by Moira Rogers
Devi tried to let herself believe it as she crossed the hall. It was a possibility—but the Templars seemed bent on accuracy. If destroying the control room had no effect on the transports, why bother?
Dakota met her just inside the door. “It’s clear.”
“Did you check out the cars?”
“Only one left. I got Kate and the kids into it, but we need to set it to launch and get out of here.”
“Do these things have internal controls?”
“Only an emergency stop cable.”
Shit. Devi nodded to the sleek, compact car. “Get in there with Kate.”
For the first time, Dakota hesitated. Dark eyes set in a weathered, tired face studied her, and she knew that he understood. “Let me. Maybe it’s nothing, but if it’s not… No one’s back in Rochester, waiting for me to wake up.”
No amount of argument would persuade him, just the painful truth. “I don’t think that’s how it works.” She gripped his hand. “I’ll be sending Cache along, if she’ll come. She probably won’t.”
He didn’t like it, but Devi saw the moment his concern for Kate and the two teens overrode loyalty to two near-strangers. “I’ll get them out,” he whispered. “You two take care to get out of this in one piece. I don’t want Dominic Wetzel coming for my head.”
Zel. “If we don’t—” There were so many things she still had to tell him, but so little that could be filtered through someone she barely knew. “Tell him not to feel guilty. I didn’t do this for him.”
Dakota squeezed her hand and nodded. “Good luck.” Then he was off, running toward the transport with the shotgun clutched in one hand.
In the control room, Devi found Cache on her back under one of the control banks, her oversized tablet resting on her stomach. “How much time have we got left?” she asked without looking away from her task.
“A few minutes.” Devi crouched beside her. “Is it hosed?”
“Beyond hosed.” Cache closed her eyes. “Believe me, there’s no way any transport should be launching, not from here. Except… Well, you know. Just like the door. A manual override that shouldn’t be here.”
“Then we can get them out of here.” She held out a hand to help Cache stand. “Will you go with them?”
“We’re both being tested, Devi.” Cache scrambled out from under the panel without taking Devi’s hand, rocking to her feet on her own. “I can’t go. You know it.”
“All right.” She almost asked for a security sweep of the level, but it didn’t matter. There was no time left to find the charges, even if they wanted to defuse them. “Launch the transport.”
Cache reached for a wild knot of exposed wires and twisted two together, then gritted her teeth together and touched a third to them. Something sparked, but a screen came up with a simple interface. Cache held the wires together in one hand and used the other to enter a speed and destination. Her finger hovered only a moment, then landed on a small touch-screen button marked simply LAUNCH.
The sound of grinding metal drifted through the open door. Cache did something else with the wires, and the screen flickered and changed to a camera view of the launch platform. The transport shot away, barreling down the track, and Cache blew out a breath. “They’re gone. Safe, I guess?”
Devi shook her head. “Can we track its progress and make sure?”
“I think—” She used the wires to flick through several screens until she dragged up a schematic of the transport system. A blinking dot moved slowly toward the building’s perimeter, gaining speed. “Christ, I can’t make it go faster. A hunk of steel that big can only accelerate so fast—”
“They’ll make it.” Even if they didn’t, she’d done the best she could, and there was no changing any of it now. Forty seconds. “Cache, I’m sorry. About Shane, about the bad run. Everything.”
“Don’t. Don’t, Devi, because if you say this shit it means we’re not waking up.” Cache let go of the wires and grabbed Devi’s hand instead, fingers clutching tight. “We are waking up. And then you’re going to have stupid amounts of sex with that hot halfblood, and I’m going to save Trip and become the most elite hacker on the planet, and life will be awesome. All right?”
Devi had known Cache for years, long enough to recognize a plea when she heard one. “All right.” Tanner would have the trucks, and Juliet… Whatever her bonding with Jai entailed, however long it lasted, she would be fine too. “Life will be—”
Another explosion drowned out the rest of her assurance, rocking the floor beneath them. Devi pushed Cache back under the desk as more detonations echoed in the distance, each one thundering closer than the last.
Groaning steel and shattering glass barely registered over the ringing in her ears as Devi dropped and edged under the desk, driven by sheer primal instinct to cover herself. To hide from the violent, unstoppable destruction headed her way.
I’m sorry, Zel.
Halfway to Rochester, Devi tensed and drew in a single sharp, loud breath. Then, terrifyingly, she began to shake uncontrollably.
Zel grabbed for his tablet in one hand and reached for Devi’s pulse with the other, his own heart hammering painfully. “Trip? What the fuck—”
Trip interrupted. “Cache’s telemetry just flatlined.”
Devi stilled. Terror erased everything else as Zel gave up on finding a pulse and pressed his ear to her chest. Even with the rumbling of the truck underneath them, he should have been able to hear her heartbeat, strong and steady.
Nothing.
An enraged roar filled the trailer of the truck, his own pained, terrified noise emerging up from somewhere deep and feral. He couldn’t lose her, a senseless sacrifice to his cursed heritage. He lifted his head and fit his hands over her chest, fighting against his own strength as training took over. He began shallow, quick compressions, forcing her blood to keep moving.
