51. Chapter 51
Evie
Milo’s voice tears across the factory. I spin toward the entrance, and there he is, coming through the broken doorway at a run. His hair is wild, glasses crooked. He barely slows until he reaches me.
“Have you signed anything?” he asks, breathless. “Please tell me you haven’t signed anything.”
“No.”
His eyes close, shoulders dropping as he drags in a ragged breath, and behind us, Krell exhales roughly.
“Zavian.” He sounds less furious than inconvenienced. “You have impeccable timing in the most irritating possible way.”
Milo’s eyes open. “We’re leaving.”
“No.” I plant my feet, and his attention snaps back to me. He stops trying to guide me toward the door.
“Evie, please.”
“I came here for a reason.”
“I know exactly why you’re here.” His fingers close around my sleeve. “And you can’t do this.”
“Can’t, or you don’t want me to?”
“Both.”
Krell makes a thoughtful sound behind us. “For accuracy’s sake, she absolutely can.”
“Stay out of this.” Milo shoots him a glare.
Krell’s mouth curves. “That may be difficult considering I’m quite literally the other party.”
I turn back toward Krell. Milo’s hand slides down my arm and closes around mine as I step forward.
“Evie, please.”
I look at him. His chest is still rising too fast, curls damp at his temples despite the cold, and behind the glasses, his eyes are bright with fear.
“I want to do this.”
His grip loosens, but he doesn’t let go. “I’m not worth your soul.”
“That’s not your decision.”
“It should be when it’s my freedom you’re buying with it.”
“And it’s my soul.”
Neither of us says anything. Behind us, Krell politely allows us to have a relationship crisis in the middle of his transaction.
Eventually, he clears his throat. “As touching as this is, Evie, if you still intend to proceed, you have approximately three minutes left.”
Cold shoots through me, and I turn toward him. “Then start again.”
Milo catches both my shoulders this time and turns me back. “Wait.”
“I have to try.”
“Just wait.” His panic gives way to concentration so abruptly that my next argument dies. “I got to thinking about your little arrangement.” Milo shifts in front of me. “Attaching yourself to other demons’ contracts. Poaching.”
“That is a very dramatic word for what is essentially good business.” Krell’s expression hardly changes, though the amusement in it diminishes. “No, I recognize an opportunity before someone else loses it.”
Milo’s mouth tightens. “I thought everyone downstairs might be interested in knowing how often you’ve been doing it.”
That gets a real laugh out of Krell, though it’s thinner than the ones before. “Interested? Certainly. Outraged? Almost definitely. Hell is full of fragile egos.” He tips his head. “But do you honestly think anyone who matters will care?”
“I suspect the demons you’ve robbed will.”
“Robbed,” Krell repeats the word like it offends him personally. “You really are determined to make this sound sordid.”
“Is it inaccurate?”
Krell’s smile slips, revealing a brief flash of teeth sharper than they were a minute ago.
“I have broken nothing. That is the part you seem determined not to understand.”
“Then explain it.”
Krell exhales through his nose. “I attach myself as a third party to a contract already in force. Properly. Legally. Once the magic recognizes me as part of the agreement, I have standing within it.”
“So you let another demon do all the work, wait until they’re about to lose the collection, then take it from under them.”
Krell gives a small shrug. “I prefer to think of it as preventing waste.”
I glance at Milo. “What does this have to do with anything?”
“Give me a minute.”
“We don’t have a minute.”
“I know.”
His thumb passes once over the back of my hand, absurdly calm, and I finally understand why he keeps asking Krell questions. He’s been keeping him occupied.
I yank my hand from his. “You did that on purpose.”
Milo turns toward me, and the guilt on his face answers for him.
I pivot toward Krell. “Start again. Whatever I have to say, tell me now.”
He doesn’t answer. His attention fixes somewhere past my shoulder as the pressure in the factory drops hard enough to pop my ears.
The temperature plummets, turning my next breath white, while loose grit skitters across the concrete beneath my boots and the rusted beams overhead resonate with a long metallic groan.
“No.” Krell’s jaw tightens.
The shadows at his feet stretch away from him in the wrong direction, thinning across the floor despite the angle of the moonlight, and Milo’s do the same.
“No, that’s not right.” Krell steps back, one hand lifting as though he can physically halt whatever has found him. “There should still be—”
A screech tears through the factory and cuts him off.
His body lurches backward with such violence that one polished shoe skids sideways through loose glass. He grabs the nearest brick column, fingers biting into the mortar, and for the first time since I met him, elegance abandons him. Another wrench drags him several inches despite his grip.
The same invisible pull hits Milo, and his hand tears from mine. I catch his forearm with both hands and nearly lose my footing under his weight.
“No.”
My shoulder screams as I haul him toward me. His shoes carve pale tracks through the dust, and I tighten my grip, stupidly believing I’m winning.
Then Hell pulls harder.
His body snaps away from me, taking me forward with him. My knee slams into concrete, pain shooting up my thigh, but I keep hold of his sleeve, fingers twisted into the fabric until the seams strain beneath them.
“Milo!”
“Evie, let go.”
“Absolutely not!”
I brace one foot under me and pull. The darkness around his legs has thickened until it looks almost liquid, erasing the edges of whatever it touches. The line of his boots blurs, returns, then vanishes again below a ripple of black that sinks straight through the unbroken floor.
Behind him, Krell is still fighting with considerably less dignity than I suspect he’d prefer anyone to witness. His mortal form slips under the strain. Red floods his skin, and his nails lengthen into claws that score through old brick. He looks furious rather than afraid.
“There’s a grace period,” he snaps toward whatever unseen bureaucracy is hauling him home. “There has always been a grace period.”
Hell answers with another subterranean shudder. Under any other circumstances, that would’ve been funny.
Milo watches me, wrecked and apologetic, and being right about why he did it only makes me angrier.
“I’m sorry.” His face twists. “But I knew you wouldn’t stop.”
“I could’ve saved you.”
“Maybe.”
That hurts more than if he’d told me there was never a chance.
The darkness takes another violent pull at both of them. Krell swears, his voice warped by something deeper beneath it, but my focus narrows to Milo’s hand sliding from mine.
Loose debris skitters toward them in widening circles, scraps of paper and leaves dragging themselves over the concrete before vanishing wherever the darkness touches.
The moonlight above them warps, stretching thin around their bodies, and the deeper the distortion becomes, the harder it’s to judge where they actually are.
Krell loses the column. His fingers rip free in a shower of crumbling mortar, and the force whips him backward several yards before darkness folds around his shoulders. Then he’s gone, and my brain keeps expecting him to reappear somewhere else in the room.
“Milo.”
I hate the expression on his face because it’s too calm for what is happening. “Don’t look at me like that.”
His mouth tightens.
“I mean it.”
Another yank drags him backward. I stumble forward, catch myself, and haul him closer, only for the force to steal the distance back.
“I’m so angry with you.”
“I know.” He smiles at me. It’s small and sad. “I need you to live a long, ordinary, and happy life. That’s what I want. You were never the thing that needed saving.”
“No!” His last two fingers slip through mine.
I lunge, but the darkness closes over him first. I’m left reaching into empty space as the distortion snaps inward with a concussive rush that knocks me onto both hands.
“You asshole,” I whisper.
The words vanish into the empty building.