by Lish McBride
Venus pursed her lips. “You,” she said, waving airily at Hipster Mustache. “What is your name?”
“Lock,” he said.
“And you, lovely one, what is yours?”
“Ezra.”
“You will be her team. Go together or work out a driving schedule. I care not. Now go. You tire me.” And with that we were ushered out of the room.
DINNER was awkward. Ryan would hardly make eye contact with me, and Brittany was eating it up. Which is about all she was eating. She took only three bites of her entrée. I counted. After that, she just pushed her food around. And it was a freaking salad. Jeff talked, but nobody listened.
By the time dessert came, Ryan’s cold shoulder and Brittany’s barbs were getting to be too much for me, and I had to do something I hadn’t had to do in months. I snuck into the bathroom, checked under the doors for feet, and when I saw the coast was clear locked myself into a stall. With my back pressed against the door, I raised my hands and aimed at the calm water in the toilet bowl. The water gave a satisfying hiss each time I hit it with an egg-size fireball. The stall began to fill with steam.
Fireballs take concentration and focus, and I needed that grip right now. Shooting them into the toilet instead of at Brittany’s stupid face gave me a safe vent for my anger and kept me from committing a felonious and disfiguring act on the stuck-up ice princess.
I heard a whoosh and the click of heels as the door to the restroom opened, but it was too late to stop the fireball I’d already sent. There was nothing I could do but enjoy the resulting hiss and the small billow of steam that came up as the fireball made contact with the water in the toilet bowl.
The heels stopped, and I heard a hesitant “Everything all right in there?”
“It’s the steak,” I answered. “Never sits well with me, you know?” She didn’t reply. I guess she didn’t know. I heard more heels clicking and the sudden burst of restaurant clatter as she left. Apparently she just didn’t have to pee as bad as she thought she did.
I felt better when I got back to the table, sticking my fork into my dessert with rapturous joy despite Brittany making oink oink noises under her breath. I knew Ryan had other friends, and statistics told me that at least a few of them must be decent people. But Brittany was a she-beast from beyond the stars, and Jeff had obviously crawled out from some primordial slime and decided to stop evolving soon after.
Brittany passed on dessert, choosing to sip her diet soda instead. I guess she was cool with malnutrition as long as she stayed a size negative two. Jeff also skipped dessert and went straight for sucking on Brittany’s neck. At the table. Gross. Have I mentioned how much I loved this whole double-dating thing?
I offered Brittany a spoon. “Are you sure you don’t want any? Their desserts are award winning—supposed to be the best in the city.” I lifted up the plate and watched as Brittany’s eyes followed the movement. It might have been the light, but I swear a slight dew of sweat had broken out on her upper lip. Her self-control was straining, I could tell.
“No, thank you,” she said, another plastic smile on her face. “I need to fit into my prom dress. I guess you don’t have to worry about that, homeschool.” Her grin widened, an obvious score mark appearing on her side of the board. I continued to eat out of pure stubbornness, and I couldn’t help but notice that Ryan hadn’t argued with her. I guess he wasn’t planning on taking me. Not that I wanted to spend my evening watching Brittany dry-humping the Neanderthals at her school and calling it dancing, but it would have been nice to put my arms around Ryan’s neck, that awkward little corsage getting in the way as I did, while we slow-danced under cheap streamers and a disco ball.
As I took the last bite of my strawberry cheesecake, I felt pretty miserable, and when I saw who was approaching the table, I knew it was only going to get worse. I considered stabbing myself with my steak knife and getting it over with.
Venus was wearing an ultrachic off-the-shoulder number that probably came straight off a runway. Every guy in the vicinity stopped midbite, and Brittany instantly became grumpy from the lack of attention. I guess that was at least one positive outcome of Venus’s arrival.
My boss always reminded me of someone you might on a Swiss Miss package, or an advertisement for Norway or Sweden: blond and milky skinned, with high cheekbones, and if her look had stayed like the ads, I might have felt cozy and welcome. I didn’t. The difference between the two was simple: The advertisements were inviting and Venus wasn’t. She possessed a cold and haughty kind of beauty. If I had to guess her age based on sight alone, I’d say she was just striding into her early thirties. But if Venus was thirty, I was a penguin.
