by Elena Lawson
I turn to find Kincaid watching me, his lips twitching as he holds back laughter.
“Paige,” he calls, but I’ve already stormed out of the room.
Bastard.
I bet he wouldn’t be cracking jokes if he were the one who had to touch the fucking demon stick.
15
Lady Devereaux dozes in the armchair where I left her.
Her head tipped back against the backrest, mouth gaping and expression soft and drooping.
She doesn’t look so mean that way.
“What!” She jumps awake, sleep-slowed gaze swimming through the room until her eyes narrow on me.
I take it back. She couldn’t ever possibly not look mean.
“Someone needs to teach you some manners, girl. When I ask you to go and fetch something, I expect that you’ll—”
“Lady Devereaux. Have a nice nap?”
She fumes at Kincaid as he strolls into the sitting area and goes to lean against the wall next to the entry to the library. He looks at her with a challenge in his stare, and I know he’s purposely trying to taunt her. I’m not sure if I want to chastise him for poking fun at an ornery old woman or applaud.
I’m leaning toward the latter.
If this morning was any indication, my training with Lady Devereaux was going to be anything but enjoyable.
Something in the way she looks at me tells me she would relish breaking me. She would examine all the pieces with a keen eye and then leave me half put back together, satisfied to know what makes me tick and uncaring of what I’d need to go through for her to figure it out.
“Asmodeus,” she says by way of greeting. “I didn’t realize you’d returned.”
“I told you I wanted to be present should Paige use the Scepter. Is your mind affected by memory loss these days?”
She shakes her finger at him and bares her teeth. She goes to say something I’m sure will be equally biting, but Kincaid silences her with a raised hand.
“And it’s Kincaid here in the city. No one calls me Asmodeus.”
“A pity if you ask me. Kincaid is a ridiculous moniker for a demon.”
Kincaid crosses his arms and gestures to where I stand, holding the Scepter at arm’s length. “Do you think it best if we go outside?”
“I’m perfectly happy right where I am. Go on, girl, unwrap it.”
I look to Kincaid for affirmation, but it’s Lady Devereux who speaks again.
“Is she always so difficult?”
Kincaid’s brows rise. “You have no idea. I’m sure the pair of you will be a match made in Hell.”
That’s reassuring.
I wet my dry lips and set to untying the knot in the silvery rope with fumbling fingers when I hear Artemis coming down the stairwell outside the room.
“Here, let me,” he offers, and I gratefully pass him the Scepter, my stomach flipping.
It barely takes him three seconds to get the knot loose, and the rope falls away, slinking to the floor with a hiss against the thick fabric.
“Pass it along,” Lady Devereaux rushes him, and Artemis lets the heavy blanket drop from the Spirit Scepter.
Immediately, the whispers rush in, the beads around my wrist rendered useless. The pressure on my chest is bone-crushing, but I know that once I take hold of the staff, it’ll ease.
“Is that…” Devereaux’s question trails off. “Bless my black heart. It can’t be. Only two were ever forged. How did it end up here?”
“I’m not sure,” comes Kincaid’s reply, but my eyes are sealed shut against the barrage of whispers and the crushing weight on my chest.
“Likely he brought it himself during the opening of the gates. Have you told him it’s here on the mortal plane?”
“No.”
I tune them out, not understanding what the hell they’re talking about anyway. As terrifying as it was the last time, the promise of the rush of power is enough to make me want to rid myself of eight hundred pounds of spirit pressure on my lungs.
Kincaid slips over to us so quick I barely notice him as he slides the bracelets from my wrists just a second before I reach out and snatch the Scepter from Artemis.
The rush is just as I remember it, except this time it doesn’t feel like my heart stops dead in my chest. I’m prepared. Ready. The same wind that swept out over the graveyard before sweeps into the room now, and I twitch at the sound of broken glass as the windows bow and break from the force of it.
Lady Devereaux and her chair have fallen back. Her socked feet flounder in the air and her arms flail.
