Page 11

11. Hierarchy of Power

Gemma

I trudged over to where the others were sitting around the fire and basically fell onto the log next to Kerry. He put his arm around my shoulders and propped me up against his side, his chin resting on my head.

“I don’t know what else to do for him.” My words slurred a little in my exhaustion. “I put him in a coma so he’s not feeling the pain, but it will make it harder to transport him.”

“How long will that last?” Tara asked.

“We’ll find out.” I didn’t mean to sound so grim, but I was perilously close to drained. “I didn’t have a lot of power to put into it. Hopefully until tomorrow at least.”

“What do we do now?” Maddy looked from me to Kerry and back to me. “Should John get him back to the Sanctuary?”

“If Gemma, the strongest healer in a century, can’t heal him, who can?” Tara pointed out. “There’s no one at the Sanctuary who’s more powerful, is there?”

“No. There isn’t.” Clem’s nap must have revived him, and his eyes glimmered in the firelight. “And I have a few reasons to think we should avoid the Sanctuary for now. Something’s not sitting right about that circle we found today.”

“But Jax will die if we don’t figure something out!” I wailed.

Kerry inhaled sharply and his muscles tensed into iron bands - and I knew Jax getting injured had hurt him more than he would ever admit.

Tears pricked my eyes. I hated failing him - and Jax - like this.

“Clem, surely you’ve seen someone fall victim to a Hell creature before,” Travis said. “What do the healers do?”

“Just what Gemma has.” Clem grimaced. “Stop the bleeding and seal the wounds.”

“That’s it?” Maddy squeaked.

“That’s it. It isn’t a spider bite, kiddies. It’s poison from Hell , which is anathema to our Divine half. We can only stand so much of it before it does us in.”

“So they mostly die?” My voice spiraled higher. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yeah, angel. That’s what he’s saying.”

The fire’s snapping and popping was loud in the silence that followed Kerry’s words.

“We need a miracle worker,” John said at last.

“Good luck finding one of those.” Travis poked at the fire with a long stick. “There have never been very many, and we have none at our Sanctuary.”

“I know a miracle worker,” Clem said.

“You do?”

“Where is she?”

“Would she help us?”

“Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

“Ah, I guess I should have said I knew a miracle worker,” Clem cut in over our excited voices, and his sorrowful look shut us up quickly.

“She’s dead?” Kerry didn’t have a problem saying it.

“As good as. She was frozen in stone a couple of centuries ago.”

I slid down the log and took one of the old man’s rough hands in mine.

“If it’s not prying, would you tell us what happened?”

His eyes narrowed as he studied my face for a long moment, then he began to speak.

“I was away on a mission that took far too long. Amanda usually came along as part of my team, but this time, she wanted to stay home. I don’t know why, and she wasn’t the kind you badgered for answers. She’d tell you when she was good and ready and not before. Anyway, when I finally made it back, I found a granite statue on our front porch and the stench of the Diabolical everywhere.”

“She was your wife?” Maddy asked.

He nodded.

“After it happened, I kept her with me at first because I couldn’t bear to let her go. I didn’t want to move on if it meant leaving her behind. It took three decades before I woke up one morning and realized that I could mourn her until I died from the grief, or I could avenge her. So I put her somewhere safe and went back to work.”

His laugh was harsh and his face turned to flint, giving me a glimpse of the fearsome warrior he had once been.

“Of course, the William Greenaway who emerged from isolation was a different man altogether. That’s when my friends started to call me Clemency. They thought I needed a reminder to show some on occasion. Heh. I suppose that still holds true today. Even now, I’d sacrifice anyone and anything if it were possible to regain what I lost.”

He turned back to me and his eyes went wide when he saw my tears.

“Oh, don’t do that. It was a long time ago.” He patted my shoulder awkwardly and looked over at Kerry. “Boy, come get your girl.”

Kerry’s strong arms folded around me. He picked me up and settled back on the log, and I sank into the cradle of his body with a soft sigh. I loved being wrapped in his strength.

“Clem, did you ever find out why they targeted her?” John asked. “I mean, that doesn’t sound like it was a random encounter.”

“In all these years, I only ever found one piece of the puzzle. Maybe eighty years after Amanda was petrified, I received a summons from an angel. He wanted to know what happened to her, and I told him what I knew.”

“Then what happened?”

“Well, if you think Kerry’s violent when he loses his temper, you should see it when an angel does!”

“Shut up,” Kerry groused, making me half-smile.

“Which angel was it? And did he say anything else?” Excitement made Travis speak a little faster than normal.

“How would I know which angel? It’s not like they wear name tags, son. All he would say after that was I needed to keep her safe. I told him I planned to.” Clem’s years suddenly seemed to weigh heavily on him.

“First, demons attacked her, then an angel asked about her.” Tara tilted her head. “Maybe she was keeping a secret.”

“Or guarding something,” Maddy suggested.

