Frowning, Abby searched her awareness for any sign of it. She didn’t feel anything, but then, she hadn’t before. Apparently being possessed could turn out to be a relatively painless experience.
Um, hello? she thought.
No one answered.
Abby realized she had no idea what that meant. She knew the thing could talk to her while she was conscious, since it had offered all kinds of suggestions, most of them obscene, since it had first taken up residence within her, but being able to and actually doing it seemed to be two different things.
Hey, are you in there?
Silence.
Was the fiend ignoring her? Now, that would be rude. If she was going to give the thing a home for the next few days, the least it could do was answer when she rang the doorbell.
Come on. Wake up, she thought. I want to know what happened. I need you to tell me what’s going on. Are you there? Can you hear me?
“Great.” Abby opened her eyes and gazed up into a darkened room. “Even the damned are giving me the silent treatment. This should be fun.”
The room around her was pitch black, not even enough light to read her watch when she brought her wrist right up next to her face. She glanced around for an illuminated clock face but saw nothing. She didn’t hear any ticking, either, so she couldn’t hope for an old-fashioned alarm clock on the bed stand. Not that she could see if there was a bed stand. She couldn’t even see the faint outline of light around the edges of a window’s heavy drapes. She may as well have been in a tomb.
“Oh, great thought, Ab. Real cheerful.”
Bracing herself, she prepared to throw back the blankets that covered her and go feeling her way to a wall and, she hoped, a light switch. Before she could even sit up, a door opened and a warm, golden glow spilled in from the hallway.
The figure silhouetted in the doorway didn’t bother to reach for a light switch, but she did leave the door open enough for Abby to identify her.
Samantha.
If Abby’s conscience hadn’t already been programmed to hypersensitivity by twenty-eight years of Catholicism—twelve of them spent in a school run by Benedictine nuns—the look on Samantha’s face when she regained consciousness would have sent her running to the nearest confessional at top speed. The Lupine wouldn’t even look her in the eye, let alone speak to her.
Abby felt about as tall as your average cockroach.
She had woken in a different bed from the one she’d occupied last night, and this time the soft cotton sheets felt more like sackcloth. The faint light spilling in from the hall was all Abby needed to see that Samantha bustled around the room with her head occasionally tilted at such an awkward angle that she had to be giving herself muscle spasms just to avoid looking in Abby’s direction.
An apology burned in the back of Abby’s throat, but she couldn’t seem to force the words out. She felt terrible for lying to the Lupine, but she couldn’t tell Samantha she was sorry for trying to escape; she wasn’t. She hoped that if their positions had been reversed she would have expected the Lupine to do the same thing, but Abby felt like the worst sort of slime for using Samantha to do it. She’d probably gotten the woman in all kinds of trouble for giving her the cell phone and not watching her more closely in the park, and that had never been one of Abby’s goals. She just wanted to get out of this mess, not cause a bigger one for anyone else.
Who knew what the others would do to punish the Lupine? Maybe there was some sort of ancient ritual of shunning or stoning or head-shaving.
Abby almost worked up the courage to ask. But another figure stepped in through the open doorway, behind Samantha. This one flicked on the lights.
“It’s just as well you’re awake,” Tess said, her voice brusque. “I’ve been checking your pupils every so often, but this way you can answer all the standard questions about your name and who’s president at the moment. If I don’t tell your brother you’re hale and whole and concussion-free in a few minutes, I’m going to have to turn him into a three-toed sloth just to shut him up.”
Abby sat up and pushed her hair out of her face. “I feel fine. No dizziness, no nausea.”
“Good.” Setting the glass she carried down on the table beside the bed, Tess leaned forward and peered into Abby’s eyes. “Any pain?”
Abby thought about it. “I feel like someone whacked me upside the head, but it’s not bad. My sinus headaches during allergy season are a lot worse than this.”
The woman nodded. “Fine. Drink this.” She pushed the glass into Abby’s hand. “Samantha, you don’t have to stay any longer. Rafe and Graham will have security outside the door all night. She’s not going anywhere.”
The Lupine nodded, said something in a low, tired voice before she slipped out of the room, pulling the door shut behind her.
Abby swallowed the last of Tess’s brew—a sweet, herbal concoction that tasted of green and cinnamon with a faint note of bitterness in the background—and frowned over the rim of the glass. “Did she get hurt in the park?”
Tess raised an eyebrow and looked at Abby for a long moment. “No, it wasn’t in the park.”
A flush of guilt crept up Abby’s face, and she frowned down into her empty cup. “I didn’t mean to upset her. I just wanted to get in touch with my brother.”
“Right. And of course, you should always get what you want. Even when what you want is immature and selfish and a serious threat to your safety and the safety of the people trying to take care of you. The world always works that way.”
Tess snatched the glass out of Abby’s hands and headed toward the door.
“Hey, I don’t think you have the right to get mad at me.” Abby’s voice stopped Tess just as the other woman reached for the doorknob. “In case you’ve forgotten, I’m being held here against my will. I never promised to be an obedient little hostage. I’m not going to let you feel all bent out of shape just because I slipped my leash. I didn’t hurt anybody. I just left.”
