Chapter 3
ARES
I unbuttoned my jacket as I opened the back door of the sleek black sedan waiting for me outside of the bowling alley.
A news station was playing on the radio.
One of the better stations, but Saints, if the shit they let go on the air wasn’t a bunch of utter drivel.
The public radio hosts were interviewing an influencer, trying to ask her questions about whether or not she really liked the things she hawked on her platform.
“Shut that shit off,” I scolded as I slid into the back seat, not wanting to hear the answer. Everyone was selling something all the time now. There was no trick to it. No art. We were all just selling our souls to the Authority. To the Corps. And, much as I hated it, the Consulate.
Avaline and my brother were waiting, sitting in companionable silence in the front seat. Eryx read the newspaper. He preferred a fresh hard copy each morning to using the app that came on his phone, and the car smelled faintly of leather and fresh ink.
Eryx flipped the switch on the radio, but not before the host announced that they’d be interviewing freshman Senator Cromvale next. I grimaced at the name. The Three-Cities Senate was as corrupt as the rest of them.
Avaline’s favorite little Poltergeist was consuming something disgusting in the back seat. “Out,” I commanded.
It gave me its hellish version of puppy dog eyes, to which I glared. Av looked in the rearview at her pet and shook her head. The thing was about to throw the disemboweled rat at me in protest.
“That would be an unwise choice,” I murmured, twisting the family ring on my right index finger. “You know what I can do.”
The Poltergeist disappeared, not wanting to be blasted out of existence, I suppose. “I do not enjoy that thing,” I remarked, checking for signs of rat detritus before I moved over.
More likely than not, the rat hadn’t been real, just an illusion to disgust me. Poltergeists were like that—they mostly wanted to irritate the fuck out of their victims.
“His name is Stanley,” Eryx reminded me, voice dry as a bone.
Not a hint of humor whatsoever. My brother was not joking. The cursed Poltergeist had a name. I gritted my teeth, suppressing the urge to give a lecture about respecting spirits’ essential nature and not treating them like pets.
For her part, Avaline was, as ever, the picture of perpetual calm—alert and deadly.
My crew joked that the necromancer never slept, and I couldn’t deny she had a kind of otherworldly air about her.
She’d been that way since we were children.
Of course, that was so long ago at this juncture, that it was practically irrelevant.
“Did you give her the information?” Av asked.
“Yes,” I replied tersely.
She’d never felt good about what happened twenty years ago. Av’s sense of honor made it difficult to reconcile that what we’d looked into hadn’t caused Lara’s capture—though I couldn’t deny it had been relevant to the scenario, if she’d been taken for the reasons we suspected.
Destroying the Maere’s old place made an enemy of Ember Verona, but we couldn’t risk anyone finding out what we knew—and all the answers had been in that ramshackle old mansion, if anyone had known what to look for.
And someone had been closing in on us. Burning it down had been the only answer—but we’d thought they’d all been out.
We’d seen Serafine Duval just an hour before. Or at least Av was told we had, by one of her best informants. But we’d been wrong. And while the Maere couldn’t die, they could be gravely injured. It took Sera years to recover. It’s what broke Orphium’s Maere. We broke them.
And much as I hated to admit it, the Trinity needed strong Maere to keep the balance between us, the Consulate, and the mundane world.
The Authority and the Corps pulled too much power these days—they were practically one and the same, having bought one another off so many times that anyone who bothered to pay attention had lost count.
It had only made them both worse, and more powerful.
The Consulate was nothing like my adoptive father, Roman Necroline, had intended for it to be anymore.
They had lost their way long before his untimely death, but things got worse all the time.
The nominal power the Trinity used to hold within the organization had dissolved, and as I wasn’t Roman’s biological child, I had no claim to his Founder’s Seat on the high council.
We took a calculated risk by tipping Verona off to the swords.
I could only hope it was worth it. The Consulate ruled us more directly, but they were not a sovereign entity.
Despite everything, on some level, they still answered to the Authority.
We all did—there was no use in longing for the ancient past.
I shoved the threat of nostalgia for a time that never was to the back of my mind, drumming my fingers on my knee.
Av took a sip of her coffee, then put the car into gear.
As she pulled out of the alley, I leaned back in my seat, breathing deeply.
Trying to get the scent of Ember Verona’s perfume out of my nose.
Typically, I hated the smell of roses, but she smelled like something else as well, something rich, musky, with a hint of spice. Peppercorn, perhaps? That had to be it. The perfume’s unexpected allure was the reason I couldn’t stop thinking about how she smelled when I dropped the tip.
She’d been hungover, keeping her oval sunglasses on the entire meeting, but she never went out without earrings, a slick of lipgloss, and smelling good enough to devour.
Today there’d been a slump in her shoulders that made me uneasy.
I’d had the bizarre urge to ask her if she wanted my macaroni and cheese recipe, but blessed be the Saints, I’d kept that to myself.
I tried to tell myself I was just happy she hadn’t vomited in public.
“What’s the word on Lara Achilles?” I worked hard to banish thoughts of the way Verona’s leggings hugged every luscious curve of her thighs, or the odd surge of jealousy I felt seeing her oversized leather jacket.
Six of one, half dozen the other she was going for style, but the mere thought that it might have been a lover’s irritated me.
Eryx folded his newspaper and pushed a lock of hair away from his face.
People said we looked alike, but my brother had at least twenty-five pounds of muscle on me and a good five inches.
Other than that, sure, we were alike. Dark hair, somewhere between brown and black, pale tattooed skin, and our mom’s crystalline green eyes.
Eryx turned slightly in his seat. “Achilles paid a visit to Aqualand last night.”
Inwardly, I swore. How did she know we were on to her? “Did she talk to Bubbles?”
“They were the only one in last night,” Av said as she turned uptown.
“Hang a left on Park,” I said with a sigh. “Let’s go see about a fish.”