Chapter 40
40
T he house is a wreck.
It feels like there’s a gaping hole in JJ’s chest as he numbly looks around, trying to process the damage. Cass’s second-favorite safe house is nearly destroyed: windows and doors broken, furniture overturned or shredded, glass and splintered wood strewn across the floor. There was clearly a struggle?—a struggle where Cass got hurt, judging by the bloodstains?—and now, the house is just ruined and bare and horribly silent.
Now, Cass is in the Sanctum. He’s in the Sanctum’s prison.
And JJ knows exactly what they do to demons down there. “No,” he stammers, fear taking up a stranglehold around his lungs. “No, they can’t have him?—they can’t??—?”
“Well, they do,” Ez snarls. She’s visibly shaking, her hands curled into fists. “You led the hunters straight to him. You left him alone, and??—?”
Obie’s voice, smooth and methodical, cuts through Ez’s anger. Somehow, it’s even more chilling. “How do we even know we can trust you, Jackson?”
Desi hugs JJ’s neck tightly. “JJ,” she whispers, her voice trembling. “JJ, are the bad people going to come back?”
Tears burn behind JJ’s eyes. He opens his mouth to answer.
“Of course not, sweetie,” Ez interrupts, and she snaps her fingers. JJ feels a cool rush of magic settle into place around them. “I just put up a shield spell, see? Now, the bad people can’t come back.”
She doesn’t recommend that they rift to one of Obie’s many safe houses. That, more than anything else, tells JJ just how little she and Obie trust him right now.
Just how quickly he managed to betray all the kindness they showed him. Heart cracking, JJ sets Desi down on the ripped couch, gives her Kira the Wyvern to hug, and turns to Obie. “Search my memories. As far back as you want. Just?—?” He winces. “Just maybe don’t focus too much on this morning. There were, um. Some things with me and Cass that you might not want to see.”
Obie’s eyebrows shoot up. “Ah,” he says, and deliberately, he reaches out, grabs JJ’s wrist, and closes his eyes.
A faint, tingling pressure builds up between JJ’s temples. Obie sifting through his memories, probably, searching for anything relevant and disregarding the rest. JJ squeezes his eyes shut, tries to relax his shoulders, prays that Obie is finding what he needs to prove JJ’s loyalty??—
The faster he can do that, the faster they can get Cass back.
And clean up JJ’s mess. He swallows hard, guilt and nausea clawing their way up his throat. Because he trusted the wrong person, and compromised the safety of his and Cass’s home, and brought the Sanctum straight to their doorstep.
Because he decided?—albeit briefly?—that retreating into his old life was more important than building a new life with Cass. That it was safer, even.
He was such an idiot.
“You are,” Obie says absently, and JJ starts with surprise when Obie releases his wrist. “An idiot, I mean. But not a traitor.” He meets Ez’s eyes. “He’s clean. Just made a very large, very stupid mistake at the worst possible time.”
Ez’s jaw works. “Yeah, okay,” she says eventually, and she crosses her arms over her chest. “Just one more human shield for the jailbreak.”
And Ez and Obie might not be Strike Team Kappa, but JJ feels the calming, familiar sensation of planning for a mission wash over him anyway. “If Roma was never on our side to begin with,” he says, “then there probably isn’t a way to counteract the anti-rifting spell work in the prison?—she must’ve just gotten the Sanctum to deactivate it for a few minutes. That means we’ll have to get in and out the old-fashioned way.”
Obie drums his fingers against his leg, considering. “Into the prison proper, at least. If your escape was engineered from the beginning, JJ, then the Sanctum might not have patched the loophole Cass always used to get into the building itself. We’ll just have to rift inside, sneak into the prison, find out where Cass is??—?”
“Just,” Ez repeats scornfully. “That prison is a labyrinth, Obie. And we still don’t know anything about its layout.”
“I do,” JJ says immediately, leaning forward. “My best friend is an interrogator down there. I might not be able to draw full blueprints, but I can give us a good idea of where to start.” He glances at Obie. “Or can you just… pull the memories out of my head and download them into your heads? Can you do that?”
Ez frowns at Obie. “Actually, can you? Because that would be very convenient, and also kind of awesome.”
Obie shoots her a long-suffering look. “Yes. Yes, I can do that. But that’s ignoring the fact that, since the Sanctum got Cass but not JJ, they’re going to be expecting a jailbreak. They’re going to be expecting opposition.”
“Can we outgun them?” JJ asks desperately. “Bring it to the Chain or something?”
Ez’s scowl deepens. “Cass is a fugitive from the Chain, remember? Because of you.” She hesitates. “You and Desi. They might agree to a jailbreak, but they’d want to question him themselves afterward. And, above all, bureaucracies move slowly. It could take days.”
They don’t have days. If JJ knows the Sanctum at all, they’re probably torturing Cass right now. “Do we have any allies? Like?—like Maggie Khan? Or Micah and Gregorio? They’ve all helped him in the past, right?”
Obie shakes his head. “Maggie might be willing to bend the rules for Cass, but at the end of the day, she’s loyal to the Chain. As for Micah and Gregorio…” He lets out his breath in a hiss. “I don’t even know whose side they’re on nowadays. And I don’t want to find out the hard way.”
“So it’s just the three of us,” Ez says flatly. “Great. Obie and I can hold our own, but you’re basically useless, Jackson.”
