by Lucy Auburn
Stepping out onto the scene, I look all around me and marvel at the effort that went into it. Standing next to the table, also dressed well, his hair neatly parted and style, is Sam.
The way he looks at me makes me even more nervous than before. As Liam puts a doorstop in the door frame and shuts it most of the way, I shoot them each a worried look. “Guys, what’s going on?”
They exchange a glance. Sam motions towards one of the chairs at the table, which is pulled out just slightly. “Sit down and we’ll tell you all about it. Over dinner, of course.”
“It’s a pretty neat place,” Liam adds. “Sometimes when the headmaster is on one of her rants, you can hear it if you get close enough to the dome. But we mostly just use it to break on-campus drinking policies.”
“Which is why we brought wine.”
As I approach the table, I see the basket on the other side, which was hiding behind the tablecloth before. It’s full of food: bags of chips, fries in little cups, burgers wrapped in grease-soaked paper. My stomach gives a full-throated growl, and I admit that I’m helpless to the call of good food, especially the salty, fatty kind. I take a seat and try to figure out what’s going on.
It’s only when I add it up that I realize: three chairs, two boys, both of them clearly in cahoots. “Is this some kind of group date?”
Liam flashes his teeth in a grin. “Sort of—that’d be kind of weird. It’s more like a group choice.”
“Yeah, but we should eat while we talk. We don’t want Dani to starve to death.”
“That’d be a shame.”
Sam sits down to my right and starts pulling food out of the basket, while Liam uncorks the wine and takes the seat to my left. They both look nervous, but it can’t be as bad as what I feel brewing in my stomach. Whatever this is, it’s making me anxious.
So of course they appear as if out of nowhere, suddenly lined up on the other side of the table, right in my line of sight and standing just where they’ll distract me. Ezra narrows his eyes on the boys, and I grab my wine glass, tilting it so Liam can fill it to the brim.
“The fuck is this?” Mateo demands. “These sweaty little boys making a play on our girl?”
“She’s not ours.” Ezra sounds beyond tired. “It’s clearly some kind of Three’s Company deal.”
Sebastian mutters, “Your references are so dated. Get an iPhone.”
“The signal is terrible in Purgatory,” Ezra shoots back, not even looking at Sebastian. “I don’t care what the humans do with their little lives.”
Liam clears his throat, and I glare at the demons to get them to shut the fuck up. Lynx is staring at Liam, eyes narrowed, one of the books I checked out for him clutched tightly in his hand, and I’m very glad that he’s not corporeal. I have the feeling that if he were, he’d be getting his rope out right now and preparing for a bloodbath—and whatever this is has barely started.
I have the feeling I know what they’re going to say to me.
And I don’t know what I’ll do about it.”
“So.” Liam flashes those pearly white teeth at me. “You may have noticed that you’re pretty cute.”
“Jesus, Liam,” Sam grouses.
“Well, I had to start somewhere.” They exchange a brief, irritated look, before Liam starts back up again. “Anyway, you’re cute. We both think so. To get to the short of it, the two of us kind of realized at the same time that we wanted to ask you out, and it was kind of causing friction in the friendship.”
“I nearly eviscerated him during our last shifting class,” Sam says, and it almost sounds like a boast coming from him. “Things were getting rather tense.”
Lynx is really glaring now. All the demons are. “So you thought you’d... share me?”
Liam looks horrified. “God no. That’s some human bullshit... polygamy or whatever.”
“Polyamory,” Sam corrects him.
“Yeah yeah. Whatever it is, you won’t catch two shifters dead doing it.” He leans forward and, as if confessing to me, adds, “We’re far too territorial for that. It’s a primal kind of masculinity.”
Sebastian mutters, “Stop the child, he’s making himself sound stupid.”
“Too late for that.” Mateo shakes his head. “This one, primal and masculine? More like a manipulative dumbass. What’s next, are they gonna pee on her?”
It’s very hard to follow both conversations at once, mostly because I’m incredibly horrified. “Are you asking me to choose between you or something?”
