by Lucy Auburn
Maybe it’s because I was born a Grim, but death tastes like little pastries.
“So, next up is... blood. Of course. Good thing I heal quickly, right?”
With a sigh, I dig around in my nightstand until I find the—you guessed it—phoenix-branded letter opener inside. Wings unfurled, feather tips nearly touching, the phoenix perched on the end of the tiny knife-like opener weighs it down on one end. But it’s sharp enough to slash open a line across the meat of my palm, and I dip my fingertip into the blood that wells up.
One by one, I go to each of them and mark them on the palm. Lynx’s warm hand and warmer eyes, that look at everything with a curiosity I’ll miss. The strange touch of Sebastian’s cool hand, which take the pain of the cut away even as he looks at me with something between sorrow, pain, and anger.
Mateo thrusts his hand out towards me and waggles his eyebrows. “Keep dreaming of me, Dani.”
I snort. “I’ll try not to.”
After I smear the blood across his palm he folds his fingers around the mark, as if he wants to cradle it and keep it safe.
Last is Ezra. I approach him slowly, a heaviness in my heart. He holds out his hand palm-side up in a perfunctory manner, his expression revealing nothing at all, as if he hasn’t a single emotion about saying goodbye. As I mark his palm with my blood, a shiver goes through me, an undeniable connection of two souls—but if Ezra feels it too, he doesn’t let me see that on his face, which is shuttered closed completely.
The only thing left is to tell them to scram, just like Meyer did to that siren demon the other night. It seems too simple as a way to end something that feels so momentous.
Shouldn’t severing your soul from four murderous demons be harder than this?
I take in a deep, steadying breath to prepare myself.
“Wait.” Sebastian stops me before I can say the word, and I’m grateful for it, for one last delay of the inevitable. “There’s one last thing.”
As Sebastian walks around the bed towards me, blue eyes intense and wild, Ezra speaks up. “Sebastian, don’t—”
“You’re not in charge of this.”
There’s a challenge in his eyes. The thing that’s been simmering between them all day is bursting to the surface, bubbling up and pouring over.
Sebastian looks at me with those blazing blue eyes, and I swear I shiver harder than I have when his incorporeal form passes through me.
Then before I know it he’s right in front of me, a gentle unmarked hand resting on my shoulder, face dipped down towards mine. I feel what’s coming, and my scarred phoenix heart beats twice as fast in anticipation. Every demonic gaze in the room—wild Sebastian, curious Lynx, smirking Mateo, disapproving Ezra—is stuck on us. I can feel how close we are to making this thing simmering beneath the surface something real instead of dreamed up.
I could step back and end it here and now, say goodbye without letting this happen.
But I’m reckless and wild, reborn from the dead twice over, and I don’t want to walk away from this.
A moment. A breath. So little separates us. Those wild blue eyes stare right through me.
Then he closes the distance all at once, hand rising to grab the back of my neck, mouth pressing up against mine hungrily. I bend my neck up and stretch on my toes to meet him, grabbing onto the front of his shirt. He’s real, warm and solid beneath me. His lips move on mine as he devours me, tasting of bitterness and salt.
Pleasure crashes into me and rises impossibly high. I can’t even tell if it’s his body on mine or his powers coursing through me that makes the heat inside me blossom.
“Enough.” Ezra is there, voice rough and low. “We don’t have time for this. None of us do—that was the agreement.”
Sebastian growls but tears himself off me. As we break away his teeth nip my lower lip, and I feel a flash of rough desire—but no pain, never any pain where Sebastian is involved. His eyelashes flutter as those blue eyes open again, his bloodied palm cupping my left hand, where the cut I made is already healing over.
Roughly, I murmur, “See you around?”
“Not after this,” he points out, sounding bitter and enraged. His mouth twists. “You heard what that nerd said about the spell.”
Lynx softly objects. “Hey.”
“I’ll find a way.” It’s a promise I make to all of them, even though I’m looking up into Sebastian’s eyes. “I’ll defy the damn words in the book. We’ll see each other again at some point. Maybe at graduation, if I survive that long.”
