Boston

Boston is the Coterie’s nerve center and Venus’s base of power: a major city that, for Ava, means both a dangerous territory to avoid and a place where ordinary plans can become an encounter with the supernatural order ruling it. The city’s vanished Council leaves Venus’s power largely unchecked, while the Inferno gives that power a polished public face and a hidden, predatory interior.

The Coterie’s Stronghold

Ava thinks of Boston as the Coterie’s whole central nervous system. Venus is based there, and the organization’s reach is close enough to make a proposed weekend visit feel less like a harmless outing than a voluntary return to enemy territory. Though Ava is compelled to work for Venus, she resists the idea that she should also spend her free time near Venus and her associates. Her reluctance reflects the city’s significance in her life: Boston is not simply unfamiliar ground, but the center of the power that constrains her.

The Inferno, a Coterie-owned restaurant and dance club, is the clearest local expression of that power. Ava knows its surrounding streets well because Venus often spends time there while managing operations. The establishment launders money and serves as Venus’s lair, joining respectable business to criminal and supernatural control. When Ryan proposes a foreign horror-film marathon, Ava reasons that the outing could be safe if they stayed away from the Inferno’s neighborhood. She does not know all of Boston, but she knows enough of that area to understand the distinction matters.

The Inferno’s Public and Hidden Faces

A Friday-night line curls around the Inferno, a sign of how accessible its public image appears. The building has three levels. At street level, Purgatory operates as a restaurant open to the general public: a maître d’ takes names and seats customers whether they arrive in suits or ripped jeans. The menu ranges from surf ’n’ turf to burgers, and the candlelit room manages to feel upscale without being snooty. Ava can recognize its appeal even while wishing it belonged to anyone but Venus.

Above it, Heaven is a dance club and bar; below it lies Hell. Heaven and Hell are reserved for VIPs, unlike the public restaurant. The layered design separates a polished dining room from spaces controlled more tightly by the Coterie. In Hell, gold Art Deco elevators lead past guards and security checks. Its plush carpet, walls, couches, and chairs are almost entirely white, reflecting Venus’s taste. Ava regards the decor as perversely impractical: blood would show on it. She has deliberately tracked mud across the carpet more than once, and Venus punished each act by chaining her to a wall for an hour. The manacles Venus had made for Ava separate her from her fire power and leave her body feeling asleep; even so, Ava considers the mud worth the punishment.

A City Without a Council

Boston once had a Council, a ruling body that could prevent the kind of supernatural predation the Coterie permits. By the time of the story, it no longer exists. Ava’s understanding of such organizations comes partly from her mother, who explained that local powers once kept supernatural creatures in check, before modern communication and travel made those arrangements less necessary. In Ava’s account, many groups later died out, went underground, or were replaced by Councils. Boston’s former Council is a notable absence from that history: the city has no effective local counterweight to Venus.

The consequences of that absence are especially stark inside the Inferno. The Coterie recruits both by choice and by coercion, and its members share supernatural ancestry: somewhere in their bloodlines, something had fangs, spoke to trees, or could start fires. Ava understands the danger to human patrons in blunt terms: in a Coterie establishment, they may become someone’s meal—or Venus’s drink. Boston’s glamorous venue therefore does more than conceal criminal activity. Its ordinary customers and supernatural VIPs occupy different levels of a place where the organization’s power determines who is safe.

Ava also has reason to distrust the institutions that might offer protection elsewhere. Her mother once sought temporary asylum from a local Council, only for someone there to betray them to the Coterie. They escaped through a bathroom window in the middle of the night and never contacted a Council again. The nearest one to Currant is in Portsmouth, and rumors say it is in the Coterie’s pocket. That history makes Boston’s missing Council part of a broader pattern of failed protection, not an isolated gap in governance.

A Date in the Lion’s Den

Ryan’s invitation begins as a possible excursion to a theater showing foreign horror films. Ava’s immediate instinct is to refuse, but she is pretending to be an ordinary girlfriend and cannot simply flee the café. Ryan’s enthusiasm—and his charm—complicate a decision that is already shaped by her fear of Boston. She asks about the plan and its timing, then considers whether the theater might be far enough from the Inferno to avoid Venus’s territory.

The surprise turns that calculation against her. Ryan backs into a parking spot, and Ava recognizes the streets around the Inferno only after she has been distracted from watching where they are going. She hopes Boston’s size means they are headed somewhere else, but the neon-red sign settles the matter: Ryan has brought her directly to the Inferno. The date thus converts the city’s danger from an abstract concern into an immediate trap, with Ava entering the one place she had tried to avoid.

Later, a message from Brittany shows Ryan being led away by Venus, her arm around him possessively; the accompanying text says he did not make it home the previous night. Ava’s hands burst into flame. She drops her phone and holds them under running water until the water hisses and steams, choosing that physical release over trying to contain her rage. Boston’s significance is consequently intimate as well as political: it is where the Coterie’s domination, Venus’s control, and Ava’s personal vulnerability converge.