Page 24
24
S kip guided us from the heartwood into the woods several feet before halting, his palm raised. “I cast the shell muting sound only to this point. Once we cross this line, they’ll be able to hear us.”
“Our enemies are near,” Jae said on a low growl that jangled my nerves.
“They’ve been pouring into the nexus all day. The mercenaries the Maces hired won’t risk association with traffickers, so most here are corrupted guildies from the Towpath.” Skip frowned at me. “Trust no one.”
Jae snorted.
“I barely trust him,” I said, glance flashing to my demon, then to my familiar. “Or you.”
“Good.” Skip tipped his head in a decisive nod. “I’ll distract the sentries guarding the duplicate array on the ridge. Look for Henry. Last I saw the Dyers, they were defending their farm.” He pointed. “Can’t miss them. Head north.”
“Ready?” I asked Jae, more for my benefit than his.
“The gods knit me in my mother’s womb to achieve this purpose.”
My brows crept into my hairline, my eyes widening. Wow. Okay. “Remember. No talking.” I tightened my grip on his hand. “Avoid using magic until the very last moment. They can’t find us if they can’t trace our power to its source, us.”
Jae scowled at me, his irritation at me blooming. “Go,” he told Skip. “We will not be far behind you.”
“Find me when you set the last layer. You can’t finish this without me.” My familiar tugged to balance the backpack on his shoulders and pivoted. On silent feet, he slipped farther into the woods before veering south. I lost sight of him in the thick leaves and greenery, but could resume tracing his path when the brush rustled. My heart thudding, I jolted as a high-pitched whistle shattered the quiet—a sentry alerting his companions of Skip’s presence.
Be my shadow. And stay low.
For once, I didn’t mind Jae’s presence inside my head. When he crouched and crept into the forest, I stayed glued to his back. The woods were my home, my sanctuary. If attacked in this environment, I was as equipped to defend myself as my demon was to fight, perhaps more so, but joining the battle wasn’t the point, not yet. Finding Henry and Peaches’ discarded claw was our priority. So I snuck close on Jae’s trail, his dark bulk comforting and at the same time, sinister.
We had to reach the clamorous fighting ahead.
I spread my legs to balance my stance when the ground shook. Fire burst in a mushroom cloud over the tree canopy from the valley below us. The farther we inched past Bea’s henchmen mages, the more the air stank of ozone and blood, but my pulse racing, I kept moving. Refusing to think about how deeply Bea’s rot had poisoned the Towpath, I crawled through the thorny brush when Jae did and mirrored his sprint over rocky terrain when we couldn’t avoid clearings in the underbrush. Unloosed magic zipped by us as we ran, Griffith’s bolts of lightning, pressurized bursts of water, and whistling projectiles that burst into flame when they thunked into oaks and maples around us. We weren’t targets yet, but friendly and unfriendly fire from the fight rocketed through the surrounding woods.
Jae didn’t lead me directly to the battle. By my best guess, the combatants had collided in the Grove on the edge of the botanical garden, a haze of smoke from scattered fires that the counterattacks from water mages hadn’t extinguished yet thickest there, but though my heart ached to defend the ground I’d invested so much of my energy nurturing, no matter how desperately I craved to rescue my dryads, Megan, and the many friends I’d worked with, I couldn’t dive into the violent chaos rattling the oaks. I must not yield to that distracting temptation.
Skip was right. We needed to find Henry to end this.
Dodging combatants and the magic they unleashed in chaotic bursts, my demon and I hurried to the Dyer farm instead. Panting, my legs shaking, I raced after Jae. With the worst of the fighting now at our backs, we could run faster if not more safely. We chose speed over caution, zooming pell-mell through the forest rather than at our previous wary crouch. A blackberry thicket beside me exploded with flames as my legs pumped, my fear screaming through me. I sprinted, didn’t slow. If anything, the sense of wrongness and terror zipping through my veins goaded me to race faster, to the danger instead of away.
If Bea and her vicious posse reached the kid first, all was lost.
Black locusts and elms smoldered as we neared the Dyer homeplace. Smoke wisped and the wild jangle of magic rattled my bones. The cacophony of battle wasn’t as loud, though. I leaped like a deer over a groove cut into the scorched ground, but no power barreled toward us, nor attack targeted us. That fight had shifted to the botanical garden. My stare swept the woods and brush, panic overtaking me. Had the family fled to Megan? To Griffith’s arrival with reinforcements? Had I been mistaken to circle around the assault on my home turf to search for the youngest Dyer here?
