Banishing the Dark

5

Outside the wine bar, Lon and I thanked Arturo and watched him drive away in an expensive sports car.

“He wasn’t lying,” Lon said before I had a chance to ask. “And we can trust him.”

“I figured you would’ve stopped me if we couldn’t. I guess now we’ll need to hunt down a PI named Wildeye in L.A.”

Lon tapped the back tire of his SUV with the toe of his boot while digging his silver valrivia cigarette case out of his jacket pocket. “We need to be careful. Don’t know if this PI is loyal to Dare. We can fly down there tonight if you want. Better to talk to him in person so I can hear his emotions when we question him.”

“What about Jupe?”

“He’ll be fine with the Holidays. With any luck, we can take care of this in a matter of hours, then turn around and come back home. You feeling all right?”

I nodded. “Can I have one of those?”

He looked appalled that I’d even ask. “Absolutely not.” He snapped his valrivia case shut. “Neither one of us needs it.”

I frowned. “Meany.”

He grunted, pocketing the case. “You still want to drive into the city?”

I’d asked him to drive me to Tambuku so I could see Kar Yee. She didn’t know. Lon had called her the day before to tell her I was home but requested she hold off visiting until I was better recovered. “If we’re flying out tonight, maybe we should stop by on our way to the airport. Would save us—”

A very distinct familiar feeling stole my attention.

“Cady?” Lon said.

But someone else was talking inside my head. May I show myself?

I glanced up and down the alley. No cars. No people. The whole area was fairly dead, and it was dark. “Yes,” I told him. “Come, Priya.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Lon mumbled as a ball of white light shimmered in midair. The light flickered violently, and a gray-skinned boy with black wings exploded into view.

We backed up in tandem to give him room to land. A smoky black halo trailed over his haystack black hair as his bare feet touched the pavement. His face lit up when he saw me. “Mistress!” he called out, snapping his wings shut behind his back. “I am so relieved to see you!”

“You, too, Priya.” And I was. Despite his physical and personality changes, he was still the same spirit who had watched my back since I was a teenager.

He grinned with a mouthful of pointy silver teeth and started to reach for me until he spotted Lon and drew back. “Kerub,” he said in greeting, inclining his head politely, if not begrudgingly, before speaking to me again. “The demon boy has told me of your progress. You look well.”

“Getting there. Has Jupe been summoning you a lot?”

His eyes narrowed before darting toward Lon. Yeah. He still didn’t like Lon. And whatever he’d wanted to say, he’d definitely thought better of it. Instead, he made a funny sort of shrug as he gestured awkwardly. “We have been getting to know each other.”

Yeah, I’ll bet. I was going to have to have a talk with Jupe about using Priya like his own personal chat buddy. “Why are you here?”

“I have urgent news about your mother.”

“Let’s have it.”

“She has killed the demon Lord Chora and fled his fortress with a group of slaves.”

“Dear God.” Lord Chora, grand duke and commander of two legions of Æthyric warriors. That demon had torn down my house wards, flown away with Jupe, and nearly killed Lon. He was highly skilled with Æthyric magick—not a demon to screw around with. But my mother had killed him? “I thought he was helping her. Jupe said—”

“He was,” Priya insisted. “I do not know what went wrong, nor do I know whether she’s discovered the magick she needs to cross the planes. But you should assume the worst and be on guard. She could take possession of your body at any time.”

“Like right now?” I said, glancing up at the night sky as if she might tumble down.

“Today. Tomorrow. A few days. I do not know. But the sooner you can reverse the Moonchild spell and sever the bond with her, the better. Perhaps it’s best you seek the protection of your order until you do that.”

I shook my head. It was natural for Priya to assume that a group of magicians could protect me; Hermeneus spirits and magicians had been allies, if you could call it that, for centuries. In Priya’s mind, magick was power—and that was true. But magick wasn’t infallible, and I couldn’t sit around twiddling my thumbs while my order kept me from the inevitable.

“I’m not going to Florida right now,” I told Priya. “Lon and I just uncovered a trail we need to follow. Someone who might have information about my past.”

“We don’t even know if it’s safe in Florida, now that the caliph is dead,” Lon added.

Priya’s brow furrowed. “You should not gamble with her life, Kerub. Your associations got her injured. Put your faith in her own people now.”

Oh, boy. I didn’t have to look at Lon to know that the horns were coming out. I could feel the transmutation in my bones like an esoteric platoon of soldiers marching to war. But when I lifted my hand to hold Lon back, something caught my eye: threads of pale light.

I’d seen threads emerging from my hand before but not quite like this. And when Priya leaned closer to have a look himself, the gossamer strings brightened like fluorescence exposed by ultraviolet light. Priya’s Æthyric halo was making them visible.

When Jupe had secretly, and stupidly, tattooed my sigil on his body, it created an invisible thread connecting us. One that lit up bright gold when he was in danger, much brighter than it was now. And when I first summoned Priya in his new body, my guardian reestablished our link and created a second thread, a black cobweb that anchored him to my Heka signature, even across the planes.

Two threads. But now there were four.

Four wispy filaments of light growing out of my palm, waving in the wind like dandelion tufts. My gaze followed the black thread to Priya. And a second pale gold thread that trailed off beyond the alley: Jupe’s.

The third thread was pale green. I followed that . . . right next to me.

To Lon.

I grabbed Lon’s hand and saw its endpoint, right in the middle of his palm. Just like Priya’s. “What did you do?” I said, confused. Lon hated tattoos. And I hadn’t seen every inch of his skin since I’d come home from the hospital, but he had no reason to want my sigil on him.