Sam quickly says, “Only if you want to!”
Liam nods. “We thought we might get to know you, without Petra and Olivia around.” I wince at the reminder of the hawk shifter’s huge crush on him. “Maybe it’ll turn out there’s something there with one of us, and maybe there isn’t. But either way, it’s better to just get things out in the open before it tears our friendship apart.”
His words stick with me, because he has a point.
But it’s not Liam or Sam I find myself looking at when I think of friendships being torn apart. They’re all looking right at me—except for Ezra, who has taken the role of brooding silent type tonight, though I see him flick his eyes to me more than once.
I don’t know how I got into this situation, but four sexy, murdery demons are somehow bonded to me, soul to soul, and I’ve got to figure out what to do with it.
“So,” Sam says, oblivious to who I’m looking at, or why, “I guess we should get started with dinner.”
“Guess so!” I grab a cheeseburger and stuff it into my mouth to cover up my nervousness.
It’s going to take a lot of glasses of wine to get up the courage to tell both these guys that I’m not interested in them at all, and their friendship can remain firmly intact.
I’ve realized I want something entirely different. I’m greedy. One burger isn’t enough—and neither is one man.
It takes four glasses of wine to tell two puppy-dog-eyed shifters that you’re not really looking for dating right now. They both make disappointed-but-not-mad noises, and we pretend like everything isn’t going to be awkward for a while.
The demons watch it all judgmentally.
Those fuckers.
Draining the wine from my fourth glass—or is it fifth—I wave off Sam’s offer of help getting back to my room. “It’s just down the stairs.” A hiccup threatens to make its way up my throat, and I hold my breath to squash it. “I’m not—not that drunk. Also, you two should probably like... talk or whatever.”
Waving my hand in the air at them vaguely, I’m aware that I must sound like an idiot. So I decide to skedaddle before my foot makes it so far back in my mouth that I choke all over it.
The steps on the staircase are steeper than I remember. Grabbing onto the railing, I wobble down the first few, aware of the boys murmuring to each other at my back in disappointed tones. I don’t want to hear their sadness, so I yank the door to the roof closed to drown it out.
There. That’s better.
“Uh, Dani?” Lynx sounds concerned. “Does white wine normally get you this fucked up?”
I shrug, and take the next few steps at a skipping-hopscotch pace. “I’m good. See? I didn’t even trip. ‘S not like that time on the cliffs when I passed out. I was drugged. Now I’m just...”
Just what? Tipsy on five glasses of white wine? Maybe six. I drank them so fast. There was a full bottle and then there wasn’t. The boys drank red. Red like blood, like Kayla dying with her guts spilling out, like Victoria blown wide open in a hole in the ground, like Richard getting tortured to death.
I blink. Shake it out of my head. Feel something pass through me, warm and tingling, and grab tight onto the railing. Suddenly Sebastian is standing at the bottom of the stairs, his blue eyes staring up at me in concern, head tilted slightly as he considers me. Oh, I get it; he walked through me.
I giggle—hiccup—sigh.
He looks even more concerned.
“You should probably take care on these last few, o
r you might break your neck and waste one of those lives of yours dying in the dumbest way possible.”
Sighing, I give into his concern and take the steps one at a time. Right foot, left foot. Like a little kid. There are seven more—I count each one as my feet meet their flat surface—and by the time I step off at the bottom my head feels less fuzzy. Admitting to myself that I’ve been letting the alcohol make me feel drunk more than anything, I realize that I don’t want to get back to my room and have the conversation I know is about to happen.
Not because I’m afraid that they’ll rebuff me.
Because I’m afraid they won’t, and I’ll get my heart broken that much worse when I have to say goodbye.
But if Liam and Sam can tell me they want to go out with me, I can admit to the four demons I’m soul bonded to that I want them. I may be a fool, but I can’t be a coward. Especially not now that I’m some special, rare phoenix being trained by the first ever Grim teacher at the academy, trying to face down whatever evil puppet master keeps killing students.
