by Sadie Waters
Her lungs on fire, Ember collapsed next to Ryan on the bed, untangling her legs from his hips but resting the back of her hand on his chest. It hardly seemed fair that his heart was racing only half the speed of hers, but when she looked over at him, he was watching her, the satisfied expression she’d grown to love over the years resting on his handsome face. She closed her eyes and held back a chuckle, knowing he’d be ready to discuss the situation in no time at all, and she’d still have a stitch in her side for the next ten minutes.
“Worth it?” he asked, his voice even and calm.
“Fuck yeah,” she gasped, and Ryan chuckled at her. Ember grabbed a pillow from just above her head and slammed it into his face.
Chapter Six
The dresser across the room had an entire drawer full of perfectly comfortable pajamas, but Ember was wearing Ryan’s discarded T-shirt and a pair of his boxers she’d stolen a couple of weeks ago. She’d insisted he put his boxer briefs back on because if they were going to brainstorm the situation about their visitor, she was gonna need him to put that thing away. It was distracting enough that he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Even in the dim moonlight filtering in from between the curtains, every time he moved, his perfectly chiseled abs demanded her attention. Seeing that the conversation was getting nowhere, Ember pulled the blanket up and over him and then rolled over on her side, her head propped on her hand.
Ryan raised an eyebrow, turning his head her direction. “Am I cold?”
“No, you’re hot. That’s the problem.”
He snickered. “Okay--so if what Ruby is saying is true, and we have no reason to think it isn’t, other than the fact that it seems impossible, we both know there’s only one possibility for what the situation is with Zach.”
Ember shook her head. “Ry, how can that be?” Her voice was almost a squeal as she dropped backward onto the pillow she’d used as a weapon a few minutes ago. “You and I both know Seers haven’t existed in well over three hundred years.”
“I know what I know,” he said, his sarcastic tone matching his crooked grin. “What Zach and Ruby described is literally the definition of Seeing, Em. He saw a Scale while awake and not under any mind-altering drugs. That’s what Seers do. Did.”
Ember sat up again, her head back on her hand. “But Seers were driven into extinction back in the eighteenth century!”
“We don’t know that,” he argued. “All we know is that none of them seemed to reincarnate as expected. For all we know, the Scales did something to wipe their memories, and they were actually around. Or they’ve been trapped somewhere this entire time, and Zach somehow managed to resurface.” His tone was nonchalant, but as Ember considered his words, she realized they were true.
Still, it seemed like a stretch. They’d all just assumed the Scales had managed to find a way to send the Seers back to the heavens once and for all. Why they were targeted over any other form of Sorcha, no one had been able to say, though there was discussion that perhaps it was because the Seers were the most fragile of all Sorcha. While their gift was at least as important as any of the others, it wasn’t a weapon the way Flying or Throwing was, and it wasn’t the same sort of protection as Blending. Likewise, there had never been as many Seers and they didn’t transfer or recharge their energy the same way the other three Sorcha did. Finally, there was no Scale version of a Seer the way there was for the other talents. That fact had been a blessing to Sorcha when the Seers’ skills had given them the upper hand, but it also put a target on the more fragile Sorchas’ backs.
The entire situation had Ember’s head starting to ache. “I don’t know what’s going on,” she admitted, getting a nod in response since Ryan knew that. “But if he is a Seer… that will change everything.” She thought back to a time when she had a Seer on her team and could more easily locate Scales before they attempted to harm humans.
Ryan shifted, sitting up slightly and putting his arm behind his head, which accentuated his rippling bicep. At the same time, the blanket slid down almost to his waist. Ember ran her tongue across her bottom lip, staring at his pecs. An arched eyebrow let her know he’d noticed. She couldn’t help but grin at him as he pulled the blanket up, making a face like a woman caught topless by a peeping neighbor. Ember swatted at him but then leaned over and found his delicious lips.
Pulling away, Ryan asked, “You wanna talk, or… not talk?”
