Page 17 of Take You Home (Redwater Demons #3)

Chester is more talkative than usual right now. Probably still in shock from the events of the past hour. Obie tries not to feel too bad for taking advantage of that. “Why do they want to know about the gods?”

Chester lets out his breath in a hiss. “No idea. They’ve always had us ask, but I thought they were just easy questions to get the demons talking.

Nowadays, though, the Council actually seems interested in the answers.

” His eyebrows furrow. “How’d you even get into the interrogation room before? I thought you were waiting outside.”

“I was,” Obie says, wringing out his sponge again. “I rifted inside.”

“You shouldn’t be able to do that.” Chester sounds more bewildered than angry. “The prison is filled with anti-rifting spell work. Hell, it’s filled with anti- magic spell work?—even our spellcasters have trouble with it sometimes.”

Obie’s stomach twists. “Apparently, it works against humans and demons,” he says quietly. “Not so much against gods.”

He’s furious with himself for not figuring that out before today. It took him less than ten minutes?— ten minutes? —of poking at the Sanctum’s spell work to find multiple workarounds for every spell imaginable, from rifts to glamours to offensive spells.

If he had just thought to test his god powers sooner, then maybe they could’ve rescued Cass quickly enough back in March that he wouldn’t have gotten hurt at all, much less had his soul ripped to shreds. But Obie will just have to content himself with using those abilities in his future jailbreaks.

Chester nods slowly. “So that’s why you decided to cause the blackout and free Laila?”

Obie considers him. “Honestly?”

Chester pauses, his gaze flickering over to Obie. “Sure.”

“The blackout was an accident,” Obie says.

“I was experimenting with how far I could push past the anti-magic spell work, and I pushed too hard. Short-circuited the electrical system. Once I did that, I… panicked. I wasn’t sure what else I’d done, so my first instinct?—my only instinct?—was to get Laila out of there before something else went wrong.

” He meets Chester’s wide eyes. “I wouldn’t have interfered otherwise.

You didn’t give me a reason to. You didn’t hurt her. ”

Chester lets out a shaky breath. “Oh.”

“That was a good call with the knife, by the way,” Obie adds. “I’m sorry you had to clean up my mess.”

Chester looks away, gesturing at the spotless patch of tile floor between them. “Well, we’re?—we’re both cleaning it up now. So I guess that works.”

Obie’s lips twitch. “Yeah. I guess so.”

“Just…” Chester’s eyes dart back to Obie. “Please don’t do it again? Even if Nasir doesn’t want me back on interrogation duty, I still might have to handle some overflow cases. We’ve been getting a lot of neophyte demons transferred to us for some reason.”

Obie’s heart does something unsteady. He quickly weighs his options and decides on the truth.

“I don’t know why you’re getting transfers, but you’ve been getting a lot of neophytes in general because the Chain has been sending them directly to the Sanctum.

I told you that they’re working together, remember? ”

He instantly knows he miscalculated when Chester’s face shuts down. “Really? This bullshit again?” he bites out. “That may have worked on JJ and Roma, Smith, but it’s not going to work on me.”

Obie’s hackles rise. “Locke?—Chester, look at me,” he snaps, and Chester gives him a startled glance.

“You can think that I’m wrong all you want, but I’m not trying to manipulate you.

We’ve never manipulated JJ or Roma, either.

All the evidence points to the Chain and the Sanctum working together, and it points to them working together worldwide.

Whether you choose to believe us is on you. ”

Chester’s jaw works. “Yeah, whatever,” he says, going back to scrubbing.

And Chester??—

He might be a belligerent asshole most of the time, but he’s definitely a lot less heartless than Obie initially expected. Honestly, he can see why JJ and Roma are so fond of him?—and so determined to get him out of here.

Obie might even agree with them. Just a little bit.

It’s an uncomfortable realization. Pushing the thought from his mind, he dips his sponge back into the blood-tinged water, squeezes it out, and silently helps Chester until the interrogation room is spotless.

