For the second time that night, Andi was being driven at completely unsafe speeds in silence. She wasn’t sure what—if anything—to say. She hated how comfortable it was to be around Danny again, how easy it was to fall back into old habits, how she had to remind herself continually how much she hated him—and why! So many reasons why! The lying for half her life, for taking Uncle Lee’s side, for letting them do horrible things to him and for him doing horrible things to other people. How human was it to want to make excuses for him, and how nauseating was it that she couldn’t turn that part of her brain off?
Andi reached for the El Camino’s old-fashioned stereo dial and popped it out, then rolled the antique piece of machinery up and down the radio spectrum so she could listen to music instead of her thoughts.
“And in breaking local news, police are racing toward a freak helicopter crash outside of town—”
Danny’s hand reached over and tapped the dial in, turning the radio between them off. “What’re you thinking?”
“You don’t want to know.”
He took a turn at speed, the El Camino’s engine roaring. “The answer is five.”
Andi blinked and looked over at him. “What?”
“I’ve killed five people. Just…five.”
“Just,” Andi repeated, before biting her lips, as bile rose at the back of her throat. She waited, looking over at him, and when he didn’t say anything she asked, “Well?”
“Well…what?”
“Aren’t you going to…I don’t know…make excuses? Tell me the story? How it was them or you and you were lucky to survive?” She rolled her eyes. She was used to her slick brother Danny, who always had a reason for being late, and if he didn’t, the reason was that it was your fault somehow.
“Depends. Do you want me to lie to you, or not?”
Last chance to get off the truth train before it crashed. “I think our family’s had more than enough lies.”
Danny nodded and stared straight ahead at the road. “All right, then. You remember when we were sixteen?”
Andi kicked off her shoes and curled up in the car seat. “The whole year, or some specific part?”
“When we started hustling people for money at pool halls, after I got us fake IDs.”
“Yeah.” She shrugged.
“And do you remember the third or fourth time we did it? That angry blond guy?”
Andi sucked air in through her teeth. “Yeah.” The guy’d been twice her size and utterly convinced he could beat her, but it was like he’d just started playing pool yesterday, whereas she’d been playing ever since she could hold a cue in her hands. He’d kept doubling down until they gotten him for five hundred bucks; it was a lot of money now, and even more back then. He’d gotten in her face, and she and Danny had beat a hasty retreat before him and his friends could come after them.
“You remember what he said when we were leaving?” Danny asked her.
Andi paused a moment in thought. “No.” She remembered the guy clearly, between his beer breath and his popped collar, but she couldn’t remember a word he’d said.
“He promised he was going to come after you.” Danny spared her a glance. “Not me. You.”
Andi met his gaze. “So?”
“So I went back that night to make sure he couldn’t come after anyone, anymore,” Danny said with a shrug. “Only…I didn’t know my own strength. The medicines Mom was giving me…they affected me at weird times, in weird ways. It was like going through puberty all the time—”
She finally heard what he was saying and realized how come he’d made it through all those bar brawls unscathed. “Wait! You killed a guy for drunkenly threatening me? Who wasn’t even an Unearthly?”
Danny blinked. “Is that what they call themselves? Not just monsters?”
Andi swept a hand between them like she was erasing what he’d just said. “No! You don’t get to make this about me, Danny! I’m not the reason you killed a man!”
She saw him wind himself up to fight like they always did, then he collapsed like someone had put a pin in him. “You’re right. Protecting you was just a convenient excuse. But…after that…that’s how I knew I had the rest of them in me.” He went back to staring at the road.
Andi watched the racing streetlights cast her brother’s face in shadow, like the flickering beat of her heart. “Did Mom know?”
“No. But I told Uncle Lee. He helped me hide things. Like always.” Danny sighed. “I know you’re not proud of me. I’m not proud of myself, either, if it makes you feel better now.”
