Chapter 3
Shit. Say as little as possible,” Morgan murmured.
It was too late to turn around: they’d definitely been seen.
Would her mother sever the poor demon’s head right here in the street, or drag them off to some Shadow Council safehouse to do the deed?
Her mother’s posture hadn’t changed. Surely if she’d realized there was a demon standing next to her daughter, she would have moved into some kind of stance by now?
Morgan wasn’t actually sure. She’d been nearly as bad at the self-defense lessons as the magic lessons, and that was saying something.
Maybe I could pretend I didn’t know he was a demon, she thought frantically as she dragged her feet toward her mother. She’d look like an idiot, but that was nothing new. She felt guilty, though. He didn’t even want to be here; it wasn’t his fault. Maybe she could convince Fiona to help?
She looked at her mother, all hard edges.
Fiona wore her black jeans tight and low, the stretchy kind to allow for high kicks.
She wore her black hair, only lightly streaked with silver, pulled up and back in a ponytail too short to be easily grabbed in a fight.
While Morgan bore a passing resemblance to her and was thirty years her junior, Fiona still had the abs and the cheekbones to pull off both styles while Morgan most assuredly did not.
Morgan had made an actual effort to style her own black hair but hadn’t had the money or dexterity to really pull it off; her own jeans were relaxed fit.
Most importantly, Morgan was unarmed. There were at least four blades concealed on her mother’s person (that Morgan knew of) and warding glyphs embroidered into the lining of her coat.
A scar grazed her cheek and somehow only made her look rakish.
She’d gotten the scar fighting a rogue summoner bent on demon-assisted world domination, Morgan remembered.
There was a much, much uglier one over her kidney from the same fight.
Her mother spent most of Morgan’s childhood routinely perforated, a human drip-irrigation system leaving blood (both hers and others’) in puddles up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
Fiona had a lot of scars she shouldn’t have survived, but she was still bitter about the cheek.
No, Fiona was not going to help Lucareoth.
“Morgana Severina Blackwater-McKey, have you been ignoring my texts?”
“Hi, Mother,” she said weakly.
“Who’s this?” her mother asked, sizing up the threat at her daughter’s side. The crow eyed Morgan with disdain.
But Fiona didn’t pull a knife or a lightning bolt. Which meant her mother somehow didn’t recognize him under the glamour.
The demon had recognized the danger. His breath was speeding up, almost hyperventilating. He opened his mouth and Morgan stepped on his foot. The crow huffed.
“This is Luke. He’s the new sales intern,” Morgan said. She prayed he’d follow her lead.
Her mother’s eyes narrowed and she sniffed. Not a sniff of derision—that would have been mortifying—but the more dangerous sniff for magic. She could tell something was clinging to him that was not mundane. The last thing Morgan wanted was her mother asking questions.
“Tidepools grad,” she babbled, name-dropping the famous mage academy in Big Sur.
Her mother didn’t deal with the West Coast folks much; she hoped it would be enough.
Although her mother’s reputation certainly had made it out there—if Morgan was very lucky, Fiona would think Lucareoth’s nervousness was just the normal hero worship.
“Came in from California for the summer. Mother, I thought you had your dinner?”
Her mother relaxed a little and her hand twitched. Morgan knew some effect had been dismissed, even if she couldn’t see it. “I did, but someone didn’t show up and the whole effort was pointless.”
“I know it was a show-off-your-family-dinner, but I thought since I’m not exactly—”
Her mother’s eyes narrowed. “It’s not like they don’t already know. I needed you there to give me an excuse to even be there. Instead, you’re off doing some three-letter-acronym whatever for a silly company that didn’t exist three years ago and won’t exist three years from now.”
“Hey.” Just because it was true didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.
Her mother snorted. “What, are you going to try to tell me you’re deeply passionate about…”
“About using quantum computing and predictive analytics to help companies zero in on candidates that will generate the best medium and long-term outcomes.” Morgan lifted her chin.
She wasn’t, but she was at least supposed to pretend she was.
It wasn’t even real quantum computing, just misnamed to sound fancy because investors were already getting tired of things misnamed “AI.” But it paid the bills.
So what if it wasn’t saving the world from a death cult monastery?
Her mother and the demon gave her identical looks of skepticism.
“You trust him?” Her mother gestured with her chin.
“I met him today,” she said truthfully.
“You tapped into the local mage community, kid?” her mother demanded.
The demon—Lucareoth, she told herself: even thinking the words “the demon” around her mother seemed dangerous—glanced at her for help Morgan was entirely unequipped to give. “Uh… no, ma’am.”
