Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
New York threw its arms wide to its favorite daughter.
Joan stumbled out onto the street, ignoring George’s calls and Merlin’s shout, picking a direction and running.
And when she couldn’t run anymore, she jogged.
And when she couldn’t jog, her heart beating too fast and her breath a painful lance through her worn-out lungs, she walked.
And when even that was too much, the shadows of the night beginning to reach across her vision, she leaned against a building and hoped distantly that no one mugged her.
She’d walked out. Out of the house. Out of her family’s house. Out of their lives, undoing what she had begun the day she stepped across their threshold. She was not to appear as part of the family. She was not part of the family at all.
She didn’t fully realize she’d dialed until he picked up.
“Hey, how’s lockup treating you?” CZ said casually. “You need help breaking out to meet Grace?”
Joan breathed into the phone as tears dripped off her chin, struggling to control the tragic hammer of her heart. It pulverized her ribs. She was raw, and empty.
CZ’s tone flipped to something serious. “Jo? What happened?”
“I think I’ve run away,” Joan said, dazed, into the phone.
“To me, right?” CZ said, and there was a clattering of keys being snatched from a table. “Tell me you’re running to me.”
Joan looked up at the street signs around her. She was only a block off Central Park and several blocks south of her house. Headed in the direction of CZ. “I think I am.”
“I’ll meet you, where are you? Don’t bother answering; I have your location pin. I’m coming, Joan—stay right there.”
“CZ,” Joan said faintly. “CZ, what did I do?”
“I’m staying on the line,” he said. “Keep talking to me.”
Joan stood there for several minutes, murmuring nonsensically, listening to the swish of wind on CZ’s side, feeling her heart rate slow, and slow, and slow, until CZ was there, putting a hand on her elbow.
He must have hung up the call, because the phone was dead against her ear.
She lowered it slowly, and he took it from her limp hand.
His face caught the shadows of the streetlight, and it was full of pity, but she didn’t resent it from him.
He knew what she’d done and understood the depth of it.
How many times had Joan talked about shedding her family?
And now here she was, alone in the night.
Not alone.
“What can I do?” CZ said helplessly. “I will do anything for you, Joan, give you anything. Ask me for anything.”
Joan pulled the words out of the depths of her body. “Take me home, CZ.”
CZ took her bag off her shoulder, slung it around himself. His arm was a solid scoop at her back. He picked her up, bridal style, and Joan let him without any quips, which was how she knew she really wasn’t doing well.
The quick pace he set wasn’t very comfortable, but Joan pressed her ear to his chest, listened to the slow thump, thump, thump of his heart, and closed her eyes to the world.
Joan had never slept in this bed or apartment before, so the first few moments of waking up were confusing.
Dawn was barely touching the tips of the city. She uncurled and felt a body at her back.
“Hey,” CZ said softly, and when she turned, she saw he was scrolling through social media with earbuds in, likely at their lowest possible volume. He took one out. “You sleep okay?”
Joan’s eyes felt puffy, and her nose was kind of stuffy, and her body was still achy, but she had slept deeply.
“You really do need those blackout curtains,” Joan croaked, squinting at the strip of sun visible beyond his very thin, pale curtains.
Sun.
It was daytime.
Joan threw herself upright. “Fuck, we were supposed to meet Grace!”
“You fell asleep,” CZ said, setting his phone aside in a rush. “I texted her and canceled.”
“You have her number? Not the point.” Joan twisted to face him, balancing her weight on her left hand. “CZ, we were supposed to meet her to find Mik. Who is missing, lost in the city.”
“I know.”
“They could be hurt! If they’re upset, magic will keep coursing through them, and it could kill—” She choked herself off.
CZ gripped the tops of her arms. “I know, Joan. Take a second. You were completely worn out, and Grace wasn’t faring that well either.
We talked about it and felt it did Mik no good to have you two kill yourselves trying to find them.
We’d have heard if they’d turned up dead, so let’s assume they’re alive, and we can head over to Grace’s whenever you’re ready. ”
Joan nearly tripped and went sprawling in her efforts to get out of the bed with the blankets tangled around her.
She tore through her duffel bag for suitable clothes—she honestly hadn’t done a half bad job packing—and was dressed and showered in a record fifteen minutes, nudging CZ out the door so they could hop on the subway.
“I’m thinking of getting a car,” CZ said. “I know, I know, a car in the city? But I think it would come in handy.”
