Theirliraididn’t even demur when she was ushered into a room, or when Ignatius indicated the bathroom and handed her one of the backpacks brought from the go-shelf in the garage.Please take a warm shower and get dressed,Father said, courteously enough, and she obeyed with the dreamy slowness of an almost-catatonic.
Which left Father, Jake, and Erik to the work of reloading, making sure their weapons were in good order, cleaning up with sorcery, and changing ripped or unusable clothing.As soon as she was finished—she didn’t take long, and peered from the bathroom door as if she expected them to be gone like a normal nightmare—Ignatius and Jake bundled her back into the SUV and Erik took the first running shift.
Wet snow fell in thickening blankets, but when you kept a vehicle in sensing range through an urban area you could leapfrog from roof to roof, a Son’s strength and speed playing with physical space and time in a way that would turn a normal person into a howling, vomiting mess.
When you were already halfway to god-fueled insanity, little things like moving faster than a human being should be able to, popping from rooftop to rooftop, or even crouching on the top bar of a streetlamp and watching the traffic whiz by underneath didn’t matter so much.
If shadowbeasts took notice of the transport, Erik wasn’t trapped in a metal cage; he could arrive from an unexpected quarter to give theliraiand close-guard enough time to get away.They should have had several trios performing this duty and at least two other vehicles crammed with backup while moving a potential, let alone alirai.
But Father hadn’t been able to get hold of Control.Not from the hotel landline, and not from the prepaid cells either.He’d just dialed and listened to whatever was on the other end with a grim expression.
It wouldn’t be the first time communications with a minor frontline temple had been cut.The shadowbeasts were opportunistic predators, but there were other, fouler, and much smarter things in the hierarchy.Generally it was a short-term problem, and modern technology eased most comms tremendously even while it made avoiding cameras and law enforcement a little trickier.
But being unable to reach a larger temple—or Regional Control itself—meant the entire sector might be interdicted, and that was seriously bad news.Especially with the closest active temple three hundred miles away.
Snowflakes tried to hurt when you smacked through them at high speed; a shell of sorcery pushed them aside.The streak Erik cut through their falling was invisible to normals, but another Son or a shadowbeast would see the smear.
The only thing he didn’t like about rooftop running was that it gave him too-damn-much time to think.
It broke the boundary protection without alerting us, and it came straight for her window.Why would it do that?And thejana-spiders—they didn’t mass like that unless they had been sent; they weren’t likelengs.Ignatius had been too wounded for a simple clutch of fungal spiders, but he didn’t speak of what else had breached the temple’s defenses and Jake had, by all appearances, been very busy in his own right.
Not only that, but the incursion had been virtually invisible in its beginning stages.If Liv hadn’t screamed in the grip of nightmare…
Funny, how thinking about whatcouldhave happened slowed him, cold fear in his veins and the unsteady, unstable rage under his skin mounting another degree when he thought about how close they’d come to losing their potential.No breath of her should have been discernible outside theliraim, that was what the suites with their heavy shielding werefor, and yet the tentacled horror had expended serious effort and energy poking its snout through a window that should have looked, from the outside, no different than all others.
Erik didn’t like what he was thinking.
His jacket snapped as he unfolded in a leap, the SUV below flashing past Coringtown city limits.Now it was freeway game, energy expended on staying almost invisible while he settled atop a rattling, wallowing semi carrying a load of consumer goods from one point to the next.If predawn traffic thinned a little more, he’d land light as a leaf on the SUV’s roof itself, ready to move in any direction to face a rural attack.
It would be bitterly cold, but that didn’t matter with the mark burning on his wrist and wine-dark power flooding him from toes to scalp.The snow thickened, flakes melting as they reached salted roadway—a mild winter so far, but the iron tang to the wind said that was about to change—and Erik danced atop a stream of rumbling commercial traffic, keeping a toy car and its tiny, tempting, tormenting kernel-gleam of a potential inside.
What are you thinking, Erik?
What if, for example, a control liaison had been turned?A fullliraichecking a liaison’s work could sense any hint of corruption, but…
The snow thickened, flakes shrinking slightly as the temperature dipped.A storm settling over the area, shadowbeasts breaking a minor temple, communications failures galore—it certainly seemed like someone who shouldn’t have knew about their potential and, furthermore, wanted to make sure she never reached the Flame.
That someone might have a little friend in the Sons, a good little half-mad helper.That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it.
Even though he didn’t want to.
Erik’s stomach was full of acid, not from any indigestion or hunger.No, it was the rage—and a sinking sensation, much more frigid than the weather, that their problems had only just begun.
Grateful
This time Ignatiusdrove and Jake was in the back seat with her, which wasnotan improvement even if the smell was gone.Somehow they had magically cleaned up the monster blood, and even though she didn’t want to sit in the stuff, the apparent ease of wiping it away didn’t help Liv keep her calm.
None of this did.
Jake’s face was still bruised, but the hematoma looked old and yellow-green instead of fresh blue-black with red fringes.Ignatius shifted sometimes as if his chest hurt him, and his dark gaze rested on the rearview mirror more often than on the road.
He was watching her.So was Jake, whose apparent lounging relaxation didn’t fool her.She’d seen how goddamn fast he was.And Erik, too.
It was Ignatius who broke the tense, humming silence of tires on pavement and the engine forcing them to turn.“I must apologize, Miss Stellack.”
Oh, God.For what?Liv’s fingers tangled against each other; she pulled hard against them, her knuckles turning white.
She said nothing.
