Demon's Cradle (Devany Miller Book 3) (2 page)

“No way are you taking her anywhere near the Slip.” This from Zech with enough venom in his words to make me feel guilty and want to roll my eyes at the same time. After a while, having someone angry with you just gets old.

“Not the Slip. Midia.”

“I know you didn’t just say that,” he said and I covered my mouth before I laughed.

“Domar berries,” I said when I had control over my stupid sense of humor. I reminded him with more sarcasm in my voice than Kroshtuka had in his.

“What?”

I sighed. Had I really not told him about the berries? I hadn’t seen him in a long while, not since his hair had started to grow back. “The Wydlings have a cure for the hook sickness. They’ve been spreading the news along the borderlands. The witches aren’t really listening, but I get the feeling they look down their noses at a lot of things the Wydlings say or do.”

“Wydlings? You’re going to trust that bunch of animals with Danni’s life?”

Oh bigotry, why do you have to exist everywhere? “They aren’t animals, at least not in the derisive way you mean. And I’m not talking to you anyway, so shut up.” I hoped Danni had me on speaker, otherwise my spiel would sound tinny and unmagnificent.

“I-I’m not sure I know what to think about that. I just need time to figure out what to do. He said he called from Wyoming, but he’s wily. Probably more than halfway here, if not standing outside my door right now.”

My stomach swooped and nerves pricked my skin. The idea of Harrison lurking outside Danni’s door was too much, especially after what had happened in the Dreamscape. “I’m going to hook over.” I stumbled out of bed and grabbed my robe, belting it around my middle, the necklace with Krosh’s ring banging against my breastbone. I formed the hook, then remembered I hadn’t hidden my gills. They were a ‘gift’ from the now-deceased Fleshcrawler Queen and I hadn’t yet figured out how to get rid of them. My temporary solution was to hide them with magic, which I did now by flipping a switch in my imagination’s control room. I didn’t know why it didn’t stay flipped but it didn’t. I had to keep careful track or the switch would click off and expose the slashes on the sides of my neck for the whole world to see. Yeah. No thank you. I formed a hook again and stepped through into Danni’s living room, narrowly missing stepping on her cat, who hissed at me and ran. “Sorry.” She jumped up to hug me, her cheek cold as it pressed against mine, her hands ice. I held her tight, wishing I could just take her somewhere safe, whether she liked it or not. “Would you like to stay at my house while you decide what it is you want to do next?”

“No,” she said.

“Yes.” This from Zech and it surprised me. To Danni he said, “It would be better than sitting here waiting for him to show up. We could even ask Devany to take us somewhere far from here.” He held up a hand. “On Earth. He can’t track us through hooks.”

“Not unless he has his own Skriven taxi.” I sat on the upholstered chair by a bookshelf full of plants. “Do you think there’s still a bounty on your head in Midia, Zech?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been there since ... “ He waved at his head, at the scars from the burns he’d suffered when I’d dragged him to Midia to help me find my kids. I wished he’d let me help him fix them. I’d been practicing down in my mental control room and thought I could smooth his skin out for him, even if I wasn’t able to rid him completely of scars.

“I don’t want to go anywhere else.” Danni’s clenched fist hit her bare knee. “I’m so sick of being afraid. I never knew how sick of it until Zech came along and gave me a life without fear.”

I kept my mouth shut because what I wanted to say was, “You’re going to go. At least until this asshole is caught and put back in jail.” That type of bossiness had no place in this situation, I well knew. As much as I wanted to whisk her away so she could be safe, I knew that the decision was hers and hers alone.

“We can put up barriers. Perhaps Devany can get us another lodestone or two.” Zech looked at me. “The one I had has bled out all its magic.”

“I could do that, get you as many as you think you’d need.”

He nodded then scooped up her hand. “If you don’t want to go, we won’t.”

She gazed up at him, the look on her face one of a person who has made up her mind. “I won’t go. But I think you need to.”

