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Out of all of us, Jin was the real freeloader. He spent all day either in the back sunroom or at his rebuilt gallery in town, painting and sculpting and whatever else he got caught up in, and I didn’t know when he’d last sold any of that artwork. It wasn’t as if we still needed the pieces with the protective magical symbols he’d produced back in the day.
Gabriel ignored our barbed exchange. “The potential buyer is out of town right now, but he’ll come by to take a look in a couple of days,” he said to Rose.
She nodded. “I trust your judgment about whether he’s a good bet—and how much to charge for it. It just seems pointless letting them sit there unused any longer.”
“Give one of them to Jin and let him make a moving exhibition out of it,” Kyler suggested with a chuckle. “I’d like to see that Jaguar painted up Lyang-style.”
Jin laughed. “If you can put your research skills to finding someone who’d want to take the end product, I’d be all for it.”
“I’d keepone you worked your brilliance on if we weren’t trying to maintain a slightly low profile,” Rose said, looking amused.
Because not going out of our way to draw attention to the strangeness of Rose’s powers or our relationship had donesomuch to reduce the odd looks we got when were in town. I didn’t care if people stared at me, but we couldn’t pretend anyone thought what went on at Hallowell Manor was normal. No one had believed that even before Rose had taken the five of us as consorts, though the rest of the townspeople had no idea she and her society practiced actual magic.
Maybe the other guys weren’t as unaffected by all that as they liked to act. As Jin and Kyler bantered about what the artist might make of the car, I thought I saw a shadow pass over Seth’s face. He’d used to work on construction and renovations in our little town—with his and Ky’s dad, who also owned the local hardware store. At a pinch of my scar, something about the set of his mouth made me abruptly sure that he was trying not to miss those simpler times. That it irkedhim,even as he tried to play it cool, that Jin had kept the livelihood he’d started with.
How about that.
I watched him for a moment longer, and then my attention shifted to his twin. Ky was keeping up his usual cheerful attitude, as if he couldn’t have been happier with his lot in life, but when I studied him carefully, little hints of tension blared at me. His gaze twitched just a little too jerkily from Jin to Rose and back again when Rose joined their banter, didn’t it? His posture stiffened for an instant.
A similar certainty crept over me, as if his internal turmoil were seeping through the air into my skin. My scar prickled more sharply.
Kyler had always been the most awkward of us in general. Had he ever even had a girlfriend before Rose? He was here with us, one of us, but he couldn’t help suspecting he didn’t live up as a husband or a lover. That worry wound all through him, and no amount of computer skills could offset it.
Jin wasn’t really so carefree either, was he? When I moved my attention to him, I sank deeper into my newfound state of understanding. Whyhadn’the managed to sell any of his pieces in recent months? He was asking himself that question over and over—yeah, I could practically taste the tang of failure he was hiding behind that cheeky grin. What a poser.
The conflict and trauma of last year’s horrors hadn’t left him completely. They were holding him back too. But he preferred to taunt me rather than deal with his own issues, huh?
And Gabriel. Something inside me balked as I focused on the final member of our crew, the one who’d always held us together.
What was I shying away from? A twinge ran up my arm all the way to my shoulder, and suddenly the deep red hair that framed his face took on a darker cast. Melancholy hazed his eyes in the second before he blinked.
He was living with the ghosts of a past he was never going to shake—literally living in the apartment that he’d once shared with his dad, over the garage. Even if his dad hadn’t killed himself there, every inch of that space would be tainted with memories of times he could never get back to. Of everything that’d been torn from him because of Rose’s prick of a father.
Mr. Hallowell had wrecked a hell of a lot for all of us when he’d whisked Rose away to Portland and fired all our parents from his staff, more than a decade back. He’d done it without a shred of remorse. The catastrophe with the demons was only the second time he’d ripped through our lives. And none of us had truly been left unscarred.
As dessert came in from the kitchen, Rose’s phone hummed. She pulled it out, checked the name on the screen, and got up. “Sorry,” she said to all of us. “It’s one of the witches I’ve been mentoring—she’s just eighteen and kind of shaky. I’d better take this right away.”
“Of course,” Seth said, waving her off.
She slipped out of the room to keep the conversation private. The rest of us got started on our blueberry cream pie. I poked at it with my fork, the thought of the rich sweetness making my stomach clench.
Gabriel ate a couple bites and aimed his knowing blue eyes across the table at me. “What’s eating at you today, Damon?” he asked mildly. “You seem set on taking everything anyone says in the worst possible way.”
“Right,” I said. “Because I’m normally all sunshine and rainbows.”
“You have been a little more, well, Damon than your usual,” Ky put in.
Seth had put on his especially serious expression. “If something’s bothering you, you know we can help you work it out.”
Sure. A laugh that left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth tumbled out of me. “What if what’s bothering me is the fact that none of you will own up to how many things are botheringyou?”
Ky blinked at me, and Gabriel frowned. “What are you talking about?” our supposed ringleader said.
Everything I’d noticed during the dinner collided with the weeks, maybe months, of pent-up frustration in one angry surge that clawed up my throat. “Are you kidding me? Do you think I can’t tell? You all walk around here putting on this front like your lives are absolutely perfect now, as if the shit we went through last year isn’t still screwing us over in all sorts of ways. It’s pathetic.”
Confusion colored all their expressions now. My hands balled into fists.
“Nothing’sperfect,” Seth said slowly. “But that doesn’t mean—everything’s been fine since we got through that whole mess—”
