Damian carried Ryana carefully downstairs to his library, closely followed by Max, Mills, and Grim, and tried to answer Austin’s questions on the way.
“So, what kind of healing factor does she have?” The well-tanned werewolf was holding onto her lower leg so it wouldn’t disconcertingly dangle as he walked backward down the stairs.
Damian thought back to their childhood. “I don’t know.”
Austin made a thoughtful noise. “What about vasculature? Or heart? Hearts?”
“Austin,” Damian growled as they reached the landing.
“I’m just wondering! Like, am I supposed to pretend to be a vet here or what? She has freaking wings, Damian.”
“Just…do what you always do.”
“But I’ve never gotten to treat a dragon,” Austin pointed out. “You’re always fine—or too pissed off to touch.”
Damian grunted, feeling rather pissed off now, as they turned into the room Grimalkin had appointed for his sister. His guardian cat had shifted the spatial layout of the castle so that his old library was now a bright and airy stone-floored room with long tall windows, one of which Max walked over to look through pensively, surely thinking of other recent views.
Grim had even put sheer green and pink silks on the wall, just like Ryana’s had had back home—which was now covered under fifty feet of rubble. Damian tried not to think about that as he set Ryana carefully down on her new bed. The same medical equipment Grim had created for Zach, he’d replicated for Ryana, only this time in room complimenting shades. Austin fussed with her leg, hissing on her behalf as he brought it down even though she hadn’t woken, and arranging her wings in the way that made the most sense so that none of the bones nor leather were working at odds. Then he tugged down her dress to start putting stickers on her for one of the many electronic things Damian didn’t understand, and Damian fought down a warning growl. It pained him to see Austin be so familiar with Ryana, but he was comforted by the way the werewolf moved, with a mixture of clinical distance and awe, treating her with the utmost respect.
“Oh, nicely done, Grim,” Mills complimented the cat on the room. “Now, what to do with her friend?” She knelt down and showed the little bird to Grim.
Grim looked over to Damian. “She needs cheese.”
Damian squinted. “Does she, Grim?” He was in no mood for jokes.
Grimalkin swiped a nervous paw over his whiskers. “I don’t know. I need cheese. This is awful. Cheese will help.” Damian had never known his guardian to panic before. He knelt down, and Grim ran over to him to wind against him as Grim went on. “I just always thought we’d go back someday. I knew you didn’t want to, but that didn’t mean I wanted everything to be like that.”
“I know,” Damian said, rubbing underneath Grim’s chin and smoothing his whiskers back into place. The cat let him, closing his eyes and leaning into Damian’s fingers for several settling breaths before walking over to Lyka, still held in Mills’s palms.
“Feather-butt,” he said. “Feather-butt, wake up.”
Damian bit his lips not to laugh because his cat seemed entirely earnest. Grim looked back at him. “Tell Mills to put her on the bed for me? Up in a corner?”
Damian did so, and Mills gently transported the bird to the bed’s upper corner, as per his request. Grim jumped onto the bed, sniffed along Ryana’s length, and let his hackles raise and settle at least three times, before kneading the sheets right in front of Lyka’s face. “Feather-butt,” Damian heard him whisper, before making a tiny sad sound as he wound himself around her, encircling the red bird nose to tail. “I’ll keep an eye on both of them,” Grim promised Damian, placing his head flat on his front paws.
“Thank you,” Damian told him, then looked to Austin. “Anything you need, ask the cat.”
“Can I get a half-dragon-half-human medical text?” Austin snarked, watching the numbers on the monitor nervously. “I don’t even know what your normal blood pressure is, D—”
Damian grabbed his shoulder. “Just keep her in human ranges. She’s not like me.”
Austin looked down at her before meeting his gaze again. “Okay.”
“You two,” Damian said, turning to Max and Mills, “come with me.”
Damian paced one wall of his narrow conference room, matched by Max, pacing the other side. Mills sat down at the head of the table, out of both of their ways, plaiting her hair back quickly.
