Menai turned, coming face-to-face with Henri, who stood with his back and one boot braced against the wall. “How’s the tummy, shifter?”

His hand went to his stomach, where Athena had shot him with his own shotgun, but his gaze stayed steady on Menai. Henri was definitely into her. “It hurts. You want to rub it?”

She laughed. Menai stepped up to him, cupped his jaw and kissed him right on the mouth, and then sauntered out of the house, leaving Henri shocked and infinitely pleased. “Hell, if I knew getting shot in the belly was all it took to get her attention, I’d have done it sooner.”

Melinoe followed Menai, but as she went to step over the body by the door, she stopped and knelt by the creature. “Still clinging to life,” she murmured with a soothing voice, like an angel of mercy.

The creature lifted its head, looking pathetic and hopeful. A pang of empathy went through me. I knew from experience that not all of Athena’s creatures were mindless killers. Some were intelligent, starved for attention, or starved for an end to servitude and torture.

Mel ran her white hand over its head in a comforting gesture. The creature closed its eyes and shuddered, leaving me wondering if it had ever been touched so gently before. But it wouldn’t see the angel of mercy tonight. Mel placed her black hand over its forehead. Its body trembled, then arched up as she lifted her hand, pulling a black haze with a bit of brightness in its center from the creature’s head. When the haze withdrew completely, the creature’s body went limp and its head fell to the side.

Mel turned her hand over, staring raptly at the soul in the palm of her hand. Then she crushed it in her fist. Light spilled from the seams in her fingers and then died out. She opened her hand, glanced over at our astounded faces, and blew the ashes at us like a kiss good-bye.

An eerie silence descended in the wake of her departure.

Dub sat down beside me and let out a loud exhale. “That chick’s messed up. Makes the rest of us freaks look like the all-American family.” He shivered. “Gave me the heebie-jeebies. She’s even weirder than Vi.” He gave Violet an affectionate smile, which she returned. At some point she’d come back into the foyer, and I wondered how much she’d seen.

“I like her,” Violet remarked as she stared at the open door.

“Yeah, we could tell.”

Crank stepped over the bodies, head down, searching. She stopped and pulled her hammer from one of the minions’ skulls, made an “ick” face, and, muttering about how gross it was, took her hammer into the kitchen.

I got up, needing to shake off the creep factor Mel had left us with. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m hungry.”

“Hungry,” Henri repeated flatly. “Standing in a room full of dead monsters and you’re hungry?”

“What? I worked up an appetite.”

Sebastian’s soft laugh drew my attention. “It’s not like they’re going anywhere, Henri. We can drag them into the backyard and burn them later.”

We all went back into the kitchen as Dub regaled Sebastian with his awesome ironlike baguette.

Yep, just a normal day with the all-American family, I thought.

FOUR

THE IDEA OF DRAGGING CORPSES through the house and into the backyard was met with a lot of groans and muttered curses. No one felt like it. Especially after we’d just stuffed our bellies with oyster stew. But the bodies weren’t going to move themselves, so we pitched in, taking a leathery ankle or a bony wrist, tugging the dead out of the house. Once that was done, we wiped up the blood in the foyer and the long, bloody smears we’d made dragging bodies down the hall.

I joined the others on the spacious brick patio. Vines grew high on the fence surrounding the property, some connecting with the low-lying branches of the banana trees, growing up over the limbs to make a green shield around the property.

Violet liked to go out there and hide under the leaves. She reminded me of Pascal sometimes in her mannerisms, the way she loved all reptiles and the swamp, the way she scurried up things. . . .

I watched her as she climbed the back of a lichen-covered garden nymph. She put her elbows on the statue’s mossy shoulders and laid her hands on its head, resting her chin on top.

The corpses should have left me disgusted and nauseated, but I was more tired and frustrated than anything else. It might be a small pile of bodies in front of me, but it sure felt like there was a mountain of obstacles in my way—my curse, the Hands, Athena, Josephine . . .

Dub snapped his fingers, and a flame sprang from his fingertips. As the flame grew, he blasted the pile.

Heat blew over me. I stepped back, shielding my eyes as Henri let out a whopping curse.

“Oops,” Dub said with a wince as the brightness and initial heat blast faded, leaving behind bodies consumed in flames. “Sorry, guys. Sometimes it comes out of me too fast. Too much.”

“It’s getting harder to control,” Crank observed.

Pink bloomed beneath Dub’s cheeks. “Never used to be that way.”

