by Lucy Auburn
Hot nerds were the absolute worst kind of catnip.
15
Naomi
“We didn’t know what to do with the body.” The field agent who approached me was a sanitation fae who worked for the coroner’s office. Her pale face and white-blonde hair looked innocuous enough, but she spent most of her day wrist-deep in cadavers. “We know there are certain burial procedures for dark hunters after death, and when the detective called he made it clear it wasn’t a homicide investigation, so we just wanted to get the all-clear before moving it.”
The way she said “the body” and “it” felt so divorced from the way I thought of him: as Crane Novak, one of my mother’s close friends from training, a man I could depend on in the field. Now he was just an “it” that someone from the coroner’s office wanted to talk to me about.
My sister could’ve wound up becoming a body, too.
I tried not to dwell on that thought. Iva was whole and healthy, if unconscious, back in the Collective being cared for by one of the best (if most talkative) doctors I knew. She would wake up soon. She had to.
The sanitation fae led me to the back of the mausoleum. A line of tape marked off the bloodiest area. The body was pale and lifeless, barely recognizable as the man that I knew.
I thought about my sister for so long that it took me a moment to realize something was off. “That’s not how he died.” Circling the tape, I knelt near Crane’s head and stared first at him, then to the closed gate, then back again. “I saw him slice an artery in his neck wide open. He did it with his left hand, like this.” I showed the coroner and his fae assistant. “He died on his stomach, not his back.”
“We didn’t move the body,” the coroner said. He was one of few humans who worked for both the fae and the local government; I didn’t know him well, but I trusted him professionally. “We were on the scene at approximately 14:15. If anything happened to the body, it must’ve happened in between you lot clearing the scene and us arriving.”
I frowned; it was true that we’d left the mausoleum and the graveyard around it temporarily unguarded. In the rush to get the demigod put away, Selena brought to safety, and Iva healed of her wounds, the thought of guarding a closed door and a dead body hadn’t occurred to anyone. But now I wondered if we’d made a mistake.
Staring at the now-innocuous door Crane gave his life to seal, I wondered if it was at all possible that something else could’ve come through while we weren’t paying attention.
If so, I highly doubted it was a bunny rabbit.
“I’ll prepare his body,” I said, knowing it was my duty. “When I’m done, I’ll let you know. And if anything moved his body, I’ll be sure to stab it.”
They left me alone with Crane’s lifeless form, giving over to tradition. I was glad for the peace and quiet, even if it was for dark, uncomfortable reasons.
My people knew death well. We hunted in darkness and often greeted our ends before we were old. Crane was in his fifties when he died, and still spry for his age; it was a great loss to no longer have such an experienced hunter among us. He would be sorely missed.
More than that, I owed so much to him. He gave his life to save us, and if he hadn’t I might very well have lost Iva to her own sense of heroic duty. Pushing past the crime scene tape, I crouched in front of his body and put my fingertips on my forehead.
“Those that are lost,” I moved my hand down to my heart, “are never truly lost. All that is passed over,” I placed a fingertip on my lips, “is born again. May the next generation have your strength and knowledge. May you know peace in your journey to rebirth. May Hades curse your name, and His will be thwarted.”
Reaching out, I touched Crane’s forehead, heart, and lips in the same order as I’d touched my own. Then I reached into myself, finding the sleeping danger senses, and tugged on them until they woke. Using the small amount of willful magic each dark hunter was born with, I drew a line down the middle of Crane’s body from the top of his head to the center of his stomach. A glowing trail of magic was left behind where my finger touched him. The dark hunter gift I gave to him would keep his soul safe from the soul eaters and demons alike as he wandered the veil between realms, waiting for a moment when his soul could be reborn in a new body.
Briefly, I prayed that somewhere in one of the cities my people were hunting in, someone was finding the time to make the next generation. There were so few of us left these days, as hunting became less and less appealing. Crane’s spirit would need a new body to pass down the senses he’d honed in his lifetime, or he would be dragged into the Underworld, forced into an afterlife of misery at Hades’ right hand.
