by SM Reine
After a few minutes of giggling behind the curtain, Marion emerged from the changing room. “Et voila!”
He had to admit that Marion looked a thousand times more comfortable wearing designer clothes than she had wearing scrubs. This was who she was: a woman who probably seldom wore the same clothes twice, much less hand-me-downs from a hospital lost and found.
“You look great. Now change back. The fun’s over,” Luke said.
“The fun is only beginning. I’m sure I’ll be able to repay you once we get to my house. I imagine my parents must be rich if I have such tastes.” She mounded her curls atop her head, twisting to look at the back of her shirt in the mirror. “What do you think?” She dropped her hair and spun in place.
He had been trying not to look at her too much, but it was impossible to ignore her statuesque beauty. Marion looked every inch the half-angel, from the narrow pinch of her waist to the noble curve of her jaw.
“The clothes are fine,” he said, dropping his attention to his shoes before she could see what he was thinking.
He caught her impish smirk out of the corner of his eye. “In that case, I’ll take this outfit.” Marion waved down the clerk, who was organizing hangers in the changing room. “Can I wear this out of here? Oh! And bring me those boots in a size nine narrow if you have them.”
“Wait,” Luke said. “Price?”
It looked as though the idea hadn’t occurred to her. She plucked a tag from the hem of the shirt and showed it to him.
The number shocked a laugh out of him.
“No,” he said.
Even mild confusion was lovely on her doe-like features. “No?”
“I’m not buying anything from this store. If you want something clean, we can find a thrift store.”
Horror filled her eyes. “A thrift store? Clothes that other people have owned before?” She looked as though she might faint.
“You’re wearing scrubs from the hospital.”
“My alternative was nudity.” Marion clutched the hangers to her chest. “Now I have another alternative.”
“You don’t, in fact, because I’m not buying designer clothes for you.” He checked the price tag again, and it was just as high as he’d thought. Too many digits for a single article of clothing. “Not happening. No way.”
“You’re a doctor. Aren’t doctors paid well?”
“Whatever I make is none of your business because it’s not your money. I’ve already done you a hell of a favor by driving you here, Marion. I’m not asking you to pay me back or thank me. But I also don’t owe you anything.”
Her throat worked as she swallowed hard. The way that her eyes shimmered almost made Luke want to take it back—almost.
Marion carefully set the clothes on a shelf and stepped back with visible effort. “I got excited and wasn’t thinking.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said gruffly. “You’ve had a bad week.”
She ducked back into the changing room. It took much less time for her to put the scrubs back on than it had to take them off. She emerged looking deflated. Marion turned to the clerk, but couldn’t quite meet her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said before heading out of the shop.
The woman was scared and alone without memory, and Luke had made her cry.
“Damn it,” he muttered under his breath.
* * *
Luke gave Marion a moment to compose herself before joining her on the street corner. When he approached, she lifted her head to reveal that her cheeks were already dry. “Still hungry?” he asked.
“I don’t need to eat. I won’t starve.” She pinched at her belly under the baggy shirt.
“Come on,” he said, hooking an arm around her waist. She was a little too tall to comfortably wrap an arm around her shoulders. “Let’s go to that disgusting bar you picked. I’m buying.”
“Okay,” she said in a tiny voice.
Luke probably shouldn’t have touched her like that. Not when he was an inch from brushing her skin and causing a strange magical reaction. But pinning Marion to his side meant it would be easier to remove her from danger once they were attacked, and Luke was sure they were going to be attacked.
They were still being followed. He could feel it.
It was weird that they hadn’t been approached yet. Surely the assassins wouldn’t be deterred by the public location. The bus attack had made it clear that neither witnesses nor collateral damage were an issue for the people who wanted to kill Marion.
“There it is,” Marion said.
Her prediction that the Salty Barnacle would be “disgusting” turned out to be correct. Its boarded windows were crusted with salt blown in from the ocean. The only signs of life were the neon sign and the fact its front door was propped open by a barrel. Marion stopped in front of the door, nose wrinkling.
“Pizza’s sounding good now, huh?” Luke asked.
She gathered herself. “No. Let’s try this place first.” She moved boldly into the bar. Luke followed, skimming the room for signs of danger. Unless blue-collar workers hunched over bowls of chowder were dangerous, Marion had picked well.
Her nose seemed to have taken on a permanent crinkle. “It’s so…sticky.”
“We can go somewhere else.” Like back to the relative safety of the hotel room.
“No, I like this,” she declared.
He knew for a fact that wasn’t true. Angels were fastidious. Marion in a sticky restaurant was like Luke watching someone perform surgery without washing their hands first.
He wasn’t going to argue with her, though. The smell of chowder left him hungry. Human bodies liked to eat a lot.
They took stools at the bar. “What can I get you?” asked the bartender.
“I would like a drink,” Marion said with the boldness of a queen making a decree. “Something very strong.”
The bartender lifted his eyebrows. “Would you?”
