Chapter 46
On hour three of brainstorming, Ward brings me a hot coffee.
“I didn’t realize you had anything but liquor down here,” I tell him with a grateful nod.
“Down here?” Peter asks, laptop open on the endlessly long bar. “Oh right. There’s a whole hotel upstairs.”
“It’s not a hotel,” Baz says with a sneer.
Elliot slides into the booth beside the grouchy vamp and hands him a coffee too. “Relax, Fangs. Peter comes in peace.”
I cut my eyes to Sophia, sitting on a couch across the lounge of the empty club, and try to mouth “Fangs!” but she’s too busy scowling. “A bomb? Are you crazy?”
Deacon narrows his eyes back at her from behind the bar, whiskey glass in hand. “I said a bomb threat. But a bomb isn’t a bad idea…” He leans over the bar as if to tell Peter to search something, but I cut him off.
“No bomb. Threat or otherwise. The goal here is minimum guest disruption.”
“Well, there’s going to be some,” Peter warns. “When Ward—”
“I know,” I say, staring at the pad of paper in front of me. Each of our names, with our roles laid out. Penny: distract, Ward: plumbing, Elliot & Baz: Ada.
“I’ll be quick,” Ward says next to me with a cocksure smile. “Don’t worry. Those rich ladies won’t know what hit them.”
“Am I the only one who doesn’t think this is going to work?” Sophia asks. “What we’re talking about is virtually impossible. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills, which is usually a lot more fun.”
“Nobody’s claiming the plan is foolproof,” Elliot says. “But it’s all we have.”
“Well, I’d rather what we have not suck.”
Penny takes in a worried breath beside me, and Ward rubs her back. “We’ve been planning all night.”
“And I’m not knocking the idea of a well-plotted heist,” Sophia assures us. “But the stakes here aren’t losing millions of dollars and Julia Roberts’s affection.”
“And jail time,” Peter adds. “Pretty sure they were at risk of going to jail for robbing those casinos.”
“Man, the goonie squad needs to take a lap or something.” Deacon’s mouth curves as he sips his drink. “You bunch are a worst-case-scenario machine.”
“We’re trying to make a plan that is as safe for everyone as it is feasible,” Peter tells him, offering Sophia a nod of support.
“And you think yourselves so heroic.” Deacon shakes his head. “Avoiding danger isn’t really what heroes do, is it?”
I open my mouth to tell him we aren’t heroes, we’re hunters, and hunters don’t make unforced errors, but Peter speaks first.
“No.” He studies Deacon with real thought. “It’s not.”
“I’m not afraid of danger,” Sophia says. “But this isn’t just danger. The Elders have their hunters looking for Viv, Caspar is planning to use Ada as a sacrificial lamb, Finn would happily swap Viv for Ada if given the choice, and Reid, the psycho ex-boyfriend, is dead set on finding the ring.”
“And Reid’s mutinous warlock,” Elliot tosses in.
“Mutinous Warlock’s a good name for a band,” Baz muses flatly. Elliot snickers, and all of a sudden their friendship makes more sense.
“You really think Reid has the same plan we do?” Ward asks, cutting his eyes to Deacon.
“It’s the best night to attempt a theft if he really won’t be just knocking over the place.”
“Reid wouldn’t,” I say quietly. When Penny and Sophia both gape at me, I add, “I’m not defending him.
But by his own warped logic, he’s trying to save lives.
” He’d always wanted to fight for the side of good.
It was one of the first things that softened me toward him last semester.
“And maybe he was bluffing about his guys at Nora and Fiona’s house.
Maybe Orin—the warlock—is the only Brood still on his side.
Either way, I don’t think he has enough men to break into the Windsor without the cover of the gala. ”
“So to recap,” Sophia concludes, “we have Viv-hungry Citadel hunters, Caspar and Finn plotting grandmacide and Chasm surgery, Reid versus us on The Amazing Race, and if none of that sold you, we can thank Peter for reminding us jail time is still on the table. It is illegal to rob one of the highest-funded, most prestigious museums in the world.”
My stomach tightens. She isn’t wrong. Sophia’s list doesn’t even include all the innocent staff and guests—my mom and sister among them—who will be in harm’s way if something goes terribly wrong.
Elliot narrows his eyes at Sophia. “Since when are you the voice of reason? You have no problem with illegal shit.”
If I wasn’t looking right at Sophia, I would have missed it.
If I’d taken a sip of my coffee, or looked back down at the notepad before me with our best possible plan scrawled across it.
If I’d looked at Penny, sitting comfortably next to Ward like she’s spent her whole life within the cavernous walls of Fever Dream.
