Chapter 26
Chapter
Twenty-Six
I dreamed of fire. It was a conscious, living thing consuming the bed and the house and the entire city of Desert Flower. I dreamed of a deep, dark cave, curling myself around what was precious to me. I dreamed about piles of gold coins, a raven on one side, a dragon on the other.
I dreamed and dreamed and dreamed until I woke, sweating and pushing at the weight on my chest.
Cassander rolled off me, grumbling unhappily. His hair stuck up, the brown strands gleaming in the morning light like gold. The sensation in the dream washed over me, the satisfaction of owning something so precious, the gold underneath me, warmed by my body until it was the same temperature as molten stone.
“What’s wrong?” Cassander wiped his face, but that did nothing for his hair, still mussed from tossing and turning.
The night before, he had looked magical, precious, something beyond what I had the ability to name. Today, he looked human, the same barefoot man I had met in Paris what seemed like eight hundred years ago.
“Nothing.” I shook my head, dragging my tongue against my front teeth, trying to get rid of the taste of cotton in my mouth. “Bad dreams.”
Cassander shook his head, settling back on the bed, and I deeply wanted to curl into him, wrap myself around his body, and take solace in the feel of his skin on mine.
Instead, I got up. I shuffled to the bathroom, listening for any other sounds in the house. The radio in the kitchen and the sound of a spatula scraping against a pan alerted me to my mother’s presence.
After relieving myself, I made my way to the other side of the house. When I approached, my mother looked up, one eyebrow arched as she examined me.
“We need to know what Iris Milner is going to do next.” She flipped the mix of eggs and potatoes in the pan, the moisture from the eggs sizzling for a moment. “If possible, we need to make peace.”
“We start at her gym.” I scrubbed my eyes, watching as my mother portioned the breakfast and served me. She put some on another plate, leaving a third in the pan for Cassander. I followed her to the table. “I’ll see if I can find a way in or someone I can pay off. In all likelihood, there aren’t any members of the gym, so that won’t be easy.”
Something pale white, almost like a line of cigarette smoke, trailed close to my mother, and her head twitched, her eyes cutting toward it before she looked back at me.
“Ma.” I looked around the kitchen, seeing another trail of smoke that wasn’t smoke near the refrigerator. It disappeared before I could get a good look. “How do you know about the fae? What?—”
I gestured at one of the trails of smoke, and my mother’s chin dipped.
“I told you that I can talk to ghosts.” Her words were straight, her lips pulled tight, her eyes watching me as though I was the dangerous one.
“Ma.” I rubbed my eyes, lingering for a moment before I pulled my hands down and looked at my mother for the first time without the years of unhappiness between us.
She stared back, and the wisps of smoke around her began to take shape. One formed a face briefly before it floated away.
“Before your father died, you used to believe it.” She looked down at her plate, picking up her fork and cutting herself a portion.
“No. I always knew it was—” fake . Only after all I had just seen, after all I had learned the day before, who was I to say what was real and what wasn’t?
“The trouble with ghosts—spirits who can’t settle—is that it’s never the people you want to talk to who remain.” My mother spoke dispassionately. She brought a forkful of egg to her mouth, chewing as she watched me.
“What do you mean?” Before she could answer, I held up a hand. “Just tell me it straight. No more lies.”
“I have never lied to you.” My mother’s words were sharp, and she set the fork down on the plate with a sharp click. “I can see ghosts. I can hear spirits. When you were young, you used to believe me. I thought you would be the one to inherit my gift. But when your father died and his spirit disappeared, you… forgot. You stopped believing me.”
“That’s not what happened,” I contradicted, even as I remembered, vaguely, the warm feeling of her storefront, the comfort I felt sitting in the chairs, waiting for… something.
“It is. And it’s fine. But if you’re going to take up with the fae, you need to have your eyes open.” My mother looked at me, and it was my turn to look down, to use the tines of my fork to push a piece of breakfast around the plate.
“My eyes have been opened.” I brought some of the food to my mouth, chewing and swallowing as my mother waited. “What did you mean when you said you knew Dad was going to be bad news?”
My mother’s lips pulled together, long grooves forming next to her lips, and she shook her head slowly. “When I looked at him, I knew he was something. Something different from anything I had ever seen before. But… it was impossible to tell how, to tell what. I just knew that when I chose him, my life would never be the same.”