Andi bit her lips, feeling the silence between them taking on a life of its own, a quiet wall that pushed them further and further apart. “I don’t think we can come back from this, Danny,” she whispered, and she knew she was crying, again. How many tears did she have in her? It wasn’t fair she had to lose Damian and Danny too, although she could argue that Danny’d already been lost to her for years.
“We have to, Andi-bear,” Danny said, looking at her again. “Because it’s destiny…I know it—”
“How?” Andi asked, throwing her hands up in the air, burning the backs of her hands on the ratty upholstery above her. “How come you’re so sure?”
He pulled his car off at the exit for her hospital. “Because Mom told me so.”
“What?” she asked, wiping away her tears.
“Mom gave me all her notes, Andi. She not only did this to me, but she was training me to do it to other people. And her notes say that you’re gonna fight by my side. Quote-un-fucking-quote.”
“There’s no way, Danny,” she protested, as he turned into her hospital’s roundabout, pulling on the brakes.
“Are you going to argue with a woman who lived for four centuries and turned her son into a dragon?” Danny asked her. He gave her a pointed look and then stuck his tongue out. She closed her eyes rather than watch him try to make her laugh and turned to open up the door. He caught her wrist before she could get out though. “At least let me show you her notes, Andi. She talks about you in them.”
Andi knew she should be strong—just cut the cord already!—but she wavered.
“Tomorrow night. Just let me show you them, all right? And then after that, if you never want to talk to me again, I understand,” he said, letting her go.
“I’ve gotta go to work, Danny. I’m already late.”
“Don’t answer now, just think about it!” he shouted after her, as she slammed the door shut, and wished that closing off her past could be so easy.
Andi settled herself in the hospital elevator and wound her hair up into its official work bun. She hadn’t been crying that hard, had she? She wiped her eyes and straightened her shoulders. No time for crying now; she had a job to do.
She stepped out of the elevators and onto her bustling floor, heard people shouting orders down the hall, and then one of them turned to shout at her.
“Andi!” Sheila bellowed. Andi ran down the hall to her, ready to get yelled at and get it over with, so that she could move on.
“Sorry about being late—” she said.
“Devastating break up, eh? We’ve all been there before.” Goddammit, Sammy. Her charge nurse grabbed the strap of her bag off her shoulder and chucked it down on the ground. “I’ve got just the assignment for you,” she said, jerking her head back to indicate the chaos happening behind her. “There was a helicopter crash outside of town. Somehow, this guy survived it.”
Andi glanced past her into the room where nurses were hanging medications as doctors placed central lines. “You’re…sure?”
“Never more so. You’re the kind of woman who rises to an occasion regardless of her personal life, and I’m not above abusing that when we’re short-staffed.” Sheila clapped her shoulder, and then stepped aside.
Andi tossed her coat onto the nearest counter and grabbed some paper and a pen from her bag to start taking notes as the ED nurse—who’d wheeled the patient in—shouted at her. “Intubated, crush injury, pneumo, chest tube, you’re getting a central line right now, hypotensive, levo—” Andi caught every third word while looking at the man himself, who was badly injured. “And we took these off of him. Don’t ask me why, just give them to his relatives if they show up.” The ED nurse swung a patient belonging bag at her. She caught it and set it aside. “Why the fuck did he have a bird skull on him? Was he eating a whole entire chicken before they crashed? Who the fuck knows.”
Andi nodded, acknowledging the weirdness of the hospital and the people drawn into it, and started taking over care.
The man was her only patient, which was good. He was on the verge of crashing. It took an hour for her to get him settled, and then he was only alive because of the ventilator that was breathing for him and the medications going in. Luckily, she had plenty of help, because surviving a helicopter crash made him a bit of an ICU celebrity, as her coworkers hoped that he was one.
“Was he a radio person?” Dominica wondered aloud. She’d come up from the burn unit to help with the dressings on his face.
“No, those people are total fakers. No one uses a helicopter for traffic reports anymore. The gas is too expensive,” said Lovely.
