Eric sat on the ground with me while I retched in the commode. At least the trains had running water. “You’re pale.” He drew slight circles on my back. “If we were home, I’d see about finding some ginger. I’ve read that can be really helpful.”
“Where we’re going should have some.” They were good about keeping herbs like that around. I used to work in those gardens.
“I’ll grab some before we leave so the trip back will be easier. Do you think you’re going to be able to do this?”
I nodded, less sure than I pretended to be. “I can. As soon as we stop moving.” I’d felt fine in the train stations. I couldn’t seem to handle motion.
He held out a cracker. “Take a bite?”
I pushed his hand away. “If you put that anywhere near me, I will never speak to you again.”
Eric rolled his eyes. “Come on. Let’s try to rest.” He scooped me up. “You can’t possibly have anything else to bring back up for a while. Our daughter or son doesn’t really want to kill you.”
I laughed. He must have been listening when I ranted about an hour earlier with that round of puke. “You don’t think so?”
“I think that we’re going to come to a stop tomorrow, get off the train, and then take a carriage to the Sisterhood. The last time we were there, someone dragged you off and made us think you were dead. We don’t know what Katrina knows. We need to prepare, okay? First step is you sleeping.”
He carried me from the washroom to the bedroom. The guys had been blocking the door to the hallway on the trains. When I felt better, my powers turned on, and I kept trying to clear the possessed. Apparently, I wasn’t to exhaust myself working. I couldn’t be throwing up and clearing demons all day long. I had to rest.
Aidan had that role right then. He lifted his eyebrows, silently questioning me whether I was going to try to get to that door. The answer was no. I shook my head before I climbed into the bed.
“Shouldn’t she try to eat something?” Thaddeus turned to Eric. I’d gotten adjusted to the idea that they talked about me like I wasn’t there. I was basically non-communicative because I felt so terrible, which meant I’d given up caring that it was really rude. Manners were for times when the entire world wasn’t constantly shaking.
Eric lay down next to me. “In a couple hours.” He yawned. Was it very late? Time had ceased to matter. I hated this cursed train. I never wanted to see it again. Okay, I was whining even in my head.
Noah took the other side next to Eric. Their presence was... lovely. Slowly, the heat they gave out moved over me. Across the room, Thaddeus sighed. “She feels better. It’s moving through her.”
Noah placed a steady hand on my back. “I like that we can ease her pain. I wish I could make the nausea stop.”
I closed my eyes. I wished he could, too.
The Sisterhood loomed ahead of us. In the middle of the day, it looked like it should always be bathed in moonlight, as though everyone should know that dark things happened within its walls.
“Too late to change your mind.” Thaddeus never pulled any punches.
I rolled my eyes. “Who said I wanted to?”
“You don’t have to say it. I know you.” I squeezed his hands. “You’re doubting yourself, and you’re consumed with bad memories. I’d do this for you, but I can’t. We came all this way. So straighten your back and gut through this.”
I punched him lightly in the arm. “Will do. Let’s get this over with.”
He nodded, once. Thaddeus had known I wouldn’t back down from this. He just needed to remind me. If I wanted to be coddled, I’d have spoken to Brody or Noah.
I put my hood back on. Or, to be fair, I put Anne’s hood back on. I was in a Sister uniform we’d altered to fit me. It was relatively bland. My own clothes had actually been beautiful—well, everything but the hood. The rest of the uniform had been decorated with symbols in blue and gold. This one had none of the fanfare. It would make me seem like I was a lowly ranked Sister. In this false place, the more decorated the Sister, the more powerful she was considered to be.
They wouldn’t recognize me and hopefully no one would look too closely at my guards, at least not until I had enough time to get through the door and to Katrina. Guards were low on the totem pole. They barely even noticed each other.
I walked with a stride that said I belonged in this place. My five flanked me in the appropriate positions. We certainly seemed the part.
I walked through the gate and abruptly stopped. The Sisterhood was usually an active, alive place. All of the women and all of the guards made a lot of noise when they were in there together. But this place was… silent.
Eric shook his head. “I don’t know. Too quiet, too much.”
“Be on alert.” I still had to get inside the building. Whatever they were doing that it was so still, so seemingly deserted, I had to see if it applied to the sanctum as well. “Go check out the guardhouse. Stick to the plan. Trust me. You won’t get inside, not if we’re going to continue to fake this.”
Aidan rocked back on his feet. “Ten minutes then we bust through the door.”
“I understand. If I can’t do this in ten minutes, I won’t be able to at all. It’s not like I can kill her.”
Brody shook his head. “It’s not like you would anyway.”
I took the stairs into the house, pulling open the front door with a hard yank. I remembered how it had felt to come and go from this place. I used to be so proud, so sure of myself as a Sister. I was fighting the good fight, I was helping people. When they sent me out to destroy a demon, I did it and came back here alive. Pride and humility had warred within me, and both had made coming home to this place such a gift.
Now, I knew that Katrina only sent us out to those who could afford us and left the rest of the world to die. I suspected we might have even been doing more harm than good.
