So that’s it? We can go home?” The crutch that Choo would be using for a few weeks was leaned against the table next to him. Choo and Molly and Sig and Sarah and Kevin and Ben and I were gathered on the third floor of Food Gallery 32, a place in Manhattan crammed full of independently owned Korean food stalls. The ambiance reminded me of an IKEA cafeteria in Charlotte, North Carolina, that Sig is always dragging me to. The two places weren’t really all that alike—the IKEA didn’t have videos of Korean pop stars playing in the background for example—but they did both have the same weird combination of bright walls and traditional foods and big rooms with big views.
“Yes,” Ben said. I was too busy chewing. The spicy pork teppanyaki was excellent.
We were waiting for Kasia. She was going back to some place that she wouldn’t specify, but I was pretty sure it was one of those Eastern European places whose name ends in the letters ia and whose language has a lot of sharp Ks and hard vowels. We had a last bit of business with her. Sig had found several rare books in John Dee Junior’s private library that Sarah had assured us didn’t reek of black magic, and we’d gotten two hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars for them at a shop that Sarah knew about. Kasia was entitled to a split. It wasn’t much after being divided seven ways, not after Choo’s expenses and the purchase of some outrageously high-priced tickets to the play Hamilton to celebrate Molly being all Molly again, but it was something. The gold I’d buried had changed back to trophies and plaques made out of cheaper metals and gold paint.
“Are you sure you want to go home?” Sarah asked Molly. “You would be welcome to stay with me again for a few weeks.”
“Thanks, but I need to see my pup, and I don’t think I’m suffering any side effects from whatever happened to me.” Then Molly shifted the fork she was using so that she held it in her fist. She raised the fork over her head and stared at me with a glazed, wide-eyed maniacal look.
“Cut that out,” I told her.
“Sorry.” Molly didn’t sound particularly apologetic. She smelled more relaxed than she had since I’d met her, not that I recommend having your negative emotions literally sucked out of you and stuffed back in by a homicidal grimoire. Still, it seemed like the experience had been some kind of soul enema or something.
“That wasn’t funny,” Sig scolded, but she was smiling. Sig was still just a little tentative around Molly. She hadn’t talked too much about her experience with Molly’s shadow, so I imagine the shadow bitch had dumped a lot of the same kind of toxic waste in Sig’s ear that it had dumped in mine. The kind that has just enough truth to burn, but never the whole truth, or even the most truth. Life is what you choose to emphasize.
“About home.” Choo looked down at his plate. “I’m moving to Charlottesville to be with Chantelle. Near her, I mean. We aren’t ready for more than that.”
“Are you telling us good-bye, or are you asking us to move with you?” Molly asked.
For some reason, Choo was surprised. “Would y’all be willing to do that?”
Sig looked at me. I shrugged. “We’ve been thinking about moving someplace closer to Washington DC and New York anyhow, and there’s no way I’m living in a city. Besides, that’s only half an hour away from the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton.”
“Why are you thinking of moving closer?” Sarah sounded suspicious rather than pleased.
“I’m going to have to be more active with the Templars now.”
That didn’t exactly reassure her. “Active how?”
I didn’t have a specific answer yet. “John Dee Junior wasn’t wrong about everything.”
“That’s so sad.” Molly was working on a Red Mango frozen yogurt.
“Which part?” I asked.
“That you and this John Dee person wanted so many of the same things, and you had to kill him anyhow. It makes me wonder what he’d think if he could hear us now.”
I wasn’t in the mood to dwell on how tragic that particular cunning man’s fate had been. Our brief meeting had given me a lot to think about, and think about it I would whether I wanted to or not, but at the moment, I was in healing mode, not feeling mode. “It just makes me think of that old joke: What’s the last thing to go through a bug’s mind when it hits a windshield?”
Choo obliged me. “What?”
Molly spooned a small portion of froyo onto her tongue. “Sig, would you punch him for me?”
Sig obligingly punched me in my upper arm, but she didn’t put any effort into it. She gets sophomoric gallows humor. I leaned over to kiss her cheek, and she turned her face so that our lips met briefly. We’d both been maybe a little clingy since the tower. Not constantly asking for emotional updates or anything, but not letting each other out of our sight, touching each other on the flimsiest pretext as if just to make sure the other was still there. I expected we’d start to get over it once we were out of New York, and for now, neither of us seemed to mind.
“But are you sure that it was really him?” Kevin was staring at his spicy noodles dubiously. I think the vendor had maybe gone light on the spice to suit American palates, and Kevin liked his spicy noodles flamethrower-hot. “How do we know this School of Night didn’t pull some complicated switch again? They seem really good at it.”
“I talked to his ghost.” Sig didn’t quite manage to say it casually.
Sarah raised her eyebrows. “After John killed him?”
“It was a lot easier in that dead place we were stuck in, and I wanted to find a way out. He had a lot to say.” Sig’s tone and expression discouraged any requests for elaboration. “None of it was useful.”
Sounded like the saddest epitaph ever: He had a lot to say. None of it was useful.
And speaking of useful information, we had finally found a lot of it in regards to the School of Night. The companies that had been working in that tower were mostly shells, conducting their legitimate business over the Internet from other locations where technology worked, but we had found our first real records of property holdings, financial transactions, and communications with people who had to be members or minions. The Templars were busily rooting out connections leading to bigger connections, which was part of the reason we hadn’t invited Simon to lunch despite my resolve to start doing things differently. The other reason being I was still recovering my appetite.
