The Heart of a Monster: The Complete Series

Chapter 10

Rollick

Ilet Quinn sit in silence for a good while after we’d gotten into the car before I glanced over at her. “I’d say that could have gone at least twice as badly as it did. Consider it a win.”

She exhaled in a rush as if she’d been holding most of her breath for the past hour. “I know. I still don’t like it. I don’t like that I can’t stay with them while they’re wrapping their heads around all this. It’s so much to lay on them at once.”

In the back, Lance slid down to prop his feet against the back of my seat. “We take down the leviathan and his beasties, and then your parents won’t have to worry about it anymore anyway.”

Next to him, Crag let out a wordless rumble. “We don’t know how long that might take. But they’ll be safe until then, even if they’re still confused.”

“Yeah.” Quinn rubbed her face. “I just hope they stay there. I’ll have to call them regularly to make sure they know I’m okay and everything’s on track… as much as we have a track at the moment.”

“They’d have trouble getting very far,” I said. “Torrent’s taking the limo back to where it belongs, and this car was the only other vehicle I had nearby. They seem like practical enough people not to attempt a hike across the desert when they have perfectly comfortable accommodations where they are—and their daughter’s assurances.”

My remark didn’t appear to put Quinn at ease. She folded her arms over her chest, gazing broodingly out the window. “Do we even know for sure that any of Paisley’s friends will be waiting for us? They might have gotten caught up in the wave of sorcery the leviathan sent out, just like she did.”

“I expect we’ll have a few new allies, and those will be the most eager ones of the bunch too. I told them to meet us at a spot near the New Mexico-Arizona border, which would have put them well out of range if they set off fairly quickly. Her mistake was glomming on to us so early.”

I said the last bit flippantly, but even as I spoke, an icy jolt shot through my nerves. For just a second, my thoughts scattered as if they were dandelion fluff in a sharp gust of breeze.

My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I clamped down on the abrupt reaction. I trained all my attention on the road ahead and the steady, even breaths I was sucking into my lungs.

Quinn’s head twitched toward me. No doubt she’d gotten a flash of the strange panic that’d come over me, through the blasted emotional connection I hadn’t meant to forge. I hadn’t minded it so much when it’d allowed her to trust my loyalty to her, but I wasn’t pleased at all with her sensing my moments of weakness. Which had been happening far more often than I liked in the past few days.

I kept my expression relaxed and let out a light chuckle to follow up the remark, emphasizing how absolutely fine I was. From the corner of my eye, I saw Quinn’s mouth tighten, but she didn’t badger me about what she’d sensed. I was managing to convince her it wasn’t a big enough deal to impinge on my dignity in front of the other beings in the car. Maybe she was being kind enough to wait until I was comfortable discussing it with her, as long as I wasn’t at the point of driving us off the road.

If I never had to discuss what was plaguing me, I’d be satisfied. It should go away on its own, as randomly as the unwanted bursts of emotion had begun.

All right, their arrival hadn’t been entirely random, but I’d prefer not to think about that fact either. The less I thought about it, the less likely I’d provoke another discomforting response.

I was a millennia-old demon with more power than the majority of beings in either realm possessed. I could handle this small problem on my own while we tackled the much larger one ahead of us together.

It was the physiological responses of the woman sitting beside me—the woman who’d come to matter more to me than just about anything in either realm—that I should be more concerned about. Especially when we pulled up at the wooden hut that was all that marked the meeting spot I’d picked and I sensed not just a few but dozens of beings lurking in the shadows around us.

“We’ll want to go through the same test we did with the pixie on all of them,” I said reluctantly as I parked the car. “Confirming that they’re all free from any enemy’s sway and joining us with the right intentions. But expend as little energy as you can get away with on each of them. And if you start to feel tired, I expect you to give yourself a break.”

Quinn gave me a quizzical look. “I don’t see why that should be a problem.” She pushed open her door, stepped out onto the dry earth, and froze as the multitude of beings of various shapes and sizes rippled into physical form around us. Her breath caught with a hint of a gasp. “Oh.”

“We do have an army!” Lance declared eagerly, springing out of the car and then leaping onto the roof of it in dragon form. I couldn’t tell whether he thought he was offering them a warmer greeting by meeting them in his shadowkind appearance or attempting to intimidate anyone who might not give our mortal woman the respect she was due.

But our reluctant sorcerer knew how to handle herself just fine by now, initial hesitation aside. Her shoulders had already squared as she gazed out over the crowd of what I could now see was several dozen beings—and at least half of them higher, capable of more than just animalistic fighting. Twice as many as I’d spoken to yesterday. Many of the lesser shadowkind had wandered off since the pixie had first approached us, but the arrival of more thoughtful beings more than made up for their absence. They must have gathered more numbers like a snowball picking up new layers of frost as they’d moved across the country.

The leviathan’s gambit might even have worked a little in our favor, despite what we’d lost to him. Any being that’d sensed what he was attempting to accomplish but managed to escape the sweep of his sorcery would be that much more motivated to make sure he never got the claws of his unnatural magic into their heads. More motivated than the various contacts I’d established over the centuries, most of whom still preferred to protect their own necks while they hadn’t seen the full impact of the threat.

But then, how could I blame them when I’d taken the same tactic myself for so long? Too long.

“All right,” Quinn said, moving to the hood of the car and propping herself against it. “Can you all get into some kind of line so we can be a bit organized about this? I just need to make sure none of you are under any compulsion from the shadowkind that wants to, y’know, kill me. I’m sure you can understand why I’d be cautious.”

I’d already told the original bunch I’d talked to what would be required. They shuffled forward without argument, though they appeared to have some trouble with the whole idea of assembling in a line.

