I sat in my apartment alone, belly full of pain killers and beer in hand, unsure what day or time it was. I stared at the bowl of fruit on the counter. When I lifted the beer bottle to my lips, nothing came out. I set it with the other two empties, went to the bathroom to get rid of the liquid, got another beer from the fridge, and sat down at the table again.
The pomegranate hadn't moved. It didn't look magical, but it was a pretty fruit. Sensual. The color was the crimson of painted lips, the shape reminiscent of a plump breast. Not my breast. Mine wasn't particularly plump. Mine were plums. Maybe peaches. Definitely not pomegranates.
I sipped my beer.
The world was getting a little soft and fuzzy around the edges. Mission accomplished.
My favorite musician watched me from a poster on the wall. His dark eyes had a curious slant to them.
"I've never been in love before. Not really."
The poster didn't comment.
"I love people. I love Jaja and Busia. I love Chantelle and Frank and the kid. I love Mandrake. That's different though, right?"
Presumably, he understood what I was getting at. He'd sung a lot of songs about love. Wanting it, finding it, losing it.
I took a drink of my beer. Hard to say if the alcohol was making the pain more manageable or if it was just making me care less, but either way it was an improvement.
"Of course, there's an element of lust. That's his superpower. It's been there since the first time we made eye contact. But I think I fell in love the night he got attacked by salamanders. At least, that's when the seed was planted." I made a wide gesture with my beer bottle, and nearly fell out of my chair. "I saved his ass that night. He might be a god, but I saved him. He needed me."
The poster was just a poster. It didn't offer any response. Of course it didn't. I hadn't expected it to. I'm not crazy. At least, not in that way.
Still, I maintained eye contact. "He needed me." The frightened little animal in my chest buried its metaphorical face under its imaginary paws. "He's really freaking scary," I whispered. "He's too intense. Too strong. Too beautiful."
My beer was empty. I set the bottle aside, stood, wobbled, steadied myself, and took three steps to the counter where the fruit bowl sat. When I picked up the pomegranate, it felt warm and heavy in my hand. I carried it to the place beside the sink where I kept a cutting board and set it on the wooden surface. A sharp knife was within easy reach. Cutting the fruit open wasn't exactly a commitment to eat it.
The blade sliced through the flesh and crimson juice pooled on the cutting board.
My muscles remembered the feeling of driving the knife into the soul eater's spinal cord, the hot splash of blood.
I dragged a finger through the thin, sugary juice and drew a little heart.
"I don't need him. If I didn't have him in my life, I'd be sad, but I'd carry on." I smeared the heart out of existence. "Eventually, I'd marry someone else. Maybe even Drake. Maybe we'd have a baby. A tiny little demigod."
It was easy to pluck a single bright red seed from the bunch. When I held it up to the light, it glowed like a ruby. "Maybe I'll find a human guy. One who doesn't even believe in vampires and demons. A scientist with a 401k."
The seed slipped from my fingers and rolled under the counter and out of sight.
I picked up the fruit, tore it open so that the bunches of tiny berries lay fully exposed, and bit into it. Nothing had ever been so sweet or refreshing. It was as if the flavor of sunshine had been captured within that thick red and white rind. I gnoshed on it. Juice ran down my chin and rolled down my arms in streams that dripped from my elbows and stained the cheap linoleum tiles. I ate every seed. When I was done, I searched for the seed I'd dropped, rinsed it clean, and ate that one, too. I slurped the juice from the cutting board and licked my hands clean.
No one could accuse me of half measures.
When nothing was left, I looked around my apartment.
Nothing had changed.
Maybe it was a trick.
I emailed Hawwa from my laptop which had, somehow, made it back to the apartment with me.
Ten minutes later, when she knocked on the door, I'd already changed into a clean shirt and put on my shoes and jacket. Braced for powerful revelation, I yanked the door open and faced her.
She held her hands clasped in front of her. Her green pantsuit brought out a glimmer of green I'd never before noticed in her eyes. The always-flawless braids hung around her shoulders. A rather pleasant scent that reminded me of wet clay rose from her skin. She looked exactly as she'd always looked and I knew, deep in my gut with a certainty that couldn't be rivaled, I knew that she'd reached a calm, content resignation with her lot. There were many things she couldn't change. What purpose would it serve to wring her hands over them? What she could do was love and be loved, and she loved me. She loved me for loving her son, but also because I was a foolish, bright-eyed child who bumbled through the world with more enthusiasm than wisdom.