The demons had simply moved on to places where we didn’t fight them. The ones who still showed up to fight us were playing, nothing more.
The hallway was dark. Where was the conversation? Where were the footsteps?
As quietly as I could, I walked through the hallways. With curiosity being too hard to resist, I opened one of the bedroom doors. It was empty. I sighed. Okay, maybe they’d abandoned this place. To confirm this, I opened door after door. Had I driven Katrina to run? I wasn’t that scary, particularly not to her, not if she could invade people’s minds.
Finally, I got to the lunch area. The only place I’d see after this one was Katrina’s office. If she’d run for her life, maybe I’d get some good information from her desk. Otherwise I was just not—
I came to a stop, my breath catching in my throat. On the floor, on their knees, were fifty Sisters. Their heads were bowed, and they rocked back and forth. I knew this scene. I’d witnessed it with Mika and Krystal. She’d trapped them in some dark place.
No power flowed through me. I wasn’t lit up. I couldn’t use my already functioning power to help them. I took the steps into the room two at a time. How long had they been here like this? How long had she left them?
Why these fifty? Where were the rest? I touched the arm of a Sister whose name I couldn’t remember. She was a little bit younger than me. The redheaded woman raised her head to regard me. “So dark. The light is gone.”
Not forever. I wouldn’t leave them here like this, not if there was something I could do about it. This was why my vision had been dark, had been blank. They had no future right now. They were lost in the dark. There were too many of them. Even Mika and Krystal hadn’t been this out of sync with the future.
Of course, this still begged the question, how had Krystal and Mika gotten to us?
Who had helped them?
We might never know.
Eric
“This one is empty, too,” I called out to Thaddeus. Every single guardhouse was abandoned. Well, some of them looked like there might have been a struggle. Two in particular had bloodstains on the walls. I didn’t w
ant to imagine what would have caused that.
Teagan wasn’t okay. She’d just been struck emotionally. Sadness and fear warring inside of her left a bad taste in my mouth. When my girl wasn’t all right, I wasn’t all right. It really was that simple for me. If Teagan was happy, the world was all right.
I looked at Aidan. Knowing that these men who I had loved like brothers since childhood would die for her the same way I did? It made everything better. Who was I kidding? I’d known them and considered them family way back to a time I could hardly remember. We’d chosen this together. We’d been gifted with Teagan.
He nodded to me. Aidan was a bulldog. He’d make it inside and take care of our girl while the rest of us took one last glance at this mess out here.
Noah stared at the sky. Those birds must be talking to him.
“Hey,” Thaddeus called out to all of us. “Incoming.”
What did he mean? I ran to him to see what was talking about and came up short. The five assholes who had dragged us out of here were back. I shook my head. That wasn’t possible. We’d killed them. One by one.
What in the hell was going on?
“Thaddeus?”
He stayed very still. Finally, he answered. “I’ve got nothing. They’re dead.”
Brody shrugged. “Look, it’s obviously demons. They’ve been taken over. Risen from the grave. This stinks of Katrina and her brand of dark power. We need to be very careful with this. They probably can’t die.”
With Noah and Aidan inside with Teagan it was just going to be the three of us and these… things that probably couldn’t die. I grinned at Brody. He liked to be underestimated, yet it didn’t surprise me at all that Brody had immediately deduced what was happening. I had to study. I could hold onto a million pieces of information and make connections. Brody could make snap assessments, and nine times out of ten he was right.
I was going to assume this was one of those times. Still, I had to rag on him. If we were about to be killed by these dead-not-dead demon things, then I had to at least manage to have a little fun with it. “When did you get so smart, Brody?”
He grinned. “Jealous?”
“Always.” I pressed at my link with Teagan. I just wanted to feel her. “Why shouldn’t I be? Ever since childhood it’s all I can do, feel jealous of you, Brody.”
He rolled his eyes. “And don’t I know it.”
The five men rushed at us. Thaddeus took his sword off his back. He’d been our leader since childhood, and only when we were officially guards had it become formal. Thaddeus had been the most serious child I’d ever known, and we were all pretty darned solemn in that orphanage.
I grabbed my sword. I preferred just about anything else to fighting. That didn’t mean I wasn’t good at it. I was really, really talented when it came to destroying evil creatures. I rushed forward.
Thaddeus had once pulled me out of a pit where some truly bad demon-possessed men had wanted to set me on fire. I wasn’t going to let those things rushing at us now get anywhere near him.
“Eric,” he shouted after I took off the head of the first guy, the one who had, I believed, taken Teagan, “I got this. I’m not in need of saving today.”
Well… that was too damned bad.
Teagan
I rushed down the hall, nearly colliding with Aidan. He grabbed me by the shoulders as Noah caught up behind him.
“Teagan.”
“Aidan.” I wrapped my arms around his neck. “There are fifty people in there and they need my help. I need a demon. Something to activate me. I keep trying to see, to use prophecy, and I’m getting nothing. It’s this place. Katrina has done something to it.”