“Plus, what kind of traffic is there this late?” Faizah said, scoffing.
“NBA player, then?” Dominica guessed.
Lovely made a sound. “Grim…but possible. Any visitors yet, Andi?”
Andi looked up from the charting she was desperately trying to catch up on. “What, huh? No.” She spotted the belonging bag though and put some gloves on. If the man’s wallet was inside, they could do a google search, which’d cool her coworker’s jets some, until social work could hunt down next of kin come morning. She opened up the plastic bag and gagged.
The scent of burnt bone wafted out at her—worse than the man himself smelled, which was saying something. But the ED nurse hadn’t been lying. Andi reached in and found a bunch of bones—including a bird skull—strung on chains. Like gruesome trinkets.
Talismans like what Xochitl and her fellow Hunters had worn.
That explained how this man had managed to survive the helicopter crash. He’d been wearing a 90’s rapper’s worth of magical amulets. As for why he’d been in the helicopter to begin with, it was all too easy for her imagination to run wild.
Because what better way to fight a creature that could fly than from in the air beside it? Her pulse started to pound in her ears. What if something had happened to Damian? Did he need her? Was he all right? Had he been injured? She’d seen Damian get hurt before—that one time with the succubus stinger, and she’d seen Xochitl’s sword work on Eumie earlier in the night. And if fighting Damian had been the reason Xochitl had run away….
It was one thing for her to step back to protect him and another to think that he might be out there, somewhere, hurting without her.
“Andi? You okay?” Lovely asked.
Andi snapped the top of the bag closed. “Yeah. No wallet.”
“Well, between no wallet and no face right now, it’s gonna take a while to ID him,” Dominica said, but she was wrong.
He was a Hunter. That was all Andi needed to know.
Andi shooed her coworkers out the door so she could think and then went into the room’s en suite bathroom to catch her breath. Damian had to be okay. There was no other option. Surely if he was hurt, someone else on his team would’ve reached out to her.
Unless they were all dead, too.
What if he was hurt somewhere…dying alone?
The terror of not knowing clung to Andi like a fog, and it wasn’t something she could just push through, not like the other times she’d been emotionally messed up at work before. She appreciated Sheila’s faith in her, but right now she wasn’t sure she could manage her own shit, much less a dying man who’d most likely been trying to kill her ex-boyfriend.
She splashed cold water on her face in a desperate attempt to stop panicking, and then blotted herself with flimsy paper towels. She swore she saw flashes of red between blots and wondered if it was an oncoming migraine, and then felt a burst of cold air ahead of her, like someone had opened up a freezer. Andi blinked and saw a woman on the other side of the mirror that was not herself.
“Why aren’t your mirrors reasonably placed?” the woman complained after ducking through. She jumped to the floor, landing lightly even though Andi had seen a flash of heels beneath her skirt. A red bird followed the woman and started spinning in tight circles against the ceiling.
“Ryana?” Andi had only seen her after her injuries in the Realms and had never met her once awake. But she was too like Damian to not be his sister; her chin was narrower and her brow less defined, but they shared the same full lips and haughty cheekbones. She was half-a-foot taller than Andi was, though not as tall as Damian, and had the kind of generous curves Andi had longed for her entire life. She was holding a wicked looking knife with a jeweled hilt and a twisting blade.
“Princess Ryana,” the woman corrected her.
Andi ignored the knife entirely. “Is Damian okay?”
One of her eyebrows arched up. “Of course. Why wouldn’t he be?”
“So, that’s not why you’re here?” Andi pressed, because she needed to hear the words.
“Not in the least.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I am a person of action,” Ryana said, pointing her knife in Andi’s direction. “Regardless of what anyone else thinks.”
Andi backed up. “What does that mean?”
“Currently? That I’m threatening you.” She looked Andi up and down disdainfully. “Common human that you are, you need to make up your mind.”
“What?” Andi blinked helplessly as the other woman took up more space with her anger. Ryana’s arrival had done nothing to help the already high levels of adrenaline in her blood.