“I’m sorry; I was at a board meeting, and I couldn’t leave,” Zach said, practically running in. Magic made him look like an older version of Damian so that he could pretend to be Damian Blackwood the Elder, billionaire industrialist, in lieu of Damian’s younger ‘Damian Blackwood the Third’, who was also a dragon, who didn’t age as fast as humans and who needed to be more available to fight Unearthly. Seeing Zach with magic on always shocked Damian a little because the older version of himself looked so much like his father, which felt especially poignant now as somewhere in the Realms, his father’s legacy was burning. Then Zach slid his hands up his face and out, ripping Mills’s magic off himself, showing himself to be a younger werewolf underneath, wintery where Austin was warm, with his own pale skin, black hair, and blue eyes, instead of Damian’s golden ones. “What’d I miss?”
Max made a pained sound, and Damian inhaled but couldn’t quite speak.
“Damian’s sister is here now,” Mills said, saving them both. “Injured, in the library, under Austin’s care, just like you were not that long ago. And the Realms seem to be in chaos currently, although all mirrors are closed, and I think they need to stay like that,” she said, looking pointedly at Damian.
“Agreed,” he said. Looking at the Realms again would only be like pouring salt in a wound.
“But,” Zach said, hesitating before sitting down, “does her visit count as interference?”
“Technically, her guardian brought her over here, not me,” Damian said.
“Does your stepmother traffic in technicalities?” Zach asked, tilting his head, knowing the terms of Damian’s arrangement.
“For all I know, she’s dead.” Damian stopped pacing and dropped himself into a leather chair.
“Is that good or bad?” Zach asked.
“I don’t fucking know,” Damian grunted.
“We just saw our home obliterated as far as the eye could see,” Max growled at the wolf.
“Sorry, sorry,” Zach said, holding up his hands. “Although…this does explain why they were trying to kill you, D.”
Damian glanced in his direction.
“It’s probably a coup,” he went on.
Damian inhaled and exhaled. Zach not only pretended to be an older version of him for convenience’s sake so that Damian himself could fly under the radar as a distant cousin, but he’d managed to learn a thing or two sitting in on all the cutthroat business meetings Damian got to dodge. “Probably,” Damian granted. “Because the same silver stuff Stella knifed you with…that’s how Ryana made it here. Her bird went and got a bladder full of it and poured it on the ground to make a reflection big enough to push her through so that I could catch her.”
“And you still didn’t get me a sample?” Jamison said, coming in last. He sat by Mills, catching one of her hands for a quick squeeze before releasing it. “I was running an experiment in the lab; I couldn’t shut it off until it was through.”
“What’d you hear?” Mills asked him.
“Enough,” Jamison told her. “What do you think’s going to happen?” he asked Damian.
Damian spread his hands on the table in front of him. “I’m not entirely sure. If The Snake is dead, the throne’s up for anyone to take. Everyone in the Realms knows I’ve said I’ll die before I go back, but that doesn’t mean they all believe me. And they probably won’t rest until they find Ryana’s corpse, to prove the end of my father’s line—which they won’t because she’s here.”
“Hmmm,” Mills said and pouted thoughtfully.
Jamison looked at her and beamed. “You’re going to say something genius aren’t you, baby?”
“I am,” she agreed, eyes narrowing thoughtfully before turning to Damian. “I don’t think it’ll be all that hard to fake a corpse. Especially one that’s all damaged. Burned, even?”
“Ooh, heavy, I like it,” Jamison encouraged her.
“You can do that?” Zach asked.
“I can sure as fuck try,” Mills said. “Jamison, can you buy me some tissue culture equipment and growth media? And,” she turned to Damian, “I will need an actual sample from your sister so that it passes muster. But between my magic and a thin veneer of her own tissue, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.”
“And then when you’re done, we’ll just shove it through a mirror, eh?” Max said, hands clenched over a leather chair’s back.
“Underneath some rocks. Looked like there were plenty of them falling. Why not?” Mills turned to Damian for permission.
“Yes. Absolutely. As fast as you can…money is no object.” Not when it came to possibly curating Ryana’s freedom.
“I know,” Mills said, looking pleased. She stood and left the room to begin.
“And the rest of us?” Max asked, finally sitting down.
Damian looked around the room one by one. “Keep your guard up.”
Andi showered sexily for five minutes and then gave up because she really, really had to pee.
