Beauty and the Demon

Book 5: Hell Bent

by Aurora Ascher

Genres: Humorous Fantasy; Fantasy Romance; Paranormal Romance

Synopsis

New York Times bestselling author Aurora Ascher's hilarious and hot blend of spicy demon romance and cozy fantasy featuring a half-mad demon with questionable morals, a goth witch who kicks ass and takes names, and a magical library in a castle in Hell. Perfect for fans of Hannah Nicole Maehrer, Brynne Weaver, Jenna Levine, and Kimberly Lemming.

A villain always has a plan . . . but she’s a complication he never saw coming.

Murmur, the nefarious Necromancer, is losing his mind. His army of souls screams in his head, and his dreams are filled with bone-chilling visions of his approaching death. To save himself, he will unleash a torrent of destruction unlike anything Hell has seen before . . . But for his plot to succeed, he requires one final ingredient: the blood of a certain headstrong witch.

This witch can rescue herself . . .

Suyin, leader of the Montreal coven, hides her dread beneath a tough exterior. Unusual abilities she can’t explain are taking over her life, and she’s haunted by ominous dreams. Her fears are realized when she’s captured by a demon with bloodshot eyes. Murmur plans to leave her in his dungeon, but Suyin has no intention of making this easy for him. Bargaining with demons is dangerous business, but she’ll do anything to survive.

Enemies may become lovers, but fate has other plans.

Forced into close proximity, things begin to shift between Suyin and her captor. But as the Necromancer’s machinations reach a pinnacle, he is faced with an impossible choice: achieve his master plan, or free the woman who resurrected his dormant soul.

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

SUYIN DROPPED THE CURTAIN AND STEPPED AWAY FROM the window, her pulse racing. The park across the street from her apartment was poorly lit, but there was still enough light to see the shadowy figure of a man lurking by the bushes. She was pretty sure she had a stalker.

This wasn’t the first time she’d seen him there. Her apartment was on the second floor of a street lined with three-story buildings. There had to be fifty different flats on her side of the block, yet every time she looked around that curtain, she felt eyes on her.

At home wasn’t the only time she felt the skin-crawling sensation of being watched either. Whenever she left the house, she swore she was being followed, whether it was on busy sidewalks or empty side alleys.

It was making her paranoid as hell.

Still standing beside the window, she reached over and flicked the light off, plunging the room into darkness. Then, she crouched and lifted the bottom edge of the curtain, slowly peeking over the windowsill until she could see outside once more.

The figure was there, standing beside the tall lilac bushes. It was too dark to see anything except that the person was lean and broad shouldered. Probably male, but then, that was hardly a surprise. Most perpetrators of creepy activities were male.

She peered harder into the darkness, trying to discern any details of the man’s face. Instead, her nape prickled, and her heart skipped a beat. She couldn’t see his eyes, yet somehow, she was certain he was staring right at her.

She ducked behind the windowsill and slumped against the wall onto the floor, breathing hard. Then, she shook herself.

Fuck him. She wasn’t scared of any man.

She was a powerful blood-born witch who’d trained her entire life to protect herself from things far more terrifying than some creep in the park. And she had more than a trick or two up her sleeve.

She climbed to her feet and flicked the light back on, standing in front of the window behind the closed curtain, knowing her silhouette would be visible from the street below. Then she raised both middle fingers and held them out so he’d see if he was watching.

Then she set about checking her wards.

She wasn’t scared of some creep, but she’d had premonitions lately that were making her paranoia worse. And a few months ago, a real-life fucking demon had broken into her coven’s gathering place, threatened one of her members, and stolen a grimoire from her.

She already knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep if she wasn’t hiding behind half a dozen of the most powerful wards she knew how to cast, and life was too short to spend in an exhausted haze.

She’d tried it before. Wasn’t worth it.

Chalk in hand, she went over all the lines, making sure nothing had smudged. Then she lit the candles and spoke the appropriate incantations, the sacred syllables to match the symbols in the sigils.

When she finished, she stepped back and surveyed her work, equal parts proud and exasperated. The ridiculousness of needing six anti-demon wards just to fall asleep was not lost on her, but she didn’t fucking care.

Not when she dreamed of Hell every night.

As for her stalker, he could be kept out with the deadbolt on the front door—or the baseball bat tucked between her mattress and headboard. If he actually tried to enter her house, she would kindly show him the error of his ways by bashing his skull in.

