by Jessica Gunn
There was a second door that swung open into what was probably the kitchen, and along the opposite wall, closest to us, was a large fireplace roaring with an evening fire. The air smelled faintly of smoked meat and beer. And where demons had been chatting with each other before, the room grew so silent upon our arrival that I heard someone drop a utensil in the kitchen. The ping of metal echoed out into the main room as the silence grew heavy and thick.
“Well, well, well,” called a male voice from the back of the room. “I wasn’t sure you would actually show up.”
The crowd at Talon’s Drum, still gaping at the sight of us being escorted through by soldiers, parted as Jerrick approached us. Today he wore the Talon’s armor uniform like the rest, although his violet-and-red leather ensemble came adorned with a cloak draped over both shoulders. Gold embroidery lined its edges, although from what I’d seen of Jerrick the last time we’d been here, this sort of distinction wasn’t necessary.
Jerrick’s steps were light but sure as he made quick work of the distance between where he had been sitting and where we all now stood. His face was jovial, an honest—or, seemingly honest—smile twisting his lips. He reached out a hand past one of our guards and held it out to Jeremiah.
“I do hope your trip here went well,” Jerrick said. Despite our surroundings, and despite the glaring red burgundy color of his eyes, you would think Jerrick was doing nothing more than addressing an old friend. His dark, sandy-brown hair had been cut short.
Jeremiah gave a little nod. Nothing that could be even slightly misconstrued as a bow. “We came as soon as possible. We would like to hear your offer.”
Jerrick lifted an eyebrow and watched Jeremiah’s face for a moment before laughing. “A man who gets straight to the point. I can appreciate that. Please,” he said, gesturing toward a suddenly-clear large table. “Come. Sit with me and we can discuss matters.”
“Thank you,” was all Jeremiah said in response.
I glanced at Kian. His brown eyes met mine and he nodded slightly. I sighed and tried to not think about how screwed we would all be if Jerrick decided to turn on us.
“Come on,” Ben said quietly to Kian and me while Krystin and Brian joined the other two at the table. I followed along behind, sitting with Ben on one side and Kian on my other.
“Drinks!” Jerrick called, a smile on his face, to a nearby waitress. “Let’s get a round for the table.”
Jeremiah lifted his hand. “That’s quite all right.”
“Nonsense,” Jerrick said, offering our interim Leader an exasperated look. “To drink with potential allies is the best of luck.”
“‘Allies’ might be too strong a term,” Krystin said dryly.
Ben cleared his throat while I fought the urge to draw a palm to my face. For all the times I’d spoken out of turn, at least I hadn’t egged on someone in charge of the very demon city we couldn’t teleportante out of easily.
Jerrick turned his amused burgundy gaze on Krystin and smiled warmly. “Ah. It is an honor to make your acquaintance, Ms. Blackwood. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
Krystin lifted an eyebrow. “And yet, somehow, despite raiding your previous master’s hideout twice and warring with her at Alzan, I’ve never seen your face. A shame, really.”
Jerrick’s eyes darkened. “The biggest disgrace is that she wasn’t strong enough to kill you that day. I would not have let you get away, Daughter of Alzan.”
Krystin’s face remained deadpan, unmoving, for several moments. Then a slow smile twisted her lips and she chuckled. “Good. At least we know where we stand.”
Jeremiah pulled in a breath so deep, his shoulders rose, then he sighed. “Can we please focus on why we’re here?”
“But we are,” Jerrick said as our drinks arrived. The waitress placed a glass in front of him first, then gave one to each of us. They were filled with a light brown liquor.
“I was merely saying hello to everyone in your party.” Jerrick’s gaze traveled from Krystin to Ben, focusing on him and his freely-showing Neuian eye tattoos, down to Brian, Kian, and me. “I see we have some old friends with us as well.”
I should have bit my tongue to keep it from moving. But instead, words slipped past my lips as I lifted my glass. “Less ‘old friends’ and more ‘potential ally,’ no?”
Jerrick’s smile turned from sly to amused, then he lifted his glass as well. “As you wish, Ava Locke. To potential allies.”