Only, she couldn’t in her bathroom anymore, could she? Because any minute now, Damian would be waltzing back through with a Magic Cat Diner breakfast for her, and she really wished they’d come up with some rules on general privacy.
But that was a thing, she thought, as she furiously slathered herself down, that they could talk about when he got back. Over eggs benedict. Or steak and eggs. Or it would honestly be okay if he came back with scrambled eggs, as long as he also brought really crispy bacon.
She finished up her shower, wrapped a big towel around herself and trotted through her room and down the hall to Sammy’s bathroom, to use it as quietly as she could. She set the lid down, flushed, washed her hands ever so softly, and then stepped back into the hall and into Sammy.
“Andi?” her roommate blearily asked, rubbing her face with a hand. “Why’re you here?”
“Would you believe I ran out of toilet paper?” Andi asked.
“Completely. Weirdo,” Sammy said, brushing past her to go into the bathroom herself. “There’s more in the hall closet,” she added as she shut the door. “Andi!” she said more loudly, gathering steam. “Oh my God, Andi, I’ve got to tell you about last night!”
“Can…it…wait?” Andi asked, feeling more like a jerk with each additional word.
“Do you have someplace to be?” Sammy asked, flushing the toilet and pulling the door back open. “Come on now,” she chided, wiping at her face with a makeup-remover cloth. “I listened to your whole sex-in-a-Pagani escapade.”
“I know, but…” Andi began, but she couldn’t very well tell Sammy that things with Damian had sparked again. “Fine. Hit me.”
“Okay, so, you’re right. Tasha’s brother is dumber than a bag of hammers. But…his friend,” Sammy began, putting toothpaste on a toothbrush, “is fine as hell. And is getting a Ph.D. They’re like friends from childhood because someone saved someone else’s dog, I don’t even know…but he’s dreamy.”
Andi hovered just outside the doorway listening to Sammy’s story as politely as she could, well aware that her fantabulous breakfast, brought over by her exceedingly attractive new man, might be cooling in her bedroom even now. But Sammy was her friend before Damian was in the picture, and if anything should ever happen to Damian, Sammy would still be her friend after.
She didn’t want to think like that, but she couldn’t just assume things like Damian did like everything would be okay forever and ever amen. Despite the fact that he’d promised her the world at least three times the prior night. It was nice to think about being happy forever and all, and she was glad that he didn’t seem to be bolting out the door, but she’d had twenty-seven years of rather brutal personal proof that bad things happened to good people. And there was still everything with her brother and her uncle to deal with. While amazing sex helped, it wasn’t just going to make that shit disappear.
“And then,” Sammy continued, “we were finally alone. He pulled out a cigarette, and I was all you’d better smoke that fast.”
Andi blinked back to attention. “He smokes? Ugh.”
“Don’t concentrate on that; concentrate on the fact that I was fucking suave as hell.”
Andi grinned at her roommate, who had much the same hair as she had had pre-shower. “You’re a dork. A suave-as-hell dork.”
“I give up on you. Go back to your room,” Sammy said, and shooed her off. Andi laughed and ran back down the hall. “Hey! I thought you were sick!” Sammy called after her.
“I got better!” Andi shouted back.
Andi leaped into her room, hoping to eat, but Damian wasn’t there yet. She flopped down on her bed and envied Sammy brushing her teeth. Also, deodorant. Andi sat back up and marched into her bathroom because it was her bathroom, and if he was going to catch her putting deodorant on, well, whatever, it was a thing people did and…nothing. She brushed her teeth in silence and decided to even floss because what the hell, and…still nothing.
“And here I thought breakfast was the most important meal of the day,” she muttered to herself, but then, suddenly, she wasn’t hungry anymore because there were too many other things to be worried about instead. Like what Damian was off doing and if he was safe. And a stupid niggling fear that he hadn’t meant a single thing he’d said the prior night. That even now, he might be out with, oh, say, any one of the women she’d seen him with online before all this—before she’d ever taken the job at his house. The ones who had the hair and the clothes and who already knew what a Pagani was on sight.
