Demon Bound (16 page)

“So why didn't you know she was there?” Mackenzie looked at Becca. “You told me everyone knows where everybody lives.”

She shrugged. “It's all the way up in Boreas—which is empty now. No one heads there anymore; mostly they stay in Zephyrus and Notus, but I haven't seen her there. So I assumed she was at the Archives, or close to it. Somewhere near the center temples.”

And, thanks to that, Mackenzie looked more confused now than he'd been before. Leaning forward, Jake pushed aside the pile of chips and put a blue one in the center of the table. “This table's Caelum, right? You've got Michael's temple here, and it marks the central areas, with his quarters, the Archives, and the general meeting places.”

“And the freak courtyard,” Becca said, her dark eyes widening. “All of the archways leading into it are Gates, so you can't walk through them—you'd just end up on Earth. And if you fly over them, thinking you'll go over the top of the buildings around it and land inside . . . it's not there.”

“Dun dun dun,” Pim intoned dramatically.

Jake shook his head. “I teleported in. There's just a fountain—and you can walk out beneath the arches, no problem.”

“What?” Pim stared at him. “You didn't tell us?”

“You'd built it up into the dark altar that Alice sacrificed all of her novices on,” Jake said. “I didn't want to ruin it for you.”

“
Alice?
”

Jake ignored her speculative glance, looked over at Mackenzie again. “And there's no real east, west—because the sun doesn't move, and a compass just spins. But there are these four spires we use the same way, like points on a compass, and they're the name of the Greek winds. So the north quarter is Boreas, then there's Eurus, Notus, and Zephyrus in the west,” he said, moving clockwise around the table. “Odin's Courtyard is way up here near the edge of Boreas.”

“Got it.” Mackenzie nodded, then folded his cards. “And I need to meet this Black Widow sometime. If she doesn't have acid for blood and little kids in her oven, I'll know Guardians are liars.”

“We never lie,” Becca said with a straight face and moved the chips back to the center of the table. “So what
did
you do in there with her?”

“Nothing,” Jake said.

“Nothing? That's all you're going to give us?” Pim sighed. “You've been so closemouthed lately. Alejandro's rubbing off on you, Jake.”

“And not in a sexy way,” Becca agreed.

Pim propped her elbow on the table and put her chin in her palm, staring off dreamily. “I wonder if I'll rub up against Dru in a sexy way.”

Mackenzie was suddenly very still. Good man. When women went there, a smart guy knew to stay quiet and let them keep going.

Pim, Drusilla, and rubbing. If those magic words didn't cure the rotting ache in Jake's stomach, then there was something very, very wrong with him.

“You think she swings that way?” Becca asked, and Jake decided to toss her into the mental mix, too.

A moment later, he pinched the bridge of his nose, tried to beat back his frustration. Everything in his head was sexy as hell, but it wasn't working.

Pim shrugged. “If she doesn't, I can always go back to my human form.” She grimaced. “Only taller. And
bigger
.”

“Oh, God. Do not want.” Mackenzie shook his head as if to rid himself of that new image, and Pim laughed. “Anyway, is that a good idea—hooking up with your partner?”

“No,” Jake said.

Becca frowned at him. “I know I'd feel a lot better if I was out there with Mackenzie instead of being cooped up here.”

“I'm just running into other vampires, baby,” Mackenzie said.

“Yeah, until you hit a community being run by a demon. Or the nephilim show up.”

Jake tossed his cards down. “And then what would you do, Becca? With no Gift and only five years of training under your belt, your head would be stuck on a pole next to his.”

“Fuck you, Jake.” Becca leaned forward in her seat, an angry flush burnishing her cheeks. “You've been nonstop with your negative crap since you went active and fucked up in Seattle—”

“Becca,” Pim said softly.

“—and tonight, you sit there like something's crawled up your ass and died there. Don't take that shit out on us.”

Jake stood, placed his hands flat on the table. “Golly gee, Becca—what do you want me to say? That it's pretty out there? That it's easy?”

“Pretty? Easy?” She sat back, shaking her head. Her anger disappeared as if she'd clicked it off. Jake wished he could do the same. “You're out there, being a Guardian. Saving people, helping them. Doing what we're supposed to do. Pretty and easy isn't the point, retard.”

Jake stared at her.
Being a Guardian
. It wasn't that simple. Nothing was that simple, but it cleared a path for him. Unwound some of the tension in his gut. “I love you, Becca.”

She rolled her eyes. “Duh.”

He grinned, and pushed away from the table. “I'm out.”

Behind him, he heard Mackenzie grumbling, Becca's sarcastic attempt to soothe the vampire, and the scrape of a chair. A second later, Pim caught up, her short legs working overtime.

“So when you're a guy, you want to be tall,” Jake said. “But as a chick, you're just high enough to—”

“You don't want to finish that.”

She had a point—he'd already lost too much money that night. And a glance at her face told him that even though she'd said that with humor, she was nervous, too. He stopped walking.

“What?”

Pim gave him a tight smile, and pulled him into one of the empty offices.

I need a favor,
she signed. Her fingers clenched before she rushed through the rest.
I want to know how my brother is doing. But I don't know how to access anything but Google, and he's not showing up in any of the searches I do.

Whoa, boy. Jake slid his hand over his head, the sick feeling rushing back in. Different, but tearing him up just as much.

The custom of training in Caelum for a century wasn't just about obtaining enough skills to fight demons. It forced them to leave human relationships behind. After a hundred years, family members, friends . . . most of them would be dead.

But she, Jake, and the other novices had come back early. And instead of finding out how their families lived and died through historical records, they had to accept knowing their loved ones were out there—and still living.

Maybe.

Jake let out a long breath, then signed,
Are you sure?

