“Maybe Karishma can help?” Mai suggested.
I nodded. “I’ll give you her number.”
There was the clip of boots, and then Jay appeared in the cell block. “No record of any Custodian sect in the archives. Just spoke to our liaison at headquarters to update them on the attack. They’re sending agents to comb the outskirts of Scorchwood. If there are any more of these tainted psychos hovering about, then they’ll be caught.”
Lex snorted. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”
I crossed my arms and canted my head. “Care to enlighten us? It would save us time on all the torture.”
“Like fuck.” He grinned. “You’ll find out in due course.”
“Due course? Ooh, you’re so scary.”
He responded with a slow blink.
Fucker. I turned my back on him and flipped the switch that cocooned him in silence and muted our conversation from him.
“We had an interrogator at Ravensheart, but I don’t assume any of you are trained as one, are you?”
Lark looked to Jay. “It’s time, Jay.”
Jay exhaled heavily. “I know.”
Mai placed a hand on his arm. “Lark and I stumbled on your secret, and keeping it from Kris was hard enough. We agreed once he’d been with us for some time, once he’d proven himself, we’d tell him, and Kat, well, I’m certain we can trust her.”
My heart was pounding. This was it. They were going to tell me about the fomorian. But what did that have to do with interrogating the Custodian?
Jay fixed his honey eyes on me. “I think it’s best if I show you. Come with me.”
He led the way out of the cellblock and across the flagstones toward the door that hid the fomorian. The pulse in my throat was hammering away because Jay wasn’t just pulling open the hatch, he was opening the door. It opened without making a sound. Well-oiled hinges, no doubt. And then Jay was stepping into the darkness.
“Go,” Mai said. “You’ll understand soon enough.”
The scratch of a match was followed by the flare of light, and then the chamber was lit by a lantern. The runes etched into the walls glowed briefly before settling to a dull silver color. Jay stood by a cot shoved up against the wall, and my gaze fell onto the creature lying there.
The fomorian was huge, taking up every inch of space on the bed. His eyes were closed, and his chest moved up and down in the even breath of deep sleep.
Jay looked down on the monster. “This is Bres. This is my secret. He’s a fomorian.” He looked at me, waiting for a reaction.
Shit. “What? No!” I put my hand to my chest and widened my eyes in shock.
Jay frowned. “But … you already know about him, don’t you?”
I dropped my hand from my chest. “What gave it away?”
“You’re a really shitty actor, Justice.”
“Yeah, you’re not the first person to tell me that.”
Jay let out a breathless chuckle. “How long have you known?”
“The first week I got here.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
I shrugged. “Honestly, I’m not sure. I was intrigued. I wanted to speak to him again.”
His brows shot up. “You spoke to him?”
I winced. “A couple of times. I wanted you guys to tell me about him yourselves. If I’d brought it up, and then you’d told me, it would have been because you had to, not because you wanted to. Not because you trusted me.” I shrugged. “If you told me yourself, then it meant you’d accepted me as part of the team.”
Jay sighed. “I’m sorry. I had to be sure about you. I guess I got lucky you could be trusted, or I’d have been in deep shit.”
My gaze slipped back to Bres. His face was all planes and angles that, although softened by sleep, were still brutally handsome. And the ink that trailed like kisses across his skin was definitely runic in nature.
I resisted the urge to poke his bicep. “He’s a heavy sleeper.”
Jay’s smile was wry. “And so am I during the day.” He met my eyes. “You see, there’s more to the secret than having a fomorian locked in the dungeons. Things like the fact that our life forces are entangled, and the fact that we’re trapped in a cycle where I can only wake during the night, and he can only wake during the day.”
Click, click, pieces fell into place. Why Jay was never visible during the day. Why he was always clock watching.
“How long?”
He looked suddenly weary as sin. “Too long. Centuries.”
“Wait, what?” How old was this guy?
“We’ve run and hidden and survived for longer than I can recall,” Jay said. “This place, Scorchwood, is a reprieve for us.” His throat bobbed. “You see, we decided the best place to hide was in plain sight. Right under the noses of those that hunt us. Right amidst the Nightwatch.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’m not who you think I am. My name is Edward Henry Hyde, and I’m almost three hundred and eighteen years old.”
His words sank in. “Damn, you look good for your age.”
His lips twitched. “Thank you, but not aging grew old after the first century—pardon the pun.”
“So, who’s Jay? The council seems to think you’re Jay Hyde.”
“A descendant of mine. Bres and I stumbled upon Scorchwood by chance eight years ago. A town that provided natural protection from the outside world and reinforced Bres’s cloaking runes. It was the perfect spot to hide from the council for a while. And then I found out about the Watch base. About my descendant, Jay Hyde, who was the master here. I stalked him and discovered that he had an uncanny resemblance to me. His team was small. Just him and two others. They were all killed in a rogue Nightblood attack seven years ago.”
“That’s when you stepped in, isn’t it? You took over. You claimed to have survived?”
He nodded. “Yes. They sent me Mai and Lark. Kris joined us two years later.”
“And you set this up?” I scanned the runes. “Cloaking runes?”
