by Eva Chase
The space should have been dark and cool, but warmth emanated from a ruddy light at the far end of the cavern. Warmth and a pulse of energy so off-kilter it made my stomach turn.
I walked toward it, and nausea swelled to fill my entire abdomen. A faint whine filled my ears. My nerves started to jitter in revulsion. I still didn’t understand what I was looking at, only that it was a ring of hazy reddish light on the far wall of the cave, maybe as tall as I was but high up near the ceiling, with a thinner reddish glow swirling within the ring in time with that pulsing, sickening energy.
There was something almost magical about that energy. A sense that it could be used to shape and control, the way I could use the magic I was familiar with. But this energy didn’t move or taste the same at all, in some way I couldn’t have explained.
It was simply something other, something unlike anything I’d ever experienced or could have put a name to. But every particle in my body was vibrating now with the deep certainty that whatever it was, it had never been meant to be here. To be part of this world in any way at all. It was simply wrong.
I was maybe ten feet away from it when a face appeared in the midst of that shifting glow. A face half the height of my entire body, its skin swirling with the same red glow, with gnarled features and eyes so dark they seemed to fall away into an abyss.
My legs jarred. A squeak of shock slipped from my mouth. Behind me, Damon swore. The face turned its eyes toward me, and every drop of blood in my body turned cold.
The immense being’s twisted mouth curved into a smile. For an instant, through the glowing ring around it, I caught a glimpse of a whirling red-tinged world sprawling out behind the monster—a world that wasn’t any part of my own. Then the face pushed farther out into the cave, the suggestion of a clawed hand beside it, and I stumbled backward. My arms shot up defensively, but I didn’t have a clue what magic could repel that… that thing.
A familiar and yet unexpected voice rang out in a language I didn’t recognize. A barked command, several short choppy words.
The monster in the opening flinched. It made an expression that looked like a sneer and rasped a brief response that sounded disdainful, but it pulled back. In an instant, the red glow had swallowed it up as if it had never been there. My chest released from its painful contraction as my breath spilled out of me. But I didn’t have time to enjoy my relief.
I spun around to face my father.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Rose
Dad had stepped out from behind one of the large stalagmites near the wall. The strange lighting of the cave made his face look haggard. My gaze shot to his hands, and mine dropped an inch from their poised position when I saw he wasn’t holding any weapon. But only an inch.
“Stay right there, asshole,” Damon said. His hands were up too, his pistol pointed directly at my dad. His face had gone sallow, I was going to guess because of the horrific visage we’d just seen, but his arms held steady.
Gabriel eased to the side, peering down the passage we’d entered through. “I don’t see anyone else,” he reported, his voice hoarse.
“If anyone were coming, we’d have heard from Naomi,” I said. One way or another. My gaze stayed fixed on Dad, and his on me.
“They’ll come,” he said. “But maybe not for a while, if you got this far.”
“So, you were just hanging out here waiting for us alone?” Damon said.
“I thought if we couldn’t overpower you, maybe talking would get us somewhere.”
“And where exactly is that?” I asked. “What are we going to talk about? How you were planning on shackling me to Derek or whatever other consort you could dig up who’d agree to your contract? What the hell that thing we just saw was? How you know how to talk to it?”
Dad’s jaw worked. “I’m sorry, lamb,” he said.
His old nickname for me hit me like a punch to the gut. He had treated me like a lamb, hadn’t he? One he was going to lead to the metaphorical slaughter.
“You’re sorry?” I repeated. “Are you fucking kidding me? Is that supposed to smooth everything over?”
He winced. “No. But it’s true. I wanted to say it, before we got into anything else.”
“Why did you do it?” I said. The question had been gnawing through my mind since the first moment I’d realized he was part of this scheme. “Why would you want that kind of future for me? How could you?”
“It wasn’t that I wanted to,” he said. He stayed where he was, by the wall of the cave, but he spread his hands as if in appeal. “I made a deal, one I didn’t have a lot of choice in, one I didn’t fully understand before I’d ever had a wife or a child… I made a deal. You felt the energy around the being that came through that portal, didn’t you? You know what kind of power it has. You don’t break your word when it comes to something like that.”
I stared at him. “You made a deal with that thing? What does that even have to do with me and the corrupted consorting?”
“What the hell was that thing?” Damon broke in.
“Yeah,” I said. “That too.”
“We call them ‘demons’,” Dad said. “It must have seemed like the most appropriate word, when witching kind first summoned them. They’ve never really been clear on what they call themselves.”
A demon. Like something out of an old story. Except the thing that had peeked into the cave—through the “portal”?—had been utterly, horrifically real.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
Gabriel folded his arms over his chest. “You came here to talk. Why don’t you start the real explaining?”
“There isn’t much to explain,” Dad said. “We need magic to hold them back. We need magic to make use of them.”
“And so you need to be able to force witches into doing that magic for you?” I demanded.
“It’s complicated.” Dad took a step toward me, and every muscle in my body tensed. “I don’t want this. But we need to think of the larger consequences. You see how big this is now, don’t you? How much could be at stake?”
