by Eva Chase
“Where the fuck are we going to go?” one of the enforcers up front was saying. “We can’t stop that thing.”
“We regroup at the Assembly building. That’s the plan,” the other said.
“And then what?”
“I don’t know. There’s got to be something.”
There’s got to be something. I traced my fingertips over Seth’s slack face again, fighting to focus on the healing magic I was offering him and not the turmoil of emotion inside me. I didn’t even know where Jin was—I hadn’t seen him in the final chaos.
He had to be alive. I wouldn’t be if he wasn’t. The connection between us still shone through my veins, and without the pained flicker of my bond with Seth. But I had no idea how close the demon might be on his heels. The cries and the thunder of its approach seemed to be getting louder.
A tree blackened and torn up by the roots hurtled past us to crash by the side of the road. The driver swerved, just barely avoiding the nearest branches. Buildings loomed ahead of us, lights glittering against the growing darkness, and a deeper queasiness formed in my gut.
The demon would slow down soon—when it reached the city with all the possibilities for carnage that lay there.
I was speaking before I’d even thought the words through. “We have to—”
I cut myself off. Had to what? Stop and make some kind of last stand? I didn’t for a second believe we could push back the demon right now, scattered and panicked and many of us wounded.
We’d always known the creature had more power than we could contend with directly. But all of our ideas to try to outsmart it had failed. Lady Northcott hadn’t sounded as if she had much of a back-up plan when I’d talked to her an hour ago.
The enforcer in the front passenger seat twisted around to look at me. I expected annoyance, but all I saw in her face was desperation. She wanted me to have an answer.
I opened my mouth and closed it again. “I’m sorry.”
Her lips pursed. “You shouldn’t be apologizing. That thing is just… I wish we could feed the traitors who summoned that creature to it and watch it choke on them.”
I doubted it would work exactly that way, but I couldn’t deny the image was a little satisfying. Why weren’t the Frankfords and my father and the rest of them out here facing the results of their crimes?
Because they’d have turned tail and run at the first glimpse of the destruction they’d brought down on us.
Seth’s head tipped to the side. For an instant, I thought it was just with the motion of the car, but then his eyelids twitched.
“Seth!” I said with a twinge of hope. I stroked his forehead, soothing, mending, as well as I could. His body was still mottled with the marks of battle, but at least I’d stopped any bleeding. As for what was in his head…
His eyelids fluttered again and opened. He gazed up at me, his gray-green eyes hazy.
“Rose,” he croaked, and my heart leapt.
“Right here with you,” I said. “Do you remember what happened?”
He blinked slowly, his face going slack and then tensing again. “The demon. It was coming at all of you. It killed people. Did we—where are we?”
“In a minivan headed away from it as fast as we can get,” I said. There wasn’t any point in worrying him with the question of what we’d do when we couldn’t run anymore. “How do you feel? You blanked out for a while there. Does anything still hurt? I tried to help every way I could…”
He wet his lips and shifted his body a little as if testing it. “My head aches. Well, really, every part of me aches. But it’s kind of a dull pain, not like I’m, I don’t know, fatally wounded or anything.”
A jolt of frustration shot through my relief. “You could have been. It could have killed you. What were you thinking, coming at it like that?” If it had been Damon, or Gabriel—Spark help me, I’d have expected that kind of brash charge from any of the other guys before Seth.
His brow furrowed. He gazed at the ceiling of the van distantly, lost in his thoughts for a several seconds.
“It was going to destroy the cars,” he said. “And then it was going to destroy all of us. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.” His shoulders tensed as if he were about to try to sit up, but I clamped my hand down on his chest to hold him in place. “Did it work—did the other witches—”
“I think most of them got away,” I said. The scene on the field had been too frenzied for me to keep track of much as we’d been peeling out of there ourselves. “You did distract it and keep it occupied for a few minutes longer than we’d have had otherwise. So I guess it was a good thing, even if it was also an incredibly reckless move and I hope I never have to see you do anything like that ever again.”
Seth managed to chuckle, followed by a wince. “Sorry. If I could have done it without scaring you, I absolutely would have.”
“I know.” I leaned over him, pressing a kiss to his forehead. The van swayed as we took a corner too fast. We’d be back at the Assembly building soon—I’d have to leave him in the care of the medics. I couldn’t play healer once there were real healers around and so many other people I had to try to save.
“Jin?” he said, that single syllable enough to convey an entire agonizing question.
“He has to be okay,” I said. “I’d know if he wasn’t.”
“He was probably cheering me on,” Seth said in a wry tone. “He said we needed to push outside our comfort zone. There was definitely nothing comfortable about jumping into that truck.”
Jin had said that? When I wasn’t around, I guessed. I might have asked more if Seth hadn’t still looked so fragile despite his bulk—and then the van screeched to a halt. We’d reached the Assembly building.
Medics were already pouring into the underground parking garage with stretchers and salves to tend to the wounded we’d been able to collect. It occurred to me with a lurch of my gut that we’d probably left at least a few witches behind who’d been alive but too injured to run or even call for help. Maybe we couldn’t have saved them anyway, but…
Oh, Spark help us all, how many had the demon already killed since then as it rampaged into the city?
