Julia creeps across the floor.
“Constantine,” she whispers. “Are you awake?”
“Hmm.”
“Shh. I don’t…I don’t want to bother Cass.”
She creeps closer, pausing with every step to make sure that Cassius is still snoring.
“They’re going to let us go, right? Cass says so. We didn’t do anything to them, so they have to.”
Julia was always protected from everything. She was never told and never asked where the money came from that had been laundered and rinsed and fed into her seemingly endless account. (“Import-export,” August said.) At her father’s funeral, we were told not to mention how he died. (“Heart attack,” August said.) She seemed utterly unconcerned with how a healthy, middle-aged man came to die of a heart attack, or why a healthy, middle-aged man who died of a heart attack warranted a funeral with a closed casket.
Afterward, when we went out to eat, the table was rearranged so that Julia wouldn’t have to see the crustaceans getting fished out of the tank when she ordered lobster.
Something about it has always bothered me. Not something. I know what bothers me. It’s that Julia was still being treated as a precious innocent when she was thirty while I was forced to fight adults for food at the age of nine.
“You mean aside from the killing, arson, and kidnapping, we’ve done nothing to them.”
“I don’t believe you for a second, and anyway, I never did anything,” she says, her voice simultaneously hushed and indignant.
“You drove a van of guns and hunters to their land.”
“That wasn’t me. Cassius was driving. I was just supposed to be entertaining. We were supposed to go to New York. I didn’t know anything.”
“What do you want, Julia?” I’m tired and she’s grating on my last nerve.
“Is Uncle August really dead?”
“A werewolf put a metal slat through his throat, so yes, he’s dead.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Who?”
“The werewolf.”
“No. I gave her a car.”
I feel the fringe of her blanket brush against my hand.
“Baby?” Cassius says groggily, snuffling around in his pillow. “Julia, what are you doing?”
She jumps away from me.
“I’m just trying to find the bathroom.”
“Hold on, I’ll be right there.” The dull thunk of skull against wood is followed by a muffled “Shit!”
“Sorry,” she says again and stands sniffling in the middle of the room until Cassius shuffles over to join her. Her voice is faint against his shoulder.
“Cass, we’re going to get out of here, right?”
He makes all sorts of reassuring promises about plans to escape, none of them true. We have no guns, no phones, no families, and with August gone, nobody who cares whether we live or die.
The difference is I don’t care. I had asked for one thing from August. Maybe if I’d asked for more I might not have been so surprised when he reneged. Anyway, I spent several weeks trying to figure out how to get myself and Magnus far enough away fast enough and with sufficient funds that even August Leveraux couldn’t track us.
That was when it started to dawn on me that following elaborately laid-out directions was not the same thing as having a plan. I scrapped all my half-baked ideas when Lucian abducted Varya. It didn’t matter whether my lupus ex machina had a plan, because she had something better. She had purpose. It radiated from her in wave after dark wave. She refused to give August anything—fear, respect, anything—until she whipped out the steel slat she had torn from its soldering under the bed in the room where we’d kept her and, with a graceful pirouette, pushed the bar still dripping with Romulus’s blood through August’s throat and gave him death.
Why did I warn her about the hunters coming to the Great North?
I think because I couldn’t help but wonder what it was that inspired so much devotion in such a brutally hard woman. After she had gone, I stood looking at the dead men who had defined my past. Just for a few minutes. Nothing morose. Then I called Tiberius on his old number, and on the third ring, he answered.
It was warm during the day so we opened the windows, and when the drops hit the screens, they explode into cool mist. We pull the windows shut, fastening them by hooks and eyes so the sheets and blankets won’t get wet. When I go to close the door, I find Tiberius still sitting there, the rain streaming down his face.
From the tree line across from the door, a dark wolf-shaped shadow watches with flaming eyes.
Chapter 3
Evie
It always takes