“Yes. We replicated the runes on Bres’s body. They feed off Bres’s energy and reinforce the cloaking that keeps us safe. For the first time in forever, we’ve been able to put down roots, because as long as Bres doesn’t stray out of this room for an extended period, we’re safe.” He stepped away from Bres. “Come on, we can continue this conversation upstairs over tea.”
* * *
Kris was still unconscious, and Killion had moved him up to his room. Henri was back with Tris, who was firmly planted against my thigh while we snuggled on the single-seater sofa. The golem had taken his favored spot by the door, arms loose at his sides, glamour off, so his silver features looked harsher than usual. Mai and Lark were sharing the three-seater sofa, sitting thigh to thigh.
Tea had been poured and biscuits distributed, and my body was finally relaxing after all the crazy of the day.
“You know that the Hyde family has produced shadow knights for generations,” Jay said.
Or should I call him Edward? No. Jay was best. It was the persona he’d donned and what had saved him.
“I was one of those knights,” he continued. “I fought in the fomorian war, and I almost died beyond the mist. Bres saved my life, although he’ll tell you it was me that saved him. I guess we saved each other.”
His statement contradicted everything we’d been taught at the Academy. “You saved a fomorian? Why would you assist the enemy?”
He let out a bitter laugh. “There is so much the later generations don’t know about the war, about what really happened beyond enemy lines. All I can say is that just like any race, all fomorians aren’t evil. They have their own dynamic, their own wars, and we … We were just the tip of the iceberg.” He sipped his tea. “Memories have become clouded over the years. I’m tired, and so is Bres. We’re trapped on this side of the breach because we have more chance of survival on my side than on his. And yet, neither of us had a home until this place. The council thinks E
dward Henry Hyde died in the war. But the truth is that fomorian magic saved me, but it bound me to Bres. We’re forced to share one life force. To share the day. But we can’t be awake at the same time. We’ve had no choice but to trust each other. He kept me safe during my day slumber, and I did the same for him during his nightly one.”
Wait a second, did that mean … “You haven’t spoken directly in three hundred years?”
He laughed. “Goodness, now that would have been a challenge. No, there is a period of about an hour and a half when our waking time seems to overlap, and we’re both awake.”
“Is that why you check the clock all the time?”
He smiled. “Yes. I guess it is.” He set his cup down. “But there’s more. The reason why I haven’t been going on patrol the past three months …”
“I thought that was PTSD after seeing Lark die.”
“Oh, I was traumatized, but not so much that I couldn’t patrol. No. Something happened when the shimmer man took Lark. A blast of energy hit me, and I blacked out. It happened again the next day when I got upset and angry—my body flooded with adrenaline and then I was waking up on the floor of the study. It was only a day later when I spoke to Bres and discovered he’d woken up for several minutes around the same times I’d passed out. We did a test run the next day, where I injected myself with adrenaline at a specific time. Like we suspected, I passed out, and when I spoke to Bres, he confirmed he’d woken up at the same time I’d blacked out.”
Lark sat forward in his seat, forearms braced on his thighs. “Exertion, adrenaline, anything like that causes blackouts for Jay. I’m working on a way to fix it. I’m working on a way to separate them both and give them back their lives.”
So, that’s why going on patrol was too much of a risk. “Why not just tell Kris the truth about the blackouts?”
Mai gave Jay a raised-brow look that told me she’d asked him the same question.
Jay shook his head slightly, looking sheepish. “Because it was a weakness I wasn’t willing to share.”
“Really? You were worried about losing macho points?”
“No. It was more than that. I still wasn’t sure about Kris. Shadow knights and daemons … we don’t have the greatest history of getting along. Plus, he hasn’t opened up about his past, aside from saying there are people in Demonica that mean him harm. We have no idea why he’s here and not there. He’s a closed book.”
Disclosure was a huge factor in trust. I could totally understand Jay’s reservations. What I didn’t understand was his change of heart. “I get it. But what’s changed? Kris is still the same person he was a few hours ago.”
“He is,” Mai said. “But he had my back for three months when Lark was gone, and Jay was unable to be out there with me. I told Jay enough was enough the other day. We agreed to tell Kris everything.”
“And Lark was adamant we tell you too,” Jay added.
“You saved my life,” Lark said to me.
It hadn’t completely gone down like that, but heck, a little praise was always welcome. Although, since he’d been back, he’d been cloistered away with Mai, and no one had explained how the shimmer man had gotten his clutches into Lark.
I had to know. “What happened to you? How did the shimmer man get into your head?”
There was an uncomfortable silence in which Mai gently took Lark’s hand in hers.
“I can’t remember,” Lark said. “And trust me, I’ve tried. All I can surmise from the facts Mai and Jay laid out is that the shimmer man pulled me out of this realm. I have no idea where he took me or how he made it look like he’d killed me. For me, it was a matter of minutes. One moment, I was talking to Jay, the next, I was waking up back here with Mai telling me it had been three months.”
The shimmer man had called Lark a find, and the only thing different about him was the same thing that was different about me. “This has to be linked to your ability to see and hear the dead. Like me, you can speak directly to them.”
“You think the ability makes us somehow vulnerable to him?” Lark asked.
