Chapter 5

"I'd liketo know how you're going to justify abducting me and nailing me to the ceiling of the prison cell for centuries." Bellamy is really hung up on the abduction, which, valid, right? Even I threatened Akile while we were avenging the abduction, because yeah, no one fucks with the Foxilys without consequences, and that was unusually cruel.

Akile bites his lower lip, squinting at Bellamy from the front seat of the taxi we're taking to the base of operations that Akile's organization has set up here. Apparently the taxi driver is another cherub in the know; the cherubs have reassigned my permanent taxi driver and put this one in his place. She's cute, and her smile melts my heart. I can't say I'm opposed to having another cherub friend.

"First, it's important to tell you that the cherubs did not choose the way you were detained. That was fully the cultists that took delivery of you. The only limits we put on the contract were that you had to be alive so Fox could make you immortal, and the cultists knew you needed to be in that prison cell out of view of the cameras. The only blind spot was unfortunately on the ceiling, but they made the choice for how to attach you to the ceiling." Akile widens his big, hazel eyes and tries to look as blameless as possible. He's as adorable as any cherub, so obviously we believe him.

What? I like the cherubs even when they're naughty. Maybe especially when they're doing things that they shouldn't.

"A hammock would have sufficed," Bellamy points out, outwardly calm because he's all but over it.

Akile has the grace to look abashed. "The cherubs don't work with the cultists, and as per their deity of choice, they're sometimes cruel in the name of their god."

Bellamy makes a noise of acknowledgment. "Why that prison cell and why the human cultists?"

"The easiest way to see if you're a potential Avatar was to put you in the same place as the previous Avatar, and you had to be exposed to the imbuing magic long enough for it to wake up. It's nothing but a dormant seed at this point, trapped in the prison of a mostly dead body. We theorize that the seed of magic should be able to transfer to the next Avatar through the wards keeping it trapped. The draw would be strong enough to overcome the wards with some time, so we couldn't have your location discovered too quickly. You had to be in that cell for at least an hour, and Kristie is an extremely competent warden. She would have gotten you out of there before you had time to wake the magic up if she'd seen you on camera."

I hold up a staying hand to everyone as I work this out for myself. Fox and Bellamy both know what I'm doing and why I enjoy unraveling the mysteries of the paranormal for myself.

(It makes me feel smart, and I deserve to give myself good things, including the feeling of pride in myself.)

Are you saying that the previous Avatar, the one that the cherubs deposed three thousand years ago, is in that prison cell right now, and you put Bellamy in there with him? The cherubs trapped the magic of neutrality, a whole universal force, in a corpse?

"Partly. We don't think they could trap it in a corpse, but trapping it in a mostly dead body that hasn't given up its soul yet would be possible. It's probably under a preservation spell that's keeping the body on the line between life and death, and our parents hid it in an impenetrable cell behind some seriously heavy warding and then built the prison on top of it to make sure there was always a warden in place even if the warden doesn't know what they're guarding," Akile explains.

"You think?" Bellamy questions with that look that says he's hiding his annoyance.

Akile shoots us an apologetic grimace. "We've only been working at this for a year, and we only found the prison two months ago. We're making educated guesses, but we're cherubs, Sexy Red."

Bellamy's ears turn red and his freckled cheeks flush, but he ignores his own embarrassment. "And a cherub's guess is as good as fact for the rest of us."

Akile shrugs and nods in agreement, smiling brightly at my son.

Gah, they're cute, right? Every time we meet someone new, I can totally see them and Bellamy hitting it off. I really need to stop shipping him with every Tom, Dick, and Harry that comes along. Dick… hehe.

"Impenetrable?" Fox asks as intrigued as he ever sounds when in the company of strangers, so not at all. Clearly he hasn't decided if he's going to let me keep Akile yet. I don't mind. He can take his time coming around. Akile's ours, of course, but Fox can take his time realizing that.

Akile looks disgruntled with a cute line of frustration between his manicured eyebrows. "We have no idea what material our parents used or how the cell was constructed, but nothing we've tried has been able to penetrate the physical or magical barriers around the cell. It's really annoying, but we can't ask our parents, because then they'll know what we're doing. No one wants to alert them to our activities before we fix this idiocy."

"Why would you think that the seed of magic inside would be able to get through the warding?" Bellamy questions dubiously.

"We put soldat worms on the cell to eat away at the warding," Akile explains.

Fox considers this for a moment before saying, "I might be able to help. I'll have to look."

Akile smiles happily at him. "We would love the opinion of someone who was alive when the new government was instituted."

