Page 68 of Marked by the Demigod

Her phone rings. Like, an actual call, with Katya's name and a glass of wine as her picture popping up.

"Um," Aimes says, staring at the screen. "You wouldn't mind?"

He waves his hand.

She clicks accept, and before she can even say anything, Katya's already talking.

"Where are you?"

Iakov can obviously hear everything Katya's saying, so close to the booth. "Um. Texas, apparently."

A quick withdrawal of breath from Katya. "Are you with him right now?" And the veneer of professionalism drops from her voice so quickly.

She glances up and grabs Iakov's gaze. His eyes are hard, his jaw set, a tick in the muscles.

"Yeah, I've been with him all morning." She avoids the obvious impulse to turn away, to step away from the booth and have the conversation in private. "What's going on?"

Katya makes a noise in the back of her throat, garbled over the phone lines, but a noise of distress and dismay. "Aimes, Dave's dead."

For a few seconds, Aimes is sure that she misheard, that that's not what Katya just blurted out, that she heard it wrong, heard the name wrong, heard the word wrong, something. "What?"

Iakov looks away, eyes wide.

The same sound comes through the phone again. "They found his remains this morning, at around 10 AM. It looks, it looks like someone banished him late last night."

"Wait wait wait, banished?" Aimes clutches her purse closer to her, her hands sweaty damp. "I just saw him at the convention, he was..." Her eyes flicker up to Iakov, who's staring out at the bar instead of her.

He was warning her about the necklace, and about people not treating her well because of it.

Slowly, still not looking at her, Iakov grasps her hand, and Aimes is unsure if it's an anchor or a handcuff.

"With what he is, he's a ghost, banishing' basically… he's gone, and he can't come back." Katya says, and her voice rambles, shaky. "Get Jake to bring you back to Vegas."

Iakov jerks, both at the name used and at the order. "What?" he says, loud enough that Katya can hear him. "I'm not someone for her to order me around."

A quick intake of breath from Katya over the phone, before she audibly steels herself over the phone. "Aimes, just..."

The hand on hers tightens, and without even blinking they're back in Aimes’s hotel room. She staggers, dropping her phone, and Iakov turns away and is immediately gone.

She gasps, the air feeling like it's been punched out of her.

"...mes?" Katya's voice says, tinny, on the speaker on her phone, and Aimes scrambles to pick it up again.

"I'm here, I'm here, I'm… back in Vegas and and and… and he's gone?" She takes a deep, shattering breath, "He brought me back, and then left."

She sits, heavy, on the bed, cradling her head between her hands. Of course he left, he got twitchy, he needed to get away, because he's nothing if he doesn't just disappear whenever they're together.

And Dave's dead.

"Aimes?" Katya says, voice quiet and tinny over the phone. "Aimes what happened?"

"He just took me back, then left," she says, again, and the quiet of the room is stark after the soft rain and patter of the Texas bar. "He had taken me for burgers."

"Burgers."

"Yeah." She lays down across the bed, and then curls in on herself, not really wanting to look at herself in the ceiling mirror. "Dave's gone?"

"Dave's gone." A long, heavy silence, with the phone static between them. "Was he with you last night?"

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