Page 8 of Take You Home (Redwater Demons #3)
He’s barely two parking spaces away when there’s a sharp stabbing sensation just behind his left eye. Locke flinches, pressing his fist to his mouth like he’s trying not to throw up. Obie forces himself back another foot, and the pain roars up to something explosive.
Sucking in a hard breath, he takes a few steps closer to Locke. Instantly, the headache recedes. “That’s our limit. Twenty feet, give or take.”
Locke looks appalled. “What? But we can’t?— I can’t live like that! I can’t just bring a demon back to the Sanctum!”
“You say that like I’d actually want to be there,” Obie says, massaging his temples. “Which, to be perfectly clear, I don’t. I’d rather eat glass.”
“How do we break it, then?” Locke hugs his arms across his chest. The posture looked prickly and defensive before, but now, it’s like he’s just trying to hold himself together. “The bidirectional binding?”
“Easy. We just use the counterspell.” Obie gives Locke a savage smile.
“Oh, that’s right?— The Magic-Weaver’s Companion doesn’t have any counterspells.
And I don’t suppose you thought to do a thorough nuance analysis before playing with the dangerous spell book?
Or even just researched other binding spells to check their reversals? ”
Locke’s jaw works. He doesn’t answer.
“You’re in way over your head here, kid.”
“I might not know much about creating point-by-point counterspells,” Locke snaps, “but we both know someone who does. Call Roma or?—or Esmeralda Laguerre. One of them will be able to figure it out.”
All at once, the world goes very still around Obie. “Call Roma or Ez,” he repeats, cold realization flooding through him. “You chose this spell on purpose, didn’t you?”
Locke squints at him. “What?”
“You said yourself that you want Roma back.” There’s a roaring in Obie’s ears. “Did you seriously expect me to fall for that? You really thought you could cast a spell that neither of us could break and convince me to compromise her? Or Ez?”
Locke shakes his head sharply. “That’s not what I meant. That’s not??—?”
“Because that’s not going to happen, hunter,” Obie snarls. “I’m not putting my friends in danger. Never.”
“My plan,” Locke stresses, slowly and clearly, “was to cast the binding spell on you and force you to tell me where Roma and JJ are. This?—?” He gestures between them, frustrated. “This is just bad luck.”
The sheer annoyance on Locke’s face implies that he’s telling the truth. Still, Obie isn’t about to risk his friends for a hunch. “Yeah, well, your luck just got even worse. I’m not calling them.”
Locke rakes a hand through his hair. Under the streetlights, his pale skin is washed out and his dirty blond hair looks almost white, but his hazel eyes are as dark as ever. “Fine. Damage control, then. You’ll have to come back to the Sanctum with me tonight, and then??—?”
Obie scoffs. “Not happening.”
Locke glares at him. “I have to make curfew, Smith. There’ll be hell to pay if I don’t.”
“That sounds like a ‘you’ problem, not a ‘me’ problem.”
“Well, it’s going to turn into a ‘you’ problem if I refuse to leave this spot all night,” he says, and then, like a five-year-old proving a point, he sits down cross-legged on the blacktop.
“I’m not above sleeping on the ground. And, since you can’t be more than twenty feet away from me, it’ll be so easy for the Sanctum to take you down when they come looking for me. ”
Obie rolls his eyes. “Please. No one in their right mind would’ve signed off on this piss-poor excuse for a plan. You’re flying solo right now.”
Locke smirks. “Yes, but I did leave a note with this address on my desk. Just in case you killed me before I could bind you. If I don’t check in before curfew, they’ll search my room and find it?—along with all my other research into you.”
Obie stares at him. “You really thought I was going to kill you that quickly?”
Locke’s expression shuts down. “I wasn’t blind to the possibility.”
“Then why did you even risk it?”
“Because I want my friends back, Nostringvadha,” he spits out.
Obie twitches at the sound of his real name in Locke’s venomous voice, but that’s not what bothers him about the words.
No, what bothers him is the fact that Locke actually sounds sincere.
He actually sounds like he’s upset that he didn’t accomplish his goal, upset that he couldn’t find JJ and Roma.
And Obie has been in Locke’s head. He’s seen how devastated Locke looked whenever he saw JJ post-defection.
Chester Locke might be a brainwashed attack dog, but he truly does miss his friends. He truly does think he’s doing the right thing by trying to drag them back to the Sanctum.
Obie wouldn’t go so far as to call any of those redeeming qualities, but they certainly mean Locke isn’t as much of a sociopath as he could be.
He lets out a slow breath, weighing his options.
Clearly, bringing Locke back to Obie’s house isn’t an option.
And if Locke really did leave his location in his room, then Obie doesn’t want to still be here when the strike force inevitably arrives.
The only real option is to follow Locke back to the Sanctum. But that might not actually be such a bad thing. If Obie is invisible, then Locke won’t be able to stop him from doing some low-level snooping, maybe even stealing some intel.
Getting the concrete evidence they need to bring the Sanctum down. “All right,” Obie relents. “One night. Do you have the spell book in your room? ”
Locke shakes his head. “It’s in the restricted spellcasting library in the prison, so we’ll have to wait for tomorrow. It’ll raise too many red flags if I swipe in while I’m not on shift.”
Obie bites back a grimace. Looks like his espionage plans will have to wait. “Fine. We’ll analyze the spell tomorrow and figure out how to break it. Hopefully, it won’t take more than a few days.”
“Hopefully,” Locke says dourly, glaring at a point over Obie’s shoulder. “Back to the Sanctum, then?”
Obie swallows down his misgivings. “Back to the Sanctum,” he agrees quietly, and he peels open a rift to just outside the property, ushers a scowling Locke through it, and steps straight into enemy territory.