The look Tess shot Abby nearly singed off her eyebrows. “You didn’t hurt anybody?” Tess repeated quietly. “I realize you might not remember everything that happened in the park, since Rule and Samantha said Louamides took over the instant Seth showed up, but if you think your little escapade didn’t hurt anyone, let me explain to you how very wrong you are. Not only is Samantha having to deal with the disgrace of having failed to carry out orders given to her by the Alpha of her pack, but the wife of said Alpha is having one of the loudest fights in the history of interspecies relationships because she put herself and her baby at risk to save your ungrateful behind. A man who has done nothing but grab you out of harm’s way since the moment he set eyes on you has a bullet wound in his side, and I just finished putting twenty-four stitches in your own brother’s calf.” She finished her summary on a hiss, her chin jutting out and her blue eyes crackling with anger. “So don’t tell me no one got hurt because of you. I’ve seen the casualty list. And let’s just take a peek at how many other people will be hurt because of you if you don’t stop being a conceited, selfish, blind little girl.”
Tess raised a hand, muttered something under her breath, and slapped her palm against Abby’s forehead before the other woman could so much as blink, let alone duck.
If Abby had even for a moment forgotten that Tess De Santos was a witch, what she saw in those moments while the other woman touched her mind ensured she would never forget again. Not for the rest of her life.
It came in flashes, shorter than commercials, more real than movies. More horrifying than her worst nightmares. She saw her own body lying bloody and broken at the base of a huge stone altar in the middle of an open space. The air seemed to burn with foul, gaseous heat. All around, the world seemed cloaked in blackness while the sky above glowed with a bloodred fire that shed no light but cast shadows everywhere, thick, dense pools of black that seemed to pulse and throb with sentient evil.
On top of the altar stood a figure so grossly misshapen and twisted in its being that it too
k several slow heartbeats for Abby to even recognize it as a living being. If you could call something animated with the pure spirit of malice alive. It had bent, broken legs like no beast Abby had ever seen stride upon the earth and a long, disproportionate torso that swayed back and forth like a great snake. Its arms seemed too long for its body, huge, swollen knuckles dragging on the ground like a gorilla’s.
A huge, vaguely bovine skull sat atop wide, muscular shoulders, but the skull looked nearly bare. What little flesh still clung to it looked stringy and rotten and vile. Huge horns grew from the center of its forehead, spearing up toward the dark, cursed sky.
It was a figure Abby knew she could never have conjured even in her darkest moments, and while she watched, it threw back its head and gave a mighty bellow that sent her flesh crawling. It sounded like a thousand tortured souls screaming all at once, and its echo set the earth to trembling. As it raised its great fists, she saw that it held a ball of fire the same sullen red as the sky in one hand. In the other it clutched a child.
Helpless, Abby watched as the perspective of the image shifted, pulling back like a camera to show a wider shot. Around the altar, Abby began to see the city, now smoldering and ruined beneath the crimson darkness. Bodies lay strewn in the streets, creatures ghastly and cruel hunted the living, and small groups of fighters waged doomed battles against the hordes of fiendish creatures that seemed to pour like an infinite flood through a portal near the altar.
Saint John the Divine had never envisioned an Apocalypse so complete and so terrible.
“Tess, that’s enough!”
The shout was accompanied by firm hands grasping Abby by the shoulders and yanking her out of the reach of the burning hand on her forehead. Blinking through a veil of tears, she saw Samantha standing between her and the witch and snarling. Not at Abby but at Tess.
“Leave her be! She doesn’t understand what you’re talking about! You can’t just rip her illusions away and leave her with nothing familiar in her entire reality! It’s not right!”
Tess wiped a hand across her own eyes and shot the Lupine a red-rimmed glare. “Someone had to show her the truth. If she keeps thinking what happens to her doesn’t matter, she’s going to doom us all. I’m not going to let that happen.”
“And you think showing her the worst-case scenario is going to help? Come on, Tess. She’s not Ebenezer Scrooge and you’re not the Ghost of Christmas Future.”
“Someone has to be.”
“Is that really what will happen?” Abby croaked, feeling as if her throat had been singed by the flames she’d seen in her vision. “Did you show me the future?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Tess . . .” Samantha spoke a warning.
Tess sighed. “One of them.”
“One of what?” Abby wondered if she felt as confused as she looked.
“One of the futures.” Tess’s anger seemed to be dissipating, leaving behind a fatigue Abby found it easy to sympathize with. “The future changes all the time. Every time we make a decision, we’re turning off one path and onto another. Every time we take a new path, the ones we didn’t take and the futures they led to cease to exist. Life is like a great big Choose Your Own Adventure novel.”
“You’re psychic?”
Tess tucked a stray curl behind her ear and sat down on the edge of Abby’s bed. “Only in the loosest sense of the word. Really it’s like I have déjà vu a lot, only the things I see didn’t already happen. They’re things that might happen in the future. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years trying to develop it into something like precognition, but what I showed you is as close as I’ve gotten.”
