by Lucy Auburn
My teeth set on edge.
“Oh, that one too—Dani. Dani, look at me. You’re not seriously telling me that you won’t check out any books. You have an ID now! Use it for learning!”
A piece of teal-tipped hair wafts towards my mouth, and I blow it away, rolling my eyes in Lynx’s direction.
“So you’re ignoring me now? How mature.” He pouts. “I just want to read anything new. I haven’t gotten to in ages. You have no idea how boring it is to be stuck in that nowhere place you send us to, with nothing to do and only Mateo’s endless bullshit for entertainment.”
That stops me up short before I reach the double doors. With a sigh, I turn towards the shelves and Lynx perks up.
“Are you getting me a book?”
“Which to check out,” I mutter as if to myself, aware of the nearness of the study nook and all the people who will hear me talking to Lynx. “Which book, which book... just the one book, no more...”
“Aw, just one? Fine, I guess I’ll have to make it count. Something good... but unfamiliar. I wonder what they have in the fiction section here... or no, a biography! Maybe there’s one of some of the more prominent leaders during the Phoenix Wars...”
I follow him as he peruses the shelves, looking for all the world like a boy with his nose pressed up against the glass of a candy store. It’s endearing, if a bit annoying, because he can’t seem to make up his mind.
Finally he settles on the book he wants. “Ah-ha! The Bayou Bend Werewolf Mysteries by Gardenia Plumb. A bit of fiction inspired by real life events—not that most humans realize that, which is why they’re so much more popular among the paranormal. Get me the first two?”
Sighing, I grab them off the shelf, and he beams—then smiles salaciously. “As thanks, I can take my shirt off again.”
Heat climbs up my cheeks. “Not in here,” I hiss at him.
“Why not? Only you will see me.”
Rolling my eyes, I ignore him and take the books to the front counter, where I check them out with the help of a guide on the screen behind the scanner. Feeling eyes on me, I’m not at all shocked to glance over and spot the head librarian watching me with her unnerving wide eyes.
I’ll bring back that book right away.
It’s that, or fear that she’s something even bigger and scarier than an owl. For all I know the fine for overdue books is a combat test.
Books in hand, I head out the double doors. As soon as I’m clear I mutter to Lynx, “You’re welcome.”
When he doesn’t answer, I turn to make sure he’s following me—and meet his panicked eyes. Stiff as a board, he’s standing frozen in the open doorway, struggling against invisible forces.
He mouths something at me that stops my phoenix heart cold: I can’t breathe.
Chapter 14
What the fuck do I do? Who the fuck can even help me? Clearly the wards have done something to trap Lynx right where he is, but I don’t know how to undo it.
Shit shit shit shit shit.
He’s mouthing something at me again. Someone. Somewhere. Summon. Summon? Deliberately, even as he starts to strain from not breathing, he closes his eyes and opens them again.
Oh. Right. Maybe if I dismiss him he’ll go to the nowhere place and be okay again.
Closing my eyes, I try to let everything inside me go just like Yohan taught me, but my heart is beating a mile a minute. When I peer through my eyelashes to see if Lynx is gone he’s staring at me frantically.
I take a deep breath in, and let it out slowly, trying to relax. Jaw clenched, I close my eyes—peace, silence, serenity, be a calm-ass bitch—but when I open them again Lynx looks even worse off and more miserable than before, still stuck in the wards.
“I don’t know what to do!”
“Get lost?” Liam calls out as he, absurdly enough, pushes open the double doors and walks straight through a weakening Lynx. “Your room is just down the hall, you know.”
“I’m uh—I’m good! Just stressed about... studying.”
While I’m trying to come up with an excuse to get rid of Liam, I realize he’s provided just the distraction to help me by walking in front of Lynx so I don’t have to see him as I try to calm down. Closing my eyes, I let out all my worries and fears, breathing deep.
“You okay?”
I open my eyes and shoot Lynx a hurried smile. “Fine.” Peering around him, I check the library doors—and sigh with relief to see that Lynx is fine. “I should get back to my room though.”
