by Jayne Faith
“I’ve never been so pissed about not being a crafter,” he said, his words muffled against my hair. He pulled back to look at me. “You didn’t get hurt, did you?”
“Uh, no, I’m fine,” I assured him, still reeling from his embrace.
I looked into his eyes, and the depth of worry in them made my cheeks heat. I wanted to crack a joke but stood there tongue tied.
“Thanks for your concern, man,” Damien said sarcastically, saving me. “Little help here? You know, for the guy who just saved your pretty ass?”
Johnny and I both shot surprised looks at Damien and then at each other. Apparently magical exhaustion brought out his sharper edges. I kind of liked it.
While Johnny slung an arm around Damien and helped him around the open door to the driver’s seat so he could sit down, I went to Roxanne’s side. She was still sitting in the truck, looking dazed.
“You okay?” I asked, awkwardly patting her forearm.
She nodded, but her eyes were still glassy. “Is that lady going to die?”
Knowing she was thinking of her brother, I followed her gaze to where Strike Team had bagged up the possessed girl in what looked like a mummy sleeping bag but with white mage-spelled magic woven through it. They had her on a gurney, and it did look a little like they were going to wheel her off to the morgue. My stomach did a slow flop at my memory of my almost-trip into a drawer in the basement of the hospital.
“No, they got here in time,” I assured Roxanne. “She didn’t hurt anyone else, so she’ll be okay. They’re going to take her to a safe place where someone will separate her from the demon. If Nathan needs this kind of help, we’ll make sure he gets it too.” I offered her the cocker. “Would you hold him? I think he could use a buddy.”
She nodded, a faint smile touching her lips as she gathered the little dog into her lap.
One of the Strike guys broke away and sauntered toward us. I groaned internally. Of course it was Brady Chancellor.
His eyes flicked over the four of us. “Anybody here need medical attention?” he asked. Genuine concern clouded his face.
“We’ve got one case of mild magic exhaustion, but otherwise we’re okay,” I said.
He nodded and then turned to rejoin his team.
I was just beginning to wonder if we should make our getaway, when a regular police car pulled to a stop nose-to-nose with my truck. The lights were on, but there was no siren.
The doors winged out, and two officers emerged. They walked past us toward the back, quickly checked the base of the gargoyle with their flashlights, and then turned the beams on us.
“Who’s the owner of this vehicle?” asked the one with beefy arms and dark brown skin.
I stepped away from Roxanne and squinted in the light trained on me. “I am,” I said, suddenly feeling sure that I didn’t want to be the owner of the vehicle.
Beefcake reached for his cuffs and came at me. “Ma’am, you’re under arrest for possession of stolen property.”
I dropped my head back and groaned up into the night sky. The guys were protesting, speaking over each other, but I knew it would do no good. Cool metal rings laced with anti-magic threads clicked around my wrists, and Beefcake packed me into the back of the patrol car as he read me my rights.
I searched the uniformed Strike members, looking for the guy who’d been staring at the gargoyle during his team’s operation. Instead of calling Supernatural Crimes when he’d spotted the statue, he must have called the regular police. Or maybe he’d contacted someone at Gregori directly. Regardless, it appeared that Jacob had at least one friend on Strike, and probably at least a few in the police force. I fumed and silently cursed his name all the way to the station.
Chapter 17
GREGORI HAD DROPPED the charges by the time we’d reached the station, and I was back home an hour later, but Jacob’s men had claimed the gargoyle in the meantime. Our bargaining chip was gone.
Deb had shown up at the house while I was gone, and we’d spoken for a few minutes in my bedroom. She was still pissed at Keith, apparently.
I let Deb take my room, and I lay next to Roxanne on the foldout bed with Loki snoozing at our feet, the TV flickering in the dark room. The arch-demon and the possession had really shaken her, and she didn’t want to be alone. She’d fallen asleep an hour ago, but I was still awake, caught in that state of over-exhaustion where your body longs to slip into unconsciousness but your mind won’t allow it.
