Chapter 13
Maxim was quiet in the car as he drove. Pippa had expected something, whether it was a question or a demand or a concern, but after he’d asked about the demon that had attacked her and Jules and she’d assured him that, yes, she was—mostly—undamaged, he might as well have been a chauffeur for all the chatter he wasn’t making.
He’d stuck right by her side as the building was evacuated due to “structural concerns.” He’d hovered nervously nearby in the parking lot as she and Jules had given their statements and as the EMT checked her for head trauma.
She’d been able to explain away the black demon blood as grease from a damaged pipe.
She was pretty sure the EMT didn’t believe her when she’d said the blood on her palms was a different type of grease, but without any visible injuries, he’d had no choice but to nod.
Despite Jules’s state, she was also deemed well enough to only require an ice pack to her head and a shock blanket, but not well enough to drive, so Kenzie volunteered to take her home.
Jumped at the chance, really, which had Pippa wondering if hers wasn’t the only case of inter-office canoodling.
And with the HR representative, too, which—
“Am I taking a right or left here?”
Maxim’s question jerked her back to the car and the reason why he needed directions.
“Left.”
The blinker was a low, soothing tock, tock, tock against the silence, punctuated by the creak of Maxim’s hands on the steering wheel.
“What was it?” he’d asked as soon as they’d gotten in the car. Pippa hadn’t needed him to elaborate. She told him about the Whisper Hound and its verbal magic, how the hallway ended up the way it did, and Jules’s revelation that Pippa was horrible at keeping any sort of secret.
And then, Pippa had told him where she was intending to go. He’d less volunteered to take her there, and more simply assumed. She had been too tired to argue.
He’d seemed tense though, in the same sort of angsty, brooding way she had come to expect from him before she’d gotten to know him so much better. It was as if a wall had slid into place. Not a heavy wall, or an impenetrable one, but a little of his warmth felt cut off from her.
Pippa aimed the air vent away from her damp hair. They’d stopped by her apartment just long enough for her to shower, scrub the dried blood off, and change into her nicest sweater and skirt.
The Ash Coven didn’t appreciate dishevelment. Plus, if she could make her appearance as put-together as possible, maybe her emotional state would follow. Eventually.
Her throat felt too tight, so she fiddled with the air vent again. She should have gone to them sooner. Getting attacked in an alley hadn’t been anything out of the ordinary, especially since it wasn’t the first time a demon had admitted to receiving money in exchange for killing her.
But the responsible thing would have been to go to the Coven after getting attacked at work by a demon who’d been armed with a poison it knew would incapacitate her. The first time, that was. She chewed her lip and glared out of the window.
Going to the Coven felt like defeat. It meant admitting she couldn’t handle her own problems and hoping that a group of people in a musty-smelling room who had more connections and more power than she did would be able to fix the shitty situation she’d wrangled for herself.
Of course, if she hadn’t been so goddamn proud and had gone to them earlier, Jules Cohen’s biggest issue this week would have been wondering how to make an alien/Spock/Kirk threesome sound believable.
Oh, Pippa was tired. Only the steady beat of dread kept her from slumping against the passenger door during the drive.
“Thanks for taking me,” she said. “You didn’t have to.”
“Yeah. Of course.” Maxim’s voice was soft, almost encouraging. “This was the place you’ve been wanting to join, right?”
She sighed. “Yeah.”
“And they’ll help you?”
“That’s the hope.”
They were coming up on the Ash Coven’s building, a three-story Victorian house surrounded by a picket fence, because the Ash Coven really, really liked “aesthetic.” A few blocks ahead, the roof’s black iron finials were becoming visible.
What if someone glanced out a window as they parked? What if they saw Maxim? What if they asked questions?
“Turn here,” she blurted.
With an, “Oh, okay?” Maxim slowed and turned onto a dirt-paved alley, moving carefully around the potholes. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”
“Say?”
“To make your case to them.” At the growing look of dread that must have been on her face, he reached over and patted her thigh. “Well. Good thing you have a lawyer with you.”
Any other time, his goofy smirk would have made her laugh, but now it just rankled.
“You won’t be with me,” she said. “Just park here.” She jumped out of the car as soon as he rolled to a stop. “I’ll meet you later.”
