Bryce hid her smile as well. It never got old—the awe. Mostly because she knew Danika had earned it. Every damned day, Danika earned the awe that bloomed across the faces of strangers when they spotted her corn-silk hair and that neck tattoo. And the fear that made the lowlifes in this city think twice before fucking with her and the Pack of Devils.
Except for Philip Briggs. Bryce sent a prayer to Ogenas’s blue depths that the sea goddess would whisper her wisdom to Briggs to keep his distance from Danika if he ever really did walk free.
The boys stepped aside, and it only took a few milliseconds for them to notice Bryce, too. The awe on their faces turned to blatant interest.
Bryce snorted. Keep dreaming.
One of them stammered, turning his attention from Bryce to Danika, “My—my history teacher said the Gates were originally communication devices.”
“I bet you get all the ladies with those stellar factoids,” Danika said without looking back at them, unimpressed and uninterested.
Message received, they slunk back to the line. Bryce smirked and stepped up to her friend’s side, peering down at the dial pad.
The teenager was right, though. The seven Gates of this city, each set along a ley line running through Lunathion, had been designed as a quick way for the guards in the districts to speak to each other centuries ago. When someone merely placed a hand against the golden disk in the center of the pad and spoke, the wielder’s voice would travel to the other Gates, a gem lighting up with the district from which the voice originated.
Of course, it required a drop of magic to do so—literally sucked it like a vampyr from the veins of the person who touched the pad, a tickling zap of power, gone forever.
Bryce raised her eyes to the bronze plaque above her head. The quartz Gates were memorials, though she didn’t know for which conflict or war. But each bore the same plaque: The power shall always belong to those who give their lives to the city.
Considering it was a statement that could be construed as being in opposition to the Asteri’s rule, Bryce was always surprised that they allowed the Gates to continue to stand. But after becoming obsolete with the advent of phones, the Gates had found a second life when kids and tourists began using them, having their friends go to the other Gates in the city so they could whisper dirty words or marvel at the sheer novelty of such an antiquated method of communication. Not surprisingly, come weekends, drunk assholes—a category to which Bryce and Danika firmly belonged—became such a pain in the ass with their shouting through the Gates that the city had instituted hours of operation.
And then dumb superstition grew, claiming the Gate could make wishes come true, and that to give over a droplet of your power was to make an offering to the five gods.
It was bullshit, Bryce knew—but if it made Danika not dread Briggs’s release so much, well, it was worth it.
“What are you going to wish for?” Bryce asked when Danika stared down at the disk, the gems dark above it.
The emerald for FiRo lit up, a young female voice coming through to shriek, “Titties!”
People laughed around them, the sound like water trickling over stone, and Bryce chuckled.
But Danika’s face had gone solemn. “I’ve got too many things to wish for,” she said. Before Bryce could ask, Danika shrugged. “But I think I’ll wish for Ithan to win his sunball game tonight.”
With that, she set her palm onto the disk. Bryce watched as her friend let out a shiver and quietly laughed, stepping back. Her caramel eyes shone. “Your turn.”
“You know I have barely any magic worth taking, but okay,” Bryce said, not to be outdone, even by an Alpha wolf. From the moment Bryce walked into her dorm room freshman year, they’d done everything together. Just the two of them, as it always would be.
They even planned to make the Drop together—to freeze into immortality at the same breath, with members of the Pack of Devils Anchoring them.
Technically, it wasn’t true immortality—the Vanir did age and die, either of natural causes or other methods, but the aging process was so slowed after the Drop that, depending on one’s species, it could take centuries to show a wrinkle. The Fae could last a thousand years, the shifters and witches usually five centuries, the angels somewhere between. Full humans did not make the Drop, as they bore no magic. And compared to humans, with their ordinary life spans and slow healing, the Vanir were essentially immortal—some species bore children who didn’t even enter maturity until they were in their eighties. And most were very, very hard to kill.
But Bryce had rarely thought about where she’d fall on that spectrum—whether her half-Fae heritage would grant her a hundred years or a thousand. It didn’t matter, so long as Danika was there for all of it. Starting with the Drop. They’d take the deadly plunge into their matured power together, encounter whatever lay at the bottom of their souls, and then race back up to life before the lack of oxygen rendered them brain-dead. Or just plain dead.
Yet while Bryce would inherit barely enough power to do cool party tricks, Danika was expected to claim a sea of power that would put her ranking far past Sabine’s—likely equal to that of Fae royalty, maybe even beyond the Autumn King himself.
It was unheard of, for a shifter to have that sort of power, yet all the standard childhood tests had confirmed it: once Danika Dropped, she’d become a considerable power among the wolves, the likes of which had not been seen since the elder days across the sea.
Danika wouldn’t just become the Prime of the Crescent City wolves. No, she had the potential to be the Alpha of all wolves. On the fucking planet.
Danika never seemed to give two shits about it. Didn’t plan for her future based on it.
Twenty-seven was the ideal age to make the Drop, they’d decided together, after years of mercilessly judging the various immortals who marked their lives by centuries and millennia. Right before any permanent lines or wrinkles or gray hairs. They merely said to anyone who inquired, What’s the point of being immortal badasses if we have sagging tits?
Vain assholes, Fury had hissed when they’d explained it the first time.
Fury, who had made the Drop at age twenty-one, hadn’t chosen the age for herself. It’d just happened, or had been forced upon her—they didn’t know for sure. Fury’s attendance at CCU had only been a front for a mission; most of her time was spent doing truly fucked-up things for disgusting amounts of money over in Pangera. She made it a point never to give details.
Assassin, Danika claimed. Even sweet Juniper, the faun who occupied the fourth side of their little friendship-square, admitted the odds were that Fury was a merc. Whether Fury was occasionally employed by the Asteri and their puppet Imperial Senate was up for debate, too. But none of them really cared—not when Fury always had their back when they needed it. And even when they didn’t.
Bryce’s hand hovered over the golden disk. Danika’s gaze was a cool weight on her.
“Come on, B, don’t be a wimp.”
Bryce sighed, and set her hand on the pad. “I wish Danika would get a manicure. Her nails look like shit.”
Lightning zapped through her, a slight vacuuming around her belly button, and then Danika was laughing, shoving her. “You fucking dick.”
Bryce slung an arm around Danika’s shoulders. “You deserved it.”
Danika thanked the security guard, who beamed at the attention, and ignored the tourists still snapping photos. They didn’t speak until they reached the northern edge of the square—where Danika would head toward the angel-filled skies and towers of the CBD, to the sprawling Comitium complex in its heart, and Bryce toward Luna’s Temple, three blocks up.
Danika jerked her chin toward the streets behind Bryce. “I’ll see you at home, all right?”
“Be careful.” Bryce blew out a breath, trying to shake her unease.
“I know how to look out for myself, B,” Danika said, but love shone in her eyes—gratitude that crushed Bryce’s chest—merely for the fact that someone cared whether she lived or died.
Sabine was a piece of shit. Had never whispered or hinted who Danika’s father might be—so Danika had grown up with absolutely no one except her grandfather, who was too old and withdrawn to spare Danika from her mother’s cruelty.
Bryce inclined her head toward the CBD. “Good luck. Don’t piss off too many people.”
“You know I will,” Danika said with a grin that didn’t meet her eyes.