“Not headed down to dinner? Usually this is Dani Feeding Time.”
As if it understands him completely, my stomach grumbles. “I’ll be down in a bit.”
“See you then.”
I ignore the smile he flashes me, and the brief brush of his hand against my shoulder as he walks past. Lynx is probably right—Liam is clearly flirting with me—but it’s basically at the bottom of my list of worries.
Hurrying through the hallway towards my room, heart in my throat, I grasp tightly to the two books. I didn’t even get a chance to give them to him. I don’t even know if he’s okay. He might still be suffocating in that nowhere place, stuck in the spell wards on the library because I accidentally summoned him inside.
I’m not the only one in danger because of our bond.
Clearly I’m a threat to them too.
I have to hope that Meyer is going to somehow figure out a way to fix all of this before it gets fucked up completely.
Sighing, I throw myself down on my bed, kicking the sheets around, pleated skirt hiked up to my hips. Laying Lynx’s two books on my chest, I try not to worry too much about him. He’s a demon, after all; they should be tough to kill. At least that’s what the combat instructors seem to think.
But I’m still worried.
I can’t seem to relax.
“That’s a nice pair of underwear you’ve got on.” I abruptly clamp my thighs together and sit up, staring straight into the face of the Patron Saint of Blowing Shit Up himself. Mateo grins at me rakishly. “Did you summon me here to officially deflower you? Because I gotta say, the Cockblocker in Chief won’t approve.”
I ignore him. “Is Lynx okay?”
“Yeah.” He sobers up a little, those his eyes are still wandering up and down my body. “Y’gotta be careful with that power of yours, Dani. This place is riddled with traps for demons. Mostly the gates and the restricted rooms, but still... once in, we can’t get out.”
My mind races. “So even though you’re incorporeal...”
“We can’t follow you everywhere. Especially now that this Grim teacher of yours has laid down new traps.” He flips his middle finger up and holds it high in the air, like he thinks Meyer is God and he’s aiming sacrilegiously in his direction. “The fucker.”
“What if I leave campus again? Like if I ran away. Not that I’m planning on it.”
Mateo shrugs. “You’d have to dismiss us and re-summon us, I’m pretty sure. Bummer, right? And to think, I used to be a free agent with a badass motorcycle.”
I roll my eyes. “What, do you want the money to replace it?”
“That’d be nice, yeah.” He grins at me. “Or we could barter.”
“You are so much worse without the others around to keep you in check.”
His chuckle is darkly amused. “Can’t say I appreciate you saving me for last. But it wasn’t sex I was thinking about—that’s for you when you’re dreaming in bed... or touching yourself.” Leaning towards me, he gets so close that I shiver in anticipation of his ghostly touch. “I was thinking of something else.”
“Oh?” I don’t appreciate how high-pitched and mouse-like my voice comes out. “Spit it out, then.”
“I want your fire.”
He pulls something out of a leather pouch at his belt and holds it out to me. This close, I’m taken in by the twisting movements of the swirling tattoos around his arms, and I don’t look at the object right away. His muscles ripple beneath the black tattoos and brown skin of his arms, p
romising wicked things that would happen if I ever suggest the guys break their agreement and act on what I’ve only ever imagined.
Mateo is nearly as hot as he is crazy. Fuck, probably even more so. On the crazy/hot chart his dot would be an outlier in both directions.
I blink as I stare at the thing in his palm. It’s a tiny ballerina figurine with a wick, and it takes me a moment to realize what it is.
“A... candle?”
“A bomb.” He looks affronted. “What am I, a Bath & Body Works? Don’t answer that. The only thing wax is good for is wax bombs, and the only thing wax bombs are good for is taking off hillbilly eyebrows.”
I’m lost. “Cool.”
“This is a timed device.” Pressing his thumbnail against a nearly-invisible seam in the ballerina’s side, he reveals a mechanism with thin, crisscrossing wires, the purpose of which escape me. “When we’re stuck in that nowhere place there’s nothing to do, and I’m shit at sitting still. So I repurposed some of my stuff and this figurine Ezra got stuck with from that chick he stabbed in the gut.”
