I yawned and cocked an eyebrow.
A long, assessing look later, my bestie gave me a very shark-like grin that I swear involved too many teeth. “You scared of me?”
“Little bit. Yeah. Happy?” We ended up in the back left corner of the lot, a large unused space that had been bulldozed into uneven dirt in anticipation of more car storage.
“Yup.” She stuffed the wrapper in her pocket, then glanced at her hands. “It’s been way too long. I needed that fix.”
“Don’t make yourself sick. If you need to, suck ’em dry, baby.”
“I always do,” she said.
“Phrasing.”
She patted my cheek, leaving a sticky, bloody smear. “Should have set up a safe word.”
I spun in a circle, sunlight winking off the cars and cooking me alive. No signs of zizu demon life at all. “Now what? Either the diamond is a dud or the demon isn’t–”
More giggling from the two chubby, and now grubby, kindergarteners. Sunlight caught their baby-feather hair tufting off their heads. Wait. Zizu had feathers. These kids had been following us for a reason and it wasn’t because they were little dorks.
Bingo! “Leo! Show the diamond!”
She was already opening the bag.
Tony and Clea giggled and ran off. Nope. I wasn’t playing hide and seek with a couple of demons.
I chased after them, clouds of dust kicking up at my feet. They zipped around the corner and I put on an extra burst of speed to catch up. Closing the distance, I flung my magic at them, scooping them up in my electric net.
“Kids!” Eddy skidded to a stop, his voice an anguished howl. He dropped his yellow tool box and sledgehammer.
“Back off, demon,” I snarled at him.
“Nava!” Leo’s face had drained of all color. “What have you done?”
The kids thrashed and screamed in my net.
Really terrified, really human screaming.
I’d just attacked human kids.
I carefully set them down on the ground with shaking hands, shutting down my magic. “I’m sorry,” I babbled.
I’d been so sure.
The kids were ugly crying with snotty sobs. Eddy ran toward them but Leo reached Tony and Clea first, trying to calm them down.
I’d been so wrong.
I ran my thumbnail hard enough over my cuticles to rip them off. Blood welled up in half-moons.
Tony grabbed the diamond out of Leo’s hand, right as Clea kicked her in the shins. Leo yowled and ran after the little spawn, but they remained two steps out of reach.
“You little assholes!” I blasted the kids, who’d morphed wings and were zigzag running trying to get lift-off. I whirled on Eddy, convinced I’d find papa demon, but he was still human, his expression glazed with pain.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “They’re just children.”
“They’re demons.” A ball of magic danced in my palm. “How about you?”
He held up his hands, cautiously stepping forward. “They’re not evil. They’re just scared.”
Was he for real?
Leo snagged Tony by his leg, his blue outfit shredded over his bird body, and brought him crashing down. He tossed the diamond to his sister.
“Riddle me this,” Leo said. “What’s up with the purple magic?”
Tony snarled and called her a bunch of names that were troubling when said in a clear, high voice.
Clea clutched the diamond to her chest and flew to the top of a bright green engine hoist.
“Answer me.” Leo raised her bloody hand. Still struggling, Tony turned his still-human, little boy face to hers, his eyes pooling with tears. Leo hesitated and the demon yanked free.
Eddy rushed me, knocking into me like a roaring bear. His ball cap sailed into the dirt.
“Quit it!” I twisted left, stumbling over my feet and barely avoiding frying the guy, my magic going wild to scorch the hoist Clea was on.
“Daddy!” Clea flew down to Eddy.
Winding my current around the boy demon’s leg like a lasso, I swung him high into the air. Clea gasped but I only had eyes for Eddy. “Tell one of them to answer the question or they’re toast.”
Eddy wrapped a protective arm around Clea, sledgehammer at the ready. “I’ll kill you before you hurt another feather on either of them.”
I used every ounce of willpower to keep up my tough-girl bravado when with each of the little guy’s cries as he dangled there, my heart broke into smaller and smaller pieces. My expression hardened. “You sure you can?”
Clea tugged on Eddy’s sleeve. “Make her put Tony down.”
