Chapter 2
Visiting my gargoyle ex-boyfriend’s nightclub on a Friday via a back-alley entrance wasn’t my idea of a fun time.
But Thorne wouldn’t have asked if it wasn’t important—and I knew he knew exactly what it’d cost me.
The second I turned on my crown—the tech hidden in my hair comb that protected my mind from other people’s thoughts—it felt like something small and creepily multi-legged was trapped inside my skull and wanted to get out.
But it was better than the alternative—listening to the innermost thoughts and immediate feelings of however many paying members of Thorne’s human and monster “social club” were attending tonight.
Thorne’s club, Nocturne, was a place where willing members of either species could pay a membership fee to be vetted and then commingle—and rumor said it had “all-you-can-heat” rooms on the second floor.
I didn’t want to know what most people were thinking on a good day—so I was certain I didn’t want to open my mind up here, now.
Bram led me through a dark hallway, laced with noctylis vines overhead, their tendrils dangling down and coiling up at the slightest touch.
“Inside count: 193. Exits: ahead, left, and behind. One week to full moon. The noctylis are quiescent. Your sidearm carries tranq and impact rounds—nonlethal for most monsters here, sufficient to slow, but potentially lethal to humans,” Nex whispered into my earpiece.
I nodded subtly, but I knew Nex would catch the shift in the pendant’s camera as the chain moved on my neck.
I was fairly certain I wasn’t heading into a trap—Thorne and the other monsters who ran his club were all ex-MSA.
But Thorne’s request to meet here, rather than meeting me somewhere less people-y—and bass-y too now—was odd enough that I wanted backup.
Telling Nex was my way of splitting the difference, and the second I had, he’d insisted on coming with me, via an earpiece and the pendant around my neck—a small orb of sapphires in which he’d installed a camera using the armatures in his lab.
I didn’t want to know how he’d gotten the purchase orders past my dad.
Which probably meant he hadn’t.
The buzzing in my head got louder as we moved closer to other club patrons, and my crown had to work harder to drown them out even as it hurt me. I fought not to wince when Nex added, “Also, any alcohol you see glowing is either illegal or alive.”
I smiled, distracted from my incipient headache for a second.
Nex always knew what I needed to hear, and when I needed to hear it. He had preternatural timing, it seemed, anticipating each of my concerns and . . . I knew I shouldn’t think of him as a him.
No matter that he’d given himself a name.
Or that he seemed to be watching over me most of the time.
“And if someone says they ‘don’t bite’ here, the odds are 23% that they do,” he added.
I snorted.
He was a gift from Arcus Marlow, an eccentric billionaire—and weren’t all of them crazy?
—whose daughter we’d rescued years ago. After he’d gotten over the shock of her marrying her bodyguard, his two grandchildren were born.
Twins, despite the fact that the girl seemed to be entirely human and the boy took after his father.
He’d sent over Nex the very next day. Presumably so we could keep Nine, his son-in-law, safe, although who knew—and how could anyone make an Arachnaea any safer, anyhow?
—but ever since then, the AI had embedded himself in our day-to-day work lives.
With his perennial helpfulness, occasional bouts of sarcasm, and, what I was afraid to admit out loud, charm.
Except he wasn’t real, really.
For all that on all my missions, every mission, he was always with me.
If not physically . . . then at least in my ear.
“Would you like me to pull a fire alarm? I can clear 51% of the club in 90 seconds. 73% if I fake sprinklers, assuming they’re not knotted down.”
I settled my shoulders and shook my head.
“Then Thorne is in the next room, along with what I believe to be a small, angry female human,” he announced, and sure enough, Bram paused to knock on an unobtrusive door.
Rather than the door opening, Thorne came out to meet us in the hall.
He was in a getup I’d never seen before, dark trousers, a halfway unbuttoned, lighter-colored shirt showing off a rock-hard chest, literally, and suspenders, which probably helped to keep his pants up around his prehensile tail.
I’d never gotten to find out what else his tail could do, alas.
We’d only dated for like a month and a half, probably not even long enough to qualify him for ‘boyfriend’ status, but when most men were afraid of you reading their minds, you had to let every second someone was willing to hang out with you count.
“You came,” he said, tucking his wings behind himself.
“You asked,” I said, with a shrug. “Is this a social visit or a work one?”
“It’s a favor—so it’s kind of in between.
” I raised an eyebrow as he continued. “You were the only person I could turn to, Sirena—I wouldn’t have asked you here otherwise.
” I didn’t like the sound of that. Thorne had worked at the MSA for almost a decade, and now that he was out, he surely didn’t lack for cash or connections.
“I won’t do anything illegal.” All of the MSA knew I never shared any of the random thoughts I heard—and I didn’t go looking for things to listen to.
My two choices when I wasn’t wearing my crown were to either pretend to be some variant of a superhero and try to solve everything—and I’d tried that for a while, until it’d become personally injurious and exhausting, seeing as my abilities were bound by my very mortal flesh—or just to turn my mind into a steel vault, where other people’s thoughts disappeared.
“I know that,” Thorne said, waving a thick, gray-skinned hand. “It’s just that this situation might lead to work, of a sort,” he went on, tilting his head, the implication of future violence heavy in the air. “But that’s my call to make. Not yours.”
I squinted up at his implacable face. I’d once found the thought of dating someone whose mind I’d have a hard time reading intriguing. But I liked daylight, sleeping at night, and swimming with someone who wouldn’t sink to the bottom of the sea.
And Thorne, I’d discovered, liked himself.
And money.
“If there’s a girl tied up behind this door, Thorne, so help me God,” I muttered, pushing past him.