Joan grabbed him and tugged. “I know you’re as worried about Mik as I am, so why aren’t you looking more panicked?”
CZ’s stream of jokes died down as they crossed the street, heading for the 50th Street station.
His face was drawn. Joan said his name questioningly.
“I am panicked,” he admitted. “I’m panicked about what we’re going to find when Grace casts that spell.
The two of you were hospitalized, and Abel had his hands full trying to help the displaced vampires who were run out of the market.
It fell to me to find Mik, and I failed. Whatever happens next is my fault.”
Joan pulled them to a stop and made CZ face her, squeezing their hands between them. “Cane,” she said.
CZ groaned. “Not my legal name.”
“Cane Aleczander.”
A louder groan. “Am I being grounded?”
“This is not your fault,” Joan said firmly.
“Whatever comes next, it is not your fault. I’m the one who sent Mik out of the tent into the middle of the market.
I’m the one who brought Grace in, which is how we did that tether spell.
We’re in this together, alright?” Joan was going all in on this.
Her life was a pile of rubble, but Mik—Mik, she could still save. CZ, she could still protect.
CZ bumped his forehead against Joan’s briefly. “You give a good pep talk.”
Joan led him onward. “I mostly repeat stuff you’ve said to me before.”
Once they made it to Brooklyn, the increasingly familiar walk from the Bay Ridge Avenue subway stop to Grace’s apartment felt eternal.
Despite her encouraging words, Joan was feeling the same concern as CZ.
Mik would have had to escape through a fiery, chaotic market, and Joan had told them to go to Grace’s apartment.
The fact that they didn’t surely meant they’d been picked up on the way, and the only people who would know to look for them, who had been looking out for them, who might have been able to help them, had been knocked out in a hospital or scrambling to help a wave of refugees.
They made it to Grace’s building eventually, catching the door as someone walked out and making the trek up to the fifth floor.
Joan was not feeling well enough to take the stairs, but she refused to admit weakness, so she kept dragging her feet up step by step, turning down CZ’s repeated offers of a piggyback ride.
She was shaking a little by the time they made it to Grace’s door.
Luckily, Grace looked similarly awful. She didn’t bother with pleasantries, leading them to the kitchen.
“Billy won’t come out,” Grace said miserably. “I wanted to ask her if Mik came and left, or never came. I went through their room, but I couldn’t tell.”
Grace picked up a mug of tea, sipping from it. “I assume you’d have heard from your parents if they picked Mik up though.”
Joan wasn’t sure anymore what they would have told her. That is, before she’d left in the middle of the night. “I’m kind of exiled,” Joan admitted.
That woke Grace up a little. “Exiled? You coven broke?”
It was nice of CZ not to have told Grace last night.
“They wanted me to pin blame on Moon Creatures for what happened to us,” Joan said with a shrug, playing off what a soul-rending event that had been. “I said no.”
She wasn’t sure what Grace would say here. She didn’t want the easy comfort of platitudes. She didn’t want someone else’s condolences or their congratulations. Neither seemed right.
“Oh.” Grace set down her cup. “We had better find Mik. And once we do, we’re going to seal them, then set up some sort of audience with your family to get the blame off Moon Creatures and back on Fiona.
If you trust Molly, we can call her in to help with the sealing.
Or maybe we should take a leap of faith and try Wren if she declined to join Astoria at the market. ”
Joan let out a breath. “Do they know about Fiona? Did you mention her?”
“No one was interested in talking to me,” Grace said. “And your family kept quiet from everyone that I was even hospitalized. I assumed you told them?”
Joan had not. Somehow, she’d been too busy arguing with them.
CZ rubbed his face. “We’re seriously the only people on earth who are on Fiona’s trail?”
“The Greenwoods have been checking in with us both to see if there’s been progress on recreating the spell,” Grace said. “She texts me about it. I highly doubt they think it’s her just on their own.”
“Let’s get Mik quickly, then,” Joan said. “And maybe we go after Fiona ourselves.”
“Absolutely not,” CZ said.
“And do what with her?” Grace asked worriedly.
“We have more bargaining power if we get to her first,” Joan said.
With a huff, Grace fished out a shirt Mik had worn, holding it in one hand as she put the other on top of it, rapidly casting a tracking spell. There was already a roughly drawn map of New York on a piece of paper on the counter, since she still didn’t have a kitchen table.