I searched my mother’s face. “Was he fae? Something else?”
My mother exhaled slowly before looking up at me. “I never found out before he died. The spirits told me when I first met him that he would break my heart.”
I watched her and suddenly had the desperate desire to be hugged by her like I was a child again.
“Ma—”
The bedroom door opened, and we both looked toward the hallway before returning to our food. Enough emotional conversations. By the time Cassander got to the dining room, my mother and I were knee-deep in planning.
“You can’t pull the same con twice,” my mother was arguing.
“This time, it really will just be a smoke machine,” I argued. “No explosions.”
My mother blew out a long breath, eyeing me as though I was the kid in the back of class blowing spitballs at the ceiling. It was still impossible for me to wrap my head around the fact that she could actually hear ghosts. I kept almost forgetting it, the knowledge of it slipping through my mind as frustration would take over.
Part of me wanted to say it didn’t even matter. Even if part of her con was true, that didn’t negate the fact that she spent her entire life stealing from people and had taught me and Candy to do the same.
But it did matter. My mom had just flipped over the checkerboard and revealed that we’d actually been playing chess the whole time, and all my kinged pieces didn’t matter because I’d been playing wrong to begin with.
“There is, of course, an easier answer.” Cassander settled in one of the chairs, looking at me significantly until I rolled my eyes and stood, going to get him his own plate of food. When I placed it in front of him, he smiled up at me, and something curled tight inside my stomach. The word he’d used for me last night was almost audible: precious.
“You want to tell us your plan?” I asked, sitting back in my chair. My mother ate, watching Cassander with suspicion, and I wondered what her ghosts were telling her.
“We parlay.” Cassander raised both of his eyebrows. “It gets us in the door. It makes it clear that we don’t want this war to continue, but it requires some give from Iris Milner.”
There was something about the way he said her name, the curl of it on his tongue. My mind immediately went to how hard it had been to get his name out of him. Knowing her name gave him power.
“A parlay means we have something she wants, and other than my head mounted on her wall like a deer, I can’t think of anything that she wants from me.” I raised both my eyebrows, waiting.
“It’s a good plan,” my mother said finally. “Solid. The trick will still be getting you out.”
“No. If she should break our parlay, break the deal we have struck, I will bring the house down around her again.”
“Cass, I don’t want to rain on your parade, but you can’t bring down every building in Desert Flower. The point of this is to bring down less buildings, not more.” I watched his face, still not sure how he had done what he had done, but desperate to find out more from him.
“Is it?” Cassander’s lips twitched. “Yet you were willing to do another Click and Clack.”
“I was brainstorming. Nothing was written in stone.” I put my hand in my pocket, drawing out the coin and twisting it between my fingers. Finally, I nodded. “Fine, we parlay. Let’s go make a deal with the devil in her knockoff 24 Hour Fitness. But first, we check this.”
I held up the coin, making it appear and disappear with a twist of my wrist, a sleight of hand I’d learned from my father.
When I looked over at my mother, she recognized it, her eyes going soft in the corners.
Cassander looked at me, head tilted, but lowered his chin in agreement. I looked at my mother. “What are you going to be doing?”
My mother exhaled. “Don’t worry about me.”
Which made me worry about her all the more. My mother was like me. If she had a first plan, then she also had a second, all the way down to a tenth plan that probably involved llamas and maybe a clown car.
We finished eating, and I led Cassander out into the backyard. I flipped the coin, catching it in one hand and opening it to reveal the dragon. Then, to test my luck, I stepped onto a loose brick that bordered my mother’s meager rosebush garden.
I could see the brick shouldn’t hold my weight. It had worn away from the masonry that kept the others in place, but I didn’t fall. I smirked at Cassander before hopping off.
“Oh, good.” Cassander rolled his eyes. “You can play children’s games.”
“Now you try.” I tossed him the coin, and he caught it automatically in one hand, not even looking at it before he shook his head, following my lead and balancing on the loose brick.
“This isn’t that hard,” he said severely. But then, his brows twitched together. He raised his free hand, bringing it down sharply, and flowers sprung to life in the yard, dancing in the breeze. He looked at the coin in his hand, then back at me.
