“I was afraid there was. Tom said there was.” He frowned. “Damn it, he used helping you as a chance to tie you to the Hollows again.”
I nodded and slumped back on the pillow, not taking my hand from him. I didn’t think he was lying. Not this time. I was too tired and feeling too alone to be smarter than that.
“Stay with me,” I said.
He didn’t hesitate, just crawled into bed, fully clothed, and carefully put his arms around me. The wash of his magic pushed the darkness back and my body relaxed, floating as if I were indeed in the water, the coolness soothing some of the hurt in both my body and my heart.
No dreams haunted me after that, and when I woke in the morning, Corb was not there. Maybe he’d never been there and I’d only imagined it. I sat up slowly, my body aching but my ribs not nearly as bad as they’d felt the day before.
“I can’t believe you slept with him,” Alan snapped from his corner of the room.
I twisted around. “So he was here?”
“He held you all damn night.” He shook his head, his nose wrinkled and lips pursed. As if it were disgusting that Corb had showed he was worried about me and had given me far more care than Alan would have done if the roles had been reversed.
I rubbed my face and slowly pulled on my jeans, a clean bra and shirt, and my work boots. I put my knife sheaths over the jeans—I wasn’t going out without them anytime soon. Scooping up my bags, I took them out onto the second-floor landing.
“Gran, I have bad news,” I said softly.
She flickered to life in the doorway to her bedroom. “I also have bad news.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “You sound weird, are you okay?”
She spread her hands wide. “I am not your grandmother. My name is Matilda.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to react to that, so I just stared at her a moment before I could speak. “Shouldn’t you have been kept out by the spells and garden?”
“The other witch removed the protections as she left, the one you call Missy,” she said. I noticed that her terrible wounds were healed. She touched her neck. “Yes, the energy here is healing for the undead. Which is what has finally allowed me to speak. The blood-born demon has your grandmother. She’s been trying to help me these last few days, but that was what he wanted all along. He wanted her. I was here, and she was busy hiding me from you. We didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late. We didn’t realize he wanted her knowledge.”
“Why would she help you?” I snapped, not sure I wanted to believe her words. “You were like two small dogs barking at each other across the fence.”
She spread her hands in front of her. “Because the demon made a grab for you. We all saw that. She thought to weaken him by bringing me here.”
And that made perfect sense to why Gran would do what she did. To protect me.
I was up and running before she could say anything. I grabbed my hip bag and threw it over my shoulder.
The blood-born demon had my gran.
I was going to kick his balls so hard that they lodged in his throat if he so much as hurt a hair on her undead head.
I yanked the front door open and was outside with a single jump. “Robert, he has Gran!”
Robert was at my side in a flash, and I was sprinting across the lawn, hopping the fence and pounding up the front steps of the Sorrel-Weed house as if I didn’t have cracked ribs and a wounded heart. As if I’d never been remotely scared of it.
The door swung open for me, but the eeriness of that didn’t bother me. I was burning with rage that he’d dared touch my gran. Never mind steal her away.
In the main room I stood, breathing hard, Robert next to me. I reached out and touched him, my magic flaring as I brought him from skeleton to a fully formed man.
“Bree,” he growled. “The magic here is darker now. Just in that short time since we were here last, it’s been growing.”
“The basement,” I said, pulling my knives from their sheaths. “That’s where the tour guide said not to go, so that’s where we go.”
Robert nodded and took the lead. He opened the door and reached for the light. Nothing.
“In my bag,” I said. “There’s a flashlight.”
He opened the bag, pulled it out and flicked it on. “This is going to be rough.”
“I’ll probably pee my pants at some point,” I said. “Don’t tell anyone.”
He grunted and took the first few steps down. “I’ll probably pee my pants too. Your secret is safe with me.”
I kept close to him and wasn’t surprised in the least that the door slammed behind us. Not surprised, but I did still jump and wobble on the stair edge.
“This feels funny,” I said as we made our way down the steps. “Like the air is wrong.”
“A demon’s home is never funny,” Robert said. “Smelly, horrid, but not funny.”
At another time I would have laughed.
Okay, I did smirk. Give it to Robert to pull even that much out of me. We reached the bottom of the steps, and he swept the flashlight over the room. Beside him was a light switch on the wall, and I reached over and flicked it on, figuring there’d be electricity due to the tourist visits.
Robert didn’t flick off the flashlight. We crept forward. The basement had some ground-level windows, and there were pieces of furniture all over the place, scattered haphazardly.
“Gran,” I whispered her name.
I knew you’d come.
The blood-born demon’s voice curled around my ear and I spun, slashing with one knife, cutting through absolutely nothing. Laughter rippled around us and the lights dimmed but didn’t go out.
“Where is my gran?” I yelled.
I’m going to enjoy killing you.
A whoosh of air behind us, a sudden shriek, and I hit the ground, rolled onto my belly and found myself looking straight at Robert. He’d pulled the same move. “We have to kill it.”
“I know,” he said. “But you ran in here without any thought about how you were going to do that.”
“I killed the other demons.”
“They were amateurs.” Robert grunted and pushed up to his feet, those icy blue eyes sweeping the room. He grabbed my hand and tugged me in close, his mouth against my ear. “You can’t hurt him until he takes solid form. Let him grab me. He can’t hurt me.”
He let me go and took a few steps away from me. The air behind him moved, shimmering with a form I could almost see.
“Robert, look out!”
But I wasn’t fast enough, and neither was he. The blood-born demon wrapped itself around Robert, holding him tightly as the critter bit into his shoulder, tearing into him.
The demon was solid, and that meant I could kill it.
The creature swung Robert around to face me.
You have to kill him to kill me.
Which meant the life I’d given Robert had—temporarily, at least—confused the demon. It didn’t seem to get that he was already very much dead. It wouldn’t kill him to have the knife stuck through him. Again. The thing was, I didn’t want to hurt Robert. And the chance that my knife could indeed finish him off was there.
I wouldn’t risk it.
I lifted one of my knives then lowered it. “Take me instead.”