Leo poked me in the back. “Keep moving.”
“Don’t drop the merchandise,” I said sourly. “I don’t have time to track down another flawless cursed diamond.”
Rohan, Kane, Ari, and I had spent the past couple of weeks tracking the gem down using intel gleaned from David Security International, the Brotherhood’s public persona. Actually retrieving it had been a bitch of a mission involving oversized crab demons and a taste of being buried alive.
I placed my hand on my head as a makeshift hat against the relentless sun.
“You should have bought me a Popsicle,” Leo said.
“Hand over the ten bucks you owe me and you can pick your flavor.”
“A real friend wouldn’t have me pay up.”
“Be sure to mention that when you find one.” I wiped sweat off my brow, silently chanting eyes front. “Renege and I start charging interest. I’m not a good person like Rohan is.”
“Yeah, yeah. You have the best boyfriend in the world.”
“I do.” I veered around the jagged edge of a rusted door that was sticking out of a stack of crushed minivans. “Plus, he knows I’m no dilettante.”
“Okay, you need to stop with the app.”
“Expanding my vocabulary is an interesting and useful endeavor.”
“Nee.” She spun me around, the diamond behind her back, and turned her heart-shaped face up to mine, her brown eyes suffused with pity. “This isn’t your parents with Ari. It isn’t even Cole. Rohan doesn’t want a Lily imitation. He wants you.”
Any heartfelt sentiment I was about to spew was kiboshed as an araculum, a spider demon the size of a kitten, skittered across my foot, training its creepy rows of eyes on me.
I screamed, jerking back so hard I smacked my tailbone on an engine hoist. “Fuuuck!”
Leo crouched down by the araculum.
“Don’t touch it!” I yelled.
“I’ve touched worse.”
“That’s on you for hooking up with Drio.” I hissed through the burn, rubbing my back.
The demon scurried off under a VW camper and I heaved a sigh of relief.
Until he returned.
With buddies.
My first thought was “The kids!” then I had no time to think because dozens of araculum poured from the cars, swarming us. I burst into a full-body electric current, doing a cartoony jig so they couldn’t crawl up my legs. My normally ghost-pale skin turned blue, animated lightning bolts sliding over it as I slammed the monsters with everything I had.
Only once I’d dispatched the last of my attackers did I see Leo’s blood-covered hands. She clutched an araculum and was exsanguinating the fuck out of it. The demon was literally deflating, its legs spasming, and its body shriveling in on itself. Its fur was so soaked, the demon resembled a bloody sponge. The run-off dripped over Leo’s wrists, falling with quiet plops on her cute blue pedicure and running into the dirt next to the velvet bag laying at her feet.
Hot copper filled the air and my stomach heaved. Way to make me not care about the diamond.
With a soft pop, the final araculum winked out of existence, sucked dry. Leo had activated the sweet spot to kill it.
I forced myself not to step back and injected as much not-wigged-out cheer into my voice as I could. “Wow. Can you scent me when I’m on my period? Like a shark?”
Leo’s eyes flashed red as she licked the blood off the inside of her wrist, dainty, like a cat. “No.”
A tense silence fell over us, broken only by the crackle of Leo halfway unwrapping a power bar she’d stashed in the pocket of her sundress. Gotta love a dress with pockets. Even one with bloody fingerprints now dotting it. She crammed a piece of it into her mouth, barely chewing it before swallowing. “This is why I have to eat all the time.” I looked blankly at her. “The redcap goblin thing. If I don’t eat?” She ripped the rest of the bar open. “I crave blood. Probably have to rampage and pillage to satisfy it.”
My eyes bounced around for a safe place to look because the savagery of her bloody hands and feet were an unnerving contrast to my adorable friend. “That would suck,” I said carefully. “Hard to fit that in to your school schedule.”
“And work. Rampaging doesn’t give me extended medical.”
“What happens if you do get all bloodlusty and don’t satisfy it?” I braced myself. I wasn’t going to electrocute my bestie but her eyes still had a slight red haze to them.
She swallowed the other half of the energy bar and the haze faded. “I’d feel inclined to sport a hat kept wet with blood. The hottest accessory for any fashion-conscious redcap.” She twisted the torn wrapper, her bleak eyes at odds with her flippancy. “I’m scared one day I won’t make the right choice.”
I’d never seen Leo’s goblin magic and she’d never volunteered, so I’d never pushed her on it before. Seeing my best friend vamp out didn’t even phase me in the grand picture of what my life had become. What did phase me was the grand picture of what my life had become.
I should have reassured her that she’d always make the right choice, because at my continued silence Leo scooped the velvet bag off the ground and stomped off. “This is why I didn’t want you to ever see it. Because you can’t unsee it. Like that good-one-side dolphin we found on spring break.”
I ran after her. “I shoot electricity, my twin suffocates people with shadows, and I’m dating Ginsu Man. We’re all freaks, Leo. You’re not a half-rotted aquatic mammal. You’re my best friend and I love you.” I pointed at her chin. “You got a little schmutz there.”
Leo licked the blood off, her guarded eyes trained on mine.
I yawned and cocked an eyebrow.
A long, assessing look later, my bestie gave me a very shark-like grin that I swear involved too many teeth. “You scared of me?”
“Little bit. Yeah. Happy?” We ended up in the back left corner of the lot, a large unused space that had been bulldozed into uneven dirt in anticipation of more car storage.
“Yup.” She stuffed the wrapper in her pocket, then glanced at her hands. “It’s been way too long. I needed that fix.”
“Don’t make yourself sick. If you need to, suck ’em dry, baby.”
“I always do,” she said.
“Phrasing.”
She patted my cheek, leaving a sticky, bloody smear. “Should have set up a safe word.”
I spun in a circle, sunlight winking off the cars and cooking me alive. No signs of zizu demon life at all. “Now what? Either the diamond is a dud or the demon isn’t–”
More giggling from the two chubby, and now grubby, kindergarteners. Sunlight caught their baby-feather hair tufting off their heads. Wait. Zizu had feathers. These kids had been following us for a reason and it wasn’t because they were little dorks.
Bingo! “Leo! Show the diamond!”
She was already opening the bag.
Tony and Clea giggled and ran off. Nope. I wasn’t playing hide and seek with a couple of demons.