Chester fumbles his bow and arrow for the fourth time in three minutes and curses under his breath. “How do you make this look so simple, Nehemiah?”

“Easy. Like this,” Bryant says, and she fluidly pulls an arrow out of her quiver, aims at the target across the training grounds, and lets it fly. It whizzes over the sixty yards like a homing missile before hitting yet another perfect bullseye. “See? Nothing to it.”

Chester scowls, pulling back his own bowstring and squinting across the field. When he lets his arrow go, it arcs through the air and just barely lodges itself in the outermost ring of his target.

Better than his previous few attempts, though. At least this one actually hit the target. “I’m already regretting my decision to let you choose this morning’s training.”

“Aw, live a little!” Bryant says, nudging him in the ribs. “Just have fun with it. It’s not like you need to know any of this for your job, so…”

Her smile wavers with the last few words, like she only realized as she said them that they could’ve been more tactful.

The same mix of shame and anxiety from three days ago snakes through Chester’s stomach, but he just forces a smile.

“It’s fine. Really, it is,” he says, carefully nocking another arrow.

“And it?—it works out that I won’t be interrogating for another few weeks.

If my hand slipped that easily, it means I’m more on edge than I thought. ”

Bryant purses her lips. “On edge about JJ and Roma, you mean?”

Actually, Chester was referring more to the invisible demon who’s been following him around for the past two weeks.

Scratch that?—the invisible demon god with the horns and the tentacles and the eyes on his forearms who’s been following him around.

“A little bit,” Chester hedges, avoiding Bryant’s eyes as he aims his arrow and lets it fly.

He’s not surprised when it sails straight past the target.

He never learned this in as much detail as Strike Team Kappa, after all.

He and JJ trained primarily under Sawyer Solomon, and her specialty was close combat?—particularly Filipino martial arts.

Expert markswoman Naomi Gutierrez was more involved with Bryant and Roma’s training, and their fighting styles reflect that.

The memories leave a bitter taste in his mouth now. “And I guess I’m thinking about Sawyer and Naomi, too,” he says cautiously, gauging Bryant’s reaction.

Predictably enough, her face shuts down.

“Yeah, well,” she says shortly, grabbing an arrow and shooting it with barely a glance.

It hits the target dead-on with a dull thwap.

“They have even more explaining to do than JJ and Roma. At least we have tacit confirmation that JJ and Roma were manipulated into defecting. Sawyer and Naomi just abandoned us for nothing. That?—?” Bryant scowls, relentlessly reaching for another arrow. “That hurts.”

Chester’s heart twists. It’s a confession she never would’ve made to him a few short months ago, but now that they’re the only ones left from their friend group, they’ve been starting to open up with each other more.

It’s been eye-opening and frustrating at the same time. In the past, Chester was always on guard against purebred Bryant reporting any of his more critical views of the Sanctum, and from what Chester has slowly been realizing, he thinks Bryant might have had the same fears.

That she might’ve thought Chester would use her words against her to increase his own status.

It kills him to see how easily the bloodlines hierarchy managed to divide them.

They could’ve had years of talking and laughing and training together if they weren’t always convinced that one wrong move would get them outed to the Council.

“It does hurt,” he admits quietly. “And you’re right?—it does feel worse than what JJ and Roma did.

” He shoots her a sideways glance. “Did you ever get the feeling that Sawyer and Naomi weren’t happy here? ”

Bryant’s jaw works. She shakes her head. “Nope. Not even once. In hindsight, it must’ve been during those last few weeks when they started training us together?—when they started talking to each other more. I guess they realized they had more blasphemy in common than they thought.”

Chester winces. He remembers that last month before Strike Team Kappa’s final exam. He was so excited when Sawyer and Naomi slowly started teaching them together instead of separately, when Naomi really started treating Chester and JJ like hunters instead of interlopers.

None of them knew what was coming.

Suddenly, Bryant’s lips twitch. “Hey, do you remember when you were our demon?”