Aton eased closer, moving slowly. “Let me. You breathe for her.”
“Get back.” Zel shifted, tilting her head back and fitting his mouth to hers. His breath, his life, he’d give her all of it. Anything to feel her move beneath his hands.
But she didn’t.
Aton sighed roughly. “I know how to do this, Dominic, and it’s my fault she’s here. Let me help her.”
Not even his pride was worth Devi’s life. He lifted his head and pinned the demon—his father—with a vicious look. “If she dies, you all die.”
The demon nodded. As he bent to Devi, the speaker at the front of the trailer crackled, and Ruiz’s oblivious voice spilled out. “Five minutes out.”
Zel ignored the voice and the swaying of the truck as it struggled over cracked, uneven pavement. He sealed his lips to Devi’s and willed life into her along with air, keeping time between breaths by his own frantic pulse thundering in his ears. Memories played across the backs of his eyelids, their short time together passing before his eyes as if he were the one dying.
A deep breath in. Memory flickered.
The Pit Stop was a dump and the network’s ADS had him ready to climb the walls, but she was a slice of life hot enough to send blood rushing to all the wrong places. Light glinted off the smooth curve of her neck as she lifted the bulk of her hair, and he pictured his fingers curled in that shining mass, his tongue rasping over her skin.
“What else do you need from me?”
Oh, the ways he could answer that question…
Breathe out. The truck lurched, gears grinding, and Zel ignored it, focused only on the still body beneath him.
They almost hadn’t made it in time. Zel pried the wing off the terrified little net-hacker and sliced his knife deep, spilling life and death onto the sand. The hauler—Devi—scrambled to their side and bent over her fallen comrade, terror bleeding out from her so thickly the demon inside wanted to pounce, to roll them over and over until she was sheltered under his body, safe from the world.
Breathe in.
Blood coated his hands, his body, and Drake disappeared from the challe
nge ring as the crowd surged to their feet, cheering blindly because no one cared who won as long as someone did. Everyone but Devi, who stood frozen in the midst of chaos, wide-eyed and beautiful and everything that stirred the man and monster in him. His. His, damn it, and he would have her. No one could stop him from taking her.
Out. Out, out, out, pouring everything he was into her.
Naked, in his bed. Her frustration that he wouldn’t fuck her yet tempered by her pleasure as he licked and kissed and touched and loved. For the first time, he understood the other side of the violence, that the need to keep her safe could stir something primal and perfect to life inside him.
Breath tickled his lips, and it wasn’t his own.
Aton hauled him up. “Shh, shh.” He bent low, his ear cocked toward the center of Devi’s chest. “She’s alive.”
Trust was a long way from cemented. Zel pushed Aton away and bent over Devi himself, pressing his ear to her chest. Her heart beat, slow but strong, and that wildness inside bled to fierce, desperate hope. “We need to get her out.”
“Through an attack force? She’ll be better off here with her friend until the battle is over.”
Hearing the truth from Aton’s lips didn’t make it more palatable. Zel left one hand resting against the smooth skin of her forehead as he lifted his tablet. “Trip, is Cache okay?”
“She’s—wait—” Confusion colored his voice. “Her vitals just came back online. And Kate and the others have logged out of the program.”
Brakes squealed, and the truck rocked one final time. “Trip, can you feed the GPS chip-tracking program onto this thing? I need to see where everyone is so I can get an idea of the battle lines.”
“It’s going to be chaotic,” he warned, but a moment later the handheld beeped and displayed a layout Zel knew all too well.
The small screen made it hard to untangle. The battle program was meant to display on a wall, preferably inside the network. The generals who had fought the losing war against the demons had retreated to the newly formed underground cities and issued their orders from the comfort of the Global, safe from threat of corruption or contamination.
Zel didn’t have time to link up and get a clear picture. The jumble of dots surged across the screen in a mess of advance and retreat, and he fiddled with the settings until he managed to engage a filter to eliminate everyone but the halfbloods.
Drake was at the front, surrounded by a tight knot of the weaker warriors. Outside the perimeter, their movements suggesting heavy battle. For a moment it made no sense, until he found Lorenzo’s signal.
Not on the battlefield. In the nursery.
Not alone, either. Drake had situated the strongest of Rochester’s halfblood warriors at the heart of the settlement. Knowing Hailey, the rest of the settlement’s vulnerable members would be sheltered there as well. The fighters who were left…
They could repel the invasion—eventually. But they would die by the dozens, by the hundreds, unless something tipped the scales. He didn’t want to leave Devi, but Ruiz and Tanner would stay with her. They’d keep her safe.
It was time for Zel to do what he’d been born to do. Leaning down, he brushed a soft kiss against Devi’s forehead, then rose. Now was the time to take a chance. Demon, undying or celestial, it didn’t matter. The man standing across from him had given him life, but he also understood the art of death. “My mother is protecting the children they’ve come here to take. If you care about her safety as much as you claim, help me keep these bastards out of my city.”
Aton unsheathed his sword, the curved blade glinting in the low, artificial light of the trailer. “I swore to help you. Even if I hadn’t, I would protect your mother.”