“Sure,” I said.
The others lifted their glasses, albeit warily, as well. I knew we all were having the same thoughts. Jerrick could have easily had each of our glasses poisoned. He might have been served first to ensure the safety of his own drink. But more likely he’d been given his first out of respect. We were in his domain after all.
No. If Jerrick wanted to kill us, it wouldn’t be by using poison, despite Talon’s knack for it. Their notoriety as poison masters wouldn’t make killing us personal enough. Not for Jerrick.
Besides, killing us outright wouldn’t gain him anything. Our deaths might make the Fire Circle temporarily weaker, sure. Krystin’s death would severely handicap Alzan’s battlefront. But the immediate gains wouldn’t help Jerrick or Talon or Landshaft in the long run. Not when we knew the general Darkness populace didn’t stand with Jerrick.
Not when the Neuians were still a threat to us both.
We all sipped from the glasses. The liquor burned my throat despite otherwise going down smoothly. Whiskey. Quality whiskey, for sure. I wondered if they distilled their own here in Landshaft.
Probably.
“Now we can begin,” Jerrick said as he placed his glass back on the wooden top of the table.
I glanced around. The room had gotten too quiet all of a sudden, as if everyone had suddenly left or all the demons had decided to listen in. My quick look revealed the former was the case. Which was strange because I hadn’t even heard them clear out. Not a single scrape of a stool sliding along wood.
Jerrick leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “The Neuians are a threat.”
“We know this,” Jeremiah said. “We have for months. And yet you seem to be keen on poking the sleeping lion.”
“And the Hunter Circles seem keen on sleeping through it themselves,” Jerrick replied. “At least we’ve been working toward a solution.”
“So have we,” Ben said, meeting Jerrick’s gaze with his own icy blue one.
“Ah, yes.” Jerrick, glass still in his hand, gestured vaguely at Ben. “The Neuian among you, one of the Fire Circle’s top choices for their next Leader. Please, someone do explain to me how this is possible.”
Jeremiah didn’t hesitate for a moment when he said, “Ben, among the other three, showed great intuition and initiative regarding Lady Azar, Alzan, and our last Leader, who was a traitor and a Neuian.”
“Like Benjamin Hallen himself is,” Jerrick said, tossing Ben another look.
I swallowed hard. Not even Dacher or Jeremiah ever used Ben’s full name. I supposed a quick Internet search was enough to learn it, but the fact Jerrick was so freely tossing it around…
What else does he know?
Krystin turned ever-so-slightly and looked to me for a moment. Long enough to get across a message without speaking: Jerrick probably knows everything.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “Sue me. I didn’t know about my heritage for my entire life. And thus far, it’s helped us broker a sort of peace with the Neuians. It’s helped us save Alzan.”
“Excuse me when I say I’m not excited about that last one,” Jerrick said.
Krystin leaned forward. “If Alzan blew, we’d all be dead right now. So if I were you, I’d be thanking Ben and—” She stopped herself and shook her head. “Alzan holds all of the cianzas together. Without it, they all explode and we all die.”
Jerrick leaned in too. “Except the ones on the Neuian plane of existence.”
My eyes narrowed. “Are those actually connected?”
“If Alzan’
s is, and it’s on another plane of existence too, then it’s safe to assume that those on the Neuian plane are as well,” Jeremiah said. “If one goes, they all do.”
“Cianza Alzan was the first,” Jerrick said. “This we know. It is also the largest. It’s the reason the first Daughter of Alzan was able to siphon enough power from it to move the city on her own.” He looked again to Krystin. “But what if there were a way to neutralize a cianza, to… force it to expel all of its power without causing damage to the rest?”
“Like Cianza Boston?” Krystin asked, her eyebrow once again lifted. “Any other cianza stuck on our plane is safe. If one goes, the rest don’t. We don’t know why. But the expulsion of energy from Cianza Boston alone would take out most of the northeast, so it’s not really worth it, now is it?”