Feeling more relaxed, she went through her nightly routine and then tied her long black hair into a messy bun and threw on her pajamas—a vintage Night of the Living Dead T-shirt in XXL. She didn’t wear shorts or underwear. It was healthy to let the lady parts breathe.

After checking her locks and wards one last time, she touched the baseball bat to make sure it was in its proper place and then turned the night-light off, plunging her apartment into darkness.

She jerked awake exactly five hours later.

Her eyes popped open, and she stared at the ceiling, chest moving with rapid breaths. Rolling over, she switched on the lamp and opened her nightstand drawer. She pulled out her notebook and flipped to her last entry.

It was the same again. I’m chasing a feather down city alleys. The tip of the feather is writing something as it blows, like a quill, but I can’t decipher it, and I can’t remember any of the symbols once I’m awake.

Then I hit a wall—I think? That part isn’t clear. But when I look up, I’m staring into eyes so bloodshot, the whites are fully red. And I keep getting the image of a scorpion. When the scorpion strikes, the dream changes.

I’m near the bottom of a huge pit, a wide circular chasm. I’m standing on a ledge, and below me is an enormous pit of fire. Above, the sky is red. There’s a tunnel behind me with a glowing-red seal at the end. I walk toward it, and I see a stone door. I try to open it, but the stone is too heavy.

The entry ended there. Suyin had been keeping this notebook since last winter, when she’d started having the nightmares. Today, there was nothing new to add—she’d dreamed the exact same thing for the last couple weeks—so she closed the notebook and stowed it back in the drawer. The clock on her nightstand told her it was quarter to five. The sun wouldn’t rise for another hour, but there was no way she was falling asleep again.

She grabbed her phone, turned off her seven-o’clock alarm, and scrolled through her notifications. Yeah, she knew better than to check her phone first thing in the morning—alpha brain state and all that—but she wasn’t in the mood for self-care today.

She’d been dreading this day for a while. Three hundred and sixty-five days, in fact.

There were several emails from yesterday that she’d put off answering. Coven members asking for help with whatever they were working on, mostly. She ignored them for now, planning to answer while at work.

As coven leader, she was not only a teacher to other members, but a mentor of sorts. Witchcraft relied heavily upon intuition, and it was often necessary to confront one’s inner demons as part of the learning process. Many coven members came to Suyin with personal problems. It wasn’t a responsibility she’d ever particularly wanted, but she valued the sense of purpose it brought her.

She had enough unanswered questions about her own life, and she’d spent most of it on her own, looking after herself, with a head full of secrets. It was nice to be able to provide answers to someone else and be a source of stability to her coven.

She climbed out of bed and went to the kitchen to make coffee. Decaf, because caffeine worked a little too well on her, and the last thing she needed today was a burst of manic activity followed by a crash into inescapable lethargy. Her phone buzzed just as she took the first sip, and she frowned when she saw it was a text from Iris.

Happy birthday, witch bitch! Congrats on being old. I miss you. When are we hanging out?

Six months ago, Suyin had thought of Iris as her closest friend. Maybe the closest friend she’d ever had. Now she wasn’t sure what they were.

Things had shifted majorly, and Suyin wasn’t entirely sure why. Iris’s new boyfriend, Meph, had a lot to do with it, but she didn’t think that was the only reason.

There’s a show this Friday at Les Katacombes that I want to catch, Suyin replied. Wanna come?

She ignored the birthday part. She hadn’t made it a secret that she hated birthdays—though she’d never explained why—and Iris was usually content to allow her to pretend not to have one. This time, however, she supposed it was an excuse for Iris to reach out when they hadn’t spoken in almost two weeks.

Iris’s response popped up seconds later. I’m in. But it’s 5 a.m. Why are you awake?

Just got up, Suyin replied. I like mornings. Can’t say the same for you. What’s your excuse?

I haven’t gone to sleep yet. Iris sent the awkward-smile-and-sweat-droplet emoji. We threw a housewarming party for Meph’s brother and tried to get him drunk enough to pass out. He outlasted all of us though. Jerk.

Didn’t you throw him like, five housewarming parties already?

… No comment.

Suyin rolled her eyes. Go to sleep.

Text me the deets for the show, Iris replied. Looking forward to it.

After finishing her coffee, Suyin went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. Dabbing it dry, she leaned into the mirror and peered at her reflection.

She turned to each side, studying the skin of her face. She lifted her brows, causing her forehead to crease, and then relaxed them again, watching it smooth out. With two fingers, she stretched the corners of her mouth and then between her brows.

