“Bitch,” I breathed with a smile.
“Cunt.” No smile, but there was a glimmer in her eyes that gave me hope.
I waved to Eden, told her to tell her mom to ring me up—that it had been too long since we played euchre—and headed out the back door. The woman would never call. She never did, but I still offered.
Outside, Lara’s midnight blue Dodger was in the parking lot, shiny and looking like it just got a wax. I heavily doubted she’d ghost me. She loved the car too damn much. I didn’t dare lean on it, so I crossed my arms against the cold and waited. Autumn had been especially frigid.
In exactly ten minutes, Lara came out. Her raven hair was damp, and she wore a swipe of lip balm, a decades-old ThunderBowl t-shirt, and a blue satin bomber jacket with a rising sun on the back. The jacket used to be mine, but I could let that go if I knew where she’d had it stashed. She wore her Saints medallions as well, the gold charms clicking together as she fished a box of Luckies out of the jacket’s inner pocket. She hadn’t had them on the night she was arrested.
The vast majority of our stuff had burned up in the fire. I’d taken the Dodger to Bubbles for safekeeping. They were close, and I knew they’d take care of the car, but where had these clothes and her jewelry been? Suspicion gnawed at me.
Lara lit a cig, and I hadn’t the heart to smack it out of her lips. What did it matter if it gave her lung cancer? She’d never know it. Never sick, never injured, never dead. That was us. The other parapsychs—members of the Trinity dynasties—were different. Their lives played out much like the mortals’ did. They could get ill, hurt, and even die. So long as they didn’t, they’d live forever, as far as anyone knew.
But the five of us and the rest of our kind? We were eternal. Hurt us badly enough and it would take a while to recover, butwe alwaysdidrecover. So what did it matter if Lara Achilles smoked a pack a day, or two or three.
“Give me one,” I said as she unlocked her car.
She threw the gold and white box so hard it smacked me in the face. “Light it yourself.”
They were the expensive ones that smelled like whisky and creamy vanilla. Lara slid into the front seat and reached over to unlock my door for me. The inside of the car was oxblood leather and plush carpet.
I used the car lighter as Lara started the Dodger. A mixtape I made her thirty years ago came on, playing at full blast, and I grinned. “You still love me.”
The only answer was Lara flinging the volume knob all the way to the right before peeling out of her parking spot. While she didn’t say a word, a smirk curled the left corner of her full lips. Neither of us spoke as she headed uptown, an old habit on car rides. I couldn’t remember which of us decided it wasn’t something we liked, but among the five of us, we never chatted idly in the car.
Instead, we sang. At the top of our lungs. Lara drove like a maniac and the rest of us were required to sing as loud as we could. As we crossed the bridge into uptown, Lara wove through traffic, barely missing the other cars as the city sped by, rain pelting the front window. But it was just me and Lara now, singing twenty-year-old top 30 songs and dying inside. Metaphorically, of course—there was nothing in this Saints-forsaken world for us but time.
Lara turned the music off a block away from the National Gallery’s main offices and archives. They weren’t located in the museum proper, but two blocks away in a secure building. It’d been a while since we had dealings with the Gallery, but we’d done jobs for them before. Ones on the up and up. As liaisons between the Consulate and the Authority, we often had to deal with the National Gallery in cases of haunted objects.
“How do you want to play this?” Lara asked. “Go right inand introduce ourselves to the new curators, or try to get a look at the swords another way first?”
Neither of us was dressed for a meeting with the curators. This kind of thing had to be handled delicately. But I was fine to stop by the visitors’ center. “I’ll hit up the front desk.”
I pulled out my wallet and flashed my membership card at Lara. “They put out these exclusive brochures before an auction.”
“For members only, I assume,” Lara said, examining my card before rolling her eyes.
I pushed open the car door. “You got it. Back in a flash.”
CHAPTER 5
ARES
The day had turned darkerthan usual, despite the fact that it was past lunchtime. Orphium was like that. Clouds combined with the perpetual smog that covered the city—evidence of our corporate overlords’ never-ending toil. Gray and more gray, but today everything was murkier. It made the red and gold leaves that fell to the ground stand out more, their jeweled tones the only thing that broke through the dismal cityscape—besides the endless neon lights in the stygian atmosphere.
This far downtown, people rushed back and forth between shifts. The sidewalks were full of people, and the spirits they attracted. Most mortals couldn’t see them. But a few wanted to be recognized and were willing to drain the energy of the living to be seen. Those spirits were visible islands in the stream of people we passed, showcasing the ways they died, or lived, as was sometimes their way. It didn’t matter what they did. Mortals and parapsychs alike avoided them downtown. The nebulous prejudice against parapsychism always applied more down here than uptown, where the Trinity mixed with the upper crust regularly. I hated the way it worked.
“Bad weather rolling in,” Eryx commented, glancing back at me as Avveered towards the curb.
It was obvious he was talking about more than the rain. My brother was a poetic soul, as he’d always felt the shifts in tides of power more acutely than I could. I took his statement for what it was—valuable insight—and nodded to show I understood. We’d never needed many words, often communicating in just such a shorthand.
There was a rare parking spot right outside Aqualand. My brother punched Av in the arm, light with his touch. “Rockstar,” he said in a tone that let me know it was some kind of inside joke between them.
She stuck out her tongue and shook her head, shaking her black hair so that it undulated like a sheet of silk. Definitely an inside joke then. Anyone who didn’t actually know them would say they were the most serious in my crew—the most ruthless—but here in the car, when it was just the three of us, we were kids again.
I wasn’t privy to all their secret jokes. In some ways, they were a closed circle. But I was allowed to be here, and they were comfortable showing their true selves around me, which was something anyway. A small stab of envy over the intimacy between them hit me in the chest. An unusual reaction for me, as I believed in holding myself apart.
As I got out of the car, an elderly couple came out of Aqualand, holding hands. He carried a pair of goldfish in a plastic bag and held them up to her. The old woman smiled and said, “They’re perfect. Just like us.”
