25. A Hot HAM Potluck
A Hot HAM Potluck
SNOW
"You don’t ever, and I mean ever go home alone. Not unless Ryder or I are there to take you," I say to Ariel as I wipe the bar so hard, I’m close to stripping the varnish. "Do you understand?"
"Not even if I’m packing an Uzi?"
I look up at Ariel who gives me her round innocent eye look. But I’m not in any mood.
"No. Not even an Uzi."
"Pfft, you only have daggers. I think if I had an Uzi, I’d be just fine."
I stop, my arms giving under the weight of the invisible pressure pushing down on my body. Tears catch in my throat.
"Ariel. Cinder is gone." My voice is scratchy. My heart is caving in from the grief and fear that’s driving me out of my mind. Cinder disappeared the same way Goldie did. In Boston, without a single trace or clue left behind. Another mage friend just vanished.
"I can’t lose you too."
Ariel’s teasing expression evaporates. "As far as anyone knows, I’m a regular human. I’m going to be fine, but I’m worried you won’t be."
She’s not wrong. It’s been days and nights of me stalking the streets, rounding to Goldie and Ted’s house, trying any place to find information, to get a clue of where our friends have gone.
I feel like I’m being torn apart. My people, my family is disappearing and there is nothing I can do to stop it.
Rap has pulled all the resources she can to help find our friends, but nothing has surfaced.
Ted has been going out of his mind as much as me. He walks into Poison Apple multiple times a night before going outside to stalk the city, then comes back again, hoping his wife will miraculously appear.
Now Cinder’s husband, Prince Kaison Charming, is hunting as well.
Too many feral men on the loose. And I’m just as out of my mind as them.
I can barely work my shift, constantly getting drink orders wrong and breaking things, because I’m watching, listening for any hint of suspicious behavior at the bar.
Isabelle’s husband, the Beast of Boston, the most powerful were and mafia lord of the city has also come up empty.
Poison Apple is being targeted, and it’s up to me to find them.
Which is why, the second the lights flicker for last call, I'm flipping chairs onto tables at a speed that earns me a raised eyebrow from the whole bar.
Four is at his spot at the end of the rail, waiting for our nightly prowl. He watches me with his ruby red gaze as I close out my register faster than I ever have in my life.
"Big plans?" he asks even though he knows exactly what the plan is.
I take his arm and tow him out the side door into the night before answering. I take out a folded piece of paper from my back pocket.
"It was stapled to the pole outside the laundromat." I hand it over. "Over Ariel's flyer. Staples right through her face."
He reads the cheap yellow paper with smudged toner.
COMMUNITY SAFETY ASSEMBLY. CONCERNED CITIZENS OF BOSTON. THURSDAY 9 PM. KEEP OUR NEIGHBORHOODS OURS.
"It’s a Humans Against Magic meeting." The paper starts to brown along the edge where Four’s thumb is.
"Hey." I snap it back and shake it cool. "I need that. It has the address on it."
"The address." His voice goes careful, which from Four is its own alarm.
"People I love are gone. HAM is the only group in this city that wants them gone, and tomorrow evening every HAM mouth in the neighborhood is going to be in one basement.
" I fold the flyer away. Despite our dwindling number of bartenders, I managed to convince Rap to let me come to work a couple hours later than normal.
"I'm going to stake it out and get the details on what they’ve been up to. "
"Snow."
"You can come or not."
He looks at me for a long moment, and the wind drags the smell of warm cotton off him. "Fine," he says. "But for the record, this sounds boring."
"Come on now, you’re starting to sound like Two."
Looking down from the fire escape on the back of the old church, we watch the door in the alley someone wedged open with a folding chair.
We lay flat on the landing, watching people arrive while rust imprints itself on my forearms. The smell of burnt coffee and haze from the smokers clustered just inside the doorframe rises up to us.
Though it’s hard to pay attention with a horny Four pressed to my side.
His hot fingers stroke down my back, playing with my naked spine.
Between it being hot as ogre balls out tonight, and the fact I need to head straight to work after this, I’m wearing my work outfit, a leather bra and matching leather shorts.
I did go minimal on my accessories to avoid any loud clinking that might draw attention to our hiding spot.
Even as I tilt my head to listen better, Four finds the crook of my neck and lays slow, hot kisses there which dampen my panties and make my inner muscles clench with need.
But this can wait, so I gently push him off, trying to get some distance.
I spot a familiar hairdo, one slicked back into an afro puff, and give Four a nudge to pay attention.
It’s that same girl who was there the night I met The Seven, along with that guy with the dirty looking scruff and the massive dude. Lilah, I think was her name.
Sure enough, Wrecking Ball walks in a couple minutes later.
He’d been one of the first ones to attack at Dry Dock.
But as Two pointed out, throwing insults about one’s mama does tend to escalate things, which is why tonight is about the sneakier route.
Maybe I can get more info just by listening ninja style.
Four shifts beside me for the fourth time in a minute. He's picking flakes of rust off the railing and flicking them into the dark, his jaw working, one knee bouncing against the iron.
