Page 2 of Trick Of Light

“That anyone, or anything, would go after my friends,” Dylan finished for him.

“Yes,” Malic croaked out.

They were quiet a moment, doing that communing thing couples did.

“Love,” Dylan said, “how could you have foreseen any of this?”

“If I’d never pulled you into—”

“Don’t say that to me again,” Dylan snapped, adamant. He was heartbroken, yet still trying to soothe the hurt he saw in his warder and future husband. I was touched just bearing witness. I could only imagine how Malic must feel. “You’re my love and my blessing, so please, let’s not second-guess. Let’s just deal with what happened.”

“How can you be so calm?” Malic asked, his voice breaking. He ran his hands through Dylan’s thick chestnut curls, pushing the hair back from his face so he could gaze into the big, warm brown eyes.

“Because now we have to focus our efforts on finding out what happened, and why and how we can prevent any further attacks. That’s the important thing; that’s the only thing we should be focusing on.”

Malic nodded quickly.

“Whoever did this, they meant to hurt me, which in turn hurts you. And it’s about all the warders and their hearths, not just us.”

We all understood what he meant.

It had all started when Dylan was out with his friends. They had crossed a street from where they’d been out dancing in SOMA and taken a shortcut down an alley. It was a blur of claws and teeth after that. The only thing Dylan could recall was that he’d been screaming with his back against the side of a building and his hands out in front of him. Anything that bumped against him shrieked in agony even as they left bruises and scratches on Dylan’s face, chest, and arms. The branding touch of a warder’s hearth had saved him, but his friends were not so fortunate. All three had been eviscerated, and throughout the attack, the demons, which looked to Dylan like a cross between snakes and men, had shrieked his name. He’d tried to move, to reach any of his friends, but the demons’ power, even when unable to touch him, had held him in place. By the time the assault was over and he’d managed to call Malic, Dylan was nearly catatonic.

When the murders hit the news, it was blamed on junkies hopped up on PCP. Dylan had gone to the three funerals, and people treating him like a hero for trying to save the others had created survivor’s guilt in him that was hard to bear. The only thing that got through to him was Malic’s remorse. Malic blamed himself, and Dylan wasn’t about to have that.

A month later, Dylan was upstairs alone one day when he’d let out a high-pitched wail that brought Malic from the first floor to the attic faster than humanly possible. He’d found his hearth in shock and tears, trembling as he held in his hands a photo album of his lost friends, but instead of sadness, Malic was faced with anger. Only later, when we were all together, did Malic find out why.

“We’re going to find out who did this,” Dylan had told all of us, “and we’re going to make them pay.”

There were no more tears after that.

“Tell me again,” Julian Nash, Ryan Dean’s hearth, prodded Malic.

I watched Malic swallow hard, and then he cleared his throat. “I’ve been all over that alley.” He coughed softly. “I checked it that day before the police arrived, and I’ve checked it since, and the only trace of anything out of the ordinary is the smell of perfume.”

“And when he told me that,” Marcus chimed in, “I went with him, and as soon as I walked down to where Dylan was attacked, that perfume hit me, triggering a scent memory. It reminded me of this strange whiff I caught before I fell through the dimensional door the night I got lost.”

None of us had been there to see Marcus fall—that was the sacrifice he’d made at the time, to stand and fight so that the rest of us could get to safety, but none of us could ever forget the moment when we felt the loss as keenly as though he’d died.

What had almost been harder was knowing that he was, in fact, alive—we just didn’t know where. There were infinite hell dimensions, and locating him was completely beyond our capability, our sentinel’s, or the entire Labarum that governed all warders. He was gone for close to a year, all of us knowing he was somewhere, breathing, because his hearth, Joseph Locke, lived in a house that retained the seal of his warder, shielded against demons, and he himself was still in possession of the branding touch.

Any human loved by a warder became imbued with the power to scald a creature from the pit with even the brush of their hand. No paranormal entity could breach the home of a warder; it was protected against any and all non-human intruders. As long as a hearth was loved and shared a home with their warder, the domicile itself was a sanctuary, and the mate of a warder could protect themselves.

So Joe had known, as we all had, that Marcus was among the living, just not anywhere we could reach him. When he’d returned, thanks to my mate, we were overjoyed.

“You’re saying that the scent from the night you were dropped into hell is the same one that’s lingering in that alley?” Leith asked Marcus.

“Yes. And as soon as it hit me, I remembered it.”

“And you think it was…what?”

“I told you,” Marcus replied solemnly. “I think it’s Moira. I think that’s her particular scent, her signature if you want to call it that, and once she manifests in a certain place, it takes a long time for the smell to dissipate.”

“We were all so blind,” Malic told him. “It all started with—”

“Me,” Leith growled at him. “Fuck, Malic, don’t you think I know?”

And Malic combusted, as he’d been poised to do over the terror of nearly losing Dylan and the certainty that he’d failed him when his friends died. He flew across the room, grabbed Leith, and drove him back hard into one of the walls. “You should have checked when you and Ry went back and burned the club to the ground. You should have known Moira wasn’t dead!”