Kincaid and Artemis are in the entry now, pressed against the farthest wall. Where Kincaid watches with a sort of reverence in his eyes. Pride for his purchase. Artemis looks like he might be sick, and it makes me want the wind to stop.
As I think it, they are able to lift their heads from the wall and take a step forward. It dawns on me that I am the ruler of the Scepter and not the other way around.
I try to rein in the hurricane gusts, pulling them back to myself. It works, but only to a point. It’s too hard to concentrate with all the whispering, shouting, spitting voices in my head. Nothing like the assault at the cemetery, though.
Here, there are fewer spirits to contend with, and I feel them out, filing through them as if they were pages, searching for one of two familiar voices.
Kincaid and Artemis each take one of Lady Devereaux’s arms and help her to stand. She leans back from me with an arm raised to shield herself from the still bustling wind. Her eyes go wide at what she sees, and I find myself smiling.
She’s afraid of me.
Why should I enjoy that?
I shouldn’t. Yet, I do.
“Incredible,” she says and I have to read her lips to make out the word.
“She is,” Kincaid says next to the old Necromancer, his voice deep enough to penetrate the wind and cacophony of voices filling my ears like cotton and lead.
“Paige!” Kincaid shouts over the roar. “Can you hear them?”
I shake my head. “I’ll keep trying.”
I shut my eyes, drawing on the raw energy rushing through the staff and into my veins. Inhaling to slow the deafening thunder of my pulse, I begin to sift through the voices again, searching for the ones I want.
“Call them to you!” Lady Devereaux croaks as she sinks back into the now-righted armchair, leaning over the edge of it.
I shut my eyes once more and speak their names in my mind.
Dantalion.
Malphas.
When nothing happens and I hear no new voices, I repeat their names over and over, beseeching them to come to where I can hear them.
I feel them before I hear anything different. Like a dark stain on an otherwise blank canvas. As my eyes fly open, they come into view. They are a mirage on a dark horizon. Distant wavering images—like they are merely silhouettes of themselves. With white eyes and dark chasms for mouths.
I keep calling, drawing them in. Closer. An ache forms on the precipice of my skull, and I wince, gripping the staff harder.
“Impossible.” Lady Devereaux’s voice finds me in my focused dark, and I turn to see her staring out into the distance, too. Past the doorway to the library and beyond, into the chasm opened up by sheer force of my will. To where the two shadows wait in the fathomless deep. She can see them, too.
“You can’t draw them both,” she calls to me, hustling to her feet and rolling up the sleeves of her dark gray blouse. “Focus only on one of them, send the other back.”
I do as she says, shoving back the shadow to the right in favor of the one on the left. The one pushed away vanishes, evaporating into nothingness, as the other becomes clearer.
His features come into focus. Hair like a halo of gold on his head and eyes glittering like fresh cut sapphires in a face so sharp it could also have been cut from stone. Dantalion.
His mouth moves, but I cannot hear him. The din of incessant chatter in my mind is too loud. “I can’t hear him,” I grit out a
s a droplet of blood finds its way into my mouth. “The voices—they’re too loud.”
“Draw him closer,” she instructs. “Pull him in as you would a tug rope. It won’t be without some effort.”
No shit.
I envision the rope. Try to mentally reel it in.
“Good. Now you must shut out the others. Shore up your mental defenses. They are tools for you to wield and command and nothing more. You must push them out.”
I try, but it’s too much. I can’t pull in Dantalion and shove out the other voices at once. Not even with the help of the Scepter.
“I…can’t.”
“You can.”
I have to stop doing one thing to succeed at the other. I hold fast to Dantalion but do not draw him any farther, screaming internally with all the force I have for the other spirits to get out.
It works, but not nearly as well as it did in the graveyard at Bellefontaine. There, I’d barely had to think to wield the staff and silence the voices. The level of available spirit energy there was much greater, though.
Once I have them all at bay, I resume pulling Dantalion’s spirit to me, sighing when his moving lips begin to emit sounds I can hear.
