Chapter 41 #2
The Huntington Manor living room materialized around us slowly, the way it always did when Trace ported us through time and space. The familiar walls bleeding in first, followed by the floor solidifying beneath my feet until the world decided it was done rearranging itself.
At least this one was still standing.
The relief of that hit me before anything else did, the simple, almost embarrassing gratitude that at least these walls were still intact, that the ceiling was where it was supposed to be, and that I hadn’t landed in another gutted skeleton of a house.
I knew every corner of this room. I’d paced the mantle more times than I could count.
I’d drunk endless drinks at the bar. I’d sat on that sofa and bled on that sofa and cried on that sofa and laughed on it too…
something that felt so far away from me now that it might as well have been a dream.
And then the sheets registered.
White linen draped over every piece of furniture, the sofa and armchairs reduced to pale, shrouded outlines that turned the room into something that belonged to no one, as though the entire house had purposely been put to sleep.
The curtains were drawn and the fireplace was dark.
Even the air was stale and cold, the kind of cold that seeped into a space when no one had been in it for a long time.
The whole room appeared to have just sat there, silent and waiting and thoroughly unconvinced that anyone was ever coming back here.
Dominic stepped away from us first, moving through the room without a word.
He pulled the sheet from the side table in one clean motion, then the one draped over the sofa, dropping them both to the floor before reaching for the table lamp and clicking it on.
A low amber glow filled the room, washing over the uncovered surfaces, and somehow that only made it worse
Glancing back at me once, he crossed to the window and pushed the curtains back to crack the window open.
Cool evening air drifted in, carrying the smell of wet leaves and something earthy and seasonal that had no business being there.
Because it smelled like autumn. And the last time I’d stood in this room, it was winter.
“This is bad,” I said, and I meant it more broadly than just the room. I tore my gaze away from the dust on the mantle and looked between them. “I need a phone. I need to call Tessa and make sure they’re okay.”
“I may have a spare burner in the study,” said Dominic, already walking out of the room.
His footsteps faded down the hall and left me standing there in the amber glow with Trace, the house quiet around us in a way that made the back of my neck prickle.
I could feel his apprehension humming through the bond before he even opened his mouth.
“I’m sure they’re fine, Jem,” he said, his hand lifting as though he wanted to touch me, to comfort me, but then decided against it, like he wasn’t sure how it was going to be received.
“Are you?” I looked at him sideways. “I can feel you, Trace. You’re just as worried as I am.”
He didn’t admit he was but also didn’t deny that I was right. He just pressed his lips together and looked away for a second, which was answer enough for me.
I turned and leaned back against the bar counter, needing something solid against my back. I couldn’t make myself go any further into the house. I didn’t want to check the other rooms. I didn’t want to look around and find more evidence of all the time that had passed without us.
“What if they had to run?” I said, more to myself than to him. “What if the Order came for them after we disappeared and they had to move? They could be anywhere right now.”
“They could be,” said Trace, his blue eyes pinned on me.
“Gabriel would have gotten them out,” I said. “He’s smart. He would have had a plan.”
Trace nodded slowly. “He always does.”
I wanted to believe it. I did believe it. I just needed to hear Tessa’s voice on the other end of a phone to stop the low, persistent hum of dread that had taken up residence somewhere behind my ribs the moment we landed in those ashes.
“How long do you think we’ve been gone?” I asked, barely able to get the question out without gagging on it.
He looked at me, and those dimples appeared, the reluctant ones that showed up when he was working his way toward something he knew I wasn’t going to like. He wet his bottom lip. “I don’t know, but I think it’s a lot longer than we think,” he said gently, as though trying to prepare me.
I swallowed roughly at his words, but neither one of us said anything after that.
Dominic’s footsteps came back down the hall before the silence could get too heavy.
He strode back into the room with a small phone in his hand, already working through the setup as he walked.
He crossed to me without slowing and held it out, the screen open and a number already keyed in and waiting.
I took it and hit the call button before bringing the phone to my ear.
The line rang once before an automated voice came through the speaker, flat and unhurried and completely indifferent to what it was telling me. To the fact that it was dismantling my entire world with sixteen simple words.
The number you have dialed is not in service. Please check the number and try again.
Ice scraped against my back as I slowly lowered the phone from my ear.
“What is it?” asked Trace, his gaze bouncing from the phone to my eyes and then back again. “What happened?”
My mouth opened and then closed as I failed to produce any words.
