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And here we go again, the sibling bickering. Evera screams at him. “Don’t you dare be rude about my girls. You work even less than them.”

“True, but where are they now, your hardworking lovers?” Every wiggles both his eyebrows, looking like a court jester from some medieval, Shakespearean play.

“On a paid leave vacation to Disneyland. They’re with Queeny’s fairy folk at the moment. I sent them there just now ’cause you’ve got beef with them.”

“Oh yeah? And how’d you know I’m even coming over?”

“Papa told me.”

Every sniffs the air snobbishly. “Well, I didn't tell him this plan.”

His sister just shakes her head. “Oh, Ev, but you’re the most predictable person on this planet.”



An alarm blares, but it turns out to just be Evera the Ice Queen’s ringtone, the volume set to the maximum. “Yo, what’s up, mate?” she asks with her mouth full of Peking duck wraps, still chewing. A bad habit, not fit at all for the queen of ice. But whatever.

“We’ve got a fire?” she continues, “on an ice planet like this? An ass-freezing desolate wasteland like this homey-fucking-house of ours? You’ve gotta be shitting me, man.”

The person at the other end of the phone seems to scream something at her, but since her phone’s speaker mode is not on, Lily cannot be sure. So she simply ignores it and continues inhaling the exotic fruits provided by her kind host, digging them into the leftover salted-egg sauce as she eats.

Not so becoming for a fairy queen either.

“Well, whatever. Every’s here, and he’s gonna help you, right, lil bro?” She turns to her elder brother now, then speaks back to the phone. “He’s got a firefighting license, if I remember it right.”

Every grunts from his seat beside Lily-girl. “It was a basic firefighting training course that papa signed me up for when I was eight. And I failed it. But whatever.”

He strips out of his Prada three-piece suit and museum-worthy Pietro Yantorny pumps, then rushes out of the hall, away into the ice and snow like a batshit crazy patient running from the psych ward.

Thick mahogany doors bang open and close.

“Sorry ’bout that,” he yells from outside the warm hall. “But I ain’t getting my fresh new clothes all sooty and grey.”

CHAPTER 13: YOUR PET OF A GIRLFRIEND

“I guess the cold made me grow scales.” Every speaks with a blank face as he attempts to solo-stop a fire burning a barn. He hovers around the perimeter, now in a kinky firefighter costume with shiny pink neon stripes.

Why there even is a barn on this ice planet, or a fire at all, in all the cold weather, one could not tell.

Lily Landor Lindor stares at him with a paw clutched pettily to her hip, looking as if she is a model doing a catwalk. But a failed one. She stares at his long claws, bright blue scales, and icy-white wings. And he just stares back at her, looking every inch like a bald little bird.

Her man has once again transformed, but this time, not exactly in a good way. He was supposed to be a dope alien barbarian, she assumes, complete with the whole set of abs and arms, scales and tails, horns and thorns. And wings. But comes off rather as a furry cartoon character, like that combination of species that is seventy percent bird and thirty percent lion.

What’s that called again?

A phoenix, yes, a phoenix.

Like that Egyptian statue. No, dork, that’s a sphinx.

She continues staring at him again, as if he had grown an extra head, which technically he did—not that she knows it. Just not the one on his neck.

Still a ten, though.

“Aww, my little bird, blue bird,” she coos.

“No, bitch,” someone murmurs in an exceedingly dull, flat tone. Well, that tone sounds familiar somehow in a way that Lily, as always, cannot place.

Evera, now standing beside her, peering without a care at the burning barn from under her painted lashes, snorts. “So, the fuck are we doing here again?” she asks Lily-girl, who dragged her from the takeaway Chinese food to this whole clusterfuck in the first place.