Chapter 12
Meera
The portal spat me out onto the penthouse floor with all the grace of a sack of potatoes. All that was missing was a squelching sound and a laugh track.
The first thing I noticed was that this place was huge.
It screamed upscale man cave with dark furniture, hardwood floors, granite tiles, and more dark brown leather couches than should be in one living room.
There was also a giant screen better suited to a movie theater than to a home.
The plush, cream-colored rugs softened everything up, and several throw cushions on the couches added a more feminine touch.
There were two huge Bird of Paradise plants, one on either side of the French doors that led out to the rooftop patio, and plenty of smaller plants scattered around, adding a lush greenness to everything.
The woman I’d seen through the portal earlier was there instantly, offering a hand to help me up.
It wasn’t immediately obvious, but since Carly had mentioned it, I noticed the gentle swell of her pregnant belly.
Sunlight streaming through the massive floor-to-ceiling windows caught her golden hair.
She was stunning. Like, model beautiful, all the way from her flawless skin to her brilliant smile.
“Thank you.” I reached up for something, anything, to steady myself.
“First time traveling by portal?” she asked, guiding me to sit on one of the couches.
I nodded, then immediately regretted it as the world swam around me.
“Eamon, can you grab her some juice and a snack?” She turned back to me. “Sugar helps. Any food, actually.”
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, there was a hand holding a juice box and a granola bar in front of me. And attached to the hand was… a demon.
I’d seen pictures and videos of demons before, but still, I couldn’t help but stare. His red skin gleamed in the sun. He wasn’t like Flame and Blaze, whose legs disappeared into a swirl of smoke. He was solid all the way down to his feet, which were tipped with dark claws.
He wore a white muscle top and jeans that molded to his legs. His horns curled back from his temples, and there was a glow in his eyes. He was just as good-looking as Tansy.
Wow! I was meeting a whole lot of beautiful people lately, and here I was probably looking some shade of green and trying not to puke on their floor.
“Thank you,” I said awkwardly before spearing the juice box with the straw and taking a long drink.
I immediately felt better.
The demon turned, and oh look! A tail. It swished behind him, the triangular point waving hypnotically.
And that had me thinking about Graham and the fact that I still hadn’t actually seen his tail.
But if he thought I was going to touch his tail after that bit about our kiss being a mistake, then he was going to be waiting a very long time.
As if summoned, Tall, Dark, and Grumpy stepped effortlessly out of the portal next to us. He looked around and cleared his throat. “Tansy. Eamon. This is Meera. She’s under Redrock protection for the time being.”
The bright orange, yellow, and green bird that had come to perch on Eamon’s shoulder squawked indignantly.
“Oh, right, we can’t forget. This is Nugget. It’s short for Chicken Nugget, and she’s a menace.”
Nugget bobbed her head and said, “Peek-a-boo!”
I grinned, feeling a lot better than I had just moments ago. “Peek-a-boo to you too, Nugget.”
Graham got straight to the point. “Get her set up in one of the downstairs rooms, Eamon. I’m exhausted. I need to crash.”
“Can’t,” Eamon said. “That senator who’s been getting death threats is in town. She’s got the suite for the next few days.”
“We’ve got two extra rooms up here,” Tansy said, opening a granola bar of her own.
Graham’s expression could’ve curdled milk, but he didn’t argue. After a noise that sounded suspiciously like a grumble, he gave a curt nod and stalked off through the nearest door.
“He’s grumpy today.” The demon looked amused.
“He did fly over halfway from New York with no sleep.” I didn’t know why I was defending him.
“He’ll probably perk up after a nap.” Tansy eyed the mostly empty backpack in my hands. “Is that all you have with you?”
“Yeah. I packed a few things for the trip, but we had to abandon it with the SUV.” I looked down at my dirty clothes. My shirt was smudged with dirt from the woods and torn from the wreck.
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll get you sorted.
Okay, world’s fastest tour. The penthouse has five sections.
We’re in the central one right now, which is a shared area.
Those doors over there”—she pointed to four doors, two on each side of the massive living room—“go to our private suites. You can help yourself to anything in the shared kitchen, which is right over there next to the foyer. The bathroom is in that corner. It’s a full bathroom too, so you can take a shower if you need. ”
A shower sounded heavenly.
I stood and followed Tansy past the bathroom.
“Here are the spare rooms. The first one is full of Gunnar’s crap right now. You can take the second one.” She opened a door, which turned out to be a closet, and picked up a cotton tote filled with stuff. “Here you go. Towels, hygiene products, toothbrush, the works.”
“Thank you,” I said, my eyes welling with tears. Everyone had been so nice.
She dropped her voice. “Oh, and don’t let Nugget into the bathroom with you, no matter how much she begs. She will watch you shower with no remorse. And she learned how to mimic peeing sounds.”
I smiled to myself. Nugget sounded like a lot more trouble than Q-Tip.
Before long, I was cleaned of all the smoke and dirt and tucked into a comfy bed, ready to take a nice long nap. Even though it was bright and early in the morning, I fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow.
When I woke and ventured back into the common area, Tansy and Eamon were gone.
Instead, I found a woman watering the plants with an oversized watering can that dwarfed her slim frame.
Her sleek, dark hair fell down her back in a shiny curtain, and she had a bright, friendly smile that put me at ease immediately.
“Oh, hey! You must be Meera. I’m Lillian, Gunnar’s mate. I’m just waiting on Shelby to head out to grab some lunch. There’s a new Mexican place that just opened up across the street, and I heard the birria is really good. Want to join us?”
I hesitated. “I’m hungry and want to get out there and see what Darlington has to offer while I’m here, but I’m not sure I’m supposed to go out.”
