Chapter 9
“Consort? Rewarded?”
I heard the rage in Eric’s voice as he took a step toward the old man. “I’m nobody’s consort,” he snarled, the unfamiliar violence coloring his voice matched only by the fury with which he lunged forward.
In an instant, he’d kicked the rubber cap off the end of his cane, revealing the steel point. Then, in one lightning quick move, he whipped the cane up and sank the tip deep into the demon’s eye. “You can keep your damn reward,” he added, as the body of Henry Blankenship fell lifeless to the sand.
“Eric!” I grabbed his arm and yanked him toward me, then stepped closer until I was right in his face. “What happened to interrogate? Hello? Things we need to know. Like whose consort you’re supposed to be? Lilith? Because if that’s the case—”
I shook it off with a shiver. “But no,” I continued. “We kicked her ass back to hell, maybe even for good. But even if she’s not permanently banished, she can’t be back again so soon. Can she?”
He said nothing, and I rattled on. “But if not her, then who? And why? For that matter, when?”
I was spewing out questions, but dammit, I was pissed.
Not to mention scared. “Do they want you alive? They seem to, but, again, why? We don’t know, Eric,” I said, finally winding down.
“We don’t know, because you just killed the demon who could have told us.
” I gave his chest a shove out of pure frustration. “What the hell were you thinking?”
I expected him to look frustrated. I expected him to run his hands through his hair, to pace back and forth on the sand, to tell me that we needed to hide the body and get someplace safe where we could talk.
Instead, I watched as this man I loved reached up, pressed his hands on either side of his head, then fell to his knees with a guttural howl that seemed to curdle my soul.
When he looked up at me, all I saw was fury in his eyes. “It never ends,” he said. “I mean it just never, ever ends.”
He released a low, sour string of curses, and when he stood again, his eyes were filled with infinite sadness. “Kate, I—”
I held up a hand. “Not now. We have to get rid of the body.” I bent down to hook one of the old man’s arms around my shoulder. “Now,” I said.
For a moment he stayed as he was, his expression a reflection of pure misery.
Then he drew in a breath, squared his shoulders, and took the man from the other side.
Together, we dragged him through the sand, trying to make it look as if we were just two friends helping our drunken third buddy stumble along.
Once we were around the bend, the ocean on our left and the cliffs on our right, we shifted the angle so that we were dragging his feet even more. We were leaving a trail, but we’d take care of that when we left, and what we didn’t cover, the tide would take care of.
By unspoken agreement, we maneuvered him into the first cave, far enough back that he would be in the shadows even once the sun came up.
“It will look like an accident,” Eric said as I turned on my phone for light.
And though I knew that both Mr. Blankenship and the demon were gone and we were holding nothing but empty flesh, I still flinched when Eric slammed the face against one of the barnacle-covered rocks in the cave.
We had to do it. Had to make this look like something other than a stake through the eye. An old man, lost and confused, had stumbled into the cave, tripped, and fallen on the rocks, the body left to the ravages of the weather and the tide.
I looked at the body and then Eric. Then crossed myself. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I was crossing myself for the old man, for Eric, or for all of it.
I sat down on another barnacle-covered rock near the cave entrance that would be under water when the tide came in. “We need to talk.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” He drew in breath, then sighed, long and low. “I’m sorry. I lost it out there. I’m so, so sorry. I just—” He lifted his shoulders in a shrug.
“You want answers. So do I.”
He took a step toward me, then fell to his knees in front of me, almost as if he was supplicating himself to me. Begging me for forgiveness.
Maybe he was.
“Tell me I didn’t screw it up for Allie,” he said when he finally lifted his head. “Tell me she’ll be—”
“She’s going to be fine,” I said, because he needed to hear it. “And you didn’t screw up anything. It was your parents. It was those renegades in the Church.”
He dragged his fingers through his hair, then tilted his head back, so that his neck was stretched as he looked up at the dark rock above. “They thought they were doing good,” he said, possibly to me, possibly to his dead parents, possibly to God.
“Maybe. But they were playing God. And that never works out well.”
He brought his head down, his eyes locking on mine. I saw the pain, and knew I’d put it there.
I slid off my rock and sank to my knees in the sand before him. “Except maybe once,” I said gently, taking his hands. “Despite everything they did to you, you turned out fine, Eric.”