Venus paused and smiled down at us. It was a dazzling smile, to be sure, but it looked wolfish, like she’d just spotted some fluffy sheep to gnaw upon. Baaa.
“Ava, you didn’t tell me you’d be bringing in your lovely friends this evening.”
I stared at her, trying to not betray all the anger that I felt. It was never good to let Venus know how you felt about anything. Once she found a weakness, she’d stick a small knife in it over and over again and then watch as you bled out slowly.
“It was a surprise,” I said.
“I bet it was,” she replied, all glitter and sunshine. There wasn’t a day that went by when I didn’t want to burn her slowly until nothing was left but ash. Unfortunately, Venus always wore her ward, and it made other wards look like useless trash. Her ward was roughly the size and shape of a Scrabble tile, and it hung out of her dress as she stood over me. The rune was set in platinum that glinted in the candlelight, mocking me. If only she’d forget that damn thing just once. And whatever other secondary runes she had stashed on her body. She’d need to forget her guards, too, and Owen, I suppose. But then we’d see what was what.
She rested a hand on my shoulder like we were bosom pals. “We can’t let friends of Ava’s leave after dinner. That would be a waste of an evening. How about some passes into Heaven?”
“We’re not twenty-one,” I told her happily, earning me some dagger-eyed glares from my companions, plus a kick under the table from Brittany. Please, like a kick from her little high-heeled foot could do anything to me. I was used to way worse, and if we went up into Heaven, I was positive we’d see way worse.
Venus waved my response away, like the law was something to be considered only by insects and puny mortals. Which shouldn’t have been a surprise. After all, Lock and Ezra worked Purgatory’s bar, and they weren’t of legal age either. “Let me worry about that,” she said with a flash of teeth.
Everyone thanked her, even me, though my face probably looked more stiff than full of gratitude as I said it. As if on cue, a waiter brought over a tray, the passes spread out and ready to grab. “I believe Ezra informed you that the meal was on the house, which I do insist upon. If you don’t mind, I’m going to steal Ava for a brief moment. I’m sure she won’t object if you wish to go upstairs and enjoy yourselves in the meantime.”
No one minded. Shocking. Venus gracefully left the table, and Brittany looked at me with reluctant awe. Of course, Ryan wouldn’t look at me at all. Yay for our romantic date.
Though I didn’t spend much time in groups of my peers, even I knew better than to try to dissuade them from taking Venus up on her offer. There was no way on earth I was going to keep them out of Heaven. It would have been easier to teach Horatio to salsa dance on his hind legs while playing tiny kitty-size maracas. The best I could do was try to keep them out of trouble. Things could easily go wrong in Heaven.
I got up and followed Venus. She was long gone, but I knew where she was going. No one tried to stop me.
I wasn’t sure of the details, but I could guess why Venus wanted to see me. In the human world, if you want someone taken out remotely, you hire a sniper. In my world, you hire a firebug. Occasionally we have to call in a cleaning crew, but not as frequently as a vampire would. A burned-up body, if done right, is easier to explain away than a body drained of
blood. Even the most unimaginative cop, when faced with an exsanguinated corpse, will think the word vampire. They may not say it, but they will at least entertain the idea. When they find someone burned to death, they think electrical fire, they think arson, they may even think spontaneous combustion, but not a single one will say, Hey, chief, think some girl burned this guy up with her mind? Maybe we don’t get sexy TV shows about us, but there are a lot of good things about being under the human radar.
Behind the maître d’s podium was a bank of elevators for staff use. They were a tad ostentatious, all gold Art Deco design, but they were pretty. I showed my ID to the guard even though he knew damn well who I was, swiped my key card, and went down. At the bottom I’d have to go through another set of guards and a pat-down. If I carried a purse, which I didn’t, it would have been searched.
Hell is plushly carpeted. It is also, probably out of stubborn perversity, decorated almost entirely in white. Venus loves white. The carpet is ivory, the walls are a paint color called Arctic Chill, and the couches and chairs are the color of fresh snow. Rather hard on the eyes, really. And considering the general goings on, rather stupid, in my opinion. Blood shows on white things. But only a suicidal person want point that out to Venus. More than once, I had tracked mud onto the bright white carpet. Each time, I’d spent an hour chained and hanging from a wall. Venus has this nifty set of manacles built especially for me, a present she picked up from some necromancer on the other coast. When the manacles are on, I’m separated from my power. I can’t use it, and my entire body feels asleep. It’s uncomfortable and disorienting. Getting mud on that carpet was worth it, though.
