Pel stared at them.
"I," he began, and then the guilt hit.
His dead wife. His dead, demon-slain wife. He'd lived this long, lived fourteen years with that anger, that hatred. No demon was an exception, because it could have been any of them to do it. How could it not be, if the first one that she met ended up murdering her?
But the guilt wasn't just toward that. It was in the realization of the lie. He would have willingly sacrificed himself on the altar of his own lust, lacking the ability to stop for his own sake once he got started.
And Tari—Tari hadn't let him.
Then there was Kip: open and honest and an emotional wreck and he'd been that way as a cat, too, clingy and sad and needy. He'd needed Bruant, and Bruant had needed him. So much of Bruant's life had started to revolve around that cat, that companion, giving him something to turn to when he could no longer face Pel. Kip was a support for him. But still, a predator. Both of those at the same time.
Demons were all predators—that was still true. That was undeniably true. They wouldn't have even found themselves in this situation, this weird dance of consent and guilt and necessity, if Tari didn't need to feed off humans. Kip did, too. And they were just coincidentally both demons who fed on human emotions, which could seem harmless enough, but there were others who fed on flesh, minds—
I just don't know anymore. Maybe some of those were careful too. Maybe predator meant nothing more than dangerous.
And humans could be dangerous, too—to demons and each other. He'd been preying on the people in this city, encouraging them to trust him while watching for openings to turn them in. He hadn't wanted to hurt anybody—had wanted to protect people—but Bruant had been right. It was hypocritical to behave like a protector while ensuring people would get hurt.
Bruant had hated that, both on its own merits and because he hadn't wanted Pel to hurt anyone for his sake. Bruant wouldn't want him to continue now, either, not past what he wanted to do, even if it would make it easier to rescue him. Bruant would never put himself before others.
He'd been using Bruant as an excuse, using Phalene as an excuse, when really the only person responsible was himself.
"Pel—?"
He'd gotten up without realizing it, stumbling away from the bed and scrubbing his hands roughly over his face. The guilt felt like a palatable cloud around him, like he could taste and smell and feel it. His wife's ghost hanging around him, Bruant's condemnation hanging around him, his own stubborn refusal to see hanging around him, a cloud of confusion mixing in a stomach-churning stench.
"Fuck." The arousal still rushing through him with every breath made it even worse. He had to do something. He couldn't stay here, but he couldn't think— "Where's the toilet?"
"Next door," Tari said. Then, with a strained, sympathetic smile and a tone like they were trying to lighten the mood, "Mind if I lean on the other side of the wall while I wait for you?"
It didn't work. They know what I'm going to do. Shit. Really? He was aroused to the point of pain, nauseated with it. Of course a cubant would know.
"Do what you want," he said, more implicit permission than he wanted to let himself think about, and fled.
*~*~*
He returned sooner than he'd like, red-faced and unnaturally tired, with water dripping from his hair after he'd splashed his face from the tap. Tari had opened the window sometime recently and Kip was back inside, looking about as embarrassed and anxious as Pel felt.
"Uh," Pel said, then decided that he didn't want to explain himself or, in fact, anything at all, and just sat on the bed with Tari like nothing had happened. He tried to find whatever lack was in himself after feeding them, and found nothing but the vague sluggishness that he'd normally write off as exhaustion from a day like today. He cleared his throat. "So. Did that help?"
"It definitely helped," Tari said, smiling at him with a small shrug. Their hair slid aside and he saw that the mark he'd tried to leave on their throat was already gone.
He wasn't sure how he felt about that.
They clearly misunderstood the look on his face. "Don't worry too much," Tari added. "It's only enough that I feel like it wouldn't be blatantly suicidal to take on an entire anti-demon brigade, anyway. Just mostly suicidal."
Pel let out a breath. They weren't odds he liked, but they were the odds that they had. "We need to get him out of the city," he said, low-voiced. "There's nowhere safe to hide him once we get him out of the Inquisition building. I don't have any friends who'd be willing to stick their necks out if the Inquisition came knocking, and the bar will be the first place they'd look. Even assuming we were able to get him out of his cell in the first place."
