Protect Her: Part 4 Page 5

  He rolled his eyes. “Be right back.” He disappeared.

  At least without the distraction of the demon, I could focus on what I was going to do about the knife. Judging by the amount of blood that I saw pooled on the floor around me, I was losing a lot of it regardless of whether or not I pulled it out. I didn’t understand why Bruno had left me in this state. He needed me alive in order to accept the goddess and allow her essence to use my body as her vessel.

  I couldn’t think about that. I needed to focus on the knife. I wrapped my fingertips around the handle, and even that increased bit of pressure caused me to gasp in pain. I took a deep breath to prepare myself.

  “Done!” Pavla rematerialized next to me.

  I jumped, and nearly let out another screech as the knife jerked in my thigh causing another round of sharp pain. “Stop doing that!” Then I thought about what he just said. I looked at the corner of the room. The Wiccan wasn’t there.

  “Are you kidding me?” It was a rhetorical question.

  “He’s not going to be back for a bit. You want to try your magic now?”

  I stared at the demon. “I don’t know how.”

  He giggled. “Sure you do. You want me to help you?”

  “If you can use magic, why don’t you heal me yourself?”

  “Oh, my magic doesn’t work like that,” Pavla said, shaking his head. “Healing is a completely different thing. It requires magic that I don’t have. So I can’t help you there. But you can do it.”

  “How?” I was starting to feel weaker by the minute.

  “Close your eyes,” he said. “And think it.”

  It was my turn to roll my eyes. A pressure was building behind them that was making it hard to think straight. I pressed the bridge of my nose between my fingers and tried to concentrate. “I think there’s a bit more to it than that.”

  His nose wrinkled. If I didn’t know that he was a demon child, I probably would have found that adorable. “Not really. It’s all about being able to harness energy. You have to believe that you can do it. Then you have to open yourself to it. But not too much.” He waggled his finger in warning. “Take in too much magic and you can burn yourself out.”

  If I believed even half of what Pavla was telling me, I was learning new things about demons all the time. But I didn’t have anything to lose by trying other than feeling completely silly. I put my hands out over the top of the knife and closed my eyes. Reminding myself that I had done magic before, I thought about the knife. “Poof!” I said, jerking my hands up and down.

  I opened my eyes. The knife was still lodged in my thigh.

  “Really?” Pavla was looking at me as if I were crazy. “You’ve got to try harder than that. Did you see that on some TV show? Be serious.”

  My shoulders slumped. “Really. I don’t know how to do this.”

  He settled back on his heels. “Maybe we should try this a different way.”

  “You could just take me out of here,” I said hopefully. “If you really want to help, you can take me back to where I came from.”

  “Heck, no,” Pavla said. For the first time, his tone held no humor at all. “Bruno brought you here. I don’t mess with Bruno.”

  “Then why are you helping me at all?”

  “You’re pretty.” The demon looked at the ground. “Plus, helping you stop bleeding all over the place isn’t going to hurt anything. I mean, look, you’re ruining a perfectly nice rug that I think Bruno picked up in Turkey like five hundred years ago. Plus, I’m pretty sure that he thought you’d figure it out anyway.”

  “Bruno is the one who told the Wiccan to keep me from doing magic,” I protested.

  “I told you that Wiccan can’t keep us from doing magic.” He repeated himself patiently. “Bruno might be able to keep you in here by using blood magic. That’s really strong magic. But he can’t keep you from doing magic at all.”

  Was he right? If so, the Wiccan was nothing more than a bluff to keep me quiet. Bruno had witnessed the magic that I used to destroy his gargoyles. I was strong, but that had come from being terrified out of my mind for Riley and Benjamin’s life.

  So far, the only time I had been able to do magic was if I thought that either I was going to die or someone I cared about was going to die. My eyes were drawn back to the knife buried in my thigh.

