The sight of the fat wad of cash she pulled from her suit pocket finally convinced Fatma and Ali that she was worth keeping around, though Fatma still stared, her dark eyes full of distrust if not outright disdain. She wouldn’t be won by a pretty smile. At least her brother seemed to prefer to focus on the cards. Helen met Fatma’s stare and lifted her brows as if daring her to make a move.

  Bold. Probably stupid, but she’d never been able to back down from a challenge. Maybe she had more in common with the fair folk than she thought.

  Fatma gave her nothing but a twitch around the lips that might have been the beginnings of a smile or probably indigestion. Helen put it out of her mind as the game began. The other woman at the table, Crystal, was the designated dealer, so Helen saved her charms for the actual players. She bid or called or raised, worrying her lip sometimes, trying to seem like she couldn’t control her face. She didn’t win every hand; she wouldn’t risk these people knowing she was cheating. No doubt she could fight her way out, especially with the kladenet. But even a self-swinging sword couldn’t win every combat, and her charges didn’t need her laid up while she healed. Besides, the crooks at this table might bring her more unlooked-for gifts in the future.

  “This big dude is trying to bluff a straight,” Maurice whispered in Helen’s ear. “And Ali’s got a full house.”

  She’d already figured out the bluff. The “big dude” had a massive tell in his twitchy index finger, even though he tried to hide it with his other hand. But a full house beat her two pair, and she needed a win this round in order to stay in the game. She tapped the cards, silently asking Maurice to get a look in the deck and move the cards she needed.

  He chuckled, his cold breath nearly making her shiver. “Such an expense of energy will require extra vittles, quality ones.”

  Helen held in a frown. She couldn’t risk nodding or shaking her head. Demigoddess or not, she wasn’t making a deal with a fairy without a ten-page contract. She picked up her water glass and whispered, “We’ll see,” just before she drank. That was the best answer he was getting.

  “Aye,” he said with another sigh and a dash more brogue than usual. “Give me a bit of a distraction.”

  Like what? She couldn’t very well point and shout, “What’s that?” Everyone would suspect her of tampering with the table. She’d have to lean on the winsome naivete she’d been hoping to instill. She only wished playing dumb didn’t feel like setting feminism back fifty years.

  When the bet got around to her, she said, “Check,” something she could only do if everyone else had also checked. Which they hadn’t.

  “Sorry, sweetheart,” Abados said, giving her a look with so much pity and condescension, she almost let the kladenet out to play. “The bet’s already at one-fifty. It’s either call or raise.”

  “Oh, sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.” She batted her lashes and could almost feel him trying to decide if he wanted her money more than her. Ugh. She fumbled with her chips, dropping some on the floor. Even if only two players helped her pick them up, the others wouldn’t be closely watching the deck.

  And Maurice could move objects faster than anyone could follow. It did expend a lot of his energy, and she would try to find him a reward later, but she’d never agree to anything vague where he was concerned. When she, Abados, and the big guy righted themselves, she called, and no one seemed to have noticed anything was awry. She got a better full house than Ali’s on the next deal.

  A quick look of surprise passed over Crystal’s pale face when she dealt Helen’s cards. Oh ho? Did one of the other players have the dealer working for them?

  “I think the dealer’s crooked,” Maurice whispered in Helen’s ear. “Trying to cheat us? The cheek of it. I ought to give her a walloping.”

  Helen caught a hint of real danger in his tone. Hating being cheated while already cheating was just another dichotomous part of his nature. She shook her head slightly, disguising it in a stretch. She’d rather figure out who Crystal was cheating for and beat them at their own game.

  But as the rounds ticked by, she still had no proof, but her money was on Fatma and Ali. Or maybe just one, whichever didn’t want to risk losing the very artifact they’d brought to the table, maybe.

  The two other men were out of the game, banished to the corner before the real prizes came out, leaving just Helen, Abados, Fatma, and Ali.

