Chapter 3
THREE
Joan excused herself from the room after fifteen of the longest minutes of her life, swinging by the kitchen to raid the well-stocked pantry for whatever dried fruit was Selene’s latest obsession and then getting in the shower.
She stood under the spray, contemplating her family’s alignments.
Valeria, at least, had said she didn’t intend to turn humans into loyal followers en masse.
She could typically be trusted to keep her brother in check.
But Joan had been away for a long time, and Merlin had spent his life obsessed with the Greenwood legacy.
This was a major carrot dangled in front of him.
She exited the shower. Her childhood bedroom was a patterned green, and it looked like something out of Architectural Digest rather than the mind of a ten-year-old because Joan had only been allowed to pick some colors, not the actual furniture.
Children ruined interior design, her parents had explained to her—in vaguer, more passive-aggressive terms than that, but the message was clear.
This would always be the official Greenwood residence, not so much the warm, fuzzy home of a kid.
She had a queen bed as the centerpiece and a small balcony off to the side. The adjoining bathroom was also green and respectably large. By the time Joan emerged from her shower to pull wrinkled pajamas out of her duffel bag, the house was still buzzing very faintly with noise.
It was abominably early, but she’d rather be crushed in a trash compactor than venture back into that hellscape downstairs, so Joan got into bed and closed her eyes, just for a second. She’d had a very hard day and deserved a moment of rest.
She woke to darkness outside her window and her phone vibrating on her nightstand.
She’d been awake only a second ago, and the level of disorientation she was now experiencing forced a despairing groan from deep in her chest as she slapped around, trying to pull her phone to her ear.
Her watch indicated it was one AM, which was embarrassing, because it had been no later than five thirty when she closed her eyes.
Words wouldn’t form in her mouth, so she kind of made a high-pitched questioning noise, like a particularly fucked-up bird.
“Oh, finally,” CZ said, panting slightly, which meant he was really in a bind, because he truly didn’t need much air. “I need help.”
Another bird noise, this one slightly more formed, but still unintelligible to anyone who wasn’t her best friend in the whole entire world.
“You didn’t call me, so I assumed you were sleeping, or dead; I didn’t know which you’d find preferable.
Anyways, I went on with my life after meeting with my family and took a little stroll around the Night Market and—No don’t touch that, okay, okay, sit tight—” CZ’s voice muffled as he talked to someone in the background.
Joan managed to coherently say his name and hoped she’d tacked a question mark onto the end.
“I need you to come over,” he said. “I have committed crimes the likes of which the world has never seen.”
That woke Joan up. She threw the covers off her body, darted a glance at the door, and still cupped her hand over the phone to shield her voice. “Murder, CZ? On my first night back? Really?”
“Not murder—TRASH CAN, THROW UP IN THE TRASH CAN—something worse.”
Joan scrambled to get out of bed, looking desperately for a pair of pants. “Worse than murder? Also, who the fuck is there?”
“The person I stole,” CZ said.
Joan set her phone down on the dresser to shimmy into her joggers, leaning toward it to whisper-scream, “You stole a person!?”
“Get here first, answers after you arrive, and hurry up. I need to go clean up vomit,” CZ said, and hung up the phone. He texted moments later with his new address.
Though she was utterly bewildered, Joan’s hesitation was nonetheless brief.
CZ called, she answered. This was a law of the universe.
The only uncertainty was how to get out of the house.
It sounded like people might still be awake, which made sneaking down the corridor risky. The only other way out was…
Joan rifled in the back of her closet and was relieved to find her rope was still in its little, innocuous box, left between several sketchbooks and her clarinet from when she’d been forced to pick up the instrument for two years until her parents begged her to stop making such gods-awful noises.
She pulled the rope out triumphantly, and the movements returned like muscle memory—throw open the balcony doors, tie one end to two of the metal bars, swing her leg over the banister.
She’d snuck out in high school this way many a time, mainly to wander the grounds and sketch because she didn’t really have friends to party with.
After Joan twisted her ankle once and made enough noise that Molly had caught her, Molly had then been so kind as to charm the rope to make Joan semi-weightless when on it, and thus less likely to crash down to her untimely death.
Time had eaten away at the spell, dwindling the amount of magic that had been pushed into it during Molly’s original casting. Luckily it still held, though it was less effective.
Joan was grateful for it as she lowered herself into the hedges, remembering only when her feet hit the carefully manicured mulch that she hadn’t jammed shoes on. She pulled herself back up to gain a pair of sneakers.
By the time she was darting around the house for the side gate, she was enormously sweaty from all the stress. Joan was reaching for the handle when a voice cut through the courtyard.
“You know you’re an adult, right?” Valeria said, and Joan yelped, effectively annihilating her stealth mission. Valeria was sitting on a stone bench, entirely shrouded in shadow. Her gray hair was unbound, loose around her shoulders.