As I navigated through twisting hallways, I wondered what life without the Coterie would be like. My mom once told me that organizations like the Coterie used to be more prevalent. Before phones and cars and all those modern conveniences that make communication and quick travel possible, creatures needed a local force in place scarier than they were, to keep them in check. Even monsters needed monsters, it seems. They were vicious, bloodthirsty organizations that would have made Vlad the Impaler shake with envy. Survival of the fittest doesn’t even begin to explain it.
Over the last century or so, most of these groups either died out, went underground, or were supplanted by a Council. We’d evolved past our need for our own personal bogeyman. But instead of following along with the rest of them, Venus seemed to take it as a challenge. Give up? Not her. No way. To her it was an excuse to step up her game and be the biggest baddie she could be. Right now she was content with ruling Boston, but for how long? Creatures like Venus never stayed satisfied. That’s the thing about being the biggest baddie. You have to keep finding other baddies to challenge just to prove you’re number one.
There were a few times in our travels where my mom would seek temporary asylum with a local Council. One time, it almost got us killed. Someone on the council ratted us out to the Coterie, and we had to sneak out a bathroom window in the middle of the night to avoid capture. We never contacted a council again. The closest one to Currant is in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. If the rumor mill is true, though, they’re in the Coterie’s pocket—totally useless.
I went down a set of stairs and through a door, back to where Venus usually held court. Walking through the lower level can be a bit like walking through a Hollywood extras lot, at first. Or, at least, what I imagine it would look like. Lots of people in different costumes, from different time periods, mingling and making small talk. Not all the women are classic beauties, and not all the guys are ruggedly handsome, but there’s an old-Hollywood sense of glamour about the place.
As I approached Venus, I saw that she was lounging on a divan, elegantly decked out in a skimpy beaded gown that probably cost more than everything I owned, and, as usual, smoking a cigarette stuck in a long, slim holder, like she was Cruella de Vil—a comparison that wasn’t too far off, when I thought about it. Venus loved her wardrobe changes. I bet she’d kill puppies to make a jacket too.
“Ah, Ava,” she said smoothly. “There’s my other little firebug.” Owen stood behind her. I did my best not to snarl at him.
“We need to talk about the ice elemental the other night. A text message?” She shook her head, saying tsk-tsk, cigarette smoke billowing around her face as she did. “We’ve discussed this. Within a certain range, you’re supposed to report in person. At the very least, I expect a phone call.”
“Phone call, text message—what’s the difference? The job’s done, and lucky you, I didn’t have to call in the cleaning crew.” Mick’s Sparkle-Time Cleaners consisted of Mick and a few surly workers. They showed up in dirty coveralls, grunted a lot, and made you wonder if you could count on them to clean themselves, let alone whatever actually needed cleaning. Meeting Mick also made you wonder how an overweight, grizzled, churlish beast of a man who spoke mostly in monosyllables came up with a name like Sparkle-Time. That is, until you saw his little girl, who liked to dress up like a ballerina and needed everything she owned to be in various shades of purple. With glitter, if she could get her adorable little hands on some. I once saw Mick pummel an enraged troll with a metal fender after it stumbled and dented his truck. A troll that could easily have eaten his truck. After a few minutes of red-faced screaming, fender-wielding, and general assault, that troll skulked away completely cowed, its tail held contritely in its hands. But Mick say no to his little princess? Not happening.
Venus always preferred it when we didn’t need to call in Mick—he was expensive, for one. Those purple tutus don’t pay for themselves. Venus also detested having Mick in her white-carpeted kingdom. You didn’t entertain the help, and she certainly didn’t want him to smudge something in her underground lair. Knowing Mick, he’d charge her to clean it up after he did.
“It matters because I say it matters.” Owen grinned behind her, a chilling specter.
My mouth went dry. A smiling Owen is a portent of bad things to come.