He made a guttural noise. “Now you’re just being kind. Or blind. I’m not sure which is worse.”
“Eric—”
“Don’t play games, Kate. And don’t try to sugarcoat this. You can’t erase what just happened. What I did.”
“What you just did? You killed a demon. That’s what we do. And, yes we’d planned to interrogate him, but I understand why you lost it. He blindsided us.”
I bit back a frown. Didn’t he? Had Eric understood what the demon meant? Why he revered Eric? Did Eric know who she was?
Considering his reaction, I didn’t think so, but was he putting on a show for me?
Mentally, I shook my head, telling myself not to let the past poison the present. He’d been possessed by a demon when he’d lied to me before, when he’d hurt both me and Allie. Now though … well, now he was back to being just Eric.
Wasn’t he?
“I mean I should have controlled my temper,” Eric said. “I got mad, and then I went and killed our best lead as to what’s going on. And now I can’t even blame the demon living inside me, because he’s long gone and now I know it was never just him.”
“You’ve always had a short fuse,” I agreed. “But I think anybody would be angry when they’re accused of being the consort to a demon. Especially a demon they don’t know.”
“It must be Lilith. She’s back. Somehow, she’s come back.”
I shook my head. “No. We killed her.” I spoke with more certainty than I felt, but it couldn’t be true. I wouldn’t let it be true.
“Not in her true form. She was in Nadia.”
“But she was bound to Odayne,” I reminded him. “He died, she died. And even if we got all that wrong, she still has to regroup. That should take generations of our time. Not weeks or months.”
“So we were told. But where was the proof? Ancient texts? Runes? Hieroglyphics? No one really knows. They only think they know.” He shrugged. “Maybe we’re about to get the proof of how it all really works.”
“I don’t care how it works,” I told him.
“The bottom line is she’s not corporeal.
We would know. We would have gotten word somehow.
We know she can’t move into any old body like lower demons.
Her energy would burn right through them.
And I have to believe there aren’t too many like Nadia willing to timeshare.
It’s a rare person who both wants to share their body with a demon and is strong enough to house their energy. ”
Of course, I’d witnessed exactly that twice within the last two years, so my certainty that it hadn’t happened again was a bit misplaced. But, dammit, I didn’t want that bitch back in my life.
“We’ll do the research,” Eric said. “We’ll figure out if she’s back. But that wasn’t what I was talking about.”
I frowned. “Oh?” Try as I might, I had completely lost track of the conversation. “What do you mean?”
“I said I couldn’t blame the demon for my temper. For losing my shit. It was never just the demon.”
Dread prickled my skin. “What are you talking about?”
“That time in the house,” he said, his voice cold and harsh. “With you. What I did.”
I didn’t want to, but I tensed. “I remember.”
“It didn’t feel like me, but it must have been because I remember it. In the house with you—what I did. And then with Allie at the theater. In the street. Dear God, Kate, I almost hurt my daughter.”
“But you didn’t,” I said gently. “We’ve been through this before, Eric. Demon. Living inside you. You need to get past it.” I reached over and took his hands. “I’ve told you before. That wasn’t you.”
“But wasn’t it? Wasn’t that the point? It was so deep inside of me that it was part of me?
An essential, core part.” He drew in a deep breath, his face lined with pain.
I wanted to pull him close and hold him, but at the same time some part of me was scared to touch him.
Scared of what he was thinking, because dammit, I knew what he was thinking. Hadn’t I been thinking it too?
“After the battle,” he continued, as if in response to my thoughts, “before Rome, I mean, I thought it was finally, truly out of me. Maybe it is. But that doesn’t really matter now does it?
Because that infected part was bound in me for long enough.
Because it’s in Allie now. It’s part of her.
Of my daughter. So you tell me, Kate. Did I screw it up for our daughter? Is she—”
“She’s going to be fine,” I said again. “Allie is going to be just fine. She’s the same girl she’s always been. And that girl is wonderful.”
At the same time though, I couldn’t argue with him. Because he was right. Somehow the demon was in him deeper than we ever knew, and because of that it was in our daughter now. A geneticist would say it was part of her DNA. I wasn’t entirely sure what the Church would say.