a shark tank or a hungry-bear sanctuary. But they were already inside, and there was no way I could make them leave. If I didn’t go in, they’d have no one to protect them. Defeated, I mouthed “thanks” to the bouncer as I passed him, even though I wished he’d thrown us out on our asses.
My luck held through the maître d’, and all the way until we were seated. Or, at least, everyone was seated except me. I was about to climb into the booth next to Ryan when Ezra pounced. I suddenly felt myself lifted off my feet as Ezra gave a yip of joy, and if he hadn’t yelled “Ava, my saucy dumpling! My curvy cherry blossom! The delectable damsel of my loins, how are you?” while he did it, I might have been able to play it off as a case of mistaken identity.
When I found my feet again, I was blushing and Ryan looked ready to hit something, probably Ezra.
“Hey, Ez,” I said with a sigh. “I’m fine.”
He noticed Ryan’s glower and snuggled in closer to me, kissing my cheek as he did. “We’re not working tonight, are we?” His voice was a soft whisper in my ear, and though I couldn’t see his face, I knew what it looked like. Mischievous smile, eyes glinting, and warmth in his cheeks from the game. Foxes like to raid other people’s henhouses. The phrase “Gentlemen, lock up your ladies” is a good one to use when Ez is around. (“Ladies, lock up your gentlemen” might also be useful. Ezra loves attention. He isn’t about to let a little thing like gender get in his way.)
“What are you doing here? I didn’t know you’d be in town tonight,” Ezra said. He hadn’t quite let me out of his grasp, something Ryan had definitely noticed, and when Ezra observed Ryan’s rising blood pressure, he of course had to rub it in. He squeezed me closer. At least it wasn’t Lock, I thought. That would have been way worse. Which was of c
ourse when Ezra said, “Hey, Lock, look who tumbled in.”
Lock ambled over, a serving tray under his arm. His bleached-blond hair was spiked and reflected the candlelight as he approached. Lock is stockier than Ezra, and not a classic beauty like our foxy friend, but I knew for a fact that he went home with just as many numbers. Lock is a charmer, and unlike Ezra he won’t steal your wallet.
He didn’t look charming now. He was hiding it well, but I could tell by the expression on his face as he scanned the people I was with that he was unhappy with my current life choices. His expression held both annoyance and hurt, if you knew how to read him right, and I knew how to read Lock. I felt instantly guilty.
“Paws off, Ezra,” he said, leaning in to give me a chaste kiss on the temple, which for some reason I found more embarrassing than Ezra’s manhandling. I felt my cheeks get hot. He slipped an arm around my waist, tugging me out of Ezra’s grasp and tucking me in close. “So this is the elusive Ryan,” he whispered into my ear. “I thought you’d skip the bad-boy phase.”
“You knew?” I didn’t whisper. It’s rude.
Lock continued being rude. “When you didn’t spill, we asked Cade. He was a little surprised that you hadn’t told your friends. Besides, I saw your phone yesterday when you tried to burn down the shack.” Ah, the photo Brittany had sent. Another thing to thank her for. Guess who’s getting a box of angry vipers for her birthday.
Ezra patted my head in a way that managed to be both affectionate and condescending. “Please. Like you could hide things from us.” He grinned. “We discussed it and decided that you were a big girl and we’d only step in if he broke your cold black heart.”
“How thoughtful,” I said through gritted teeth.
Ez looked Ryan up and down. “Lock, pay up.”
Lock kept his arm around me while fishing money out of his apron. “I was sure he’d be taller.” He shoved a ten into Ezra’s open palm. It was bad enough having one guy manhandle me in front of my date, but to have Lock come in and steal me away with nothing more than a bit of possessive dialogue while money changed hands was worse. Ryan was frowning so hard, I thought his face might shatter. Brittany looked like she was going to combust with sheer glee. Her boyfriend just needed some popcorn for the free show. I leaned away, but Lock squeezed me back in.