He grimaced and then grabbed the phone from my hand, bringing up to his ear and then listening for a short beat. Lowering it, he clicked ‘end call’ and then looked up at Dominic. “The line’s been disconnected.”
Something shifted in Dominic’s expression, a flicker of understanding settling behind his eyes before his face went still again. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. Or maybe he didn’t want to.
Instead, he turned away from us and went to the bar, opening the cabinet beneath the counter and pulling out three glasses before setting them down one after another on the wood.
I stood where I was, my mind already working, already trying to find the reasonable explanation.
Maybe they’d just needed to change phones.
Maybe the other one had been traced. Or maybe it broke.
Things like that happened all the time when you were living on the run and had to move fast. That was all this was.
A disconnected line didn’t mean anything except that things had changed while we were gone, and of course things had changed.
We’d been gone long enough for leaves to pile up in the corners of my burned-down house.
It didn’t mean anything else.
Dominic grabbed a bottle without looking at the label and filled each glass with something dark and expensive looking, pouring straight from the neck without spilling a drop.
I looked up and met Trace’s eyes. He hadn’t said anything either.
He just held my gaze, something careful moving through his expression, as though he had been doing the same mental gymnastics I’d done.
Dominic slid Trace’s glass across the counter, then came around to where I was standing and held mine out.
I took it without thinking. Didn’t question it.
Didn’t slow down. I tipped the entire thing back in one swallow and set the empty glass on the counter, and not even the burn of it touched the numbness that had settled into my chest like concrete.
Dominic watched me, still holding his own glass. “We don’t know anything yet,” he reminded me, his eyes tracking my every movement. “If they had to move quickly, changing numbers would have been the first thing my brother did.”
“I know,” I said.
“Then stop looking like that.”
“I’m not looking like anything.”
I could tell by the slight lift of his eyebrow that he disagreed, but he at least had the courtesy not to call me on it.
Trace was quiet for a beat, watching the two of us, then looked at Dominic. “Do you have a TV in this place?” he asked, his drink still untouched on the counter.
Dominic blinked at him. “In the den. Why?”
“Why do you think?” He was already moving, pushing away from the counter and heading for the corridor. “So we can figure out how long we’ve actually been gone,” he said over his shoulder without looking back.
I didn’t move. I didn’t need to. I already knew that whatever number the TV gave us wasn’t going to be small enough to make any of this okay.
Ignored the dread behind my ribs, I pulled in a breath and replayed all the reasonable explanations for the disconnected line, the ones that ended with Tessa picking up a new phone somewhere on the road and Gabriel having a plan and Ares being safe and sound.
The ones where all of this could be easily explained away.
I was good at that. I’d had a lot of practice.
Dominic didn’t follow him either. Instead, his dark eyes came back to me, moving over my face with that slow, taking-apart quality he had, like he was cataloguing every crack before deciding which one needed shoring up first.
“They could have simply gotten a new burner,” he said at last, his voice low and tempered. “It’s what I would have done.”
“Even without a reason?” I challenged, refusing to say the rest of it out loud. That even if that were the case, there had to have been a really good reason for them to change phones.
And something told me that reason had everything to do with the Order.
“We’ll find them,” he said, holding my gaze.
I didn’t get a chance to respond.
Trace reappeared in the doorway to the living room, and one look at his face told me everything I needed to know.
Or rather everything I didn’t want to know.
It was written all over his face. The grim set of his jaw, the way his eyes found mine and held them with the careful steadiness of someone trying to figure out how to say something without making it worse. Which meant it was worse.
Much worse.
He opened his mouth just as an arm shot around his throat from behind. He was yanked backward into the corridor, a wooden stake pressing up under his ribs before any of us had a chance to even react.
“Who sent you?” hissed a woman from behind him.
I was already moving, my pulse roaring in my ears as I rounded the bar and crossed the room in three steps, my hand going to the Sword of Angelus on instinct, steel already half out of the sheath as Trace twisted out of her hold.
And then I stopped dead in my tracks.
“Jackie?”
“Jemma?” Her voice broke on my name, as though she couldn’t remember how to say it anymore.
She was staring at me the way people stare at things that are not supposed to be there anymore.
Like I’d just crawled out of a grave she’d already filled in, grieved over, and learned to live without.
The weapon dropped to her side. The color drained completely from her face, and her eyes, my mother’s eyes, which I had never once in my life seen look anything close to undone, were glassy and wide and absolutely certain they were looking at something impossible.
It lasted only a second before her expression crumbled.
And that single second told me everything I needed to know about just how long we’d really been gone.