If I’d looked at Elliot, chuckling softly as Baz made a wicked comment in his ear.
If I’d been staring at Deacon behind the bar, arms spread wide as he leaned on the stone countertop and listened, silver chain hanging beneath his shirt.
But I wasn’t. I’m staring right at Sophia when her eyes dart across the room to Peter. “I just don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
And he’s looking at her too.
Later, when we’ve gone over the plan until Elliot is snoring in the booth, everyone makes peace with the fact that there is nothing more we can do except sleep.
When Sophia rouses Elliot and they begin their goodbyes, Deacon looks up from his conversation with Ward. “Hold up—you’re not leaving.”
“We aren’t?”
“I didn’t close my club on a Friday night just for us to convene. You’ll stay here tonight.” His eyes fall to me. “All of you. With Caspar knowing who Viv is now, and Harker shutting its doors…It’s just safer.”
“I thought we were just fucklings?” Sophia looks skeptical.
Deacon shrugs, a sparkle in his eye. He is the only one of us who doesn’t look beat down by exhaustion. I guess hundreds of years without sleep will do that to you. “Fucklings, yes. Disposable, no.”
Elliot rolls his eyes, but even I can see the clear appreciation in him as he and Sophia course correct and head for the stairwell in the back.
“You can borrow some of my clothes,” Penny tells Soph and me.
“Great,” I say. “I’ll meet you up there.”
“And you can borrow mine,” Baz tells Elliot. There’s an ominous, slightly seductive gleam in his violet eyes.
To my surprise, Elliot swallows hard, his hand gripping the back of his neck. “For sure.”
Deacon and Ward are the last to leave, still speaking in hushed tones about tomorrow, so I don’t get a chance to thank him. Not for tonight. Not for earlier…
I’m still sitting in the booth, staring at the raised dais where the DJ would be on any other Friday, when I realize Peter hasn’t left, either. He’s still at the bar, computer open, staring off into the distance.
I follow his eyeline to Sophia. She’s wearing a silk paisley handkerchief as a top, her back bare and tanned and strong. Her hand laces through Penny’s, her copper hair swaying with each step as they bound up the spiral stairs beyond the ever-steaming hot spring.
“I saw the way she looked at you tonight,” I say, quietly. “I know you did too.”
He doesn’t even deny it. “We’d be an odd couple. Don’t you think?”
I try to imagine the pairing of brainy, cautious Peter and free-spirited, fun-loving Sophia.
Weekends spent pushing him from his comfort zone with things like salsa lessons or bungee jumping, followed by quiet mornings reading comic books side by side in bed.
She’d make him feel fearless. He’d keep her safe…
Somehow it feels like a lesson I’ve been learning for a while.
“I think we’re supposed to be with people who fill the gaps inside us, not suffer from the same ones. ”
Peter shakes his head, eyes on the impossibly high ceiling. “I just wish I had the balls to tell her.”
“What’s the worst that could happen? Rejection?”
His handsome, angular face twists. “I’m not a kid. I can handle rejection. What I couldn’t handle is losing her completely.”
“If she abandons your friendship over that, then she doesn’t deserve you in her life at all.”
They don’t fucking deserve you.
My mind drifts back to that night with Deacon.
I’d felt so similarly about my own family for so long, but the other day in the department store…
I’m shocked to realize how close I’d come to telling them what I was.
Looking my mother in the eye. Admitting I was more than she ever saw in me.
Whether that changed how she felt for the better or the significantly worse, perhaps it was just time she knew.
I’m different now, I realize. Different from when I first came to Harker.
Maybe because of what I’ve been through, the pain and suffering, losing Reid and blaming myself, his gutting betrayal…
But maybe it’s because these people—my friends, my family—have shown me that I have less to fear, less to hide, than I’d once thought.
Penny, who I’d dreaded discovering what I was for years, has accepted me with open arms. And I’ve accepted people I never thought I would too.
“I’ll make you a deal.”
“Isn’t that your and Elliot’s thing?” Peter says with a laugh.
“You tell Sophia how you feel, and I’ll tell my mom I’m a hunter.”
His brows shoot up. “Really?”
Something triumphant and thrilling is whirling inside me. “Yes. Really. I don’t want to live like this anymore.”
“Me, either.”
I feel like I’m floating. “Let’s do it. Tonight.”
“No.” Peter shakes his head, eyes shining. “When all of this is over. When that thing is out of you and we can breathe again. I’ll tell Soph, and you’ll tell your mom.”
My heart twists at the fear and hope and determination on his face. “Deal.”