Ashmedai
Ashmedai didn’t needto hear all the details to understand what had happened tonight. Daniel, Alex, and Julian had come across Nicolas’s squad during their patrol, and a fight had broken out. Nicolas had been forced to side with his squad in order to maintain his cover with them. He’d helped to hurt his friends, which explained why he was so distraught when he came home. His human was a good man, and the guilt was eating him alive.
Even now, as Daniel and Julian dragged him over to the rest of the group and offered him a chair, Nicolas’s bright soul was dim. It wasn’t permanent, not yet, but it would take time for him to forgive himself. For a moment when Julian and Daniel hugged him, it had flared so brightly it almost hurt to look at him.
His brilliant soul could turn black, and Ashmedai would still love him. But he hated seeing him in any kind of pain.
Like an olive branch, Nathan passed out drinks and offered an amber bottle to Nicolas, who took it with a nonplussed look and said, “It’s five-thirty in themorning.”
“You’ve been up all night, and you’ll sleep half the day away soon. It’s more like an evening drink before bed. Besides, you look like you could use it.”
Nicolas ducked his head. “Thanks.”
Ashmedai hung uncertainly near the edge of the group as they all sipped their drinks. He was the only one who didn’t consume physical food or drink, and he didn’t understand why these particular drinks were so appealing.
“I meant what I said, you know,” Daniel said after a while. He was sitting on the end of the sofa nearest to Nicolas, so close their knees brushed.
“When?” Nicolas asked.
“Out on the street, in front of the squad. I shouldn’t have let you talk me into leaving you at the guild alone.”
Nicolas blew out a breath. “I was afraid they’d target you to test my loyalty.”
Daniel gestured at his bruised face. “Uh, that happened anyway.”
“A brief encounter on the street isn’t as bad as being surrounded at HQ. I didn’t trust them not to do something to you—or forcemeto do something to you.”
Daniel’s mouth twisted. “Yeah, I get it. That stuff was already happening.”
“What? It was?”
“Yeah. Tripping me in the locker room. Shoving into me in the halls. Taking cheap shots during training. I knew my time there was coming to an end. They didn’t want me anymore.”
Nicolas’s shoulders slumped. “I didn’t know about all of that. Some of it, yeah. They didn’t make a secret of it during training. I should’ve been harder on them, forced them to stop.”
Daniel shrugged. “You couldn’t have stopped it. Anyway, I didn’t feel outright threatened, just annoyed. But I knew it was a matter of time before things ramped up.”
Nicolas’s gaze went distant, cold with fury and hurt. “We can’t keep going like this.”
“We won’t,” Nathan said resolutely. He was across from Nicolas, sitting on the floor between Storm’s legs. “But first we have to get the kids back.”
“And then what?” Nicolas asked.
“Then… we make a statement,” Talon said, standing at the other end of the sofa, beside Alex. “These guys tell me there are still good people in the guild. So we warn them. Tell them we’re going to war, and if they don’t wish to fight, they can leave the guild. Join us or just lay down arms, I don’t care. Whoever stays with Sloan forfeits their lives.”
“You think that’ll work?” Nicolas asked.
Talon’s dark eyes met his speculatively. “Would it work for you? A few weeks ago, if you’d heard a message from us declaring war on the guild with the promise to have mercy on anyone who left it, would you have stayed to fight or quietly left?”
Nicolas’s head tilted. He was quiet for a long, tense moment, and then he said, “Yeah. I’d have left. I think there are some in the guild who would, too.” He thought of Dr. Maxwell, balancing between his oath to do no harm and his duty to follow guild orders. Cyrus, and his mysterious reasons for sticking around. Aidan’s screams at the wrongness of it all as Nicolas dragged him out into the courtyard.
“I think some of the prophets would choose to leave,” Ira added. “Plenty of the teachers and administrators, too. They aren’t fighters. As long as we didn’t harm the children, we’d have nothing to fear from them.”
“We’d never harm children,” Luke growled.
Nicolas looked around at them all. “Do you really think this little group can take on the whole guild?”
Ashmedai looked around. Eight human warriors, two leviathans, three halflings, a behemoth, and a sin eater. Four of their number were very powerful demons with special abilities that would allow them to kill multiple enemies at once. Yes, he thought they stood a very good chance, especially if they were correctly estimating how many people would leave the guild.
