you put yourself back together? I like you looking like you."
Pierce glanced at the stairway. "I didn't want to be spied with two faces in the car barn."
"Garage," I corrected him, and he softly repeated the word, brow furrowed.
Nick's steps were soundless as he reached the top. A building-long hallway stretched with doors on one side, windows on the other. It looked like it had once been an open balcony looking out onto the side street, long since bricked up to give some protection from the elements.
"It's the one at the end," Nick said, seeming as eager as us to avoid any more encounters.
Someone was yelling at someone about their choice of TV and eating all the yogurt as Nick hustled down the hall, me trailing behind with my sore knees, looking out to the blah brown building across the street in the cold spring sun. I felt a tweak on my awareness, and I wasn't surprised when Pierce shuddered, and I looked to see him like himself again. Even his fingers were different. Not so thick, smaller, more dexterous.
Nick stopped at the last door, doing a double take as he saw Pierce. "That's a good one," he said as he fished out a second key. "I'd never have known it was you if you hadn't been sitting next to Rachel. Demon magic? Must have cost a lot."
Pierce shrugged, eyes on the brown building across the street. "Someone died for it. And this is the disguise, sir."
Nick hesitated with the key in the door, clearly having second thoughts.
"Thanks for letting us crash at your place," I said, not wanting to have to go back downstairs and grab a bus. "I'm amazed you found us, with me looking like an old lady."
His expression softening, Nick twisted the key and unlocked the door. "Remember the library? When we broke in to see the restricted section? You were wearing the same thing."
I laughed, but Pierce was appalled. "You are a hoister, Rachel? Lifting books from a... public institution?"
My smile grew fond. "I just wanted to see them. I didn't walk off with anything." Nick had, though. Slowly my smile faded. That had been the night I'd met Al. He'd torn my throat out at the request of Ivy's old master vampire. I'd survived, obviously, but that was the beginning of everything that put me here, shunned and beholden to the very demon who'd tried to kill me. "I needed a look at the spell books," I finished softly.
"Then why didn't you simply ask?" Pierce asked. "Surely if you had impressed upon the librarian your plight, he would have allowed you access."
"They wouldn't have made an exception," I said sadly, knowing I was right. "People just aren't that way anymore."
Good mood thoroughly gone, I entered Nick's apartment. As I crossed the threshold into the one large room, I rubbed at the demon mark I'd gotten that night, wondering if that one decision could be responsible for the entire rest of my life. Why Pierce was scowling, I hadn't a clue. It couldn't be Nick's place. It was nice. Really nice. In-any-neighborhood nice.
It was a corner apartment with windows on two sides and a rack of plants under a skylight in the kitchen. Jax was dusting heavily among the greenery already, and the place smelled like a conservatory: green and growing. The kitchen was faded, small, and clean.
"Make yourself at home," Nick said as he dropped the single key conspicuously on the Formica kitchen table and sat down to take off his tatty sneakers.
I came farther in as Pierce shut the door, his flat black shoes making a slow turn on the low carpet. It was all one big room, with trifold screens to loosely define areas. Shelves lined the walls between the windows, each holding stuff that I'd classify as knickknacks if I hadn't known they were probably priceless. Some had spotlights. It reminded me of a museum, and I couldn't help but wonder if Nick had had this place before we broke up.
The living room was a couch before a wide-screen TV bolted to the wall, out of view from the windows thanks to the screens. Beside it in the corner - also out of sight - was a stack of expensive equipment, everything black and silver and piled as if they were worth nothing, but nothing was likely what he'd paid for them. The last corner between two windows had a gray slab of slate propped two feet up on cinderblocks, probably