5.
Melanie sat ash-faced in the passenger seat, looking like a shell-shocked soldier pulled from the trenches.
“What they did, when they took that stuff,” she said in a small voice. “What they did to each other…I barely got out. If I hadn’t been able to barricade the bathroom door when everyone went crazy then slip out the window…why? Why would anyone do that?”
Damn good question. The Network was an oiled precision machine, built for stealth. It operated in the deepest waters, and we had no idea how long it had been around. Lurking in silence, an urban legend. If the law or the media managed to swing a spotlight in their direction, they smashed it without hesitation.
Thirteen dead kids, killed in some of the worst ways imaginable thanks to a bad batch of ink, was a disaster in the making. In one night’s work they’d guaranteed more cops, more feds, more public funding to fight them tooth and nail. It was equal parts pointless and stupid, and the Network wasn’t stupid.
I tried to put myself in their shoes, work out a reason why I’d pull that move, and I came up empty. If I wanted somebody dead, I put a gun to their head and pulled the trigger; I didn’t toss a hand grenade into a crowded room and hope I hit the one person I was aiming for. Then again, maybe that was the point: to obfuscate the intended target.
Like the child of somebody they wanted to send a message to.
“Any of your classmates, the kids at the party,” I said, “do any of their parents work in law enforcement? Or work for the city, maybe?”
Melanie walked back through her memories. Aching, and I ached right with her. I knew from experience that she was picturing her friends two ways right now: before, and after.
“Jenna…her dad’s a lawyer, I think. There’s this one guy—I don’t really know him, he’s in my social studies class—his dad’s a lobbyist, I’m pretty sure. I don’t know.”
“I’ll figure it out,” I told her. “You should get to class. They’ll probably dismiss early, anyway. Considering.”
She put her hand on the door and froze.
“Something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” she said.
“Shoot.”
Melanie turned in her seat and looked my way. Her eyes glistened. The threat of tears brought out the red, bloodshot from loss and lack of sleep.
“Teach me.”
“Teach you?”
“Magic,” she said.
“That’s…that’s not a good idea.”
She perked up, intense, like she was asking permission to go to a rock concert and had a list of preplanned arguments.
“My mom would be okay with it! I asked her! I mean, not about you, specifically—she wants to set me up in a mentoring program with this guy she works with, ew, no thanks—but in general she’s okay—”
I cut her off with a distracted wave. “That’s not the issue. I had an apprentice, once.”
A little of her energy faded, and I saw the look in her eyes; she had her junior reporter hat back on.
“What happened?”
Then it was my turn to look back and see the before and after.
Before: thick as thieves, my arm around Desi Srivastava’s shoulders, snapping a selfie with a disposable camera in front of the dancing fountains at the Medici. I still had the photograph. I took it out sometimes, when I was drunk and felt like torturing myself.
After: sand swirled across the floor of a deserted office lobby, rising up in a whirlwind, taking on form. A drooling crocodile snout, shimmering armored hide. A custom-built trap for me and my crew, at the end of a heist we were never supposed to survive.
“I can do this, Dan!” Desi’s voice echoed off the inside of my skull. “I can do this!”
Her head hit the floor, bouncing across the blood-streaked tile, two seconds before the rest of her body did.
“It ended badly,” I told Melanie.
“That doesn’t mean this will! I’m a good student. You know I’m a good student.”
“I know you are. I’m not a good teacher.”
“I don’t believe that. And I don’t want to learn from my mom’s friends. She’s already pushing me to intern at Southern Tropics over the summer, and I…” She shook her head, her bottom lip trapped between her teeth. “I don’t want to work for those people, okay? I don’t want that.”
Southern Tropics Import-Export, aka the shell company that covered the Court of Jade Tears’ operations on earth. Emma was the queen of the boardroom, handling Prince Sitri’s cash, and she expected Melanie to follow in her footsteps.
“Don’t know if you heard,” I said, “but apparently I work for ‘those people’ now.”
