Chapter Twenty-Four
Twenty-Four
Time stopped. Not literally, though that would have been cool.
Rather, my brain ceased processing everything except for Eric, standing next to me on a floor teeming with hungry parasites.
All I could see was the sword held loosely in his hand, its blade wreathed with fire.
I couldn’t understand how he was there, in the lobby of Dark Enterprises.
Maybe I hadn’t escaped the haunt after all, and this was the World Behind the Mirrors, where everything was backward and upside-down.
Then Eric reached out to grab my arm and time began moving again. Employees stumbled past us, racing for the exits. Screams rose from the other side of the lobby. Someone had been pulled through the floor and people were scattering.
Fingers tightened on my sleeve, and I realized Eric was talking to me. “Colin? Are you okay? Colin!”
I looked back at him, my head turning slowly. “What are you doing here?” I asked stupidly.
Before he could reply, the entire building vibrated like a struck gong.
Sizzling purple flame erupted from the air all around the lobby, forming a series of enormous sigils that hissed and threw off sparks.
More purple light flared as protective magicks spiderwebbed across the floor, forcing the haunts flitting beneath us to recoil.
“We need to go,” Eric said tersely. Still keeping a hand on my arm, he began pulling me toward the broken window where people were clambering outside.
While those huge sigils burned and rotated slowly in the air overhead, he pushed me out onto the sidewalk before following.
My shoes slipped on the broken glass littering the pavement, and I would have fallen again if he hadn’t been steadying me.
The baristas at the Starbucks across the street stared at us from behind the windows of their own corporate prison.
Dazed, I allowed myself to be drawn away from the building, Eric close to my side as we walked quickly away from Dark Enterprises.
He wasn’t holding his sword anymore. It wasn’t until we’d crossed onto the next block that I finally pulled my arm out of his grasp.
“Wait a minute. Stop. Stop.” Halting in the middle of the sidewalk, I turned to him.
“What the heck is going on? How did you get into the lobby?”
He glanced over his shoulder, back toward the building we’d escaped. “Can we do this later? I want to get as far from there as we can.”
“No.” Wrapping my arms across my chest, I took a step back from him. “We need to talk about what just happened.”
“Colin, there’s something dangerous in that building—”
“It’s gone,” I interrupted. “For now, at least.”
The worried crease between his eyebrows faded, but he still held himself warily, as if ready to move at a moment’s notice. “Gone where?”
“Hell.” He didn’t blink. “How do you know about that?” I demanded. “How did you know where to find me?”
Eric shoved his hands in his pockets and looked down at the sidewalk. “I’ve always known.”
“I don’t understand.”
His eyes lifted to mine. “About you, and your job. I’ve always known you work for Dark Enterprises.”
I said nothing as his words sank in, dropping like stones. “What do you mean?” I finally asked, my voice surprisingly steady. “How?”
He took a deep breath, as if bracing himself. “I’m a sworn Knight of the Seraphic Conclave,” he said quietly.
I stared at him. “No. You’re lying.”
“I’m not lying.”
“But—” My mind whirled from one thought to the next. “But they attacked us. In the park.”
Eric watched me carefully. “Yes. They were there for you. Because I hadn’t done what I was supposed to do.”
“This is—” I shook my head. “No. I don’t believe you. You wouldn’t—”
“Listen,” he said urgently, reaching for me.
I twisted to evade his touch and he let his hand fall back to his side.
“My family has worked for the Conclave for generations. They taught me that the people who work in buildings like that one back there are monsters. Evil. I never questioned it. But I started watching you, and then I got to know you. You’re not a monster, Colin.
You’re complicated, sure, but you’re not a monster. ”
Uncomprehending, I latched on to a single detail. “You’ve been watching me?”
Slowly, he nodded without taking his gaze from me. “Yes. Months ago, one of our prophets received a vision. A warning. She saw that you would free an Abomination. I was sent to New York to stop it from happening.”
“To stop it,” I repeated numbly.
“I followed you to and from work. I even joined Amira’s yoga class to get closer to you.
I needed to understand what you were planning to do.
But then—” He shook his head. “I got to know Amira, and the way she talked about you…you couldn’t be trying to free an Abomination deliberately.
You just couldn’t. The more I watched you, the more certain of that I became.
You seemed lonely, and sad, not evil. A hundred times, I thought about casually bumping into you on the subway, striking up a conversation, saying something that would make you smile.
I was supposed to remain objective, to keep my feelings in check, but that got more and more difficult to do.
And then Amira asked me if I wanted to go on a date with you, and”—he shrugged helplessly—“I said yes before I knew what I was doing.”
I couldn’t breathe, as if I’d been squeezed flat under the weight of all these revelations. “You—” I coughed, then tried again. “You came here to kill me. Because you knew what I would do.”
