“Close one,” Carsis said.
“I guess if they attack out in the open, with other humans around—”
“You gotta fight,” Carsis said, confirming it. “The humans around us won’t believe their own eyes. Someone will be made culprit. But it’s far better that you kill a rampaging demon and save the day while getting arrested than it is that you let the demon escape to cause more mayhem. You can always escape prison. Good luck trying to hunt down a demon trying to escape.”
That sounded good… except that the demons weren’t killing anyone yet. And if they did, then the angels would come. So why cause more mayhem than necessary?
“Why?”
“Well, I can do it a bit better than you can since I can wander into the spiritual realm, and shift physical substance to move through walls,” he said, reminding me of the puff of smoke he had once become, much as Tyrus did. “But since you’re only half-demon, it would be much harder to reach the spiritual realm. And your powers are not the same as the powers of demons.”
“I meant more why would we fight a demon?”
“Do you want more humans to become shifters and allow hell to possibly win a war?”
Well, put it that way…
Both of us were on edge. I was exhausted and still fluctuating between royally pissed off and depressingly sad over Brady, and I think Carsis had had enough of my trash talk.
“No,” I said curtly. “Guess if they come, it’s take no prisoners.”
“You got it.”
Another five minutes passed of silence. Mostly, my mind shifted to my brother. Maybe he was home now, just waiting for us to come back, ready to laugh as I hit him for leaving us in such limbo.
But no. I knew he was captured, probably being tortured as Paul had been tortured. It made me shudder. One had died because I was a coward, and one was going to die because he sacrificed himself for me.
No! No, Sonya!
Brady isn’t dead until you actually see his dead body. Do not give up. You are strong. You would not quit on a gut feeling. And you know he’s alive, anyways. So get home, recover, and plan. You, DJ, and Carsis can save him.
I thought of bringing it up with Carsis, but having done so a couple of times already, I chose to do the remainder of the walk in silence. I think a couple of hours of shuteye—or at least a couple of miles of distance—would do both of us a lot of good, even after the productive training session.
The house finally came into view and I walked inside. I held the door open for Carsis, but when I looked back, he had vanished. Duties of a Power, I thought before turning around, not giving any thought to it. I climbed up the short flight of stairs and was about to head up the last flight to my room before I heard Sarah and Caitlin speaking in their bedroom.
“… surprised, he never would’ve done that as a kid.”
“I know, right? He had such low self-esteem and was always scared to do things. Now, we’re alive because of him and his girlfriend.”
I paused right at the bottom of the stairs. I wouldn’t go up until they had finished talking. Low self-esteem? Scared to do things? They do mean DJ, right?
“Sonya? She’s sweet.”
“And badass. Don’t cross her.”
“I want to know where she got her guns.”
“America.”
The two giggled some before going silent. I waited a beat, but when they started talking about trying to focus on schoolwork, I walked up the stairs and knocked gently on their door.
“We were wondering where you were,” Caitlin said as she sipped on some tea after we greeted each other.
“Outside, looking for Brady in all the places you can imagine,” I said, which was kind of the truth. “He never made it across the portal after we brought you home. Haven’t seen him since.”
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “Whatever we can do to help.”
“It’s fine,” I said, trying not to laugh at the image of the two girls trying to fight demons as I did. “He’ll come around eventually.”
Sarah nodded and Caitlin continued sipping her tea.
“Where’s everyone else?” I asked.
“In their rooms,” Sarah said. “DJ’s just relaxing, listening to some music. The Brits decided not to leave the house until you came back.”
“Smart,” I said.
I thanked them and left, pausing outside my room. The temptation to teleport and surprise DJ was a strong one.
But if I were exhausted now, I’d go into a coma if I used anymore magic, especially in the human realm.
Instead, I gently pushed open the door as DJ laid in bed in gym clothes, reading his book.
Chapter 8
“Sonya,” DJ gasped when he saw me. He stood up and squeezed me tight. I held him back as tightly as I could, swearing that I heard tears from him at one point. He sniffled, but when I looked up at him, he simply looked away. I was surprised to see this kind of emotion from a man so hidden, yet pleasantly surprised at that. It dropped the aura and showed me a real human being.
When we finally finished our hug, we sat on the bed. No one seemed to want to break the silence, to finally, I spoke.
“I’m confident my brother is alive,” I said. “I don’t know where he is, obviously, or in what state he’s in. But take it from someone who deals with hostages regularly. He might be beaten. He might be bruised. But the demons want something from us. They want me, probably.”
DJ sighed, folded his hands, and looked down. I could not begin to express my appreciation for the support he provided now, especially considering my brother hadn’t exactly high-fived him for his help in Amsterdam.
“I’m sorry,” DJ said. “You shouldn’t have to deal with this.”
“Honestly, DJ, I can’t, and so I won’t,” I said. “I’m not going to let Brady suffer or die. I’m going to go and rescue him. I just need to figure out how. The fewer distractions I have in my way, the better, and as much as I like you, we have to put what we had to the side. I haven’t even thought about it since Brady sent me through the portal last night.”
