He was silent and still now, and I looked at the band, circling it around and around my red wrist. I was a day-walking demon who couldn’t do magic. But I could feel wild magic in me, simmering. Was it coming from the band of silver? Or had it been there all the time, and I only now noticed it, now that my contact with the ley lines was utterly and absolutely cut off?

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Trent said, not understanding my silence. “A choice?”

I took a deep breath, pulling my gaze up as I gathered my thoughts.

“Yes. Yes it is,” I said, and he smiled weakly. “Thank you.”

It was what I wanted. What I had always wanted. So why did it feel so empty?

Thirty-two

Trent’s long black car pulled up to the curb, a soft hush in the dark. In an instant, Ivy was reaching for the handle. The front passenger’s door opened, and she was standing in the street, her eyes on the church’s steeple. Looking back in, she glanced first at Quen, then at Trent, sitting in the back with me and Bis, Lucy in her car seat between us.

“Thanks for the ride, Trent. Quen,” she said, her voice low but sincere. And then she was gone, boot heels clicking on the night-cooled pavement, visibly shaking off being too far from home for too long. Vampires truly were the homebodies of Inderland society, and it had been hard on her in ways I could never imagine. That Trent had chartered a specially designed, low-flying jet to get us home in hours, not days, had been a godsend.

“Tell your pilot his pressure control still sucks,” Jenks said through the open window in parting, and then darted to join Ivy. Giving me a toothy grin, Bis hopped to the open sunroof, and launched himself after them and into the dark.

I held a hand to my head to keep my hair from flying around in the draft from his wings, and Lucy frowned in her sleep, her hand flashing out as if she was falling. Together, Jenks, Ivy, and Bis ascended the stairs in the dark, pulling the heavy oak doors open to let out a flood of light and pixies. I glanced at the headache-inducing cloud of silk and gossamer, then settled back in the soft leather, reluctant to get out—even as glad as I was to get home.

A flash of liquid light turned into Jenks darting to the steeple as he checked in with the pixy on sentry duty. I heard a sharp wing chirp and a high-pitched harangue start. Jenks wasn’t happy about something. More reason to just sit for a moment.

With the sound of clicking metal, Quen undid his seat belt and got out. There were kids shouting somewhere in the next street over, and the revving of a car engine. The trunk whined open, and I shifted my new shoulder bag onto my lap. I didn’t know what had happened to my old one. My phone was gone, but at least Vivian had given me my scrying mirror—for what it was worth. “Thanks for the ride home,” I said to Trent softly, so as not to wake Lucy. “Don’t mind Jenks. The pressure was fine.”