The events of the evening spun through my head and kept snagging on the moment when I’d touched the gargoyle. I’d replayed it dozens of times, slowing at the point when I’d seemed to look through the gargoyle’s eyes and saw myself. My insides twisted as I forced myself to return to the painfully obvious implication—I hadn’t seen through the gargoyle’s eyes, but through the eyes of the demon that had possessed the gargoyle. The statue had been warm with demonic energy. And from what little I’d learned about the skittish stone creatures, it surely would have flown away under its own power long before we arrived, if it had been able. Gargoyles commonly hid atop tall buildings in their stone forms during the day, but at night they flew and hunted. A Gregori gargoyle was somehow altered to attract a demon and then once possessed trap the demon by turning to stone.
So. I had looked through the eyes of a demon. The only people able to do such things were necromancers. The mere idea that I could possibly have anything in common with Philip Zarella made me want to pull my own skin off.
But I couldn’t help wondering: did Zarella have necro-vision like mine? Did he see random images in dreams, like I did? And the million-dollar question . . . did Zarella know how to control the vision to seek out something specific, or someone specific? That’s what I needed to do—discover how to control the necro-vision to find Evan.
I nearly snorted a wry laugh. Necro-vision. Like my brief death had turned me into some kind of superhero, a character from Roxanne’s comic books.
I closed my eyes, wanting sleep and more images of my brother. I lay there for several minutes, still wide awake and thinking about Nathan and Roxanne. It didn’t take a PhD in psychology to see that my desire to help them was driven at least partly by my own past and my need to save my brother.
Evan had begun slipping away from me early, at least it had felt that way. He’d always been a quirky little kid, often lost and playing in his own made-up games or coming up with off-the-wall observations about the world that made me and Mom laugh. But around the time he turned twelve, he started to withdraw. His magical aptitude developed—he was a high Level I—and that just seemed to make him even more reticent. By the time Grandma Barbara passed, when Evan was thirteen, he was already experimenting with drugs. I’d been trying to deal with our grandmother’s rapidly failing health, money problems, and finishing high school. I knew Evan was sliding headlong down a dangerous path, but he seemed determined to self-destruct regardless of anything I tried to do to pull him back. It had all happened so quickly, and he’d seemed to slip through my grasp like smoke.
I needed to find him.
My breath was coming slower, and weariness was beginning to claim me. But before I drifted off, a thought bubbled up. My efforts to save Nathan had so far fallen short, and I realized I needed to enlist stronger forces. We’d intended to use the gargoyle to expose Gregori through the media, but I thought of something even better: Rafael St. James. No one could whip up outcry over injustice more effectively than he could. I wasn’t sure how quickly he could act, but first thing in the morning I’d get in touch with him.
Sleep finally came, but it was dreamless.
I woke to Roxanne bending over me with her hand on my forearm.
“Ella,” she said. “I’m leaving now. I have a babysitting job today. Will you text me and tell me what’s going on with Nathan?”
“Of course.” I pushed up onto one elbow, passing the back of my hand over my eyes as I tried to sharpen my mind through the haze of sleep-brain. “Do you need a ride?”
“Okay, text me so I know whether you’ll be home for dinner.”
We stared at each other for a moment and then both busted up.
“Will do, Mom,” she said with that adolescent edge to her voice, but she shot me a grateful smile as she slipped out the front door.
I flopped back and stretched, tempted to try to get another thirty minutes of sleep but knowing it wouldn’t happen. I had too much I needed to do, and first and foremost was to get hold of Raf.
I scooped up my phone and sent him a text, saying that I had an urgent humanitarian situation and needed his help.
The bedroom door swung open, and I turned my head and watched Deb emerge, looking fairly rested, all things considered. But her eyes narrowed as she came and stood over me, holding up the remnants of a candle in one hand and pinching a piece of paper between the thumb and forefinger of the other.
“What are these?” she demanded, and jiggled the paper. “I told you to see a hedge witch to get something medicinal for your insomnia, not buy a sleeping spell.”