Andi went back into her bedroom and was sitting down on her bed when she saw Damian’s shoes on the ground. Yes, she’d been in his closet once. She knew he had like fourteen pairs of them, each more expensive than the last, and he could definitely—definitely—afford a kajillion more. But seeing them, she couldn’t help but think he’d really been meaning to come back.
It was just hard to believe, was all.
Maybe even harder to believe than the fact that he was a dragon.
Or…that Danny was.
She stared up at her apartment’s popcorn ceiling. How long did Danny know he was a dragon? Did it start when he disappeared three weeks ago, or before that? Why didn’t he tell her? Why’d he run away last night? Was he hiding from her? Protecting her? Or just doing whatever the fuck he wanted to—like he always did?
Why wasn’t he here to yell at when she needed him to be?
Andi swept her phone up and texted him quickly: So, was, like, our entire childhood a lie or just most of it?
To her surprise, she saw the message go ‘read’ and the hovering dots of someone about to text her in return: Not all of it, he messaged her back. She bit her lip and waited as the dots went on: I mean, all the times I refused to eat salisbury steak at school—those were real.
Andi clung to the phone like a life preserver as she was flooded with emotions. He was alive. And somehow now accessible. That made the betrayal of his recent absence sting even worse. She texted back: What the fuck, Danny!
I just figured if they were going to make a meatloaf-type thing, they could put it in between buns and call it a hamburger without the gross gravy, you know?
DANNY, Andi typed back, as he sent a laughing emoji over. I’M GLAD YOU’RE ALIVE BUT I’M ALSO SO PISSED AT YOU RIGHT NOW.
Yeah, I figured. Want to talk about it?
YES. Where?
The dots hovered again, and if Danny didn’t message her back, if he was just playing her, she was going to figure out a way to strangle him with her mind—use-the-force style.
Mom’s, he finished.
Andi bit her lips again, hating that she had to ask it, but needing to: Is it safe?
Of course, it is. Now?
Now, she agreed, dropping her phone to run for her closet.
Andi trotted down the front stairs of her apartment fifteen minutes later with wet hair in the crisp autumn chill and still didn’t make the bus. She watched it drive off with a groan and dove into the warmth of Eumie’s bakery to wait for the next one.
“Andi?” Eumie said with surprise after clocking her arrival. “You’re up…and it’s daylight?” They stepped out from behind the counter to give her a hug. The nonbinary baker had become one of Andi’s best friends after she and Sammy rented the apartment upstairs a few years back.
“I know…I thought the light would burn me too,” Andi said, waving one of her hands at the outside world. “Can I get a tea to go? And some butter cookies?”
Eumie winced lightly. “Thinking about your brother?” They knew those were his favorite.
“Kind of…sort of,” Andi partially confessed. “I’m going to see my mom. I figured since it’s daytime, I should get some good daughter points in, and I’ve got fifteen minutes until the next bus.” Andi slid herself and her bag into her normal spot and fidgeted with her phone as she watched Eumie go through the saloon doors into the back of the bakery where the magic happened. She wanted to text her brother and tell him she’d be late, but maybe it was okay for him to just wait on her for once in his entire life.
Plus, she was worried if he didn’t respond, she’d think he’d abandoned her again. There were only so many times she was willing to put her heart through that particular wringer in one twenty-four-hour period.
“So, how was that furniture delivery?” Eumie shouted out to her from the back.
“What?” Andi shouted back, distractedly.
“You know! The one you got around four a.m. this morning!” Eumie shouted back with a wicked chuckle, and Andi groaned.
“Eumie!”
“It’s not my fault the ceiling is thin…hang on, we’re out of chamomile…how did that happen? I mean, maybe if the furniture you got delivered wasn’t quite so heavy,” Eumie went on with a snicker. Andi flushed, shaking her head, and saw someone familiar on the stairs outside, walking up to her apartment’s level.
Elsa, her uncle’s Nordic looking secretary. She’d recognize the ice-blonde hair and sneer of disdain anywhere.
Andi grabbed her bag and bolted into the back of the bakery, leaving the saloon doors swinging behind her.
“It’s not an emergency…I found some!” Eumie announced at seeing her, holding a half-empty tea tin, before clocking the emotions on her face. “Wait, what’s wrong?”
