Demon Shade (The Demons of Oxford Book 2)
Page 21
“Bleed into the stone. Halvard says…”
She sensed Aeth swallowing, rolling his eyes, not believing he was even entertaining the idea.
“Says it will work. A blood offering. Some sort of ritual. It’s what his race does.”
She got it. “Okay.” What did she have to lose? She ran her hand down her coat into her pocket. The thing that had taken over Chris had taken her powers—but not her knife. She grasped it now and before she could catch up with what she was doing, cut at her wrist. She jammed her hand onto the rock above her, rubbing the cut into the stone, crying out at the pain of the abrasion and cursing every drop that spattered down on her instead of running into the stone. And…nothing.
“More?” she gasped, weaker than ever now. With the last bit of resolution she possessed, the last spark of energy, the last drop of courage, she took the knife firmly and gouged deeper into her skin. Blood spurted and she again swiped her wrist back and forth against the rock.
Still nothing. This…was it. Better than lingering, starving to death. Very Roman of her, almost. “I’m not sorry,” she called, with the last breath in her lungs. Aeth would understand.
And then…there came something like a green shoot, a tiny spring tendril unfurling, uncurling, growing, lengthening. She could see nothing, but she felt everything, A trickle of power reaching for her! It seeped down and settled, filling the tiny space and couldn’t be contained within in. No, it gained strength and mass and volume until it overflowed the tomb and burst through the stone, shattering it into four pieces, pieces that four sets of hands caught and heaved to the sides.
Four people, two male and two female, but Kennedy ignored the huge blond guy and the two women. “Aeth!”
“Careful!” he cautioned, his voice and hands unsteady as he reached for her and pulled her free. He cradled her to him for a few scant seconds then set her on the freezing-cold hard ground that felt like the softest, fluffiest blanket to her. “Are you…all right?”
“Not really,” she managed, holding up her damaged wrist, then flinching as the olive-skinned brunette wrapped a cloth round it and the black-haired woman tied it securely.
“We’ll deal with it,” Aeth promised, a catch in his voice.
“Thank you, Halvard.” Kennedy looked up at the tall man. “That was genius. You’re very learned. Your culture is very rich and wise.”
“The blodoffer? I saw it in a movie,” he announced. “Well, a cartoon, actually. But one about Vikings,” he added, in the shocked silence, as if that made it better.
Weak, in pain, scared, Kennedy nevertheless laughed. “Thank you all. Halvard, and Sela and Kaya. I owe you. Well, you know that.” She supposed they were all linked now. “If ever you need me…” Give me notice and I’ll run away.
Despite the season, a few hardy people were eating lunch in the garden, the savoury smell of their healthy soup and lentil something filling the air. As she turned to them, they averted their eyes, concentrating on their plates or the screens of their phones. Typical. How to be English, lesson one. She struggled to her feet.
“Careful,” cautioned Sela, breaking off from her task with Kaya of replacing the tombstone and sealing the fissures.
“Careful later,” Kennedy replied. “This isn’t over. I need to face whatever took Chris over and get him back.”
“Kennedy, it’s not—”
“Later,” she told Aeth, not needing his warnings or disapproval at that moment. “If you’re not in…”
Aeth shook his head but took her hand. “Where to?”
“There’s a theme to this. Places I haven’t been to yet. There’s one more. And you’ll like it. It’s all stone. Very pretty, they say.”
She sent him a mental picture of the monument and he put a hand on the grave marker she never wanted to see again, even from the up side, and pulled her down into the earth. Again.
30
“Aeth?” Kennedy’s voice held alarm. He’d been supporting her all along their journey, even after they emerged dishevelled and fighting for breath from a statue at the edge of a quad in University College. Now, after they’d cut through a staircase door, he stopped at the metal bars of an ornate, domed enclosure. Stopped and wilted, careful not to touch them.
“I can’t go any farther.” What little colour he had seeped from him. “It’s warded. Protected.”
“By whom?” Kennedy looked around.
“Alchemists,” he hissed.
“What?”
Aeth indicated the memorial. “Alchemists love Shelly. And his wife. As do Rosicrucians. When this was created, a whole group of them got together to ‘protect’ it. The wards still hold. I can’t get nearer than this.”
“Damn! Why didn’t you say?” Kennedy thought rapidly. Where else would be good?
“I didn’t suppose their work would hold.” Aeth sniffed. “Just because those bloody Shellys were always writing about alchemy and rosicr—”
“Well, it has. And there’s no time now for lit crit. Look, stay here. Well, as near as you can. I’ll be in sight there. This shouldn’t take long.” She hoped. “If you know anything about exorcism, I can pick your brains. Literally.”
