I swallowed hard against the taste of metallic bile. Tony was still unconscious, his little boy features slack, and Clea, lip trembling, kept apologizing to her daddy. I couldn’t leave these demons alive. Human life trumped demon and Eddy had already had one brush with death.
The more firmly I entrenched myself in this fight against evil, the more my moral compass was more of a moral tightrope.
“Is Daddy going to be okay?” Clea asked.
“Yeah.”
She nodded and returned to her brother, trying to shake him awake.
Coward that I was, I waited until her face was bent down towards Tony’s and I couldn’t see her eyes before killing her. The fact that I dispatched of both demons with two quick strikes was little consolation.
Eddy cried brokenly, his entire body racked with sobs.
“I’m sorry.” There was no forgiveness in the hate-filled glower he shot me. I picked up the discarded sledgehammer and stalked off.
Waves of anxiety rolled off Leo, running beside me to keep up, the diamond clutched in her closed fist.
I waited until Eddy could no longer see us, and then I wailed on the first intact car I found, obliterating its windshield and smashing its doors until they crumpled and broke off their frames.
I tossed the sledgehammer away with a shriek, my chest heaving.
Leo hugged me. “You had to do it. Him wanting to parent them, knowing they were demons? It wasn’t normal. It couldn’t work.”
“What’s so wrong with wanting normal? Maybe he couldn’t have kids any other way? Maybe–”
“No. We can’t obsess about maybe. This is the hand we’re dealt. Normal isn’t always in the cards and the sooner people face that fact, the better.” Her voice was steel. Someday I’d ask her how hard it had been to reconcile herself to being half-demon.
“Eddy playing dad to demons may have been deluded,” I said. “But wanting that connection? Not because of proximity or adrenaline rush bonding or because I’m the only female option in his Rasha life, but an unassailable certainty that Ro’s mine and I’m his? I mean…” Fuck it. There was no way to recover from that Freudian slip.
Leo blinked at me. “Wow.”
“I’m just saying it wasn’t deluded of Eddy to try for everything he’d ever wanted.” I spun around and walked out of the lot.
4
Hastings Skatepark was located at the edge of the Italian Gardens on Vancouver’s east side. The whir of wheels on concrete overpowered the cascade of water trickling out of the faces carved into the ivy-wrapped stone pillars in the garden and running along tiled channels. However, nothing could drown out the screams from riders on the Hellevator or The Beast at Playland, the huge amusement park sitting smack dab between the gardens and the racetrack to the east.
Rohan greeted me at the skatepark’s turnstile gate, sporting baggy cargos worn low on his hips and a T-shirt that had been washed so many times that whatever cool boarder logo had originally adorned it was now a vague suggestion of a line. His skateboard was tucked under one arm.
“Cute disguise,” I said.
His eyes hit my face for a second, needle-sharp. I’d splashed a small lake’s worth of cold water on my red-rimmed eyes at Leo’s before driving here but I guess it hadn’t been enough.
I edged past him into the brightly tagged, multi-level skate park, with its checkered concrete. “No Mercy” graffiti was sandwiched between a painted cartoon bunny and realistic-looking bulldog on the main bowl, while traffic beyond the park provided a soothing white noise.
“Hey.” He tugged gently on my elbow. “What happened to Plan B?”
I stepped into his open arms, burying my head in his neck. His silky curls tickled my cheek and the scent of musk and iron enveloped me. Ro provided a safe harbor with his arms wrapped around me and my head tucked in under his chin. My breathing calmed and my tension rolled away like an outbound tide, my body resonating against his. He was my personal tuning fork, not for pitch, but alignment with the universe.
He kissed my head. “Whatever went down, let it go.”
I shook it off. Not in a boppy Taylor Swift way. In a “cram that sucker into the overstuffed, creaking box of things in my psyche I couldn’t deal with” way.
I leaned on the large “No Graffiti” sign bolted to the chain link fence and filled Rohan in on when and how magic combined and that I’d been right about demon coercion. “But wait, ladies and gentlemen. Order in the next fifteen minutes and we’ll throw in a prophecy, absolutely free! ‘Tick tock goes the clock, blood to rule the might. Tick tock speeds the clock, the lovers reunite.’ Judging from the first part, I’d say a witch or group of them used blood as a binding agent.”
“You got the how on the purple magic.” Rohan high-fived me. “The timeline and lovers don’t mean anything to me, though.”
“Too bad we don’t have an Acme Corp gadget to spit out the answers to all our questions.”
“That’d be more Wayne Enterprises technology,” he said.
“You are such a nerd.”
“It’s common sense. Acme is low-tech. You’re talking major computing power.”
“Super nerd.” I poked him in the chest. “And don’t bother to deny it, guy who insisted on wearing a different superhero costume every day in grade one.”
Rohan knocked his hip against mine. “It was endearing.”
A laugh burst out of me. “Your precious Ro-mantics are the ones that called it ‘endearing.’ You do read your fan boards. I knew it!”
“Do not.” Rohan dropped his board onto the concrete. “There’s only one person here reading my fan boards, and it’s not me, sweetheart.”
“It’s not me either,” I backtracked. “Leo told me.”
“Uh-huh.” He got a pious expression. “My mom reads them and shares the good stuff.”
“You lie like a rug. How’s it going with the dealer?”
Rohan nodded at some skinny kid riding the lip of one of the bowls. “That’s him. Elliot. I’ve been working on getting his source.”
“He’s good.”
“He’s okay.” Rohan’s critical expression matched his tone. “He’s got decent tech but no gnar.”
I shot him a blank look.
“No style. You wanna have both when you skate.”
“Whatever, Tony Hawk. Go. I’ll hang out, watch the park. See if I can spot any other deals going down.”
Rohan kissed my nose. “Put on sunscreen. I put some in your purse this morning.” He pushed off, his body one with the board as he carved a lazy semi-circle.
I blinked. I didn’t know he could skate.
He rode up a graffiti-tagged curved ramp, hovering on his back wheels at the top for an impossibly long moment. Right when gravity had to make him its bitch and a wipe-out was imminent, Rohan popped his board up, catching it mid-air in both hands briefly before reversing directions. Riding halfway back down, he jumped his board onto the railing beside the ramp, skating down the edge with effortless grace and nailing his dismount.
The showoff then had the audacity to wink at me.