“You’re hurting my brother, and for what? Your pride? You think he doesn’t have pride, too?”
“But…he’s alive?” Andi heard herself asking softly, as if from far away.
“Yes,” Ryana said, then lowered the knife slightly, as her green eyes narrowed. “Why do you keep asking?”
“Because…helicopter,” Andi said, pointing through the wall behind her.
Ryana frowned. “What is a helicopter again?”
A voice interrupted them both from inside the room behind her. “Visitors incoming!” A pause, and then a question. “Andi?”
Her charge nurse shouting her name brought her back to life. Andi reached past Ryana and hit the wand to make the toilet flush. “Just emptying the urinal!” she shouted back.
Visitors meant Hunters. Ryana was here and Hunters would definitely want to kill her. And Damian may or may not be alive because Ryana didn’t know what the fuck a helicopter was.
Andi wanted to scream, but instead she took a deep inhale to pull her shit together, ignored the knife, and grabbed Ryana’s shoulders. “I need you to go back right now, Ryana. It’s not safe for you here.”
“I am tired of other people telling me what to do,” the woman growled.
Andi danced in place for a moment, trying to figure out the best course of action. “Fine then, but whatever you do, don’t open this door and don’t say another word,” Andi told her and then left the bathroom, closing the door solidly behind herself.
Seconds later, she heard a cluster of men with Australian accents coming down the hall, talking to a coworker. “So this was a horrible tourist accident?” she heard Lovely ask them.
“Oh, yeah. We all told him it was a bad idea. There’s nothing to see at night.”
Another man said: “Ah, but money burns holes in some people’s pockets.”
“And there’s always other people around to help you spend it,” a third man said with a short laugh.
Andi knew who she was going to see before they reached the room’s front glass. The Australian hunter who’d wanted to see her mother’s notes for himself. All three of the men were tan with close cropped hair, wearing khaki slacks and pastel polos. They looked like they’d just come off a golf course, but the man she remembered had the same strange little toothpick, no doubt made out of ivory.
He nodded at her first. “Andrea.”
“You two know each other?” Lovely asked.
“Ah, no, I just saw her nametag.” He gestured at Andi’s chest, and then his own. “I’m Jack. Nice to meet you.”
Andi didn’t respond.
Lovely looked between them quickly. “All right. I’m gonna go give Faizah a break. You’re on deck next, okay, Andi?”
“Great, thanks,” Andi said, waving her away, as the Hunters surveyed their fallen comrade.
“He gonna make it?” Jack asked, giving her a sly look.
Andi frowned but kept her position between the men and the bathroom door. “He won’t die on my shift because of me, if that’s what you’re asking.”
The man chuckled. “Lee’s right. You’re too soft for that.” He put his hands into his pockets. “You’re going to have to toughen up when you join us.”
“I’m never joining you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, making a show of looking around, touching his friend, the bed, IV bags. Andi wanted to slap his hands down. “Consciences serve people in good stead in daylight, girl. But look at you. You live and work the night. You’ll come around.” He flipped the toothpick he gnawed on to the other side of his mouth and leered at her. “You wanna know if we got your friend?”
More than anything. But to announce it aloud would be to let them know they had leverage on her and would make this conversation go on longer, keeping Ryana in danger, if she hadn’t wisely poofed herself back through the mirror when she’d closed the door. “I want you to leave. You’ve seen your man. We’ll do the best we can.”
One of the men grabbed the belongings bag, taking stock of its contents with a grunt. “It’s all here,” he announced.
Jack rocked his toothpick across his upper lip with his tongue, considering her. “All right, then. We’re off. See you soon, I’m sure.” He touched the brim of an imaginary hat as his men left, and he followed them. Andi walked into the hall behind them to watch them depart, making sure they were through the next two sets of doors before heading back into the bathroom.
