S.M. Reine's Blog

Here is a list of books I have on sale for 99c or less! To navigate this sale, click on the book cover below, and then click on the icon indicating your favorite book store. This sale applies mostly to Amazon Kindle. It may also be on Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and Kobo, but they are slower to change prices so I can’t guarantee it. (If you don’t see them on Saturday, try again on Sunday!)

These prices will stick until Monday whenever I wake up and get around to changing them back.

(PS: It’s not on the list here because I don’t have a book page for it, but the boxed set with books 4-7 of Preternatural Affairs is also 99c, if you go looking for it.)

Series: The Cain Chronicles The Cain Chronicles Darkmoon Of Wings and Wolves Alpha MoonSeries: Dana McIntyre Must Die Drawing Dead Kill Game Cashing Out Suicide QueenSeries: Descentverse The Descent Series Complete Collection Preternatural Affairs The Tarot Witches Complete Collection Ascension SeriesSeries: Mage Craft Cast in Angelfire Cast in Hellfire Cast in Faefire Cast in Balefire Cast in GodfireSeries: Preternatural Affairs Bitter Thirst The Road to Helltown Wretched WickedSeries: War of the Alphas Omega Beta Alpha Pas

One of my most frequent requests from readers is to have a complete, ordered reading list of The Descentverse. So I’ve made a printable PDF reading list!

Click here to open it on your computer.

I update the reading list anytime I solidify plans for new books, so revisit this page for future updates!

Fritz Friederling was fourteen years old, and in boarding school in the German Alps specifically for young men such as him. Men who were not raised by parents, but nannies and professors. Men from families with money red as blood and old as time. Men for whom anything less than total mastery of the world was unacceptable.

That was where he met his father, Werner Friederling. Fritz had seen Werner once or twice prior to that; he had aged little over the years, remaining a strong-backed man with eyes like shards of glass. He strolled through Fritz’s private room in the dormitory, picking up trinkets that Fritz had built in shop class, rearranging the top of his desk, rolling his eyes at book titles. Werner behaved as though he owned it all, because he did. He held stake in the school. He bought the suits Fritz wore to class. His sperm had donated a portion of the genetics within Fritz.

Nothing was Fritz’s, and everything was Werner’s, including the boy’s legacy.

“You’re a kopis,” Werner had said, taking the seat at Fritz’s desk. He gestured magnanimously to the bed to indicate where Fritz should sit.

“What is a kopis, Father?” Fritz asked. He did not sit.

Werner’s golden brows drew to meet in the middle. “You’ve noticed you’re stronger than the other boys. Faster. Heal better. Superior reflexes. Haven’t you?”

Of course Fritz had. He’d yet to meet a human who wasn’t physically inferior to him in all ways.

“That’s because you’re a kopis,” Werner said. “It’s a special class of gaean created by the Treaty of Dis to protect humanity. I’m a kopis too. Your grandfather was a kopis, and his father was a kopis. Your son will do the same.”

“What does it mean?” Fritz asked. “Am I called to an army?”

“There’s no army of kopides. They work independently. They fight alone. They die young and get replaced by another. It’s uncommon for a kopis to see thirty, and you should know that,” Werner said.

Fritz surveyed his father, surely much older than thirty and still alive. “Why are the Friederlings special in this?”

“Because we’re always special,” Werner said. “We don’t fight on the front lines. We’re too valuable for that, you see.”

“It sounds like cowardice to me.” Fritz would not be a coward. He couldn’t even bring himself to flatter his distant father on a rare visit.

Werner reached into his jacket pocket, and tossed a yellowed book to Fritz. The title was Lolita. “The hero of that book there is seduced by a sinful, filthy girl.”

Repulsed, Fritz moved the book to the bedside table. He had read it before with his literature tutor and was well familiar with the story. “That hero’s a child rapist.”

“He wrote the book,” Werner said, “so he’s a victim of the girl’s seduction.”

“There are no kopides in that book, Father.”

”Be less literal. My point is that we write our stories. We’re not cowards, Fritz. We’re generals who strategize for the pawns on the chessboard.” Werner rose to pick up the book, and Fritz stood too. His father was not nearly as tall as Fritz remembered. “People on the outside will have other narratives for our experiences, but remember: we are heroes. Friederlings are always something worth preserving.”

“Then I suppose I am lucky in that respect, to have the kopis powers without the burden of death,” Fritz said.

“The burden remains,” Werner said. “You’ll watch your loved ones die before you can kill the demons, and you’ll live a long time to regret the memories.”

His father said goodbye by gripping him on the shoulder. There was emotion in Werner’s eyes for once—Fritz thought that was emotion, though eyes had a deceptive way of being mirrors—but his lips were silent, and he only gave a single nod before dropping his hand.

Isobel Stonecrow’s report was accurate: Cesar Hawke had killed a woman, and he was on the run.

“Guess you never really know a guy,” said Janet from Forensics, wiggling her fingers into latex gloves. She’d already covered her shoes in booties, ensuring that she wouldn’t contaminate the evidence scattered all across the floor.

There was a body in Cesar’s bath tub. The victim was named Erin Karwell, and she had worked at the Olive Pit. She was not one of the waitresses that Fritz had fucked. At least, he didn’t think so. He seldom looked at his sexual partners’ faces.

Her murder had been violent. It showed in the handprints on her throat, the disarray in Cesar’s apartment.

When Fritz stood over Erin Karwell, he could not help but remember his father’s warnings. You’ll watch you loved ones die before you can kill the demons, and you’ll live a long time to regret the memories. He had no memories of Erin Karwell to regret, but he had stood over his dead wife like this too—his Emmeline, his Belle, murdered by a client. He’d seen a dead woman’s bloodless face with flawless makeup like this. He’d held her cooling body. He remembered it years after the incident, so vividly that he feared he was about to see it again.

Cesar Hawke had killed Erin Karwell.

The OPA had little patience for employees who crossed lines.

And this would qualify as a line regardless of motive. Cesar’s reasons for the killing would be pure. Erin must have tried to kill him or a loved one first. There was no doubt in Fritz’s mind about this, not even for a moment. Yet upper management at the OPA wouldn’t care enough to hear the reasons.

Indeed, his BlackBerry was ringing at the moment. Lucrezia de Angelis, Vice President of the entire organization, wanted Fritz’s attention.

Fritz was about to watch Cesar die. One more person he would outlive and remember.

He answered the phone. “Lucrezia,” he said.

“Fritz,” she said. “Cesar Hawke has escaped police custody. Find him.” She hung up, but Fritz was barely a heartbeat behind her, and only another heartbeat elapsed before he was calling Agent Takeuchi to track Cesar down before Lucrezia could.

Until Cesar Hawke’s recruitment to the OPA, it had been years since Lucrezia de Angelis last showed her face in Los Angeles. Even when she hadn’t loathed Fritz—in the days where she told everyone they were destined to begin a new dynasty via marriage—they had rendezvoused outside the city, far from the Office of Preternatural Affairs or other business interests.

Ending his sexual relationship with Lucrezia meant she seldom communicated with Fritz directly anymore. She certainly wouldn’t show her face around him. Some bitter ex-girlfriends would burn a man’s clothes or slash his tires; Lucrezia had arranged for one of her businesses to forcibly acquire a Friederling business, then tanked it, along with the stock in most other Friederling businesses. He’d lost a fraction of his billions. She couldn’t have been more repulsive spitting into his eye.

He was startled to see Lucrezia waiting for him in the bleachers within the OPA indoor track. Not least of all because, in a fur-lined white jacket and red-soled stilettos, she was dressed more elaborately than anyone else in the gymnasium. But if Lucrezia had been one of Fritz’s male business rivals, he’d have responded to that invasion with his fists.

She was not a man, and she was allowed to be there. The Vice President could go near anywhere she wanted, much to Fritz’s irritation.

“It’s time for you to pick an aspis,” Lucrezia told him, while OPA agents raced around the track. They thundered past in a near-uniform clump.

Fritz lounged insolently against a railing, pushed back by the unspoken history between them. “I told you before, I’m not going to be pushed into a pairing like other OPA kopides. I’m not like them. I’ll pick someone when I pick someone.”

And he would never pick someone.

Fritz had only ever known two witches he could begin considering as aspides. His dead wife, Emmeline, would have been perfect as an aspis, except her powers were too weak to form the bond.

And Cesar Hawke was running the track right now, sweat flying off his forehead, lingering neither in the front nor the back of the pack. It was his last physical trial before his hiring could be confirmed. Fritz would never make an aspis of the man. He didn’t deserve to be stuck with a Friederling.

Cesar was almost too good of a detective. The man who couldn’t keep ketchup stains off his tax paperwork was elusive in the streets of Los Angeles. This should not have been an issue. Cesar had been in LAPD custody and should have remained there until Fritz could fabricate the paperwork required to free him. But the police had not expected to detain a witch with magically augmented strength; they’d barely realized he’d torn the window off his cell before Cesar was over the fence.

The ensuing whack-a-mole was charmingly frustrating. Fritz kept arriving at scenes after Cesar was gone: at the Olive Pit, where he’d been questioning potential witnesses; at a cemetery, where he absconded with Isobel Stonecrow to advance the investigation; at a library, where Cesar’s mysteriously pustule-riddled face had terrified several patrons. (It later turned out that Isobel had cursed Cesar in their brief encounter, as Isobel had mistakenly feared for her life.)

At some point, Fritz accepted that there was no point trying to catch the former private investigator, and he was right.

It took little time for Cesar to find his way to Fritz’s Beverly Hills mansion. He showed up looking rumpled, exhausted, and dirty. Fritz had barely a spare thought for what his distant celebrity neighbors must have thought about a murder suspect stumbling to his front gates. He swept Cesar inside the amniotic safety of the Friederling mansion—nearly a city-state unto itself, immune from mundane police enforcement—before even realizing why Cesar had come.

Not for protection. No.

He intended to turn himself over to the OPA’s punishments for killing Erin Karwell.

Fritz said, “I wish you had come to me when you left the police station.”

Cesar looked so grim. “Would have made your job easier, huh?”

There was nothing easy about the job Fritz had chosen to perform, and not because the tasks themselves were onerous; fabricating paperwork to clear Cesar’s name wouldn’t be simple even with Fritz’s contacts. And that falsified paperwork was only necessary because Fritz had chosen to work within the OPA’s bureaucratic confines.

That was neither here nor there. Fritz ached from the idea that he could trust Cesar to kill for him, but Cesar didn’t trust Fritz to shelter him from the consequences.

“I might have been able to help you,” Fritz said levelly.

“I don’t think there’s any helping me now.” Cesar glared hatred at his own hands—the hands that had formed the imprint of bruises on Erin Karwell’s neck, as verified by Janet’s measurements.

“You’re a good agent, Cesar. I don’t have many good agents under me—and fewer that I could trust.” None that would fire a bullet to save Fritz Friederling, their boss who was loathed at worst and tolerated at best. He swallowed against the harsh scrape of dryness in his throat. “I’d hate to lose you.”

“I’ve always appreciated my job,” Cesar said, ducking his head, looking up at Fritz through his bangs. “But you didn’t send anybody to pick me up from the 77th Street station. I figured you’d written me off.”

Of course Cesar expected that disloyalty from a Friederling. Fritz couldn’t begrudge him for it.

“The paperwork takes time. You’d never have gone to trial.” Also true. Fritz would have rather had his witches blow memory spells through the brains of half of Los Angeles’s judicial system than let Cesar slip beyond his grasp.

Fritz surveyed Cesar’s taut features. He looked so angry, so confused. How much angrier would Cesar become if he learned that he’d had his memory augmented before? That further holes were likelier because of previous alteration? At least Cesar would know to blame Fritz rather than himself.

But then he would blame Fritz.

Right now, Fritz was only a few minutes and a couple of signatures away from making Cesar’s problem disappear. They would need another culprit for the murder—someone that was equally plausible so that OPA management would forget their suspicions—but one life was nothing to sacrifice for Cesar’s safety. Fritz had done worse for people far less deserving.

The real issue was Lucrezia de Angelis.

Fritz had a teleconference with her in regards to the case shortly. He would have to exonerate Cesar in the most subtle of ways. Something that left no room for the OPA to punish him.

She was as composed as ever on the video call, wearing a tailored white suit that matched her icy hair. Lucrezia wore a locket nestled between her cleavage. Fritz had given her that locket during a lengthy affair, and he knew she wore it to taunt him.

He could not address the locket in this meeting. There were others from the OPA with them, which Fritz hadn’t expected. Several were from the Los Angeles OPA office.

“About Cesar Hawke,” Fritz began.

He didn’t get to continue from there.

“You should be ashamed, an agent in your department doing something so heinous,” said Director Trask. “What’s your plan for dealing with Agent Takeuchi?”

Fritz’s mouth had been open to defend Cesar.

Instead, he asked, “What about Agent Takeuchi?”

Suzy Takeuchi was a convenient fall guy. Fritz sent her to the same facility as Black Jack, and he planned to give her as little thought as the witch who’d been detained before her. It turned out that Suzy hadn’t committed the murder—it had, in fact, been Cesar Hawke, and he had been acting out of self-defense against the half-demon called Erin Karwell—but the distraction of her detention meant that Cesar got away Scot-free.

Almost Scot-free.

Of course, Lucrezia became suspicious after the first high-profile incident with Cesar. As her suspicion grew, so did her scrutiny; Fritz began fielding calls from her on his BlackBerry daily, though there was no reason for Lucrezia to be involved with his current case. He had responded to unusual infernal activity in Reno, Nevada because no other OPA official of his stature was available. And he had taken Cesar with him.

“You seem to have an unusual interest in this particular agent,” Lucrezia said all too knowingly. “One would think there’s a reason you’re keeping him so close.”

“I also brought Agent Takeuchi,” Fritz said, sounding bored. “Why aren’t you asking questions about her?”

“Because,” Lucrezia said, “Agent Hawke is somehow different, and I think I know how.”

Fritz doubted that to be true. He still wasn’t entirely sure how Cesar was different, or why the world seemed brighter when he was around. He only knew that he wasn’t ready for the brightness to leave him. That he wasn’t sure he could survive the darkness that would follow when Cesar inevitably died, and Fritz was left to only remember sunlight.

“I’ll indulge you,” Fritz said. His tone was so flat. “How is he different?”

“You’re considering him for aspis,” Lucrezia said.

The OPA had been telling Fritz he needed to pick an aspis for months, and Fritz had resisted it. The OPA hated having unmatched kopides in its ranks. They were a vulnerability, apparently.

The idea of taking an aspis left Fritz feeling far more vulnerable.

Fritz glanced through his bedroom’s doorway. Cesar was brewing potions with Isobel Stonecrow in the kitchen. They flicked spoonfuls of potion at each other, laughing at the sparkly mess it left behind, and his chest hurt as though Lucrezia had kicked him with spike-heeled pumps.

“I am considering both Takeuchi and Hawke, but I’m in preliminary stages,” Fritz finally said. “I’ll notify you of my decision when it’s made.”

It was enough to make Lucrezia drop the subject for that day.

But only that day.

In the end, it was not a dramatic incident that closed the trap around Cesar’s throat. It was an accident. Fritz had been abducted by a werewolf (not a huge cause for worry) and Cesar had panicked. He’d used Fritz’s BlackBerry to call Lucrezia de Angelis for help. And that was that.

“We have such careful information security rules,” Lucrezia said, looking pleased as a cat with nip, “that I’m afraid we’re going to have to terminate Cesar Hawke’s contract with the Office of Preternatural Affairs.”

And that had left only one route for Fritz to protect Cesar’s employment, life, and memory. The same route that Fritz could have used to get Black Jack out of detention.

“Have you chosen him?” asked Lucrezia de Angelis.

And Fritz said, very casually, “I have.”

“I’ve never thought about being an aspis before,” Cesar said.

They were back in Los Angeles and in between cases. Things should have felt normal, but the rapid change of events had shifted the hues in the world; lazy Los Angeles summertime felt like a feline in the moments before pouncing. The heat was sticky and no amount of wealth could keep Fritz from sweltering on the golf course.

“Think about it now,” Fritz said. “Think hard, Hawke. This is your life.” He swung the club. Its angled face met the ball, and the ball soared into the air, vanishing against scalded blue.

Cesar watched it go, as if he could somehow see it all the way to the sixteenth hole on the bottommost terrace. He managed to look as though he glistened rather than sweated. Good genetics were something money could not buy, and the Hawke family had it in spades.

