Chapter Seventeen #2
Silas had taken the first steps to escape the cult-ture we’d shared.
But the head, heart, and body worked at different paces.
Azrames gave my shoulder a squeeze as I watched Silas’s profile, brows bundled as palm trees, concrete, and paint blurred through the window of the Vegas strip.
I wanted to draw blanket conclusions about demons being good and angels being grouchy, but I understood how subjective morality could be.
I checked the timestamp on my phone obsessively. Every minute took us closer to zeroing out Silas’s clock. He hadn’t officially fallen. Not yet.
To any churchgoer, Azrames truly was the devil on my shoulder, encouraging corruption and tempting a human and angel toward Hell by paving the path with sympathy.
Silas’s crisis of faith wasn’t a one-act play.
He’d made his decision.
But that didn’t make the guilt go away.
The cab turned off the strip and into the sheltered driveway for Fontainebleau.
I held the back door open for a little too long as Azrames and Silas slid out.
They could probably jump to wherever I was if I slammed the door on them, but given the rough approximation of hopping apart from one another, with the added security blanket of my invisibility, it seemed safer to move as a unit.
I gave the cabbie a fifty and told him to keep the change before putting on my most useful personalities.
I strode into the enormous lobby, past the square pillars composed primarily of high-definition televisions playing art displays.
It was one of the few hotels on the strip that hadn’t absorbed decades of stale tobacco.
Instead, they’d done their best to pump fresh air and something vaguely perfumy through the atrium.
The slot machines dinged with muted enthusiasm far enough from the bank of check-in desks to keep from being off-putting to the guests.
A dozen steps into the hotel, we had a problem.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Azrames began a stream of expletives I didn’t understand.
I whipped between the men, only to see that Silas’s eyes were wide. “Take her! Go!”
I didn’t know why I was being guided away from the public or why Az was shoving me toward the bathroom until we’d stumbled through the swinging door toward the women’s stalls.
“You’re on our radar,” he said hurriedly. “Which means the angels—”
“On it.” I dove into my pocket and fished out the baggy. I struggled to unzip it, desperate for its contents, terrified that it was already too late. My fumbling came at a cost. I came down on the container too hard, shoving my credit card into the plastic, when the force popped it from my grip.
My life flashed before my eyes.
Everything we worked for, everything we’d strived for, tumbled toward the toilet.
If it hadn’t been for Azrames and his preternatural speed, Alessia’s gift would have been lost to the Las Vegas sewers.
Instead, he snatched the bag, dumped a pile onto the silver container in the bathroom stall, and used my credit card to create a line.
“But, yuck, I don’t—”
He shoved my head toward the container, and I sucked every grain up through my left nostril. If it was anyone else, I would have been furious. The Patron Saint of Women, however, would only do what it took to keep me safe.
I pinched the excess powder off my nose, glancing at the crowded bathroom and flushing stalls, wondering who had heard me do drugs in the corner. “Are we okay?”
“No,” he said through gritted teeth. “We need to grab Silas and switch hotels. They know you’re in Vegas, which means they know the two of you are traveling together.”
Shit, shit, shit.
I had two choices in that moment: Dissociate, or collapse.
There was too much at stake. I couldn’t fall apart now.
Merit and Maribelle shook hands in that instant.
We grabbed Silas in the lobby and yanked him toward the taxi stand, demanding that the first car take us to the Cosmopolitan.
We didn’t have the luxury of leaving the city, but the change in venue would put at least two miles between us and the accidentally pinged location.
“I should have warned you sooner,” Silas murmured beside me in the cab. “I should have protected you. I should have—”
“What’s done is done,” Azrames said coolly. “Don’t bring her more anxiety than you already are by being an angel at the end of the world.”
I stared out the window, letting the colors blur amidst the baking concrete, the flashing neon, the reddish, desert earth. It was too early for an existential break.
We finished the ride in silence. When the car came to a stop, I had to salvage what I could. The proverbial hourglass was running out of sand, and the world counted on our success.
Merit and Maribelle shared their masks as they marched into the line at the Cosmo, given that there was only one honeymooning couple ahead of them. When it was Merit-Maribelle’s turn at the counter, they leaned forward conspiratorially to whisper with the concierge.
