Chapter 44
44
O oh, and Auntie Ez!” Desi says excitedly from her perch on Ez’s hip. “Do you wanna stay up all night and play dragons with me? I promise I won’t tell JJ and Cass!”
Just out of Desi’s eyeshot, Cass frantically shakes his head, slicing a finger across his throat in an “absolutely not!” motion. Ez fights back a laugh at the sight. “Not tonight, pumpkin,” she says, tapping a finger on Desi’s nose as she carries the toddler to her bedroom. “Auntie Ez needs her quiet hours, too.”
And Ez might not need to sleep, but shutting off her brain for a solid six to ten hours a night has proven to be helpful over the past week?—and so has the walking distraction machine that is Desi Jackson-Chin.
Desi has been ecstatic to have Ez staying with them, of course. As she should be, Ez thinks approvingly. Auntie Ez always lets Desi watch scary movies and eat junk food and stay up past her bedtime, much to the exasperation of Desi’s actual fathers.
But they should really just let Ez have her small pleasures. After all, she helps out enough around the house when she’s off shift to make up for it. She’s taken over most of the cleaning with a ferocity that made JJ look faintly concerned, she’s meticulously worked her way through Cass’s stockpile of spell books, she’s played dragons with Desi until Desi herself was ready to call it quits?—anything to pull Ez away from her tangled thoughts.
Especially since they always seem to drift back to a certain hunter.
Desi pouts as Ez tucks her into bed and hands her Hana the Wyvern. “But I don’t like quiet hours. They’re so boring!”
“Well, you can always take a nap,” Ez points out, sitting on the edge of Desi’s bed and plucking a picture book off the shelf. Desi has long since graduated to chapter books, but they still indulge her with a more colorful story every night at bedtime. “Or you can read by yourself. Have Cass and JJ taught you how to read by yourself yet?”
Desi brightens. “A little bit,” she says, snuggling up to Ez, “but I like it better when they read to me! They do all the funny voices. Can you do the funny voices, Auntie Ez?”
“I can certainly try,” Ez says magnanimously, and she flips the book open to the first page. “‘Once upon a time, there was a good dragon’?—big shocker there?—‘who wanted to have a slumber party’…”
Ez loyally attempts the aforementioned voices as Desi pokes at the pictures and occasionally “helps” with the words she recognizes. By the time Ez finishes reading, Desi looks no less awake than she was before, but Ez knows she’ll settle down soon enough. “‘And they all lived happily ever after,’” she announces, snapping the book shut. “The end.”
Desi hugs her arm. “That was great! It’s one of my favorites!”
“I like it a lot, too,” Ez agrees, and she touches a kiss to Desi’s hair. “Good night, sweetie. Get some rest, okay?”
“Nighty-night, Auntie Ez!”
Ez makes sure Desi’s night light is plugged in before switching off the lamp and tiptoeing into the hall. When she arrives in the living room, it’s to find JJ curled up on the armchair, absorbed in his own reading materials?—although, since said reading materials come from a manila folder, Ez thinks they’re probably a lot less fun than slumber-partying dragons. “Hey, JJ,” she says, sprawling across the couch opposite him. “Is Cass already in bed?”
“Yeah. I just want to finish this first, though.” JJ rubs his temples tiredly, wincing.
Ez frowns. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. It’s just a headache.” The words are barely out of JJ’s mouth before he immediately stiffens, like he said more than he should have.
A prickle of unease runs down Ez’s spine. “Oh. You… get headaches?”
JJ busily stares down at the open folder, his eyes not moving across the pages. “Occasionally. Yeah.”
“Demons don’t get headaches.”
“Well, I’m not a demon.”
“You’re half of one,” Ez says, and she pushes herself up to sitting, leaning forward. “Talk to me, Jackson.”
JJ wavers briefly before relenting. “Yeah, I’ve been getting headaches,” he confesses softly. “And I’ll spare you the gory details, but my stomach has been pretty funky lately, too. But I hardly ever got sick even when I was fully human, so the fact that it’s starting to happen regularly now that I’m half-demon is…”
Ez finishes the thought. “Concerning.”
“Yeah. That.” JJ’s voice lowers even further, like he’s afraid Desi?—or Cass?—might hear him. “I’m worried that it’s related to the soul exchange. Is it possible that my body might be rejecting my piece of Cass’s soul? Or that my piece of Cass’s soul might be rejecting me?”
Ez lets out her breath in a hiss. “Maybe? There’s a reason why most spellcasters avoid soul magic?—it’s volatile and unpredictable. Let me just…” She fixes her gaze on JJ’s chest, letting her eyes go unfocused.