They follow me to my room. Gather around me as I stumble onto the bed and pull my shoes off, wriggling my toes.
“You know,” Mateo drawls, “I kinda miss all the fighting and killing. Think we’ll get the chance to stab people and blow things up again soon?”
Ezra points out, “Knowing Dani, she won’t survive the week without getting herself into trouble.”
“Ha-ha.” I glare up at him. “I’m not running away again, if that’s what you’re afraid of. I’m in it,” another hiccup, “to win it, baby.”
“You’re a cute drunk,” Lynx says affectionately. “Very aggressive though.”
I try to push him, only to abruptly remember he’s still incorporeal when my fingers go through his middle. Shuddering at the tingles, I pull my hand out of him and try to ignore the blush creeping up my neck.
“So,” Sebastian asks, “have you gotten a D-Day from your new teacher yet?”
“Still don’t like him,” Mateo mutters.
“He says he’s figuring it out.” My hand rises up to the lump behind my shirt, and I pull the black opal out. It’s strangely cool in my palm, despite the heat of my body leaking into it all day. Maybe that means it’s doing its thing. “But it’ll take some time. And until then...”
I trail off, staring at each of them.
The words are on the tip of my tongue, frightening and huge.
Like an involuntary hiccup, they spill out of me in a flash, tinged at the edges with white wine and panic.
“I have feelings for you.”
Chapter 17
Lynx raises his brows, pointing at himself. “Me?”
“I don’t understand.” Mateo’s voice is practically a growl. “You’re picking the nerd?”
“No, no.” I wave my hands around, aware that I’m stepping in it. Another hiccup bursts out of me, making the bed jiggle beneath my ass. I’m way too drunk to do this right. “Not like, you. Like you. You you.”
“She’s wasted.” Sebastian shakes his head. “Dani, you should dismiss us and go to sleep.”
It turns out liquid courage can backfire. Splendidly, in fact.
But Ezra is staring at me, recognition in his green eyes. And he puts to words the feelings I find myself struggling to express. “She means all four of us. Don’t you Dani?”
I nod enthusiastically. Maybe too enthusiastically, because my head starts spinning and doesn’t stop even after I’m done nodding. “Right. I like all of you. Not just Sebastian and Mateo even though I kissed them.”
“Hey!” Lynx shoves Mateo, looking outraged. “We swore.”
He scowls back. “It’s every devil for himself in the game of romance.”
Sebastian looks like he’s considering ways to poison Mateo. “You got mad at me for doing exactly what you did?”
“Dani wanted to kiss me.” Mateo smirks at me, all rakish charm and reckless abandon. “Isn’t that right, Dani? You instigated the whole thing. I’m the one who had the self-control to stop it before it went too far.”
Well, he’s not lying. I hiccup too hard to say anything, but the truth must show on my face, because Lynx mutters, “Unbelievable. Just after I nearly died too.”
“Enough.” The tiredness has faded from Ezra’s expression completely, replaced with the resolute take-no-shit guy in charge I first met. “This is why we had the agreement in the first place. The whole point was to prevent something like this from happening, and now here we are, all because she had a few glasses of wine. Dani, dismiss us and sleep it off. You’re too drunk to be making this kind of decision.”
My teeth grind together in irritation. Lifting my chin, I stare Ezra down. “No. I said what I said and I meant it.”
He throws his hands up, looking thoroughly frustrated. “Fine! Far be it from me to stop you from throwing yourself off another cliff to meet your certain death. This isn’t wise, Dani, and you know it.”
I don’t realize that I’m grabbing onto the black opal and holding it tight until the claws dig into my skin, sending a shudder through me as I remember just what exactly it is that this charm used to be.
But if it helps me hold onto my powers and my life long enough to stick around with the guys and have more important moments with them, it’s worth it.
I have to be brave. I’m done running away—in more ways than one.
