Demons Anchor

Chapter Two: Run, Burn, or Trust

She grabbed his arm.

Not because she trusted him but because the shadows were multiplying and she had exactly zero other options, and she had always been the kind of person who chose the least terrible option available rather than freeze waiting for a good one.

The moment her hand closed around his forearm, something electric cracked between them, not painful, but impossible to ignore, a jolt that went from her palm straight to her sternum like a key finding a lock. Zarian went absolutely rigid.

Then his hand closed over hers, and he moved.

He moved the way shadows move, impossibly fast, no wasted motion, pulling her with him through the dark between two buildings into an alley she had not seen a second ago. She had just enough time to notice that the shadows in this alley were bending away from them, from her, before he pressed them both flat against the wall and held them completely and perfectly still.

She could hear the wraiths outside. Not with her ears. The sound was lower than that, a vibration in the air that she felt in her teeth and in the base of her skull. Multiple of them. Maybe six. Moving fast.

Zarian's hand was still over hers. Neither of them let go.

She could feel his heartbeat. It was slower than it should have been, much slower like the measured rhythm of something that had long since stopped treating physical danger as an emergency. She found it absurd, that she found it calming, like standing next to a wall in a storm.

"Don't use your power," he said against her ear. A breath of sound, nothing more. "They can feel it when you burn. It's a signal."

"I wasn't planning to."

"You were." A pause. "Your hand is warming up."

She looked down. He was right. The faint glow was building under her skin, visible through the surface of her palm in hairline threads of light and she hadn't even noticed. She pressed it down, the way she'd been pressing things down her entire life, and felt it subside, reluctantly, like something living that didn't want to be contained.

Three minutes. Then the vibration faded.

He released her hand.

She felt the loss of it more than she intended to.

"How many?" she asked.

"Six wraiths and a Shade captain." He stepped back, putting careful distance between them, she noted that too. He was being deliberate about the space. "Seven targets for something that takes a demonic hunting party to find. You've been drawing attention for longer than you know, Selene."

"Why do you keep using my name?"

"Because your file is four hundred pages long and I've read it three times. You feel like someone I know." He said it completely without warmth, as simple fact. "Whether that's comfortable for you or not."

She stared at him. "I have a file."

"You've had a file since the night your power first manifested. You were eight years old. You were in a car accident with your parents and you woke up the only survivor, in a field two miles from the crash site, with no memory of how you got there. The field was a perfect circle of scorched earth." He looked at her steadily. "The shadow realm registered you that night. The Council has been watching you since."

The night her parents died. He was talking about the night her parents died.

Something cold moved through her chest. Not grief she'd processed that, or done her best approximation of processing it, through fifteen years of foster care and three therapists and a habit of working too hard to leave room for it. This was something colder than grief. This was the sensation of a floor turning out to be a trapdoor.

"The Council," she said carefully. "What is the Council?"

"The governing authority of the shadow realm." He said it the way you say the sky is blue; factual and inarguable. "Seven Overseers. Ancient beyond reckoning. They maintain the boundary between the shadow layer and the physical world."

"And you work for them."

"I am their Iron Warden, their enforcer." A pause that had a quality to it. "When something goes wrong that cannot be handled by ordinary means, they send me."

Selene processed this. The ancient supernatural governing body had sent their top enforcer. For her? A twenty-three year old who worked double shifts at a diner and still couldn't quite afford her South Loop apartment.

"What do they want from me?"

Zarian looked at her for a long moment. In the dark of the alley, with the shadows bending respectfully away from them, his eyes were the deepest black she had ever seen. Not dark brown, not very dark grey but black, the way the space between stars is black.

"They want to use you," he said. "What they will tell you is that they want your help."

The distinction landed like a stone.

"And what do you want?" she asked.

"To complete my assignment."

"Which is?"

"To bring you to the Council chamber before the tear in the shadow realm grows large enough that your power becomes the only thing capable of closing it." He held her gaze. "You have three days before that window closes. After that, the tear is permanent, and what comes through it will not be stoppable by any force currently in this world."

Three days.

Selene thought about the screaming shadows. The wraith in the alley. The way the glow kept building in her hands whether she invited it or not. She thought about the file he said had four hundred pages. About the scorched circle in the field where her parents had died.

She thought about the word use.

"If I go with you willingly," she said, "will I come back?"

He didn't answer immediately. That told her more than the answer would have.

"I will make sure you come back," he said finally. It was not the same thing as yes. They both knew it.

She studied him. The severity of his face. The way his shadows still leaned back from her, the only ones in her entire life that had ever given her space.

"You read my file three times," she said.

"Yes."

"Why three times?"

He looked away, the first time since she'd met him that he looked away from her. It lasted only a second. When his eyes returned to hers, the composure was back, perfect and impenetrable.

"Because the first time, I couldn't believe what I was reading," he said. "And I don't disbelieve things easily."

Selene took a breath. Made the only choice that was really available to her.

"Show me where we're going," she said. "And if I don't like what I see, I walk. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

He turned and moved toward the alley exit, and she fell into step beside him, and neither of them mentioned that she had agreed to follow a six-hundred-year-old shadow demon into the supernatural underworld of Chicago with nothing but a tingling hand and a bad feeling.

She had the bad feeling about the bad feeling most of all.

Because something in the shadows ahead was watching them leave together and it wasn't a wraith. It had a face. And it was smiling.