Marcus rounded on Leith. “Did you, or did you not, find the white ashes that would tell you a blood witch had died? I know there was no body, no bones, but were there ashes?”
There was a silence then as we waited.
“I don’t know,” Leith rasped, shaking his head, and I saw it then, on his face, the pain etched there, that he was the weak link. “I was so angry…because of you.”
Marcus nodded, reached for him, and because it was him and only him, Leith let the hand slip around the back of his neck, allowed the bigger man to draw him close. None of us, myself included, ever pushed Marcus away. It just wasn’t possible.
“It was crazy,” Ryan told Marcus. “I went with Leith, and I don’t remember anything except wanting to kill whatever we found. I was furious…wrathful…and that’s all I was.”
“You assumed,” I said, the first words I’d spoken since I walked in with my mate, Raphael Caliva, two hours before. “You assumed it was Moira who attacked you.”
“Yes,” Ryan husked, his eyes red and raw as he stared at me.
“But you didn’t know for certain; you’d never seen her before.”
Ryan nodded quickly.
“So the woman, creature, that tried to kill you could have simply been a demon sent in her place while the real Moira looked on.”
They were all staring at me now, and I felt my mate’s hand slide between my shoulder blades for comfort.
“You knew Moira was there, in town, because Raph tracked her that far from here, from the city, but he’s the only one of us who knows what she actually looks like.”
“Jesus, that’s right,” Malic gasped, shaken.
“None of us had any way of knowing who, or what, we were fighting,” Marcus summed up with a sigh, as Joe, his hearth, stepped in beside him. Instantly Marcus clutched the smaller man close, just holding him helping to ease his tension. “I assumed Moira would be the one coming at me. It made sense that it would be her, but I never got an answer. Whoever that was never said yes, it’s me. She didn’t do anything but try and gut me.”
Joe trembled, and Marcus gave him a reassuring squeeze, as if to remind his hearth that he was alive and well, that Joe hadn’t lost him.
“When Ryan cut off her head,” Marcus continued, “I assumed the same thing you all did—that she was dead and gone.”
“Yeah,” Malic said, “but you didn’t actually know if it was her or not. You couldn’t say for sure.”
“No. Ryan cut the head off a creature I thought was Moira. I saw him with my own eyes, and she had spoken to me not moments before.”
“But you didn’t really know who you were looking at,” Malic stressed.
“No. You’re right. All we had to go on was what we saw during the fight. To me, to all of you, it looked like the witch was dead, and Shane, Joe’s old friend, the warder, had his memory washed, so he couldn’t corroborate anything either.”
Leith nodded in agreement. “And then, of course, there was a fire.”
We had fought a demon and his minions over a hell dimension, and after Malic was hurt and Leith had to help get him home through a portal, there was only me, Marcus, and Ryan left. We’d done our best, but there were so many creatures, wave after wave of them, and when we were overrun, Marcus, with his great strength, had lifted all three of us high off the floor, near the ceiling, in a move that only he could manage. Ryan’s power, like Leith’s, was in the portal, which took him and me home to safety. Marcus had fallen through the dimensional door, and we’d thought, at the time, that he was lost forever. It took almost a year, but he was finally restored.
“When I killed who I thought was Moira, whether it was her or not, a warder void should have opened and sucked the body through the wormhole and scattered the remains throughout all the planes of hell so the demon, or witch, couldn’t regenerate.”
The void always appeared; it was how we killed demons without raising questions. If there were bodies lying around, it would be hard to keep the warding under wraps.
“Thinking back, I don’t remember if it appeared or not,” Ryan confessed. “I was so focused on other things, on fighting, on finally having killed our enemy, and then on trying to stay alive when the demons surged through the door, that now—”
“Now we don’t know,” Marcus concluded.
“And afterward, when we went back to look through the rubble, after the fire died out, there wasn’t a body in the debris for Raph to look at, and I don’t remember seeing any ash that was different from all the rest,” Leith said miserably.
“Christ,” Malic groaned, “what a fuckin’ mess.”
“Everyone sit down.” Jael’s voice filled the room, and we did as we were told, unable, from years of listening to him—he was our sentinel after all—not to heed any and all of his directions. We sat in twos in his living room, each hearth with his warder, everyone looking up at our sentinel and the stunning woman who joined him, his fiancée, Deidre Macauley, a sentinel from Scotland.
“Let us take stock,” she said, taking a breath, and so, following her lead, we all did as well. It was good, just that moment of calm, of clarity. We’d found out in the last few months that she had a surprisingly soothing effect on all of us, and her smile showed she was pleased with us listening. “So Moira, mate of the demon lord Saudrian that Raph killed, is still very much alive. For whatever reason, probably because his hearth is the youngest, she came after Malic first. But what we need to remember here, is that for her to be in our home—and by that, I’m referring to this plane—means she’s either cast an extremely powerful spell, which, having crossed paths with her many times in the past, I would not have thought her capable of, or some other force is at work.”
“What do you mean by other force?” Dylan asked her. “Like some kind of power?”
“Like some kind of demon,” Raphael corrected him. “She means that a stronger entity has backed Moira’s play to come after this clutch.”
Not a sound in the room.
“What makes you think it’s a demon?” Jael inquired, staring at his fiancée.
“Look at the facts, Jael,” she said solemnly. “To step through a dimensional rift, kill, and then leave nothing behind but a lingering scent? To leave no trace for a warder to follow? That’s powerful magic. Think now: nothing born from the pit has that kind of power.”
He appeared startled. “You think we’re dealing with one of the fallen?”
“Even Saudrian couldn’t cross planes without leaving a residue. Isn’t that so, Raph?”
Raphael nodded. “That’s how I tracked him, and it’s the same way I found Marcus. There’s a signature you can see and feel, and now, in Moira’s case, smell.”
“So this demon or fallen,” Jael said, “they opened a door, allowed her to kill with whatever minion she had with her, and then sealed the rift.”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Deidre said. “Moira is a blunt instrument. The creature I know enjoys inflicting pain quickly, gratuitously, meaning that she would have come after you all again and again after failing when you lost Marcus. And that, in and of itself, would have been a wasted opportunity.”