"Sneaking him out the city gates is too much of a long shot," Tari said. "Having come in through one, I'd assume the others are pretty much the same?"
"Pretty much," Pel said. "I was thinking we'd have to go over the wall. I know the patrols well enough to know their timing gaps—that'd be the safest bet." He dropped his gaze, unable to keep eye contact with them. "But I don't know that it'll work. After we break him out, the patrols won't stick to their normal rhythm. They'll start combing the area for likely escape routes. And they'd alert volunteers, too. The city would be up our asses in under a quarter hour, even this late at night."
"We can move fast," Kip said, determinedly. "As long as we get to the other side of the wall, it's fine, right? We won't be their problem anymore and anyway. They don't go out there."
"We're not all as fast as cats," Pel said, a little cranky. "And us humans need actual food to eat. There's a lot of wilderness between here and the next city. We'd need to bring supplies with us, so it's not as simple as just getting out with nothing but the clothes on our backs."
Tari held up a hand. "I've got an idea forming. Give me a minute to think it through."
Pel stared at Tari as they closed their eyes, frowning, a line between their brows, and took the moment to study them, feeling a strange rush of gratitude. There was no sign of hesitation in Tari's pose, no resentment or regret for being dragged into this.
Tari opened their eyes again, the horizontal pupils narrowed to a line. "Okay," they said, tone firm. "Let's try this."
And then they were changing—hair swirling around them as it pulled itself up to become short, shoulders broadening, even their stance shifting to something more solid. Pel gaped as he abruptly found himself facing a perfect copy of himself, down to the scars on his cheek.
The other Pel winked at him, smirking.
Pel's mouth worked a few times as he stared at them. Tari had mimicked his appearance with an uncanny accuracy, from height and weight to smaller details. The fine worry lines on his forehead were there, as was the slight bend of his nose from where it had been broken years earlier, and the small mole at the corner of his left eye. They had matched the light brown of his skin perfectly, and copied his hair not only in style or length but, he thought, perhaps even perfectly representing the smattering of gray throughout his hair. In appearance alone, it was like staring into a mirror.
But they had shifted to lean on one hip again, hand planted there, grinning slyly. In Pel's voice, they asked, "Not bad, hm, sweetheart?"
"I don't talk like that," he managed, through his shock, and heard it come out awkward, like his tongue was too thick. "I don't stand like that."
"You don't, do you?" Tari mused. "Then let's try this again." They straightened, shoulders back, and crossed their arms across their chest instead. "Listen up, soldiers," they barked.
Kip giggled.
"I don't talk like that either," Pel protested, flustered, and Tari flashed him an unnervingly charming smile. Shit. My dimples really are devastating, he found himself thinking, and almost got dizzy with confusion.
"All right," Tari said, and this time, the tone of their voice was unnervingly accurate. They relaxed a little, a perfect mimicry of Pel's usual stance. "Enough joking around. Here's what I'm thinking…"
Chapter Eight<
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Somehow the plan ended up with Pel alone, filling two packs as heavily as he thought they could carry on a journey by foot, and wondering how it had come to the point where he had to leave rescuing his own son to a pair of demons while he dithered over what parts of his life to bring along in a bag.
But Tari's idea was the best that any of them had managed, especially on short notice.
Tari would transform into a copy of Pel, mimicking his mannerisms and speech patterns as they had previously demonstrated. Kip, under "Pel's" cloak, would go with them up to the door. Tari would use their aura of attraction to become more persuasive while begging to talk to Bruant, while Kip drained the guards' anger at "Pel's" intrusion to make them even more susceptible.
Then, while "Pel" talked to Bruant, Kip would reestablish a bond, letting him pour energy into and through Bruant. He could use this to briefly obscure the scene while Tari embraced Bruant and transformed into Bruant instead, transferring the cloak and Kip to allow them to essentially switch places.
