by Kiki Howell
“There you have it,” Nicholas said, addressing Jacob again. “Your girlfriend’s gonna be fine. And so will you. Now do you think you can calm down?”
Another tiny nod, this one from Jacob. Those two weren’t father and son for nothing.
“Wonderful,” Nicholas drawled, rolling his eyes. “Now, is one of you going to go check on whoever walked in downstairs or are we going to argue over nothing for another hour?”
Jacob left the room. It wasn’t until they could hear his steps going down the staircase that Andrew came closer and said quietly, “I notice you convinced him I’m not going to do a thing to her, but you didn’t give any such reassurances about yourself.”
Nicholas arched an eyebrow at him. “You think I would?”
“I don’t think anything. I’m noticing, like I said.”
But Andrew’s voice, as cold as when he’d been talking to Kirsten, gave away that this was more than a simple observation. Nicholas smiled at him in a grin that bared his fangs.
“So it’s all right for you to threaten the girl, but God forbid I do the same?”
“Nicholas...” The word was a growl on Andrew’s lips.
Nicholas huffed.
“Oh, stop that. You’re as bad as he is. Of course I’m not going to murder the girl our son has been smitten with for years. Even if you hadn’t promised to throw me out if I killed again, I still wouldn’t. I like her. But if a bit of fear helps make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid...”
He shrugged, and Andrew relaxed, though not by much.
“I still don’t think it’s a good idea to show her those notebooks,” Andrew said with a sigh, leaning against the counter next to Nicholas.
Nicholas pressed his shoulder against Andrew’s.
“You could still burn them.”
It’d have been Nicholas’ choice, though he realized Andrew wasn’t going to. He might not like it, but he was going to take that risk, both because Jacob had asked him to and because it was the ‘right’ thing to do. He could be so silly, sometimes.
And Nicholas wouldn’t have it any other way.
Chapter Twenty-Four
BEFORE HE EVEN reached the first floor Jacob could see who had come in, and his worry and restlessness abated a little. He still didn’t like the threats Andrew had made toward Kirsten—or that she had accepted them so easily—and he still had a lot to discuss with her, the least of them being her spell work and the demons. But for now all that slipped to the back of his mind and he smiled when he saw Rachel.
“Are you looking for Andrew?” he asked as she peered into his father’s empty office. “He’s upstairs. Did you want to talk to him?”
She turned to him and smiled back. “Hey. That’s all right, I just wanted to say hi.” She shrugged a little, hands buried deep in her jeans pockets. “I’m not used to sitting home and doing nothing.”
Jacob was about to comment that after a week anyone would grow bored, but he caught himself in time. It hadn’t been a week for her, merely a day. He could have told her about his and Kirsten’s little escapade into the demons’ world, but he felt reluctant to do so.
Telling his fathers about it had felt normal, even necessary. He wasn’t sure he wanted anyone else to know. Or maybe he didn’t want to answer the questions it would raise about how they’d ended up there or why the demons had been, at least for a time, so friendly toward Jacob.
“How’s your leg?” he asked instead. “All healed up?”
She flexed her knee, tapping her foot down even as she nodded. “Perfectly fine. If I didn’t know I got hurt, I wouldn’t believe it. Kirsten really knows her stuff.”
“Yeah, she does,” Jacob said quietly.
Rachel’s eyebrows arched at that and she gave him a curious look, though all she said was, “Are you up for a bit of light sparring? Not the kind of beat-up you give Vinnie or your fathers,” she added quickly, her lips twitching into a smile. “Just to see if my leg holds up.”
Jacob agreed. A bit of sparring, even if it wasn’t to his usual level, might be just the thing to help him clear his mind. And indeed, once they’d stepped over to the training room and each armed themselves with a sparring sword, he found that falling back into the familiar positions, attacks and parries calmed all those thoughts he’d put on the back burner for now.
“You seem in a rather quiet mood,” Rachel said when they’d been trading blows for a little while. “Something wrong?”
Jacob shook his head.
“Nothing wrong. Just... a lot has happened since yesterday.”
And that was true even discounting the week he’d spent in the demon world.
Taking a step back, Rachel lowered her sword and gave him a slight grin.
“It’s Kirsten, isn’t it?” she said knowingly. “Are you two back together?”
Stunned speechless, Jacob could do little more than open and close his mouth a few times, no words coming out. He must have made a rather interesting impersonation of a fish because Rachel chuckled.
“Oh, come on,” she said. “Don’t look at me like I predicted the lottery numbers. It didn’t take a seer to figure out how this would end.”
Jacob still didn’t know what to say. He certainly hadn’t seen this coming. On the contrary, he’d been rather certain that the last thing Kirsten wanted when she’d come back to town, was to start anything with him again. Would this really have happened sooner or later, the way Rachel seemed to think? It’d seemed to him that their unplanned adventure had forced their emotions to crystallize, and secrets to spill that would otherwise have remained unvoiced.
“It’s... It’s more complicated than you make it sound,” he said with an uncomfortable shrug. “And we’ve still got a lot to discuss, and...”
“And you love her,” Rachel finished when his voice trailed off. “She’d have to be blind not to see that. Just like you are blind if you didn’t notice the way she looks at you.”
