Chapter 5
When I get back to our apartment, it’s nearly one in the morning and I’m drenched in sweat.
The oppressive Astera heat does not abate at night, and the speed with which I rushed home didn’t help.
Hound greets me with such fervor I nearly topple right over him.
Deadly deviant slayer overpowered by her own dog. Same as it ever was.
I try to calm him down, but he licks the salt from my face like it’s his job, and I’m no match for the hundred-pound Doberman. I sit back and allow myself to be bathed in slobber.
“I know, boy.” I scratch behind his ears. “I missed you too.”
Penny and I adopted Hound only a few days after we’d moved into our apartment here in Babylon.
We found him abandoned in a dumpster outside Cobwebs when we were taking out our trash.
I said something like “Penny, we’re going to be parents” to combat the lump in my throat. It only made Penny cry harder.
Sufficiently licked, I pull myself up with help from the edge of the kitchen countertop.
I’m weak from the evening’s battles and more than twenty-four hours without food.
Not to mention everything Reid said still rattling around in my head.
And the depth of his eyes. That kind of blue should be criminal.
I crack Penny’s door open to check on the birthday girl, and once all toes and fingers are accounted for as well as one mop of blond hair fanned over her pillow, I kick my shoes off and head to the kitchen to make myself some goddamn dinner.
Hound trots in behind me and I allow my mind to wander.
Reid was surely full of shit, right? But why?
What’s the end goal? What kind of trap is he laying?
He had me in his clutches and passed up the opportunity to drink my soul so he could fool me with some tall tale about an elite deviant-slaying college?
Perhaps Reid’s some sicko who likes a long, drawn-out game of cat and mouse before he goes in for the kill.
But a game that involves sparing the life of the intended victim? Feels like a stretch.
Hound’s gentle whining pulls my thoughts back to the matter at hand—dinner—and I realize I’ve opened all our cabinets and put together a strange concoction of bananas, peanut butter, and stale cereal in a bowl.
This can happen from time to time—hunters do pretty well on tactile autopilot.
Sometimes I’ll realize I’ve filed an entire cabinet at the Windsor while thinking about the best detergent to combat viscera.
I scoop up a fingerful and hold it out for Hound to enjoy. Then, despite my exhaustion, I stand over the counter and eat an entire bowl of whatever this is, turning my conversation with Reid over and over in my mind. It doesn’t make any more sense no matter how I look at it.
Still licking a peanut butter–coated spoon, I slip into the bathroom and slide my daggers out from their sheaths.
Under piping-hot water and a pump of hand soap, I scrub the silver and watch demon blood swirl down the drain.
As I run my finger along the splintered crack, I find my light eyes and pitch-black hair reflected back at me in the polished silver.
Both daggers have antique cross guards carved from hilt to end.
One depicts a serpent twined around the pommel, the other a sleeping fawn in tall grass.
I never asked my father where he got them, but there’s something almost biblical about the engravings.
Sometimes when I wield them, I wonder if these blades weren’t forged in that same old world that yawned the underworld into existence.
The same one that birthed pure lymantrians and, alongside them, our black-sheep aeon bloodline that can see wicked deviants for what they are.
But to be seen is to be known. And to know deviants…
to feel them under your own skin…There’s a reason aeons were killed off.
When their thirst for deviant blood couldn’t be quenched, they were said to have hunted mortals.
Sometimes I think that the unholy darkness within me—that ferocious hunger for the kill—is as primordial as the blades in my hands.
All this time, I’ve fought the deviants and my own sickness alone. But if Reid was telling the truth—
“What are you doing?”
Penny’s groggy voice shocks me so thoroughly I barely have time to toss the blades to the shower mat and cover them with my bare foot. Pain sears through my arch—one of them has sliced my skin.
“Just washing this spoon,” I rasp, willing my eyes not to water. “Kitchen sink on the fritz.”
Penny’s hair pokes this way and that, mascara smeared down her sweet face. “I swear it looked like a little sword.”
I laugh way too hard, pointing the peanut butter spoon at her. “You’re still drunk. Back to bed with you!”
“I didn’t take my makeup off,” she says, eyes fluttering closed, leaning into the doorjamb.
