by Ivy Sinclair
There was a relic that I could use to block Eva, and it was supposedly located on Calamata Island. What exactly it was or how I could use it was still a mystery, but that’s where I was headed before Bruno Proctor kidnapped me the first time. I found it incredibly ironic that for three years the object of my long search had likely been within my grasp the entire time.
Riley’s squeeze on my thigh brought my thoughts full circle back to the man who occupied the back seat with me. I didn’t know him well. There were many parts of him and his work that scared the crap out of me. But I also knew that he wouldn’t hurt me. He had done nothing but try to protect me from harm.
I was twenty-two years old, and I had never been in love. Since I was a teenager, there had been no one in my life worthy of it. Even if there had been, I don’t think that I was the kind of person who had been worthy of receiving it. I had done terrible things. Someday, I knew that I’d have to sit down and sort out all of my thoughts on that, but I couldn’t focus on that right now. If there was one thing I had become incredibly adept at, it was compartmentalizing my emotions from my actions so that I could ignore them entirely or rationalize everything away.
Riley’s large body took up a fair amount of the back seat, but I found that I didn’t mind. I was cold, and I could feel the heat emanating from his body. Trying not to be obvious, I shifted in my seat and scooted a little closer to him. His hand stilled on my leg. Then he pulled it away from me, and I wondered if I had done anything wrong.
His arm moved around my shoulders, and he pulled me in closer. “You’re shivering.”
I wasn’t complaining one bit about being able to snuggle up against him. But I realized that he was right. The cold that I was feeling was growing more intense by the moment. “Something’s wrong,” I said. My teeth started to chatter before I could control them.
“What’s wrong?” The demon, Abigail, sat up straighter in her seat and peered at me in the rearview mirror.
“Keep your eyes on the road,” Riley barked. “Paige? Tell me what’s happening.”
“I don’t know,” I stuttered. “I felt fine just a few minutes ago. Now it’s like there’s an ice river running through my veins.”
Riley’s arms engulfed me, and I buried my nose in his chest. My body was visibly shaking now, and even though I could feel his body’s warmth under my fingertips, none of it seemed to be permeating my skin. I grabbed bunches of his shirt in my fists and tried to think straight.
“Talk to me,” Riley said. His hands vigorously rubbed my back and arms. “Tell me what you’re feeling.”
“Cold,” I said. It was barely a whisper. My face was going numb. “Just so cold.” It was a true, but woefully inadequate description. My limbs felt heavy and with each passing moment I felt stiffening in my joints that threatened my ability to move. Goosebumps flashed up my arms and across my shoulder blades as the chills ran rampant through my body. It was as if every bit of warmth inside of me was being systematically decimated and replaced by a block of ice.
“What’s happening?” Abigail demanded from the front seat.
“I don’t know!” Riley’s voice was tightly controlled, but I knew him well enough now to sense the anxiousness that sat beneath his words. “Paige, I need you to stay with me and keep talking. Where’s the feeling of cold coming from? Do you feel some kind of draft?”
“Inside,” was all that I could manage. My eyelids felt as if they had weights on them. Suddenly, I found that I wasn’t anxious at all. I just wanted to go to sleep. If I went to sleep, I sensed that everything would be better. I’d be warm again.
“It’s a spell,” the other demon said. I thought that I recalled Abigail saying that his name was Fernando. “This is dark magic. Blood magic.”
“How is that possible?” Riley demanded.
“Simple. She has demon blood in her system,” Fernando said.
“That’s fucking impossible,” Riley roared.
The edges of my consciousness were growing fuzzy. I tried to pat Riley’s arm, but I couldn’t feel my fingers or hands anymore. “S’ok, Riley. Sleep.”
The jolt of my body being shaken back and forth forced my eyes open again. I saw Riley’s mouth moving, but I couldn’t hear his words. The only thing that I could hear was my own heartbeat, and with each passing moment it slowed down. Riley reached for something that Fernando passed to him from the front seat. Then I sensed rather than felt his arms travel around my body.
