Chapter 11 Ares
ARES
“She wants to apologize,” the spirit said, as I pushed past Ember with my mess of a laundry basket. “She just doesn’t know how.”
I glared at the spirit, then noticed something familiar about her.
Her eyes. They were the same shape and color as Ember’s.
“Are you related to her?” I whispered, hoping that Ember, with her preternatural Maere hearing, couldn't pick out the sound of my voice over the washing machine and dryer that were still going.
The spirit appeared to sigh, and nodded.
I paused at the door to the laundromat, waiting as she spoke.
I was curious to know the answer. “Distantly. She’s taken care of our family for centuries.
I can’t understand why. From everything I could tell when I researched her history, my ancestors treated her terribly. ”
I smiled at the spirit. The answer was easy. It was one I was quite familiar with. “Devotion.”
Not love. Love was not for people like Ember Verona and me.
But devotion? Devotion was a concept we both knew all too well.
I pushed the door open with my shoulder, turning to look back.
Ember stood under the cascading foliage of a spider plant, her hazel eyes wide and glassy, teeth sunk into her full bottom lip.
I could practically hear those molars grinding together from here. She should quit it with that or she was going to need one Hel of a dentist. The thought almost made me laugh. Almost.
But almost was enough to remind me why I came in the first place.
Why I’d burned her ridiculous house down all those years ago, misguided as it was.
The Maere were the parapsychs’ best hope, the only force in the three territories that could genuinely stand between us and the Authority’s horrors.
In Aradios and Palladiere, the Maere had made things better—made the Trinity better there as well.
The difference was the swords… And the fact that the Palladiere and Aradios Maere hadn’t been shattered to pieces. Guilt gnawed at me.
“I’ll call you if I find anything else out, Verona.
” I don’t know why I said it. Maybe I believed she could make things better if she had her swords back.
Maybe I wanted to accept the apology in her eyes.
Or maybe I just didn’t want to leave mad.
My guts were twisted up with unfamiliar emotions.
Ones I couldn’t afford, but I wanted her to know she could trust me all the same. “What we talked about stays here.”
Her teeth sank deeper into her lip. If she drew blood, I might drop everything to try and fix it. I had to leave. Whatever this was flooding me, I had to get away from Ember Verona before she crept into my heart. I pushed out of the laundromat, infuriated that I’d let my feelings take me over.
Outside, rain poured down. I crossed the street, towards the metro tunnel, and as I made it to the other side, I made the mistake of looking back.
Ember stood on the sidewalk in the pouring rain.
She’d followed me out of the laundromat.
It was raining hard enough that she was already soaked, and freezing from the looks of things.
Her sweater clung to her body, revealing the shape of her breasts.
Desire raged through me, an inferno I had no business allowing to burn.
Every base instinct in me told me to drop the basket, cross the street, and kiss that look right off her face.
Push her up against the brick building the laundromat was in and warm every bit of that cold, wet skin with my hands, my body, my mouth.
We stared at each other for far too long. Her lips parted, and hard as it was raining, I could see from here that her chest was heaving as hard as mine was with the labor of her breath. The labor it took to stay in place, when all it seemed either of us wanted to do was cross the street.
Years of eyeing each other silently had come to this. Less than an hour alone in a hole-in-the-wall laundromat, and I was tempted to throw all my principles away to get inside her. To feel that long, pliant body wrapped around mine. To be the person she trusted.
Fuck. What was wrong with me? I willed myself to move first, to take the power back and show her I didn’t want anything from her. Her mouth moved. She was saying something. Two words, over and over. I can’t.
Whether she spoke to herself, or meant for me to understand, it didn’t matter.
She couldn’t, and neither could I. We had people to worry about, two factions that weren’t exactly opposed, but also had never bothered to work together.
That’s not how the Trinity worked, and it certainly wasn’t how the Consulate worked.
Despite my pie in the sky dreams about a better future, the Maere were bought and paid for.
They were Consulate creatures through and through, and the Consulate could not be trusted.
That was the truth and it should be reason enough to walk away.
But those words on her lips. They were the only ones that mattered to me.
She couldn’t. Couldn’t turn away from what she felt.
I’d known Ember Verona for so long, it was hard to remember a time when I didn’t know her. And though we weren’t close, I knew her nature. Impulsive. Chaotic. Reckless. She was doing everything she could to rein that in right now. If I had a shred of decency left in me, I’d fix this for her.
In one horrifically painful moment, I tore my eyes away.
Time, which seemed to have slowed while I hesitated, moved at its normal pace again.
If I wanted it to continue, I would have to keep my attention focused on my own business.