"The obscuring won't do much," Kip had warned. "Because he won't know the spell. I can force it through him but it'll just cause a little misdirection. Make it easier for them to see what they're looking for instead of what's actually happening."
"That's fine," Tari had said in Pel's deep voice, eyes glittering in a way that Pel was fairly certain his own eyes did not. "A real spell has a higher risk of setting off their wards, anyway. A bit of energy just focused on causing confusion is more likely to fly under the radar."
After that, Tari, now "Bruant", would refuse to help, and the real Bruant, being fed energy by Kip to keep him going no matter how badly off he was, and still obscured so people would be more likely to confuse him for Pel, would storm out. The two of them would then go to meet up with Pel and escape over the wall to safety.
And in the meantime, Tari would sit in the cell, pretending to be Bruant and buying time for them to be well away from the city. It wouldn't take long, because they wouldn't need to go far—as Kip had noted, the guards were reluctant to leave the city, and would hardly walk several hours out in a random direction to catch people they'd want gone anyway, especially if they wouldn't even be sure at first that they'd left the city. So after a few hours, Tari would transform into a shape that could get out of the cell and slip away.
It was a plan, but not exactly the most foolproof, which meant Pel's mind was helpfully outlining all the ways it could go wrong.
From the start, Tari and Kip could get turned away. Or they could get in, and the wards could reveal them for what they really were before they even got to Bruant. The inquisitors might demand he take the cloak off. The obscuring could fail or Bruant could be too badly off to pretend to be Pel without warning. The warding could prevent Tari from transforming into Bruant. They might be detained on the way out. Tari might not be able to slip out later.
Even for his own part, if the guards had changed their routine at all, or if Kip and Bruant were held up, or if he somehow missed their approach, he might get caught loitering and not be able to clear an escape for all of them.
He'd expressed this to Tari, of course.
"Well," Tari had said, giving Pel an expression so doubting that he thought at once he might come to hate his own face, "I could just murder everyone in the building instead and break him out that way?"
"What? No!" Pel had stared at them. "I've known these people my entire life, Tari!"
"Then the riskier option it is," Tari had said, and grinned. "I'll save the other one for a backup plan."
So as Pel lurked behind a tree, sweating half his body weight out and straining to make out any unexpected movement on the pathway leading past this section of old wall, he wished he was, perhaps, a little less moral and a little less attached. There's no way this haphazard plan could ever work.
There was nobody more surprised than him that it did.
Exactly around the time they'd hoped, even though they'd had only a vague guess of how long things would take, a pair of people approached. They were moving through the shadows, the smaller one supporting the other beneath a too-large cloak.
They've done it. Pel had to use all his will in order not to break from his own hidden position and run over, fearing that would be too obvious, but his throat swelled tight and his eyes stung. Finally, when they were close enough that it would no longer risk undoing everything they'd worked for, he reached out to touch Bruant's shoulder.
Bruant startled violently, his cloak falling back from his hair, and Pel stared at him in silence for a moment. There was a massive bruise at the corner of Bruant's mouth, but it already looked old. Kip, too, had kept his part of the deal, and was forcing Bruant to heal faster than his body would normally manage. Bruant stared back at Pel, silent and unsure. His eyes were completely wild, white showing all the way around the irises.
It wasn't that he didn't recognize his father. He did—but in doing so, feared he'd escaped the Inquisition only to fall into the hands of one more judge.
Worse than that, though, worse than seeing Bruant afraid of him, was something else in that expression. Something was wrong there that Pel couldn't place, unhinged and hurt, like a wounded animal on the brink of fight or flight.
Still, given what he'd just been through, it was no surprise.
"I'm so glad you're alive," Pel whispered, and carefully pulled Bruant into an embrace.
Bruant winced at the first touch, half in physical pain and half in some kind of terrified anticipation—then let out a sob, beginning to tremble violently. Pel started to pull back, not wanting to trap him, but then Bruant's arms came around him in return, unsteady but firm.
