Chapter 13 #3
“Firstly,” Deacon says, wiping a hand over his mouth to quell his amusement, “if Vivienne thinks I go around handing vials of my blood to any mouth breather who asks, she’s not as intelligent as I’d come to believe.
Which is an insult to my intelligence. And I don’t take kindly to insults.
” He focuses back on me. “Blood is as valuable as gold or poppy—especially a demon’s blood.
Especially my blood. The number of spells and rituals your warlock friend could do to me alone…
” Deacon shakes his head as if the three of us should have known far better.
“If anyone is using my blood to track Reid, I’m going to be there. ”
“Fine.” There is no worse feeling than when someone you despise makes a good point. I’m already trying to figure out how we can get Harker’s groundskeeper to come with us to Fever Dream when Deacon speaks again.
“Secondly, the fact that you think I cannot enter Harker, or have never been on your untouched, warded, secret little campus, is so uproariously funny it almost makes up for how little you understand of who and what I am.” His crystal-blue eyes gleam with such predatory resolve my chest seizes. “Almost.”
“Jesus,” Elliot mutters.
“Basically,” Baz replies, bored.
“You…” I stammer. It makes no sense. “You can’t have been inside Harker. Deviants can’t do that.”
“Huh.” Deacon makes a frowny face. “And yet I have. Mind-boggling.”
“How?” I ask. I manage to swallow the rest of my question. And why haven’t you stormed the school with other demons? I can answer that one: Because Deacon doesn’t care about hunters or other demons. He only cares about himself.
“Because the Elders, like everyone else, have dirty business in this city too. Who else better to help them out than yours truly?”
I want to roll my eyes, but a seed of doubt burrows into my gut.
What had Driscoll said? He was a liar, sure, but he told me the Elders made a point to keep Deacon alive and Fever Dream running and that even he didn’t know why.
How else could this place still be standing in a city filled with hunters?
Without another word, Deacon abandons us for the back of the club, where that aquamarine pool of water emits pleasant steam in curls and wisps. He slips through a back door, and the four of us are left in uncomfortable silence.
“Is that it?” Sophia asks. “Are we done here?”
I chew my lip. Debate going after him. “I don’t know.”
“So,” Elliot says, leaning on the bar beside Baz. “How long you been working for that guy?”
Sophia and I exchange looks of bewilderment. But Baz only stares at him before returning to his work restocking the bar. “Fever Dream opened in 1921. It was a speakeasy back then. He had a railroad business before that…And a successful high-sea trade a century previous.”
“You guys were pirates?” Elliot asks, intrigued.
I’m still stunned by whatever is happening here. Are Elliot and Baz…bonding? Sophia cuts me a similar glance. I feel like we’re Elliot’s strict parents and he’s our wayward son, hanging out with ghoulish vampires. Kids these days.
“We shipped goods from port to port. Textiles, rum, fur…”
“…human souls, blood, weapons, drugs,” Sophia continues for him, words edged with venom. “Not too different from what you do today, is it? You trade girls too back then? Slaves?”
“Enough,” Deacon booms, walking back inside from wherever he’d disappeared to.
He’s no longer in his sweats and instead has donned a pair of workman’s pants, a beat-up leather jacket, and some vintage white sneakers.
Although maybe they’re not so vintage to him.
He swings his bike keys around his index finger. “Time to go.”
So he is coming. To Harker. I don’t know whether to rejoice or throw up. “You still haven’t told me how—”
“—with this.” Deacon flashes a key chain at me—and on it, a shiny lymantrian coin. Copper, while all of ours are silver. He breezes past us and toward the front doors. “Today, please. Your hunter stench is suffocating.”
We shuffle out, one after another, Elliot offering Baz a wave goodbye, which to my absolute shock Baz returns.
“And for what it’s worth,” Deacon says to Sophia, once we’re out in the flurry of snow beyond his club’s walls, “Baz not only fought for the Union from ’61 to ’65, he also freed more trafficked women under the feared pirate Anne Bonny than any corrupt, elven council of yours could dream to.
” He studies Sophia’s slender jaw and full lips, and I’m sort of baffled to find no lust lingers in his cool eyes.
Everybody wants Soph. “Anne would have taken great pleasure in skewering a foolish, unimpressive, faux-righteous huntress like you.”
Sophia’s mouth hangs agape as Elliot’s fists curl in her defense.
But I am unsurprised.
Deacon has no morality—no ethics that guide him toward right or away from wrong.
Nor the other way, like some deviants I’ve known who actively seek out the lascivious and depraved.
Deacon’s code is simple: He does what he wants, when he wants.
Sometimes that’s helping me find Reid; sometimes that’s taking a human soul or selling guns to criminals.
But I’ve also misjudged him in some ways.
While I assumed all powerful demons felt as Reid did—that deviants like Baz and Ward were beneath them—that seems to be another ruleset Deacon refuses to play by.
Ward and Baz…are his friends. And Deacon seems willing to do whatever it takes to protect not just his club—his home—but also his people.