“Just…someone I don’t want to see outside.”
Eumie rose up in height, their dough-kneading slouch straightening, and it felt like they’d become a foot taller. They reached for a rolling pin. “Furniture man?”
“No. A friend of my uncle’s.”
“I thought you liked your uncle?”
“I did too. It’s a story I don’t have time for right now.” Andi heard the woman above knock on her front door. She knew Sammy would never let Elsa in their apartment again; she’d call the cops first, for sure, and she hadn’t told Sammy where she was going this morning, besides. “Can you let me out the back? And if that woman comes in—the tall, angry-looking blonde—tell her that you don’t even know who I am?”
“Of course,” Eumie said, pulling aside so that Andi could run through the corridor of supplies and down the hallway for the alley with Eumie on her heels, a bag of pastries in hand. “Hey,” Eumie said, pressing the bag to her, catching her before she could bolt away. “You know you don’t have to do everything alone, right?”
“I know,” Andi said. “And, thank you,” she added, before bouncing up on her toes to give Eumie a quick, fierce hug before running down the alley, shoving the paper bag of treats into her bag as she ran.
Andi darted through the maze of alleys behind their buildings, lurking in the shadows on the farthest side as she summoned a ride with her phone, and then threw herself down in the back seat after it arrived.
Why was Elsa visiting her? Her uncle still had her phone number and clearly knew her address. He could apologize on his own.
But what could he really apologize for? For murdering other people? She wasn’t going to listen to that—not from his mouth or his secretary’s. If everything Damian had said about Hunters was true—if they were cruising her hospital looking for shifters to murder, to use their bones and skin for magic—Jesus Christ! There was no way she could forgive that. Not ever.
But why hadn’t she known? Why couldn’t she have guessed? She felt like every neighbor in a true crime show, ever. Oh, he seemed so normal! He was so nice! I would’ve let him babysit my kids! And to think, he’d tried to set her up with David. Andi had to bite her lips to not want to barf.
Her brother had better tell her straight. At least spotting Elsa at her apartment likely meant that her uncle didn’t know she was meeting up with him, because if Danny tried to pull the three of them having a surprise family reunion graveside, Andi was going to explode.
She caught a glance of herself in the car’s rearview and saw the unhappy way she was frowning. She wondered if somewhere Damian was looking at her, too, even though he’d promised not to. And if he was okay. Because there had to be a reason he hadn’t gotten in touch with her yet. She dawdled her phone on her knee as the driver took the final turn in, and she directed him to the back of the cemetery.
From last night through this morning was a lot to juggle. And the longer she was away from Damian, the more everything had this crumbling sand feeling like she couldn’t hold onto anything real, no matter how hard she tried.
The driver stopped where she told him to, in front of a series of gently rolling hills dotted with tombstones. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks,” she said, hopping out of the car with her bag. “Me too.”
Andi strode up the hill toward the plot Uncle Lee had picked out for her mother. This was the nicest cemetery in town—a beautiful, gently sloped park with neatly trimmed grass and large trickling fountains so that you heard the sound of falling water no matter where you went. One entire hill of it was dotted with tombstones primarily written in Chinese, which was where her mother was. Uncle Lee’d been the one to handle all of her mother’s bills and affairs after she’d gotten sick. He was the only one who could afford to. And since her mother had never expressed any strong desire to be buried one place over another, Andi didn’t see any point in fighting with him, especially as he’d picked a place with such nice feng shui and plenty of ghost-neighbors to play mahjong with her.
She knew where her mother’s red marble tombstone was by heart. It had carved dragons around the edges and a sepia-toned portrait of her mother that Uncle Lee picked out to have displayed on it, enameled onto the cold dark stone. As Andi walked up the hill, she saw the wind catch and press a jacket against a slender man standing where she’d stood so many times herself, making his black hair spike and flutter. He was at least half a foot taller than she was, but she felt even shorter behind him, standing on the hill’s slight slope.
“About time,” he said, as she came to a stop.
Her heart jumped into her throat. “Sorry, missed the bus,” she said, waiting for him to turn around—part of her afraid that he might be a ghost, too.
