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I spun on her only to find that she wasn’t a mortal woman. Her pale eyes burned with an otherworldly light. Dark hair had been pulled away from her face, revealing a pair of bone earrings in her ears. She looked between me and Cerri.
The air around her turned cold. Blue firelight appeared in her eyes. She gave me a deadly stare.
“It’s fine, Addie. He’s a friend. Even if he is a bit of a dick about it.” Cerri sat upright and dug her sandwich out of the bag.
The woman named Addie gave me a once over. She didn’t look convinced, but she also didn’t look scared. I lifted my chain and slid into a prepared stance to see if she might notice. The way she flinched, almost imperceptibly, told me that this woman had been in fights before.
“Keep it up and her husband is going to phase out of nowhere and kick your ass,” Cerri warned before biting into her sandwich.
“Like I couldn’t handle myself?” Addie asked.
Cerri rolled her eyes despite her smile. “I didn’t say you couldn’t. We both know Maddox would just beat you to it.”
Addie preened. “You’re right. I barely have to lift a finger.”
Arcana popped in the air. The bone beads in my hair snapped free, clattered to the floor, and grew into fully formed creatures. A rabbit and a lynx appeared between me and the necromancer. She knelt and held out a hand to each. Both creatures nuzzled her without any regard for each other even though the lynx should have naturally hunted the rabbit.
The animals sat and kept their attention on Addie like she owned their souls.
I twisted. “Is this the witch that put wards over your friends’ house? The shifter house.”
Cerri’s head snapped up. “Excuse me? No. Don’t you dare compare Addie’s magic to that witch’s.”
I gave the animals a sidelong glance. It was amazing that no mortals had come in for their midday coffee yet. The café was still blissfully empty.
“This isn’t natural,” I said with a grimace.
Cerri lifted her head primly. “It is, in fact, very natural. Addie’s arcana is the natural opposite of my own. While I have power over life, she has power over death. If I can use my arcana to kill, it makes sense that she can use hers to bring things back to life.”
When the princess fixed a narrow-eyed glare on me, I knew I’d treaded into dangerous territory. This was one of her friends, and I’d insulted the woman. This was why she couldn’t trust me.
Still, Addie’s magic seemed wrong. The animals obeyed her like they had no other choice. How was that right?
Addie looked up at me with a gentle smile. She waved her hand, and the creatures shrank, falling back into the small bone pieces that they’d been. “I promise I got their permission before calling them back.”
Addie’s arcana touched me one more time. This probing wave of cold power seemed to question my existence. The beast inside me moved and growled in response. I felt the arcana slide into the beast and fill the creature’s hollow bones.
That made Addie narrow her eyes at me, too. She’d discovered my dirty little secret. I would have said that I knew hers, too, but it seemed that everyone did. The little necromancer was an open book about her otherworldly abilities.
I, on the other hand, wanted to keep my beast to myself. Cerri didn’t need to know about the thing that’d been shoved inside me. I was a cage for something that no one could truly kill. So long as I held it, the creature would likely die with me. I wanted to reassure Addie of that, but I wasn’t about to open my mouth right here and now.
Addie paid little attention to me, though. Her attention went back to Cerri. A worried look took up space between Addie’s brows. I caught a hint of guilt weighing her down, too. Addie nodded and stepped back, hesitating before returning to her post behind the front counter.
“She’s an interesting one,” I said quietly.
Cerri snorted. “Remember when I said two of my friends have stopped apocalypses from happening. She’s one of them.”
I straightened and leaned back to steal another peek at Addie in the front of the café. The woman was small and unassuming. That aura around her, though, told of a different story. She had nigh god-level power packed into that small frame.
A tall man with shaggy platinum hair walked out of the nearby restroom. He shook out his trench coat and flicked his hair out of his face. He paused, looking me up and down, before heading towards the front of the café.
“When did you get here?” Addie exclaimed to the man.
“I snuck in.” His voice was low and kind—to her, at the very least.
Addie bristled. When she spoke, her voice was a hushed whisper. “I told you to stop teleporting into the bathroom. What if there’s someone in there? You’ve gotten lucky so far, but that’s going to run out eventually.”
Near me, Cerri laughed under her breath. She must have been eavesdropping on the conversation, too. These were her friends, the people she spent all of her time with.
