by Lucy Auburn
“You can talk to Leon and Petyr about that. There may be a way around it.” She reached out to squeeze my hand. “Right now, things are pretty chaotic. I’m honestly not sure that they’d turn down any help they can get out in the field. Elah doesn’t have a degree, after all.”
Her eyes sparkled a little at his name, and I knew there was some teasing coming. So I decided to intercept it. “Maybe that’s what I’ll do, then. Find the bad guys, take them down.” I chewed my lower lip. “Naomi is a freelancer, right? I can be like her.”
“You can be anything you put your mind to,” she said, which was just a line parents trotted out when they wanted to make you feel better. “First, though, let me have you to myself for a day, okay? Just the two of us.”
I was itching to get my phone and talk to someone about trying to track whatever had come out of that gate, just in case it was Damen. But I couldn’t resist the look in Maggie’s eyes.
“Okay,” I said with a smile. “We’ll make a day of it.”
Five hours later I’d seen what felt like every Marvel movie in existence. Apparently while I was in Hell the franchise was expanding, and Maggie wanted me to catch up—which meant re-watching previous movies to make sure we both understood what was going on.
When we got to the end of Infinity War, I found myself regretting everything. Maggie muttered, “That wasn’t the pick-me-up I was expecting.”
“No it wasn’t,” I agreed. “Ice cream for lunch?”
A smile broke out across her face. “Ice cream for lunch. Just like old times.”
When I was a sullen teenager mourning my parents, Maggie sometimes cheered me up by taking me to an ice cream parlor for lunch. We always walked out stuffed and full of regret, but it never failed to get me in a better mood, at least for a while. Some of my best memories with her had been made over two scoops in a waffle cone.
We headed to Sullivan’s in Maggie’s car; apparently the battery in mine died a few weeks ago, and needed to be replaced. It was jarring to see my car sitting on the driveway, covered in a layer of dirt because I’d been gone for so long. It felt like my life went stale while I wasn’t around to live it.
“You can pick the radio station,” Maggie said as she pulled out onto the street. “I’m sure there are new pop songs you missed out on, too.”
“Christmas music,” I murmured, thinking of the entire month worth of celebration I’d missed. “I didn’t even get the chance to be annoyed by Jingle Bell Rock.”
Maggie grinned. “I have a few mixed CDs at home. I can play them through the living room speakers until you’re ready to kill me.”
I groaned. “I regret saying it already.”
We both laughed, and I relaxed back into my seat, arms wrapped comfortably around my waist. My phone was in my pocket; when it chirped, I pulled it out and stared at the screen, heart in my throat.
But it wasn’t a text from Talia, who hadn’t responded to me yet. It was an inquiry from Leon. “Holding up well?”
I typed back: “Still on Earth. Still thinking about what happened in the stall.” Staring at the screen, I paused for a long moment before pressing “send,” my cheeks warm. Maggie was singing along to some Taylor Swift song on the radio; I angled the phone away from her, unsure how Leon would respond.
Watching the little dots appear next to his name, I felt little butterflies in my stomach. “Still thinking about it. And about a few other things,” he wrote. “Will I see you again soon?”
I glanced over at Maggie. We were pulling into the parking lot of the ice cream parlor. Swiftly, I typed back: “Out with Maggie today. I’ll try to come in tomorrow.” Pausing, I added a second text. “Am I still your apprentice?”
Maggie and I were walking through the front doors of the shop when I heard that telltale chirp from my phone. “At this point, Selena, I think you’re the expert. You have a place on the team if you want it. After yesterday we’re down two dark hunters.”
I knew immediately what my response would be, which was surprising; up until now I’d been so unsure of so many things in my life. Maybe this was a sign that college had never been for me.
I responded: “I’m in,” then slipped my phone into the pocket of my jacket to marvel over the ice cream flavors with Maggie, and pick which ones we wanted for lunch.
Once we got our ice cream we sat down outside, enjoying the cool winter air in Baton Rouge—a rare moment of reprise from the heat and humidity Louisiana was known for. In a month or two early summer would hit and it would all be over. As I bit into my ice cream, I found myself making a list in my head of the local staples I wanted to take advantage of now that I was home: Coffee Call beignets, snow cones out of little styrofoam cups, the Louisiana Lagniappe Restaurant. I briefly thought of the bars I used to go to with Talia, a pang in my chest. Then I realized with a start: I would be twenty-one soon. In just a short month and a half, my fake I.D. would be completely redundant.
“What’cha thinking about, Silly?” Maggie tilted her head at me, ever curious.
“The future. What I’m going to do.” I licked melted ice cream from my lips, glad for the chill to keep the rest of my cookies ‘n cream from melting onto my hand. “Leon said there’s a place for me on the team. And... I think I want to do that. I don’t think college is for me.”
“Okay,” she said, surprising me by not putting up a fight. “If dropping out is best for you, then I support it.”
I found myself wanting her to push back on the decision, even if it meant a fight. “That’s it? You fought so hard to get me to go to LSU. I thought I’d have to convince you.”
