Page 26 of Ash Fall

"What the wolf said matches what I learned." Mars speaks up. His eyes stay on his hands, shadows curling faintly between his fingers restlessly. "A few days after the moon broke, I pulled a trapped creature out of a city bus downtown. It was this little thing, maybe eight inches tall with wings, glitter and an absolutely vicious attitude. She said she was an honest-to-God pixie and that she'd gotten trapped on our side when the worlds crossed," he pauses for a second and swallows before continuing. "She called it the veil too. Said the veil tore, our realms slammed together, and magic leaked into ours. She told me that humans started waking up with powers we have no right to. And she said if she made it across, then bigger and badder things crossed over too."

His eyes come up then, and they find mine before I can look away. His eyes are dark and unreadable. My stupid heart trips exactly the way it used to, and I hate every single thing about that.

"She owes me a life debt for letting her out of the bus, according to her," he adds, "and told me if I ever really need help, I should call for her. Then she poked me in the chest, told me not to die because things are only going to get weirder, and vanished in a puff of glitter that left the whole street smelling like peppermint and burnt sugar."

Bigger and badder crossed over too. Those words get added to the list next to Reid's angry dragon and Gage’s wolf man. A shiver moves through me at how unprepared we are to face those kinds of thing. We aren't just surviving a disaster anymore. We're sharing a world with creatures that have had magic for a thousand years, and we've had ours for a week.

Jules looks around the table at all of us and throws a hand up.

"So just to recap," he starts ticking fingers, "Fae wolves, pixies with attitude problems, at least one confirmed dragon, a torn veil between realms, and the seven of us sitting here with starter-pack magic. Congratulations, everyone, we're living in a high fantasy novel. I want it on the record that I did not choose this genre, I was promised a normal apocalypse, and the only quest items we've secured so far is a field trip memory and a talking dog."

The laughter that rolls around the table feels out of place and so totally normal at the same time. I’m exhausted but I can feel some of the tension lifting, at least for a moment. I let mine out with the rest of them while my eyes make their slow circle of the faces I love. There's Gigi's dry smirk and Kara leaning into Reid. Torrin has a tired grin, Gage a low chuckle, and there's even the ghost of something softening Mars's mouth before he catches it. This is my family, sitting in the wreckage of one world with the monsters of another one out there in the dark, laughing in spite of it all because we are together.

The pixie told Mars that things are only going to get weirder, and everything in my gut says she's right but whatever that weird is, we’ll face it together.

Chapter 11 - Luna

The meeting breaks apart around me in a scrape of chairs and a flurry of assignments. I catch Kara's hand before she can wander off to stare into her dead phone again.

"You're taking my room." I tug her toward the stairs. "The shower in there is yours, and so is my closet. Whatever fits, it's yours, and I already know you're going to reorganize my hangers while you're in there, so I'm giving you permission in advance."

"I would never." Kara presses a hand to her chest, deeply wounded, before she ruins it completely. "Although I absolutely will. Your color grouping is a crime scene."

Behind her, Torrin pushes up from the table and snags Mars by the arm without a word, hauling him toward the stairs. Mars goes with only one glance back over his shoulder. Whatever those two need to say to each other has been simmering for two years. I'm glad it will happen behind a closed door where I don't have to watch it.

Gigi's arms come around me from the side, and I turn into them and hold on. She smells the same as she always has, Chanel, cigarettes, and home, and I’m so glad she’s back and leading this mad survival adventure for us.

"Go love on your boys, peach." She kisses my temple and pulls back with her lighter already in her hand. "I'll be on the deck committing my one remaining sin. We'll talk soon, you and me, a real talk, when the world stops demanding things for five minutes."

I watch her slip out the door into the dark, and my heart pangs with a wish I don't have time for. All I want is a slow, easy afternoon with my grandmother, a pot of tea, and nothing to plan. The world owes us so many ordinary days, and it keeps refusing to give us any.

Packing would be the responsible next choice, except there's barely any packing left for me to do. Gigi and I spent the whole week filling boxes and stacking them by the garage door, jars, freeze-dried bags, and everything my paranoid, brilliant grandmother insisted on. All of it just needs loading now, which means I have a window. There are two people in this house I haven't had a single minute alone with since we freed them from the warehouse, so I head that way.