Nothing. Not a wrinkle to be found.

Of course there wasn’t. And if she kept checking every day like this, she’d never notice them if they did appear.

But they weren’t going to.

She was finally coming to terms with that, even if it scared the shit out of her. Even if staring at her face in the mirror, untouched by a single sign of aging, made her stomach feel like a hollow pit.

It was the opposite of every other person’s experience, she knew. Most people grimaced at the sight of age spots and wrinkles. Suyin cringed at the lack of them.

But Suyin wasn’t normal. And she had no idea why.

She was reaching a pivotal turning point in her life, and she didn’t know what to do about it. In another ten years or so, her lack of aging would start drawing attention. Soon after, her IDs and passports wouldn’t be any good anymore. Eventually, she’d have to go off-grid. Would she have to fake her death and find some sketchy black-market documents?

She could have told the coven, or Iris at the very least. She knew Iris and her twin, Lily, had a rare ability that allowed them to extend their lifespans. It wouldn’t be unbelievable that Suyin had a similar gift. But talking about it would make it real and involve trust, and she and Iris were on shaky ground now. Suyin had always been guarded, and besides, she doubted anyone could fix whatever was happening to her anyway.

Her disinclination to share was partly why she’d left New York. The Montreal coven had put out a call for a blood-born witch to come help Iris and Lily maintain the cloaking spell that hid them from the demon hunting them, and Suyin had responded. But that had been a convenient excuse. In truth, she’d already been planning to go.

She stared at her reflection. The woman who stared back at her, with dark eyes, a downturned mouth, a small nose, and a squarish jaw, was youthful. Her thick hair was long and shiny with a short fringe cut above her brows, and not a single strand of gray stood out against the inky black.

But according to her birth certificate and IDs, today was her birthday, and she was fifty years old.

And she didn’t have a clue why she wasn’t aging.



The feeling of being watched crept up the back of Suyin’s neck as soon as she stepped outside, though her stalker was nowhere to be seen. She’d checked out the front and back of the apartment before she left and had seen no sign of him.

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t there.

She scanned the alley carefully before descending the spiral staircase from her balcony to the downstairs neighbor’s garden. It was still spring, and the plants hadn’t grown to their full lushness yet, but the trees were speckled with buds due to burst into foliage any day.

She opened the tall gate and peered around, seeing nothing except a couple neighborhood cats hissing at each other. Her skin still crawled. She swore she felt eyes on her.

She’d rented out the small garage behind her building, and she entered through the side door, careful to lock it again behind her. It smelled like engine oil. Her rusty piece-of-shit Civic was tucked as close to the wall as possible to make room for her brand-new baby: an all-black, 745cc Honda Shadow Phantom.

She’d traded in her beat-up old Harley a few months ago for the Phantom, going for something sturdier with a lower seat and room for a passenger on the back. The suspension and brakes had been upgraded, and the matte-black stealth paint job was too nice to pass up.

Still, the coven’s meeting place and occult shop was only twenty minutes on foot, and normally, she would’ve walked. She didn’t like leaving her bike outside for the long hours she was at work.

But now, all she could think about was how easy it would be to sneak up on her at a walking pace, and how quickly she could be ambushed around a corner.

She pulled her favorite helmet off the hook on the wall, zipped up her leather jacket, and lifted her satchel strap over her head. Rolling up the garage door, she pushed her bike out and then shut the door and locked it. She fired up the bike and shot down the alley, stray cats fleeing at the rumbling engine.

As she peeled around the corner onto the main road, she almost smiled. It felt good to ride, especially with all the doom and gloom she’d been carrying around lately.

She drove a few extra blocks to purge her heavy emotions, pulling up in the alley behind the shop half an hour later. Engaging the disc locks on her tires, she covered the bike with the tarp she’d stashed behind the garbage bins. After one final scan of the alley, she opened the heavy back door and set about flicking on the lights.

Le Repaire des Sorcières—The Witches’ Lair—was a cozy occult store full of casting supplies and other knickknacks witches found attractive. A lot of witches had mild hoarder tendencies when it came to their love of trinkets with potential use in their practice.

They loved crystals, charms, and figurines of goddesses from different cultures and mythologies. They loved herbs, incense, candles, and books. Le Repaire supplied those items to the witches in Montreal, and it also held appeal to non-witches who were curious or liked the aesthetic.

The spacious basement cellar where the coven met had a circle of chairs and a whiteboard for meetings, open floor space for sigil drawing, and several rows of bookshelves and worktables for study.

