by Eva Chase
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and for once I thought she really meant it. “He’ll be dealt with. We’ll do what we can about the portal—I swear it.” Her gaze rose to Gabriel. “With the magicking on those batons, Lady Hallowell won’t be able to do very much for an hour or so. She should be given space to recover. Do you need help bringing her to your rooms?”
“No,” Gabriel said evenly, but there was a tautness to his voice that told me he was furious under the calm front he was presenting. “I can manage.”
He slid his other arm under my knees and scooped me up, tipping me against his chest with my head on his shoulder. I leaned into him as well as I could in an effort to make myself easy cargo.
“As soon as the effects have worn off, reach out to us,” Lady Northcott said to me. “We’ll talk.”
Heat flooded my face at the thought of all those officials watching me be carried out of the room like a helpless child, but I was just glad when the door closed behind us.
Talk. It was all talk. Were they even going to do anything about the portal other than that? But I couldn’t express any of that to Gabriel. I just nestled closer, my forehead coming to rest on the side of his neck. He bowed his head as he marched down the hall.
“I’ve got you,” he said. “They’re not touching you again. Unless…” He hesitated at the stairs. “If you want me to ask them to send a medic…?”
I managed to rouse my tongue enough to form one word. “No.”
His embrace around me tightened. He shouldered aside the door and headed down to the floor below.
The door to our office was open. As Gabriel strode past it to the room with the cots, Kyler and Damon emerged. I guessed Seth and Jin had left to see about the cage like Seth had suggested.
“What happened?” Damon asked, bursting in after us. Anger already burned in his eyes as he watched Gabriel lay me down on the cot.
“One of the enforcers stunned her with his baton,” Gabriel said. “Lady Northcott said it’ll take about an hour before she can move normally again.”
“Fucking hell. The bastards.” Damon dropped down beside me, clasping my hand. The heat of his touch coursed through me. My fingers trembled and closed around his, just slightly. A little more sensation, a little more control, seeping back in.
“What can we do?” Ky asked, crouching at my other side and glancing up at Gabriel.
“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “It sounded like it’ll just wear off on its own. I don’t think there’s much we can do.”
He didn’t move, though. None of them wanted to leave me. I squeezed Damon’s fingers harder. My tongue formed another word that only required the slightest movement of my lips: “Stay.”
“Of course, angel,” Damon said. “Whatever you need.”
“What even happened?” Ky stroked his hand over my hair. “I thought she was down with the witches from the faction. Where did an enforcer come from?”
“One of the witches down there thinks the other demons will break through the portal soon,” Gabriel said. “Rose believes her. She went to tell all those Assembly people that we need to shut down the portal, destroy it, but all they did was argue, as usual. The enforcer got pissed off that we hadn’t gotten an invitation before coming in.”
“Assholes,” Damon muttered. “Are you sure we can’t just leave them all to be demon food?”
I made a noise of protest, and his expression softened. He kissed the back of my hand, his eyes tender when they met mine. “You know I don’t really mean that. I mean, I might like the idea, but I know that’s not what we’re doing.”
Ky leaned in to brush his lips against my cheek and pushed back onto his feet. “I’ll see if I can find out what’s going on. I’ve read a fair bit about the portal in the records. If we can convince them to act right away, I should be able to help strategize. Unless you want us all to stay, Rose.”
“No,” I said, clearer now. “Do… what you can.”
He nodded briskly, his mouth twisting at my halting voice, and headed out. He tugged the door shut behind him to protect me from passing glances.
Damon eased me over and climbed onto the cot beside me, pulling me flush against him from chin to feet. “Is this okay, angel?”
“Good,” I murmured. My nerves were tingling again, the numbness seeping away. I managed to shift my arm to ease it around his back before the muscles released again. “Better.” My body tipped a little farther into his, my core coming to rest against his groin, and a flare of a different sensation shot through me. Hunger. Desire. It burned away some of that horrible helpless feeling.
I wasn’t completely helpless. I could ask for what I wanted, and trust the guys with me to offer nothing less.
My jaw clenched up for a second before I worked the next words out. “More. It helps.”
Damon tipped his head to meet my eyes, so close his nose grazed mine. I wet my lips, and my fingers traced gentle lines across his back. “What kind of more are you asking for?” he said, his voice gone husky.
I could shift my hips just enough to press against his groin, where he was already hardening. “Rose,” Damon murmured.
His lips found mine. He kissed me with more care than usual, as if he were afraid he might break me if he gave his hunger free rein. I found that was exactly what I needed. The warmth of his mouth washed over my skin, and the numbness ebbed even more. His hand eased up under my shirt, and I offered an encouraging noise.
Another hand came to rest on my hip. “How much more do you need?” Gabriel asked, so low the words sent an eager shiver through me.
“Yes, please,” I said, and he chuckled.
He lowered himself onto the cot behind me, just fitting onto the edge. Damon shot him a brief look, his eyelids hooded, but then something in him seemed to relax.
