Somehow, even with the spheres of magic that Jamison had developed to hide them, bursts of machine gun fire had the werewolves pinned down. The Hunters didn’t have to see who they were shooting, because as long as they kept up a barrage at the door, they knew they’d get the fighters inside eventually. Damian was lucky that they hadn’t broken all the windows yet—there was an intact pane in the room he was able to step through. The second he landed, he knew why they’d called. The scent of warm dragon blood hung in the air. There was only one dragon it could be from.
Danny.
His own dragon answered, aligning itself beneath his skin, readying to fight. Finish this, it whispered, its monstrous urges echoing inside him. His dragon showed himself a vision of him tearing the other dragon limb from limb, and then flying free.
But he flashed back to Andi, crying on his castle’s roof. What if this destroys everything we have?
She is our mate, it hummed, its surety charging him like electricity. She is our destiny.
“Where is your sphere, Damian?” Zach hissed.
The magically imbued metal marbles protected anyone inside their radius, hiding them from view, but Damian was already inches from the door, bullets landing at his feet. He turned back toward Zach. “Why?”
“Because you don’t even have a mask on!” Zach snapped, pulling his own off to throw it at him.
Damian caught it as the pull of battle rolled through him like a tide. “I won’t leave any survivors,” he said, tossing the mask back. “Wait here,” he commanded the werewolves, pointing at the ground like they were puppies, flipping a heavy conference table over for their protection.
Damian stepped out of the room they were in and advanced on the nearest cubicles, kicking over the next wall. Three men running submachine guns advanced and Damian ignored them, feeling the bullets hit the scales just beneath his skin. He walked for the nearest one, who couldn’t believe what he was seeing, until he could grab the hot metal of the gun’s barrel and twisted it off with a snap. The fool kept pulling the trigger and the gun exploded in his hands, shrapnel shooting everywhere. Damian relieved him of the weapon, clocking him with it and cracking his skull, before hurling the gun at the next Hunter, nearly taking off his head.
“It’s him, it’s really him!” he heard the third tell someone else, excitedly, and whoever smelled like dragon finally advanced.
The man wore a mask just like Zach's, and he was as broad in the shoulders as Damian was. Damian remembered the fight at Rax’s casino. Danny—Andi’s brother—was a slight man. Wiry and fast, but not bulky. But he knew they’d been doing experiments on him….
His dragon lunged inside him. Killing Danny was the answer to all of its problems, whereas Damian hesitated. “Who are you?” he demanded. Before he murdered the man, he needed to know his name.
“The man who kills you,” the man taunted, and then he leapt for Damian.
Damian dodged the blow and let him take down another wall of cubicles like dominos, as the remaining man with the submachine kept firing. Damian scooped up a desk chair and threw it at the man with the gun, who yelped and ducked, as the draconic man found his footing again, and whirled, launching himself at Damian’s knees.
He was definitely faster than a normal human—but not as fast as Damian. Damian sidestepped him and stomped on his back, catching him flat on the floor. He flipped himself onto his back as Damian dropped down, bringing his elbow down to crash into the man’s sternum. Damian heard it crack—not a very dragon-like sound.
“Who are you?” he hissed, reaching for the man’s mask. Austin flew out of nowhere, catching the man’s hand as it came up with a knife for Damian’s neck. It fell to the drab carpeting and bounced.
Damian ignored it and ripped the man’s balaclava off, and the man underneath was Caucasian, definitely not Andi’s twin brother. Stella lunged beneath him and snapped the man’s neck before he could.
Zach caught up with them after dispatching the last gunman. “What the fuck, Damian!”
Damian eyed him. “Are you going to bite me again?”
“I should,” Zach growled. “You endangered all of us, acting on your own without a plan. Without even a mask!”
“We would’ve had it covered with Jamison,” Austin agreed.
“You didn’t need Jamison when you had me.” Damian looked down at the Hunter’s dead body. He was relieved it wasn’t Danny, but that meant that that problem had merely been kicked down the road—not solved.
