CHAPTER 23

Doyle discharged me on the ninth day.

He didn’t say much about it. The silence was warning enough, and he didn’t offer to drive any of us anywhere either.

The stairs up to the flat took three rests. Lisa carried the bag and didn’t offer to carry me, which I was grateful to her for in a way I didn’t have the spare breath to say.

The core sat quiet in my chest the whole climb. Small draws only. The System had repeated it that morning like a landlord reading out the terms.

The flat felt smaller than I remembered.

Nox was there when I got back, sitting on the stairs as he always did. Lisa let herself in ten minutes later with a bag of takeaway nobody had asked for and nobody was hungry enough to eat.

We sat in my flat instead of the lobby. Nobody suggested it. It just happened.

The three of us ended up in the one room with a working kettle.

“So,” Lisa said, eventually. “We should talk about it.”

“About what?” Nox asked.

“About the part where a man who wasn’t even trying put all three of us in a hospital.”

Nobody had a better read. Lisa didn’t stop there.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I meant the rest of it. The horns. The voice you keep half-listening to when you think we’re not watching. Whatever Doyle meant by ‘the one in your head,’ it was a fact everyone in that room had already agreed on.”

Nox said nothing at all, which was answer enough. He’d clearly been waiting for this conversation longer than either of us had given him credit for.

I looked at both of them for a while before I answered.

“His name is Azazel,” I said. “He’s not a curse, and he’s not a possession. Three years ago, I merged with him inside the gate that took my old life apart. We share this body. Some days more of him drives than me.”

Lisa’s mouth opened slightly. Nothing came out of it for a moment.

“Merged,” she repeated. “As in permanently?”

“As in there’s no undoing it. He’s not going anywhere, and neither am I.”

Introduce me properly while you are at it. Third prince of Elysia. She may pay her respects if she likes. I will not insist on it.

I relayed none of that.

“Is he dangerous?” Lisa asked. “To us? To you?”

“He hasn’t hurt any of you yet. He’s not going to start now.” I thought about how to say the rest of it honestly. “He’s the reason I’m alive most weeks. Cú Chulainn nearly finished us both. Azazel’s the one who kept fighting after I couldn’t.”

Nox finally spoke. “That thing in the woods. The wings.”

“That was him, and not me doing an impression of him. Him.”

Something in Nox’s face settled. “Took you long enough to just say it,” he said.

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you? We’d have believed you a month ago the same as we believe you now.”

“Because saying it out loud made it real.” I looked at my own hands instead of either of them. “And because I kept waiting for you to decide if I was something to be handled, instead of someone to trust.”

I stopped there. There was more I could have said. About the Zodiac Gate and the kid who’d been dragged into the dark in front of me. About why I’d signed Doyle’s form and taken every mission he’d handed me without asking too many questions. Colt was still out there. Everything I did came back to that.

Lisa crossed the small kitchen and sat down across from me instead of hovering by the counter.

“You should have trusted us sooner,” she said. “But I’m not going to spend tonight lecturing you about it, certainly not after the week you’ve had.”

“Tonight only. Tomorrow I’ll lecture.”

“I keep thinking about the wrong part of it,” I said. “Not that we lost. Azazel was winning. For a while there, he actually had him.” I looked down at my hands. “And it still wasn’t enough. The body just ran out before the fight did. That’s worse than losing to someone better than us. That’s losing to a clock we didn’t know we were on, with no idea how much of it is left.”

“How long is the clock?” Nox asked.

“I don’t know. That’s the part that keeps me up.”

Lisa hadn’t touched the takeaway. “I keep thinking about mine,” she said. “Wet paper. He called my summons wet paper and didn’t even slow down when he said it.” She turned her cup in her hands, not drinking from it. “I’ve had that thought about my own magic before. From my own family. It’s different hearing it from someone who has no idea he’s saying something you’ve already heard a hundred times.”

“You built something that killed a man twice,” I said. “That’s not wet paper.”

“It was, though. Against him.” She said it flatly. “I’ve never had a reason to make it better than good enough. Now I do.”

Nox hadn’t said anything for a while. When he did, his voice was quieter than usual, which for him counted as shouting.

“He didn’t even see me as a threat worth remembering,” Nox said. “That trick has worked on everything that’s ever come for me. Everything. He caught it before it finished forming and told me it was cute.”

He looked at his own hands as I’d looked at mine.

“I’ve spent my whole life being the thing nobody sees coming. I don’t know what I am if that’s not true anymore.”

“You’re still you,” Lisa said.

“I know. That’s not the problem.” He shook his head once. “The problem is ‘still me’ clearly isn’t enough.”

No clean answer existed, and I didn’t try to invent one.

“So what do we actually do with it?” Lisa asked. “Knowing we’re not strong enough yet. Sitting here and saying it out loud doesn’t fix anything by itself.”

“No,” I agreed. “But I think it’s the part we skipped last time. We went from D-rank to fighting something out of legend without ever once asking if we were ready. We’re asking now.”

“That’s not the same as being ready,” Nox said from his corner of the room.

“No. But it’s further than we got last time.”

You are all doing the thing where you list your own failures and call it a plan, Azazel said quietly in my chest. It is not a plan. It is just grief with better posture.

“What’s the plan, then?” I asked him internally.

Get stronger. Actually stronger, not the kind you perform for each other in a kitchen. I don’t know how many more of him there are. I would guess more than one. An organization doesn’t build its entire operation around a single dangerous man. If this is what an ordinary Tuesday looks like for them, I would rather not learn what the good days look like unprepared.