Jules and Reid's door is cracked open, and the shower is running behind the bathroom door. Reid is stretched out on top of his bed staring up at the ceiling with his hands folded on his chest. His golden curls are pure chaos against the pillow. Everything inside me goes soft at the sight of him, safe and home and lying in the same spot he's claimed for two years.

There's nothing that needs saying, so I don't try. Climbing up onto the bed, I snuggle into his side, and his arms come around me before I've even settled. He gathers me in against his chest, buries his face in my hair, and breathes.

"God, I missed you. I missed you so much it made me stupid with it. The whole way home, every single terrible thing we passed, all I could think was that I didn't know if you were safe, and I couldn't stand it. I'm so glad we're home together, Hobby. You have no idea how scared I was for you."

"I think I have some idea." My hand finds the steady thump of his heart and flattens over it. "The news said a wave hit Vancouver, and then it was reporting one horrible thing after another until I had to stop listening to it or go mad. I spent the whole week alone with my imagination. My imagination was a scary place to exist."

His arms tighten, and for a while we just breathe together, and his heartbeat under my palm does more for me than anything anyone has said all day.

"How are you holding up?" he asks finally. "Really, I mean. Not the answer you've been giving everyone downstairs."

A laugh bubbles out of me, slightly unhinged around the edges. "There's so much crazy happening all at once that my brain gave up processing it somewhere around the word dragon. Honestly, I don't know how I'm holding up, and I've decided not to check." My fingers curl into his shirt. "At least everyone I love is here now. That helps more than anything else could."

Reid pulls back far enough to look at me, and his amber eyes catch the lamplight, warm and gold and completely without armor to hide how he’s feeling. I can see the love shining in them as he stares at me and it makes my heart sing.

"All that mattered to me was getting back to you. To us, both of us, Jules would say the same thing." His thumb traces a slow line along my jaw. "I don't care about any of this shit, Hobby. Ash, dragons, all of it. As long as we're together, the rest is just details."

His gaze drops to my lips and stays there for one endless beat, and I suck in a tiny breath. He's going to kiss me. That thought slams into me with a swoop low in my stomach, and right behind it comes the question of if I should let him. I want him to, but before I even finish thinking the answer is yes, four other faces flash through my mind. Gage, Torrin, and Jules and even Mars, God help me. Confusion crashes into the want and tangles everything up. What is wrong with me? A girl is supposed to want one person to kiss her, right? My heart apparently never learned to count that low because all of them are in the answer. I want all of them to kiss me. I feel the blush rush into my cheeks as the bathroom door opens. I suddenly feel like I’ve been caught with my hand in the cookie jar. I roll away from Reid and sit up on the edge of the bed so fast that the room tilts briefly.

Jules steps out in a cloud of steam with a towel slung low around his hips and every coherent thought I own packs up and leaves. Beads of water trails down his chest in slow lines, sliding over muscle and the defined ridges of his abs before disappearing into the towel. I swallow hard against a jolt of pure lust that arrives with no warning. His icy blue eyes find me sitting there on his best friend's bed and the smirk that spreads across his face says he can guess every single thing happening in my head right now.

"Well, hello there." He crosses the room, grabs my hand, and pulls me up off the bed and straight into a tight hug with the smell of damp skin and clean soap and the heat of the shower still coming off him. "I missed you, Cin," he breathes into my neck, and his lips brush the skin there. It’s barely a touch but it causes a hot shiver to roll all the way down my spine and pool somewhere it has no business pooling.

Then the mattress shifts behind me, and Reid is there, pressing his warmth all along my back until I'm sandwiched between the two of them. Jules's arms are around me, Reid's chest is against my back, and there's nowhere in the world to look that isn't one of them and all I can think is, what would it be like to be with both of them? Heat detonates low in my belly, a deep, pulling ache that shocks me with how strong it is, how fast it builds. My skin starts to buzz with that rising, fizzing feeling I'm learning to recognize far too late every single time.