Chapter 50
When I said I wanted an army, I should have specified I didn’t want said army inside my house. All at once. With the doorbell apparently optional.
The first ones arrived within minutes. By the time I’d made it back upstairs with Anita to the study to figure out what came next, the rain had thickened into something biblical, and the front lawn of the Blackburn Estate was no longer the front lawn of the Blackburn Estate.
Through the window, in the gray-black wash of the storm, I could see them gathering.
Dozens of them. Then more. Figures cloaked and hooded in the drowning rain, standing in loose formations along the property line, unmoving and patient as the water sluiced down around them.
Dark Casters. I could feel them through the new hum at the base of my spine, the way I might feel light against my skin without looking at it. The powerful ones, the older ones, the ones who’d been alive long enough to know what it meant when the Hadean line of succession closed.
Then the demons came.
They didn’t walk through the front door.
They simply were, suddenly, where they hadn’t been a second before.
High Demons mostly, judging by the way they took up space, the way the air around them seemed to bend a fraction to accommodate them.
Tall, narrow figures with skin the color of burnt parchment, and eyes that didn’t quite hold light the way human eyes did.
Two of them stationed themselves at the foot of the stairs, and three more along the corridor outside the study.
They didn’t speak. They didn’t acknowledge anyone but me, dropping their heads in slow, respectful bows every time I walked past them.
And then there were the hellhounds.
At least nine of them that I’d counted, every one of them appearing the same way the demons had. Standing where nothing had been standing a second before.
Three followed me everywhere I went, padding silently at my heels with their massive heads tracking every step I took.
Three more lined the upstairs hallway, and three at the base of the staircase, sitting upright on their muscled hind legs, those sinewy hunches rising almost as high as their heads.
Coarse, oil-black fur slick with rainwater, as though they’d carried the storm in with them.
Every time Trace or Dominic moved within a few feet of me, one of them would rise just enough off its haunches to make the threat clear, a low growl rolling out of its chest like a warning that hadn’t bothered to finish forming.
“Tell your dogs to stand down, angel,” said Dominic dryly the third time it happened. “They appear to be under the impression that I might double as an appetizer.”
I lifted a hand without looking. “He’s mine,” I said, my voice carrying further than I intended it to. “They both are. Anyone who touches them touches me.”
The growling cut off at once. The hellhound at the foot of the stairs ducked its enormous head once and went still. He looked like the pack leader, though I wasn’t entirely sure hellhounds even had packs.
Dominic blinked at me. “I’m not going to lie. That was unreasonably attractive.”
“Focus,” I scolded him, even though the corner of my mouth pulled up anyway.
Trace hadn’t said much since the army of darkness had started arriving.
He stood by the window in the living room, watching them gather on the lawn under the dark sky, his arms crossed and his jaw set.
I knew that kind of silence. It was the one that came over him when he was running every possible outcome and not liking most of them.
I crossed to him and slid my hand up his back. “Hey you.”
He didn’t turn. “You’re calmer than I expected you to be.”
“It’s the throne. There’s something…grounding about it. I can’t explain it.” I rested my chin against his shoulder. “I’m still me though. Just a little less afraid.”
He turned his head just enough to meet my eyes. The blue of them had gone dark and unreadable in the storm light. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
I frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
“Fear, in the right amount, is what keeps us careful,” he said, his voice low. “And careful is the thing that keeps us alive.”
I couldn’t really argue that, so I didn’t. “I’ll always be careful. I have too much to live for, remember?”
He smiled, his dimples pressing in faintly as he dropped a kiss on top of my head. He seemed to like that answer.
I leaned into him for a beat longer and let his warmth wrap itself around me before continuing on with my rounds to make sure everyone was behaving and no one was stealing the good silverware.
As I made my way past the foyer, I caught Arianna standing in the hallway outside the study, her amber eyes already fixed on the spot where I would appear before I’d even rounded the corner.
She’d been doing that for as long as I’d known her.
Seeing things half a heartbeat before they actually happened.
