Chapter 30
“These look great,” I tell a dejected Penny, wagging my toes in her direction. Midnight black, and not a drop out of place. I wouldn’t expect anything else from her painter’s hands.
“I miss my job,” she admits, swiping a splash of bright red polish across Sophia’s big toe. Our favorite oldies pop album plays a song we know all the words to but nobody sings. “And my parents.”
“I miss you guys being at Harker,” Sophia says, clicking through the muted TV as I reach for the bottle of merlot.
“I miss when my boyfriend wasn’t on the run.” I pour my second glass of wine, and then top off Sophia’s third. Penny rejects my pour, and I remember she stopped drinking after one glass because she’s determined to get everyone’s toenails done properly, saintly woman that she is.
It’s been weeks since the naga incident.
Since Penny and I almost died. Weeks of limping around the residence as my welts heal.
Weeks of barely contained syrabraxa episodes and bad rom-coms. Weeks since Reid appeared in my dreams, since Nicco confirmed some enchanted ring existed that could remove this syrabraxa from me. Weeks, stuck at Fever Dream.
We’ve done as much research on antique rings as anyone who isn’t Fiona can stomach.
Me on my own, and Sophia, Peter, and Elliot on campus.
I nag them incessantly only to be told they have no new information.
I don’t know why I’m shocked that the library, archives, and even Fiona bore no ring-shaped fruit.
My settings should come geared for disappointment.
“I don’t just miss painting,” Penny says, twining the impossibly soft duvet around her legs. “I miss being helpful to people. I miss teaching…”
“I bet you could ask Ward for help,” Sophia suggests. “He’s naked half the time anyway. You could practice your figure drawing.”
Heat rises on Penny’s cheeks, and I stifle a laugh.
If I have one commendation of my new bedroom it’s the size of this bed.
Sophia fits on it perpendicularly, neither head nor toes hanging off the edge, and there’s still room for Penny and me to sit up against the cushioned headboard in our pajama shorts, Hound curled between us, blankets in lumps and piles like we’re puppies in a litter.
And on a glum night such as this one, there’s honestly no place I’d rather be.
“What has become of my bachelor pad?” Deacon drawls outside the doorway.
Sophia averts her eyes back to the TV in displeasure. Not even him saving my life has softened her to Deacon. Or perhaps this is her softened—total disinterest.
It’s not like he can sneak up on me—aeon abilities and all that.
But even when I know Deacon’s around, his low, husky voice still manages to steal the breath from my lungs.
Hound’s ears perk up and his tail begins to wag.
I wish my heart didn’t have a similar reaction, but when I meet Deacon’s icy blue stare, it’s a lost cause.
He’s in those gray sweats again, which I’ve taken to calling his sex pants in my head because he’s always in them when he has girls over.
But tonight he’s also wearing a backward baseball cap, which, paired with the cigarette behind his ear and tattoos on his neck, feels uniquely unfair. I cross my legs tightly.
“Wow, this looks like a dream,” says a teensy blonde in a green dress who pokes out beside him. Her hands loop around his middle easily. “Girls’ night in!”
Penny nods enthusiastically, but Sophia and I only groan.
“We’re trying to raise our spirits,” Sophia admits to her, still avoiding Deacon’s gaze. “To mixed results.”
I take a sip of my wine. “So if you think about it, it’s more of a séance.”
The girl doesn’t really get it, and I don’t blame her. She’s Tinker Bell—what does she have to be dark and gloomy about?
“Well,” Deacon says, eyes roaming over my bare legs from ankle to thigh before they land half lidded on my face with a wink. “We’ll try to keep it down. Wouldn’t want to wake the dead.”
When he pulls the door shut Sophia lets out an annoyed breath. “That wink was absolutely filthy.”
“Yeah,” I say, curling my body into a ball and resting my head on Hound. “He’s repellant.”
But that’s not what she meant and we both know it. My eyes fall to the picture of a smiling Reid on my bedside table, and my stomach twists in discomfort. I should probably get rid of that. If he was coming back to me, I think he would have by now.
Sophia’s phone rings and she fishes through the sheets for it before putting the call on speakerphone. “Hi, Peter,” she sighs. Penny and I chime in with our own hellos. “We’re having a pity party.”
“How come?”
Sophia looks to me as the leader of our band of melancholy, and I accept the role gladly.
“Missing boyfriend, lost my dad’s locket in a naga’s stomach, world-ending magic fused into my back, deviant archvillain and a supreme court of elves after me and all those I hold dear, no luck on the ring hunt… Take your pick.”
