The Afterlife of the Party by Darcy Marks

Author:Darcy Marks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aladdin
Published: 2023-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

I tossed it up and watched it disappear with a brief flash of flame.

It took a few minutes, but before I could completely work myself into a panic about school friends not actually equaling real friends, a piece of parchment fell from the sky onto my stomach.

Yeah. What’s up?

—Az

Maybe I was capable of making friends on my own. Who knew?

TWENTY-THREE

It turned out that trying to cram an eternity’s worth of history into a couple of weeks’ worth of classes was a nearly impossible task. A task that only Lilith’s and my tracks were focusing on, so much so that I was seeing less and less of Lilith as she crammed at home.

The magicians were working practical magic under unusual conditions, and who knew what Aleister’s track was doing. He had missed more and more of our daily check-ins as well, but unlike Lilith and me, it didn’t seem to be so he could cram schoolwork. It was so he could hang out with his new friends, who were clearly more important than us.

Crowley was a “natural” at his new assignments, though we all knew it was only because he’d had a head start. He had already learned how to use his magic in the mortal realm, and under much higher pressure.

I was also starting to have a sneaking suspicion that he had spoken to Charity, even after we’d returned home. There were moments when he’d let something slip that sounded an awful lot like it had come from one very chatty witch. As the silence grew between me and Sean, the urge to talk to Crowley about that suspicion grew larger. I would remember at night after I fell into bed, then would forget immediately when morning came. Then it would happen all over again.

The frantic—and, let’s be honest, ridiculous—amount of work greatly reduced our snooping, as well as our squad hangouts. I hadn’t seen Lilith’s basement in weeks. On the other hand, Azael started coming over to study, and my parents were ecstatic.

By the time my regular appointment at Glamourie rolled around, I was so tired, I fell asleep in Morgan’s chair. I hadn’t even told them what I wanted, but when I woke up, my hair was back to its natural color, with silver highlights that sparkled in the light of the flames. My wings were almost natural but more. All the blue, purple, and green highlights that were normally there when I caught the light just right were emphasized so that the colors were always there, even without being directly under the light.

“It’s perfect,” I said.

“Of course it is,” they said.

And then Morgan packed me a bag of tea from Faerie that was supposed to give me energy and focus for study but smelled like perfume. I brought it home and tossed it on the counter, just as Azael knocked on the door for yet another study session.

I took one look at Azael’s tired face and decided to throw caution to the wind and brewed a couple of cups, which were currently sitting on the coffee table beside us.

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