by Sierra Dean
But this wasn’t that. This was subtle and confusing, and it made me feel good and bad in equal measure, which was no fun at all.
“We can talk about that later. Right now we need to find Sig before there’s no New York left for me to move home to, okay?”
“I suppose that’s the best I’m going to get. Sutherland, you ready to go see the goddess?” Holden was staring right at me as he spoke, and we shared a look at had a bittersweet quality.
We had once meant so much to each other, and though that love still existed in some form, it was now tucked deep into the past.
“Let’s do it,” Sutherland said, moving towards the café’s door like a man on a mission, with my request fresh in his mind.
Holden gave me one last look, and then the pair of them stepped over the threshold and vanished.
Which left four of us standing in front of Starbucks with nothing to do but wait. It was agony, not being present for what was happening between worlds right then. I would have given almost anything to be the one who had gone through instead of my father. Not just because I missed seeing Cal, which I did, but I knew I would understand Cal’s often cryptic messages better than Sutherland could.
I was grateful Holden was with him, because he’d be able to relay her words to me more clearly.
I paced nervously in front of the store, and my anxiety must have been palpable because several people who seemed to be headed towards the Starbucks changed their course at the last minute and moved away from us. There wasn’t much I could do to curb my uneasiness, unfortunately. Somewhere beyond that door the answers I needed might be waiting, and they were dangling mere inches—but metaphysical miles—out of my reach.
I was counting on a madman and my ex-boyfriend to come through for me.
And for Sig.
My phone rang as I paced, bringing my focus back to the real world with a start. I scrambled for my pocket and answered quickly when I saw Tyler’s face on the display. The photo I’d taken of him was one where he had not been paying attention until the last second, so his call picture was him glaring at my camera unhappily. It was a great representation, and normally made me chuckle every time I saw it.
“Tyler, what’s up?”
“You aren’t going to like this,” he said almost breathlessly.
“I mean, if we’re being honest here, when was the last time you called me with good news?”
A beat. “Point taken.”
“So what’s the disaster now? Distract me.”
When he spoke again, his voice was leaden with suspicion. “Distract you from what?”
“I’m waiting for my dad to get out of an interdimensional waiting room to tell me where to find my master-vampire-slash-demon-bait former boss before a cult can open a new portal to Hell. You know, the usual.” A woman walking past me gave me a strange look and I shrugged as if what I was saying was perfectly normal sidewalk conversation.
Tyler coughed lightly to cover what I imagine was a much less polite response. “Well, that actually explains a lot about why I’m calling. We’ve been tracking Belphegor over the last two days, and based on the occurrences of demonic activity we’ve had popping up across the country, we have reason to believe he’s headed right for you.”
Ugh.
It was one thing to know a portal might open soon to let a bunch of new demons out to play, but quite another to find out that a demon who was already here on Earth—one who had tried to kill an entire unit of FBI specialists—was on his way to crash the party.
The demon cult was going to be super pumped.
I, on the other hand, could have done without the special surprise guest.
“How sure are you?”
“We’ve been seeing an array of possession attempts, livestock mutilations, and chatter on the occult message boards from California, through the Midwest, and about an hour ago we got a hit on his name in Pennsylvania. The path pretty clearly shows him headed in a beeline right for you. I’m guessing the earlier attempts to open a gate at High Line Park must have marked it for demons as a hotspot of some kind. Something Harry might have been polite enough to mention to us.”
My gaze darted to Harry, who was watching me with interest and not the faintest shred of guilt. Could demons even feel guilt about things? It struck me as a backwards emotion for a demon to have. It would make the whole death-and-possession gig way less fun if you felt bad about it afterwards.
“We can deal with that later.”
“Is he there, at least, or do I have to worry about a hijacked demon plane flying all over the country too?”
“He’s here, and he’s actually being very helpful.”
Considering I was looking right at him, Harry had no doubt who the he I was referring to was. He mimed an aw, shucks gesture at me.
This guy.
“Look, Secret, I’m not here how to tell you to handle your business, but you need to be careful. You saw what happened the last time we faced off against this guy. It was nearly a damn massacre. I want to make sure you and Emilio come back in one piece and we limit our civilian involvement, okay?”
I don’t think Tyler would consider two vampires, a demon, and a human servant as civilians in this instance. Nor would he care if I brought in some backup with Shane and Siobhan if the extra hands were necessary. I was glad to be somewhere there were people I could count on at the drop of a hat.
I was about to assure Tyler I had things here as under control as could be expected, when a sudden, searing pain stabbed into my head so ferociously I collapsed on the sidewalk, dropping the phone as I let out a very uncool yowl of agony.
This was a pain unlike anything I’d ever experienced. It was as if someone had heated a sharpened metal spear in a white-hot flame, and then jammed it right through my eyeball. Tiny, agonizing explosions were going off in rapid succession all throughout my skull. It was so bad I found myself unconsciously pulling at my own hair, hoping to yank the feeling right out of my brain.
Faintly, I heard Tyler’s voice through the phone saying my name. “Secret? Secret, what’s happening?”
