We arrive in the alley behind the club. It’s late afternoon in LA, the sky washed out and hazy. The air still. I breathe in exhaust fumes, stale bourbon and something funky from the bins; freeway traffic hums a block away.
I hate this place. The gate to the caged portico around the back door is shut and locked. The last time I was here, Bel had me pinned against those bars. I’d be dead if Mya hadn’t put two bullets in his forehead and one in each biceps. Gave me a fighting chance before she ran off to help Jess get the kids to safety—the trembling, dull-eyed kids we found cowering in the basement.
Mya’s responsible for a lot of shitty, underhanded things, but what happened here on Friday wasn’t one of them.
I still don’t know what to do with all these shards, all these pieces of Mya. I’m hoping for an epiphany when I see her.
Ez takes a moment to check her knives. ‘Gabe, can I say something?’
I nod, unsure if I want to hear it.
She lifts her free hand to shield her eyes against the sun. ‘You’ve always been fearless, that goes without saying. But what you’ve coped with this past week—how you’ve handled yourself, not knowing who you are or who to trust…It’s the gutsiest thing I’ve ever seen.’
I swallow, try to hide how much that means to me. ‘I didn’t do it on my own.’
‘That’s part of my point. You let us help you.’
‘Ez, I didn’t remember who I was. Who you were.’
‘You knew we hadn’t been allies in a while. Zak and I made that pretty obvious.’
I give a short laugh, remember their reaction to me in my kitchen: bracing for an attack. ‘You stuck around.’
She studies me. ‘You remember who you are but you’re not the same Gabe anymore, are you?’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘The fact we’re standing outside this club having this conversation. And because you haven’t started throwing punches.’
She doesn’t mention Rafa, but there’s no missing her meaning.
I head for the end of the alley, look back over my shoulder. ‘It’s still early.’
A few traces of last week’s riot remain in the street: a burnt-out van, blackened and gutted; graffiti-covered rollerdoors peppered with bullets; crime-scene tape over a broken window. The front door to the club is covered in spray-painted phallic symbols and scarred with cigarette burns. Bolted to the side of the building are vertical neon letters that spell out Angels Den, lit pink even under the insipid Californian sunshine. A twenty-four-hour taunt to the Outcasts.
I push open the door and we step into murkiness. There are no voices. No thumping music. More crime-scene tape hangs over the entry to the strip club, empty darkness beyond it. I draw my sword. Ez has hers pressed to the side of her leg.
We pass through a curtain of faded purple and green beads—they jingle behind us as they settle—and into a narrow, badly lit bar. It smells like every other shitty dive I’ve been in: stale beer and musty carpet. Cheap cigars and cheaper aftershave. The only sounds come from a television mounted on the wall. A baseball game. Even before my eyes adjust I know there are only three people in here: a skinny barman with bony shoulders; an old guy hunched over a beer glass; and Mya. She’s at the far end of the bar. Her katana is laid out in front of her, a bottle of rum and a shot glass beside it. The resentment rises, old and familiar. But it slips away before I can work out if I need it. Or want it.
The barman notices our swords. He grunts and shuffles to a back room. Mya pours herself another drink, ignores us.
‘Hey,’ Ez says as we approach. She pulls up a stool, gives Mya plenty of space. I stay standing.
Mya throws back the drink, bangs down the glass and finally looks our way. Her face is ashen, kohl smudged around her eyes. She looks older than the last time I saw her, worn down and strung out. She scowls at me.
‘Have you come to rub my nose in it?’ She slurs enough to suggest the rum bottle was full not too long ago. Annoyance stirs. I can’t help it.
‘I’ve come to keep you alive long enough so I can.’
A bitter smile. She gestures to the katana in my hand. ‘If you remembered how much you hated me, you would’ve used that thing already.’
‘Mya, she does.’ Ez says it sharply enough to drag Mya’s attention to her. ‘Gabe remembers.’
It takes a second for the words to penetrate the rum haze and then Mya stumbles back from the stool. She snatches up her sword, knocking over the empty shot glass. Points the blade at me as she backs away.
‘We came to talk,’ Ez says and lays her weapon on the bar.