“You just sit out here? At one AM?” Joan gasped, clutching her chest like she was one hundred and eight. “Shouldn’t you be in bed with your wife?”
“Ronnie gave up waiting for me on nights like this long ago,” Valeria said. “Don’t deflect—as I was saying, you are an adult. If you’d like to leave at all hours of the night, you can exit through the front door instead of over the balcony on that ridiculous old-fashioned rope.”
Joan straightened her hoodie self-consciously. “You know about that?”
Valeria’s returning look was long-suffering. “I know about everything on these grounds.”
“Do Mom and Dad?”
“This isn’t their house,” Valeria said. “Technically. All the spells are keyed to me. What they don’t know won’t hurt them. Besides, I thought it was funny. A rope, Joan? An honest-to-Circe rope? What are you, a pirate swinging from the mast of a ship?”
“Better than a string of bedsheets,” Joan grumbled. “I’m going; don’t tell anyone.”
Valeria’s chuckle was soft. “It’s good to have you back in town, Jo. But don’t worry, I won’t hold my breath waiting for you to say it back. Be careful out there.”
Joan nodded her agreement, unsure if Valeria could even see her through the darkness, before slipping out the gate, orienting herself toward Hell’s Kitchen, and taking off.
Joan hadn’t been to this apartment before. It was new, the result of a pay raise at CZ’s soulless, corporate Wall Street finance job. And generational wealth.
She knew it had been a little bit of an event in his family when he moved—his brother lived close to their parents and aunt in Queens, as it was their pack’s home territory. But CZ had insisted on carving out a life for himself away from their long shadow, and it had taken him here.
The exterior looked like every other New York apartment building in the area, and Joan texted the moment she hit the front door to be buzzed up. The response was instantaneous.
As she climbed the steps to his unit, sweating even worse than before, her thoughts began to catch up with her.
CZ had kidnapped someone. Likely for good reason; CZ wasn’t prone to making bad decisions.
He was silly sometimes, sure, naturally rather nocturnal, and he could drink you under the table, but he was a good guy, Your Honor, and she’d testify to that effect on the stand.
Before she could knock, CZ was practically ripping the door off its hinges, a wild look in his red-brown eyes.
“Finally.”
“I can’t run at superspeed,” Joan said, stepping inside without preamble. “Oh my god, this is so much space.”
“I know, right, and it was a deal. I feel like it needs a renovation, blackout curtains, whatever—you’ll have to design it for me, Mister Big Man Architecture, and find me some nice plants to liven the space up,” CZ said, gesturing at the entryway, the kitchen bordering it, the living room beyond.
It was a warehouse-esque space with exposed metal rafters and impossibly high ceilings.
“If you dodge the federal kidnapping charges, absolutely,” Joan said.
“Right.” CZ closed the door, then locked and deadbolted it. “Mik!” he called. “Come out!”
Well, the person was at least not chained up, another point in CZ’s favor.
A likely indication that it wasn’t a full kidnapping.
She’d present this evidence on the stand beside her testimony.
It was unclear if this would be a witch trial or one set in the human world—maybe a vampire one?
She’d need to be prepared for all legal systems.
From the block of rooms at the back of the rectangular space, someone shuffled out of a doorway, a trash can in their hands.
Their head was shaved close, their skin a very light sun-darkened brown, and their cheekbones high, rounded, and flushed red. They were dressed in a hoodie Joan could recognize as CZ’s and boxer shorts that Joan guessed were also CZ’s.
Joan turned to CZ, eyebrow raised. “A hookup?”
“What, no,” CZ said, walking to Mik’s side and gesturing at them. “Joan, this is Mik. I found them at the Night Market and had to lend them some clothes after they threw up on theirs because of the magic.”
“Hi, Mik, I’m Joan,” Joan said, walking forward and offering a hand.
Mik stared at it, dazed and sweaty. “I’m sorry for my appearance,” they said. “I’m having a really bad night. Or week, really. A bad life.”
“We’ve all been there,” Joan assured. “The market’s magic can be tough on humans, but the adverse effects will fade in a few hours.” Any creature would get magic poisoning from a high enough dose of raw magic, but humans had the lowest tolerance.
“Oh no, sorry, wow, I really didn’t explain anything on the phone, did I?” CZ said with a wince and a laugh that bordered on delirious. “This isn’t because of the Night Market—this is a reaction to their own magic.”
“You’re a witch?” Joan blurted. She’d assumed human based on how sick they seemed. “Did you channel past your limits?”
“I’m not a witch,” Mik confirmed. “I don’t remember much, but I remember that. I am totally human.”
Joan made meaningful eyes at CZ, explain what the fuck this is eyes.
CZ performed a stupid flourish. “Joan, let me introduce you to the human who recently ascended to witchhood: Mik Batbayar.”
Mik, to punctuate this point, threw up in their trash can.