Page 40 of Take You Home (Redwater Demons #3)

I t’s been exactly eight hours, forty-three minutes, and fifty-five seconds since Obie last saw Chester.

Not that he’s keeping track because he misses him or anything. Of course not. In fact, Obie is currently enjoying the last few minutes of his shower?—his non-communal shower?—in his own home, a luxury he’s been denied for the past two months.

Good water pressure is a fantastic thing. He doesn’t technically need to shower?—there are spells he can use to keep himself clean?—but nothing beats letting a steady stream of hot water melt his worries away.

Worries like all the trouble Chester could be getting into back at the Sanctum without him.

Obie fights back a wince, rinsing the last of the shampoo out of his hair.

Right now, he and Chester are testing the time limit on the binding spell, seeing how long they can be apart without incident.

It’ll be important to know if Obie gets stuck while sneaking through the purebred-only wing or needs to leave Chester’s side for another reason, but?? —

But that doesn’t mean Obie has to like it. He hasn’t felt the slightest bit of a pull towards Chester for almost nine hours, not even a hint of a headache, and honestly, it’s making him anxious.

What if something happened to his stupid hunter?

The two of them haven’t been apart for more than a few hours since this entire debacle began, and frankly, Obie has gotten used to Chester’s presence.

He’s gotten used to Chester’s solid form and his shadow on the floor and the cadence of his voice and the rhythm of his breathing and??—

Obie shuts that train of thought down before he can follow it any further. No reason for him to think about his preoccupation with Chester Locke right now, not when he’s still enjoying the tail end of his?—and he repeats?— non-communal shower.

He’s looking forward to introducing Chester to the wonders of non-communal showering once he leaves the Sanctum.

Chester obviously had a shower in his parents’ house before his family was killed, but that was over a decade ago.

Obie wants to see how Chester reacts to having his own personal containers of body wash and shampoo, not to mention Obie’s fluffy towels.

He wants to see how Chester reacts to a lot of Obie’s creature comforts, really. He wants to cook good meals for him, introduce him to new books and TV shows, buy him new clothes and warm pajamas and a cozy robe that he can wear while he curls up on the couch with a mug of hot cocoa and??—

Honestly, Obie just wants to spoil him. It’s an impulse that he’s carefully not analyzing too deeply.

Sighing, he steps out of his?—once more, for emphasis?— non-communal shower, dries himself off, and pulls on his clothes, padding out into the living room.

It’s been almost two months since he’s been in his safest of safe houses, his actual home, and even though a quick cleaning spell took care of the dust that’s gathered since then, he can’t shake the feeling that there’s still something off about the space. It feels almost…

Lonely.

He’s not analyzing that sensation too deeply, either.

Grimacing, he snaps open a pocket dimension, grabs a folder of research from inside, and collapses onto his couch, flipping through the pages.

He and Chester have spent the past few days doing a deep dive into documents from six years ago?—when the Chain lured the demons responsible for the Jackson–Locke murders back to Redwater just in time for Strike Team Kappa’s final exam?—but so far, they haven’t found anything that the Conspiracy Fam doesn’t already know.

Obie hasn’t come across anything about Chester’s final exam, either. For the purposes of their investigation, he knows that Kappa’s was more important, but he can’t help wondering what the Council chose for their other neophyte hunter.

Right on cue, his cell phone buzzes on the end table.

Hope flashes through him before he remembers that he and Chester have never exchanged numbers?—between the binding spell’s distance limitations and its still-bizarre telepathic link, getting Chester’s contact information never really seemed necessary.

And it’s definitely not necessary for Obie to be wishing for a text from Chester like a teenage human with a crush. Scowling, he plucks the phone off its charger and swipes into the screen, skimming over the message.

His eyes widen.

ESMERALDA: Hey, so does Kyle’s idiot friend still need that counterspell? Come on down, we found a winner

“Holy crap,” he breathes, and without bothering to send a reply, he pushes himself to his feet, snaps open a rift to Ez’s house, and strides through it. “Seriously? It was that easy?”

Ez sputters indignantly from the couch. “Easy? We’ve been working on it for almost six weeks, Obadiah! Meals were skipped! Sleep was lost! Eyebrows were burned off!”

“Eyebrows?” Obie repeats, glancing at Roma next to her as he sits down in the armchair across from them.