Call the hound. She will answer you.
I didn’t question Jae or his judgment, not for a single moment. Even though my shout would draw any of Bea’s mages close enough to hear me—finding Henry was that important. “Peaches,” I yelled out, my chest heaving with my urgent struggle for more oxygen, to suck in the air to keep going, no matter what. I hurdled a shattered pine and ran like hell itself chased after me. “Peaches!”
A joyous yip resounded through the valley, drowning out the deafening detonations in the botanical garden behind us. “This way.” Jae darted into a tangle of scrub brush to our right. “Keep calling the hound.”
I obeyed him, screaming the hellhound’s ridiculous name as her barks grew louder, closer. Occasionally, I yelled for Henry, too. Couldn’t hurt.
But I knew. Because I would have done the same.
When Bea had launched her attack on the farm, Andrew Dyer had set his most lethal weapon—a young, though no less deadly hellhound—on protecting the most vulnerable member of his clan.
When we found Peaches, we’d also find Henry.
My dread robbing the oxygen from my lungs, I lurched and stumbled in Jae’s shadow—and plowed into him when he halted, which spilled us both to a forest floor that glowed with the dying embers of battle that had raged here short minutes ago.
Peaches exploded through the wreck and ruin of the foliage when Jae and I rolled to a stop, the both of us panting. I screamed, wriggling again when Jae sank his claws into me to grab me and contorted to shift us in the dirt stingy inches from where the hellhound’s massive paws crashed to the ground. My soul briefly left my body, my horror complete when Peaches hunkered over us, muscles bunched. Spittle sprayed from her protruding, blood-smeared snout, razored teeth smeared with red. “Oh, my fuck. Dear Jesus. Henry!” I shrieked over the predatory growl vibrating Jae’s chest pressed to mine.
When the kid’s face appeared next to the hellhound’s thick neck, when he beamed a wide, radiant smile at me, my heart stopped. Just stopped. “Oh, there you are,” Henry Dyer said, his cheeks smudged with ash and the tips of tangled hair at his left temple still lit red with embers burning. He held up a claw.
A black, bloodied, and newly shed hellhound claw.
“The bad lady stole Peaches’ toenail from under the deck, but that’s okay. Peaches gave me another one.” He patted the beast’s flanks. “Cause she’s the best, best girl. Aren’t you princess?”
“Let me up,” I said on a shrill squeak, scrambling to catch the hellhound claw the kid dropped to me.
Peaches bounced off me, off us, but my demon held me in place, his rough hands sweeping over my torso to check for injuries. “For fuck’s sake, get off,” I said, sitting upright in the dirt. I swept my hands through the dead leaves. “You made me drop it.”
My demon shoved me aside to rifle the leaf litter in search of the claw. “Got it.” His smile wide and victorious, he lifted the totem we needed for the last layer of the array.
I glared at him, wiping hellhound spit off my neck. It splattered, thick with mucous and tinged pink by blood, when I shook the slime off. “Thanks.”
Peaches kneeled in the broken twigs and dry, crackling leaves and snickering wildly, Henry climbed off her back. His feet thudded to the ground, his legs bared by cutoff shorts smudged with dirt. Several thin scratches that must have come from thorns etched his skinny legs. “Now you just need the bones.”
Bones of the betrayer. One totem in the fifth and final layer of the array.
Without them, we couldn’t complete the magic.
Sucking in air, I shoved to my hands and knees before, lurching, I stood. “Where’s Bea?”
Blinking his consternation at me, Jae slid the hellhound’s claw underneath the breastplate protecting his chest. “Why? Your enemy will die, but that vengeance must wait.”
“Our enemy. She wants to chop you up and sell your pieces, too.” My mouth thinned. “And I don’t want vengeance. I want justice.”
“We’ll kill her later.” My demon shrugged a negligent shoulder. “Or according to the dragon, you will.” He clapped his hands. “First, we must acquire the bones.”
“What bones? Whose bones?” Scowling, I shoved him. “I can’t think of a bigger betrayer than Beatrice Hocking, but using her bones doesn’t feel right.”
“Humans.” Jae huffed out a frustrated breath. “So stupid.”
The kid frowned at him. “That’s not nice.”