They held each other tightly for a few precious seconds, both shaking, and then, reluctantly, Pel drew back. "We don't have long." The guards would be by again soon; they needed to get to the wall and over it. "Did Kip explain?"
Bruant nodded, eyes too-wide and tears clumping his lashes together. "Dad, I—"
"Not now. When we're away."
Kip put his arms around both of them. He was incredibly warm, as though all the energy he'd been pouring into Bruant in the course of this plan had overheated him, like a lamp left burning too long. "We have to hurry," he agreed. "I'm going first."
Pel studied Bruant again, anxious and mindful of his son's well-being, then turned to watch as Kip took a run at the wall and then up it, hands and feet not even seeming to need the footholds that Pel had confirmed were there. He reached the top in seconds, then turned around, pressing his stomach to the edge as he dug his knees into the rough stone of the top and held his hands down.
"Come on," Pel said. He led Bruant over to the wall, with a quick look around to make sure the guards weren't in sight yet, and twined his hands together, making a stirrup for Bruant.
Bruant hesitated, wobbling briefly without support, but then his look of uncertainty firmed up. Pel grinned a little, half-rueful, half-proud.
Yeah. There's no option here. You've just got to be able to do it.
Leaning on the wall, Bruant hopped and got one foot into the cup of Pel's hands. He reached up as far as he could, grabbing a double handful of the rough-hewn rock.
"One—two—" Pel began. On "Three!" he shoved up as hard as he could, at the same time Bruant hauled himself up. For a moment he was unbalanced, almost airborne, hands off the wall and reaching up toward Kip.
Kip grabbed on, hands locking around Bruant's wrists, letting out a whine of effort as he hauled Bruant up. Bruant's feet scrabbled on the wall until they found footholds. He was pulled more than he climbed, but made it to the top, balanced unsteadily next to Kip, clinging to him and breathing hard.
Bruant looked drawn with pain even in this pale light, shuddering with it, and anger rushed through Pel at both the Inquisition and himself for having let it come to this. I don't have time for regret, he reminded himself. I need to stay calm, we're not out of this yet—but he remembered Kip and let himself feel it.
Someone might as well get
something out of this.
As he looked up at Kip, their eyes met and the anger drained away. Even knowing that he'd been offering it up, he couldn't be sure if it really was Kip accepting the reward, or if his impulse to push it down and focus had taken over. But Kip smiled at him and, surprising himself, Pel couldn't help but smile back.
Next were the packs. He tossed them up to Kip one at a time, a quick hand-off before Kip dropped them over the other side. Despite their speed, it still felt like it was all taking far too long. Pel wiped his sweating palms off on the legs of his pants, then grabbed the rock and climbed.
It was just as well he'd given it a test run earlier; it was dark and he was tired and nervous. But he'd made climbs like this dozens of times, and got to the top with only a couple of scares. Once he reached it, he was grabbed by both Kip and Bruant, the latter struggling a little and letting go as soon as Pel was balanced.
Sitting on the top, he could see both the city stretching away on the left and the wilderness stretching away on the right. It was unnerving, a strange split between the reality of the life he'd lived so far and the reality of the life he was going to live from now on. Time was ticking. If he hesitated any longer, the guards would come into sight. The three of them would be terribly visible up on the wall, backlit by the moon—
"Hey." Kip butted Pel's shoulder with his forehead. "You gotta get down first so I can lower Bru to you."
He went.
Through some miracle, they made it in time. On the other side of the wall, he could hear the guards walking past, talking together, but they hadn't seen or heard anything. There was no sound of disturbance. Tari had, it seemed, pulled off their part well.
And so they were free.
Chapter Nine
At first they walked in silence, finding their way to the nearby river and then following it—or, rather, Pel stayed silent. He didn't want to talk, and wasn't sure what he'd say. They were outside—out of the city. The sounds of nature and the scent of fresh air and the weird silence of the forest around the river were unnerving, overwhelming.
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