Salimah bent to the ground, collecting Connor from his heap. He seemed too dazed to be interested in retaliation just then, but Salimah shot me a last lethal look as they left the alley, one that said I was dead if we ever crossed paths again.
I wasn’t sure if I should thank Sterling, but it seemed the right thing to do. He was already lighting a cigarette. I scratched the back of my neck, staring down the alley after Salimah and Connor.
“I – Sterling – I guess – ”
“Don’t mention it,” he said, looking away and blowing out a thin stream of smoke into the wind. He was doing that thing where he was deliberately turning away, one hand in his pocket, legs stood apart like he really thought he was a hero. God, what a douche.
“You’re lucky I showed up when I did.”
I tried not to roll my eyes. “Yeah. Lucky.”
He nudged his head towards the alley’s exit, already walking. “Tell me all about what happened. Diaz wouldn’t have sent anyone to bother you without good reason.”
“Well, I was just going for a bite to eat.”
Sterling shook his head. “Story of my life.”
I recounted what happened as I glanced at the time on my phone. The Happy Cow was closed.
Damn it. I just wanted a burger.
Chapter 2
“A ruby in the shape of a teardrop,” Carver said. “Perhaps it is a little oddly named, as the jewel does not actually stop the heart. It preserves a newly deceased body, staving off the ravages of decomposition and rot. Quite useful for vampires, I would imagine. And necromancers. And blood witches.”
So that was what the Heartstopper could do. I knew it wasn’t the exact same thing, but it reminded me of how I’d once been found in a morgue. Through magical means I’d been made to appear so convincingly unliving that actual professionals had declared me dead. It was the entire reason I had to shed my former life and join the arcane underground.
Gil frowned, his eyebrows like caterpillars across his forehead. “So it’s like a magic meat locker? That’s all it does? So why is this Diaz so sensitive about it going missing?”
“Vampires like their treasure, I guess?” I shrugged. “Who knows.”
Sterling scoffed. “Not me. You’re thinking of dragons.”
Asher spoke up before I did, his mouth open. It saved me the trouble of asking what Carver was undoubtedly going to consider a stupid question. “Whoa. There are dragons?”
Against all expectation, Carver smiled and nodded politely. I kept my shock to myself. Holy shit. Dragons?
We were in the hideout. You know, that dimensional chamber that Carver created, the one that was hidden in the back kitchen of a Filipino restaurant out in the Meathook. We were sitting around the hideout’s living room, because yes, we have a living room now.
I’m not one to hold a grudge, but Carver was being awful nice to Asher. Rather, he’d been super nice to Asher since the beginning, and call me crazy, but it felt like he’d gone a little sour on me. Even meaner than before, is what I’m saying.
Carver, my mentor, my employer, and possibly one of the most powerful liches in existence, had done a little sprucing up when Asher joined us. Okay, a lot of sprucing up. I got that he was super stoked to have someone with enormous magical potential to mentor – a necromancer, of all things, a wielder of some of the rarest talents to be found in the arcane world – but Carver was probably spoiling him a little.
The worst thing was that Asher didn’t even have the decency to let it get to his head and start acting like a jerk. There was nothing I could hate him for. He was a good kid, maybe the effect of finally having friends after being locked away by a druidic death cult. I never did ask how long he’d been with them, exactly, but he was eighteen when we found him.
I’d assumed that it was the same main reason he’d been forced to keep his hair grown out, being shut in the same room for ages, but even months after rescuing him from the Viridian Dawn, Asher maintained his luxurious head of black locks. I approved. It suited him, admittedly. It helped him fit in with the young hipsters who littered Valero’s streets.
Sterling approved, too, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that they shared hair tips and products. Asher got along with everyone, even Sterling, of all people. Especially Sterling, who was sprawled across the sofa. The rest of us were in armchairs, because while the sofa could clearly accommodate three people, it had been designated Sterling’s perch from the day it was moved into the hideout. Sterling’s like a cat that way, only meaner, and with bigger teeth.
Gil, our resident werewolf, was perfectly happy with the setup. He was especially grateful about how we had wifi now. How the hell wifi could even penetrate another dimension is an excellent question, but in the short time we spent in the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu’s domicile, I saw her searching for something on a browser on her very small and very cute smart phone.
It seemed that Carver had successfully copied whatever juju she’d mixed up to enable internet access in a magical realm. It made me wonder if there was some high speed internet service provider out there that catered specifically to the arcane market. Don’t laugh, you didn’t know dragons existed until a minute ago either.
And me? I was waiting for the slop in my lap that hardly passed for microwaved beef stroganoff to cool down enough so I could shove it in my face. Mama Rosa, the Filipino restaurant’s proprietor, had gone home for the night, and I was too hungry to order out for a fast food burger. All we had were frozen dinners, which Asher was only too happy to eat. There was also the freezer of raw steaks that made up the bulk of Gil’s diet. He was very generous about sharing them with the rest of us, but I really couldn’t be bothered to cook. So frozen stroganoff it was.
Carver took a sip of his boiling hot coffee, barely flinching as the magma-hot liquid slipped past his lips. I’d warned him so many times that it wasn’t how humans were built, and that he’d have to behave better if he wanted to pass for a mortal when we went out for lattes, but did he ever listen to me?
“Diaz is a blood witch,” Carver said. “He has his reasons for being attached to the Heartstopper. I imagine he uses it to further his research. Perhaps he even enchanted the ruby himself.”