Two of the women eased Seth away from me, offering reassuring murmurs. I let him go with a tearing sensation in my chest. An arm came around me, Jin’s faintly smoky scent reaching me, and I couldn’t contain a sob.
“He’s awake?” Jin said, turning me and wrapping me in his embrace. “He’s okay?”
“I think so,” I said. I wanted to stay there enveloped in his warmth until the rest of the world was right again—but it might not ever be right again unless I helped. I squeezed my consort hard and forced myself to step back. “I’d better get upstairs and find out what the hell we’re going to do now.”
He followed me inside. The whole building was full of bedlam. The enforcers returning from our confrontation with the demon mixed with officials demanding answers and other panicked employees scurrying without much sense of direction. Voices echoed through the hall in a barely decipherable cacophony.
I couldn’t see any of the officials I knew. I didn’t see a single familiar face. Where was Naomi, or Thalia, or—
I spun around, jostled in the crowd, and found myself staring into a face that was both familiar and totally unexpected.
“Rose!” Imogen said, and threw her arms around me.
I hugged the younger witch back instinctively, my chin coming to rest on her mussed red curls. Imogen had come to my estate seeking shelter weeks ago—her aunt and uncle had been mixed up with the Frankfords and had tried to draw her into their clutches after she’d lost her parents and she and her younger sister had moved in with them.
It’d been a while since I’d seen her, though. After one of the Frankfords’ surreptitious attacks—and my inability to fully explain what was going on—she’d packed up and headed back to her relatives. I’d known they’d been arrested along with the rest of the faction’s witches, but I’d wondered how she
was holding up.
“What are you doing here?” I said. She’d always been exuberant, but I hadn’t expected quite this big a show of affection.
Imogen pulled back, her cheeks colored with an embarrassed flush. “Sorry. I just—I’ve felt so bad since I found out why you had to keep quiet and what you were really protecting me from. I heard something horrible was happening down here, and… I shouldn’t have run away last time. I shouldn’t have let myself get that scared. So I came. I don’t know how much I can help, but I’ll try, however I can.”
I didn’t know how much she’d be able to help either, unconsorted and without the use of her spark. But her words brought a bubbling of hope into my chest where I’d felt so vacant a moment ago.
There were so many of us, and we weren’t giving up without a fight. The enforcer in the van had been right. There had to be some way we could overcome this thing.
And whatever that was, we had to figure it out as soon as we possibly could.
“Come on,” I said, grasping her hand and catching Jin’s eye so he’d follow us. “Let’s find the witches in charge and see what we can still do. We’re not beaten yet.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Gabriel
The first sign we got that something was wrong was a curse ringing down the hall from one of the other offices. Kyler stiffened in his chair at the desk. Damon’s head jerked up where he’d been sitting on the couch for the last half hour, glued to his phone with regular tapping of his thumbs. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he were literally going through with his plan to try to find someone in the state who could deliver weapons of mass destruction on short notice.
“What was that?” Ky asked. I moved to the doorway. A voice talking, harsh and too low for me to make out the words, behind one of the other doors. A couple of officials ducked out of their offices and hustled down the hall away from us. My stomach sank.
“It’s obviously not anything good,” Damon said. His tone was flippant but the shadows in his eyes told me he was just as worried as I was.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” I said.
Ky gave me a mock salute, his mouth pressed flat in an anxious line.
A small cluster of Assembly employees was forming at one end of the hall. One woman was jabbing her hand in the air frantically while another seemed to be trying to soothe the group with her soft words. A guy at the edge of the group shifted his weight from foot to foot, looking as if he’d rather be anywhere but there.
“What will we do?”
“They’ve called a meeting. They’re working on a new plan right now.”
“But if all the other plans didn’t work…”
“Hey,” I said in as friendly a voice as I could manage, giving the guy closest to me a gentle tap on the shoulder. “What’s the news? How are our defenses against the demon?”
A couple of the witches shot me looks that were downright icy. The guy rubbed his mouth with a nervous twitch of his hand.
“There are no defenses,” he said. “The demon went on the attack. Eight enforcer casualties reported so far, and twice that many who haven’t been confirmed yet. They’ve pulled out.”
“The demon’s here,” one of the women said, her voice squeaking on the last word. “It’s already in the city.”
Shit. My skin went cold. “What do they want us to do?”
“What are you going to be able to do anyway?” another official snapped.
The guy near me grimaced. “We don’t know. No one’s said anything definite. We’re waiting to get word.”
With their gazes turning increasingly hostile, I figured that was as good a time as any to extricate myself. I hurried back to our office to find Damon waiting in the doorway, his gaze even darker than before. He stalked inside when I reached him and swiveled on his heel to face me.
“Well? What did you get out of them?”
Ky was watching from the desk, his body still rigid. My body balked, and I suddenly understood the awkwardness of the people I’d just talked to on an even deeper level. It hadn’t been only dismissiveness of some unsparked guy they didn’t respect. Telling people horrible news felt horrible.