Ryana was waiting inside, looking like a sea-nymph out of a Waterhouse painting, her dress and hair all aflow, only sitting on the counter instead of a stone. Her knife was tucked petulantly up underneath her chin in her hand and her red bird was on her shoulder. “Those were Hunters, weren’t they.” She sat up straight and her green eyes pierced Andi, sharper than the blade she held for sure.
“Yes.”
“And…you didn’t betray me.” It was a statement, not a question. She’d been able to hear every word.
“I would never, Ryana.”
“Yet you’re trying to keep one of them alive?” She stared through the open door behind Andi, at her patient on the bed, and frowned.
“Also, yes. I’m not a murderer, Ryana. At least, I’m trying not to be. I know you probably think that makes me some kind of traitor, and I don’t know what Damian told you, anyhow.” Surely he didn’t think that of her, and even if he did, it didn’t matter anymore now, did it? Andi shook her head. She’d done the right thing…even though it hurt her! “All I know is that they were out tonight, trying to kill him, and I need to know he’s all right more than I need air to breathe.”
The words were out of her mouth before she could consider them, but every single one of them was true.
Ryana frowned. “Is a helicopter like that sky-weapon in Die Hard?” she asked sincerely.
Andi nodded helplessly.
The other woman’s eyes widened and she pulled her legs up onto the counter beneath her. “I’m going back then. But you,” she said, pointing at Andi with the knife, “the time is going to come when you’ll to have to choose.” The mirror behind her went black and a burst of freezing air came through as Ryana’s frown deepened. “And if some reason Damian’s been hurt—because of all your human-hunter-friends—I swear I will come back and kill you.”
Andi’s heart thundered in her chest as Ryana disappeared into the darkness. “I might let you,” she whispered after her, as her mouth went dry.
Alive.
Damian typed the word into his phone to send to Andi despite the fact that it’d never felt further from the truth. After confirming that Austin would be all right, Jamison had led them on a long and strange route home to make sure they weren’t followed, and Damian spent the entire trip trying to convince himself that the Hunters hadn’t just gone and proved Andi’s point entirely. How could he keep himself safe for her if they were willing to send helicopters after him?
“You’ve been quiet,” Austin said.
“Just thinking.”
“Hard thoughts?”
“Yes. No interstate side trips though.”
“Eh, I’m in no condition to meet strangers,” Austin said, shrugging his injured arm.
Damian was still lost in his own misery as Jamison parked the car remotely, right in front of his mansion’s front stair. As he got out of the car, he was surprised to see his sister running for his side.
“Ryana?” he asked as she engulfed him in an embrace. She was cold—maybe because she’d changed into a dress.
“Are you all right?” she demanded to know, despite the fact that he was standing right there.
“Sure, check in on the nearly immortal dragon first,” Austin said, grunting as he got out of the car. “Don’t mind me bleeding out over here.”
Ryana flashed him a look. “I’m not responsible for your incompetence guarding my brother, wolf-creature.”
Stella sucked in air through her teeth. “Austin, which do you want first, a bandage for that wound or some ice for that burn?”
Ryana wheeled on Damian again. “Did you really see a helicopter?” she demanded to know.
Damian blinked. Maybe she’d overheard Jamison leading them in.
“Yeah, but we’re fine,” he told her. Her sudden concern was mystifying, but then again, he was literally the only person she trusted on Earth. Before he could address her fears, Jamison came out of the house, trotting down the stairs two by two.
“My baby,” Jamison groaned, dodging everyone standing, heading straight for the car. “I knew it was bad, but….” He patted the hood with his metal hand and sighed.
“Sorry about that, Jamison,” Damian said, giving his friend a nod.
“We were going to have to ditch it once they made it, anyways,” Austin said.
“No, I know. It’s just such an uncivilized decommissioning,” he said, circling the SUV with a frown. Ryana peeled herself away to follow him and her eyes went wide. There were circular dents in the side of the vehicle where the paint had been blasted off, letting the dull sheen of the reinforced metal show through, and there was a pause where they all looked at the car together.
