Chapter 15

FIFTEEN

When a minute passed without the pop of gunfire or the crack of furniture, Paris nudged open the bathroom door. Hearing no raised voices or other sounds of a fight, he opened the door wider and peeked out. Mac was standing over the front door threshold, puffed up and growly, blocking Paris's view of their visitor and their visitor's view of him. He fed his crush that protective nugget, wallowing in it, until his name—"Paris Cirillo"—reached his ears.

"I don't know who you're talking about," Mac lied.

"I know he's here," said the voice Paris would recognize anywhere. Out of any danger, Paris set aside his makeshift weapons and hustled across the cabin.

"How's that?" Mac practically barked.

"Because I told him," Paris said, talking over his best friend's "Because I can smell him." Strange reply, but whatever... Kai was here . Paris ducked under Mac's arm and swallowed the smaller man in a crushing hug.

"You what ?" Mac barked at him now, and Paris would get to that truth in just a moment.

For now, he wanted to revel in the familiar, in his first taste of home in over a week, and it warmed his heart that Kai hugged him back just as fiercely. The three of them—Kai, Jason, and Paris—were family, the real kind, and Paris had missed them, dearly. He drew back, checking his friend over, from his dark tousled curls to his tan skin to his big brown eyes. "I missed you," Paris said to him, then glancing over his shoulder at a simmering Mac, color high in his cheeks, fingers white-knuckling the door, added, "He's a friend. One of my best."

"No one is supposed to know you're here," Mac said, voice strained. "Not after the last time."

Okay, he had a point, and a right to be angry—no contact was one of the rules—but if it had been a hard and fast one, Liam wouldn't have let him use his phone that day. And Paris's position from that day hadn't changed. He wasn't going to leave his human friends stranded in the middle of a magical shitstorm without some kind of backup.

Was that why Kai was here now? Were he and Jason in trouble? Where was Jason? All questions he wanted answers to—inside the cabin. "It's fine," he told Mac. "We can trust him." He shifted from Kai's arms to Mac's side and patted his chest, seeking to assure the raven in the same place Paris felt his reassurance whenever he needed it. "Now, can we let him in before the witches get even more curious? The crows are audience enough."

With a combination glare and growl that would turn Paris on at any other time, Mac begrudgingly opened the door wide enough for Paris to slip back through with Kai in tow.

"What are you doing here?" he asked as Kai glanced around the cabin.

Mac closed the door, then stood beside them, arms crossed. "Better question. Why didn't the crows alert me that you were here in the first place?"

Kai shifted Paris's grip, flipping it so he was the one squeezing Paris's hand. The apology in his eyes nearly startled a gasp out of Paris. "You gotta promise not to be mad at me. This wasn't about you."

Not about him? Mad at Kai? For what? Showing up here? Not possible. "I missed you too much to be mad."

Kai released his hand, then held his own out to Mac. "Because I'm one of you. Kai Finley."

Paris did gasp at that. One of you, as in a raven? A shifter?

Eyes wide, Mac seemed as surprised as him for once. "What's your real name?"

"Kaimus. Finley was my father's surname. My mother's was Kasta."

"Haida?" Mac asked, and Kai nodded. When Mac spoke again, his tone did a complete one-eighty from suspicious to almost... reverent. "I thought your kind were gone."

His kind? So he wasn't a raven? And what was Haida? Kai rarely spoke about his parents or where he'd come from before landing in YB, but he had mentioned his mother was from an Indigenous tribe up north. Was Haida that tribe? Of shifters?

"Not gone," Kai said. "Just hiding."

"Cormac Kelley. It's an honor. And please, call me Mac."

Head spinning, Paris slid between the two men, glancing back and forth between them. "I'm lost. Can someone please explain?"

"You didn't know he was a raven?" Mac said.

"Clearly." He pointed at Kai's face. "And his eyes are brown." Only humans had brown eyes.

"Not really," Kai said, apology in his gaze once more. Standing beside the table, he removed a case from his pocket and removed contacts Paris had never suspected, had never seen him put in or take out before. When Kai lifted his gaze back to them, his blue-green irises were again not what Paris expected.

"They're not purple like yours," he said to Mac.

"No, because he's a different kind of raven. He's special, Paris."

"Well, the special part I knew." Kai was the best of them, the one who'd gone straight and earned an honest living tending bar. He was calm, he was caring, he kept him and Jason in line as much as he could. Paris trusted him completely, but not the other way around, it seemed? He couldn't keep the hurt from his voice. "But the other..."

Kai captured his flailing hand. "I'm sorry. With your dad, I couldn't risk him finding out what I was."

"Does anyone in YB know?" Mac asked.

"Our other best friend, Jason. He's the only person here I've told."

That stung, not because Kai hadn't told him, but because Paris's father had stolen something else from him, had put a wall between Paris and his best friends. One of whom was conspicuously absent, and with everything Paris had learned about ravens lately, Paris's worry ratcheted higher. "Where is he?"

"That's why I'm here. I think he's in trouble." He shifted his gaze to Mac. "The raven knows he is."

