Chapter 24
Cursing Delacroix—and my own stupidity for agreeing to this—I headed off through the endless sea of red sand. Conventional wisdom dictated that if you strayed off a trail you stayed put, but those were hiking rules on an earthside mountain. The only rule applicable to magic deserts with bad-touch sand hands were GET THE FUCK OUT NOW!
I trudged over dunes for an eternity, my throat parched from the relentless heat.
Nothing ever appeared, and the dark didn’t give way to daylight though I’d been walking for hours. My steps grew more laborious, my thighs burned, and my body was slick with sweat. I wiped myself down with the jacket that I’d tied over my head, and sucked on the fabric, desperate for moisture.
“Ezra!” I called out for the thousandth time, my voice cracking. The sound was swallowed by the vast emptiness around me.
The landscape shifted constantly, dunes rising and falling like waves. I’d hobble to the top of one, hoping to spot something—anything—only to find my view obscured by another, larger dune that hadn’t been there moments before.
I’d flipped into my shedim form for protection and added stamina, but the effort of maintaining it outweighed any benefits, and I soon reverted to my normal body.
Sand cascaded beneath my next step. I stumbled, rolling my ankle with a hot shaft of pain, and sank to my knees with a cry.
Get up , Cherry snarled in my head. We are not dying here .
Just let me rest . One little nap with dreams of cool water and shade. That sounded nice.
Don’t you dare lie down! She screamed at me until I pressed on, precious tears running down my face from the hell that each weight-bearing step caused my left ankle.
As I crested yet another dune, my heart leapt. In the distance, I saw a flash of green—the cactus! I’m coming, my pretty! I threw myself down the hill, rolling faster and faster, my heart soaring. There had to be a way out once I got…whatever it was I was here for.
Or I found… Wasn’t I with someone?
I tumbled to a stop at the bottom, but the cactus shimmered and vanished, leaving me alone once more. A sob of frustration escaped my cracked lips.
Suddenly, the sand shifted, pulling me down.
Panic surged through me as I sank deeper, the grains rough against my skin. I thrashed, but it only made me sink faster. The sand was up to my waist now, threatening to swallow me whole.
In desperation, I reached for Cherry. She responded sluggishly, like I was trying to grasp smoke, but my arms transformed, frosted green scales glinting in the harsh moonlight. With renewed strength, I dragged myself out of the quicksand’s grip and lay on solid-ish sand, panting.
Cherry went quiet, barely a spark inside me. I was fully human and totally exhausted, every part of my body throbbing. My eyes burned with sand, and tears streamed down my cheeks. When my vision finally began to clear, there was another flash of green nearby.
The cactus’s flesh was torn apart like a jagged smile to reveal a metal door.
“No,” I moaned. “Not another mirage.”
This one didn’t vanish.
I wish it had, because the sight of Ezra fighting an enormous man made of sand, one arm dangling limply from the Prime’s shoulder and his skin a mix of soot and blood from dozens of cuts that weren’t healing, would have been a nightmare I could wake up from.
Delacroix appeared out of thin air, a cigarette jammed in the corner of his mouth. “Ah. Perfect timing.” He stepped over me, rubbing his hands like a cartoon villain.
The sand creature punched its fist down on the top of Ezra’s head.
My boyfriend collapsed like a balloon that had lost all its air, crumpling facedown in a heap.
I grabbed Delacroix’s pant leg. “Help him!”
He dragged me across the sand, not even slowing his pace.
“Anything happens to Ezra and your magic at the Hell goes to shit.” I spat out sand. “You won’t be safe.”
Delacroix growled an annoyed sigh. “Then get up, girlie, and open the safe door. That brain isn’t going to steal itself.”
Hating the demon with every fiber of my being, I rose, keeping as much of my weight as possible on my uninjured leg, and hobbled over to the cactus. I couldn’t let myself look back, because if Ezra still hadn’t moved, I’d shut down.
We hadn’t overcome everything thus far for my fucking father and some sand creature to destroy us.
I glanced over my shoulder.
My boyfriend was bathed in a silver glow, fighting alongside Delacroix to shred the sand creature into ribbons with a brutal thoroughness.
The demon had lost his human glamor in favor of majestic silver scales that rippled over his thick serpent’s coils. His strikes recalled the swell of waves, while the sand monster, roughly ten feet tall and humanoid, felt rooted to the earth’s core. Delacroix shot forward and sliced off a ribbon of sand using the heavy black horns that curved upward off his head.