“Our consort,” he said, still watching Gabriel’s expression. There was a note of challenge in his tone, but only faintly.
“Our consort,” Gabriel agreed steadily. “To cherish and protect. Together.”
The corner of Damon’s mouth quirked upward. “We’ve always been better together, haven’t we?”
He dipped his head to kiss a path down my neck. Gabriel ran his hand over my thighs. Enveloped by their bodies, mine was flooded with heat of the best kind. If this was the fastest way through the effects of the baton, at least I could enjoy it while it lasted.
For all I knew, this might be the last moment we had before the end.
Chapter Twenty
Kyler
When I made it to the meeting room, the Northcotts were already leaving, other officials trickling out behind them. My feet jarred on the linoleum floor.
“Wait,” I said. “Have you come up with a plan for closing the portal already?”
Justin Brimsey, who’d just emerged from the room, crossed his arms over his burly chest. “I don’t think that matter should be your concern.”
“Of course it’s my concern,” I said. “That thing is coming this way, isn’t it? The other demons might too, if they all get out.”
A middle-aged woman with short fawn-brown hair came to a stop in the hall. “We can’t worry about the portal right now,” she said. “Believe me, we’re tackling this in the best way we know how.”
“Which is what?” I demanded. “I’m sorry, but you don’t have the best track record when it comes to handling problems in a way that actually gets them solved.”
“And you think you know better?” Brimsey asked with arched eyebrows.
I raised my chin. “Maybe I do. I’ve spent the last month going over those records from the Frankfords. I’ve got to know them better than anyone here does. I don’t think it’d necessarily be that difficult to close off the portal, based on the comments about how it was opened in the first—”
“Which will be wonderful, when we’re in a position to do that,” the woman I didn’t know said. “But we’re not. So leave it.”
“Why the hell not?” I asked. “It wouldn’t even have
to take that much manpower. I can think of a couple ways—”
Lady Northcott held up her hand. “I know you’re Lady Hallowell’s consort, and I respect that, but you need to respect our position here too. We know details beyond those records. Do you think we want a catastrophe any more than you do?”
“Of course not,” I said. “But ignoring this doesn’t make any sense. When you look at the facts—”
Brimsey sighed and meandered off in the other direction as if the argument was boring him. I bristled, but at the same time I took in the expressions on the faces of the officials still facing me. Defensive, resistant. Just like I was feeling.
Well, how did they expect me to act when they were ignoring all the research I’d done, all the knowledge I could share, just out of hand?
That thought drew me up short. It was hard not to think of Jin just an hour ago, laying into us for getting stuck in the same old patterns. Telling us to try new angles, step outside what was comfortable.
What if the point here wasn’t all the things I did know that they were dismissing, but the things I didn’t know? Because, if I was being honest, there were probably an awful lot of the latter. This wasn’t my world, no matter how much research material I’d gotten my hands on. I’d only been a part of it, and only in a small way, for a few months.
I took a deep breath and ignored the balking sensation in my chest. I was supposed to be the guy with the answers, the guy the others could count on to know or find the key info that they needed. But going all know-it-all with the Assembly hadn’t gotten me anywhere in the last few days. I could admit the gaps in my knowledge too, couldn’t I?
“I’m sorry,” I said, slower and more evenly than before. “I rushed in, and I don’t have the full picture. It was wrong for me to act as if I did. There’s obviously a lot I don’t understand about the situation. But I want to understand—I want to be in a position to help later if I can. Is there time for someone to explain to me what the issues with closing the portal are?”
“So you can shoot them all down the second you get the gist of them?” Lady Northcott said skeptically.
My face flushed. That was sort of what I’d already been doing. “I swear I’ll listen with an open mind. And mouth zipped.” I drew my thumb across my lips.
Mr. Northcott’s mouth twitched into something that was almost a smile. He glanced at the woman who’d spoken up earlier. “What do you say, Lady Paulson? Did you have any urgent business on your side of things?”
“No,” the woman said, but with a certain amount of hesitation. The way she looked at me was skeptical too.
“Please,” I said. “All I want to do is help, however I can. I was coming at it badly. But I can’t do anything at all if I don’t have all the necessary context. And if you know more about the portal than is in those records… I’m kind of dying to understand this whole situation better, to be honest.”
Lady Paulson’s jaw worked. “All right,” she said, not sounding all that happy with her decision. “Come on. I want to be in my office if any new reports arrive.”
With that underwhelming welcome, I couldn’t say I was all that enthusiastic about the short hike across the building and down to a little office about the same size as the one I’d spent most of the last few days working in. Inside, maps, a large one of the state and several smaller ones with more detail of specific counties, hung on the wall beside a neatly organized desk. A broad whiteboard gleamed on the far wall, the lingering scent of the markers making my nose twitch.
Lady Paulson strode right up to the desk and grabbed a folder off the top of a pile. “You want to understand?” she said. “It’s all here. People I work with have been out in the field observing this creature and the gateway it emerged through from the first moment we knew about the Cliff. Testing them with magic. Collecting every observation they could possibly make.”
