He exited the manor and walked around to the eastern side where the stables were. Greggs was just mounting when he arrived, and Sadie stood several paces away from the footman and horse. She was absolutely fine. Nicholas stopped, relief leaving his legs weak.
Sadie turned around and stared at him with her head cocked to the side.Did something else happen?
He shook his head, not sure he could string together a thought coherent enough to share with her.
Sadie waited until Greggs rode off, then crossed the gravel path separating the stables from the manor. “What’s wrong?”
Giving in to the need pulsing through him, Nicholas wrapped his arms around her, crushing her against him. Some of the fears he’d entertained, all the ways a demon could have hurt her, must have made it to the surface of his thoughts, forSadie was soon rubbing soothing circles on his back as her voice whispered through his mind.
It’s fine. I’m fine. Nothing happened to me. The demon wasn’t here. I’m safe, Nick.
Holding her, he slowly convinced his body to let go of the terror, though his mind resisted. He pressed his forehead against hers. “I don’t think I can let you out of my sight right now, but I also need to go find the tear to the demon realm.”
“Then I’ll go with you to hunt for the portal in the forest. Maybe we can find it faster with two of us looking.”
Most of the time would be spent traveling to the area Nicholas suspected the portal was, but he didn’t point out that a second set of eyes wouldn’t actually speed up that process. Not when Sadie had volunteered to stay with him. Not when she willingly eased his worries, and he wasn’t left wanting to beg her to let him protect her behind a ward the demon couldn’t breach.
He couldn’t lock her away.
But he’d gladly keep her by his side. He pulled back, but took her hand in his. “Do you ride?”
Sadie’s shoulders drooped. “No.”
“Then we’ll walk.”
“Won’t that take too long?”
“I wouldn’t have been riding that quickly, anyway.”
Sadie snorted. “If you are going to lie to me, don’t project your thoughts so clearly.”
“How about this, then?” Nicholas swooped in for a quick kiss. “If I ride out now, I will be too distracted worrying about you to search effectively. So, it will be better to walk with you than to ride without you. Plus, Greggs took my usual mount to Valway.”
“Fine, we’ll walk. But we’d better leave now.”
???
For the firstquarter of an hour, Sadie and Nicholas walked in silence through the Gloaming Forest. The birds chittered overhead, the wind rustled through the leaves, and slowly the tension drained from Nicholas’s body.
When he’d come out to the stables, Sadie had been certain that some further tragedy had befallen someone while she was outside. But it was only his fear that the demon would hurt her that had worked him into such a state. It was why she offered to go into the woods with him, though he didn’t need her help to find the portal.
She waited until his thoughts had calmed before breaking the silence. “Where are we headed?”
“There’s a spot by a stream where many travelers stop that was mentioned in several of the recent reports about hauntings. Water was one of the only landmarks mentioned in my ancestor’s journal that would still be in place centuries later. Even if the stream has shifted, it will be in the same general area.”
“How hard will it be to spot the portal?”
“It will supposedly blend in with the shadows well enough that a casual glance wouldn’t warn someone that something is wrong, but it will be obvious if we are looking. At least, that’s what my however-many-greats grandfather wrote.”
“Beatrice said the bigger the portal is, the more it will pull at the demon, but do we have any idea what range of sizes we are looking for?”
Nicholas grimaced. “Not really. The journal mentioned the portal growing over time. It was the size of a large dinner plate the first time Lord Alfred saw it and was as big as a bathtub by the time he closed it off. But we don’t know how small it might have been before he found it.”
“So, we are looking for a shadow that can blend in, and that might be any size.”
“Pretty much. But we only have to search near the stream. That is the one clue that was clear, the portal brushed against water two hundred years ago. The spot we are heading to is the only stream close enough to the manor for it to possibly be the same location my ancestor sealed a portal.”
Sadie stopped, pulling Nicholas to a standstill next to her. “The only way to banish the demon is for it to jump between hosts near the portal.”
