by L. C. Davis
“Last I checked, you were an adult. I don’t see why I have to tell either of them anything.”
“You’d be surprised just how refreshing that opinion is.” I frowned. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“I was on a walk and I saw the lights on. I also saw Julia at the market, so I figured it was either you or a burglar.”
“A burglar would probably have done less damage,” I sighed, looking around the scattered boxes. “I’m on my second comb through and still no sign of the journal.”
“Yeah, if it ever was down here, I doubt it still is.”
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t hear this from me, but Locke would rather you not get your hands on that thing. He was sniffing around, trying to find out if I knew where it was, so I doubt you’re going to find anything he couldn’t.”
“Shit. What did he say to you, exactly?”
“Just the usual cryptic bullshit. Where is he, anyway?”
“He’s out of town.”
“Ah,” he said knowingly. “Hence, the mouse playing.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about being the mouse in this scenario, but I nodded and moved to stand. Daniel offered a hand to help me up and I noticed his skin was cold to the touch again. “How long ago did Locke approach you about the journal?”
“A few days, why?”
“That’s enough time for him to do a lot of looking,” I muttered. “Are you in a brave mood, Daniel?”
“Brave enough to confront a burglar, but I’m not sure I’m ever brave enough to go through Locke’s shit, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I grinned. “Come on, you know the layout better than I do.”
He grumbled, climbing the stairs. “Don’t remind me.”
“Besides, if you’re an accomplice, you can’t tell on me.”
“I’m not an accomplice, I’m just keeping an eye on you while he’s gone. No offense, but you cause as much chaos as he does.”
“Fair enough,” I said, following him out of the house and up the road.
“Did Locke say why he was leaving?”
“He’s going to pick up number seven out of Seven.”
“Seriously? Who?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. As far as I knew this morning, there were only Nick and…” I trailed off, remembering I was walking alongside Number Two. “You know. You.”
“Right. It’s been so long since I agreed to it, I kind of forgot. Guess I was hoping Locke had, too.”
“Yeah, archaic virgin sacrifices have a way of sneaking up on you,” I said flatly. “Keep your schedule open, though, I might need you to sex me at any moment for the good of all mankind.”
He choked out a laugh. “You and Nick still haven’t…?”
“Nope,” I said, glancing to make sure the lights in the post office were out. It would be bad enough if Nick figured out I’d lied about being busy with lessons, let alone if he saw me wandering around town with Daniel. Once we made it to the forest, I breathed a little easier even though I probably shouldn’t have. “At this rate, I’m not entirely sure Nick will even want to be first in line.”
“He’s just trying to give you space.”
“He’s a werewolf. Space isn’t something they do.”
Daniel winced. “Yeah, that might actually be my fault. I was in an advice-giving mood a while ago when he came to me.”
“It doesn’t matter. Our issues run deeper than that. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be digging through mountains of Mrs. Marrin’s inherited horde trying to get answers when I could just get them from him.”
“If it makes you feel better, I’ve known Nick all his life and I still don’t have answers for half the shit he does.”
I thought about it for a second. “You know, it really doesn’t.”
Daniel gave me a sympathetic smile and looked up warily at the Victorian. “Somehow, it’s even creepier when the demon’s gone.”
“Yeah, I still haven’t gotten used to it,” I said, surprised when Daniel took out a key and unlocked the front door. “So, you went from dating Dennis to holding onto Locke’s spare key in a week and they call me the Whore of Babylon.”
He rolled his eyes, walking inside to turn on the hall light. Locke’s obsession with conserving energy lent a small bit of credibility to his claim to want to preserve the world from destruction, at least. “What are the chances this place is magically boobytrapped?”
“It is, but Locke had me put up most of them so you’ll be fine. Unless you try to sneak around in my room,” I teased, motioning for him to follow me up the stairs.
When we reached the upstairs hallway, Daniel cast a nervous glance at the empty wall. “You okay?”
“Yeah, fine,” he said, going to stand in front of Locke’s door. His hand hovered above the doorknob.
“I’ll go first,” I said, opening the door. I winced in anticipation, but when no flaming arrows shot out at me, I ventured a step inside and turned on the lights. I’d never actually been in Locke’s room and I found myself surprised by how normal it was. Other than the four-post bed and the draped silk covers, the decor was fairly understated. He had a few large wooden chests stacked on top of one another and a huge bookshelf filled with his personal collection.
“Okay, so where do we start?” asked Daniel, flopping down on the edge of the bed. He looked a bit too comfortable there, but I tried to push the image of him fucking Locke out of my head when it spurred a strange tinge of something that wasn’t quite jealousy but was much too close for my comfort.
“It’s Locke, so if he does have the journal, there’s a damn good chance he’s hiding it in plain sight,” I said, kneeling down in front of the bookshelf. I scanned each shelf carefully.
“Find anything?” Daniel asked, yawning.
“No, but I’m pretty sure this is the world’s largest collection of books on sex magick.”
“Can’t say I’m surprised. He is an incubus.”
I blinked. “A what?”
“You didn’t know?”
“You did?”
“He’s pretty open about it.”
“Not with me.”