Dantalion looks at me incredulously, his face a mask of horror. “How?” he asks, and his voice is a shaky whisper carried to me on the breeze. It almost sounds like it’s coming through a radio.
“Beats me,” I manage through the internal strain.
“Are they here?” Kincaid bellows, searching the air where both Lady Deveraux’s and my eyes are fixed.
“Dantalion,” I reply. “He’s here, but I don’t know how long I can hold on to him.”
The dark abyss from where he came hovers at his back. Its pull on him like a super magnet.
Kincaid straightens. “Dan, what happened? Who did this to you?”
Dantalion’s dark blue gaze falls to his brother and a flicker of vivid agony crosses his features. It hurts to look at him.
“I don’t know.”
I reiterate the message to Kincaid while Lady Devereaux looks on in stunned silence and Artemis just kind of watches from the corner of the room.
“It…it was like being torn apart. But from the inside,” Dantalion explains. “Then…nothing.”
There’s almost no trace of his holier-than-thou attitude anymore. He isn’t the same demon who twirled me around the gleaming dancefloor at the Midnight Court. But I supposed dying would do that to a person.
“Spirit magic,” Lady Devereaux muses when I finish telling Kincaid what he said. “Must be.”
Kincaid’s face hardens. “Do you have any enemies, Brother? Diablim or demons in Astrum who would want you dead?”
“Many.” Dantalion scoffs with a dark laugh. “But none capable of this.”
Kincaid grits his teeth as he considers this, his fists clenching and turning black as he works through the puzzle before him.
“What was done with my body?” Dantalion asks, and I pose the question to a now mostly-demon Kincaid.
He cocks his head. “It’s entombed at Hightower.”
Dantalion’s lips press together and I get a sense of what he’s truly asking, a sick feeling roiling in my belly. “You want me to try to put it back,” I guess.
His eyes glimmer with hope when he levels them on me again. “Can you? Is it possible?”
I look to Lady Devereaux for guidance, and her wrinkled face pinches. “This shouldn’t be possible,” she sneers with a frustrated wave of her arm.
It’s as much of an answer as we’ll get.
“Would your body not be, you know, decomposing?” I ask, shuddering at the thought of putting life back into a worm-eaten corpse. That wouldn’t be living. It would be something else. Something terrible.
Dantalion gives a slow shake of his head. “It’s a celestial vessel. It does not decay.”
“Is that true?” I ask Kincaid, who just stares confusedly until I remember he can’t hear his brother. “That his body doesn’t decay?”
Kincaid’s brows lower in thought, and then he nods. “It’s true.”
A sharp pull at my core tells me we’re running out of time, and I rush to redouble my efforts to hold Dantalion steady in this plane. To keep him from vanishing into the other. “I’m losing him!”
Kincaid steps forward as he would reach out and hold his brother here in this world, but then his hands return to balls at his sides, and he drops his head. “I’ll find who did this to you, Brother,” he promises. “You will be avenged.”
The rope snaps, and Dantalion is shot back into the dark like a star slung across an empty galaxy.
16
The Spirit Scepter is released and with it every remaining ounce of my energy and the barriers I erected in my mind vanishes.
Kincaid catches me before I can do too much damage to my knees as I fall. He tugs on my bracelets and brushes his black hand up and down my back until my breathing evens.
“Artemis,” Kincaid growls. “The Scepter.”
The cloth slides over it and Artemis rushes to wrap it up with the silvery rope, lifting the phantom weight from my chest enough that I can breathe properly. I blink through the blur in my vision until I can see Lady Devereaux standing opposite us.
She stares into the library, into where the void had been, her hands in fists on her hips.
“What does this mean?” Kincaid asks her. “Can she bring him back? Can she bring them both back?”
I cough and blood splatters over the back of my hand, coating my tongue in the earthy, metallic taste.
As though drawn by the scent, Lady Devereaux whirls. “How should I know?” she snaps at Kincaid, looking between him and me with clear distaste.
