Chapter 1

I’m sure Ohio’s a perfectly nice place, once you get to know it. For me, right now, it was akin to one of the inner circles of Hell.

“How,” I demanded, “can the air possibly contain this much moisture? It’s like going swimming.”

My sister, walking beside me in the late-afternoon sun, grinned. “Use your magic to push it off you.”

“Too much work. It just keeps coming back,” I grumbled. Jasmine, like me, had been raised in the dry heat of Arizona, so I couldn’t understand why she didn’t have the same revulsion I did to the monsoon conditions of high summer in the Midwest. We both wielded weather magic, but hers was focused primarily on water, so maybe that explained her blasé attitude. Maybe it was just the resilience of youth, seeing as she was about ten years younger than me. Or maybe, just maybe, it was because she wasn’t nearly five months pregnant and hauling around an extra ten pounds or so of offspring who seemed intent on overheating me, sucking my resources, and pretty much slowing down every goddamned thing I did.

It was also possible hormones were making me a little irritable.

“We’re almost there,” said a polite voice on the other side of me. That was Pagiel. He was the son of Ysabel, one of the bitchiest gentry women I knew—and she didn’t even have excess hormones as an excuse. Pagiel hadn’t inherited his mother’s personality, thankfully, and possessed a knack for crossing between the Otherworld and the human world that rivaled mine and Jasmine’s. He was roughly the same age as her, and the fact that I had to have a teenage escort to get me to my doctor’s appointments only added insult to the many injuries I’d endured these last few months.

A block ahead, the Hudson Women’s Health Clinic stood among its carefully pruned pear trees and neat rows of geraniums. The business was right on the line of the commercial and residential zones of the city and tried to give the appearance that it was part of the latter. It wasn’t the pretty landscaping that made me keep coming back to this sauna, walking half a mile each time between the Otherworldly gate and the clinic. It wasn’t even the medical care, which was fine as far as I could tell. Really, when it came down to it, this place’s biggest appeal was that so far, no one had tried to kill me here.

That cursed wet heat had me dripping with sweat by the time we reached the building. I was used to sweating in the desert, but something about this climate just made me feel sticky and gross. Fortunately, a wave of air-conditioning hit us as we walked through the door. As glorious as it was for me, it was a miracle for Pagiel. I always liked seeing his face when he felt that first blast. He’d grown up in the Otherworld, where fairy—or gentry, the term I preferred—magic could work wonders. He wouldn’t blink an eye at magical feats that would make a human gape. But this? Cold air produced by a machine? It blew his mind every time. No pun intended.