“You won’t get any disagreement from me,” DJ said immediately, and unlike before, he added no flirtatious gesture with it. He understood the gravity of the situation. And that made me like him even more—though as a human, not as a sexual object.
Good. Worry about your attraction to him later. Act first on getting your brother, then on getting DJ.
“Right now, the three of us—you, me, and Carsis—need to figure out a plan for finding Brady, and we need to execute it. Of course, the pain in the ass part is where to start.”
“Actually, funny you mention that,” DJ said, and for the first time since we started talking, he seemed more upbeat. “The Brits and the girls downstairs went downstairs to eat shortly after you left. I joined them but mostly kept silent because of last night. Sarah asked Nicholas if they wanted to do anything.”
“So naturally, Nicholas got super excited and wouldn’t shut up.”
The laugh said it all.
“Exactly. They were talking about spending the day as tourists, trying to forget about the disaster of last night. So, of course, what do you do as a tourist in Berlin? You go to the Berlin Wall. Well, here’s my theory. If the demons want you, they want you to find them so that they don’t have to draw attention in the human realm. But they know you can’t just find them in any place, right? If they hid out in some small restaurant on the outskirts of Berlin, you’d never find them and they’d have to try and capture you—not exactly an easy task with me and Carsis by your side. But if they make it obvious and can lure you in…”
Then they know they have the bait. And they know I’m a fish who won’t refuse that kind of bait. Can’t refuse.
“So you think they’re at the Berlin Wall,” I said, finishing his thought.
“That would be my guess, yes,” he said. “Problem is, the Berlin Wall is a bit of an exhibit. It stretches out over multiple places, including an area where the actual wal
l is still intact, at Checkpoint Charlie, and a few other memorials. So the place to start isn’t as clear as just saying ‘the Berlin Wall.’”
Perhaps not, I thought, but it sure narrowed it down significantly. Even if the Wall remained entirely intact—which, obviously, history had taught that it wasn’t—we could run along it and find a portal eventually.
“Not bad, DJ,” I said as I hugged him. “You got some detective skills of your own.”
“I would hope so,” he said with a laugh, which suddenly reminded me of the conversation I’d overheard.
“Skills, it sounds like, you acquired pretty recently,” I said.
“And what does that mean?” he said, still laughing.
“Caitlin and Sarah were talking about you, about your childhood.”
It was like I had just told DJ I’d castrated him in his sleep. The laughter immediately vanished. He scooted back about half a foot. He bit his lip.
“I see,” he said, creating a gulf between us. “And what kind of things did they talk about?”
Had I needed to drag something out of DJ, as an agent, I would have come up with a creative lie, something that would’ve sounded unpleasant from the outside but was really just a hilarious misunderstanding. But I wasn’t interacting with him as an agent, but someone who’d rapidly become a good friend.
At, let’s be honest, a minimum.
“They just talked about how as a kid you didn’t have a lot of self-esteem and you were scared to do things but that now you’re different.”
Notably, DJ did not react. He kept the same face, the same distance, and refused to say anything. I could see he was calculating the best way to respond. Again, in the CIA, we let silence compel the subjects to talk. But this was not the CIA.
“It’s OK if you were, DJ. I still like you for who you are and will continue to do so. It’s not going to change because you were with low self-esteem as a kid or—”
“Enough,” DJ said, holding a hand up. Sensing I was treading on some ugly territory, I now went silent, giving him the space to speak. Which it took him several seconds to do so. “What Sarah and Caitlin said isn’t wrong. I had friends, yes. But I was a nervous wreck for a long time. I didn’t have the social confidence to speak up. I loved my stories and always wished for the day that I could tell my stories. There were a couple of people that I would confide my stories in, and they’d always say to share them. But I was scared to. I was scared shitless. Do you know what it’s like to reveal something you created to your circle of friends, unsure if they’ll like it or not? Do you know how it feels to think that ‘if they don’t think it’s amazing, what they’re really saying is that it’s shit and they just don’t wanna be rude?’”
No. I didn’t have any idea. But DJ wasn’t asking me questions he wanted answered.
“I don’t like to talk about my past in such terms because it doesn’t do any good to dwell on the socially awkward moments, the feeling of not being able to speak to anyone because no one would care what I said. The past I told you about in Amsterdam is completely true. My stories did get the most attention for being told. It’s a good story of stories, and I don’t really care to have that marred by some bad memories that I don’t want to go back to.”
But I couldn’t quite wrap my head around that being the truth. DJ had revealed some vulnerable things to me before. The way he talked about growing up in a small town where there wasn’t much to do seemed like an honest thing he wasn’t the proudest of.
What I realized instead was that I was looking at a guy who didn’t mind revealing his insecurities… so long as he was secure in revealing them. It was one of those weird things that didn’t make sense when I first thought it, but the more I analyzed it, the more it made sense. Once DJ had gotten comfortable with admitting he didn’t have certain things, he could confess it. But if someone revealed parts of him that he wasn’t comfortable with, he got defensive.