Mya’s not listening. The tip of the katana trembles, pointed at my throat. ‘You must be so happy with yourself right now.’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake, you really want to play the victim?’ I don’t have time to coddle Mya. We need to get back to Pan Beach. ‘After everything that went down between us, you had a chance to do things differently and what did you do last week, Mya? You dragged me to this shit-hole to score points against the Sanctuary.’
‘Does it kill you, knowing you did a job with the moneygrubbing mercenaries?’ she says. ‘Or is it the fact you did something useful instead of cowering behind Nathaniel?’
‘Save the martyr act. It might work on Jude. It doesn’t work on me.’
A harsh laugh. ‘I knew the second you remembered who you were you’d turn straight back into the same old uptight, heartless bitch.’
I lunge at her and pin her to the wall by the throat. A stool falls sideways and I kick it clear. I bang Mya’s wrist against the wood panelling. Once, twice. She drops the sword and I lean in closer. ‘Then what does that make you?’
Her face hardens. ‘The piece of shit you always said I was.’
I tighten the grip on her neck, smell the drink on her breath. ‘I didn’t like you. I never said you were a piece of shit.’
‘You thought it, though.’ She tries to push me away but I slam her back into the wall. She could shift. She doesn’t. ‘You never gave me a chance—’
‘You didn’t want one.’ Anger thuds in my chest, at my temples. Our voices are loud now. ‘You came to the Sanctuary with one goal: tear the place apart. And that’s exactly what you did.’
‘Maybe if you hadn’t treated me like I was something you’d stepped in, things might have been different.’
‘Bullshit. You were always going to create a rift. That mightn’t have been the original plan when your psycho grandfather let you live, but it served his purposes just as well.’
Her eyes go wild. She thrashes against me, throwing punches and lashing out with her boots. I toss my sword aside and block a punch. She swings again; I catch her by the wrist, wrench her arm behind her back and shove her against the wall. I grab her neck and press her face against the timber. Ez stays out of the way, but I feel her anxiety.
‘You had everything,’ Mya spits at me. ‘You had Jude. You had Rafa. Everyone thought you walked on water. How much would it have hurt you to cut me some slack?’
‘So your scheming was my fault?’
‘I wanted a home,’ she says, teeth clenched. ‘You have no idea what it’s like to be despised by your family, to be the abomination, the thing that has to be tolerated because it’s their holy duty.’
‘And that gave you the right to take away people I cared about?’
She glares at me through one eye. ‘I didn’t take them away: you let us leave. And you were fine without us. You still had Malachi and Micah. And Daniel. And Daisy and Taya worshipped at your feet for staying loyal to the Sanctuary.’
I should tell her how wrong she is. How losing Jude almost crippled me; almost cost me every relationship I had left at the Sanctuary. She’d understand: she’s feeling that debilitating remorse right now. We’ve both paid the price for our pride and our lies. The realisation steals the oxygen from my anger because there’s a sting of truth in her accusations: I did think I was better than her.
‘You’re not helping yourself, Mya,’ I say, lowering my voice. ‘This is where you remind me how you saved my life twice in the last few days. How if it wasn’t for you, Rafa and I would both be dead in that iron room.’
‘Doesn’t matter, does it? I’m a traitor.’ All the fight goes out of her with that last word. All the rage. She sags against the wall. ‘You win, Gabe.’
I have a brief moment of perverse satisfaction—closely followed by shame. I lean in. ‘Of course it matters. That’s the whole point of me being here.’
She stays slumped against the grimy wood panel, not moving. Her neck is blotchy, her blonde hair flat and lifeless. ‘Do what you have to do.’
It takes a second for me to understand: she thinks I’m going to kill her—and that Ez is going to let me. And even thinking that, the most reckless of all of us isn’t putting up a fight.
‘You’re a lot of things, Mya, but I didn’t pick you for gutless.’
She stirs under my grip.
‘Do you care at all about my brother? About your Outcasts?’
Mya closes her eyes and a tear slips out from her lashes, leaves a watery grey streak down her cheek. ‘I would have died for them.’
‘Then suck it up, take responsibility for your own mess. And get your head back in the game.’