She looked awfully smug, and Jacob couldn’t help but wonder what that was about. For a while, a few days earlier, it had seemed as though she was interested in him in that way. Jacob hadn’t wanted to make anything of it, but even Nicholas had made comments about it.
He understood a few minutes later when Vinnie came in for a bit of training, and the first thing Rachel told him was, “I won. Pay up.”
Vinnie’s eyebrows shot up his forehead and he gave Jacob a startled look.
“Seriously? You and Kirsten? Already? I thought it’d take at least a couple of months!”
It was with no small shock that Jacob realized his co-workers had been taking bets on his and Kirsten’s love lives. Part of him wanted to be outraged at what felt a little like an intrusion, but it wasn’t as though they’d pushed them back together, or tried to keep them apart. They’d just stood to the side and observed, and what they had thought would happen had come to pass.
As for Jacob, he could barely believe it had happened. Was he soon going to wake up and realize it had all been a dream?
AFTER DAYS OF EATING those odd eggs—eggs of what creature, Kirsten still didn’t know, nor did she want to know—and whatever fish Jacob had been able to catch, having lunch in a restaurant should have been heavenly. And it was, but only for a little while. By the time the waitress had taken away the empty appetizer plate and brought their entrees, Kirsten’s brother, Alex, started a new topic of conversation, one she’d have wanted him to leave untouched.
“So, how’s Jacob? Are you two back together yet?”
Delivered with a teasing smile, the question should have been easy to dismiss, or to turn around back toward Alex’s abysmal love life. But when Kirsten hesitated, it was as good as an affirmative answer to Alex, who proceeded to crow and claim he’d known all along this was why she’d come back to town regardless of how much she had denied it.
“It wasn’t,” she protested yet again. “All I wanted...”
In front of Alex’s burst of laughter, she fell silent, heat creeping up her che
eks.
“I can’t tell if you actually believe that or if you’re just toeing the party line,” he said in between two bites of food. “Either way, you’re not fooling anyone, you know. Everyone in the family has been hoping for years that you’d stop moping and get back together with him.”
Gob-smacked, Kirsten could do little more than stare at him. After a few seconds, she managed to get words out but they didn’t begin to convey how shocked she was.
“Everyone has been hoping... What are you talking about?”
He shrugged, focusing on his food again. “Just that we could all tell how miserable you were and it didn’t take a genius to figure out what was wrong. When you said you were coming back to town to work with him... well, we didn’t throw you a party, but it was a near thing. Mom has been calling me every day to ask for progress reports. I can tell her you two sorted it all out now, right? Maybe that way she’ll stop calling.”
“What you can do is tell her to call me rather than talk behind my back,” she huffed. “And we’re changing the topic. Now.”
Her displeasure at having her own family gossip about her and her relationships was real, but it wasn’t the only reason why she didn’t want to answer. She simply didn’t know what to answer.
Were she and Jacob together again? Was it all ‘sorted out’? They’d each admitted they still had feelings for the other, but the situation was more complicated than that, at least for her. The reason why she’d needed to break up with him was still there: he still fought demons, still risked his life night after night, and she wouldn’t stay home and worry every time he went out whether tonight was the night when he didn’t return.
If Andrew gave her those diaries—she still had a feeling he might very well change his mind—and if she managed to find something in them she could work with, things would change. But who knew how long it would take her to work something out?
Some spells were simple, requiring little more than common ingredients and a few words imbued with power, to the point that anyone with a little bit of talent could do magic. But what she wanted to do was on an entirely different level, even for someone who, like her, was gifted with a lot more than ‘a little bit of talent.’
First, she’d have to understand the magic Jacob’s mother had intended to do; hopefully the diaries would have enough details for that. Then, she’d need to figure out how things had gone wrong, and how a spell meant to create life had done that much—and so much more, too, by allowing the demons access to this world. Once she understood those basic principles, the hard part would begin and she’d need to extrapolate, go from the known to the unknown, come up with an entirely new spell.
It was something she was good at, something she enjoyed doing, but she’d never worked on a project of this scale. Her end goal was to stop the demon invasion, and that was happening over the entire world. If she was lucky, one spell—a probably very complicated, very difficult spell—would suffice, but she had a feeling that she might need to go to all those places where demons were appearing, and seal them, one by one.
That was, of course, assuming that she was indeed able to create that spell. Not just that, but also that she was strong enough to perform it. She wouldn’t be surprised if, at the minimum, it all took months. She wouldn’t be surprised if it even took years. Was she ready to let her relationship with Jacob remain in limbo until then?
Sensing the dark mood that had wrapped around her, Alex heeded her request and changed the subject. He retreated to a safe topic, telling her about a common acquaintance she hadn’t seen in a while. She listened to his stories absently, nodding in all the right places and making the appropriate noises of surprise or amusement whenever warranted, but the entire time her problem remained at the back of her mind. And quite a problem it was, too.
She couldn’t ask Jacob to choose between her or fighting, not any more today than when she’d broken up with him. If he chose her, she knew he’d end up resenting her, sooner or later. If he chose the fight... Well, she could imagine how she’d feel; she didn’t need to experience it for real.
