by Eva Chase
I didn’t wait to see if he’d agree. The appeal to being here for Rose should do the trick. I loped down the hall and up the stairs to the higher offices.
Lady and Mr. Northcott were both on their respective phones at opposite ends of their office, talking in strained voices. I didn’t see any sign of the meeting the lesser officials seemed to have assumed was happening. I might have stayed put to wait for their attention, but the secretary hustled me out with a glare and a shove of magic when I hesitated.
“Leave them be,” she said. “They’re trying to save us all.”
So am I, I thought, but I bit back the words.
Gwen Remington swept past me in the hall. “Lady Remington,” I called after her, but before I could make any sort of appeal, she dismissed me with a jerk of her hand. The lock to her office thudded into place the second the door had closed behind her.
I hurried farther down, peering past doors left open into empty meeting rooms and offices. Up ahead, another door burst open with a squeal of its hinges, and Justin Brimsey stalked out.
“If it wasn’t for that, we wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with,” he snapped at whoever he’d been arguing with. He shoved the door shut. His expression hardened when he saw me.
“I don’t have time for this,” he said, moving to march past me. His dislike for me—for all Rose’s consorts, I was pretty sure—simmered closer to the surface than I’d ever seen it before.
Maybe that abhorrence should have made me falter. But at the same time I remembered who this guy was: the head of the Unsparked Relations division. The person who made the final call when it came to any clash between witching and unsparked interests.
A demon his community had unleashed was currently tearing apart one of the biggest cities on this side of the country. Maybe I couldn’t blame him for being abrupt. But he might also be the person in the best position to get something done to save this city.
“Mr. Brimsey,” I said, moving to intercept him. “We’ve got to get a plan together, fast. Someone has to step up and let everyone know how we’re dealing with this.”
He stopped, his glare nearly burning a hole in my forehead. “And do you think that person will be you?” he said with a disgusted curl of his lip. “Let us witching folk deal with our witching business.”
My hackles rose, but at the same time a hot flush of shame washed over me. I was trying to take the lead, wasn’t I? They were all scrambling to find a solution in their own way, these people who’d never have looked at me twice until I’d shown up at Rose’s side. Why should they look to me for real guidance?
Or at least, for some kind of leader. There were other things I could offer, if I let myself.
Brimsey had started to brush past me. “Wait!” I said, grabbing his arm as carefully as I could. “Rose is witching folk. Rose can get things done.”
His eyes narrowed. “Your consort seems to prefer to do whatever she pleases without much concern for what the rest of us think is the best course.”
I didn’t think that was a fair assessment, but this didn’t feel like the right time to point that out.
“You have ideas the others aren’t listening to?” I asked, tipping my head toward the room he’d come out of. “I want to hear them. I’ll bring them to Rose. Work with us, and you can be calling the shots. Take the lead and we’ll stand behind you. Just give us a chance. All we want is to see that demon gone and the city still standing.”
Brimsey hesitated, still eyeing me. “Why should I think calling the shots with you is going to do me any good?”
I gave him a crooked smile. “We’re running out of time and running out of options. You’ve got an idea we haven’t tried yet? I can’t promise Rose will listen to you, but she’ll listen to me. And you know how much she’s capable of.”
He did. I could see him fighting with himself between the hope that I might be able to deliver what I was offering and his distrust of me and what my presence here at all meant to his ideas about witching kind. After a moment, his shoulders eased down.
“Come here,” he said brusquely. “I’ll show you what we need.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Rose
I hadn’t found any of the major officials yet when Gabriel came upon me in one of the halls. His gaze took in the dirt and the smears of blood on my clothes in one swift sweep, and then he was tugging me to him, his arms tight around me, his head bent next to mine.
“Sprout,” he said hoarsely, as if we were ten years old again, and by the Spark how much I wished we could go back to that time when the biggest problem we’d encountered was how to climb to the top of some tree Damon was set on scaling.
I hugged Gabriel back, giving myself permission to stop racing around and bury my face in the mossy-sweet scent of his shirt for a moment. I felt rather than saw his head rise again.
“Where’s Seth?” he asked.
“Wounded but awake now,” Jin said before I had to. “The witch medics are looking after him.”
“The demon is already in the city,” I said. “I can’t— I need to find the Northcotts, or someone—we have to come up with some other way to push it back…”
Gabriel eased away from me and looked into my eyes, his own bright blue ones more serious than usual. “I might be able to help with that. But I don’t think you’re going to be happy about this strategy.”
I knit my brow as I stared back at him. “Why? What do you mean?”
He glanced at the floor and back up again. “From the moment we heard your force had retreated, I’ve been trying to talk to the officials about next steps. I couldn’t get anyone to speak with me except Brimsey—and I had to convince him that we’d follow his lead if we agreed with his route. He has an idea, one we could probably convince the rest of the Assembly of—if you support him and help make it work.”
Justin Brimsey had agreed to ally himself with one of my unsparked consorts? I supposed that wasn’t the strangest thing that had happened in the last week, or even the last twenty-four hours. “What is the idea? Why do you think I won’t like it?”
