by Sara DeHaven
Leander had made it to his feet and was shouting at her, over the noise of the crowd, “We’ve got to get out of here, Bree! We won’t be able to help anyone if we’re dead!” There was a wild look on his face, part fear, part anger, part something else she couldn’t name. She noted he was not touching her even though one hand was hovering near her elbow.
He had to have seen her casting out demons with Gelsenim’s help. She hadn’t had any choice. It was that or let the possessed Keltoi kill both her and Leander, not to mention all the other people they might yet hurt this night. It was probably the only good she’d managed to do in this whole fucked up mess, and she’d outed herself in the process. She realized belatedly that Leander had mentioned having low power Demonsense. There was a good chance he knew she was possessed as well. She was badly rattled and couldn’t think what to do.
My host, please hurry! Gelsenim insisted.
Having been unable to form a next move herself, she went with Gelsenim’s plan. “C’mon, this way,” she shouted back at Leander. She was able to read the movement of the crowd to find the quickest way through, dodging the worst of the violence, and her Demonsense warned her away from any more possessed. I might as well go ahead and de-possess more, I’ve already completely blown my cover, she told Gelsenim. She wasn’t truly sure she was doing the right thing in trying to get out of the crowd.
You have not revealed yourself to any those ones you call Keepers, as far as we know. And your base energy is weak now, your will energy weaker. Even with my help, doing that much casting and so many de-possessions have drained you greatly.
I could at least try to do a few more, she replied, slowing down.
Leander must have seen her hesitation. The crowd was thinner, and he didn’t have to shout any more. He bent close to her as she walked and said, “Don’t even think of going back in there. We’re damned lucky to get out with our lives. It’s just too out of control, and I can’t do much more warding, if any. And besides, there are more police now. I can smell the tear gas. Things will be winding down soon.”
When she still hesitated, he finally took her arm and propelled her along, though he let go as soon as he’d got her moving again. The crowd was thin enough here that they could move at a jog. Bree reluctantly let herself be convinced. Not that she wanted to plunge back into that nightmare. She’d never been so afraid in her life. This crowd was far worse than the one at Alki, denser, more violent. She was sure many people must have been killed. Just think of all the gunshots she’d heard, not to mention people probably getting trampled, or knifed, or beaten half to death. There had definitely been a higher proportion of demons in this crowd as well. She never had seen a Keeper, which she supposed on one level she should be thankful for.
As they passed the ragged edges of the crowd, she saw a group of men beating in the glass front of a store with a metal table, likely intent on looting. The world has gone mad, she thought. It was surreal, seeing the fabric of society break down like this. It had felt like that at Alki as well, but it hit Bree harder now, because now that first riot wasn’t an isolated incident. As they got free of the crowd, Leander took the lead. She was having a hard time keeping up with him in her dress flats. She was exhausted and on the verge of tears.
You did well. You did what you could do, Gelsenim offered.
I thought I’d be able to do more. I accomplished next to nothing, and almost got Leander and myself killed. Who am I fooling, trying to act like a Keeper?
I do not fully understand it myself, my host. Why put yourself at such risk?
Perversely, the demon’s question made her take the opposite stance. Who am I if I don’t resist this kind of evil in whatever way I can? It’s so incredibly wrong to stir people up like this, cause them to kill one another, over some kind of political game. I may not be that effective at trying to help, but I have to try!
You are upset, my host, Gelsenim soothed.
Damned right I’m upset!
Leander was finally slowing down, and Bree realized he had taken a round about route to his place. She could see his building up the street, half a block away. She finally grasped that she was about to be alone with Leander. If, by some miracle, he hadn’t seen everything that happened, if his Demonsense had been confused by so many possessed, there was still a chance to keep him in the dark about her abilities. Now that they were alone, if he had a chance to really focus on her, he’d be able to feel that she was possessed.
Gelsenim, I need you to leave. I need to find out what Leander saw, and I don’t want him to sense you if there’s any chance he hasn’t already.
I think it is too late, the demon replied doubtfully.
Regardless, I’ll be more nervous about the whole thing if we’re still joined. Thanks again so much for coming to my rescue. I will call you again soon.
As you wish, my host, Gelsenim replied softly. She felt the warmth of his presence draining out of her body, and along with it, the boost to her power. She staggered as the last of it left her. She felt incredibly weak. Leander got an arm around her and walked her the rest of the way to his building. Her purse was an uncomfortable bulk between them. She had draped it across herself bandolier style, and had managed to retain it. He supported her up the stairs and into his apartment, deposited her on his couch, then collapsed onto it next to her.
Bree did a quick inventory of her injuries. She’d gotten elbowed and kicked around a bit, and she could feel some spots where she had bruises, but she was free of any serious hurt. Her energy was way down. She'd been casting like crazy in the midst of the action. She suspected an experienced Keeper like Daniel would have more carefully husbanded their resources, not poured it all out at once like that. But she hadn’t known what else to do. She’d been acting on instinct.