Eddy glanced down at her, seeing the diamond for the first time. He blinked and reached for it. “Clea, give that to me.”
“No, Daddy.” She hugged it tightly, hopping away on needle-sharp talons.
Eddy lunged for her so I shot the ground at his feet. “You. Stay.”
The kidling demons were starting to molt in distress, blond feathers drifting down to the ground.
I swallowed past the lump in my throat. The demons were the only leverage I had, so I increased the voltage pouring through Tony. Silver-blue sparks danced through the air.
He screamed.
“I’ll answer!” Clea cried.
I released my magic and Tony plummeted to the ground. He hit, rolled twice, and lay still. If I could see him, he wasn’t dead, but I still felt like a fucking monster.
Panting, I brushed stinging sweat from my eyes. “Purple magic.”
“Witch and demon magic,” Clea said a voice strung high with fear.
“Thanks. I’ve used crayons before. A partnership or coercion?”
“No true demon would willingly help a human,” she spat at Leo.
“I’m special.” Leo waved a bloody hand at Eddy, who’d been edging closer to the diamond. “You really want to listen to your kids and stay back.”
He stopped, holding himself in check with visible effort.
“Less insulting my friend. More answering.” I planted myself over her brother’s body.
“Forced,” she sneered. “Magic isn’t crayons, it doesn’t automatically combine. One magic must become submissive to the other for that to happen.” Interesting.
“Binding demons.” I checked Tony’s chest. Still breathing. His eyes fluttered but stayed closed. “I want to know who, why, and how.”
She inched closer to Tony. “I don’t know.”
I blocked her. “You’re lying. You zizu are oracles. What have you seen?”
“Let me be with my brother.” Clea trembled.
Grr. I was the biggest fool in the world. But I was also a twin. I stepped aside.
Clea knelt down and touched Tony, but he didn’t stir. Her eyes turned milky and her head jerked back.
“Tick tock, goes the clock, blood to rule the might.” She spoke in a singsong voice that caused goosebumps to break out along my skin. “Tick tock, speed the clock, the lovers reunite.”
Peachy. Creepy nursery rhyme prophecies starting with a clock metaphor always boded so well for a happy ending.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I braced a hand against a school bus, heat and magic overuse making me dizzy, but she didn’t answer.
Whatever. I had at least a partial answer to my questions and we were all going to walk out of here alive.
Eddy rushed Clea, swiping the diamond from her hand, and holding it aloft. His face was bathed in wonder.
Leo and I both sprinted for him, but Clea got to him first.
“Mine, Daddy!” She swiped the diamond away with one of her talons, slicing his flesh open. Blood was everywhere, on the ground, on the engine hoist, on dead husks of cars.
Eddy paled, clutching his arm, and crumpled to the ground.
Clea ducked her head. “Sorry.”
Eddy started convulsing.
“Poison.” Leo dropped to her knees beside Eddy, placed her hands on him, and shuddered.
“What are you doing?�
� I said.
“Drawing out the poison. Cool, huh?” She was sweating, a milky ooze bubbling out of his skin and over her hands.
“Die on me and you’re so dead,” I said.
She was coated in the toxin. Could there be residual effects for Leo? Some slow poisoning where we’d think she just had the flu and then bam! She’s dead? I had to trust she knew what she was doing, but I wanted to knock her aside and hose her down, because in the scheme of Leo versus this guy, there was no comparison. If that made me selfish, so be it.
“All good,” she said in a shaky voice. “You should get your cholesterol checked,” she said to Eddy, scrubbing her hands with dirt to remove the toxins.
He turned his head and vomited.
I swallowed hard against the taste of metallic bile. Tony was still unconscious, his little boy features slack, and Clea, lip trembling, kept apologizing to her daddy. I couldn’t leave these demons alive. Human life trumped demon and Eddy had already had one brush with death.
The more firmly I entrenched myself in this fight against evil, the more my moral compass was more of a moral tightrope.
“Is Daddy going to be okay?” Clea asked.
“Yeah.”
She nodded and returned to her brother, trying to shake him awake.
