“Dad, this is Lana.”
Deliverance looked at Lana and, of course, ran his eyes over her slowly before he smiled the most predatory smile Lana could imagine.
“Lana. I’m not full demon, but he is.” She noticed what Deliverance was doing. “Stop it. You’re not here for that.”
The incubus looked at his daughter. “I’m always here for that.”
“Well, control the impulse for a minute. Please.” She turned back to Lana. “He’s a sex demon, which means he has a hard time staying focused on other things, but he can manage to function like a normal demon for short periods of time.”
“Hey. I’m normal!” The demon sounded offended.
“Let’s have that debate another time,” said Litha. She slapped at Deliverance who had turned his attention toward the nurse, who was evidently ready to receive.
“Ow,” he said.
“Will you just stop? You know I didn’t hurt you.”
“I thought you wanted me to be ‘normal’.” He whined the word, normal.
“We need to take Lana through the passes to a Callii stronghold.”
Deliverance’s attention snapped into place and focused with laser intensity. He looked at Lana again. “She’s human.”
Litha smiled slowly. “I know. That’s why we need you. Listen to what I just learned.”
In ten minutes Litha had convinced her father to donate both his blood and his time to the cause. He protested mightily and called injecting his blood into a human “sacrilege”.
“What if she picks up other abilities besides being able to travel the passes?” he argued.
Litha smirked. “You mean what if she becomes a great lay?”
“Well, yes. That is what I was thinking.”
“I’m sure her boyfriend won’t mind.”
Deliverance looked at Lana. “You have a boyfriend?”
“Well, yes, I guess. I hadn’t really named…”
“It doesn’t matter,” Litha interjected. “The fact is that we need to give her a ride.”
“I don’t know, Sweetness. The Callii aren’t always hospitable.”
“There’s worse and you know it,” replied Litha.
When Deliverance saw that his daughter had made up her mind, he said, “This is on you. If anything happens, I’m not taking the blame. Again.”
“All on me, Pop.”
Litha withdrew the purple fur-lined handcuffs.
“What are those for?” For the first time Lana was questioning the wisdom of the “experiment”. She took a step back.
“Insurance,” Litha said. “Passengers can get lost in the passes if we don’t have a firm grip on them.”
Litha was careful to not look at Deliverance, who crossed his arms over his chest and looked away. “If that’s all you need from me.”
“All for now.” When Litha smiled at Deliverance his features softened and he returned her smile. “Dinner Thursday.”
“You know I…”
“Just be there.”
“Okay.”
And he was gone.
Litha handed the syringe with her blood to the nurse. “Dispose of this, will you?”
The nurse took the syringe, nodded, and left the room with the sound of stocking-covered legs rubbing together.
“Okay. You ready? This time we’ve got the real deal.” Lana looked at the syringe, looked at the handcuffs, swallowed hard, and nodded. “I’m going to inject you then put the handcuff on.” Litha paused. “Do you suffer from motion sickness?”
Lana thought back on her experiences with being taken from one dimension to another. “Not usually, but the…” she waved her hand.
“Traveling the passes.”
“Yes. That. Does seem to make me nauseous.”
“Wait here.” Litha wasn’t gone for more than a couple of minutes before she returned with a motion sickness drug and a bottle of water. “Take two of these.” She handed Lana two round white pills about the size of common aspirin and screwed the top off the bottle of water for her.
She continued while Lana took the pills. “I’d like to give your system a few minutes to respond to the injection anyway.” She looked at her watch. “Maybe fifteen minutes. We could hang out here or I could take you anywhere in this world if you’d like a quick trip. Some place you’d like to go?”
Lana’s eyes met Litha’s. “There’s a restaurant in Dallas…”
Litha sat down at the bar with Lana and said, “No alcohol. We have no idea what that might do.”
They ordered drinks.
Lana had been secretly hoping for a glimpse of her father, but knew it was unlikely. Ten minutes later Litha said, “Time to go.” She snapped the handcuff on Lana’s wrist and they were gone.
When they emerged from the passes, Lana was saying, “Hey! You just did an eat-and-cheat on my dad. Or a version of my dad. Same thing.”
She looked around and saw that they were outside a dungeon cell with Brave not only inside, but manacled to the wall. “What the…? Brave!” She rushed forward and began pulling on the cell door as if she actually believed she had the brute strength necessary to wrench it from the hinges.
Brave raised his head. Looking through blurred vision, he wasn’t sure if he was hallucinating or if he actually saw Lana standing outside the cell with a curly-headed brunette.
“Lana? You came back?”
Litha looked at Brave and said, “Yes, she did,” in a matter-of-fact tone. To Lana she said, “The good news is it worked. You’re here in one piece and that’s a breakthrough with far reaching ramifications that I haven’t begun to consider. The bad news is that I’m guessing you weren’t expecting to find your prince in chains.”
Because Brave was Lana’s first concern, it hadn’t yet dawned on her that there was cause to be afraid. She looked at Brave.
“Brave. What happened?”
Litha took hold of the cell door, murmured something and it opened.
