“A bit.” I swallowed. “Bex, he—”

  “I know. I was afraid of this happening all along. It’s why I didn’t use him to kill his father in the first place. I would have been alive still, if I had, but . . .” The boy shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, Bex. I should have stopped him, and now . . .” Now I would have to kill him. How do you tell that to someone’s mother, looking right at you through her son’s eyes?

  “Now what?” Becca said through Noah. Then she seemed to sense what I meant. “Oh Darcy, give me a break. You’re not going to kill my kid.”

  “You think I can’t do it? The least I can do now is clean up my mess. I can’t let this happen again.” I gestured around at the destruction Salma had caused.

  “Then be a fucking responsible adult and tell my son No when he wants to start gobbling up people on the street. Give him a cookie instead. Teach him manners.”

  “I . . .”

  “And it isn’t your mess, Dumbo. You’re not responsible for every bad thing that happens around you. The world doesn’t revolve around you.”

  Etty had said the same thing to me, just hours before, and it had saved me from Salma just moments ago. But I knew now that they were both wrong. I was responsible for every bad thing, because I couldn’t live with it otherwise. It was why I’d become a Guardian in the first place, and it was why I’d been so eager to let them fire me when I’d failed. I hadn’t been able to keep the bad things from happening, and I could only cope by running away from them.

  And now . . . now I was so terrified I couldn’t keep a child from becoming a monster that I was willing to murder him in cold blood to prevent it.

  Batty hell, Becca and Etty were at least right that I needed to get over myself.

  “I’ll be here too, okay? Even if you can’t hear me,” Becca said to me through her son. “And Etty knows all about self-control. Have you ever seen her dessicate a dude?”

  “No . . .” I said, although I couldn’t promise she wasn’t doing just that to Dirk right now.

  “That’s because she taught herself how to control her impulses. Not because she doesn’t want to every damn day.”

  Noah’s mouth opened wide for a moment, his eyes shutting as his face contorted into a twisted yawn—like he was some sort of robot, glitching.

  I tilted my head and leaned over to get closer to him. “Are you okay? Bex?”

  “I have to go,” her voice said faintly when it returned. “It’s chaotic in here, but . . . so much nicer than the other place. It’s filled with everything Noah loves. Stars and birds and fish and clouds . . . He needs his body back. Darcy?”

  “Yeah?” I asked reluctantly, not wanting her to go. I supposed Noah had at least saved her from Salma’s eternal fire, but I had hoped for so much more than that.

  “Burn my body again, okay?” she said weakly. “Not with magic this time. I know you love me, but resurrecting me to walk around all zombie-like is undignified. I’m not a plaything.” She narrowed Noah’s eyes at Miriam.

  I cringed, reflexively shifting the muscles on my back as I remembered the feel of the wings and what they meant about me. What I’d done to her without even realizing it. “Sorry,” I whispered.

  “What are you sorry about, Auntie Elephant?” Noah said to me with his own voice, an innocent lilt in it that I wasn’t sure he deserved now that he’d just put my knife through an old lady’s eye. Without waiting for my response, he yawned again and fluttered his eyes, falling into me as he whined, “Can I go to bed now?”

  And Becca was gone, just like that.

  21

  The apartment was empty when I got home. I had refused to get in an ambulance when responders had arrived at the scene, and Adrian and Dirk had been kind enough to keep me out of handcuffs as well. Baz hadn’t been so lucky on that front, considering he’d harbored and aided Salma—not to mention the building he’d singlehandedly brought down.

  My shoulder was still completely mangled, and I’d probably broken a rib or two, but everything else was scrapes and bruises. Those, I’d been able to heal on my own pretty easily. But the magic inside me was still resisting anything bigger.

  Now that I knew it was some kind of sentient being—my birdie friend, as Baz would say—I could only assume turning off my magic was its way of throwing a tantrum.

  Maybe it wanted me to go to the hospital, but I’d been avoiding hospitals for years. I was sure it was difficult for doctors in places like that, everyone looking at them with all their hopes and worries, all their gratitude and blame. But still, most people understood doctors weren’t magic.

