The Demon Beside Me (32 page)

The figure scrambled up and I saw red streaking down her face, a face that I recognized. “Tink, that’s Hikari.”

“Shit!” She immediately scribed some sort of binding, but Hikari was already moving, clutching her head and running. People reacted, stopping to stare and call out.

“Kibs!” I shouted, turning away from the window and running to the door. “Dammit, Kibs, now!”

The imp phased through the floor. “What-“

“Shut up and get imps to follow Hikari! She was watching from outside the building! She’s running down the street, that way, bleeding from a head wound.” I threw the door open and sprinted for the stairs, Tink snapping curses and racing after me.

We burst out of the building and an imp immediately oriented us. “She’s going for speed,” he said. “You won’t catch her without being obvious and we don’t have the resources to make suggestions to all the humans in this area.”

I ignored the imp and started running. She was bleeding, probably drained from maintaining her spell, and slower than me. I could also run practically forever with just minimal use of my ichor. “Do we have any patrols who can cut her off?”

“Already being oriented,” the imp said as I left Tink to scramble after me as best I could. “We’ll be able to catch her as long as she doesn’t use any more magic.”

“Don’t count on that,” I said. “She knows about imps, and she’s a master level mage. Does she look like she’s running randomly or going somewhere in specific?”

“One moment.” The imp was invisible, but I felt his presence vanish. Hikari was smart enough to have a contingency plan for something like this. She’d have an escape route. We’d have to catch her before she got there. “She seems calm,” the imp reported, his voice barely audible in my ear. “Odds are she’s running to something. Without knowing where she’s going, there’s no way to know if we’ll catch her.”

I racked my brain to think of what she’d do to get away. She wasn’t afraid of demons, but she wouldn’t fight against the odds we could bring to bear. If she were just looking to spy on me, she wouldn’t have bothered to hide. If she had been hiding, she was trying to learn something that I wouldn’t share with her. That meant it would have to do with either Tink or Caleb. “Shit! We need to bring her down. If the opportunity presents itself, bring her down, period. She’s bringing information to the Choir.”

“By your word.” The imp vanished again.

I continued down the street, running as quickly as I could in my human form, which was fast enough to draw attention. “Take your next right,” another imp said in my ear. “She has changed direction, away from our patrol, outward from our area of control. We have no word of Choir activity in this area, but be careful.”

“She has a cell phone in hand,” said a voice in my other ear. “A smartphone. She has been doing something with it while on the run.”

“Probably uploading something,” I said. “Like a video. Shit!”

I spared a glance back to see if Tink was still behind me somewhere, but she was nowhere in sight. The poor girl had probably given up. Short legs couldn’t carry her this long. It took another change in direction and three more blocks of running before the news I was dreading finally came. “Zay, you can stop running,” Kibs said in my ear, his voice thoroughly disgusted. “She’s fucking gone.”

“What happened?” I slowed to a stop, leaned on my thighs, and took a deep breath. Even with ichor helping my metabolism, I still hadn’t fully recovered from the coma.

“She hit a park and must have had some sort of triggered spell waiting. One step there was one of her, and then there were six bitches, all running in different directions. We were just about to trip her up, too. We did get one, but it was a simple illusion and popped as soon as it hit the ground.”

I swore quietly and at length. “Now she’s got something she can provide to the Choir to show that Caleb’s a traitor.”

“You don’t think she’d do something like that, do you?” Kibs asked.

“I don’t know what she’s planning, but why did she run like that?” I shook my head and straightened up. “Why was she hiding in the first place?”

“Maybe she’s just stalking you.”

“Not funny.”

Kibs sighed. “If we track her down, what do you want us to do?”

“Let me know. Don’t bother pinning her. Whatever she did, it’s too late to stop it. What happened to Tink?”

“Gave up and went back to the hotel.”

“That sounds like a good idea.”

It took me ten minutes to walk the distance I had covered chasing Hikari. I was tempted to walk around longer, but I knew that Tink would be waiting for an explanation. I didn’t want to give her one. The group that we had forged to bring war to House Lucifer had shattered. Of the mages, Julian had died and Chrissy had disappeared after the collapse of my old apartment. Becky had distanced herself. Jase had died and Caleb was leaving. Now Hikari had turned against us.