The ‘click’ of metal roared in my ears, and I reared back from him bringing my hands to the sides of my head. I heard Riley’s voice tumbling in my mind, but it was too loud and harsh for my brain to process what he was saying.
“Stop, stop, stop!” I said, trying not to raise my own voice and add to the clamor of sounds in my head. I curled up into a tight ball in the corner of the seat pulling my head into my knees. Thankfully, the voices stopped, and all was still. All I could hear was the roar of the car’s engine now, but as the moments went by even that sound eased on my ear drums.
I had no idea how long it was before I slowly brought my head up. The two demons in the front seat were both turned around facing me. Obviously, Abigail had pulled the car to the side of the road. But it was Riley’s face that drew my attention. His expression was dark, and he pressed up against the other passenger door as if he were afraid to invade my space.
“What the fuck was that?” He hadn’t taken his eyes off me, but I knew that his question wasn’t for me. It was for the demons in the front seat.
“That was Bruno Proctor,” Abigail replied wearily. “I told you that we needed to move quickly. Apparently we weren’t quick enough.”
“Fernando said it was blood magic,” Riley said.
“His attack was on her mind,” Fernando said. The demon sounded completely unruffled by the fact that Riley looked ready to pounce. “To have that kind of effect, he has to have a strong connection with her. It is a logical conclusion then that that came from the exchange of blood.”
My mouth fell open, and I felt the flush creep up my cheeks.
Riley stared at me. “Did you ingest Proctor’s blood, Paige?”
“I agreed to do something for him,” I whispered. “I didn’t really have a choice.”
Riley turned and yanked the car door open. He was out of the car a moment later, and I flinched when I felt the back of the car bounce from the impact of his fists on the trunk of the car.
“Mr. Stone has some anger issues,” Abigail said.
I had no patience or energy to deal with the demon. I needed Riley to understand. I slowly got out of the car, testing my weight on my legs as I put my feet on the ground. Every muscle of my body felt bruised. Riley saw me and turned away. He leaned against the car staring out into the night.
I made my way around the car but stopped a few feet shy of him. He still didn’t look at me, and I felt a momentary rise of anger in my chest. “I didn’t have a choice, Riley. Yes, I made a blood pact with him.”
“For what? Your life? I sure hope you got something better than that out of the deal, Sweetheart. You’ve opened up your mind and soul to one of the evilest bastards to ever walk this realm or even Hell for that matter.” Riley’s harsh tone cut at me. He had never spoken to me like this before.
“He promised to teach me how to use my magic to ward off Eva’s possession,” I spat back at him. “In exchange, I’d owe him a favor. But I made sure that he wouldn’t be able to harm anyone I cared about when it came time to collect.”
Now I had Riley’s full attention. His green eyes glinted in the moonlight. “You are a fool. You have no idea what you’ve done.”
“I managed to survive for four years on my own, Riley Stone. I’ve made some pretty shitty deals, and I know what it means to have to lie in a bed of your own making. But if I can save my soul in the process, you can be damn sure I’ll do it. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me, and you certainly have no right to get on a high horse and judge me. You know wh
at? You can go straight to Hell.”
I turned on my heel and for a moment considered walking away. I wasn’t a stranger to hitchhiking. But then I remembered that Riley said that Abigail was taking us somewhere safe. I needed a plan, and I couldn’t make any stupid decisions. I got back into the car.
I saw Abigail’s raised eyebrow. “I’ll go to wherever it is that you are taking us, but I’m only staying long enough to get a good night’s sleep and figure out where I’m going next.”
Abigail nodded. “You are welcome on our farm, and can stay as long as you wish.”
I turned my face away from her and glared out the window. A moment later, I heard the other back door open and felt the weight shift in the car as Riley got back inside.
“Let’s go,” he said.
