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I shrugged, shoving my hands in my pockets. “No need to break with tradition when there was a perfectly good solution right there.”
Bullet bumped me with his shoulder. “Yeah? That’s all it was?”
I grunted noncommittally, but followed him to sit on the far side of the sofa, giving Dare plenty of room to work while Wild acted as his assistant.
“I don’t love this pen,” Dare muttered eventually. “But I suppose this is what you get when you’re using equipment from the back of someone’s van.”
“Comforting,” Grace replied with a grimace, unsuccessfully trying to hide her discomfort as Dare worked. “How are you guys so covered in tattoos? Maybe I have a low tolerance for pain.”
“I did warn you the wrist was a sensitive spot,” Dare teased. “Also daimons can pretty much go all out on, er, numbing agents without any negative side effects, so there’s that.”
Very true, there was only one or two I had done while completely sober.
“Is it too much, Gracie?” I asked, monitoring the bond to make sure she wasn’t about to pass out or anything.
“It’s not too much,” she replied tightly, while I appreciated her inability to lie for a moment, even though I usually found it to be controlling bullshit. “It looks pretty.”
“Dare is good at what he does,” I assured her. “Besides, he’s done this design before, and he’s got a cheat sheet, so he can’t fuck it up.”
“I never fuck up,” Dare scoffed. He cut me a look before hunching over Grace’s wrist again, and I did my best not to laugh at his silent warning. Daredidn’tfuck up really, but he was clearly trying to impress Grace and didn’t want me to get in his way.
I got that. Dare felt like he was behind, like he had towooGrace and get her to fall for him in the way she’d already fallen for the rest of us. There was something else there too—resentment maybe?—but I couldn’t quite place what it was. As much as I hated to admit it, both Dare and I had been through so much since the last time we’d seen one another, we weren’t the same people we were all of a few weeks ago. It bothered me that I couldn’t read him the way I used to.
Dare and Grace started a quiet conversation about her brothers while Wild and Bullet sat shoulder-to-shoulder, watching them, and I slipped out onto the terrace, giving them all a moment.
Maybe I should have tried a little harder with Bullet. Maybe I should haveapologized, which was basically the most undaimonic concept ever. He and Wild were so awkward with one another half the time that it seemed rude to interrupt them.
“Any news?” I asked Foster, taking the seat next to him while he watched a newscast, Estrella perched on his lap, disinterestedly examining her chipped nail polish.
“Nothing good,” he replied with a grimace. “There’s some kind of closed door meeting happening right now with a bunch of important people. Like, world leader-level important. They keep cutting to an empty podium, waiting for whoever is going to come out and speak.”
“Great,” I sighed, hoping it’d be good news for us and knowing that it almost certainly wasn’t. We didn’t have that kind of luck. Whatever the worst-case scenario was, that’s what we’d get. “Any more of Grace’s asshole relatives crawling out of the woodwork?”
Foster’s lips twitched. “No, but there was a human from Milton who gave an impassioned speech about how amazing Grace is. Apparently, she was in and out of the shelter where Grace worked, and she said Grace was her angel and she’d always known it. I don’t know if it’ll sway anyone, but it was kind of… nice? You know, as an agathos. Usually everything we do is unacknowledged.”
He shrugged, blushing at Estrella’s derisive snort.
“How hard you agathos have it,” she said drily, though she shot him an affectionate look that softened the blow. “There are no humans going on TV to talk about their gratitude for daimons. There’s too much happening right now for people to focus, but when they really take in what we are, that we exist, we’re going to get blamed foreverything. Every bad decision some Joe Schmoe has ever made in his life is about to be a daimon’s fault.”
She was probably right, but in fairness, wewereresponsible for a lot of people’s bad decisions.
I watched the newsfeed for as long as I could handle the hysteria and giant scorpion footage, before giving up and heading back inside. Grace immediately held out her arm with a beaming smile, showing me the design on her wrist wrapped with a clear tattoo adhesive. Dare had foregone the actual card the way Bullet had always wanted them on his skin, just inking The Fool—a skull in a three-pronged jester hat. It was surprisingly dainty and elegant, and suited Grace perfectly.
More than suited her. It was sexy as fuck.
She blushed, picking up my train of thought through the bond. “So, you like it?”
“I love it. I’d like it more if you were naked.”
“I’m sure you would,” Grace laughed.
Wild snorted, having taken Grace’s spot in Dare’s makeshift tattoo chair at the dining table while Dare worked on his forearm.
“Wild hasn’t even flinched,” Grace told me, giving him an indulgent smile. “You’d think he was just getting a haircut or something. The bond doesn’t lie—he is feeling zero discomfort. Where are you going to get yours?”
I pulled the collar of my shirt to the side, showing Grace the empty spot on my collarbone.
“Nice,” Dare said, glancing up at me before returning to his work. “I’m going to have to do my leg because I’m doing it myself—no offense, but I don’t trust any of you to do it.”