Coward that I was, I waited until her face was bent down towards Tony’s and I couldn’t see her eyes before killing her. The fact that I dispatched of both demons with two quick strikes was little consolation.
Eddy cried brokenly, his entire body racked with sobs.
“I’m sorry.” There was no forgiveness in the hate-filled glower he shot me. I picked up the discarded sledgehammer and stalked off.
Waves of anxiety rolled off Leo, running beside me to keep up, the diamond clutched in her closed fist.
I waited until Eddy could no longer see us, and then I wailed on the first intact car I found, obliterating its windshield and smashing its doors until they crumpled and broke off their frames.
I tossed the sledgehammer away with a shriek, my chest heaving.
Leo hugged me. “You had to do it. Him wanting to parent them, knowing they were demons? It wasn’t normal. It couldn’t work.”
“What’s so wrong with wanting normal? Maybe he couldn’t have kids any other way? Maybe–”
“No. We can’t obsess about maybe. This is the hand we’re dealt. Normal isn’t always in the cards and the sooner people face that fact, the better.” Her voice was steel. Someday I’d ask her how hard it had been to reconcile herself to being half-demon.
“Eddy playing dad to demons may have been deluded,” I said. “But wanting that connection? Not because of proximity or adrenaline rush bonding or because I’m the only female option in his Rasha life, but an unassailable certainty that Ro’s mine and I’m his? I mean…” Fuck it. There was no way to recover from that Freudian slip.
Leo blinked at me. “Wow.”
“I’m just saying it wasn’t deluded of Eddy to try for everything he’d ever wanted.” I spun around and walked out of the lot.
4
Hastings Skatepark was located at the edge of the Italian Gardens on Vancouver’s east side. The whir of wheels on concrete overpowered the cascade of water trickling out of the faces carved into the ivy-wrapped stone pillars in the garden and running along tiled channels. However, nothing could drown out the screams from riders on the Hellevator or The Beast at Playland, the huge amusement park sitting smack dab between the gardens and the racetrack to the east.
Rohan greeted me at the skatepark’s turnstile gate, sporting baggy cargos worn low on his hips and a T-shirt that had been washed so many times that whatever cool boarder logo had originally adorned it was now a vague suggestion of a line. His skateboard was tucked under one arm.
“Cute disguise,” I said.
His eyes hit my face for a second, needle-sharp. I’d splashed a small lake’s worth of cold water on my red-rimmed eyes at Leo’s before driving here but I guess it hadn’t been enough.
I edged past him into the brightly tagged, multi-level skate park, with its checkered concrete. “No Mercy” graffiti was sandwiched between a painted cartoon bunny and realistic-looking bulldog on the main bowl, while traffic beyond the park provided a soothing white noise.
“Hey.” He tugged gently on my elbow. “What happened to Plan B?”
I stepped into his open arms, burying my head in his neck. His silky curls tickled my cheek and the scent of musk and iron enveloped me. Ro provided a safe harbor with his arms wrapped around me and my head tucked in under his chin. My breathing calmed and my tension rolled away like an outbound tide, my body resonating against his. He was my personal tuning fork, not for pitch, but alignment with the universe.
He kissed my head. “Whatever went down, let it go.”
I shook it off. Not in a boppy Taylor Swift way. In a “cram that sucker into the overstuffed, creaking box of things in my psyche I couldn’t deal with” way.
I leaned on the large “No Graffiti” sign bolted to the chain link fence and filled Rohan in on when and how magic combined and that I’d been right about demon coercion. “But wait, ladies and gentlemen. Order in the next fifteen minutes and we’ll throw in a prophecy, absolutely free! ‘Tick tock goes the clock, blood to rule the might. Tick tock speeds the clock, the lovers reunite.’ Judging from the first part, I’d say a witch or group of them used blood as a binding agent.”
“You got the how on the purple magic.” Rohan high-fived me. “The timeline and lovers don’t mean anything to me, though.”
“Too bad we don’t have an Acme Corp gadget to spit out the answers to all our questions.”
“That’d be more Wayne Enterprises technology,” he said.
