Chapter Eleven
By the time we neared the woods, a column of white smoke curled up from the tree line, smearing the sky.
My stomach clenched. “What is that?”
“Not sure.” Owen parked on the shoulder and we both jumped out.
We ran through the trees. The smoke thickened the closer we got, carrying the bitter tang of sulfur and something burned. When we burst into the clearing, I skidded to a stop.
The ground at the base of the hickory tree roiled.
The black sludge that had bubbled there before writhed and heaved, pulling itself upright into a shape—a human shape. White smoke bled off its surface in curling strands, spiraling up through the high branches. That was the plume we’d seen from the road.
“What… what is that?” I whispered.
“Get down, you idiots!” Tani’s tiny voice shrilled past my ear. The fairy, once again fun-sized, zoomed past our faces in a streak of pink.
Owen grabbed my arm and pulled me with him behind a screen of brush. We dropped to our knees and peered out.
The black sludge finished knitting itself into a man.
Tall. Dark-haired. Clothes as black as the muck he’d risen from. His eyes were closed as he took a long breath, chest expanding, then exhaled slowly and opened his eyes.
Thick black hair brushed his shoulders, threaded with faint silver, and his eyes were the color of a storm-tossed sea, blue-green shot through with gold.
Every fine hair on my body stood on end.
He took a step away from the tree. The last of the ooze sloughed off him and soaked into the ground. The smell of sulfur burned my nose. I shot Owen a look and mouthed, Who is he?
He shrugged and shook his head.
The man tilted his head up to the sky, closed his eyes, and inhaled the air like a man gulping in fresh air he hadn’t had in years. Then he smiled and spoke.
“Come out, my friends. There is no need to hide.”
His voice was a deep, resonant drumbeat that reverberated through my chest. The words sank into my skin and wrapped around something deep and lonely inside me, tugging hard.
I started to stand.
Owen caught my hand and yanked me down. “What are you doing?” he hissed against my ear.
His voice broke the spell for me to realize I was halfway up. I dropped back to my knees, heart hammering. “I—I don’t know.”
“Come, all of you,” the man in black said. “You don’t have to be alone anymore.”
Again, the words pulled on me. On the hollow ache I didn’t realize I’d been carrying since Alice died.
Everything in me screamed that I needed to go to him.
That he understood. That with him, I’d never feel this empty again.
The ground tipped. Nausea slammed into me.
I pressed my fingertips to my temple, trying to anchor myself in my own body.
“Piper?” Owen whispered.
I grabbed his hand and squeezed so hard my nails dug into his skin.
“What is it? What’s he doing to you?”
“I… I don’t—” The words shredded in my throat.
Tani zipped by again. “Get her out of here, Owen. Now.”
“Why?” he demanded.
“He’s riding the breach. Drawing on whatever’s leaking through the ley lines. He’s pulling her into his spell,” Tani said. “Take her out of here.”
“No.” I shook my head, fighting the urge to stand. “I need to see. I need to know.”
I forced myself to look back at the clearing.
Shapes rose from the ground—humanoid mounds shedding grass and wildflowers. As they shook free their camouflage, five other figures appeared—three men, two women—all dressed in black like him.
The man in black opened his arms. “My children.”
They went to him in a rush. Touching, clinging, pressing their faces to his shoulders like lost souls finally coming home. Their sighs of relief blended with his low, satisfied laugh.
Another hard yank on that dark thread in my chest. Another swell of desperate longing—not for him, but for what he offered. An end to the emptiness. Someone who understood. A place to belong. I tightened my grip on Owen’s hand until my knuckles ached.
“There is another,” the man said. Slowly, he turned his head, gaze cutting toward the brush where we hid. “Come out, little one. You don’t have to carry it all alone.”
I flinched. I turned my face into Owen’s neck and pressed my forehead there.
“Don’t let him take me,” I whispered.
“I told you to get her out of here,” Tani snapped. “Now it may be too late.”
