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Well, henna.

“Oh, hell,” the phoenix said when his gaze landed on me.

“River, I presume?” I glared back at him, lips pursed, not even offering my hand to shake.

“And you’re Cassandra,” he replied.

I thrust my chin and flicked my hair over my shoulder, studiously ignoring the cloud of dust the action created.

“I didn’t think you two knew each other,” Queenie noted while Daruka helped her adjust her headpiece.

“We don’t,” River said flatly.

I didn’t enlighten him.

“Before we get into all that,” the demon slash elf or faery said, “tell us what happened.”

Queenie pointed at the fuse box. “I flipped the circuit breaker and then—” She spread the fingers of both hands, miming an explosion.

I watched Asmoday while he studied the fuse box, fully aware that River was watching me with far more intensity. It was unnerving, to say the least. I wanted to snap at him to look somewhere, anywhere else, but at the same time, I didn’t want him to look away.

Confused didn’t begin to explain my state of mind at the moment.

I recognized him. He was the phoenix I’d forced to regenerate over and over again, until he finally disappeared like, well, a bird that flew from the nest.

The first time I’d seen him, boarding the trolley on St. Charles Avenue, I’d gasped, stunned by his absolute beauty. So lean, so lithe, so confident. And that hairstyle, like nothing I’d ever seen before. I itched to drag my fingers through it, make it all bedhead messy and then smooth it out again.

Over and over.

My uncle had heard my gasp, glanced over to see what startled me. “Wow,” he said. “That’s a phoenix. They’re so rare. And you know they regenerate, right? Like, they can’t be killed.”

Yes, regeneration was an interesting aspect of one’s supernatural makeup. I was pretty sure there was no other being with that sort of magical ability.

“I understand the process of regenerating is absolutely beautiful,” my uncle added. “A phoenix growing from the ashes. That would be something to see, wouldn’t it?”

Well, sure, maybe, I’d thought at the time. But really, I just wanted to see him again. However that could happen.

Which it did.

My uncle and I were on the second level of a two-story empty building in the warehouse district in New Orleans. I was practicing my magic, which had been wonky for years by then. I’d already been trying to avoid using it at all—no small feat when one lived with a coven of witches who treated magic like the junk drawer in the kitchen: if you dug around long enough, you’d find something that got the job done.

My uncle insisted that he could help me, but we had to practice in secret and not tell anyone else in my family. Considering the bullying I suffered because my magic refused to do what it was supposed to, I was more than happy to comply.

Next to the building was a plot of land that had been turned into a community garden. And River was out there, tending to the sprouts. Weeding, watering, singing to them.

He had an amazing voice.

Like a magnet pulled to a refrigerator, I was drawn to the window. One minute I was standing there with my eyes closed, absorbing the glorious notes and wishing I had the confidence to go down there and talk to him; the next, a giant, rusty storage barrel slipped off the ledge of the open window, fell into the garden, and landed squarely on…River.

“What did you do?” my uncle had whispered, staring down at the barrel lying in the middle of the garden bed.

“I…I…” I had no idea. I hadn’t felt anything, hadn’t been thinking bad thoughts. I hadn’t been thinking about my magic at all. To this day, I still couldn’t say how that barrel had slipped from the ledge.

“You have got to control your magic, Cassandra,” my uncle admonished, then shouted, “Look! He’s regenerating!”

Sure enough, the barrel suddenly burst into flames, bright orange and yellow and blue fire that curled around it and turned it to ash in a matter of seconds.

And then the ashes stirred, shifted, and moved as if a wind were blowing through the alley. There’d been no wind up on the second level of that building. We were in downtown New Orleans; it tended to be pretty stagnant unless a storm was raging through.