My demon scowled, but tipped his head in grudging acknowledgment. “Yourself excepted, oracle.”
“You shouldn’t be mean to your mate. That isn’t healthy. That’s toxic.” He jerked his jaw at his hellhound. “Peaches doesn’t like it. Good demons get to live. Wicked demons get to be her supper. That’s the deal.” Henry grabbed my forearm and tugged until I shifted my glare from my demon to him. “And you are repeating her mistake, David. The bad lady knew her brother had figured out she wasn’t sweet like him, that she’d turned out wrong. She thought her bro told your dad. That’s why she killed them. Since they were twins, she thought her brother was the betrayer who would unlock the magic.”
My stomach flipped, sour bile creeping up my esophagus. “She used Clark’s bones in the array?”
Jae chuckled. “Stupid human.”
Henry glowered at him. “Stop it.”
Peaches’ snarl lifted the small hairs at my nape and jellied my knees.
Even my demon gulped.
“A joke isn’t funny if it hurts somebody you love. So quit it,” the kid ordered my demon mate, then returned his attention to me. “The bad lady burned her brother’s bones, but it didn’t work. Because she was selfish, because she didn’t understand the array she’d stolen, the bad lady didn’t care about whose magic it came from or know whose bones it needed, who the betrayer was. Neither do you.”
“It was my dad’s array.” My eyes burned with the tears I would not shed. “It’s my responsibility. He left this to me.”
“He did.” The oracle shook his head, sadness glittering in eyes too old for a young boy. “But it was someone else’s magic first.”
I shoved a hand through my hair and struggled to swallow down the grief, to think. When I glanced at Jae, he waited patiently, despite the battle raging behind us and the risk of our enemies finding us while I fought my way through this. “You know.”
He winced, his stance loose. Ready. “The magic is layers of human magic and demonic. First Blood magic. My tribe.”
My stomach knotted. And flipped. My throat tightened, sudden fear choking me, but I gritted out the words. “The betrayer isn’t human. Never was.”
“The betrayer was a demon.” He shifted on his feet, his shoulders squaring. Wouldn’t look at me. “The one First Blood elders banished and then sealed the nexus to prevent his return to daemonica .”
My blood curdled because how long had Western Maryland’s nexus lain dormant? Centuries? Long before white men had landed on the shores of the Americas. Generations before colonization, natives had deemed these mountains as cursed somehow. “Well, it worked. The nexus closed, and that demon died here.” I trembled. “But the array includes human magic, too. Not just demonic.”
Henry grinned. “He bound one of us, a human, as any portaled demon must to survive, but he also fell in love. Like Jae.”
My demon shuddered. “I am no betrayer.”
“Nope, but he learned the same lesson you have. He and his mate created the array because they knew another demon would come and someday, their power would finally fix what he broke.” Henry hugged Peaches’s neck, and he side-eyed my demon. “I know where his bones are.”
My spine shot straight.
Wily and cool, Jae regarded the boy with an unblinking stare. “You hid them.”
“Just for a little while.” Henry laughed. “Are you ready to fetch the betrayer’s bones? And finally complete the circle he laid for you?”
My voice rose over Jae’s unhelpful snarl. “Where?”
Jaw gaping, I watched as the Dyer boy gave a triumphant fist pump and then scrambled atop the lethal hellhound again. The beast’s tongue lolled while Henry’s skinny legs grasped the barrel of her chest. He fisted a clump of Peaches’s inky fur, riding the enormous predator like a fucking horse.
Unbelievable.
“It isn’t far, but you’ll have to fly. Too much fighting. Me and Peaches can slip past. Nobody cares about us,” Henry said, squeezing Peaches with his legs to guide her around. “Even with the dragon showing up, you won’t make it on foot, though.”
“Obie’s here?” Weird buzzing filled my head. “He’s fighting?”
“He’s real mad the bad lady killed his mate.” Eyes grim, Henry nodded. “I’ll lead you to the bones of the betrayer. C’mon.”
We soared through the air, the glare of the sun settling low in the sky blinding me…or maybe it was the fireballs and bolts of lightning Jae dodged. The claws on his feet stabbed into my gut as I dangled, shrieking while the forest and the furious battle zipped below me. Jae hadn’t waited for me to glue to his front like I had when we’d escaped the botanical garden. Oh no. With his goals finally within his reach, he’d snatched me off the ground as he’d taken to the sky as though I was luggage.