Lana did a double take because she’d just been pulling and pushing with all her might and it hadn’t budged. Rushing forward she took Brave’s face in her hands. “We’re going to get you out of here.”
Litha apparently worked some magic on the manacles because they fell free. Brave collapsed and Lana went to the floor with him, trying to hold and comfort him.
“Now’s the time to tell us, Brave. What happened here?”
“I guess I’ve been distracted with thinking about Lana.” He sounded weak. “We were attacked by the Reinlitegen. They came right into Court. The first thing they did was to grab me. There were so many. Callii didn’t have any choice but to evacuate.”
“Evacuate?” Lana asked. “You mean run away and just leave you to the mercy of the, uh…”
“Reinlitegen. It sounds bad when you say it like that, but the Callii aren’t aggressive like the Reinlitegen. Staying would have been suicide.”
“So they took over your world and put you in here?”
He tried to smile. “Kind of ironic? That they’d imprison me in the prison I built as an amusement park for you?”
“Yeah. Ironic.”
Litha had been listening to the exchange carefully. “So why did they want you in particular, Brave? From what you’ve said it almost sounds like you were their real reason for being here.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I’m not interested in getting involved in a war between Callii and Reinlitegen. Not what I signed on for, but I can see that you’re falling victim to demon ignorance, Brave. They took you, but they don’t know what to do with you. They really have no concept about the care and feeding of humans. So I’m going to make sure your strength and health are returned to you and then after that, what happens is your fate. Not mine.”
Brave looked at Litha and tried to focus on her features. “Who are you?”
“I’m just here to help out your girlfriend.”
“My girlfriend?”
“She means me,” Lana said.
Brave’s eyes cut to Lana with such an adoring look that it provided Litha with a feel-good kind of payoff.
“Lana, we can take him back to The Order long enough to get him healthy. And maybe return him to the Callii he belongs to. Wherever they are. But that’s as much interference as I can offer.”
Brave focused on Litha and tried to clear his throat. “I understand. I’d be grateful.”
“We’ll be grateful,” Lana corrected and Brave gave her that look again that said she had to be the goddess that hung the moon. “How are we going to do that? He doesn’t have any of the magic juice in his system.”
“Magic juice?” Litha chuckled. “I love that. Well, I guess I need to go back to the source and get some more.”
“Your, uh, dad? Something tells me you’ll have a fight on your hands.”
Litha just pressed her lips together. “We’ll see. Let’s go.”
“What do you mean? I’m not leaving him.”
“I get why your first impulse is to want to stay with him, but I don’t think that’s smart. If you come with me now, then at least we’ll have you out of harm’s way.”
“No. If the Rein-whatever come back and find him out of the chains, we don’t know what they’ll do. Take us somewhere in this world where he’ll be safe until you can come back.”
Litha chewed on her top lip. “Where would that be?”
Lana looked at Brave. “There’s an outpost where he could stay for a little while. A ramshackle sort of hunters’ cabin.”
“I still have to take you first so you can show me where it is.”
Lana had no choice but to concede to that logic. “All right. Can we hurry?”
“A rush order. My specialty.”
It seemed that demons, and half demons, had the ability to see through the murk of the passes, whereas unenhanced humans did not. For that reason, returning to the shelter was a tricky process, a little like having a blind person describe how to get to a place where they’d once been when they were still sighted. Though it took much longer than Lana would have liked, Litha was eventually able to deliver both Brave and Lana, separately, to the cabin. Fortune had been with them. Brave’s captors had not discovered that he’d been freed from his chains. So Brave was spirited away from his prison, though the irony that he’d built that very dungeon as a prop had not been lost on him. He’d thought about it countless times during the long hours and days that he’d hung from manacles that cut into his skin while, without sustenance, his body succumbed to weakness.
Once Litha persuaded Deliverance to give up more of his “magic juice”, it wasn’t that hard to draft him into service to help retrieve half of the couple in need of rescuing.
While Litha administered doses to Lana and Brave, she gave instructions to Deliverance. “You take him. He can’t even stand up and will more or less need to be carried.”
Deliverance looked at Brave then eyed Lana and smiled his wolfish smile. “I’ll take her.”
“No you will not!”
He pouted. “I’m hungry.”
“You can wait for ten minutes. Okay? That’s all this will take. Just leave him in the clinic and I’ll do the rest.”
“Scotia Fae. Hmmm. Yes. Just what I’m in the mood for.”
The process of transporting Brave and Lana to the clinic at The Order’s headquarters in Edinburgh took a fraction of the time because the demons knew where they were going.
Deliverance dumped Brave on a gurney and turned to leave, but Litha put a hand on his forearm before he vanished. “Dad. Thank you. I know I ask a lot and don’t say it often enough.”
The demon’s features softened. He pulled her into a big hug, growled, touched the tip of her nose, kissed her on the cheek and gave her the sort of breathtaking smile that the Creators had reserved for incubi alone. Then he was gone.
The staff started an intravenous feed to get Brave rehydrated as quickly as possible. When Lana refused to go further away from Brave than the hallway outside his room, Litha brought the mountain, or rather the Director, to her.