She reached up and pressed her warm, soft hand to my cheek. "Now, I will take you to him."
We went to The Agency.
Mx. Landry watched us emerge from the elevator with all the emotive expression of a wrinkled potato. When we paused in front of the window, they met my gaze. "This is dangerous."
Fear, deeper and more horrible than any I'd ever known, shown in their eyes. Unfathomable pain held them in an iron fist. Love as immense as the ocean rippled across their skin like djinn tattoos.
If they'd let me, I'd hold them and rock them and kiss the top of their head and tell them lies about how everything would be okay, but they'd never consent to such human nonsense, so I just said, "I know."
The door buzzed.
Hawwa and I walked past Nick's office and the conference room to a door I'd never seen opened. She turned the knob and held it for me. We entered a small elevator lobby. A single button was set in a steel panel beside the elevator door. I pressed it and we waited.
Hawwa's hand slipped into mine and I held on the way a little kid will cling to her mother while crossing a busy street.
The elevator carried us downward for an impossibly long time. We emerged into a small, cave-like room that had an odd, garlicky, metallic odor.
I rubbed my nose.
"Iron," Hawwa said. "It's thick in the soil here. It's why Nick chose this place to build his home and, by extension, his business. His fae blood isn't dominate enough to prevent him from wielding iron, but it would be all but impossible for him to dig through a concentration of it this heavy."
So, he's part fae. I'll have to tell Chantelle.
A sharp thorn pricked my heart. There'd be no telling Chantelle.
Directly ahead of us, a metal door was set into the stone. Etched warding covered every inch. To the right of that, hung a thick black curtain.
"The window is made of quartz and enforced by powerful spellwork. He can't break it without altering reality."
He probably can't dig through the soil. He can't break the window unless...
Containing a god was tentative business at best.
She squeezed my hand. "You can open the door when you're ready. It's not locked on this side. I'll leave you alone. Be patient with him, Olivia. He's more fragile than anyone realizes." I saw her love, her worry, her fear, her hope.
I was her hope.
That was a lot of pressure for an ancient being to put on a twenty-five-year-old woman.
I watched the elevator swallow her before turning back to the ominous warded door. When I stepped closer, the stones devoured the sound of my footfalls. My hand didn't tremble when I reached for the edge of the curtain. I pulled it aside, revealing a thick slab of quartz set into the wall.
It was not the same as looking through glass. Nick's small apartment looked wavy and dim through the strange window. The furniture—a small table with two chairs, a sofa, an armchair, an end table, all appeared blackened and burned. Most of it was toppled or canted at strange angles. One of the legs had been ripped from the table. Stuffing from the sofa lay on every surface.
Nick stood in the center of the mess, wearing black tactical pants with one leg ripped open from thigh to shin and the other cut off below the knee. The burnt remains of his shirt hung around his neck like a hideous fashion accessory. Electricity sparkled and cracked along the lines of his djinn tattoos. His face, chest, and arms were covered in streaks and spots of dried blood. He twitched, bared his teeth at me, hissed, and flew at the window, slamming into it with his full body.
I jerked back. A strangled little squeak erped out of my throat. My heart pounded against my breastbone.
Nick scratched at the stone. It shredded the tips of his fingers and dark streaks of blood traced his movement.
Maybe I'd sprained my tear ducts with all my recent outbursts. Probably, because my eyes remained dry as I gritted my teeth and pressed my hands against the stone. I looked at him. I saw, and I understood.
"Poor Nick. It's okay now. Everything's okay. Do you see? I'm fine." A little white lie never killed anybody. Probably. I hoped. "I'm fine. You saved me. That's what we do, right? We take care of each other. You did that. You took care of me. And that woman, she's gone. You can't hunt her, Nick. It's over."
His frantic tearing at the stone slowed.
"Can you hear me? I'm okay. She's gone."
His hands formed into fists, pressed hard against the spot where my palms rested. Balls of electricity formed around them.
"I'll wait for you to be ready. I won't leave."
Lightning shot from his body, so bright and powerful I had to squeeze my eyes shut against the light. When I opened them again, he was pounding at the door, screaming. His pain poured out of him in flashes and bursts of light and color.
I pressed my forehead to the stone and waited.
I was patient.