“So”—I looked around—“is this good luck for you?”
“Something like that. Using my magic has been a struggle since my brother took what should have been my throne. But this was easy.”
“What do you mean using your magic has been hard? You looked barely winded after bringing down the pool hall.” I opened my hand, and Cassander dropped the coin back into my palm.
“That was payback. It’s… different.” Before I could press him for more information, he held up a hand. “Has your curiosity been sated?”
“Not even close.”
“Using this too much…” Cassander frowned at me, gesturing for the coin.
I handed it to him. “I get it. It’s powerful; you said it has its own agenda. But the reality is that it’s stuck to me. So either I learn how to use it, or I get used by it. Trust me, I’ve spent my career learning how to make my problems into assets.”
“This is different than using your upbringing to your advantage,” Cassander said. “This is trusting that you can put a bridle on a kelpie and ride it.”
“Give me a surfboard, and I’ll show you how to ride a tsunami.” I forced a tight smile. “I know it’s dangerous, but what other choice do I have?”
Over the next hour, we practiced flipping the coin, tossing it back and forth, trading the good luck we had and switching off the bad luck when it came to that.
“Why not just leave it on dragon side up?” Cassander asked, rubbing at a bruised elbow where he had tripped and fallen over his own shoes.
“Because I have an idea of how to give this bad luck to people who need it more than us.” Finally satisfied, I sat down in one of the chairs, observing the flowers Cassander had grown earlier. They were already wilting; nothing that pretty was supposed to grow in the desert.
“Do you feel ready to face her?” Cassander asked, sitting in the chair next to me. He raised his hand again, but no magic sprang from his fingers. He fisted his hand, banging it lightly on the tabletop.
“Not really. But what choice do we have?” I looked back at the house. “We can hide here like teenagers hoping Mom and Dad don’t notice the missing vodka after their weekend getaway, or we can face her. At least this way, we can find out what she wants.”
“We know what she wants.” Cassander was staring at me, his eyes hotter than the sun beating down overhead. But I couldn’t look at him, couldn’t meet his eyes in case he said something as beautiful as last night.
Precious .
“Yeah. She wants my gorgeous face. So does American Spy Monthly for their calendar collection. That still doesn’t answer why Iris Milner wants me dead.” But I was beginning to suspect something. It was half-formed, less an idea and more of a whisper, like one of Mom’s ghosts was talking in my ear.
“We could leave.” Cassander spoke quietly, and I looked at him sharply, but he was staring at the flowers, now baked under the desert heat, nothing more than the impression of something beautiful that had been crushed to nearly nothing.
“You don’t believe that.” I watched his face, and when his mouth tightened, I repeated it.
“I believe that I have found my prize, and I will protect it.”
“Well, I’m going to protect my family.” I stood up, rolling down my sleeves and buttoning the cuffs. “Come on. Iris Milner won’t parlay herself.”
Getting dressed, I couldn’t help but feel the strain that settled between us, the way Cassander stared at me from the corner of his eyes, the frown on his face. As I turned to the door, he grabbed hold of me, shoving me back against the wall.
“Damian, you must understand, I will not willingly let her have you.” He searched my face. “I can see in your eyes that if you are all she wants, you will be tempted to give yourself up. I need you to understand that is not an option.”
Something dropped in my stomach. Dr. Aston couldn’t possibly be right. This wasn’t even a job .
“You pretend that you value no one but yourself, but it’s actually the opposite. You are the only person you don’t value. So, as the only one between the two of us who does care about you, know this: I will not let you throw yourself to your own death just because you can.”
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. Cassander was a massive predator, and I was the stupid rabbit who’d walked right into his den. When he pulled back, his chin going up, he smirked. “What? Speechless? I’m shocked.”
“Nah.” I waved him off. “I’m just trying to figure out how egotistical you are that you think I’m some little baby fawn about to get pushed onto the ice. This isn’t my first op.”
But it was the first time I’d ever had a partner in work or in the bedroom who cared about me as more than a means to an end. And, somehow, even worse, Cassander made me care more about him than I’d ever cared about another agent. That was dangerous, but when I looked at him, something primal said mine , and I knew I should fight it, but instead, I wrapped my hand around his.
“Let’s go.”