Bound by Light (30 page)

"We need to open this up." Bela stretched out her arms, and Jake felt her earth energy pushing against the shabby elemental seal on the stones. "I’m going to move the dirt and see where this goes. Maybe we’ll pick up the strong sulfur trace as we go."

One of the stones shifted, and a spray of dirt burst through the opening to land between Merilee and Bela. Merilee swayed.

Jake caught her immediately, pulling her into his arms. She was so warm—almost too warm.

Feverish?

Failing?

Shit!

Enough. She was leaving.

"I need to get you back to the townhouse," he said, but Merilee pulled out of his grip.

"I’m fine," she said in a shaky voice, giving him a wicked, intense frown. "We’ve got work to do."

Bela lowered her hands and gave Merilee a nervous glance. "Okay, honey, you better tell us what’s wrong with you, right now."

Merilee stood on her own power, but Jake kept his hands on her hips, not trusting her strength or her balance. "Sorry. Just—my head keeps swimming. Something’s off here, but I just can’t put my finger on it."

Jake’s gaze shifted from the back of Merilee’s head to the furious red sulfur trace clinging to the dirt on the basement floor near her feet.

To their right, one of the OCU technicians screamed at a standard tech.

"Hey!" Bela wheeled on the arguing pair. "Knock that shit off. We’re trying to move air and earth over here." From the corner of his eye, Jake saw a standard tech pick up one of those little orange plastic cones and pound her rival in the head with it.

"What the hell?" He started to pull Merilee closer to shield her, but she evaded him, gazing up at the ceiling like she was hearing the Keres again.

Another couple of techs swung at each other, shouting about clumsy evidence handling.

Bela let off a tiny wave of earth energy to knock the warring techs apart. All three of them were facing the techs in the greater part of the basement now, but Jake heard the creak of stone behind him. A second stone shifted in the wall, and more sulfur-coated dirt spilled into the basement at his feet.

The moment the debris hit the floor, Merilee fainted.

Jake’s heart pumped. He caught her and swept her into his arms before she got near the floor. "Bela. Bela!"

Bela shook her head and staggered, almost falling and using the crumbling wall to hold herself upright.

Behind them in the basement, all hell broke loose as roaring, screaming, flailing techs threw down their supplies and instruments. Fists pounded heads. People yelled. Metal clattered and glass smashed against stone and dirt. The stench of rotten eggs flooded the entire space, which didn’t help the battle calm down at all.

Every synapse in Jake’s body fired at the same moment. He lifted Merilee’s unconscious form against his chest with one arm, grabbed Bela with the other, and plowed up the basement steps, through the line of five regular officers guarding the basement entrance, and into the main campaign headquarters.

Their appearance caused quite a stir among the three dozen or so campaign workers manning the desks and phones, but he couldn’t worry about that now.

As soon as she reached the fresh air upstairs, Bela seemed less woozy. She helped Jake settle Merilee on the floor, then glanced over her shoulder toward the door to the basement. With a tense expression, she looked at Jake again.

He took her meaning.

It tore at his gut to leave Merilee, but he knew he had to go downstairs and try to get the techs out before they killed one another.

"Stay out," he instructed the officers at the basement door, who were turning to go intervene. "Something’s bad down there. Poison or worse."

As he ran back toward the chaos, he tried to shift to demon form, figuring he could move faster, better, take more people out at once.

He couldn’t reach that essence inside him.

With each lunging step toward the noise and fighting, Jake tried to tap his full Astaroth abilities, strained for them, demanded them—but nothing happened. As he plunged into the room full of warring techs, Mother Anemone’s words echoed through his mind.

You must use your demon essence consistently, frequently, or risk losing it and never being whole again. . . .

"Shit!" Jake yelled as he waded into the fray, still trying to shift yet still staying human.

Not knowing what else to do, he started grabbing snarling, kicking, howling people and punching their lights out. Man, woman, it didn’t matter. He just wanted them down. Unconscious.

How many were there? Eight? Ten?

Felt like a goddamned ten dozen by the time he punched the last two—and some of them had already hurt one another pretty bad.

"Call for ambulances," he said to the guarding officers as he got the first two unconscious women up the stairs. "We’ve got nine down. And call Hazmat. And OCU headquarters—and the medical examiner’s office. We need a full team here, in a big fucking hurry. Tell them to bring masks and suits."

He glanced to his left and saw Merilee pale, but sitting up. A measure of relief nudged against the fury and frustration almost shorting out his mind. To Bela, he said, "Get her out of here. Get all these people to the street, Bela."

The earth Sibyl reacted immediately, pulling Merilee to her feet and shouting orders at the campaign workers, who grabbed their bags and coats and ran like hell.

Jake turned and headed back to the basement. Stubbornly he dug inside himself, trying to force out his fangs, his wings. Trying to claim that more feral—and much stronger—part of him.

What the hell?

He had shifted so easily, almost out of control, when he had been with Merilee.

Was that some sort of flame-out? A final burst of my demon self? Fuck!

Some damned aspect of his demon essence must still be functioning, because he hadn’t been affected by whatever got hold of Merilee and Bela, and whatever drove all the techs nuts.

Jake reached the basement, started to pick up the closest two female techs—and stopped.

Their sightless eyes gazed back at him like a mute accusation.

Too late, Jake.

Too late, demon-man.

Cursing, Jake reached for the next-closest tech, but the man was as dead as the first two. Increasingly numb, Jake checked the last four.

Dead. All dead.

Did I kill them? Fuck, I didn’t hit them that hard! I couldn’t, not in my human form. Not all of them. Could I?

Instinct told him it had to be something else, some other cause. Something unnatural.