She looked over at Leander where he sprawled next to her. He was holding one hand to his side, and she saw blood in his hair, and on the side of his face. He must have been hit or kicked in the head. With an effort, she roused herself to move closer to him to inspect it.
“It looks like you got hit in the head. How's it feeling? And did you get hurt anywhere else?”
“It hurts like a son of a bitch, but I don’t feel like I’m going to pass out or anything. I got kicked a lot and stepped on, but nothing feels broken.” He pulled away involuntarily as her fingers questing gently in his hair came into contact with the bump on his head.
“Sorry,” she murmured, parting his sticky hair carefully to get a better look. The lamps that had come on when Leander flicked the switch on entering the room weren’t providing enough light for her to get a good look. “Let’s go to your bathroom, and I’ll clean this up for you.”
“Are you sure you can stand?” Leander asked.
Bree answered by getting carefully to her feet.
“I was kind of hoping you couldn’t,” Leander admitted with a tired smile. “Now I have to do it too.” He pushed off on one arm of the couch and levered himself up. He shrugged out of his coat and dropped it onto the couch, and Bree copied him and did the same with hers.
He led the way into his bathroom, and sat obediently on the closed toilet as Bree fetched a washcloth down from the towel bar, wet it in the sink, soaped it up, and began gently wiping the blood off his face.
After a moment, she got another washcloth down, and wet that one to wipe away the soap. Leander begin to relax under her ministrations. His eyelids drooped tiredly, and she reflected that he’d probably used a lot of power on warding, as well as any other casting he may have done while her attention was directed elsewhere. She was grateful that he was being so quiet. She hadn’t been able to gather her thoughts enough yet to think what lies she might have to try to weave to cover herself. It was probably a lost cause anyway. He was a Reader, he’d admitted he could even read some tells. Her chances of lying to him convincingly weren’t good.
He tensed up again a little as she worked her way closer to the wound. He had quite a lump on his head, with the skin broken in
a line across the top. When she’d cleaned it as much as she could, she put down the washcloth and looked more closely at him. He still had a hand to his side. “Let me get a look at that,” she said, gesturing to his torso.
He reached up one hand to try to wrestle with the top button on his shirt. After a moment of watching him struggle, Bree pushed his hand aside and bent to do it for him. She pushed the shirt open when she was finished, exposing the very fair skin of his chest. She’d expected more color from a California boy, but she reflected that, like most redheads, he probably burned easily, so he probably avoided the sun. He had a small scattering of light red hair at the top of his chest. The area where he’d been pressing his hand was already coming up with a bruise.
She tried to remember how Dion had examined her for broken ribs. She pressed gently, asking Leander to report on when it hurt worse. “I don’t think your ribs or cracked or broken,” she finally said, straightening up. “Or at least, you’re not reacting like Dion said I would if I had broken ribs. They could well be bruised like mine were, though.” He was looking up at her, blue-green eyes strangely open and vulnerable. For just a moment, her Reader sense came up, and a pattern formed. She got the hit that he wasn’t used to being cared for in this way. He wasn’t at all used to nurturing of any kind. He was very like Daniel in that way. A blend of empathy and guilt rose up in her. She put a hand on his shoulder and said, “I’m so sorry I got you into this. I’m sorry you got hurt.”
“And I’m sorry I wasn’t more use,” he said in return.
“Oh, I don’t know. You were really kicking ass there for a while. Have you studied martial arts or something?”
“A little, as a teenager.” His eye contact was steady, and something in it held her up, made her want to know what he was thinking. She shifted her hand on his shoulder until it was resting on his skin rather than the fabric of his shirt. He must know she was preparing to read him, but he didn’t pull away or break her gaze. After all, he’d asked her to read him before, had seemed almost to want her to succeed where others had failed. It was crazy to try to do it now, when she was so drained. She would hardly be at her best, but somehow, with him looking at her like that, she couldn’t resist.
She couldn’t have named why that was so. In another mood, at another time, she wouldn’t have done it without thinking it through, without talking to him about it, but she was still frazzled and feeling a little reckless. So she shifted her internal focus and consciously attempted to read him, starting with a simple power read.
As before, the information seemed to shift and slide under her regard, but this time, the glimpses she got, while never fully forming up into something she could be sure of, seemed a little more coherent. She got a brief sense that his will energy was lower than his base energy. She tried harder to feel for his power profile. Wasn’t that Caster power? And that bit there felt like Warding power. She really wanted to feel for his level of Demonsense, but she couldn’t get a grip on anything else.
She was about to pull out when, for a brief moment, she felt her energy try to attune with his, as happened in a deep read. It was a dizzying sensation because of the strange way his energy never seemed to settle into a recognizable pattern, but nonetheless, she could just about feel something starting to click into place.
Unfortunately, her focus gave out, unable to drive her weak base energy any further. She listed to one side, and Leander put a hand on her hip to steady her. It took a moment for her to be able to see again, or rather, to be able to focus on her sense of sight. She must have gone deeper than she’d thought.
Once she was aware again, she saw Leander was regarding her very seriously. “Well,” he asked, “what did you read?” She couldn’t discern from his tone what he was hoping to hear.
