Chapter 26 #2
Never give up, she thought, biting back semi-hysterical laughter. You miss one hundred percent of the abductions you don’t undertake.
“Unfortunately, we tarried too long. Your rescuer arrived before we could remove you from the premises.” Goodling glanced at the dark-haired demon behind him.
“But at least the fire provided an excellent opportunity to cast suspicion upon poor Hugh’s sterling reputation for moral rectitude.
Just in case he, like Boucher, chose to interfere with my plans again. ”
The female demon’s lips thinned at that, but Goodling didn’t seem to notice. “Luckily, another vision revealed your new hiding place. And here you are!”
Beaming, he gestured to where Gwen sat on the floor. Then cupped a hand around his mouth as if imparting a secret.
“This particular minion of mine…” He cast another look of amused derision over his shoulder. “She made a remarkably terrible bargain with me five years ago. But if she tells anyone, her entire family will suffer, so…”
He raised his shoulders as if to say, What can you do?
Gwen closed her eyes again, because she knew then. She knew.
The timing all added up. Almost exactly five years ago, this particular demon would have been desperate to bail out her failing business…
and had suddenly experienced an influx of returning clients for unclear reasons.
That influx had saved her law firm. It had mended her family’s tattered reputation.
It had also enabled her son to leave the firm and pursue a career in interspecies politics.
As soon as Gwen opened her eyes, Goodling waved the female demon forward.
“Gwendolen Wexloff…” Still grinning in malicious glee, the fae performed an entirely unnecessary introduction. “Please meet Marlee Blacke. Hugh’s mother.”
—
The good news for Gwen: She now understood how the arsonist had penetrated Hugh’s top-notch wards.
Marlee would have known how to bypass those wards, because she and her husband had decorated the interior of the apartment.
Afterward, reconfiguring everything to protect his home against his own parents would never have occurred to Hugh.
The bad news for Gwen: Her lover’s freaking mother had personally abducted her.
Once Gwen studied the demon more closely, she could spot some resemblance to Hugh in the elegant arcs of Marlee’s cheekbones.
The umber hue of her thick hair. The sleek lines of her frame.
But her dark eyes shone with sullen resolve rather than thoughtful concern.
Her horns pierced the air above her head, sharp enough to wound instead of blunted at the tips.
Finally, while Hugh might possess certain stick-up-his-butt qualities, he also radiated warmth. Marlee, on the other hand…
She might be able to light fires at will, but she exuded subglacial chill.
Goodling smirked. “I’ll leave you two females to talk while I make the necessary arrangements.”
He spoke briefly with one of the guards, who headed toward the cubicles while Josiah exited the area’s lone door. All the while, Gwen simply looked at Marlee, picturing Hugh’s devastation if—no, when—he discovered his mother’s perfidy.
“I had no other choice.” Marlee spoke first, defensiveness freighting every word. “You don’t understand. You couldn’t understand, given who you are and where you came from.”
She was probably right. Nevertheless, Gwen extended the invitation Marlee clearly hoped to receive. “Tell me anyway.”
“I imagine Hugh explained about his father.” At Gwen’s nod, the demon told her, “My rightful social status declined when I married a human male, and potential clients didn’t trust Timothy to be as ruthless and detail oriented in his contracts as a demon.
Building a new firm with him required far more time and effort than I’d ever imagined. ”
A faint wince creased her narrow, aristocratic face. “At one point, my parents actually had to financially support us to keep up appearances, which deeply injured my husband’s pride. So did all the snubs from our peers. When our firm finally began to thrive, Timothy was…”
Just another heartless lackey facilitating deadly corporate depredations, from what Hugh told me?
Gwen bit her lip, willing herself to silence.
Marlee’s lips curved fondly. “He was so happy that first year we turned a profit. So thrilled that everyone could see his true worth at long last.”
Gwen could see a few things of her own. First, that Marlee still believed in the demonic social hierarchy despite the challenge her marriage had posed to it.
Instead of questioning the importance placed on family reputation or the validity of interspecies bigotry, she’d instead fought for her husband’s assimilation into that hierarchy’s summit and—eventually—attempted to erase any reminder of their children’s humanity.
Second, she clearly adored her husband. Knowing the puncture to his pride that a damaged reputation or failing business would cause him, she would have been eager to protect that reputation and business. At all costs.