Maggie paused for a moment before responding, deep in thought. “When you came to me, Selena, you were so angry. And I didn’t entirely know what to do with you. I thought that I should honor your parents’ wishes: keeping the truth of your fae nature from you, making sure you graduated high school with good grades and went to college. We fought a lot about it.”
“I remember,” I said, slammed doors and angry, tear-filled fights echoing in my head. “I was such a brat.”
“You knew what you wanted,” she corrected. “I thought I was doing what was best for you by making you go to college. But you couldn’t even figure out your own major, because you weren’t passionate about any of them.”
“I liked psychology for a little while,” I said weakly, hearing how unconvincing my own voice sounded. “It was probably good you made me do something with my life. Otherwise who knows where I’d be.”
“Maybe.” Her mouth crooked up at one corner, and she ate a spoonful of her chocolate chip ice cream before continuing. “You know who you are now, more than ever. And from what you told me about what you’ve been through the past few months, you deserve a break. If that means you put getting your degree on hold indefinitely—or even forever—than I’m behind you one hundred percent. Besides, I’ve seen you with Naomi and Leon. Working with them has centered you. I won’t fight you on this.”
“Okay.” I stared at her thoughtfully, a light breeze blowing through my hair. “I’ll be going into work tomorrow then, I guess. I’ll have to find out what else has changed while I was gone.”
“A lot,” Maggie said grimly. “More than you know.”
We ate the rest of our ice cream in silence, and when we got home we watched Hallmark movies to get the taste of unhappy endings and too-sweet ice cream out of our mouths. By the time the second movie was halfway through, I found myself falling asleep with my head resting on Maggie’s shoulder, her fingers combing through my long hair. She hummed softly under her breath until all my worries faded away, and I felt peace.
For a moment, at least, the world stood still for me.
23
Selena
I didn’t have my I.D.
The paper laminate completely slipped my mind this morning when Maggie and I got up early to shock the battery in my car. “You’ll still have to get a new one,” she’d warned me as the engine sputtered to a start. “This shoul
d get you to work, though. Call me if you need a pickup.”
I’d gotten in the car so fast that I hadn’t stopped to think about what I needed. The dagger Naomi gave me, I of course remembered—but everything else fell to the wayside. The three months I’d spent not going to the Collective to train and investigate had an effect on me, apparently.
Which was how I found myself standing in front of the guard simulacrums at the top of the stairs, trying to convince them they knew me. “I came here every day!”
Blank stares. Of course, for all I knew these golems were made from scratch every morning. They might not retain any old memories—which meant that until I got Naomi or Leon to come outside and let me in, I was stuck on the steps, being glowered at by living clay.
Thinking about the simulacrums sent my mind back to Damen, and I knew that I had to start looking for him. If he was what crawled out of the hell gate, I had no idea why he hadn’t joined the battle outside—or found me. But I still couldn’t give up that little bit of hope beating in my chest, which told me that he might not be dead despite the sacrifice he made for me.
And if something else had gotten out of Hell without us noticing and putting it down, we had to find it. Demons in the flesh could wreak havoc on the city, panicking people and killing them. Either way the trail was the same, and I wanted to help follow it to its end.
“Forgot something, Suck?” Naomi’s voice behind me caught my attention, and I turned to see her heading up the stairs. “I got your texts. Guess we forgot to give you your permanent I.D. yesterday. It was in my car’s glove box this whole time.”
She held up a shiny card at the end of a black lanyard, with my face printed on it. “Thanks!” I took it from her with a grin, staring down at my photo in the middle of the card. It was taken months ago, and I knew I didn’t look any different—my hair was even the same exact length—but somehow it felt like I was looking at a completely different person.
We flashed our I.D.s to the guards, and they moved aside to open the doors and let us in. As we walked through the hallways towards Leon’s office side-by-side, Naomi looked over at me curiously. “Couldn’t figure out how to buckle the straps?”
“Adjusting them with it on me was hard.” I held up the sheathed dagger in its shoulder holster, knowing it looked silly tucked loosely under my arm. “I figured you could show me how it works.”
“No problem.” She unlocked Leon’s office with a key, adding, “The detective is in a meeting this morning, so it’ll just be you and me for the first hour or so. But I’m sure we’ll find something to occupy our time.”
I swallowed, following her into the empty room. “I’m sure,” I echoed, trying not to feel nervous. This was Naomi, after all—I’d worked with her on more than one investigation already. I had no reason to feel nervous around her.
Except that I couldn’t get our last kiss out of my head. It was different from the other kisses—and it opened up the possibility that we could actually explore something more. But it felt like the timing was wrong, and I didn’t know how to make the next move. I wasn’t even sure that it was my turn to make a move, or if the ball was in her court now.
Keeping track of these things was exhausting.
So I decided to just pretend like things were business as usual, and forced myself to remember how I acted around her before. We were friends, sort of, and friends caught up on each other’s lives. The unfortunate thing was, our lives right now weren’t exactly sunshine and berries.
“Is Iva doing well?” I asked, watching Naomi take the holster from me and hold it up near my shoulder to adjust its fit. “When I left yesterday, there wasn’t any news about her.”
