Never Ever Hand Us a Baby
TWO
Snow pulls open the lavender door, and the cheerful bell chimes overhead. A stained-glass rose, pink and wrapped in thorns, catches the mid-morning light as I follow her inside Chapter Three.
I tug my hood up over my head and shove my hands in my jean pockets, feeling out of place among the bright pastels and smiling cartoon couples pressed against every shelf.
Snow and I patrolled all night, though that really meant wandering through the city not really speaking to each other. It was a companionable silence, though. It helped ease the self-hatred coursing through our veins, burning us like rivers of lava.
Every time I opened my mouth, I tasted smoke, blood, and old magic.
Four kept flexing our hand like he could still feel the drunk’s shirt burning under our palm. One had gone so quiet it made the back of our skull ache.
Six kept counting things. Streetlights. Crosswalks. Windows. A coping mechanism to keep thinking about anything but what happened.
And Seven sat at the bottom of us like a lit match dropped in oil. He burned with hot rage over the audacity of mage-kind. Over the violence they felt they could inflict on others.
Then we remembered we were exactly the same, and the spiral of shame and hatred intensified tenfold.
Neither Snow nor I could sleep, and neither of us wanted to be alone. So we hung out at a diner for several hours, nursing crappy cups of coffee and occasionally cutting into the biggest, most ridiculous pile of pancakes I’d ever seen, complete with a face arranged in fruit. Her choice, of course.
And now we are here.
Inside the romance bookstore, the air smells like paper, espresso, and lavender. The ceiling opens high above us, a second-floor railing visible over the shelves, with more pastel spines and trailing flowers tucked along the edge.
Ooh, Five breathes. Books.
They're romance books, Six points out with disappointment.
Love is the oldest story, Three says, backing up Five’s enthusiasm.
Even One’s interest perks up at the sight of the stacked shelves.
I’m more of Six’s mind and feel like the onslaught of girly vibes is silently telling me I’m not welcome here.
The desire to phase back through the door we entered is strong, but I stick to Snow’s side.
A coffee and wine bar runs along the far wall, all brass fixtures, blush tile, hissing milk, and bottles arranged between jars of biscotti.
Pink velvet chairs sit in reading nooks under heart-shaped lamps. Paperbacks line the walls in neat rainbow stacks, their covers full of bare chests, ball gowns, fangs, claws, crowns.
A banner stretches across the larger space near the café.
Lust & Lit Book Club
Thursdays at Seven
Under it, a chalkboard near the register reads: Currently obsessed with monsters who grovel.
Snow points at it. "Educational establishment."
"I can see that," I say. Despite my shitty mood, my lips twitch with a smile remembering how she made us grovel in Poison Apple after closing hours.
My humor vanishes when I remember why we’re here.
Snow’s friend Goldie is missing.
"Goldie never misses a shift," Snow says, leading me through the Historical Romance aisle. "She's pathologically reliable. She once came in with food poisoning and made daiquiris between trips to the bathroom. Ted said she didn’t make it home from work the other day."
"Ted." I’ve heard the name but have already forgotten.
"Her husband. Big guy. Bear guy." She waves a hand.
"He shifted and tried to track her from Poison Apple, since he knows her scent.
He should have been able to pick her out fine.
But he says the place stinks to high heaven, with so much magic crammed in one place he couldn't pull anything clean out of it.
Just that she was there, and then she was gone.
His brothers are canvassing the city. One of them's a hacker, but still nothing. "
Snow stops and turns to look up at me. "Here's the thing I can't stop thinking about.
" Her eyes move back and forth between mine, focused somewhere past them.
"Goldie can't be taken. Her power is…when she's in danger, real danger, she teleports.
It's automatic. She doesn't even control it.
A mugger flashed a knife at her last year, and she ended up on top of a parking garage in Cambridge with one shoe.
So, somebody explain to me how a woman who physically cannot be grabbed is gone? " Frustration leaks through her voice.
Six takes the problem apart somewhere in the back of us, silent, gear by gear.
Nobody else is going to try to offer an answer.
Still, she stares up at me like I’m some kind of savior. Like I’m a good man she can trust.
I want to put my fist through the nearest shelf. I want to claw out of my own skin because she has no business looking at me like this. Every one of us feels it land and flinches at once, because we know what we are.
Our magic is an infection I can feel pulsing. If cutting it out of me would do a single thing, I'd borrow one of Snow's daggers and go to work right here.