“The fuck we did, D, I saved your goddamned life!” Austin said, picking up the knife the man had dropped to show Damian. Its blade was bone. It was a talisman harvested from another unearthly creature, and Damian recognized the carving on the hilt, as did Zach.
“That’s dragon bone,” the dark-haired werewolf rumbled. “And you hesitated.”
“I’d have lived.” Damian stood up, glowering. What were they thinking, shouting at him? He was nigh invulnerable, the night was young, and Andi wasn’t far. His dragon’s energy suffused him, and he didn’t want to fight it as it urged him to mount the stairs to the top of the building where it could take flight, because she was close—so close. Go to her, his dragon wheedled.
Stella took two quick steps up to Damian and punched him in the stomach. “This is exactly what she was afraid of, you idiot!” Then the three men gawked at her as she started dancing, cursing, holding her wrist, and Damian was so surprised he became himself in an instant.
“Did you just punch me?” Damian asked her, blinking.
Go to her! Now! his dragon insisted, but its spell over him was gone.
No, he growled, shoving it back. We have to wait until she wants us.
Zach reached for Stella’s injured hand. She offered it to him reluctantly. “There’s a reason we just shout at him,” he said.
“Or turn into wolves first,” Austin added.
“Oh, fuck all three of you,” Stella said, yanking her hand back from Zach. “But especially you,” she said, focusing in on Damian. “Because Andi told you that this would happen and you didn’t believe her.”
Damian took in his unmasked self, the dragon-bone knife that would’ve actually pierced his skin, and the man wielding it who he’d waited to kill. Stella was right…as was Andi.
“This is your second strike, Damian,” Zach informed him. “I don’t know what we do at three strikes, but you’d better cut this shit out.”
Damian fought back a growl at being chastised, but the wolf was right. “I know.”
Zach gave him a begrudging nod and touched his earpiece after that. “We’ll debrief later. Jamison, are we clear?”
Damian didn’t need to wait for Jamison’s okay. He could use his dragon’s ability to feel-see heat, and the only thing he sensed were cooling bodies.
But the scent of blood had come from somewhere, and the knife alone wasn’t enough to make someone change. He knelt down and ripped the Hunter’s shirt off, revealing an eight-by-eight panel of scaled skin bound against his chest with slippery green edges.
Stella gagged. “God. That’s fucking fresh.”
That was the dragon he’d scented. And he’d been right—in a fashion. The man on the ground wasn’t Danny, but the portion of dragon skin he wore was. Peeled right off of Andi’s brother, to help the Hunters’ cause.
“Disgusting,” Austin said, lip curled.
Damian grunted in agreement, pulling it off the Hunter. It was a piece of hide from a dragon’s stomach, with overlapping scales in mottled army green, in sharp contrast to the bright green blood still fresh on the rawer side.
His dragon resurfaced inside him at feeling the rough skin of another dragon’s hide against his palm. In this instance, your sister is correct, it told him. Traitors should be killed on sight.
Damian rode back in the SUV with them, their mood far more muted than it should’ve been after a successful night. They’d taken all the Hunters’ talismans with them so it was just as impossible to ignore the scent of Danny’s blood stinking up the cabin as it was to ignore the knowledge that the dragon that was on their side wasn’t guaranteed to play nice.
For his part, Damian stared out the window or played with his phone. Still nothing from Andi. And what would he send her if he could? I hope your brother stops skinning himself for the Hunters soon, or, You were right, I hesitated, or, Currently, my friends think I’m an asshole.
But he knew that even if she wanted to be apart from him, she would be worried. It wasn’t in his princess not to worry, because she cared. It was part of what drew him to her—her profound depth of empathy. She needed things to work out, her friends and patients to be healthy, her relationships to be good. She was like some benign force of nature, radiating a wholesome kindness that his own scarred and scaled-self found impossibly alluring, wanting nothing more than to bask beneath her benevolent sun.