My eyes popped wide as I recognized the sheet for the spell I’d purchased on Crystal Ball Lane. For a moment my mind raced, searching for an excuse, a story I could feed her. I sat up and raked my fingers through my hair. No story. I needed to come clean.
“You’d better sit down,” I said.
She did so, placing the spell items in her lap and looking at me expectantly.
Then I told her everything. I described the shadows that had appeared after my accident, the dreams, the visions, and what had happened the night I used the spell.
The color drained from her face. “The thing that’s . . . with you now, it took you to the fenced-off house on Sixteenth? Six-thirty-seven North Sixteenth?”
“I don’t remember the address, but yeah that’s probably about right. Why?”
“It used to be a foster home, lots of kids went through that house.” She clasped her hands together and pulled them into her chest where her fingers twitched in nervous little movements on the fluorite stone she wore on a chain, a subconscious gesture she often made when unwanted memories of her childhood surfaced. “I lived there for a little while. There was a fire. Kids died.”
I swallowed hard. Silence thickened in the room for several seconds, and I heard the bathroom faucet drip with tiny, measured plinks.
“So those were ghosts I saw,” I finally said. Necro-vision was seeming more and more apt.
“Sounds like it.” She shook her head as if trying to jar loose some thoughts. “But that’s not important right now. You need help, Ella.”
The other had been drawn to ghosts, the wandering souls of the dead that hadn’t been put to rest. It had its own desires, but I didn’t yet know the exact nature of them. Something told me I needed to learn what they were if I wanted it to cooperate with my search for Evan.
I scrubbed my hands down the sides of my face. “Yeah, I guess. At first I thought I wanted to get rid of the thing, the other, but after the visions of Evan I just want to figure out a way to use it so I can find him.”
She grabbed my wrist, gripping it with surprising strength. “No. You need to have it extracted, exorcised, whatever. It’s dangerous. I don’t know how I missed it before.” Her eyes roved the air around me. “I guess I was too preoccupied with my own crap, but now that I’m paying attention . . . this is bad, this thing clinging to you. I don’t know what it is, but you’ve got to get rid of it ASAP.”
I pulled my wrist out of her grasp. “I can’t, Deb. It knows where Evan is. It somehow sees him. I’m not getting rid of it until I find my brother. I don’t care if it kills me.” I spoke with such ferocity, my voice cracked.
We stared at each other for a long moment, and she finally nodded. “You have to let me take you to someone who might be able to tell you what it is. Will you agree to that, at least?”
“Yes,” I said. I pushed myself up from the sofa bed, eager to leave the topic behind. My phone chirped, giving me an excuse to pick it up.
It was a message from Raf saying he was going to Eats and Java soon, a coffee house a few blocks away from my apartment, and he could meet me there or talk after.
I quickly filled Deb in on my idea to involve Raf. “Up for some coffee and eggs?” I asked.
“Absolutely.” She quirked a smile at me, but I could tell by the intent look in her eyes that she was worrying about my condition.
We got dressed and headed out. A pleasant sense of normalcy washed over me as we walked to Eats and Java. I filled her in on my communication with Raf. A glance around told me we’d beaten Raf, and by the time our food arrived he still hadn’t shown. While we sat at one of the outside tables with our drinks and omelets, Keith tried to call Deb about ten times. She ignored all of them and finally shut off her phone, and I started to wonder if she might actually be serious about leaving him.
During a pause in our conversation, I looked up and spotted Raf heading our way, holding the hand of a willowy brunette with dewy skin and trendy side-swept short bangs. His usual entourage of do-gooders followed—guys wearing beanies even though it was almost eighty degrees out and fresh-faced girls who looked like they’d just hiked a mountain.
He caught my eye and flipped the fingers of his free hand in a little wave. He said something to his girl, and she and the rest of the group continued on toward the front entrance of Eats and Java. The girl half-turned and shot him a lazy lidded smile, and then slinked away with a loose-limbed model’s stride. I was about her height and build, but I couldn’t pull off that walk if my life depended on it. I’d look like a drunken giraffe if I tried.