Jake turned a slow circle in the dark room, until he was facing Derek Holston’s brutalized corpse. The red traces all around the body, the trails leading to the sealed stones in the wall, and the coating on the spilled dirt were slowly fading away now, as if they had discharged whatever malice they had been holding.

An image formed in his mind then, of the picture of Thoth from Phila Gruyere’s book. It shifted to an ibis. Then, less definite in shape but more definite in presence, Merilee’s Stone Man.

Jake’s lips pulled back to give his fangs room, even if they didn’t descend.

He didn’t give a shit if he didn’t have the evidence to tie this asshole to Charlotte Heart’s suicide. He knew it connected to the disappearance of Phila Gruyere and the other strong practitioners. And Holston’s murder and the death of these techs laced into everything, too. Jake knew the Stone Man was responsible, and more than that, an active danger to Merilee, to the Sibyls, to everyone in New York City. Maybe the world.

If his claws had emerged, he would have used them to dig straight through the sealed wall, through all the dirt, following that ribbon of red before it left his vision completely.

"You fucker," he whispered to the arrogant, murdering son of a bitch, wherever he might be. "I don’t care what you are. Now it’s going to be me, coming after
you
."

(23)

Merilee planted her feet firmly on the floor, leaned forward, and pressed her palms into the table. Her knees shook, and she had to tense her whole body to control her spinning head as she glared at Sal Freeman across the long table in the townhouse conference room. Andy was, for the moment, out of harm’s way with another Sibyl, sending messages to the Mother-houses. Good thing, because Merilee was plotting to blow the captain of the OCU to some other planet.

Without opening the windows.

Mother Keara in her green robes and Mother Anemone in blue stood behind Freeman as if to shield him from Merilee’s fury, but her triad and Creed and Nick stood with her at the opposite end of the table. Jake sat in a chair at the table’s center with his Glock on the table in front of him, hands folded beside the gun, eyes focused on a point somewhere in the back of the room.

Wind surged through Merilee’s still-weak body and she barely held back disaster as she snarled, "You
can’t
suspend Jake."

Freeman’s dark eyes blazed. "I have—" he began, but Jake finished for him.

"He has to do it. Seven people died this morning under suspicious circumstances—after I knocked them out." Jake kept his gaze straight ahead on nothing at all. He didn’t move. The sleeves of his jacket didn’t so much as twitch. Even at an angle, Merilee could tell his expression was as flat as his voice. "It’ll be a while before the M.E. gives us anything definite."

In her thick-headed, confused state, she couldn’t stop focusing on him or his talisman, which still rested between her breasts, beneath her leather jumpsuit. Her fingers itched to touch it, rub it, force him to respond to her in some real, emotional way. But no. She wouldn’t let herself do it, couldn’t allow herself to override his will, but
damn
it she wanted him to fight this.

"It’s my fault," Jake added in that terrible toneless voice. "The techs are dead because of me."

"That’s not true," Mother Anemone argued before Merilee could sputter out the words. "Some terrible, wicked power killed those unfortunate technicians, and when Yana returns from conducting her investigation, she’ll tell us what it was."

"I’ll still have to suspend Jake until our own internal investigation is completed." Freeman looked genuinely sorry, miserable actually, but Merilee still wanted to kill him. "It’s policy—and with Alvin Carter and the presidential race involved, and the existence of the OCU spilling into the open—damn. The media is swallowing this whole. The entire city is losing its mind, panicking about supernatural activity and potential paranormal threats."

"Policy sucks," Cynda snapped from behind Merilee as a tendril of smoke snaked across the table. "The media sucks! They don’t know what Jake is, and they haven’t found out about the Sibyls yet."

"Careful," Nick said, and Merilee knew he was trying to calm Cynda’s fire energy. "I agree with you, but take it easy with flames."

Powered by Cynda’s unexpected but very welcome support, Merilee let loose with more of her frustration. "Who gives a shit about a bunch of reporters or some half-assed political candidate instantly pulling out of the presidential race because Derek got murdered in the candidate’s secret basement? Bela told you if Jake hadn’t smacked those people in the head, they would have torn out one another’s throats."

"My brother did what he had to do." Creed’s voice had the steady quality of an earth Sibyl, but Merilee caught the edge of frustration in his tone. "He’s no murderer."

Another tendril of smoke curled past Merilee’s face, and she wished Cynda would just torch Freeman and have done with this goddess-awful nightmare. She’d fan the flames herself.

Freeman released a long breath and lowered his gaze. "I respect that. I believe that, and I believe in Jake. But—"

Riana’s calm but angry voice overrode Freeman’s lame explanations. "Jake saved Merilee’s life.
Again
. And Bela’s, too—and a couple of those insane evidence techs. Doesn’t he get credit for that?"

"Damn straight." Merilee’s woozy head pounded as her wind fought to jump across the room. She imagined Freeman caught in a whirlwind, spinning off to Antarctica. If Riana’s steadying hand hadn’t rested on her shoulder at that very second, it would have happened. "You can’t do this, Sal. You’re supposed to be his friend, for the sake of all the goddesses. You know Jake’s a fine officer and good man."

"I’m not a man, Merilee." Jake turned his head just enough to face Merilee, and the pain devastating his handsome face completely twisted her insides. "I’m an Astaroth demon, for all the fucking good it did me or anyone else today. Freeman risked his career when he advocated for my training, and again when he hired me. He
is
my friend, and he’s doing the right thing now. Leave it alone."

It was the words he didn’t say that hurt her worse.

Not out loud, no, but in his posture, in the dull darkness of his normally bright eyes.

Leave
me
alone.