So he decided he could risk one word, and he could pretend it was more for her sake than for his.
Alive.
He sent it before he could talk himself out of it as Zach put the tour bus in park in their garage, and he willed himself to expect nothing in return.
“You’re going to dispose of these, right, Wind Racer?” Stella asked, handing the bag of talismans she’d collected over to Zach.
“With dragon fire,” Zach said. “The next time we can trust him, that is.” He gave Damian a meaningful look.
“Which is now,” Damian grumbled.
Stella snorted. “I’ll believe it when I see it, big guy.”
“Which means you’ll come out with us again?” Zach pressed. He was half a head taller than Stella, and he didn’t need his suit on to look like he still meant business; you could hear it in his voice. She ducked away, heading for her motorcycle, nearer the front stair.
“Sure, I guess,” she said, shrugging one shoulder as she pulled her jacket on.
“Hold up,” Damian called to her, walking to her side.
“I don’t give rides to strangers,” she said, standing beside her Suzuki GSX-R. She had real gear on, stiff black leather, and was pulling her light blonde hair into a low ponytail for her ride.
“Are you all right?” he asked her, entirely conscious of the way that Zach was now staring at his back.
“No thanks to you and your washboard abs.” She frowned, reaching for her helmet.
“About that…I owe you an apology.”
She squinted at him and finished pulling her helmet on, before tapping the side of it where her ear would be. “I don’t think I heard you,” she shouted, like she was deafened inside.
Damian knew very well she wasn’t, but also understood this was a burden that he’d earned. “I’m sorry,” he said, much louder.
“What?” she shouted back at him.
“I am sorry!” he said, at high volume. “For threatening you this evening…and endangering you tonight.”
She glanced past him, at where Zach was, and her lips curled into a grin. “Apology accepted,” she shouted back. “Call me if you want to go out again.” She made an imaginary phone with her gloved hand and waved it by her ear before straddling her bike and taking off.
Zach came up behind him and clapped his shoulder. “Just because you apologized doesn’t mean you get to skip debriefing.”
“I didn’t think it would.” Damian was resigned, and Stella wasn’t the only one he needed to make amends to. He headed back inside with Zach, and found Austin waiting on the stair, looking peeved.
“I know. I’m sorry,” Damian began, but the werewolf waved his apology away with a hand and cut to the chase.
“Did you really watch Die Hard without me?”
Andi was on her last break on her longest shift at work ever. Both of her patients were despicably healthy, one of them even had transfer orders, so there was nothing for her to do. They were sleeping, for crying out loud, no neuro checks or vascular checks. They were just normal people.
Plain, boring people.
Like her.
She tried not to huff as she turned over on the breakroom couch. There were other people in the room who legitimately needed sleep, so she shouldn’t be rude, but what was there to do? She still had three hours of work left after this. How was she going to make it? She didn’t want to read books on her phone, because all of known fiction was a fucking lie, and she didn’t want to look at Instagram and see happy people with daytime lives, her old nursing school friends with their real tans acquired from actual sun, holding babies and smiling by pretty food.
No, she needed legitimate distractions from all her internal agony. She wanted to do things and save people and not have a goddamned moment to herself to think about the consequences of her decisions, or how awful her family was and how she’d had to leave Damian. She was still in a bad mood when her break was finished, quietly closing the breakroom door behind herself to find her charge nurse waiting in the hall.
“We transferred your room four out and got in a crainy.”
“While I was gone?”
“Yeah. Zenaida was going to take it, but one of her kids called, they threw up, so she’s going home. It’s yours now; we put them in three.”
An actually sick patient meant stuff to do. “Halle-fucking-lujah,” Andi breathed.
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry. It’s just, tonight’s been—”
“Don’t say it.” Sheila glared. Everyone in the hospital knew you never said that it was slow or quiet. There was no surer way to curse your shift.
