by Krista Walsh
Once they were out of the house, Allegra turned on the others. “Where do you suggest we all go? Shall we rent a hotel room, or would it be better to head to Zachariel’s hovel? My condo is not an option.”
“Always a team player, Allegra. Thanks for that,” Gabe said, although Zach picked up amusement in his voice. He saw Vera glance between him and the succubus.
Great, he thought, that’s just what we need. They should all be focused on Molly, not on some kind of juvenile romantic drama.
“Fortunately, I have a better option,” Gabe continued.
Vera cast him a look. “Are you sure?”
He shrugged. “Better than finding a way back to Jermaine’s locked room, don’t you think?”
Daphne shuddered. “What did you have in mind?”
“Follow me.” Gabe started toward the back of the house. Vera followed without hesitation, but the others held back.
“Do you mean for us to camp in the backyard?” Allegra asked.
“If you don’t keep up, I might leave you here to do just that,” Gabe said.
Zach couldn’t help scanning the street one last time for any sign of Molly, even though he knew it was pointless. It was time to leave. But being away would mean he wasn’t there to watch over the house. If the demons were torturing the girl — the thought made his rage flare — what would prevent them from grabbing her parents and using them against her?
He reminded himself that Ara was staying behind. Vera would have a direct connection with the dryad. If anything happened, he could come back and fight them off.
Everything would be okay.
He hoped that wasn’t just a stupid wish.
Resigning himself to someone else’s plan, he went after Gabe, leaving Allegra and Daphne to take up the rear.
Once they were all in the backyard, Gabe ran his finger through the air, spilling a shimmering golden light around the edges of a newly formed rift.
Zach’s mind went numb at the sight. His muscles tensed as he took in what appeared to be a living room on the other side, with a couch and two end tables in front of a dark fireplace waiting for them.
“Where is it?” he asked.
“My house,” Gabe said. “It’s outside Boston, but, as you can see, the where hardly matters. We can get back here quickly enough if we need to. Are you coming or not?”
Vera stood by his side, ready to move when he did, but they both waited for one of the others to take the first step.
Finally, Daphne rolled her eyes. “Oh, what’s the big deal? At least it’s somewhere quiet.” She stepped through the rift, then looked around the room. “Nice place.”
Allegra crossed her arms. “Is it clean? I assure you, I will not settle for sitting in a dump.”
“Be quiet, or that’s right where I’ll put you,” Zach growled. He grabbed hold of Allegra’s arm, and her eyes widened as she stared up at him. She tried to wrench away, seeming to look at something over her shoulder, but he tugged her through the rift, leaving her to sputter and smooth out her form-clinging dress once they reached the other side.
The house was spacious and comfortable, simply decorated, and smelled of dog. The reason for the odor was explained by the two panting faces pressed against the screen door leading to the backyard. The beasts barked and paced back and forth by the door, but they didn’t appear anxious about the strangers stepping into their territory. A squat table lamp beside the burgundy-and-cream couch filled the space with an easy warmth.
Zach felt out of place, but at least it was better than the bright lights of the Harris kitchen.
Vera and Gabe followed last, the Gorgon-Fae sealing the rift behind them.
“Welcome to our place,” he said. “Now that we’re here, I guess it’s time I fill you in on the other problem.”
Daphne crossed her arms. “What do you mean, ‘other problem’? I don’t think there’s any more room on my dance card.”
Allegra leaned her hip against the back of the couch. “Unless it in some way leads to the explanation of my dreams, I cannot say that I care.”
“Why are you even here?” Daphne asked, rounding on her. “Please feel free to tell us about your dreams and then go back home and let us do the work, because if I have to listen to one more complaint about how you don’t want to be here, I’m going to smack you.”
Allegra’s eyes flashed gold and her teeth elongated into fangs. The glow of Daphne’s magic rose to cover her hands. Zach stepped between them. The last thing he needed was a fight going down just when they were about to discuss strategy. He didn’t bother saying anything, leaving his size to serve as enough of a barrier that both women backed down.
“What’s this new problem?” he asked Gabe.
Gabe looped his fingers through Vera’s. “This buddy of mine, human but more knowledgeable about our world than most of us probably are, did something incredibly stupid, and now it’s come back to bite him in the ass.” He let out a breath and cupped the back of his neck.
Zach’s eyes narrowed. White heat swirled in the pit of his stomach, the increasingly familiar desire for justice and balance, but he quashed it down. He’d at least wait to hear what the man had to say.
“Two months or so ago, I was working on a case,” Gabe said. “I’m guessing you all remember that snowstorm we had?”
Deep in his core, Zach shivered. The trade college had done little more than provide a roof over his head during those long weeks. It had definitely done nothing to keep him warm.
“To help me solve it, my friend revealed a project he was working on.” Gabe shifted on his feet, dropping his hand to his thigh and tapping a rhythm with the pads of his fingers. “He created a software program that recognized otherworldly energy. It works the same way as thermal imaging, except instead of seeing body temperature, you see…energy.”