With more conviction than she felt, she pushed open the metal barrier and went in. The room was small, just a gallery space really, built to house the plinth and its white marble figure. The white gleamed starkly. Funeral marble. A groan sounded, shaking her from her reverie. Kennedy inched her way around the plinth and saw a figure lying face down on the floor behind it.
“Chris!” She rushed to him, stopping when she remembered the wisdom of keeping a distance.
He flipped over, his body shuddering and his head turning from side to side in confusion. “Where am I?” he whispered, looking and sounding like the baby-faced young police office she knew, his accent revealing his northern origins. “Kennedy? Is that you? Have I been in an accident or sommat?”
“Something,” she muttered, trying to discern—
“Can’t tha’ help me? I don’t think I can stand. I feel like I was hit by a truck. Or I’ve been drinking. Or both. I can’t remember owt.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Probably speaking to you. I’d been that worried. Since the body—Emma—and that prof from your college said he was with you. I read the file. I was trying to speak to you and then I finally got you.”
What? That seemed so long ago. And a lot had happened after that. “Go on.”
“No.” Chris’s face was scrunched with the effort of talking or recollecting. Either must hurt. “There’s more. But it sounds mad. That you called me, told me there was a body at the weir. And I went to see and…” He shook his head, wincing at the pain it caused. “That must have been a trick? It can’t have been you. If I’m recalling it right. And when I got there, someone must have hit me on the head? It really hurts!”
“That sounds awful.” Kennedy took a slow look around. She wished she could see outside, see if the city looked as it should. How much had been an illusion? Maybe the fair was still in situ, all its members there. This place was no help.
Chris sat and followed her movements. “Should apologise for this date,” he said, attempting a laugh. “Bet this isn’t the way you wanted to see this attraction.”
Kennedy’s heart thumped. The thread of unease that had ribboned earlier, at his house was now unfurling, billowing like a pennant. “What do you mean?”
“Seeing as you haven’t been here before and you wanted to see it.”
Kennedy knew, just knew, that she hadn’t mentioned this place to Chris on any of their encounters, or their few dates. She hadn’t even known about it until she’d shown the tour group around. “Well…” she responded, her meaning as vague as she could make it. Words had power. She didn’t want to hand any more over to whatever this being was. This entity that she was confined in a small space with. As she thought that, the metal-barred gate swung closed with a creaking nose and clinked into place.
As soon as she was on the other side of the monument, she scrabbled for the square of glass in her pocket and yanked it free, ripping the fabric of her coat in her clumsy haste. She flipped the protective covering open and before she lost her courage, slanted the mirror to look behind her. And wished she hadn’t. What she still thought of as Chris was rising to its feet, massive, tall and black-winged.
If she’d thought about winged creatures at all, she’d perhaps imagined them with feathery wings, soft plumes, not leathery-looking appendages that creaked and cracked as their owner walked. Walked closer and closer until he was behind her, looming in fanged and clawed menace. Kennedy palmed the glass and reached for the gate. It was fastened hard, not even rattling in its frame. She sought frantically for something, anything, to help.
‘“Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity’,” she read from an inscription on the wall. “Yep. No arguments here.”
The presence behind her halted. “What?”
Kennedy whirled, and seeing Chris there, person-Chris, boyfriend-Chris confused her. Just for a second. “I don’t want to do this,” she began. Then a question struck her. “Why me?”
“Why you?” Chris put a hand to his head, rubbing as if surprised to find a lump there. “We’re alike! Both started with nothing. Both trying to make it in the world. And we can. We both have such power, such potential…we can get anything.”
“Like your house.”
“Exactly! Well, it’s okay for a starter place. Just like this city’s fine for a starter city.”
Kennedy had backed up so far that she thudded into the railed door. The still unmoveable door. “Chris.” She took in a huge breath, buying time. “This is your last chance. You can still walk away.”
“Kennedy Smith.” Chris’s face wore such a pitying expression that she wanted to wipe it smooth. Preferable with a brick. Why didn’t she have one? “You have no idea at all, do you? No clue what—”
“Kid?”
About to yell a warning at the woman who’d approached the memorial and spoken, the woman who was dicing with death, Kennedy almost fell backwards when the gate opened behind her. She slipped to one side as the woman came in and stood beside her.
“Kid, is this cambion bothering you?” the woman enquired. “Bloody half-demons. They’re the worst. Always with the poor-me and always such damn pains in the arses, trying anything and everything and everyone to get what they think should be theirs.”