“And?” I said, and caught myself before I could point out all the things I already knew. “What have you seen that makes you think the rest of the demons aren’t a threat?”
“Oh, they are,” Paulson said. “They’re just not as great a threat as what will happen if we manage to close the portal while the demon already out is still on the loose.”
I blinked at her. “Okay. I think you’re going to have to lay that out for me step by step.”
She sighed. “You haven’t been close to this thing, have you? What has your consort told you about the impression it gives her?”
Rose’s comments from the few times she’d encountered the demon came back to me easily. “It feels unnatural. Like there’s something just wrong about it, some kind of dissonance in the energy it gives off. Just being near it makes her queasy.”
Paulson nodded. “We don’t understand very much about the realm these creatures come from, but it’s clearly not one that can exist in harmony with our own. The witches who’ve gone out to study the portal and the Cliff around it, as well as those who’ve been tracking the creature that escaped, have experimented with various sorts of magic and tested the destruction it leaves behind. None of our innate energy has the effect we’d expect.”
“That’s why Rose has been so important to the efforts to stop it,” I said. This was all information I already knew, but I reined in my impatience. “Because she has a little of the demon-type energy in her magic.”
“Yes. But the other consequence…” Paulson paused and contemplated me. “With all the reading you’ve done, what do you think would happen if we managed to kill this creature?”
What kind of question was that? “Well, I guess you’d… bury it somewhere?” I said. “Or burn the body? And then we’d be done with it.”
She gave me a crooked smile. “That would work if the demon were a creature of this realm. But as Lady Hallowell has noted, it doesn’t correspond with this world at all. The effects we would expect from an ordinary beast don’t apply.”
“Which means…?”
“One of the initial attempts to stop the demon resulted in a small fragment of its… well, let’s just say skin… being sliced off. The witch who managed that, it immediately killed.” Paulson gave me a pointed look as if to say I shouldn’t try the same myself and then opened up the folder to a photograph. A ragged bit of dark gray material with a reddish glow around the edges lay on a white surface.
“Dead flesh,” she went on. “As it were. But it would not burn away and it showed no signs of rotting. What it did do is deteriorate any surface it was placed on for more than a few minutes. It seared holes in that table. We couldn’t find any material of this world that could consistently contain it.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. If a tiny piece of the demon did that, then what effect would an entire immense corpse have? “What did you do with it?” I asked.
“We ran all the experiments we could, moving it often, and then when we’d exhausted the possibilities we could think of and didn’t want to see any more equipment damaged, we tossed it back through the portal.” She closed the folder and glanced up at me. “Which is what we need to do with that demon, alive or dead, once we manage to contain it.”
“And if we close up the portal while it’s still here, then we’re stuck with it—and whatever ways it’ll keep destroying this world even if it’s dead.”
“Yes.” Her lips formed a tight smile. “So you see, our primary focus has to be getting the one demon back to its proper home as quickly as possible. Only then can we focus on sealing its gateway into this world.”
The explanation made sense. I hadn’t seen any hint of this possibility in the Frankfords’ records—but then, how could they have known? They’d never let any of the demons through to see what effect they might have on this world.
I swallowed my nausea. “I’m sorry I was so pushy before. If you’d told us—told Rose—”
Paulson lowered her head. “It isn’t information the higher officials want spread through the entire witching community. That would cause even more panic. We couldn’t di
scuss it openly in front of everyone at that meeting. But—maybe I should have made more of an effort to speak with Lady Hallowell about it, to take her aside. I was startled when she burst in, and, well…”
“You don’t think all that highly of her or us,” I finished for her, without much rancor. “We’ve noticed that’s the general attitude. It’s kind of hard to miss.”
“You do want to contribute, though, don’t you?” She peered at me curiously. “You had no idea magic even existed until recently, from what I understand? Lady Hallowell has said she didn’t reveal that secret until shortly before your consorting.”
“That’s true,” I said. “But I didn’t have to see that much to believe in it. It’s hard to deny something that’s happening right in front of you. Honestly, all I want is to learn as much as I can so that I can really contribute. I’m pretty good at putting pieces together and finding possible answers… if I have all the pieces to start with.”
“And you have had access to the Frankfords’ files for weeks longer than we have.” Paulson hesitated, and then said, “You’ve requested access to the full Assembly server. There are some sections that must stay secure—I don’t have authority over them in the first place. But I can’t see any reason you shouldn’t be able to look through our general records and historical archives, in case that gives you a better grounding, more context for what you’ve read already.”
My heart lifted. “Really? That would be amazing. Now?”
A warmer smile touched her face at my enthusiasm. “I can set you up. But first—can you swear that any insights you gain, you’ll share with the Assembly rather than the bunch of you running off on your own?”
Her hand twitched as she spoke, and the air vibrated around us. I had the sense that my answer was going to be binding in a literal way. But that was all right. She’d trusted me—I could return that favor.
“I swear I’ll consult with Assembly officials before we take any action,” I said.
“All right. Then let’s get you started.”