Zach’s throat closed as the white-hot anger once again stirred in his center. Not only a human involving himself in the otherworld, but one threatening to expose them? How was it possible that so many of these fools were sharing their secrets with the world? Was it so much to ask that they keep their otherness to themselves, as the treaties demanded of them?
He tried to press his angel brain down, but the heat drifted through his veins like a mist.
“I told him it was a horrible idea,” Gabe said. “I told him to destroy it. He wouldn’t. He’d been attacked by our world too many times and wanted to have a defense in case it happened again. I know I should have pushed harder, but I honestly believed him when he said it was for research purposes only, and that no one else would know.”
“So what has changed?” Allegra asked, her tone dry.
The muscles in Gabe’s jaw bulged as he clenched his teeth. “Someone found out. They hacked their way into his system and stole it, then destroyed his files.”
Daphne dropped into a dining chair and rested her arms on the table. “Who?”
“He hasn’t been able to track them. All he knows is that the source came from somewhere near the coast.”
Zach stiffened and looked to Daphne, who had raised her head and twisted it toward him.
“What is it?” Allegra asked, looking from Daphne to him.
“One more coincidence,” Zach said, the words sour in his mouth.
“That’s where Mayzell Industries purchased their new property,” Daphne explained. “Molly, Zach, orb, book, software. It all has to come back to them.”
“But there has to be more we haven’t put together yet,” Vera said. She crossed her arms and, as though unconsciously, the rest of the group shifted until they formed a circle in front of her. Zach realized his feet had moved with the others’, and he hated that this woman had somehow taken control of the situation. “These demons have clearly been working on this for years. In one way or another they’ve touched all of our lives. There has to be some detail we’re forgetting or not putting into place that would tell us exactly where they are.”
At her words, Zach felt a tingle in t
he back of his mind, sending all of his other thoughts into disarray. It was something that had happened far too often since his angel-demon halves had come together. The tingle grew worse, like a memory within reach but constantly dodging his attempts to grab it. Whatever it was had been completely forgotten until now, but mention of the coast had triggered something.
Something someone had said? No, he didn’t think so. It was something he knew, even if he didn’t know how he knew it.
Flashes of a fight danced through his mind. A blow to his cheek, a black-scaled fist soaring toward his head, Zach dodging out of the way to avoid it. A deep voice that rattled the earth whenever it spoke.
“Lozak,” he said aloud.
“How do you know him?” Vera demanded, and Zach jerked his head toward her at the vehemence in her voice.
“He’s the one who came to fight me,” Zach said. He swallowed his question of why it was that Lozak had still been able to come after Zach when Vera had been in a position to stop him. That would come later. “He’s a middleman, a warrior on par with the slimy salesman who tried to recruit me to whatever Mayzell is planning.”
Vera’s auburn eyebrows rose. “Slimy? That’s the word Molly used to describe one of her captors. She called him Karl.” Zach growled and focused on his breathing as Vera hugged her arms around her middle. “She also said Rega’s been to see her and plied his particular skills. Luckily, it didn’t have the results they wanted, so I don’t think he got very far with her.”
She rubbed her right arm, and Gabe slid his hand around her waist, drawing her closer.
“Lozak’s the one who finally pushed Zach into his full power,” Daphne said. “I saw it happen, and it was incredible. One second, our big guy was losing, his angel side not enough to overpower this demon. The next thing I know, he’s gone full daemelus. But then Lozak changed, too. The same kind of scales, but thicker and darker. Wings, stone fists, the whole shebang. He fled like a coward after Zach turned him human with the orb, sure, but until then, it was a matched fight.”
Vera frowned. “Demons like him should be locked up. I don’t understand how he hasn’t been stopped.”
Zach’s hands fell to his sides as his anger drained out of him, a cold dread taking its place. “He had been.” The knowledge that had been escaping him was now flooding through his brain as though the gates had opened.
“What do you mean?” Vera asked, at the same time as Daphne asked, “How do you know?”
Zach bowed his head into his hands to calm the rush of information now threatening to overwhelm him. A gentle hand rested on his back and guided him around the couch so he could sink into the rough upholstery. He tracked the scraping chair legs against the floor as the others arranged themselves in front of him, while someone took the seat beside him.
“It was when I reached my full angel form,” he said. “I’d never done that before. My Korvack blood has always been my dominant half, but after I almost died, the angel blood rose up to heal me, blocking everything else.”
Daphne nodded. “I was there to see that, as well. It was one of the most beautiful and terrifying things I’ve ever watched.”
“In that form, I tapped into the psychic link that connects all angel kin,” he said. “A database of transgressions, letting us — them — track the beings who have wasted their second chances. These angels are merciless against those who don’t show the right kind of remorse, and are unforgiving of anyone who might betray the secrets of the otherworld to the masses.”
“They must have loved working alongside the guardians,” Gabe said.
Zach frowned. “It would have been redundant. The guardians possessed angel DNA.”
Vera nodded. “The Collegiate explained that to me when we met.”
“They should know best, considering it was the Collegiate who created them.”