“You could have asked me,” I said. “You could have said you needed my help instead of trying to trick me into having no choice.”
He gave me a pained smile. “No one who’s had the choice has ever been much help. Rose… I tried to forget about it. I tried to pretend that everything could be normal. Everything would have been normal, most of the time.”
“Except when you were using me the Spark only knows how.”
He ignored that point. “We were counting on you,” he said. “We needed you. The balance of power has already been shifting too much in their favor. The families tied to the portal can’t afford to let you go, Rose. If they did, it could be catastrophic for our entire world. Not just us but all of witching society, and all of their society too.” He nodded to Damon and Gabriel. “Is that what you want?”
“Don’t try to turn this around on me, as if I’m somehow failing you,” I said. My voice shook with a sudden surge of anger. “Don’t you dare make this my responsibility. I still don’t even know what the hell is going on. You’ve hardly told me anything that really makes sense.”
“I’ve told you all you need to know,” Dad said. “I need you to trust me that I wouldn’t have brought you into this situation if I hadn’t thought it was the only thing that would work, if I hadn’t hoped I’d find a way to get you out of it again. I—”
“Trust you?” I sputtered, my rage flaring hotter alongside a crackle of my spark. Magic thrummed through my body, ready for my command. The man who’d raised me, who’d taught and comforted me, who’d planned to shackle me to a consort who barely tolerated me for some scheme involving the monsters behind that glowing ring—he wanted to talk about trust?
The hot rush of power melted my hesitation. A jolt of resolve shot through me. My hands swiveled through the air in front of me. “I can make you tell us everything. I can drag every detail about this portal and those families—”
My
compelling spell whipped through the air and disintegrated just inches from my dad. I frowned and cast again, weaving the strands even tighter. The magic I threw scattered into useless fragments around my father.
He shook his head. “You’re not going to get anywhere that way. Did you think I wouldn’t come prepared? You’ve got a lot of power, Rose, but I knew that before I came down here. I made sure I was ready for it.”
He’d had other spells cast on him—repelling ones, shielding ones. I wasn’t sure I believed they were layered on densely enough that I couldn’t have found a way to break through them—but I also wasn’t sure it would be worth the energy I’d expend finding out.
Damon waved his gun. “Are you prepared to deflect bullets?”
Dad looked at him, his gaze turning hard. “You want to shoot me? Go ahead. It isn’t going to help her, if that’s what you actually care about.”
No, the gun wasn’t a good enough threat. Not for a man who’d been willing to sacrifice his own daughter—and maybe both of his wives as well—to this conspiracy. He was far more afraid of the thing on the other side of that portal.
An idea came to me with a fresh wave of queasiness. His portal families and the Assembly resources they commandeered had gone to all this trouble to keep me alive for some purpose to do with the demons. With harnessing them. But who was to say my power couldn’t be used in the opposite way.
I raised my hand toward the shifting glow on the cave wall. “Or I could try my magic on that portal. See what happens if I encourage one of your ‘demons’ through.”
Dad’s head snapped around, his face blanching. Oh, he was afraid of that, all right. “Rose,” he said with a rasp. “You have no idea— For the sake of the Spark, leave that alone.”
“Why should I?” I said, my anger flattening my voice. “Are they really going to treat me any worse than you and your associates have?”
I wouldn’t, for even one second, really have considered releasing the fiend I’d seen poking its face through that opening. I could still remember the malicious inhuman energy that had wafted off it, all the way through my bones.
Dad should have known that. Dad should have known what kind of witch I was—what kind of woman I was.
But he didn’t. He was staring at me with his eyes panicked-wide. He’d raised me, but he’d never paid enough attention to see who I was. To know the power I’d come into wouldn’t make me a monster.
The last shreds of love I’d held for him crumbled into dust in that instant.
“They’re evil,” he said. “They’d tear you and everyone here apart. Please, Rose.”
“Explain it to me,” I said. “Properly. Why has this faction of the Assembly been covering up the fact that witches can take more than one consort, that we can consort with the unsparked? Where do these demons come into it? Where do I come into it? Make me understand.” I twisted my fingers, and the portal’s glow brightened. An illusion, but he couldn’t tell that.
His jaw gave a nervous twitch. “I don’t know all of it,” he said. “I never wanted— If you ask Charles Frankford, he could tell you everything. The Frankfords have been at the center of this from the start. The Hallowells were only ever on the sidelines.”
A reasonable claim. It was the Frankfords who held this land, after all. It was the current head of that household to whom Dad had turned to for advice and approval while arranging my corrupted consorting. But it wasn’t as if Charles Frankford was going to sit down and have a calm, open discussion with me.
“I suppose you figure that as soon as I’ve left, you can warn him I’m coming, let him arrange some sort of trap,” I said. I glanced at the guys. “We need his phone.”
Gabriel nodded. He and Damon approached Dad, who stepped back to the wall. Dad’s hands fisted. He moved to shove Gabriel away, and Damon grasped his arm, wrenching it back as he slammed his pistol to Dad’s temple at the same time.