“I can’t believe we survived,” Stella said, shaking her head.
“I can’t believe I got shot by a goddamned helicopter,” Austin muttered.
Jamison looked down at the SUV’s dented hood with a sigh. “I can’t believe I’m going to have to figure out where to fit a rocket launcher into the next tour bus by dawn.”
Their small group went inside, minus Jamison, who was already working on his new task, and Zach thundered down the stairs to meet them. “A helicopter?”
“I know,” Damian said, trying to cut his surprise off at the pass.
“Are you all right?” he asked Stella next. Zach wasn’t wearing a suit anymore. He was in low-slung pajama bottoms and all the tattoos across his chest were clearly on display. Damian could feel heat splash across Stella in response to seeing him, like lighter fluid on an open flame.
“Look, I’m sorry my injury doesn’t rate, but can someone at least get me some whiskey?” Austin grouched.
Zach turned to his brother’s side. “Austin,” he tsked, at seeing all the blood, then looked at Stella again. “I thought I told you to keep an eye on him?”
She blinked in surprise, and her ruby lips pulled into a smug grin. “What do I look like, a superhero?” she laughed.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Austin waved his brother off. “I’ll heal.”
Ryana left Damian’s side and snapped her fingers at Austin. “Let me see,” she demanded.
“Why? Have you picked up tips from Gray’s Anatomy?” he snarked.
“Could I have been watching earthly medical instruction this whole time?” She sounded profoundly disappointed she’d been watching Aliens.
“No, no you could not have,” Damian told his sister. “Do not get your medical knowledge from TV,” he said, and gave Austin a glare in warning.
Ryana looked between the two of them, frustrated anew. “Well…I want to hear what happened.”
“Me too, Ryana,” Zach agreed.
“Yes, now that you don’t look like my father, you’re allowed to stay.”
“Up to your old tricks?” Stella asked him, her eyebrows high. Damian remembered how they first met, and it was Zach’s turn to flush.
Damian recounted their night quickly, noting the way that Stella was perched on her chair in particular, like she didn’t want to fit in. It wasn’t until he told the story of their last encounter, including the way that she’d helped save them with her quick thinking that he saw her relaxing, until she caught Zach looking at her with wariness.
“Okay, well, that’s enough of that!” she announced, throwing her bag of reclaimed talismans into the center of their circle. “I’ve gotta go.”
“But,” Zach began, also standing. “It’s not safe.”
“Hey, if you can’t figure out where I live, neither can anyone else,” she said lightly, backing up. “Don’t worry…tonight was too fun not to repeat sometime.”
Zach watched her leave with a frown, and then noticed the others noticing. “It’s not safe,” he repeated.
“You don’t have to convince me,” Austin said, shrugging his injured arm. “In any case, hooray, we survived. Damian didn’t dragon out in any capacity, and I need to go wash this shit, badly.”
Ryana turned towards Damian. “This is why you need servants, brother. He shouldn’t have to care for himself.”
“You’re right, he can’t. That’s why he has me,” Zach said low, and Ryana snorted.
“You know you were looking for a job, earlier,” Austin reminded her.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I only supervise,” she said coolly.
Austin made a show of scratching the golden stubble on his chin before breaking into an easy grin. “Well, it just so happens, I’m a man who definitely requires supervision.”
Ryana laughed, and let him lead her away.
Keeping the Hunter alive was a matter of professional pride—nothing more—which was why Andi didn’t feel bad about checking her phone at the bedside. Damian usually texted late at night, when she assumed he was finally done saving the world and going to bed, and the second it turned two a.m., she started pacing, phone out, waiting for some message to come in, which was why she saw Sammy’s messages as they landed at 3:45 a.m.
I think Eumie’s out of the woods. I called in sick tomorrow and I’m going to bed.
You okay?