Mateo scoffs. “You? You’ll be queen of this place by the end of the year. Just don’t burn too much of it to the ground. That’s my job.”
I smile at him, heart twisting even as I feel a certain kind of peace. “I’m sure we’ll see each other again. I know it.”
And I do, somehow.
That’s enough. It has to be. I can say goodbye if I just convince myself it’s not forever. There are ways around every rule, and there has to be a way back to them after this, if only because it’s not fair that our bond will kill me.
Taking a deep breath, I step back, so that I can see them all. Ezra is looking at me, his expression tired but resolute. I wonder what he meant when he said there was an “agreement,” if somehow he got them all to decide they should avoid getting close to me like Sebastian just did.
The kiss was worth it.
I guess it’ll be our only one.
Before I can get too upset, or even start crying like a big fucking idiot, I say the words I’ve been dreading all day.
“Begone, and return to your home.”
Chapter 9
Nothing happens.
What the fuck?
Blinking, I double check that I got the words right.
“Begone.” I stare at Ezra, eyes narrowing like glaring at him will make it work. “Be...gone?”
“Dani, you have to mean it,” he says, like I ever could. “Don’t say it like it’s a question. Say it like it’s a normal statement, a part of your everyday life.”
“I don’t exactly say the word ‘begone’ on a regular fucking basis.”
“Try.”
Fine, okay. I can do this. Stretching this out even further is just more torture. Taking a deep breath, I find my eyes wandering—and I settle on Lynx’s face, staid and stolid, kind and always patient. He’s not looking at me in annoyance like Ezra, or making my heart twist like Sebastian; he also isn’t fidgeting childishly like Mateo.
Look at Lynx. Say it like you mean it. It’s just the word ‘begone,’ after all. That’s something I can imagine Lynx actually saying in casual conversation, so I’ll just imagine that I’m talking to him.
“Begone, and return to your home.”
There’s a stirring in the air. The faded teal tips of my hair brush against my cheek as an inexplicable breeze starts. I yelp and clasp my hand as the place where I sliced my skin heats up suddenly with power.
Each of the four demons holds out their blood-marked palm, and a sudden burst of yellow-gold energy shoots up out of their skin to envelop them completely.
I blink at the bright light, and take a step back, eyes devouring every last inch of them. I want to remember this moment, the last one I’ll get with them, forever.
The energy spreads throughout the room, dissipating in a gentle glow. My hand returns to normal, the white line an already-fading scar. I bite my lower lip to hold back the childish tears—a street rat like me should know better than to get attached, especially to four psychos like these.
But then.
As the glow fades away completely...
They’re still here.
“Huh.” Mateo looks around my dorm room with his eyebrows raised. “Little Hell has changed since our last visit.”
Ezra stares at his palm like he thinks his green eyes might bore a hole through it if he tries hard enough. “Clearly we delayed too long between getting our palms marked and Dani saying the words out loud. We’ll have to do it again.” He cuts
his eyes over to Sebastian. “No funny business this time.”
Sebastian scoffs. “What are you, the dad on Leave it to Beaver? No one says ‘funny business.’”
“Yeah Ezra,” Mateo echoes, “call it tonsil hockey like everyone does.”
I start to snicker only to get one of Ezra’s patented green-eyed glare, and quickly swallow the laugh, turning it into an awkward snort-cough-gasp.
Lynx, who’s been ignoring the general bickering, shoves his finger at a passage in the open spell book. “Ah-ha! It says this spell works best on Grims who have purposefully created a soul bond with demons. But Dani is a Black Phoenix who unintentionally created a soul bond with demons. And... well, it also says here that severing such a bond requires great mastery of your powers.” He looks over at me and shrugs. “You’ve only had one Grim Training class, so I’m going to guess you’re not there yet.”
I blink at him, my world spinning slightly. “So are you saying I can’t send you guys back to your home?”
“I don’t know?”