“You can add complicated feelings for missing boyfriend’s evil brother to the mix if you’d like,” Sophia tells him.
Penny’s gasp borders on theatrical.
“No,” I cut in, skin feeling tight and sweaty. “You cannot. Strike that from the record.”
Peter laughs on the other end of the line. “Consider it stricken.”
“And I’m on house arrest,” Penny mopes.
“Because you tried to fight a naga on your own,” Sophia says with a withering glare.
Penny nods, chastened, even though I’ve already told her she was kind of badass with that spoon.
“And I was sleeping with an instructor who tried to murder my best friend,” Sophia adds, faux cheery. “So we’re all really excelling.”
“Proud of my gals,” Elliot says through the speaker.
Shushes sound around him, and Peter lowers his voice. “Elliot and I are in the library. We might have something.”
I shoot up. Finally. Good fucking news. “Hit me.”
“Did Nicco say if the ring was Sumerian by chance? Because one of the rings mentioned in this book is a Sumerian relic called the Caspian Ring…”
“No,” Sophia says for me, as Penny fixes a line of paint on her pinky toe. We’ve been over the details of what Nicco said and didn’t say so many times we all know the answer. “Nothing about its origins.”
Elliot clarifies, “And the Mer only said—”
“The band lights the attic,” Penny finishes.
But the Caspian Ring sounds familiar. Something we learned about in Dawnmere’s class, though I don’t remember it having anything to do with syrabraxas. “Ask Dawnmere about that ring tomorrow. She may have mentioned it in Runes, Relics, and Charms before I left school.”
“Will do,” Elliot says.
A strange sound comes from the wall behind us, and both Sophia and I whip around, alert. “Thanks, guys, talk tomorrow,” Sophia tells them before she clicks off the phone.
We both listen in the silence, save for the music drifting from the speakers.
“I hate when you guys do this,” Penny says.
Sophia leans forward. “You don’t hear something?”
“No,” Penny says, putting her yellow polish on the bedside table. “I don’t hear anything, or see anything, or smell anything, ever. Not when all of you do, at least.”
I wonder for the first time if Penny might feel left out by this thing that unites the rest of us. She had felt that way months ago, when I’d grown close to my new friends after starting at Harker. I make a mental note to cut down on the hunter-speak moving forward.
“So, Pen.” I try to change the subject, mysterious sound forgotten. “Have you talked to Claude at all since the breakup?”
“Just a little. He keeps texting me asking to ‘catch up.’ But obviously I can’t go anywhere right now, so I just keep saying I’m busy—”
Behind us, the noise sounds again. Like thumping.
Hound sits up from his sleep, eyes watchful.
“Okay, that one I heard,” Penny says.
“Turn off the music,” Sophia tells me, and I silence the portable speaker on the bed.
The sound repeats, again and again, until I realize what it is. Then I wonder if I’m going to vomit. A moan, light and breathy, accompanies the next few, and Sophia stands on the bed. “Oh my god, they’re fucking.”
Penny pales. “Who is? Ward?”
“What?” I cut my eyes to her, surprised by the level of hysteria in her voice. “No. That’s Deacon’s room.”
“Oh,” she says, but relief shines clear in her green eyes. Busted. “We shouldn’t listen. Turn the music back on.”
But Sophia and I do no such thing. The noises rise and fall, mostly just Tinker Bell, but the occasional low, husky grunt filters in too.
One that I’d know was Deacon’s even if I were seventeen rooms away.
I’d know it by the register of his voice.
By the cadence of it. The richness. By the way it carries and settles along my bones.
He’s inside a woman right now—
And I want to rip out my eyeballs.
I stand abruptly, as if I can escape my own traitorous brain. Sophia and Penny stare at me like I’m about to do something deranged. Perhaps I am. “Let’s go down to Fever Dream.”
“Viv,” Sophia says, brows lowered. “You can’t go anywhere. And there’s already a party going on right next door.”
As if on cue, Tinker Bell whines something plaintive. The image of Deacon’s beautiful hands, veined and strong and occasionally rippled in opalescent scales and tipped in those lethal claws, blares in my mind. They move slowly over a shoulder, down a slender stomach, across a pair of thighs—
“It’s safe, right? That’s why Penny and I are staying here?” I’m up, yanking myself free of my sweats. Sophia’s in a giant Willie Nelson concert tee that I doubt is even hers. “You can borrow something.”
