“I take it back.” I kissed his shoulder through his shirt. “You’re the absolute best mate ever, and I love you more than the single-origin Costa Rican chocolate bars I order from French Broad Chocolates in Asheville.”
The ride was oddly peaceful, probably due to me shutting my eyes just for a second. Or three. Or maybe during the whole trip.
The jolt as the elevator stopped jarred me awake, and I shuffled out before recalling I was supposed to be going up to our apartment and not making a pit stop in the lobby.
As I pulled my vision into focus, I noticed Remy. She grinned at me, her needlelike teeth flashing, her skin so pale it was translucent. Her spiked pixie cut highlighted the roundness in her cheeks, and the green elastics on her braces matched her hair.
Tonight, she wore a palm-sized white lily behind one ear, a tame accessory by her usual eighties punk rock standards. Her wide blue eyes, the color of her pronounced veins, sparkled with excitement as she futzed with it.
“You look like crap.” Remy wrinkled her nose at me. “Oh, and the Faraday is surrounded by the coven.”
Dunking my head in an ice bath wouldn’t have shocked me to alertness any faster.
A cold sweat drenched me, my heart galloped a mile a minute, and the spit dried in my mouth.
“The coven?” I reached for Ambrose on instinct. “They’re here?”
She had to be wrong, right? Reece hadn’t noticed, and Bishop hadn’t warned me. The OPA didn’t make mistakes on this scale. We ran a tight ship, but if Remy was right, the Faraday was sinking.
“The enforcers haven’t reported any unusual activity.” Midas frowned toward the break room where they hung out between shifts. “Are you sure?”
“Two and Six have been people watching from the roof for hours.” She honed her glare. “They’re sure.”
Remy was fae. A macalla, if you wanted to get technical. Or simply an echo in layman’s terms. She could split herself into eight sentient halves, or halves of halves, or halves of halves of halves, as the case may be. Make that seven, since Eight had been reabsorbed into the collective upon her death.
When not expanding our Peachy Keen Sheets empire, or terrorizing commuters, Remy dispatched her other selves on intel-gathering missions across the city to get me the scoop on any fresh trouble brewing.
Now that the Faraday was her home, a territorial side of her was emerging.
One that appeared to include spying on her new neighbors.
I would have to sit her down and explain how that was wrong, but I was grateful for it right now.
Goddess knows, I needed all the help I could get. Honestly? I wasn’t sure which would kill us first.
The coven.
The archive.
Or Natisha.
The last one worried me most.
Knowing the archive was anchored in Faerie, that it created a bridge between our worlds, I couldn’t fork over the promised hearts. Natisha was too powerful, and she had no love for mortals. She would parade across that bridge, terrorize the people I had sworn to protect, and then, when she got bored, she would raze Atlanta to the ground.
But welshing on our agreement would cost Ford his life. I couldn’t let that happen either. He was a good man, and he deserved his second chance. And Lisbeth… She would be heartbroken to lose him now that she finally had him.
“Why haven’t they moved on us yet?”
Stealth mode was only slightly better than an all-out assault. It meant we were safe, for now. But it also meant the coven was watching us, cataloguing our weaknesses, and planning a strike guaranteed to cut us off at the knees.
Personally, I preferred to give my enemies as little quiet time to think as possible. We had to distract them, scatter their focus, and see what insight we could divine from their responses.
“I’ve been asking myself that.” Her hand strayed back to the flower, and she flicked one of its petals with a thoughtful expression twisting her face. “I don’t think they can.”
Talk about too good to be true. “What do you mean?”
“They must be familiar with the layout of the building, Liz would have fed them that, but they don’t know where we stashed her, right? In the infirmary or in a cell will be their top picks, sure, but they can’t tell for certain.”
“The coven’s past actions tell us they view members as disposable,” I reminded her. “What makes you think this has anything to do with recovering Liz?”
“Two overheard chatter about a baby, a boy, if you’re interested. They’re calling him the child price, whatever that means.” She bounced her shoulders. “Maybe he’s The Chosen One or something, and they can’t afford to hurt his vessel in a siege for fear of harming him. Why else pump the brakes?”
We held knowledge of the existence and location of the archive, a catacomb of tombs brimming with the souls of all the creatures the coven had murdered for their skins, their thoughts, their powers. Their very souls.
They should have been throwing everything they had at us. They should have been trying to wipe us off the map before we attacked the wellspring of their power. They should have been desperate to protect their repository of magic.
And yet, despite getting the drop on us, they hadn’t lifted a finger against us.
“Surprise, surprise.” I rubbed my face. “They know something we don’t.”
“Fertility is crap among the fae, but most witches breed like rabbits to build their covens. The bloodline connection enhances their power when they cast spells. The more relatives, the more power, the more magic they can conjure when they work together.”
“What do you mean by most?”
“Black magic is a toxin the practitioner chooses to release into their system. Most of them find ways to insulate their brains and organs from its poisonous effects, but a fetus is another matter.”
Spinning the charmed ring on my finger, I asked, “The mother can’t protect it?”
“Most practitioners aren’t strong enough to shield an infant, a whole other person, from conception to birth, and their magic is too busy feeding on the child’s potential for it to grow strong enough to protect itself.” She hesitated. “There are actually covens who get pregnant for that exact reason. They use the kid as a power boost for particularly tricky spells.”
The tips of my fingers went numb. “As in, they sacrifice their unborn children?”
“Yeah.” She angled her face away from me. “Fae do it too. We’re just quieter about it.”
As low as birth rates were for fae, I couldn’t imagine them killing their own offspring in the womb.
Then again, as I could attest, a kid wasn’t any better off being born to someone with those proclivities.
“The coven didn’t reveal themselves until after Liz got pregnant.” I indulged in a brief fantasy. “Just think, if she had gotten knocked up sooner, this could have all been Linus’s problem.”
Midas kissed my forehead, right between my eyes, and he smiled while he did it.
I chose to view it as his endorsement of me as the better candidate to handle this situation, and not that he was laughing at me.
“Liz no longer practices.” Midas rubbed his jaw. “Yet it took her years to conceive.”
The timing worried me too. Had it really taken that long? Or had they planned it that way?