“We talked to Graham right before he left. He said it should be pretty safe since you don’t have the egg anymore, and the only one who’d be after you for a personal reason is still in New York.”
I relaxed. “That’s good to hear. Sure. I’ll come along. I’m ravenous anyway.”
“Great. Shelby will be out soon.”
Shelby must be another one of the Redrock wives.
As I waited, I quickly called Jack, a colleague who worked at the same real estate office, to ask if they could cover a home showing for me.
I didn’t necessarily trust Jack not just to steal the sale from right under my nose; the real estate industry in New York was cutthroat like that. But hey, desperate times and all.
Shelby was a petite woman with generous curves. She had soft brown eyes, and she’d pulled her reddish-brown hair up into a messy bun. A pincushion was wrapped around her wrist like a bracelet, and she followed my eyes there after our quick introduction.
“Oops! I keep forgetting to take that off.”
“You also have a measuring tape draped around your neck,” I said.
“That too.” She removed her sewing accessories and placed them on the counter. “Let’s go. I’m famished.”
The birria was really good, exceptional even. Better than anything I’d had in New York, and that was saying a lot since we were spoiled for choices there when it came to food. The three of us sat at the table by the window so we could look out into the street as we ate.
“For some reason,” I said, “I thought Darlington was a small town. But this is not giving small town vibes at all.”
I looked out at the building across the street that we’d just come from.
Built in the Gothic Revival style, with steepled roofs, pointed arches, and an abundance of decorative elements, it towered over the smaller buildings around it.
But it wasn’t the tallest building in the area by far.
Cars hummed past, and the sidewalk teemed with people, some in suits, some in leather jackets, a few with horns or scales.
This wasn’t some sleepy small town. This was a city pulsing with life and magic.
“Darlington has grown a lot since The Wall fell,” Shelby said, dipping a chip into her frijoles puercos.
“But even before, it wasn’t a small town.
Not by a long shot. I think they described it as a small town at first so that the general public wouldn’t freak out that a whole-ass city of monsters and magic had avoided detection for so long.
Like, what do you mean satellite imaging missed it? ”
“Oh, that makes sense. Experts did say the crazy technology we have now is why The Wall fell. Too many cameras, and I guess the satellites didn’t help. Did you always live here?”
“Yup! I did. But I didn’t know about the monsters and the magic.”
“Really? But it’s everywhere!”
I wasn’t exaggerating. A woman with iridescent wings zipped past on a scooter.
The group of kids at the street corner weren’t kids at all now that I had a good look; they were…
goblins? Not to mention, according to the placard on the wall, the Mexican place we were currently at was owned by the friendly neighborhood chupacabra. Was that even a thing?
I also had the distinct feeling that something was watching me. But I wasn’t sure if I was being paranoid.
“Yeah, it is everywhere. But I’ve lived here all my life, and I thought it was just a quirky local thing. It’s also more heavily marketed now.”
“How did your family end up here?” I asked, trying to make small talk.
“I come from a line of green witches. Plant magic. It skipped a generation, and Mom decided to raise me like a normie. My grandparents assumed I didn’t have magic either, so they never mentioned it.
It was hard for my mom to grow up knowing she was missing something.
They were just trying to do what was best for me.
Grams was ecstatic when she found out I had magic after all. ”
“Ooooh, you have magic?” I asked, awed and remembering Eva and her spell.
“Very little. Watch the napkin.” Shelby concentrated, and the napkin on the table folded itself in half.
“It’s not very impressive. Gargoyles are supposed to be naturally attracted to women with some magic in them.
But so far, Lillian, Emily, and I all have just a teeny, tiny bit.
Emily’s magic is so weak that she didn’t even know about it until we started looking for it.
We’re nothing like Tansy. She’s sorceress-caliber. ”
“Wow, really? I had no idea.” I wondered for a second if Graham’s attraction to me was solely because of the supposed magic that ran in my family, but I refused to let myself dwell on it. I turned to Lillian. “What about you?”
“I can’t cast spells, but I can do this.” She raised her hands up in the air, and they suddenly turned into paws. She also had the most adorable cat ears. “Shifting is considered a type of innate magic, like a talent."
“You’re a shifter! That’s so cool.”
Lillian’s face turned red. “Not a full shifter. This is all I got. Paws and ears. Like Shelby, we all have magic, but very little. I’m part snow leopard.”
“That’s still really cool. All I did was witness my ex murder someone and steal an egg.”
“Did you want to talk about that?” Lillian asked, her ears and paws changing back.
“Maybe when it doesn’t feel so surreal. Right now it feels like everything’s a dream and I’m going to wake up in my own bed in the morning.”
“Okay. We’ll be here when you’re ready.”
Shelby nodded in agreement.
“Thanks.”
After we finished our food, Lillian suggested we take a walk around the block to digest and show me a little more of the city, even if it was just one block.
The midday sun warmed the back of my neck as we strolled down the street.
Darlington hummed with life and activity: shopkeepers arranging displays, office workers hurrying to lunch, the occasional honk of a car navigating the narrow road.
The air smelled of fresh bread from a bakery down the street and the faint, earthy scent that told me there was a large body of water not too far away.
Then I felt it again, that little prickle at the back of my head. I slowed, glancing over my shoulder. No one stood on the sidewalk behind us. But still, the feeling lingered.
“Do you guys feel that?” I asked.
Lillian turned, her gaze sweeping the street. “Feel what?”
“Like we’re being watched.”
She frowned, studying the faces around us. “I don’t sense anything unusual. But—” She hesitated. “Maybe you’re just on edge after all that’s happened.”
“Maybe.”
“But let’s get back sooner rather than later, just in case,” Shelby said, quickening her steps.
“Good idea.” Lillian nodded, and we hurried back to the Redrock building.