“Yeah, no,” Andi said, shaking her head quickly with a grin. She went to her rooms and got a fast report from Zen, and then hopped into her new patient’s room to do an assessment. But much to her horror, they, too, were relatively stable, past the craniotomy.
Andi closed the doors and checked over her shoulders for witnesses before announcing, “Tonight’s been slow,” to her very-well-sedated and missing-a-portion-of-their-brain-now patient, welcoming any chaos that that might bring.
Her phone buzzed. She pulled it out and found a simple one-word text from Damian: Alive.
A sense of profound calm washed over her—one she couldn’t deny. She’d wanted to protect him from herself, yes, but everything he did was dangerous, so she was happy just knowing he was all right, even if she didn’t feel comfortable responding to him. She didn’t want to lead him on, but she sure as shit didn’t want to block him. She sighed and rocked back on her heels, feeling like a ten-ton weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
“Hey,” she told her patient, pulling one of their eyelids open, their wide pupil focusing only on the ceiling. “It’s not slow here anymore. I take it back.”
Damian’s days fell into a rhythm after that. Mills announced targets—despite the fact that they didn’t know where Danny and Lee were, there was a never-ending stream of Hunters coming into their city, it seemed—and he and the others carefully took them out. They even closed a rift which Jamison’s gear had predicted. In the beforetimes, that would’ve been a cause worth celebrating, but everything felt dead without Andi.
Each day was a struggle to contain his dragon’s anger and his growing apathy toward all else in his life. The only thing he had to look forward to was the moment between two to four a.m. each night when he broke and texted her.
Alive. Alive. Alive. Over and over again. Even though it wasn’t true, because was this living, really? He was killing things, yes. Protecting his friends and family—also true—but he might as well have been a robot. He’d trained so hard, he could do the things he did in his sleep, and slowly it felt like waking and dreaming made no difference to him; everything was just painfully the same. His life, if it could be called such, was wrapped in drab gray fog.
Alive.
He never got any response.
Was he bothering her?
Alive.
Had she blocked him?
Had she changed her number?
Alive.
He did his best not to scroll up through the texts and torment himself with the photos of her body that she’d sent him or her half-hidden face in the photographs the paparazzi had taken. But sometimes his resolve broke; he couldn’t help himself, and it hurt far worse than any of Jamison’s lasers.
Because he was still himself, he had urges—strong, monstrous, and dark. And dreams of being with Andi haunted him at night, and came at inopportune moments throughout the day, but the idea of touching himself and imagining her stopped him cold. Coming for her while knowing she wasn’t there to answer when he called out her name felt like exactly the kind of thing that might break him.
More, if he were being honest with himself. Break him more…because he was already pretty damn broken.
“Damian,” Grimalkin greeted him, batting at his face one morning till he woke.
“What,” he grumbled. He’d been having a perfectly nice dream. He and Andi had been in a deep forest, walking side by side, and it’d felt so real he’d been able to forget actual reality—until Grimalkin had started in. “We’re not under attack, there are no klaxons. Come back later,” he said without opening his eyes. If he could fall back asleep, there was a chance he could go back to his walk and her smile.
“I brought this for you, Damian,” Grimalkin said into his ear, his whiskers tickling against Damian’s neck.
Damian shivered and growled, sitting up. He was too awake to chase his dream now that Grimalkin had ruined it. “Explain yourself,” he told the cat. Grimalkin stepped sideways, revealing a small crumbly pile of white cheese on a wooden cutting board, looking for all the world like a miniature avalanche. “I should’ve known this conversation would be cheese related,” he said flatly.
Grimalkin pranced to stand behind the platter. “This is the pule cheese I made you get me. I hid it from Austin, obviously.”
Damian wiped a hand over his face, like the last of his dream was a cobweb he needed to knock off, and he scratched at his stubble. He remembered the hassle of getting this particular cheese for Grimalkin. More than the expense—although it was quite expensive—the stuff came from donkeys milked in Serbia. “I got you five pounds of it,” he recalled.
