• • •

Anxious and stressed, I rode back to Morella with Lon that afternoon in his black pickup. In the back was a generator he had in storage, just to help me get some temporary lighting in the bar. I spent most of the ride thinking about my mother. Just because Nivella was dead didn’t mean that my mother was necessarily alive. The demon could’ve tortured my parents to death and died later of something unrelated.

That’s what I told myself, several times, until Lon turned on the radio to distract me. A local news station was reporting Tambuku’s robbery, along with several others in the area. It pissed me off, to be honest. Why couldn’t we make the news for winning some award or hosting a noteworthy event? Seemed like my failure to catch the robbers was being broadcast for the world to hear. Look at the mighty magician: she couldn’t stop two douchebags from maiming her business partner and making off with the register!

After we set up the generator in the alley, I left Amanda and one of our busboys to wait for the electrician to show up and fix our fuse box. Lon and I walked two blocks over to the corner shop that had been robbed.

Like many of the businesses in this area of the city, Diablo Market had a small Nox symbol on its sign, indicating it was demon-friendly. It had once been a run-of-the-mill place to buy Cokes and candy bars, and beneath the counter, cheap valrivia and the latest issue of Savage Shemales. Last year it remodeled and started carrying overpriced organic juice and Brazilian chocolate. I liked it better when it was trashy.

We waited in front of a coffee house for the walk signal to flash so we could cross the street to the market. One of the baristas waved at me through the front window. Davey. He was a couple years younger than me and cute in a starving-artist, nice-guy kind of way.

Lon made a small noise. Passing cars kicked up a wind that blew open his thin, brown leather jacket, revealing a taupe T-shirt tucked into jeans. My eyes dropped to his fly. This particular pair of jeans, though pricy enough to be hanging around the hips of a male model, had a permanent, whirlpool-shaped dark mark below his belt buckle, caused by developer chemicals in his darkroom. I swear he wore them on purpose to distract me.

“Who’s that?”

“Huh?” I tore my eyes away from Lon’s hypnotic dark spot to see him jerking his head toward the coffee shop window, his gold-and-green halo trailing. “Oh, that’s nobody.”

“Well, nobody sure is staring pretty hard at you.”

“I highly doubt that.”

Green eyes squinted down at me. “Then why are you embarrassed?”

“I’m not embarrassed,” I protested, but I totally was.

“And why is he jealous?”

I glanced at Davey through the glass and gave him a tight smile while speaking to Lon. “You can’t possibly read his feelings this far away . . . can you?” We were a good twenty feet from Davey. No way his empathic knack worked from this distance.

“He’s got a jealous look on his face,” Lon explained.

“Oh,” I said, a little relieved. For a moment, I wondered if Lon’s knack was getting stronger. If this enhanced-knack phenomenon was affecting all Earthbounds, I’d be in some major trouble. “Davey and I went out once. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“He’s a kid,” Lon grumbled. “Probably doesn’t even have to shave.”

And a year ago, I would’ve laughed at the idea of dating a man Lon’s age, but now . . . well, I couldn’t disagree: Davey seemed like a kid to me, too. “I said we went out once. There was a reason for that.”

“Which was?”

I glanced down at his dark swirl again, then met his gaze. “No chemistry.”

Lon tried—and failed—to suppress a cocky look while the streetlight turned yellow. I pulled his jacket closed, then jumped when he cupped two bossy palms around my ass.

“Hey,” I protested weakly.

He gave my cheeks a slow squeeze. “Just want to show the scrawny barista what he’s missing.”

“If I knew you were so fond of PDA, I’d have never taken up with you.”

“Liar.”

I chuckled.

“Hey,” he said. “Stop worrying about things you can’t control. If your mother is alive, we’ll deal with it.”

I gave him a soft smile. “You’re my favorite person, you know.”

“You’re my favorite person, too.”

Our private code. A normal couple would’ve already exchanged the L-word, but Lon was uncomfortable expressing emotions. Being constantly bombarded with everyone else’s feelings made him apprehensive about wearing his heart on his sleeve. I also wondered if his failed marriage made him guarded. Understandable, if it did. But no way was I saying it first, regardless of how I felt. Besides, this worked just fine for us.

“Light’s changing,” he said, letting his fingers trail over my back as he released his grip on me. “Come on.”

Holding his hand, I matched his stride, ponytail swinging across my shoulders, and stuffed my free hand inside the pocket of my black hoodie. It had an embroidered dragon on the back and the word KOREA curved over it in big block letters—something Jupe and I found in a Morella thrift store a couple weeks back.

The handwritten sign on the market’s door looked similar to the one I’d stuck on my bar’s: CLOSED TEMPORARILY FOR REPAIRS. WILL REOPEN NEXT WEEK. Yet, the lights were on inside, unlike at Tambuku. I rapped on the door until a stooped-over elderly Latino man with a dark green halo peeped from behind a rack of freeze-dried fruit snacks. I waved and smiled.