“Who is he?” Owen demanded, never taking his eyes off the clearing.
“A demon,” Tani said. “A powerful one. The breach gave him form. And he wants her.”
“I need to go to him. He understands.”
The words spilled out of me before I could stop them, muffled against Owen’s skin but full of raw, aching truth—and it wasn’t my truth at all. It was his. It was the spell.
I inhaled the sharp tang of Owen’s cologne, clung to the memory of his thumb brushing chocolate from my lip. His mouth on mine in the basement. Anything that wasn’t that demon’s voice promising impossible things.
“It’s the spell talking,” Tani said. “He’s using whatever power he’s got to twist the grief that’s already there. The loneliness. The gate’s too open. He won’t stop until he has her.”
Owen wrapped his arm tight around me. “He can’t have her.”
“Then move,” Tani snapped.
Owen surged to his feet, hauling me up with him. We barely took two steps before the demon moved—too fast, a blur of black.
He was suddenly there.
Smiling. Teeth sharp as knives.
“There you are,” he crooned. “My lost little darling.”
He reached for me.
Tani exploded into full size between us, a curved dagger flashing in her hand. She slashed, catching him across the upper arm.
He roared, a sound made of rusted metal and nightmares. Rage flared in his eyes, hot and molten.
Images slammed into my mind. Not my own—his. Tani broken on the ground, wings torn, blood on her lips. Then Owen sprawled in the dirt, ribs crushed, throat bruised where those clawed hands had squeezed—
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I gasped.
“Yes,” the demon said silkily. “You shouldn’t have done that, little fairy.”
His voice wrapped around me like a shroud. My knees buckled. If Owen hadn’t still been holding me, I would have crawled straight to the demon’s feet and begged him to take away the ache.
The others were advancing, leaving the tree, moving in a slow, predatory circle.
“Owen, you going to stand there all day or do something?” Tani snapped.
Somewhere to the left, I heard the creak of a bow. I forced my head around in time to see Tani nock an arrow and let it fly. It hit one of the men square in the chest. He dropped. As if a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Another arrow. Another body.
The demon’s snarl deepened. His outline began to glow faintly, as though lit from within by coals.
Owen shoved me behind him and stepped forward, hands curling into fists.
“You leave her alone,” he said.
“Who’s going to stop me?” the demon asked, amused. “You?”
His voice hit me like a physical blow. I dropped to the ground, palms scraping over dirt and leaves.
The longing roared back, drowning me in promises of belonging and understanding and an end to carrying everything alone.
My muscles trembled with the urge to crawl to him.
To let him take it all away. His mind spilled into mine—images of myself curled up safe and understood, never lonely again, never grieving, never afraid.
“Yes,” I breathed. The word hissed out of me before I could bite it back.
I found myself moving over sticks and stones, knees digging into the earth, hand slicing open on something sharp. I barely felt it.
He’ll make it all stop, I thought wildly. He’ll make it all stop.
“He won’t,” Tani said aloud, stepping in front of me again.
My vision blurred. Through the wash of tears I saw Tani loose another arrow. It drove into a woman’s chest. She crumpled.
The demon’s glow intensified.
“Be gone, fairy,” he said.
He flicked his hand.
Tani flew backward like she’d been hit by a truck, crashing into the trees with a sickening thud.
My heart stuttered. I tried to scramble toward the fairy, but the demon’s voice slid through my veins like poison honey and turned me around again.
I crawled toward him, hands bloody, breath coming in harsh gasps. Images flooded my mind—him holding me while I cried, him telling me it would all be okay, him promising I’d never be alone again. It was a lie, and I knew it was a lie but some part of me wanted to believe it, anyway.
“Stay where you are.”
Owen’s voice snapped like a thunderclap.
The spell wobbled. I collapsed where I was, cheek pressed into damp leaves and dirt. Shame mixed with relief, burning behind my eyes. I let out a strangled sob.