Grimalkin looked affronted. “I’ve. Been. Rationing,” the cat informed him, before batting the cutting board closer to Damian’s thigh. Damian sighed and reached for one of the crumbles and Grimalkin swatted at his hand with his paw, claws out. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Trying five hundred dollar a pound cheese?” Damian guessed, setting the crumble down and looking at his hand, where Grimalkin’s tiny wrath had left four small red streaks. He was bemused by the injury; not many things were able to hurt him.
Except for Andi.
“It’s not for you,” Grimalkin said, as if he were insane. “It’s for her. Take it back through the mirror and make things better.”
Damian realized what a sacrifice this was for his guardian and how dire his situation must seem for Grim to offer it. “Cheese doesn’t fix everything, Grim,” he said, knuckling the cat’s tiny head.
“But it almost always helps,” his guardian informed him sagely, while leaning into his hand. “Unless…she doesn’t like cheese? No. You couldn’t be mated to someone who didn’t like cheese. Impossible.”
Damian chuckled. “I’ll ask her next time I talk to her.”
“But when will that be?” Grim pressed. Damian didn’t know how to respond, and the cat panicked, sensing that. “She’s your mate and you don’t even know?” The cheese disappeared, and Grimalkin hopped into his lap with a discomfited sound, to start kneading nervously against his chest. “She was supposed to be the one to lick you forever, Damian.”
Damian took a shuddering inhale, feeling a fresh pang of loss as he stroked a hand down the cat’s soft back. “I know.”
“Hey, so,” Sammy began, from her spot beside Andi on the couch, with the Investigation Discovery channel playing in their background. “Is your man avoiding me?”
Andi looked at her roommate over the Ben and Jerry’s she’d been sincerely eating for dinner. “No. Why do you ask?” Andi knew she’d been lucky. She and Sammy had been on opposite schedules for a while now—Sammy out on dates or Andi asleep—but she should’ve known this moment was coming and prepared.
“Because. I want to know when I get those drives.” Sammy grinned at her. “I bet he’s scared of me crashing his fancy-ass car.”
Andi gave her a tight smile. “Probably!” she agreed.
“Although, I bet he’s insured out the wazoo,” Sammy went on, considering. Then she stared at Andi, and realized Andi wasn’t frozen on the couch just because of her ice cream. “Wait a minute,” Sammy started.
“I can explain everything,” Andi tried, even though she couldn’t.
“Did you guys break up?” Sammy asked, each word rising in volume.
“Yes,” Andi answered slowly.
“And you didn’t tell me?”
Andi took the longest inhale of her life. What was there to tell? Girl meets dragon, girl’s family hates dragons, girl breaks dragon’s heart? “Also, yes.”
“Wait. What?” Sammy blew air through pursed lips at her, clearly stunned by her betrayal. “I’m torn between being really pissed about you not telling me and wanting to know what happened, and I’m not sure what to yell about first.”
“Well, at least you’re honest,” Andi said. “Unlike me,” she added, before Sammy could for her. Sammy held out her hand, and Andi passed the ice cream over with the spoon, taking a savage scoop of it before twirling the spoon in midair to indicate Andi should go on.
“We, uh, had some differences. I guess.”
“Uh-uh. Not good enough. Phone,” Sammy said. Andi reluctantly pulled out her phone and queued up Damian’s number, handing it over. Sammy held the spoon in her mouth while she scrolled back.
“Don’t go too far or you’ll see things you don’t wanna see,” Andi warned.
“If you’re broken up, why’s he still texting you?” Sammy asked, talking around the spoon like it was a cigar. “What’s this ‘alive’ shit? Is he suicidal or something?”
“It’s hard to explain. Really. But…he’s not in my life anymore, Sammy. And neither is his car,” Andi explained while Sammy scrolled. She watched her roommate’s eyes widen. She’d gone too far, for sure, and seen the photo of Damian’s hand and then she turned off Andi’s phone.