Landshaft was located inside New England. There were other demon cities, sure, but Landshaft was the first in the United States—as far as the Hunter Circles knew, anyway. Even if it wasn’t the largest demon city, it was the center. The core. The same way Lady Azar’s Vermont hideout had been the core of Shadow Crest. If Cianza Boston blew, Landshaft would be gone.
“I’m not talking about Cianza Boston,” Jerrick said. “Nor the one in Vegas, or near Los Angeles. I’m talking about a way to pinpoint direct sources of Neuian power on their plane to keep them from invading ours.”
I glanced at Ben, who had his jaw locked while he listened. A year ago, he’d have said something by now. I wasn’t exactly sure what had changed in him from the Ben that had taken me from Headquarters to his team’s house the night Veynix had killed my team to the Ben who sat before me without words now. But change him it had.
“The Neuians don’t want to invade our plane,” Kian said. “It sounds like they just want us to stop our war.”
“That’s what the Neuians would like you to believe.” Jerrick asked. “Their plane of existence came first. Their civil war created ours. We’re their mistake, a mistake they want squashed from existence. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d like to think we’re more than just someone else’s error.”
“You’re not the Neuians’ screwup, Jerrick,” Krystin ground out through clenched teeth. “Darkness is Aloysius’s. I think you need to stop forgetting that just because you served his daughter, whom you also seem to disrespect.”
Jeremiah cleared his throat and sent Krystin a warning glare. Krystin only shrugged and relaxed back into her chair.
I was with Krystin on this one. “Then what’s your actual plan, Jerrick?” I asked, surprising even myself by addressing him directly. He didn’t scare me as much this time around. Maybe it was the empty tavern. Maybe it was because Jeremiah, Ben, and Krystin were with us. Either way, Jerrick alone didn’t seem like such a huge threat.
Maybe that was the point.
Jerrick turned once more to me. “Hydron has created a lot of nifty… antidotes, let’s call them. The anti-aura-sickness pills, for instance, are one of my favorites.”
“And ours,” Brian interjected.
Jerrick nodded to him. “We are close to reverse engineering them and finding ways to overcome.”
Brian’s face remained neutral save for a singular twitch in his jaw. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Jerrick said. “In doing so, we believe we have found a way to suppress—slightly—demonic magik in such a way that would allow us to continue to use our magik but not directly affect a cianza in an adverse way. That is step one.”
“That’s a load of bullshit,” Krystin said. I smiled. “That’s not how that works. The cianza is going to know.”
“Cianzas aren’t sentient,” Jerrick said. “If magik touches them, they react.”
“So how is suppressing magik you still intend to use going to work?” I asked. “Especially if you intend to…” Understanding slammed into my awareness. “An army of souls touched by demonic magik and turned is going to tilt a cianza no matter what you do.”
“Not if the Son and Daughter of Alzan are there to balance it out,” Jerrick said, leveling a look at Ben. “And having a Neuian on our side would help considerably as well.”
“No,” Ben said. Krystin spared him a weighted glance I didn’t know the meaning of. Ben shook his head.
“It is the only way,” Jerrick said. “You may not think they’re invading. So let’s take it from your view of things, shall we? If they come here to end the war we won’t, how do you think they’re going to do that?”
“We get your point, Jerrick,” said Jeremiah. “But we can’t fight them. Neuian magik is ancient. We don’t know how powerful it can get.”
“Powerful,” Jerrick said. “We’ve seen it firsthand. But a single Neuian against one of our Ember witch soldiers doesn’t fare well.”
“I know,” I said. “I watched one butcher a Neuian at Crimson. You’ve turned our allies into monsters.”
A cruel smile graced Jerrick’s lips. “It is what Darkness does best, love.”
Kian’s fists curled on the table. “You want to go to their plane of existence and unleash those tainted, unstable Ember witch soldiers. You want them to go and attack and force all the Neuians to experience magikal backfires. You want to wipe them from existence.”
Jerrick shrugged slightly. “It’s a thought.”
“A bad one,” I said.
Jeremiah sipped his drink once more, listening to all of this. “We will assist with the plan to fight the Neuians head-on if you’ll set free the Ember witches in your possession. All of them.”
