Chapter 25
That night, after bathing in a luxurious marble shower that I am certain will ruin all other showers for me, I pad into the kitchen to make myself some tea.
I’ve been waiting weeks for these photos, and now that I have them, I’ve spent all day making up excuses not to open the package.
Cowardly is an understatement. But after learning that Reid was on campus and never came for me, learning that he knew the High Thane’s identity—was related to him—and never told me, and learning that my friends lost faith in him a lot quicker than I did, I can admit to myself that I’m scared of what I’ll find.
There are other outcomes besides the images spelling his fate that have kept the photos buried beneath my duffel bag.
But I’m out of excuses. I’ve showered. I’ve unpacked. I’ve called Peter to see if the words the band lights the attic meant anything to him—nada, but he’ll look into it. Now I just need industrial levels of caffeine to keep me alert. I am functioning on twenty-four hours without sleep. Again.
“This view is extraordinary. I think I’m going to try to draw a series on the night sky,” Penny says from the couch in the living room, where she’s sketching the city’s sparkling skyline.
“I’m going to lose my mind with nothing to do now that I’m not pretending to be a Harker student anymore.
” When I grimace she mirrors my expression. “Sorry. Poor choice of words.”
“It’s fine. You enjoyed your time as a fake hunter?”
“I actually did. I liked learning about all the rituals and potions…I’ll never have to call an exterminator again, that’s for sure.” Penny puts down her pencil to study me. “It’s kind of amazing, what you guys do. How you help people. I’m really proud of you.”
I cross the room to give her a squeeze and a kiss on the head, careful not to let my wet hair drip on her sketchbook. “I’m proud of you.”
“Me?” Penny balks. “Why me?”
“Look at all you’ve been through this year. And somehow it’s only made you stronger. And more…”
“Empowered?” she supplies, a bit sheepishly.
I can’t help but grin at her. “Exactly.”
She nods to herself, a rosy glow rising on her cheeks. “Who knew all it took to feel less fragile was to risk being broken a few dozen times?”
“Tell me about it.” My eyes fall to the soft lines of her drawing pad. “Just wait until Ward hears about your night sky project. He’s going to try to tell you how wolves know a thing or two about the moon.”
Heat rises on Penny’s cheeks, and I stifle a laugh. “He’s like a dog with a bone.”
“Literally.”
Penny twines the blanket around her dainty fingers. “I don’t even mind. He’s been so welcoming. He showed me how to use the service elevator instead of lugging my art supplies up all those stairs…I just don’t know how to tell him I could never date a guy with his…issue.”
“A werewolf.”
Penny looks at me like that thought never would have occurred to her. “A player.”
I’m not surprised to hear that Ward is a quintessential fuckboy.
It’s written all over his painfully handsome, charm-riddled face.
If he were to ever bed Penny, he’d probably never speak to her again.
My heart swells for sweet, innocent Penny, who may be naive at times, but can take better care of herself than even I give her credit for.
I know a hundred women—Sophia included—who would have slept with Ward without a second thought.
Penny’s goodness weaves in my mind as I leave her to her sketches and stroll into my new, stupidly majestic bedroom.
Penny would have no qualms whatsoever about dating a werewolf.
Having never grown up with a hunter parent like I did, she has none of the preconceived notions I do about deviants being inherently bad or dangerous.
And after all I’ve seen as of late—deviant Elders, lymantrian Mer who eat songbirds alive, Reid, Deacon, Ward…
We’re all the same. There are no good guys.
The thought is loftier and more frightening than I can tackle at the moment, so I dig through my rich hardwood bedside table, with its guttering black candles and dark red spray roses, and pull out the two stacks of developed film.
The king bed depresses under my weight as I get comfortable, clean white sheets that smell like detergent bunching all around me.
Because I’m a big chicken, and my heart is already racing too fast, I open the film from my half-frame first. My hands sift through the images: some construction workers in Lethe, a woman taking a smoke break in the sweltering summer.
A shot I particularly like of a tired couple on a bench somewhere outside the Windsor, her hand entwined in his, his gaze soft on her profile as she watches the sun set.