No, there was only one way out, and that was through magic. Now all she had to do was wait for the diaries that would, hopefully, be the first step on a successful journey.
ALL DAY LONG, ANDREW tried to think of a reason strong enough for him to cancel the whole deal.
He wished he could have doubted Kirsten’s word, or even doubted that she was strong enough and clever enough to make something out of Cara’s diaries. If he could only have convinced himself the whole thing was useless, it might have been easier to say no.
Unfortunately, she was a skilled mage, and smart to boot; it was, after all, why he’d hired her. He also couldn’t deny that he trusted her. She was, had always been, a good kid. She wanted to do the right thing. She wanted to save Jacob from a future that, Andrew agreed with her, was all too likely. They shared the same goal. How could he say no now?
When night fell and they received the call that two demons had been sighted, he was almost glad for the opportunity to go out and let out some steam. Nicholas and Vinnie came along, but Andrew left them to deal together with what seemed like the weaker of the two demons while he battled the second one alone.
The beast was close to nine foot tall, with fewer intact spikes on its body than demons usually displayed, but a rather large number of broken off protuberances.
It was an older demon, he realized as they engaged the fight; one that had fought many times before, either here on Earth or in that world, that parallel dimension Jacob had visited. Not just a run of the mill opponent, but a true fighter, one that stepped over the slippery leaves covering the ground as lightly and securely as Andrew would have stepped over hardwood floors, one that feinted and varied its attacks to try to find Andrew’s weaknesses and exploit them while oftentimes demons were all about brute force.
It was a challenge as well as a dance, and as the fight went on long after Vinnie had struck a death blow to the other demon, Andrew refused the help of his companions. He knew Nicholas would call him an idiot for it later, and he’d be right about it, but there was something about this demon, about this fight that was different.
He understood what it was when the demon caused him to trip down before lashing out with its sword. It fell an inch away from Andrew’s neck. Had he not rolled away at the last possible second, his life would have ended here, at this demon’s hands. Over two decades of fighting, and it could have all ended like this.
And it would end like this, wouldn’t it? If not tonight, if not this year, then certainly sooner or later. He would die fighting, and—it hurt just thinking about it—so would Nicholas, so would Jacob, and so many others. People would keep dying until someone closed the door Cara had opened between their world and the demons’.
“Now can we help?” Nicholas shouted at him, moving forward before Andrew answered.
Yes, Andrew thought as the three of them tackled the demon together. It was time to accept help before it was too late.
Chapter Twenty-Five
THAT MORNING, KIRSTEN had only been in her office for five minutes when a light knock on the door made her look up from the messenger bag she was restocking with magic spell ingredients. Her stomach did a strange little dance as she invited Andrew to come in. It wasn’t his presence that made her jittery; she’d never been afraid of him, neither before nor after she had discovered he was a vampire. No, what caused her mouth to go dry was what he held in his hand: two thick notebooks, the same kind a student might use. As he sat down across from her, keeping the notebooks in his lap, she could barely tear her eyes off them.
“Is that...”
Andrew smiled grimly at her unfinished question.
“It is. One has a lot about her failed experiments, and the other mentions the book she found that gave her a new idea and where she went from there. I’d given all her magic books to Julie, so it should be somewhere in there if you need it.” He gestured at the packed bookshelves.
“If it’s not, let me know and I’ll ask Julie if she took it.”
She nodded, her fingers twitching as she longed to wrap them around the diaries. She’d only learned of their existence days earlier, but it felt as though she’d been looking for them all her life.
“And remember,” Andrew said, his voice a little deeper now. “You promised not to do anything without talking to us first. Don’t make me regret this. You wouldn’t want me to become unpleasant, believe me.”
“Yes, yes, I remember.”
It was all Kirsten could do to keep the impatience out of her words. She understood why Andrew was rehashing all this, why he thought it necessary to make veiled threats—although honestly, he wasn’t all that frightening—but she wished he would get it over with and give her the damn things at last. Unfortunately, he still wasn’t done.
“And one last thing,” he said slowly. “You are not allowed to take these out of this house, to make copies or to show them to anyone else. They are for your eyes only, and only in this office. If I find out you take them home or share them in any way, the deal is off and I’ll fire you.”
Those last minute constraints irked Kirsten, and she came close—very, very close—to asking Andrew what exactly he would do if she just took the diaries and moved to the other side of the country, or for that matter if she scanned them and posted them online where every mage, every researcher working on stopping the demon invasion would be able to access them. He might say he’d kill her, but if everyone in the world had access to Cara’s words, Kirsten’s death wouldn’t change much of anything.
She realized however that mouthing off now would only cause Andrew to rethink the whole issue. Later, when she had read the whole thing and started to take notes about it, she would tell him his rules were more obnoxious than anything else. For now, she held her tongue and nodded again, and was rewarded when Andrew held out the diaries to her above the desk.
A smile burst onto her lips and she took hold of the notebooks with both hands. For a few seconds, Andrew refused to let go and held on to the diaries even as he held her gaze. Finally, he let her have them, and it was all Kirsten could do not to clutch them to her chest before he could change his mind.
