“You trust him?” Her mother gestured with her chin.
“I met him today,” she said truthfully.
“You tapped into the local mage community, kid?” her mother demanded.
The demon—Lucareoth, she told herself: even thinking the words “the demon” around her mother seemed dangerous—glanced at her for help Morgan was entirely unequipped to give. “Uh… no, ma’am.”
The crow peered at him and fluffed his feathers with suspicion. They were talking to each other, Morgan knew. Fiona had come back from one case with the corvid soul-bonded to her. Morgan had never been quite clear if Murder was a magical creature himself, or a regular old crow. Normal crows were quite smart, even without a telepathic bond to a mage. Murder got away with murder; he seemed to choose to exhibit exactly as much intelligence as it took to get Morgan in trouble. If she underestimated him, he seemed to feed her mother information. If she complained that he’d shit on her homework, she was told he was just a crow. It didn’t seem fair that she’d never even been allowed so much as a hamster.
“You’re hiding something,” her mother said, her eyes narrowing. Morgan’s heart stuttered. Then Fiona’s eyes suddenly widened with understanding. “Oh!”
“What oh?” Morgan said, her alarm growing. “There’s no oh.”
“You could have said you were on a date,” her mother said. Fiona was sex-positive as a parent. Very sex-positive. Too sex-positive. Morgan knew more about her mother’s exploits than she had ever wanted to know. By the time Fiona was Morgan’s current age, she’d already banged a werepanther, a Navy SEAL, a selkie seal, a paramedic, at least two cops, and a merman. Several of whom Morgan had met over the course of grade school at various picnics and apocalypsi, most of whom still seemed to be carrying a torch for her mother. Which was the most horrifying thing imaginable to find out in sixth grade. “You should be on dates.”
“I’m on plenty of dates,” she protested, not daring to look at Lucareoth’s face. She should have been relieved that her mother had jumped to the wrongest possible conclusion, but somehow this felt much, much worse. Yes, he was gorgeous, but she didn’t have a death wish. All right, maybe she did have a little tiny one. He was such a weird mix of alluring and hapless. He would probably be amazing in bed, all sultry command, but didn’t seem like he had the unjustified confidence to accidentally reset the Wi-Fi like the last guy Gisele had brought home. Did demons date? Was he thinking about what it would be like to date a human right now? Clearly it had been far too long a dry spell and she needed to shut this train of thought down right here. “But this is not a date. He’s a coworker.”
“Look,” her mother said, lowering her voice. The street sounds suddenly muffled. Lucareoth twitched. “He’s not involved with this if he got here recently, and the California families have never really gone for this kind of thing.I suppose the one advantage of your… limitations is that you couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it. So you keep on analyzing your thingies.”
Fiona used the same tone she used to use when Morgan had wanted her to take fifteen minutes away from tracking down kappa mobsters to play dolls with her. She ground her teeth. Just because she wasn’t passionately committed to HR outcomes didn’t mean she didn’t care about being half decent at her job. Monster hunting didn’t give your kid a trust fund, and NYC rent was eyepopping. “Thanks so much, Mother.”
Her mother patted her on the shoulder. “It’s all right, pumpkin, you know I’d never let anything happen to you.”
Over her childhood and college, Morgan had been kidnapped three times and turned into a penguin once, so she took that assurance with a grain of salt. After that last one, she now had to try to pretend that she only liked sushi a normal amount. “You always do this. You drop mysterious hints about some dire happening, and then you run off and come home with a stab wound.”
“Well, you do work in an office. It’s not really your thing,” said her not-particularly-office-ready-looking mother, whose pants were low enough that Morgan knew she’d be able to see the tattoo at the base of her mother’s spine peeking out over the waistband, much to Morgan’s mortification. “Although this would have all been easier if you’d come to the dinner. Like I asked.”
“Well, you know, work. In the office.” Morgan made a show of checking her phone. “Speaking of which, we need to grab a late dinner. Early meeting tomorrow!”
“Urrrrgh,” her mother groaned. One of their manyconflicts over the years had been over Morgan’s disinterest in staying up until dawn and Fiona’s inability to function without a small vat of coffee before noon. “You and your early mornings.”
“Bye, good luck with the Shadow Counciling, say hi to Dad,” Morgan said in one breath, dragging Lucareoth by the elbow down the stairs into the subway.
They got to the bottom. He darted to the side, yanking her wrist to take shelter against the wall next to him.
“OK, I know she’s a lot, but that’s unnecessary.” It wasn’t like Fiona had a Shadow Council badge on her lapel. Morgan tried to pull away, but his iron grip kept her shoulder pressed against his.
Lucareoth gave her a wild-eyed glance. “Are you kidding? She’shunting demons.”
4
What?” Morgan hated feeling like she’d missed something important, but was used to it happening around her mother. “How can you tell?”
“The thing she wants most right now is to find the mage who is summoning demons and stop him,” the demon hissed. He kept glancing around the corner in case Fiona had followed them. Across from them, the downtown train on the other platform screamed its way to a halt, covering their conversation. “And she wasn’t clear on what she wanted to do to the demons in question, but it’s definitelynot good. How do we get out of here?”
“How do you even know that?”
“She’s practically screaming it in her head, how can younot?” His voice rose.
Had he been telepathic this whole time? Something to unpack later. Right now, she needed to get him calmed down before the poor demon had a heart attack of his own. “Yeah, she tends to mono-focus.”
“If she comes down the stairs, I’ll push her into the pit and you run. If we’re lucky another one of the giant metalscreaming things will come by before she can attack either of us,” he told her earnestly.
“We’re not pushing my mother onto the train tracks!” She pulled her wrist back.
“You’ve disappointed her,” he pointed out. “But it’s OK, we’ll get her before she can eat you to fuel the next brood.”
“What? No!” That was mostly horrifying, but also just a tiny bit sweet? The few real boyfriends she’d had had bailed almost immediately after meeting Fiona, and here he was planning murder to protect her. He could have just abandoned her to be eaten. Except. “We don’t eat people on this plane. Also, I love my mother.” Most of the time. At least some of the time.