I moved towards the metro tunnel, and much as it pained me, I didn’t look back.
Two days later, and no one had heard a word about Lara Achilles.
Nor had Ember been spotted at any of her usual haunts.
My desk chair felt like a part of my body, but I was determined to know if the two of them were all right.
And more than that, I wanted to know what Ember planned to do to stop Lara from getting herself, and all of us, into trouble again.
Because if she was the killer, and the Authority found proof, they could take us down with them. We’d covered up what she’d done. I glanced over at Eryx and Av, who were simultaneously playing a game of chess while each of them watched a screen of their own.
Av had a chat box open in a corner of the dark web that I didn’t particularly want to know more about, while Eryx scoured less shady parts of the internet for mention of “the Angel.” I’d be a fool not to think that moniker referred to Lara Achilles.
I glanced at my phone for the tenth time in as many minutes. None of my contacts had gotten back to me. Reluctantly, I opened a spreadsheet. Waiting was not my forte, but spreadsheets I could handle.
Though being the head of the Orphium Necroline dynasty seemed like a fairly glamorous job from the outside, the truth of the matter was that it was a lot of paperwork and analyzing data.
The business of keeping my people safe in a world that wasn’t built for them was boring a lot of the time, but usually I was willing to put in the hours.
Right now, the columns swam before my eyes, practically meaningless while other thoughts clamored for attention.
The three of us sat quietly for a while, with only the sound of tapping keyboards and marble chess pieces moving in the background.
When this was Roman Necroline’s office, the paneled woodwork on the walls had gleamed with precious oil, and the chesterfield furniture had been soft and supple.
Under Magnus, things had slipped into disrepair.
I’d done my best to restore things to the way Roman had kept them, but I could never quite measure up to his nobility.
The wood never had the same luster, and the leather in all the furniture bore scars.
Still, our offices, high in the bureaucratic wing of the Carlyle, were nicer than many of our people’s homes.
That thought grounded me, drove me to focus.
I slipped into a flow state, my fingers flying over my keyboard as I calculated a projected budget for the fourth quarter.
“Ares?” Av’s voice broke through my focus.
I glanced up to find her next to me, laptop in hand. Her Poltergeist, Stanley, wove around her feet, taking the shape of a rather adorable sewer rat. When I almost smiled at him, he grinned back, revealing a mouth of human teeth.
“Revolting,” I said, refusing to react further.
Av smiled. “He doesn’t know any other way to behave, Ares. He’s a good boy.”
I swallowed hard, not wanting to argue with Avaline. If she was happy with her ghostly little pet, who was I to argue? Eryx covered his mouth to keep from laughing. We were both humoring her, apparently. She held up her laptop as Stanley disappeared.
Her screen showed grainy footage of the Pizza Queen. Lara Achilles walked in, sat down at a booth, and picked up the phone to order. Only, instead of ordering, Lara was quiet. She nodded several times, then hung up.
“What are we looking at?” I asked. “Is there sound on this?”
Av shook her head. “No, but look.” She pressed a key and the video sped up. At the video’s twenty minute mark, someone brought Lara a pizza box. She opened it, took out a slice of pepperoni mushroom, bit into it, and walked out.
“She never said a word,” Av remarked as she closed her laptop. “So what did whoever was on the other end of that call tell her?”
Eryx shook his head, his brow furrowed. “You’ll never find out unless she tells one of us.” His phone pinged several times on the table. My brother leaned forward. “We’ve got them. Verona’s at the Automat, and Achilles is four blocks away, closing in on her. Should we intercept?”
I shook my head. “No, if they’ve been avoiding each other, they need to catch up. Let them.” I glanced at my watch. It was nearly eight o’clock at night. “But we’re going to follow. See what they do.”
Eryx nodded to Av, who stowed her laptop in the safe.
I slid mine in after hers. We didn’t have desktops anymore, and the safe was built as a Varaday cage—a shielding device against EMF and other surveillance tech.
Each of us had similar pockets built into every jacket we owned for our phones.
Our secrets were locked up tight these days, and would stay that way.
“Bring your phones, but make sure they stay in your pocket unless we need them,” I cautioned. “I don’t want anyone to know what we’re up to.”
Av nodded. “I’ll call Stanley in, as well.”
I nodded. This was why I let Av keep the disgusting creature. Poltergeists were incredibly effective at repelling tracking tech, but it took a rare medium to befriend the contentious creatures. Av was my secret weapon in more than one way.
“Let’s find out what our girls are up to,” I murmured as I followed Eryx and Av out of my office. The more we knew about what was going on, the safer everyone would be.