Andi stared at her phone, her heart still beating at the same frantic rate it’d had when Ryana left. No, I am not okay, she wanted to text back. And I will never be okay. But instead, she just sent back, Yeah, with the world’s lyingest smile emoji, and fell into the chair beside her computer.
The ventilator whooshed, the pumps pulsed, the sleeves on her patient’s calves inflated and deflated, but the longer she waited, watching her phone, the more still she got. She was so filled with fear there was no room for anything else. Even her heart had quieted down, beating once, twice a minute, at most it felt like, as her dread coalesced into a physical object around her, like a cloak that was both heavy and lined with spikes.
If being away from Damian hadn’t saved him, what had been the point?
Six a.m. rolled around. She was incredibly behind and she didn’t even care. She could chart anything she’d missed tomorrow.
If there was a tomorrow.
How could there be if she didn’t know what’d happened to Damian?
Andi picked up her phone, feeling like she faced a traitor. She typed in: Are you alive??? and hit send.
Damian didn’t bother to shower; he just kicked off his shoes and lay down on his bed. The last several hours in the training gym had been brutal. Jamison’s lasers had dismounted from the walls to join forces and walk toward him on spindly legs, like a tiny laser spider army, but he’d gotten what he wanted. His dragon was quiet at last.
He stared up at the ceiling. Sometimes, it felt like these moments, when his dragon was away, were the only moments he got to grieve properly. When it was safe to feel all that he’d lost—raw and sharp.
His phone blinked on his nightstand, and he turned to pick it up, sending the photos of Andi that he kept there fluttering to the floor. He sat up and picked them up, too, carefully aligning them and putting them back where they belonged, in a small stack on his nightstand’s corner. Always present but out of reach, just like the real thing.
He glanced at his phone, expecting to find a text from Austin that said his sister had hurt him, could he come retrieve her please, when he saw a note from the number he’d been waiting for all this time.
Are you alive???
Damian realized his own message to her was sitting as a draft on his phone, unsent—he’d been so distracted after the helicopter that, although he’d typed it, he hadn’t managed to hit send.
And because of that, he’d gotten his first sign of life from Andi. The first signal that she still cared and that they still had a fate. He went to text her yes, then realized his feelings were too big for just one word to hold anymore.
He’d been a fool to last as long as he had.
He got up instantly, grabbed a dark blue hoodie, and went for the door.
“Come to help?” Jamison asked from beneath the hood of a vehicle as Damian went outside. His techmaster was inside one of the garage’s bays, already working on modifying another SUV.
“No. Sorry.” Damian knew what he had to do, and he only had a twenty-minute window to pull it off. He jogged for the gates and then stopped, running back. “Jamison, how did you tell Mills you were meant to be together?”
The dark-skinned man put a wrench down and dropped the car’s hood. His metallic arm shone beneath the garage’s fluorescent lights. Damian was painfully aware that Jamison was younger than he was and probably vastly less experienced at all things except for this—because somehow he and Mills were happy. She was even cursed too, and it never seemed to bother him.
“It’s different in humans, I think,” Jamison said and laughed, wiping his hands down the front of his work shirt. “But when it’s right, you just know. And then you tell her everything. Because not telling her feels like dying.”
“That it does,” Damian sighed gently.
Jamison jerked a thumb at the vehicle beside him. “You want me to drive? I’ve almost got this car ready.”
“No, I’ve got it covered.” Damian shook his head as Jamison gave him an improbable look.
“After tonight, you don’t think you need backup?”
“I need to do this alone. You understand.”
“I do, and I know you need her, but we need you too.” Jamison leaned inside the SUV’s open window and popped the glove. “Humor me; take this. I promise I’ll keep it one way, I won’t listen in.” He threw the earpiece at Damian, who easily caught it. “I’ll be your eye in the sky, all right?”
Damian settled the gadget in his ear. “Thanks,” he said.
“No problem.” Jamison gave him an earnest smile that was almost as bright as the oncoming dawn. “Go get your girl.”