“Are you all right?” Sammy asked, handing the phone back with a frown.
She wanted to lie again to Sammy, but the thought was more than she could bear. “Not really, no,” she admitted.
Sammy set the ice cream down and wrapped Andi against her side, and they watched the rest of their TV show while the ice cream melted—Andi content to be held in the safety of her best friend’s arms. She’d done so much quiet crying in the shower over the past few weeks she didn’t have any tears left in her, just a seemingly bottomless pit of sorrow that followed her like her shadow. She felt on the verge of falling in all the time despite her best efforts to avoid it.
But it was what it was, and as long as Damian was still alive, she knew she’d be okay.
“We’re going out tomorrow,” Sammy announced, her chin placed on Andi’s head protectively.
“You and Mister PhD?” Andi guessed forlornly.
“No, you, me, and Eumie.”
Andi’d been avoiding Eumie as well. “They might have plans.”
“They’ll break them for you. I can’t believe you’ve been suffering a breakup alone.”
“We weren’t together very long.” It just felt like they had. It felt like everything.
“Shut up and let me be nice to you, you stupid, stubborn girl,” Sammy said. “I swear, sometimes you’re just like Danny.”
Andi sighed into Sammy’s arms. “Not really.”
Andi made it through work that night on autopilot, then went straight to bed when she got home, because she knew Sammy was a woman of her word, and sure enough, the soft knocking at her door started at 5:05.
“Coffee, dinner, movies,” Sammy announced, when she heard Andi rustling.
“Gimme twenty,” Andi asked, hiding her face with a pillow. “Although, I don’t need babysitting, Sammy.” Despite the fact that she still hadn’t yet put a fresh pillowcase back on the pillow she was using….
“Don’t make me fight you,” Sammy threatened, and because Andi knew she meant it, she got up.
Sammy drove them to Jones and Shah for coffee—which was good and bad. Andi still got free coffee, but she remembered the time Damian had accosted her there, back when she’d been trying to pump David for information about her brother, before she learned that everything about Danny was bad.
“And you’re sure he wasn’t mean to you?” Eumie asked, having closed the bakery early to join them, and all too ready to join Sammy’s ‘cause Damian physical harm’ brigade. They were looking masc today with heavy denim jeans and a ‘Team Building 1999!’ T-shirt on underneath a flannel jacket.
“Yes.” Except for the times I wanted him to be mean because it was hot. Andi knew she was going to have to be Wonder Woman to deflect all the questions they were going to pepper her with tonight if she didn’t manage to head them off at the pass. “It was just a doomed thing. From the start. Which, yes, both of you tried to warn me, and I swear next time I’ll try to listen.” She gave her chest a decent Catholic cross.
“I don’t think I told you it was doomed. In fact, I clearly remember telling you to get some,” Eumie said, with an evil chuckle.
Sammy glared at the baker. “I might have said the doomed thing? But then I was swayed by the car. I should’ve known though that any man who could afford a Pagani would also be an asshole. The connection between cash and dickery is clear.”
Eumie offered their coffee up in a silent toast to Sammy, who obliged with hers back. “In any case,” Eumie continued, “let’s figure out what movie we’re going to see.” They grabbed one of the omnipresent local papers and flipped over to the showtimes page, putting it on the table between the three of them.
“No rom-coms,” Andi begged. “And no action movies, either. Or fantasy. Or sci-fi.”
Eumie gave her a look. “Is there a genre of movie he didn’t ruin for you?”
“Foreign films?” Andi guessed. “Wait…no.”
Sammy closed her eyes, zigged her finger through the air, and planted it on the page. “This is what we’re seeing,” she said, lifting up her finger. “Diary of a Middle-aged Man. The Art Deco House. Seven.”
Eumie grit their teeth and inhaled sharply. “I can already tell that’s going to suck.”
