brightly. “Fae have realms, most of them small pocket dimensions, but there are bigger ones. The Market? The fae black market? It’s actually the exact same in every city, but it exists in multiple places at once. It’s similar to the Tribunal Chambers, a pocket dimension that can be entered wherever a door is made. Most of the Tribunal members have a door in their residence and jump in it whenever they’re needed. It cuts down on the traveling.”
“See, that doesn’t bother me. Humans have been trying to prove the existence of the multiverse for a long time now,” Raphael said, shrugging. “Honestly, it’s a little comforting.”
“Really?” I raised an eyebrow, wondering why he thought so.
“It means a lot of the supernaturals can go back to where they came from.”
“Ah, that’s a problem. Werewolves and werecats are just humans with a nasty, transmittable curse. Vampires are…kind of the same way. Once human, but they’re more like…magically reanimated dead. Witches are humans with a magical spark and a keen mind that allows them to bend the forces of the world around them. They try to be fae and fail every time, but they’ve got considerable skills as well.”
“What do you mean by they try to be fae?” Raphael yawned, and I realized he was finally getting more comfortable with the wildness of the world he was now living in. Being bored was better than being scared—always better.
“They make powerful, complex spells to try to do what a fae can do with a snap of their fingers.”
“They normally just blow something up,” Cassius mumbled. “But they are very good at blowing things up. They also dabble in things a fae can’t or won’t do.”
“Yeah, summoning demons and angels and other shit we try to pretend doesn’t exist, even as supernaturals. There are creatures that live on other planes that don’t belong here and can’t belong here. Like demons and angels. None of us want them around.”
“There are more besides them, but because humans have such a deadly fascination with them, they’re the most common beings popping up in our world, trying to break dimension barriers,” Cassius said.
“Are they…like Gabriel and…”
“Raphael, the angel your parents obviously named you after? Like archangels? Abrahamic lore?” I shrugged. “Don’t know. Never met either type. Don’t want to.”
Cassius pointed at her. “She actually has the right idea here. If you ever hear anyone say ‘summoning’ with ‘angel’ or ‘demon’ following it, please tell one of us. It’s an executable offense, and we’ll need to shut it down before it gets too far.”
“Um. Okay. Sure. You know, why don’t we pick up all this tomorrow? I think I just want to focus on tonight.”
“Fine,” I sighed heavily. “I’ll sit here and be quiet.”
“Try to be quiet, you mean,” Cassius mumbled.
We sat in the car silently…well, almost silent. I played around with the radio until we lost any of the good stations. Then I started messing with Cassius’ phone to get some music going. My foot tapped. I kept moving around in my seat, trying to get comfortable.
I was never very good at not being restless before a kill. Even when I was doing more covert work, I got antsy and hyped up. The adrenaline started for me too early and wouldn’t stop until it was all said and done. Talking, keeping things light, those kept my mind busy before events.
And I didn’t want to think too hard on my plan. I didn’t need either man in the car to know something was coming, and if I stewed on the plan, Cassius would know something was off with me and be worried. He knew me well enough to know what would be unusual behavior.
Plus, I had been enjoying talking to Raphael. I liked seeing his eyes light up as he learned new things, even if the light was somewhat dimmed by caution and a healthy, reasonable dose of fear of the unknown that most humans had.
“Okay,” Cassius said softly, turning off the long, dark road we had been on, going far south of Phoenix. “We’re nearly there.”
I looked around. We were in the desert, all right. If anything happened, the likelihood we would get human attention was next to nil. Cassius was now looking at a state-of-the-art GPS map that was heading to the coordinates that Sinclair had given us. It had us turn off the small road we were on and head further into the desert, further away from civilization and help.