Thankfully, they left the door open so the microphone inside carries every word to us.
A woman acts as the welcome committee. Everyone needs to fill out the sign-in sheet, and there is a basket for the fund to support Queenie Fairchild in her hour of need.
Though I doubt Fairchild needs their pennies for her medical bills, it goes to show how committed they are to getting the woman elected.
The speaker graciously thanks a couple of people for the casseroles and cookies people can help themselves to at the back by the coffee.
"This is pointless," Four whispers, his eyes flashing with frustration. "Nobody in that room knows anything. They're talking about casseroles."
"Cool your jets, it just got started. I’m sure evil doing is third or fourth on their agenda after the school carnival and saving puppies to throw the Feds off. Then it’s straight on to bigotry, hate crimes, and where the hell they’ve taken my friends."
He doesn't answer. The railing under his hand has started to make a small ticking sound, like a radiator waking up.
Then a metal chair scrapes loudly below, and a deep voice I'd know anywhere says, "Yeah, I got something."
My whole body goes still. I know that voice. Wrecking Ball.
"Most of you know I was attacked and injured in my attempt to defend this neighborhood," he says. "Lilah and I both suffered wounds from the attack, as well as Jimi."
I gasp. "That gigantic dickhead! They attacked us. He’s trying to sound all noble."
"We thank you, Clarence, for all you’ve done to keep our city safe," the woman running the meeting says.
"And we bow our heads in remembrance of our fallen HAM member, Jimi Bullock, who was brutally murdered in his attempt to keep our streets safe as well. While there wasn’t any evidence of magic used in the killing, it was a messy brutal struggle by the end of his own kitchen knife. "
What? Someone killed a HAM member? Dirt-face?
I feel rather than see Four stiffen next to me.
I twist to look at him, but suddenly he is very focused on that propped open door.
And I just know.
"Did you—"
"No," Four says with force.
A beat passes between us.
"Who did it, Four?"
The man next to me reeks of guilt so much it radiates off him in waves.
"Four," I press.
"Two did it, okay? He knew that creep—Jimi, was it? He was going to come back for you and probably us, so he took care of it."
Holy faefucks. Two committed murder to protect me? My head reels, and I’m not sure how to feel about it.
"We suspect it was done by the girl who attacked us." This time, it’s Lilah who speaks. Still, I stare at Four in a daze. "The same one who crashed the Dry Dock bar."
"It was a Black girl in her twenties with white hair and blue eyes, and while she looks magic, she’s human. She was with one of those mages, but the way Jimi went..." Lilah stops speaking as if choked up. And maybe she really is, but it’s hard to feel sympathy for her when she’s smack talking me.
"The kind of sloppy murder spree fits her style," Wrecking Ball, or rather Clarence, finishes for her.
"She’s human?" someone yells out.
I can only imagine Lilah and Wrecking Ball nodding gravely, as if I were the antichrist itself.
I can’t help but roll my eyes.
"Traitor to her own," someone else shouts.
"Official word from up the chain is," Lilah continues, "steer clear of her.
She's human, she's not the mission." A pause.
"Unofficially? Her little magic friends figured out this city's done with them and cleared out. Maybe somebody suggests she go the same way. Out of town, one way or the other. And if we can’t convince her... " The implication is clear.
A chill rolls up and down my spine like fingers on a piano. Not an easy thing to overhear, the idea of forty people agreeing that I should end up in a ditch.
And under the cold flooding my body, my brain snags on the thing it came for.
Her little magic friends cleared out.
Cleared out?
The HAMs think the mages and fae have been leaving of their own free will?
I mean granted, Boston has been super hostile lately, but do these assholes really think everyone is just picking up and walking out without saying a word or taking their belongings?
Goldie's husband walks into Poison Apple six times a night, searching. Missing posters have been going up all over the light posts and fences.
Whatever is happening to the magic-kind of this city, the people in that basement either genuinely don't know, or the truth is being kept above their pay grade, and I don't know which one scares me more.
I'm so deep in my thoughts I almost miss Four getting up to leave.
He's up on one knee. The air over his shoulders bends the brick behind it.
"Four."
"They are going to try to hurt you." His whisper is scorched at the edges. "I need to take care of this."
"Four." I get in front of him, both palms flat on his chest, a stove through a shirt. "You go through that door and my friends stay gone. And I will spend the rest of my life as the girl whose boyfriend firebombed a church."
"Boyfriend?" he says, cocking his head. Before the self-consciousness can get to me, his lips quirk up in a goofy kind of smile.
My heart flutters like a bird.
I hadn’t meant to say that, but it's basically true. We spend almost all our free time together, the sex is mind-blowing, and there’s no one else I could possibly want after knowing him. And based on the fact he murdered someone for me, for fae’s sake, I think he’s kind of invested too.
Then Four’s expression flattens as if becoming even more resolved. "Go home, I’ll meet you at your apartment." He kisses me on the forehead, giving my arms a squeeze.
While my heart melts a little, I know I can’t let him do the very stupid, murderous thing he’s about to do.
So I throw my arms around him and kiss him.