Whatever, I screamed my fool head off and summoned as much power as I could muster to counter the attacks coming from the combat mages on the ground now that they could see where we were. Griffith had marshaled his forces from the direction of the garden’s Visitors Center, which billowed ominous black smoke, so I concentrated on the flurry of water, fire, and magma bursting from the cracked earth at the Grove, where Jae and I had first met. While I would’ve been more effective fighting on the ground, I could still focus my magic on acorns burrowed in the dirt, force them to blossom and unfurl from seedling to sapling to young tree in a chaotic burst. Trees shot up like arrows from the earth, some already catching fire from jagged gashes of molten rock an earth mage had forced to the surface. Clouds formed around us as water mages countered that assault with a magicked deluge. Rain dumped from the sky in a torrent, so fiercely the downpour knocked Jae’s flight aside.
Water flooded over my face, into my eyes. I couldn’t see.
But I didn’t quit. Couldn’t.
Stopping my magic meant death and spiraling to our brutal end in the chaos.
Luckily, Obie had eschewed his human form, the dragon swooping from the cloud cover above as his beast, his vibrant blue scales glinting, as big as flying McMansion. With a furious roar, Obie breathed fire on the mages hurling magic at us. They scattered at the intense burst of licking flame, giving Jae and me the chance to escape.
I couldn’t guess how Jae kept us aloft. Everywhere, lightning streaked and sizzled, the smell sweet and pungent as static tingled over every inch of my skin. Wind gusted, the rain-soaked air hitting us like a fist. Despite the slick wet of the torrential rain, my demon didn’t drop me. The tips of his claws dug into my belly, the pain hideous as I fought to call up the trees and the vines, begged and demanded the forest to defend me. Jae’s outstretched wings beat a steady thump, partially shielding me from the rain. Sometimes, I could wipe away the wet to make out what was happening beneath us, enough for joy to swell my chest at blurry glimpses of the dryads falling upon the dark shapes of intruders who had invaded their home.
I don’t know how my demon could see to follow a loping hellhound with a young boy rider, but we soared away from the pitched battle at the botanical garden. To town. Toward the FSU campus buildings squatting a few blocks from the main drag through Frostburg.
Goddess help any mundane not smart enough to seek shelter once the first rumblings of the fight had thundered across the valley.
We soared free of the magicked rain, streaks of fire, and other attacks in the assault. Jae rode the air currents lower, down to the buildings lining Frostburg’s bucolic streets. Relax your muscles. Roll.
That was the only warning I had before, five feet above the FSU commons, my demon released me. I screamed until the thunk of my body impacting the ground stole the breath from my lungs. Pain sliced through my right arm and leg, both shoulders, and my spine as I tumbled across the dry grass—an Olympic gymnast, I was not. When the world stopped spinning and I panted up at the blue sky, I took a mental inventory of the aches and throbs. The hideous agony eating me from my neck down to my ribs on the right side made cataloging the rest of the damage impossible. “You broke my fucking shoulder,” I said to Jae when his face swam into my field of vision.
He sniffed disdain. “Dislocated.” He grabbed that arm and pulled.
The pain was so intense my vision grayed, but the relief, too, was instantaneous when the joint reset with an audible pop. “I hate you,” I said through gritted teeth.
“On your feet.” My demon reached for me and pulled me up from my left uninjured side. Muscles protesting, every part of me aching and bruised, I staggered upright…and would have collapsed back to the grass without Jae bracing me when my ankle rolled. “Humans are very breakable,” he said, voice ripe with irritation.
Henry whooped his delight as he rode Peaches galloping through the quad to reach us. “That was awesome!” When the hellhound pounced to a halt inches from where I struggled to remain standing, he slid off her back to the dirt. His wide grin faltered when he saw how heavily I leaned on my demon. “You’re hurt. Oh. I’m sorry.”
Jaw clenched, I tried to curve my mouth into a reassuring smile. “That ankle’s been unstable since I sprained it in T-ball,” I lied. “I can still walk if I have help.”
“The museum is on the first floor.” The kid sighed. “Follow me.”
With Jae’s arm at my waist holding my steady, I limped to the Compton building, and I nobly did not bitch when my demon had to muscle me up the front steps. Fortunately, Henry did my grousing for me. “You shouldn’t have dropped him from so high.” The kid held the glass doors wide for Jae to lead me through them to the interior. “You’re supposed to defend your mate, take care of him, protect him above all others, including yourself.”