“Vulnerable and valuable. He did use your body to manipulate the ghosts of Scorchwood, after all. He threatened them and siphoned power off them to make his presence here stronger. He wouldn’t have been able to reach them like he did without using your abilities. He wouldn’t have been able to collect the humans he needed without the riders.”
“Shit,” Mai said. “I didn’t even think of that.”
Lark’s throat bobbed. “He’ll be back.”
“Yeah, but it’s me he wants. He used you to get me here, and now that he has me where he wants me, he’ll be back. But by that time, we’ll have a plan. We’ll have a way to stop him.”
I injected confidence into my voice. Confidence that I wasn’t feeling.
Tris patted my arm. “You’re not alone, chickie.”
“No, you’re not,” Henri said.
No. I was part of a team. A real team who knew me, all of me. And now I knew their secret too. We would have each other’s backs. No matter what came at us. Yeah, I needed to be focusing on my trip to Demonica if I wanted to save my gramps’s life, but Kris was incapacitated, and right now, it looked like these Custodians were going to be the threat of the fucking week.
We needed to crack Lex.
Which reminded me. “When I mentioned the interrogator earlier, and you said you had something to tell me … were you going to tell me that Bres is the interrogator?”
“Bres is very good at what he does,” Jay said.
Lark nodded. “He does a memory wipe after he’s got the information he needs.”
“Like Kris does?”
“Not exactly.” Lark looked uncomfortable. “Whereas Kris manipulates memory by suggestions, Bres simply eradicates them.”
“It’s like they have a black spot in their minds where Bres was,” Mai explained.
Jay cleared his throat. “We haven’t had to interrogate often.”
“Yes,” Mai agreed. “And now that we’ll be filling Kris in, he can do the memory stuff instead of Bres.”
It was obvious they felt bad about blasting literal holes in someone’s memories, and I couldn’t blame them. There were some lines that shouldn’t be crossed. Fiddling with someone’s mind to protect them from horror was one thing, but slicing out chunks to protect yourself was another.
But still … “Can I watch Bres interrogate the Custodian?”
Chapter Ten
“You need to sleep,” Tris said firmly. “Staying up for another day to watch an interrogation is a bad idea.”
We were back in my room, and Tris was not happy about my need to watch torture. Hell, it wasn’t as if I was planning on taking popcorn and a Coke to the event. It was more curiosity than anything else. I’d taken the requisite classes in interrogation but hadn’t made the cut for the advanced classes. Turned out, I wasn’t interrogator material.
Uses humor as a tool, my report had said. Apparently, humor had no place in a room where you were intending on tearing off someone’s toenails. Go figure.
“I can handle one day of not sleeping, Tris. It’s several in a row that take a toll. Besides, I need to know what we’re up against with this Custodian.”
She gave me a skeptical look. “You mean you need to see the fomorian again.”
My neck heated, but I met her gaze levelly. That too. “You know how much I hate not understanding stuff. I have to figure out why I’m so drawn to him.”
“Are you drawn to him as much as you’re drawn to Henri?” There was no judgment in her tone, just a gentle prod urging me to open up.
I sighed. Nothing much got past Tris, and she’d been part of the trio for too long not to notice when there was a new kind of tension disrupting our little group dynamic.
I sat on the end of the bed, and she climbed up next to me and placed a hand on my shoulder. “You care about Henri.”
My chest ached. “I care about him more than I should. He’s a golem.”
“And I’m a gargoyle. But you love me.”
“That’s different. It’s a different kind of love.”
She nodded. “I know. You’re confused, and you’re scared.”
“I don’t even know if he has these feelings, if he can even feel in that way, you know?”
She nodded. “Henri is a contradiction to his kind, that’s for sure. In this case, you can’t apply rules to what’s unfurling between you. You should talk to him about it.”
My pulse fluttered, and my stomach flipped. “And say what? That he makes me all fluttery, warm, and fuzzy?” I shook my head. “I can’t go down that road, especially when he might be taken away from me at any time.”
“What do you mean?” Tris was on high alert now.
I rubbed a hand over my mouth. Urgh. I hadn’t wanted to worry her. Karishma was working on the problem, after all.
Tris’s round eyes narrowed. “Spill it, chickie.”
“He’s compromised, Tris. The shimmer man knows the word to deactivate him, and Karishma said there is no way to change the word. She wants to replace him.”
“No!”
“That’s what I said. I told her she couldn’t have him, and then I begged her not to take him. She’s looking for another solution, but if she can’t find one, then there’s every possibility they’ll come for him and …” My voice cracked, and a sharp pain lanced through my chest. “I can’t even think about that. I can’t think about losing him.”
“And it would hurt more if you took the next step …” Tris nodded. “Does he know?”
“I haven’t told him about what she said, but yeah, he’s aware of the risks. He’s the one who brought up the fact that he was compromised. He told me to replace him.” Just before he’d looked at me as if he’d wanted to kiss me. I blew out a breath. “I need to focus on other shit right now.”
“Like the fomorian interrogating the Custodian and finding the crossroads daemon.”
I smiled down at her. “Yes, just like that.”
Give Up the Ghost: The Nightwatch Series Book 2 Page 8