Groaning, Ember dropped her head to his shoulder, and he brought his arm around her shoulders. The scent of his perspiration mixed with his aftershave, and she breathed him in for a moment, contemplating an answer. He squeezed her close, and she draped her arm across his chest. “I don’t know,” she moaned. Wiggling free enough so that she could see his face she said, “We aren’t going to get anywhere on this tonight either way.”
“Not any further along than we already are.”
“Which is square one.”
He shrugged like he disagreed but didn’t bother to restate his argument. Once again, Ember dropped her head so that her face was buried in his chest. As tempting as it was to wrap her lips around his nipple and go for another round, a wave of exhaustion washed over her, and she knew she’d had enough of everything for one night.
Ryan could read her as well as anyone. He pulled the blanket around her, shifting so that he was no longer sitting up, and Ember slid up to his shoulder, her eyelids suddenly seeming to weigh a hundred pounds each. The warmth of his lips against her forehead was as comforting as the blanket, and she sunk into him.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said, his voice a soft whisper. “You gonna take him to Ford tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” she managed, half asleep.
“I think that’s for the best. He said he has to go to work in the morning, class in the afternoon, and then he has another study session in the afternoon. I’m afraid Mr. Parker’s going to have to change his plans. Maybe for a while.”
Usually, Ember wasn’t one to let sympathy affect her, but thinking back to how scared and vulnerable Zach looked when he’d first stepped out of the restroom earlier, she couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him. He seemed like a genuinely nice, unassuming dude who just happened to get tangled up in something he didn’t understand and shouldn’t have seen. But if what Ryan was proposing was true, then, yes, life for their new friend was about to take on a complicated twist.
Ryan brushed his lips across her forehead again, and Ember let out a soft moan, ready to let sleep take her. Putting off sleep for problems that wouldn’t go away in the middle of the night, no matter how busy her brain was, made little sense, so she gave in and drifted off to a land where everything was as it should be, and regular human dudes who worked at coffee houses couldn’t see demons lunging at them from the shadows.
Chapter Seven
Normally, Ember didn’t get out of bed until close to noon on days when she’d been out hunting the night before. But she’d fallen asleep like a rock and woke up with the sun, unable to go back to sleep. While it was pleasant watching Ryan’s chest rise and fall with his measured breaths, her thoughts were stirring, making her restless, so she got out of bed a little past 7:00 so she didn’t wake him.
She knew Carson and Jake wouldn’t be up and about just yet, and she didn’t figure Zach would be either since he was a human who had been up for most of the night and was sleeping in a strange location, something most people found difficult to do. The idea of sitting in the nook in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and watching the sun spill over Manhattan was enticing.
Ember fixed a cup of breakfast blend, added way too much creamer, and sat down at the table, her feet up in the chair so that her knees were almost in her chin, her shins pressing against the edge of the table. The aroma rising from the steam was invigorating, and she felt herself coming back to life before the first sip scalded her tongue.
The view was lovely as cityscapes go. High rise apartment buildings nearby, skyscrapers in the distance, green spaces plentiful enough to remind a person na
ture existed. She’d picked this apartment building out in her last lifetime and made the necessary arrangements to make sure it ended up back in her hands when she came around again. It hadn’t been easy--willing a home to someone who wasn’t born yet--but she had enough money to pay a good lawyer and had gotten it done. Somehow, in the interim, her traditionally decorated 3000 square foot mansion of an apartment had morphed into an industrial space with hardly any walls save the bedrooms and shrank by a couple hundred square feet. But it was plenty big enough for the four of them, and the decor fit her current style more now anyway.
“Four of us,” she muttered, thinking about Zach. “Sometimes five.” She had no idea how long they’d have to keep him here, but she would have to find a way to explain as much as she could about the world he’d stumbled into before she took him to Ford. It wouldn’t be fair to the professor to have to enlighten him and determine what the hell he was.
