Chapter 52

52

MINA

A few hours later, we were back downtown, eating at a restaurant that catered to monsters—the room we were in was huge, the booths were spacious, and there were places along the walls to roost and web. I had my purse with me and my gun was in it, just in case.

"Should they be seeing me?" Sylas asked, as we entered. He looked like he was suited in gray, with a trench coat and hat on, like I was dating someone made of smoke and also from the 1920s. I wasn't mad about it. Especially not when he took the hat off respectfully, the second he walked inside.

"Do you really want a girl in the high-seventieth attractiveness percentile to look like she's eating alone?" I teased. I had all my hair pulled up into a bun, and was in jeans and a baggy long-sleeved T-shirt. "But really—I figure this is the safest place to be. You'd have to be an idiot to start a fight here. Also, they have really good ramen."

"Ra-men," he said, sounding it out, and I opened my mouth to launch into an explanation, when I realized he was pulling my leg. He laughed, and I gave him a look, then ignored him until I was done giving the server—an avian with peacock heritage, based on the lovely waving iridescent feathers she was crowned with—my order.

"Do you miss it?" I asked him. "Eating?"

"I like eating you," he said, and I felt myself flush, all the way up to the tips of my ears. "But no. Tasting things is enough. I don't find solid substances useful."

"What is it like?"

"Being covered in tongues? I think you should tell me," he said, and I laughed.

"No. The rest of it. Being a pretty-damn-omnipotent time-being." His eyes flashed, but he waited until the server was done returning with my order to respond.

"Ask what you want to know, Mina. Don't shy away. Our time is too short for that."

I broke my chopsticks in two—they sounded like breaking bones. "What will you do without me? Will you be okay?"

"No." He put his hand on the table between us, and I took it. "I no longer want to kill you—so I won't. I will stop fate."

My eyebrows rose into peaks. "I'm flattered as fuck, Sylas, but...have you ever done that before?" I asked, before leaning forward.

"I have never desired to," he said, and I made a tense face. "That does not mean that it is impossible."

"No, just, highly improbable, is all," I said. "But in any case...we've got a few days. And I was hoping we could call a truce on talking about future-things. It's too rough, and poetic, and sad." I stirred my chopsticks aimlessly in my broth. "I always thought I was a goth until all this—and while I still am—I just want to spend whatever time I have left being in love with you. I don't want there to be an asterisk beside it, for a footnote about dying, every single time."

"I agree. But just as I believe in you, I need you to believe in me," he said, with utter sincerity. "I am going to find a way to save you."

Whether he was or wasn't, it wasn't worth fighting him on, so I gave him an impish smile instead. "So sex with me was that good, eh?" I teased, and he laughed so loud every other patron in the restaurant looked at him.

After that, I scarfed my noodles down and we worked on the next murder. I'd pulled blueprints for Garrett's ancestral home from the city after a remodel, so I knew about half the structure of the house, and once we got inside of it, Sylas could handle the rest, I was sure.

"Gates and walls?" Sylas asked.

"Just rose gardens," I said, flipping through the pictures I'd taken between us.

"I thought you said there was security?"

"I was a cute college-aged girl in a Fiat. They weren't super worried about me. Plus, I knew everybody's names." I got to the last photo in my phone. "Does anything about these pics say ‘ancient bad magic,' to you?"

"No," Sylas said, with a frown, sounding gravely concerned. "What of Nolan?"

"I can't believe I forgot!" I took my phone back to frantically search.

My original account on my college's forum had been deleted, but I quickly made another—and while there were several comments under the post I'd made—the image itself had been moderated from the boards, for being "too graphic."

"Oh, come on!" I muttered, and hit up all the news sites—and saw a headline about a report of a "mass hallucination on campus" related to undiluted pesticide exposure at the football field's end. My eyes about fell out of my head. "You've got to be kidding me," I snarled—but all the reports were the same—kids were hysterical, thought they saw something awful, but it was definitely not supernatural, and they were all being given treatment.

"They're covering it up, Sylas," I said, holding my phone out to him. He read the article quickly.

"All twenty-one murders?"

"They've been practicing for years." I pushed the end of my ramen bowl aside. "No one ever found any of the other girls, before Ella."

Sylas reached into our table, and brought out Nolan's piece of skin.

"Oh, Sylas, I just ate," I said, putting a hand over my stomach.

"Hear me out," he said. "What if, in addition to having some rudimentary ability to control fate, they can use dimensions? Like I can?"

I did quick math in my head. If the RRP had been going strong since their founding, sometime in the late 1800s—hell, maybe they'd been created for this awful, magical reason—a girl every four years, for a hundred and fifty years? Then there'd had been at least thirty deaths, counting the ones that'd happened before newspapers were kept for historical purposes and the internet.

Suddenly I was queasy for a deeply different reason.

"But why take the tattoos from them, if they were going to hide the bodies anyhow?" I asked. "They took those tattoos off of all of the men in the stadium tunnels."

Sylas ran his fingers over the skin again—and quickly disappeared it when our server neared to take my bowl away.

"I think there's something in the mark," he said, when she was out of hearing range, then pierced me with a look. "Where do they keep the dye they make it with?"

I grimaced. "I don't know. Trent already had his when we hooked up. I know there's a big annual ceremony when the new members get theirs, but as a lady I wasn't invited."

He made a thoughtful sound. "Perhaps we can discover that before we murder this man tonight."