She met me at the hotel entrance, blue eyes fixed on me. “It’s just you and me now, Tinkerbell,” I said.

“She’s going to turn Caleb in, isn’t she?”

“I don’t like the fact that you and I both came to the same conclusion.”

Tink walked up to me and jabbed me lightly in the center of my chest, with her fingers and not with her knife. “And what do you plan on doing about it, demon? Do you have some sort of master plan to recover from this?”

“I’m open to suggestions,” I said.

“We need to get Caleb out of there.”

“If we rescue him from the Choir, that only proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s a traitor in their eyes. What would we do then? Keep him locked in the basement here? Expect him to fight his own people? What can we do, Tink?”

She balled her fist and punched me, leaving her fist pressed against me. “Fuck you, demon. Stop telling me what I don’t want to hear.”

“Like I said, I’m open to suggestions.”

“Call Hikari. Ask her what she wants.” Her head lowered. “Give it to her.”

“What if she wants you and me to break our contract?”

“Do it. Caleb’s life is worth more than our contract.”

“What if it’s too late?” I asked softly.

Tink’s head came back up, her eyes cold and bright. “Promise her that whatever happens to Caleb, I will make sure it happens to her.”

We called her the next morning, bright and early, assuming that it would throw her off. She picked up on the second ring. “Good morning, Isaiah.”

“Good morning,” I said.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I was calling to see if you had recovered from your head wound.”

She laughed. “Well, aren’t you just a sweetheart. After you inflicted it, you decided to call to apologize?”

“That was me who caused it,” Tink said. “And I wasn’t planning on apologizing for it, but if you’d really like one, I suppose you can have it.”

“Anna, what a surprise to find you with him, first thing in the morning.” Hikari delivered that line completely deadpan, and I rolled my eyes. “To be quite honest, I couldn’t care less about what you say or do, so I’d appreciate it if you simply shut up and let the adults talk.”

I saw her bristle, then deflate as I glared at her. “There’s no call for that,” I said to the phone lying on the table between us.

“Zay, don’t waste my time.”

“What do you want in exchange for not distributing the video or pictures you took?”

“What makes you think I took video or pictures?”

“Hikari, don’t waste my time.”

Another laugh crackled over the phone connection. “Oh, Zay, you’re so easy to bait.”

Tink looked about ready to explode. I almost laughed, but someone was bound to take it the wrong way. “Well, I figured that since you were busy doing something with your phone while you were running away for no apparent reason, you might just be uploading some pictures or video for later distribution.”

“The imps should be commended for their attention to detail.”

“So assuming you didn’t just upload it directly to the Choir, what would you like in exchange for not distributing it?”

“What makes you think I’d send it to the Choir? Assuming that I did anything of that nature in the first place, of course.”

I slapped a hand down on the table, making the phone jump in the air. “Stop playing around! Caleb’s life is on the line here!”

She clicked her tongue. “Don’t get so excited. What would I want? Let me think about that for a moment. Oh, wait, I know exactly what I’d like. Can you guess?”

“I’m afraid to guess.”

“Oh, come on. I’ll tell you whether you’re hot or cold.”

“You want us to break our contract,” Tink snapped. “Because you’re exactly that sort of petty bitch.”

“No, Anna, that’s not strictly accurate. I want you to break the contract because I’m a bitch. I want you to break it, irrevocably, in my presence, because I’m a petty, vindictive bitch. Get it right, whore.”

“What did you-“

“Shut up, Tink,” I snapped. “Stop provoking her.”

“Fuck this bitch!”

“He did that,” Hikari said, her tone that of barely restrained laughter. “Further than you’ve ever gotten, isn’t that right? With anyone, ever? Maybe that’s why you want to save Caleb so much?”

“Why does everyone assume I want to fuck Caleb?”

“Save it,” I said. “Both of you, save it. All right, Hikari. You want the contract broken in front of you? Fine. Where and when?”

