Chapter 37: Smoke and Mirrors - Part 2

Tristan pulled a cigarette out of his jacket pocket and turned it between his fingers, but didn't light it. 'Liam Dawnstar. I've looked into his whole life on paper. He has an engineering degree, was a foster child, has no criminal record and has no memberships or subscriptions to anything weirder than a streaming service.' He set the cigarette against his lower lip. 'Doesn't exactly scream "occult".'

"No," I said.

"So how does someone like him end up tangled with someone like you." He wasn't quite asking. "I don't think he summoned you himself. Doesn't seem the type. Did he even know what he was getting into?"

I thought about it for exactly one second. The honest answer was also, technically, the only answer. "It just happened. Our paths collided one day and that was that." I kept my hands loose in my lap. "He didn't know what he was getting into. Not at first."

Neither of those statements was a lie. I was reasonably proud of that.

"Right," Tristan said.

"You agreed to no personal questions."

He lit the cigarette. "I said I'd try to be professional. Try being the operative word." Smoke curled toward the ceiling. "But fine. No more personal questions."

Daniel shifted in his chair. Tristan watched him with faint amusement and then looked back at me.

"Here's a professional one, then." He leaned forward and rested one arm across the desk. "How do you know his soul isn't in his body? That's specific. That's not I ran a spell and got a vague reading specific, that's I know the answer and I'm working backwards specific." He tapped ash into the saucer. "Demons deal in souls. So I'll ask plainly. Are you actually looking for Liam, or are you just collecting?"

The cigarette smoke reached Daniel. He turned his head and coughed once into his fist.

I took a moment. Not because I needed it, but because answering immediately would have been its own kind of tell.

I gave it a moment. The thing about Tristan was that he'd watched me through most of the last twenty minutes and something in the way he held that cigarette, patient, unbothered, told me a lie would cost more than it bought. He'd know. Not the shape of it, perhaps, but that something failed to line up cleanly.

Still, the whole truth wasn't his to have, and wouldn't be until I knew who had hired him and why someone else wanted to find my original body. But a partial truth, correctly shaped, was still true.

"I don't know exactly what happened to him," I said. "What I know is that his soul isn't where it's supposed to be, because if it were, I would know. His soul belongs to me." I held Tristan's gaze. "To find out what happened to it, I need to find the body first. Whatever was done to him happened there. The body is the beginning of the answer."

Tristan sat back and took a long pull from the cigarette.

Daniel coughed again, properly this time.

Tristan exhaled. "Figures. You lot are never just altruistic about it."

"Are you done?"

"For now." He stubbed the cigarette out, reached down below the desk, and came back up with two manila folders. He dropped them both onto the oak surface between us. "Let's compare notes."

*

The rain had picked up while we were inside. I pulled the umbrella from my ring as we stepped through the metal door, shaking it out one-handed before it could soak through my jacket.

Daniel walked straight into it without breaking stride. His car was parked maybe thirty feet up the street and he clearly considered that a negligible distance.

"So," I said, falling into step beside him. "Ancient magic."

"It's something."

"Is it? Because in my experience, ancient magic is what you write when you have no idea what kind of magic was used. It's a placeholder. It means the residue didn't match any catalogue entry and he didn't want to say so outright." I stepped around a puddle. "Every second novel does it. Terrible shorthand."

Daniel glanced over. "Still more than we had yesterday."

"Barely. It might have meant something if he'd let me take the crystal. As it stands, we're waiting on his contact to surface, and we have no timeline for that and no way to push it." I turned the umbrella slightly against the wind. "We're not actually further forward. We're just aware that we're stuck."

"We could go back to the warehouse," Daniel said. "Together, this time."

The warehouse. The booths, the low lighting, the particular quality of that air, warm and close and charged with something that had less to do with atmosphere than with the concentration of bodies in it. Valerian's hand at my shoulder. The slow, unhurried hours of it.

I shook my head. "Let's go back to yours. We'll think better there."

Daniel clicked the car unlocked. He looked at me across the roof of it, rain dotting his jacket. "Do you want to drive?"

I turned the question over. Behind us, Tristan's door was shut. No light in the narrow gap beneath it.

"Are you sure?" I said. "I haven't really driven. Since." I didn't finish it, but he knew what I meant.

He shrugged and dug into his pocket. "As long as you promise not to total it." He tossed the keys underhanded and called, "Here, catch."