His mouth fell open, but no sound came out. I looked back at my palm to the fourth thread: a white line that on first glance seemed to be sprouting from my palm like the others but on closer examination was a little bit different. It splintered from the green thread connected to Lon, and it headed . . .

Down.

To my stomach.

But that couldn’t be right. That meant . . .

Goose bumps pimpled my arms as my world tilted. The oncoming rush of memory made me feel as if I were strapped to a railroad track with no chance of escape, watching a train barreling toward me. I remembered Dr. Mick forcing Lon to leave the surgery room. Mick leaning over me, telling me the news . . .

The baby survived. I’m not sure how—you’re badly bruised, and your hip is broken. But it showed up in the blood work, and I can detect the heartbeat with my knack.

You’re about seven weeks along, I’d guess. Maybe eight.

“Leave us,” Lon barked at Priya, his angry voice snapping me back into the moment. “Return when you have news.”

“Mistress—”

“Go!” I shouted.

Priya disappeared, and in his absence, the threads quickly faded until they were invisible. I looked up at Lon, blinking into the fire flaring from his halo. His eyes were wide, his brows drawn together. The shock I felt was mirrored in his face.

“You knew,” I whispered accusingly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’ve been trying, asking if you remembered Mick telling you.”

“But I didn’t. You should’ve—”

“I didn’t know how you’d react,” he said, suddenly becoming animated. “You have no idea what I’ve been through. None at all. When I walked into Tambuku and saw you lying on the floor in a pool of blood, I thought you were dead. You damn sure felt dead in my arms. Your pulse was so weak I couldn’t hear it. And even when I got you to the hospital, I didn’t know if you’d make it. And if you didn’t make it”—his eyes glazed over as grief lanced through his features—“I didn’t know if I could handle that,” he ended in a broken voice.

“But I made it,” I whispered.

“Yes.” He blinked rapidly and pulled himself together. “But you had trouble remembering, and Mick said to take it slow. To let you remember on your own, or it might be too upsetting. I just . . . did the best I could.”

I heard what he was saying, but it was all just too much. I strode away from him, to clear my head. To breathe and get some perspective.

So . . . I was pregnant.

Fuck.

How the hell had that happened?

I went through the same list of symptoms I’d gone over the first time I’d been told, remembering things I’d ignored over the holidays. All the crying and getting tired at weird times. My breasts getting bigger. I glanced down. Pfft. Not anymore. I must have lost it all in the coma.

And oh, God, that’s right: my stupid phone alarm. Forgetting to take the Pill. And of course, we pretty much screwed like rabbits—before the coma, at least.

I spun around to face him and nearly shrieked in surprise when I found him inches away. “You bastard!” I said, shoving him back. “You knocked me up!”

“You helped!”

We stood there for several moments, glowering at each other, until I started laughing. His face twisted in confusion. Then I burst into tears.

His arms roped around me, and I fell against him, weeping into his shirt as the distant sound of a speeding car mingled with the crash of the Pacific surf.

“What are we going to do?” I said, pulling back to see his face after I’d gotten a grip on my tears.

He’d shifted back down, no horns, no fiery halo, just Lon, green eyes peering down at me over his brown and gray beard. With the pad of his thumb, he brushed away the tears beneath my eyes. Then he pushed my hair away from my forehead with one warm palm. “I don’t know.”

“It could be Earthbound.”

“Or human.”

Or something else entirely. I looked down between us and put a tentative hand over my stomach. How could I not know? Surely that had to make me the worst mother ever already, and I hadn’t even started. I pulled up my T-shirt. “I don’t feel anything. I’m not showing.”

“You’re only eleven weeks along, and you just got out of the hospital. But don’t worry. That tea I’ve been making you is a thousand calories a glass—”

“Oh, my fucking God.”

“—which you need. I can already tell from your face that it’s helping.”

“But how do I even know the baby is okay?”

“They did sonograms and tests and monitored you. Mick checked everything before he left for the funeral and said it was healthy and normal. That was a day before you woke up.”

“I can’t believe he told you.” I felt a little betrayed. As if it wasn’t his business to share. As if they were scheming behind my back.

“He didn’t have a choice, Cady. I had to sign the surgery release. He thought you might miscarry.”

And how I had managed not to, after what I’d been through . . . I couldn’t even think about it. I just couldn’t. It was too awful. But in shunning one bad thought, I faced another. “I’ve been releasing kindled Heka without a caduceus all day.”

“I told you to stop doing that!”

“I didn’t know why! You didn’t tell me I could shock my own baby!”

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, calming himself. “Electrical tolerance is inherited, so I’m sure the baby is fine. And you saw the threads. They’re a supernatural marker, just like halos, and you know how a halo changes when you’re sick or unhealthy. But the baby’s thread looked as strong as mine, and I’m fine, so I think we can assume that means everything’s normal.”

“Normal? Having threads in your palm isn’t normal.”

He grabbed my chin and leaned closer to my face. “They are for you, because you’re extraordinary and special, and what you have inside you is, too. Not because of what you are—I don’t give a shit if you’re a goddamn alien or an average human being. You’re mine, and so’s that baby. And whatever it is, it’s beautiful.”

Goddammit. I almost started crying again. Until I had a terrible thought. “Oh, God. My mother—”

“Cannot find out,” Lon said firmly.

She could drop down from the Æthyr and possess my body. She tried to kill Lon. What was to stop her from trying to take my baby away? “What if—”

Lon shook his head emphatically and cradled my face between his hands. “Not going to think about what-ifs. We’re going to figure out a solution, and we’re going to live through it, just like we always do. You hear me?”

“I hear you,” I said in a quiet voice. “And I love you. But I’m very, very scared.”

“Me, too,” he said, pulling me closer. “All of the above.”