“Agreeing to it that easily? See how quickly he’ll abandon you, just like he abandoned me?”

“Abandon you?” I saw red. “Who’s the one who never came back, Hikari? I put up with everything you put me through, I compromised for you, I compromised to keep you, and as soon as one person told you off to your face, you walked away and never showed me your face again. Who fucking abandoned who, here?”

“I-“

“Shut up.” Even Tink recoiled from the tone in my voice. I almost didn’t recognize it myself. “You disgust me almost as much as I disgust myself here, giving in to you yet again. At least this time it’s something more than just my pride on the line. Just tell us when and where to meet you and we’ll get this over with and then we’ll never have to deal with each other again.”

She gave us instructions on how to reach a place, a public park that had closed a year ago. The place would be quiet and isolated. We’d meet there at noon. As soon as she finished, I ended the call and looked over the table at Tink. “It’s a trap,” she said.

“No shit.”

“We’ve walked into traps before, but something tells me this is a bad idea.” She spun her knife on the table, raising an eyebrow as it slowed to a stop with the point aiming directly at me. “Maybe we should bring backup.”

“Not really an option. It’s not as if we can call up Opheran and ask him if he’s got our back. In fact, he’d probably sit on me to prevent me from going anywhere. House leadership tends to disapprove of suicide missions in the middle of a war.”

“So we can’t tell anyone we’re going anywhere, right? What about the imps?”

I shrugged. “I doubt they’re eavesdropping on us. We’ll leave a message just in case whatever trap she’s got set is too much to handle.”

“That sounds like a plan to me.” Her expression darkened. “I’ve never heard you snap at anyone quite like that before. You really are disgusted with yourself, aren’t you?”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“I wouldn’t have ever put myself in that sort of position.”

I snorted. “Never been in love before, then?”

“What does love have to do with anything? Do you even believe you were ever actually in love with her, or were you just going to jump in bed with any girl who showed you that much interest or affection?”

I couldn’t help but flinch away from that. “That’s cold, Tink.”

“At least I didn’t call you desperate.”

“I was in love with her,” I said. “When we first got together, there was a spark. Yeah, it had been a couple of years since my last serious relationship, but there was something there, and it took a long time for me to get to the point where I realized the spark was gone.”

“That point was today, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” I stood up and stretched, wincing as my legs protested the movement. Yesterday’s run had taken more out of me than I wanted to admit. “Come on, we’re going to be late.”

We left a handwritten note explaining the circumstances and our meeting place. On the way out to the car, I called up an imp and told them that we were heading out for a while, leaving something cooking on the stove, and that if we weren’t back by one o’clock, to have someone enter my suite and make sure nothing burned down. The lame excuse was politely accepted and we were barely five minutes away from the hotel when my phone rang.

“My Prince,” I said politely.

“Isaiah, you’re a thrice damned fool.”

“I was a little too obvious about it, wasn’t I?” Next to me, Tink snarled soundlessly and stomped on the accelerator. She had insisted that we take her car and I hadn’t argued. “My Prince, if you haven’t heard back from us by quarter past, assume the worst.”

“What, that you’ve been captured, killed, or that the Horsemen will be given dominion? You’re putting more than just your own lives on the line. Get back here. We’ll mount an operation to extract Caleb.”

“We thought about that,” I said, wincing as we ran a red light. “But that just makes him a traitor, period. As long we keep this within our little Gatekeeper family, he has a non-treasonous reason to fall back on. If you lead a force to pull him out, how could he ever prove that he wasn’t a spy? They’d never believe him.”

“Your life isn’t worth his.”

“That’s where we’ll have to disagree, my Prince. I think risking my life to save his is worth that risk. Besides, when have I ever failed to come back?”

“I am dispatching forces after you,” Opheran said, his tone flat. “I’ve given you leeway before, Baronet, but I will not allow you to risk yourself on this. They will be given orders to restrain and return you here by any means necessary.”

“We’ll just need to finish up before they reach us,” I said, and flicked the end call button. “I assume we’ll only have about ten to fifteen minutes before they reach us. Think that’ll be enough time?”