Nothing is ever really over like in fairy tales and movies. There is no happily ever after. Real life goes on after people say “I love you,” and credits don’t roll when someone dies. I hadn’t forgotten that Aubrey had mentioned some elf renegade calling himself Uriel, for example, but even if it really was the same being calling itself Uriel that had communicated with the original John Dee, it was a being that was really good at hiding and whose plans took centuries to crystallize. And we had just ruined its latest one.
I hadn’t forgotten that the Templars had dirty bombs and were willing to use them under the right (or wrong) circumstances, either. The thing was, I knew from personal experience that the only way to work around the knights’ geas was to change the terms they were thinking in, and there was no easy, short-term way to do that. I had a feeling that I was done with rushing around in crisis mode with a critical deadline and insane consequences hanging over me for a while. I had some long-term one-step-at-a-time groundwork to start building, in both my personal and professional life, if you can call what I do a profession.
“I have some ideas on how John might get more involved,” Ben announced.
I stopped eating. “I’m not passing out any fliers.”
“You’re the one who suggested having werewolves and squires train together,” Ben reminded me, without explaining why he was reminding me.
“I was thinking about that orphanage that Simon came out of,” Ben said. “The one for kids who grow up with knights’ blood without knowing they’re geas-born. Those kids can see all the things that the Pax Arcana usually screens out, and they don’t know why, and they don’t understand why they can’t talk about it, right?”
“That’s what I heard. Those places are supposed to be pretty hard-core because not many people know about them, and the kids don’t have any connections or sponsors to protest how they’re trained. A lot of the deadliest knights are supposed to come out of them.”
“Sounds perfect. It wouldn’t raise a lot of opposition, then, and those kids would be on the track to be knights, but they wouldn’t have a lot of the attitude against werewolves drilled into them yet.”
“You’re thinking of a test school,” I said.
“Magnet schools were test schools once,” Ben said. “And now they’re some of the best schools around. But a school that trained young geas-born and werewolves would have to have good teachers. People who knew what it took to be a knight and a functional werewolf and weren’t irrationally prejudiced against either.”
“I’ve got all kinds of issues with both.”
“I never noticed.” Ben’s eyes crinkled. “I said irrationally prejudiced.”
Sig seemed intrigued. “Starting small might be good. You said you wanted to change the way knights think. This would give you a chance to mold some minds.”
“You want me to be an authority figure.” I started eating again. “I hate authority figures.”
Ben’s smile was pure evil. “Revenge.”
Ben didn’t even have to think about it. “For making me do all the hard work while you went around killing things. For being so damned hard to lead. Have you ever heard the expression don’t piss off a Chippewa?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, I just made it up,” Ben admitted. “But it’s still good advice.”
“I don’t care what you call it. Me being an instructor is the single worst idea I’ve ever heard.”
Molly clapped her hands.
“What?” I asked.
“That means you’re going to do it.”
“It absolutely does not.”
Sarah smiled gently. “How many worst ideas have you heard that you wound up not doing?”
I opened my mouth and realized that I didn’t have a ready rejoinder to that.
Sig smirked. “I thought you understood how jinxes worked.”
“If you’re right about me and worst ideas, it explains how I wound up hanging around you bums,” I grumbled.
“Speaking of bad ideas and people you hang around, what’s taking Kasia so long?” Kevin wondered.
I was glad to get the opportunity to shift the attention off me for a while. “Why are you so interested? Did her flirting get under your skin, Kevin?”
He reddened. “She just didn’t strike me as the kind of person who’s late. Ever.”
“Uh-huh. Methinks the laddie doth protest too much.”
Choo had his own concerns. “Are we sure she isn’t lining us up in her rifle sights right now?” He only sounded a little uneasy, but then, he was on painkillers.
“She said she’d decided not to kill any of us.” Sig almost sounded disappointed. “She wouldn’t lie about that unless somebody was paying her to.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Sarah said caustically.
“You can all relax,” I said. “She got stuck in a food line downstairs.”
“How do you know that?” Sarah was still a little hung up on establishing that I had a little psychic something extra.
“Because she’s coming up the escalator.” And she was. Kasia had recovered from her wounds, and I didn’t even want to know how she was getting her blood transfusions. She was in one piece now, but that one piece was still moving stiffly compared to her usual panther’s grace.
Sig reached over and squeezed my hand. “Whatever we decide, I guess we won’t be taking any more trips to Iceland for a while.”
“I hope that’s not how you guys refer to having sex.” Was that a joke from Kevin? Maybe he was loosening up because he’d almost been killed a few times, or maybe he was just getting me back for teasing him about Kasia, but it still seemed like a good sign.
“Sig and I took a vacation in Iceland a few months ago,” I explained, then took it a little further because Kevin seemed embarrassed that he’d spoken up, and I didn’t want him shutting down again. “We call making love taking the night train to Valhalla.”
“We do not,” Sig said firmly.
“You mean I never said that out loud?”
“You did not.” Sig addressed the rest of the table then. “And just so everybody knows, anybody who makes any jokes about my caboose is going to wake up regretting it.”
I started to say something—nothing bad, honest—but Sig cut me off. “If I even see you thinking it, I’ll throw you out the nearest window.”
“Sig, I love you,” I said. “But if you start seeing my thoughts, I’ll throw myself out the nearest window.” She rolled her eyes, but the corners of her mouth twitched up, and I kissed her cheek, then her lips again. We stared at each other, our eyes maybe four inches apart. Hey, you. We’re still here.
“Please stop.” Kasia had arrived. “I was planning to eat.” And she was, too. She’d brought enough food to stay awhile. Huh. She sat down next to Kevin, and we got back to the business of being happy to be alive.