JJ flinches, remembering how easily Roma got the upper hand earlier. “I know,” he admits. “But I have a working knowledge of the prison’s layout, and I know most of their spells, and?—and if worst comes to worst, I have my escrima sticks. I can hold them off long enough for you two to get Cass out.”
Obie’s eyes narrow. “No. No sacrifice plays tonight. We all go in, and we all come back out. It’d be helpful if we had more people, but??—”
“I can grow up, you know.”
JJ goes still. So do Ez and Obie.
Desi is still curled up on the couch’s middle cushion with Kira hugged to her chest. Neatly, she sets the plushie down next to her. “I can grow up,” she repeats, and there’s something about the calm, rational, adult tone of her voice that makes a chill run down JJ’s spine. “I might not be as experienced as Ez and Obie, but in terms of power, I come close to matching them. I can grow up, and the four of us can storm the Sanctum, and we can get Cass back. Because that’s how this ends with demons, right? That’s how this always ends.”
Obie bites out a curse, looking away. “Oh, Cass is going to be livid.”
“But it could work.” Ez sounds reluctant. “We all know that Desi is powerful. And having a wyvern on our side would make it easier to storm the prison.”
The words sound far away past the sudden roaring in JJ’s ears. He stares at Desi, at her stiff posture and grim expression and flat eyes, and this??—
This is exactly what Cass feared most, wasn’t it? This is exactly what he wanted to avoid. He wanted Desi to have the opportunity to be a little girl, to be sheltered and protected and loved, to have a childhood? ? —
Because Cass didn’t get that chance. Neither did Ez. Obie probably didn’t, either.
Hell. JJ had that chance taken away from him at ten years old, and even over a decade later, that loss still feels raw sometimes.
This was important to Cass. This was the most important thing.
And it’s important to JJ, too. “Can I have a few minutes alone with my daughter?” he asks abruptly.
Ez’s eyes narrow. “Jackson??—?”
Obie wraps a hand around her elbow. “Come on, Ez,” he says quietly, and with one last suspicious look, Ez follows him down the hallway.
Swallowing hard, JJ turns around to face Desi. Walks over to the couch and crouches down in front of it, putting himself a little lower than her. “Hey, sweetheart.”
Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. It looks older than she is, tight and mirthless and just wrong on her face. JJ thinks that this moment?—this decision?—is Desi hovering in the space between the little girl she is now and the adult she could become in the blink of an eye, one foot in either world until she fully commits. “Hi, JJ.”
Taking a deep breath, JJ grabs her hands. “I love you,” he says. “And Cass loves you, too. You know that, right?”
She squeezes his hands. “And I love you and Cass. So we have to save him.”
“We do,” JJ says, and gently, he reaches up to smooth her hair back. “Desi, I’m so proud of you. I’m so proud of the person you are and the person I can already see you becoming. You’ve always been so kind and caring and good, and I know you’re going to carry that with you for the rest of your life. That you’re going to do great things someday.”
Desi lifts her chin. “So that’s a yes? I should grow up?”
JJ’s heart hurts. “I know that you love Cass just as much as I do,” he whispers. “And if you really want to help save him, then I won’t stop you from making that decision. It wouldn’t be fair.” Carefully, he frames her little face between his palms. “But it was always important to Cass that you had the chance to just be a little girl?—just be our little girl?—for as long as possible. That you weren’t forced to grow up too quickly like he was. Like I was, too.
“Desi, I want you to always feel safe and cared for and loved. I want you to never have to feel afraid, to never have to fight for your life. To never have to hurt anyone else. I?—I want you to learn about the world, and to make new friends, and to take ice-skating lessons. And between me, Ez, and Obie, we can handle this. We can save Cass. I’m not going to stop until I bring him home, and I know they won’t, either.” He meets her eyes. “If you want to grow up and come with us, I won’t stop you. But I’d be really happy if we could give you the childhood that none of us had. And I think that would make Cass really happy, too.”
For a few long, breathless seconds, Desi searches his face, her eyes dark and bottomless and ancient.
And then, suddenly, it’s like a switch gets flipped. Her eyes lighten back to their usual softness, and her chin trembles as she crawls forward and throws her arms around JJ’s neck. “I think I want that, too,” she whispers, her voice back to its usual cadence. “I like being your and Cass’s little girl. It feels safe. Because you’re bigger than all the bad guys and the nightmares, right?”
JJ’s eyes burn. “Right,” he manages, and he pulls away just enough to press a kiss to her forehead. “We’re going to get him back, okay? I’m going to bring Cass home for you. I promise.”
Desi hugs him again. “Okay. I love you.”
She’s still so small?—small enough to balance on JJ’s shoulders, fit snugly on his hip, or curl up in his arms. Someday, though, she’s not going to be that small anymore. For the first time, JJ wonders how his own parents felt when he started to crawl and wobbled away from them instead of towards them, or when they sent him off to school on his own and were left waving from the driveway while his bus drove away.
He wonders how they felt the first time he stepped out of their arms and started to walk towards something else.
But, at least for now, JJ gets to delay knowing how that feels for a few more years. “I love you, too,” he whispers into Desi’s hair, tightening his arms around her.
There’s the sound of a throat clearing. JJ glances over his shoulder to see Obie and Ez hovering near the hallway. “I have a high-security safe house,” Obie says without preamble. “It won’t hold up to a full Sanctum offensive, but it’ll keep Desi safe while we’re gone and keep any rift-trackers away once we get Cass back. Sound good?”
“Sounds good,” JJ agrees firmly, putting Kira back into Desi’s arms and standing up. “Let’s get moving.”