Wind whipped through the clearing, rattling the leaves overhead. The trees shuddered, branches bending low. The air changed—metallic and charged, like the moment before a tornado dropped out of a green sky. The temperature plummeted.
A raindrop splashed on my cheek.
“I said stay where you are.”
I had never heard Owen sound like that. Dark. Commanding. Absolute. I turned my head enough to see his back—rigid, broad shoulders braced, fists clenched at his sides.
Lightning crackled across the sky, followed by a booming crack of thunder that shook the ground. The wind howled, ripping leaves from branches. The clouds above rolled in a churning, slate-gray mass, swallowing the sun.
Owen thrust his hands forward.
The gust that hit the demon was like a physical wall. The man in black went flying backward across the clearing, slammed into the hickory tree, and crumpled to the base of it, pinned there by wind that shrieked like a living thing. He was out cold.
The moment he hit the trunk, the roar stopped. The clouds broke apart as if ripped down the middle. Sunlight poured into the clearing. The wind died to a whisper. The suffocating pressure lifted.
Summer snapped back into place.
Owen spun and dropped to his knees beside me, hands closing around my shoulders.
“Piper. Are you all right?”
His voice—his normal, worried voice—flipped the switch inside me. The ugly, invasive longing evaporated like mist. I sucked in a lungful of hot, humid air and nodded.
“I am now,” I managed. “What happened? Did you… use your magic?”
“Yes.”
He helped me to my feet but didn’t let go, arm steady around my shoulders. He brushed dirt and leaves off my cheek with gentle fingers.
“What did he do to you?” he asked, jaw tight.
“I—I don’t know. Every time he spoke, it was like I had to go to him.
Like he could make the loneliness stop. Like he understood everything, and I’d never have to feel this empty again.
” Heat flared under my skin—not desire, but shame at how badly I’d wanted to believe the lie.
“He was pulling on the grief. On missing Alice.”
The images still lurked at the back of my mind, false comfort wrapped around hooks.
Owen’s jaw ticked. The anger in his eyes wasn’t for me. It was for the demon.
A pained groan sounded from the edge of the clearing.
“Tani,” I gasped.
We hurried toward the trees. The fairy queen lay crumpled on her side, still in her full-size form, one hand pressed to her head. Blood trickled down from a gash along her hairline.
“Why didn’t you use your powers sooner?” she muttered, and gave Owen’s arm a weak, annoyed punch. He didn’t even flinch.
“You knew he has magic?” I asked, exasperated. “Why am I always the last to know everything?”
“You silly girl. He’s an elemental,” Tani said. “A Druid.”
Druid.
The word landed differently this time.
“An elemental?” I said. “What does that mean?”
Owen met my gaze. “Elemental druid. We use the powers of the world around us. I can harness air. Hence the thunderstorm.”
“That was… you?”
Realization slammed into me. The thunderstorm. The wind. The lightning. And then I thought of his father—the way Dougal had incinerated the other demon without hesitation.
Fire.
Air and flame. Father and son—guardians of a Crossroads town that sat where realms brushed too close.
“Help me get her back to the truck,” Owen said. “She needs that cut looked at.”
“I’m fine,” Tani grumbled, trying to stand. Her knees buckled. Owen caught her before she face-planted. “Okay, maybe not fine.”
“We need to move,” Owen said. “I bound him to the tree, but I don’t know how long it’ll hold. He’s drawing on the ley breach. He’s stronger than me here.”
“Who is he?” I asked, unable to stop myself from looking back.
Tani shuddered. “Something that should’ve stayed on the other side of the gate,” she said. “And he’s decided you’re his new favorite prize. He’ll use your grief like a fishing line until he reels you in.”
I swallowed hard. I took one last look at the demon slumped against the hickory, shadows already coiling around him like smoke.
I had a gut feeling this wasn’t the last time I’d see him.
And that terrified me.