Chapter 21
Chapter
Twenty-One
“I’m not so much angry,” I said, as I windshield-wiper flicked Geraldine and Grisette Gibson’s blood off my face with my finger and flung it on the floor, “as I am disappointed in your lack of control. You didn’t even give Fennel or me a chance to react.”
Cecil didn’t respond. He’d turned away from the horror movie scene he’d just created and began stuffing the things he’d taken out of his hat back into it.
“Can’t say I’m not impressed, though. How’d you get the explosion to be so localized? And so quiet?” I held up a bloody hand. “Never mind. You can tell me later.”
Fennel shook, spraying blood everywhere. Not that it mattered, because blood was already everywhere. Cecil’s spell had silently vaporized the sisters. Basically, they were mist. Dark red mist.
I wouldn’t mourn them. Maybe they’d banished some demons for The Org, but I couldn’t help but wonder how many times they’d gotten it wrong. How many times they’d viewed hurting a non-demon, like Bronwyn, as part of the job because they knew it would draw their quarry out.
If this was a technique they commonly used, were they banishing actual demons? The ones I’d dealt with didn’t care about anyone but themselves. You couldn’t draw them out if you held their own mothers at gunpoint.
Besides, I’d given the sisters a chance to redeem themselves, and they’d chosen to attack. Nope, I’d sooner shed a tear for Brock Greer, and believe me, I wasn’t getting red-nosed and teary-eyed for that monster.
This had created a new problem, though. I didn’t know where Bronwyn was trapped, and the only two people who could’ve clued me in had been atomized by my partner.
Geraldine had said the salt circle they’d used was upstairs, so I supposed it was as good a place to check as any. I had no confidence she’d be there, but it’d be stupid to ignore what she’d said.
I shuffled to the stairway, my chest still hurting, my body barely responding to me, and what felt like all the worry in the world on my shoulders.
Madame Responsable in action.
Fennel tromped up the stairs ahead of me with Cecil clinging to his back. By the time I’d reached the landing, he was growling and Cecil was reaching into his hat again. His tiny scimitar gleamed in the midday sunlight streaming through the cracked windows.
I trailed them into an old bedroom. Fennel leapt onto a pedestal table serving as a nightstand beside a rusted iron bed that had collapsed in the middle.
The top mattress was gone, leaving only a dirt-encrusted box-spring behind.
The streaks in the floor dust told me the bed and nightstand had been pushed against the wall recently, and the freshly poured salt circle in the center of the room told me why.
“Bronwyn?”
No answer.
I looked at Fennel, who now sat beside Cecil on the broken-down bed, whiskers twitching, tail swishing. “Is she here?”
He nodded once then shook his head. Here, yet not.
The reality of what the Gibson sisters had done to her hit me with a blow far worse than what I’d experienced downstairs—at any point today, really.
My breath caught. I backed up until I hit the wall then my legs went out and I slid down, dragging chipped plaster and wallpaper remnants with me.
Bronwyn.
I knew where she was. The Gibson sisters had preferred death over going after her, and there was only one place that would terrify two powerful necromancers that much.
The place they’d tried to send me.
“Betty? Betty!” Frantic voices shouted my name.
“Where are you?” Ronan yelled from downstairs. His wolf was strong in his voice, but still it trembled. “Answer me right damn now.”
The combination of power and vulnerability drew the words from my lips. “Upstairs bedroom.”
He burst into the room like a storm, in hybrid form, fur dusting his magnificently nude, muscled body.
The shadowed planes of his face were stark, his eyes cold.
He looked hunted, like all the fears his brain could summon had converged on him at once.
His gaze darted from the boys to the salt circle, finally returning to me.
“I’m okay,” I said. Okay was a stretch, but I was alive.
The moment he entered, the pain I’d been carrying eased.
It hit me then that this was the chest ache that had intensified downstairs right before the Gibsons made their ill-fated move.
It hadn’t been the pack or the coven. It had been Ronan’s pain.
Ronan, who loved me so much his worry had been an agony that had wounded us both.
“Baby.” He went to his knees beside me and pulled me gently against him. “Thank the gods.”
His arms were strong and warm, and I wanted to fall into them and never leave, but I couldn’t. I still had responsibilities to attend to.
“Betty?” Ida stomped up the stairs and tromped into the room. “What happened here?”
I opened my mouth to explain, but all that came out was a sob. I stared at the salt circle until the image of it was burned into my eyes, until every time I blinked I saw a white ring—on the floor, on the wall, on the broken bed. On Ida’s face, in Ronan’s eyes.