Letting the dual pieces of JJ’s soul come into view.
“How does it look?” His voice is quiet. “My soul. Or souls, I guess.”
“Not bad. There might be a bit of damage forming where your human soul is in direct contact with your demon soul, but that’s probably normal.” Ez grimaces. “Or as normal as any of this can be, anyway.”
“So, basically,” JJ says, “we have no idea.”
Ez’s chest twinges at his dejected expression. “Once we end the mega-rift epidemic,” she says, “I’m going to dive into researching soul magic again. We’ll figure this out, okay? I promise.” She nods at the papers on JJ’s lap. “In the meantime, though, what’s in the scary folder? Anything interesting?”
JJ’s eyes go distant. “Well. Yes. But not in a good way. It’s, uh.” He clears his throat. “It’s one of the files from Sawyer and Naomi’s research. About the conspiracy.”
Ez’s pulse stutters. “Ah,” she says evenly, and she rests her forearms on her knees, considering him. “How are you doing with that, by the way? I know it was a shock when Naomi and Sawyer first dropped that bombshell, but…”
JJ smiles ruefully. “You mean that I nearly went catatonic for half a week?”
Ez winces. “Yeah. That.”
“I’m doing better now,” he says, and he tentatively meets her eyes. “It almost helps to know that there’s an explanation, you know? That my past wasn’t just random chance and bad luck. Everything in my life from the murders onward was calculated, and that makes it easier to unpack some of what the Sanctum did to me.”
Ez’s heart twists. “But?”
“But some of it is worse, too. Like?—like thinking I’m the reason why my family was killed. I know they weren’t specifically targeting me?—I was nothing special, and they just needed two ten-year-old boys?—but part of me feels like my family might still be alive if I didn’t exist. My parents might still be alive.” JJ looks away. “My little sister would’ve turned eighteen in April. That was a rough birthday to get through.”
Ez shakes her head. “That’s all on the Sanctum, JJ. Not you.”
“I know. I just need to convince myself of that.” JJ pauses halfway through flipping a page, one with the surname “Locke” printed across the top. “And I’ve been thinking about Chester a lot, too. He?—he would take the conspiracy in stride, I think. He was always more critical of the Sanctum than I was. He wasn’t one wrong move away from defecting, but he… cared about the system enough to want to fix it. Even when the system itself was against his very existence.”
“You still miss him? And Bryant?”
JJ’s smile is sad. “Yeah. Every day. I’ve been worried about him, especially since we learned about the conspiracy, and?—and I’ve been worried about Bryant, too. She might be a purebred, but she’s the youngest of her bloodline, so she definitely doesn’t know about the Sanctum working with the Chain.” He hesitates. “I still think about Roma a lot, too.”
Pain slices through Ez’s chest. “Well, we don’t need to worry about Gutierrez anymore,” she says curtly, and even she’s surprised by how bitter her voice sounds. “She got exactly what she deserved. Exactly what she wanted.”
JJ’s expression shifts. “I’m… not so sure about that, actually.”
Ez laughs hollowly. “Don’t tell me she got in your head. Don’t tell me you believed any of what she said.”
“That’s the thing,” JJ says. “I think I do. Honestly, the fact that she was on assignment initially makes me less suspicious of her motives than I was before.”
The words take Ez off guard. “What?”
“Roma always lived in the shadow of other people,” JJ says. “At first, it was Naomi. After Naomi defected, it was the scandal she left behind?—the scandal that Roma was desperate to erase. Sometimes, it was Bryant.” He looks away. “Sometimes, I think it was even me. Not with the Council, obviously?—I was just an attack dog to them?—but in battle. She… thought I was braver than her. Because I was always the first to volunteer for a dangerous assignment or put myself between my strike team and a threat. But she didn’t understand that it was desperation, not bravery. Desperation to be appreciated, to be accepted, to even be noticed. That?—that was all I had left. Or that’s how it felt, at least.”
Vividly, Ez remembers how easily Roma was able to trick JJ away from Cass a few months ago by giving him another mission to get behind. Her heart hurts. “You’re a lot more than that, JJ.”
“I know. Mainly because Cass makes it a point to tell me that at least twice a week. But…” His smile fades. “Ez, Roma never would’ve agreed to work with you on her own. She never would’ve gone out of her way to befriend a demon, especially one she blamed for taking me away from them. It was just so against her nature, so at odds with her conservative tactical decisions, so counter to her entire belief system.” He shrugs one shoulder. “But once we found out that the mega-rifts were her fault, everything else fell into place.”
“Yeah, because everything else was just part of her con,” Ez says, an edge creeping into her voice. “Everything else was fake.”