  “I’ve stopped that Crystal cheating twice more,” Maurice whispered, though he sounded louder, his tone flatter, a bad sign. “I managed to thwart her, but—”

  A soft buzz interrupted his words, and Helen’s vision blurred. She had a moment to gasp before it cleared again. The others looked at her while she was still reeling, and she put a hand to her chest and sipped some water, forcing herself to smile but using the sudden nervousness she felt. “Sorry, just got a little lightheaded.”

  Abados gave her a sympathetic look. “After this, I’ll take you to the best seafood restaurant in town. Anything you want, babe.”

  She fluttered her lashes again as if he was God’s gift while she resisted the urge to throw up on his suit.

  Maurice lightly pulling her hair was a nice distraction…at least until he spoke. “That was glamour,” he practically growled. “She has fairy blood, and she’s pulling a glamour on me?”

  Oh shit.

  Helen tried to control her breathing, wishing she could say some soothing words and calm him down. Crystal likely didn’t even know Maurice was in the room, but that didn’t matter. Fairies disliked having their honor besmirched, they hated when others tried to cheat them, but they positively loathed when anyone sought to out-glamour them. “Easy,” she said around another cough and drink.

  “No one outcons me.”

  “Maurice.” She tried to smile disarmingly as Fatma looked her way. “Let it go,” she said behind her teeth and her water.

  “Fuck that. It’s the principle of the thing.”

  “You don’t have principles.” Now everyone was looking at her, and she felt as if she was trying desperately to put a cork back in a bottle.

  Or a tiger in a cage. Myths about fairies often mentioned their stature or speed or magic. But Helen knew from experience that they were very, very strong for their size.

  Especially when they were pissed.

  It was almost a relief when the table launched upward as if swatted by a giant hand. At least the room didn’t feel as if it was holding its breath anymore. Helen dove away just as everyone else did, cursing Maurice and the fact that she understood why he felt he had to deliver this particular walloping. But how in Hades was she supposed to have known that one of the people she’d be spending the afternoon with could use glamour?

  Everyone was talking over everyone else. Crystal screamed as she flew to the side, straight into Abados. They both toppled. Helen’s mind raced for a plausible explanation but came up empty, especially after Crystal’s ear was pulled straight up, making her cry out again as she stood rapidly, her arms flailing.

  “Think you’re smart, do you, low blood?” Maurice shouted, his voice filling the place for all its high pitch. “Queen of the goddamned fairy mound?”

  A slight spark came from Crystal’s fingers. Maurice grunted as he let her go, his small body outlined in white fire for no more than the beat of a heart.

  Helen gawked. Crystal must have more fairy blood than she realized. She began to feel the same urge to protect her that she did her charges, but Maurice wouldn’t kill her. Or rather, by the look of things, Crystal wouldn’t let him.

  Still, she couldn’t just let them wreak havoc. She pulled a small flat jar of the Maurice Contingency Plan from a hidden pocket in the waistband of her skirt, uncapped it, and threw a line of superfine gold glitter into the air. Crystal’s head snapped toward it as if on a string, and Helen knew Maurice would do the same. They’d both be drawn to the sparkles by their fairy blood. Helen grinned, never regretting the day she’d learned that those descended from the fair folk accounted for sixty percent of all glitter-based purchases.

  It was just a bonus that the glittering cloud now hovered between her and the other poker players. The two who were already out of the game had fled down the stairs. Everyone else’s eyes were on Crystal.

  And Fatma’s bag was on Helen’s side of the glitter cloud.

  She grabbed it and ran for the stairs. Hopefully, it also contained some money, but nothing was more important than the ambrosia. “The police are coming,” she shouted as she reached the ground floor, sending the employees of the dry cleaner’s running in all directions, adding to the chaos. Maurice could take care of himself after the glitter fascination wore off, and meanwhile, she could get—

  “Hold it,” Fatma yelled from the stairs.

  Shit.

  Helen ran down the hall toward the rear doors of the building, pushing out a heavy door into a sun-filled alley. She darted to the right and turned a corner, but a dumpster blocked her way. “Fuck.” She turned, but Fatma slid around the corner, her shoulders heaving as she breathed hard.