“How dare you?” the Chris-thing roared.
“Oh, shut it, wingding.” The woman grinned at Kennedy, who was too startled, too scared to take her eyes off the half-demon in front of her for more than a millisecond. “You know what I find works? Trapping them in a demon prism.” She chuckled. “Funny. You know how you get wrong ideas and you don’t know they’re wrong? Until embarrassingly recently, I thought it was called demon prison.”
Kennedy gaped. The woman’s voice, her way of speaking…
“So, if you happened to have a bit of blood glass handy…?”
All at once, Kennedy understood. So much. In one synchronised movement, she and the stranger held up their mirrors, their pieces of glass, and positioned them so the demon was caught in twin reflections, and then in many more, the images repeating and kaleidoscoping like something from the hall of mirrors where she’d gotten the instrument. The demon shrieked, the inhuman noise threatening to pierce her eardrums, and fought against the capture, his strength making Kennedy’s arm shake until she couldn’t hold the mirror up. The woman reached out to support Kennedy’s weakening arm.
“Thanks,” she gasped, hardly audible against the howling and screeching of what hit her like a cyclone until, with a sharp crack and what felt like a thunderbolt hitting the mirror she held, it stopped. No noise, no movement. Just stillness and silence. It felt heavenly. The woman brought her hand across and placed her square of glass on top of Kennedy’s, taking Kennedy’s from her.
Kennedy, shaking out her aching arm and hand, caught more movement behind her and whirled. “Aeth! How did you get in? What about the ward on the gate?”
“Lifted. I don’t know how. Must have been someone powerful…” He stared from Kennedy to the stranger putting the sections of glass away in a bubble-wrap envelope she pulled from her bag.
“Note to self: remember to empty the prism,” she remarked, fastening the wrapping tight. “Handy things to have in the field: lip balm, bottled water and blood glass. Although, it’s probably called something else nowadays. Who was he, anyway, kid?”
“I thought…a cop.” Kennedy couldn’t take her eyes off the woman, off her long brown hair with its hint of red, her hazel eyes with their strange starbursts of green around the pupils.
“Huh. Never trust a copper.”
“He seemed…nice.”
“Especially when they seem nice.” The woman shook her head.
“Who are you?” Kennedy demanded, the question bursting from her. “Aeth? What’s up with your face?”
“Kennedy, this… She…”
She’d never seen him speechless. He pointed from her to the woman in her heavy-soled boots, combat trousers and leather jacket, her satchel slung across her slender body, looking from Kennedy’s messy hair to the woman’s, also coming loose from its braid, but still looking a lot tidier than Kennedy’s. Tidier, but similar, just as her greenish eyes were similar in her pale face. A face that was like and unlike hers, harder, more self-reliant, its eyes holding mysteries and secrets in their depths. She looked slim but athletic, leanly muscled, all coiled-spring readiness. Not a person who suffered fools at all, let alone gladly. Not a woman to be messed with.
“This woman. She’s your…”
“Mother,” the woman finished for him when he couldn’t.
“M— You’re my mother?” Kennedy turned, her movement jerky and violent. All that she’d been through, as an orphan, and now, a living parent standing in front of her? She lunged for the woman, the stranger, and threw herself at her…to wrap her arms around her in a bone-cracking hug. The woman’s eyes opened wide and she stiffened, but after a moment, she hugged back.
“Yep. Oh, and happy birthday.” The woman patted her.
Kennedy, still held to her chest, sobbed a few years’ worth of tears, and her mother slid a tissue in to dab at her eyes for her.
“Kidlet, I know we have some catching up to do, but I actually came for your help. You see, I’ve finally got a lead on where your father’s being held, and I think, together, we can free him.”
Kennedy stilled.
“It’ll be dangerous,” her mother continued. “Difficult too. And not exactly…legal, shall we say.”
Kennedy stepped back, her head on one side as she considered the stranger. Her mother. “I don’t know you,” she said slowly. “Don’t know anything about you. But, breaking the law, risking death, on a dangerous and reckless mission? Somehow…I wouldn’t expect anything else.”
The wicked grin she felt curve her lips was mirrored on her mother’s.
“So, yeah.” Kennedy swiped at her eyes and sniffed. The time for tears had come and gone. “Mother.” The word felt so strange on her tongue. “Catch me up and count me in.”
Also by Kara Silver
Book One, Demon Bone, is available now
Book Three, Demon Gift, is available for preorder now
Book Four, Demon Mage, releases January 2019
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