Taste was possible to purchase, and Cesar had not. He hadn’t had any appropriate golf attire. He wore Nike shorts and a House Stark t-shirt. Fritz would ensure he had a new wardrobe soon to make sure Cesar blended in with Fritz’s ilk. And then, if Fritz made sure to drink enough brandy, Cesar almost wouldn’t look like an innocent dragged into the tarnished Friederling world.

“This is my life now,” Cesar mused, squinting against the sunlight. “Ha. Domingo would give me shit forever if he saw me doing this old man stuff.”

“Old man stuff? Golf is a precision sport,” Fritz said. “Importantly, it’s a language of business. I don’t maintain this skill for fun but for socializing with business partners. You’ll need to learn it too.”

“Can I just serve canapés and carry your golf clubs?”

“You’re going to be my aspis, not my servant,” Fritz said. “That means we’re on near-level footing.”

Cesar stared around at the golf course with a scoffing laugh. This was Fritz’s private course at his Beverly Hills Mansion with uniquely difficult landscaping to ensure his skills remained on point. It was maintained by a small, dedicated staff, and the green glittered.

“I haven’t even wiped the toothpaste off my faucet in two years,” Cesar said. “You’ve got one guy whose whole job is to get golf balls out of a pond.”

“We don’t have to be on level footing in regards to money. What’s mine is yours. We’re bound indefinitely, if you choose to see this through.”

“What’s the other choice?” he asked. “Forgetting everything from the last few years? I’d rather eat uncooked donkey balls than have my mind screwed with like that.”

Then uncooked donkey balls were on par with being trapped as Cesar’s aspis. “Losing a few years is better than a lifelong commitment you can’t reverse,” Fritz said tightly. “And if you do become an aspis, you must know that this means change.”

Cesar shrugged. “Sure.”

He wasn’t really thinking about it. Didn’t realize how bad things would be tied to the Friederling legacy.

But Fritz was too selfish to make Cesar see the truth.

He fished around in a side pocket on his golf bag, then handed Cesar a box from inside. “Happy birthday.”

“Whoa.” Cesar hooked a finger in the wristband of the watch, lifting it out of the box. It was so glimmery-bright that it reflected gold against his irises. “Holy crap, look at this!” There was obvious glee in his face as he put the watch on, figuring out how to settle the clasp just right against the pulse inside his wrist, and Fritz watched him without smiling somehow. Cesar’s joy was more infectious than the venom of Lilith’s Touch.

“It’s a reminder that your life will change as my aspis,” Fritz said. “Most much more jarring than the watch, unfortunately.”

Cesar’s eyes narrowed. “Wait, how expensive was this watch?”

Adjusting to the luxuries of the Friederling lifestyle was the least of it. Fritz shrugged and named a sum of money that was meaningless to him. He low-balled it, knowing the actual value would stagger Cesar.

Even the smaller amount made him look nervous. “This is great, man. I just don’t know if I can accept a gift like that.”

“I earn thrice that in a minute collecting interest,” Fritz said. “It’s just a birthday present. Don’t sweat it. It’s not as though I can walk into Walmart to get you a tacky tie.”

“That’s what I want for my birthday next year,” Cesar said. He was grinning like an idiot as he held up his wrist to appreciate it with the watch in place. “I’m going with you to Walmart.”

Fritz dropped his club into his golf bag.

Next year. That assumed that Cesar would be alive to see the next year.

Being drawn into Fritz’s orbit meant, after all, that Cesar was going to die.

It never occurred to Fritz that he might be the one who was killed.

Being abducted by a fallen angel was different than being abducted by a werewolf. The werewolf had been a calculated man who became a monster twice a month. He’d had an agenda.

The angel was madness packed within the shriveled body of a monster.

She abducted Fritz from his garage. He’d tried to lock himself in his armored SUV when she appeared, but even inches of plate steel couldn’t stop the wildness of a fallen angel. Naamah, her name was. Cast down to Earth for bearing a son that Adam hadn’t permitted. Stripped of her sanity and beauty, she was forever seeking her husband: the father of her forbidden son, and a lover long since slaughtered.

Fritz looked like Naamah’s husband, Shamdan. And for that, he was targeted.

The fight was short. Fritz’s years of training weren’t up to the staggering reflexes of the fallen angel. Her mere presence disabled every technical security system and his wards were nothing to her.

In the end, he was dragged unceremoniously out of the car by an old lady, and she flew with him to Helltown so fast he couldn’t breath.

He retained consciousness up several stories of the bell tower that Naamah dragged him, thumping Fritz’s head along each stair with a jolt. The amount of pain sent him into shock. He dozed on the waves, in and out, only occasionally watching the angel’s cloven hooves stomping in front of him.

Fritz was only awake long enough to think it was funny—that he had been attacked by his most powerful enemy yet, and it was a mistake, not because he was a Friederling.

Then he was hanging in the bell tower. He wasn’t aware of time passing. It was probably a concussion, and it only felt worse the longer that he dangled.

She had wrapped a chain around his ankle, leaving him upside-down like the clapper of a bell.

He tried to swing and could not. He was too weak. He could sit upright for a few moments to try to release his ankle, but his fingers wouldn’t work. What little strength he possessed was drained after the first few hours hanging upside down.

Night fell, and Fritz remained alone, strung up in the bell tower. The OPA hadn’t come looking for him. They wouldn’t. Helltown was untouchable.

Fritz had no plan to escape.

He wasn’t sure that he would.

Even if Fritz got out, what would he do against a fallen angel so powerful he couldn’t stand against it?

He would die.

It was a fear that he had never felt—not even once—since that day his father had told him that Friederlings were privileged in all ways. They were the narrators of their own stories. They were special, worthy of preservation.

With a chain tight around his ankle and blood rushing into his head, Fritz realized that he could die young. That this could be it.

Before he went unconscious again, he thought it was lucky that Cesar had not yet performed the ritual to seal the aspis bond.

At least, Fritz thought, Cesar would be free.

Fritz really should have died then.

Oblivion swallowed him, and there was no reason for him to rise from the nothingness on the other side. Fritz wasn’t even cast into Hell. He wasn’t that important. Death was endless, lonely nothing.

Until it was not.

He saw stars and thought he was dreaming, at first. They were so vivid. Fritz felt like he’d never seen stars until that night, not really, and only now could he perceive the multidimensional facets of ice glimmering in the expanse.

The fresh air on his face was too real to be a dream. And Fritz did not think he would have dreamt such a feeling of painful pressure on one wrist, so sharp that his fingers tingled. He could barely feel them.

Fritz lifted his head to look. He found his arm bound to Cesar’s, blood seeping between them. The witch wasn’t even looking in his direction. He was shouting at the shadowy sky that swirled with nightmares, wind whipping his shirt against his collarbone.

Are we on the roof of the church?

He got dizzy trying to look down.

Darkness enveloped him again.

It wasn’t the absolute darkness he expected from death this time, but a powdery-soft blanket swaddling him. He wasn’t alone either. There was another heart beating alongside his, and a golden thread to bind them.

Sword and shield. Kopis and aspis.

Cesar did the ritual.

Fritz shocked awake this time, instantly clear-headed. It felt as though ever sense were honed. He was attuned to the nightmare demons circling him, but not susceptible to their fear; he felt the fallen angel nearby, but remained cogent.

The only thing missing was Cesar.

He had climbed out of the dormer to chase the angel up the roof. Fritz could see their silhouettes against Los Angeles’s smoggy glow, chasing each other through combat. Shriveled monster against unprepared witch.

Fritz could kill Naamah now. He was certain of it.

He tried to stand and fell against the window, catching himself on the frame. The leg that had been chained inside the bell had no feeling. His toes were black.

It was useless underneath him, making his ascent to the apex of the roof a one-legged effort. Cesar was pinned by Naamah. Most likely, he was moments away from being slaughtered by the half-angel. He was still streaming blood from his arm.

Yet when their eyes connected, the world stopped.

Fritz and Cesar were bound. Neither of them had died. And it took both of them to sever the angel’s wings, cut the heart from her body, and sever the head from her neck. Fritz did the dirty work—the smallest way to show his gratitude. Cesar verified that all parts of Naamah had died sufficiently, and he carried Fritz down the stairs. It took both of them to get through that long, dark night in Helltown, surrounded by nightmares and unable to escape until dawn.

Lucrezia de Angelis visited Fritz in the hospital that day. It was not a friendly visit.

“You seem to be doing fine, thanks to your new aspis,” she said.

Fritz wasn’t on so much morphine that he missed her acid tone. “You must be delighted to have performed a successful matchmaking.”

“Yes,” she said. “Delighted.” She folded her arms and glared at him.

“Were you surprised that he passed the test qualifying him to become bound as my kopis? I understood you planned to fire him if he failed.”

“I would never set up one of our valuable agents to fall like that,” Lucrezia snapped.

He noted that she didn’t specify if Cesar was one of their “valuable” agents.

“It’s too bad that you didn’t get to fire Agent Hawke, isn’t it?” Fritz asked mused, smiling lazily at her through the haze of the morphine. They’d given him enough to murder a horse. “You must be so disappointed.”

She stepped over, lifted the blanket on the bed, peered at his heavily bandaged leg underneath. “I may not have gotten to destroy your pet witch, but I’ll settle for watching you two make each other miserable,” she hissed in a low voice. “You got one of the OPA’s weakest witches. He gets a broken, useless kopis. How long before you two drag each other into death?”

“Whenever it happens,” Fritz said, “you’ll still never have been good enough for me.”

Lucrezia jerked back. She dropped the sheet, white knuckling the strap of her purse.

“And Cesar Hawke is?” she asked.

Had it not been for the morphine, Fritz never would have said, “Absolutely.”

Days later, Fritz woke from surgery without a leg.

He barely looked at the place where his blankets laid flat against the mattress instead of curving over a foot and shin. He used the remote to bring his bed upright, pulled the bamboo tray over his lap to hold a water glass, and then pressed the button to summon assistance.

Fritz expected a nurse.

He got Cesar Hawke.

“Hey!” The agent hung back against the door, his bandaged arm dangling in the room. “You okay? Are you dying? Do you need a surgeon?”

“I wanted my BlackBerry,” Fritz rasped.

“What, so you can work? Don’t even think about it.” Cesar whispered something to a person in the hall then entered the room. He took the chair next to Fritz. “Your surgery went good.”

“I’m missing half a leg,” Fritz said with more sharp points than the succulent on the windowsill.

“You get to keep the knee. Could be worse.”

“I could have a leg,” he said.

Cesar snorted. “Pity party for the gimp in room two! Shoulda brought strippers to liven it up.” He grabbed the newspaper off the bedside table before Fritz could get it, then flipped to the sports section. He spent a few minutes reading before quietly asking, “How do you feel?”

Fritz felt like he wasn’t missing his leg…until he looked down.

The rest of his injuries had already healed. If the kopis healing hadn’t ensured that, then his expensive Friederling-owned doctors would have. There was grogginess from the anesthesia—a dose to keep kopides unconscious was huge—but Fritz felt otherwise physically normal.

The rawest wound was a new awareness of time.

The leg would never come back. No privilege could repair it.

He was aging, slowing down, unable to keep up against fallen angels.

Fritz might die before Cesar, and he had no idea what to feel about that.

“I want the newspaper,” Fritz said.

Cesar pulled out the section with the comics and tossed them to Fritz’s lap. “No stocks and bonds and shit for you. Read Peanuts. You’re relaxing.”

“A comic about a depressed bald child isn’t relaxing.” But Fritz was somehow…smiling?

He read the comic. It was puerile.

“We might as well get used to this stuff,” Cesar said, propping his feet up on the bed and reclining in the chair. “Like, hospital shit. Because we’re gonna be stuck with each other the rest of our lives, and that includes being grumpy old men together.”

“The rest of our lives,” Fritz echoed quietly. The idea of a long-lived future sounded so different from Cesar than it did from Werner Friederling. “I know you’re looking forward to this about as much as eating uncooked donkey testicles, but…”

He grinned. “You rank better than donkey testicles. Just a little.”

Maybe Cesar had put more thought into what the bond meant than Fritz realized.

“Here’s the rest of the newspaper.” Cesar tossed it at Fritz. “I’m gonna make myself a protein shake. Want me to hunt up someone to give you the nightly nutrition suppository?”

“You’re mixing shakes here?” Fritz was recovering in his private clinic, which was on the back of the manor. It used to be used by his many cousins, aunts, and associates, but he’d kicked them out for stealing OxyContin.

“Not here,” Cesar said. “The big house. I’m staying here with you until you’re better. Drive you around and stuff.”

“I have drivers,” Fritz said, baffled. He paid a lot of money for his highly trained staff to cater to his every need, real or imagined.

“And I’m your aspis,” Cesar said. “I’m the magical muscle. The guy punching away paparazzi and hell-spawn. Your personal PI.” He feigned a few punches at an invisible enemy.

Fritz had almost forgotten where Cesar began—his inauspicious origins in Los Angeles’s filthiest trade. At this point, it felt as though the man had always been part of Fritz’s life. Obviously it was untrue. Cesar was much too interesting to have originated from the cesspool of the upper class. But even if he had not come from the same place, they were stuck together from now on.

For the rest of their lives, until grumpy old men.

“Then get me whiskey,” Fritz said, flicking up the newspaper to read Garfield.

“Nurse says no booze until you’re off morphine,” Cesar said. “Even for a kopis. I’ll run out and get you a jumbo Slurpee like I always got for Pops after knee surgery, how’s that sound?”

Fritz couldn’t even envision how it tasted. “It sounds perfect.”

“I’ll get you a red one. Don’t argue, red is best.” Cesar stepped out, but hesitated by the door. “Sorry I didn’t get there soon enough to save your leg, Fritz.”

He left Fritz alone, but not lonely. And he did drive Fritz around in the weeks to come. Perhaps it was an excuse to get behind the wheel of Fritz’s exotic sports cars, but he didn’t care.

At that point he’d already given Cesar half his soul.

The rest of it were only things.

Black Jack was not an especially dangerous witch, but he was a persistent one. It was impossible for the Office of Preternatural Affairs to operate in the American Southwest without stumbling over witches using Black Jack-crafted hexes. He graffitied the magical world with equal parts mischief and danger.

Some of his most impressive magic was the most subtle, like when he’d magicked a grocery store to make everyone inside forget what they needed. All his pranks were like that. Little things. Irritating things. Illegal things that were impossible to trace back to him, even though everybody knew it was his fault.

He’d already been warned once to get out of the black market trade in hexes.

Warned by Fritz, in fact.

Black Jack and Fritz frequented the same illegal gambling ring, run by a demon named King One-Eyed. They had bonded over a shared admiration of baccarat, agreeing it was undeservedly obscure and that King should have held more baccarat tournaments, usually while they were playing something prosaic like hold-‘em.

Though King only held games every few weeks, Fritz and Black Jack had gotten to know each other well over the course of steady years. This was nothing unusual. Fritz was friends with many disreputable people. More disreputable than reputable, realistically speaking.

As a courtesy, Fritz’s criminal contacts pretended he wasn’t upper management at the Office of Preternatural Affairs, and he pretended he wasn’t investigating them. He never warned his contacts when the OPA would finally crack down on them. He simply did.

But in this regard, Fritz’s relationship Black Jack was unusual.

“You’ll never see the light of day again if you keep selling hexes like that,” Fritz had said during their first meeting.

At their second meeting, he’d said, “The OPA is aware you exist now. They’re building a case against you..”

And when he learned that a Phoenix-area OPA office had taken an interest in Black Jack, Fritz said, “If you don’t go into hiding, I’ll be at your doorstep within weeks.”

Each time, Black Jack responded with the same Gallic shrug, a gesture that said everything and nothing. He heard Fritz. He might do something about it. He might not. Black Jack’s poker face was appropriately perfect, so there was no way to tell.

“If you don’t fold, I’m going to walk away tonight with all your money,” Black Jack said, changing the subject from his imminent arrest.

Fritz looked at his hand. They were playing hold-‘em again, and he had two face cards in spades. There was a ten and queen of spades on the table. “You’re wrong.”

Black Jack smiled the way the moon smiled the night before it vanished, thin and bright and cruelly sharp-edged. “What do you want to bet? Would you bet those nice sunglasses tucked in your jacket pocket?”

“You mean, bet them in this hand?”

“Separately,” Black Jack said. “If I get all your money tonight, I get the sunglasses too.”