  She didn’t seem in the mood to talk as she tied her long dark hair in a knot at her neck. “That’s not yours,” she said, nodding toward the bag.

  Helen reached back and drew the kladenet. “Feels like mine.” The short thin sword went into a guard position in her hand. It would do all the fighting for her.

  “Oh, honey, that’s so cute,” Fatma said as she drew a small pistol from the pocket of her black leather jacket. “But now the bag feels like it’s mine again.”

  Well, shit. But Helen wasn’t afraid. In another time, she might have enjoyed this encounter. There was something about women who were armed. Could have been the take-no-shit attitude. Fatma’s bronzed skin and tight jeans would have helped. But not anymore. Helen was too tired of lamenting all her yesterdays, and her past had permanently purged all desire from her life.

  Luckily, her heart didn’t need to be in this encounter in any way. A self-swinging sword didn’t necessarily need a wielder.

  Helen let it go, and it dropped nearly to the ground, enough for Fatma to begin a smile, a look that morphed to confusion as the sword rose again, hovering in the air between them. “Attack.”

  “What the fu—ah!” Fatma screamed as the sword lunged toward her, point-first. It slapped the pistol out of her hand as she brought it up, leaving a line of blood across her knuckles. She fell backward, hand to her chest, screaming again.

  “Halt,” Helen commanded, pausing the sword an inch from Fatma’s throat. Helen kept the smirk off her face as she strode forward and picked up the pistol. “I hope you don’t look on today only with regret,” she said to Fatma’s terrified expression. “Against any other opponent, I’m sure you would have done well.” Then, she looked to the sword. “Subdue.”

  The kladenet flipped over in midair, and Fatma barely had time to gasp before the pommel rapped against her forehead, and she lay still.

  Helen grabbed the kladenet and secured it to her back again. She tossed the pistol into a trash can and walked back by the rear of the dry cleaner’s, wondering what the others were up to inside, but it wasn’t worth the risk to find out. And Maurice would catch up soon enough. Someone who’d been alive for thousands of years wouldn’t be defeated by some criminals, a human with fairy blood, and a jar of glitter.

  Helen swung the bag over her shoulder and sighed. All part of a day’s work in running a sanctuary for mythical creatures. And she hadn’t had to launch a single ship.

  Chapter Three

  When Chloe woke up in the shitty motel bed, fatigue still had a heavy hand upon her. After she’d gotten in the night before, she hadn’t had the energy to shower, but now she wished she had. The smell of cayenne on her hands brought up too many memories of ghosts, real or otherwise, and her mouth tasted like a raccoon had been nesting in it.

  Still, when she opened her eyes, she didn’t move. Near the foot of the bed, Ramses hovered on a chair next to the flimsy desk, his hands laced over the toned abs sported by his statues, never mind that he’d probably never achieved that look in real life, but he’d always appeared as a mash-up between his various statues and what he’d really looked like. He’d once counted himself lucky that he wasn’t stuck with the tied-on pharaoh beard and a heavy-looking pectoral every time he appeared.

  His dark skin was slightly tinted from his own blue glow, and that was currently rivaled by the light from Chloe’s laptop as he streamed a TV show, the closed captioning flashing across the bottom. She sometimes bemoaned the amount of money she spent on streaming services, but he was addicted to at least one show on every goddamned platform, and he only had to use a jolt of ghostly energy to switch between them after she got him set up each night.

  She’d never say no to his hobby. The money was worth it to entertain him while she slept. Even if he promised to stick around and watch over her, she felt better knowing he had more reasons to stay, that she could see him every time her eyes flickered open.

  After all, it only took a flash of time for people to disappear forever.

  A depressing thought, one that often haunted her mornings, sending her down a depressed spiral that felt like a metal slide in summer. And it had been hot the day of the wreck; she could still feel sweat dribbling down her spine and the pain in her chest from the seat belt. Pain like that wasn’t supposed to linger like a badly healed bone, but she could summon it like someone had surely summoned Chester M. Goodspeed’s ghost.