My eyes land on my outstretched foot with the daggers hidden beneath. Blood is pooling on the bath mat.
“Who needs eyelashes? Sleep first,” I tell her. “Makeup off tomorrow.”
Penny nods as if that makes sense and trots back off to bed. I exhale mightily.
When I’m certain she’s in her room once more, I lift my foot up and inspect the damage. It’s a nasty slice, but nothing I can’t slap a Band-Aid on and worry about tomorrow. Once I’ve done so, I wipe up the blood, rinse my daggers again, and make my way into my own bedroom, desperate for sleep.
My room is compact. It barely fits one full-size bed with no frame, box spring, or headboard—so a mattress with sheets, I guess—and a dresser Penny and I bought at the Babylon Bazaar, an open-air marketplace that sets up in our neighborhood every Sunday.
There’s also a string of low, glowing lights that eases my hunter senses.
I’ve filled the walls with too many black-and-white photographs, some I’ve taken, some I just love.
Annie Leibovitz, Ansel Adams, Robert Mapplethorpe.
The box of my dad’s things that my mom’s people dropped off this morning sits in front of my bed.
The fact that she can clear all memorabilia of him from her home…
The disrespect to the memory of my dad—the warmest, most loving person I’ve ever met—fills me all over again with the kind of rage that teeters on combustible. Aeon rage.
To calm myself, I use my unbroken dagger—the one with the serpent—to slice the cardboard open. I pull out my dad’s college lacrosse stick and hang it on the wall across from my photographs, then place some of the framed photos of the two of us around my room.
I comb through the rest of the box, putting off the necessary high-quality crying. Moth-eaten sweaters that still smell like him, old vinyls that are peeling at the edges, and a silver locket. I recognize it as the one that used to hang from his keys. He told me he’d gotten it from his mother.
The inscription is fading and coated in dust. I rub my thumb over the words and give them my best shot. It looks like it reads, For David. Harker Bound, Fall 1992.
My breath stalls in my lungs.
Harker Bound.
Harker.
I never met my grandma, but she was an aeon as well.
My dad told me she wore the charm every day for protection.
I didn’t know she’d had it inscribed before she gave it to him.
I press my fingers into the groove of the antique oval but can’t get the thing to budge.
With my hunter strength that means it’s probably welded shut.
I slip it around my neck in the quiet stillness of my bedroom and try to feel close to him.
To remember his laugh. To think of the adventures we used to go on together, the safety I felt when he was alive.
When my fingers find the pendant, the smooth Victorian-era silver is warm from lying against my skin.
I’m struck with a sudden sinister loneliness so bitter I can taste it.
I have nobody to ask about any of this. I have nobody with whom to share all these questions burbling in my mind.
What a relief it must have been for my dad to share his hunting with both me and his mother.
I fight off a strange jealousy—she had him, he had me, and I have no one.
I’d give up just about everything to ask my dad a handful of questions.
How did he deal with all the years of hunting by himself before me?
Does he even recognize what’s become of Mom?
Why did the Brood go after him that night, twelve to one?
Who was he talking to before he died? The words have haunted me every single day since: You.
After all this time…At least tell me why.
I’d ask if there was any way I could have saved him. If this whole Harker thing is a joke. And if it’s not, why he kept it from me.
At some point I fall asleep atop the covers with all the lights still on, Hound in my bed, and the only remaining artifact of my dad’s secret life looped around my neck.
The Windsor is always beautiful, but early in the morning it’s the staggering kind.
By eight the lobby is a madhouse, crowded with students on field trips, scientists and historians, guests staying at the Maison Hotel across the street who want to pop by and see the enormous bronze fossils in the lobby.
But at this pale, chilly hour, it’s something else. Something breathtaking.
The Windsor is so far North of the Chasm it’s practically in the clouds.
Astera is built on a slight incline, from the slums to the hills that separate the city from the Hesperides, and the Windsor sits as far North as the Half City goes.
The elevation up here means all the glass in the museum is illuminated just a few hours after dawn, when the sun can drift inside, while the morning fog still lingers below.
The whole lobby glows with it; it’s like being inside a chandelier.