“Morgan.” Luke made to follow her. He looked at the guard and his eyes started to glow.
“Yo,intern.” Brad snapped his fingers like for a dog. “You signed a contract.”
As Morgan looked over her shoulder, Luke jerked like a leash had yanked at his throat. Maybe one had, for all that it was invisible. She tried not to hyperventilate. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand that you don’t have a badge, ma’am,” the security guard said, sounding bored. It was probably not his first time doing this. “If you want to purchase one, you can do so at registration. I think on-site prices are something like $1,295. Don’t quote me on that, it’s hard to keep track with a new show every week.”
She didn’t have thirteen hundred bucks. She didn’t have rent. Oh god, she didn’t have a job anymore. She was definitely not making rent this month or any month.
And Kelly was about to sign that contract, the first in a parade of souls.
Tears stung her eyes. She’d failed. Again. In every way possible. She’d sacrificed everything, all the way down to her very soul, and hadn’t managed to save anyone. She was as useless as her mother had always thought. She wasn’t good for anything at all. Just as well. Because now that she thought about it, sacrificing her career and her apartment and her family and her demon maybe-boyfriend were all a moot point since she was about to spend an afterlife in a lamp. Maybe Lucareoth would visit her occasionally.
She tried to choke the tears back, but a few sniffles made it through. By the time they’d made it to the exit, the security guard was giving her stealth pity-looks, which didn’t make her feel any better. An ambulance was pulling away on Eleventh Avenue as they emerged. Her mother turned fromthe curb, brushing off her hands, and caught her eye.
“What happened? Luke called me—he said you needed my help,” Fiona hurried over. “Sounded like the poor boy was shaking like a leaf calling me, but he said you needed me now.”
To Morgan’s mortification, she burst into tears.
“What did Luke do? I’ll cut his horns off and kick him back where he came from, even if he did call me,” Fiona snarled, her hand going to the back of her waist where she usually kept her rowan-wood blackjack.
“He didn’t do anything,” Morgan managed to choke out. “He tried to sacrifice his soul for me.”
Fiona blinked. “OK, objection withdrawn, he’s a keeper. But what happened with the demo?”
Morgan could only cry harder. All the terror and anger she had been holding back for weeks came crashing down. Fiona patted her shoulder ineffectually, at a loss as always. She finally gave up and guided Morgan over to one of the indents in the convention center’s many-angled façade. The walls were all glass, so they could still be seen by passersby both inside and outside the building, but at least they weren’t easily overheard. She handed Morgan a laundered handkerchief with any number of questionable stains, took a quick look around, and followed that with a flask. Morgan took a swig and choked again on the fiery contents.
“I need you to tell me what’s going on so I can help,” Fiona said with a little despair.
She didn’t want to want her mother’s help, but she was past the point where refusal was an option. Again. The details she’d kept hidden spilled out—Bel’aliol calling in her debt, the respective offers from Bel’aliol and Brad, the fact that she’d tried to stand up to them too late and then failedcompletely. All the while knowing that this never would have happened if she’d been the daughter her mother had wanted. She would have been able to send Lucareoth back from the start, she would have never been swept into the demon realm, she could have fought her way out on her own if she had. A real mage would never have had to make a bargain like that in the first place. A real mage would have been able to figure out how to stop Brad in his tracks. And because it was her—the runt, the failure—now things had progressed past the point where someone competent could easily fix it. She’d doomed them all, not merely in her incompetence but in her refusal to admit that incompetence so someone useful could help. She was worse than useless. She was a danger to everyone.
“So you’re telling me you got thrown out by security,” her mother said slowly, “after making a quixotic and self-sacrificial last stand? Geez, kid, I thought you were tryingnotto take after me.”
Morgan looked up from the ground for the first time in the recitation, confused. “What do you mean? If I were anything like you, none of this would have happened.”
“Well, OK, you managed to get stabbed in the back from a career perspective rather than literally stabbed in the back,” Fiona conceded. “Mine usually involve more viscera.”
“You always do this!” Morgan pulled away.
“Do what?” Fiona planted her hands on her hips.
“Find a way to remind me how stupid and banal my problems are! Yes, I know it doesn’t involve mind flayers from another dimension, but you always act as if mundane problems are trivial compared to yours!” Morgan crossed her own arms, hugging her ribs. “Boring stuff like rent and taxes and voting and business deals have real-world impacts, too.Sometimes just to the boring mundane people dealing with them, sometimes to everyone. You were so sure that this whole demon problem was coming from the magical world, but it was the mundane humans who set it all in motion.”
Fiona took a sharp breath. “You’re right. I’ve got a blind spot, and it bit me big time here.”
It was so rare to hear her mother say she was right. She pressed the point. “But it shouldn’t take mundane humans meddling in magic to get your attention. It shouldn’t even take mundane humans endangering the world! Every time you tell me how much more important your problems are than mine, you’re telling me how much more important you are than me.”
“That’s not—”
“And I get it, I do. I know I’m not important to the world. And yes—” she kept going when Fiona opened her mouth to argue, “I know I’m important to you. But I also know that the fact that I’m not important to the world is a never-ending disappointment to you and Dad. That I can’t fight the big battles you care about like you wanted me to. That the one time I tried, I just made everything worse.”
“I fight them so you don’t have to!” Fiona looked anguished, but anguished wasn’t what Morgan wanted. “So I can protect you!”
“I don’t want to always be the one protected, like I’m a toddler!” Another tear escaped and she rubbed it away angrily. “I don’t want a protector, I want a mom. I want someone who will be proud of me and respect me for who I am and what I can do. I’d say it wasn’t something I’d get to have now, because I’m about to lose everything, but let’s be voluntarily honest with each other for just once in our lives.It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d lived to be a hundred. I was never going to have your respect.”
Fiona took an angry breath, and then Morgan watched her hold it. Release it. Look away. Then she met her daughter’s eyes. Her voice was so soft, so sad. “This is why you didn’t tell me about this to begin with, wasn’t it? It wasn’t just that you were protecting Luke.”
“Yeah, I guess not.” Morgan looked away, trying to keep from collapsing back into sobbing. If she was about to be pulled back to the Infernal Plane, it would be nice to have a tiny bit of dignity. “Not that it matters now.”
