4
KATE
“Stuart!”
I was moving even before I finished saying his name, catching him as he started to slide sideways in the chair. His body had gone rigid, every muscle locked, and his eyes, when they rolled forward again, were white. Completely white. No iris, no pupil. Just endless, milky nothing.
“A vision,” Eric said, though we’d all figured that out on our own. After going head-to-head with the high demon Lilith to save Allie, this had become a regular—albeit disturbing—thing.
“Kate,” Eric added gently, “you should give him some space.”
But I couldn’t back off. This was my husband, and I knelt beside the chair, one hand on his arm, and watched as his mouth opened and words that weren’t his slipped out.
“The door will bleed.”
Stuart’s voice, but not. Deeper. Older. Like something ancient was using his throat as a megaphone.
“The door will bleed,” he repeated as his body shook and tremors ran through him like electricity.“Only living shadows can seal the wound. Blood calls to blood.”
I tightened my grip on his arm, not sure if I was willing him to come back or to tell us more.
It didn’t matter. His body went limp, and I caught him before he could slide out of the chair. I pulled him against me and felt the reassuring thud of his heart hammering against my chest. “Stuart. Stuart, can you hear me?”
His lids fluttered open, and I looked into eyes that were familiar again.
“Kate?” His voice was soft and thready. “Another?”
I nodded. “Do you remember?” When he shook his head, I added, “You said the door will bleed. Does that mean anything?”
“Nothing.”
“How about only living shadows can seal the wound?”
His brow furrowed, his lips moving as he repeated the words, then slowly shook his head.
I forced a smile and nodded. “Well, that’s okay. It’s over.”
It wasn’t, though. Not really. There was something there. Some sort of truth hidden in these strange words that left him hollow and drained. But I didn’t have a clue what that truth was.
That was frustratingly normal—or what passed for normal with Stuart’s visions. The prophecies came through him like water through a pipe, leaving him empty and drained on the other side. Sometimes he remembered fragments. Usually, he remembered nothing. But I never discounted them. After all, his prophetic words had saved us all from one of the vilest demons ever to inhabit hell. Not to mention this world.
I looked around the room at the others. Laura had gone pale, and Cutter had moved even closer to her. Eddie was frowning so hard his eyebrows had become a single fuzzy caterpillar. Eric’s face was carefully blank, but I could see the tension in his jaw.
And then I caught it—a look passing between Eric and Allie. Quick. Loaded.
“Well, ain’t that a pisser,” Eddie said, apparently understanding what I, too, had just figured out.
“Living shadows,” Allie said as she looked around the room. “Me and Daddy.”
“What?” Laura said. “No.”
Allie nodded. “We’re alive. The demonic essence in us is the shadows.”
Laura whipped her head around to face me. “Yeah,” I said, resigned. “Already got there.”
“And we’ll deal with it,” Allie said, her voice firm, but her hand so tight in Jared’s her knuckles were white. Still, her chin lifted in that stubborn tilt I knew so well. She wasn’t going to fall apart. She wasn’t going to run. She was going to face this head-on, whatever it was, because that’s who my daughter had become.
My heart cracked a little more, right down the fault lines that had formed every time this life had asked too much of her.