The covers grin down at me. Fangs, claws, men with power bleeding off them, women crawling into their laps to get nearer to it. Women line up and pay for the same thing that pinned Snow to a wall last night.
It’s not right.
"Yeah," Snow says to my silence, and starts walking again. "That's where I keep landing too."
"So we're asking a bookstore for help?" I make sure she can hear my opinion of the plan as I shove my violent feelings all the way down into the waiting arms of Seven, who absorbs the darkness, making it his own.
"We're asking Isabelle," she stresses, then pauses. "Well. We're asking Isabelle to ask her husband for help."
"Who's her husband?"
Snow's jaw works. "He's just...a very powerful dude."
"Powerful how?"
"The kind you don’t ask too many questions about his methods or how many fingers he cut off to get an answer."
"Why don't you ask him yourself?"
She snorts. Then the snort dies, and she goes quiet as she picks up a book and checks the cover before reshelving it.
"He's loyal as hell," she finally says. "He adores Isabelle like she hung the moon. He'd probably say yes just because she asked him to, but he scares the ever-loving piss out of me. I’ve seen him smile exactly once, and it haunted my dreams for two weeks."
I wonder if I could take a walk and see that, Three says.
Stay out of her dreams, I shoot back.
"You know as we walked in, there was that black limousine sitting at the curb across from the bookstore?" she asks.
I nod.
"That’s how I knew Isabelle would be here today, even though she has a new baby. With all the anti-magic sentiments, Dominic sits out there to keep watch over her when she pops in the store."
"Why? Is she magic?" I ask.
Snow shakes her head. "No, but with all the anti-magic bullshit, he’s worried about her being targeted because of what she sells." She picks up a book and shakes the cover at me. Mated to the Mage Next Door. She puts it down as the kid behind the bar, stocked with coffee and wine, clocks us.
They could be sixteen or in their mid-thirties, hard to say with the impish and mixed East Asian features. Short lavender hair, a rainbow sweater three sizes too big with an enamel pin on the chest reading THEY/THEM.
"Snow," they greet with a grin that shows off a chipped front tooth.
"Chip," Snow says, stepping up to the bar and reaching over for a fast slap, slide, knuckle bump combo that ends with Chip flicking their fingers like confetti.
"Are you coming to the next Lust & Lit Book Club? I think we’re reading Bitten By Death, one of Isabelle’s favorites." They waggle their eyes at Snow before giving me the side-eye.
"Not this time," Snow says, "but I already read it and loved it. Except no spice for the entire book? Pffft. What was the author thinking?"
"What? Don’t hate. The book literally has slow burn to spicy in all the descriptions of the trilogy.
And when it happens in book two," they whistle.
"The tension is so worth it." They turn to me.
"Got another convert here? Dudes are totally welcome to the club too, my guy.
" Chip opens their arms in a welcoming gesture.
Snow’s mirth evaporates, her expression turning grave. "As much as I’d like to stick my friend here in a smutty book club with a bunch of assigned reading," she gives me a pat on the back so hard I lurch under it slightly, "we’re here to see Isabelle."
I cut a pointed glare at Snow, which she ignores.
Note to self: never set foot in here again, or I’ll be in danger of being forced to read romance books.
Not that Snow could make us do it...
A resounding and damning silence comes from the rest. Even Six silently acknowledges the girl could likely make us do anything she damn well pleases.
"Isabelle will be out in a second," Chip says. "She’s in the storeroom, pumping."
"Got it. Then make me something iced with enough espresso to legally qualify as a weapon." Snow props her elbows on the counter. "And I want an irresponsible amount of whipped cream."
Chip’s grin spreads as they grab a clear cup. "So your usual emotional support beverage."
"Obviously."
I step away as the two of them fall into easy chatter. Snow leans against the counter like she belongs here, one boot hooked around the other.
As the coffee grinder shrieks, I drift toward the closest shelf.
I pick up a book with a shirtless man on the cover and a castle burning behind him. Snow laughs at something Chip says, bright and sharp enough to cut across the store.
The title reads, The Duke’s Monstrous Secret.
"That one's the fourth in a series," a soft voice says behind me. "You want to start with the first. If you wanted. To start that is."
I turn to find a small woman beside a cart of books.
Her voice stutters, unsure, but her gaze is fixed and unblinking.
Soft brown waves fall around emerald-tinted glasses, a pencil tucked behind her ear.
A folded cane hangs from the cart handle next to a stack of paperbacks feathered with sticky notes.