Demons of Good and Evil by Kim Harrison

            “They’re awake!” the young nurse exclaimed when the door opened and people swarmed in. Cassie was in seventh heaven, flushed and as proud as if they had fought the devil themselves to return, and maybe they had.

            “I have you,” Trent whispered as we pushed through the press of people, forgotten. I felt icky, overly full. Letting go of the ley line only made it worse, though, and I let a stray thought linger in it to give the mystics clinging to me a path to the ley lines.

            I felt good at Cassie’s elated cry: “They are awake! She woke them up! See? They are awake! Rachel, thank you. Thank you so much!”

            “Jenks?” Trent said as he led me into the hallway. “We need a quick way out of here.”

            “On it,” he said, and then even his sparkles were gone.

            It was easier to breathe in the hall, and after a few steps, my head came up. Trent was still holding my elbow, and I looked at him, seeing he was as dragged out and weary as I was. It hadn’t been the fight. It was the mystics. They sort of . . . drained everything.

            “You okay, Bis?” I said as I touched his feet, and he gave my shoulder a squeeze in return. The kid was half asleep, his feet clamped securely as his eyes closed.

            “Maybe this will show the coven that I’m not a threat,” I said as we rounded a corner and the noise diminished.

            “I hope so.” Trent’s pace quickened, and I found I could keep up. “I’m taking you home.”

            “Good idea. I could use a soak in the tub,” I said, and Trent’s hold on me shifted.

            “Um, how about a glass of wine in front of the fire?”

            A fire sounded great, but it would take at least half an hour to get it going, and I didn’t have any wood, much less the wine. “Sure,” I said reluctantly. “We’ll have to stop somewhere on the way.”

            Trent pulled me closer until our hips touched. “Not your house. My house. We can call up for wine, or anything else, from the restaurant.”

            Eat in? From Carew Tower’s revolving restaurant? I was all over that, and we didn’t look back at a sudden commotion in the hall. “I thought you were still waiting on the drywall.”

            “I am.” We followed Jenks’s fading dust around a corner, the noise going faint behind us. “But the fireplace works, and some of the plumbing. I, ah, think we should be hard to find for a few hours until we know how the world is going to react to this.”

            “All I did was wake them up,” I said, and Bis sighed in his sleep. Poor guy was tuckered out.

            “And downed hospital security,” Trent added. “And a nurse. Fled the scene.”

            My shoulders slumped. “Right.”

            Damn it, Vivian, why didn’t you answer your phone?





CHAPTER


            18

            Hands clasped, I stood in the small lift, Bis on one shoulder, Jenks on the other. Trent was beside me checking something on his phone until he lost connection and put it in a pocket. “I’m going to have to do something about that,” he muttered, and I gave him a thin smile. The elevator was dirty in the corners and smelled like two-by-fours. Which was odd, seeing as it wasn’t big enough for freight.

            This was actually the second elevator needed to get up here, the first stopping at the tenth floor, where Trent had moved his legal business affairs, and then this one, a private lift from his new downstairs office to what would eventually be his two-story flat under the Carew Tower restaurant. “Did you have this put in?” I asked, and Trent’s attention dropped from the instrumental eighties music whispering from the speakers.

            “Ah, no. But I did have the call buttons removed from the floors between my office and my new place.”

            New place. There’d been a hint of anticipation in his voice, and I realized it was his first place, the first time he had chosen where to live. College dorms didn’t count. Loving him all the more, I linked my arm in his.

            Now that the mystics were gone, I was feeling pretty good. From nowhere, the memory of the kiss that Kisten and I shared when I thought I was going to die at Piscary’s teeth rose through me, making me stifle a shiver.