Page 27

"It has to work." She was in the doorway with her arms crossed over that ruined cardigan and she wouldn't come any farther into the kitchen, which told me plenty. "Try it again."

I tried it again. Same thing.

"Sissily."

"…Try Mike's."

I looked up at her. She had her chin out and her eyes somewhere over my left shoulder. A spot of color was blooming high on each cheekbone as I watched.

"You never changed it back," I said.

"I can't do this right now."

I dropped it because I couldn't poke that hornet's nest at the moment either. The phone opened on the first try. My bestie had been held together with tape and bad attitude since the shit show in the yard, and one shove would unravel her. I let her be, but I would be addressing the nonsense later without a doubt.

The phone rang four times. I'd got as far as composing a voicemail in my head, something light, something that wouldn't sound like a woman calling at two in the morning covered in demon guts, when the line picked up and there was a wall of noise behind it. A radio. Somebody laughing about something in the background. A door that needed WD40 on the hinges.

"Byrne." Davon sounded unsure.

"Hi." I breathed dumbly.

In return I got nothing. Just the radio, and under it the sound of him breathing through his nose, which is a thing Davon does when he's deciding whether to be angry or just swallow his feelings.

"Davon?"

"Yeah. Hang on." The noise cut off shortly after his mumbling, with the sound of a heavy door slamming shut. "Okay. Sorry. I'm in the stairwell."

"You sound like you're in a stairwell." My attempt at humor fell flat.

"That's because I am in the stairwell, Hazel."

I sat down on the bench at Amber's long table. Somebody had killed the big light and left the one over the range burning, so the whole room had turned to hushed yellow tones. The corners of it didn't exist anymore. They were shaded in darkness. Four hundred dollars of pastry sat under dish towels where she'd left it since that morning. Nobody had touched a crumb and nobody was going to.

The gunk on my arms had dried to my skin in patches and pulled when I moved my fingers.

"So, I turned my phone off," I said. "And forgot about it."

"I gathered."

"Eleven days ago, I mean. And then I didn't turn it back on, because…"

"Yeah. I worked that out. I'm a detective, believe it or not." A pause. Then, flatter: "Sorry. That was… yeah. Sorry."

I closed my eyes. Four years ago that tone would have started a two-day fight, and the fact that neither of us had the energy for one anymore was its own small tragedy.

"No, that was fair." I leaned back with a heavy sigh. "Hecate knows I deserve it."

"It's not fair. I've been awake since Tuesday." Something creaked, the sound of rustling fabric and the scrape of a shoe when a man sits down on a step in a concrete stairway, which is how he took every call he didn't want overheard for the entire eighteen months I knew him. "You don't sound like yourself. Are you hurt?"

"Why does everyone… no." I took a deep breath before my temper got the better of me. "No. I'm bruised. My feet are bad but that's a shoe issue… you don't want to know."

"A shoe issue."

"I wasn't wearing any shoes on the gravel…" I trailed off. This conversation was going nowhere.

"Why weren't you wearing…" He stopped himself. I could hear him physically force himself not to ask for details. "You know what, I'm not doing this tonight. I don't have the… never mind. Are you safe? That's the question."

I looked out the window over the sink. The yard was black except where somebody was working by the barn with a flashlight, and the beam kept swinging over the pile of dead demons they'd dragged out past it and then hurrying away again.