When he came back, his hands had healed, but the blood streaks remained. He beat his fists on the stone and screamed at me. Though I couldn't hear him, the words were clear on his lips. "Let me out. I'm going to kill her."
It wasn't murderous rage after all. It was terror. He was so scared it had reached the point of madness. The man whose earliest memory was unimaginable pain and guilt lived each day in the grip of bone-deep fear that his actions could cause additional pain and guilt. He didn't hate my kidnappers. He wanted to protect the world from them. If he saved enough lives, maybe he could balance the scales. Maybe it would make up for the innumerable lives he'd destroyed.
I shook my head.
He bent double and pulled his hair, screamed and let out bursts of electricity that sometimes landed on the already-ruined items in the apartment.
I waited.
I was patient.
My legs grew tired. My ribs ached.
I sank to the floor and waited with the side of my head pressed to the stone window.
If my life depended on estimating how long I waited, I'd be dead for sure. But at some point, I realized it had been a long time since I'd seen a flash of blue.
I turned and looked through the translucent surface.
Nick lay on the floor on the far side of the room, his knees drawn up to his chest, his arms wrapped around his legs, his head tucked down tight. Small, quick, arcs of electricity zipped across his body.
I stood up at pressed my hands to the window again.
His body shook with sobs, but he made no move to stand up.
I saw and I understood. Hell, I empathized. His fit had been no different from the one I'd thrown in the lobby above us. Now he was in the same emotional place I'd been when Hawwa pushed me into the shower.
With my heart in my throat, I took my life in my hands and reached for the doorknob.
Nick didn't move when I entered the room, latching the door securely behind me, locking myself in with him. His crying was that of a lost soul at a graveside, a mother holding the body of her child, a man longing for death and unable to die.
It was pain so great it made my own misery seem pathetic by comparison.
Except pain isn't like that. Someone else having it worse doesn't do a damned thing to make my pain more manageable. Pain just hurts and each of us has to find a way to manage as best we can with what we have.
All of the furniture was broken and smoldering. Everything stunk like burnt plastic and ozone.
I sat on the floor and crossed my legs, leaving maybe a foot of space between Nick and me.
"My parents never really wanted me. They never liked me, but the world gave me Jaja and Busia, Chantelle, and Drake." I spoke as softly as if reading a bedtime story to a small child. "I never expected more than that. It was enough. It was more than some people got in a lifetime and, let's face it, I'm barely more than a kid, right?"
He failed to hold in a low, keening wail that wrenched my soul. He rocked back and forth on his side.
I clenched my fists so tightly my nails bit into my palms. There was no room for my big unmanageable feelings in that space at that time. "Then I met you. I've never known anyone who could love the way you love. I've never known anyone who would burn the world for me. Heck, I've never known anyone who would burn the world for anyone. I didn't know that love like that could exist. It's not possible that I did a thing to deserve it. You just chose to give it to me."
No agreement or argument came from him. He just lay there, crying into his knees.
"I suppose no one does anything to deserve love. Love isn't some form of payment." Would I be able to say any of this if he was in his right mind and making eye contact with me? Probably not. But he wasn't, so I plowed on. "I love you, too, you know. I love you so much I... well... I'd take on a curse if it meant we could be together."
Is it my imagination or did he react to that?
"I ate Hawwa's pomegranate, Nick. I'm a little scared about that. I suspect I don't know all the repercussions."
He peeked up at me.
I lay down facing him. "It doesn't matter what the repercussions are. I just want to be with you."
"I'm the antichrist." His voice had been dragged fifty miles behind a dirt truck on a gravel road. The electricity settled into his skin and he looked almost human.
"I don't care."
The moment reason came back to him, I saw it happen. I understood. I reached for him, and he curled into my arms and let me kiss his head and tell him over and over that I loved him.
I winced when he wrapped his arms around me and squeezed.
He jerked back. "What is it?" His gaze roamed over my face.
A split second of fear that my injuries would send him spiraling again fizzled under the understanding that he wanted only to fix it—both for my pleasure and his. So far, the "curse" was turning out to be rather helpful in communicating effectively. I nodded my consent.
Nick drew my pain into himself and consumed it.
"Better," I said.
He ran a hand over my face and held my gaze. His stupid magic lust powers lit a spark in my belly. As if this is the time. And then I thought, what time was better? I reached for him, and we helped each other relieve the stress of the past week.