Wednesday, 3:30 am

Anne

I cry for the first few blocks. Then I text Tess. I’m not surprised when she doesn’t respond. It is, after all, three in the morning. Normal people are in their beds sleeping, not almost having sex while in someone else’s body, confronting cranky Russian mermaids, and getting kicked out of their house. People who aren’t me.

Ethan lights a cigarette and smokes half of it, blowing smoke out his open window. I choose not to complain. The “I could die from secondary smoke” discussion is not where I want to expend my energy right now.

“We need to get some sleep,” Ethan says. We’re in Evanston now, headed in the general direction of his apartment, but neither of us has committed to actually going there.

“We need lots of things,” I say. It comes out much sharper than I mean it to. Probably I should apologize. But even talking is an effort right now.

Two more blocks.

Ethan breaks our more than cranky silence. “Pancakes.”

“What?”

He points. A neon IHOP sign blinks in the dark about a block ahead of us. “Do you want pancakes?”

“What?” I repeat. Is he actually offering to take me to breakfast? At 3 a.m.? In the middle of a crisis of legendary proportions?

“They have lots of syrup choices. Do you like syrup? I don’t think we’ve ever discussed it.”

Syrup?

Ethan pulls to the curb near the IHOP parking lot. The look on his face says that he is serious about the syrup question.

“If I take you home with me right now,” he says quietly, “we’ll both be uncomfortable. I want to take you home. I want you to sleep in my bed, and I want to hold you and keep you safe. I want to be there when you wake up in the morning. I want to brew you a pot of tea and make you toast with butter. Then I want to spend a day with you. We’ll walk by the lake and go to a museum, and later we’ll walk some more and we’ll talk. The sun will shine and we won’t be running and you won’t be scared. That’s what I want to do. But as none of that is going to work right now, I think we’re left with pancakes.”

It is the sweetest, most romantic thing he’s ever said to me. It’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me. Possibly that anyone has ever said.

“You want to take me for pancakes?” Maybe it’s a trick. Some Baba-Yaga- or rusalka- or Viktor-induced delusion that’s going to go poof as soon as I agree to IHOP.

But Ethan nods and shifts the car in gear. In no time at all, we’re walking into the brightly lit IHOP, being seated at a booth and handed menus. We order pancakes. Buttermilk all around.

“They used to have more choices.” Ethan points at the four little syrup pitchers tucked against the wall of our booth. “I liked boysenberry. But I suppose it really was wasteful to put all that out on each table.”

I gape at him again. He is not a person who I imagined having syrup preferences. Or going to IHOP. Or eating pancakes.

“I’m a purist,” I tell him since it seems rude to let him chat about this all on his own. “Maple syrup. Warm. Maybe a dab of butter.” Maple is not represented in the four little pitchers of syrup tucked against the wall of our booth.

The tired-looking waitress wearing green and white Nikes brings our pancakes and a pitcher of maple syrup—sufficiently warm. She leaves a big pot of coffee on the table after filling our cups.

For a while, we eat. Pour warm syrup on warm, dense pancakes and fork them into our mouths. Ethan reaches across the table and wipes a dot of syrup off my chin with his napkin. I gulp two cups of lukewarm coffee. Somehow it makes me feel a little calmer.

Maybe we’ll just stay at IHOP forever. If we kept ordering pancakes, they wouldn’t kick us out, right?

Cup of coffee poised at his mouth, Ethan looks at me. A crooked smile plays at his lips.

I had forgotten that we were reading each other’s thoughts. Correction: I’ve been too freaked to read his since we got back from the past. But I guess in his head, I’m still coming in loud and clear.

“Not always,” Ethan says, which answers my question even without me asking it. “It comes and goes.”

So we can’t even count on that. Wonderful.

I eat another pancake. Chew and swallow. Chew and swallow. Ethan pours us both more coffee. He shakes a sugar packet—two quick flicks of the wrist—rips it open, and stirs the contents into his mug. Two booths over, a heavy-set middle-aged guy places an order for blueberry waffles.

I set my fork on my plate. Ethan looks up from his coffee. I don’t want to ask. But I also don’t want to wait to read it in his thoughts. I want him to tell me. If he tells me, then I can trust him.

“Whose magic is in you, Ethan? Even a few weeks ago, you didn’t have that kind of power. When we were stuck in Baba Yaga’s forest, when you basically died and I brought you back to life, there was nothing like that inside you. But now there is. And it doesn’t feel like you. Not at all.”

“You ask like you’re sure I have an answer.”

I shrug. The truth? I have my own answer. I’ve had it since I was trapped in Tasha’s body. I just didn’t understand until now.

Ethan leans into the booth, his eyes very serious. They’re regular Ethan blue now, not dark and scary. A tired look crosses his face.

“I think,” he says very slowly, “that it has to do with Viktor.”

“Just think?”

His lips quirk in that signature crooked, self-deprecating smile. “I can’t be sure. But yes, I think the power has somehow come from him. And I don’t have to read your thoughts to know that you agree.”

The pancakes in my stomach threaten a reversal. “I’m part of Viktor, Ethan. I’m his blood. Your magic, it’s always felt clean to me. Lily, she’s just sad all the time. Baba Yaga’s power feels ancient. When I use what she’s given me, I feel linked to things that go back so deep I can’t even imagine. But Viktor’s magic frightens me. And not just because he’s tried to kill me with it. There’s just a darkness. Like he’s so furious all the time. Not like you. When we’ve linked our power together, it’s scared me, but it’s always felt right. This just feels angry. Like Viktor.”

Ethan drums those long fingers of his on the Formica table. Purses his lips.

“But why?” His question sits between us, heavy as the congealing maple syrup on the remains of our pancakes. “If we’re right, why make me more powerful? Doesn’t that make me a threat? He knows Lily wants him dead. He knows we want to strip his abilities. So why would he give me more power?”

“Distraction, maybe? He’s big on that, remember? That’s what he convinced Tasha to do to you. So maybe it’s like that. Only this way, he doesn’t need to get anyone else involved. He just shifts some mojo to you somehow and then bam—you’re so distracted trying to get rid of it that he can get away with whatever it is he wants to get away with.”

“Maybe. But it doesn’t explain how he managed to come back to life after Lily shot him. I don’t understand it. You don’t understand it. Even Dimitri—”

I narrow my eyes. We still haven’t dealt with the whole “Why did you go see Dimitri and not tell me, and can you really trust him?” issue.

My phone, resting on the table near the holder of flavored syrups, scoots closer to the strawberry pitcher as it begins to vibrate.

Tess.

Tess? At four in the morning?

“My brother woke me up,” she says when I answer. “He’s doing this internship, remember, the one where he shadows a heart surgeon at Rush downtown. He has to be there at five. And his car wouldn’t start, so can you believe that he just walked into my room and started pawing through my purse for my car keys? Like that would be okay even if it wasn’t dark thirty in the morning?

“So I’m like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ and he’s like, ‘I need to get downtown. The freakin’ trains aren’t even running yet.’ So I let him take my car. And then—because now I’m totally wide awake, I check my phone. And there’s your text. Oh my God, Anne, what’s going on?”

It is such an insanely long monologue that I lose track halfway through, refocusing only as she finally takes a breath.

“I can’t explain it all over the phone. Can you meet us?”

“Us? As in you and Ethan?”

“Yes, Tess.”

“I’m on my way.” Beep. She ends the call.

I redial her number.

“I said I’m on my way.”

“Not home.” I give her directions to the IHOP.

“Tess,” I say before she can hang up on me again. “You don’t have a car, remember?”

“Not a problem.”