It was the classic case of “I can complain about my wife, but if someone else says something bad about her, there’s hell to pay.” Except instead of a wife, it was his past.
I tried to imagine what my reaction would be to Brady if he told DJ that I had scarred myself when I was a teenager—and that was the worst he knew of. If he actually knew what had happened that one night…
Maybe you should do that right now. Show him a part of you that you yourself suppressed for so long that you barely remembered it. It would show him that we all have scars. It might do him some good and calm him down.
But as much as I liked DJ, I couldn’t bear to admit to him my past being that sordid and depressing. The only reason Brady found out was because I went out to the bathroom one evening, crossed paths with him and he noticed. I fucking hated his guts for getting help and refused to talk to him for a good month or two before I begrudgingly let him in. Even now, as I thought about it, I may have appreciated what he did, but I could still remember and feel the seething rage I had felt.
And I was supposed to unveil that past to someone I’d known just a few days? Even if I had sex with him, there was a chasm the size of the Grand Canyon between having sex and revealing that part of my past.
“I’m sorry, DJ,” I said. “I don’t know what it’s like to expose yourself creatively. I don’t have that gene in me to be creative. I can’t possibly understand your process and emotions with creativity.”
“You do, everyone does, it’s just not unearthed often.”
I mustered something of a thankful smile. I didn’t agree, but his words sounded more sincere than charming.
“But I can understand what it’s like to expose a part of yourself to the world that you don’t want exposed,” I said.
“It’s not even that,” he said. He sat closer to me now and took my hand in his, squeezing it with affection. “But that is a source of anxiety, you’re right. It’s more like… every story has a piece of my soul in it. Whether it’s a story with romantic undertones, violent, torturous overtones, or themes of friendship, something that is a part of me is there. And sometimes, I don’t know what that part of me is. Maybe I can guide the story in a way that reflects who I am, but the thing about a reflection is that it shows you everything—even the details you don’t want to see. We all love mirrors when they make us good and want to break them, curses and all included, when we see something we fear unattractive.”
I gulped. This was another side of DJ that was tough to see but made me appreciate him more—the painfully vulnerable side. It was a bit tough but much easier when it was self-disclosing vulnerable. When it was unearthed, though…
“Thus, even now, even to this day, when I write something, I feel great when I’m writing, I get in the zone, and all I want to do is write as long as the sun is up. But, darling, I’ll tell you, as soon as I see that book on shelves or online… I get nervous and clammy as could be. I know it’s silly—the people who would judge me for it are the people I wouldn’t care to be friends with. But still. A part of me is in that story, and I don’t like having parts of me exhumed that I can’t control. Whether in a story or from childhood friends.”
I couldn’t lie, there was a part of me that as I heard this became interested in experiencing it. I never shared my story with anyone, mostly because I never saw a reason to. What good did it do to tell coworkers how I struggled with anxiety in middle school, had no friends in high school, and struggled with self-confidence early in the CIA, largely to the point of costing a good family man his life? I was too practical to ever engage in such conversation, keeping my personal banter to current events and my professional conversations to the missions and duties at hand.
But even through the admitted fear and struggle that DJ felt, I also sensed a strong amount of catharsis. Yes, there were nerves in showing a part of his soul to the world. But there was also a feeling of satisfaction, as if whatever had haunted him before was laid to rest in the characters or setting of his most recent book.
Clearly, though, he had not put the way h
is childhood felt to him all the way behind. That would require a sequel.
Or maybe his memoir.
“Well, I appreciate you telling me this about yourself,” I said. “I know it’s not easy to open up about feeling that way as a guy, or just as a human, period. So thanks, DJ. We all need some reminders of our humanity these days.”
“Hah, too true,” DJ said, kissing the top of my forehead. “All I know is that the Brits and I are human. And you and Brady may be half-demon, but you’re as pure a person as I’ve ever met.”
“Oh stop,” I said, punching him in response to the mock flattery. He laughed, grabbed my arm, and pulled me on top of him. In a matter of less than two seconds, I found myself mounted on top, my hands on his shoulders, our chests pressed against each other, my face near his neck.
It was both dangerous and arousing. It was so easy, and so tempting, to go at it right there. No one would dare interrupt us, not with the door closed and some moaning and bed creaking to ensue. If we went quickly, I could finish off DJ in less than five minutes.
But now was not the time. Even as we laughed, stared into each other’s eyes, and felt a strong bond forming, I didn’t think we could spend even a half minute naked. Not with my brother in trouble, and not with the city of Berlin trying to trap us for a battle.
Besides, if—OK, at this point, probably when—we had a sexual experience, I didn’t want it rushed.
“You’re tempting,” I said, the most I would give him as I climbed off him and stood to the side.
“You know I have a way of giving into temptation,” DJ said with a smirk. He reached up and tried to pull me in for a kiss, but I would only give him a cheek.
“Which is why we can’t do this,” I said.
“I suppose you just got topless last night to pose for an art painting.”
We shared a laugh at that, but DJ’s tone signaled his acceptance. He would not push back on the matter too hard.
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