“Are you mad?” he asked, “Because you seem kind of mad.”
I was, now that he mentioned it. I just didn’t know why. “No,” I lied with a dry laugh. “Of course not. I mean, I guess I just thought he’d tell me something like that since I’m the one who sold my soul to him, but I guess not,” I said, shoving a few books back onto the shelf.
“You mean you guys haven’t...you know? At all?”
“No! Of course not. I’m dating Nick.”
“Sorry, didn’t mean anything by it,” he said, holding up his hands. “It’s just, you weren’t always exclusive with Nick. You live together and I know Locke needs to feed on sex, so I just assumed…”
“We haven’t. He’s never come onto me or anything. Not that I’d do anything if he tried. I guess I’m just not his type.”
Why the hell did that bother me?
Daniel stood, wandering over to me. “You wanna talk about it…?”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I said with a shrug. I moved to stand and he offered a hand to help me up. “Thanks.”
“You know, he does care about you. The way he talks about you, it’s… well, at first, I thought he was just using you. Using all of us, but for what it’s worth, I think he actually does care what happens to you. You especially.”
I smiled halfway. “That’s sweet, but it’s ridiculous to even care. I mean, it’s weird to care, right?”
He nodded reluctantly. “It’s kind of weird, but not much about this situation is normal. And if I’ve learned anything, it’s that what you feel doesn’t always make sense. Doesn’t mean you feel it any less.”
“No,” I agreed, looking around the room. “Other than all the black magick books, this isn’t as nefarious as I thought it’d be.”
“Hang on,” he said, moving over to the trunk. To my surpr
ise, the latch opened easily.
“What’s in there?” I asked warily.
“Sex toys,” he said, digging around.
“Uh…” When I leaned over his shoulder to take a peek, I realized he wasn’t joking. From handcuffs to packaged probes and lubes of every variety, it was quite literally a sex box. “What the fuck?”
Daniel looked back at me, cocking an eyebrow. “Chill. God, you really are a little Puritan, aren’t you?”
“Don’t touch anything,” I hissed.
“I’m a vet, I touch worse things than clean silicone on a daily basis,” he said, rummaging through the chest until he pulled out what looked like a long piece of metal. “There we go.”
“What is that?”
“A key,” he said flatly.
“Is that supposed to be a euphemism for something?”
“Yeah, it’s code for a piece of metal that opens shit.” He closed the lid on the box and set it aside, fitting the key into the chest underneath it.
“How’d you know that was in there?”
“I saw it the other day while I was looking for the cuffs and judging from the way you reacted, this is the best place to hide stuff from you.”
I grimaced. I could have done without that detail about Locke’s sex life, but Daniel had a point. I watched as he turned the key in the lock and I heard a click, but even after the padlock opened, the lid of the chest wouldn’t budge. “It’s stuck.”
I doubted there was a box sturdy enough to hold up against Daniel without magic. “It’s probably enchanted,” I said, reaching out to feel for an energy field around the chest. Sure enough, the wood was humming with magick. “Whatever’s in there, Locke wants it to stay in there.”
“Maybe it should.”
I gave him a look and knelt down. “This had better not be full of dildos,” I muttered, hovering my hands over the chest. I closed my eyes and focused on siphoning the energy from the box into my fingertips like Locke had taught me.
“What are you doing?”
“Most keep-out spells work the same way,” I explained, keeping my eyes shut. “There’s usually a password you have to put in, like logging onto a computer after it’s gone into sleep mode.”
“Huh.”
A second later, I felt a surge of energy and stepped back as hazy green smoke rose up from the box. A stream of smoke broke off and formed a question mark, while the rest of the smoke formed hazy letters that circled the punctuation in the air.
“Holy shit,” Daniel breathed. “That’s cool.”
I laughed. “It’s unnecessary, but Locke is nothing if not flashy.” I reached out to test the illusion, dragging my finger over one of the letters. It moved along underneath my fingertip like a touchscreen until it slipped into place and disappeared in a poof of smoke. “Guess whatever the password is, it doesn’t start with ‘Z.’”
“Try Adam.”
I looked at Daniel, then back at the smoke. “Okay,” I said curiously, drawing the ‘A’ out from the circling letters. It stuck. So did the ‘D’, another ‘A’…”Holy shit,” I muttered as the question mark and the other letters disappeared in a plume of green smoke. The chest creaked and the lid popped open. “Who’s Adam?”
“An angel, or so Locke says. I think they were in love.” He hesitated. “At least, I think Locke loved Adam.”
“A demon and an angel,” I murmured, pulling back the lid of the chest. “He’s always pushing boundaries, isn’t he?”
“What’s in there?”
I stared into the darkness, holding my phone over the chest for light. Inside sat a single book, about six inches thick and bound in dark green leather. There was a golden sigil etched on the front, but I didn’t recognize it. There was a long horizontal bar tipped with crosses on either side, with another cross bisecting the top of the line and curving through it like a scripted lowercase ‘h.’ The symbol itself was flowing, smooth and seductive and I didn’t even realize I had reached for the book until my fingertips brushed the smooth leather. A wisp of a breath escaped me as I caressed the leather, tracing every curve of the binding, every texture of the sigil engraved in it.