The long-forgotten memories spark through Chester. A reluctant smile tugs at his lips. “During Kappa’s drills, you mean? When you needed an adversary?”

“Yeah!” Bryant’s grin widens. “They pre-cast baby offensive spells on your arm and had you attack us with them. It was adorable.”

“I wasn’t adorable,” Chester says defensively. “I was fearsome. I made a great demon. ”

Abruptly, there’s a snort from just behind Chester?—a snort that most definitely didn’t come from Bryant. Chester nearly starts with surprise, attempting to cover it with a cough. He knows that Obie has to stay invisible, but Chester hates never knowing exactly how close the demon is.

And having Nostringvadha at his back makes him feel just a little bit lightheaded.

“You did make a great demon,” Bryant says, and Chester hastily refocuses his attention on her. Her smile is wry and fond. “And you’re a halfway decent training partner, too.”

“Gee, thanks. I’m honored.”

“You should be.” Bryant nods at his target.

“You need to follow through. There’s a split second between you releasing the string and the arrow leaving the bow, and you’re relaxing the tension in your back muscles before the arrow actually leaves the bow.

Try to keep your form until the arrow hits the target, just for practice. ”

Chester blinks at her, surprised. “Thanks, Nehemiah,” he says, following her advice. This time, the arrow hits the outermost white circle of the target again, but at least it doesn’t sail straight past it.

He and Bryant lapse into silence for a few minutes, leaving him alone with his thoughts.

Frankly, he’s not sure if that’s a good thing.

He’s pretty sure that Bryant’s main objective in choosing a more difficult skill for this morning’s training was to take his mind off of Friday’s debacle?—and, more specifically, of getting reamed out by Councilwoman Nasir afterward.

He can still feel the weight of her disapproval roiling through him, and he swallows hard, trying to force it down.

If only she knew just how much of a disappointment he really is.

Not only did he allow the demon he was interrogating to slip away before she could be tested, but he’s also been carting a demon god around the Sanctum and bringing him dangerously close to all their secrets .

That was a good call with the knife, by the way.

A dull flush heats up the back of Chester’s neck. Determinedly ignoring it, he nocks his next arrow.

He’s going to be hearing Nasir’s sharp voice ringing in his head for weeks, but he’s been a lot more preoccupied with what he learned about Obie three days ago than anything else. It was very nearly overwhelming to see just how powerful Obie is, just how unhuman he is??—

Just how easily he wore that mantle of godhood. Just how genuinely happy Laila was when Nostringvadha appeared to save her.

Chester knows the legends. He knows that Nostringvadha was banished for stealing the Fount of Blessings?—a fountainlike structure that contains the essence of the Fourteen’s power?—from the gods’ inner realm and installing it in the center of Tamaros, where all of his people could freely access its life-giving and curse-breaking abilities.

But Chester was never able to reconcile that image of a benevolent god with the scowling face of Obadiah Smith until Friday, and the effect has been striking, to say the least.

Especially since he finally saw Obie’s true form?—his real true form. Chester always thought that Obie’s demonic facade was the monstrous dragon–chimera hybrid he’s glimpsed over the past few months, grounded in creatures of myth and magic, but apparently, that was a misdirection all along.

No, the real Obadiah Smith takes the form of a human with a thousand different animals blended into his skin. The real Obadiah Smith is a living, breathing testament to all of humanity, to all of Earth, to everything this dimension has to offer.

Chester doesn’t want to admit just how much he instantly understood about Obie after that. Doesn’t want to admit just how effortlessly all the old legends about Nostringvadha fell into place.

Doesn’t want to admit how much he kind of wants to see that true form again, to really absorb all the little details outside of the tunnel vision of darkness and panic.

Chester reaches back for another arrow, but his fingers close on empty air. “Shall we reset and try again?” he asks, sighing with exasperation when he sees how cleanly all of Bryant’s arrows pierced her target.

“Let’s,” Bryant says smugly, and they walk down the range side by side, Chester knowing that Obie is keeping pace just behind him.