Fritz’s fingers played over the folded arm of his sunglasses. He’d been gifted those sunglasses by his long-dead wife. “What do I win if you don’t get every last penny?”

“Then you can arrest me.” The witch unbuttoned his cufflinks and rolled them up, as if prepared to be apprehended.

“I’m going to arrest you anyway,” Fritz said.

“Really?” he asked. “You’d really arrest me?” They had been part of the same circuit for over a year, so Black Jack had as much dirt on Fritz as the other way around.

“Yes,” Fritz said.

He would arrest anyone. He’d have arrested his own childhood nanny if she’d broken his laws. He was as cruel as his father, from the tips of his hair to the tips of his toes, and nobody would be spared the merciless sweep of his fist.

Black Jack’s poker face melted into an expression of open heat, anger swirling with disbelief and betrayal.

The last card was placed by the dealer. An ace of spades. Fritz had a royal flush.

He took every last chip from the table, now a million dollars richer. By the time Fritz cashed out with King One-Eyed, Black Jack had vanished.

Black Jack jumped Fritz in an alleyway behind the Bellagio. Fritz had been walking alone to meet his driver, who had spent the night at lower stakes tables on the Strip, so he was unguarded and unready when Black Jack slammed his back into the wall.

Knuckles met Fritz’s face. It was a hard blow, and it was quickly followed by harder blows. Friends or not, Black Jack never started fights he didn’t intend to finish.

Fritz was much the same.

He kneed Black Jack away, pinned him to the corner.

“Assault doesn’t make me less likely to arrest you,” Fritz said, gripping Black Jack’s wrists. The witch was trying to strangle him. But Fritz was a kopis—a demon hunter imbued with legendary strength—and Black Jack’s hands couldn’t reach his throat to close around it.

“You won’t have me arrested,” Black Jack said through his teeth, straining to push closer. “You know you won’t. I know you won’t. You’re bluffing.”

“Want to bet?” Fritz asked.

“You haven’t even collected on the last bet,” he said.

“There’s still time.” The smile that crossed Fritz’s mouth was deliberately cold. He wanted to scare Black Jack into hiding. Wanted the witch to run away and vanish.

Black Jack ripped free.

But he didn’t run.

He kissed Fritz hard, pressing their mouths together and jamming both their bodies into the same narrow space.

Fritz had been thinking of doing the same thing much of the night. He tangled his hand in the witch’s hair and pried his head back and bit hard on the muscles of his neck.

It wasn’t the first time that a poker game ended in such a way. Black Jack was an aggressive man. He’d made his intent for Fritz clear the first time they met, and Fritz, though accustomed to the company of women, hadn’t been averse to participating. Now it was a ritual they performed when their paths crossed every few months. They rubbed together like flint and steel, and they set each other on fire, and Fritz was going to arrest him soon.

Instead of having Fritz’s driver return him to Beverly Hills—a five hour drive from Las Vegas—Fritz had the driver take him and Black Jack to one of his local penthouses.

They spent a few hours there together. They fought between starched white sheets. They bit and punched and tried to grip one another’s shoulders and skin slipped where it met sweaty skin.

Dawn was chasing the horizon when the driver knocked on the door of the condo. Fritz untangled himself from the limbs of the witch, rolled over to turn the alarm clock toward him. It was after six. Fritz would need his helicopter to get to a morning conference with the OPA directors.

He sent a text message to his driver as he got dressed again, hunting for his tie, cufflinks, and wallet.

“Where are they?” Fritz asked. Black Jack hadn’t even gotten out of bed. He was flipping through channels on the TV, one leg on top of the comforter, the other still all tangled up. His erection stirred again when he shot a smile at Fritz.

“Where is what?” Black Jack asked.

Fritz glared at him as he buttoned his shirt, flicking the collar into the correct position. “You didn’t win the bet. Where are they?”

“Oh fine,” said the witch.

He tossed Fritz’s sunglasses to him.

“Remember what I warned you at the game last night,” Fritz said, tucking them into his jacket pocket. “It’s your only warning.”

Black Jack rose from the bed. “I know,” he said. He kissed Fritz goodbye. They hadn’t kissed like that before—like they weren’t trying to murder each other. The witch’s lips imprinted goodbyes upon Fritz’s skin, and they parted.

Fritz was buttoning his waistcoat in the helicopter when he felt the inside pocket of his jacket and realized that Black Jack had gotten away with his sunglasses. The really nice ones that his late wife had given them on their last anniversary. They had been there when he went in to play the poker game, and they had still been in his jacket when Black Jack shoved it off of his body to suckle at his collarbone, and now they were gone.

“You’re in a bad mood,” remarked Cesar when Fritz stormed into the office. Most people avoided Fritz when he was in a bad mood, but not Cesar. He followed him through the hall, up the elevator, and past the break room into an office that said “Director Friederling” by the door.

“Do you need something, Agent Hawke?” Fritz hurled his briefcase to the desk. It slid off the edge and crashed to the floor.

Cesar didn’t even take a step back. “Actually, I thought you might need something. You blew in here like a bat out of hell two hours later than usual. You don’t get worked up unless there’s a really bad case.”

Fritz braced his hands on the edge of the desk.

Control. Where was his control? He never lashed out like this. Not where he could be seen.

He contemplated the angry burn in his gut, and the red marks that Black Jack had left on his wrists. He wished he had his sunglasses. They were the only pair opaque enough to conceal his worst emotions.

Cesar was not safe in the office with him.

Nobody would have been, but especially not Cesar.

“I have meetings all day,” Fritz said. “Get out of here.”

Cesar lifted his hands in an unworried gesture of surrender. “All right. I’ll get back to paperwork. Hit you up for lunch?”

Fritz opened his mouth to tell Cesar to fuck off, to leave, to quit the job.

He said, “Sure.”

Cesar breezed out again. Fritz caught a glimpse of Agent Takeuchi slouched at her desk, feet up on the gray half-wall that formed the cubicle. She was using yellow sticky notes to form a collage of Bic illustrations that looked like an enormous dick.

The door shut.

On the other side, Fritz could hear Cesar laughing at Agent Takeuchi’s dick collage. Cesar laughed so easily. Even during the “really bad” cases, there wasn’t a day that Cesar didn’t find humor with his coworkers. He was loud and obnoxious and almost shouting, filling the air with his joy until there was no oxygen left for Fritz to inhale.

Years had elapsed since Agent Hawke had shot his former deskmate. They had been pleasantly uneventful years. Cesar was a good agent. Not a spectacular agent, but good. His close rate on cases was twelve percent lower than Agent Takeuchi’s. She was the gold standard, whereas Cesar was a standard of government mediocrity.

But he was the person most requested as backup. The person most requested by dispatch. The person most requested for delicate work. When agents went out to bars each night after work, Cesar was always invited along, too.

Fritz wasn’t the only one who noticed how easily Cesar laughed.

The director settled in behind his desk, steepling his hands in front of his face. He didn’t need his sunglasses to feel calm.

He pushed a button on his phone to summon Cesar back.

The agent returned.

“Pretty sure ten o’clock is more brunch than lunch territory,” Cesar said. “It’s been five minutes.”

“Close the door,” Fritz said.

He did.

When Fritz gestured, Cesar took the chair across the desk.

“My late wife,” Fritz said. “My Emmeline. She gave me a pair of sunglasses a few weeks before she died. They’re the only pair I’ve owned since. I made a trip to Las Vegas last night, and I lost them.”

Cesar rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “Shit, man. I’m sorry. That blows.”

“Yes,” Fritz said. “It does.” And so did Black Jack.

“No chance you’ll find them?”

“Possibly. I have good men on my payroll I can use to do a search for me.”

“I hope it works out, Director,” Cesar said.

Fritz managed a smile. He picked a curl of black hair off of his lapel, flicking that final vestige of his night with Black Jack into the trash bin.

He pulled a file out of the top drawer of his desk as he said, “How’s your caseload? Do you have time for a trip to Phoenix?”

“Arizona? This time of year?” Cesar asked, casting a miserable gaze toward the window. Los Angeles reached temperatures above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, and Phoenix was worse. “Do I have to?”

“You don’t have to do anything,” Fritz said, “but there’s a notorious criminal in Phoenix we need to detain. He recently charmed an ex-girlfriend’s car keys and she died as a result.”

Cesar’s face darkened. “I can go to Arizona for a piece of shit like that.”

“Glad to hear it.” Fritz handed Cesar an arrest warrant for Black Jack.

It took six months for Cesar to track Black Jack down.

Black Jack had always been slippery, but Fritz had made the mistake of warning him that an arrest was imminent; the witch had gone from elusive to downright invisible. One didn’t thrive as a gambler, master thief, and chronic criminal without learning to evade law enforcement.

For those months, Cesar remained in Arizona, living out of a Motel 6. He filed regular reports on his goings-on. Fritz read them with as much obsessive regularity as he used to observe Cesar through a Scrying ball.

If anything personal happened between Cesar and Black Jack, it would not be in the reports. They were dry, poorly proofread, and utterly professional. Too many things could have been happening with Cesar—and with Black Jack—that would never show on such reports.

Cesar would be catnip for someone like Black Jack. He perceived himself as the sexual equivalent of a feline toying with deadly mice, and it would have tickled him pink to seduce an agent Fritz sent for the arrest. Cesar was unaware that he held any sexual appeal for other men. He wouldn’t see Black Jack’s intentions until his pants were around his ankles and his favorite pair of sunglasses were gone.

These kinds of details, had they existed, were not included in any report.

Fritz couldn’t stop wondering how he’d react if something did happen. That was why he’d sent Cesar, wasn’t it? To see what happened when the witches crossed paths?

He thought about closing the case and extracting Cesar.

But six months passed, and the arrest itself was anticlimactic.

A mundane slip-up led to Black Jack’s apprehension. The gambler had used his credit card once to get gas, and Cesar caught him buying cigarettes in the station.

Black Jack was admitted to a detention center in the Mojave Desert within hours. Fritz watched footage of Black Jack’s intake into the detention facility and tried to decide if he felt bad for putting Black Jack away.

He didn’t.

“Sir?” Cesar stood in the doorway to Fritz’s office, looking travel-worn and tired.

“Good work, Agent Hawke.” Fritz closed his laptop on the security footage of Black Jack. “Clean arrest, flawless paperwork, great procedure. That’s one for the books when we train new agents.”

“If you’re teaching other agents with my work, your other agents must suck,” Cesar said.

Fritz couldn’t help but laugh, and he startled himself with the sound. He wasn’t like Cesar. He didn’t laugh easily. It felt a little painful coming out.

This time, Cesar didn’t laugh along.

“I searched Black Jack when I arrested him,” Cesar said. He set a hard case on Fritz’s desk.

Cesar had found Fritz’s sunglasses.

“When you said that you’ve got guys on payroll who can take care of stuff for you, you were talking about me,” Cesar said.

Fritz pushed his sunglasses into his hair, relieved by the missing weight of the frames against his pate. “Is that a problem?”

“Nah.” There was no conceit in Cesar’s casual shrug, as always. “Wish you’d have told me, though.”

“I’m not that kind of man.”

“Guess you’re not.” Cesar jerked his thumb toward the door. “The guys are going to The Olive Pit for drinks tonight after work. Wanna come? I know that Suzy—Agent Takeuchi—wants to see how much tequila she can force into me. It’s bound to be hilarious.”

The nape of Fritz’s neck prickled. “You don’t drink alcohol.”

“Suze is hard to argue with.”

That she was. “I have other work,” Fritz said, attempting to close the door on a rare opportunity to see Cesar Hawke drunk. And then he fouled it up by saying, “I’ll make an appearance if I can.”

Two hours later, Fritz was in the helicopter, on his way to the Mojave Desert detention facility.

It was criminal for Black Jack to look so disheveled and undignified on the floor of an empty cell. His eyes sparked with the barest mirth when Fritz came inside, careful not to pass the outer boundary of the pentagram on the floor. That magic not only guaranteed a witch couldn’t cast his way out of custody, but also protected Fritz from attack—as long as he stayed outside.

“Took you long enough to get here,” Black Jack said, climbing to his feet. “Let’s go.”

Fritz didn’t move. “Go where?”

“I don’t know. Your place or mine. I don’t care, but I bet your place is nicer.”

“I didn’t come to let you out,” Fritz said. “You’ve committed a crime. You’ve been arrested. You will be detained for the rest of your life. I can’t change anything about that at this point.”

“Bullshit! You’re a kopis. I’m a witch. This here—this arrest, our fights, the whole investigation—is just courtship.”

“I’m not gay,” Fritz said. He wasn’t feeling defensive. This was a fact. He was not gay, not courting Black Jack, not flirting via apprehension.

“The kids call people like you pansexual these days. But we’re talking about something a lot bigger than that. More fatal than friendship, more permanent than family, closer than the oldest friends.” Black Jack bared his inner wrist again, much like he had during that one night at King One-Eye’s poker game. He wasn’t asking to be arrested now. He was asking to be bled. “You don’t have an aspis, so take me. You know you want me.”

It was true that Fritz could have taken him as an aspis, with or without Black Jack’s consent. The Office of Preternatural Affairs preferred all kopides to be partnered to aspides , as they provided a degree of innate protection from demons, angels, and other witches that a kopis couldn’t get elsewhere.

But Fritz could only ever have one aspis. One soulmate. It was a card he kept close to his chest, waiting for the right hand to play it.

“I don’t want you,” Fritz said simply.

“Come on. You know you wouldn’t have bothered with me if you didn’t.” Black Jack was getting desperate, and that too was an unflattering look on the man. “Just like how you wouldn’t have sent that cute little fish to nibble at my tackle if you hadn’t wanted him to bite. What was his name? Agent Cesar Hawke?”

Fritz reached into his jacket. In one pocket, he had discharge papers that could pardon Black Jack and free him, hopefully now wise enough to stop selling hexes in Fritz’s jurisdiction. In the other pocket, he had sunglasses.

He tossed his sunglasses at Black Jack’s feet.

“Your consolation prize for losing our bet,” Fritz said. “Enjoy eternity in darkness.”

He left.

Black Jack was pounding on the door and screaming before Fritz got ten feet down the hall.

As soon as Fritz had cellular reception, he got a phone call. He would have answered to no name except the one on his BlackBerry’s screen in five bold letters.

“Belle,” he said huskily.

“It’s your target, the guy I’m investigating,” she said. “He’s in trouble.”

Fritz wanted to talk to this woman right now, but not about this. Isobel Stonecrow was the only woman on the planet he trusted. He had conversations to offer her much more delicate and personal than the matter of investigating Agent Cesar Hawke.

It was a formality, really. Fritz had studied Cesar long enough on his own to be sure that it was safe to induct him into more secretive operations. But Belle had a good head on her shoulders. She saw things differently than Fritz.

If anyone was going to find a problem with Cesar Hawke, it would be Belle.

Still, Fritz doubted she’d find anything.

“What kind of trouble?” Fritz asked. “Did he forget to mail his DVDs back to Netflix again?”

“He murdered a woman,” Belle said. “He’s on the run.”

 

One week after Cesar finished his month-long training to work for the Office of Preternatural Affairs, Agent Swallow from Statistics reported that they had a traitor in their midst.

“We can’t determine whom from existing data,” she said, presenting a folder to Fritz, “but we know it to be Agent Banerjee or Agent Herd based upon the cases they’ve worked.”

Agent Banerjee was a witch who typically worked in the accounting department. During times of budgetary constriction and criminal expansion, Fritz had borrowed him from Director Gethin to help resolve cases. He’d often had access to evidence without oversight.

Agent Herd was with the Magical Violations Department. He was a reliable agent who seldom called in sick, though he performed in the bottom twentieth percentile of turnaround on case closures.

Whether Banerjee or Herd, the perpetrator had been seizing equipment from witches and reselling that equipment on the black market. It was legal to perform seizures against any preternatural, with or without reason, but seized assets immediately became the property of the United States government. These artifacts, on the other hand, had been disappearing without paperwork.

The thief was stealing from his employers.

He was stealing from Fritz.

“Interesting,” Fritz had said, sitting back in his chair, smoothing hair back from his forehead.

“You don’t sound surprised,” said Agent Swallow.

He wasn’t. Fritz was a wealthy man; one did not maintain such status without being acutely aware of potential thieves.

The agent from accounting had no loyalty to the department, but still had elevated credentials. He’d have been a fool not to consider how much he could access, and how much money he could earn from it. Accountants were frequent thieves in Fritz’s experience.