The crow peered at him and fluffed his feathers with suspicion.
They were talking to each other, Morgan knew.
Fiona had come back from one case with the corvid soul-bonded to her.
Morgan had never been quite clear if Murder was a magical creature himself, or a regular old crow.
Normal crows were quite smart, even without a telepathic bond to a mage.
Murder got away with murder; he seemed to choose to exhibit exactly as much intelligence as it took to get Morgan in trouble.
If she underestimated him, he seemed to feed her mother information.
If she complained that he’d shit on her homework, she was told he was just a crow.
It didn’t seem fair that she’d never even been allowed so much as a hamster.
“You’re hiding something,” her mother said, her eyes narrowing. Morgan’s heart stuttered. Then Fiona’s eyes suddenly widened with understanding. “Oh!”
“What oh?” Morgan said, her alarm growing. “There’s no oh.”
“You could have said you were on a date,” her mother said.
Fiona was sex-positive as a parent. Very sex-positive.
Too sex-positive. Morgan knew more about her mother’s exploits than she had ever wanted to know.
By the time Fiona was Morgan’s current age, she’d already banged a werepanther, a Navy SEAL, a selkie seal, a paramedic, at least two cops, and a merman.
Several of whom Morgan had met over the course of grade school at various picnics and apocalypsi, most of whom still seemed to be carrying a torch for her mother.
Which was the most horrifying thing imaginable to find out in sixth grade. “You should be on dates.”
“I’m on plenty of dates,” she protested, not daring to look at Lucareoth’s face.
She should have been relieved that her mother had jumped to the wrongest possible conclusion, but somehow this felt much, much worse.
Yes, he was gorgeous, but she didn’t have a death wish.
All right, maybe she did have a little tiny one.
He was such a weird mix of alluring and hapless.
He would probably be amazing in bed, all sultry command, but didn’t seem like he had the unjustified confidence to accidentally reset the Wi-Fi like the last guy Gisele had brought home.
Did demons date? Was he thinking about what it would be like to date a human right now?
Clearly it had been far too long a dry spell and she needed to shut this train of thought down right here.
“But this is not a date. He’s a coworker. ”
“Look,” her mother said, lowering her voice.
The street sounds suddenly muffled. Lucareoth twitched.
“He’s not involved with this if he got here recently, and the California families have never really gone for this kind of thing.
I suppose the one advantage of your… limitations is that you couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it.
So you keep on analyzing your thingies.”
Fiona used the same tone she used to use when Morgan had wanted her to take fifteen minutes away from tracking down kappa mobsters to play dolls with her.
She ground her teeth. Just because she wasn’t passionately committed to HR outcomes didn’t mean she didn’t care about being half decent at her job.
Monster hunting didn’t give your kid a trust fund, and NYC rent was eyepopping. “Thanks so much, Mother.”
Her mother patted her on the shoulder. “It’s all right, pumpkin, you know I’d never let anything happen to you.”
Over her childhood and college, Morgan had been kidnapped three times and turned into a penguin once, so she took that assurance with a grain of salt.
After that last one, she now had to try to pretend that she only liked sushi a normal amount.
“You always do this. You drop mysterious hints about some dire happening, and then you run off and come home with a stab wound.”
“Well, you do work in an office. It’s not really your thing,” said her not-particularly-office-ready-looking mother, whose pants were low enough that Morgan knew she’d be able to see the tattoo at the base of her mother’s spine peeking out over the waistband, much to Morgan’s mortification.
“Although this would have all been easier if you’d come to the dinner. Like I asked.”
“Well, you know, work. In the office.” Morgan made a show of checking her phone. “Speaking of which, we need to grab a late dinner. Early meeting tomorrow!”
“Urrrrgh,” her mother groaned. One of their many conflicts over the years had been over Morgan’s disinterest in staying up until dawn and Fiona’s inability to function without a small vat of coffee before noon. “You and your early mornings.”
“Bye, good luck with the Shadow Counciling, say hi to Dad,” Morgan said in one breath, dragging Lucareoth by the elbow down the stairs into the subway.
They got to the bottom. He darted to the side, yanking her wrist to take shelter against the wall next to him.
“OK, I know she’s a lot, but that’s unnecessary.” It wasn’t like Fiona had a Shadow Council badge on her lapel. Morgan tried to pull away, but his iron grip kept her shoulder pressed against his.
Lucareoth gave her a wild-eyed glance. “Are you kidding? She’s hunting demons.”