THEY DIDN’T SPEAK on the drive back into town. Kovit had loaded the body into the ice cream truck after they’d called Adair. It was in the freezer, keeping fresh for Diana.
Nita wondered if Adair would tell the ghoul where her meal came from, and decided if he did, he’d lie about it.
They’d parked the ice cream truck on a side street, where Adair was coming to collect it. Nobody wanted the truck left alone while Nita and Kovit saw Henry.
Not that Nita would be seeing him. But she’d be watching.
In her hoodie pocket, the INHUP agent’s gun weighed heavy. Their security.
Henry had agreed to meet Kovit at a Starbucks. It was a busy one on Queen Street—familiar territory. Nita had met her mother in this street. She recognized the Venezuelan restaurant they’d gone to as they walked by.
She wondered what her mother was doing now.
Nita imagined her, sitting with a bowl of popcorn, watching the news and following the black market discussion boards, silently laughing as Nita got herself in more and more trouble. Nita could almost see her black and red fingernails clicking against her phone, typing a message reminding Nita that if she just came home, all her problems would be solved, and her mother would make sure the black market regretted targeting her.
Nita swallowed the thick, viscous fear of defying her mother, and pressed shaking hands against her side. A hunt like this was just the kind of thing her mother would have loved to participate in.
“We’re too early.” Kovit considered the Starbucks where he was supposed to meet Henry. “Why don’t we get lunch in the meantime?”
“All right.”
They made their way across the street to a sports bar. The interior was dimly lit, making it seem like night. There was only one other customer, drinking at the bar. In the corner, a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall played one of Lyte’s live concerts. She was an aur, a type of bioluminescent unnatural, and when the lights went off and the music started, she used her ability to cast spiral shadows through carefully designed holes cut in her clothes. People said her concerts were works of art.
The bar smelled like grease and fries, which reminded her of Vietnam. Her mother had hated the taste of lemongrass and ginger, which were in practically every dish there. So she’d made her own truly terrible burgers. Nita had to fake liking them, but whenever her mother went out, she’d grind the burger meat up, soak it in chili oil and spices—lemongrass and ginger included—so she couldn’t taste what her mother had done to it, then eat it on rice noodles or in pho.
Nita and Kovit took a booth to the side. Nita tentatively ordered a burger, hoping that it would be better than her mother’s.
The silence stretched awkwardly between them, and finally Kovit cleared his throat. “When it’s time to meet Henry, you should stay here. We don’t want him seeing you.”
“I’ll be in disguise.” Nita kept her eyes on the table. She still couldn’t look at him. “Shall I show you?”
He swallowed and nodded, hands pressed tight to his sides.
Nita closed her eyes. First, she did her hair. She removed the keratin in it so it fell straight, and changed the melanin levels. It melted from medium brown with a faint orangish tint into a soft gray with hints of white.
Next Nita targeted the skin cells on her face, and deepened the wrinkles on her skin until she looked old, aged well beyond her years. Her eyes peered out from heavy folds of skin, and her mouth was pulled down by deep-set wrinkles.
She’d considered just making her face swollen like she had at the airport, but she was worried that a swollen face would gather more attention, not less.
The thing about disguises was people could see through them. Her mother used flashy distraction, colored hair and lipstick and nails, to make people remember the wrong things.
But if they were looking for her, they’d see her.
If people were looking for Nita—a seventeen-year-old unnatural—and they saw an old woman, they weren’t going to look twice.
Kovit stared. “Wow.”
Nita cracked a smile. “How do I look?”
She rose and got out of the booth to spin around for emphasis.
He blinked and tilted his head. “Like a very sporty grandma.”
Nita snorted. “I’m sure there are grandmas who wear hoodies.”
“Undoubtedly.” His voice was solemn, but the corner of his mouth twitched. Then he frowned. “Couldn’t you just look like this all the time? The black market would never recognize you.”
“I haven’t actually changed my features, just loosened skin and taken the color from my hair.” Nita sighed. “I don’t want to look seventy for the rest of my life.”
Kovit gave her a small smile. “I bet you’d never get carded. You could pick up alcohol for all your friends.”
Nita laughed. “You mean like you? Aren’t you already legal?”
“Here I am. Eight more months in the US.”
Nita rolled her eyes as the waiter returned with their burgers. He did a double take when he saw Nita, then shook his head, shrugged, and left.
Both of them dove into their food like they hadn’t eaten all day. Which they hadn’t, now that she thought about it.