“Got stuck with?”
“We all take little things from the big scenes,” he explains. “Normally after the bodies are cool, but since you distracted us and we went all ghost-like, the only thing Ezra was able to get was this little ballerina. He took it when she was hitting on him. Guess she carried it around as a good luck charm.”
Leila. My memories of her when she was alive are all wrapped up in her violent death—and the things I learned about who she truly was from the demons. Apparently when Lynx read her soul, he saw the sinner inside, the one I never got the chance to meet, who was willing to watch her friends cut my entrails out to gain power.
In a way, the little ballerina figurine is a lot like its former owner: pretty on the outside, innocent to the eye, and deadly within. A contradiction between what you see and what you get.
“I didn’t know bombs could be that small.” I’m tempted to reach out and touch it, but remember at the last second my finger will just go through. “I guess all your stuff is as incorporeal as you.”
“Except my motorcycle.” He sighs longingly. “It was too big to yank home. I always had to put a spell on it to bring it back and forth. And now it’s gone.”
The way he’s talking, you’d think the motorcycle was his long lost love and not a piece of chrome painted black.
“So you want me to make you corporeal and what... light the bomb with my phoenix fire?”
“Exactly.” Mateo grins at me. “You get it. Let’s go.”
“I don’t know...”
“You destroyed my precious bike.” He pouts at me, just like Lynx, except unlike Lynx it’s an explosion he wants, not a book. “You owe me something. Also it’s boring as fuck in that nowhere place. If I have to stay there for a while longer, I need some kind of entertainment.”
“I nearly died just a few days ago.”
“That too! I just can’t get over it.”
Placing the hand that’s not holding the little bomb over his heart, he does his best to look distraught, and fails at it entirely. It’s not that he’s callous—far from it—but he lives in the moment so thoroughly that he’s incapable of dwelling on the future or the past.
It must be nice. I wish I could borrow some of that careless freedom from worry.
Maybe for a moment I can.
“Fine,” I tell him, deciding that I will. “But how big is this explosion going to be? Do we need to go outside?”
He waggles his eyebrows. “Like everything I’m packing, it’ll be huge. You have no idea.”
I ignore the heat that pools in my cheeks and stretches down my neck. “Out to the back acreage it is.”
We walk towards the back corner of the acreage, where a picnic table and some chairs serve as a not-so-secret late night get-together place for the students. Petra told me about it; while it’s not like the kick-backs they have on the roof, it’s where they go when they don’t have access up there. A spot between a shed in the corner and the wall serves as a hiding place for beer, but when I check it there’s nothing there. Bummer.
Maybe I’ll actually peel myself away from the demons and the drama of getting nearly-killed long enough to take the shifters up on their invitation to go up to the roof of the Great House and relax with a drink or two.
Unlike a certain Bomber, I don’t relax via blowing things up, shooting people, and lighting shit on fire—the latter of which I’ve never seen him do but am absolutely sure he would.
“You ever find out where the place really is?” Tilting his head back, Mateo looks up into the pink-hued sky as the sun sets. “They’re very secretive about the whole thing. I know it’s not Santa Cruz.”
“Apparently it’s somewhere and nowhere at the same time. Kind of like Washington D.C.”
“So we’re in Maryland and Virginia at the same time.”
“More like California and the border of Connecticut and Rhode Island simultaneously, but basically. The longitude and latitude of the campus is two locations at once.” I shrug, moving forward through the dense grass off the beaten path at the edge of the property. “All I know is the sky is pretty and the weather is cool. Which is good, because they make us wear these damn blazers everywhere.”
“We could blow up the blazer.” Mateo throws me a wicked grin. “Really make this a two-for-one special.”
I’m tempted, but it seems ungrateful. Besides, they’d just give me a new one. There’s no escaping the ubiquitous branding. If I ever forget that I’m a phoenix now, the embroidery on my back serves to remind me.
