Page 62 of Redline Communion

“To what?” Zaconia calls.

“New beginnings. I’m serious.”

“Okay.”

“No, you don’t understand. Lorelei is tired.” I press one hand to my chest because apparently this has become a speech. “Lorelei is so fucking tired.”

Kiwi looks at Talia.

Talia doesn’t look back.

“Okay, dramatic,” Kiwi says. She smiles when she says it, but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes.

“Call me something else tonight.”

Zaconia sits forward immediately. “Like what… mine?”

I look around the room as if somebody might have written the answer on a wall.

Nothing.

Then a name comes out.

“Lark.”

“Lark?” Zaconia repeats.

“Lark.”

“Where did that come from?”

“I want to be free. Like a bird.”

“Yes, babe. I know what a lark is.”

“Then why did you ask?”

She laughs, and I do too, high and hard enough that I have to catch my drink before it spills.

“Lorelei’s dead,” I announce. “Lark’s free. Somebody get Lark another drink.”

Zaconia whoops, and the people nearest us pick it up because they’re drunk and high and it sounds like a game.

“Lark needs a drink.”

“Who has Lark’s cup?”

“Move, let Lark through.”

The name travels across the room without anybody asking permission, and I let it.

Lorelei belongs to the house, the church, the Offering, and every person who has ever decided what she can survive.

Lark is currently standing on somebody’s couch with one shoe missing.

Lark seems fun.

Rafe finds me a little after midnight. I know Kiwi called him before he says anything because he enters the room already searching, looking past the dancers, the drinks, and the man asleep beneath a decorative blanket until he finds me on the couch.