I tried not to think too often about the God who gave my people our skills, and then abandoned us to the darkness with only the fire in our hearts to keep us warm. Sometimes I thought that it was only legend that told us we were created by the God of the Underworld; other times, I felt the truth of it twisting in my gut. I knew his other names: Osiris, Yama, Mictlantecuhtli, Batara Kala, Susanoo, Mot, Supay; at times he was a woman, named Hel or Ereshkigal. He was the Black God, worshiped and feared by the ancients we came from. Whatever his true name was, he cursed his children to walk the Earth and destroy the evil he let loose upon it, as penance for his many sins.
I didn’t appreciate being used like a tool. But if his curse gave me the strength to kill demons and sense danger, then I couldn’t turn my back on him fully. At least not when it came to death.
The light I drew across Crane’s body faded in a few moments. With it, his body was cleansed, and I hoped that his spirit would not wander for long. Sighing, I pushed back to my feet and walked towards the mausoleum entrance. “I’m done.”
“Cool.” The coroner and his assistant were sitting at the edge of their open van, casually eating sandwiches next to unused body bags. “We’ll have to take him to the precinct for processing, since he has a human identity. But it shouldn’t take long to get him released into the Collective.”
I gave them both a short nod, wandering through the graveyard until I found a relatively quiet spot. Gathering all of my remaining strength, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed my mother’s number. It was evening where she was, but I hoped that she might be done hunting the streets of London for her own hell gate.
Or maybe I would get her voicemail, which might be better for both of us.
No such luck. She picked up on the first ring. “My darling Naomi. How goes it?”
I chewed my lower lip; she sounded like she was in a good mood, which was about to change. “Mom.” I cleared my throat. “Everything is okay. I just want to say that upfront. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Spill it.” Her voice lost all amusement. “Did I make a mistake leaving Iva with you? Has she gotten into trouble?”
I inhaled sharply; this was getting off to a poor start. “She’s okay, but she was injured pretty bad in the field. The Anyana half-fae ambassador healed her—she’s fine now.”
“What happened?”
“The hell gate opened.” This news was greeted by silence, but I could almost hear the gears in my mother’s head turning. “Crane is dead. He gave his life spilling his blood to close it, and keep us safe from whatever lurked on the other side.”
“And your sister provided her own blood sacrifice,” my mother inferred. “Why didn’t you stop her, Naomi?”
Here it was: the fault lied with me, as always. “I tried, Mom. But I didn’t move fast enough. I’m sorry.”
For a moment I waited, expecting to get a dressing down. But instead my mother sighed, the sound surprisingly sad. “I always knew this day would come.”
There was something unfamiliar in her voice; not just resignation, but almost... fulfillment. “Mom, how did you know? You sound like... you sound almost like you’ve always known.”
“Your sister has a self-sacrificing, heroic streak,” she said, but I heard the lie as she said it. “It was inevitable that she would get in trouble like this one day. S
he’s lucky the ambassador was there to save her; Anyanas don’t grow on trees.”
I refused to laugh at her terrible joke, my mind fixated on the lie I heard in her voice. “You didn’t just think that Iva would do something like this. You knew, Mom. Tell me how. I can’t watch over her properly with half the knowledge.”
Those gears were turning again, but when she spoke I heard the acknowledgement of what I’d said in her voice. “I’ll right, I’ll tell you. But you’re not going to like it.”
“I never said I would.”
I could almost see her eyes narrow through the phone. “Very well then. It concerns the prophecies, mostly, but also the soul reading I had done on your sister after she was born.”
The prophecies I knew by heart; all dark hunters did, even if they were mostly superstitious nonsense that had been translated too many times to make sense. The soul reading was new. “What about her soul reading? As far as I know they don’t ever really reveal anything worth knowing.”