Roma looks amused. With a start, Obie realizes that he hasn’t actually been here since before Chester cast the binding spell, and the little changes that have accumulated since then are striking: the piles of spell books stacked around the couch, the notebooks and loose pieces of paper strewn over the coffee table, the twin mugs of tea on the end tables.

To Obie’s surprise, they all make the space feel more cozy, more lived-in, more complete.

And Roma looks at home here, too. Like she?—and her thankfully intact eyebrows?—really belongs. “There are spells to grow them back. Not a big deal. And it bears mentioning that the skipped meals and lost sleep were mostly on Ez’s end, and she doesn’t actually need either of them.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Ez stresses, and she turns back to Obie with a sigh.

“But yes. It was ‘that easy,’ quote-unquote. We just had to take your description of the bidirectional binding spell’s effects and reverse engineer probable mistakes in the pre-casting process that would’ve led to the original incantation having the effects in question. ”

Obie opens his mouth, closes it, and says, “All right, I take it back. That doesn’t sound easy at all.”

“Oh, you noticed?”

Roma rolls her eyes, handing Obie a piece of paper off the table. “Here’s the counterspell. The only catch is that it requires both affected parties to cast it simultaneously, so they’ll definitely want to do a few dry runs first.”

“No preferred magic stance,” Ez adds, “although they should both use the same stance, and they should be within a few feet of each other. Also, they’ll want to make this gesture at the end, just to facilitate the magic.” She raises a hand to chest height, her palm facing the ceiling.

Dutifully, Obie copies the motion. “How many rough drafts did you have to go through?”

“A lot,” Roma admits, holding up a well-worn notebook as evidence. “Most of these were just trial and error to find the mistake in the pre-casting process, but we worked through a lot of different magic bases for the counterspell itself, too.”

“I still think we should’ve gone with Blakeman,” Ez says.

“You always think we should go with Blakeman.”

“Because we always should! It’s by far the most versatile neutral base!”

“And this is…” Obie squints at the reversal. “Malachi?”

Roma looks pleased. “Yep.”

“It’s a very human-lite base,” Obie says.

Ez jabs a finger at him. “That’s what I said!”

“But it’s technically neutral,” Roma says emphatically, “and the people involved are human, so it works.” Abruptly, she frowns. “Actually, I shouldn’t have assumed?—are either of Kyle’s friends demons? They’ll still be able to cast the counterspell, but…”

“Not that I know of,” Obie says evasively, folding the paper neatly in half and tucking it in his pocket. “And I feel like that’s something Kyle would’ve mentioned.”

“Probably,” Ez agrees, and she hesitates.

“But while we were crafting that counterspell, we spent a lot of time researching binding spells in general, too. And we actually think we might be getting close to a reversal for unidirectional binding spells?—as in, the ones that summoners use on neophyte demons.”

All at once, the world goes quiet around Obie. “What?”

“Yeah.” Ez smiles ruefully. “Our current draft still requires dual spellcasting with the neophyte in question as one of the spellcasters, which obviously isn’t realistic, but we’re fairly confident that we’ll have a usable counterspell within a few months.”

Obie leans back heavily in his armchair, absorbing the words. He wasn’t terribly shocked when Ez and Roma started putting together human-magic glamours and neutral-base healing spells, using their combined knowledge of demon and human magic to find unique solutions, but somehow??—

Somehow, he never even considered that they could figure out how to break unidirectional binding spells, too. Never even considered that there was a way to do that without killing the summoner.

Never even considered that the most traumatizing aspect of this dimension could someday lose its power. “I’m… happy,” he says slowly, glancing up at Ez. “Really, I am. It’s just…”

Ez finishes the thought for him. “It would’ve been nice if it existed when we needed it. Right?”

Fleetingly, Obie remembers when the first hunters came for him, remembers how their binding spell crawled over his skin and burrowed into his bones, remembers the screaming and the blood and the pain and??—

He shoves the memories away. “Right,” he agrees softly. “It?—it would’ve been nice.”

“Well,” Roma says, giving him a small smile, “even if nothing else good came from this whole episode with the bidirectional binding spell, then at least we’ll know it set the foundation to help demons in the future.”

Obie’s smile feels easier this time. “Yeah. And a lot of good has come from the bidirectional binding spell,” he adds impulsively. “If it weren’t for that, I never would’ve met Kyle. And Kyle is… a good thing. ”