“Only one person can answer that question,” Ezra points out. “But I don’t want to meet him on this plane in case he tries to enslave us. Dani, ask Meyer if he can help you.”
It’s irritating to have Ezra boss me around, but I know better than to try to argue. He’s just frustrated—and if the dark circles under his eyes are any indication, stressed out and tired, too. The easiest thing is to just go along with what he’s saying.
But before I can close my eyes and dismiss them, Sebastian reaches out and snags my elbow, pulling me towards him. “You know, if we’re sticking around a while longer, I can think of a few fun things I’d like to do.”
I open my mouth to reply, only for Lynx to speak up, the book in his hands, open to another page.
“Meyer wasn’t lying about what he said to Dani.” He looks up from the page he’s reading, sorrow and regret in his eyes. “Our bond will drain her powers and eventually kill her if we’re not careful. The closer we get to her, the worse it will become. And the only protection against it is to sever the bond completely. Everything else is a half measure.”
I swallow tightly, and Sebastian takes a step away from me, alarm crossing his face. “Even I can’t take away that kind of pain. I wish you didn’t know everything, Lynx.”
“I’d rather not know it, either.”
It’s time to say goodbye.
I can’t stand looking at them as I dismiss them, so I close my eyes to do it, releasing all the anxiety and tension in my chest and imagining them fading away. It’s gotten easier to do over time, which should maybe worry me if the strength of our bond is going to doom me to an actual death.
A few seconds pass before they fade away, though, which gives Ezra time to say something that squeezes my heart in a tight, hot fist.
“We’ll do whatever it takes to protect you. Including saying goodbye.”
As I open my eyes to the empty room, I know that I should fetch Meyer right away and get to the bottom of this. But instead I find myself sinking down to my crumb-covered bed, shoving The Arcane Arts of the Living and the Dead to the ground, toeing it under my bed, and letting a few miserable street rat tears roll down my face.
Stupid demons, making me feel things.
“This isn’t something I foresaw,” Meyer admits, as his eyes skim the same page Lynx found. “I’ve never met a Grim who accidentally summoned a whole quartet of higher demons. Your subconscious instinct to protect yourself must be very strong.”
“Well, someone else got the spell started,” I admit. “I was drugged at the time, but I guess some part of me must’ve still been awake to hear him cast it. Like a coma patient or something.”
“Can you get in touch with the original spellcaster?”
I shake my head. “He’s super dead now.”
Poor Dickless Dicky. He was just trying to cut my entrails from my still-living body so he could enslave some badass demons to his will and do terrible things to many people all at once instead of a few people at a time. How was he to know he’d get his dick severed for it? He probably thought it’d be just another Sunday.
“That’s too bad,” Meyer murmurs. “Speaking to the person who cast the spell, even if they weren’t able to finish it, would be helpful.”
I decide not to tell him the whole genital-ripping part of the story. Not that I think he’d blanch—he’s from a clan of Grims who rip hearts out of phoenix chests, after all—but I have no idea how he’d react to the knowledge that the demons I summoned turned out to be the super murderous kind.
“So is there anything else we can do?” I ask him. “I mean, you said that the soul bond will drain my powers, so... I’d rather not die. Again. At least, not permanently. The last two times weren’t exactly the most fun, if I do say so myself.”
He chuckles a little, leaning over his wide mahogany desk. “Let me look through my drawers, I think I have something in here.”
As he rummages around I find myself studying our surroundings. I discovered him in his office, next door to Yohan’s. Unlike the Phoenix Fire teacher, Meyer has very little on his shelves or any of the surfaces. In fact, either he came here in a hurry—which seems quite possible, given how the headmaster hired him—or he just doesn’t own any crap at all, which would be weird.
Even when I was living on the street I had stuff. Most of it stolen, useless, and hidden in several different places, but stuff nonetheless. It lives mostly in the upper shelves of my wardrobe now, along with the quickly depreciating ten thousand dollars in cash I haven’t had time to deal with between getting attacked and nearly (once, actually) killed.