He watched the demigoddess’s face pale, but she held herself together, drew back her shoulders, and met his gaze. “That’s a different point of discussion. What I don’t understand is how the angels are able to function with that amount of data running through their minds.” She frowned. “I imagine the list of transgressors wouldn’t be a short one.”
“The information is designed to remain tucked away on the psychic link until one of the transgressors presents himself. Like what happened when I faced Lozak. That’s how I knew his name.” Zach snarled. “And that’s how I know he’s an escapee of Tartarus Prison.”
As though he’d spoken a magic word, a heavy silence descended on the room.
The image of Tartarus popped up in Zach’s mind, although he’d never been unfortunate enough to see it in person. A stone fortress on a magically created island off the Atlantic coast, it was the otherworld’s most notorious containment center. It had been created fifty years ago to help with the increase in crimes following the destruction of the guardians in the demon wars. The worst villains of the otherworld were sent there, the ones who threatened the balance of the world, if not the very survival of the otherworld. At least in this dimension.
Run by a group of elected otherworldly representatives and their chosen wardens, the prison had survived for years, being sold as a secret military operation by those of their kind who served in the highest government positions. Under this guise, the prison had been left alone, ignored in the budget, removed from discussion by those who knew that it was in the country’s — the world’s — best interests to let things remain as they were.
The prison was indestructible and impervious to any form of attack or escape. So how had Lozak gotten out?
Gabe rose from his chair and started pacing back and forth across the room.
Vera frowned. “And we’re sure we’re speaking of the same demon? Scars, a wide smile, and a taste for finely tailored shirts?” Zach nodded, and her frown deepened. “That’s odd. I never saw a trace of scales or wings. He was strong, but that’s all.”
“The Fates are pulling their strings tighter around us,” Gabe said, his sudden pronouncement drawing everyone’s attention. He stopped and whirled around to face the others. “During that case I mentioned, with the snowstorm, the jinni I was working with suggested that when we caught the culprit murdering the men on the harbor, we could send her to Tartarus Prison.”
Allegra squared her jaw. “I remember. It was that suggestion that pushed you to make a deal with him, like some sort of naive amateur.”
“Not now, Allegra,” Gabe snapped. Again, Vera looked from one to the other, her eyebrow raised, but she said nothing. “My point is that at the time we agreed he only presented the option to make the other choices more palatable, right? What if there was more to it?”
“How so?” Daphne asked. She pulled her chair closer and leaned forward to rest her elbows on her knees.
“After we finished the case, Percy — my friend with the software — got it into his head to do some research on the prison. He’d discovered it was on lockdown.”
The tension in the air grew heavier.
“What sort of lockdown?” Allegra asked.
“All communication cut off, no internet, no power. It was completely shut down.” He paced the room again. “I had Percy keep an eye on it, just in case anything changed. He hasn’t mentioned it since, so as far as I know, everything is stable. But what if the change had already happened?”
“What are you thinking?” Daphne asked. “That there was an uprising, and the wardens closed in?”
Gabe shook his head. “If there was an uprising, we would know. The wardens would try to keep it low-key to avoid panic, but if they weren’t capable of shutting it down themselves, they’d need reinforcements. With more people going in, word would have spread.”
Zach frowned. “So you think the lockdown is because of something happening inside.”
“I wonder if that uprising happened…and succeeded,” Gabe said, looking at each of them in turn. “Think about it. No information is going in and out of that place that we can track, which means someone doesn�
��t want the authorities elsewhere knowing what’s going on. What if Lozak didn’t escape — what if someone set him loose?”
Vera paled, and Daphne sucked in a breath. Allegra seemed to have turned to stone, but inside Zach’s head, he couldn’t find any sort of stillness. He was eager to move, to set off for the prison and find out what was going on. The muscles in his arms bulged, and he pushed himself off the couch to join Gabe in pacing the floor. Nervous energy surged through his veins, pulsing and beating in an erratic rhythm until his entire soul felt off balance.
“Mayzell Industries moved in that direction,” Daphne said, her voice barely more than a whisper. “You think that somehow they’re connected with Tartarus? That whatever their big reveal is going to be, it has something to do with the demons they freed?”
“Do we think that’s where they’re keeping Molly?” Vera asked. Her fingers flew to her mouth. “She said it was cold and damp and that her cell was lined with stone that had been gouged. She said there was a hum of machinery.”
Zach thought of the blueprint in his pocket with the twenty-four rooms, all a similar size. It had occurred to him once before that they might be cells, but he’d never imagined it would be somewhere so sinister.
“How would that be possible, if there is no power?” Allegra asked.
“Would they even have regular power?” Daphne asked. “Wouldn’t that give them away, even if everything was in the clear?”
Zach scowled. “Human governments know all our secrets, even if they’re not aware of it. The power company likely thinks it’s a glitch in the system.”
“Based on Percy’s scans of the place before it went dark, they definitely had power,” Gabe said. “But to go off the grid, they likely cut all ties. The machinery Molly’s hearing could be run by magic.”
He shoved his hand through his hair, then stopped by Vera’s side. She took his hand and squeezed it tightly enough that her knuckles turned white. “The mud on Molly’s carpet would make sense,” he said, “if that’s where they came from.”