  “He wants me to do magic. He wants me to remember how. And he sent you in here to make sure that I did.” I looked at Pavla with an accusing glare. “You are already playing a game with me. One that Bruno put you up to.”

  He didn’t deny it. If anything, his grin grew bigger. “I play all sorts of games with all sorts of people.”

  “Why does Bruno want me doing magic?” It didn’t make any sense.

  “If I were you, I’d worry about that later,” Pavla said. “Right now, you gotta figure out how to get yourself out of this mess.” He moved so fast that there was nothing I could do to stop him. He grabbed the hilt of the knife and wrenched it out of my leg.

  I screamed as I grabbed my leg. The little bastard disappeared in a fit of giggles leaving me bleeding and cursing the whole time.

  CHAPTER SEVEN – Riley

  “Did you get the answers you wanted?” Alice stood waiting for me on the convent stoop. She had her jacket on, and my kit sat at the bottom of the steps.

  I looked pointedly at the kit. “I take it I’m going somewhere?”

  “If you know what you need to know, then you know that I can’t allow you to come into the convent again. Not now.” At least she had the decency to look ashamed.

  “Are you serious?” I hadn’t darkened Alice’s door in five years, by my own choice, but it still hurt that she was kicking me out. A shrink would probably say that it had something to do with how my own mother ousted me onto Alice’s lap without any seeming regret at all. In fact, when I remembered the last look that my mother gave me that day, I’d say that she was more than a little bit relieved.

  “I didn’t say that I wouldn’t help you on your way. You had one foot out the door already,” Alice said. She shivered in her jacket. It was chilly outside, but I had become immune to such things over the years. I think it was my proximity to death on a regular basis that had numbed me to those kinds of external factors.

  She stepped down onto the ground and picked up my kit. She handed it to me, and I took it. I had too many questions, and the one person that I felt as if I could trust was clearly ready to be rid of me.

  “I don’t understand what I was told,” I said in a hushed tone. “If you could give me just fifteen minutes. Ten even, and tell me what you know, then maybe I can make sense of all of this.”

  “Riley, you don’t need me,” Alice said with a heavy sigh. “I don’t pretend to have all the answers either, but if you can count on anything for certain, it is that you and that girl were always meant to cross paths. Call it destiny or fate or whatever you like. It’s not any of my business, and I should have guessed something was wrong when you brought her here.”

  “Because I don’t have feelings or regard for anyone anymore,” I said in a mocking tone. “Because without my family keeping me grounded in my humanity, I’m nothing better than a demon.”

  “What’s done is done, Riley. You can’t change the past, and I can’t give you the forgiveness that I think you are looking for when it comes to what happened with Joanna and Gabrielle. I hope that you can once again find peace. I don’t think that your mother would have wanted you to suffer over what happened.”

  Alice hadn’t seen what Bruno Proctor did to my mother. She hadn’t watched as both of them were flayed and burned alive in front of me. She hadn’t heard how they screamed for mercy and for me to save them. With their souls banished into the ether forever, I didn’t think that my mother or sister carried anything but hatred for me. If I hadn’t been born who I was, then they wouldn’t have died. Of that much, I was certain.

  But now, there was a new layer of complexity to the story. If I believed what Abigail
had told me, then my path had been predetermined long before I had ever been born. A series of seemingly unrelated circumstances and decisions were put in my way so that I would eventually wind up in a cemetery on Calamata Island and find Paige. It was a bit too much to even try to swallow.

  “I don’t believe in that shit,” I said, jerking my chin up. “I don’t know why I even brought it up.”

  Alice looked at me with that expression on her face that I knew meant she wanted to say something more, but she didn’t. Instead, she opened her hand. Settled on her palm was the locket that she had shown me earlier in the church. She told me that Paige had left it in her care after she visited Alice the first time. Apparently she had also made off with an ancient knife that was supposed to kill a vast majority of demons. I understood why Alice was still a bit miffed about that.

