The drive passed quickly as the guys compared notes on their strategies, successes, and failures. Sitting beside Kai and Sin, I found my gaze lingering on Ezra as he twisted in his seat to see Aaron. The scar that ran down his forehead, across his pale left eye, and partway down his cheek stood out starkly against his warm bronze skin.

“Well, Tori?” Kai prompted. “Where did you go wrong with your strategy?”

I let my head fall back against the seat. “Um … the building we used was too obvious a choice. It was the closest to the tower, so the enemy expected us to go there.”

“And,” Aaron concluded triumphantly, “you walked right into our ambush.”

“Don’t you mean you walked right into Kai’s paintballs?” I shot back.

Kai and Ezra snickered. A minute later, Aaron pulled into the guild parking lot. Andrew’s SUV and the guild’s communal monster-sized van squeezed into the tiny lot after us, and everyone piled out. I automatically headed for the back door that led into the kitchen, but Andrew and Kai herded the group around to the front entrance. We mashed through the threshold, and I barely noticed the icky surge of fear the spell on the door, used to repel humans, caused me.

The pub awaited us, its ceiling striped with dark beams. Wood-paneled walls enclosed the polished tables that dotted the space, and the bar stretched across the back so the bartender—aka moi—could watch over her patrons and the door.

“Hey!” I barked as two guys bumped a table while loudly bantering about something. “Cooper, Bryce! Watch it.”

Cooper—our greasy, lazy weekend cook—and Bryce—a handsome thirtyish telepath—shot me guilty looks over their shoulders, and everyone clustered closer to avoid knocking into my tables. Yeah, that’s right. Fear Tori’s wrath.

Ramsey poked his head through the kitchen’s saloon doors. He grinned, black hair hanging in his face and dark liner dramatizing his eyes. “How did it go?”

“Red Team won!” Cameron yelled, and half the mythics threw their fists up with a cheer.

As Aaron and Ezra shouted their victory, Kai and I exchanged dark looks.

“We got a great demonstration of a new technique,” Laetitia announced. “It’s called the Tori Feint.”

My head snapped around. “Huh? What?”

Liam wormed between Aaron and Sin to throw a skinny arm around my shoulders. “No, we should call it the Tori Bluff and Blast.”

“How about the Tori Cheat?” Cearra suggested nastily.

“Sore loser much?” I asked as I shrugged off Liam’s arm.

She stiffened. “My team won.”

“Uh-huh.” Flipping my ponytail over my shoulder—then flipping the bird at Cameron and Darren when they called out new suggestions for my patented fake-surrender strategy—I led the way to the stairs. The laughing, bantering group followed.

Chapter Two

We split into the men’s and women’s showers, and I joined Sin as we waited for Gwen, Laetitia, Cearra, and Alyssa to fight it out over the two shower stalls. Lost in thought, I tugged my t-shirt over my head.

“Tori?”

“Eh?” I realized I was standing in just my bra, holding my shirt in front of me. I quickly lowered it. “What?”

Sin frowned. “You okay? No lingering potion effects?”

“No, just tired. The gang takes these games way too seriously.”

“Well, it’s more training than play,” she pointed out, stripping off her damp top. She hadn’t been running around getting shot at, but she’d been wearing the same hot gear as the rest of us. “Speaking of training, how’s that going?”

I peeled off my jeans. “Good, I think. Aaron says I’m making excellent progress. I should be, considering how hard he and Kai push me.”

She sat on the bench in front of the scuffed green lockers to pull off her socks. Gwen and Laetitia exited the shower stalls, wrapped in towels, and Alyssa and Cearra took their places.

“What about Ezra?” Sin asked. “Does he help with your training?”

“No.” My mouth twisted. “He doesn’t help. He …”

She waited a moment. “He what?”

He wasn’t even there, that’s what. Not anymore. Which was freakin’ stupid, considering he lived in the same damn house where I trained for two hours, four days a week.

I’d thought everything was okay between us. He knew I didn’t hold the fact he was an illegal demon mage against him. I didn’t care—much—that he had a real live demon embedded in his body, or that it occasionally tried to control him. He was my friend, and that’s all that mattered.

Yet, he’d begun to withdraw. First, Kai or Aaron had begun taking me home instead of letting me sleep over at their house, which I used to do almost every weekend. Then Ezra had stopped coming to the Sunday and Monday dinners I cooked for the four of us. Then he’d stopped joining us for my workouts and training. I’d scarcely seen him in the last two weeks.