My hand was already up. The keys landed clean in my palm.

"Nice," he said.

"There are benefits." I walked around to the driver's side.

The seat was set for Daniel's height. I found the adjustment lever and walked it forward until the pedals were reachable, then tilted the backrest two notches. The steering wheel was cold through my palms. Familiar weight, familiar geometry. I'd driven this car before, or rather my hands remembered a version of it, some aggregated muscle recall that didn't belong to this body but worked through it anyway.

Daniel settled into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut. His gaze dropped for a moment before it came back up.

"It's fine," I said.

"I wasn't—"

"Daniel." I checked the mirror. "It'd be stranger if you didn't. And after everything I've gotten up to in the last few weeks, I genuinely don't mind."

He was quiet for a moment. "Was it really that bad?"

The rain tapped the windscreen in slow, uneven intervals.

"At first," I said. I thought about how to put the rest of it. "Then you get used to it. And then you start to enjoy parts of it, but you tell yourself you're just adapting. Coping. Being rational about an irrational situation."

"And then?"

"And then you stop telling yourself anything at all." I checked the mirror, indicated out of habit, pulled away from the kerb. "You just do it."

"I'm sorry," he said.

The road was quiet. A bus shelter slid past on the left, a woman under it with a pram tilted inward to keep the rain off.

"Don't be." I kept my eyes on the road ahead. "You didn't do anything. It's just what happened." I took the next left, following the route back toward his place from memory. "It's fine. I'm fine."

The wipers swept again.

*

I pulled into the space on Daniel's street behind me and cut the engine. Somewhere on the last stretch, the rain had stopped, leaving the road dark and reflective under the orange street lamps. I sat for a moment with both hands still on the wheel, before getting out.

Before I could tell it to, my spine arched and my arms lifted overhead. The sound that tore out of me was embarrassingly involuntary. It was low and satisfied — the kind of noise that belonged in a different context entirely. Something in my throat hummed with it. Each vertebra from my tailbone to my neck seemed to sigh in turn, one small pleasure building on the next.

Daniel had come around from the passenger side. He opened his mouth.

"Not a word," I said.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"Good." I dropped my arms and started walking up the pavement towards his door. "Come on."

He fell into step beside me. The concrete was still wet, reflecting the light from the lamp above his gate in a long, wobbly stripe.

"So, what's the plan?" he asked. "From here."

"Poke around for a day or two. Then go back."

He slowed down slightly. "Back where?"

I laughed. My voice was quieter than I expected. "Where does a demon go back to, Daniel?"

"Right. Obviously."

"I'll be back next weekend, though. So don't forget about the circle." I stopped at the front step and waited while he dug out his keys.

"Same time?"

"Probably." The lock turned and the door swung inward. I followed him into the narrow hallway, the familiar smell of the house closing around me. "I'll most likely have to bring others with me. They've already complained about this trip. More specifically, they complained about me going alone."

Daniel pushed the door shut behind us. "Aria and Isabella?"

"Yeah. Them."

He shrugged his jacket off and hung it on the hook. "Should I be worried?"

I thought about it seriously for a moment. "They probably won't try anything. Probably." I moved through to the sitting room and stopped by the arm of the sofa. "Just don't agree to sleep with them. Aria especially."

He hung his keys on the hook below the jacket. "I wasn't exactly planning to, but why specifically?"

"Because if you do, she'll drag Isabella in. And then she'll try to drag me in. And I genuinely do not want to think about what excuse I could give for why that's a terrible idea."

Daniel leaned against the doorframe. The corner of his mouth moved. "But think about it, three suc—"

"Stop." I pointed at him.

"Hear me out—"

"Do not finish that sentence." I held his gaze. "I mean it."

He held up both hands.

"Good." I sat down on the sofa and pulled one knee up. The soft, well-worn leather took my weight without complaint. "Because if that ever actually happened, I would never be able to look you in the eye the same way again. Not now. Not after I got my own body back."

Daniel dropped his hands. The amusement left his face. "Yeah. No, you're right. Sorry. That was a stupid joke."

"It was." But I didn't mean it.

He crossed to the low shelf by the television, crouched down, and came back up with two controllers. He held one out. "Wanna play?"

I took it. "Sure."

He sat at the other end of the sofa, leaving the middle cushion between us, and turned the console on.