As Quinn got started, aiming a few sorcerous words at the first being to approach her to check for existing magic gripping its mind and then to question its intentions, Lance sprang back off the car. He and Crag prowled around the crowd like monstrous sheepdogs surveying their flock.

I stayed next to the car, within easy reach of Quinn should I need to yank her away from a troublesome being, though they seemed peaceful enough so far. Standing in one spot also made it easier to ride out the faint tremors of chill that rippled through me here and there as the odd syllables spilled from her tongue.

They reminded me too much of the commands the behemoth had hurled at me when he’d tried to force me into becoming his slave. The memory of that time was the deepest, darkest chill in the back of my mind.

I’d fought him off enough that I hadn’t hurt Quinn or interfered with the trap we’d managed to set off. He hadn’t gotten the best of me.

But he almost had. There’d been that moment, right before the trap had closed its metal jaws on him, that something had fractured in my self-control. There’d been nothing ringing in my head except his orders. I’d been about to attack Quinn.

Maybe I’d have wrestled control back and stopped myself, but I’d never know that for sure. And now I’d spend the rest of my ancient life living with that uncertainty.

As well as the uncertainty of whether another time, if a foe like that tried me again, I might lose myself altogether.

But that possibility didn’t matter right now. Right now I held the most authority out of any being around us, and I wasn’t going to let them forget that.

I stretched into my full shadowkind form, letting my hooves paw at the dusty earth and smiling to show off my jagged teeth. Any shadowkind who’d had the slightest inkling of turning on my woman had better think twice.

Quinn moved through each of the beings in just a minute or two, but I noticed when that time started to stretch a little longer. Once she’d spoken to maybe half of the crowd, finding them all honest about wanting to stand up to the leviathan, she exhaled so raggedly I was about to enforce a break. But then she got up herself and took a brief walk around to stretch her legs, drink some water, and eat a pear that Lance insisted on dicing up for her, show off that he was.

Even so, I wanted to tell her to give it a rest. That we would bring the beings we’d confirmed were trustworthy back with us and let the others linger here for another day or two until she’d recovered. But I could already imagine how well the suggestion would go down. I settled for eyeing her closely for any signs of deeper discomfort.

By the time she’d checked the last of the shadowkind who’d come to our aid, the sun had touched the horizon. Quinn sagged back against the hood with a sigh of relief.

“All good,” she said. “Where do we go from here?”

I glanced to the east. “I was thinking we’d gather our forces and decide on our next steps in my badlands house—the one you visited briefly before. It’s well out of the way of any ocean and also well-protected. Any beings in this bunch who can’t handle the metal installations can stay outside them, and you’ll go out to them when you need to make arrangements.”

Quinn cocked her head but seemed to decide my strategy was solid enough. “Fine. Let’s get going then.”

I turned to the crowd around us. “There are plenty of shadows on and around the car. Hitch a ride if you like and can find room. The gargoyle will stay back with those who can’t and show you the way. Stick to the gloom—we don’t want to be spotted by any of that beast’s minions who might have wandered this way.”

A murmur mixed with grunts of agreement spread through the mass of beings. I didn’t know how much of an army they’d prove to be, but at this point, I wasn’t going to be choosey. At least every shadowkind with us was one that the leviathan hadn’t bent to his will.

As we got into the car, I settled back into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Quinn pulled out her phone, equipped with the SIM card I’d newly restored to her. I thought she might be going to place a call to her parents even though we’d only left them behind hours ago, but instead she flicked at the screen. I didn’t know what she was up to until a few minutes later when she sucked in a horrified breath.

My gaze flicked from the road we were cruising down to her. “What?”

“A big wave hit Jacksonville just forty minutes ago. Half of the city is flooded. A bunch of people who were near the beach drowned or were killed by wreckage in the currents.” Her voice wobbled.

“It’s a good thing we got your parents out of there, then,” I said. “The rest… We did our best to warn them. There are probably fewer casualties than there would have been otherwise.”

“Yeah. It’s just scary thinking of how close a call it was. If we’d waited even another day…” She ducked her head. “And I’d bet the leviathan told his minions to start with Jacksonville because of me. If I wasn’t involved in this?—”

“Hey,” I said, sharply only so I could cut through her self-recriminations. “He’d have had them hit somewhere no matter what. He’s the one responsible for the deaths, not you. You’re doing everything you can to stop him.”

“I know. I know.” She closed her eyes for a minute and appeared to gird herself. Then she started scrolling through the news reports again. I kept most of my attention on the road, but I noticed when her frown deepened.

“It isn’t just that one wave,” she said. “There was another near Seattle. And people have finally figured out there’s a huge one building off the coast of L.A. But it’s not just waves either. There are strange cloud patterns in the skies where all the storms are happening. People are saying they’re seeing faces there, glowing eyes, that sort of thing.” She glanced at me. “I thought shadowkind like to keep a low profile. This is even more over-the-top than the attacks on the streets in L.A.”

“They generally do lay low.” A frown of my own crossed my face. What was the leviathan up to? “It’s sounding more and more like our enemy wants to make his influence known. I guess he isn’t scared of the Highest stepping in now that he’s already faced off with some of their warriors and won. Maybe he’s even rubbing his disobedience in their face for some sadistic reason.”

Lance let out a short growl from the back seat. “Maybe he wants to scare all the other shadowkind who see it hoping they’ll obey him.”

“That’s also possible,” I said, but my stomach had knotted with uncertainty. None of those reasons quite added up with what I knew about my kind.

But if the leviathan was going for something beyond the obvious, what was he hoping to achieve?

And how the hell was our little makeshift army going to stop him?