“I came here to stop you. Yes.” He looked at me with an earnest expression.
“Please understand. We thought you were deliberately trying to destroy the world, or eradicate some huge part of the population, or something equally terrible. The people you work for—those are the kinds of things they do. Do you know how many times we’ve stopped Management from carrying out one of Their insane schemes?
” He shook his head. “That doesn’t matter.
The point is, I became convinced that you weren’t like that. ”
“You think that’s the point? No, Eric! The point is that you’ve been lying to me!”
“You’ve lied to me as well,” he pointed out. “You lied about your job.”
“Because telling you the truth would have gotten you killed!” I stared at him, anger warring with disbelief. “You think we’re monsters? Your people attacked me! They sent you here to murder me!”
“The Conclave does whatever it has to.”
“That’s funny. We say the same thing in Dark Enterprises.”
His jaw clenched before he visibly mastered himself. “There’s no comparison. Your company does horrific things every single day.”
“We make the hard choices everyone else is afraid to contemplate!” I shouted, suddenly furious.
It was bad enough that Eric had lied to me, but now he was casting aspersions on the company’s mission.
It was more than I could take. “Don’t pretend your Conclave is unwilling to sacrifice a few people to achieve its goals.
That’s why they sent you here, right? To sacrifice me to some higher purpose? ”
He opened his mouth angrily before giving his head a hard shake. “I’m not going to debate this with you, Colin. I wanted you to know the truth, and the truth is, we thought you were going to end the world. And now—”
A dark suspicion crept into my mind. “Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “All those questions, you wanting to know my darkest secrets…you were digging for information, weren’t you?”
“No! I mean, yes. At first.” He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, focusing his gaze on me with a grim intensity.
“I wanted to understand your intentions. I thought I could…I don’t know, talk you out of doing something terrible.
I didn’t realize you’d already freed the Abomination by the time we had our first date.
No one knew that until people began to disappear, and then my instructions from the Conclave changed.
My job after that was to try to contain the situation, not to stop you.
I thought it was safe to get closer to you. I wanted to get closer to you.”
“So you could gather intelligence. This was a mission for you. And I was the poor, desperate dupe who actually believed that you were interested in me.” I laughed bitterly. “I’m such an idiot.”
“I am interested in you!” Eric insisted, moving closer. “I was ordered to leave you alone, but I couldn’t. You’re cute and funny and a good person.”
“A good person,” I repeated, layering my words with scorn.
“What does that even mean? I was a good person for most of my life and it got me exactly nowhere. The rest of the world walked all over me while I smiled politely and took it. Is that what you want? Someone who says please and thank you while life grinds him down to nothing?” My whole body vibrated now with the force of my rage.
“Dark Enterprises showed me that I can have everything I want. I just have to be willing to take it. I’m done with being polite and waiting my turn. ”
Eric watched me with an unreadable expression. “Even if the whole world has to die?”
“Don’t you dare judge me!”
“I’m not!” His hands clenched and then relaxed at his sides.
“I’m not,” he said again, less shouty this time.
“I don’t know why you freed an Abomination, or how.
And I don’t care! I should, but I don’t.
All I want is to keep you safe. That’s why I’m here.
I’ve been staying close to you ever since things started to get bad in the city, trying to keep those other two agents at a distance.
But after I dropped you off this morning, I got an urgent message from the Conclave.
They’d detected another incursion here in Midtown, stronger than anything they’d felt before.
It was coming from that building, so I tried to get inside.
The protective wards had been weakened, but they were still strong enough to keep out anyone who isn’t an employee.
Then people started breaking windows. It was just the doors that were warded, so I was able to jump inside, and then I saw you lying there on the floor, and—” He came to a halt and drew a long, shuddering breath. “I thought I was too late.”
It’s kind of sweet, some part of my brain reflected.
The stalking, I mean. I could see the worry in his eyes, hear the mingled relief and fear that roughened his voice.
He’d saved my life. If not for him, I would be lost in the World Behind the Mirrors right now, like Beverly and Mr. Venables and who knew how many others.
Weighed against that, though, were the lies. He’d lied repeatedly, and not to protect me. He’d known who I really was all along. I felt exposed, as if someone had been watching me do something private. Our relationship had been unbalanced from the start.
“I don’t know you,” I said at last. A flicker of hurt passed across his features and my chest ached a little at causing him pain, but I pressed on.
“I’ll be honest—the fact that you’re some sort of magical knight makes you even hotter, something I didn’t think was possible.
But that doesn’t make up for the fact that I was ready to hand my heart to a total stranger. ”
“I’m not a stranger,” he insisted. “You do know me.” He reached for me again, and this time I allowed him to touch my hand before I pulled away. His eyes searched mine. “You do.”
“I wish that were true,” I said, before I turned and walked away.