Devil May Care (23 page)

I welcomed his help back to my feet and then again when I staggered like a drunk. My eyes rolled, my stomach lurched, and I fell back to my knees, retching. Could I vomit the dark out of me? My body wanted to. I dry heaved for what felt like forever. I was sick to my bones and hurt all over. Why would it not end?

“You need a doctor...” Ryder crouched beside me. Did he know what had happened? His eyes had hardened, but his expression hadn’t. He attempted a smile and I very nearly pooled into a jabbering wreck on the floor.

“Muse?”

I couldn’t breathe. I gasped again and again. Panic. Run. Hide. Dark pulsed inside my chest.

Ryder gripped my good shoulder and captured my gaze in his. “Muse… Breathe slowly. It’s alright.” He leaned in. “Pack the fucked-up shit away. Don’t let it control you. I need you. Stefan needs you.”

“I know,” I mumbled. I was kneeling in two feet of snow inside the building. Bowing my head, I clamped my eyes closed. Pack it all away. Dig a hole and bury it. Deny it. My breathing slowed. The fear receded. “Where is he?” My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else, distant and throaty.

“Stefan’s gone, but not far. There’s a blizzard outside. The Enforcers are trackin’ the eye of the storm. They’re goin’ after him. They’ll kill him, Muse.”

They could try.

I nodded. The movement felt as though I was dragging a bag of nails through my aching head.

Ryder helped me stand. I wobbled and hissed as my shoulder flared up, but at least I was on my feet. My body appeared to obey me again. I saw what remained of Damien on the ground behind Ryder. The ashes barely resembled anything humanoid. The snow hadn’t settled on the grim pile. It stood out like the white tape outline of a body at a murder scene. My stomach lurched, and the hideous clinging parasite inside of me throbbed with a sickly heat.

Ryder deliberately stepped in my line of sight and ducked his head. “You can do this, okay?”

No. I shook my head. No, it wasn’t okay. Ripples stuttered through my limbs. I wanted to blurt out that Damien wasn’t dead, that he was inside me. I wanted to pick up the jagged piece of metal nestled in the pile of ashes and use it to carve him out of my chest.

Ryder gripped my good shoulder. “Muse, I get it. Okay. I get it. But you can’t break down on me now. We have to find Stefan before the Enforcers do. Before he suffocates the city in snow. We gotta do that, an’ I can’t do it without you. Can you hold it together? Just for a few hours?”

Tears skipped down my cheeks. “Yeah,” I croaked. I could, but it was going to be a close thing.

R
yder hadn’t been
wrong when he’d said, “suffocate the city in snow.” I caught snippets of news feeds on my way out of the building. Waiting for me outside was a world turned white. Temperatures had plummeted to -29 degrees. The sub-zero temperature would have been a record breaker for winter, but it was summer, and the people of Boston were demanding answers. Snow drifts had piled up against houses. The water in Boston harbor had hardened to ice a foot thick, crushing the hulls of the boats and ships moored there. The blizzard raged.

The Institute was in chaos. Alarms shrilled. The corridors brimmed with people either trying to get out or armed personnel trying to reach those in need. Ryder and I were buffeted along toward the exit. He explained over his shoulder in snippets that, when Akil and Stefan turned up on his doorstep, he nearly had a —insert a few Ryder-themed expletives—heart attack. Then the call came in from the Institute for Ryder to get his ass back to HQ. Muse was back, and the fire alarms had tripped, never a good combination. Akil had given them the non-corporeal lift back to the Institute and promptly vanished, much to Ryder’s relief;
“If I ever have to get that close to the Prince of Greed again, it’ll be too fuckin’ soon. And I ain’t ever doin’ that Star-Trek teleportation crap again, yah hear? I feel dirty.”
Once inside, Stefan had wasted no time retrieving the PC34 antidote. He’d threatened to kill Adam if they didn’t give it to him. Needless to say, Adam now had a broken arm, and Stefan got his demon back. Like Damien, Stefan had cut a path of destruction from the medical department to the conference room where he’d found Damien skewering me, but unlike Damien, he hadn’t killed anyone to get there, just put the fear of ice into those who tried to stop him. I took that as a good sign. To call this much power, he had to be drawing from the veil, which meant he continued to syphon off more power than he could handle. How long could he maintain control of his demon? Had he already lost control? If Stefan had let go of the reins, what could I do to stop him? He wasn’t like Akil. I couldn’t drain Stefan of power. We were two sides of the same coin, destined never to meet and yet so close.

Nobody prevented Ryder and me from leaving. The Institute teetered on collapse, but I had no interest in helping them. If anything, they’d brought this on themselves. They were lucky Stefan hadn’t decided to turn the Institute into the arctic. He could have. He probably should have.
He might still...

