“Marketing buzzword.” Although—she suddenly had an idea. It was like her father’s articles. Just because she wasn’t someone important in her own right didn’t mean she didn’t know things. Or in this case, people. “Maybe it doesn’t need to come from me.”
She grabbed her phone and found the browser tab she’d left open to Stavrula’s contact info.
How are you? Would love to catch up, she typed.Lunch?
“Finally,” Gisele said. “That’s better than the wallowing, isn’t it? Now, I have a hot date with a bookmarked fanfic that isn’t going to read itself.”
“We got this,” Morgan waved. Luke watched Gisele shuffle off to her room, his eyes drawn to the cartoonish amphibian slippers whose feathery gills wobbled with every step. She guessed the Infernal Plane wasn’t big on whimsical footwear.
Morgan started the now-daily process of transforming the dubious futon into a dubious bed for Luke. They’d originally picked the frame off a curb in sophomore year; one corner rattled every time you knocked into the arm.
Luke helped her wordlessly. Their hands brushed as she tucked the corner of the sheet under what passed for the mattress, and he inhaled sharply and yanked it back. She paused.
“I’m sorry,” she blurted.
“For what?” He didn’t meet her eyes.
“For what Hayley said. About us, I mean,” she tripped over her words, aware her ears were burning. “Not that there is an us—that Hayley thought there was an us.”
“You want there to be,” Luke said quietly. “And you also want there not to be.”
How horrible to know exactly how much someone you didn’t want wanted you. “You can want something and not want to want it,” she said, trying desperately to make him feel less hunted. She hadn’t realized until Hayley hinted how unethical she was. He was stuck here, literally sleeping onher couch, and constantly aware of her inappropriate desire. He must feel so trapped.
“I can’t…” he trailed off. “I can’t tell what you’re thinking, you know. Only what you want.”
She wanted to not be having this conversation.
“Me, too,” he said quickly.
Cold showers. Unflavored oatmeal. She tried to think about anything else, something that wouldn’t make him uncomfortable. “We’ll just… agree not to talk about this anymore? Since neither of us wants to talk about it?”
“Whatever you want,” he said.
She fled, wishing there was more than a cracked plaster wall between him and her shame.
13
Morgana! It’s been, what, a decade?”
Morgan squinted as she stepped out of the shade of Bethesda Terrace. Stavrula had suggested taking a walk in Central Park for their meetup, which had seemed both very public but also a weird way to get coffee. But when she saw the sphinx making her way through the crowd of tourists, who didn’t seem to notice that they unconsciously parted to make room for Stavrula’s invisibly glamoured back half, she understood. She wasn’t sure if Stavrula had cast her own glamour or purchased it, but the leopard-print skirt was a nice touch. The cats-eye glasses may have been real.
“I go by Morgan these days,” she said, accepting the cheek kiss. Stavrula smelled faintly of sandalwood and hot sand. “How have you been?”
“I shouldn’t complain, but I probably will,” Stravrula laughed. “I’m embarrassed to even tell my aunts and uncles what I do for a living. All I ever hear about is how my cousin is Games Editor at theNew York Times, and what riddles have I set or unraveled recently. Remind me what your company does again?”
That did make Morgan feel a bit better. Stavrula camefrom an ancient and proud pedigree, and it was nice to know the disappointment of your family was universal. “Quantum-based hiring—I mean, HR platform.”
The developers looked increasingly panicked these days. If the point of the shuffleboard had been to increase collaboration, it had failed. Josh was in a cast, which clearly couldn’t have helped his typing speed, Ops had accused the biting victim of stealing his lunch in retaliation, and now neither was allowed to be in a room with the other without a third party. Ayumi appeared to be giving the entire office the silent treatment.
“Oof, that’s a mouthful of buzzwords there,” Stavrula said. “Let’s go pay our respects.”
“Do we have to?” Morgan followed her unhappily back through the cool, beautifully tiled arcade that smelled only a little like pee, back onto the tourist-packed Esplanade. Beyond the Terrace glimmered the lake bordered by the leafy shores of the Ramble, all with the elegant high rises of the Upper East and West Sides as a background. In between loomed the massive fountain, capped by a blackened bronze angel with a lily in her hand.
“One family tradition I do hold with,” Stavrula said. “Anyone turned into a statue deserves memorializing, regardless of the origin or reason.”
Morgan supposed that someone with the Great Sphinx in their family tree would feel that way about petrification in general. Still, she put ancient home-grown tyrants in a different category from invaders from other planes. The Angel of the Waters was one of the bogeymen of any mage child who grew up in the New York City area. She looked beautiful, one hand stretched over the fountain’s watersin blessing. Angels appeared rarely and mysteriously, manifesting on this plane as divine punishment for sins the locals were often unsure of. The Angel of the Waters had appeared in the early 1830s, immediately followed by a cholera outbreak that swept through the city. So when she appeared again thirty-odd years later, the Shadow Council of the time had moved swiftly. It had taken a Working circle of twenty-four mages to entrap her in bronze.
A number of the gargoyles on St. Patrick’s Cathedral were similarly trapped incursions from other planes, including the Infernal Plane. Morgan looked up at the bronze face of the Angel and imagined Luke’s face similarly frozen. She shivered.
