Kaz looked up from his phone. The grim expression on his already brooding features sent a shiver of unease down Silas’s spine. Instincts blaring, he sat up straight and reached for the knife in his boot.
“Because,” Kaz answered, “you weren’t the only leaders hit today.”
Epilogue I
“What can I do?”she asked, anxious to help.
“Nothing.” Silas clicked something into place and then turned to adjust a dial on one of the machines. A pale blue liquid began to flow through clear tubing that snaked beneath the bottom edge of the chest piece. “You’ve already done everything I needed you to do, baby. Just sit back and watch.”
Silas stood hunched over the table, his hands moving quickly doing gods’ knew what. He appeared to be securing all Tal’s limbs into their proper places, but there were so many tubes and wires and strange fluids pumping through the machines arrayed around the table that she couldn’t be sure of anything.
“What if it doesn’t work?” It seemed insensitive to ask when Tal was within hearing distance, but Petra had to know.
“Then no harm done. We’ll just try again.”
Petra picked her way around the tables to perch on a chair identical to the one he had in his lab in Tennessee. “You’re sure it won’t hurt him?”
“We’ve tried this several times before and it hasn’t,” Silas replied, gaze flicking her way. “The worst thing that’s ever happened is he had to lay low for a couple weeks andrecuperate.” There was a pause, then, begrudgingly, “He says thanks for the concern.”
The lights in the lab were dim, so there were too many dark corners for her to guess where he might be. But she’d gotten pretty good at sensing him in the weeks since she and Silas had officially moved into the mansion, so she felt him there.
Speaking to Silas, she said, “Of course I’m concerned. He’s your brother. That means he’s mine, too.”
Silas stilled. He turned his head ever-so-slightly to one side, to a corner of the room that was just a fraction darker than the rest, and murmured, “I know.”
Petra strained to make out Tal’s form in the shadows but couldn’t quite manage it. “What’d he say?”
He cast her a lingering glance over his shoulder. “That we got lucky.”
A lump formed in her throat. “Yeah, well, me too.”
She’d never had a brother before, but no one had ever said she struggled to adapt to new circumstances. Petra didn’t take any kind of family for granted, especially now, after everything. If he was Silas’s brother, then he belonged to her, too, and she was nothing if not intensely loyal to her people.
And whether or not he admitted it, Petra knew it was important that his brother got to stand with him at their wedding.
He didn’t have very many requests, since demons didn’t put much stock in something as ephemeral as vows, but when they discussed eloping, he’d hesitated. Tal really had waited a long time to get his body back, Silas told her, and it seemed a little rude to not invite him to the wedding.
It was so casual, almost flippant, that she was pretty sure he believed he’d gotten away with admitting hecared.Of course he hadn’t, because Silas was about as subtle as a bull in a chinashop. She’d seen right through the act, and moreover, she agreed with him.
They couldn’t get married without his brother there to witness it — in the flesh, such as it was.
Her mate’s focus was perfect, his every movement fluid and precisely calculated as he buzzed around the table. Magic gradually built in the air as he worked. Petra’s breathing deepened, her body falling into a meditative state as Silas channeled more and more of her power into his task.
She watched from under heavy-lidded eyes as he shut off the machines one by one. It was as if the air pressure in the room had increased, which simultaneously made her drowsy and invigorated as the sense thatsomethingwas happening built and built.
Gradually, Silas cleared away everything except for the body on the table. It was whole now, its limbs connected in all the ways they should be, but it was lifeless, limp like the body of a dead giant.
Empty eyes stared at the ceiling, waiting.
The lights began to flicker, first intermittently, then with increasing frequency until, one by one, they began to go out. For just a moment she was taken back to the night she met Silas in The Broken Tooth, when she glimpsed him for the first time in the shadows between flickering lights. She’d been terrified then, but now his appearance in the darkness only filled her with relief.
“Everything is gonna be okay,” she whispered to herself and to the men in the room, too, even if they were too distracted to hear it. Shewilledit, and she sent that will outward, into Glory’s radiant ear.
When the magic in the air grew almost too thick to breathe comfortably, Silas, wreathed in darkness, circled around thetable to stand by the head. He placed his palms down on either side of it and announced, “Let’s do this, Tal.”
It was too dark to see much of anything besides Silas’s pale skin and glowing eyes. Not that it would’ve helped her understand what was going on any better if shecouldsee. He’d given her the basics of how it would work and the warding techniques he’d modified to bind Tal to the biomechanical marvel on the table, but most of it was too high level for her.
For all intents and purposes, he’d explained, it was a real body. It functioned with an artificial circulatory system, senses, and was, for better and worse, mortal. When Tal bound himself to it, Silas was nearly certain that he would be tying himself to the machine’s lifetime. When the magic that powered it at last guttered out, so too would he. After that, they really weren’t sure what would happen.
