“There’s an arrest warrant out for my mate,” I explain. “He pissed off Cyrus and—”

“Enough said. No one likes to toy with his subjects more than the vampire king.” She shakes her head. “What a sad little man he is.”

“I was thinking horrible little man,” Macy says. “But I guess sad works, too.”

The Crone laughs. “I like you,” she tells my cousin, who grins back.

“I like you, too. And you have great hair.”

That startles a laugh out of the Crone, who flips the hair in question. “It is fun, isn’t it?” She turns back to the rest of us. “My best advice to you is to stay out of the prison. Do whatever it takes to not be sent there, even if it means fleeing an arrest warrant. Because once you get in, it’s not just that it’s hell to get out. It’s that in a lot of cases, you lose your will to want to get out.”

“How is that even possible?” Luca asks. “Who loses their drive to get out of prison?”

“Let’s just say it’s a very…unique place.” The Crone smiles. “The design is terribly clever.”

“Does that mean you have an equally clever get-out-of-jail-free card you can offer?” Flint asks hopefully.

She clicks her tongue. “Nothing is free, dragon. Certainly nothing of value.” She stands up, and at first I think she’s going to order us out the door. “If we were to reach a bargain, how many people would be needing…passage…from the Aethereum?”

I cough. “Umm…we would need three.”

The Crone’s eyes narrow. “That would be quite expensive, my dear. Are you sure you wish to pay the price for such a request?”

This is it. The question I knew was coming, the one I was dreading, and yet I’m surprised how fast my answer comes. “Yes.”

We stare at each other, and I can tell she’s weighing her next words carefully. “Very well, Grace. I will provide safe passage for three people from the Aethereum in exchange for a favor. One day I will ask something of you, and you will be unable to refuse. Do you agree?”

“No!” all my friends shout at the same time. Well, except Hudson, who offers a healthy, “Hell fucking no.”

But the question is simple. Am I willing to trade my future for that of my friends, my family, the Circle’s survival itself? For Hudson? And Jaxon?

“Yes,” I reply, and she starts to smile, “with several caveats.”

“You’re not in a position to bargain, Grace.”

The words are delivered with deliberate calm, and that’s how I know—I have something she wants. Badly. So just maybe I am in a position to bargain…

I shrug, “Well, you’re welcome to turn down my offer, and we can leave as we came and find another way.”

Her eyes narrow on me again before she finally says, “Very well. What are your terms?”

“I will not do anything that harms my friends, my family, or really anyone on this entire fucking planet, whether directly or indirectly.”

“Those are the exact words of your terms?” she asks, and I run what I said through my head several times. What loophole did I leave for this witch to exploit?

I can’t think of anything. I nod. “Those are my exact terms.”

“I accept,” she says and walks over to the basket of flowers she gathered this morning before we arrived.

She sorts through it for a few seconds, and as she shifts them, the flowers release the most heavenly scent into the room. I have no idea what she’s looking for—or why she’s looking for it now—but when she turns around, she is carrying an armful of green stems with clusters of tiny bright-orange flowers.

“This is the only thing I can think of that will get you free from the prison,” she says. “But it demands a steep price.” Then she walks straight out of the room.

“Umm, was that an invitation to pay her?” Macy asks, rummaging in her pockets. “Because I think I’ve got twenty bucks on me.”

“I don’t think that’s the kind of payment she’s talking about,” Hudson says.

“So do we just kind of hang around here and hope for the best,” I ask, “or go find her?”

“Find whom?” the Crone asks as she walks in a totally different door—from a totally different direction—than the one she left by.

“You,” I answer, leaving the “obviously” off.

She blinks those super-blue eyes of hers at me. “But I’m already here, dear Grace. Why would you be looking for me?”

I have no idea what I’m supposed to say to that, so I just kind of smile and nod. “You’re right.”

The flowers have now been snipped of their stems and are sitting in a small bowl of water. “These are for you,” she tells me, holding the bowl out to me.

“Thank you,” I tell her, though I don’t know why she would give me a bunch of chopped-up flowers—especially in the middle of a conversation.

But as I lean down to sniff the fragrant blooms, she stops me with a firm hand to the shoulder. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

I freeze, because if there’s anything I’ve learned from living in this paranormal world, it’s that when a being of power tells you not to do something—especially in that tone—you don’t do it.

“Okay,” I say, lifting my head.

“That’s butterfly weed,” she tells me. “The only plant in the world that monarch butterflies will lay their eggs in. It’s beautiful and it smells very nice and it is horribly, horribly toxic.”

“Oh, well then…thank you for the gift?” I tell her, holding the bowl as far away from me as I can get and still be polite.

She sighs. “It’s not a gift, dear. It’s your—what did you call it?” she asks Flint. “Your get-out-of-jail-free card? All you have to do to cash it in is die.”

98

Hope Blooms Eternal

I drop the flowers on the nearest table. I come close enough to dying on a regular basis that I don’t need some weed to help me along.

The Crone just smiles indulgently at me, though there is a dark watchfulness in her eyes that doesn’t quite fit the sugar and spice and everything oh so nice vibes that she’s working so hard to give out.

“You won’t die from touching them, Grace. Just from eating them,” she tells me.

“So let me get this straight,” Luca says, “just because I like everybody to be on the same page. My friends tell you they don’t want to go to prison—and they definitely don’t want to get stuck there for crimes they didn’t commit—and your suggestion is suicide?” He looks as horrified as he sounds.

“What? Of course not! Suicide helps no one, young man.” She sighs heavily even as she picks up one of the severed flowers and uses the index finger of one hand to spin it around in the palm of the other. “This is my own specially engineered butterfly weed. It has most of the properties of this species of milkweed—including toxins that cause everything from bloating to hallucinations to death.”

“Sounds fun,” Flint tells her in obvious disgust.

She ignores him. “With a little something extra added from me.”

“And what exactly is that extra something?” Hudson demands, and I only thought he looked skeptical before. Right now he looks like she could tell him that today is Monday and he’d tell her she was full of shit, even though it definitely is.

“Just a little…magical genetic engineering I do on some of my flowers. Call it a hobby.”

“Making them less dangerous?” Macy asks, and even she sounds cautious. “Or more dangerous?”

The Crone’s teeth snap together as she smiles. “What do you think? Dear.” The last is tacked on, like she had to remind herself to say it.

“I think we should probably not take those flowers,” Macy answers.

“That is, as always, up to you.” She glides back to her chair. “But they will solve your problem.”

“By killing us?” Hudson asks dryly. “Been there, done that. Not keen on a repeat.”

“By making you appear dead long enough to break the prison’s hold on you and get you taken outside the walls by the guards.”

“Is that a polite way of saying they’ll bury us alive?” I ask, just the idea making me sweat.

“No one from the prison gets buried when they die,” she says sweetly. “That’s just silly.”

This is getting sketchier and sketchier.

“So, what you’re saying is, we eat the flowers, knowing they are poisonous and they will kill us—” I break off as she shakes her head adamantly.

“Make you appear dead,” she tells me. “Not the same thing at all.”

“Oh right, sorry. They will make us appear dead, and then the guards will—for some reason unknown to us—take us outside the prison walls and not bury us, at which time we can get away.”

She smiles. “Exactly. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?”

“What it sounds like is some magical, next-gen Romeo and Juliet shit,” Flint answers. “And I think we all know how that worked out for them.”

“I’ve never read it,” she tells him, but her tone is about ten degrees cooler than it was.