Agent Herd, on the other hand, was sloppy with his paperwork. His inventories were incomplete. The gaps in coverage meant Fritz had already suspected him of misbehavior for months. Two weeks earlier, Fritz had assigned Agent Herd to the desk nearest his office door so that he could be supervised, within the same cubicle as the newly-anointed Agent Hawke.

“You’ve placed surveillance on Banerjee and Herd?” Fritz asked.

Swallow bobbed her head. “We should have a single suspect soon.” She set a folder on his desk. “I’ve opened a separate case file for recovering the artifacts themselves. It would be more suitable for one of your agents to address than one of ours.”

Fritz’s chair swiveled so that he could look out into the cubicles beyond. Agent Banerjee was, coincidentally, talking to a woman a few desks away. Herd was much closer. One of the two was working his final day with the OPA and didn’t know it yet.

Fritz was shutting the file on Agent Herd’s treason into his briefcase when a knuckle rapped on his door. The newly anointed Agent Hawke leaned against the frame.

“It’s six. We’re all clocking out and the guys are heading to the Pit,” said Cesar.

Fritz’s blank expression had been cultivated over decades of terse conversations with his father. It fell into place as he swept a jacket over his shoulders, seized his briefcase handle, and tucked in his chair. “Is that so?”

“Are you going?” asked Cesar.

“Are you?” asked Fritz.

“Agent Herd asked me, so yeah.”

Fritz almost said, But you never go to bars. “You’re only a week into working here, and you already need to drink the pain away?” he asked instead, arching an eyebrow and twisting his mouth in a manner that would be interpreted as mirth.

“No, it’s fine here,” Cesar said hurriedly. “Lots of paperwork. Lots of cases waiting to get picked up. Don’t think I’ll ever get bored, that’s for sure. It’s just that the guys just asked me if I wanted to go across the street, so…” He lifted one shoulder in an uncomfortable shrug, still unaccustomed to wearing suits all day. “I don’t drink alcohol, actually. Heard the Pit’s got good wings, though. You like wings? Beer?”

Fritz had an entire cask of century-old whiskey aging in the temperature-controlled basement of his family’s New York condominium tower. He’d planned to spend his night naked, trapped between at least three peroxide blondes.

“Sure,” Fritz said. “I’ll come.”

It was common practice for the witches within the Magical Violations Department to get drinks at The Olive Pit after work. They didn’t seem to need a reason for it. The parties were rowdier when someone closed a big case—something that had taken months of research, stake-outs, and logistics to resolve—but they also performed a mass exodus across the street when nothing of interest happened. Sports games, maybe. Avoiding families, probably. Fritz didn’t know. He never went.

The other OPA agents didn’t seem excited for their director to appeared at The Olive Pit for post-work drinks. They watched him out the corners of their eyes, got quieter when he passed, and never took off their ties.

Fritz tactfully positioned himself on the glass mezzanine where they would feel more comfortable conversing, unheard by their boss. Fritz didn’t need to listen in directly. He had bugs passively recording activity in half of their homes.

Cesar carried a basket of wings to the mezzanine, set it on the table in front of Fritz, and sat down. “The waitress will bring your beer in a minute,” he said, tucking a napkin into the collar of his button-down and spreading another across his lap. “Two beers, actually. You can have both of them if you want. I’ll buy one. The waitress bullied me into getting it.”

Fritz frowned. “She bullied you?”

“Well,” Cesar said.

Fritz understood once the waitress delivered their drinks. She had huge tits. Cesar must have thought he was discreet in staring at their reflection in the mirrored bar top.

The waitress was closely followed by Agent Mack Herd, one of Fritz’s suspects for the case. Agent Herd was a narrow, nervous man who tried to drown his fear in cologne and a swaggering walk.

“Hawke,” said Herd.

“Herd,” said Hawke.

They gripped hands, bumped chests, slapped each other’s backs in a tersely masculine greeting.

“Keeping on?” Cesar asked in a gruffer tone than he used with Fritz.

“Keeping on,” agreed Agent Herd. A flush climbed his forehead. He was drunk. “One of those beers for me?”

“Get your own, mooch,” Cesar said, feigning a volley punches at Agent Herd.

Herd boomed with laughter. “Right, right. Hey miss, get a third out.”

The buxom waitress was wiping down the next table. She glanced at the men, and her hard mien only softened the slightest for Cesar. His attraction had been noted, and was returned. “Will you be sitting here for a few minutes? Should I bring it this way?”

Herd’s eyes flicked to Fritz.

Fritz held Herd’s gaze as he took a slow sip of the cheap beer, which tasted like dollar hotdog night at the baseball stadium, like green smoothies in a strip mall, like a private investigator whose shredder was used to destroy evidence harmful to gay actresses.

Agent Herd had unbuttoned his shirt and rolled up his sleeves but he was still dewy skinned. He sweated pure Jovan Musk.

“Naw, I’m not sticking around up here. I was in the middle of something with those guys.” He nodded toward the agents downstairs. “You can bring the drink down there.” He turned back to Cesar and said, with forced bravado, “Wouldn’t want to drink with a dick like you anyway. You’ll scare off the ladies with that mug.”

The chill burn of Fritz’s gaze must have been stinging Herd’s skin. The agent slapped his neck, scratched his nape.

“Be around,” Cesar said. “See you in the morning.”

Herd bobbed his head, shuffled down the stairs.

“You seem to be getting along with your new desk mate,” Fritz said.

“Like blueberries in a muffin.”

“Don’t get too attached to him,” Fritz said.

Cesar looked up, as if startled. “Firing me already?”

Fritz shouldn’t have said anything. “I’m rearranging the office soon.” It would have to be rearranged if Agent Herd was the thief. There was no version of reality where the culprit kept his job. “Speaking of work, two new cases crossed my desk today. You can have first pick.”

Cesar brightened. It was amusing to see someone who didn’t yet dread his job. Someone who hadn’t learned that interest was rewarded with more burden without more money.

Sucking his fingers clean of sauce, Cesar grabbed the folders from Fritz and flipped through them.

One case was easy. A witch named Suzumi Takeuchi had been caught using magic to augment her townhouse, and they wanted a full profile on the woman. It would probably end in an arrest, but nothing dramatic.

The other case was to search for the stolen artifacts that had been taken by Agent Banerjee or Herd. This was the casefile that Agent Swallow had brought earlier that day.

“That one.” Cesar tossed the townhouse file to the table and kept the artifacts. “Since we’re talking work anyway, we’ve gotta talk about that one thing.”

An electric jolt slithered around Fritz’s spine, anticipating that Cesar would now confront him about his spying, his deceit. “Yes, Agent Hawke?”

“There were some photos of dead bodies in my inbox today,” he said. “Old cases that Agent Herd suggested I look at.” Cesar gave a charming grin and shook his finger at Fritz. “You said I wouldn’t have to deal with dead bodies.”

It took Fritz a moment to understand.

Once Fritz had made the job offer, mere hours after Ofelia Hawke was rescued from the Silver Needles, Cesar had asked three questions: Could he tell his family that he was going to work for a secret organization? (No.) How good was the pay? (Bad.) And would he have to kill anyone or solve murders?

Fritz had only expected the first two questions based on what he knew of Cesar. The last one was less orthodox.

“The Magical Violations Department doesn’t often handle murders,” Fritz had said. “We have a separate tactical branch that handles dangerous perps.”

“So I wouldn’t have to ever be assigned to something with dead people?” Cesar had pressed.

And Fritz had seen in him a fissure waiting to crack and spread. This answer mattered more than the others. Cesar could accept low government pay in exchange for benefits; he could not accept facing death directly.

In truth, Cesar couldn’t pick his cases. Fritz had absolute discretion over assigning them to agents, and since cases always outnumbered employees, he tended to pile the next case on the first person to come up for air.

But his mouth had opened, and he’d promised Cesar in the chilly blue fluorescence of the hospital, “You’ll never have to do a case involving dead people.”

Now Cesar wasn’t accusing Fritz of anything. He hadn’t lured the director to The Olive Pit to corner him, to hurl utterly true accusations that Fritz would deny coolly.

Instead, Cesar was teasing him. This was a genuine smile without a hint of sarcasm. There was nothing but honesty in his open expression, in fact, and the glow of the lights over the pool table his jawline glimmered bronze. Cesar had missed several patches while shaving. He’d have benefited from a better razor.

The expectant tension in Fritz’s shoulders unraveled. “If you can’t even look at photos of dead bodies, I’m going to have serious concerns about your constitution, Agent Hawke.”

“Naw, I can be a second pair of eyes on cold cases. I can do that. I might peek through my fingers at the gross pictures.” Cesar mimicked the action, and then guffawed, and then shredded the meat off of a chicken drumstick with his teeth. Barbecue sauce flecked onto his collar.

“What’s your aversion to bodies?” Fritz said.

Cesar shrugged. “No upside to people dying, right? At least when I’m chasing cheating wives, the wives are having a good time. Someone’s happy.”

Fritz took a sip of the beer. It was terrible. He took a longer sip when Cesar glanced up from demolishing his wings. He now had a barbecue sauce mustache. He was grinning. He shouldn’t have been working for the Office of Preternatural Affairs.

Cesar didn’t stay at The Olive Pit for long. He made excuses and left, and once he was gone, the rest of the employees hurried away too. It was typical for Cesar to get home early. The rest of them usually stayed until nine or beyond. They really didn’t like Fritz watching them from above.

“Did they already leave?” asked the buxom waitress, who’d returned to collect empty glasses. “All of them? Even the one with the blue tie?” She was asking after Cesar.

Fritz donned his jacket. “I’m afraid so.” He slid his sunglasses into his hair, surveying the waitress as she leaned across the table. Her skin glimmered bronze in the lights over the nearby pool tables.

When she straightened, she wobbled with the weight of too many glasses. Fritz rested his fingers on her elbow to steady her.

She turned wide brown eyes on him, breath caught in her throat. Her pulse fluttered under her jaw.

Fritz knew how to let his chilly expression slide away, replaced by something warmer. He knew how to turn instantly from aloof to accessible. This woman, like so many others, wavered under the intensity of his sudden interest. He could tell from the way the hairs stood on the back of her wrist that she was interested.

He let his knuckles wander up her sleeve so that his thumb could trace the corner of her mouth, painted with lipstick the same shade of matte brown as Cesar’s irises.

“Are you done working soon?” Fritz asked.

They fucked in the alley beside the business, hidden in a corner of the loading dock where the camera couldn’t see. Fritz lifted her skirt. She pulled her panties aside. He entered her in a single movement and braced an arm on the wall beside her head as he took what he needed. When his fingers contacted her clitoris, it took only moments for her to dissolve into weeping orgasm.

He left without her phone number or name, the case file for Suzumi Takeuchi locked in his glovebox.

Fritz went home. Today was a day he’d driven himself to work, so he came home behind the wheel of a Porsche 918 Spyder. He stepped out on loafers from Jason of Beverly Hills and slid Chopana sunglasses down the bridge of his nose to survey manicured topiaries that looked like exquisite boxwoods, though he’d bought these from an ethereal botanist. The pots and plants alike had once been in the ethereal city of Araboth. He’d bought them from a plunderer who’d found Michael’s base of operations on Earth. They were rare, dangerous pieces that broke up the otherwise safe monotony of cultured landscaping.

Dangerous artifacts were suitable decor for the sprawling mansion. When a man’s money reached “fuck you” levels, it stopped mattering if he owned two or ten million-dollar cars. Even the imported marble lining his six pools was merely par. Fritz’s family had become rich mining in Hell, so it was only right that he should distinguish himself as superior to his peers by stealing pieces of Heaven.

He was greeted at the door by one staff member, helped out of his coat by another. They brought brandy to his study so that he could drink. And when Fritz sat in front of the fire to kick up his feet and catch up on OPA emails, he was alone, one pinprick of a soul among the vast hollowness of his mansion.

Fritz’s phone pinged. He saw Agent Hawke’s new agency email in the “from” field and opened it.

Cesar had written, “I’ll find your artifacts by the weekend.”

Fritz turned his phone off, emptied his brandy, and took a shower in a cavernous tiled room.

Yet even though Fritz had fucked and drank and relaxed, he could not sleep. He spent hours in his bed, eyes unable to close, heart beating a little too fast. He wondered if Cesar was working, or if he’d sunken into his beaten couch to watch hours of Battlestar Galactica again, or if he was also lying sleeplessly in a vast empty night.

At midnight, Fritz stopped pretending he was going to sleep.

He sat up.

Fritz scrolled through the emails on his Blackberry, his hand rimmed blue from the light of its screen.

There were developments in the case of the missing artifacts. Agent Swallow had used their time at The Olive Pit to search Agent Banerjee and Agent Herd’s respective homes, ultimately locating one of the missing artifacts in Agent Herd’s basement. He was the culprit. There was no room for doubt.

Another email had come from Agent Hawke too.

Surprised, Fritz opened it.

“Got a lead,” the message said. “If I close my case tonight I’m not coming into work tomorrow. Ha ha ha.”

Setting his phone back on its charging base, Fritz rose and stretched, striding to the balcony. Gardeners quietly moved through his grounds. Crickets sang. From here, the road was too distant to hear road noises or see cars, but the light pollution dimmed the stars to yellow smudges.

The near-full moon provided enough light for Fritz to see his cultivated pathways, and the garage where he kept his favorite cars. The fountain between them was softly splashing, its surface slashed by moonlight.

Fritz looked at all he possessed and he thought about thieves like Agent Herd. Some shriveled have-nothing man.

The Friederlings had spilled blood for the money that bought all this. They’d sacrificed dozens, probably hundreds, of mortal lives in order to get a foothold in Hell’s industries. They had bitten and scratched and climbed over innocent others to reach the top of society, and this was theirs.

He returned to his phone and drafted a new message to the OPA dispatch team. Fritz CC’d Lucrezia, since the Vice President would want to know that Fritz was cleaning house. And then Fritz got dressed to go to work, painted by yellow starlight, warm with anger.

Fritz was in the first of the three SUVs that quietly parked a block away from Agent Herd’s house. He ordered the other men to stay back and progressed alone, ignoring objections from dispatch over his earpiece.

He entered Agent Herd’s house through the back door. He slid soundlessly across the kitchen linoleum toward the basement door, which Agent Swallow had marked on diagrams of the house.

The basement in Agent Herd’s house was cluttered, dim, cobwebbed. The only clean corner held a box underneath a white drape. Fritz whipped it aside, expecting to find the stolen artifact—an egg the size of a bowling ball.

Except that the box was filled with a jumble of medical equipment. Fritz lifted rubber tubing, confused, and found a binder with instructions underneath. Home Hemodialysis. There were also medical bills tucked in the front pocket. Agent Herd was millions in debt. His wife had reached her lifetime maximum from the government insurance company.

A click.

Fritz turned.

Agent Herd stood at the bottom of the stairs, cradling the stolen egg-shaped artifact in one arm. He held a handgun in the opposite hand. He was wearing pajamas, and his eyes were rimmed with the black bruises of exhaustion.

“It’s not my fault,” Agent Herd said.

Fritz’s mouth had no moisture. “You’ve been stealing and selling magical artifacts. How do you plead?”

“Innocent. Fuck, I’m innocent.” Agent Herd pointed the gun at Fritz’s skull. “This is all your fault, Director Friederling.”

Fritz was a good fighter because he was well-versed in body language. He sensed no willingness to kill from Agent Herd. The man didn’t have the guts. He’d try to run, Fritz wagered, and the agents would arrest him outside.

Agent Herd would never shoot.

Except then a gunshot split the air of the basement.

Fritz flinched.

But it was Agent Herd who dropped at his feet, and on the other side stood Cesar Hawke with a Remington.

“I quit,” Cesar said.

It was two days after Agent Herd’s arrest. Cesar had not returned to the OPA office in the elapsed time. One day was reasonable; after all, he had emailed to say that he would take a day off if he resolved the case of the missing artifacts. Two days was something different.

Fritz had hopped into his Bugatti to check Cesar’s apartment, and here they were now, having this conversation in a doorway.

“I don’t accept your resignation.” Fritz brushed Cesar aside and entered his apartment. It was slightly bigger than a closet and smelled as most bachelor pads smelled. The smell hadn’t been communicated through the Scrying ball yet Fritz felt it was as familiar to him as Cesar’s sorrowful expression. “Close the door.”