“Sorry,” I said. “Won’t happen again.” Yeah, right. Of course I would do it again. Punishment would follow, but as long as I didn’t push her too far, it would be manageable.
Venus tossed her hair like she was stalking down a runway in Paris instead of reclining on a divan in a basement in Massachusetts. “If you would move closer like I keep telling you to do, then you wouldn’t have to worry about this kind of thing. You could just pop in and report on your way home.” She curled out of the chair, slow like a cat, and sauntered over to me on bare feet. “I’m sure your guardian could keep just as good of an eye on you here.” She smiled, mockingly using the legal term for Cade as a reminder that he couldn’t really guard me at all. Cade was amazing—he could cook a steak like nobody’s business, he homeschooled me without complaint, and he’d even learned to sew when I’d moved in so he could replace plastic buttons with more heat-resistant material. You melt the buttons on one blouse and suddenly it’s a hazard.
Cade always took that kind of precaution because he wanted to keep me safe, but what he couldn’t do was protect me from Venus. Not really. He was wonderful but also totally, completely, ordinarily human. He didn’t have the know-how, the connections, or the power my mom had.
Venus’s cold, pale hand touched my jaw, turning my face this way and that as she inspected me like I was livestock—which was precisely how she saw me.
I dug my hands into my jacket pockets, my fingers sliding along the fire-resistant cloth Cade had sewn in, but didn’t speak. This was an old argument, one she knew I wasn’t going to budge on. When your life is mostly engineered by others, you don’t give up the few choices you have a say in. Like where you live.
“If I didn’t live far out, Owen would have to travel more, wouldn’t you, Owen?” A bare twitch of an eyebrow was the only answer I got from him. And it was creepy, at that. My fellow firebug was pasty pale, having mostly converted his schedule to match Venus’s. Despite popular folklore, vampires can go out in the sun, they just prefer not to. They are substantially weakened
by it, and they do about as well as any other nocturnal creature in the daylight, but with enough sunblock and a parasol or umbrella, they can manage for short periods. Though Owen was no vampire, he clung so tightly to Venus that he might as well have been.
Owen pulled a hand out of his jacket pocket and blew me a kiss. I flipped him off, but in a very ladylike fashion (I batted my eyelashes and smiled), because that’s the type of girl I am. Classy.
Owen wagged a finger at me slowly, his black curls shining in the light. Venus ignored us and handed me a file. My next job, and coming a little too fast on the heels of the other two, as far as I was concerned.
I opened up the file and, when I saw what was inside it, immediately tried to put it back in her hand. She wouldn’t take it, so the file dropped to the floor, the papers scattering across the pristine carpet. One of her flunkies darted over and scrambled to put the pages back together. He handed it to Venus and scuttled away again. She kept her eyes on me the whole time, holding the file out for me again when it was placed in her hand.
“No,” I said. The room stilled. I swear I could hear the air move. Venus froze, her hand in the air like she’d been paused while conducting an orchestra. She was in stasis—a fly stuck forever in amber. Then I saw her pupils shrink and the tiny muscles around her mouth tighten. I felt a squeeze in my gut and a cold chill run down my spine. I was in it now. Licking my suddenly dry lips, I continued. “I don’t care what beef you have with Duncan. He’s off limits.”
I have a rule: I don’t kill people who hang out in my kitchen. If I did that, no one would ever visit.
DUNCAN is the closest thing I’ll ever have to a grandpa, and I hang on like hell to family. I never knew my dad, I lost my mom, and I’m not losing anyone else. Even if I didn’t care, Cade loves Duncan, and that’s enough for me.
Cade was never close to his parents. From the stories he tells me, it sounds like he has what Lock calls pod-baby syndrome. It’s like someone stole the baby his parents were supposed to have and left Cade in its place. They weren’t evil, they just didn’t get along with their kid. Still, they managed to go through the motions, until Cade met my mom. Cade’s parents didn’t like Lilia because they thought her parents were, and I quote, “ne’er-do-wells.” (They weren’t entirely wrong—Lilia’s parents were Coterie, so they certainly weren’t up to any good most days, but I wouldn’t say they never did well. A bit of an exaggeration there, I think.) Cade’s parents forbade the friendship. Cade ignored them. The die was cast, so to speak.