He shook his head.

“Harrison is coming for me. If you’re here, he will kill you. I could never live with myself if that happened.”

“I’m not going. Even if I have to camp outside and sleep in the doorway downstairs, I’m staying.”

“Zech,” she said, but he shook his head again.

“I know you want to protect me but I can take care of myself. And you, if you let me. Just ask her,” he said, head nodding in my direction. “I’m a hard S.O.B. to kill.”

Considering a death curse had been placed on him and he’d lived to tell the tale, I’d guess he was rather hard to kill at that.

Danni hid her face in her hands, pushing away from him when he reached for her. “I need to talk to Devany. Alone. Please?”

He, too, was biting his tongue to keep himself from insisting. I could see it in his face and the tight jump of his jaw but he stood and walked from the room.

When he was gone, Danni lowered her hands. She hadn’t been crying but her face was flushed. “I need to ask you something and I want you to tell me the truth.”

“Okay.”

She took a breath. “I want him to stay. I want it so bad that the idea of him leaving makes my stomach hurt.”

I could tell. Wasn’t sure where she was going with this, but I could see that she felt physically ill at the idea of him leaving.

“I want him here but I know what Harrison is like. I know him. He’s evil, Devany. And when he comes—and he’ll come—he’ll kill Zech.” She slid her fingers into her hair at the scalp and tugged. She admitted when she first came to the Caring Shelter that she had a hair pulling problem. It made her feel good to pull her hair out, helped her cope with the extreme emotions she dealt with. She wasn’t pulling out hairs so much as just tugging on the strands so I didn’t say anything.

“He wants to stay, Danni, and with lodestones, he could access magic to protect you. Harrison might be a nasty asshole but he’s never gone up against magic.”

Her hands dropped to her lap. “I just don’t want anyone to underestimate him. I know I make him sound like he’s the embodiment of evil, that he can somehow watch my every move. I know that he’s human and not an all-knowing mastermind, but he’s extremely smart. He might not be able to see into the future, but he has an uncanny way of predicting what people are going to do. ” Her eyes locked onto mine and I saw the absolute truth in them. Had I not already come face to face with so many other evil things, I might have been chilled. But a mere human male, no matter how sociopathic or evil, just couldn’t compete with between-world demons or swamp-dwelling nightmares.

“Let Zech stay. Let us both help you.”

Danni blinked. Time stretched between us and then she finally turned away. “Okay.” She didn’t sound convinced.

“I could take you both to Midia. As a last resort. Even a guy like Harrison couldn’t get there. I have friends who would take care of you until the jerk is back in prison.” She didn’t answer. I stood. “I’ll go get lodestones now. We’ll make a plan to keep you and Zech safe.”

“And anyone who helps me. Work. Jeff and Adam down at Thrift Thrills. He’ll go after everyone I care about if he can’t find me.”

A superstitious fear zinged through me. With more conviction than I felt, I said, “They’ll catch him before he goes that far.”

She didn’t say anything and I knew she didn’t believe he would be caught. I wasn’t sure I believed it myself now. She had me worried. “I’m going to go grab the lodestones,” I repeated, as if they were the answer to all our prayers. “I’ll bring them back here in about an hour.” It wouldn’t take long for me to hook to Midia, gather the stones and get back, but the hinky way time slid between the two places would put me at least an hour out before I was done.

***

I hooked home first and checked on the kids. They were both asleep. My brother, who quit his job in Alaska and moved back to Omaha after Tom died, slept in the basement with Arsinua. Until they found a place of their own, they were with me and I had to say I didn’t mind it. Sure, my brother could be annoying, but having Arsinua around was like having a wife. She cleaned and cooked and did all those things that fell behind with me working. I tried paying her but she refused the money. “You’re giving me a place to stay and feeding me,” she’d said, and I’d realized it would be impossible for her to find work here. She was from another world; worse, she was in a body made by Tytan and I doubted it was anything like a human body on the inside. She didn’t have a birth certificate, social security number, anything that would prove she belonged here. If she got arrested, what would happen? No one would have a record for her. Would she sit in limbo, in a jail cell, forever?

