Ever After (Rachel Morgan)
“You have more important things to think about than what Ku’Sox is going to do over the next hundred years,” he said, a thick, heavy hand falling on my shoulder and turning me around. “We’re on trial.”
“Again?” I asked, shaking as I leaned past Al to eye Ku’Sox. “What, are we broke?”
“No.” Al’s voice was sour. “It’s your damned ley line. It went wonky. Leaking like the bloody Titanic. ”
Remembering the increasingly caustic sound of the lines, I turned to face him fully. My line? Had it really gone that badly unbalanced?
Al’s eye twitched. A spot of ice slid down my spine, making me stiffen. We’d been trying for weeks to get the line I’d scraped between reality and the ever-after to close or at least balance, but until I knew how to jump the lines by myself, it wasn’t happening. The imbalance was slowly siphoning off the ever-after into reality, and the only reason that no one had said anything before was because it was only a trickle—plenty of time to fix it. That, and because I was the only female demon they might get some baby demons out of after they tired of the trinkets I could solidify into reality for them. They’d been losing maybe a cubic foot of their dimension a year, not much at all. “How bad is it?” I whispered, trying to smile as I looked at Dali, Al’s parole officer.
“Bad.” Al’s voice was faint but resolute. “Stand up. Try to look sexy.”
“In a bedsheet?” I complained, running my hands down it. “How can I look sexy in a bedsheet?” He cleared his throat, and I grimaced. “Never mind.”
Frowning, I leaned past Al to glare at Ku’Sox again, certain that he was the reason my line had gone wonky. The demon’s smile confirmed it, and suddenly I realized just how deep in the crapper we were. Ku’Sox had thriving Rosewood babies. He had the leverage to make Trent give him the permanent cure. He had a line—my line—leaking ever-after enough to be a real problem. He was going to kill the ever-after and blame me for it.
“Oh shit,” I whispered, and Ku’Sox inclined his head as he realized I’d figured it out. I took a breath to shout out the truth, hesitating only because Ku’Sox seemed to want me to. There was more to this; I could see it in his face, feel it in the air, moist and heavy.
Frantic, I turned back to Al. “Al,” I hissed. “Tell them he broke my line!”
“Right . . .” Al muttered. “We don’t know that, and saying so will only get us in jail where you can’t do anything.”
“But he did it!” Crap on toast, this had gone from bad to worse, and Al didn’t care.
“Don’t say anything to get me in jail, love,” Al breathed, hardly audible over the noise. “You don’t have enough to get both of us out. We’ll find out how bad the damage is and fix it.”
I wasn’t sure if Al meant damage to my line or damage to my credibility. Frustrated, I cocked my hip and fumed.
Dali, who’d been counting heads by the look of it, stood up, his hands raised to quiet the rabble behind us. “Quiet! Quiet!” he shouted, his resonant voice booming. The demon was used to being listened to, and the last of the demons hustled to find their places. Every demon was equal in the ever-after, but some had more power than others, and some had more money. Dali had both.
Beside me, Al jammed a finger into my ribs to make me jerk straight. “I’ll do the talking,” he said.
“If you can’t shut your mouths and your minds in that order, I’m going to clear the room!” Dali bellowed. “None of you will have a chance to vent!”
Newt sniffed, curving her legs up beside her on the bench to look oddly sexy. “And by the Turn, you need to vent,” she said, her soft voice carrying to the back of the stands. “It smells like goats in a locker room.”
There was a smattering of masculine guffaws, and finally they all shut up. It was like living with perpetual sixth graders. Dali lowered his hands, moving his middle-aged spread gracefully as he walked to the center of the narrow stage. Demons could appear as whatever they wanted. I still didn’t know what Dali found appealing in being a fortysomething, slightly overweight, graying civil servant.
“As Al’s parole officer, I am responsible for keeping Algaliarept’s behavior within acceptable parameters,” he said, and Al cleared his throat and made an elegant bow. “And you,” Dali added, pointing at Al, “are responsible for your
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