“Which isn’t very close,” Samantha pointed out. She shut the door she must have left open when she reentered the bedroom and sat on the bed corner opposite Tess. “What she comes up with tend to be like fantasies or nightmares. Either the best-case scenario or the worst. I don’t think I need to ask which one you got.”
“Hey, what I showed her is a very real possibility,” Tess said, crossing her arms over her chest. “If Uzkiel and his goons get ahold of Louamides and force him to give up the solus spell, the future we’re looking at wouldn’t necessarily be so different from what she saw.”
Abby leaned forward over her knees and braced her temples on her palms, burying her fingers in her hair. Then she fisted them as if she would yank the stuff out by the handful.
“I just can’t make this make sense,” she said, staring at the embroidered coverlet in her lap. “What I do or didn’t do has never been important to anyone but me. And maybe my family.”
“Well there’s been a major change there.”
She looked up into Tess’s expression, which had settled back into its normal expression of mild amusement.
“I’m sure this is a job for one of you. For an Other, I mean. Someone with special powers or supernatural strength or speed. I’m sure you could handle this all a lot better without me getting in the way.”
“It’s not a matter of you being in the way. It’s a matter of Louamides being in you.” Samantha reached out and patted Abby’s knee. “Trust me. It’ll get less weird once we get Lou out of you.”
Abby sighed and finally managed to look straight at Samantha. “I’m sorry if I got you in trouble before,” she said. “That wasn’t my intention.”
Samantha gave her a half smile. “It’s not the first time I’ve been in trouble. And I somehow doubt it will be the last. Besides, the Luna stepped in and deflected the worst of it. Alpha was too busy worrying about her to keep yelling at me.” She pursed her lips. “But if I were you, I’d probably try to avoid running into him for the next few days. Or, you know, decades.”
“Right. Real easy, given he happens to own the place where I’m being—where I’m staying.”
Tess must have noticed that catch, but she just grinned. “Oh, did I happen to mention earlier that he and Missy live right next door?”
Abby collapsed back against the pillow. “Yeah, but thanks for reminding me.”
“Don’t worry about it. If you want my opinion, I think your brother looked almost as pissed off as Graham. Didn’t you tell him what was going on when you sent your little bat signal?”
“How? It’s not like I sent him a blueprint of the joint and a schedule of shift changes in the guardhouse by carrier pigeon. I had a cell phone for seventeen seconds. Not even a thirteen-year-old can text that fast. I just let him know I was in trouble.”
Tess tilted her head. “You may be in even bigger trouble now.”
Abby just sighed and continued staring at the ceiling.
“I don’t think the brother is anything to worry about,” Samantha said dismissively. “The demon, though . . . now he’s another story.”
“Ugh. Stop. You’ll give me nightmares.”
“Fair’s fair,” Tess snickered.
“Says you.” Abby turned a pleading expression on the blonde. “But there’s no reason I have to see him again, right?” Her mind rushed back to the kiss she’d almost managed to forget and she contemplated pulling the covers over her head. “I’m safe and sound back at the club. There are plenty of people here to look out for me. If I promise not to try to leave until this is all sorted out, can’t you send him out to hunt down that Uz-whoever guy? The sooner he does that, the sooner I can get out of everyone’s hair.”
Tess and Samantha exchanged a speaking glance over Abby’s head. She didn’t think she wanted to hear what it had to say.
“He’s a multitalented fellow,” Tess said. “I’m pretty sure he can manage to fit in hunting the fiend and reading you the riot act. In fact, when I left to come upstairs, he was rehearsing in the library.”
“Gee. Isn’t that swell.”
Samantha rubbed a reassuring hand over Abby’s forearm. “I’m sure it won’t be all that bad. I mean, he knows you’re human, so he’ll probably be trying really hard not to hurt you.”
Abby glared at her. “You’
re such a comfort.”
“I’ve found there’s only one sure strategy for dealing with situations like these. You have to go on the offensive. Even if he’s the one in the right, you have to throw him off balance. Make him forget that.” Tess’s beautifully manicured hands punctuated her instructions with decisive gestures. “You’ll have to seduce him.”
“What?!” Abby sprang upright like a jack-in-the-box. “I have to what?!”
“Seduce him. If you want him to forget about being mad at you.”
Abby looked over and saw Samantha nodding, her expression serious, as if the idea weren’t completely insane.
“Absolutely,” the Lupine agreed. “I mean, I don’t have a mate myself, but the Luna swears by the tactic, and if it works on the Alpha . . .” She shrugged. “It’s got to be worth a try.”
Abby’s stomach felt as if someone had just installed a hamster wheel with a very energetic rodent inside. And then fed it diet pills. “That’s—I . . . I mean . . . I-I can’t.”
“Sure you can. It’s all in the lips.” Tess wriggled her eyebrows up and down.
“No. I can’t. Really. I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Abby just shook her head and wondered if someone had slipped her something. Her heart felt like it might beat a hole straight out of her chest. In double time.
“I just . . . can’t.”
“Well, I know you’re not gay,” Tess said, sounding exasperated. “I saw that kiss, remember? If I had been wearing glasses, the things would have been fogged up. Before I opened the door.”
Samantha looked impressed. “That good?”
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