Cesar obeyed. “I’m quitting, and you can’t make me not quit, sir. It’s that—look, I’m grateful for the job. Okay? I thought I’d like having someone else pay my employment taxes. But you said there’d be no dead bodies and I already killed my desk mate.”

“Agent Herd lived. You didn’t kill him,” Fritz said.

Cesar sat down hard, as if relief had turned him boneless. “I’m still quitting. I don’t think this is the right work for me.”

“You’re really bothered by Agent Herd, aren’t you?”

“He brought me coffee,” Cesar said. “We were coming up with a funny team name, like a 70s cop show. I shot him. I can’t forget that.”

“Actually,” Fritz said, “have you sent in a resignation letter yet?”

Cesar shook his head. “Why?”

“Just making sure.” Fritz’s thumbs moved over his Blackberry, and he sent an email to the Vice President of the agency. “There’s a clause in the contracts that all OPA agents sign. When terminated, they forget their time employed with us. All of their colleagues ranked below me will also lose their memories. It’s a matter of security.”

“You mean…” Cesar raked a hand through his hair. “I’m gonna forget this? The whole last week?”

Fritz squared his shoulders before saying, “Yes.” He was braced to be struck. Cesar had every right to be angry.

But Cesar had looked relieved.

“I won’t remember shooting a guy?”

“None of it,” Fritz said.

Cesar sank against the back of the couch, shutting his eyes.

After a moment, he said, “Thanks.”

Five minutes later, when Cesar was looking for a drink to offer Fritz other than protein shakes, he suddenly stood up straight and looked confused. He checked his watch. He looked down at his pajama pants. He turned back to Fritz. “Why’d you visit me, again?” Cesar asked, scratching his chin.

“You were late today,” Fritz said in a neutral tone.

Cesar looked even more confused. “So you came to my apartment? Don’t OPA directors have other stuff to do?”

“I hired you personally. What kind of man misses a day in his second week without calling in?” Fritz asked.

“Oh yeah.” Cesar looked sheepish. “Sorry. I’m not even sick. I guess I got so used to working for myself that I forgot I can’t sometimes stay in my pajamas all day.” He shut the refrigerator. “Give me a second. I’ll get dressed and head in.”

Cesar disappeared into his bedroom, and Fritz uncapped a protein shake to sip at it. He liked hearing the thump of Cesar hurrying to dress on the other side of the wall.

The apartment—and Cesar’s companionship—was a pleasant, boring, and yet somehow completely comforting place to be.

Fritz put the next new agent at the desk with Cesar.

Her name was Suzume Takeuchi, and she became the strongest witch in the Magical Violations Department from the moment they dressed her in one of those black suits. She also had the worst psychological and personality assessment scores.

She had been investigated for using magic to expand the size of her townhouse. It was ruled illegal. She’d been given the option to go into detention or work for the agency, and now-Agent Takeuchi had spit in the face of the agent who suggested it. But she’d signed the paperwork.

Agent Takeuchi was adequately respectful when first meeting Fritz, but she’d told every other OPA employee she met to go fuck themselves, and he was not fooled by her veneer of politeness.

If she was going to go the way of Agent Herd, then Fritz liked thinking Cesar was capable of shooting her. Cesar no longer had a clue that he’d shoot someone to protect Fritz, but Fritz knew it, and that was enough.

As it turned out, Cesar and Agent Takeuchi—or Suzy, as he called her—became fast friends and excellent partners. Fritz wasn’t surprised that a human as bitter and caustic as Agent Takeuchi would quickly fall smitten with Cesar.

Cesar just seemed to have that effect on people.

 

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Fritz Friederling’s obsession began months before Cesar Hawke almost punched an incubus to death.

It began with an investigation.

Los Angeles was lousy with private investigators. In a glitzy world of haves and have-nothings, entire industries bloomed around covetousness. Private investigators were rapists looking up skirts for scandal and slipping their fingers where fingers were unwanted. They ripped away the disguises that society’s upper echelons were entitled to wear. They murdered stock portfolios in exchange for pocketing pennies.

Those have-nothing men destroyed men-who-have like Fritz.

Bottom feeders, all of them.

Fritz Friederling was confident his opinion on the profession would never change. And it was true. Fritz never would become fond of the profession.

It was a stale winter day when the report crossed Fritz’s desk. A complaint had been filed with the Office of Preternatural Affairs. A private investigator was using magic in his work, and it fell to the Magic Violations Department to apply regulations.

Regulations, not laws. Because the Office of Preternatural Affairs was a ghost organization. The general public didn’t know that witches walked among them, and Fritz was certain that was for the best. As the MVD’s director, Fritz had seen both victims and perpetrators of magical crime in gory detail. There were things out there that could make even Fritz’s sculpted Germanic features turn green.

This particular case wasn’t in that league; the witch in question hadn’t used his magic to hurt anybody, so there was not yet a crime scene to process, and no specific incident to uncover. Agent Herd offered to look into it while dropping off dry-cleaning in that neighborhood.

Fritz bought a glamor and booked a consultation for himself with Cesar Hawke, Private Investigator.

Mr. Hawke kept an office in a strip mall near the apartment he called home, which Fritz knew because he already knew everything that the law knew about Cesar Hawke. His juvenile record was sealed, but money crossing the right palm got every detail of the petty larcenies unveiled. They were unremarkable. There was no adult record.

Fritz also looked into Cesar’s business for weaknesses. There were none; he kept up on his paperwork and state taxes in a manner Fritz would describe as flawless, were it not for the amount of mustard stains smeared on Cesar’s paperwork. Fritz imagined a witch hunched over self-employment forms eating a hoagie, stacks of photos beside him, a cigar smoldering in an ash tray.

The director also looked for news stories involving Cesar Hawke’s name, such as celebrity exposes, but there were none. In fact, the only time he had ever appeared in newsprint was because a poem he wrote in third grade had been selected for the governor’s award of excellence.

He kept looking in the days before the appointment.

He kept digging.

Every man has skeletons in his closet. The only question is how deep the closet is.

But Fritz dug and dug and dug, and he found no bones.

He disguised himself before arriving at the appointment. As a billionaire heir of the Friederling fortune, there was no such thing as an over abundance of caution. The glamour made him look shorter and browner and unrecognizable as a Friederling.

Cesar was not short. He was over six feet tall and broad to match; his hair was such a smoky black that it looked as if it should have left smudges on his forehead. He had kind eyes. Fritz hadn’t expected those eyes.

The consultation was very short.

“I want to pay you to look into Sadie Hackett,” Fritz said. “She’s the leading lady in a movie I’m producing. I suspected she’s violated the terms of her contract by taking boxing lessons. Our insurance won’t cover it if she’s unable to film for an injury unrelated to work. Catch her boxing and I’ll pay you a five figure fee.”

“All right,” Cesar Hawke had said, “no problem,” and he had left to investigate Sadie Hackett.

This woman was indeed an actress, and was indeed shooting a movie. Fritz had no professional affiliation with Sadie. He’d only slept with her once, after a Golden Globes party. He’d selected her as a test. Her skeletons were buried deep, but she had skeletons aplenty.

It only took a couple of days for Cesar to call Fritz back.

“Sadie Hackett isn’t boxing,” Cesar said. “Mostly I just got a lot of pictures of her with her boyfriend. Seems to be all she’s up to when she’s not on set.”

“Who is she dating?” Fritz asked. He was watching Cesar through a Scrying ball, which showed the man’s visage as if seen through an inch of water. Cesar was looking through photographs at his desk in that strip mall office. There was no hoagie with mustard. There was only a tall glass of some sludgy vegetable smoothie.

“I didn’t investigate who Sadie Hackett is dating.” Cesar was looking at a picture of the actress in flagrante delicto. Sadie’s boyfriend was actually a girlfriend. Given that she was currently starring in a big-budget romantic movie targeted toward Middle America, her status as a lesbian could torpedo the project.

She was a bitch. Fritz wasn’t worried about her. He was worried about Cesar casting a miniaturized circle of power on his desk, surrounding a small alchemical kit.

“I asked you a question,” Fritz said. “Who’s Sadie Hackett dating?”

Cesar picked up another photo, brow crimped as his too-kind eyes tracked over the actress’s face as she leaned in to kiss her girlfriend. He had no idea that Fritz was looking over his shoulder, Scrying the situation, yet he turned the picture over on the desk as if to conceal it.

What did that expression mean? Was he…worried?

“I didn’t investigate Sadie Hackett’s love life,” Cesar said. He dropped the photo into a shredder.

“I’ll see who she’s with when you give me the photos anyway,” Fritz said. “And if you don’t give me the photos, I won’t pay your fee.”

“Of course you won’t, asshole,” Cesar said.

He hung up, tossed the phone to his desk.

Surprised, Fritz called him back. “You heard me say I won’t pay you if you don’t complete the investigation, right?”

Cesar hung up again and continued shredding the rest of the photos he’d taken of Sadie Hackett.

Fritz watched from afar, hands steepled.

There was only one important checkbox on the paperwork about the case for Cesar Hawke. It asked if Fritz thought he presented a threat to society. Checking that box would be enough to get Cesar detained for the rest of his life.

Fritz closed the file on Cesar Hawke officially.

Privately, he continued Scrying sometimes to see if anything happened which would change his mind.

For six months, Fritz Friederling watched Cesar Hawke, looking for a reason to detain him.

Or worse. A reason to hire him.

Cesar Hawke was a dull, wholesome man. He met clients during normal business hours and followed targets in the evenings. When not at work, he seldom left his apartment in the evenings, preferring to read comic books or watch Netflix DVDs. He had a girlfriend for the first few weeks. She stopped calling him, and Cesar, seemingly baffled but unhurt, moved on with his life.

Aside from that, his only socialization was familial. He helped his grandfather haul trash, went to the gym with a brother, and enjoyed regular lunches with a teenaged sister named Ofelia.

Watching them through the Scrying ball was boring, but not exactly a chore. All the Hawkes were well-proportioned people. Only in Los Angeles could such symmetry and quality of appearance go accepted as average. They easily could have been a sitcom family on any major TV network.

See Cesar walk in on his brother having a spousal argument. Hear the audience laugh.

See Cesar investigate a cheating wife. Watch the credits roll.

On Friday nights they made pupusas and Fritz watched unseen from the next position on the counter, as if waiting to remove the sizzling dough from the skillet. The grandfather Cesar called Pops made a joke, and Fritz chuckled, signing off on the arrest of an entire coven of thirteen witches.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he observed Cesar’s exercise routine as a healer repaired Fritz’s shattered fists. The director had gotten into a fight with a werewolf. The werewolf had won the battle, but Fritz’s silver-armed agents had won the war. He’d smiled when the werewolf took a bullet to the brain. Cesar apologized when he took too long occupying equipment at the gym.

On Saturdays, Cesar met Ofelia for lunch, and Fritz nodded along with the conversation, dining upon shark fin caught freshly in Japan while the Hawkes ate Quarter Pounders.

Interest surely would have waned eventually. Fritz was confident of this. He was not obsessed; he was just bored with everything else in his life. Even cocaine-fueled yacht parties featuring big-breasted models got dull after a while. Soon he’d have an assassin on his tail, or he’d be roped into Friederling family drama. Soon he would forget about the Hawkes.

Except that Cesar’s routine suddenly broke.

One Saturday, Ofelia didn’t appear for lunch.

Cesar was left sitting alone on a bench outside McDonald’s, checking his phone with that same worried expression he’d used on Sadie Hackett. Fritz almost reflexively checked his phone too, just to see if Ofelia had canceled on them. Of course she hadn’t.

Fritz was called away to a meeting. He tried to forget the missed lunch. Despite her obvious adoration for her brother, Ofelia was still a teenager. There was no reason to think anything was wrong. And even if something had gone awry, the matters of Cesar Hawke’s life were none of Fritz’s business.

The instant his teleconference ended, Fritz returned to his office to check on Cesar.

The private investigator was following someone. Cesar should have been indoors; a rare hurricane was descending upon Los Angeles, and rain pounded through a crooked car window he couldn’t roll fully shut. His left sleeve was sodden. There was a baseball bat in the passenger’s seat where Ofelia should have sat. The worry shadowing Cesar’s eyes had sparked with anger.

Once Fritz adjusted the Scrying ball’s focus to peer into the car Cesar was following, he understood.

There were four incubi in that car.

Demons.

They bore the pallid skin and distinctive leather gear of the Silver Needles, which was a gang of incubi living in Los Angeles’s Helltown neighborhood. Human trafficking was the profession and passion of their clan. It didn’t take significant mental math to realize what had happened to a teenage girl who was almost as tall as her brother and almost as pretty.

Fritz shot out of his chair. It tumbled to the carpet, and its upthrust wheel was still spinning by the time Fritz had shouted his first orders to the Magic Violations Department.

Cesar Hawke, amusingly wholesome and dull, was going after demons.

The Office of Preternatural Affairs needed to arrive first.

Yet the same unwitting competence Cesar showed in his tax forms also showed in his stalking methods. He was an expert tail. He turned cunning and ruthless when motivated; there was no indication of his quiet politeness in any of the glimpses Fritz Scried. He drove over curbs. He blew through red lights. He parked, flung open his door, and vaulted over a low fence to slop through muddy sand toward the shore.

Cesar arrived at the storm-tossed beachside hut where Ofelia was imprisoned first.

It took ten minutes for the Office of Preternatural Affairs to follow.

Ten minutes was too late.

Scrying didn’t work when the viewer was at high speeds. For the duration of time that Cesar was in the Silver Needles’s hut, Fritz had no visual on what had happened. He imagined the death as vividly as he had once imagined Cesar eating a hoagie. More vividly. He could guess what those kind eyes would look like once they were impaled upon stilettos.

Fritz’s breath was too loud in the enclosed car. The assisting agents didn’t speak. They clutched sidearms and exchanged looks, afraid to ask why the director was riding along. They thought that they were being audited. Fritz didn’t even know their names.

The driver parked, Fritz flung open his door, and he stepped out to survey the inevitable result.

Except Cesar hadn’t been killed by incubi.

The private investigator was knee-deep in the surf, knuckles bleeding, clothes plastered to his flesh by the waves and slamming rain. There was wildness in his eyes, a beastly hatred.

At the sound of sirens, Cesar woke from the violent reverie.

He looked down at his hands, realizing that they were bloody. He looked at the collapsed skull of the incubus underneath him.

Hatred turned to horror.

He yanked himself out of the sand, making room for OPA staff to move in. He almost fell over, unsteady on the beach.

Fritz was the one who caught him.

“Careful,” Fritz said.

Cesar looked at Fritz with no hint of recognition in his eyes.

Fritz knew this man had celebrated his birthday by buying a hardback edition of Watchmen, his preference for sci-fi TV shows, and how badly he wanted to bench press more weight than his older brother.

Cesar didn’t even know that he’d met Fritz before.

Now they stood together under a pier. The wind was screaming. Kelp clung to the left toe of Fritz’s loafers and Cesar smeared blood on his lapels when he grabbed them for purchase.

“Is he gonna be okay?” Cesar had very perfect teeth and more muscles than most bodybuilders. His eyes were puffy. His hair was limp over his forehead. “Are you guys gonna be able to help him survive?”

He meant the incubus.

“You won’t go to jail for this,” Fritz said.

“But will he be okay?”

Fritz realized, belatedly, that Cesar wasn’t worried about being pinned with a murder charge. He was only worried that a worthless demon was hurt.

The director extended a job offer to Cesar Hawke that same day.

 

The date of March 23rd, 2034 happened twice. Not that anyone noticed. It was an unremarkable day that bore no resemblance to the drama of Genesis. There was no preceding Breaking, nor were there any fissures to Hell, and nobody was consumed by an enormous black void.

On March 23rd, people went to sleep and then woke up the next morning on March 23rd. They didn’t even realize it. Calendars and watches progressed as though a day had elapsed. It was the fabric of Time itself that had experienced a minor hiccup. Subsequently, calendars and watches would be quietly wrong by one day for the future.

The date of March 23rd, 2034 would not go into mortal history books.

Even the Librarians missed it until the Traveler nudged them, at which point they wrote it down, pretending as though they had already done so and it was very annoying that the Traveler was bothering them.

When Onoskelis—the current Head Librarian—wrote it down, she wrote it down like this.

March 23rd, 2034: The Second Genesis of the New Gods.