“She woke up last night,” Naomi said, her voice quieter than usual. “Only for a while, though, and she didn’t seem completely aware of where she was or what happened. Petyr said that sometimes a side effect of his powers is mental fog, because the body can’t take so much healing at once. But if she wakes up again today and moves around a little, we should be able to go home soon.”
“That’s good,” I said, pushing down the spasm of guilt that made me want to apologize for opening the gate—again. “I barely even got to meet her before I left. Does she fight like you?”
Naomi snorted. “She fights like someone who’s never been wounded in battle. We learned how to throw knives from the same woman, so in that respect we’re similar. Take off your jacket.”
It took me a beat to realize she was switching the subject back to the knife holster. Pulling my jacket off, I hung it on a hook on the wall, next to the place where Leon’s jacket was hanging. Something about it felt like coming home, as if the past few months hadn’t been stolen from me—until a twinge in my neck reminded me that every part of it had been real.
“Hold up your arms a little,” Naomi instructed. I moved them up some, and she moved my left arm down a little. “There, like that. Now hold still while I get this thing situated.”
She moved in so close to me that I could feel her warmth and smell the leather of her jacket. Her small, nimble hands put the holster around my shoulder, so that the knife was in the front—something I’d apparently gotten wrong when I tried to put it on by myself. The knife pointed up, with the handle facing down, so that its wearer could pull it from the sheath quickly. Now that I saw how it was supposed to work, it all made much more sense.
“Reach across and grab the handle so I can see if I’ve put it in the right place.” I did so, and she frowned. “It’s a little high. Let me adjust it.”
As her fingers reached out to loosen the buckle of the holster, her touch brushed against the side of my breast. I held my breath, looking up and away to try to distract myself from the feeling of her long hair brushing up against me. I could imagine what it would be like to have her above me in bed, her soft thighs parted, a smile on her mouth, those cutting eyes looking down at me as we took turns pleasuring each other.
This was work, though, and I was supposed to be a professional. As Naomi pulled back and told me to try it again, I saw a glimmer of something in her eyes and wondered if she’d heard the hitch in my breath, or felt the same way when her touch grazed against the softness of my body.
I grabbed the dagger’s handle and pulled it smoothly from its sheath, trying to remember the stances she’d taught me. Naomi nodded approvingly. “Your form needs work, but at least you remember to aim the pointy end away from you.”
Shaking my head at her words, I practiced a few stabbing motions in the empty air. “I managed pretty well while I was in the Underworld. At least, as long as I had something sharp in my hands, which wasn’t often.”
The time apart hung between us, stark and heavy. Naomi asked, “What exactly happened down there anyway? If you’re ready to talk about it, I’d love to hear more.”
I licked my lips, hating the idea of lying to her, but knowing that I couldn’t explain those months well at all. “There were... demigods,” I said haltingly, trying to figure out what I could and couldn’t say. “And demons. But mostly I was just locked in my room all day.”
Her brows dipped together in confusion. “By who?”
Thankfully, before I had to come up a lie as to why the Queen of the Underworld would lock me in Hell—a lie that didn’t involve her being my birth mother—Leon came through the door. He took one look at the naked dagger in my hand and raised his brows. “I thought I said to meditate every morning, not stab flies.”
I reddened, thinking of the fact that he sometimes meditated without his shirt on—something that felt very heated now that he’d suggested the sort of things we could do to each other, if I so chose. “Naomi was helping me with the dagger she gave me. The holster was... complicated.”
I re-sheathed the knife without looking at either of them, as Leon closed the door behind him and went around to the other side of his desk. “Well, you might need a dagger on our next mission, so it’s just as well that you’ll have one on hand.”
“What’s our next
mission?” Naomi asked, crossing her arms over her chest and tilting her head at him. I took a moment to try to banish the heat from my cheeks, wondering if I was going to feel this way until the sexual tension was gone—and replaced by something else.
Leon answered, “We’re going to find the Key,” and the look on Naomi’s face just then only added to my confusion. “Godspring is coming, and Petyr says even the trees are worried.”
Apparently some things had changed while I was gone. “The Key? Godspring?” I looked back and forth between the two of them. “Can someone explain to me what’s going on?”
“Gladly,” Naomi responded, “though we might need to take a seat. This is the sort of story that goes back centuries—literally.”
24
Naomi
As I settled into the chair in Leon’s office and prepared to catch Selena up on our current conundrum, I glanced over at her face and wondered once more what had happened in Hell.
She didn’t look like it’d been a simple lark, but I also didn’t understand completely how she’d gotten out—or survived while she was there. The Underworld wasn’t meant to be kind to those who had not yet died, making exceptions sometimes for the children of gods but rarely much else. Though I could imagine ways in which a strong fae might survive down there, especially a succubus, none of them were pleasant.
It would all come out in due time, I hoped.
Meanwhile, we had other things to discuss. “The demon possessions have been ramping up while you were gone,” I said, looking over at Leon. “Some of that I think we told you about, but—it’s worse than you can imagine. Some of the cities with hell gates, where the most demonic activity is concentrated, are starting to talk about plagues.”