Chapter 5 Tyson

#MAEVE

Ryson picked me up a little after nine, engine idling outside my building like he hadn't spent all night convincing himself this was a good idea. I climbed in anyway. That was the part I couldn't forgive myself for later. I climbed in anyway.

"Reconnaissance" he said again like repeating it made it truer. "In and out. You watch, I listen, we go home"

"You've said that four times now”

"Have I?”

"You have. It's starting to sound like something you're trying to convince yourself of”

He laughed but it came out thin. I noticed that. I filed it away and didn't say anything because some stupid, hopeful part of me still wanted this to just be nerves.

He handed me a bottle of water somewhere past the second exit, already opened, condensation beading down the side like he'd been holding it a whike.

"You look pale” he frownednin concern. “Drink something"

I did. He'd been handing me water bottles for two years. My body didn't know how to be suspicious of him yet eben when the rest of me was starting to catch up.

The city blurred sooner than it should have. Streetlights smeared into long gold ribbons against the windshield. 

My head tipped against the window and the glass felt too cold then not cold enough. Then I couldn't tell anymore because my skin had gone strange and distant like it belong to someone standing a few feet away from me.

"Ryson"

"We're almost there"

"Ryson, something's wrong"

He didn't answer. He didn't look at me either and that was the detail that finally cracked through the fog and lit something like real fear in my chest. 

Ryson always looked at me. Even when we argued even when he was annoyed. Hell even when I said something deliberately obnoxious just to watch him roll his eyes, he looked at me.

He was looking straight ahead now like the road owed him something.

"Hey" I said and my voice came out wrong, slower than I meant it. I never slur. "Look at me"

"Almost there" he said again and his jaw was so tight I could see it working.

I tried to reach for the door handle. My arm didn't want to cooperate. It moved like it was underwater and by the time my fingers found the handle the car had already stopped. 

He was pulling me out of the seat with an arm around my waist that felt gentle and final at the same time like he was carrying something he already regretted breaking.

"I'm sorry" he said, so quietly I almost missed it. "I'm so sorry, Maeve"

That should have terrified me more than it did. Mostly I just felt very far away like I was watching this happen to somebody who happened to be wearing my face.

The alley smelled like wet concrete and something underneath it, something sulfuric and old. I registered brick walls swimming in and out of focus, a dumpster, a flickering light three buildings down that couldn't decide if it wanted to work.

Ryson set me against the wall. My knees weren't entirely convinced they still worked so I stayed there, upright mostly out of spite.

"You drugged me" I said. It came out slurred, almost funny. If I was the kind of person who could still find things funny right now. Turns out I was, even now. "That's rude. I would've at least ordered dinner first"

He actually flinched, like the joke had landed somewhere he wasn't braced for.

"I needed you calm. I needed this to go easy” he explained. 

"For who?"

He didn't answer that either. He snapped his fingers instead and the air in front of us split apart like something tearing fabric, wet and wrong and four shapes stepped through into the alley.

I tried to focus on them and mostly failed. My vision kept sliding sideways but even blurred, even fractured through whatever Ryson had poured down my throat, I could tell these weren't ordinary Lore. 

They were too tall for one thing, folded wrong at the shoulders like their bodies had been built for a different kind of gravity. Horns curved back from their skulls in a deep, wet violet. That same color bleeding down half of each of their faces like something had been poured over them and never finished drying.

"Well" I mumbled, blinking hard, trying to make them hold still. "That's certainly a look"

One of them turned toward me at the sound of my voice. Its face on that side was almost handsome in a cold, symmetrical way. The other half looked like wax left too close to a flame, features slumping into each other, the violet deepening into something closer to a bruise.

"Is that one talking to itself, Ryson" it said, in a voice that scraped rather than spoke.

"She talks to plants too" Ryson muttered anf there was something almost fond buried in it, which made me hate him a little more than the drugs already had me hating him.

"Betrayal and small talk" I said or tried to say. My tongue felt too big for my mouth. "Very efficient trafficking operation you two have going"

None of them laughed. Tough crowd.

I tried to focus past the fog, tried to find the thread of magic I always kept humming just under my skin. It is ready to fold the world into something friendlier whenever I need it to be. 

I reached for it the way I'd reach for a doorknob in the dark. My fingers or whatever the version of my fingers was that lived inside the spell, found nothing. 

I reached again. Static. A wall of white noise where my magic should have been like someone had unplugged it and left the socket sparking uselessly in the dark.

The half melted demon crouched in front of me, tilting its head with something that might have been curiosity if it belonged to a person and not whatever this was.

"No tricks left, little witch?"

I opened my mouth to say something clever. Nothing came. For the first time since I was seventeen years old and learned exactly how much trouble my magic could get me into, I had absolutely nothing to hide behind. 

The last thing I saw before the alley folded into black was Ryson's face still turned away from me refusing to look. Fucking Archers.