Sophia and Penny exchange an alarmed glance. But I’m moving around the room too fast to care. I mask any potential sex sounds with my hands rummaging through drawers and heel clunks on hardwood. I’m a Foley artist. A professional hider from unpleasant things.
“Nobody wants to do club drugs more than me,” Sophia says, “but downstairs sounds like the least-safe place for a syrabraxa-laden aeon. Even if Ward and Baz and Deacon won’t let anyone hurt you, you could hurt someone else.”
That takes the steam right out of me. If I am lucky enough to somehow live a real lifetime, I’ll never forget the way Sophia looked at me that day outside Shiloh. What she knows I’m capable of.
I plop down on the bed, adrenaline smoothing out to heartbreak. This is what it’s come to. I’m teetering on the edge of becoming a danger to innocents if we don’t find the ring soon. Maybe my strange yearning to feel Deacon’s skin beneath my hands…Maybe that’s the madness already taking hold.
Another moan sounds, this time accompanied by a low, husky chuckle. I try not to imagine if ram’s horns split from his head too when he can’t contain himself.
“Even his sex groan is pretentious,” Penny mumbles.
“Pretentious?” Sophia asks. “How so?”
Penny flops back onto the bed as if she can get farther away from the noises. “You know those matching tattoos the three of them have? The symbols? Ward was telling me what they mean.”
Sophia quirks a brow at me, but I’m somehow more interested in the tattoo meaning reveal than the fact that Penny and Ward were discussing his knees. How long had I stared at the thoughtfully scribed ink on Deacon’s neck, mesmerized?
“What did he say?” I ask, willing my voice into something vaguely casual.
“Something like where I won’t go, and the other is where I went?”
Sophia snorts. “That is some dumb deviant gibberish if I ever heard it.”
“I told you it was pretentious,” Penny says.
Where I won’t go, where I went…It doesn’t mean anything to me. Maybe it has to do with his club. Or his long-lost lady love, Odette.
I wonder if the litany of women that Deacon spends time with are an attempt to fill the void of the one Caspar’s held captive all these years. If maybe he imagines her when he’s fucking Tinker Bell and Snakeskin Dress and the rest…
My entire body aches with the thought. Liquid misery running through my veins.
“I think I need to go to sleep,” I tell them. “I’m sorry, guys. My head isn’t right tonight.”
“It’s fine,” Penny says. “Maybe Ward will watch a movie with Soph and me.” When Sophia and I both stare at her, she adds, “Or Baz, or Hazel, or someone.”
But her cheeks are the pink of a dirty little crush, and I’d grill her over the flames about it, but mine is a hundred times worse. So in silent truce I say nothing but, “Sounds fun.”
Sophia, crush-less and free, clucks her tongue at us. “The two of you need treatment.”
And even when they’ve left me alone, and the sex noises have receded, and all the lights are out, I find I cannot sleep.
I stare out the windows that make up the entire right wall of my bedroom.
The Half City sparkles beyond them under a swath of decadent night.
I study each burnished, glowing square in each high-rise—all the lives being led inside those windows.
Lonesome or hopeful or unsatisfied. In townhomes or penthouses or tiny apartments like ours in Babylon.
Families making dinner. Workaholics crouched over desks.
Couples sleeping in knots. Kissing against walls. Bathing together.
Just like it has every few minutes for the last hour, the image of Deacon’s gentle features under the spray of water in my cramped shower blooms in my mind.
I haven’t been able to escape him all night.
I replay the image over and over and over the way you run your tongue over a cut in your mouth.
I’m looking for something but I’m not sure what.
And yet I fall asleep thinking of Finn of all people.
Of what he and his father have taken from me.
My friendships, my school, my family, Reid.
None of us would be here if Finn and Driscoll hadn’t lured Penny to the docks that November day.
I’d never have lost a man I thought I loved.
I’d never have had to see him pursue some artifact instead of coming home to me.
I’d never have found myself fascinated by and constantly craving the attention of someone I thought I loathed.
Are those feelings real? Are they fueled by this spell in my back?
I wonder where I end and where the syrabraxa Finn and Driscoll put in me begins.
Why the Elders felt deviant and Nicco the djinn did not.
And now I don’t even know if I can go down to Fever Dream without hurting an innocent person.
The ones my father painstakingly taught me to protect.
I make an oath to myself to end my life before I ever get close, and drift off with that fear twined around my heart.