The monster lunged for the demon, but the serpent bobbed out of his grasp and opened the crimson spike that protruded from his neck into blades that shredded his opponent.
The sand creature reared back with a howl, bleeding granules.
Ezra tore his attacker’s head off, and the creature dissolved into a pile of sand.
Delacroix slid toward me, shrinking back to his human glamor. His skin and hair were dusted in sand. He snapped his fingers at me. “Don’t just stand there.”
I wrenched on the safe’s handle, grunting and pulling with all my might to release its top edge from inside the cactus. The cut from the thorn I’d first stabbed myself with tore open, and a smear of blood stained the metal.
The door flew open, almost smashing me in the nose.
Inside the safe was nothing more than a two-by-three-foot hollowed-out section of the cactus cavity. Impaled on a single large thorn was the brain Delacroix sought. It wasn’t a dusty, almost quaintly desiccated lump, but a fleshy pulsing monstrosity covered in strange dot-like growths that didn’t correspond to any anatomical structure I’d ever seen.
Ezra gaped at it, the silver glow of Delacroix’s magic boost gone. “Qué mierda?”
A demon brain . My curiosity almost made a dent in my panic and pain.
Being around it didn’t incapacitate me with nausea—more proof that this innate demon magic detection that I manifested since taking off my Maccabee ring didn’t work on full demons—or their parts.
I reached for it with a grimace, the brain quivering like cold jelly under my palm. Shuddering, I adjusted my hold and tugged, but the brain didn’t come loose, and now I was stuck fast as well.
I couldn’t move, and worse, something was assessing me, creeping through me.
It poked and my magic freaked out.
Scales to skin, crimson locks to brown, claws to fingers, my features flipped back and forth as if something was puzzling me out. My transformation slowed like a slot machine window, landing on the winning prize of all shedim parts.
The brain quivered and plopped into my hands.
A second later, I was knocked aside. The brain was ripped from my grasp so brutally that a burst of scales tore free.
Delacroix seized me by the shirtfront and lifted me off the ground with one hand.
“Let her go.” Ezra ran toward us.
Delacroix froze him in his tracks and leaned his face close to mine, his eyes glittering dangerously. “Keeping secrets, girlie? Frankly, I’m a little hurt it took a cactus to facilitate a proper family reunion.”
“I’m not. You always were a prick.”
My lungs suddenly felt like they were filled with salt water. They weren’t actually, yet I couldn’t breathe. Coughing, I thrashed uselessly in my father’s grip. He was drowning me in the middle of a desert, and every part of me burned from the lack of oxygen.
Ripples rose up from the red waves cascading out to the horizon. I tried to touch them, but I couldn’t lift my arm. I was numb.
My soul drifted down to a place without panic. Without pain. I was surrounded by a swirl of colors and beauty.
Fuck that , a voice growled in my head.
The numbness tore away like a sheet ripping off a line. Fire seared every one of my nerve endings, my vision flecked with giant black dots, but the magic drowning sensation subsided a fraction—just enough for me to drag in a gasping breath.
“I don’t like being tricked,” Delacroix said.
“Should have earned your demon detective badge,” I snarled and swiped my claws across his cheek, drawing blood.
Delacroix was so startled that he dropped me.
I landed on my bad ankle with a howl, instinctively reaching out for something to grab hold of.
My fingertips sank into one of the growths on the brain and my vision exploded into chaos. I went rigid as a torrent of information flooded my mind, streaming numbers and letters that blinded me. Then I sagged to the hot sand, my thoughts blurring in a feverish haze.
The barrier keeping Ezra from me must have fallen away in the demon’s shock because my boyfriend reached me and slid his shoulder underneath mine to take the weight of my bad side as he helped me to my feet. “She’ll kill you for that,” he said to Delacroix, “and I’ll take great pleasure in helping her.”
My body felt light, almost floating through the heat shimmering off the sand, but my skin was cooking. “Plus codes,” I gasped.
Delacroix froze.
The gentleness of Ezra’s grip was belied by the menace he directed at Delacroix. “The brain contains the locations of the prison cells?”
I’d given them to Delacroix? My legs buckled but Ezra kept me upright.
The demon touched a finger to the blood on his cheek. “Keep your mouths shut about this or I’ll tell its previous owners where to find the Maccabee and Prime who stole it.”