I give her neck one last squeeze and walk back to the bar, pull up a stool. I can’t look at her anymore. It would be so much easier if I could keep blaming her for what happened a decade ago. So much easier if I still felt superior to her. But I don’t. I’m in no position to judge. I never was.
‘Mya,’ Ez says, her voice thin. ‘Come and sit down.’
We have to get back to Pan Beach, but I’m still rattled. I check the doorway where the barman disappeared. ‘Any chance of some service out here?’
He creeps into view, grips the doorjamb like he’s ready to run. ‘What can I get you?’
‘Whatever you’ve got on tap. Ez?’
She shakes her head.
I take the rum bottle and Mya’s empty glass and slide them up the bar away from us. ‘We’re done with this. She’ll have a club soda.’
Mya lowers herself onto the stool between Ez and me. ‘And a beer.’
We sit in silence while the barman shuffles to the tap and pours two glasses with trembling fingers. He spills some of mine when he puts it in front of me. It barely has a head on it. Simon and Taya would be appalled. I pull out some crumpled bank notes and realise they’re Australian. Mya snorts.
‘I should’ve known it was too much to think you’d be paying.’
The beer is weak and watery, but by the third mouthful I feel the tension ebb from my shoulders. Mya wraps her fingers around the glass, her chipped black nails stark against the pallid ale. She hasn’t touched the soda water. Ez picks up a coaster, folds a corner over and then presses it out flat on the bar. On the screen above us, someone scores a home run.
‘Ez…’ Mya falters, seems to change her mind about whatever she was going to say. ‘Is Brother Stephen okay?’
Ez puts down the coaster and meets her eyes. ‘I don’t know. A lot has happened since you took Virginia.’ She waits for the barman to go down the other end of the bar and then gives Mya the short version: about Zarael blowing up the commissary, Dani’s vision of the Gatekeepers attacking Pan Beach and the latest walkout from the Sanctuary.
‘The other guys left…knowing who I was?’
‘It wasn’t about you,’ I say. ‘It was about protecting a town.’
‘Even Malachi?’
Ez glances at me. ‘The farmhouse changed a few things.’
Mya sips her beer, watches me over the rim of the glass. ‘This girl, Dani. If she can see the Rephaim, how come she didn’t know the truth about me?’
‘She can’t see you,’ I say. ‘We think it’s because of the ink over your Rephaim mark.’
Mya reaches for the crescent moon scar on the nape of her neck, hidden by a Celtic cross in faded ink.
‘She hasn’t been able to see Jude and me since last year either—not since our marks were scarred.’
‘I suppose it’s pointless asking if I can meet her.’
I tap the base of my glass on the bar, watch sluggish bubbles rise to the surface. I know how curious Dani is to talk to her. ‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘If you come to Pan Beach and help us stop Zarael.’
Mya narrows her eyes. I see uncertainty—and guarded hope. Just like Jason, sitting in a rickety old farmhouse ripe with chicken shit and wet feathers. Beating himself up over his inability to protect Virginia and her family from demons and the Rephaim. Rafa—in a rare moment of charity—threw him a lifeline. Told him we needed his help to find Jude. Told him to get over himself.
We’ve all fucked up at one point or another. You can’t live as long as we have and not make mistakes.
The memory pulls at me. I knew at the time Rafa was talking about himself, but now…Now, I think he was talking about me too. Was that his way of apologising for the past and letting me know I was off the hook for what happened between us? I tip my glass away from me. What’s left of the foam clings to the sides. I need to talk to Rafa about the last two weeks. And the last eleven years. I feel myself dismantling just thinking about it. I take a steadying breath and focus back on the bar, on Mya. She’s staring into her beer again, her grip tightening on the glass. ‘Do the others want my help?’
‘You’ll have to ask them.’ Ez leans forward and touches her wrist. ‘Mya, this is the showdown with the Gatekeepers we’ve been talking about since we left the Sanctuary. We need every fighter we can get.’
‘Do you have a strategy?’
‘The Butlers want to use explosives. Needless to say, I’m not a fan.’
Mya’s eyebrows go up. ‘Use explosives how?’
I’m about to explain Mick’s crazy-arse plan when my insides lurch like I’ve stepped out of a plane.
Demons.