  “Her accent was different the first time she was here,” Alice said. “I’d say she came from somewhere in the Midwest. Somewhere north though, maybe even Canada. I gathered that she didn’t grow up in a big city. I think the name of the jeweler is on the back, but it looks like she tried to scratch it off. I’m sure you have ways to decipher it.”

  “I need to know where to find a Mercon amulet,” I said. “Or a Jepson stone. Either one can help with a locator spell.”

  “Surely you have sources for that kind of thing,” Alice said. “No, what you need from me is the way to open the bond between you so that you can communicate with her.”

  That was true, but it wasn’t something that I was going to press on her as much as I wanted too. “You did say that you would help me,” I reminded her.

  “That was before I saw that symbol. You have everything you need, Riley. You don’t need me anymore.”

  “It’s a tattoo, Alice. It’s not as if it’s some kind of magical transistor radio.”

  “Are you sure about that? Two hours ago you didn’t even know that you had it or what it was.” Alice put her hand on my arm. “I can’t get involved any further than I have. Trust me when I tell you that you have everything you need. You will find your girl. I believe in you.” A quick squeeze on my arm was all she offered me before she turned and made her way back up the steps.

  I would have pursued her, but I caught the faintest glimpse of tears in her eyes before she closed the door. I had asked a lot of Alice in the last twenty-four hours. How far could I push her before she pushed back and closed me out for good? I took one step toward the convent door and then stopped. Then I slung my kit over my shoulder and turned around to head for the street.

  As I approached the curb, a black car pulled up to it in front of me. The passenger window slid down, and I found Fernando’s face looking up at me. Abigail leaned over from the driver’s seat. “Need a lift?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. I was wary of getting any further involved with Abigail and Fernando. They didn’t know about Paige, and if they did, I had no doubt that they’d be all over any kind of spell that would suck their Goddess’s essence into Paige’s body.

  “We’re headed to Des Moines. We can drop you off wherever you want to go if it’s in that direction,” Abigail pressed.

  “What’s in Des Moines?” I asked.

  “That’s where I live,” she said. “It’s nice and quiet and off the radar of pretty much all the ranking demon officials and archangels around here. Lower level demons wouldn’t dare set foot on the property.”

  There was something appealing about being able to take advantage of a hideout. I wasn’t stupid. I had a target on my back, and Bruno Proctor was planning on taking a shot at it soon. He might have Paige, but he wasn’t done with me yet whether she was in the picture or not. Plus, I had to figure out how to decipher the mystery of Paige’s locket, and Alice had said that she thought Paige’s hometown might be north of Kansas City. Des Moines was as good a place to start as any.

  “You know that I can cut the spell that keeps your lover here at any point, right?” I pointed at Fernando, who looked at me with a bored expression.

  “No need for threats, Mr. Stone. I think we have some common interests. Why don’t you get in the car, and we’ll talk about it along the way. If, at any point, you don’t like what you are hearing, we’ll pull over, and you can be on your own way.”

  “Nothing like jumping from a moving car to get the blood pumping,” I said sarcastically.

  “As you’ve so crudely pointed out, you can take Fernando out as easily as you brought him back to this world. You aren’t going to come to any harm at our hands,” Abigail said. “We have no quarrel with you.”

  I looked back and forth on the street. I might have access to some magic, but teleportation was far beyond my abilities. Therefore, my ability to travel was limited to my feet, wheels, or a plane. My car was in the parking lot of the ferry that went over to Calamata Island, some two thousand miles from where I was standing. I hated flying. And I had no idea where I was supposed to go yet.

  I really hated it when my best options involved demons.

  “Fine. But if I get the sense of anything shady going on, we’re done,” I said.

  Abigail smiled and cocked her head toward the back. “Get in.”

  I quickly cataloged everything that was left in my kit. There were at least a few things that would come in handy in an emergency situation. “Fine.”