“Or someone,” John said.

“Wait a minute!” Kerry’s hold on me tightened. “I think I may know something about this. It wasn’t that long ago, either. Gemma, what month was it when you found me?”

“August. Late August.”

“The weather was warm, but not too hot, so maybe May or June? I can’t remember exactly. The demon called it Midsummer.”

“June 21,” Travis supplied. “St. John’s Day. The summer solstice. It’s the longest day and the shortest night of the year. Most cultures have legends about it.”

“Well, I can tell you Diabolical creatures were everywhere after dark. The demon wanted to go to a witches’ gathering at midnight. It was horrible. All I’m gonna tell you about it is that I walked into a shadow. It wasn’t pleasant. The shadow didn’t like it, either. He said that if I wasn’t more careful, I’d need a miracle worker to put me back together, and he’d personally taken care of the last one of those two hundred years ago.”

His laugh was harsher than Clem’s had been, and a sharp shudder ripped through his whole body.

“By then, I think I would have let him kill me, but he only punished me. Later, the demon wondered why a prince would lower himself enough to deal with one neph, even if it was a miracle worker.”

“Punished you how?” I was suspicious of how casually he’d said that.

“A prince?” Tara asked at the same time.

“The Diabolical world has a food chain, although that’s not the right word for it. The strongest are at the top and the weakest at the bottom.”

He chose to answer Tara because he doesn’t want me to know the gory details , I thought. It must have been bad.

“It’s called a hierarchy of power,” Travis said.

“Hierarchy,” he repeated. “Well, princes are way at the top of it. They don’t dirty their hands with killing. They use others for that because they’re too busy with long-term projects.”

“Wait.” My brain was too mushy to do much thinking, but I’d misunderstood something somewhere. “Where did the prince come from? I thought you said you walked into a shadow.”

“Shadow is slang for an avatar of a demon bound in Hell,” Clem cut right to the chase, which was good for my exhausted self. “The demon is just a shadow of itself, see?”

“But the real demon is still in Hell?” Tara asked, and I felt better that I wasn’t the only one ignorant on this subject. “Only an image of it is on this plane?”

“Okay, look. A demon can take a tiny bit of its essence, shape it like a human, and send it to Earth,” Kerry explained. “The more powerful the demon, the better the avatar, but they never quite look human. So that night, I bumped into a shadow, an avatar, that a demon had made and sent to the Real World. My demon said it was a prince, and I don’t think it would bother to lie about something like that.”

“There are so many pieces in the puzzle.” Maddy turned to Clem. “Was Amanda petrified two hundred years ago? Could she be the one Kerry’s shadow prince meant?”

“Yes. Two hundred years ago. It’s possible. I don’t know.”

“I think we should go see her,” John said. “Even petrified, she may be able to tell us something.”

“Where do you store her? I mean, keep her?” Tara made a face. “Sorry, Clem. I don’t know how to word it.”

“She’s in Augusta, which isn’t too far from here.”

“Is it big enough for an outpost?” Kerry asked.

“It’s the capital of the state, boy. Yeah, there’s an outpost there.”

“We’ll take Jax and Gigi with us. Maybe their outpost has some ideas about what to do or can point us in the right direction,” Kerry decreed.

Although I was still worried about Jax, knowing we had a plan made me feel better. I snuggled against my boy, closed my eyes, and drifted off.

#

Kerry

John banked the fire for the night, and I put Gemma back to bed in her tent. I ran an idea past the old man and he nodded. Soon a strong blue line ran over the snow and rocks in a circle around our campsite. It was the least I could do to ensure we all got some rest.

Nothing Diabolical’s gonna be slipping through that.

I had another idea, but that one I didn’t mention to Clem. All that talk about miracle workers earlier got my brain working. I walked around our campsite until I got a signal, then made a call.

“Kerry?” As soon as I heard Hank’s voice, I realized I woke him up. “All good, kiddo?”

“No.”

I told him in quick, quiet sentences what had happened and asked him if he could bring me Ms. Chapman’s Balm of Gilead.

“That’ll fix him up, right? You said it was a miracle in a jar.”

“Yeah, it’ll work, but I’m looking at your location right now and you’re in the middle of nowhere.” His voice was muffled for a second, like he’d covered the phone with his hand, then he was back on the line. “Gina says she’s been to the Augusta outpost before and knows the medical chief there.”

“Good. At first light, John and Gigi are ’porting us back to the SUVs. I figure we’ll get to Augusta at about eleven.”

“We’ll go now and leave it with the medical chief.”

“Sounds good. Thanks. Wait a second. Miss Weatherbee’s there now ? This late?” My sluggish brain woke up for a second. “Oh. She finally took mercy on you?”

“She did. We were married this morning at the courthouse.”

“You’re one lucky son of a gun, Hank.” I smirked and shook my head.

“Don’t I know it.”