Gabriel grimaced. “He thinks we need to involve the witches who are still recovering from the way the faction used them. I know you’ve wanted to protect them and keep them out of this conflict as much as possible… but he made a pretty compelling case. And nothing we’ve tried without them has worked so far.”
My stomach twisted, but what he’d said was true, and really, if we didn’t step up then the recovering witches would be facing the demon in even more dire circumstances before the night was over.
I set my jaw. “Okay. I’ll rally them as well as I can to tackle the demon with us. I don’t know if that’s going to be enough power even then, though. We need a strategy for how we use that power, or…”
I trailed off at Gabriel’s expression. He looked as if the words he needed to say left a horrid aftertaste in his mouth.
“Brimsey has a strategy,” he said. “And it’s not for those witches to just fight alongside us. He thinks—and some of the accounts in the Frankfords’ files do seem to support the idea—that the demon will be particularly interested in feeding off the energy of the witches it’s familiar with. That the monsters have developed a ‘taste’ for those witches’ specific magical ‘flavor.’ He wants to make a few adjustments to Seth’s cage, and then we use them as bait. They draw it in and then slip away once it’s trapped.”
A jolt of revulsion rushed through me. It’d been bad enough thinking about asking Thalia and her charges to go up against the creatures that had tormented them. To encourage them to let the fiend feed off them again, to put them in an even more vulnerable position than they’d been before when at least the barriers on the portal had kept the demons distant…
But at the same time this plan made a sick kind of sense.
“What do the other officials think about the situation?” I asked. “Has anyone come up with another option?”
“Not as far as I can tell,” Gabr
iel said. “They all appear to be flailing with panic. Brimsey thinks our best chance of getting some kind of action pulled together is if you can convince the witches to participate and then join him presenting the proposal to the Northcotts and the others. As soon as possible.”
Of course. I didn’t need reminding of the urgency of the situation. I exhaled, a prickling ache filling my lungs.
I hadn’t come up with any better plan on our drive here. Every moment we delayed, more people were dying out there. I didn’t think we were going to get through the night without every one of us making sacrifices—even those who’d already given up too much.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go talk to them. Thank you for going to Brimsey—for working something out for when I got here.”
“Is there anything else we can do right now?” Jin asked.
I hesitated. “Talk to the other guys. Tell them what’s going on. Seth won’t be on his feet for a little while, but it’ll make more of a statement if I come to the meeting with as many of you as possible. And maybe Kyler can find some data to back the idea up even more. Jin, you could at least talk to Seth and see if he has any specific ideas for engineering the cage the way Brimsey is thinking. Someone’s going to have to go out and gather the pieces…”
Logistics the Assembly would worry about once we settled on this course of action.
It would have been a comfort to bring one of my consorts down to the recovering witches’ rooms with me, but there wasn’t much they could contribute there. Those women trusted me. If I was going to make this ask, I had to be brave enough to face them on my own.
Gabriel squeezed my arm one last time, and he and Jin hurried off. I turned back to the stairwell, my heart heavy as I started to put together the pitch I’d need to make.
It’d only been maybe five hours since I’d gone down to the lower floor to help calm the witches who’d been so wrenched by the demons’ approach. Some of them might not even be able to handle coming that close to it. But I guessed we didn’t need all of them participating. As long as some were able to find the strength…
Thalia came out of the lounge room as I crossed the hall. Her face was drawn.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” she said. “If you’re back already, and—a few of the women aren’t doing so well.”
“It’s bad,” I confirmed around the lump in my throat. “I need to talk to all of you. Can you gather everyone—everyone who can manage it—into the lounge?”
She nodded, her mouth tightening more at my tone. As she hustled into the nearest dorm, I went into the lounge room and let myself sink into one of the armchairs. That was where my cousin found me a moment later.
“Rose!” Naomi said, clasping my shoulder, sounding both hopeful and frantic at the same time. “What’s going on? Everyone came charging in—they haven’t wanted to stop to tell me anything—”
I looked up at her. “I’ll be explaining when everyone’s here. I don’t know what’s going to happen tonight. I wouldn’t blame you if you grab Aunt Ginny and Aunt Irene and get out of here.”
Naomi gave a disbelieving laugh. “We wouldn’t consider that for a second. We’re here, and we’re fighting this thing.”
Those words managed to hearten me a little, but it was hard to hold on to that assurance as the recovering witches started to file in through the doorway. I stood up, taking a spot at the front of the room, unable to ignore the halting footsteps, the hunched shoulders. Half of the women here looked as if they’d just been through the same battle I had. I caught myself worrying my lip with my teeth and forced myself still.
Thalia came in with a dip of her head. This was all of them. A dozen witches the Frankfords’ faction had manipulated and abused, some of them for decades.
My hands intertwined in front of me, clenching tight.
“This is going to be hard for me to tell you, and hard for you to hear,” I said. “I’m so sorry about that. I wish we’d never ended up in this horrible position. The one thing I can offer to keep in mind while I explain is that there may be a way you can help, even if it is horrible. And whether you’re able to do that is up to you. No one is going to force anything on you.”