“Your sister’s did.” A breeze caressed my cheek as she told me the next part, fingers of wind trailing through my hair. “Most soul readings are about as useful as tea leaves in the bottom of the cup, or tarot cards. I don’t put much stock in them; dark hunter spirits split and change when they find new bodies, so about all you learn is that a tiny part of you may or may not be someone’s dead uncle who killed a hundred demons in his life. Iva’s was different. Her soul was pure, and unexpected.”
“How so?”
“It’s not good.” She sighed. “Hold on, let me walk out onto the balcony. Paul is asleep.”
Paul was her live-in boyfriend, who was okay as far as boyfriends went. The extra time was too much; it let my mind go wild with possibilities. My heart raced, and I had to move around, putting extra energy into walking through the graveyard. The sanitation fae had yet to clean it up, so there were still pieces of soul eaters on the ground, and I found myself kneeling to pull dirty knives from them so I could clean the blades for later.
“Okay.” My mother was out on the balcony now; I could tell from the light static of a breeze coming through my phone’s speaker. “The soul reader said that your sister’s soul was an ancient one that should’ve passed on to the Black God long ago.” Anna Shostakovich used the old name for Hades, as always. “Iva’s soul is an exact carbon copy of the soul of Sophia Sobol.”
I inhaled sharply, staring out into the sky stretching out at the horizon. “Sophia Sobol,” I deadpanned, “the dark hunter who led the sacrifice that closed the hell gates on the last Godspring.”
“I told you it wasn’t good,” my mother said, her voice heavy. “I know you don’t like being kept in the dark, Naomi, but I spared you the knowledge because I foolishly thought that keeping it a secret would prevent it from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
I had to hold in a darkly inappropriate laugh; of course my sister was the reborn soul of the first dark hunter to open her veins and sacrifice her life to prevent Hell on Earth. And of course my mother kept that information from me, deciding as always that her will was best for us. Biting back as much of my anger as possible, I demanded, “And you didn’t think it was a coincidence that she was born shortly before the next prophesied Godspring?”
“I try not to put much stock in those prophecies,” my mother said, which was true but sounded like an excuse. “These things have always been fuzzy. Who’s to say that the Godspring will happen soon? Maybe the star charts are wrong.”
“The seers say, Mom.” I was reminded of the words Shuri spoke in Petyr’s office, and had to walk off more spare nervous energy. “We just had to close a hell gate that was trying to open here. And there are demon possessions all over the globe—you know that, it’s why you’re in London right now. You should’ve told me this sooner.”
I was surprised when my mom said, “You’re right. I should’ve told you, Naomi. And for that I’m sorry.”
Something about the sadness in her voice took the wind out of my sails. “I get why you kept it from me.” Staring into the trees, I ruefully observed, “If I’d known sooner, I would’ve wrapped Iva in a cocoon of blankets and never even taught her how to hold a knife, much less let her go out into the field. The only reason she was here today was because this was supposed to be a reconnaissance mission—we even went in the middle of the day, when the sun is up.”
“Evil walks beneath daylight when it’s called to,” my mother reminded me, as always. There was a moment, and then in an uncharacteristically soft voice she added, “There’s one more thing I have to tell you.”
I bit down on a groan. “What? Don’t tell me the hell gate opened up there, too.”
“No, it’s all quiet here—or at least, we’re only dealing with the same increase in possessions as the rest of you. It’s about your soul reading.” I blinked in surprise; I’d never even heard anything about my soul reading growing up, and had always believed I was just like all the others, a mix of spirit material from dark hunters who’d come before, born in a mostly human fae-touched body.
“What about it?”
“Your soul is new, Naomi,” she said, her matter-of-fact voice shattering any illusions I had of being normal. “You’ve never been born before—not like all the other dark hunters. I swore the soul reader to silence, and she kept the secret. You know what it means, don’t you?”
I told myself I didn’t. “I don’t want to know.”
