Fall out of love with someone, I think. Or break a Connection. “Make baklava. Doesn’t that sound good right now?” is what I say out loud.
Zthane drops in the seat at the head of the expansive table that dominates most of the Guard conference room. “I don’t know what baklava is,” he says to me, “but I wish you could whip me up a double espresso like my mamán used to make for me after school on cold afternoons.” He pretends to shiver; the room is set at a comfortable seventy-two degrees. But then, Zthane hails from a Goblin region where the average temperature hovers around one hundred degrees year round; years of living in Annar has never taken the heat out of his blood.
“Did you actually ever experience anything below eighty degrees?” Iolani muses. A pen is chucked her way. She ducks in plenty of time.
Giuliana plunks a paper cup with a lid in front of Zthane. “I guess you’ll just have to suffice with this.”
He looks up at her, adoration stretching his lips wide.
“Before you offer up your first born, know it hails from the coffee cart outside,” the Elemental warns, choosing the chair next to him.
His smile doesn’t falter one bit. “Grazie.”
Dusky red spreads across Giules’ cheeks before she looks away. “Is everyone here?”
Iolani sits down across from me. “We’re still waiting on—”
“We’re here!” Karl steps into the room, Kellan right behind him.
Raul whistles. “You look like hell, hermano.”
As a matter of fact, both men do. Hair disheveled, clothes muddy and torn in a few places, smudges of dirt and plaster caked on their faces and brows. I must be the only one alarmed, because nearly everyone else in the room bursts into laughter.
Karl practically collapses in the chair next to me. “Shut it. All of you.”
Kellan sits next to Iolani. I try not to stare at him, but I fail miserably. He’s better than I, though. He hasn’t looked at me once since he entered the room. Hasn’t spoken to me once since the day we all left Costa Rica.
“You could say we got into a scrape,” he drawls, amusement dripping from every word as he taps a pen against the agenda in front of him.
More laughter. “Do tell,” Kiah Redrock says from further on down the table.
“Well,” Kellan says, “it all has to do with a spider.”
“SHUT IT,” Karl growls. He’s turned beet red.
“Kellan, expect to be benched for the foreseeable future if you do not finish this story,” Zthane says. Karl sighs deeply and crosses his arms.
Kellan is happy to oblige. “Apparently, this little spider dropped on Karl’s neck just as he was about to trigger the earthquake—”
“It was huge!” Karl barks. “Easily three inches across! Plus! It was a black widow, I’m sure of it.”
There are tears, people are laughing so hard. “As I was saying, it dropped on his neck, and in his panic to not . . .” Kellan grins across the table at Karl. “How’d you put it?”
“Screw you, Whitecomb.”
Kellan quirks one of his half-grins. “I think it was die. He was afraid of dying, or so he kept squealing, like his toddler would. Anyway, he started freaking the hell out. The spider finally hit the ground—”
“Goddamn thing bit me!” Karl sounds like he’s being strangled. “Here! On my neck!”
I peer at the back of his neck. The skin is smooth but dirty.
“So, of course, Karl figured it had to die an ugly death itself,” Kellan continues. “Which meant, he—”
“You didn’t.” Iolani cackles. “You smashed it, didn’t you?”
“Oh, he did,” Kellan grins. “Quite forcefully.”
Nearly every cell phone in the room is whipped out, so stats on the earthquake he caused just hours before on the Human plane can be disseminated. “Six-point-seven?” Raul’s eyes look like they’re about to pop out of his head. “But . . . Karl! It was supposed to be a three-point-one!”
I didn’t think it possible, but Karl slinks even further down in his chair.
“We were in an abandoned building that was situated right on top of the fault line,” Kellan says. “It was already falling apart. Karl simply helped demolish it. It just sucked that we were in it at the time.”
The guffaws in the room are deafening. It takes threats of bodily harm from Karl before petering out. “Well, Karl,” Zthane says, struggling to maintain a straight face, “I’m glad that in the battle of Magical versus Spider, the Magical won.”