Showtime.
I straightened my shoulders only to soften them. I puckered my lips, if only slightly. My brows met in the middle. I’d perfected the wealthy-person cosplay years before I’d had a dime to my name, and I knew exactly how my expression would land.
“I don’t mean to embarrass anyone here, but it seems the Cosmopolitan has lost my reservation. Merit Finnegan? Could you look me up in the system?”
The concierge got halfway through my name before stopping in the middle of her sentence. Her cheeks flushed. Her lips parted. Her eyes darted between me and the screen before repeating, “Merit Finnegan?”
I nodded. I’d rolled the dice when stepping into this line, but she certainly fit the role of my target demographic. I passed her two forms of ID. One was with my driver’s license, sporting only my legal name, and the other was my card for Inkhouse, with both my legal name and pen name.
She nodded hastily before picking up her landline.
“Do you have to do that everywhere we go?” Silas asked.
Azrames leaned against the counter. “Yes, she does.”
The concierge looked up at me as I snorted, then did my best to cover it with a cough.
I suppressed the laugh as I signed my name to the bill and made my way to the first tower.
The Cosmopolitan had been at capacity, but elite chains always set aside a few rooms for celebrity drop-ins and one-percenters, just in case.
I tried to wave the first crowded elevator away, but a woman in her thirties recognized me and dragged the entire elevator out for photos. After her selfie, she said, “I’m so sorry about the senator doxing you. Super fucked up. We’re with you.”
Oh. Right.
The stakes were so high, I kept forgetting the very human fate that had pushed me to the Nordic realm in the first place.
Republican Senator Geoff Christiansen, a man of traditional family values who loved to vote against women’s autonomy and former high-paying client of Maribelle’s companionship, had outed her as an escort to all the world when caught in a cheating scandal.
I grimaced. The looming war of the realms had done a good job of burying the hellscape on earth.
Though I’d spent weeks realm hopping, it had been only a few days by all mortal accounts since the Senator had made his announcement.
Fortunately, it had bought me a few weeks off of work, which was convenient, given that I was flitting around the globe in my attempts to end the world.
I thanked the fan and slumped into Azrames, looking to all the world as if I had an unnaturally graceful predisposition for balancing.
He patted me supportively. “Hey, with any luck, the apocalypse will hit, and humanity will be gone by next week.”
I raised a lip, sneering at him from over my shoulder.
“I’m mostly kidding,” he said.
Silas contributed an unhelpful shrug in return.
I righted myself as the neon numbers began to count down, announcing the elevator’s descent once more.
In the door’s golden reflection, I saw myself in black silk, hair twisted up in a high messy bun, strappy Prada bag over one shoulder.
To my left stood gray and black and smoke and horns and Hell.
To my right, golden eyes, white and beige leather, the frankincense and myrrh of Three Wise Men lore.
Except the angel and the demon weren’t coercing me into anything.
I was the one pushing them.
The elevator doors parted, and I led them into the tiny cube. Both frowned at me as I remained uncharacteristically quiet as we shot into the sky. We rode in silence to the forty-eighth floor. They trailed behind me as I led them to a corner suite.
“Everything okay, Marlow?” Silas was the first to ask.
The door beeped twice as the lock turned from black to green.
He held the door open with a large hand while I released all the air in my lungs and dragged my bag into the room.
I stepped out of my shoes, dropping my bag amidst the couches and mini bar in the first room, walking through the door, bypassing the bed, and heading directly for the balcony.
I yanked the door open and let the dry, desert heat into the air-conditioned room, gripping the silver rods meant to stand between drunken guests and their demise.
“Marlow?” He repeated my name.
I tried to turn toward him but couldn’t quite muster it. My mouth twitched in a half-smile. He was the only one in this world of realms and veils who called me by the moniker printed on my birth certificate. Az hung back as Silas joined me on the cement slab.
Nothing would ever be okay.
Even in our disastrous, apocalyptic plan, I was already failing.
The angels knew where we were. Silas’s timeline wasn’t the only one in jeopardy. I’d tipped our hand.