“Yes.” She did that thing where she fluffed her hair and batted her eyelashes. It was a tactic that young women had used to get drinks without showing ID for many generations. It worked, as always. The world had changed, Genesis had killed everyone, and Marion’s memory had been wiped, but it still took only a smile from the pretty girl to get liquor.
A quick sniff of Marion’s drink told Luke it was a Long Island Iced Tea. Strong indeed. He pushed it over to Marion.
“Beer for me,” he said. “Chowder too.”
The bartender blasted cheap beer into a mug and headed into the kitchen to get them food.
Marion was so tense from trying to avoid touching the bar itself, the stool, and even the floor that Luke thought she might self-destruct. When the bartender returned with bowls of chowder, soup was dripping down the sides from his lazy ladling. Her eyes got a little wider.
“Let me know when you want to go back to the hotel,” Luke said, and he dug in with gusto.
She took a long sip of her drink, as though she needed to fortify herself before she could eat. It wasn’t enough. She took a napkin and gingerly wiped the outside of the bowl clean. Then she folded the napkin and set it aside.
“Delicious,” she announced after her first taste of chowder.
Luke couldn’t help but laugh.
“I don’t appreciate being laughed at,” Marion said.
“I’m not laughing at you, exactly. You gotta admit this is a little funny.”
She admitted nothing, giving him an imperious look that was only slightly ruined by her attempt to stop smiling. “Tell me more about this thing we were discussing on the drive, this Genesis.”
“I don’t know what else to tell you,” he said. “The world ended. Everyone died. That’s basically all there is to it.”
“Don’t insult me by oversimplifying it. An event of that magnitude must have been the result of numerous complicated factors.”
“Sure,” Luke said. “Factors that are beyond the reckoning of mortal minds.”
“And everyone died because gods got into a slapfig
ht.”
“Everyone died, but most people came back, many of them changed. For instance, all of the sidhe—faeries—who exist now used to be straight up human before Genesis. But even though everyone started out as one species, they fragmented into two major types of sidhe: the ones with dark power, the unseelie, and the ones with light power, who are called seelie. And then there are hundreds of breeds of each type beyond that.”
“Have all my attackers been the evil unseelie?” Marion asked, blowing on another spoonful of chowder.
“I said dark, not evil. Like nighttime versus daytime.”
Marion set her spoon down without eating. “The fact that I’m a preternatural…”
“You’re wondering if you were changed by Genesis.”
“I must have been young if I had.” Marion studied Luke with her cheek pressed to her shoulder. “You must have been young during Genesis too. Do you remember it well?”
He didn’t remember it at all. He’d been dead for a year before it happened. “Nope.”
“I’m sure that’s for the best.”
“Yeah, probably,” he said. “Most folks aren’t over it. There are a lot of support groups thanks to the werewolf Alpha.” He focused on scraping chowder out of the bottom of his bowl. “Rylie set up social programs for people reborn as gaean species. One of those programs is publicly funded therapy.”
“This Alpha sounds very caring,” Marion said.
Luke took a long drink of his beer in lieu of an awkward pause. He swallowed it down, cleared his throat. “Anyway, that’s what’s been going on for the last fifteen years. All these people came back as shifters, vampires, whatever. It’s hard. But we’re working it out.”
“How lucky that there are doctors like you who help people,” Marion said.
His beer had mysteriously vanished. Her Long Island Iced Tea was running low, too. Luke flagged down the bartender and ordered two more drinks. “I’m just doing my part.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Dr. Flynn,” Marion said. He appreciated the way she said his name, sort of like she was teasing him. Being called Lucas Flynn had never quite sat right with him. There was cognitive dissonance even when his nurses said that. But when Marion used his name, it was sort of…cute.
“This is yours.” He gave her the second drink.
She took it with an appreciative smile. “Tell me how you got interested in doing preternatural medicine.”
“Not much of a story there,” Luke said. “I saw how many people needed help after Genesis, so I jumped in where I could.”
“You are quite the hero,” Marion said.
He was transfixed by the paleness of her eyes, the way that she stared at him.
Luke could almost ignore the fact that she looked like a woman he had known once upon a time, in a very different life. A woman whose features couldn’t cross his mind without being followed by a swell of hatred in his chest.
He took another drink, and another. He didn’t even feel buzzed. “So what’d you get out of the autobiography? Anything I didn’t tell you?”
“I’ve learned that Seth Wilder was a human man who helped run Rylie Gresham’s werewolf pack. He built their sanctuary, too. Not because he was rich—he came from rather humble beginnings, in fact. He simply invested his whole soul into the project.”
“Huh,” Luke said. “The whole sanctuary? And the pack? That’s what the book says?”
“Indeed. He sounds interesting. I can’t wait to meet him.”
He hummed noncommittally into his beer. “Anything about where we can find him?”
“Unfortunately the Alpha parted ways with Seth Wilder around Genesis, and his current whereabouts weren’t mentioned. I skipped ahead in the book, you see. I enjoy spoilers.” Her cheeks dimpled when she smiled. “Regardless, I thought I might go to the sanctuary to see if someone can refer me to him. That will happen after I visit home, of course.”
“Of course,” he echoed faintly.