“You know, I started to get something like recognizable readings that time. I’m pretty sure I got a read on your energy levels, and maybe the beginnings of a read on your powers. But I already knew you were a Caster and a Warder, so I’m not sure that’s a good test.”
“I thought that maybe you were trying for a deep read,” he said hesitantly.
“I didn’t set out to do that. I think my focus is a little fried from earlier. I don’t know about you, but it did feel a little like attunement started to happen.”
“Well, I felt something, but I have know idea if it was attunement because no one has ever been able to attune with me.”
There was a definite wistfulness to his words. She'd been right, a part of him really did want to be read.
“I could try again another time if you want, when I’m more fresh,” she hazarded.
“I would like it if it were you. If you were the one who was finally able to do it,” he said softly, gazing directly up into her eyes.
She was touched by the trust implied in what he was saying. She was likely still affected as well by the intimacy of the read. She felt a kind of resonance between them, as if perhaps he was trying to attune to her. Even as she thought it, Leander reached up and placed a hand on her shoulder, working it under the edge of her blouse so he could touch her skin. He shut his eyes, and she knew he was about to read her in turn. She experienced a belated spike of panic, but he was already in.
In truth, Bree hadn’t been read that often by others, especially not since the Academy, when it was part of her training. It was an odd sensation. It felt like sound vibrations more than anything else, like one of those Tibetan singing bowls where you ran a stick around the rim, causing it to throb in building harmonic tones. A quick read was like a few short waves of sound. The attunement of a deep read was like having those sound waves build in your mind, then move down to encompass your whole body, resonating in a vibrational dance with the person reading you. It was both pleasant and profound. She lost for a moment the fear she had that Leander would see she had some kind of Demon Master ability. She got immersed in the sensation, which was hypnotic and stimulating and the same time.
And then it was over, and Leander opened his eyes and looked at her with a mixture of surprise and wonder. “You are… amazing. Unique,” he marveled. “I don’t think I’ve ever had anything like that experience on reading someone before. I can’t usually attune like that.”
“I wonder if it’s because of whatever it is that makes it hard for you to be read? It feels to me like your energy won’t settle and come into focus. That would make it hard for you to attune enough to do a deep read,” Bree replied in a weak voice. She was feeling a little dazed and breathless from the after effects of the read.
Leander’s eyes narrowed in thought. “I think I don’t really even try to attune when I read other people. Maybe I don’t want to risk being read in return. Whatever it is that prevents people from being able to read me, it’s been a sort of armor. I haven’t always, my life hasn’t always been like it is now. It hasn’t always been safe.”
What he was saying fit to Bree, fit in a way she couldn’t consciously parse out. On the surface, Leander seemed confident, fun loving, and more than a little outrageous. But she must have been getting hints, somehow, of something more vulnerable underneath. It bothered her not to be able to put her finger on why she thought that. She was used to that information just coming to her, fully formed, like Athena out of Zeus’ head, due to the strength of her Reader sense. Reading was something she often did unconsciously. She could turn it off, and she often did to spare herself empathy and information overload. And she could certainly consciously turn it on and direct it to specific levels. But in many instances, it was just another sense her brain automatically processed, like sight or touch. She could often form a good understanding of people, of their vulnerabilities and strengths, through that sense.
Of course, sometimes the conclusions she drew from that information were completely inaccurate. Like anyone else, she was prone to seeing what she wanted to see, what she expected to see. One thing she had not expected to see in Leander was a willingness to show his vulnerability. And she most certainly hadn’t expec
ted to be this vulnerable to him in return. She’d never planned to allow him a deep read. It belatedly occurred to her that if he’d seen her Demon Master potential during the read, he would probably look appalled. He looked anything but. She was afraid to assume he hadn’t seen it, though. She’d rather know if he knew.
“So, what did you read that makes you think I’m so unique?” she asked him hesitantly.
“It’s partly just that I could attune to you. But you also have an unusual power signature. There’s a talent in there I sensed that I’ve never read before. Granted, I’m used to just being able to do a surface read on that kind of thing. I can’t usually, for example, distinguish low power from high power, or Readers of energy versus Readers of energy and tells. This thing I felt, well, I wonder if it explains why you were able to cast out demons even though you don’t quite read as a Demon Master.”
Bree’s knees went weak at Leander’s words. He knew. She’d been senselessly clinging to the hope that he didn’t. Well, now she’d have to face the consequences of her actions. She could just imagine what Gelsenim would say. We must kill him, my host. He will turn you in, and then you will be dead. She didn’t think she had it in her to deliberately kill anyone, and even if she did, how was she supposed to do it? Even as all this sped through her mind, she realized Leander was looking at her with patient calm.
“Bree, I’m not going to rush out and turn you into the Ecclesias,” he said after giving her a beat to respond. “I don’t think you’re Keltoi, and I don’t think you’re a Demon Master in the classic sense. Am I wrong? Are you calling demons and making them possess people for your own ends?”
“No,” she whispered.
“Are you experimenting with demons?”