Henri snorted. “It’s called puberty, dumbass. Everything grows. Powers. Hair. Body odor. Your johnson—”

“Jesus!” Dub yelled. “Shut up, Henri!”

Dub and Henri bickered all the time. They reminded me of brothers—the banter, the joking, the one-upping and embarrassing each other. But this time Dub didn’t give as good as he got. This time his irises seemed to glow like the fire that burned in front of us.

“Nice, Henri,” Sebastian said with a resigned sigh, which made Henri roll his eyes.

“You might be able to fly, Henri, but Dub can turn your wings crispy in a heartbeat. So you better watch it,” Crank warned, her lips set into a stubborn line.

“No shit,” Henri shot back. “Which is why he needs to start taking his power seriously. Otherwise, he’s gonna let loose and blow up the house or one of us. Yeah, I’m an ass. We all know this. I get on his case because he never listens.” He stared at Dub. “Nothing I said was wrong. Your power is growing because you’re getting older. It’ll get out of hand if you don’t learn to control it, master it now, before it gets too big for you.”

Dub just stared at Henri, but the spark disappeared from his eyes and the tension seemed to ease out of him. Dub once told me there were people and kids on the fringes of Novem society who were special. Gifted. Doué, he called them in French. Not witch, or vampire, or demigod/shifter. Just . . . different. His ability to summon fire out of thin air made him one of them.

Henri might suck at the delivery, but his message was spot-on. Dub needed to hone his talent or he’d end up screwed.

We all stared at the fire, lost in our own thoughts. Mine shifted to Athena’s message and then to the Hands.

“You were right, you know,” Sebastian said at length, his hands shoved deeply into the front pockets of his jeans. “About Athena. As soon as you give her what she wants, she’ll try her best to take you out.”

He lifted his gaze from the flames. His gray eyes were bleak. The concern for me was evident, but behind that was a vague despair. It was hard to look away; hard to stay where I was and not close the step between us and offer what comfort I could. He was struggling, and I wasn’t sure how to help him.

“You should be the one making the terms, Ari,” Henri said. “You’re the one who can heal her. You’re the one who can bring her kid back to life.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” I replied. “I’ve only done it once. And Sebastian was stone for a blink of time compared to that baby.”

“Yeah, but Athena thinks you can do it.” Crank turned an old cooler over and sat on top of it. “And that’s saying something, you know? Plus, she’ll give you that vow. So if you word it right, like Menai said, then she won’t be able to kill you. Or us,” she added with a crooked smile.

“You can make any terms you want if you get your hands on those . . . Hands.” Some of the lightness came back into Dub’s sober expression as he sat down next to Crank.

“The Hands are your golden ticket, Ari,” Crank went on. “You get those and everything will be okay.”

“Yeah, no more snaky-snaky.”

Crank hit Dub with her cabbie hat. “You’re such an idiot.”

“No, I’m funny. There’s a difference.”

“You hit one of those creatures with a loaf of bread,” she pointed out.

“Well I couldn’t exactly fry them inside the house. And it was a hard loaf of bread! Don’t be insulting my Baguette of Terror.”

The corners of her mouth twitched. For a beat no one said anything, and then we burst out laughing.

Dub grinned widely as if that had been his plan all along. He poked Crank in the ribs with his elbow. “See. Ain’t it nice laughing by this nice fire?”

Crank rolled her eyes. Henri groaned. Sebastian shook his head, smiling. A campfire of corpses. Sure, real nice. But that was life in New 2. In the French Quarter you had the rich and wealthy Novem, the restored buildings and shops. Out in the wilds, in the swamps and the ruins of Midtown, you had creatures that made even the high-and-mighty Novem take note, and here in the GD, you had squatters and misfits and kids like us who did what was necessary to survive. If that meant grave robbing, stealing, whatever, so be it. There were no schools, no parents to teach right from wrong. What was learned was by trial and error, by life and death. I had more respect for the kids than I did for most adults I’d met in my life.

A breeze rustled through the high grass and weeds surrounding the large patio. Smoke blew in our direction. Sebastian muttered an oath and stepped toward the fire. Energy sparked in his hands as he waved them toward the flames, sending the smoke to the sky.

“Nice,” I commented with a half smile.

He shrugged, glancing down at his hands. “Magic’s good for some things, I guess.”

It was good for a lot of things, things more important than shifting smoke, and Sebastian wasn’t afraid to use whatever power he had to protect us and fight by my side. Much to his grandmother’s dismay.