It had to be enough. Zel lifted the handheld. “Trip, disable our anti-demon signal.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Devindra. Wake up.”
Devi heard the voice, pleasant and carefully modulated, but she couldn’t respond. Her head pounded, and her leaden limbs refused all commands to move.
“The discomfort is in your head. Tell yourself that you feel better, and you will.”
As if it could be that easy. She willed her eyes open and blinked to focus. Sweeping stone arches formed a high ceiling over her, and she forgot her discomfort as she bolted upright.
The Temple.
Beside her, Cache moaned, creaky as a rusty door. “Dev?”
She almost sagged back to the floor with relief. Instead, she struggled to her feet and pulled Cache up beside her. “I think we did it.”
Cache swayed, then shook herself like a giant cat, blinking away confusion. “Christ. I feel worse than I did when I almost died.”
The guardian stood before them, his sword once again balanced tip-down against the floor with his hands on the pommel. “You did die, and were reborn. Worthy. Your genetic code has been added to the records. The secrets of the Templars are yours to access, when and as you will.”
There was only one thing she wanted to know—the answer she’d been sent to seek. “How do we send them back? The demons?”
“First you must understand your own history.” He turned both hands palm up, though eerily enough, his sword continued to balance perfectly on its tip. “Celestials.” He lifted one hand. “Undying.” The other. “You call them wings and skins. They come from the same world, but they are not the same creatures. They’ve been crossing between worlds for generations, mingling their bloodlines with that of humanity. It altered the balance between worlds so gradually that no one realized what was happening until the last pure human died.”
“You’re talking about the Fall.” It seemed inconceivable that a single moment could make such a difference. “They no longer have to be summoned, I know. But if they can come here freely, why did Aton talk as though they can’t go home again?”
“Before the…” The man hesitated, then seemed to adapt their word. “Fall. Before the veil weakened, undying could only cross the barrier when ordered. Summoned. Then the last human died, enabling both sets of creatures to cross the barrier at will.”
And that was when they’d coordinated and attacked. One mighty blow against the humans, Devi thought.
“Yes,” he confirmed, as though she’d spoken aloud. “Too many crossings in too short a time upset the balance once more. The barrier snapped back into place, trapping those who had crossed in both directions.”
Devi ran a hand through her hair. “So where do the summoners fit in?”
“In its normal state, the barrier is navigable only by undying who have been commanded to cross by a child of the Choir, or by the Choir themselves.”
Cache grew impossibly pale. She’d been raised devoutly Catholic, and everything the AI was saying bordered on heresy. “Choir…like angels?”
“A subset of the celestials.” His voice gentled, as if reacting to Cache’s clear distress. “We have written extensive histories to separate myth and mythology from fact, and you are welcome to peruse those at your leisure. For now, it is only important that you understand that the Choir have the power to command their own kind, as well as the undying. Mated with humans, the Choir produce what you call summoners.”
Like Juliet. “How much Choir blood does a human need in order to summon?”
“Twenty-five to thirty percent. To safely control what has been summoned, forty percent is best.”
Devi wondered how much Juliet had, then remembered that Cache didn’t even know about her. So much had happened, too fast, and she had no hope of processing it. “I need to get back so I can talk to Zel and Aton. You said Cache and I can access the archives whenever we want?”
The guardian nodded, returning his hands to his sword. “Of course. But I assumed you wanted to know the answer to your question?”
She had, before he’d started rambling about things more likely to break her head than not. “The answer seemed to be a bit more complicated than I anticipated.”
A tiny smile. “Perhaps. You want to reclaim your
world from the undying and the celestials?”
“Is it possible?”
“You cannot send them home, but you can defeat them.” He waved his arm in a sweeping gesture and the room spun in a gut-wrenching blur. The walls turned into streaks of color, then jolted to an abrupt halt.
They stood in the center of a vast library. The guardian’s tunic and sword were gone, replaced by nondescript brown robes. “When you come here in the future, this is what you will find. Our library.” He strode to a large, sturdy table and dropped his hand to a heavy, leather-bound book. “And this. The original Book of Summoning. This is what the Templars fight to protect. In the hands of a daughter or son of the Choir, this book can help turn the tide of battle.”
It made sense that only a summoner could banish the demons from their realm, but the rest of it… Devi glanced at Cache, who looked just as confused as she felt. “The battle against humans, or something between the wi—the celestials and the undying?”
“All of it.” His fingers caressed the cover with a devotion that seemed odd in an artificial intelligence, but this was clearly his purpose. “With this book, you can do what has never been done before. Summon the Choir to take up their flaming swords and lead humanity’s armies against the undying.”
“Aton won’t be happy to hear that.” It was an understatement, but it was all she could force through numb lips.
The guardian tilted his head. “Aton made his choice. He fights for humanity. He fights for his son. Perhaps it is time you joined them.”
“Fight?” Devi took a step and fell as a jolt shook her, the gut-tugging sensation of dropping out of the network.
Hands framed her face, small hands, trying to hold her still. “Tanner, she’s waking up.”
“Finally. Boss, you okay?”
Her disconnection had been disorienting, and it took her a moment to center herself and focus on Juliet and Tanner. “Where’s Zel?”