The witches stirred nervously in their seats. “Just tell us,” Eloise said, her face pinched and pale.
I dragged in a breath. “Our most recent attempt to contain the demon failed. It’s pushed into the city now. We don’t know what path it’ll take or how far it’ll go, but right now it’s destroying everything around it, and the sooner we can act, the better.”
A few of the witches turned completely white. Crystal dragged her legs onto the chair to hug her knees. A tremor ran through her skinny body. “I knew it,” she mumbled. “I could feel it.”
“What can we do?” Selena asked, her expression fierce. I wasn’t sure she’d still look that confident when I told them.
“We’re running out of plans,” I said. “But there’s one thing we haven’t tried yet, that both the Assembly and I think could work. I never would have wanted to ask this of you… but we haven’t been able to propel the demon into the trap we’ve made, so we’re wondering if we could lure it. And the one thing we’re sure it would be lured by is your magic.”
Crystal flinched. Even Thalia stiffened. I swallowed thickly and barreled onward. “Like I said, no one would insist you help. We’re just asking. Pleading. If you think you have the strength to stand up to this monster. This time it’d be your choice. You’d be doing it not to give someone else power but to be a part in cutting off this fiend’s freedom. It’ll be dangerous. I wouldn’t pretend it won’t be. But we’ll do everything we can to make sure it’s only a taste of your magic that you lose.”
Someone drew in a ragged breath. Someone else started to cry, softly, with hitching breaths. My throat constricted even more. But Selena raised her ivory-coiffed head and said, “I’ll do it. We’ll take that Spark-forsaken creature down.”
“I’ll help,” Thalia put in. “It’s worth it. We have to stop that thing.”
“What happens if we don’t help?” Eloise said. “If it keeps coming—is it going to come here?”
“We don’t know,” I admitted. “We have no idea what it might do next. But it could make it this far.” If the demon figured out that the witches it’d fed on before were right here for the taking, this might be exactly where it would want to go. But I couldn’t bring myself to say that much.
The witches could put together the pieces on their own, no doubt. A few of them huddled together, talking in hasty tones. Crystal started to rock in her chair.
“It wants us,” she murmured. “It wants us…” Her chin jerked up. “Let it try to have us, then. It’s going to regret that it ever tried to devour us. We’ll laugh when we see it captured.”
The vehemence in her words seemed to spread through the gathering in an instant. Eloise straightened up, tucking her gnarled hands in her lap. “Yes,” she said. “We can bring it to its knees.” And around the room, other faces brightened in agreement.
I’d say my spirits lifted, but a sickening weight still pressed on my gut. This wasn’t the sort of victory I’d wanted. If it would even be a victory in the end. But we had to try.
“I’ll go to the Assembly and let them know you’re ready to join the battle,” I said. “Take the next little while to settle your thoughts and your nerves as well as you can. And if you change your minds—it’s your decision, right through to the end.”
I was just stepping into the hall when a wan man I’d seen at one of the last meetings ducked out of the stairwell. His expression when he caught sight of me was at least as distraught as it was relieved.
“Lady Hallowell,” he said. “The authorities of the Assembly request your presence immediately. The demon… We don’t know what to make of this at all.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Rose
The key officials who’d been involved in addressing the demon problem were all gathered in one of the meeting rooms, ben
t toward a phone someone had set in the middle of the table. A voice crackled from the phone’s speakers as the man who’d fetched me ushered me in.
“It’s past the freeway now, moving southwest in a fairly straight line.”
“Any further casualties?” Lady Northcott asked, her elbows rigid against the table top.
“No, it hasn’t paid any attention to the cars or buildings it’s gone past. It seems pretty intent on getting to wherever it’s going. I’d estimate it’s moving at up to twenty-five, maybe thirty miles an hour. That’s the fastest we’ve ever seen it.”
“And the captives?” Mr. Northcott said. “What’s their status?”
The voice on the other end turned more raw. “Impossible to tell at this distance, especially with night coming in. It definitely isn’t being careful with how it’s holding them, but it seems to have suppressed some of its innate destructive energy. We’re not seeing damage to the vegetation it’s passing by. It may be tamping down on that energy to keep them alive for its purposes. I’ll report more if we can make more out later.”
“Please check in the moment anything changes,” Lady Northcott said.
I came to a stop at the edge of the table as she reached to end the call. Had I heard all that right? My nerves shivered, uncertain of whether to be giddy or quaking.
“That’s one of the enforcers who’s monitoring the demon, isn’t it?” I said. “It’s heading back to the coast—to the Cliff?”
“It appears that way,” Mr. Northcott said, sinking back in his chair. He didn’t look happy about that fact. From the dire expressions around the table, I suspected my second assumption was right as well.
“It’s grabbed some people too.”
Lady Northcott nodded wearily. “After causing a great amount of wreckage and chaos in the west end of the city on the tails of your retreat, the creature caught up four—or maybe five, the reports aren’t completely clear—bystanders and immediately set off in its current direction.”