A wave of adrenaline made me stand up straight. Aidan checked over his shoulder. “They’re battling. Without me.” Aidan took off running, and I stumbled forward, straight into Noah’s arms. He caught me before he set me right on my feet.
“I need to get out there.” He kissed both my cheeks. “But first, I have to tell you that the ravens have told me that divinity has never seen anything like this.”
“Well, that does not inspire me with a great deal of hope. I need to get outside, too. Whatever they are fighting, if it’s at all demonic, I need it.”
Noah grabbed my arm. “I’m not done. They also said you’re not alone. That you have another Sister with you right now, at all times, and that she can help you do what must be done.”
I stopped moving. “Does that mean what I think it means?”
“Our daughter, yes. We don’t know which one of us fathered her, but it doesn’t matter. She belongs to all of us. She’s mine, whether or not she is actually related to me.” His gaze was solemn, his expression difficult to read.
I put my hand on his arm. “Noah, I’m not sure I can do that. I don’t think I can draw power from my unborn daughter. That’s… cruel.”
He nodded. “I don’t think it will hurt her. If she’s like you… then she’s made to do it, right?”
This was all so ridiculously complicated. “I’m only using this knowledge as a last resort. It’s my job to protect her.” I grabbed at my belly to block it like I could keep what was outside and around us away from her. Up until this point, I’d thought of her sort of as a terror and something that was making me sick. But she was mine.
Noah put arms around my shoulder. “I’m keeping you both safe.”
Outside, the guys battled what had to be dead people. One of them was running around without a head. This was really among the strangest things I’d ever seen. Demons walked around in the bodies of the dead all the time, either on purpose or because they got stuck there without someone else to possess. But fighting with the dead? That was new.
They usually just dropped to the ground.
“Someone you know?” I turned to ask Noah in time to see a muscle tick in his jaw.
“Don’t you recognize them? These were the five we had to kill because they took you. They were Katrina’s guards at that point.”
I didn’t know the five dead men. I wouldn’t have recognized them if I somehow bumped into them in a square somewhere. The night I’d been taken, I hadn’t seen a thing, not really. Images of the guys getting hurt and the things that had happened all blurred together.
The past needed to stay where it was.
I walked forward. I’d come here to confront Katrina. It didn’t look like I was going to get that chance. But I could help the fifty women inside by just undoing whatever this was.
I rushed at one of the dead men and yanked the demon inside of him out. It was a rough pull. My arm burned from the interaction with the demon. The creature inside really didn’t want to let go.
I didn’t care. My powers were blaring. I grabbed the next one and yanked. Five times, over and over, I got rid of the demons, leaving the five guards dead where they belonged. I turned around and ran up the stairs back into the manor. I couldn’t let the powers turn off.
I reached the first woman just in time. I closed my eyes. I was greeted by the same dark path that Mika and Krystal had traveled. I extended my hand. “Come with me,” I shouted. This was going to be a very long day.
Brody
It was everything I could do to not rush forward, put her over my shoulder, and make her stop. There were too many women in here for her to help. This wasn’t like demon possession, which was bad enough. This was going to kill her if we weren’t careful.
I looked at Aidan. “How many?”
He didn’t pretend to not understand me. “Ten today. Pause. Sleep. Eat. Ten tomorrow. Back onto the train. She’ll never be able to do any of them there. By the time we get home, she’ll be back and able to help more. It is just going to take some time. She didn’t do this, and she’s not responsible for how long it takes to fix it.”
He was right, of course. “She’s not going to like it. She’s going to fight.”
“Obviously.”
Teagan jerked backward, tried to stand and tumbled over. Her eyes were huge. I jolted forwar
d and was at her side in a second. This didn’t seem right. I checked our link. Teagan felt… cold. That wasn’t okay. I touched the side of her face. Her skin was warm. So, this was something… else, something happening on the inside.
Thaddeus knelt on her other side. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
Teagan
Katrina circled me. We were back in the train area, the distortion of the future I wanted so much to help create. She smiled. “I see you have found the presents I left you.”
“Get out of my head.”
She smiled, slowly. Her eyes were dead. The creature that had followed her around the last time was here again. “In a second, you won’t know what’s happening. Have you figured it out?”
I shook my head. “It? I’m not going to play your games.”
“Oh, but you are, and what’s worse is that in a second you won’t even know that you are playing my games. You’re going to be back in those mines, and this time you’ll never, ever get out.”
“No, she won’t.” I whirled around to see Brody kneeling nearby. He rose, slowly. “This is real. I’m here.”
I nodded. I didn’t know how Brody had come into this moment. I was immensely grateful for his presence and insanely nervous that he was anywhere near Katrina. He walked toward us. Katrina stood frozen, her eyes were huge. She hadn’t expected to see him here, either.
“Take my hand.” He extended it, and we linked fingers.
Our link tightened. I could feel him and his ties to the real world. It would be easy to let that sensation bring us both back to our bodies. I wouldn’t be leaving without dealing with Katrina.
I opened my powers. Futures flooded through me. Great. If I could see them then Katrina could, too. She was in my head? We’d do this together. “Brody, hold on to me. Don’t let me go.”