“Whatever they ended up trying to do to stop the demon before it got to the city, it didn’t work,” I said. “It broke through, killed a bunch of people, and as far as anyone knows, it’s making its way into the city now.”
It was Damon’s turn to swear, much more creatively and emphatically than the voice we’d heard from down the hall. He paced back and forth on a five foot strip of the carpet, his hands clenching.
“What about Rose? Is Rose okay? Seth? Jin? They went out there too, messing some more with that stupid cage, didn’t they?”
“It wasn’t stupid,” Ky broke in, but his face was even paler than usual, the flecks of his freckles standing out against his pallor. It was both his consort and his brother out there.
“They’ve got to be okay,” I said quickly. “Alive, at least. The bond we formed with that second consorting—we wouldn’t still be here if they weren’t, right?”
My appeal to facts seemed to ground Kyler. He nodded, his chest rising and falling with a short breath. “Right. They’re okay.”
For now, none of us needed to add.
“Fuck,” Damon muttered. “That thing is in the city—is it coming this way? Maybe it wants the assholes who messed with it and its kind for all those years.”
“I don’t know,” I said. My stomach sank even lower, until I felt as if it were sitting on my feet. What the hell did I know about anything that was any use to us right now? Maybe the witches’ dismissal hadn’t been unprovoked. “This was the closest major city. It might have nothing to do with the witching community here.”
Damon let out a sputter of a laugh. “Just wait. I’ll bet a hundred dollars it’s making a beeline for this fucking building right here. They wouldn’t listen to us, they wouldn’t listen to Rose, not when they should have, and now we’re all screwed.”
“They’re already trying to figure out what to do next,” I said, but that statement sounded weak to my own ears. I didn’t have a huge amount of faith in the ruling body of Rose’s witching Assembly either. “Rose must be on her way back with the enforcers and whoever else was out there. She saw firsthand what went down.”
“No.” Damon’s tone turned abruptly flat. He strode across the hall to the room we’d spent our first few nights in and started grabbing the scattered things we’d left there. I followed him, Ky coming up behind me.
“What are you doing?” I said.
He stuffed the clothes Rose had discarded earlier into a bag. “We should get over to the hotel suite, grab everything we want to keep from there, and get the car ready. Find that cousin of Rose’s, maybe—she’ll probably help. She’s not an idiot.”
“Get the car ready for what?” Ky said, crossing his arms. “We’re not taking on that thing alone.”
Damon’s laugh was totally raw now. “Of course we’re not. We’re getting the hell out of town. There’s putting up a good fight and there’s knowing when you’re beat. That monster has gotten enough chances at killing us—at killing Rose—already. It’s in the city? Then we’re getting out of here.”
I stared at him. “You think Rose is going to agree to just abandon everyone here?”
“I think we can convince her. I think I’d be willing to haul her off under protest if that’s what I have to do. What have these fuckers done this whole time except sneer at us and then use us whenever they have the opportunity? This is their problem. Let them fix it. We’re nobodies’ lackeys.”
“But the whole city,” Ky said quietly. “All the people here…” From his expression, I could tell he was doing the same calculations I was trying to. How many regular people who could never have imagined that anything like a demon existed had already been slaughtered by that fiend as it made its way into the city? How many more would die in just the next few hours?
“…are total strangers,”
Damon filled in for Ky. He glowered at us. “What about our people? Our families, back home? What if this thing doesn’t stop here? We’ve got to get to them and be ready to take care of them if we have to. We look after our own. That’s what matters.”
“That’s not how Rose is going to see it,” I said.
Damon stepped right up to me, his eyes flashing. I’d thought, in those moments when we’d made Rose sigh and whimper between us just this afternoon, that we’d come to some kind of peace. It couldn’t be more obvious from his expression now that his anger toward me hadn’t gone anywhere.
“What the hell do you know about what’s best for Rose?” he demanded. “Who made you grand lord over everything we do? At least I’m doing something. What’s your great plan?”
I groped for an answer, feeling momentarily unbalanced. I’d come back to this sort of family, I’d promised I’d be here for these guys as much as for Rose, but how could I say that if I couldn’t offer anything more right now than those nervous figures in the hall? Let’s just wait to get word.
Fuck that. “I don’t know yet, but I’m going to work something out,” I said. “I’ll find the Northcotts or whoever and figure out what we can do. But I know for sure that you’re never going to convince Rose to leave here, and you’re sure as hell not hauling her away unless you’re thinking you’ll chain her up like those assholes in the prison did.”
Damon flinched. “She’ll see,” he said. “When we talk to her, when she realizes we’re ready to go, she’ll see.” But he didn’t sound so confident now.
He was scared. Maybe terrified. Why wouldn’t he be? I raked my hand through my hair.
“Okay. Do whatever you’ve got to do. But—just stay close, all right? We don’t know when Rose is going to make it back. We should be here when she does. I’ll catch up with you as soon as I can, and I’ll have better answers then.”
