Demon Master (Demonsense series Book 2) (48 page)

“Thank you, Bruce. You’re a rock.”

“And built like one too.”

Bree smiled as she hung up, for what felt like the first time in days. She called Daniel, and the phone went to voice mail after only a few rings. She called again, then again, hoping that, like Bruce, he was just sleeping through the ringing. After the third try, she decided she should start heading over towards his place.
 

She told Steve where she was going and hugged him goodbye. She got outside to find that it was still dark and a thick fog had descended on the city. It was hard to remember a time she’d sen a fog more dense. The streets were blessedly light in traffic. It was still technically curfew time for people who couldn’t justify going to work early, but like Steve, she had the good fortune to avoid any police hassles. She tried Daniel's number several more times on the way with no luck.

Her phone rang just as she was leaving the freeway for the Wallingford exit. It was Dion, and as she’d expected, he’d been pulling a long shift, though apparently not at Westlake. “There was a big gang confrontation down in Rainier Valley,” he told her tiredly, “not to mention the usual craziness we’ve been having for the past couple of weeks. Look, I’ll stop by Harborview on the way home. I’m just about out of juice, but if they’ll let us in to see Kevin, I’ll do what I can.”

“Steve will probably be grateful to have someone medical there to help him ask the right questions if nothing else. I’m sorry to ask it of you, it being so late and all…”

“For Christ’s sake, Bree he’s my friend too,” Dion replied, annoyance creeping into his tone.

“Okay, right, sorry. Just running low on tact. As usual. Gotta go, I’ll see you back there.” She tried Daniel’s number for about the twentieth time, and still got no answer.
 
His house wasn’t that far from the freeway. She pulled up and sprinted up to his front door, leaning hard on the doorbell. She waited, in more than a little tension about what his reaction would be to seeing her there at this hour. Well, that’s what he got for not answering his phone, she thought grouchily.
 

After what seemed like enough time had gone by for him to make it downstairs, she rang the bell again, several times. Still no response. She stood back to look at the house. It was completely dark, and the blinds were drawn.
 

What if he’d left town? What if he’d decided that was the best way to get time alone? Or what if he’d decided to leave Seattle entirely, just get away from the whole benighted, complicated mess?
 

Heart in her throat, she went back out to the street and started walking up and down, looking for his car. He didn’t have a garage or driveway, so it could be parked anywhere within a block or so. She got progressively more frantic as she found no sign of his Jaguar.
 

She had just turned to go back to her car when she remembered that Daniel liked to go rowing early in the morning. Four thirty seemed awfully frigging early, but maybe he’d not been able to sleep. She climbed back into her car, and made the circuit of the block, just to be on the safe side. No Jaguar. So she headed back south, down to Lake Union, where she knew Daniel kept his rowing scull, those long, narrow boats she associated with upper crust British and East Coast colleges.

It only took ten minutes to drive there and park. Unfortunately, she had only a vague idea where his rowing club was. She walked up the lakeside block and finally spotted the place. The fog was, if possible, thicker down by the water, blurring the edges of everything. It made dim, glowing orbs of the few lights around the club building.
 

She walked around it to find a dock at the back, jutting out into the lake. There was no one else around, and Bree began to doubt her inspiration that Daniel would be here. She hadn’t seen his car on her quick walk to the building. She strode out to the edge of the dock, eyes straining for any sign of a boat. The smell of water, oil and wood filled her nose. In desperation, and feeling somehow foolish as she did it, she shouted, “Daniel! Daniel Thorvaldson!” She listened hard, hearing nothing but the lap of the gentle lake waves against the dock. The city lights of downtown across the lake were only visible as a distant, muted glow.
 

She called out for him again, then again. She thought she heard what might be a shout of answer, far in the distance, but she wasn’t sure. “It’s Bree! There’s been an emergency!” she yelled. Nothing. Still she waited, hoping she’d heard something earlier, hoping it was Daniel answering her. She swayed back and forth on her feet, hands in coat pockets, in a combination of cold and nervousness.
 