Really, it should have read like Genesis Part Two, because the shift wasn’t that big. It was a thread tugged just a little bit out of place.

The gap it left behind was so small that nobody should have noticed.

The Second March 23rd, 2034

Summer Gresham saw the second line appear, and she immediately unwrapped a third test to pee on that one too. There was very little urine left in her bladder at this point, but she was a lupine shifter, and she was capable of summoning dribbles for marking her territory at all times so there was no reason she couldn’t dribble on one more pregnancy test.

These dribbles barely stained the end of the stick. It would have to be enough. She set it on the bathroom counter and then finally pulled up her underwear, wiggled her butt into slacks, and flushed the toilet.

“Are you okay?”

That was her mother’s voice on the other side of the door.

“Fine! You can go back to your meeting with Deirdre!” Summer called back.

She thought she’d done a pretty good job sounding normal, but Rylie still said, “Oh my God open this door right now.”

Summer did.

The woman on the other side was the same age as Summer by a weird stroke of fate, but Rylie Gresham was the Alpha with all of the accompanying power, and that meant that she still looked about thirty while Summer looked like she was approaching forty—which she was.

Forty wasn’t very old. It was a little bit older than most mundane women had children, but…not too old.

She suddenly felt very old.

In fact, for an instant, Summer felt like she was over a hundred years old. She glanced at herself in the mirror and saw a woman whose skin had bagged into wrinkles with dark spots on her face and patchy curls that exposed her scalp, and she felt ancient.

Tears leaped to her eyes.

Oh. Oh no.

It was like something terrible had just happened, and she’d just lost someone so important. Like she was raging against circumstance with the last of the fire in a fading body and…

No. It was gone.

The instant where Summer felt old passed quickly.

The lingering feeling of melancholy did not.

“Oh. My. God.” Rylie hadn’t noticed Summer’s weird moment. She had pushed into the Academy’s bathroom to stare at the three sticks on the sink. “Oh my God! Nash?”

Summer couldn’t help but laugh and roll her eyes, tired as she suddenly felt. “Yes, Nash.” There had never been anyone else for Summer. She had a lot of things in common with her mother, but Rylie’s penchant for bearing children by men she wasn’t mated to was not among them.

I’m going to have Nash’s baby.

It finally started to sink in.

“Oh my gods,” Summer said, and it was in almost the exact same tone as the way that Rylie had said it, with the same cadence, though she added an extra heaping serving of disbelief. “I thought we couldn’t. I mean—shifter, angel—”

They had been trying for years and had adopted half of the orphans in the pack in the meantime. In fact, they’d just adopted an infant a few weeks earlier—little Bree Adamson, who had a terrible case of colic and slept about two minutes a night and was cute as a gods-damned button. Bree’s preference for not-sleeping was the reason that Summer had taken so long to realize she was fatigued and gaining weight and that it wasn’t normal.

And Summer loved her. She loved Bree just as much as she loved Michael, and Flora, and Donna, and…

And now there was going to be another one.

Rylie’s eyes were brimming with tears. “I’m going to be a grandma again.”

“Really Mom?” Summer said. “You’re already grandma to like a thousand—oof.”

“I love you,” Rylie said, squeezing Summer so tightly that it hurt, but in kind of a good way. “I love you so much.”

Summer clung to her feeling that weird sadness again. The melancholy hadn’t gone away.

But there was a new feeling too.

Gratitude.

This all felt impossible somehow, like it never should have happened. And yet the dribbles on the third stick had already produced a second line. There was no denying it. Summer Gresham was pregnant.

“I can’t wait to tell Nash,” she said.

Elsewhere and elsewhen.

The Traveler stepped into the Infinite and was met on the other side by a frowning, annoyed face. “Just because you can come over here doesn’t mean you should,” said the gaean god, also known as Time, and also known as Elise Kavanagh.

“I’m the Traveler,” it said simply. Traveling was what it did, unconstrained by most rules of time and dimension. “I wanted to check in on her.”

“I don’t owe you that. I don’t owe you anything.”

“I didn’t say you did.”

“Fuck it, fine,” Elise said.

She started walking, and the Traveler followed.

Elise didn’t slow down to make sure the Traveler could keep up, even though the fabric of the Infinite was infinitely complex, and there were an infinite number of places to get lost within its hundred-thousand-billion folds. Elise beelined directly for the newest addition to the Infinite.

“That’s pretty cool,” the Traveler said when they stepped through to the next plane.

It was a place very much like the rest of the Infinite. There were no smells to describe. No sights, no sounds, no textures. It wasn’t a sensory place. It was a concept that surely made sense to entities like the gods, who existed on several dimensions that even the Traveler did not.

Were the Traveler to attempt to summon an image of the place, it would have thought that it was a sunny field where the sky was a little bit too close and the blackberry bushes grew very thick.

“James says we should call it Heaven,” Elise said, “but I told him to shove it up his fucking ass.”

“Then what will you call it?” asked the Traveler.

“My vote’s for Valhalla,” she said. “But I guess since I named our kid, James is fighting me to the end on this one.”

The Traveler considered this. “What is the end?”

“It hasn’t come yet,” she said. “I’ll let you know when it does.”

“You should call it Afterlife,” the Traveler said.

“Fuck you. You don’t get an opinion,” Elise said.

Just as there was no world to describe in Afterlife—which the Traveler did have an opinion about—there was really no describing the residents of Afterlife. It was a quiet place filled with quiet people. A waiting room, for the most part. Souls drifting through long swaying grass and standing underneath shady trees and soaking their feet in a crystalline river that didn’t really exist.

The gods had made several changes in the Second Genesis, and this had been the biggest of them.

No more did people die and pass on immediately to be recycled into new souls.

Instead, they waited.

“How long will you keep them here before letting Death have them?” the Traveler asked, following Elise down a narrow path that smelled of honey and nothing at all.

“Depends on the person,” she said.

“Will you let Death recycle them normally when they leave here?”

“Maybe.” The terseness of Elise’s response was  answer enough. She hadn’t decided what to do with everyone, because she hadn’t made Afterlife for everyone.

At the moment, in the sunniest part of this corner of the Infinite, one particular soul was waiting around.

She was a brighter spirit than the rest. Small, but fiery. This was a pure spirit, an innocent one without words. She was tangled with an entity who shined with as much force as Elise.

Victoria and James were enjoying the day in the Infinite.

“What’s it doing here?” James asked, and the Traveler got the impression of the ethereal god pulling Victoria into his arms protectively.

“I just wanted to see her,” the Traveler said.

And as it saw Victoria, the daughter to the gods saw the Traveler too.

They connected on the same level that they had connected in the cemetery that one day in the future, which would never happen now that Elise had rebooted the universe. Again.

Both of them remembered that connection.

The Traveler and Victoria shared consciousness. They traveled through each other’s minds, and through the threads of life that they’d left behind in time.

Just as the Traveler could ascribe arbitrary qualities to Afterlife, there were arbitrary qualities that would have suited Victoria’s reaction to its presence, too. For instance, the Traveler was certain it felt pleasure coming from the daughter of the gods. It thought it may have even heard her giggling.

“You won’t take her,” Elise said. “I won’t let you.”

“I don’t think I could if I wanted to,” the Traveler said. “As I told you, I only want to see.”

“You’re not the only one who’s been curious about her,” James said. “We are keeping things quiet. Private. You understand.”

“Of course.”

“I’ll find you if you tell anyone,” Elise said.

And the Traveler said, “Of course.” It wouldn’t be necessary. The world would not fail to notice the thread that had been tugged out of place known as Victoria Faulkner, no matter how hard Elise and James attempted to hide her. Eventually, things would unravel.

For now, there was a bright, pure spirit in the Afterlife, hanging out with all these other mortal souls, and also two gods.

In truth, it was the gods that the Traveler had wanted to see, because it had suspicions.

Suspicions which had now been verified.

Despite the fact that gods were omniscient and omnipresent, they were still constrained in some ways. The more places they existed simultaneously, the thinner they were stretched. And right now Elise and James were stretched thin. Much of their attention was still not on godhood or Afterlife.

“I won’t help again,” the Traveler said, and it meant that statement to be as ominous as it sounded.

“We won’t need it again,” Elise said.

She pushed the Traveler back to the mortal worlds.

That was that. The end of the visit.

The Traveler tried not to wonder if it had made the right decision to help in the first place. Regrets were useless, even for someone who perceived time as an additional dimension.

But it couldn’t help but think on it in the years to come and speculate on what would have happened if Victoria Faulkner had remained dead.

Somewhere—March 24th, 2034

“Excellent, Elise. You’re doing wonderfully. Just keep breathing.”

“You fucking keep breathing,” she said.

And then the next contraction struck her, and she knew that this was it. This was the last one. This was the time.

Elise bore down, back arching, toes digging into the wooden floor of her kitchen, fingers gripping the edge of the counter. The contraction squeezed her from crown to abdominal muscles to thighs to ankles.

And the baby emerged from her vagina in a final gush of blood and placental fluid.

This time, the infant did not hit the floor. She tumbled into a waiting pair of hands, and was immediately drawn gently, carefully against a bare chest, because James had removed his shirt when Elise’s water had broken on him in bed overnight.

“Well,” James said.

Elise leaned back against the corner of the cabinets, panting. She gazed with bleary eyes up at her husband, who was gazing at their baby.

Their living offspring.

Reborn.

“A girl,” he said. “It’s a girl.”

Elise was too exhausted to point out how unnecessary that declaration was.

“She’s not crying,” James said.

“Clear her mouth out, stupid,” Elise said.

“Right. Yes, of course.” His pinky finger inserted gently into his daughter’s mouth, and he scooped out some gunk. Then he grabbed the nasal aspirator and cleaned her throat. And then the baby began screaming in a gasping, halting wail, which was a miserable goat sort of sound that Elise thought she’d missed. It turned out she didn’t miss that sound. It was still awful.

James sat on the slick floor beside Elise, as if he were as drained by the birth as much as she was. The umbilical cord was still between Elise’s legs. She wasn’t done yet, and wouldn’t be done until the placenta came out. So for the moment, while James held the baby and Elise’s uterus held the remaining organ, the three of them were connected. Bound together.

Two godly avatars and a mortal soul reincarnated.

Hidden somewhere on Earth again.

“Rosalind is still a perfectly good name,” James said.

“Fuck off,” Elise said. “Give me Victoria.”

She took the baby from him, and the newborn’s cries subsided to miserable little grunts, which didn’t cease when Elise jabbed her nipple into the baby’s mouth.

Victoria obediently ate.

Elise let her head fall onto James’s shoulder.

“I should have made you carry her this time,” Elise grumbled.

“I offered.”

“You didn’t mean it.”

“You didn’t want me to anyway,” James said.

He was probably right about that. He had to be right occasionally.

They sat in silence for a few minutes while the breastfeeding induced more contractions, and once the placenta was produced, Elise felt ready to take a very long nap. Which she could do this time, because there was no assassin. Nobody had managed to find them.

Not yet, anyway.

“You’re beautiful,” James said, kissing Elise.

“You’re a liar,” she said against his mouth. But she liked the lie. She would never have words to describe her gratitude for the mere fact that James was present this time, and she suspected he felt the same, so words weren’t really necessary anyway.

James grabbed Elise’s knife to cut the umbilical cord. “How long do you think this’ll last?”

“Too long,” she said. “Not long enough.”

“Do you think there will be consequences?”

“Yes,” Elise said. “Obviously.”

James sawed at the tissue. Then placenta was disconnected from baby, and Victoria was on her own in the world, human and alive and independent.

The baby’s eyes were open as she ate. She gazed blankly at the ceiling, seeing nothing and everything.

A single thread tugged out of place.

A few small changes.

Summer and Nash made a new life that shared their blood, and that was another thread tugged out of place.

Their child was a happy one, laughing and running and playing with the wolves. Every motion tugged another thread. Every decision tugged yet another.

Elsewhere, Victoria grew when her fragile little body should have died, and that tugged things around a little bit too.

Eventually the shifting started to ripple into bigger changes.

And somewhere very far away, much further than anyone had ever ventured in spaces that nobody but Librarians even knew existed, someone noticed the fabric had gotten the smallest tear. That someone began to wake up.

Victoria Faulkner looked through the tear.

And the eye of a stranger more enormous than the world looked back.

Of all the motivations that Elise had expected, Nashriel as a fallen angel hadn’t been among them.

In retrospect, it should have been obvious. But she had been so prepared to think of Nash as a warrior for Adam rather than one of Eve’s beloved sons. He was a bitter man driven by hate, not a victim of his biology.

Yet here he was, standing in a living nightmare with cloven hoofs, a feathered chest, and the tail of a lion—the exact kind of chimera Elise had seen before in previous angels.

She had never seen it end well.

Elise stopped trying to stab Summer and stepped back.

“Dead?” Elise asked. It had taken a moment for the angel’s words to sink in. “Victoria is…dead?”

Nash nodded, and all Elise could think about was how the motion was a little jerky, a little bird-like. Because he wasn’t in his right mind. He wasn’t okay. He wasn’t aware of the world around him if he was fallen—not the way that an angel was aware before the fall—and as he sank into a more animal state, his thoughts and behaviors would be erratic.

He wouldn’t know if Victoria was dead.

He wouldn’t be able to tell.

Elise’s head was pounding, and only so much of it was due to her avatar’s loss of blood. Physical pain was something that she could push away. She could dominate it, ride it like a wild horse. But this…

“How?” Elise asked, and the word hurt. Acknowledging that there was a chance Nash could be right hurt, and it was so much more worse than her physical condition.

Nash was trying to remain himself. She could see the battle in his eyes, and in his posture. “There was something wrong with your baby.”

Elise remembered the words “transient blindness” and the way that the infant had looked directly at the Traveler.

Something is wrong with your baby.

And now she started to believe Nash.

Is Victoria already dead?

“How?” Elise asked again.

“You made so many mistakes when you remade the world,” Nash said. “You can’t begin to realize exactly how many mistakes you made. The Fascination—it’s driven me mad. I’m turning into a fallen angel by virtue of losing Summer alone. I’m doing the kinds of things that torment me the most, and it’s your fault!”

“Lilith made the Fascination when she made the last world,” Elise said. Technically, it was Lilith’s fault. Another of her curses. Not too different from the ichor that overtook the fiends when cut by the Infernal Blade.

“But you perpetuated it after Genesis. You didn’t fix anything. Not one God-damned thing!”

Elise was beginning to believe that was true. She had seen what had become of preternaturals firsthand, especially when she’d been in the OPA shelter with Hailey and all her tiger cubs. She’d seen how her new, beautiful world had become so quickly stratified so that people were crushed and left behind.

And she hadn’t fixed the Fascination. She hadn’t. She’d left a route for fallen angels to be created.

“So it was an accident,” Nash said. “I never intended…I never would have…” His throat worked. “Summer spent her youth here, in the Haven.” He swept his hands around the cabin where the Wilder woman had grown up. “She didn’t reunite with her parents until she was an adult, and I saw how much it hurt all of them to be divided during those critical mortal years. My intent was to simply withhold Victoria from you. I would force you to return to the Infinite, keep Victoria Faulkner on Earth, and make sure that you never got to walk the mortal planes alongside her again.”

He was right. That would have been torture enough…assuming Elise had cared once she got to the Infinite.

“But?” she prompted.

“She died when I crossed worlds,” Nash said. “I don’t know if it was a flare of my power, or the shift in dimensions, or…” He looked down at his hands. They shimmered with a failing glamour that hadn’t been intended to function off of Earth. He had claws, black claws, sort of like a big cat’s. “Her heart stopped beating.”

Elise was falling too. She was tumbling down into nothingness.

Her sword slipped from her hand and she didn’t even care.

Nash took the chance to lunge forward, seizing Elise. His arm locked around her throat. She didn’t struggle against him. She gazed up at his familiar face, which was familiar only in part because she’d known him in this life.

When she looked at Nash, she felt a lot like she did looking at Victoria. She felt…strange. Unsettled. Fearful, but fond.

It had been over a century since Elise had borne Eve’s soul inside of her, but she remembered being mother to Nash, and she remembered how that felt.

Such fondness coexisted seamlessly with the anger. Elise’s emotional landscape had become dizzyingly complex, an endless jangle of sensation that she couldn’t pick through. Only one thought rose above all the others. One thing that she could focus on through everything else.

I have to find Victoria.

“Where is she?” Elise asked, her fingers creeping up to seize Nash’s arm. Her nails dug into his forearm. It felt both too bony and too strong.