“Being wise is overrated,” I point out. Mateo grins, mouthing that’s my girl at me. “I don’t want to be wise. I want to be happy and fulfilled. Meyer made this necklace to protect me, and it’s working. I can feel it.” Or so I tell myself. “If I want to make the most of the time we have together, even if it puts me at risk, that’s my choice. Not yours.”
Getting up, I stride over to Ezra to stare at him face-to-face, just to really drive the point home—and realize only when I’m standing inches away from him that I can feel the heat of his body, undeniable and alive.
Barely able to believe it, I reach out with one still-tipsy hand and splay my fingers against his chest. There’s a warm rib cage beneath my palm, a heart beating insistently against it, pumping blood into his stupid brain and making the veins in his stubborn neck flutter. I don’t even remember when I made him corporeal.
He’s staring at me, I realize, not with anger and frustration—okay, there’s a lot of that there—but with wild confusion, raw and desperate, visible in the shadows of his green eyes.
“I want you,” I tell him. Looking at each of the others one by one, I admit to myself as well as Ezra, “I want all of you. Not just a little, but a lot.”
In a tortured voice, Ezra points out, “We have to say goodbye. For your own good.”
“Yes,” I acknowledge, pressing forward, daring to believe. “But not tonight.”
He echoes, “Not tonight.”
I want to close the distance between us, but I hold myself back, waiting. Searching his eyes for a sign he’s willing to give in—not just to me, but to his own desires, to the wants I see hiding behind the fears in his eyes.
I can practically hear the beating of his heart. Boom. Boom. Boom. It’s so loud and insistent.
“Wait.” Pulling back, I frown up towards the ceiling. “Is that coming from up there?”
Clearing his throat, Lynx points up to the roof. “I think you locked your heartbroken friends outside when you left.”
Mortified, I pull back from Ezra and move towards the door—brushing past smirking Mateo, intense Sebastian, sighing Lynx—to go get them out.
Stopping with my hand on the doorknob, I glance back at the guys. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.” Licking my lips, I add belatedly, “That’s not an order or anything.”
Lynx raises a brow. “You sure?”
“Yeah. But this is definitely an order.” Leaning in close, I whisper something roughly in his ear, and he immediately responds by dropping his book and reaching down to grab the hem of his shirt. I smile, struck by my own brilliance. “This will only take a sec. Try
to keep some of your clothes on while I’m gone.”
As I shut the door I can hear Lynx crow, “See? I told you she likes it when I take my shirt off. She even ordered me to do it.”
“Yeah, but she didn’t kiss you like she kissed me,” Mateo brags.
“She would’ve!”
“During mouth-to-mouth resuscitation maybe.”
Their bickering fades away as I hurry to the stairs. Now that I’m out of my room, I can tell quite clearly that the pounding is coming from the roof. I have no idea how long I left them up there for; in my drunken state, I didn’t even realize as I was shutting the door that they must’ve put the doorstop there for a reason.
It wasn’t enough that I had to let them both down at the same time. I also locked them out in the cold with their misery. Great move, Dani. They certainly won’t be putting me at the top of any “Friend of the Year” list.
As soon as I’m in the stairwell I hear Sam’s pitiful call. “Hello? Somebody? Anybody?”
“I’m telling you,” Liam argues, “we should shift and jump down.”
“And break half our bones!”
“You might. My lion is way too strong for that.”
Okay, I don’t feel that bad for them anymore. Clearly they aren’t suffering. “I’m here!” Hurrying up the last few steps, I grab the doorknob at the top and twist it open to meet them both. “Sorry, I was drunk and I closed the door.”
“Thank god. We thought we’d get stuck here all night until the headmaster found us and suspended us both.” Sam looks relieved; Liam won’t meet my eyes, which is just as well, because I can’t deal with his pouting and competitiveness right now. “The last time we were caught up here we promised we’d never do it again, and well...”
Liam grouses, “Let’s just get out of here. It’s not like Dani wants to talk to us.”
I frown at him. “Hey. Don’t be a dick. We’re still friends—at least I hope we are.”