The burgers were definitely better than her mother’s. Too salty, though, but she’d been finding everything in Canada too salty after living in Peru. The Coke tasted different too, sweeter, and not in a good way.
She couldn’t help touching her face as she ate. She’d never tried messing with her age before. She’d always been scared it would be irreversible. What she’d done now, that was temporary. She could slough the skin cells off, and it would be fine. It was no more than a mask. But really changing her age, the deep, internal stuff, that she’d never tried.
As she ate, she wondered if it was as simple as surface stuff. Healing issues as they appeared. Healing her cells so they stayed young.
Her mother had looked the same for Nita’s whole life, even as her father grew gray at the temples and the lines around his mouth deepened.
Her mother was permanently about thirty.
Nita had always figured it was an illusion, much like what she’d just done.
But she wondered—with a body that could self-heal, and the ability to appear young . . . How old was her mother?
It was a slightly disturbing thought, because Nita wasn’t really sure.
They slowly finished their food, still awkwardly not looking at each other. Kovit was polishing off the last of his fries when he froze, staring at something beyond Nita’s head.
Nita stiffened, and slowly turned around. There was no one there.
“Excuse me!” Kovit called to the waiter. “Can you turn the volume up on the news?”
The waiter shrugged and obliged.
Nita blinked, and opened her mouth to ask Kovit what was happening, but he held up a hand and stared intently at the TV screen.
Nita looked up at it. The caption below said TEEN MURDERED BY UNICORN IN MONTREAL. The screen showed a school photo of a smiling white girl with long blond hair.
“Miss Lyon was found at four in the afternoon by a man walking his dog. Her eyes were open, and missing their irises, which prompted the man to call INHUP immediately.”
The eyes were the window to the soul, as the saying went, and anyone who lost their soul was missing their irises. It was the signature of a unicorn attack.
Someone onscreen was now talking about unicorns. They looked like human men, and could steal a soul with a simple kiss, or in some cases, even a touch. They could only steal unstable souls, though, souls that weren’t comfortable in their bodies. Most children and teens, and many younger adults, had unstable souls, which was where the virgin association started. But the truth was, lots of people who weren’t virgins or who were older also had unstable souls. Instability of the soul had less to do with age or virginity and more to do with mental stability and being settled in one’s body.
The horse concept, explained the man on the television, was because in the past, unicorns would lure people away to eat their souls. However, if the soul was too established in the body, they needed to destabilize it before they could eat. So they would “mount” the youth and pierce them with their “horn.” Raping the victim usually caused sufficient trauma to destabilize the soul so that the unicorn could eat it.
Nita made a face and looked to Kovit. “Is there a reason we’re watching this? Unicorns are creepy.”
His mouth tightened, and his eyes stayed on the screen. “Zannies are creepy too.”
“I never said they weren’t,” Nita agreed pleasantly. “Is this a friend of yours or something?”
“I don’t know any unicorns.” His mouth twisted in distaste for a moment. “That’s a lie. I met one once. It tried to eat me. I was unimpressed.”
Nita snorted. “I met one too, when I was a kid. It also tried to eat me.”
Her mother had whisked her away and killed the unicorn. Nita’s chest tightened at the memory. It would be easier if her mother were all evil, then Nita could hate her. But she wasn’t, she was kind too.
Like Kovit.
Nita turned her eyes back to him, just in time to see him visibly stiffen, eyes widen as he stared at the screen.
“And now we’re back to Agent Vidthuvitsai, the INHUP agent in charge of the investigation here in Montreal. Agent Vidthuvitsai, tell us, are there any suspects currently?”
Onscreen, a small brown woman with long black hair smiled a PR smile at the reporter. “I’m sorry, at this time, we can’t disclose details of the investigations.”
The woman had thick dark eyebrows and a slight hook to her nose. Mid-twenties, pretty, but there was something older in the set of her mouth and the tilt of her head. Her eyes were dark and thoughtful, and somehow deeply sad.
Nita frowned and turned back to Kovit. His fingers were clenched tightly around his napkin, and his eyes were glued to the screen.
The same dark eyes as the woman on the screen.
Nita’s eyes widened, and she whipped back to the screen, but the news had shifted onto something else.
Kovit slumped in his seat, swallowing.
“Was that . . . ?”
“My sister,” he whispered, horror slowly overtaking his features. “My sister’s an INHUP agent.”