We stepped out into a land of white. My brain could hardly wrap itself around the fact that three feet of snow had settled over Boston like crisp white icing on a wedding cake. My boots crunched through the white stuff, and the cold sucked the heat out of my flesh. I instinctively wrapped my element around me, keeping me warm. So cold inside… where the darkness waited.

We walked to where the backstreet joined one of the main arterial roads. People shivered beside their cars, many sat huddled inside, engines running, fending off the arctic temperatures. The early morning rush hour had been captured in ice. Nobody was going anywhere.

“...a Boeing overshot Logan International,” Ryder was saying. “There were three hundred and twenty seven people on board.” Ryder paused, and when I met his stare, he didn’t need to finish. “He’s outta control, Muse.”

Someone had to stop him, but I wasn’t sure that someone was me. “I’m not going to hurt him. I can’t.”

“They’ll kill him.” Ryder looked pained. Anxiety twisted a knot inside me.

I turned my back on Ryder and trudged through the snow. My centrally heated footfalls melted the snow beneath my boots. Ryder fell into step behind me. I heard his teeth chattering and the rustle of his coat, but otherwise, the street was quiet. “Nica’s dead,” I said, keeping my head down.

Ryder waited a few beats. “I know. Adam briefed us. I… can’t believe it. Stefan saw her. Shit. What a fuckin’ nightmare. Muse… I need to say this…” Ryder sucked in a breath. I tensed and stamped through the snow. He puffed out a sigh. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get you outta the netherworld sooner… Adam didn’t want to summon Yukki Onna. I told him I’d quit.”

The change of subject stalled me. I stopped and looked back. “You said you’d quit?”

His mouth turned down. He dropped his gaze. “I knew what that sick son-of-a-bitch would do to you… After what you said at Stone’s Throw… I had to do something.”

An unexpected sob wedged in my throat. I tore my gaze away and gulped down the rising emotion. My lip quivered. I pinched my mouth closed and squeezed my eyes shut. If I cried now, I wouldn’t stop. Ryder had saved me. I met his eyes and fought to keep the raw emotion from my face. “Thanks.” My voice cracked. “Yukki Onna did enough. She got me away from him. I was… I was gone. If you’d done nothing… I’d be dead. So thank you, David Ryder, you soppy bastard.”

He grinned. “I wasn’t gonna let Adam give up on you the way he did Stefan.”

I turned away, grateful for diversion of our conversation before things got too blurry-eyed. I slogged through the snow. “Stefan just needs our help.” It occurred to me that David Ryder, the hard-as-nails Enforcer was here, with me, not with the Institute. The Institute was his life, but he’d made his choice. I glanced over my shoulder at him, catching his eye.

“Where are we going?” He hugged his coat tighter around him. Snow settled in his hair and melted on his face.

I looked at the wash of gray above us. Falling snow obscured any traces of the sky. Further ahead, not far from the financial district, the sky lightened. “I know where he is.”

“What happened, Muse? This ain’t Stefan. I’ve known him for years. He doesn’t do this... He’s the most level-headed guy I know. He’s always been dangerous… But he’s never let loose. Never.”

“The netherworld happened.” We passed suited-up commuters trying to dig their cars out of the snow. Nobody could have prepared for a white out in summer. “Stefan was raised here, on this side of the veil. He’s spent his entire life controlling his demon, but it doesn’t work like that beyond the veil. A human body can’t survive unprotected in the netherworld for long. The demon takes over. It protects us, wraps us up in demon bubble wrap. There’s no choice. It just takes the reins. Stefan would probably have fought it to begin with, but after time... the demon always wins.”

“Fuck.”

“After long enough, you start thinking like a demon. The human half sits on your shoulder, whispering about self-restraint, emotions, and wrong versus right, but the demon doesn’t give a damn about any of that. It wants. It hungers for chaos. Stefan wouldn’t have realized what was happening. He would have needed the demon to begin with. You don’t get through a night there unless you fight your way up the food chain. The weak get eaten. He survived, and to survive you gotta be the biggest, baddest thing in the forest. I saw him Ryder. He... He’d become demon. No half measures. He’s always had it in him to be top of the food chain.”

Ryder mumbled something colorful. “Can you help him?”

I wasn’t even sure I could help myself. I was putting on a brave face, but one wrong move, and the madness clawing at my skull would break out. I tried not to think about it, about what sat rotting inside me and focused instead on the task at hand. Could I help Stefan? I hadn’t done a great job of helping him so far.

“What’s that?”

