Chapter 34
34
E z swings her second-favorite safe house’s door open wide the second Roma knocks. “Well, don’t you look like garbage,” she says, stepping aside to let Roma in.
“Bite me,” Roma says tiredly, walking into the entryway. Almost immediately, she tips her head back, sniffing the air suspiciously. “What is that?”
“I’m making a pizza for dinner,” Ez says, motioning her towards the kitchen table. “Come on.”
Eyebrows furrowed, Roma follows her. “Why are you making a pizza? You don’t need to eat.”
“Yeah, but you do,” Ez fires back, collapsing into her chair and casting a glance at the oven timer. “Should be ready in a few minutes.”
“You… made a pizza for me?”
Her phrasing makes Ez’s heart do something funny. Actually, Roma’s mere presence is making Ez feel a little short of breath right now. It’s their first time seeing each other since their shift ended yesterday?—they both wanted to take today to work out the kinks of their counterspells, so the Chain and the Sanctum found them coverage?—but Ez didn’t realize just how restless she felt without her hunter until now.
And Roma looks the same as always standing there in her button-down, tactical pants, and ubiquitous ponytail, but somehow, she makes Ez’s lackluster safe house feel full of life, full of comfort.
Like having Roma here really makes it feel like home. Ez forces the thought away. “Yes, I took a frozen pizza out of a box and stuck it in a preheated oven for you. You should be honored, Gutierrez.”
Roma rolls her eyes, settling herself in the seat across from Ez. “Uh-huh. So where do we stand with the reversal?”
“Well, I asked everybody from my side for opinions,” Ez says, and she passes a small stack of papers to Roma?—copies of their counterspell with notes from each person. “Those are from Maggie Khan, Gregorio, Micah, Obie, Cass, and JJ.”
Roma skims over the scribbled comments. “Anything exciting?”
“Not in the sense of potential mistakes,” Ez says. “But Obie thinks the original rift-opening spell might actually be based on the one that was used to banish Nostringvadha, so that was a neat tidbit.”
Roma looks taken aback. “Really? How could he possibly know that?”
“I… have a suspicion that he might’ve met Nostringvadha at some point here on Earth,” Ez admits. “But that would’ve been millennia ago. And he’s never mentioned it, so I’ve never asked.”
“Huh. One of my friends might actually be interested in that,” Roma says, flipping through the rest of the papers. She pauses over the second-to-last copy, her eyes lingering on JJ’s handwriting, before turning to the final page. “And this one?”
“Oh, that one is from Desi,” Ez says. “She wanted to help, too, so she drew us a dragon for good luck.”
Roma squints at the offending picture. “That’s supposed to be a dragon?”
“She’s four, okay? Cut her some slack.”
“Well, I actually think it’s a halfway decent…” Roma turns it to one side, tipping her head in the opposite direction. “Horse with wings. But not a lizard with wings.”
“Rude.” Ez taps a finger on the table to get Roma’s attention. “Who checked it over on your end?”
Roma rifles around in her pocket, pulling out a handful of folded pages. “The Council put our five best spellcasters on the job, but they couldn’t find any errors, either. I asked Bryant and Chester, too, even though spellcasting isn’t their forte. And, um, Naomi ended up reaching out, so I also got feedback from her.”
Ez stops halfway through reading the first page of notes, her eyebrows shooting up. “Naomi reached out? Your sister, Naomi?”
Roma scowls down at the reversals. “Do we know another Naomi, Laguerre?”
“I mean, I’ve met a few over the centuries,” Ez says, and she ducks her head, trying to catch Roma’s eye. “So how was that?”
For a long moment, Roma is quiet.
And then she says, “Exhausting. In so many ways. She was?—I was?—?” She scrubs a hand down her face, grimacing. “I don’t think I got that closure you were talking about.”
Ez’s heart hurts. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. I’m just… more confused than ever. About everything.”
Ez hesitates. “About the Sanctum, you mean?”
Roma doesn’t look at her. “Yeah. Partly. She gave me the names of all the other neophyte hunters worldwide. I looked them up to make sure they actually existed.” Her jaw tightens. “They exist.”
Ez almost doesn’t want to ask. “And…?”
“Well, there wasn’t a blinking neon sign pointing to a conspiracy,” Roma says flatly, “but there sure were a lot of criminal demons ‘coincidentally’ showing up at the perfect time for a neophyte hunter to get revenge.”
Ez winces. “That’s hard.”
“Yeah.” Roma’s eyes flicker up to meet Ez’s. “I don’t know what to do yet. The Sanctum has always been my home, but?—but it really hasn’t felt like home lately. Hell, I’ve barely been able to look Chester in the eye for weeks. I just?—?” She shakes her head sharply. “It’s a lot to process. And I haven’t really been processing much for the past month or so.”
Ez’s heart stutters unevenly. Roma looks sad and frustrated, like she’s resigned to questioning the Sanctum’s every move now, like she’s struggling to find the pride she used to have in being a hunter??—
Like she’s seriously starting to consider the possibility of leaving that life behind altogether.
Defect and come live with me. Defect and come live with me. Defect and? ? —
“Well, you have time to figure it out,” Ez forces herself to say, avoiding Roma’s eyes as she stands up to grab the pizza out of the oven. Giving them both a little space. “Time to gather your own evidence, do your own investigation. Figure out your next steps.”
“Yeah.” Roma lets out a slow breath, glancing out the window. The sun is just starting to drift towards the horizon, the sky fading from light blue to a gentle shade of orange. “Once we end the mega-rift epidemic, I should have a lot more time on my hands to work through everything.”
She’ll have all the time she’s currently spending with Ez. A pang twists through Ez at the thought. “As long as the Deep doesn’t decide to smite us, of course.”
“Well, if the Deep smites us,” Roma says, “then none of this will be my problem anymore, anyway.”
Ez snorts. “That’s one way of looking at it.”
“Yeah.” For a few seconds, Roma seems lost in thought, her gaze fixed out the window; then, abruptly, she turns back to Ez. “So there isn’t anybody else we want to ask for feedback, right?”
Ez shakes her head. “More opinions are always better, but it seems like we’ve both exhausted our lists of options. All that’s left now is to actually cast the spell.”
“Then…” Roma’s eyes dart towards the sky again. “Do we want to do it at sunset?”
Ez’s stomach lurches. “Tonight? You want to do it tonight?”
“Well, when else would we do it?” Roma’s shoulders hunch unsurely. “There’s really no reason to wait. We don’t need any more opinions or feedback, and we’ve already proven that we can cast an effective spell after a few dry runs. And?—and the sooner we stop the mega-rift epidemic, the better off we’ll be. The safer we’ll be.”
The sooner we’ll leave each other behind for good. Ez bites back the words. “But the pizza,” she complains, gesturing towards the cooling rack. “What about the pizza?”
Roma rolls her eyes. “We can just have celebratory pizza afterward. And it’ll probably still be warm?—we just need a rift to get out of here, a quick spell to stabilize the Deep, and another rift to come back. Ten minutes, tops.”
And Roma??—
Roma’s chin is lifted and her eyes are firm. She’s ready to go through with this, ready to officially put their counterspell to the test, ready to risk it all to save Redwater.
Ready to close the book on this chapter of their lives. Ez’s chest squeezes. “All right,” she says, her voice coming out curter than she intended. “Far end of Lakeside again?”
“Sure. It worked well last time.”
“Let’s get moving, then,” Ez says, and she snaps open a rift.
And, as Roma gives her an unreadable smile and strides through, Ez realizes that this really might be the last she sees of Roma Gutierrez.