  I opened the back door and got in. As the car pulled away from the curb, I looked back at the convent. I couldn’t be certain, but I thought I saw the curtain on the window that led to the kitchen flutter close. Alice was always keeping an eye on me.

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Paige

  I didn’t know how long I thrashed around on the ground trying to stifle the flow of my blood onto the rug underneath me. Several times, my vision skewed, and I thought for sure that I was going to pass out. I wasn’t sure what kept me lucid, other than the thought that if I did, I’d disappoint Riley. I didn’t know how I knew it in those moments, but I had no doubt that he was looking for me and would come for me. I had to have the same kind of belief in him that I think he had in me.

  Thinking about Riley allowed me finally to find the inner strength required to unhinge my consciousness from my physical body. If I was asked to replicate it again, I wasn’t sure that I could do it, but for the moment I wasn’t questioning it. This was the state that I needed to be in to do what Pavla told me I could do.

  Once I did that, I felt a calmness settle across my limbs. The pain was gone, and my thoughts cleared. That wasn’t so hard. I wasn’t sure now why I had fought Pavla when he told me about it. There was a fuzziness to the edges of my thoughts, but I didn’t think about that. I thought about where I felt safe instead. There was little question about that.

  It was in Riley’s arms that I felt safe and complete in a way that I couldn’t remember feeling in my entire life, even when my parents were still alive. I had no doubt that they loved me. But now I understood that I was born into a strange community where every female child was examined for any signals that she was going to grow up to be a vessel for Eva.

  Although my parents tried to hide me away and spare me from that fate, it wasn’t meant to be. Instead, they sacrificed their lives so that I could escape. In the end, I had run right into Bruno’s arms. Fine mess I made of that. I could just let go and let it happen. If Bruno had found me a week ago, that might have been what would have happened. But something changed in my life. Something, or more appropriately someone, entered my life and skewed every aspect of how I viewed my future.

  That someone was Riley Stone.

  I wondered if I should question or feel ashamed of the fact that I realized that my feelings for him went far beyond innocent lust. What happened between us in the cave had been a phenomenal physical experience, but it was just the cusp of what was possible. With Riley, I didn’t need to worry about being someone else. I could just be me, and he accepted that. It was heady and exciting and mind-boggling.

  I wanted to be with him again. I needed to get back to him.

&
nbsp; There was something else in my awareness. Riley was one-half of my whole, but he wasn’t the end all be all. He might have my back, but I was strong and capable in my own right. Hadn’t I saved him from the gargoyles? Another forgotten memory surfaced then. I touched the lake on Calamata Island and destroyed all of the demons who had followed us intending to harm us.

  Riley hadn’t told me what I had done. He had to have known then that I had magical abilities, but he didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure why, but I could only guess it was because he didn’t want to frighten me. I wasn’t ready then the way that I was now. Pavla was right.

  I wasn’t human. I might have been born that way, but I was something else entirely. I wasn’t Eva, at least, not yet. I had no desire to be possessed and live out the rest of my days as someone else. But, at the same time, I couldn’t deny that I wasn’t the same as other mortals.

  Bringing my hands up in front of my face, I saw that they were glowing. Of course, they were. I had found a center that allowed me to access at least a portion of the energy that was available to me. I brought my hands down to touch the wound on my thigh, and I hissed at the shock of the contact, but I didn’t let go. I wasn’t sure how long I sat like that, with my glowing hands knitting together the fabric of my injured skin.

  Then it was if a fog lifted from my thoughts. I was sitting in the chair once again. I hissed when I realized that Bruno sat in the chair across from me. Somehow I had lost time during my healing. My eyes quickly discovered that the Wiccan stood in the corner once again, and beside him, Pavla still in his human child form.

  “That was quite impressive,” Bruno said, folding his hands in his lap. “Just imagine what you could do if you tapped into that kind of power on a regular basis.”

  “You mean if your Goddess tapped into her power. I’m pretty sure that she won’t have to figure out how to use it,” I snapped.