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CHAPTER 15
She was alive, then.
The roar of the Black Market’s bazaar did nothing to sway me from my thoughts. We’d thanked Jackson and Xander and left them to their devices, Morrow and I silent as we strolled back to the dimension’s boulevard, heading for the portal.
It was stupid of me to hold out hope that Freyja had actually wiped the Goddess of the Valley off the face of the earth. But as I was starting to learn, not all gods were built the same, not even those from the same pantheon.
Loki, for example, had concentrated all his energy on building Happy, Inc. over the decades, raising up his own temple. Freyja was flightier, powerful enough that anything beneath her simply escaped her notice. Which was a nice way of saying that the goddess was a little lofty, a little loopy, maybe a bit of an airhead.
But there was still the problem of the third god.
“I want to say that we should have known,” I said at last. “Wishful thinking, though. Part of me was so hoping that she was dead.”
Morrow shrugged. “Director Sakamoto said as much, that we should stay alert. But I thought the same as you. Rather, I hoped. So now there’s another god in the mix.”
“This is a damn mess,” I said, glancing around the bazaar. “What I wouldn’t give to just walk into the crowd and disappear right now, let this all be someone else’s problem.”
“You don’t mean that,” Morrow said with a small smile. “You care too much to leave Nomicon Valley — hell, potentially a very large segment of humanity — up to someone else.”
I scoffed. “You’re supposed to enable me sometimes. You don’t have to be right all the time. I hate that you know me a little too well now.”
Morrow smiled harder, placing his hand on my shoulder. “If it means anything, I’m glad that I’m going through this mess with you. I can’t imagine suffering through all this with anybody else.”
A little bit of that gooey feeling wriggled around in my stomach, like glowing butterflies. “That’s really sweet of you, Morrow. Like, in a pretty fucked-up way, but it’s still very sweet.”
His hand was still on my shoulder, his smile faltering only the slightest as a different sort of look took over his face. Oh, shit. Right here, in the middle of the boulevard?
At the end of the cobblestoned lane, the portal away from the Black Market hummed. Around us clamored the call of merchants in languages I’d never even heard of, the song of birds from different dimensions, the zing of otherworldly musical instruments.
Yet all I could hear was the thumping of blood in my temples, and — yes, I was sure I could hear it. The frantic beating of my own heart.
Morrow took one step closer, his body shielding me from the sun. I realized I was tilting my head very slightly back to look at him, to gaze into his eyes. Huh. Maybe the bastard was right. Maybe I wasn’t six feet tall, after all.
Theodore Morrow’s face drew nearer. I swallowed hard, then licked my lips.
“Is that Jericho Frost and Theodore Morrow?” came the lilting, friendly greeting, a familiar sweetness delivered with just the faintest hint of malice.
Xavi Ximenez came trotting down the lane, beautiful and tan as ever in a plain tank top, the bulging muscle of his shoulders glowing bronze in the dimension’s sunlight.
I clenched my teeth at the thought that we’d been caught almost — well, doing what, exactly? Then I clenched my fists at the thought that Xavi had so rudely interrupted whatever was about to happen. I recorded this deeply in my memory, etching the incident into my brain the way a blunt pencil digs desperate furrows in a notepad. Xavi couldn’t go teasing me about having terrible game when he was, at least in this instance, the chief cockblocker.
The secondary cockblocker ambled into view, though to be fair, he hadn’t called out deliberately to interrupt, again, what might have been something interesting and exciting. Houston was wearing an off-white cowboy hat, a brown suede vest over a white tank top, and jeans that fit him criminally well. He waved excitedly at us, like he was genuinely happy to see me and Morrow, which he probably was. Sweet guy. I waved back with a sheepish smile.
Xavi bounded up to us, all innocence and perfect white teeth as he leaned in to hug me, then squeezed Morrow on the arm.
“Fancy seeing the two of you here,” he said. “Out on a hot date?”
Morrow chuckled. “Are you talking about yourself? You and Houston here are looking quite hot. Er, I mean you’re dressed perfectly for the hot weather. And are probably on a date.”
The way he stammered through his reply, the way he carefully avoided the question of whether or not the two of us were on a date — somehow it didn’t annoy me like all the times he’d feigned ignorance before. Something was absolutely about to happen back there. I forced a smile on my face as I turned to Xavi, engaging all my muscles to keep my body tense and stop me from reaching out to knock his block off.
“We came here to consult with a couple guilds about the charms, actually,” I said.
Houston’s eyes lit up. “Well, isn’t that a coincidence? Xavi and I came to do the same.”
Xavi slid his finger against the corner of his mouth, then gave me a meaningful wink. “Oh. We came all right.”
Morrow blushed tomato red. I narrowed my eyes at Xavi. Houston, bless this golden retriever of a man, just kept on smiling like he’d heard none of Xavi’s obvious innuendo.