Luke was spared of trying to think of something else to say by the TV behind the bartender. Someone had flipped the channel from sports to the news. A reporter named January Lazar sat behind a desk, staring intently into the camera as she spoke.
“With only days until the first summit at the United Nations, significant members of all preternatural factions are closing in on New York City,” January said. “A security risk? War waiting to happen? Or something more insidious? We turn to senior correspondent Amber Gregory on site at the United Nations for more information. Amber?”
“Don’t watch that,” Luke said. “January Lazar’s trash.”
But Marion’s eyes were fixed on the TV. They were cutting to footage of people arriving at the UN building. The ethereal delegation arrived by wing at a zeppelin dock, and their entrance was filmed from a wavering camera that suggested distant helicopters.
Even at that distance, the images of the arriving angels were blurry, but the footage was good enough to see the imposing figures they cut. They were each tall and statuesque, with wingspans that easily tripled their height. Most of them were also carrying swords that burned with fire.
Fear flitted through Marion’s pale eyes. “Those are angels?”
“They’re with the ethereal delegation, so yeah,” Luke said, scooping clam chunks out of the bottom of his bowl. “The news station is most likely using warded cameras to film them.”
“What makes you say that?”
He kept forgetting how little she knew. “Angels are near impossible to photograph. Whenever their energy flares up, they knock out everything electrical for blocks. In order to film them, an angel has to restrain their power and cameras have gotta be warded by witches.”
“You know a lot about angels,” she said.
He knew a lot about a great many things. “Folks have talked a lot about the non-human factions since Genesis. People are especially interested in angels since they’re so reclusive. They’re mysterious.”
“I’m mysterious?”
“Angels in general,” Luke said.
Marion was clearly internalizing this information. She was turning it inward and examining herself through the lens of the other angels. The way that the newscasters talked about them with fear and respect. How intimidating the ethereal faction looked. The amount of power they held.
And the swords.
He had a hard time imagining Marion with a sword. Entitled as she might have been, she struck him as being roughly as threatening as a three-legged kitten. She seemed to come to the same conclusion, since she shook her head and returned her attention to her second Long Island. “This summit the angels are attending. What is it for?”
“I’m not paying all that much attention. I only worry about preternatural medicine, not preternatural politics.”
“That’s happening on the East Coast, yes? And we are west.”
“That’s right. Most angels live in the Ethereal Levant, though. That’s not even on this continent.”
“In that case, I doubt I have anything to do with the likes of them.” She drained her second drink.
While she was still drowning her worries in liquor, the door to the bar creaked open. A man entered.
Luke’s eyes and brain registered two completely different sets of stimuli from the newcomer’s arrival. His eyes registered a narrow-shouldered human with skin the color of peaches and cream, like he’d never been in the sun before. There was a boy band look to him—untouched, polished, and vain.
That was what Luke could see.
His brain told him something else entirely. Mostly that reality was distorted by the powerful glamour magic draped over this stranger. Luke felt like someone was pushing on the backs of his eyeballs from within his skull.
This man had been following them since Ransom Falls.
“Check please,” Luke said. The bartender, annoyed, slapped their receipt on the bar and shuffled off.
Marion looked disappointed. “I’m still hungry. I’ve barely eaten.”
“Sorry,” he said. Boy Band sauntered toward a booth and sat down. “I don’t want to alarm you, but we were followed here.” She twisted to look, and he grabbed her wrist. “Don’t.”
Marion’s eyes went blank. He had touched her bare skin again.
Luke drew his hand back, but it was too late.
“Oh,” Marion breathed, lifting her hand. White light crackled around her fingertips.
Luke felt things opening inside of him when he touched her. He’d felt it at the hospital when they’d been exchanging translations using his phone. He had felt it when she’d carried Mrs. Eiderman to the other side.
And he felt it now.
At this point, Dr. Lucas Flynn knew what destiny felt like. He knew when it was rubbing against him with feline eagerness.
He drained his mug and pushed it away. “Damn.” When he settled back on the stool, he let his jacket swing open, giving him easy access to the gun.
Nobody was looking their way. It seemed impossible that nobody could have sensed such a massive shift in the world—in the damn universe—but nobody was looking.
He threw a paper napkin over Marion’s glowing fingers before dragging her toward the exit. “Don’t let anyone see,” he said. “Mages aren’t common and witches don’t cast magic like that.”
“Sorry.” She stuffed the offending hand into her pocket.
The two of them stepped outside to find an empty street under a drizzly gray sky.
And there he was.
The young, handsome assassin stood six feet in front of them, holding a sword as long as he was tall.
“I found you, Marion,” he said. “Finally.”
8
Marion barely had time to register the presence of the assassin before Luke shoved her behind him and drew his gun. The doctor fired three shots: two toward center mass, and one toward the head.
The sidhe killer moved even faster than Luke. He blurred the street around him as he erupted into starlight, becoming a form larger than human, larger than should have been able to fit within the confines of a single town.
He enfolded Marion in glittering magic that burned into her skin, simultaneously cold and hot. Her mind couldn’t seem to decide how to process the sensory information.