“Well, too bad.” She answered her question for me anyway. “The Black God made you himself. Which means he has plans for you.”
Selena
Elah visited me not long after Tae Min and I had shared our passionate kiss, and seeing his face brought up a stir of emotions again. The doctor glanced at him then back at me, and made up some excuse as to why he had to be in the other room.
“I visited earlier, but you were asleep,” Elah said, taking a chair near my bed. “Plus I had to wash the dirt of battle off of me.”
I saw what he was talking about. His armor had been replaced by his regular clothes, the amulet that the armor lived in strung around his neck. The black of his gleaming hair was stuck to the top of his head, half dry at best. And he’d scrubbed his skin until it looked raw.
My eyes fell to his right forearm, which had been wrapped in a bandage. “What happened there?”
“At times, my flames burn too hot,” he explained, reaching out to play with the edge of the bandage. “I haven’t burned myself in years, but I suppose in the heat of battle I grew hasty. It’s unlike me.”
“Oh.” I glanced down at my lap, feeling vulnerable under the heavy gaze of his caring eyes. “I’m sorry about all that. It was probably my fault you got hurt.”
“I’d do it all over again a thousand times.” There was real passion in his voice, and the sound of it drew my eyes up to his classically handsome face. I found myself staring at his lips more than once as he spoke. “The way we said goodbye wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t even really a goodbye in the first place.” Reaching out, he took my right hand between his palms and loosely held it in his warm grasp. “I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to say to you ever since you disappeared. And I don’t accept.”
“What?” My brows knit together, confused.
“The breaking of our engagement.” There was fierceness in his eyes as he looked down at me, and my cheeks grew hot. “I’ve just barely begun to know you, Selena. I’d like to continue courting you.”
“You don’t even know what happened while I was gone.” I drew my hand out of his grasp, feeling sick despite myself. I wanted this, wanted him, and I knew I should be ashamed of it. “The things I’ve done, Elah... you wouldn’t want me if you knew.”
“How do you know that?” A gentle finger pressed at the bottom of my chin, forcing my gaze up to his. “No matter what it is, Selena, at least let me decide for myself if I’m in or if I’m out. Don’t push me away before I even get the chance to know you.”
I wanted to believe, more t
han anything, that someone as good and brave as Elah Havaala could care for me—fall in love with me, even. Just like I wanted to feel worthy of Leon’s passion, and good enough for Tae Min’s gentle care. But it was all so much, so quickly.
Before I’d even said anything, Elah nodded and drew back. “I can see that it’ll take some time.” His voice was gentle, a delicate hope in his tone that I didn’t want to destroy. “I want you, Selena, and I’ll wait until you realize that you can trust in me. I won’t wait forever—but I’ll wait.”
Biting my lower lip, I struggled with the things I was holding inside, desperate to spill them all and see acceptance on his face. I hadn’t even begun to decide if I would say anything or not when she walked into the room, fierce and strong as ever.
Maggie. “Sir Havaala,” she said, lips twitching at the two of us. “Could you give me some time alone with my daughter?”
“Of course.”
Before he left, Elah leaned forward and tenderly kissed my forehead. I closed my eyes at his touch, even as I wrestled with how I felt. Darkness danced on the other side of my closed eyelids, and I saw my mother’s face.
Then he drew away, leaving me alone with the woman I dreaded facing more than anyone. I had no excuse for what I’d done to her; when I drained Maggie and bent her to my will, I did it out of selfishness. Unlike the things I’d done in the Underworld, I couldn’t justify that I’d been forced. What I’d done to her had nothing to do with survival.
I watched her as she came to sit in the chair Elah had been in only moments before, studying her face. I didn’t realize until she leaned in close to tuck the edges of my blanket in that I’d been looking for signs of suffering, as if I expected to see scars on her skin from what I’d done to her. But there was no physical sign of it—just the shadow in her eyes staring down at me, and the stain on my heart.