"I was a child when the new government was instituted," Fox responds flatly.

"Really?" Bellamy asks, surprised. "You were over six hundred years old then."

It takes a hundred years for demon babies to be born; it's not really a surprise that it takes a few hundred years for them to grow up.

Reminding them of that also makes me eye Fox. We've recently agreed to stop using condoms because it's really unlikely that he's going to get pregnant any time in the next thousand years, but still. I'm not father material for babies. I love them, but I also love handing them back to their parents when they're upset.

"Demon spawn mature in about a hundred years. Elflings take a thousand," Fox corrects. "I didn't split the difference."

Oh. He spent a thousand years growing up. That's difficult to conceptualize, and if we ever have biological children that better not happen to us. I can't imagine parenting for eighteen years, much less a thousand. I'd prefer the cherub way of doing things (the parents apparently get to choose how fast their babies grow up).

The taxi turns into the parking lot of what looks like it used to be a big box store that's only a few blocks from Diner (where we had lunch), and the driver takes us straight to the front doors where she lets us off. Akile leads us inside to a reception area where a couple of toddler size cherubs are manning the front desk.

They. Are. Soooo fucking cute. Imagine Boss Baby irl. They have headsets on, and they're wearing office attire. One of them has a little green suit and the other is wearing slacks and a polo shirt. They're chatting with their heads together, and when we enter, they look up, smile, wave, and go back to their conversation.

Akile leads us past them, through an employees only door, and into a huge space filled with desks and the cherubs working at them. There are no walls, not even cubicle walls, except the four enclosing the space, and those four are covered in white laminate with colorful writing, formulas, and doodles drawn all over them. Every wall has at least eight cherubs at it working in pairs or groups, and the space is incredibly noisy.

It's amazing.

"Akile!" The exclamation comes from what looks like a teen girl, but these are cherubs. She's probably in the latter half of her first millennium.

Akile turns toward the girl, opening his arms before he sees her and catching her when she jumps at him. He squeezes her and spins her in a circle, kissing her cheek before releasing her back to her feet. He slings an arm around her shoulders, turning her to face us. "Meet Ace Aristide, my little brother. That's not his forever name; he's still choosing the right one, but Ace works for him for now."

Oh. Ok. He, not she; got it.

I reach out and shake Ace's hand, then look at Fox, who says what I'm thinking, "He's happy to meet you, and he thinks you're as adorable as your brother."

I nod to confirm his words since Ace might not know that Fox speaks for me.

He laughs. "Thank you. I'm really early in my transition and today felt like a cute boi day. I've only recently come out, and the only people who know are in this building." He smiles, but it's clear he's telling us not to out him outside of this building. "So, like, if we meet on the street, call me Talia."

"We will keep your confidence," Fox says for us both. "Congratulations. We wish you well on your journey."

Ace blushes with a smile. "Thank you." He turns to Akile then. "Stacy is ready for you."

Akile kisses Ace's cheek again and drops his arm off his shoulders. "Thanks, bro."

Ace flushes again, waves at us, and races off back to where he came from.

Akile beckons us to follow. "Stacy is the coordinator in charge of my division of the project. She'll want to meet you, and then she'll pair you with interviewers who are going to compile the data you provide into workable files that will become actionable plans."

It's all very organized.

Akile glances at his phone when the text goes through and he laughs. "We're cherubs. No one is better at organizing than we are."

Ace isa whiz with data management. He's been interviewing me, and so far he's let me tell him the (very truncated) story of how I fell in love with Fox and what happened when Bellamy was abducted. He's been making notes and reading my story. He hasn't asked any questions yet, but we're finally finished with the retelling, and he turns his attention away from his notes.

His curly hair is up on top of his head in a big puff, and it sways with his movement in a hypnotizing way. He's wearing a blue and pink crop top with a white butterfly on it, and I honestly should have picked up the transgender pride signs all over his person immediately upon meeting him. When Ace smiles, there's enough similarities between him and Akile that there's no mistaking them for anything other than siblings.

"Ok, next I'm going to ask some questions about the people you've met or mentioned," he explains congenially.

Being interviewed by a teenager is both strange and hits all the aww-how-cute buttons in me even though I'm only a few years out of my teens myself. I guess I feel like I'm more of an adult because of the whole homeless thing, and probably because I've adopted two people who are both older than me, or could be the surviving of three mass murders… There's a few things that make me feel more adult than my age would suggest.

