Page 66 of Lucky or Knot
“Good. Was that so difficult?” The line went dead, my screen blinking with the end of the call.
Oh, my gods. Fairies. No wonder Raven liked it better on this side of reality.
And he must, right? Since he had to be coming back. Raven, Raven, Raven…my heart beat to the rhythm of his name, and I didn’t even care how incredibly lame it was that I’d think something like that.
I’d only been on my way to get coffee and kill some time, so I didn’t have anything to cancel. I hung a right to get out of the traffic jam and hit the gas.
Raven would be so pissed to be picked up in this same shitty car, but he’d have to deal with it. The morning he’d left, before he broached the subject of said departure, he’d told me airily, “I put some money in your bank account.”
I’d looked up from my laptop, the screen full of joblistings in various cities in the Pacific Northwest. My parents and sister would be thrilled to have me closer to them and were champing at the bit to meet Raven, and he’d agreed that the forests and the ocean sounded like more his speed than neon and dusty rocks. So we were making some preliminary plans. Nothing concrete yet. But I had a good feeling about it.
“Money?” I asked. “Wait, how do you have access to my bank account? Not that I mind, but I mean, how much money? Why? Are we talking twenty bucks for gas, half the rent, what?”
“Oh, you know,” he said, and fluttered a hand at me, sauntering over to steal my coffee cup and then dodging as I swatted at his ass. If he didn’t want me grabbing it, he shouldn’t be hanging around the apartment in nothing but a lace thong and one of my undershirts, was all I was saying.
“No, I don’t know, Raven, that’s why I asked.”
He raised an eyebrow at me over the rim of my own damn coffee and took an obnoxiously loud sip. “You should get a better car,” he said. “And new clothes. Oh, and a house. The neighbors put another note on the door complaining about the noise. It’s time for us to move on.”
“A house,” I repeated, wondering—not for the first time, almost certainly not for the last—if I’d lost my mind, or if he had. “A car? And a house? How much money, seriously?”
He drained my coffee and handed the empty mug back to me with a smile. Gods help me, I adored him.
“Enough,” he called back over his shoulder, disappearing into the bedroom. “Human money doesn’t exist, really. So I never run out, now that no one’s monitoring my spending. Get a new car while I’m away for a few days, will you? I hate buying cars. That kind of vulgar, imprecise transaction is so unbearable. No one in this realm knows how to write a contract properly.”
“You should talk to my lawyer friend, he’d—wait, hang on a minute, while you’re where?” I said, and jumped up andfollowed him into the bedroom.
That had inevitably ended up with him bent over the side of the bed with the torn thong hanging off one of his ankles, with him making a hell of a lot more noise the neighbors would hate. But he’d also filled me in on his intent to go home, see his mother, and make sure his affairs there were in order.
After which had come the kissing, and the swanning, and my black, miserable mood.
It had occurred to me later that day, staring in disbelief at more digits on the screen than my bank account had ever dreamed of, that Raven hadn’t been kept by Cunningham in a style he’d been unused to. In fact, reading between the lines, he’d been slumming it with a casino mogul, let alone with me. The only reason he didn’t already have a replacement for the luxury car Cunningham had bought for him was his distaste for car dealerships, and it even crossed my mind that he might’ve gone through the fairy portal for a bit with the specific aim of forcing me to run those errands for him on my own, so he wouldn’t have to be bothered.
No, surely not. Not even Raven would travel between freaking worlds to avoid spending an afternoon signing paperwork.
But maybe.
Anyway, I hadn’t bought a new car, because I was stubborn like that, although I had bookmarked a few gorgeous, rural real estate listings on the Washington coast that I thought Raven would like.
But now he’d come back, or presumably would at two, and I couldn’t get there fast enough.
Aside from my own desperation to see him, hold him, and kiss him senseless, I had a lot to tell him, just not about cars. I’d called Declan to ask his opinion about Cunningham, whether he’d cause us any more trouble. Declan had informed me, withtotally unsuppressed glee, that everyone had heard about me wiping the floor with him, and he’d left the country to escape the embarrassment. Declan didn’t think he’d be back. Most of Cunningham’s valued business contacts were shifters, and they now thought he was a joke.
“Blake’s on my ass to put on a tiger show at the Morrigan,” Declan added. “I guess that friend of his you conned into getting you into Audacity was upset about his loss of revenue and worried about his rescue tigers going hungry. I think they could just eat him, but no one asked me. Anyway. Any chance you’d perform? He told Blake that before you kidnapped the host’s boyfriend, you were the best big cat he’d ever worked with.”
Declan had burst into laughter at my stunned, horrified silence, but honestly, I’d been considering it. I did owe Axel a lot. I’d told Declan I’d get back to him.
At least I didn’t have to apologize to Sean. After parking the car for me—in a totally different garage than the one attached to the emergency stairs, because he was a fucking stoner—he’d lost his nerve and quit on the spot. Declan, bless him, had followed through on his promise, and I’d gotten a text from Sean with a thumbs-up selfie wearing the Morrigan’s much less hideous valet uniform.
And none of that, satisfying as it was, had given me much joy without Raven to immediately share it with.
I couldn’t wait in the parking lot of Endless Sky; I was too impatient. So I pushed open its faintly glowing door at a quarter till two, kind of surprised that it even opened for me. The lobby was disappointingly normal, with some plush chairs and a rack of bottles of lotion or shampoo or something. The place stank of magic, though, and I had to fight back a sneeze.
The tallest, most muscularly intimidating and stunningly beautiful woman I’d ever seen sat behind the desk, her coils ofshining brown hair piled on top of her head in a gravity-defying way. On another day, in another life, I’d probably have taken my chances with a violent death and asked her out to dinner…but then she spoke and ruined the effect.
“You must be Mr. Kaplan,” she said in a tone reminiscent of every disapproving sixth-grade teacher in the world, her voice unmistakably the same as it had been on the phone. “You’re early. But so is your appointment, so you can go through to room four. Don’t go anywhere else in the building. You might not return.”
Without even bothering to thank her, kind of scared of how she might react, I just nodded and shoved open the door to her right and into the hallway beyond. I found room four down a ways on the left, and I sucked in a deep breath, bracing myself for a letdown. Maybe Raven had sent a messenger to tell me he’d changed his mind.