That was where Suyin’s grimoire had been stolen from a few months ago. The demon had walked into the store and threatened to kill the witch on duty, Marie-Thérèse, if she didn’t open the ward for him. Suyin didn’t expect anyone to risk their life for grimoires, even priceless ones, and she was glad Marie hadn’t been hurt.

She’d since upped the store’s protections. Now, as long as her wards held, it would take a powerful demon a lot of effort to break in, giving them plenty of time to fight back or escape.

After completing the same ward-maintenance rituals she did at home, Suyin opened the store for business. An occult shop on a Monday morning wasn’t the busiest place around, and she knew she’d have time to kill.

Settling onto the stool behind the front counter, she pulled her laptop out of her bag and fired it up. She didn’t open her inbox to respond to her coven members’ messages, though she probably should have. Instead, she pulled up the PDF she’d downloaded from the coven’s database after the theft.

The demon had stolen one of Suyin’s oldest possessions and left everything else untouched, and she wanted to know why. He may have taken her grimoire, but thankfully, Marie-Thérèse and a couple other coven members had faithfully scanned every book in their collection and saved the files on the computers downstairs.

Suyin had been poring over the scans of her grimoire for months now. As if it was going to make any more sense now than it had when she’d read it ten years ago, and ten years before that, and when her mother had first given it to her …

The grimoire was entitled The Book of Gamigin, and it was the last thing in their collection she would’ve guessed a demon would want. Supposedly written by a father she’d never met, the book had been her mother’s most prized possession, though Suyin had never understood why. Even when she’d left it to Suyin before her death, on Suyin’s eighteenth birthday, she’d been unable to provide a reasonable explanation of its importance.

Keep it safe, was all Fay had said. This book contains knowledge beyond even what the angels perceive. Your father entrusted it to me, and now, I’m entrusting it to you.

It was one of the few times Fay had spoken of Suyin’s father, Samuel, and Suyin knew only the barest facts about him. According to Fay, Samuel had been an avid witch practitioner with a passion for demonology—hence the name of his grimoire—and he’d died of an illness only months after Suyin’s birth.

Apparently, he’d tried to summon Gamigin, a demon known for wisdom and magical expertise, on several occasions throughout his life and failed each time. More surprising than the failure was that Samuel hadn’t been killed in the process. As a rule, demons did not respond well to humans trying to enslave them.

As for Fay, she’d never been a particularly nurturing or emotional person, but Suyin had always gotten the sense that she’d loved Samuel deeply and spent the rest of her life quietly grieving. She’d left China with baby Suyin immediately after his death, and for the most part, she’d never spoken of him again. Suyin had never even seen a photo of him.

After Fay’s death, more than thirty years ago now, Suyin had cracked open the old grimoire, hoping it contained information about her father and why Fay had hidden it for so long. Unfortunately, it hadn’t made a lick of sense.

After months of study, she’d concluded that either her father had suffered from a mental illness causing severe delusions—perhaps as a result of messing with black magic, one of the reasons Suyin had always steered clear herself—or he hadn’t written the book at all. Maybe he’d gotten possession of it from a demon somehow. After all, it was written in Sheolic.

Now that it had been stolen, Suyin was motivated to read it again. She was desperate to understand why a demon might want it. Something had to make sense. Somehow, everything fit together. She was just missing the bigger picture.

After an hour or so of trying to decipher incoherent ramblings—cross-referencing everything with her Sheolic-English translation book—the little bells over the front door tinkled, offering a welcome distraction.

“Good morning,” she called out, straightening from her computer. She blinked her eyes back into focus, realizing her nose had been only a couple inches from the screen.

Then she frowned.

The shop was empty. No one replied to her greeting because no one was there.

There was a clear view of the front door from behind the counter, and none of the shelves were high enough for a person to hide behind. But she’d definitely heard the bell ring.

If that fucking park creep found me at work, I swear to god I’ll make him regret it.

Nape prickling, she closed her laptop and slipped off the stool. She checked behind the shelves in the far corner. The shop was tiny; it wasn’t like she would miss someone if they were here. She went to the front door and looked out onto the street. The wind blew bits of garbage and dead leaves. Nothing was out of the ordinary.

Fuck, was she losing her mind?

She gave one last look at the deserted street, shaking her head and—

“Hello.”

Barely stifling a shout, she spun around and came face to face with another person.