“I left her in the house,” he said.

He’d left her alone.

Elise shut her eyes and allowed herself to drift back. Not far, just a few days. She thought of lying in bed beside her infant and trying desperately to sleep in between Victoria’s periods of crying. She thought of how quickly the baby quieted when pulled from her carseat, and the dampness of her hot, tear-streaked cheek against Elise’s chest.

She was alone.

“Parenthood,” Nash snarled into Elise’s hair. He had been carried on the memories alongside her, witnessing the idle moments of having a new baby. The smells, the sounds, the exhaustion and the strange instants of giddy bliss. “I didn’t want it. I never needed it. But Summer… We adopted many children, and she loved them all like they’d come from her body.”

“Then what’s your fucking problem?” Elise asked.

“I needed it,” he whispered. “Summer’s blood mingled with mine. To face eternity without her…” His mind rippled over Elise’s. The ethereal energy had curdled and begun to reek like a bowl of milk on a hot day.

There was no way that Nash could have resisted an innate biological mechanism. He couldn’t stop from falling.

“You didn’t have to take my child,” Elise said.

“Would you have helped me if I hadn’t?”

“I’m not going to fucking help you now. There are rules, Nashriel. A thousand-million rules. The integrity of the universe rests on these rules, and if I start pulling on threads, the whole thing’s gonna fall apart.”

“But you can fix this,” he said. “You can die and return to the Infinite and fix it. Give Summer back her youth. Take away my Fascination. Restore me.”

“Why the fuck should I give anything to you?”

“Because it’s your fault! Everything is your fault!”

Simmering madness snapped into rage. His arms locked onto Elise, and when she fought against the press of his hands on her head, she found she could only twist the both of them together. She couldn’t break free.

Nash’s breath blasted against the back of her neck, stinking of sulfur.

“I’m going to kill you,” he said, “and you’re going to go to the Infinite and fix everything.”

Elise’s spine was aching. The cervical vertebrae at the base of her skull were on the brink of snapping.

No amount of godly willpower would keep her avatar animated after that.

And if Nash was confused—if he was wrong about Victoria’s condition—Elise would drop dead instantly, and she would indeed return to the Infinite.

That would be the end of her current life.

No more Danäe and Daniel.

No more naps stolen alongside a sweaty, stinking baby.

No first laughter, words, or footsteps.

Elise tried to say, “No.” But Nash was pressing harder. Twisting harder. He was leaning all his weight on her, and she knew with total certainty that she was about to die.

And then a woman spoke.

“Stop it.”

Her voice was small and quavering. Elise was so shocked to hear it that it took her a moment to realize there was also a blade sliding between her back and Nash’s concave stomach.

Summer Gresham had awakened, and she was holding the Infernal Blade on them.

The change that came over Nash was immediate. Elise could see him becoming himself again the way that Elise had felt more herself—more right, more normal—as soon as she’d gotten in that Chevelle with James. Nash’s broken mind was dragged back through the years to a happier time the instant he saw his wife, and he looked upon her as though she were still the fresh-faced girl in the living room paintings.

“Summer,” he said. His arms went limp. Elise yanked away from him.

The Infernal Blade didn’t follow her.

Summer kept the sword pushed against Nash’s belly.

It didn’t seem to be the first time she’d handled a sword. She had its point underneath his breastbone, angled upward toward his heart. Elise could tell that the trajectory would be perfect for killing Nash, assuming that Summer’s thin arms could apply the right amount of force.

She probably could. Even now, lost inside the wrinkles and white hair, Summer was a shapeshifter. She was a preternatural of strength only slightly lesser than her Alpha father’s.

Nash looked down at the sword. He looked up at Summer.

“Oh,” he said. “You heard everything.”

“Everything,” Summer said. “You didn’t tell me you were falling.”

“I didn’t realize it was happening until you were already…” His throat worked. His chest hitched. “Gone. But you woke up.”

“Wish I hadn’t,” she said. Pearlescent tears glimmered on her cheeks.

Nash looked crestfallen. “It was all for you.” And then he thought about it and said, “No. Not for you. It was her fault—she did everything to us.” He pointed at Elise, who had suddenly become completely superfluous to this scene.

“I always told you,” Summer said, her voice hoarse, her hands shaking. “I wouldn’t let you be like this. I wouldn’t let you turn into Him.”

Nash cradled her face in his hands, gazing at her as though she were as beautiful as the day they’d met. She wasn’t a shriveled centenarian. She wasn’t on the brink of organ failure, incapable of taking on her wolf form. In his eyes, she reflected back with unwrinkled skin and fluffy hair and strong arms.

“I know,” he said. “I love you, Summer. I will always love you.”

The Infernal Blade glinted. “Help,” she said.

His look of love turned to one of thoughtfulness. “You or me?”

“You.”

He looked relieved. Nashriel’s knuckles stroked down her shoulder, traveled to her wrist. He closed his fingers around the delicate bones encased in paper-thin skin. “I love you.”

Nash jerked.

His mouth opened in a gasp.

Summer’s hand was still closed around the hilt of the sword. It was hilt-deep in his body.

The weight of his sinking body dragged the blade up to his heart. It must have cut it in half. He died quickly—before the ichor had even begun to to spread over his skin, turning his feathers into black shards of obsidian.

But the obsidian did take him.

And Elise was left standing over Nash and Summer, the woman’s body folded over the man’s, her very bones shaking. Elise could see the weight of this action taking its toll physically and mentally. She knew that it would kill Summer.

She didn’t care.

“Abel sends his regards,” Elise said.

Summer said nothing. She was crying.

Elise bent, holding her hand out, and Summer’s dull golden eyes lifted to hers.

“Here,” Summer rasped. She handed the Infernal Blade to Elise. “You should go.”

“You’re dying,” Elise said.

“Yeah,” Summer said.

Elise wasn’t going to argue. She abandoned Summer like that, carried on the buzzing white noise in her skull, trying to convince herself that a fallen angel could never know what had really happened around him.

The cruel twist of falling—usually a punishment inflicted by gods, not something that happened as an ethereal analogue to age-related decline—was that angels had to live out their worst nightmares. Elise had known one fallen angel to devour newborns, leaving behind nothing but husks. She’d heard of other fallen angels too, including one that had murdered men who looked like her late husband.

If Nash thought he’d killed the baby, then perhaps he feared it enough for his mind to make it true.

Perhaps Victoria was alive.

There was not much life in the Haven. The demons that Nashriel had rallied were dropping around her as she limped on wrecked legs through the forest.

She wasn’t sure she’d make it.

She needed to make it.

When she got to the edge of Nashriel’s mansion, she saw someone waiting for her there. A calm, genderless entity with full lips and empty eyes and hands folded in front of it.

Elise didn’t greet the Traveler. She’d already known that it would be there.

“You’re running short on time,” the Traveler said.

“That’s your wheelhouse,” Elise said.

“Yes,” the Traveler said, “it is. I’m here to make sure that you arrive just on time. As you requested.”

Elise had requested the Traveler’s help? She had no recollection of it.

But if the Traveler was here, it could only mean that drastic measures were necessary.

Hope and grief warred.

“You can save her,” Elise said.

The Traveler shook its head. “I can’t undo what’s been done.”

And that was the death of hope, impaled upon a blade just as swiftly as Nash killed by his wife.

“I can’t give you moments,” the Traveler said. “But I have held onto something for you. Something you will find valuable.” It held its hand out. “Let’s go inside.”

Elise didn’t want to go inside. She didn’t want to see what she now knew she would find.

She took the Traveler’s hand.

They walked together into the foyer, up the stairs, and down a crimson hallway runner past artifacts collected from an artificial world without history.

The Traveler stood back when they reached the open door.

Elise had to go in alone.

She found James sitting on a rocking chair.

“Victoria,” James said. “My victory. My triumph. My child.” He was looking upon her for the first and last time, cradling her soft head in one hand, stroking his other hand along her body. He felt the shape of her limbs, the curve of her belly. He counted her toes. All ten of them.

She wasn’t breathing.

James’s head bowed over his infant daughter, and his shoulders shook.

Elise did not cry.

She felt clearer than she’d ever felt before.

I made mistakes.

So many mistakes.

Right now, one of those mistakes meant that Nash and probably Summer were hurtling toward permanent death. Souls outlasted bodies by minutes. Time to fix these errors was short.

The time to save Victoria had already passed.

The baby was dead.

Elise struggled not to lose herself in the thoughts of things that would never happen: never again letting those little fingers curl around one of hers, never changing a foul sticky diaper, never getting to relieve the weight of her milk-heavy breasts, never getting the precarious satisfaction of stopping her cries.

Damn it, Elise didn’t even like motherhood. She’d hated every last goddamn moment of it.

Even when she looked at you? And when she smiled?

Judging by the color of the baby’s body, she had been dead for quite some time. Too long for Elise to resurrect the body using traditional methods of necromancy, had they even been accessible to her.

There was no time.

But there was still Time.

Elise’s Time.

She turned to see that the Traveler was gliding into the room now, having permitted them the moment of shock. James gazed at the Traveler with hopeless pale eyes. “You’re too late,” he said. “Even you can’t revert the timeline this far.” His voice was thick with tears. Even if it pained Elise to think of the moments she wouldn’t get to repeat, James didn’t even have memories of those moments. This would be his only memory of their daughter.

Unless I fix my mistakes.

The Traveler touched a hand to Victoria’s forehead.

Then it said, “Be quick. I’ve only given you a few moments.”

“Thank you,” Elise said.

The baby didn’t come back to life. The Traveler was not a necromancer, and as James had said, it could not revert the timeline to a point before Victoria’s heart stopped.

She lifted the Infernal Blade that Summer had just used to kill Nash. It was still slick with silver blood.

“You or me first?” Elise asked James.

Realization dawned over him. He didn’t look happy. Fresh tears welled over, spilling down his cheeks, and he held the baby to his chest. He pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

“Both of us,” he said, “please.” His voice was thick with tears.

James leaned forward, as though the weight of his grief was dragging him down.

Elise rested a hand upon his spine, feeling the beat of his heart on the other side. This heart had provided half of Victoria—an infant Elise had neither wanted nor believed herself to love. Now her own heart felt as though it were collapsing. There was no air left in the room.

“We need to make changes,” Elise said.

James seemed to have gone to a place beyond words. He lifted his head to look at her, his pale eyes empty.

“We forbade second chances for a reason,” she said, bringing her fingers to his bicep. “We forbade afterlives for a reason too. Everything is for a reason.”

His hand convulsed over hers. He nodded.

“I’m going to make changes anyway,” she said, her voice dead, her soul dead, her heart unbeating. “I’m going to pull on the threads and see what happens.”

Elise didn’t wait for James to nod, or shake his head, or remember how to speak. She didn’t want to leave this choice to him. Whether he assented or dissented, Elise had already decided that some things were worth risking the universe over.

She killed him.

It was swift. She thought it would likely be painless, but Elise had never specialized in deaths that didn’t hurt. That was neither her interest nor her forte. She could guarantee nothing to James except that he would die.

A blow to the head to render him momentarily unconscious.

A blade to the heart through the slats of his ribcage.

A slice across his jugular.

His blood poured over the baby, and his body collapsed over hers, and Elise watched until there was no more motion. She watched until James’s skin was colorless.

She tasted the blood on the knife, savoring the flavors of James’s fading life. There were memories in that brief taste—not just memories of their time as Danäe and Daniel, young lovers building an ordinary life together, but memories of their first life too. Accepting a ribbon from their first dance competition. James embracing Elise when she graduated with an accounting degree. Curled against each other in a hospital bed, recovering from injuries.

Some of Nash and Summer’s memories lingered in that blood too. Elise did not know love; she knew need, urgency, dependence. She knew that James was her lungs and she was his spine and neither could survive without the other. But Nash and Summer…

They’d never needed each other. They’d wanted each other.

Chosen each other.

From the moment Nash had first seen Summer in an angel-built artificial paradise, he had chosen that this woman would be his. Summer had chosen him too. She had chosen a wretched, sinful soldier of God to be in her life—a life of joy and laughter—and they had been together out of love. Real love.

Nash’s anger had been as flawed as his love. But everything he’d done to Elise had been well-earned. She had left him vulnerable to Fascination and to Falling, as she did many other angels. And there were numerous other sins that she had permitted to exist.

James had done terrible things to keep Elise. Would Elise not do the same for James?

“I would do more,” she told James’s body, now nestled with the body of his daughter, where they would forever rest in the Haven alongside hers.

Elise used the knife to unzip her mortal form. She drew lines to expose her skull in flaming lines of pain, and she savored it. She sawed open her own body. A y-incision never meant to be performed upon a living body.

In the intensity of the pain, her mind stopped thinking. She stopped remembering.

There was godhood in the pain. There was transcendence—ascension to a higher state.

Elise suspected that she died of shock and blood loss before she reached her heart, but her fingers still guided the blade to the center of it all, just in case.

And she rose.

Elise returned at the edge of the Pit.

She was not alone.

James stood beside her in his godly form, radiating the blinding white light of ethereal power at its purest. The third god of their triad was also there: the man once known as Seth Wilder, now a wan shadow draped in grief, suffering through his eons as Death. Elise was the entire spectrum of colors between and beyond Life and Death.

She was Time.

And as Time, she saw that Nash and Summer’s souls were in the Pit, just moments away from being recycled.

Elise reached out to stop time. She halted processing within the Cauldron.

“What have you done?” Seth asked. His arms cradled white light. A soul.

Victoria’s soul.

When the Traveler had touched Victoria, it had turned back time just enough in a small enough bubble to preserve Victoria’s soul for this moment.

For a goodbye, maybe.

Elise didn’t plan on saying goodbye.

“I did what I had to do,” Elise said.

Seth gazed at the infinite bundle in his arms with an expression of such horror, such grief, such anger. “I’m sorry, Elise. I’m so sorry that this happened to you.” He folded Victoria against the heart at his dark core as if he could protect her. “You never should have done this in the first place.”

“I was owed a selfish decision after all this time. Now I’m making another one.” Elise extended her hands. “Give my daughter to me.”

“You know the rules. People die, they get mixed back up in the Cauldron, they get spit out again.”

“Not my daughter.”

“Even your daughter,” Seth said.

James loomed over Seth, endless light pressing against endless darkness. But even at full power, the ethereal god was nothing against the infernal god. Light was the exception to darkness; life was the exception to death. No matter how big James became, Seth was still everything beyond him. He couldn’t force anything on Seth. “The rules are changing.”

“You’ve always said it’s not possible.”

“Anything is possible if you let me,” Elise said. But Seth still wasn’t moving. And in a way, Time was victim to Death too. She hadn’t known that she could feel desperate as a god until it welled up inside of Elise. “I need to hold her.”

Seth finally spilled the light into her arms, and it was not a baby, but an idea. There was no soft, fragrant skin to inhale, no lungs to expand, no belly to fill with milk.

Victoria was as dead here as she had been in the Haven.

Elise imagined that she was burying her nose in the brush of Victoria’s black hair to smell her. She remembered the weight of the body draped over her arm that first time in the hospital. The strange odor of the white slickness on her skin. All the blood.

She remembered the tugging at her nipple as the baby fed, and the almost frightening bonelessness of a newborn loosely swaddled. Mortal sensations. Human feelings she wouldn’t have again.

But that didn’t mean losing Victoria.

“I’m going into the Origin again,” Elise said matter-of-factly.

“I can’t let you,” Seth said. “That’s how Adam snapped.”

James grew. He loomed. “Try to stop her.”

There would be a battle between Seth and James. It would last an eternity, and the resolution was irrelevant, because it served primarily as distraction.

Elise took Victoria to a place of swirling light. The same place that Elise had told James that she agreed, that they could substantiate into avatars, that they could make a baby.

This baby.

A blind baby, a smiling baby, a baby who looked like James.

With a thought, Elise upended the universe to expose the place she had hidden the Origin underneath.

She held Victoria to her breast, plunged inside, and made some changes.

The drive to the Haven was not long from the sanctuary, and the longer that Elise spent in the front seat of the Chevelle, the more she felt her mind returning to the super-sharp clarity of her first life. It was a product of being in an old car. A very old car now, with all the mechanical parts and the physical buttons on its dashboard and the wheel that James needed to steer. The smell of its leather seats was straight out of her old life. The growl of its engine. The sticky brakes.