He slowly turned, and it was really Danny, flashing her the same grin she’d seen from him for as long as she could remember, the one that said, Hey, I’m about to get into trouble, wanna help? She flew at him without thinking, and he caught her in a hug, picking her up and spinning her around before setting her down again.
“I can’t believe you still don’t know how to drive.”
“And I can’t believe you can turn into a fucking dragon, so hey, we’re even.” She caught his head between her hands. “What the fuck, Danny!”
He laughed like it was nothing. “You really just want to jump in the deep end?”
“Yeah. Or we could back up to the ten thousand dollars of bail you owe me.”
“Jesus, Andi,” Danny said with an eye roll, bringing back every similar moment of his exasperation with her during their childhood.
“How the fuck did you think I would take this?” Andi stepped back to look him up and down. “First, I thought you ran out on me; then, I thought you were in trouble; then, I thought you were dead, and now…. I don’t even know what I saw last night, Danny.” She caught his hands in her own. “I need you to tell me everything from the beginning. Please.”
His brown eyes searched hers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t get a choice in how it went down. The timing was bad, they couldn’t have me go to prison, and then I never should’ve called you. It was just a moment of weakness during one of my tests—”
“I don’t understand any of that; back up and slow down,” she pleaded.
He swallowed, looking down at her. “Andi, I’m not sure how much is safe to tell you, honestly.”
“Does Uncle know you’re here?”
“No. If he did, he’d murder me.”
Andi frowned up at him. “Are you helping him?”
“He’s…showing me things.”
“What the fuck does he know?”
Danny gave her a soft smile. “A lot. You’d be surprised. More than all those bullshit stories he told us on holidays, that’s for sure.”
Andi felt like she was hovering on the edge of a knife, and the longer she waited, the sharper it got. “But did you know that he’s killing people?”
Danny’s jaw clenched, and he nodded slowly. “Not like a lot of people—”
Andi danced three steps back, coming perilously close to stepping on her mother’s neighbor. “What?” she sputtered.
Her brother inhaled and exhaled slowly. “If you’d seen the things that I’ve seen now, Andi—they’re these creatures from other worlds, and they don’t belong here. They’re not like us. And they’ll kill all of us if we don’t kill them first.”
Andi stared at her brother, aghast. “Do you hear the words coming out of your mouth? You sound so evil right now. I don’t know what to do with you. And…what’s this ‘like us’ bullshit when I freaking saw you change?”
Danny stood up straighter. “That’s different. I’m special. I’m one of the good guys.” Andi just stared at him, stunned, as he continued. “I know it’s hard for you to believe, but it’s true!” He hit his chest with his hand.
“Danny,” Andi began, waving him down. “I love you. No matter what. I do. But you were going to jail for stealing cars. I’m not saying I’m perfect; we used to go out and steal money from people playing pool together, remember? But like…you’re a lot of things, and some of them are positive qualities, but good is stretching the truth a little, don’t you think?”
“Oh, so only Andi-the-martyr gets to be the nurse out there saving lives, but when I want to be the good one, it’s impossible for me to change?”
Andi crossed her arms. “Well, I did see you changing last night.”
“Do you believe this?” Danny said, twisting to include their mother’s portrait in their conversation. “I told you she’d be mad at me.”
“Don’t even,” Andi said. “Mom would be mad at you, too, if she were here, Danny.”
Danny wheeled back to face her, tilting his head. “Yeah, so, that’s where you’re wrong.” He leaned over behind the tombstone and pulled out a plastic bag, handing it over to her. “I’ve gotta go.”
Andi blinked. “Wait…what?”
“I still have to be careful. I’m not in control all the way yet. I shouldn’t be alone very long—especially outdoors.” He put his hands in his pockets and started down the hill.
“But I still have questions!” Andi shouted after him.
He shrugged. “There’s no point in me answering them if you don’t bother to listen.”
“Danny!” Andi yelled, reprimanding him with his own name, and he looked back at her for a still moment, recreating every time she’d ever been disappointed in him in the past. She reached into her bag to grab Eumie’s pastries and threw them at him, to land at his feet. “They’re your favorite, dammit!”
He picked them up, then turned and kept walking.