Salty sweat burned my eyes. “You mean you’ll tell the shedim how your daughter took it thanks to very precise instructions from her father?”
He flipped the brain over to examine it. “There are other shedim who look similar to me. Who’s to say you’re not one of theirs?”
My eyes flared so bright green with rage that Delacroix blinked and looked away. After all he’d done to me, it shouldn’t have been any big surprise that he’d toss me away like trash if it suited him.
I clenched my fists to keep from rubbing away the sting in my chest, then stepped up toe-to-toe with the asshole demon. “Free those prisoners and there won’t be a corner of any reality that’s dark enough or far enough to hide in.” I could barely get the words out because my brain felt like it was melting, plop by plop disintegrating in my skull.
“Who said I planned to free them?” Delacroix cast about in his shock of hair for another cigarette, which he jammed in his mouth.
“Something worse, then,” I retorted. Though I couldn’t imagine what that was.
“Aviva,” Ezra said insistently and tugged my arm up.
My scales were a sickly gray.
“I’ll stop you,” I said to my father. “Whatever you’ve planned.”
“Yeah, I’m terrified. You look like a guppy some two-year-old caught,” Delacroix said with a mean smirk.
“Get us out of here,” Ezra snarled at the demon and swung me up in his arms.
I tried to speak but my mouth was dry and tasted of sand. The bursts and swirls of colors dancing around my head were pretty, though.
Well, they were until they swam around me in a nauseating blur.
The world bounced twice, then Ezra pressed his wrist to my lips.
I tasted copper. I savored it, drinking greedily, the healing magic in his blood flowing into me.
He finally disengaged his wrist with a wince. “Stop,” he said gently.
As my senses returned, I saw that we sat outside under a tree with the villa in the distance.
“How long was I gone?” Off his confusion, I clarified. “When I first disappeared in the desert?”
“Only a few seconds. I turned around and you’d vanished, then you just reappeared.”
I stared at him in disbelief. Seconds? It had felt like days of torment. “Time was different there.”
Ezra’s expression darkened. “Whatever Delacroix is up to, we’ll stop him.”
“Sure. Just add it to the list.” I sat up with a muttered curse. “He didn’t give me the person who can identify the Ashbishop or anything on the vamp supplicant. Take me to the Hell.”
He did as I asked but didn’t let me leave the foyer. “I’ll corner Delacroix and get that information myself right now. Unless you want me to come home with you.”
“I do, but no. Keep an eye on him.”
“I will.” Ezra kissed me softly.
I sighed in relief when I returned to the alley behind my condo tower and there wasn’t a vampire waiting for me, but the emotion was short-lived because Alastair sat in the lobby, swapping gossip about the British royal family with Mrs. Carson from the fourth floor.
“Ah!” The Brit waved at me. “Here she is now. Thank you, my dear, for keeping me company until Aviva got home.”
The older woman, a notorious grump who always side-eyed me, ducked her head with a blush. “The pleasure was mine.” She passed me with a frosty glare and got into one of the elevators.
“Did you compel her?” I said.
“I’m hardly old enough for that.” He tutted me with his finger. “A word of warning, luv.”
“Do tell.”
“Make it easy on yourself and leave your watchers alone.”
I crossed my arms. “Your concern for my well-being warms the cockles of my heart.”
“It’s just laziness, innit?” he said, straightening the couch’s throw pillows. “You or Ez move against Natán and then I’ve got a mess of trouble to deal with. One missing vamp I could explain away. Two’s a coincidence. Three is a nasty, nasty pattern, and I’d hate for the box man to have to intercede.” He rose fluidly, strode out the door, and out of view.
I’d hoped that after sand monsters, my father’s wrath, vampire minions, and a demon brain that I’d get five freaking minutes to catch my breath, but I’d just gotten into my bedroom when my mother phoned.
“Linda’s home burned down,” Michael said. “Firefighters couldn’t find her when they went inside.”
“Oh my God. Did Troy do it?” I chucked my socks into my hamper.
“We don’t know. There haven’t been any sightings of him. Forensic techs will check for a body when the house cools down enough. Let’s hope she got out and will reach out to us.” She ended the call.
I was all for Linda making contact, but her lover was still on the run with two occupied prison locks in his possession, and her mother had worked with a shedim who freed jailed demons.
Linda might indeed get in touch soon, but with who?