"Jason's always in trouble," Paris said, though he sensed something was different this time. It had to be for Kai to risk coming here, to expose his identity. Paris squeezed his hand in solidarity, letting him know he didn't hold anything against him, that he still had his back.

Kai nodded, then turned his attention back to Mac and lifted his other hand, splaying it over his chest. "It burns."

The resemblance to the motion Paris had just shared with Mac was unmistakable. He wasn't surprised his best friends were connected in a similar way. But what did he mean by it burns ? "What's happened?" he asked as he led them to the seating area, Mac buttoning his shirt along the way.

Kai lowered himself on one end of the couch. "Moira."

Because of course it would be her. Paris flopped next to Kai and hung his head back on a groan. "Fucking hell."

"Who's Moira?" Mac asked from the chair.

"Asshole vampire of the highest order." He righted his gaze and flicked a hand in the air. "She and Jason were a thing for a hot minute."

"She told him there was a stash." Kai cleared his throat and glanced guiltily at Paris. "One of your father's in the Canyon Lands. She needed a lock pick."

"And Jason needed a payday," Paris surmised.

"To get us out before tomorrow."

Paris looped an arm around Kai's shoulders and pulled him into a sideways hug. Why wouldn't his friends just let him help? Jason didn't have to put himself in danger; Kai wouldn't have to worry about him. Granted, it was more complicated when Vincent had been alive, especially if Kai hadn't wanted to expose himself, but now... Now, when whatever this was was all over, they were going to have a serious conversation about how to stay alive, all of them, because Paris needed his family.

"I didn't know where else to go," Kai said.

"This is why I told you where I was, in case of emergency." It gave him some hope they could work out an arrangement in the future. Now he just needed Mac's help in the present. "I'm sorry, but I needed them to have some backup."

Mac's gaze held his for a long moment, understanding passing between them, before he leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. "You said it burns. What did you mean?"

"That they're connected," Paris said, and barely bit back the like us he wanted to add. Would Mac want that shared with Kai? Did Mac feel the same way?

"There's connected," Mac said. "And then there's ‘it burns.' Very different."

"You know what my people did?" Kai asked, and at Mac's nod, he continued. "I think—" He cut himself off, swallowed hard, then started again. "I know Jason's a phoenix. And he's in danger."

"But Jason's human," Paris said, voice rising with panic, the world starting to spin again.

"Not anymore."

Mac rested a hand on his knee. "Breathe, Paris." Squeezed. "You did the right thing. We'll try to help him." He left his hand there as he glanced back to Kai. "I need to know everything."

For all of Atlas's efforts to make sure he was well-read and educated, Paris had gotten a crash course in the supernatural the past twelve days. And as Mac and Kai talked, as Kai divulged more details, Paris tried to suppress how overwhelmed he felt and focus instead on the mundane because that was the only way he could help in this situation.

He zeroed in on certain words from their conversation.

Stash.

Phoenix.

Power.

Staring at the calming blue-green wall, the same color as his friend's real eyes, Paris put himself in the shoes of the person he had the misfortune to know best in the world.

Vincent Cirillo.

The human who had hunted phoenixes, held them captive in stash houses, and bled them dry in order to replenish his own stolen power.

Fuel stations , his father used to say. I need to visit a fuel station.

Fuel stations that were marked on a map he kept in his private study, a room only he and Atlas had ever been inside. That Paris regularly broke into to steal from his father's supply of Daylight.

Rocketing off the couch, he grabbed the closest paint brush and the tubes of black and red paint. He squeezed a dollop of each onto the back of his hand, swiped his brush through the black one first, then on the blue-green wall, he began to sketch the outlines of the Canyon Lands. Crumbling stone jetties and canyons of deep, dark water, broken buildings and disintegrating streets, the barbed wire fence that separated what amounted to YB's haunted house from the rest of the city.

He was so deep in his memories, so focused on translating them correctly onto the wall, that he didn't notice the conversation behind him quiet or Mac move to stand behind him. He startled when he rocked back on one heel to evaluate his work and ran into him.

"What's this?" Mac asked, steadying him by the shoulders.

"My father had maps. Lots of them." He rinsed his brush in the paint water mug, flicked off the excess, then swiped it through the red. "There was this one in his private office. It had red dots on it." He marked the five spots on the map he'd replicated. "When I asked him what the dots were, he told me they were fuel stations."

Mac stepped beside him, stared a long moment at the wall, and then a satisfied smirk stretched across his face, the sexiest thing Paris had ever seen. "You're amazing," he said, clasping the back of Paris's head and hauling it closer to press his lips to his temple, searing Paris with the affectionate touch. "Go pack."

Wait... what? Paris jerked his head back, meeting the raven's dark eyes. "We're leaving?"

"I need to go into the city with Kai, but I'll send Liam for you. If your friend is a phoenix, if he survives, we'll need to bring him back to the mountain after. I assume you'll want to be with him."

"Yes, of course," Paris said as he tossed aside his brush and wiped his hands on his sweats. "But why are we going back to the ridge?"

"Not the ridge," Mac said. "We're going to Monte Corvo. In Talahalusi."