“If I did, I would have no problem admitting it,” Ciprian says. “Big hair. Bigger?—”
“Okay, we get it.” Celine laughs, bending to dig around in Alistair’s bag. She pulls out one of his T-shirts, and his eyes flash red as she shimmies into it.
“Are you going to investigate the other gateway locations?” Ali asks.
Celine nods and sits down on the end of his bed, fishing a brush out of her bag. “I’ve got to. I can’t logically explain it, but I won’t give up on him. I-I can’t. It feels...” She sighs. “It feels wrong. Not like I’m betraying him, but like I’m betraying myself.”
Alistair darts to the end of the bed,scoops Celine up, and sits back down, propping himself against the headboard with her tucked between his legs.
Celine rolls with his sudden, possessive move, calmly working the brush through the ends of her wet hair without missing a stroke. “I’m out of my depth, guys.” Her voice is steady, but none of us miss her gaze flitting toward the bathroom.
“He’ll come around,” Ciprian says.
She frowns. “I don’t want him to come around, though. That’s not?—”
The water turns off, and we all go quiet. I understand what she didn’t get to finish saying, though... no one wants to convince someone else to be with them.
“Malach will be shocked when you show up to save him,” Ciprian says, smoothly changing the subject. “I can’t stop imagining the shock on his face when you kick down the door and toss him over your shoulder.”
Celine’s lips twitch. “I’m not going to drag him into a cave; we’re going to have a conversation.” The half smile on her face drops. “Honestly, I’m terrified. If my father’s hurting him...” She shudders.
I want to reassure her. Gods, I’m desperate to erase her worries one by one. But I won’t spout bullshit I don’t believe, and the truth is: I’m worried, too. If Celine is right about Malach, and I think she is, then he’s under S’lach’s control, and nothing good can come of that. He’s tough, though. I keep reminding myself that if anyone can hold on, it’s him.
“The southern enclave has received recent reports of a celestial gateway sighting,” Alistair says. “We booked you a flight to Georgia. It leaves tomorrow.”
Celine lets the hairbrush drop to her lap. “How did you hear about that?”
“Joshua made some calls,” Ciprian says.
“Are there angels living in Georgia?”
I shake my head. “None that Joshua’s friend knew of. He wants to check the gateway out, but since no one there is an angel...”
“It won’t activate for them, anyway,” Celine murmurs. “This could be a wild goose chase.”
I bite my lip, hating how discouraged she is. Determined to cheer her up, I snag the remote from the bedside table where Alistair abandoned it and queue up the latest season of our favorite island dating show.
“We’ve got a lot to catch up on,” I tell her. “They added exes this time, but they aren’t allowed to tell anyone who they used to date. If a castmate figures it out, they push a giant red button on the wall and call them out in front of everyone. If unmasked, the exes must leave immediately, but if their accuser guesses wrong, they get the boot instead.”
Celine smirks. “That’s terrible.”
“I know. We should binge it, though, right?”
“Fuck yes.” Celine tosses the hairbrush to me, and I put it carefully on the table before crawling into bed next to her and Ali. Ciprian joins us, wedging himself between Celine’s legs. The three of them are stacked like a Russian nesting doll.
We’re halfway through the first episode when Riven appears, dressed in the same clothes he was wearing when they got here. He grabs the bag of clean clothes and retreats to the bathroom again to change.
I shake my head. I don’t particularly want to see him in a towel, but getting dressed in dirty clothes only to come out and get a bag is a level of modesty I’ve never seen from a supernatural before. When he returns, wearing a pair of sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt, I watch him from the corner of my eye and piece together what I know.
He’s afraid to get close to Celine.
He’s self-conscious about his body.
And the way he crawls into the queen-sized bed by himself is painfully sad.
I focus back on the show, wishing it wasn’t easy to empathize with him. I’m not the only shifter who knows what it’s like to be at war with themself.
“Be careful, angel,” Alistair says for the tenth time. “We don’t know what the supernaturals are like down there.” He says “down there” as if he’s peeking into an active volcano, not talking about a quick trip to Georgia.