Finally, through the glowing white grey of the fog, she saw a dark shape that gradually resolved into a boat. It didn’t take long before she could make out Daniel’s erect form, dipping his long oars into the water in strong, even strokes. He glanced back as he neared, his face a blur, and rowed harder on his right to get the boat in line with the dock. He slowed, and his boat came gracefully in. He shipped the oars, stood, and stepped nimbly out of the boat, onto the dock. He turned and knelt back to the scull, and pulled it backwards until it was set in the cradle of the manual boat lift.
 

Then he turned to face Bree. His hair and his navy waterproof jacket glinted with tiny beads of moisture from the fog. His eyes were black in the fuzzy illumination of the fog shrouded dock light, and his expression was strangely empty. “What is it? What’s happened?”
 

Bree shivered, not sure if it was the early morning chill or Daniel’s remote air causing it. “Look, I have some bad news. Are you going to be okay if I tell you?”

“Well, that’s probably hard to say for anyone,” he replied, crossing his arms. “If you’re asking how I’m coming on getting some stability, I'd answer that I think it’s coming along well, better than I expected, really.”

“Good, because Kevin needs you,” Bree rushed on. She couldn’t seem to get a clear read on him, and it was making her nervous, in spite of his reassuring words. “There was a riot downtown last night and Kevin was shot. He’s been through surgery, and it’s still touch and go if he’s going to make it. He needs a Healer.”
 

“Right,” Daniel replied shortly. “Help me wipe down the boat and get it stored.”
 
He disappeared into the rowing club building, and came out with a handful of cloths.
 
Without another word, they cooperated in rapidly drying off the boat, then hoisted it together down the dock and into the building, setting it on its assigned rack inside.
 

Once he had locked up the building behind him, she gathered her courage and said, “I think it’s important I do a deep read on you before we go. I need some reassurance that you’re stable enough to handle the emotional strain of seeing Kevin hurt. The last thing he or any of us needs right now is for you to go divided again.”
 

“Do I look like I’m not handling the emotional strain?” Daniel replied, first looking down at her, then off to the side as he was distracted by the arrival of two chatting rowing club members. They nodded at Daniel and Bree, and Daniel took Bree by the arm and led her away from the building, up the stairs, and out onto the city sidewalk, where he let go of her. “I get why you want to read me, and maybe it’s not a bad idea, but do you really want to do it here?”
 

Bree glanced around. The occasional car was going by, and another couple of people approached and headed down the stairs to the boathouse. “Not really, but we’re in a hurry.”

“Can Kevin have visitors yet?"

"Let me call Steve and check." She got hold of him quickly, and he said he was told it would be at least another hour before visitors would be allowed. "Is Daniel coming?" he asked.

"I'm pretty sure," Bree said cautiously.
 

Steve's silence told her he wasn't happy with that answer. "I'm just making sure it's safe," she forged on.

"I get it," Steve finally answered shortly, and hung up.

"Steve said we have an hour. So we have time to go to your house and do a read," she told Daniel.

Daniel put a hand on her shoulder and bent over her. “Are you all right?” he asked with an edge of concern, the first real emotion he’d shown since he’d gotten out of the boat. As she felt the weight of his hand on her, looked up into his serious face, she teetered on the edge of throwing herself into his arms, even in the face of his apparent remoteness. No, she was not all right. She was sick with worry, exhausted, starving, and terrified she was making a mistake bringing him in on this. And yet he seemed perfectly steady.
 

As she looked into his eyes, it finally, fully struck her that he appeared unaffected at seeing her. Given all the intensity between them in the past, both positive and negative, she wasn’t used to feeling this much distance from him. Something in her folded up into a ball of grief at the thought that his detachment might be permanent. It killed off her urge to turn to him for comfort. “I’m hanging in there,” she told him, forcing calmness she didn’t feel into her voice.
 