  Me, though? I used magic to heal. So no one could ever understand when it didn’t work. I’d learned early on that the only thing worse than me relying on my magic was for other people to rely on my magic.

  Ironic, since now my best option was relying on Miriam’s magic. My shoulder was covered in blue squishies, which were making me feel a bit loopy, but nowhere near as bad as before. I hadn’t lost as much blood this time, and I hadn’t lost consciousness.

  “Etty?” I called out as I walked into the living room. Noah’s hand held tightly to mine as he walked beside me. He’d refused to leave my side since Becca had gone, and I needed someone to take him off my hands so I could . . . I didn’t even know what I needed to do next, but I couldn’t think with this soul-eating kid attached to me.

  No one responded to my call, and when I peeked inside the bedrooms, they were all empty.

  Etty wasn’t here. But she was supposed to be here. She had left the club to avoid being caught by the cops and sent back to the fae realm. She had said she needed to stay to see Noah safe. That Becca had asked her to take care of Noah. And I had asked her to wait for us at home.

  Had Dirk somehow gotten the better of her?

  Okay, Darcy, don’t panic. Maybe she’d gone to run an errand or something. I turned around to look at our message board.

  I’m off to fairytale land, it said. And below that: If I grow wings, I’ll fly back.

  It was written hastily, no hearts this time. And the way she’d phrased it, I knew there was no hope she’d be back. She just hadn’t wanted to write something so depressing.

  I squeezed Noah’s hand without thinking, and he yelped. With wide eyes, I looked down at him. I’d just lost both of my roommates in the space of one night—both of my friends. This little boy was all I had left of either of them. And he was completely reliant on me. Without Etty, there was no one to hand him off to. No one Becca would have approved of, at least.

  “Sorry, Noah.” I let go of his hand.

  “That’s okay,” he said cheerfully, not looking quite so tired anymore. Then he ran over to the coffee table, where the hummingbird puzzle was still laid out just as he and his mom had left it.

  I sighed. Once a Guardian, always a Guardian. That was what they’d always told us at the Academy, and I had never really understood it until now. Apparently my habit of failing time and time again wouldn’t stop people from relying on me for protection, so I should probably just stop fighting it. I might not be great at the job, but I was still this kid’s best hope.

  Fine, then. I snorted in a deep breath of air. “Want to get hot cocoa and donuts for breakfast in the morning?” I asked. There was a popular place I’d never been to right by the hospital. “If they have a red one, I’ll make it look like a lobster for you.”

  Noah nodded at me happily as he worked to fill in the hummingbird’s head. Maybe Becca was right. Maybe it wouldn’t be that tough to teach this kid manners. Maybe his fae side would lend the ifrit side more self-control than Salma had been able to command.

  Or maybe, in a few years, my soul would end up behind those cute little eyes of his right alongside Becca’s, in his cute little hell filled with stars and birds and fish and clouds.

  We would have to see. I had sworn to myself, after Simeon, that I would never protect another monster like him. It had almost become an obsession, so important that I had been afraid to protect anyone, monster or not. But if I was going to keep being Guardian Darcy, I couldn’t afford to be afraid. Even when it was my soul on the line, I would need to remember that the job was about mitigating risks, not avoiding them.

  Just like I would need to suck it up and drag my ass to the hospital. Because the alternative was risking that Ray and Carina might both be dead before I could talk to them, if they weren’t already. And now that I had a little soul-sucker relying on me, I needed to know exactly what was inside me and how to control it.

  There was only room in this apartment for one monster at most, and I needed to make sure that it wouldn’t be me.

  I felt like a teenager again as I walked through the sterile halls of the hospital under the fluorescent lights, all of them flickering minutely. I shivered, chilled and sweaty at the same time. Noah’s hand was slippery in mine, but the boy didn’t seem to care. He was fully absorbed in the “lobster”-filled dregs of his hot cocoa, and he would follow blindly wherever I led him.