A thought occurred to me. There was a question I had forgotten to ask in the aftermath of Riley’s temper tantrum. “One more thing,” I said, leaning toward the front seat. I didn’t look at Riley. “What did you do to stop Bruno’s spell?”
Fernando pointed at my chest. I looked down and found a small pendant hanging from my neck. “My magic hasn’t returned yet, but I still know a trick or two. As long as you wear that necklace, the spell will be deflected into the stone so that he can’t harm you. As such, if I were you, I wouldn’t rush to take it off.”
I fingered the round stone. It felt cold against my fingertips. “Thank you,” I said. Then I fell back against the seat and went back to looking out my window. An uncomfortable silence followed.
CHAPTER THREE – RILEY
I had been naïve to think that it would have been that easy to pull Paige away from Proctor. Of course, the demon would have done something to make sure that he would be able to find her at all times. I had no idea what he had done or said to Paige to make her believe that doing a blood deal was her only option, but I knew that the consequences of that action were going to haunt her. All the more reason that I had to kill him.
I regretted allowing my anger to get the better of me when I spoke to Paige. I had been a jerk, and now I didn’t know how to take the words back. She had been right to get angry at me, but I saw a glimmer of someone that I hadn’t seen before in her eyes when she lashed out at me. That concerned me more than I was willing to admit.
Alice told us that when Paige appeared on her doorstep three years ago she had been desperate. That kind of situation often brings out the worst in people, and it wasn’t a stretch for me to reach some conclusions about what Paige had done to stay alive back then.
I was hardly in a position to judge. On that point, she had been right. Since my mother and sister’s death, my version of a moral code had loose guidelines at best. The only thing I worshipped was the almighty dollar, and I lost any qualms I had about playing to the highest bidder for my services. I hadn’t thought twice about it until Paige Matthews walked into my life.
How one woman could interrupt and upend my life so completely and in such a short amount of time was a mystery to me. It started out as a job, and one that should have been relatively simple at that. Find the girl. Turn her over. Collect my money and go home. Instead, I found her and now had been running with her for the last several days doing everything I could to keep her safe.
Now we traveled to another unknown place where we’d face more uncertainty. I didn’t trust Abigail and Fernando to keep their word. That would be sheer stupidity on my part. They walked this world as disciples of Eva. Paige was predestined to be Eva’s vessel. I had to assume that we were walking into a trap. But given my current control over Fernando’s corporeal form, it was one that I felt we could easily extract ourselves from if push came to shove and Abigail went back on her end of the deal. For the time being though, Paige needed to rest, and I needed to get in contact with home base. I was overdue to check-in, and we needed supplies.
We rode in silence for hours, and I lost track of time. My thoughts were full of half-formed plans as I tried to account for every known variable. I needed to be prepared.
“We’re almost there,” Abigail said, breaking into my thoughts.
Next to me, I saw Paige sit up straighter. She still refused to look in my direction. Apologizing to her was at the top of my to-do list, but I didn’t want to do it in front of Abigail and Fernando. I was on her side, and she needed to know that.
“I felt something,” Paige said “Like a rush of warmth, and then it was gone.” I could tell by the fear in her voice and the way that she clutched at the necklace that she thought Proctor was renewing his attempt to reach her.
“That’s a boundary spell,” Abigail said. “We can’t mask this place altogether. That kind of magic would bring every demon within a hundred mile radius to this place, and they’d surely tell others in the process. The spell gives us a measure of warning though in case they come close, and we have devised many ways to draw their attention elsewhere on the rare occasions that happens. We have a peaceful existence here, and I intend to keep it that way.”
I almost chuckled when I realized that the warning was for me. “We are out of here in two days, tops. I have no desire to interrupt your perfect existence.”
“You speak for Ms. Matthews?” Abigail asked.
“He certainly does not,” Paige said with a scowl.
