She laughs. “How do you know what my thoughts are, perv?”
“Rook? You want to give her the gargoyle super-senses biology lesson again?” Auggie lets out another deep laugh, and then he’s gone, heading off to his darkroom to reveal more of last night’s mysteries.
Piece by piece, the puzzle comes together.
The mage attacks. The demon prince. The Codex. Our curse. Wild West herself, our fierce little witch—a mystery we never saw coming.
I clear away the mugs and plates, then return to find West curled up by the fire, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, her eyes glassy and far away.
“You still thinking about Eloise?” I ask, taking the chair across from her.
“No. I was just trying to remember my nightmare.” She draws the blanket closer. “It felt so real, Rook.”
She tells me about it—the smoldering city, the dark fae, the demon. The random horse, and of course, my epic demise.
“I wouldn’t read too much into it, Wild West.” I reach across the space between us and squeeze her knee. “There’s a lot going on in your life right now. Sounds like it all manifested in one hell of a scary dream.”
“I know. It’s just… Watching you basically die before my eyes?”
“I’m here now, very much alive, beating heart and all.”
“All that stuff makes sense—my fears manifesting in nightmares. The horse is a wildcard, though.” She laughs. “Shoot the Messenger. I haven’t thought about him in years.”
“He’s a real horse?”
She nods, a thin smile curving her lips. “My father… He wasn’t always the worst human being on the planet. When I was about five or six, he took me to the races once. Made a whole day of it. He even let me pick the horse he bet on. I picked Shoot the Messenger because he had these really cute freckles.” She laughs. “Yeah, that was the beginning and end of my illustrious gambling career. The horse came in dead last. I never went back to the track after that, but my father spent a lot of time there. He always bet on that same horse, even though he never won.”
The fire pops, and she trails off into a sigh, bringing the blanket up to her chin.
“I think he wanted to be a good father, you know? But life just… It didn’t work out the way he thought it would.”
“Never does.”
A tear spills down her cheek, but she wipes it away with the blanket.
“I wish I could hate him,” she whispers. “It would make things so much easier.”
“I know. But you loved him once. That’s not a bond that’s easy to break, whether it needs to be broken or not.”
“Why did he keep me?” She meets my eyes, her own shining with raw pain.
“What do you mean?”
“If I was such a burden to him all those years, why didn’t he put me up for adoption? Why did he even take me out of the hospital? My mother had supposedly just died in childbirth. He could’ve just… just walked away, no strings. Left me in the care of the state.” She shakes her head. “I’d say maybe he was trying to do the right thing—like maybe he didn’t want me to end up in foster care or somewhere where I’d be abused or neglected—but isn’t that the same thing as selling me to a demon?”
“I don’t know, West,” I say softly, feeling every one of her tears in my chest, a blade to my heart. It hits me all over again, like it has so many times over the centuries, and I can’t decide what’s worse:
Knowing you’re completely unwanted from the start, or spending your life chasing after the little scraps of affection a negligent parent doles out, hoping against the odds this time it will last, this time it will be better, this time it will change… Only to have it all snatched away from you again.
“I don’t pretend to understand your father’s motives,” I continue. “But you’renota burden.” I cross the small space between us and kneel before her, cradling her face in my hands. “You’re a gift, Westlyn Avery. A rare, magnificent gift. And I feeldamnsorry for anyone who can’t see that—especially a man like your father, who held you in his arms and watched you take your first few precious breaths, and still walked away in the end. And for what? One more night at the casino? One more—”
“Rook,” she whispers, and I clamp my mouth shut, shaking my head.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said—”
“No, you’re right. The casino… My father was acompulsivegambler.” Her brow furrows, the sadness fading from her eyes. “He gambled like it was his job, his passion, his whole damnexistence.”
“What are you saying?”