She went back over Ryan’s arguments from the night before and took another drink of her coffee. Everything he’d said had made perfect sense. It just wasn’t possible. Still, if Zach wasn’t a Seer… what the hell was he?
The sound of footsteps had her head spinning around. Zach came down the hall looking like a hot mess, shuffling his feet with his hair sticking up and his eyes half closed. She wondered if he was sleep walking at first, he looked so out of it. But he raised a hand in her direction, and she waved back, trying not to laugh. He couldn’t quite fill out Jake’s red and black plaid pajamas, but he didn’t look half bad for a disheveled zombie.
He knew his way around the kitchen. She watched him find the K-cups and fix himself a cup of coffee without a word, a smirk on her face. It wasn’t until he’d gulped down about half of it that he let out a long sigh and a pleasant look came across his face. “Good morning,” Ember offered, trying not to laugh at him.
Zach turned and looked at her, his eyes fully open now, and growing a bit wider as he noticed what she was wearing--or what she wasn’t wearing. Ember glanced down at her sleep attire, making sure everything was covered, which it was, but the outfit didn’t hide much. She probably should’ve been courteous enough to put on a robe, but it hadn’t crossed her mind to do so in her own home. He raised his eyes quickly enough from her T-shirt and panties to her face. “Good morning.”
“How did you sleep?”
Walking more like a human now than a creature from The Walking Dead, Zach came over and sat down at the table. “Okay.” He took another sip, clearly a man of few words. Tracing over the cityscape for a few moments, he was contemplative, taking it all in. Satisfied he hadn’t missed anything, he gave a little nod and then turned back to her. “How was your night?”
Ember raised an eyebrow wondering what he was asking, but the innocent expression on his face didn’t shift, so she didn’t take it to be an inappropriate inquiry. “I didn’t sleep much,” she said, running a hand through her hair and hoping hers wasn’t as messy as his, though she figured it probably was. “Kept trying to figure things out.”
“Yeah, me, too.” Zach took a long drink, and she figured he must be a two cups in the morning kind of guy. “I just kept thinking… all of this sounds nuts, you know? I mean, what the hell was that thing? It doesn’t make any sense.” He shook his head, leaning forward so his elbows were on the table, the remains of his coffee cradled in his hands.
Putting her feet on the floor and sitting up straight, she chose her words carefully. “What you saw makes sense to me,” she said, waiting for him to acknowledge he was listening. His eyes widened. “It’s just the fact that you saw it that I can’t sort through.”
Zach cocked his head to the side for a second before asking, “What do you mean?”
With her hand on his arm, Ember said, “Zach, I’m about to tell you something that’s going to be difficult for you to understand and accept. I won’t blame you at all for not believing me. In fact, I’m not sure you are even programmed to be able to believe it, as a human. But all of it is real, and I can prove it to you. You’ve just got to trust me, and let me tell you the whole story, okay?”
He glanced down at her hand and then back at her. “You seem nicer today than you did last night.”
The comment caught her off guard. “What do you mean?” She pulled her hand back and took another drink of her coffee, which was cool now.
“I mean, I felt like you were really angry I was here last night. And obviously Carson could’ve done without me. Jake and Ryan were nice. Ruby was… a little… odd. Anyway, you seem more relaxed this morning.”
Ember tried not to be offended. “Thanks for letting me know. I’m sorry I came across that way.” She considered his perspective and understood what he was getting at. “I guess I just don’t like surprises, especially not ones of this magnitude.”
Taking a slurp of his coffee, Zach breathed in deeply and then set his cup down before he said, “I don’t really like surprises of a great magnitude either, but it sounds like whatever you’re about to tell me is going to stretch the boundaries of my mind.”
“It is,” she assured him, a little stunned at how easily he seemed to be accepting what she was saying so far.
“Well, then, let’s get to stretching.”
