Page 51

* * *

Instead of answering the boys’ endless questions, I insist we eat first. Honestly, a little part of me is enjoying being the one with the answers for once. Not Mack, not Kole… me.

“I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since I came back, and I’ve already used way too much energy.” I look pointedly at them and they collectively grumble their apologies, even though I don’t mind one bit.

“Nova—” Mack uses his deliciously stern Daddy-Professor voice, and it sends a shiver down my spine. I love Rev, but right now I wish she was someplace else so I could rip Mack’s clothes off and make him bend me over the kitchen table.

Seems like being dead and reborn full of powerful magick really turbo-charges your sex drive. Especially when your boyfriends look so handsome and forlorn and, frankly, like sex on legs.

“Food first.” I shake my finger at Mack. “Don’t make me gag you,” I warn playfully.

There’s a moment of silence, and then Tanner laughs his loud, familiar laugh and slaps Mack on the shoulder. “Not sure that’s a threat, Little Star,” he says, winking at me.

At the stove, dropping batter into the pan, Rev rolls her eyes. “Do I really have to listen to this?”

I walk casually over to Mack and tweak his unruly beard. “I like your hair a little longer, but with this beard you look a bit like a homeless Santa Claus.”

Mack’s eyes flash amber and the familiar rumble of Snow’s growl fills his throat.

“That is exactly what I said,” Luther laughs, looping his arms around my waist. A little more seriously, he adds, “Baloo was pretty lost without you.” He clears his throat and squeezes me tighter. “Too sad for his grooming routine.”

Slipping my hand around his neck and turning so my hips are pressed against his, I kiss him softly on the lips. As Mack tells Luther to fuck off, I laugh and tell them, “I’m sorry. I’m going to spend a lot of time making it up to you all.”

Rev coughs loudly. “Too much information, Nova.”

“After we’ve eaten,” I add, hopping up onto the kitchen table to sit with my legs hanging down over the side.

“And after you’ve left my apartment for a soundproof dungeon somewhere,” Rev quips.

“Dungeon?” Tanner reaches over Rev to steal a piece of green pepper from her frying pan. He wriggles his eyes. “Now you’re talking.”

A familiar contentedness settles in the room. I let it wash over me as I watch them—laughing, cooking, teasing each other. Everything feels so normal that, after all that happened, it’s almost abnormal.

Then my eyes catch on Sam. He’s leaning against the wall near the fridge, watching the others. Unlike them, he is not smiling or making jokes. My gut twists, and my smile falters; he can’t know already. There’s no way he can know what I know.

But maybe he senses it.

Maybe something inside him has started to wonder…

32

TANNER

I wake with my arm draped across Nova’s stomach. The six of us fell asleep sometime after midnight on the blow-up mattress Rev set up in the living room. With Nico in one room, and her and Sarah in the other, there was little other choice unless we wanted to try and fit four mages, a werewolf, and a phoenix on Rev’s small couch.

The coffee table is pushed up against the wall beneath the window. The radiator is on, warm air making the bottom of the curtains sway a little.

All night, the sound of snarling, salivating demons filled the air outside the apartment. Now, finally, everything is still. I let the quiet settle into my skin and my head.

After what Nova went through, I’d expected her to be exhausted but she wasn’t. All evening, even as the howling and barking and screaming started outside, she was wide awake. Full of an infectious kind of energy that gradually took away the ache we’ve been feeling for the past four weeks.

As the others’ darkness began to lift, my own did too. Only Sam was strangely quiet, melancholy still hovering around him. Looking at him now, asleep with his arms curled around Nova’s legs, I can’t figure out why; he was the one who believed. He was the one who knew without doubt that Nova would return. Why would he not be as buoyant as the rest of us?

As if he can feel me watching him, Sam opens his eyes. He catches my gaze and smiles, then slowly sits up and pushes his curly hair from his face. Glancing at the ceiling, he points at it with his index finger then mouths, “Roof?”

I nod, unfurl my arm from Nova, and grab my sweater on the way to the door.

We don’t speak until we’re on the roof. It’s almost sunrise, so the flying Karakal demons—huge bastards that look like giant eagles with horns and no feathers—will be flying back to their nests on the roof of The Hollow.