Page 29 of Take You Home (Redwater Demons #3)

Trevor snorts out a laugh. “Dude, he keeps peeking over at you like you’re his security blanket. It’s adorable. And he offered you his mozzarella sticks not once, but twice. That’s love, right there.”

“On a more serious note,” Sasha continues, “he seems really happy whenever people ask about you, and he’s trying really hard to learn everyone’s names. It’s obvious that he couldn’t care less about bowling, but he cares about this place because you care about it. That’s the biggest tell, I think.”

A wisp of bitterness curls through Obie’s chest.

Right. So Chester is just a good actor. He’s keeping Obie in sight to make sure they don’t run afoul of the binding spell’s limits, and he’s being friendly and polite because that’s just his personality.

Obie hates himself for being a little disappointed.

Sasha excuses herself to walk up to the approach for her upcoming turn, Trevor following in her wake as they discuss how they’re going to teach “Kyle” how to bowl next week.

Once they’re sufficiently distracted, Maggie shifts closer to Obie, lowering her voice.

“By the way,” she says quietly, “I think I’m close to finding a paper trail. ”

Obie stiffens. “For the neophyte demons who keep ending up in the Sanctum’s prison?”

“Yes.” Maggie’s jaw twitches. “I’m trying to act slowly so my superiors don’t notice, but I might have hard evidence for your, ah, connections in the next week or so. Do any of you have a plan for after that?”

Obie bites back a grimace. “No,” he confesses softly. “But a lot of old paradigms have gotten shaken up in the past six months, so we can hopefully use that to our advantage.”

“Hopefully.” Maggie’s eyes slide back to the lane, watching as Sasha’s first throw predictably goes wide.

“I really want this over with sooner rather than later. I?—I don’t even want to think about how many demons I’ve personally brought to the Chain and promised that they were safe now, only for… ” She trails off. “You know.”

Only for them to end up tortured and killed in the Sanctum’s prison. Obie tastes bile. “Yeah. I know.”

And he knows Maggie feels the plight of neophyte demons?—and the guilt of following corrupt orders?—more acutely than most. Whereas the majority of neophytes end up under a summoner’s control for a few decades at most, Maggie was subjected to multiple binding spells over the course of centuries, forced to fight in a relentless onslaught of humanity’s worst wars.

Even once a rival spellcaster broke the binding after a few hundred years, well??—

Maggie didn’t know anything in this dimension besides war and pain and servitude. She didn’t even realize she could leave the bloodshed behind.

She stayed as a soldier to the very humans who kept her imprisoned for almost another century before Obie finally found her and got her out.

He wishes he’d sensed her sooner. He doesn’t always notice newly summoned demons when they arrive in this dimension?—only when they’re fairly close to him geographically?—and he just happened to be on another continent at the time.

Hell, he didn’t even do anything important during that particular half a millennium.

It was sheer chance that he missed her for centuries, and it was sheer chance that he finally found her five hundred years too late.

He thinks he’ll always regret that.

Now, Maggie lets out a slow breath, her eyes drifting down the lanes. She pauses at the far corner, her lips twitching. “Looks like the McGuire brothers got their hands on Kyle.”

“Great,” Obie groans, following her gaze. “They’ll be trying to invite him to go kayaking and paintballing with them in five minutes flat, and??—?”

The rest of his sentence dies in his throat, his eyes widening.

Chester is currently standing across the bowling alley, deep in conversation with Sean, Mark, and Jonah. All three of the college boys are gesturing meaningfully as they talk, and Chester seems utterly absorbed by the discussion, the tray of food in his arms all but forgotten.

But that’s not the bizarre part. The bizarre part is that he’s standing across the bowling alley?— a distance of at least sixty feet, more than three times their usual limit.

Obie didn’t even notice. In fact, he doesn’t feel the slightest trace of a headache, and Chester doesn’t look like he’s about to double over in pain, either.

What the hell?

“Obie?” Maggie is frowning at him. “Obie, you good?”

“Yeah,” Obie says eventually, forcing his eyes back to Maggie. “ Yeah, I’m, uh. I’m good. Just remembered something I need to ask Kyle later. Anyway, let me know what you find, okay? I can pass it along to my people, and we’ll see what we can do.”

Maggie regards him with furrowed eyebrows before nodding. “Sure. Sounds like a plan.”

Luckily, Sasha finishes her second throw right then, signaling the start of Obie’s next frame. He waves at Maggie before quickly retreating towards the ball return, his eyes drifting back over to where Chester is still obliviously chatting with the McGuire brothers.

So the binding spell is giving them a longer leash now, huh? But if the spell’s goal is to keep them in close proximity and it’s apparently decided that it doesn’t need to expend as much energy to do that, then??—

Then Obie really doesn’t want to dwell on what must’ve shifted in his relationship with Chester to make that happen.