JJ shakes his head. “I don’t think it was. First and foremost, because Roma is a terrible actress.”
Ez snorts with surprise. “I think she might be better than you remember.”
“No, really,” he says, and his lips twitch. “Back in March, I should’ve been able to see through her right away. I was just so happy to have a friend on the outside that I ignored all the warning signs.” His smile falters. “But Roma also has a strong moral code. There’s a lot that she wouldn’t do just for an assignment. A lot that?—?” He hesitates. “A lot that, based on what you two said last week, I think she did.”
Ez tastes bile. “Yeah, well,” she says shortly. “Your Roma has clearly changed a lot since you were last on speaking terms with her.”
“You tell me, then,” JJ whispers. “What happened between you two?”
Ez’s stomach roils. “We worked together to close the mega-rifts. We became friends, or so I thought. I was stupid enough to insist on including her in the conspiracy, so that forced us closer.” And closer. And closer. And… “And then we sort of had a moment after we first cast our counterspell, and then that Moment turned into some pretty hot sex, and then??—?”
Tell me, then. If I left the Sanctum and stayed here with you. What would our lives be like?
Ez’s throat tightens. “And then everything came crashing down,” she finishes curtly. “She really had me going for a while, too. Really made me believe she was going to defect. Really made me believe that?—?” That she felt the same way I did. “That she wanted to stay with us.”
“Ez,” JJ says gently, “Roma wouldn’t have done any of that just to sell a con. Frankly, I’m shocked that she even let you temporarily deactivate the Sanctum’s enchantments. That’s a level of trust I didn’t even know she was fully capable of. Trust doesn’t come easily to her.”
“She only did it to fix her mistake, Jackson,” Ez snaps. Her hands are trembling the slightest bit, and she cinches them into fists to hide it. “A mistake she could’ve told us about weeks ago, remember? She knew the spell that sparked the epidemic, knew there wasn’t an outside enemy to investigate, knew exactly how to end it. She knew all that, but she still hid it from us.”
“Probably because she was afraid we would react badly,” JJ says. “Which, you know, we very much did.”
“Because she didn’t tell us!” Ez hisses. “We caught her in the act. Caught her in a lie. And she was trying to convince us not to check the memoryscapes at all, remember? She was just trying to save her own skin.”
“Maybe,” JJ says, but he sounds unconvinced. “But I’ve known Roma for over a decade now, Ez. I know how she talks, how she reasons, how she reacts?—all of it. And everything last week? That all seemed real. When she talked about potentially leaving the Sanctum, that seemed real.” He meets her eyes. “When she said that she was falling for you, that?—that seemed real.”
Ez’s jaw hurts. With a start, she realizes that she’s clenching her teeth and forces them to relax. “Yeah, well. I doubt that.”
JJ’s lips press together. “And you? How did you feel about her?”
“Well, I trusted her,” Ez says brusquely. “I respected her. I?—I wanted to get closer to her. Wanted to know more about her. Wanted to study magic with her and cast spells with her and?—?” She cuts herself off, glaring down at her knees. “I… liked her. A lot. And she used that to her advantage.”
“Roma Gutierrez is a lot of things,” JJ says softly, “but she doesn’t lead people on. Not like that. The Sanctum might have put her in your path initially, but?—but I think her feelings for you were sincere.”
Ez’s skin crawls. “No offense,” she says, “but I really don’t want to talk about this right now.”
JJ immediately snaps his folder shut, chagrined. “Of course. Sorry. It’s none of my business, anyway?—I just?—?” He gives her an unsure smile. “I just don’t like seeing you unhappy. You’ve always gone out of your way to help me when I needed it. I just wanted to return the favor. I know that I’m still sort of on the outskirts here, but…”
Ez’s heart twinges. “No, you’re not,” she says firmly. “Not anymore. You haven’t been for a while now, lackey. You’re one of us, whether you like it or not.”
JJ grins. “I do like it,” he says, and he pushes himself to his feet, stretching his arms above his head. “All right. I’m going to head in and join Cass. Just?—just get some rest, okay? And think about what I said. Because part of me really does believe that, in the end, Roma didn’t want to betray us.”
Ez looks away. “Yeah. Maybe. Night, JJ.”
“Night, Ez.” JJ pads silently down the hallway, that demon-like grace he’s picked up over the past few months more obvious than ever, and Ez thinks??—
Thinks about how the only thing that could convince a hunter like him to leave the Sanctum was a little girl to take care of and a partner to love. Wonders if Roma saw something in Ez, in their dual spellcasting and their easy camaraderie and their delicate trust, that really did make her consider defecting, too.
Even if it was just for a moment.