City of Thorns (The Demon Queen Trials #1)(3)

I smiled. “My new place is a shabby basement with spiders. And compared to your fancy Belial University dorms, it’ll seem like a full-blown shithole.”

“Is it really that bad?”

“Hang on.” I snapped a few photos to get the point across, then emailed them to her. “Okay, check your mail. See, if we were texting like normal people, this would be going much more smoothly.”

After a moment, I heard her say, “Oh, okay. Well, yeah, it’s small. Nicely decorated, but small. I don’t love the idea of spiders…I wish I could have you here, but I think you could be legally murdered by demons if I sneaked you in.”

I nodded. “I’d like to avoid that. Maybe just a drink somewhere in Osborn?”

“Hang on…I’m zooming in on your photos to see if I can find anything embarrassing.”

“I’ve drawn thirty-two pictures of the City of Thorns gates, and most are taped to the wall,” I said, “so that’s fairly embarrassing.”

“Yeah, but I already knew you were a weirdo. I was hoping to find you were some kind of secret sex freak, too. For a second, I thought I saw giant red dildos by your bed, but now I can see they’re fire extinguishers.”

“What’s the opposite of a sex freak?” I asked. “That’s me.”

“Okay, but why do you have two fire extinguishers next to your bed?”

I sat up straighter, getting anxious just thinking about it. “There’s no way out of here, Shai. There’s a tiny window over the bed, but it doesn’t open. So if the house were on fire, I’d have to fight my way out from a far corner of a basement while the walls burned around me.”

She inhaled sharply. “Oh, shit. Can you find another place? That doesn’t sound safe even with the fire extinguishers. Is that even legal?”

“Probably not, but I installed fire alarms, too. And I stocked up with the stuff stuntmen used to get through flames.”

“Wait, what?” she cried.

I mentally reviewed what was under my bed. “Fire-retardant clothing and gels to stop my skin from burning, Hollywood-style. I could walk through flames if I had to. Oh! And I bought a gas mask in case I need to get through billowing smoke. I’m pretty much set with the fire stuff.”

“Of course. So you’re still kind of a prepper, I’m guessing?”

“Yes, so in the event of a demon apocalypse, come here. I’ve got several large bags of beans and rice and some fish antibiotics.”

“Nice,” she said. “Are we going to kill the demons with burritos and penicillin?”

“In case the shops and doctors’ offices close. And I’ve got a water purifier in case the reservoir is contaminated.”

What I didn’t mention was my weirdest prepper item: the fox urine, which was something hunters used to disguise their scent. If the demons rampaged around Osborne, hungry for blood, I’d drench myself in fox pee. They’d never find me. But Shai didn’t need to know that. Even with my best friend, I had a line of weirdness I didn’t cross.

“Okay,” said Shai. “Well, since there’s no apocalypse going on right now, let’s figure out somewhere for margaritas, okay?”

“I’m happy with wherever. It’ll just be fun to see you and get out of the basement. And I definitely need a drink. I gave an absolutely disastrous presentation today in my Abnormal Psych class.”

“Shit. Okay. Just give me a chance to call around and see if I can get us reservations, huh? I’ll text you in a few.”

She hung up, and I leaned back against my pillows. A flicker of movement caught my eye, and I glanced at a spider skittering over the floor. The scent of mildew and mold hung heavily in the air.

I pulled my drawing pad and pencil into my lap, then finishing the filagree on another image of the gates to the City of Thorns.

There were only two kinds of mortals allowed in the city: the servants born into their roles, and the students like Shai who could afford it. Every year, Belial University in the City of Thorns accepted around three hundred mortal applicants. At Belial, the demon university, they learned to suffuse their careers with the magical arts. Graduates like Shai always landed plum positions in whatever field they wanted.

But in my case, education wasn’t the real reason I wanted to get into the demon university.

I wanted revenge. I wanted to find the demon who killed my mom.

When the picture of the gate was finished, I flipped over the page and started jotting down some financial numbers. Right now, I owed seventy-five thousand in student loans, with seven percent interest. If I was going to pay that back, and also save up the hundred grand to get into Belial University on what would likely be poverty wages after graduating…

My stomach churned.

Whenever I started making these calculations, the weight of impossibility started pressing down on me. I’d done it a million times, but the numbers never added up. With my loan interest, I’d save up the hundred grand roughly…

Never.

I would never have a hundred thousand dollars to get in.

Increasingly, I was starting to think about plan B: break into the city, then find a way to blend in. There had to be a way. Even an ancient demon city would have a weakness.

As I started to mull over my more dangerous and unhinged plan, my phone buzzed with a message from Shai: Cirque de la Mer. Two for one cocktails tonight. Meet me there at 8:30 xo