A chill ran down my spine. “Samarek.”
“I didn’t know his name then. I just knew it was wrong. Powerful and wrong, and for a moment I was certain I’d screwed up.” Pain colored his face, but then he took a breath, and his shoulders sagged as if he was reliving his relief all over again. “Then you gasped, and your eyes flew open, and the poison was gone. Just like that. Like it had never existed.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, and I knew he was battling tears. I couldn’t blame him. My eyes were welling, too.
“And Mathes?”
The silence stretched. Then Eric whispered, “He collapsed. Right there on the floor, next to the symbols he’d drawn. Dead before I could even try to help him.”
He looked up at me, and his eyes were haunted. “That was the price, Kate. A life for a life. Gregory Mathes knew it going in. Knew someone had to pay. He chose to pay it himself so I wouldn’t have to.”
I stood there, trying to process. Twenty years. Twenty years of marriage and divorce and death and resurrection, and I’d never known. Never suspected that the life I was living—every breath, every moment—had been bought with another man’s sacrifice.
“So the ritual closed when Gregory died. That was the exchange.”
“Yes. Whatever door he’d opened, whatever connection he’d made to Samarek’s power—it sealed when his heart stopped.” Eric’s jaw tightened.
“If you’d asked—if Gregory had told you the ceremony would kill him—would you have done it anyway?”
He didn’t hesitate. “If he were truly offering? Yes. To save you, I would have said yes in a heartbeat.”
I blinked, fighting tears. “And what about now? I mean, why is he back? Why come here? Why kill Antonio?”
“I’ve been thinking about that since Marcus told me it was Samarek’s mark. I don’t know.” He drew in a stuttering breath. “But I have a guess.”
I felt suddenly cold. Eric’s guesses were as good as gold. And I could already tell that this one scared him.
“What? Dammit, Eric, what?”
“The Gate.”
It took me a second to figure out where he was going with that. When I did, I gasped.
“Allie,” I whispered. “You think he’s here for Allie?”
“She closed the gate,” he said. And that she had.
Our daughter had prevented the freaking apocalypse by closing and locking a gate to hell that was about to burst open and would have released a massive number of theretofore trapped demons.
A side benefit was that the gate she’d shut was connected to other gates all through our realm of existence, each connected to the other by a spiderweb of demony mystical threads. To be honest, I don’t fully understand how it works—that’s Eric’s thing. But I do understand the end result. Smaller gates all over the planet closed and locked that day, too.
And if one of those gates was Samarek’s back door, then my daughter trapped him.
And he’s probably pretty pissed.
“That’s my guess,” Eric said when I managed to put my thoughts to words. “Samarek had been biding his time for centuries. Patient. Careful. Waiting and planning for the right moment to burst free and rampage through the human world. And then some teenage girl slammed the door in his face and ruined centuries of preparation in a single moment.”
“So he’s angry,” I said.
Eric almost smiled. “I think we can call that an understatement.”
16
KATE
When I got to his room, Stuart was sitting on the edge of his bed, his head in his hands. He looked tired—the visions always left him drained—but when he lifted his head, his eyes were clear. Present. More like the Stuart I’d married than he’d been in months.
“Hey,” I said softly. “We need to talk.”
Something flickered across his face—wariness, maybe, or resignation. These days, “we need to talk” never led anywhere good.
