“I’m sorry,” I said. “That really sucks.”
He threw his head back and laughed until he was wiping tears from his eyes. “Sorry,” he said. “Cathartic laugh.” And then he shook it off. “Yeah. Unrequited feelings are never fun. I guess that’s why your refusal to report about the House felt like a betrayal. Not because you picked Ethan, or not just anyway. But because I lost out on the piece of you that should have been mine—our RG partnership. He won that, too. And it pissed me off.”
He looked back at me, smiled sadly. “I just, I don’t know, feel a connection. Which you don’t share.”
“I’m sorry you’ve been hurt by that.”
Another half laugh. “I’m not sure ‘hurt’ captures the real poetic desperation of unrequited love. Which, if I’m honest with myself, is part of the draw. Oh, the poignancy of wanting someone you can’t have.”
This time, I smiled, too. “Maybe you could find someone a little more emotionally available?”
Jonah snorted. “I can’t even ask if you have a sister, since I took her to prom.”
“Oh my God, I forgot about that. Small world. And, I mean, her husband wouldn’t appreciate me trying to get you together again.”
On the other hand, that didn’t mean I didn’t have ideas. And if fixing Jonah up would ease the tension between us, I was more than happy to help. In fact, hadn’t someone just told me she was ready to date again?
“How do you feel about food?”
He glanced at me, eyebrows lifted. “Is that a trick question?”
“Nope. Completely earnest.”
He lifted a shoulder. “I mean, I like food.”
That worked for me. Now I just had to talk to my new target.
“So what do we do now?” I asked. “I mean about the RG.”
One hand on his hip, another on the bookshelf, fingers tapping, he frowned as he contemplated. “I think I should go back to the RG, present them with a specific plan. I think it’s harder to imagine themselves as crusaders. But if we give them a task, and they begin to see their new role that way, it might help.”
“You up for working on some alchemy?”
He smiled, and some of the old humor was back in his eyes. “I am. I’ve got permission from Scott.”
“Good. Because there’s a lot of work to do. Confusing, confusing work.”
“I’m willing to learn. I’m glad we had a chance to talk about all this. To clear the air.”
That clear air was fractured by the huge sound of metallic wrenching.
“The front gate,” I said, and had just pivoted into the foyer when the blast blew in the front door.
• • •
Sometime later, I blinked. Once, then twice, until the two images of the foyer’s coffered ceiling above me combined into one again.
I was on my back on the floor, eyes stinging from dust and smoke, my ears ringing from the concussion of noise. I pushed myself up on my elbows, ribs aching on my right side. Jonah lay across my legs, facedown, arms sprawled. He’d turned his body toward mine as the wall of hot air hit us, and the blast had hit him full-on, throwing us both across the foyer until we’d nearly hit the staircase.
I lifted my gaze. The front doors were broken and splintered on the floor, the walls around them cracked and crumbling, smoke pouring into the House. There’d been a vase of flowers on the round table in the center of the foyer. The table was in splinters, the vase shattered, the flowers scattered across the floor among pieces of the door and spilled water.
Since no one else had come out to investigate, I guessed I’d been out for only a few seconds.
As carefully as I could manage, I rolled Jonah onto his back. There was a large cut across his forehead, streaming blood and sending magic into the air. Jonah and I had complementary magic, uniquely compatible. My body, wounded and eager, wanted that blood so badly my hands began to shake.
“No,” I muttered, grabbing a piece of cloth from the floor, probably part of the foyer table’s cover, and pressed it to the laceration.
I tapped his cheeks. “Jonah! Jonah! Wake up!” And when he didn’t, I put fingers on the pulse point in his wrist. He had a pulse, but it was slow.
Shots began to ring out, bullets whizzing through the front of the House with the speed of an automatic weapon. I ducked, covering him with my body, lowered my lips to his ear. “If you die, I will personally kick your ass.”
The bullets kept coming, spinning through the hallway to splinter the wood of the stairs, the plaster and art on the opposite wall.
There was a break in the noise, probably as guns were reloaded.
Help would come soon. But in the meantime, I had to get him out of here. Wincing as pain shot through my torso, I grabbed him under the arms, pulled him into the parlor.
Merit!
Thank God for psychic connections. I’m all right, I told Ethan, the fear in his voice keen. I’m in the parlor. Front door’s gone. I think they hit it with a grenade, and they’re still firing. Jonah’s down; he shielded me. I’ve dragged him into the front parlor. Too much smoke to see the perps, but this kind of fight doesn’t seem like Reed. Open the arsenal, Ethan. We’re going to need it.
Covering fire en route, Sentinel. Keep your head down.
On that. There wasn’t much else I could do. Not with Jonah unconscious. Bullets wouldn’t kill me, but I could dodge them. He couldn’t, and I wasn’t about to leave him alone.