Chapter Eight
Zach’s eyes were a shade of green Ember couldn’t ever remember seeing in another human being. Cat’s maybe. They were a sort of sage green color, but a little more vibrant than most people’s. They sort of reminded her of Ryan’s eyes, which always seemed to twinkle, except his were a sapphire blue. As he stared at her, waiting for her to start to explain something to him she’d been cautioned about sharing with anyone since the dawn of time, she found something soothing about the way his eyes followed her.
With a breath so deep her lungs began to burn before she slowly blew it out, Ember began. “Zach, what you saw last night was real. I know it’s easy to try to explain it away and say it had to be someone in a costume or wearing a ton of makeup. But it wasn’t. What you saw last night was an evil creature, the kind I’ve been battling against for thousands of years. Zach, there’s a whole other world you and the vast majority of other humans have never been made aware of. But last night, you caught a glimpse of it, and we don’t know how that’s possible. But you did, just the same.”
He stared at her for a long time, not even blinking, and Ember considered continuing, but she was doing her best to will him to say something--anything first.
Eventually, Zach opened his mouth. It gaped for a moment before he closed it, tipped his head, and then said, “I need more coffee.” He got up and headed back to the Keurig, and Ember had to hide a smile at his disorientation.
When he came back, he seemed slightly more in tune. He took a sip of his coffee and then asked, “What was it, exactly?” with an air of acceptance she hadn’t seen yet.
Ember gave him a reassuring smile before she replied. “We call them Scales. From the Scottish word, sgaile, which means shadow or darkness. They have many names, though, and while they are all evil and seek to destroy men, in the end they are all the same.”
His nostrils flared slightly, and his face turned slightly paler than normal. “What… what would I most likely have heard them called before, Ember?”
“Demons, Zach. You were almost attacked by a demon last night.”
Again, he seemed numb for a few seconds as he tried to accept what she’d said as truth, but it wouldn’t quite register yet, so he took a sip of his coffee and said, “I’m going to need some proof that that could possibly be true, Ember, before I can believe it.”
“That’s understandable.” She wanted to remind him that he’d seen it for himself, but she knew there was only so much he could grasp at the moment. “Did you go to church as a kid?”
“Some,” he said with a shrug, like he didn’t get the connection.
“Do you remember learning about how God cast a third of the angels out of heaven, back in Genesis, when Satan was trying to take over?”
“Yeah, sure. And there’s a bunch of movies about stuff like that, right?”
“Sure. Well, that’s true. There’s just more to it than that. God cast them out, but He didn’t intend for them to just roam free and do whatever the hell they want. He sent a team of assassins after them to expel them from the earthly plane and lock them below. In hell.”
“Assassins?” he repeated. Zach looked around the room, across the expanse of the living room as if there might be a clue there as to whether or not his hunch was right. “Is that what you guys are, then? You hunt demons?”
She nodded, and a grin broke out across his face. “For real, Zach. We’re called Sorcha or light. It’s all very complicated, but basically, female Sorcha and Scales are called Xana, and males are called Inks. You might have heard them called a different name.”
“What’s that?”
“Incubus.”
He wasn’t smiling anymore. “Say what?”
“Xana is basically the Austrian word for succubus. We don’t like being called succs. It sucks.”
He didn’t think her joke was funny. “You’re seriously trying to convince me that you’re a succubus and that those three dudes I met last night are incubuses?”
“Incubi.”
“What the hell ever. Ember, seriously, I keep looking around waiting for one of my friends to jump out and tell me this has all been a prank.”
She managed another reassuring smile. “I know it’s hard to believe, Zach, but we’ll prove it to you. Eventually.” Ember’s countenance changed as the circumstances sank in. “Right now, I’m just trying to press the seriousness of the situation to you, because we firmly believe you are in danger. If that Scale who got away last night goes back and tells whoever he answers to, you could be faced with a shitload of repercussions. Either they’ll want to take you prisoner to figure out how you saw them--or they’ll just kill you and be done with it. In my opinion, neither one of those two options is going to work in your favor.”