He might as well have been screaming right into my ear, because even though his voice sounded far away, each syllable slammed the invisible spike farther into my eye.
Someone was kneeling beside me, lifting my head from the sidewalk and checking my pulse. Must have been Emilio, because he was precise and measured in the way he was doing each check. No clue what he was looking for, but if he could make the searing pain stop, I would welcome whatever he did.
One moment I was trying to tell him what hurt, but the only sound to come out was a scream, and the next minute the whole world went white.
White and quiet.
The burning was replaced with a soothing, perfect nothingness that washed over me like calm waves on a perfectly sun-bleached beach.
I blinked a few times, wondering if I was dead, but as I had some experience with death, I didn’t remember it being anything like this. When I had died, there was no white light, no heavenly waiting room. I had been dead, there had been nothing, and then I was alive again.
So if this wasn’t the afterlife, I honestly had no damn clue what it was.
Like a fog being burned away by the bright sunlight of morning, the whiteness faded, and I was able to see a familiar room. There was a large fireplace on one wall, and the floor was covered in layered Persian rugs. It smelled old and faintly like incense, and it was like stepping right into a cherished memory.
Standing right in front of me, with her Marilyn Monroe face and her hair as dark as midnight, was Calliope, the Oracle herself. Her fingers were pressed to my forehead.
Next to me, Holden wore an expression of uncertainty.
“Cal?” I asked.
“Secret?” She pulled me into a tight embrace, and her familiar smell filled my nostrils, telling me this was real and not a hallucination.
I let out a little burble of laughter, and only then did I realize that my voice didn’t sou
nd right. It sounded…masculine? Lifting one hand, I saw chewed-down fingernails and hairy knuckles. Farther down was the same Ninja Turtles tee my dad had been wearing when he walked through the Starbucks door.
“What the fuuuuuck?”
“It worked,” Holden said.
“What. The. Fuck?” I repeated, slowly in case they hadn’t heard me the first time around. Hearing my words in Sutherland’s voice was so beyond surreal I couldn’t classify it as a grade of weirdness.
“I needed you to see it,” Cal said. She touched my face tenderly, giving me a sweet smile. “Needed it to be precise, and a messenger wouldn’t suffice.” I didn’t think she’d rhymed intentionally, but it definitely sounded like something a mystical Oracle would say.
“This is so nuts,” I announced.
“It won’t hold long. I could only manage it at all because you share blood, and there’s room to move around in here.” She tapped my forehead. His forehead.
My dad was so crazy that his lost mind was actually a benefit to us here. Silver lining, I guess.
“He’ll push you out soon though, so pay attention.”
I looked right at her. She pressed her palm to my forehead and closed her eyes. I did the same, even though she hadn’t instructed me to. The moment I did, we were surrounded by the darkness of night, and cold, damp grass kissed my bare feet. The two of us were standing in an open field, and I immediately knew where we were.
The Great Lawn.
“Why is it always the stupid Great Lawn,” I groaned. “These guys need to work on their originality.”
It was an obvious choice, though. They needed a lot of room for their gate, and in a city where open space was at a premium, it was a pretty ingenious place to draw a big-ass portal.
“Pay attention,” she said again.
“You could have just told me it was the Great Lawn,” I replied with annoyance. “This didn’t require body snatching. Though it is good to see you.”
Cal sighed and grabbed my face by the chin, holding it firmly. “I said, pay attention.”
In the grass was a sword. My sword. And swirling around it in white light was the strangest pattern I’d ever seen. It was a circle, with loops and squiggles, and that stupid upside-down seagull I knew now was the mark of Belphegor.
“I don’t understand.”
I stared at the markings, but they shifted and moved, and no matter how hard I focused, the more the markings seemed to change. It was like trying to memorize a poem made of magnetic words that someone kept rearranging.
“What is—?”
As suddenly as I’d arrived, I was yanked back. Back through the darkness of the park, back through Calliope’s waiting room, back through the bright whiteness, until I sat bolt upright, gasping for air, on the New York sidewalk.
A few strangers were standing near my friends, cell phones poised either to photograph the possible dead body or to call an ambulance to come to my aid. I wasn’t sure which was more likely.
I stared down at my hands. Their chipped burgundy polish was my own, my shirt was my own. I tugged at my ponytail to confirm the frizzy hair was also mine.
“Jesus, McQueen, I thought we lost you for a second there.” Emilio was still crouched nearby, and though his words indicated a level of concern, his face showed nothing of his true feelings.
“I went inside,” I said, though this obviously couldn’t explain what had just occurred. Telling them what had happened would require more time and detail than I had.
“All right, all right, guys, she’s okay.” Ingrid started to usher the strangers away. As they moved down the sidewalk or into the store, still craning to see if I would either get up or die, Holden and Sutherland came out of the café and rejoined us. Sutherland looked down at me as if I were the strange one here for being on the sidewalk.
“That’s very dirty, you know.”
Did he remember any of what had just happened? Was he even aware I’d been inside his body?
“Are you okay?” I asked him, hoping that what we’d done hadn’t messed him up any worse.
