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“My wings,” he mourned when he saw his painting-self. “Oh, is that your wolf, Aria?”
“Neo!” Marilyn snapped. “Focus.”
“Oh, right.” He gave the painting one more awed glance that had pride filling my chest, which was followed quickly by disgust. I shouldn’t feel proud that I’d painted something like that. “The Head just sent this to Director Kiyomasa.”
He turned the phone so that we could see the screen's contents. A list was displayed, and next to it were body parts and numbers. It took me a second to realize what I was looking at.
“Sariel Ambrose,” Johnny read out. “Alive, you’re worth fifty-million dollars. Dead, you’re worth twenty-five million. Your wings alone are worth ten-million apiece. Fresh blood is worth twenty grand a liter.”
“We’re all on the Black Market,” Neo said. “Aria alone is worth almost one-hundred-million alive. They want any part of her or Sariel they can get their hands on. It’s sick.”
“Great. Not only are the Upper Council and Azazel after us, but random bounty hunters, too.” Aria threw her arms up in the air out of exasperation. “We need to leave before we put these people in danger.”
“No,” I said, turning to her fully. “The Director and the Head knew exactly what they were getting into when they let us stay here. I’m not letting you play martyr and get yourself killed because you have an overworked conscience, Aria.”
“Excuse me?”
“I didn’t stutter. If anything happens to you…” I had to close my eyes and take a deep breath to calm myself. “If anything happens to you, Aria, it won’t matter that you tried to save all these people. I would start World War III over your death.”
Silence ensued as Aria and I glared each other down.
“This is really well-done,” Neo said out of nowhere as he looked closer at the painting.
“Not the time, Neo,” Johnny sighed out at the same exact time Reese’s hand reached out to smack Neo upside the back of his head.
“My bad,” the latter said, frowning and rubbing his head.
16
A LITTLE PEACE
Aria
It was extremely difficult to give the silent treatment to someone who could quite literally read your mind and feel your emotions.Extremely.
By the time we were settled in the Director’s office, a good chunk of my anger had already dissipated, but I was still pretty upset. That he could think so casually the way he did about all those lives made me a little queasy.
I couldn’t even think about the people I’d seen die without breaking out in a literal cold sweat. Even now, my skin was coated with a sheen of it as flashes of the body being devoured by rats crossed my mind.
I glanced at Marilyn. She was sitting stoically next to Johnny, completely nonplussed by the fact that she had been responsible for those deaths. Then again, those definitely hadn’t been her first kills.
I had no idea why her having killed before had never occurred to me until now. Even Johnny seemed unphased by the painting.
Lunch was served while we discussed what we would do about being a top commodity in the supernatural world. Sariel had napped for almost four hours, to my surprise, and I was sure that if we hadn’t been interrupted by Johnny and Marilyn’s arguing, he’d have slept even longer.
The general consensus seemed to be that we were safe here for at least a few more days. Each time I started to offer to leave and find somewhere else, though, Sariel would shoot me a quelling glare that made me want to empty my steaming bowl of curry over his head.
“You just got here. You haven’t even worked a single day,” Director Kiyomasa pointed out when I suggested that he give us information about the colonies in Europe. “I have faith in our ability to protect ourselves, Aria. This place is spelled. It’s technically registered as a military base, but by the time any humans get close enough to confirm that, they forget why they ever came out here. There are also underground bunkers that can keep us safe in case of emergencies.”
It made me all the more angry that I couldn’t just tell him my soulmate might have just prophesied that we would be the cause of a lot of people’s deaths. I still had no idea what species the Director was, but his heterochromic gaze made me itch—it was like he knew he’d invited wolves into his den of sheep, yet was helpless to do anything about it.
I chose to brood in silence. At least the curry was delicious and spicy.
The food in general was incredible, actually, and maybe it was distracting me from the fact that Sariel was being an overbearing asshole.
I hadn’t shut the bond because of our conversation the night before. We’d promised each other to never shut each other out, and yet he hadn’t once tried to speak to me since.
It annoyed me beyond reason that he was respecting my space and not pushing me to communicate, stupidly enough. I wanted him to hear what I was saying right now, to see that he had to stop thinking the way he was.