He squeezed her shoulder briefly, and said, “So I’ll see you back at my place?”

“I’ll be right behind you.”
 

The drive back was quick, and Bree spent it preparing herself for the read, doing deep breathing exercises as she drove. She didn’t dare examine her feelings about Daniel’s apparent distance, she told herself. She had more important things to focus on than her weird and twisted love life.
 

Daniel beat her back to the house and let her in. As she sat on the couch in the living room waiting for him to change out of his damp workout clothes, she meditated.
 

She heard the sound of his feet on the stairs, and in a moment, he was with her. He was dressed in jeans and had his shirt off, draped across his back with the long brown sleeves hanging down the sides of his chest. He was holding a sweater in one hand, and he set it aside as he perched next to her on the couch. He still seemed amazingly calm. “Ready?” he enquired.

Not really,
Bree thought, but she said, “Yep.” She turned to face him more fully, one knee drawn up onto the couch, and put her hands on his chest and closed her eyes.
 
The difference was apparent immediately. He was not faking the calm, not at all. It was there on the surface read, and still there as she started to attune energy with him and sink deeper. There was worry there, she could sense it, but it was a distant sort of concern, as if it involved something Daniel had decided he could do nothing about. She reflected that that would be the evolved way to look at it. There was nothing he could do in the present moment for Kevin but be here for the read.
 

His base energy was very strong, as was his will energy. Whatever he’d been working on lately hadn’t drained him much. He was maybe down ten percent. He’d dropped his hiding spell, so the full force of all his talents was there to read. Bree took a steadying breath and sank deeper yet, towards those levels where the division in his psyche was apparent.
 

And there she found what she could only describe to herself as a scaffolding of interconnected lines of force. In her mind’s eye it was like the underlying structure of a building, angles clean, everything nailed together nice and tight. She would have been hard pressed to explain why, but the scaffolding felt multi-colored to her, as if different energies or levels of containment were present in the various lines. It was as if he’d inserted support beams in his psyche. Bree could feel the pulse of the dark energy behind the structure, and she could dimly feel the rift where he had divided before. She delicately probed, trying to judge the strength of the restraints Daniel had somehow forged. She couldn’t find any obvious weak points, not that she was certain she’d recognize them if they were there. She promised herself for about the hundredth time that when things settled down, she would go for advanced training in deep reading.
 

There was a certain beauty to the structure, to its order, although there was also a sense that it might be in some ways restricting the normal flow of energies, and not just the dark energy. Overall, she had to admit that he felt much more stable to her, certainly as much as he’d been the first time she read him, before he’d started to exhibit those outbursts that spoke of being demon burned.
 

She pulled out with what haste she could safely manage, and came back to herself to find she’d moved closer to Daniel during the read, forehead almost touching his shoulder. She sat back and opened her eyes to find him regarding her with the first expression of doubt she’d seen in him.
 

“I don’t know what you did, but whatever it is, I think it’s working,” she told him. “I can feel the dark energy, and the place where things broke apart before, but it seems to be contained by the structure you put in place.”

Daniel pulled the long sleeved T-shirt on over his head, and the darker brown sweater over it as she spoke, then replied, “What does it feel like? The structure?”

Bree pulled off the elastic tie holding her hair back and began finger combing her hair into a neater ponytail. “It feels like a scaffolding, or a building. It has a definite structure, very mathematical, I’d say. How did you manage it?” She was alight with curiosity, and she found she was nearly trembling with the hope that he’d found an answer, maybe even a permanent answer.

Daniel stood up as he answered her. “I did some research on meditation and visualization techniques. I called a few people I knew, tracked down some sources on coping with getting demon burned, and just experimented from there. I drew from the hiding spell for my Demon Master and Binder talents as well. Once I decided on what to try, I spent most of every day in meditation and casting for about a week. For the last few days, I’ve been trying to do a couple hours a day to see if that will hold it in place. It’s kind of hard for me to tell how well it’s working. I know I’ve been feeling progressively calmer.”