After Lana told Simon Tvelgar the entire story leaning against the wall where she could see the door to Brave’s hospital room, he pursed his lips and scowled. As the story progressed and it became clear to Litha that Atalanta Ravin had not exactly been forthcoming with their employer, she said nothing but gave Lana sideways looks that were increasingly curious, if not reproachful.
“Is that all?” Simon crossed his arms in front of him. He may have been retired from active knighthood for a couple of decades, but he was still an imposing figure, capable of being intimidating even when he didn’t mean to be.
Lana glanced at Litha. Perhaps subconsciously she was trying to discern whether or not she could expect support. Litha’s features were completely unreadable.
Simon looked at Litha. “You didn’t ask for clearance to become involved in this situation, Mrs. Storm.”
Litha’s gaze slid to Simon smoothly and she replied in an even tone. “I’m not on a leash, Simon. On my own time I do what I want.”
“Poppycock!” The word was sharp, but his tone wasn’t. “You do what you want when you are ‘on the clock’.” He turned to Lana. “Young lady…”
“Oh this can’t be good,” she looked at the floor and muttered.
“What’s that?”
When Lana looked up to see that Simon had narrowed his eyes, she remembered what she had told some of her peers at a bachelorette weekend a few years earlier. Seven of Lana’s college friends had rented a large beach house at Galveston for a “hen party” to celebrate the last time they would all be single. They were sitting around a fire pit snuggled in hoodies, mittens and blankets. The sound of the ocean was too loud for whispers. So they had to say what they meant, mean what they said, and do it loud enough to make it seem true.
The question had been about do-overs. What would she do differently if she could go back to, say, age fifteen?
Lana had said that she’d break out of the mold of expectations that had been constructed for her. She’d surprise authority figures by being considerably less predictable, less domesticated.
Encouraged by Litha’s reply to their superior, she looked Simon in the face and said, “I told your representatives everything I thought they had a right to know. The rest was personal. Not The Order’s business then or now. I only agreed to amend my earlier statement because Brave’s health is at risk.”
Simon wasn’t the sort given to puffery, but when he crossed his arms he did appear to swell a little. “Now look here…”
The Director’s sentence was cut short when Lana simply vanished.
He took in a quick breath that he would deny to the death was a gasp and looked at Litha as if she might be guilty.
Litha simply shrugged and gave him a Mona Lisa smile.
“Simon. I’m going to suggest that you go back to your office, perhaps have a tea, and let these events settle on your brain. Meanwhile, I will look into what doings are afoot.”
After staring for a few seconds, Simon said, “It always surprises me when you, being such a young modern, let poetic and anachronistic oddities creep into your speech.”
Litha grinned. “I admit to out-of-the-ordinary home schooling, courtesy of the Cairdeas Deo monks. Sometimes when I’m distracted, I say what comes to mind unmonitored.”
Simon nodded thoughtfully. He leaned in slightly and lowered his voice. “We cannot have people simply disappearing from Order Headquarters without explanation.”
“I understand.” She nodded her head once in a gesture that was a relative of a bow.
“I will have tea. I will calm my thoughts. And I will expect to see you in my office in half an hour.”
“I shall be there, Director.”
Simon walked away, managing to have the last word without actually speaking. He simply shook his head.
When Simon disappeared around the corner, Litha was left alone in the corridor with no one to see her vanish.
Lana had been preparing to be dressed down and reprimanded by Director Tvelgar when she’d felt the firm grasp of a large warm hand on her arm. Before her mind could register a drastic change of scenery, she was inside Brave’s room at the foot of his bed instead of outside in the hallway. She was also looking up at a handsome demon named Dart.
Her gaze jerked to Brave, who, to her relief, was looking more like himself. He was sitting up, or at least the bed had been raised to a more upright position, and smiling.
“Lana! Hey!”
“Hey,” said Lana. “You look good.”
“Finally. Took you long enough to see it.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean you look healthier than you did when we brought you in here.”
“Oh. Well, good is good. I’ll take it.”
She looked up at Dart. “What the hell, Dart? Why did you grab me and bring me in here?”
“You’re Brave’s woman. I’m his friend. He’s indisposed and someone had to protect you from that human. I didn’t like his look or the way he spoke to you.”
Lana was having a hard time processing anything that was said after, “You’re Brave’s woman,” because she liked the sound of being called “Brave’s woman” a lot.
“Well here’s the thing. He has a right to yell at me because he’s my boss. You, on the other hand, have no rights where I’m concerned.”
“I think I do.”
“Well, you don’t.”
“Hey kids…” Brave began.
Whatever Brave had been planning to say next was interrupted by Litha’s sudden appearance next to Brave’s bedside. Her eyes quickly scanned Brave and Lana before coming to rest on Dart.
The demon was appraising Litha in an openly appreciative way. “I’m getting mixed signals. Witch or succubus?” He sniffed the air and his mouth curved into a smile. “Fire succubus. Nice.” He smiled, nodding his head.
Lana piped up. “The only signal you need to be concerned about is that she’s taken, demon. Married to a famous knight. The most famous knight.”
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