"As a reminder, I'm visually recording this interview because you are unable to speak. We did the first part mostly via text, but with the question and answer section of this interview, I would appreciate it if you would use text to speech. It will be helpful for the other cherubs if they can see that all of your answers are your own. Some of our friends like to analyze body language, and you would make a wonderful study for them. Please feel free to be as expressive as you like during the interview, that would delight them to no end, and happy friends are always better friends."

We're not alone in this big room by ourselves. We're sitting in the middle, and one of the cherubs in the desk directly next to us turns around and confirms, "It's true. Jessie would be really happy if you did your best to act naturally. She's my friend, and when she's happy she bakes cookies. Cookies are the best, don't you think?" This cherub looks like he's about eight years old.

"Cookies are the best,"I agree via voice-to text. I hate it, and I grimace at the robotic voice. I wish I could just use Fox, but he's twenty feet away at a different desk with a different interviewer.

Ace gives me a sympathetic look. "Yeah, that's awful, but let me make some calls. I bet I can find a cherub who wants to make something that will give your voice-to-text a more natural sound."

"That would be great."I exaggerate my smile to let him know that dead-robot is not the tone I would choose. Not that any kind of reading machine is going to be able to intone the way I would if I could speak.

I would be amazing at intonation if I could do that, just saying.

"Ok, I'm going to ask about the people in your spheres of influence. We're going to start with the ones you know the best and move outward to the ones you know little about. We've already dismissed Bellamy and Fox as possible candidates for the avatar we're looking for. So let's start with Edovard."

He asks for basic vital statistics about Edovard, then does the same for Gregory and then Hassan. I tell him what I know, which isn't as much as I know about Edovard, but when I ask, he tells me that anyone with a clear alignment with Good or Evil isn't going to be an eligible avatar, so basically he's just gathering data so he can rule them out.

"Tell me about the Luna wolf you met, Tala," Ace says after he finishes filing Hassan under the heading of Never-Gonna-Be-More-Than-Santanos's-Lackey. Ok, I made that up. I'm sure the column is really just labeled Low Probability or something.

"Tala is-slash-was a bounty hunter. Last time I saw him he was screaming in agony as the bonds that tied him to his pack melted under Darcy's magic." Apparently it's painful to have your pack bonds severed, and Darcy was angry enough that the magic he used to do it drew out the pain. "He saved Tala from three months of nutmeg poisoning to erode the bonds, but he wasn't nice about it, and Tala has a blood bond to Darcy now too."

I bet he's still eating those nutmegs, because if I were him I'd be doing the same thing to get rid of a bond to Darcy. I mean, I have an unwanted bond with Darcy, but…

Well, the tracker is useful, and with how things have been going recently, I wouldn't be surprised if the moment I broke the bond I suddenly needed it. Plus, it's an ally agreement that means I can call on him any time if I need him, and he won't offer Bellamy sex, which is important to me because Bellamy has terrible taste in men. So yeah, I'm keeping the blood bond with Darcy.

Ace quirks an eyebrow at me. "Darcy saved him from pack bonds he didn't want, but he did it as painfully as possible?"

I nod because that's an accurate summary, then I type out my response because he wanted my answers out loud. "Yes."

"What do you know about Darcy?" he asks with an excited twinkle in his eye.

I have to think about that, because Darcy's been with us almost from the beginning. "He's like a distant cousin that no one likes." I say that with an exaggerated grimace, and then I add, "Except, sometimes I think I do like him, and it pains me to admit that." So much pain.

"So he is a Foxily?" Ace checks, and if I could groan I would.

Instead I slap my hand to my face and slide it down in exasperation, then nod with a grimacing frown. "Technically yes, he is a part of the Foxilys. Two of us have blood bonds with him. Bellamy and me," I clarify. "He doesn't live with us, but yeah, if he asked, we'd add him to the household." It'd probably be in the basement, but Fox wouldn't deny him a roof over his head.

"Would you classify him as generally good or generally evil?" Ace asks with more of that excitement.

Would I classify him—

Oh hey, that's not a bad thought.

"Neither,"I answer, giving Ace exactly what he's looking for. "Darcy falls firmly on neutral ground. He doesn't abide any kind of great evil, but he's not a good person. He's the kind of person who does things for himself and to mold the world into what he wants it to be. Like, he thinks cherubs need to be protected, and he will track them down with alacrity, but he also has no qualms about threatening one with violence to get what he wants." (Read my previous narration to see this in action.)

"Oh yeah, I heard about what he did to Verity," Ace laughs. "She reverted back to a baby, and her parents were so upset with her that they kept her as an infant until yesterday. We rescued her as soon as she was potty-trained again."

