Forty-Six
I step out of Aleric’s house to find Khalid waiting for me by my car. His eyes are hard as he looks me over, no doubt checking to see if I’m hurt. Enoch is beside him, smelling as if he’s been scolded; his hormones all over the place. Shame. Guilt. Embarrassment. Frustration. And worry.
“You should have woken me,”
Enoch says. He’s my new bodyguard, the new reaper now that Leno’s dead and Khalid has been forced to become secondborn.
“You should’ve known,”
Khalid corrects, his voice flat as he opens the door to the driver’s seat. A silent demand for us all to get in so he can scold us in private. If the vampires think there is any discord amongst our ranks, they might think we’re divided enough to attack.
Wincing, Enoch starts to reach for the passenger door, knowing this is unavoidable, but a quick glance from Khalid has him freezing. “Shit,”
he thinks – his thoughts written all over his face.
He looks back at me. The reaper isn’t to get in until I do. He’s to keep an eye on my surroundings, ready to intercept any threat – which means waiting for me outside of the car, not in it.
He shouldn’t be in this role.
Leno –
My throat tight, I look at Khalid. “He drives.”
His lips tighten, but he nods at Enoch. After I slip into the backseat, Khalid mirrors me on the other side. Usually, I drive as I’m the weakest link. If we’re attacked, the stronger ones should be free to defend us, but Enoch can drive with his telekinesis and still attack too, and I want to see the soul dolls.
“Show me Rudy,”
I say as Enoch peels off down the drive, back towards our house.
“He’s alive.”
“Show me.”
Swirling his hand over his lap, he pulls a pool of shadows onto his thigh, then pulls Rudy’s soul doll from it. It’s in one piece; Eduardo stitched him back together with his magic.
Picking it up, Khalid closes his eyes as he listens to what is happening around our brother and sees what he does. I do not doubt that he keeps the darker stuff to himself, secreting the truth so it’s only his pain to bear.
“There’s been no change,”
he says after a few seconds, meaning Rudy’s magic is still under wraps. For now. But if they break him, he will lose hold of the control he grips so tightly. His power isn’t like normal. Most witches take the energy in their veins and manipulate it into what they want, but if a pregnant mother’s hit with a violent spell, then their fetus, if they survive, is born with chaos magic.
Meaning, Rudy’s seeps from his skin and feeds on the fears and nightmares of those around him. Then it runs back to him, its belly full with the equivalent of a grenade about to go off. It is a constant battle of wills to keep it from exploding, so if he loses his mind through Ricks or pain… it will erupt from him, affecting friends and foes alike.
But he will kill himself before then. We all know it.
“And Micha,” I murmur.
“Varius –”
he starts as he deposits Rudy’s soul doll back into his shadows.
“Show me.”
He stares at me. His lips tighten into a line of fucking stubbornness. “No,”
he says. “It’ll affect your judgement, and it’s already clearly impaired as you went to Aleric’s without any back-up –”
“I needed to talk to him in private,”
I say tightly.
“Privacy doesn’t mean you go on your own. We could have waited outside – like we did.”
“If he wanted to kill me, he would just do it at our house.”
His eyes narrow. “How?”
I shrug. “I don’t know, but he clearly has a fucking way inside.”
I think about the porno I found playing in Mother’s room when I went back to check on Micha. About the lotion he has her put on every night. Certain words he’s said here and there… There’s just been this constant itch under my skin when it comes to him and our ward.
“The sky,”
Khalid says, and now it’s so fucking obvious. The ward isn’t a dome, it’s a fence that reaches a hundred feet into the sky and digs down into the earth. He must phase up high, then fall to the ground. Or phase to it. He is actually crazy enough to try. Shit.
“I’ll get the others to close it,”
he says as he digs out his phone.
“No,”
I say. Mother would want to help, and she can’t use magic yet. The build-up in her blood is still too high. It’s going to take months, perhaps even a year or so for it to dissipate back to normal levels. If she uses a large amount of power before then, she could develop loka, a magical cancer that is always terminal.
Plus, we’d need to tell Aleric so the idiot doesn’t find out when he next decides to ‘drop in for an unexpected visit.’ As much as we’d all love to see him dead, his death would lead to too much of a power vacuum. When Micha and Rudy come home, I don’t want them to be stepping into another war.
“Leave it in case we need a trap later,”
I say instead, and Khalid nods. He types out a text anyway, no doubt telling everyone about the hole in our security.
“You still shouldn’t have left on your own,”
he says when he looks up. “It was foolish and stupid.”
“You all have my number.”
If Antonio got spotted, they could’ve reached me. I would’ve convinced Aleric to take me there. But it’s been months, and no one’s fucking seen him.
Khalid’s jaw tics. I know that isn’t what he meant, but I don’t care.
“You’d do anything for your girl,”
I say quietly. I don’t admit I have forgotten her name. She’s changed it recently anyway. Lou is teaching her how to summon eknor demons, and it’s dangerous to use your birth name with them. So she decided she wanted a full change with her new life.
I’m pretty sure it starts with a K now though – or maybe an R?
I don’t care enough to find out right now. “Now show me my wife.”
He stares at me for a moment, then says, “Enoch?”
“Fuck,”
is muttered from the driver’s seat, too soft for Khalid to hear. I only just pick it up with my hybrid senses. This is a test to see how he handles his new job as reaper – making decisions for the good of the Family.
My hands tighten, certain he will side with Khalid just because he’s being trained by –
“Show him,”
he says, and I exhale sharply as I glance at him, then at Khalid.
My brother’s face is a complete mask as he pulls on his shadows. “Wrong,”
he says, but he obeys the reaper’s order.
“What else is new?”
Enoch mutters as he takes a turn. “And it’s not like you’re doing a great job in your new role either. The Underboss is supposed to be approachable so the men feel like they can talk to you about any problems. But has anyone done that? No. Because you have the aura of a killer clown.”
Khalid’s mask doesn’t shift an inch, but I know him well enough to know that stung. He takes his responsibilities all too seriously, and if my mind wasn’t obsessed with getting Micha and Rudy back home, I would wonder what he was thinking of as a way to be more approachable to our men.
If Micha were here, would we have laughed about it?
The thought of laughter seems so foreign right now.
Closing his eyes, Khalid connects himself to my wife.
The seconds drag out in tense silence. All my hairs stand on end. My skin itches. Feeling foreign. I stare at his face, doing my best to decipher any subtle changes, but it is a mask like always.
Then his eyes finally open.
And he turns to me.
“She’s –”
he starts before the slam of the brakes cut him off. My head jerks forward to see Aleric’s appeared in the middle of the road, with both his hands up. Khalid starts to pull on his magic anyway; I can feel it electrifying the air, but now Aleric’s in the car with us.
“Antonio’s been spotted in Mljet, Croatia,”
he says as he reaches across Khalid and grabs me. Then we’re gone, my brothers left behind, though I do not doubt they’ll be quick to follow. I caught Vlad’s scent a second before we phased.