She smiled. “I understand. In fact, one of my first initiatives was weaning IPCA from faerie magic dependency. I think you’ll be pleased to find that we now use them a mere forty percent of the amount we used to.”
“Forty percent, huh? That’s still about one hundred percent more than I’m happy with.”
“We’ve got a way for you to be effective without any faerie interaction whatsoever.”
“Effective doing what?”
She glanced at David, who scowled. “I’m not having any part of this.”
“With that in mind,” Raquel said, a haughty lift to her eyebrows, “I’d appreciate it if you left the room. I can’t give classified information to two dead people, after all.”
I was confused until I remembered that David had worked for the now defunct American Paranormal Agency eighteen or so years ago, at which point he faked his own death to get out. That seemed to be a popular option around here. Of course, I didn’t fake mine; Raquel fabricated it for me, so that they wouldn’t come looking after I disappeared.
David huffed. “You seem to forget that I’m Evie’s legal guardian.”
“And you seem to forget that there’s absolutely nothing legal about your guardianship, considering all the documents were forged.”
“Don’t start with me about legality! An international organization acting with absolute impunity on American shores, not to mention—”
The front door flew open and Lend ran in. My heart did a happy flip in my chest, like it did every time he surprised me. His usual look, a dark-haired dark-eyed hottie, shimmered over his actual appearance, which was like water in human form.
And absolutely gorgeous.
“Evie!” He threw his arms around me, picking me up off the floor in a grip so tight I was suddenly aware that I had, in fact, sustained some serious bruisage.
I laughed through the pain, happy that at least I got some extra Lend time out of this whole mess. He put me down, holding me at arm’s length and examining me. “Are you okay?”
“Just some bruises. I’m fine, though, really.”
“How did you get away?”
Oh, crap.
Raquel and David gave me matching puzzled looks. “How did you get away?” Raquel asked. In their eagerness to bicker they had neglected to ask me. I kind of preferred that.
I bit my lip. “I, well, we were high? Really, really high. And it was this weird cloud and lightning and faerie thing. I didn’t know where it was taking me or why, and I was so scared I did the only thing I could think of.”
“Which was?” Lend prodded, worry shadowing his face.
I shrugged, a small, guilty gesture. “I took some.” Hating the concern in his eyes, I rushed on. “Only a little bit—not enough to hurt it, really, just enough to surprise it, and then we fell, and it tried to drop me, but I grabbed on and some trees broke my fall. And afterward the Cloud Freak was okay, really, it was. Just kind of pissed. And then it flew off.” I didn’t mention the erratic flight pattern. It was probably woozy.
My story was greeted with dead silence. And suddenly instead of feeling guilty, I was downright mad. Who were they to judge me? It’s not like I was going all Vivian, sucking the life out of everything around me. “I didn’t have any other options! You should be glad I had a way to defend myself.”
Lend quickly shook his head, squeezing my hand. “I am. Really. I just remember what it did to you before, and I worry that—”
“You don’t need to! It was barely anything. Promise.” Vivian had gone crazy and sucked the souls out of every paranormal she could find, under the guise of “freeing” them from this world, but really because she liked how it made her feel. Having all those souls in me after I took them from her—for a few minutes I was an immortal. It was strange and wonderful and dizzying to be that powerful, that disconnected from my mortal life. For a terrible moment I was tempted to abandon mortality entirely … to take Lend’s soul away from him. I didn’t like to think about it too much.
“Is it still inside you?” Lend asked.
I hadn’t even thought to look. A nervous pit formed in my stomach as I held out my arms, searching for anything under my skin. Nothing. But there—a tiny spark under my palm. And then it was gone. It was probably nothing. Definitely nothing.
“Nope,” I said with certainty. “Must not have taken enough for it to have an effect. Can’t see anything but plain old Evie.”
Lend grinned, pulling me in closer. “You’ve never been plain.”
David cleared his throat. “Well then, as long as you’re okay, that’s what’s important. Why don’t you two go get something to eat?”
Raquel’s lips pursed in annoyance. Apparently driving her crazy was a father-son thing for the Pirellos. Lend had the same knack for it. “I haven’t finished speaking with her,” Raquel said.
David looked ready to argue otherwise, so I jumped in. “Relax, it’s okay. She can tell me what she needs to; what’s it going to hurt?”
Lend and David wore matching frowns. There was no way Raquel and I would be able to have an actual conversation. And, unlike Lend and his dad, I liked her. A lot. I wanted to know how she’d been, find out how things went after I left, stuff like that. Suddenly my old life was sitting in the room with me, and I realized I missed parts of it.
Lish, especially, but she was gone forever.
I turned to Lend. “Why don’t you go see your mom? Ask her if she knows anything about the sylph.”
“Sylph? Really?” He looked at his dad, understanding how excited David would be over this. Or maybe Lend’s interest was based on the fact that he was half elemental. I wondered how much that world called to him, how much he wanted to know about it and therefore himself.
Best not to let him dwell on it. I wanted him to stay firmly in this world. “Yup. So your mom?” I would have offered to go with him later, but the truth was Cresseda still kind of scared me. Elemental immortals function on such a different plane than us, there’s very little that connects. Speaking to one is like trying to understand theoretical mathematics before you have your times tables down—you come away doubting you even understood what numbers were to begin with.
It was so weird to think that Lend came from Cresseda. He was so human, so connected. But that’d have to fade eventually. Would he slowly stop caring, slowly become like his mother, beautiful and strange and forever other? Or would he just snap one day—give up this life for an eternal one? How long would it be before he became like the other immortal elementals?
“She’s more likely to show up for you,” David said to Lend. I looked over at him. He was so good at hiding the pain from his son, but I could see it written in the downward turn of his shoulders.
Please, please don’t let that be me someday.
Lend seemed torn about leaving me with Raquel, but nodded. “I’ll be right back.” He hurried out the door.
“Before there are any more distractions, let me lay out the terms.” Raquel steered me to the couch and sat down. “You would be working for IPCA as a temporary, contract employee.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means that you work for us because you want to, and only on the projects that you choose. If you want