“That’s not the same thing. You know why Prince Sitri knighted you.”
“Do I?” I arched an eyebrow. “Clue me in.”
“Because he thought it would be funny, and he wanted to screw with you. Duh. Come on, even I know that. You can mostly still do whatever you want. I mean, you’re Daniel Faust. Nobody really expects you to toe the line. Any line. For me, it’s…it’s different. I’m supposed to be all on board.” She shook invisible pom-poms. “Yay, hell. I’m supposed to be all excited about spending the rest of my life working for my mom’s shitty company, surrounded by jerks, which will put me on an amazing fast track to spending all of eternity being surrounded by even bigger jerks. I know, I’m a cambion, that’s supposed to be my thing—”
“Your thing is whatever you want your thing to be,” I said. “Your blood doesn’t get a say in the matter.”
“See? See, that’s what I’m talking about. You don’t try to put me in a box like that. When I’m talking to you I never feel like I’m…I don’t know. Wrong inside.”
I decided to shift gears. Melanie was a pressure cooker about to burst, and there was more going on than a sudden desire to expand her studies.
“You know,” I said, “knowing magic doesn’t make anything easier. Life is tough, especially at your age. There aren’t any cheat codes.”
“I don’t care about easier. It would make me safer. Hello? I could have gotten killed last night. And it’s not the first time. Remember the Redemption Choir? Or when Damien Ecko set a zombie loose in my house?”
“You got through it okay.”
“I was lucky. I can’t count on luck.”
“You can’t count on magic,” I told her. “Why do you think I carry a gun?”
She pushed her head back against the seat and balled her hands into fists. Out of words, out of oxygen.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s going on with you? Talk to me.”
She forced a breath, but her muscles stayed taut, like she had steel cables under her skin.
“You know where I want to go to college? Emerson. Their journalism school is the best, okay? God tier.”
“Okay.”
“And Emerson,” she said, “is in Boston. About two thousand miles outside Prince Sitri’s borders. And my mother is a dignitary in his court. Which means I can’t go to Emerson, because I’d probably be kidnapped or killed the second I got off the plane. I can’t go anywhere.”
“You’ve got options—”
“No,” she said. “I…I don’t. I don’t. My entire world is Jade Tears territory, because I can’t leave. Because I’m a cambion, because I’m Emma Loomis’s daughter—I was born with a target on my back and I can never, ever take it off. And all my friends? They’re leaving. They’re going to Chicago, and New York, and Boston, and Florida. They’re going to all these places I can never go, will never go, and I’m never going to—”
The dam broke and the tears flowed at the end of a ragged, strangled word. I pulled her close and she let me, and she shook for a while. I held her shoulders and felt my shirt grow damp.
“Once we graduate, I’m never going to see any of my friends again,” she whispered into my chest. “And my mom is like, it’s fine, you’ll make new friends at Southern Tropics, and I hate those people. I need…I need to be able to make my own choices. I need something that’s mine.”
I understood. Just like I knew I couldn’t give her what she needed. I let her finish, holding her until there was nothing but a few wet sniffles left. I wiped her eyes with my sleeve. A stray, salty drop splashed across my fingers.
“I’m here for you,” I told her. “I will always be here for you. Know that. But…I can’t teach you, Melanie. It’s not you. It’s me. I can’t do that again.”
The hope in her eyes sputtered out and died. Her smudged tears felt like fresh blood on my hand.
“Fine,” she said. “Thanks for nothing.”
“Melanie—”
She shoved open the door and turned her face away.
“I’m late for class.”
She was gone before I could think of a way to make her stay. I understood better than she thought. I wasn’t far from her age when Bentley and Corman took me under their wing. They did more than teach me: they gave me confidence, an anchor in the world, a source of strength.
Something that was mine.
I could have said yes, could have passed the torch along, but I’d tried that once before. When I looked into Melanie’s eyes, all I could see was Desi. I cared too much about Melanie to ever let her get that close to me.