But she also saw something else — a network of light that connected her to Caleb, to Ty, to Pru, and even to the city itself.Power flowed through the ley lines, true, but it also ran through the bonds of love and friendship and determination that held them all together.
“Delia?”Alec’s voice came to her from somewhere, tinny and faint.“Are you having another one of those…episodes?”
He sounded uncertain, and she couldn’t blame him.
Delia opened her eyes — when had she even closed them?— and found her cousin and Alec standing beside the car, concern obvious in every line of their faces.
“I’m okay,” she said, and realized that for the first time all day, she actually meant it.The energy still surged through her system, but now it felt less like a foreign invasion and more like a natural part of who she was becoming.
“Let’s go get that coffee,” she said, managing a genuine smile.“And then we need to pick up your parents at the hotel.”
As they drove away from the chapel, Delia found herself focusing on all the changes she could sense in the supernatural landscape around them…more and more active sites, accompanied by stronger energy flows.Thrown into the mix was the unmistakable presence of entities that had no business being on this plane of existence.
But she could also sense something else — a growing network of resistance.People like herself, scattered throughout the city, whose natural psychic abilities were being awakened by the chaos.There weren’t enough of them to mount a direct challenge to Vinea’s operation, but maybe there were enough to provide the kind of support her team would need when the time came.
Her phone vibrated again.This time, the message was from Pru.
Emergency meeting tonight after family dinner.Ty found something big.
Good or bad big?
Let’s go with ‘complicated’ big.Can you get away around eight?
Under normal circumstances, Delia would never have contemplated bailing on a family commitment.Everyone was meeting at Santorini’s at six, which should have given her plenty of time.But any get-together associated with a wedding tended to run long.
These weren’t normal circumstances, though.And if Pru and Ty had discovered something that could help them rescue Caleb and stop Vinea’s operation, then she had to be there.
I’ll make it work.
Yet another energy spike smashed into her just as she was shutting off the engine.But this time, instead of fighting it or trying to shield herself from it, Delia simply let it flow through her, accepting the power as part of who she was becoming.
Whatever happened tonight, whatever they learned at Pru’s emergency meeting, she would be ready.
By the time Delia managed to extract herself from the family dinner at Santorini’s, it was nearly eight-thirty.The evening had stretched on longer than expected, through multiple courses, several rounds of toasts, and the kind of cheerful chatter that always seemed to happen when relatives who rarely saw each other tried to catch up on years’ worth of news in a single evening.
Under normal circumstances, she would have enjoyed every minute of it.Olivia’s relief at having the venue situation resolved was infectious, and both sets of parents seemed genuinely pleased with how smoothly everything was falling into place.Even Alec, who’d been skeptical about the last-minute change, admitted that Little Chapel of Hearts seemed to be a better place for the ceremony than Angel’s Dream.
But with every passing hour, Delia found it harder to ignore the supernatural energy building across the city, pressing against the mental walls she’d constructed.By the time she’d finally made her excuses and headed for Pru’s condo, her nerves were stretched, so frayed that they might as well have been made of old string.
The building’s elevator seemed to take forever, and when she finally reached Pru’s door, she thought she could hear voices from inside before she even knocked.
“About time,” Pru said as she opened the door, then stepped aside to let Delia enter.Her dark green hair fell around her face, and the faint circles under her eyes told Delia that she must have been working nonstop for hours.
Ty stood by the window that overlooked the city, his fingers tapping on the glass in a nervous rhythm that seemed very unlike him.When he turned away so he could face the two women, the strain in his handsome features was obvious even from all the way across the room.
“How bad is it?”she asked, figuring there wasn’t any point in wasting time on greetings.
“Even worse than we thought,” Ty replied as he moved away from the window to join them in the living room.“The timeline’s accelerated.Vinea’s not waiting until midnight tomorrow to get started.”
Delia sank onto Pru’s sectional, all of her muscles suddenly sore, as if the day’s accumulated stress had finally caught up with her.“How much time do we have?”
“The ritual begins at eight tomorrow evening,” Pru said.She also settled on the sectional, but perched at the far end of the L, as if she thought she might need to get up and go over to her laptop at any second.“Peak power will be at 11:47, but by then it’ll be too late to stop anything.”
“How do you know all this?”Delia asked, looking from her friend over to Ty.It was good that they’d been able to unearth this information, but it wasn’t the sort of thing they could have picked up from a simple Google search.
The half angel’s expression darkened.“Because I’ve been monitoring my people’s communications all day, and the higher-ups are in full crisis mode.This isn’t just about Las Vegas anymore.If Vinea succeeds in opening those permanent gateways, it’ll destabilize the barriers between planes across the entire continent.”
All this unwelcome news made Delia want to throw up her hands in despair, but she knew that wasn’t an option.No, they’d have to soldier through this, no matter what happened.“And they’re not sending help?”