My jaw fell open. “Seriously?” It wasn’t that I didn’t want the Ember witches to be free, but to actually attack the same Neuians who’d helped provide a cure for those witches? Who had just cured Will?
Ben’s blue eyes flashed with anger. “Jeremiah…”
Jerrick grinned. “No, no. Let’s continue this course of discussion. How about I will not release all of the witches, but I will give you those who haven’t completed their second transformation yet.”
“How many in total, Jerrick?” Jeremiah asked.
Jerrick shrugged. “A few hundred.”
I laughed, but it wasn’t because any of this was funny. Kian pinched the bridge of his nose. Brian’s eyes widened.
“A few hundred,” Krystin repeated, shaking her head. “No way. I don’t believe you. There aren’t that many Ember witches in the United States.”
“I didn’t say they were all from here,” Jerrick said. “Besides, I’ve learned quite a lot about Ember witch history while capturing and containing them. Turns out the other witch lines haven’t been keeping as close a tab on Ember witches as you all thought.”
Krystin let out a dry chuckle as her fingers wrapped around the edges of the table. “This is absurd.”
“No, Ms. Blackwood. This is war,” Jerrick said. “This is how it’s waged. When there are so many sides in this war and you find yourself surrounded by enemies even from within your own empire, you use any means necessary. I shouldn’t have to tell you or the Fire Circle that.”
Jerrick leaned in farther and waved his right hand. “But given how the Neuians slipped one of their own into your Headquarters and let him lead for years, I suppose maybe I do need to say something.”
Jeremiah slammed a fist on the table. “All right. If all we’re doing is having a verbal sparring match, let’s close up and leave.” He went to stand up, but Jerrick put a hand on Jeremiah’s forearm.
“No, stay.” Jerrick laughed a little. “I didn’t release the numbers to intimidate or anger you. The fact of the matter is that we don’t need an army to take down the Neuians.”
“We know,” I said. “A few dozen of those tainted Ember witches could take out hundreds if they’re not detected. We get that that’s the beauty of it. But let’s not forget that demons can have backfires as well, Jerrick. If we turn one of those Ember witches against their captor, maybe they all can be turned.”
“Stop using my brothers and sisters as bargaining chips,” Krystin spat out. “Th
is is about the Neuians. We either agree to ban together and stop them, or we don’t. And at this point, I don’t trust either of you more than the other.”
Jerrick regarded her with a narrowed gaze. “You’d trust those proven to already hate what you are, to want to neutralize what you are, over the kin you’ve fought with for centuries?”
Krystin met his gaze without hesitation. “Darkness and the Hunter Circles war because that’s what we were quite literally built to do. But that doesn’t mean we have to, although I’ll be damned if you can get us to stop fighting long enough to form a long-lasting peace. It’s not been done and likely never will.”
“And yet you’ve allied yourself with demons before,” Jerrick said.
Krystin leaned in, anger dripping from her form. “Giyano was trying to save us all. Including your sorry ass. Lady Azar was a lot of things, and impulsive and power-hungry are right at the top of that list. Her way would have seen us all dead and you know it.”
Jerrick lifted his hands before him. “All I’m saying is that if you’ve allied with a demon before, you can do it again. Just long enough to see our plan through. Go to the Neuian plane, take out some of them, and disable a few of their cianzas. Weaken them, and they might break. That’s what their civil war did before. What have the Neuians possibly done for you that would warrant you siding with them when it could destroy us all?”
“Plenty,” Ben said, his jaw still locked. “And also not enough. But they’ve found a way to cure what you’ve done to those Ember witches, so I’d say that right about now, it’s up to you to give an offer that’s good enough. Free the Ember witches, Jerrick. Then we can talk about next steps.”
Jerrick watched Ben for a moment, eying him with a narrowing gaze. “Your family ties weaken your Hunter oath.”
Ben lifted his chin. “My family means more to me than any oath I’ve ever taken.” I got the feeling Ben wasn’t talking about the Neuians. Not with the way his eyes trailed from Jerrick to Krystin and back again. It wasn’t the same sort of weighted look as before. This time, his eyes shone with love.