Having learned not to ignore the things that bothered me, I’d asked Aaron and Kai what the deal was. Ezra was having trouble sleeping, they’d said. Apparently, his insomnia was so bad he’d been missing workouts and napping at weird times—like my twice-weekly dinners. When I asked if he’d seen a healer, they’d hesitated. Any mythic looking at him too closely was a risk; what if the healer somehow detected the demonic spirit inside him?

A hand waved in front of my face. I straightened sharply, blinking the changing room and Sin’s concerned face back into focus.

“Sorry,” I blurted, then hastily changed the subject. “Are you excited for Monday?”

Her eyes lit up. Topic change successfully completed.

“I can’t wait!” she gushed. “It’ll be so cool hanging out with you and the guys for a week. I’ve been dying to see the Sinclair Academy since my sister started there. It was really nice of Aaron to arrange for me to visit.”

A faint blush tinted her cheeks at the last bit.

“He’s a pretty cool guy,” I teased. “We’ll have a blast. It’s too bad you can’t stay for the whole two weeks.”

“My parents wouldn’t like it if we missed Christmas with them,” she pointed out. “They’ve been moping since September, and it’s only Lily’s first term. Are they going to sulk for the next five years?”

I snorted. My dad would’ve loved dumping his kid at boarding school.

“Besides,” Sin added, “Aaron probably wants some time with his parents and best friends without me and my sister hanging around.”

I cringed. My Christmas plans were still a source of chagrin for me. Not that I didn’t want to spend two weeks on holiday at a fancy mage academy with the guys, but there were … complications.

“Something wrong?” Sin asked, watching me closely.

Cearra and Alyssa had just stepped out of the shower stalls, so I smiled reassuringly and grabbed my towel. “Nothing. Let’s get cleaned up.”

I brooded through my shower, meaning I took too long. Sin was already getting dressed when I got out, scrunching my blazing red curls with a second towel. She headed upstairs and, alone, I hurriedly dried off and dressed in a pair of jeans and a royal blue V-neck sweater.

A few guys were hanging around the fitness equipment at the center of the large room, its walls covered in action movie posters from the eighties. With more guys waiting to rotate through their showers, there was probably still a line.

Upstairs, chatting voices washed over me. More members besides our paintball party had arrived for the monthly meeting, bringing the total number of mythics in the pub up to nearly thirty. New energy added a bounce to my step as I cut behind the bar and grabbed my apron. Ramsey stood at my usual station, filling a row of glasses with ice.

“Hey!” I greeted, eyeing the group at the far end of the bar. They were clustered around something, but I couldn’t see what. “Thanks for covering for me.”

“No problem,” he said with a grin. “Tell me about the Tori Bait and Switch.”

“Why does it need a name?” I gave him a quick rundown of my antics as I watched the cluster of members, which included Darren, Cameron, Cearra, and Alyssa, my least favorite guild bullies. No group of people was perfect.

I nodded at them. “What’s going on over there?”

Ramsey slid two glasses of ice toward me. “Moscow Mules,” he requested as he poured bourbon into a shaker. “Over there … well, that would be—”

The group shifted, opening a gap, and I saw it wasn’t an object that everyone was focused on. It was a person. A person so petite I hadn’t seen her over the others’ heads and shoulders.

“… our elusive new contractor,” Ramsey finished. “She just arrived.”

My brightening mood soured again. I grabbed two lime wedges and squeezed them violently over the glasses of ice.

Our new demon contractor, Robin Page, was the final reason I’d scarcely seen Ezra. Because of her, he’d been avoiding the guild entirely. That, at least, I understood. Ezra was an illegal demon mage, so he avoided all contractors as a precaution.

She’d taken away his one haven outside the guys’ house, and though she had no clue about any of that, I was still pissed at her.

Reaching past Ramsey, I lifted a bottle of vodka from the well. “In the five weeks since she joined, she’s shown up, what, twice before this? Real dedicated, isn’t she?”

“I heard she had the flu,” Ramsey replied with a shrug. He slid me a can of ginger beer.

“Likely story,” I muttered darkly as I poured vodka into the two glasses, then added the beer.

Robin stood amidst the mythics with her shoulders hunched. She barely topped five feet, her figure and features equally petite. Her thick brunette hair brushed the tops of her shoulders and her slender hands were twisted in the long sleeves of her black sweater. She looked painfully uncomfortable.