“You are such a nerd.”
“It’s common sense. Acme is low-tech. You’re talking major computing power.”
“Super nerd.” I poked him in the chest. “And don’t bother to deny it, guy who insisted on wearing a different superhero costume every day in grade one.”
Rohan knocked his hip against mine. “It was endearing.”
A laugh burst out of me. “Your precious Ro-mantics are the ones that called it ‘endearing.’ You do read your fan boards. I knew it!”
“Do not.” Rohan dropped his board onto the concrete. “There’s only one person here reading my fan boards, and it’s not me, sweetheart.”
“It’s not me either,” I backtracked. “Leo told me.”
“Uh-huh.” He got a pious expression. “My mom reads them and shares the good stuff.”
“You lie like a rug. How’s it going with the dealer?”
Rohan nodded at some skinny kid riding the lip of one of the bowls. “That’s him. Elliot. I’ve been working on getting his source.”
“He’s good.”
“He’s okay.” Rohan’s critical expression matched his tone. “He’s got decent tech but no gnar.”
I shot him a blank look.
“No style. You wanna have both when you skate.”
“Whatever, Tony Hawk. Go. I’ll hang out, watch the park. See if I can spot any other deals going down.”
Rohan kissed my nose. “Put on sunscreen. I put some in your purse this morning.” He pushed off, his body one with the board as he carved a lazy semi-circle.
I blinked. I didn’t know he could skate.
He rode up a graffiti-tagged curved ramp, hovering on his back wheels at the top for an impossibly long moment. Right when gravity had to make him its bitch and a wipe-out was imminent, Rohan popped his board up, catching it mid-air in both hands briefly before reversing directions. Riding halfway back down, he jumped his board onto the railing beside the ramp, skating down the edge with effortless grace and nailing his dismount.
The showoff then had the audacity to wink at me.
Twice in two days Rohan had pulled out a talent I’d had no idea he had.
Irritating, old-timey music on a loop grew louder as a colorful ice cream van pulled up to the curb
. I jogged over, waiting patiently for the group of teens ahead of me to get their bounty, and ordered an orange Popsicle, since Leo had been a brat about me getting anything when we’d stopped at the store on our drive back to her place.
“I should get my boyfriend something.” Wallet in hand, I scanned the menu board tacked up next to the order window while the bubbly blonde manning the truck flaked off her mint green nail polish.
I had no clue what Rohan liked.
He knew pretty much everything about me but the reverse wasn’t true. Admittedly, our couple status was new but it wasn’t like our relationship was. We’d been dancing around each other from day one. I was closer to Rohan than anyone other than Ari and Leo but how well did I really know him? How well was he letting me? We’d fought together, he had my back, but some of the basics were blank spaces. Cole and I had known everything about each other before we started dating, and Lily was well versed in Rohan 101.
I knew the stuff that mattered, didn’t I? And I could make educated guesses on the rest of it. I scanned the menu for the most boring ice cream I could find. “A Revello, please.” I collected my change and the purchases, heading back toward the park.
“Hey!” Rohan rode after a fleeing Elliot.
Stuffing my wallet back into my pocket, I unwrapped my orange Popsicle and took that first sugar-infused taste. Mmmm.
Elliot skated by and, without missing my next lick, I kicked him in the kneecaps. He flew off his board and crashed onto the grass, rolling twice. The board shot forward, pinged off a lamppost and rolled into the gutter. Elliot groaned, flopped out on his back.
I pinned him in place, leaning my scuffed-up sneaker on a pressure point on the side of his left calf, immobilizing him.
He choked out a pained gasp.
Rohan arrived, kicking his board up to stop. “Nice.”
“Thanks.”
Rohan squatted down. “Where did you get the Sweet Tooth?”
“Fuck. You.”
“Listen, Elliot,” Rohan said. “I’m not here to narc you out. But this shit is dangerous and I want it off the streets.”
Elliot’s cheek was all road-rashy from the fall. His shaggy hair hung in his eyes in sweaty clumps. He was stinky, clearly in pain, and not about to talk.
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