Bloodshot eyes. A scorpion’s tail. A fiery pit. A glowing red seal—

Suyin blinked. A woman stood in front of her. Middle-aged, graying hair. “I’m looking for a gift for my niece,” she said with a wary smile. “Can you help me?”

“How’d you get in here?” Suyin demanded.

Tact had never been her strong suit. She was five-foot-two and weighed a hundred and thirty pounds. She’d learned a long time ago to be blunt or people would look right over her head.

The woman blinked. “I came in through the door, of course. I was just looking at the candles over there.”

Suyin looked at the candle display. It was directly beside the front desk, but it was blocked from view by a tall rack of jewelry on the counter. She closed her eyes and cursed inwardly. She’d been so caught up in her paranoia that she thought she was in a horror movie jump-scare scene.

Was this her life now? Dreaming of Hell and impending doom, dodging stalkers, and sinking farther into unsociability until she lost touch with reality?

There wasn’t anything she could do about it now. She focused back on her customer. “Right. Your niece. What does she like?”

A HEAVY SHOULDER SLAMMED INTO SUYIN’S, SENDING her flying until she crashed into another sweaty body. She shoved against the much larger man with two hands and launched back in another direction, only to be body-slammed right back the way she’d come. Another tall person crashed into her, their elbow cracking her on the side of the head.

Momentarily stunned, she stumbled and hit the ground.

With the mass of perspiring bodies undulating around her, one would expect her to be immediately trampled underfoot. Instead, a hand reached down. She grasped it, and with a tug, she was back on her feet.

The bearded metalhead raised his brows in question. She gave him a thumbs up, letting him know she was okay, and they both launched back into the melee. But her head was pounding now. The music was so loud her ears were numb.

She was fifty years old, damn it. Too old for mosh pits.

It didn’t make her enjoy them any less, though. Nor did her diminutive stature or the fact that she was female. Men were dicks everywhere in life, but there was an etiquette to a good mosh pit. You fell—especially when you were her size—but someone always helped you up.

Still, Suyin could only take such a beating for so long, and she’d left her companion for the night over by the bar. At the end of the song, she slipped off by the side stage and pushed through the tight pack of bodies. Dragging her sweaty hair off her face, she searched the crowd for the familiar flash of blue and followed it like a beacon.

When she arrived, the owner of that bright hair took one look at Suyin’s disheveled state and laughed. Not that it was audible over the start of the next song, as the blare of distorted guitar obliterated all else.

“You look like you got hit by a bus!” Iris shouted as Suyin hauled her weary body onto a barstool beside her. Iris handed over the beer she’d ordered while Suyin was gone.

It was Friday. Suyin had made it through the week without being killed by a stalker or taken to Hell, or whatever her constant sense of foreboding was trying to warn her about.

But her sense of dread hadn’t lessened. If anything, it had gotten worse.

As promised, Iris had come out. Neither of them brought up Iris’s sudden absence from the coven or why she was suddenly so cagey about her life. Just for tonight, Suyin wanted to pretend things were normal. That she had her best friend back. That her potentially endless future wasn’t looming ahead of her like a yawning pit of infinitude.

Eternal youth had never seemed so unappealing.

Suyin forced a smile and took the condensation-slicked glass, clinking it against Iris’s before taking a sip. Her blood-red lipstick left a print on the edge.

“Girl, your makeup is smudged down your face something fierce,” Iris shouted in her ear. “You look like a goth zombie.”

Suyin ran her fingers under her eyes and laughed when they came away black. Then she shrugged. Goth zombie sounded like a good look to her.

Taking another sip, she shouted in her friend’s ear, “Why don’t you ever mosh with me anymore?”

Iris shook her head. “I’m too old for that shit.”

Suyin arched a brow. If only she knew.

“Plus,” Iris added, “if I came home covered in bruises, I think Meph would go on a murder spree.”

She said it with a dreamy look in her eyes, but Suyin inwardly grimaced. Iris’s new boyfriend was an awkward subject between them. It bothered her that Iris still refused to properly introduce them.

She’d seen “Meph” once at Iris and Lily’s last birthday party—and she still wasn’t sure what his weird name was an abbreviation for. He was in Lily’s scary hot boyfriend’s group of scary hot friends. Suyin remembered teasing Iris, telling her to go talk to the fuckboy she kept staring at. Iris had scoffed and told her he was toxic, and she wasn’t going near him.

Next thing Suyin knew, they were madly in love. They’d even gotten a fucking dog together.