“That place,” she hisses, pointing at nothing. “The one you called him from; it’s not an earthly plane. It was something else. I’ve never seen anything like it. So how should I know its rules? Hmm?”
Kincaid breathes heavily against my back, and I find myself just wanting to melt into him. To close my eyes and let the rhythm of his breaths take me into sleep.
“Devereaux,” Kincaid warns at her tone, but she only scoffs at his threat, flicking her knobby fingers in the air as though he were a fly to be swatted.
Artemis kneels at my side after discarding the Scepter out in the hall. “Can I get you anything?” he whispers.
When I don’t answer, he adds, “That was badass.”
Kincaid glares at him, and he backs off, scuttling out into the hall, muttering something about getting me a drink.
“This level of power is dangerous,” Devereaux tells Kincaid, and I wonder if she’ll insist on her earlier suggestion of killing me.
She doesn’t.
Kincaid bundles me up into his arms, lifting me as though I weigh no more than a sack of flour. I let my head fall into the crook of his neck and let my eyelids flutter closed, daydreaming of my bed. “I brought you here to teach her how to control it. Are you saying you can’t?”
“No. But there are limits to what I can teach her.”
“Then teach her everything you can!”
“This power…” Devereaux trails off. “It isn’t just dangerous for those around her. It could tear her apart, Asmodeus. A half-mortal body isn’t made to withstand it.”
There’s a long silence before either speaks again, and I stir from the edge of sleep to the rumble of Kincaid’s rich baritone.
“Are you telling me I have to choose? That if I push her to do this, she could die?”
Lady Devereaux doesn’t answer, and I push myself to stay awake, to see her face. But moving is really and truly out of the question now. I manage to open my eyes though, and look up at the haunted demon clutching me to his chest.
“I’ll do it,” I murmur, drawing his yellow-eyed gaze. “Whatever it takes.”
He looks like he might argue, but stops himself, the muscles in his jaw flexing.
“I’ll be careful.” The words are barely a whisper as the cloying embrace of sleep ge
ts its claws under my skin. “I’ll be fine.”
Kincaid lifts his gaze again to Lady Devereaux, and I can see a thick vein pulsing in his neck. His demon-form is receding, leaving a sickly pale color in its wake. “If anything happens to her, I’m holding you personally responsible.”
My weight shifts in his arms as we leave, and I let my eyes fall closed again as we ascend the stairs and take a sharp left. A moment later, cool silk is against my cheek as Kincaid lays me in his bed. His scent envelops me, and I sigh.
Casper’s meow brings me back to the surface for a moment, and I watch as he enters Kincaid’s bedroom, lifting his rear as he stretches out from a nap. As though nothing at all is amiss. As though I didn’t open a rift in the space time continuum or whatever the hell I did.
“Protect her,” Kincaid orders the sleepy kitty, removing his hands from my back to draw a blanket up to my chin.
Casper chirrups in reply, as though he were a mother cat calling her kittens and hops onto the bed, nuzzling into the top of my head as though he were a crown of fur.
“I have a traitor that needs dealing with.” Kincaid seethes. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
I shudder, and if it were possible, I’d feel sorry for the Diablim who kidnapped Artemis. But it’s not, so I don’t. Choosing to smile instead as sleep claims me.
17
It’s night when he returns.
I sense him before I see him, stuck somewhere halfway between asleep and awake. Like a disturbance of air or the presence of something in water, making its volume greater. It’s his soul, I realize as I peel back my eyelids, squinting into the shadows.
He leaves his bedroom door slightly ajar after entering, a sliver of diluted moonlight the only light illuminating the space.
“Kincaid?” I venture, knowing it’s him in my bones, but needing to reassure my mind. All I can see of him is a silhouetted outline as my Diablim eyes take a moment to adjust.
“Yes, Na’vazēm,” he replies, and I don’t like how he sounds.
I push myself up, and Casper jolts awake and hisses before darting for the door. There’s a sound like rustling fabric and his jacket falls to the floor. I stand, not liking his silence.