  Stop it. Think of something else. Any goddamned thing but the wreck.

  Like the EMTs working to bring her mom back to life?

  No.

  Or the way they’d pulled Jamie out of the front seat and covered her with a sheet as if she was furniture being stored for winter?

  Oh, fuck you, brain.

  Her mind seemed to be saying, “Fuck you right back,” as she recalled the floaty feeling when they’d loaded her on a gurney, a feeling made more intense by the golden glow detaching from her mom’s body like steam off asphalt. The glow had hovered over Jamie briefly, then had ignored her, their mother’s chosen successor, much as the EMTs had.

  That gold glow had come for Chloe, invisible to everyone else, hers alone now, even after her mother’s heart had restarted.

  Chloe put a hand over her eyes and tried to get her asshole brain to shut up and leave her be, but once it started down a spiral, it had to take its flesh, just like the hot slide she’d imagined it to be. Jamie had been the chosen one. Jamie had gotten the training. Chloe had been twenty-two, studying to be a tech writer, for fuck’s sake. Tech writers did not go out and hunt ghosts and goblins in their spare time.

  And so she’d been overjoyed when they’d loaded her mom in the ambulance beside her. For so many reasons. The EMTs had brought her mom back to life, but the golden glow still hovered in Chloe’s periphery; the family gift seemed disinclined to return to its former owner. She’d felt it, too, scratchy as a wool blanket, yet cold as the hand of death, and just before she’d finally surrendered to her concussion, she’d seen Ramses’s spectral face for the first time.

  Great. We’re all caught up. Can we move on?

  Chloe lowered her arm to watch Ramses now. They were distantly related, but after having over a hundred children in life, he had descendants all over the world, scattered by oceans and time. She didn’t see any resemblance between them in his aquiline nose or patrician face—though they had the same bronzed skin tone—but it was comforting to wake up every morning to family who couldn’t leave her.

  Would Jamie have felt differently?

  “Shut up,” she muttered. She made herself move, welcoming the twinge in her swollen knee. She couldn’t get too distracted by the past. She was the dependable one, never letting anybody down, and she’d be damned if she’d let a freaking grief spiral carry her away. She’d crammed a lifetime’s worth of training into the year after Jamie’s death while her parents had been wrecks, their marriage dissolving. She had absorbed her familial duty and the trappings that would keep her alive. Now she was an expert at twenty-five. How many people could say that about anything?

  “How did you sleep?” Ramses asked, his striped nemes slipping over one shoulder as he turned.

  “Good and terrible.”

  He clucked his tongue. “You always wake up early and brood after a late-night job.”

  Chloe rubbed her aching neck. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re clenching your fists like you do when you think about Jamie.”

  She sighed, long and loud, hoping he’d just drop it. He’d never gotten to share this work with Jamie, share a mind with her, bonding as he did to only one member of the family at a time. How much of Jamie’s memories would he have carried and shared?

  When Chloe didn’t reply, Ramses sighed and stood, one hand hovering over the laptop long enough for a flicker of ghostly energy to pause the show. “Move over,” he said, waiting until she’d scooted to the middle of the bed before sitting beside her, hovering just over the covers. His nemes flickered and vanished, leaving his short, and surprisingly red, hair, the look he sported whenever he seemed to have a mind to comfort her.

  She gripped the duvet and wanted to say that she didn’t need comforting like some little kid, but she had moved over for him. Had he ever comforted his actual children like this? He never said much about his life, and the only secret he’d revealed about his death was that his heart had been judged heavier than a feather by Anubis. Instead of being devoured by Ammit, he’d been given the choice to return as a spirit and lighten his heart so he’d one day be able to join his family in the afterlife.

  “You’ve always been brave,” he said. “It wasn’t enough for you to swing across the monkey bars. You had to get on top of them. You remind me of Zahra.”