Ryder’s question snapped my head up. We’d walked for ten minutes and were nearing Atlantic Avenue. The glass fronted skyscrapers towered above us, some swathed in clouds of swirling snow, but over the Public Garden, the sky had cleared to a gray-blue, and at its center, danced the veil in all of its liquescent glory. If Ryder could see it, then so could the rest of Boston, and the big-fat secret the Institute had tried so hard to cover up was out of the bag.
Hey, people of Boston, you know those rumors about demons? About a world neighboring yours that’s filled with the monsters from your childhood nightmares? Well, looky here. What’s that great big smoking gun in the sky?
Adam would be having heart palpitations.

“Is that the Northern Lights? This far south?”

Technically, the Northern Lights or the Aurora Borealis is the veil.

“That’s the veil,” I replied, repeating the words cool and calm in my head. I could see it clearly too: ribbons of color undulating to a silent song. Usually the veil is invisible to the human eye, and I’d need to call my demon to see it, but not today, not while Stefan continued to draw power through it.

“Shit, really?”

Stefan had held the veil open longer than I thought possible. I’d only ever been able to draw from it for a few minutes before it collapsed on me. A few minutes were enough. In that time, I could consume enough of my element to incinerate a horde of demons or heal a Prince of Hell. What was Stefan planning to do with it all?

As we approached Atlantic Avenue, I broke into a jog and within a few minutes, Ryder and I entered the Public Gardens. We weren’t alone. Police cars, marked and unmarked, were parked around the snowy grounds. Some had been there a while. Snow had banked up against their wheels. I recognized the non-descript Institute cars mixed in among the rather more obvious armored vehicles and their black clad squad members. A ring of tape cordoned off the George Washington statue, or rather where the statue should have been. All I could see was a vast globe of glacial blue ice. Its curved dome encompassed the entire monument. Directly above, where the swollen snow clouds crowded around a perfect circle of blue sky, the veil twitched and rippled like a wounded snake.

Ryder stopped beside me as I tried to get a feel for the scene of orderly chaos around us. The snowfall had slowed to the occasional wayward flake.

“Ryder.” Coleman jogged toward us. He had on a thick padded jacket zipped up to his chin.

Ryder smiled tightly and nodded in the general direction of the circus. “You know who’s doing this, right?”

Coleman glanced at the opaque globe. “Yeah, your old partner. We’ve been briefed.” He slid his gaze to me and chanced a gentle smile. “Hey…” His greeting trailed off when he noticed the blood splatters on my clothes and the ragged hole in my jacket shoulder. “You don’t look so good, Charlie…”

“I’m really not.” I smiled brightly.
Seething dark
. I flinched. “Who briefed you?”

“Adam Harper. He’s on his way from the Institute.”

“If you let Adam in there, you might as well say hello to a nuclear winter.”

Coleman shook his head. “It’s out of my hands. This is demon protocol. You guys hold all the cards. We’re just here to keep the public back. The Institute knows what they’re doing. Right, Charlie?”

I winced at my own words coming back to haunt me and looked away. A crowd-control barrier had been set up a few hundred yards back from the globe. The press jostled at the front of the line, snapping away with their zoom lenses. Dammit. That was my day job splashed across the front pages.

“Can you get me closer?” I asked.

Coleman’s lips ticked at the corner into something like a grimace. “I’m... not sure throwing fire on this situation is going to help.”

My glare said,
don’t fuck with me - not in the mood
. “Hey, you just said this is demon shit, so let me deal with it, okay.”

Ryder made a noise in general agreement. “She’s right. At least give Muse the chance to talk him down. If you or the Institute go at him, all hell’s gonna break lose.” He scratched at his eyebrow and glanced at the veil. “Maybe literally.”

Coleman flicked his eyes to the veil writhing silently in the sky above. “Alright, but Charlie- Muse, whatever your real name is, please, don’t make this worse.”

I arched an eyebrow— meaning to convey how could this possible get any worse? —when I began to wonder if I was about do exactly that. Neither Ryder nor Coleman knew my precarious state of mind. That was my little secret. And with the veil throbbing with energy, all I needed to was reach for it and let go. Just let go.
Whispering dark…

I shook myself free of the chaotic lure and approached the ring of cops sealing off the monument.

“You still on for that coffee?” Coleman called, his tone hesitant.

I glanced back, watched him raise his eyebrows expectantly, and gave him a smile. It was the least I could do. The last time I’d agreed to join him for coffee, Damien had jumped me in the woods and whisked me off to the netherworld. I wasn’t making any promises, but the thought of it, the normality of relaxing with a coffee in friendly company —even if it was to talk demons— anchored me, gave me something real to cling on to. I was going to need it.