Whatever magic my father had on him didn’t protect him from physical force. Dad thrashed out, but Gabriel caught his other hand, pinning it to the cave wall in turn.
“So, this is what you picked,” Dad spat out as I walked up to him. “A bunch of unsparked thugs?”
Fury flared white-hot behind my eyes. I reached for the pocket where I knew Dad kept his phone and yanked it out.
“I picked love,” I said, in a sharper voice than I’d known I had in me. “Maybe you could learn something from that.”
The phone wasn’t enough. As soon as we left, he’d be running up the cliff to that old house, and no doubt there’d be some way of contacting people in there. But I could stop him from leaving without casting a single spell directly on him.
“Leave him,” I said with a gesture at the far end of the cave. Damon gave Dad a shove as he released him, sending him stumbling toward the portal.
“Rose,” Gabriel said quietly, but I already knew what I had to do. I motioned them behind me, back toward the passage we’d entered through, which was the only entrance and exit this cavern possessed.
“You’ll stay here with your demons until one of your ‘friends’ cares enough to come looking for you,” I said to Dad, my hands already weaving through the air. My feet pattered out a quick rhythm on the stone floor, my arms slicing through the air, and a burst of energy surged from my spark into a wall of magic that hummed from floor to ceiling across the whole width of the cave.
Dad threw himself forward—and my wall sent him stumbling backward. He gaped at me through it.
“It’ll hold at least a few days, I think,” I said. “Unless someone comes down and breaks it for you first. I wonder if you matter to them even half as much as you’ve let them matter to you.”
I spun on my heel and stalked toward the passage. Gabriel caught me with a gentle hand around my wrist.
“Rose,” he said, his voice still low. “If no one comes, he could die down here.”
I didn’t think that was likely. The spell wasn’t infinite, and there was water in that place somewhere. He wasn’t going to have an enjoyable few days, that was all. But my heart was so shattered in that moment all I could say was, “Then he dies.”
“And good riddance,” Damon muttered.
Gabriel was silent as we tramped down the damp passage and back into the gloomy afternoon outside. When we were about halfway up the path to the top of the cliff, he dragged in a breath.
“I might have enough,” he said.
I paused, glancing back at him with my hand braced against the rough rock. “What?”
He gave me half a smile. “I borrowed that phone of Ky’s, the one he lifted off the enforcer, since it has an actual camera. Once I got over being scared shitless, I tried to record that—that thing with it. I don’t know how well that turned out, but… I left it going after your dad started talking. He didn’t admit to a whole lot, but it’ll at least corroborate any other proof we find.”
My spirits leapt. I would have thrown my arms around him if doing that wasn’t likely to topple both of us off the cliff face.
“You’re brilliant,” I said.
He laughed, short and sharp. “Let’s wait until we’re actually out of this mess before you give me any credit.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Kyler
Rose lowered her hands from where she’d been weaving magic in front of my face. A light tingling had penetrated my skin, but otherwise I couldn’t feel any effects. From the way she was looking at me, though, the effects were obviously there. Her expression was an odd mix of satisfied and revolted.
“I think that’s as good as I can make the illusion,” she said. “Considering I only had a few memories and photographs to go on.”
Jin hunkered down on the bench next to her, eyeing me from the other side of the parked tour bus. “A real work of art, Briar Rose. I’d never know it was Ky, that’s for sure. He looks completely like that Frankford guy to me.”
“You’ve only ever seen the pictures.” Rose bit her lip. “I can’t give you the wa
y he moves, Ky, or his voice—I don’t have enough material for that even if I knew how to. But if you stay quiet and act confident, you should be able to fool people at least for a little while.” She paused. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
I heard the love running through her concern, but the question pricked at me a little anyway, even though my own nerves were jittering. I was the computer guy, the one who fought his battles from behind a screen and a keyboard. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for a mission on the ground.
But we didn’t have a whole lot of choice. Someone needed to go into Charles Frankford’s home and find whatever records he’d have stashed there. I was the only one who could crack the security he’d have on his home computing system once we got in. I’d already determined there was no network extending outside the house that I could even try to hack into.
So I’d just have to be cut out for this mission.
“It’s either me or no one,” I said. “And we need any proof he can give us. We’d better get moving, right? We don’t know when your dad might pass on a warning.”
Rose nodded. We’d used her dad’s phone to send a couple of messages to Frankford, confirming he was in Seattle at the moment, not on his country estate a couple hours outside the city. Rose figured he was more likely to keep any sensitive information in his primary estate anyway.
But without any warning, the house shouldn’t be that carefully guarded. He had no reason to expect us to target him. He didn’t even know I’d found those messages between him and Rose’s dad, let alone that Mr. Hallowell had pointed us straight at him.
And to distract the enforcers even more, we were going to send a decoy. Naomi and Greg came over from the old minivan they’d managed to find for our purposes. Except it didn’t look like a minivan anymore—in the time while Rose had been casting her illusion on me, Naomi had magicked the minivan to look like a taxi. We were parked on the side of a country road about halfway between the city and Frankford’s estate.