  “Miss Pierce,” someone called weakly from inside a room as I passed by. I paused, then backtracked a little to look inside.

  I nearly didn’t recognize the woman who lay on the cot, which wasn’t surprising since she was only about halfway there. Both her arm and leg on her left side were just . . . gone. Bandaged stumps were all that remained, and the look on her face reflected the rest.

  Sagging cheeks, puffy eyes, limp lips pressed together hard, all obscured behind tangled strands of short black hair.

  “Shelby,” I said. “It was you.” The ice bear who’d had her left side melted away. It was a testament to her immense power that she was even still alive, but I supposed even a shifter that strong couldn’t regrow limbs. That was what she got for turning herself into ice.

  I could see the benefit, from the perspective of the god who had convinced her to do it. The ice made for strong attacks, more durable creatures—but they were only durable until they shifted back, and not so great against fire magic under any circumstances. She wouldn’t have lost those limbs if they had been burned rather than melted, but she also wouldn’t have lasted as long in the battle.

  “Rarrr.” Shelby the ferocious bear eked out a chuckle with her mocking roar, and then it turned into a coughing fit.

  I couldn’t help but smile. I couldn’t help but like this woman, even though she’d been the one trying to have me killed while I’d been chasing after Becca’s killer.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Pierce. Truly, this time,” she said.

  “For what?” I asked innocently.

  “I’m not sorry enough to answer that question. But you know. And you won’t have to worry about us anymore. The Sweepers are mostly dead, burned—melted. Probably without their souls. Our god doesn’t care at all. I think he wanted us dead all along, just after everyone else.”

  I took a deep breath. “You know I’ll never be able to forgive you, for Simeon Drake.” Part of me wanted to add my ruined career to the pile, but I couldn’t blame her for that. She was responsible for having Simeon killed—but I’d lost my job because I’d failed to stop her. That part would always be on me.

  “I . . .” She looked at me with sad eyes, real pity in them. “That really wasn’t me, Miss Pierce. Even if we were in the business of having people assassinated . . .” She lifted an eyebrow, which seemed to say they absolutely had been in that business. “We wanted Senator Drake alive.”

  “Why could you have wanted him alive? He was against everything you stood for.”

  She shrugged. “That’s politics. He was a terribly powerful vampire, and everyone knew it. Manipulative. Completely removed from the majority of human voters. Having him in power only made people more afraid of his kind. Not to mention he’d promised to back some of the supernatural regulations we were pushing for.”

  A strong sense of déjà vu washed over me at her last sentence. I vaguely remembered Simeon telling me about those proposed regulations, and that there was another powerful vampire who wouldn’t stand to be policed by his dinner. But the memory was foggy, just like so many of my memories of my time with him.

  “What made you think I was the one who had him killed?” Shelby asked.

  “The ward your assassin had on her. The first one you sent after me, on Tuesday. The mage.” Possum and her floral potpourri. “It was the same ward I smelled on the woman who killed Simeon.”

  Shelby shook her head. “Sorry to disappoint you, but there have never been any mages in my employment. Mostly just shifters. I’ve never known a mage with enough self-hatred to do what we did. But that comes with the territory when one day you’re a little girl on a camping trip, and the next . . .” She looked away, and I could guess what had happened the next day. Little girl turns into bear, kills and eats her parents? Something like that, probably.

  Those stories had been popping up more and more frequently now that brand-new shifters were protected from being prosecuted for their actions under the law. One of the laws Simeon had helped bring to fruition. They were victims, new shifters who had been turned without consent, and to hold them accountable for what they couldn’t control would only bring more pain.

  But legally forgiving them brought a different kind of pain to the world, and I could see that pain in Shelby’s eyes. She knew she wasn’t innocent. She wanted—needed—to be punished. I couldn’t help her with that.