“Ah.” Meyer notices the way my eyes are traveling around the empty room. “I don’t really bring a lot of belongings with me when I travel.”
“Not even books?”
“Just this one.” He pulls a slim black leather bound journal out of his desk and places it in front of him. “The academy has an extensive collection, so I didn’t find it necessary to bring most of my things. Not to mention... well, I don’t think the crowd here would appreciate some of the texts Grims like me study. It seemed unwise to rile them up.”
I approach the desk and stare down at the dark leather, which is worn at the edges and stamped with some kind of patterned relief. There’s no title on the front of the journal, just a slim black ribbon marking a page in the middle. “Is that a... diary?”
“Yes. It’s a fascinating old book.” Meyer flips the book open delicately to a place in the middle. Scrawled handwriting covers the lines to the edges of each margin, dotted through with the occasional drawing or diagram. “It belonged to a man named Wilhelm Gunter who lived centuries ago. He was one of the first Grim to truly expand the limits of our power—and he founded a clan in his name that exists today.”
I try to skim the words, but they’re in a language I don’t recognize. “Is that German?”
“Close. It’s Dutch. Although much of his early work was translated to German and later English, this is the original. It’s nearly three centuries old.”
I stare at him. “And it’s not in a vault somewhere?”
Meyer shakes his head. “There’s no need. Preservation spells and care have kept it intact for years. My uncle passed it down to me before he died, and now I keep it from falling into disuse.”
“Oh.” I blink at the book, marveling at how old it is—and how incomprehensible the words inside are. I doubt I’d understand them even if I could read Dutch, based on the sloppy handwriting and weird diagrams. “Do you think there’s something in there that could help me?”
“Maybe. I’ll have to do some studying, and that’ll take some time. Until then, though, you’ll need a talisman to ward off the worst effects of the soul bond.” He rummages through his desk again, which is somehow inexplicably messy and nearly empty at the same time. “It’s a stopgap measure, but it’ll help. Ah, here it is.”
I stare at him as he pulls a chicken foot out of his desk drawer and pla
ces it on the mahogany surface. “You can’t be serious.”
“Hold on. I have to imbue it with certain powers. There’s a spell.”
Oh, great. A magical chicken’s foot. Just what a girl like me always dreamed of.
In the VHS tapes of made-for-TV movies we watched at the group home, magic was something sparkly and feminine, light and happy. It wasn’t black death powder, blood smeared on skin, and a fucking chicken’s foot.
Real life magic is turning out to be a lot dumber than I was promised as a kid.
Forming the thumb and index finger of both his hands into a triangle, Meyer mutters something unintelligible as he hovers his hands above the chicken foot. The toes of it start to curl inward like it’s still alive, shriveling into an oval shape and tightening.
Then he grabs a bit of black powder from a bag at his hip and drops it over the wrinkled old thing. “Alavanis!”
I blink as the chicken foot turns black, hard, and shiny, like a gem. A silver backing curls up beneath it and grabs onto it, forming a setting with a silver loop at the top. Meyer pulls a length of thin leather out of his desk drawer—so much seemingly useless stuff in that desk—and then threads it through the loop of the setting, effectively making a necklace.
One that he holds out to me. “There. Put this around your neck and the effects of the soul bond will be diminished, giving us time to train up your Grim powers and hopefully sever the bond for good.”
You’ve got to be kidding me.
I blink at him, wincing as I reach out to grab the necklace cord—no way am I touching the chicken foot gem. “Do I really have to wear this? You made it out of a—”
“Chicken foot? They’re useful things. The claws hold death energy in them long after the chicken’s death. And they’re cheap, what with factory farming being so common.” He shrugs, like the thought of wearing a chicken foot necklace isn’t disturbing at all. “The alchemy of the spell turns it into an opal-like substance. If it helps, just think of it as any piece of costume jewelry.”
“It still has four little claws at the end of its toes, all bunched together.” I find my mouth drawing back in distaste. “I mean, did it have to be a chicken foot?”