“I’m not the one sitting on the sidewalk,” he reminded me, and I could not dispute his flawless logic.
“Did you figure out where we’re going?” Ingrid asked the vampires, her voice betraying how desperate she was to have answers.
“Central Park,” I replied, not waiting for them. I wasn’t sure Sutherland would have known what I’d seen, and Holden hadn’t been with Calliope and me inside the vision. “The Great Lawn.”
“Well that’s deeply unoriginal,” Emilio grumbled.
“That’s what I said.” I let him help me up.
Ingrid looked baffled. “If you knew that, why did we send them in?”
“I didn’t. I needed to, uh…” I tapped my head then tapped Sutherland’s. He didn’t seem bothered by it. “I needed to see it through different eyes.”
It took Ingrid a second, but as soon as she realized what I was struggling to say, she went, “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“That was deeply embarrassing,” Harry announced.
“I’m sorry, you were embarrassed by me having an out-of-body experience on the sidewalk? Yeah, I could see how that would have been just awful for you.”
“So many people,” he said. “Looking.”
“Aw, muffin,” I replied sarcastically. “You jump into people’s bodies all the time without their permission but one human does it and suddenly you get squeamish.”
I grabbed my phone from where it had fallen on the sidewalk, and while I wasn’t sure Tyler was even still on the line, I said, “Everything is fine here, boss, don’t you worry.”
Then I hung up.
Chapter Thirty-Two
It seemed fitting to be back in Central Park.
This was where a lot of the most insane adventures of my life had begun, starting the day I rescued an innocent blonde girl from a snarling vampire.
I always ended up back here, even in my dreams.
I stood among the spring-clothed trees surrounding the lawn and squinted into the darkness. With me, I had the last-minute cavalry I’d been able to put together on short notice. Holden had stayed with us, though we had returned Sutherland to his apartment before coming to the park. He had been as helpful as he could. In a real fight he would only serve as a liability.
So I had Holden, Ingrid, Emilio, Harry, and we’d been met at the park gates by Siobhan and Shane.
“We need to be quick about this, if possible,” Siobhan said in her warm, lilting Irish voice. “The sitter charges us extra after midnight.”
“It’s on me,” I said.
It occurred to me that this was a situation of the most dire mortal-danger sort, and I was asking my friends with a baby to come help me when I wasn’t willing to ask my own husband to risk his neck. But I knew them, knew their strengths and what they were capable of, and Shane and Siobhan would have come here even if I hadn’t asked them to.
They were no strangers to taking down roving demons, after all.
Siobhan had more experience hunting and killing demons than the rest of us combined.
“Good news, everyone,” she said sunnily. “Not a virgin among us tonight. We should be well ignored by demons.” Having once been intended to be a virgin sacrifice, this was easily one of Siobhan’s favorite jokes.
“How do you know none of us are virgins?” Harry demanded, scanning the rest of the group like he was interested to know if anyone actually was.
“You pure as the driven snow, demon boy?” she asked.
I’d explained what Harry was, but I suspected she had known the second she laid eyes on him. Just like Sutherland had spotted the wrongness straight away, it was obvious to me that anyone with even the slightest bit of a supernatural touch could see Harry wasn’t quite…right.
As a druid, Siobhan was touched by magic in more ways than one, giving her a better understanding of all things demonic than most of us.
It was that and her d
eadly aim I was hoping to put to use tonight.
Shane I wanted because I had trained him well, and if there was one thing he was good at, it was killing vampires. I’d made sure of that, and he had lived up to and exceeded every expectation I had for him. No longer just a pretty face, he had become a deadly assassin.
Ingrid had gladly accepted a rifle from Emilio’s bag of toys and looked very capable of using it. I had my sword and gun. Emilio had the rest of the bag, and Harry…well, Harry was a demon, so he really didn’t need anything extra, did he?
I’d have given him something if he asked, but this time around he didn’t seem terribly concerned about going in armed. Considering demons could manipulate their human forms in a number of repulsive but sort of impressive ways, I assumed he knew how to handle himself without a gun.
The night around us was still and quiet, but the emptiness of the park was concerning in and of itself. The park naturally got less populated at night, but this was New York. There were always people around. Yet we hadn’t seen a single person on our walk in. Normally you’d run across homeless people searching for a place to spend the night, or young couples taking a shortcut that felt romantic. There weren’t even any would-be muggers out, trolling through the park looking for an easy target.
No one was here.
It was as if something about the park tonight was telling people, in no uncertain terms, Stay away.
I hated to admit it, but as we’d crossed the threshold on our way in, that same thought had passed my mind. You don’t want to go in there. These vamps had probably used some of the same magic that kept people out of the Council offices to keep mortals out of the park and away from interfering.
Honestly, I didn’t. There wasn’t a lot to be gained by squaring off against a demon cult and the probable appearance of a Prince of Hell.
This was a bad idea top to bottom, and one likely to end with some folks getting dead. But it was also entirely unavoidable. I couldn’t turn around and go home. I couldn’t make this someone else’s problem.