And third, she’d want to prove to skeptics that she hadn’t made a mistake in marrying a human male, so she’d fiercely safeguarded the family’s reputation to preserve her own pride too.
Marlee’s mouth worked for a moment. “Then the Eloise…incident…occurred. After five long years of struggling to rebuild our reputation and clientele, Josiah approached me and offered to help restore our firm’s success in exchange for a few teleportation favors and a simple nondisclosure agreement.
He claimed he didn’t always have the time or energy to teleport others himself, which made sense to me.
And the humiliation was killing Timothy, just as Josiah said, so I made the bargain without knowing who or what our family friend truly was. ”
Before Gwen could summon even an ounce of pity for her, the demon drew herself tall and added, “Even if I’d known, I might have agreed anyway. I needed to save my family.”
All at once, Gwen’s ability to keep her mouth shut failed her.
“Not your family.” Gingerly, alert for any dizziness, she stood without assistance. “Your reputation and business.”
“We are our reputations. We’re demons, not…” Marlee swept a hand up and down, indicating Gwen with a curled lip. “Not humans.”
That much, at least, Gwen could acknowledge as true.
Hugh’s mother deflated a little, her tense shoulders dropping a fraction.
“I don’t love doing this to my son’s girlfriend.
” The way Marlee whispered the words, they sounded like a sordid confession.
“But my family’s deaths would be the contractual cost of defying Josiah.
And now that you’re out of the picture, perhaps Hugh will see reason, date someone more appropriate, and stay out of fae affairs. ”
If she honestly thought Hugh would simply shrug and abandon Gwen—or any lover—to an unknown, most likely grisly fate, Marlee didn’t understand her son at all.
“Hopefully he can still be saved.” The crease in the demon’s forehead deepened. “He’s useful as a tool for Josiah on the Council, if nothing else, so he may not be killed with the others. Josiah likes his tools.”
Well, you’d certainly know, Gwen very prudently didn’t say.
Marlee had finally acknowledged the larger disaster she was facilitating. The worldwide apocalypse poised to descend upon them all, with her assistance. Had the other female actually reasoned through everything that bloodshed would entail, though?
“As long as you remain useful to Josiah, you’ll probably survive what’s coming.
” Gwen stared at Marlee, willing her toward acknowledgment of the obvious.
“But what about your husband? Will your usefulness save him too? Or will he die, either in battle or at the hands of a fae hungry for immortality?”
“I…” Marlee’s expression turned stricken, and her eyes shone with what might have been actual tears. “I don’t know.”
Gwen was poised to continue pressing that point when the burly, masked guard returned from the cubicles and waved her toward the apparent encampment.
When she didn’t move immediately, he snatched her arm in a painful grip and hauled her away.
Marlee let her be carted off without protest, and when Gwen glanced over her shoulder, the demon was already gone.
Once the guard had marched Gwen around the back of the cubicles, he released her arm and pointed to a spot on the end. “That’s yours.”
As she’d suspected, stringy-haired, drawn-faced oracles occupied half of the dozen or so cubicles shoved into this corner of the enormous room.
As if in tacit agreement, they all avoided looking directly at Gwen.
Within their assigned compartments, they sat slumped on their thin cots, each graced with a single blanket.
“Bathroom’s over there.” The guard nodded toward an open doorway. “Cause any trouble, and you’ll lose your daily food allotment. Cause too much trouble, and you’ll lose more than that.” His palm slapped the weapon at his side. “Understood?”
When she nodded, he left to resume his position at the door.
Stretching her stiff muscles, she looked around herself again. As far as she could tell, there were no usable escape routes back here, and the room’s lone exit stood across a vast, empty expanse of marble. The guards would easily be able to spot any attempted approach.
Even if there wasn’t a good way out, though, maybe there was a workable way in. Could anyone find the oracles’ makeshift encampment?
Would Hugh even try?
Famously, access to the Realm Below was tightly controlled.
Demon defenders could enter the courtroom during afterlife trials, but otherwise, admittance was denied to anyone who wasn’t either working in the Realm’s admin departments or dead.
Any trespassers quickly joined the “dead” designation, according to SERC lore, which seemed efficient for all involved.