22
I struggle to maintain consciousness, not wanting to be prone with all the spirits, reanimated corpses, and the demon who is going to be back any second hanging around.
This is not the time to succumb to my own weakness, but it seems my aching body and weary mind beg to disagree.
I’m close to losing my grip when the driver’s side door creaks open and Kincaid slides into the seat. I do my best to twist myself into a position to face him. I don’t want him at my back, especially not when he’s all horned and demony.
I breathe a soft sigh of relief when I find he’s no longer the demonic beast that carried me back to the car. He’s Kincaid again. Wicked sneer and all.
“Can you still hear Malphas?” he demands.
I groan.
He shakes me a little until my eyelids peel back enough for me to meet his gaze. “Paige,” he urges. “Can you hear him?”
I shake my head, but the gesture is so minuscule I’m not sure he’s even seen it. I assume he must have because he leaves me be, releasing my arm in favor of the steering wheel. He thrusts the key into the ignition and the engine growls back to life.
“Something isn’t right,” he hisses, peeling out onto the road fast enough that I feel a little flutter in my belly. Kincaid slams his palms against the wheel and curses in a language I do not understand.
“Could you see him?” he asks as he pulls the wheel, making the car fishtail around a bend in the road. “Can you tell me what he looked like? I have to be certain.”
I give my head a tiny shake again. “I could only see...his shape,” I stammer, breathless. “Tall. Thick shoulders. Red, red eyes.”
His knuckles go white with his grip on the wheel.
He doesn’t speak for five long seconds, then he reaches his hand to me and gently presses the back of it against my forehead. His touch feels icy cold.
“You’re burning up,” he says, recoiling. “I’ll see you home safe, Na’vazēm, but then there’s somewhere I must go.”
I cough weakly, trying to rid the blockage in my throat. “Where?”
I’m gripped with cold terror, and I can’t say why, but I know that I don’t want him to leave. As frightening as Kincaid is, he is also the only thing keeping me safe. Keeping me alive.
Startling myself with the thought, I realize that whether I want it or not, Kincaid is my one and only ally in Elisium. He is the only being who cares at all whether I live or die. Whether that’s because he’s a devilish bastard who has a morbid desire to find out what I am or not, he’s all I’ve got until I can leave this place.
“Kincaid,” I probe, my voice barely above a whisper. I can feel myself slipping away faster now. I dig my fingernails into the flesh of my wrist until I gain some more clarity. “Where?”
His yellow eyes flash in the light of a passing streetlamp, making them shine with malice. “To Hell,” he mutters.
We make it back to the house in record time, and the moment the car comes to a jarring stop, my door is open, and Kincaid is there, lifting me out. I don’t fight him, not even when he cradles me to his chest for a second time tonight. Instead, I let myself meld to his form. Beneath the tatters of his shirt, he is back to his normal self, and it’s hard not to notice the difference between being carried by his monster, and being carried by him.
His smell, so strong this close up, tickles my nose with its alien scent. His warmth makes the sting of the cold, early-morning air on my skin bearable, and I try to cling to him more tightly.
“What happened?” I hear Artemis shout just after a door bangs open and Kincaid and I pass over the threshold. He sets me down gingerly on the bottom step in the foyer, and I lean into the banister, using the carefully carved wooden posts to support my weight.
The chiming of a bell precedes the approach of Kincaid’s cat. It meows plaintively at me, coming to rest on the step above my head before it decides better of that and hops right onto my lap, nudging me with tiny clawed paws as though to wake me.
“She’s depleted,” Kincaid replies, and I note how his voice has changed, morphed into something oddly monotone. “Can you help her?”
Artemis lifts my hand from the step, ignoring a hiss from the cat, and tucks it between both of his. Unlike Kincaid, Artemis feels warm, and when my eyes flutter open again after a second, I’m startled at what I find.
That strange, eerie golden aura around Artemis is back again, pulsing brighter now than it had been before. His eyes shine as though tiny flashlights are fixed behind them.
It hurts to look at him, so I blink hard and turn my focus back to Kincaid.
“Yes,” Artemis says. “I think so.”
“Do it,” Kincaid hisses, throwing a hand through his sweat-slicked black locks. He rushes to the small container in the corner by the door, the one with all the umbrellas and canes. He draws one out. It’s taller than the others, more a short staff than a cane. Or perhaps a walking stick. It’s black with shades of blue and emerald shimmering within and hooked near the top.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can. Do not leave this house.”
He taps the staff twice on the marble floor. Two sharp knocks echo through the foyer before Kincaid explodes into a plume of fire-flecked smoke and disappears.
There’s a tense silence where neither Artemis nor I say a word. Then, unable to help it, a rumbling laugh erupts from my belly.
It aches in my sides and makes tears well in my eyes.
The cat is scared away and jumps from my lap to put distance between us.
“Um, Paige?” Artemis asks, and I realize the warm itch in my palm, running up my arm, is him healing me. It feels foreign and welcome all at once, and that, for whatever reason, only makes me laugh harder.
“Did you see that?” I ask, breathless, my energy returning with Artemis’ help. I wave a half-limp arm toward where Kincaid was just a second before, hunching over from a smarting pain in my side.
An image of Dorothy clicking her glittery red shoes together while saying ‘I wish I were home’ comes unbidden to my mind.
I can’t handle the hilarity of the comparison between Kincaid and sweet little pig-tailed Dorothy. I know it’s ridiculous, but I can’t stop laughing. I’m distantly aware that there’s something fundamentally wrong with that, but it only adds to the hilarity.
Maybe this is it. Maybe I’ve finally lost my mind.
It’s long overdue.
“Where did he go?” Artemis asks, ignoring the last of my barking laughs with only a raised brow in my direction.
I wipe a tear from my eye and shrug. “Off to see the wizard,” I joke, making the laughter start up again. “The wonderful wizard of Oz.”
Artemis grabs my hand more tightly to help me up. I nearly stumble, but catch myself on the banister, bent over and giggling like a child. “Okay, crazypants,” he says. “Let’s get you to bed.”
Kincaid has been gone for a full night and day. I thought I’d have to field an escape attempt from Artemis by now, but he’s done the complete opposite of planning his departure.
He’s ransacked the pantry and made himself comfortable in his new borrowed room, surrounded in expired crackers and canned soup. He’s showered twice today, and had a several hour nap in the afternoon.