“Pippa!” Maxim called after her, throwing his own door open with enough force to thump into the dumpster he’d parked alongside. “Goddammit— What the hell is going on?”
The rusty-red shingles of the Coven’s building showed in the distance behind a stand of palm trees. Pippa’s palms were slippery and there was a sour taste in her mouth. What if she couldn’t convince them? What if they somehow knew that she’d involved others?
“Pippa,” Maxim said again, though softer this time. She felt his hand close around hers. “It’s fine if you want me to wait in the . . . lobby, or—I don’t know if they have a waiting room. Whatever. I can be wherever you want me to be.”
She tried for a slow, steady breath that ended up emerging as a choke. “I don’t want you here at all, Maxim.”
His hand slipped from hers.
“You weren’t supposed to know about demons,” she said, “or magic, or me, or any of this. I told you that there were laws. If the Ash Coven knew I’ve been associating with you, involving you, they’d never let me in.
They’d make it impossible for me to ever—” Her throat seized around that last word and she swallowed hard.
Maxim stayed silent, and when she looked back at him, his forehead was creased, his mouth in a tight frown.
“What happens if they accept you?” he said. “Say they let you in. Say you become part of this club.”
Frustration simmered beneath Pippa’s skin at his snappish tone. “It’s not a—”
“You’re not allowed to associate with someone like me. Isn’t that the rule? Someone— What did you say the other day? Someone who’s ‘one-hundred-percent normal.’ So if you get in, what then? Do we just . . . stop? Do we work day after day and pretend there’s nothing at all between us?”
The sinking feeling in her stomach was made heavier by her growing dread. She knew where this conversation was headed, and she hated it.
“If they accept me, I wouldn’t be working at the firm anymore.”
The moment she spoke, she knew it was the wrong answer. She watched her words settle on Maxim and twist his expression into one of despair and disbelief.
“So this entire time you knew that this”—he gestured between the two of them—“wasn’t going anywhere.” His lips had paled drastically with how tightly he’d been pressing them together. “I was convenient. Someone to drive you around and, what, help you get off?”
The last words emerged as a snarl.
Frustration simmered under Pippa’s skin. She twisted to face him, her shoes scraping in the dirt and making dry dust puff into the air.
“No! Of course not!”
She adored him. She loved his brain and his humor and his hapless attempts at small talk.
She couldn’t think of what she would rather do than have him come with her and stand by her side as she knelt before the people who controlled her future.
And honestly? She’d been so swept up in the thrill of getting to know him and learn what happened behind the walls he’d so carefully built around himself she had forgotten that, yes, if she were to be taken in by the Ash Coven, she’d have to cut out the non-magical people in her life.
Fuck, this was too much. Everything was too much, and too confusing, and the sky was too sunny, and her head felt like it was trying to decide whether to burst or melt.
Yet . . . maybe she hadn’t forgotten. Maybe part of her had thought that the Ash Coven’s acceptance was so outlandish that having a relationship full of intimacy and honesty and shameless bliss was the option more likely to come true.
And if they didn’t accept her? She thought of the satisfaction she’d have once she knew that she was part of something important. She thought of what it might be to feel fulfilled. She thought of a bare patch in a cemetery that no landscaper had ever been able to fill with grass.
“I need this, Maxim,” she said. Her throat burned and her eyes stung with tears that threatened to fall. “If they accept me, then it means that I’m . . . worth it. Despite what my father did. Despite the magic I can’t bear to acknowledge. I can’t do anything else. I’m not good at anything else.”
“That’s bullshit!”
Pippa flinched at his snarled curse. “I need this!” she shouted through the strangling tightness in her throat. “You have no idea what I’m constantly fighting against. His magic fucking haunts me, Maxim, and you can’t even begin to understand how it—”
“I’d know if you’d TELL ME!”
She’d never seen him bellow before. She’d never seen the cords in his neck strain so hard she was afraid something within him would break.
There was a fierce desperation in his yell, but as big as it was, it was also fragile.
That little piece of him snuck in through her anger, and it forced her to talk.
“He was . . .” Pippa searched for the word before remembering their conversation during a car ride when she’d seen the first glimmer of the true Maxim Sheppard.