Demons Anchor

Chapter Five: Forty-Eight Hours

He gave her a room.

Not in the shadow realm, back in the physical world, in a building in the West Loop that appeared, externally, to be a very ordinary warehouse conversion. Internally it was something else: clean, spare, functional, with the particular efficiency of spaces designed by someone who had no patience for unnecessary things.

"This is yours," Zarian said, opening a door off the main corridor. "For the next three days."

Selene looked in. A bed. A window that faced east. A small bathroom. Exactly what you needed and nothing you didn't.

"Very cozy," she said. "I especially like the part where I'm not a prisoner."

"You can leave at any time."

"And the wraith hunting party waiting outside would let me just walk away?"

"They answer to me. Not the Council."

She turned to look at him. He was leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, and she was getting better at reading the language of his face, the economy of it, the way meaning moved in small adjustments rather than the large displays she was used to reading in people.

Right now he looked tired. She wouldn't have noticed a day ago. She noticed now.

"When did you last sleep?" she asked.

A slight pause. "Demons don't require sleep in the conventional sense."

"That's not an answer."

"Seventy hours," he said, after a moment. "Give or take."

"Go sleep."

"I don't…"

"Zarian." She said his name with the specific firmness she had developed working double shifts with people who needed to be redirected before they made themselves worse. "Go sleep. I'm not going anywhere. Where would I go?"

He looked at her for a moment. Something that was almost uncertainty moved through his expression, so brief she almost missed it.

"There is a secondary room at the end of the corridor," he said. "If anything…"

"I'll knock." She held his gaze. "Go."

He went. She waited until she heard his door close, then let herself into the room and sat on the edge of the bed and finally, privately, let herself feel the full weight of the evening.

Her parents had been murdered. She had known since she was eight years old that the crash felt wrong, that the field felt wrong, that the too-convenient story of a patch of ice and a guardrail had holes in it that no one in her life had wanted to look at. She had known, the way you know things in the body before you know them in the mind, and she had suppressed it because knowing hurt more than not knowing and she had been eight and alone.

She was not eight anymore.

She held up her right hand in the dark. The glow was quiet now, banked, but she could feel it, always there, always waiting. She curled her fingers slowly, and a thread of darkness drifted in from the corner of the room and wrapped around her hand like a ribbon.

The shadow was warm.

They were always warm when they came to her. She hadn't known that was unusual until tonight.

She thought about four women who had died trying to do what the Council wanted her to do. She thought about the tear in the shadow realm, four hundred feet below the city she had lived in her whole life. She thought about ten thousand wraiths and three million people.

She was still thinking when she fell asleep.

****

She woke at three in the morning to the sound of screaming shadows.

Not her usual waking the gradual surface of ordinary sleep. This was violent, immediate, her entire nervous system firing at once as the shadow layer around the building went into cacophony. She was on her feet before she was fully conscious, hand already burning, moving toward the door.

She collided with Zarian in the corridor.

He was fully awake, or whatever the demon equivalent was; coatless, his dark hair disheveled in the only visible evidence of the seventy-plus hours of sleeplessness. He caught her by the shoulders when they collided, and the electric c***k of contact moved through them both again, stronger this time, a resonance that she felt in her back teeth.

They both ignored it. Professionally.

"How many?" she said.

"More than seven." He was already moving, drawing her with him toward the building's shadow-reinforced interior wall. "This isn't a hunting party. This is a targeted assault."

"They found us this fast?"

"They tracked your power signature from the Council chamber. You were burning bright in there." He pressed her back against the wall. "I need you to do something difficult."

"Tell me."

"I need you to stop suppressing it." He looked at her with those black eyes and she felt the weight of what he was asking. "I know you've been holding it back your whole life. I know it's the only way you've survived. But suppression makes you a target, they track the pressure of it. If you release it fully, the signature changes. They lose the trail."

"And if I release it fully?" She searched his face. "What happens?"

"I don't know," he said, and the honesty of it hit her harder than certainty would have. "You've never done it. I don't know what fully is."

Outside, the assault was getting closer. She could feel the wraiths, dozens of them, pressed against the building's shadow boundaries like pressure against a dam.

"Will you stay close?" she heard herself say.

His hands, still on her shoulders, tightened slightly. "I'll be right here."

She let go.

It was like opening a door she'd been holding closed with her whole body for twenty-three years. The power flooded out, not violently, but completely, the way a river floods when a dam fails, filling every low place at once. The shadows in the corridor blazed silver-white. The walls pulsed. The screaming in the shadow layer cut off instantly, replaced by a silence so total it had a sound of its own.

Selene felt it everywhere. In her fingertips and her spine and the back of her eyes and the soles of her feet. She felt the shadow realm like a second heartbeat, steady, vast, ancient, and entirely, thoroughly hers.

She felt Zarian like a flame feels a wind. Close, disrupting and necessary.

Outside, the assault stopped.

She could feel the wraiths retreating, fast, panicked, nothing like the organized hunting party they had been thirty seconds ago. She could feel the thing on the other side of the tear, four hundred feet below, pressing harder against the breach in sudden violent urgency.

It had felt her.

It knew now what she was. What she was capable of.

"Selene." Zarian's voice, very close, very careful. "Look at me."

She looked. His face was extraordinary up close, composed as ever, but something in the depths of his eyes was not composed at all. Something was looking at her like she was the most significant thing he had seen in six hundred years.

"Can you bring it back down?" he asked.

"Yes." She didn't move yet. "Can I ask you something first?"

"Ask."

"What you felt. Just now. When I let go." She held his gaze. "What was that?"

He was quiet for five full seconds. In the glowing silver-white of her light, she watched something in his face that was not a c***k but was in the vicinity of one.

"I don't have a word for it," he said finally.

"But it was something."

"Yes," he said. "It was something."

She pulled the power back down. But she couldn't pull back the look on his face, or what it had done to her, or the quiet certainty that the next forty-eight hours were going to be the most dangerous of her life, and not only because of the wraiths.