I flip that one to the back of the pile, make a note on the negative to reprint it in black and white, and stop breathing when I see the next shot.
It’s the one I took of Reid, on that subway ride back from Shiloh.
He’s got his agonizingly handsome half grin cooking.
That smile that’s not quite laughter, the one when he wants to be annoyed but can’t hide the humor brimming under the surface.
I remember the moment as if it’s happening right now, in the witching hours in this high-rise bedroom.
Nothing between me, the sparkling skyline, and my memories.
“I don’t do drugs, but I think I’m on drugs.”
“Do I have news for you.” His grin lights the railcar in pools of gold.
I fish through my bag for my camera. “Stay right there.”
A single tear lands on the image and I wipe it away with my thumb to spare the fresh ink. I drag my sleeve over my eyes and put the photo on the bedside table. It’s enough. He wouldn’t want me to weep for him.
“He doesn’t want to be found. Not by me, and not by you.”
Before the tears can crest again, I return to the stack.
More shots of strangers, a few of some graffiti outside a Babylon art gallery.
White antlers—all over Astera, the mark of the White Stag.
I’d never put the two together until now.
I flip through a handful of pictures from Harker: ivy crawling on red brick; students in navy with books piled high; Elliot laughing in the commons, burrito in hand.
The last photo of the bunch is from Halloween night at Cobwebs last year.
Penny as a go-go girl, Sophia in her Medusa lingerie, Elliot, Peter…
Peter. Staring at Sophia. She’s flashing her megawatt smile.
The one that makes any knees in a ten-mile radius weaken.
And Peter is just gazing at her. More than yearning.
More than unrequited. It’s the look of a man who doesn’t care anymore.
Who’d rather be in her orbit as a mere piece of space junk than be relegated anywhere else.
I put that one on my bedside table too.
My heart aches for a time and place I didn’t even know existed this time last year. A life I’d come to not just accept but love wholly. People I wonder if I’ll ever get to be with again in the same way.
I try to think how I could have done things differently.
How my inherent flaws as an aeon, as a hunter, as a person led to the mess we’re all in—Reid, Kitty, Lyra, even Penny and Fiona.
How I failed them. I know the mistakes I made—not realizing sooner what Driscoll was up to, doubting Lisette when I’d yet to discover Fiona’s secret, falling into Landon’s trap…
But I still don’t know how Driscoll figured out what I was. Who I was. How he knew to take Penny. Maybe I never should have asked him for help. Never should have gone to that cottage in the first place and told him I had a bad feeling about a club called Fever Dream.
“Get to it, crime fighter.” I can’t help my bitter laugh. I’m still getting it wrong. About this place. About the man who owns it.
But I also can’t help that instinct—the one that drove me to Driscoll that day.
Deacon was kidding, but…Maybe it’s not an inherent flaw that I am always trying to fight for good.
I went to that cottage to fight for Lyra.
I went to the docks to fight for Penny. I went to that watchtower to help Reid.
It’s a new thought—that the hunter in me is not something to make peace with or accept with gritted teeth the way Reid always spoke of it.
The way he thought of his demonic nature.
Maybe using the darkness within me to fight for those who can’t fight for themselves is something kind of special.
Isn’t that what Penny just told me in the living room?
Why she was proud of me, despite all I’ve put her through?
I take a long, fortifying breath and blow it out. Hound stirs at my feet. The second stack of photos in my hands is from the silver 35mm. The gift from Reid. The time has come. I snap the rubber band off the envelope and yank out the pictures.
The first few are blurry. Smears of gray and blue and brown.
I can’t make out anything and figure if I come up empty with the rest, I’ll circle back to these.
My hope is that Reid was still figuring out how to work the camera in the first place and knew he’d have to finish the roll one way or another for me to notice and have it developed.
The farther I delve into the stack, the more the images come into focus. It’s the outside of a restaurant. One I recognize from the Camelot District—Simon and Son’s. I’ve never eaten there, but it’s said to have the best burger in the city and a mile-long waiting list.