  And she couldn’t help me. I knew she was telling the truth. In the back of my mind, I had wondered why the first assassin to come after me was the only one with that stinking ward. Whoever had sent Possum with that ward and that Sweeper pin, whoever had killed Simeon, they must have had a mole in Shelby’s group. Must have sent that assassin deliberately to make me think it was the Sweepers all along.

  They would only have done that for one reason, and that was fear. Fear of me. Fear that I would eventually figure out who they were and come after them. And now, I knew I would.

  I had nothing more to say to this woman. I needed to go find Ray or Carina, if either of them were still alive. But something was wrong. There was nothing in my hand. No slippery little fingers waiting to be led along.

  Bats, I’d lost the kid already.

  I bounded into the hallway and thought I saw his bright green shirt turning a corner. Lots of souls ripe for the picking in a hospital, I thought. I hated thinking it, but I couldn’t help it. I knew all too well just how vulnerable the souls in a hospital could be.

  I reached into my pocket as I ran, grabbing the green squishy Miriam had given me when I’d asked. If I was going to take care of a tiny soul-eater, I wasn’t going to do it without a way of incapacitating him. And I was fresh out of dragon-forged glass weapons infused with djinn essence.

  But when I caught up to him, heart racing, tense fingers ready to slam the squishy in his face, he wasn’t trying to steal anyone’s soul. A little girl’s heart, maybe. He stood by Carina’s bedside, giggling with her as he offered her a sip of his hot cocoa.

  The look on her face caught me off guard, and I realized this was the first time I’d ever really seen her smile. But then this was also the first time I’d seen her not . . . working?

  You couldn’t really call what she did with her father ‘work,’ since she wasn’t being paid. Witching, then? She had stalked me, forged weapons on the weekends, fought to the death against witches of her god’s rival . . . No wonder Ray had said her grades were suffering. I realized then just how bad a parent Ray really was, and just how much I didn’t want to be any part of their “family.”

  Not that I’m much better, I thought as I loosened my grip on the green squishy in my pocket and stepped forward into the room.

  Carina’s smile faded when she saw me, and her eyes hardened. Noah looked up and yet again smiled with more innocence than he should have had, for everything he’d been through. Seeing him there right next to Carina, I knew I needed to try to be more like Becca and less like Ray. But of all the things I’d ever known I would need to do, this felt like it might be the hardest.

  I took my hands out of my pockets and waved at them. “How are you doing, my dragon goddaughter?” She wasn’t a fairy after all, and not a demon either.

  “You blew me off the roof of a building and I landed on cement,” she said. “How do you think I’m doing?”

  “Sorry for saving your life.” I rolled my eyes. She didn’t look that bad. She’d been plated in obsidian scales when she’d fallen. Most of the damage was probably from Salma, on her wing, which didn’t technically exist now that she’d shifted back to her little girl form. “Where’s your dad?” I asked.

  She got quiet then. “I don’t know. They won’t tell me.”

  “He’s in surgery,” a voice said from behind me.

  I turned around to see Adrian, looking like a damn runway model compared to all of us with our bandages and bruises and blood-crusted unwashed hair. Okay, the unwashed hair was just me. I found myself happy to see him, even if he had screwed up the one job I’d given him. It wasn’t really his fault, not with those obsidian rabbits taking over my car, and he’d certainly done enough to help beforehand that it evened out the scale.

  Plus, just looking at him sent a calming warmth through my nerves, taking the edge off my unease at being in this place.

  “Probably be in there all night,” Adrian continued, talking about Ray. “He was in bad shape.”

  “You should find him,” Carina said loudly, and when I turned back to her she was staring at me. She seemed like she wanted to say more.

  After a brief pause, I gave Noah a nudge towards Adrian and said, “Hey little guy, why don’t you show the detective where the hot cocoa is? He looks like he needs some.”

  Adrian walked towards me instead of leaving, ignoring Noah tugging on his arm, and bent down slightly so his face was close to mine. I froze, my eyes darting from side to side as I wondered what the fuck he was doing.

  In a low voice, he said, “You can’t work your magic on drinks without touching them, right?”

 

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