“I’m not the one who wants to go,” Andi said, looking pointedly at Sammy.
“Adventure is misery fondly remembered,” Sammy said, staring the both of them down.
“What fortune cookie did you get that off of?” Andi asked.
“None, because you never let us order Chinese,” Sammy said, sticking her tongue out.
It was true, because nothing that got delivered could begin to compare to the memory of Andi’s mother’s cooking.
Two and a half hours later, during which Andi had only thought of Damian forty times, so a probable win for Sammy, they were in the back of the theater watching credits roll.
“Oh, God. That was so bad,” Eumie groaned.
“Fuck yes, it was,” Andi agreed.
“I mean,” Eumie went on, “that was like an, ‘Are You There, God, It’s Me, Margaret’ only written, directed, and acted by a forty-year old white man going through a midlife crisis.”
“That dude was pushing fifty. I don’t know who he thought he was kidding,” Sammy said, moving to stand behind Eumie. “Honestly, when I went to the bathroom, I thought about not coming back.”
“If you had ditched us after forcing us to watch a movie bad enough to be covered by the Geneva Convention….” Andi threatened, standing too.
“I would’ve had to help her murder you, Sammy,” Eumie promised.
“And no jury would convict. We’d just show them that movie as evidence, and get off scot free.”
Sammy snickered as Eumie pressed an affronted palm to their chest, the three of them navigating down the aisle. “Where’s my diary? Who’s going to write my story? Any three days in my life have been more interesting than that asshat’s life in its entirety.”
“I don’t know, Eumie,” Sammy said, matter-of-factually, “have you ever committed adultery with a sexually wise beyond her years student? Did you ever cut the brakes to your wife’s car because you couldn’t be bothered to get a divorce?”
Eumie pretended to think in the hallway’s brighter light, illuminated by a series of old-timey chandeliers that helped the Art Deco theater live up to its name. “I did sleep around with some wandering heroes. Does that count?”
Sammy laughed delightedly. “Wandering heroes, eh? I like the sound of that. I’m not having a one-night stand, I’m just a wandering hero.”
“More like wandering ho,” Andi said, and then danced out of hitting range.
“You!” Sammy shouted at her, laughing. “I don’t want to hear it from you right now, missy.” She tossed her empty box of Red Vines in the trash. “Go back to being depressed or something.”
Andi stuck her tongue out at her friend, then rejoined their line. “Don’t worry. I still am.” She heaved a sigh. “It’s gonna take a while for me to get back to ‘wandering ho’ status.” If ever. Damian’s memory was going to eclipse any other man she met…possibly for life. In fact, right now it felt like there was no point in even trying.
“Wandering ho is a state of mind,” Eumie said with a grin. “And I have faith in you. Because the walls in our building are very thin.” Andi felt herself turning beet red, as Eumie wrapped an arm around her, laughing. “But not tonight.”
“No. No boys now. Tonight is just hanging out with friends,” Sammy said, wrapping Andi up on the other side. Andi took a moment to relax into their collective safekeeping, even if it involved being teased mercilessly. “Also,” Sammy went on, “I feel like if we’re wandering heroes, we should have a theme song.”
“Sammy, you know I love you, but you cannot sing,” Andi said. Sammy was fond of early morning shower karaoke, and sometimes there was not enough Ambien in Andi’s bloodstream to sleep through it.
“Since when has that ever stopped me?” Sammy said, and inhaled to start.
They turned the corner as one, heading for the small theater’s lobby where they were greeted by another group of ten or so guests, of differing heights and ethnicities, all dressed in black. The only commonality they had were embroidered gold roses on their lapels, and then odd, organically strange pieces of armor or jewelry everywhere else. At seeing her, they snapped to attention and so did Andi.
Because she realized she knew exactly who they were, especially when the youthful looking Latina woman who’d been seated near her uncle appeared in their midst.
Hunters.