I changed into jeans and a t-shirt, pulling on socks and boots. Then I went to the basement where I found my brother sitting in front of the TV, squinting at an alien landscape as his fingers worked a controller. “Did you stay up all night or get up really early?”

“Couldn’t sleep.” He glanced over then did a double take. “What are you doing?”

“I have to get some lodestones in Midia. I’ll be hooking back here.” To overcome the pull of the stones through the hook, I had to hang on to the pull up bar Tom had long ago installed in the corner of the basement main room. If I didn’t have something to hold, something I could wrap my legs around, the lodestones would yank me back through the hook and toss me to the ground. It wasn’t fun.

Travis’ lips thinned. He didn’t like to hear me talk about other worlds. I’d taken him to the Slip once as a way to quickly get him up to speed on what I could do and he flipped out. I guess alien worlds needed to stay on a big screen TV for him to find them palatable. “Danni’s abuser escaped from prison and she thinks he’s after her,” I said, not sure why I thought I had to explain. “The lodestones will help her boyfriend protect her.”

He shrugged, not saying a word.

“Keep an eye on things, will you?”

“Yeah. If I’m gone before you get back, Arsinua will be here.”

“I might be a while.” I needed to check on Kroshtuka too. I had to see for myself that he was okay before I could do much else.

“You need to get out of this shit, Dev.” My brother had his game on pause and he had his serious face on.

“You say that like I have a choice. Like I’m doing this for fun.”

He snorted. “You may have fallen into all this by accident, but you haven’t done much to get out of it that I’ve seen. And you use that magic stuff all the time. Somebody who wanted to get out of it would be doing all in their power to rid themselves of it.”

“Well, one, it’s inside me. Magical explosion, remember? Two, if I rid myself of this magic, then how the hell would I be able to defend my family against the things that do have magic? Hmm? Do you think that the cops would be able to handle assassin spiders and demons?”

He shrugged, his mouth set in a grim line. “Arsinua says you’ve been hanging around with the demons.”

Would it be wrong to hit him? Of course it would. I stuffed my hands in my pockets and told myself to be calm. “She also tell you I am a demon? Technically?”

He didn’t answer, which meant Arsinua had been filling my brother’s head with all of her prejudices against the Skriven.

“Travis, what do you think I should do, then? Try to rid myself of the magic and let the world fall down around our heads?”

“Who says it will?”

“There are people stealing humans and killing them. They took Bethy and Liam, remember? They would’ve died if I hadn’t had magic.” I paused and took a breath. “They killed Tom.”

Travis flinched.

“I’m not sitting around waiting for them to hurt my family again. If that means I put myself in danger to try to stop them, then so be it. I didn’t ask for the magic or the explosion or any of it. I didn’t go looking. But it found me anyway and I can’t stay home, pretending everything is okay when it’s not. I can’t stay home knowing that there are things I can do to help people.” I squatted down next to my brother and took his hand. “Travis, Arsinua is afraid of the Skriven and yet she made a bargain with one to save her people. She may not like how I’m doing things, but she hasn’t been sitting idly by, either. We don’t agree on a lot of things, but we both at least try to fix things when we can. That’s all I’m doing. If you don’t want to be here, I’ll understand.”

He sighed. “I just don’t want you to get hurt. I don’t want the squirts to get hurt.”

“I know. I don’t want them hurt either. That’s why I’m doing all this, even though it scares the piss out of me.”

“You need to figure out how to get rid of the magic, Dev. It’s only bringing danger and death.”

I rose and stepped away from him. “Maybe. But maybe the danger and death would have come anyway, and without the magic I could have done nothing at all.” I formed a hook and stepped through before he could say anything more.

Lizzie and the Elders were waiting for me.

TWO