But I don’t have to wear it all the time.
Peeling off the blazer, I ball it up and throw it on top of the picnic table. I’m not wearing the stupid tie today; I noticed none of the girls do and stopped wearing it right away, even though it seems to make Ocean Johnson frown every time he looks at me.
Without the wool blend, I can actually feel the cool breeze against my skin. Pushing up my sleeves, I revel in the chill of the air, autumn promising to give over to winter.
Mateo is looking at me with something devilish in his eyes, which is saying something. Being a grenade-launching demon, he usually has at least an edge of mischief to him at all times.
I blink back at him. “What?”
“Those arms of yours would look great with a few tattoos.” He reaches out to brush his fingertips against my bare skin, but because I haven’t made him corporeal yet all he does is send sparks of pleasure up and down my arm, shoulder to fingertips. “Such perfect, unblemished skin. A canvas for art just waiting to be filled.”
I’m glad for the cool breeze, because it steals some of the heat from my cheeks. “I’ve never thought about getting a tattoo. Well,” I amend, “there was a girl at my group home who said her cousin was a tattoo artist, but the butterfly he put on her ankle looked like shit. And I’m pretty sure I would’ve gotten an infection if I tried to get ink while I lived on the street. Plus tattoos are expensive.”
“You’ve got the money,” he points out. “Live a little.”
“Like you?”
He pulls out his weird ass ballerina figurine bomb and displays it in front of me like it’s a sacred relic. “Like me. Time to watch shit go boom, Dani.”
Looking at his outstretched hand, I imagine for a moment what it would be like if he touched me again, only this time with his body and not just his soul. His fingers are probably calloused in the places where he builds things and holds a gun; there’s a strip of shiny skin on his right palm that I’m sure is a burn from setting something on fire.
But being touched by Mateo wouldn’t just be a physical thing. It would be like embracing the feeling you get before you jump off a cliff into cool water (or in my case, hard rocks), or the gasp of delighted joy that leaves your mouth when the fuse is lit and the fireworks are about to go off. He is the precipice before danger, the beginning of a laugh that makes your stomach ache.
And he’s staring right at me
with a smirk gracing his lips, suddenly very present and physical. I’ve officially made him corporeal with my foolish aching for his touch.
“That’s better. All of me is here now. So what should we blow up?”
“It’s a tiny bomb, so something small I guess.”
“Oh, it may be small, but what’s just beneath the surface is huge.”
“Does everything have to be a double entendre with you?”
“I don’t speak French.”
Despite myself, I laugh.
The breeze lifts around us, pulling my hair into my face. Mateo reaches out to push it away, his fingers brushing against my forehead. My heart is beating fast, I realize; I’ve never been alone with him before, never had to guess what chaos he might bring without the check of the other demons all around. It feels a little like balancing on a thin wire over a deep canyon. I wonder if I’ll plummet to my death yet again.
He leans forward, black hair alive in the wind, eyes half-lidded. I stretch up towards him. If I had any caution, I’d throw it to the wind, but all I feel is reckless desire.
I wonder what a lit fuse tastes like.
Mateo presses his lips to mine, and I get the answer: soft and hungry, full and deliberate. His hand pushes my hair back and dances along the shell of my ear. I go up onto my tiptoes, legs trembling, and put my hands on his shoulders for balance. He’s warm and solid beneath my fingers; he holds the crazy little bomb away from us even as his other hand travels to the small of my back and presses me close.
As I open my mouth to him, as he dips his tongue to press against mine and makes me feel the full strength of his desire, I feel the flame race from my fingertips and my toes towards my center. I feel the danger of it, can almost smell gunpowder in the air. Any second now everything inside me will explode, and I’ll have nothing left to hide behind, no excuse to step away. There’s no check on either of us, alone as we are in the woods, the setting sun streaking the sky in vibrant hues.
So it shocks me when he pulls his warm lips away, the taste of him still on my tongue. He stares down into my eyes, hand clutching my hip, gaze wild yet shuttered by a troubled expression.