I pushed my chair back and stood up. “I’ll be right back,” I said to Deb.
“What’s up?” Raf asked.
I took a deep breath, and then gave him the Reader’s Digest version of our situation with Roxanne’s brother and Gregori. I left out the part about being Jacob Gregori’s niece. Raf’s face registered some surprise when I described the gargoyles. His arrow-straight brows lowered as I spoke, until he was practically scowling.
“As far as I can tell, Gregori is committing any number of atrocities,” I said, trying to wrap it up. “What they’re doing to gargoyles, using them as bait for demon possession, is tantamount to torture. And Roxanne’s brother, Nathan, has been trapped inside a gargoyle, most likely demon-possessed himself, for days now. I wanted to talk to you to see whether you have any contacts who could help us free Nathan and shed light on what Gregori is doing with the gargoyles. At the very least, we need to get Nathan out of there fast.”
His lips pressed into a grim line, bringing out his dimples. He pulled his phone from his hip pocket. “You’re right, Gregori is violating the rights of the gargoyles as well as holding a human prisoner against his will. Atrocity is definitely the word,” he said, giving me that intense gaze. “I’m going to need a day or so to coordinate some things. I’ll be in touch soon, okay?”
I tried not to look too relieved. I hadn’t really wanted Raf’s contacts. I’d hoped he would want to jump in himself. As I watched him, I remembered how Damien had identified Raf as a shifter, but I still couldn’t wrap my mind around it. Pack animal shifters, as most of them were, tended to keep to themselves and spend most of their time in tight communities on the outskirts of cities or deep in the wilderness. And they all had an indescribable but unmistakable wildness to their eyes. He just didn’t fit the profile. But then, until recently I didn’t know it was possible for a gargoyle, human, and demon to get into a three-way possession, so who was I to say what was impossible?
I grabbed his forearm in both of mine. “Thank you so much, Raf.”
He nodded and pulled out his phone, already swiping the screen with short strokes of his finger.
“I’ll be in touch,” he whispered to me, with his mouth away from his phone. He gave me one last look and then put his phone to his ear and started walki
ng toward the coffee house door.
This humanitarian, champion of the underdog stuff was what Raf was famous for, and getting him on board for our cause was huge. Monumental. I straightened, feeling a grin spread across my face. I probably looked like a moron, but I didn’t care.
I returned to the table where Deb sat holding her mug—herbal tea, as she’d decided to give up coffee while she was pregnant—and I sank into my chair.
“You look elated,” she said, laughing.
“I kinda am elated.”
“Why? You meeting up with him tonight after he sends Twiggy home?” She brought her mug up to take a sip, but not before I caught her wicked little grin.
“No.” I shot her an irritated look. “That was eons ago. I’m just really glad he’s agreed to help us.”
“I want in, too,” she said. “Promise you’ll include me in whatever you’re doing?”
“Of course!” I narrowed my eyes and tried not to chuckle. “You got a thing for Raf, Deb?”
She scoffed. “Who doesn’t? But seriously, he’s your type, not mine. And you’re clearly more his type than I am.”
“He’s not my type,” I protested. “That was just a brief little opportunistic nothing. It lasted, what, a week?”
“Um, yeah, exactly.” She stared at me wide-eyed, as if I were missing something stupid-obvious. “Flashy, hot guy. Short term. It’s the Ella Grey special.”
“But, no, that’s not . . . my . . .” I trailed off into a frown.
Brady Chancellor. Flashy, check. Hot, check. Less than two months, check. Raf was basically the same, though not an asshole like Brady, and there had been a couple of other short dalliances in between Brady and Raf. And recently those little flutters over Johnny . . .
I slouched low and groaned, and Deb threw back her head and laughed.
“Seriously? You really didn’t know that was your thing?” she asked. Her eyes sparked with a bit of amusement, but I knew she actually cared about my answer.
The death glare I aimed at her didn’t do a thing to curb her mirth. “Go ahead,” I growled. “Get it out of your system.”