I whistled. Rejuvenation tanks were expensive. The nutrient-rich baths were typically reserved for critical cases like super-premature infants or billionaires over the age of sixty. Definitely not the sort of thing you expected to find in an Underground arena, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I didn’t follow blood sports, but you’d have to be deaf, blind, and criminally unobservant to miss the Gameskeeper’s advertising. Those big weekend fights had to make him millions. That sort of money made keeping your talent in top shape a critical investment, and while I hated to think of Nik as someone’s commodity, I was happy to hear he’d at least be getting the best treatment.
We lay still for a while after that. Not even talking, just listening to each other breathe. I could have snoozed on Nik forever, but five minutes later, my alarm went off again, this time with the super-critical ringtone, and I forced myself off him with a groan.
“That’s the final warning.”
Nik sighed and sat up as well, reaching down to grab his boots and weapons where I’d stacked them by the end of the couch. When he was shod and rearmed, he rose to his feet. “See you tonight?”
“I’ll be there the moment the doors open,” I promised, getting up on my tiptoes to kiss him one last time. “Good luck.”
He caught me and kissed me back, crushing my body to his for a too-brief second before he let me go and walked to my door. He was about to turn the handle when I finally snapped out of my romantic daze.
“Wait!”
Nik stopped, looking over his shoulder in confusion.
“You don’t want to do that,” I said, hurrying to pry his hand off my front door. “We’re kind of floating in a mind-twisting void that shouldn’t exist. It’s not fun to walk into.”
He scowled. “How do I get out, then?”
“Let me,” I said, grabbing the knob. Then I stopped. “Uh, where do you want to go?”
“Back to that weird restaurant you were at last night,” Nik said. “I left my car in Loveland.”
I gaped at him. Nik had left his car in Loveland to stay with me. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but tourist areas in the DFZ were hot spots for petty crime. Leaving anything unattended in a place like that was practically asking for it to be stolen or vandalized, and Nik had left his beloved black car parked there overnight. For me.
“I put it in a deck,” he said when the silence had stretched too long. “I wasn’t going to—”
“Shh,” I said, pressing my finger to his lips. “Don’t ruin it.”
He nodded, looking confused. Still sighing at his selfless romantic act, I turned back to my door and focused my mind on the picture I’d used to get us to Loveland last night. I was struggling to remember the details when I realized I could do even better. I’d never tried this particular variation on the spell before, but I’d used a fence gate to get back here last night, so I didn’t think it would be too much of a stretch.
With that, I pushed the old image out of my head and focused on a new one. One I knew much better. When I had it perfectly clear in my mind, I turned the doorknob and pushed, grinning wide when my apartment door opened, not onto a busy tourist sidewalk, but directly into the cab of Nik’s sports car.
“Ta-da!”
“Wow,” he said, sounding legitimately impressed. Then he scowled. “Wait, how does that even work? Your door is taller than my car. It doesn’t seem physically possible.”
“It’s not,” I assured him. “But it is quite magically possible, and that’s what counts.”
Nik puzzled over that for a good twenty seconds, then he shrugged and stepped into his car.
“You know,” I said as he sat down in the driver’s seat. “In hindsight, I could have opened a door straight to your apartment. Then we could have spent last night in a bed rather than on a couch.”
“I wouldn’t change a thing about last night,” he said, giving me a rare grin. “But that’s a good plan for next time.”
Hearing he wanted to do this again sent my heart fluttering. It felt silly since Nik had always made it clear he wanted me to stick around, but I wasn’t used to being part of someone else’s life like this. If you counted the two months I’d been forced to hide—which I totally did—Nik was by far my longest relationship. It was a new experience, in other words. Can you blame me for being excited?
“No,” Sibyl said in my ear. “But you will be very late if you don’t get a move on.”
Grumbling about killjoy responsible AIs, I waved a final goodbye to Nik and shut my door. When I turned around to make sure I had everything I needed for my morning training, I spotted my dad standing in the bedroom doorway. My actual dad, not the smoky ghost from last night.
“Hey, you’re back in your body!” I said, walking over to grab my bag off the kitchen counter. “How’d you do that?”
“I just stepped back in,” he said curtly. “It is my body.”
I’d thought it would be more complicated than that, but, “If it works, it works,” I said, slinging my bag across my chest with a joy nothing could bring down. Not that my dad wasn’t trying.
“Where is your criminal?”
“His name is Nik, he’s not a criminal, and he had to go to an appointment,” I said, refusing to let him rain on my parade. “Speaking of, I’ve gotta get to Shaman training. I’ll bring you back some vegetables or something.”
“You’re not going anywhere without me,” Yong said sternly. “The fire you gave me last night is already fading. I barely managed to climb back into my body this morning.”
“Well, maybe you should climb back out of