As I keep flipping through the pictures, they zoom in, closer and closer on Son’s.
He’s taken them at a healthy distance. An attempt not to be seen from wherever he was hiding.
The last two images are no longer of the restaurant.
One is of the Astera Times, dated from before I found the camera—a Monday in January.
And the other is of the massive clocktower in Camelot.
The third-most popular tourist destination in Astera after the Chasm and the Windsor. The time reads five p.m. on the dot.
I sort through all the photos once more but come up with nothing but a throbbing behind my eyes.
I do answer my own question of why Reid wouldn’t take any photos of himself to prove he really was the one who left me the camera—in case it got into the hands of the wrong people, he’d never want evidence that could help Finn track him down.
When my head-thrumming reaches a fever pitch, I check the time and realize it’s almost three a.m. I have been at this for more hours than is productive. If I’m going to decipher any of Reid’s messages, I need sleep.
And to sleep, I need to take something for this headache. Wrapping myself in Elliot’s Harker hoodie, I get up to rummage through the bag I packed too hastily today and realize I forgot Advil.
But maybe Deacon has some here. I can’t imagine the guy popping over-the-counter pain meds, since he willingly let me stab him in the ribs and I’m pretty sure he wears a silver chain around his neck every day, but it’s worth a shot.
I slip from my room to find the residence bathed in peaceful silence.
Most of the curtains are drawn over the wide windows that span the entire city, as the lights from Astera even at this hour would keep anybody awake.
Thankfully, even in the pitch black, I can see just fine.
In fact, something about my two-tone night vision and the pure silence of the hour puts my whole body at ease.
Taking in every single thing, all day, all the time, can be exhausting for hunters.
It’s why Harker’s bathhouse has those sensory deprivation tanks next to the steam room.
To my great disappointment, Deacon’s kitchen drawers have no first aid kit, nor loose pills rolling around the way you’d think a crime lord’s home might.
On my quest, I pass a sophisticated dining room and note twelve sheepskin chairs and a low glass light fixture that looks handmade and irreplicable, but no table. Odd.
The multiple guest bathrooms are Advil-less as well, and I’m about to call off this mission when I hear the sounds of metal sliding against metal and weights landing on the floor.
Someone is…working out? At three thirty in the morning?
I don’t know who came up with the expression curiosity killed the cat.
It’s only ever served me well to be inquisitive and sneaky and vaguely feline.
Or at least, served my hunting well. I stalk silently through the halls of the residence, around corners of heavy stone and walls decorated with paintings I know are not Basquiat replicas but the real, exquisite deal.
The gym is behind a clear glass door the way it might be at a hotel or in a nice apartment complex. One lone, white-haired demon works away inside, flooded under fluorescent lights, surrounded by piles of weights I couldn’t lift with all my hunter strength and then some.
But Deacon’s not interested in those, it seems. Shirtless, he heaves the missing dining room table overhead.
And it’s not a dinky wooden thing found at the Babylon Bazaar, but a twelve-person, handcrafted, gargantuan stone table.
He grits his teeth, sweat pooling above his brows and landing on the mat below him.
With a breathless grunt he hefts the thing up and down for a rep of ten before letting it land on the floor before him with a thud that shakes the walls behind me.
The thought hits me before I even allow it to—the guy is a fucking machine.
Where I expect a smug grin, or maybe a flex for the mirrored wall before him, Deacon only sips his bottled water and leans onto the table to catch his breath. He pants, those tattoos and scars on his back glistening, throat working around a swallow. Brows furrowed, jaw tight.
There’s something disturbingly personal about the scene before me, as Deacon scrubs a hand down his sweat-glazed face and returns to his reps.
About who Deacon Graveheart is in the wee hours, left alone to his own devices.
How he chooses to spend his time—what had he said about self-flagellation?
Not that weight lifting is torture to everyone, but doing so silently, in the middle of the night, until your fingernails bleed the way his do…
I turn and head back toward my room, fighting to ignore the way my chest sparks with something warm and uneasy and the way the scar on my back pulses, headache all but forgotten.