I said that part out loud. Nobody rushed to disagree with it.

“We have three months,” I said. “C-rank, or Gwen can’t keep the shield up over us. Might as well start there.”

✦ ✦ ✦

We took the bus to Canary Wharf that afternoon.

Zarya’s London branch took up the top floor of a glass tower. The kind of building where the lobby had a concierge, a water feature, and a smell like cold money.

The lift opened onto a floor that didn’t match the four people who worked there. Pale marble, tall windows, the river laid out grey and wide below us. Two dozen workstations stood in clean rows, every chair ergonomic and expensive, every desk bare, and not one of them had ever been sat in.

The bossy one runs an empire of empty chairs, Azazel noted.

A woman met us at the front desk before we’d even reached the reception counter. Older than Gwen, calm in a way that didn’t seem to cost her anything.

“You found it,” she said. “Good. She doesn’t like waiting, and she’s been disliking it since eight.” She looked us over without any of the weight Gwen usually put behind a look. “Yelena. I handle everything that isn’t hitting things. Which, here, is most things.”

“You’re the rest of the guild?” Lisa asked.

“I’m the half that answers email.”

She led us across the empty floor to a corner office. Gwen sat behind a desk that had cost more than most people’s cars, a laptop open in front of her. A phone sat face-down beside it, like she’d set it there deliberately rather than let it ring out.

“Sit,” Gwen said without looking up.

We sat.

“You have three months,” she said. “That’s not a suggestion, it’s a law. UK guild registration requires C-rank-certified operatives on the roster. Mine expires in ninety days. If you’re not certified by then, Zarya doesn’t exist here anymore, and neither does your cover.”

“Why does it matter that much to you personally?” I asked. “You’re S-rank. You could clear gates yourself faster than we ever will, faster than any of us are likely to manage for a very long time.”

“I could.” She still hadn’t looked up. “I’m not allowed to.”

“Not allowed?”

“I’m a foreign S-rank operating without a parent guild backing me on British soil. That’s tolerated exactly as long as I don’t act like it. The moment I start clearing gates myself instead of funding and sponsoring people who can, I stop being a guest and start being an incident.”

She finally looked at me.

“The Association could have me removed from the country over a paperwork technicality if they wanted an excuse. I don’t intend to hand them one.”

“That’s a very thin line to build a whole operation on,” I said.

“It’s the only line I’ve got, and I’ve learned to make it work.” She said it without any self-pity in her voice at all. “I can fund you. I can shield you from the parts of the bureaucracy that would otherwise eat you alive. I can’t fight your battles for you, and I can’t be seen doing it even if I wanted to.”

Her voice didn’t soften at all delivering that. “So I found three people willing to fight them instead.”

The phone on her desk buzzed once and went still. She didn’t touch it.

“Home?” Lisa asked carefully.

“Not now.” Gwen’s voice didn’t change at all. If it had, it might almost have been easier to watch. She turned the phone further face-down, like that solved anything.

Nobody asked again.

“So we clear the gates,” I said. “You fund it. We get the rank.”

“You get the rank,” Gwen agreed. “I get proof I exist here on paper while I look into this Void Order that Doyle briefed me on. He was thorough about everything except the parts that involve you. And somewhere down that road, I get closer to the thing I actually want: the winged man you already lied to me about once.”

She said it without heat, a simple statement of terms.

“I know you’re still lying. I don’t currently care why.”

I held her stare and didn’t confirm or deny it.

“Ninety days,” she said. “Yelena will schedule your formal assessment for tomorrow morning. Don’t be late. She’ll also tell you what to expect from it, since I suspect none of you have sat one before.”

✦ ✦ ✦

We left the way we’d come in, past two dozen chairs nobody had ever sat in.

“She runs the most feared guild name in the country out of an office with four employees,” Lisa said once we were in the lift. “I don’t think I’d have believed that a week ago.”

“I don’t think she’d have wanted you to,” Nox said. “That’s probably the point of the marble.”

Yelena caught us at the lobby doors with three cards and an address.

“She’s already paid for it,” she said before any of us worked out what it was. “Take it up with her, not with me.”

The address turned out to be a first-floor room above a tailor’s, the kind where nobody asks what the work is for and the measurements go onto a card with no name at the top of it. Gwen’s instructions had run to three descriptions, according to the man with the tape: black, cut close, no labels on anything.

I gave him the old coat to work from. What was left of it. The Chilterns had opened it down one side and taken a sleeve to ribbons. He looked at the ruined thing for a while, then at me. He asked no questions, which was the entire reason Gwen used him.

What came back at the end of the week wasn’t armor. Armor is what you wear when you expect to be hit, and Gwen had been explicit that we weren’t to look like people expecting anything.

Mine was the same coat made whole again. Long and matte black, the weight sitting in the shoulders with nothing loose below them. The panels where the old one had been slashed were seamed now in a violet so dark it only showed when the light moved on it. The collar stood on its own when the wind took an interest. No buttons anybody could see, and no maker’s mark anywhere on it.

Lisa’s went closer to the floor than mine and fitted at the waist, paneled below so it moved when she did. Bone-white stitching ran the length of both cuffs.

“It isn’t a theme,” she said before either of us got there first.

Nox’s was built to disappear. A dark jacket cut close and creased like it had already been worked in, the collar high enough to pull up over the mouth, and a length of dark cloth at the throat that did exactly that when he tried it. He turned it over twice and put it on without saying anything, which from Nox was a standing ovation.

She dressed you, Azazel sounded delighted. Like dolls. Very expensive dolls.