She rolled her eyes inwardly.

In the beginning, Iris’s reluctance to properly introduce them had made sense. Iris normally went through a boyfriend every month or so, each more of an asshole than the last, and there was no need for Suyin to waste time meeting guys she hated the second she saw them.

But Iris had been dating the mysterious Meph for a while now, and she had yet to complain about him. At all. In fact, she seemed to get sappier as time passed. While that was vaguely nauseating, Suyin was happy for her friend. There was only so much male assholery a woman could endure before she became a total misandrist.

But Iris still wouldn’t talk about him, and she avoided the subject of an introduction like the plague. Worse, because Iris’s life was becoming more and more entwined with Meph’s, it meant she and Suyin spent less and less time together. And the more Suyin felt like Iris was keeping secrets from her, the more she pulled away herself.

It felt like their friendship was ending, and Suyin didn’t know how to stop it.

“Are you okay?” Iris’s question snapped her out of her musings.

“Huh?”

“It’s just, we haven’t spoken a lot lately, and I can’t help but notice you look a little stressed out.”

Suyin waved her off instead of replying. Speaking meant shouting because of the volume of the music, and she didn’t feel like shouting her secrets, let alone speaking them in a normal tone of voice.

Iris glanced around the club with a determined expression, and Suyin realized she’d come to the same conclusion. A moment later, Iris seized her arm in a vise grip and tugged her across the venue.

Suyin let herself be led. A part of her knew that if she really hadn’t wanted to tell Iris anything, she could have made some excuse about not wanting to miss the show. But … she was so tired. Tired of feeling isolated. Tired of keeping secrets. Though she’d never admit it to Iris, she wanted to tell her.

They slipped through the door onto the bar’s back patio, which was more of a narrow gap between two tall brick buildings. Cigarette butts littered the ground, and smoke filled the air from all the metalheads lighting up.

Iris dragged her to an empty picnic table that rocked dangerously when they sat. They chose opposite sides to balance it out and set their drinks down between them.

“I’ve been having dreams,” Suyin blurted. She’d never been one for subtlety.

Iris blinked. “What kind of dreams?”

“They feel like nightmares while I’m having them, but afterward, they feel prophetic. Like they’re trying to tell me something bad is coming.”

“How often?”

“Almost every night.”

“Damn.” Iris took a sip of beer. “What happens?”

“It’s usually the same, but it’s changed recently.” She proceeded to explain chasing the feather, trying to read the script, the bloodshot eyes and the scorpion, and then the bottomless pit and creepy door.

“In the beginning, I used to see a crow every time, but I don’t see it anymore. And the pit and trying to open that stupid door—that’s all new. I used to wake up once the scorpion stung me. And I swear, that pit is in Hell. There are flames, and the sky is—”

“Wait.” Iris held up a hand. “What was that about the crow?”

“I used to see a crow at the beginning of the dream. It took flight, and when it spread its wings, it covered the face of the sun, and the day became night.”

Iris made a strangled laugh and then covered it with a cough.

Suyin just stared at her. “What?”

“Oh, um—” She coughed again. “Nothing. A crow and the sun, huh? Weird.”

Suyin frowned. She had the distinct impression that Iris was withholding something, which reminded her why she hadn’t confided in her friend lately. “Does that mean anything to you?”

Iris hesitated. “Well, it’s not hard to find meaning in that kind of symbology, is it?”

“That’s not what I asked,” Suyin said, a little sharper than intended. “I asked if it meant anything to you.”

“Not really.” Iris’s voice wavered, and she became focused on rotating her beer glass in circles inside the ring of condensation on the table.

She was lying.

Suyin couldn’t fathom why Iris would choose to blatantly lie about her dreams, of all things. It was symbology. Why lie about it?

Whatever the reason, it pissed her off. Here she was opening up to her friend about something personal, and Iris couldn’t even do her the courtesy of being honest.

“I’m ready to go back inside,” Suyin said, planting her palms on the table and standing. This time her sharp tone was intentional.

“Wait.” Iris’s avoidant gaze snapped back to hers. “Su, I can’t—I know you think I’m lying to you.”

Suyin didn’t sit. But she didn’t leave either.

“I’ll just say … The crow and the sun? I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Actually, I think it’s a good thing.”

Suyin frowned. “A bird of darkness covers the sun and snuffs out the light. How can you perceive that as a good omen?”

“Maybe …” Iris went back to staring at her beer glass. “Maybe the sun had been forced to shine f