I nodded. “Of course.”
“Alright.” His brilliant ice-blue eyes slid shut. “We only have a few days until the ball, and you and Serena will stay here until then. It’s the best way to keep you safe. The Legion can come here for our meetings. We will develop a fail-safe plan while I find you somewhere else to live. And then we will say goodbye.”
32
The week passed in a blur. Az and I never had a moment alone. He’d moved himself out of his bedroom and into the spare, and he’d insisted Serena and I take his. Meanwhile, the living room had been transformed into a frat house for demons. A constant stream of them came and went all throughout the day and meetings lasted well into the night.
Open pizza boxes hunkered on top of the dining table. Crumpled papers spilled out of an overflowing trash can. Cans of beer formed a pyramid on the kitchen counter. Az seemed to grow more agitated by the day. His pristine palace had been overrun.
The door flew open and Phenex stomped inside wearing a wicked smile that would make most girls melt. I felt shockingly immune to it though. In the past, a guy like Phenex might have caught my attention. A dangerous bad boy with tattoos, a crooked past, and a fondness for knives. But he was nothing compared to Az.
“It’s done,” he announced as he tossed a white apron into the corner. “Got in and out easy. No one expected a goddamn thing. Idiots.”
Az had decided the only way he’d go through with our plan was if we guaranteed my safety. He’d even put the whole plot at risk to give me a way out of the ball. Phenex had posed as a caterer to get inside the building before the party. Once inside, he’d found the bathroom window and made sure it was unlocked.
“Where is it?” I asked from my perch on the edge of the dining table. Hendrix sat on my knee, cooing happily.
Phenex traipsed over to a wall that had been transformed into a massive whiteboard. He yanked off the top of a pen with his teeth and then scribbled a drawing of the building’s interior. The blue ink showed a maze of corridors. Wherever we were going, it wasn’t a little apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.
“Here.” He stabbed a hole he’d left at the bottom edge of the drawing. “This is the door. You go down this hall, hang a left, and go all the way down here. Bathroom’s inside this door. There are four stalls. Wait until it’s empty, and then climb out the window here. A fire escape’s just outside it. Easy way out. No one will even know you’re gone.”
I swallowed hard and ignored the tension pounding against my skull. “Yep, no problem at all.”
Az frowned. “What if someone sees her going into the bathroom?”
Phenex shrugged. “Humans go to the bathroom all the time. No one will notice.”
My brows arched. “Humansgo to the bathroom all the time? As opposed to supernaturals…?”
From the kitchen, Caim barked out a laugh. “Depends on the supernatural.”
Okay, this was weird. And potentially TMI. I didn’t really want to think about the bathroom habits of demons. Still, my gaze drifted to where Serena lounged on the sofa with a new book in hand. She’d moved on from brutal stabbings in the dark and was now onto a faerie romance.
She shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I’m not a demon.”
So, werewolves were a yes. Demons…no? What about vampires? Probably also a no. They were the undead after all. Weird.
“Can we please stop talking about toilet habits and get back to the task at hand?” Bael drawled as he stepped up to the whiteboard. He tossed a soccer ball in his hands as he stared at the messily-drawn map.
Phenex nodded. “Mia, are you happy with where the bathroom is? You okay with climbing out onto the fire escape?”
“Probably?” I said, my voice more of a question-mark than a statement. “How many stories up is it? Four? Twelve?”
“Forty-seven,” Phenex said evenly.
My mouth dropped open. “Forty-seven?”
Shit, oh shit, oh shit. I wasn’t afraid of heights per se, but climbing out of a window forty-seven stories high was pure insanity. Fire escapes were wobbly, rusted things. And I’d have to climb down forty-seven ladders to reach the ground.
I needed to sit.
“She looks pale,” Valac said from where he perched on a chair in the back corner. He was hidden in the shadows. Pretty typical for him. “Humans do that when they’re scared.”
“Very pale,” Stolas muttered as he strode across the floor to take my elbow and usher me into a seat. “Don’t worry, Mia. We’ll be right up on the roof waiting for you. As soon as you step inside, we’ll fly you to safety.”
Fly?
“I don’t think that’s any better.”