“I know,” my demon said on a waspish growl.
“Now he’ll have to kill the bad lady when he can’t even stand up.” Henry scowled at Jae. “She isn’t powerful like you guys, but she’s super mean.”
“I know!”
I cringed at the fury in Jae’s tone, but patted the arm he’d looped around my waist in reassurance. “Obie said I’d do it so, bum ankle or not, I can kill her.”
“I carried you by gripping you with my feet so you could fight our way free, but I could not safely land that way. I misjudged the distance.” Following Henry and Peaches down the hall, my demon grimaced. “I am sorry.”
“I should think so,” a familiar voice purred as we shadowed Henry through another set of doors.
My head shot up. “Finnegan!” I shouted in a mixture of startled wariness and relief.
My ex-roomie looked almost as terrible as I felt. He leaned against a set of crutches I’d sport as well, if I survived the next hour. He’d dressed in loose track pants and a billowing FSU sweatshirt despite the persistent warmth of the day so I couldn’t make out the burns that had canvased his body when I’d last seen him, but bandages still swaddled most of his head, covering all except the tips and stray tufts of his red hair. Splotchy pink patches of new skin dotted his cheeks, brow, nose, and chin. That he’d survived the explosion of my childhood home was a benefit of his affinity with fire magic. Those mages resisted damage from flame, just as earth mages were impervious to injury from melted rock. But Finnegan was a weak fire mage, so his wounds had been extensive. Life-threatening.
The power of fire inside him had healed him fast, considering.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him, shifting to give Jae room to work if he needed to summon his own magic to fight my old roommate.
Finnegan shrugged, despite the crutches wedged into his armpits. “I’m lightly precog.” He lifted a sardonic eyebrow. “Surprise!”
I frowned, but Finnegan had packed the supplies we’d needed in the nexus to begin the array. Skip had also mentioned our housemate, while a lousy fire mage, boasted a range of many magics inside him.
That did not, however, make him an ally. If anything, how much he’d concealed from me and the lies he’d told to befriend me to pass information to Griffith as his spy, spoke eloquently that the wounded traitor was my foe.
Skip was right, though. Finnegan was an awful lot like me. Orphaned and alone. Doing whatever it took to survive another day, then the next. And the next. I wasn’t proud of some of the crap I’d pulled, either, the lies I’d lived.
In my heart, Finnegan didn’t feel like my enemy.
Still, the heart deceived.
I stared at him, bewildered at what to do, how to proceed.
Jae spread his feet to widen his stance and provide better balance. He unloosed his arm anchoring me to his side, and I snatched at the door to support my weight. With both hands unencumbered, he could feed a spark of his magic into the sigils covering his skin. Should I kill him?
Henry muscling past us into the museum, with Peaches trotting at his side, almost dumped me to the floor. My fingers clenched on the door. “Finnegan’s okay. He’s going to help you defeat the bad lady.” The kid swept the museum displays with a wary eye. “We need to hurry.” He waggled his shoulders, as though shrugging off a dull ache. “She’s here.”
Peaches snarled.
So did Jae.
Finnegan grimaced, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Well, I sank my morning and this afternoon searching the exhibits. Unless the kid hid the bones inside one of the taxidermy specimens, they aren’t on the museum floor.” He wrinkled his nose, fingers tightening on his crutches. “Not that I knew what to look for.”
My gaze swept the packed room, my blood curdling at how much we’d need to search. Before his marriage, Henry’s father had been an avid big game hunter who had traveled the world to bag a vast assortment of animals, from lions to gazelles and even the tiny mountain vole. Dr. Eliot Dyer’s hobbies hadn’t just included hunting, though. He’d also been mad about taxidermy, completely obsessed. He hadn’t just bagged whatever animal had caught his fancy. He’d learned the intricate skills and worked to preserve his prey as exhibits and it turned out, for stuffing dead animals, the guy had been an artist. So much so, fellow hunters had donated their kills to him to see them mounted and donated those animals to his collection. Over the years, other taxidermists had bequeathed their inventories to him, too.
Decades later, upon Dr. Dyers’s death, his collection had provided the university he’d devoted his life to the kernel of this—a natural history museum astonishing in its breadth and scope of birds and animals represented. A polar bear, white fur bristling, poised above a stuffed seal on a base of material fashioned to resemble arctic ice. Bears abounded, black and grizzly, but also the humble brown bear, in varying poses. The museum boasted a lion, wolves, a cluster of deer. Elk, wild boar, and rabbits. Moose.