But tonight there was something different about her stillness.
As though she were waiting for me specifically.
I slowed my pace.
“He’s going to be magnificent, you know.”
The words came out of nowhere, soft and entirely unprompted, and it took me a beat to even register what she’d said. “Excuse me?”
“Your brother.” Her gaze didn’t move from mine. “The one you crossed time itself to bring back.”
Something cold and protective rose in my chest before she’d even finished the sentence. I knew exactly where this was going. The Son of Perdition. The piece of their old blueprint they never got to keep.
“Whatever you and your sisters are still hoping for where Ares is concerned, let it go,” I warned, my voice cutting clean through the space between us. “He’s my family now. He doesn’t belong to your prophecies or your spells or whatever long game you’ve been running since before he was born.”
Arianna tilted her head, slow and considering. “We’re not the ones who decided what he is, Jemma. We only knew before everyone else did.”
“He’s a child.”
“For now.”
The two words landed somewhere deep in my chest and nearly broke everything there.
“The world isn’t going to be ready for what he will become or the power he will be able to wield,” she went on, her distant eyes holding mine. “It’s going to be biblical.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“You’ll see,” she said and then turned on her heel and drifted off toward the kitchen as though the conversation had never happened, leaving me standing in the hall with a fresh, low-grade dread burrowing in somewhere behind my ribs.
I did my best to shake it off. I’d worry about that later. Once we survived tonight and all of this nightmare was far behind us.
Turning back for the living room, I spotted Anita sitting in front of the coffee table, laying out a small, jagged-edged stone the color of dried blood, drawing something on a piece of paper next to it, her brow furrowed in concentration.
“You’ll want to be careful what you ask of them,” she said without looking up.
“They will do it. Whatever it is. Even if it’s the wrong thing. ”
Yikes. Talk about pressure.
“I don’t plan on asking much from them,” I assured her, lowering myself onto the arm of the sofa beside her. “Just for the protection of the people I love.”
After tonight, I had no intention of calling them out again.
Anita nodded once. A small dip of her chin. Whatever she thought of that answer, she kept it to herself.
“Speaking of which,” I went on, my eyes flicking to the window where the rain was hammering harder than ever against the glass. “Have they arrived at Temple yet?” I asked, referring to the demon mini-horde I’d ordered half an hour ago.
“You should know the answer to that.”
I blinked at her. “How?”
“By feeling it.” Her dark eyes lifted to mine. “You can communicate with them the same way you summoned them. It’s telepathic in nature. The throne is a connection, Jemma. It runs both ways. If you reach down it, they’ll be there.”
Of course it was telepathic. Because at this point, why not. I’d been screaming into the heads of vampires for over a year now, so why not add an entire army of demons to the list of things broadcasting in real time.
I drew in a breath and made a mental note to work on my filter.
I’d made the request just as soon as the sisters and the demons started showing up here.
Because I knew the Order was watching somehow.
I knew they probably had Seers stationed in shifts, picking up every movement, every breath of magic around me.
They’d have felt the moment I took the throne, the way every Dark Caster within a thousand miles had felt it.
And they’d be feeling everything I did with it now.
Which meant they’d already be making plans to run.
I’d sent the demons to Temple specifically to make sure that didn’t happen.
To pin every last one of them in place before they had a chance to scatter.
I wouldn’t come this far, take this much on, just to spend the rest of my life hunting William and his Council across whatever corners of the world they thought to bury themselves in.
He was going to die in his own building, tonight, surrounded by everything he’d built and everything he’d lost.
I closed my eyes and reached down into the hum.
It was easier this time. Like flexing a muscle I’d known how to use my whole life and had only just realized was there.
I followed the thread of it down and out, away from the Estate and through the dark, and within the span of a heartbeat I was there.
Not physically, but present in a way I had no word for.
I could feel them, my demons, fanned out across the long gravel drive that led up to Temple, moving in unhurried formation through the rain.
The fortified stone walls of the building rose ahead of them in the distance, every window lit, every door closed.
They were almost there.