I opened my mouth to disagree, and then shut it. I wasn’t going to get into an argument with her again. Instead, I rolled my eyes and sat back against my seat. “Let’s just get there already,” I said under my breath
Ten minutes later, Abigail turned the car onto an unmarked, dirt road that I would have missed entirely. There were deep ruts in the road, and as my body jostled with each bump, I felt myself rise off the seat as my head hit the roof. “Take it easy, will ya?”
“The way will smooth out when the road isn’t visible from the highway anymore,” Abigail said.
Paige didn’t say anything, but I caught her grimace as she tried to keep her body wedged tight against the door so that she didn’t touch mine. Several painful minutes later, the road opened up into a wide flat avenue just as Abigail promised. I saw a tight tree line up ahead, and as we passed underneath the branches, I heard the skimming of their long extensions above my head. Paige’s breath hitched, and my eyes were drawn to the windshield.
In the early morning light, I saw several small white buildings on the other side of the dense tree line. As we drove closer, I saw that there were even more of them set behind a large white farmhouse that sat slightly up from the rest of the buildings on a small hill. As the car pulled into a circular drive in front of the large house, I spied several red cow barns in the distance.
“When you said farm, I guess you weren’t kidding,” I said.
Abigail and Fernando got out of the car. I tried to get Paige to look at me, but she was already climbing out behind them. I sighed and pushed my body out of the car. I stretched my arms above my head and did a small turn trying to appear as casual as possible. By my count, there were twenty pillbox buildings scattered around the grounds surrounding the farmhouse.
“This is lovely,” Paige said. I looked at her sharply as I caught a wistful note in her voice. “It reminds me of a place I lived when I was little.”
“Thank you,” Abigail said with a small bow of her head. “We are almost completely self-sufficient here. Those that come here are looking for an escape from everything that is wrong with the world today.”
“That would seem to be quite a tall order,” Paige said with a sigh.
“Indeed.” Abigail put her hand on Fernando’s arm. “We have lived many years on this earth. It wasn’t always like this. At one time, there was peace everywhere, but that peace has slowly dissolved away. Humans. Angels. Demons. Everywhere you look there is war and death and destruction. Those who come to us want nothing more than a return to that peaceful existence. We give them a home and a role and the assurances that they and their kin are safe.”
“You’re living in a dream world if you honestly believe anywhere is safe from som
eone who wants in here,” I said. “I don’t buy it. There is no such thing as this Utopia that you’re trying to sell.”
“There could be,” Fernando said. It was the first time the man had spoken in hours. Then I caught his look at Paige, and I realized what he meant.
“A phone,” I said. I had no idea what kind of manpower they had surrounding us. I couldn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. I felt the weight of many eyes on me. I wasn’t buying Abigail’s kumbaya crap for one second. “I need a phone.”
“There’s one inside,” Abigail said primly. “Patience, Mr. Stone.”
“I think I’ve been patient enough,” I said. “Regardless of what you think, I have no doubt that Bruno Proctor is going to be looking for a loophole to reach Paige again, and he won’t stop until he finds one. I need to make a call.”
“I can take care of myself, Riley,” Paige said tossing her hair over her shoulder. She stared out into the fields that seemed to take up the majority of the land that we could see from our viewpoint. “I don’t need your help.”
I wanted to toss her over my shoulder the way I had the night I almost lost her to a legion of demons on Calamata Island. Back then, she had trusted me though. Clearly the tide had turned against me. “You definitely don’t need theirs,” I said. I didn’t care whether I offended our hosts or not. “You need to rest. You’ll be able to think more clearly after a decent night’s sleep.”
“I do agree with Mr. Stone on that point,” Abigail said. “You’ve been through a terrible ordeal. Let me show you to a room where you can rest.”
I didn’t like it when the demon and I agreed on anything when it came to Paige, but I saw Paige nod. “I actually am feeling a little tired,” she said. Of course, the way that she was going to get back at me was by appearing to side with the demon. I ran my hand through my hair and tried not to show my frustration.