“Holden?”
The way Daniel said my name made me think it wasn’t the first time he’d called it. I looked up into his worried eyes. “Sorry. What?”
“What’s that?” he asked, eyeing the book in my hands. “Did you find the journal?”
I hesitated, carrying it over to the bed. “I don’t think so,” I said, folding a leg underneath me as I opened the cover. The first few pages were blank, and the first page with writing on it was filled with elegant script connected by a long bar at the top. I flipped to a later page and realized it was filled with the same tightly compact script, all handwritten. “This is incredible.”
“What language is that?” Daniel asked, looking over my shoulder.
“Sanskrit. It’s old, a lot of Hindu and Buddhist texts are written in it.”
“Locke’s a demon, isn’t Latin more his schtick?”
I shrugged. “He’s a polyglot, I guess. God knows he has enough time on his hands.”
“Can you read it?”
“Not much,” I admitted, leafing through the gilded pages. “Just a few words here and there. Demon comes up a lot.”
“Great,” Daniel said, looking around the room like some might be lurking in the shadows. “That’s all there was in the chest?”
“You can look again,” I offered, poring over the elegant script. “This must have taken forever to write. It’s perfect.”
“So we found Locke’s diary instead of the Marrin family scrapbook,” he said, reaching into the chest. I heard his hands running along the bottom of the chest, probably feeling for hidden compartments.
“Looks like it.” The words on the page I was looking at began to blur. I blinked and the hallucination stopped. “I wonder why he’d go to such lengths to hide something I can’t even read.”
“Maybe he wasn’t hiding it from you.”
“Fair enough,” I sighed, closing the book once I realized that staring at the pages was just going to strain my eyes. “I don’t know what I even thought I’d find.”
“Hey, I get it,” Daniel said, closing the lid of the chest to sit on it. “Sometimes you get so tired of being kept out of the loop, you feel like you have to do whatever you can to get answers.”
“I sense a but coming,” I said dryly.
“But,” he said with a lopsided grin, “you need to remember that you might not always like the answers you find.”
I studied him carefully. “You didn’t come here to help me look for the journal, did you? You came hoping I wouldn’t find it.”
His face fell. “Holden…”
“It’s alright, I’m not mad. I just want to know why. Everyone treats me like I’m some ticking time bomb,” I said with a dry laugh. “First Nick and Locke, now you. So, what is it? What is Locke so afraid of me finding in that journal?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“You don’t know, but you trust his judgment.”
“I wouldn’t say I trust him…”
“But you trust him more than you trust me.”
He hesitated. “It’s nothing personal, Holden. Trust isn’t something that comes easy for me, not after Dennis.”
“But you trust Locke, of all people.”
“I need Locke.” The urgency in his voice surprised me. “He brought me back.”
“He’s the reason you’re dead, Daniel! At the very least, he ruined your life.”
“My life was already ruined and I did that all by myself,” he muttered. “I don’t like what I am, but I know what I’d be if it wasn’t for him. I’m not saying I love him or anything. God, I hate him too much to ever feel anything like that, but...he needs me, and these days, when everything else that used to bring me purpose or enjoyment just leaves me feeling flat, that matters. I need to be useful to him and as long as he keeps his promise, to keep me from becoming a mo
nster and to protect the people I care about, I will be.”
“You mean Nick,” I murmured. “You came back so you could protect Nick.”
He watched me and seemed unsure of whether it was safe to answer. “Yeah,” he said after a few seconds. “Nick, Julia, you.”
I blinked. “Me?”
“Don’t look so surprised,” he said, rolling his eyes. “You’re still a royal pain in my ass, but I’m kind of attached.”
I smiled a little. “Coming from you, that means a lot.” Putting the book aside, I flopped back on the bed and blew a puff of air through my lips. “Ever wish you could just rewind everything to a point where you hadn’t fucked things up quite as badly?”
“That’d be pretty far back for me, but yeah,” he said, growing sullen.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I murmured. “Before Remiel showed up, I deluded myself into thinking if I could just go back to before I came here, before I met Locke, that I could change things, but now I know better. It wouldn’t matter if I could go all the way back to the night of that fire, it wouldn’t change anything.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because as shitty as the choices I’ve made are, there were never any good ones to make, not really. It all started before I was even born, and it’s all been laid out for me like a map. Point A and point B remain the same, whether I get from one to the other in a straight line or take the scenic route.”
“What would you change, then?” he asked quietly.
“Your part in it,” I admitted, turning my head to look at him. “I’d go back to the night of the equinox festival and I’d let you go without me. Who knows? Maybe Brent was right. Maybe if he’d gotten me instead of you, none of this shit would have happened. Michael and Lucifer wouldn’t have their weapon to fight over, at least.”
Daniel frowned. “You don’t know that, Holden. If it were as simple as you dying, Remiel would have killed you. So would Locke, for that matter.” He hesitated. “You’re not...thinking about that, are you?”
“No,” I said, sitting up. “No, of course not. I mean, for one thing, I’d never do that to Nick.”
His frown deepened. “I hope that’s not the only reason.”