Even with Henry providing the clue that he’d hidden the bones of the betrayer in this room and mustering my magic to guide me, finding the bones the array demanded would take years. “This is hopeless,” I said.
Dr. Eliot Dyers’s youngest son snorted. “You guys are dumb.”
My demon snarled, his claws curling. “Not nice.”
Henry glanced over his shoulder at Jae. “See? Not so funny when somebody does it to you, is it? Stop telling David he’s stupid.”
I scowled at Jae. “He has a point.”
“Shut up,” my demon said, jaw clenched.
“Still not nice!” The kid swiveled his attention forward, trudging to displays in a side room. “The local archeology exhibit is off the main floor.”
Jae helped me limp around the clustered exhibits, Finnegan joining us at a cautious distance. “He’s right, you know,” Finnegan said, slowing his more stable pace on the crutches I began to envy. “You could be nicer to him.”
Jae flashed him a foul glare. “I can end you.”
“Just focus on the bones,” I said, the throbbing from my injured ankle testing my patience. “We need to identify and grab them before Bea does or all this was for nothing.”
“In here,” Henry’s voice rang out from the smaller room ahead.
When we entered it, I discovered maps hanging on the walls alongside photographs and various displays still very much in progress. While Allegany County and the entirety of western Maryland was rich with ancient sites and archeological treasure, I knew full well the Smithsonian had plundered the best fossil from the Bone Cave on the Great Allegany Passage before I’d been born and what the feds hadn’t taken, another local museum boasted the rest in its collection. I vaguely recalled the fossil of a cave bear displayed at the Allegany Museum downtown during a field trip when I was a boy, anyway. FSU had come into the archeology game late.
Fortunately, the university had plentiful slave labor from students enrolled in its expanded anthropology program, and our mountains boasted many unexplored and lightly explored sites in which to send them. Under the supervision of their professors, students had completed an exhibit about Barton Village, photographs of a dig dating to the 1960s and informational panels detailing several layers of prehistoric occupation. They’d encased crude tools in laminated safety glass. My gaze swept by the display, though—no bones.
The kid strode past the exhibits, heading straight to display cabinets lining the far wall. Henry reached into his pocket and withdrew a silver key. “Nobody pays attention to me because I’m just a kid and Dr. Dyers’s son, but security here is terrible.” He fitted the key into a cabinet lock. “I stole the master for the whole museum before Andrew trusted me with the keys to our house.”
I blinked, failing to comprehend how samples of rock and minerals had anything to do with our quest, but as soon as the lock clicked and Henry opened a glass door, he bent to the wide drawers beneath. He pulled the bottom one out. “Bones,” he said.
Leaning on Jae, my ankle singing sharp agony, I peered over Henry’s shoulder and at the drawer’s content.
Bones indeed.
I gaped, aghast at the jumble of assorted skeletal fragments, long bones, and at least one partial jaw. “Megan would shit bricks if we handled our samples with such a lack of respect for preservation,” I said, appalled.
Finnegan’s shoulders rubbed mine as he, too, looked. “To be fair, the department head found this in a cardboard box mixed with Dr. Dyers’s musty and dusty taxidermy exhibits. For all he knew, these bones were extra pieces and parts, assorted debris that were not historically significant.”
“How’d you know that? You’re a fucking accounting major.” I scowled at my roomie. “Worse, you were only pretending to major in accounting because you were actually spying on me. I doubt you’ve ever stepped foot in this building, forget a legit classroom. How would you know anything about this?”
Finnegan smirked. “Magic.”
“These bones weren’t important.” Henry nodded. “Until I hid the demon bones there.”
Glued at my side, Jae stiffened, every muscle in his body tightening, and when I glanced at him, his demonic eyes glowed a fiery red.
“Can you sense—”
“Issa,” he said. “I know them.”
He reached down and into the drawer, rustling the contents until he withdrew a narrow sliver of bone half a foot long. The shard broadened at one end and narrowed to a sharp point. “He is the betrayer.”
“Thank you, demon. I would’ve needed another decade to find and identify the correct bone fragment.” Behind us, the click of a gun cocking froze me in place. “Now hand the totem over, please.”