“You’re hurt. I knew this would—” Ronan bit back the admonishment.
“Betty, sweetheart, just stay still and let me take a look at you.” He shifted entirely to human and began running his hands over my body, searching for contusions, lacerations, broken bones—and he found them, but they had little to do with my pain.
Ida knelt, tucked a blood-soaked hair behind my ear. “There’s so much blood in the front yard and downstairs, we were scared it was yours.”
“Not mine.” I stared up at her, the afterimage of the salt circle ringing her face like a ghostly frame. “Not all.”
“Whose then?”
“Brock Greer. Yarnells,” I said.
Ida put a gentle hand on mine. “What’s happened?”
“Bronwyn.” I could barely say her name. “She’s in trouble.”
“Where is she?”
I patted her and Ronan’s hands dismissively then I slid up the wall using the same path I’d taken down. “I need Margaux.”
“She’s here.” Ida rose with me, dusted plaster and paper off my clothes. “Went back to her car after we heard you. Said she needed some things.”
“Margaux called while I was listening to your voicemail. Told me everything.” He rested his lips against my ear. “You are in such big trouble for coming here without a pack escort. Huge trouble. There shall be punishment, Alpha Betty, and not only the kind you like.”
Normally, I’d have laughed. Smiled, at least, at his joke. Right now, I had no humor left in me.
I knew what came next. I knew where this led, where it had been leading since Sexton hired me to procure demon-grown belladonna from Limbo for his homesickness tea.
Ronan looked at Ida. They both faced me.
“Talk to us,” he said, “Please.”
“Bronwyn is in trouble. Bad trouble. I have to go get her—in fact, I’m the only one who can.”
Ronan shook his head. He didn’t seem to be aware he was doing it. It was as if his body was reacting to something his mind hadn’t yet registered. The man knew me, body and soul, so he had to know that whatever was happening here was something he wasn’t going to like.
“Where is she?”
Ida, too, was shaking her head. Not because her body had registered something her mind hadn’t, though. The opposite. She’d done the mental calculations and come up with only one circumstance that would have me this upset.
“Wait, what did you mean when you said you put her in a place a necromancer can’t go?”
“Not can’t go, would never go.”
“Betty?” Ida took my limp hand in hers.
“Hell,” I said. “Bronwyn’s in Hell.”
“Blasted necromancers.” Ida paced the perimeter of the circle, eying it this way and that.
“We’re not all evil, but enough of us are that it makes the rest of us look bad.
” She pressed a hand to her mouth as if she were manually stopping herself from saying more.
“Where are those sisters? I’ll drag them back here by their hair and make them go find Bronwyn. ”
“Cecil turned them into a crimson rainstorm with a hex bag and an ACME blasting plunger.” I stared at the salt ring, couldn’t seem to take my eyes off it now.
Ida stopped pacing, turned, and gave my partner a fist bump.
“Were you able to question them?”
“A little,” I said. “You know as much as I do. Salt circle. Place where a necromancer is too afraid to go. Has to be Hell. Where else?”
“Could it have been a bluff?” Ronan asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“But you don’t think so,” he said.
“No.”
“What are you planning, Betty Lennox?” He asked the question with the softest of gazes and the most delicate of touches, but the ache in my chest told me he was feeling anything but tender.
“I’m going to walk into Hell, find her, and bring her back home.”
There was no way they didn’t all know that was what I’d had planned, but they all reacted as if it were a novel idea, as if there’d been other choices and I’d landed on this one by accident.
Ronan: “Fuck no.”
Ida: “Surely there has to be another way.”
Cecil chittered with the fervor of a rabid squirrel.
Only Fennel sat stone still, watching, his tail swishing like a metronome keeping time with a slow song.
“There’s no other way,” I said.
They knew it was true, but they cursed, bargained, and chittered some more anyway.
Except Fennel. He stayed quiet. Watchful.
I brushed my lips over Ronan’s then broke away from him and stepped inside the circle. Sat down.
“Do you sense her?” Ida asked.
“No, but there’s some kind of magic here. Be very careful. Do not break the circle.”
Ronan knelt outside it, as close as he could get to me.
“The necromancers could’ve been lying. Have you checked the closets?
Maybe they knocked her out and stuffed her under a bed.
Or they might’ve turned her over to The Org and we’re wasting time.
Mason is already on his way. This is his wheelhouse. He’ll know where they’d take her.”
“Maybe,” I said.
He jerked his hand through his hair, leaving the auburn strands sticking up all over his head. “You’re placating me, aren’t you? You don’t believe anything I’m saying.”
“No, I don’t.”