He points to an adorable toddler with a halo of ginger curls in a yellow and blue polka dot jumper sitting on the floor and drawing something on a blueprint.

"So, she took the job as a barista just to poison Bellamy."That tracks—cherubs are probably the right people to be trying to find the Avatar of Neutrality; they have no issue doing sketchy things to accomplish their goal.

Gah. It's a good thing they're so fucking cute; people probably wouldn't let them get away with so much if they didn't have pretty-privilege.

Ace shrugs. "She liked the menial break, but she's an engineer with a background in architectural design. She's working on deconstructing the arctic prison blueprints to see if there's some part of that helping to keep the prison intact. We suspect it's acting like a funnel, feeding magic to the cell it's built on."

I'm not going to feel lesser because I'm looking at a toddler with more education than me. It's hard not to, but I remember that she's over five hundred years old, and I mean, even if she did get her education, the likelihood is that she didn't get a formal education until recently. It's not like there were a lot of good options for schooling five hundred years ago.

Huh. I wonder what she did before.

"What did you do with yourself before the modern age?"I ask, tilting my head in curiosity.

Ace mirrors my expression. "I was in school until I came here to work."

"Right, but what did you do before you could attend school? I'm not trying to be insensitive, but people presenting with female parts weren't exactly allowed to get formal education until the last century."

"Oh, you're thinking like a human. No, I didn't attend school on Earth. I spent most of my childhood at Potts University, which is on another planet in a different galaxy."

I stare at him like he didn't just drop a bomb on my perception of the universe. Is there any expletive stronger than HOLY SHITCAKES that would work in this situation? I can't think of one; I'm stuck on the whole planet in another galaxy thing. Am I supposed to know that non-humans travel between galaxies? How? Seriously. HOW???

Fox appears by my side, resting his hand on my nape.

I blink a couple of times and take a deep breath, then Fox says. "He wants to know how."

Ace frowns in confusion. "How what?"

Fox probes the connection between us, and I get my thoughts clarified, picking up my phone to rapid text. I hate the digital voice, but it gets my questions across.

"How did you travel between galaxies? How did you even find out about another whole civilization that far away? How do you even get a visa to go study on another planet?"

Ace's confusion clears up and Fox snorts, letting me go and returning to his interview like this isn't life-changing news.

*eye roll emoji*

I'm good with change because my life before this was ever-changing, and adaptability is basically my middle name (don't say it, Capricorn is a terrible middle name), but this is pretty big even for me.

"Cherubs are from Yael; we migrated to Earth about three hundred thousand years ago, but we have an open gateway between our planets that any cherub can use. I asked my parents if I could study at Potts, and they moved our family there while I was too young to commute. When they decided I was old enough to commute, we moved back here."

"You're telling me that two different planets in two different galaxies evolved bipeds that look like us?"I give him a very skeptical look, because the monotone just isn't conveying the doubt in my question right.

Ace laughs and shakes his head. "Not really. Cherubs are chameleons. We look like humans because that's what it's safest for us to look like. Cherubs are born with the ability to blend in. Here we look human because humans are the most dangerous species on the planet. The cherubs born on Yael look a little different because the most dangerous species closest to them isn't humanity, but there's been a quirk of evolution over the last few hundred millennia. Cherubs here evolved to look like humans and the cherubs on Yael also evolved to look like humans because of all the intergalactic travel and exchange, and the predatory Bourin, who hunted cherubs before we started keeping records, evolved to blend in with cherubs, so they also look human. It's been a fascinating evolution for some of our scholars to watch."

I drop my jaw and shake my head in small movements to get across my absolute shock at the evolution of species on two different planets because of humans. "That's unbelievable. Two different planets have humanoids because of humans?"

Ace laughs. "More than two. Bourin are a species from a different planet in our galaxy, but most species look humanoid, if you hadn't noticed. Interspecies procreation has been happening for a long time. Most of us look alike because of that. Shall we get back to Darcy?"

Right. Bunny trails are dangerous. (I hear bunnies are also pretty dangerous.)

"So you would categorize Darcy as a true neutral?" Ace asks, getting us back on track.

I exaggerate a nod. "Yes."

Ace makes a note and asks about some of my encounters with Darcy, both the professional ones and the personal ones, and then he moves on. We talk about Julia, Jamie, Lionel (my friend who owns a food truck), all of the cherubs I've encountered, and as we get to people I barely know, he finally asks, "What about Elijah Penn."