Lie to me.
Her round face was serious.

Jake nodded.
I need everything you can give me about him.
He smiled when a paper immediately appeared in her hand.

She passed it to him. “Have you looked up yours?”

“No.”

“Do you think about it?”

The image of a farmhouse in Kansas flashed in front of his eyes. “Every day.”

“And you chicken out?”

“Nope.” He vanished her brother's information into his hammerspace, and thought of an attic in Manchester. Teqon had called Alice “Mrs. Grey”—and Jake knew she'd been transformed about the same time as Drifter. “I just always find something that needs to come first.”

 

For almost two days, she'd been on the verge of screaming. Alice could feel it in the back of her throat, balanced on the cusp of her determination. Only her will, she thought, kept it from tumbling over into despair, and producing a howl that might have terrified a hellhound.

Her will, and a healthy measure of distraction. The new site she'd discovered wasn't as carefully constructed or as exquisitely decorated as some of the others—but it was
different
.

A burial chamber. She was almost certain of it.

By the light of the halogen lantern she'd set on the dais in the center of the room, Alice carefully scraped paint and stucco from the chamber wall into a sterile beaker. She'd been down on the stone floor so long, her knees had actually begun to ache. All she needed was for her back to pain her, to cover herself with dust and perspiration, to be surrounded by the murmurings and discussions of the diggers, and she might have been young again, crawling around the temples at el-Amarna, making rubbings of the hieroglyphs and figures carved nearest the floor.

But it was cold, clean, and silent here. There was only the rasp of her scalpel, and the sandy trickle of stucco into plastic. The slow beat of her heart. And . . .

Alice stilled her hand, listening. There it was again—another heartbeat, almost directly behind her.

She vanished the scalpel, instantly replaced it with her naginata. In the same movement, she stood and whipped her weapon around.

And froze with the point of her blade at Jake's throat.

Oh, dear heaven. She met his eyes, then her gaze dropped to the blood trickling the length of his neck. The tip of her weapon had pierced his skin.

She vanished it, turned back around. The beaker had fallen to the ground. Her fingers shook as she picked it up, and the scalpel trembled when she called it in again. “That was—”

“Stupid, yeah. I forgot how flippin' long your weapon is.” Jake lowered himself beside her in that easy way men had—balanced on the balls of his feet, his knees wide, and his elbow resting on his thigh. He reached out, rubbed the surface of the fresco with his thumb. “So . . . what do you want me to do?”

Alice stared blankly at the painting, uncertain how to interpret his question. Uncertain how to interpret his quiet focus on her, and his lack of anger. Uncertain, even, as to why he was not after her head with his sword.

She wouldn't have let him take it, but she wouldn't have blamed him for the attempt.

A glance confirmed that he was looking at her, waiting for her response. And she decided that she didn't want more uncertainty. She had enough.

“I want you to leave,” she said.

And the wretch laughed. Disbelieving, she watched him rock onto his backside, brace his hands on the floor, and stretch his legs out. “No can do, Alice. I'm here, and I intend to stay.”

His unbuttoned, long-sleeved shirt fell open with his movement. Beneath it, he wore a black undershirt, and emblazoned across the chest was a red tongue sticking out of an open mouth.

It could have been an analogue to his response, she thought. “If you don't intend to listen, why bother asking?”

“I asked the wrong question. Well, not exactly. I didn't lead up to it the right way.”

He hadn't led up to it at all. Alice leaned forward, began scraping again. He was too blasted stubborn to take the gesture as a dismissal, but she found some satisfaction in performing it. Perhaps she ought to take a cue from his shirt, and weave “leave me be” across the back of her next dress. And add an image that would drive the point home.

There was a tug at her hair. Startled, she glanced over her shoulder.

Jake was holding the tail of her braid up, and peering intently at her back. “Wait, don't move—” He sighed, and his gaze lifted to hers. “Was that a donkey?”

Oh, dear. She'd projected that? Perhaps she'd driven the point a little too hard. “A mule.”

“And it was sucking its own—”

“Yes, well.” She yanked her braid out of his grip. “I had to amuse myself while you were leading up to whatever it is you imagine I'll want.”

“And
that
amuses you?”

Alice looked away from his grin. Her psychic shields were weak, her emotions swinging wildly. She fought the sudden urge to bury her face in her hands, to let herself cry and scream. Fought, and realized it wasn't that she wanted him to leave.
She
wanted to disappear.

Just wanted to go away . . . for a while.

“Hey,” Jake said softly. She watched his shadow on the wall darken as he came up on his knees beside her.

He didn't try to touch her. Thank God for that. She felt like a riotous mess encased by tenuous threads, and she didn't know if a touch might have her erupting or collapsing in on herself.

Either would be worse than her current misery: that he was witness as she barely held it together. And so she had a little something to be grateful for.

But she would be even more grateful for a distraction—anything that would turn both their minds away from her humiliating state.

“Please.” She retrieved her scalpel. “Go on.”

“Okay.” He drew a deep breath, but it was still another minute before he said, “Here's the thing: I never wanted to head off to war. I wanted college—wanted this, actually.”

His fingertips slid across the fresco, and Alice felt the silent pull of his fascination, his almost-buried longing. Though she couldn't fathom where he intended to take her, what leap he was making—she understood that yearning.

Slowly, she capped the beaker, then angled herself to study his profile as he continued.

“And when college fell through—because of money, and some shit grades after I shammed my way through school—I worked my ass off getting the car I wanted, and I planned to drive myself right out of town, find a job on a dig wherever and however I could.” He ran his hand over his head, glanced at her. “Then I had to go up in front of the draft board, and came close to making a run for Canada. And thought about proposing to the girl I was bang—
dating
, because there was a marriage exemption then.”