Diana Rowland - Fury of the Demon

Mzatal reached over and took my hand. “I will not abandon you, beloved,” he said softly.

Tears pricked my eyes. I gave his hand a light squeeze. “Thanks, Boss.”

I drifted off to sleep with my hand in his.

When I woke the sky ahead of us glowed with the pinks and blues of sunrise. I sat up, rolled my head on my shoulders to get the crick out of my neck. Mzatal looked over from where he still sat in the driver’s seat and gave me a fond smile.

“Hey, Boss,” I said as I rubbed the gunk out of my eyes. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Six hours and twenty-two minutes,” he replied.

A glance at the backseat showed the other two men still sleeping. “Have you been driving this whole time?” I asked him.

“Yes.”

I groaned. Damn it, the last thing I wanted was for him to wear himself out again. “You’re majorly stubborn, you know that, right?”

“Zharkat, it is much less confining this way,” he reassured me. “I am well.”

I peered at him and had to admit he did look much less stressed than on the trip to Austin.

“All right.” I ran fingers through my hair and tried unsuccessfully to bite back a yawn. “You want me to drive for a bit now, or are you good?”

“I will continue,” he said. “Have you need to stop elsewhere before journey’s end?”

I shook my head. “I just want to get home.”

“Not long now,” he said. “Sleep more.”

And I did.

The abrupt silence of the engine woke me the second time, and I opened my eyes to see trees bordering a parking lot. “Are we home?” I asked.

“We have but the short walk through the woods,” Mzatal replied. “And you are more rested.”

Bryce roused and prodded Paul awake and out of the SUV. We made quick work of unloading our stuff, then tromped through the woods, over the fence, and back to the house, where a bouncing and burbling Jekki greeted us with delight. After reassuring the faas he was indeed well, Mzatal went straight to the mini-nexus. Bryce bundled the still sleepy Paul off to bed, then headed to the kitchen to scrounge breakfast while I went to join Mzatal.

We sat quietly for a while, facing each other in the center of the mini-nexus, the potency tickling like the nibble of minnows as we listened to the chirp of sparrows and drone of insects.

“Boss,” I said after some time, “we need to do something about your aura. If you’re going to function here on Earth without causing chaos, we need to figure out how to tone it down. A lot.”

He grew contemplative, reading the implications behind the words. “It is a marked problem while among humans,” he admitted.

“Perhaps Szerain could help,” I ventured. “No one feels his aura.”

Mzatal’s frown deepened. “He is submerged. I cannot mimic that.”

“Yes, I know. But I’ve been around him unsubmerged, as well as when he’s expressing way more through Ryan. It’s as if he’s able to keep a lid on his aura projection. Maybe you could talk to him about it and see how he does it?”

I felt the resistance in him. He frowned, as if looking for any other alternative, and it was a long moment before he spoke. “It is the best and most expedient solution,” he said, though his tone was certainly grudging . “I will speak to him.”

There was something going on between those two, but I didn’t have time to deal with it now. At least he’d agreed to talk to Szerain.

I yawned, still tired. Even though I’d slept quite a while in the car it wasn’t the same as sleeping in a proper bed. I frowned. Why had I been in the car for so long?

“Kara!” Mzatal said sharply.

I jerked and blinked at him. “Shit.” My pulse lurched. “The implant containment.”

He laid one hand on my shoulder and the other against my cheek. “We are joined at the hip, beloved, as you have noted,” he said, calm and placid. “I will reinforce it again.”

He went still and quiet for only a few minutes, but it was enough time for me to go through plenty of worry. “I need to get some real sleep for a couple of hours,” I told him. “Could you give me a little of your magic sleeping mojo?”

He smiled and kissed me. “It is done. Be in your bed in five minutes or you will find yourself napping on the floor.”

I laughed, kissed him back, and headed inside. Yet as I passed the dining room I had to stop and do a double take. The elves had been at work expanding Kara’s Kafé while we were in Austin.

The dining room hadn’t been an actual room for dining in the entire time I’d lived in the house as an adult. But now, storage boxes, miscellaneous items, and cobwebs had been cleared away, and a simple but lovely eight chair dining table occupied the middle of the hardwood floor. Nostalgia tugged hard as memory filled my senses of the last Thanksgiving before my dad died: family and friends and food.

I smiled. I still had family and friends, and they were helping me turn my house back into a home.

I continued to my room, crawled into bed, and fell asleep with a smile on my face.

Three hours later I stretched awake with no remembered dreams and no sense of time having passed. After a quick shower and a cup of coffee, I felt more than ready to get back into the hunt.

My first move was to transfer case files and Tracy’s journals from the living room to the dining table. I doubted the guys had meant for me to christen the new table with work, but it was loads better than the sofa or kitchen table for spreading out.

I worked and munched on Jekki-made finger sandwiches while I tried to glean more useful information from Tracy’s notes. After about an hour my eyes started glazing over, and I pushed back from the table with a groan. Out in the living room I heard Bryce and Jekki talking.

“Hey, Bryce,” I called out. “You busy with anything right now?”

Bryce came in through the kitchen, looking sharp and dangerous in his polo shirt and shoulder holster. “Nope. Paul’s up and working, and there’s no more I can do on the camera system until we get those quotes back. Whatcha need?”

“I need another set of eyes,” I told him. “I’d like to know if there are any more references to locations in these journals. Anything is good, but particularly Texas and the Southeast.”

“I can handle that.” He pulled out a chair and sat. “Slide the pile this way.”

I shoved one of the stacks toward him, a miscellany of notes, case files, journals and photos. “Go wild.”

We worked in silence for a while, each absorbed in our own world, neither of us announcing any great discoveries. I finally sat back and pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Damn it. This shit gives me a headache.”

Bryce tossed the journal in his hand aside and picked up the next one, then put it down again. Frowning, he tugged an overflowing photo folder from mid-stack and slid an eight by ten from it. “Shit,” he murmured.

I glanced over. “Got something?”

“Maybe. I don’t know,” he said, his brow furrowed. “What are these drawings?”

I took a closer look at what he held: a crime scene photo from over a year ago of the office of murdered Greg Cerise, with sketches of people, demons, and other-worldly settings plastering the walls. “Greg Cerise drew all of those,” I told him. “He had a knack for finding people who were arcanely gifted.” I pulled out some photos that had better views of the sketches. “I think he either visited the demon realm at some point or he was awfully damned prescient, because his drawings are dead on.” I made a face. “His dad, Peter Cerise, turned out to be the Symbol Man and used Greg’s drawings to find his victims.”