Elise sat with her feet up on the dashboard—which would have pissed off Abel, but it wasn’t like he was going to get her from his hospital bed—and she had James at the corner of her eye and it was…right. It was her life again. She was herself.

Except that her breasts hurt. She wouldn’t stop leaking.

She took another antibiotic and more ibuprofen and tipped back the handle of whiskey to wash them down.

James glanced at the sloshing bottle but didn’t remark on it. No snide health remarks did not match her memory of their old life, either.

Their eyes connected briefly.

He looked a lot like Victoria.

James returned his attention to the road.

They didn’t speak on that too-long, too-short drive. The relentless trees rushed past them and clouds drifted overhead and there was no hint of demons or drifting angel feathers. Nash must have known they were coming. But he wasn’t bothering trying to kill them anymore, since it would be much easier to kill them firsthand.

The spot where James pulled off at the side of the road looked like any other spot.

“Hannah died here,” he said, remaining in the driver’s seat.

“I know,” Elise said.

She got out and took the sword with her.

A narrow halloway disappeared into the forest. It had once been a road maintained by the Union, but now it was barely more than a tunnel through the trees, worn down by the footfalls of hikers and the occasional rider on horseback. She stood at the mouth of it, gazing down its shaded throat, her fingers curled so tightly around the sword that they hurt.

She walked without waiting to see if James would follow. She set a fast pace with long strides, feeling her heart speed, her blood flow. She felt the life in her body and hoped that it would be enough.

It only needed to last a little bit longer.

Elise willed her old kopis strength into her body. She willed the power of gaeans—shifters and basandere and sidhe and everything else that sprouted from the earth like the forest—and she plunged into the belly of the forest.

The Haven was inside of a cave, at the very back, exactly where it had been left before Genesis. The cave itself was empty. The rear wall was covered in runes that had been worn down by time and obscured by mildew.

She stopped there. She could not go on without help.

James’s scuffing footsteps stopped behind her.

“Does the Haven still run fast?” Elise asked.

“No,” he said. “It shouldn’t.” He was panting.

“Open it.”

“Elise…” He raked a hand through his hair, pushing the bangs off of his face and letting them fall into his eyes again. “What is the endgame here?”

“Nash. Dead.”

“But what about us? What about Victoria?”

Elise’s heart was hurting. “Do you think she’s still alive?”

“If she is, then we need to survive too,” James said. “She needs us. She needs Danäe and Daniel. Her parents. She needs a life, and a house, and—”

“Any damage we do to these bodies short of death can be repaired,” Elise said. “If Victoria’s alive. Open the door.”

There were unspoken words traveling over James’s face. Unspoken pain.

He pressed a hand to the wall of the cave. Magic raced from his fingertips, crawling up the stone in a lacework like glowing spiderwebs. His power set fire to the runes.

Elise saw beyond the magic to the atoms forming the fabric of the universe. Life, death, time. The three most primal powers. They fragmented into a million pieces—into fire and air, earth and water, gaean and infernal and ethereal.

It felt as though an eye at the center of her forehead was opening for the first time, exposing the truth at her core to the raw Infinite.

A doorway appeared among the runes.

“We don’t know what’s going to be on the other side,” James said. “It could be a trap.” The words didn’t seem to be formed from his mouth, though it was moving.

“It’s definitely a trap,” Elise said.

There was that sad smile again. “As long as you’re ready.”

She rolled her grip on the hilt of the Infernal Blade. “Yes.”

The door blazed white, and then faded.

All that remained on the other side was a cave mirroring the one they stood inside. James let his hand drop and the door stayed open. “Elise,” he said, and when she turned to look at him, he captured her face in his hands. “What happens now…”

“Time spent talking is time wasted,” she said.

Grief knitted his eyebrows. “I love you. I wish that we had more time. That’s all.”

More time. What was time to a god?

He bent to kiss her, and where their lips met, the universe began and ended.

She had missed him so much.

Yes, they should have had more time.

Without breaking apart from each other, they pitched laterally into the doorway, the world splintered, and Earth was gone.

The Haven was a trap.

Elise knew before they emerged from the cave on the other side what the Haven would look like. Her omnipotence was trickling back in now that she’d connected to her old self, forming the bridge between Elise Kavanagh and Danäe McCollum, permitting her access to brush against even the most trivial information.

She fully expected the forest that sprawled outside of the cave, and the idyllic valley of trees heavy with spring blossoms. She was ready for the glistening sapphire lake—Lake Ast, it was called—and even the sprawling manor on its shore, where she knew that Nashriel Adamson had spent some blinks of his immortal life.

Nothing had changed. Not the artificial sky with the starlight formed of suspended flame, or the surreal pinwheel twist to the moon hanging at its center.

Except now the Haven was filled with demons.

There were so many fiends seething among the trees that they formed a leathery ocean between Elise and Nashriel’s home. He must have been breeding them, preparing an army. It would have been overkill against anyone else. But there was no such thing as overkill here, now, against Elise, and when she saw those many tens of thousands of bodies she felt nothing.

Nashriel himself was at the mansion. His enormous wings gave away his position standing on the balcony, even though he was much too distant for Elise to make out any of his features.

She couldn’t tell if he was holding a baby, either.

Elise suspected he would be.

“There,” James said softly, over Elise’s shoulder. That was where he wanted their focus. Nashriel wanted them to chase him into his mansion, where he would have surely set up another tableau like Isaac Kavanagh, like James in the dance studio. Something sadistic. It would surely be effective; angels were master manipulators.

Elise didn’t have to play his game. She didn’t have to see what surprises he had in store.

“Kill him for me,” Elise said.

“What are you going to do?”

She turned to look around the valley. There were two sides to it—the hill with the cave at its center, with everything sloping away from that high point. It was gloomy and misty and miserable everywhere in the Haven except for a lone spot on the other side of the forest, where there were no clouds, no stars, no demons.

Just an empty patch of trees.

Elise never would have noticed it if she hadn’t been searching for one spot in the Haven that didn’t look like a complete hellhole.

“I’m going to get leverage,” Elise said.

She leaped. She plunged.

For a moment, she was weightless, falling down the side of a sheer drop-off. Her braid whipped behind her. Her knees were drawn to her chest, her arms outspread for balance. She was the hawk soaring at a field mouse, talons extended, about to strike.

She landed in the midst of the fiends.

Her feet hit ground and she used the momentum to carry her forward, blade clearing the path. It cut through bone like butter. The demons were momentarily shocked into stillness by it, unable to process the stimulus, the pain, the sudden absence of limbs.

When they began to move, there was no defending against them.

Claws gashed down Elise’s arms, her face, her legs. Teeth sank into the meat of her bicep, and when she ripped free of them, she lost muscle.

There was blood. It sprayed.

But it tore into her avatar, and she’d already begun to leave the avatar behind.

Each and every pain made her mind clearer.

Her Eye opened wider.

This avatar was not as trained as it should have been, and it lacked the conditioning to fight using the total instinct that Elise could now easily retrieve. It took enough damage that she was worried it would fail. But she got into the rhythm of it soon enough—the cutting, the pushing, the running.

She made progress through the trees.

Elise climbed, getting up high above the fiends, leaping between branches. She chased that patch of unremarkable forest.

A fiend grabbed her shoe, tried to yank her down. It pulled hard enough that she heard her ankle pop.

She swung the sword without looking, and it was gone.

When Elise glanced over her shoulder, it was easy to see where she had been. She hadn’t been thorough in attacking all those demons. She had delivered very few blows that would have been mortal with any other sword. But the Infernal Blade was not any other sword.

Anywhere that it had cut a fiend, ichor spread. Skin turned to stone. Bones turned brittle, crumbling. She had left a thousand statues in her wake.

Even the trees were turning to obsidian.

Elise opened gashes on a half dozen fiends when she dropped from the canopy again, and she heard their screams squeezing off as their lungs hardened.

And then there were no more demons.

The forest was silent.

She swung around, looking for more attackers. There were plenty. But they weren’t crossing the nearest of the trees—wouldn’t follow Elise into this part of the forest. Even the ones that were dropping dead still struggled to make sure they died on the other side of some invisible line.

This place was forbidden to them.

Which meant it was exactly where Elise wanted to be.

Light blazed elsewhere in the forest. Elise knew the flare of James’s magic, and she hoped it meant that somewhere, right at that moment, Nashriel Adamson was dying a very painful death.

She turned to move deeper into the forest and fell to her knees. And then she fell onto her face.

Damn.

The fiends had ripped her hamstrings.

It was not a miracle that she’d gotten that far, but a stroke of godhood.

“Just a little longer,” Elise growled at her body, her avatar, the tool she was using to remain in this world for just a little longer.

Mechanically, her body was no longer sound. Too many tendons torn. Too much blood lost. James could fix her avatar later—he could patch her back together, turn her into a mother with functioning breasts and legs and a heart again—but for now, she needed to make sure that there was reason for the avatar to endure.

“Fucking move!”

Willpower dragged her to her feet. A wounded marionette.

She couldn’t stop.

Not now.

Not until she had killed Summer Gresham.

On the other side of the Haven, James decided to skip the fight.

“No, I don’t think I’ll be doing that,” he said, watching Elise cut a bloody path through the demons. That was one of the things that Nashriel wanted them to do. He wanted them to fight so that their avatars would be destroyed, returning them to godhood.

For Elise, that seemed to be fine. She surely had some kind of plan. She knew what she was doing, and her progress was impressive.

Not surprising, but impressive.

James would not make it very far doing something similar.

He spread his hands out in front of him. He pulled magic from the surrounding world, gathering it into himself as though it were sunlight and he were the prism.

Havens had been originally designed by mages—angels who could perform magic—and so there was ethereal power in every molecule of the world for him to access. It was almost obscene how much power he could reach.

But this avatar, this Daniel Hawker, was not a half-angel Gray as James Faulkner had been. He was human. Humans could use witchcraft, but not its purer, breathtakingly limitless sister known as magecraft. That had been a deliberate choice on Elise’s part. She hadn’t wanted James able to wield magic freely.

It would destroy his avatar.

That seemed to be part of Elise’s plan too.

So as he pulled the magic into himself and he began to fray.

He spread the power out into a platform over the tops of the fiends’ heads, and James stepped out onto invisible magic. He walked over them, just above the reach of their swiping claws, stepping around the tops of trees en route to the mansion.

When James stepped off onto the balcony of the mansion, there were more demons waiting for him. A couple of those tall ones. Elise had told him that they were called…what, nyctimus?

“I’m not surprised to see fiends in the employ of angels,” James said, adjusting the cuffs on his shirt, smoothing out his collar. He’d been rumpled by the Haven’s wind. “They are the cattle of the preternatural world. The very grumpy, very sharp-toothed cattle. You, on the other hand, are a higher breed capable of complex thought.”

The pair of nyctimuses stepped forward. A male and a female.

Both were holding knives.

“What has Nashriel offered you for your service?” James asked.

“Stop talking,” hissed the male.

“Are you aware that Elise has already killed some of your sistren? I can’t imagine that anything Nashriel offers is worth the price of death.”

“The Godslayer isn’t here,” said the female.

“No,” James said. “But I will have to do.”

They stepped near enough that they came out from under the roof’s overhang.

He pointed to the sky.

Lightning blasted the nyctimuses where they stood.

That was witch magic, thankfully. It didn’t tear into him the way that the invisible platform had. And it left nothing but charred ankle-stubs where the demons had been standing, as well as a pattern of black ash on his shins.

James wiped his slacks off. The skin underneath was spongy, delicate. He felt like he might tear if he pressed too hard on himself.

Fraying. Falling apart.

“No more ethereal magic,” he promised nobody in particular. “Nothing to bring me closer to godhood.”

Nothing to keep him from surviving for his daughter.

He expected to step into Nash Adamson’s office to find more assailants, but it was just an office. Not all that different from the sorts of offices that James had kept over the years, in truth. All angels liked to have stacks of books around and Nash was no exception.

Everything here was dusty and unloved, though. It all looked old. Not a hundred years old, but thousands of years old. Spiderwebs clung to every corner. The pages were crumbling. The heavy wooden desk was warped with age, and the plastic components to his desktop computer had degraded while the metal components had rusted.

James stepped toward the door.

It opened before he could get there.

Because he was trying not to see with a god’s eyes, he didn’t know it was coming. He was startled to see Nashriel standing on the other side, wings hanging loosely at his back, his eyes rimmed with bruises.

Nash took one look at James and said, “I didn’t mean for it to happen like that.”

His shirt hung open, unbuttoned. James realized with an unpleasant lurch that Nash didn’t have a bare chest underneath. There were…feathers. Feathers and scales all mixed together where there should have been flesh indistinguishable from human.

And there was a tail swinging under his coat.

“What happened to you?” James asked.

The angel’s eyes searched the room, flicking wildly from corner to corner.

When he didn’t see Elise, realization dawned.

“No,” Nash said.

James flung out a hand. His mouth opened, and a word of power fell from his lips.

The mansion shook like a bell hit by a sledgehammer. Nash leaped out of the way, and lightning blazed a path up the ground where he had been standing, scorching the floor tiles in fractal patterns.

The angel slammed into James, knocking him over.

James lifted his hands to cast another spell.

But Nash was already leaping past him, onto the balcony, over the balustrade, and swinging into the air to save his wife.

For a moment, James stared after him, mouth hanging open.

He considered following.

Elise didn’t need help. She didn’t need to be saved.

If Victoria was in the house…

James struggled to his feet, clutching his aching chest. He slammed through the doors to the hallway.

There was another door at the end of the hall. Down where the red carpet terminated at an open doorway. Dust motes drifted on the beams of sunlight, and there were footprints where Nash had obviously been walking recently.

It was so quiet.

James created a new line of footprints between the doors, and he went into the next room to find…a crib. A mobile. A little changing table.

A nursery.

An utterly silent nursery.

His heart twisted, his stomach flipped inside out, and it took all his willpower to walk toward that crib and look inside.

“Victoria?”

The cabin looked like it belonged in a fairytale. It was an ivy-drenched, rose-pocked fantasy surrounded by so many wildflowers that every one of Elise’s steps kicked up buckets of pollen. The design of the cabin was not dissimilar from those at the werewolf sanctuary. There were pentacles over the windows, trimmed in white, and the roof had similar shingles.

The door was unlocked. There was no need for locks in the Haven.

Elise kicked the door in anyway.

On the other side, she found a small living room that opened directly into a kitchen. Paintings hung on the walls. They depicted familiar faces—young members of the Wilder family. A teenage girl with wild brown hair and a stern-faced brother who had no hair at all. The paintings had faded with age and sun exposure. The kitchen hadn’t been used in centuries.

There were three bedrooms and one bathroom in this home. Four doors. Three of them were already open, and Elise had no interest in them because they were empty.

She opened the fourth.

On the other side, she found a young woman’s bedroom with a single twin bed. She had a computer desk, travel posters pinned to the walls, and French doors leading out into the forest. Elise could see fiends seething among the trees, unable to approach.

They weren’t allowed to come near Summer Gresham.

Elise understood that the old woman in the bed was the same as the fresh-faced, springy-haired girl in the paintings elsewhere in the cabin. But there was no obvious resemblance. She was crumpled in on herself, a raisin. She rested in bed with her head on a pillow and her hands folded over her chest and her eyes shut.

For an instant, Elise didn’t move, watching Summer’s chest.

It rose very slowly.

Alive.

For the moment.

Elise shifted her grip on the sword as she crossed the room. Her shins bumped against the side of the bed.

“Your husband took my daughter,” Elise said to Summer’s unresponsive, withered face. “Your father is worried about you. I promised that I would take care of you.”

And if taking care of Summer meant destroying Nash in the process…

Elise gripped the hilt of the sword in both hands and lifted it so that the point hung over Summer’s breast.

And she plunged it toward the shifter woman’s heart.

“No!”

Hands clamped so tightly on Elise’s wrists that she thought they probably broke instantly. Not that it mattered. She didn’t need bones at this point.

She turned to glare at Nashriel Adamson. He’d managed to stop Elise’s blade a centimeter from Summer’s chest.

“Don’t,” he said.

“I told you I’d kill her if you hurt my baby, and you took her from me,” Elise said.

“You’ll get nothing out of hurting Summer except for revenge,” Nash said, and for the first time, Elise saw it in him. The wildness in his eyes. The strange slouch to his back. His perfect immortal form breaking down into one more like a monster’s. He was fallen. “It’s too late, Godslayer. Your baby is already dead.”