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  Jason looked at Sam.

  “You get the feeling we aren’t going to have any allies at this thing?”

  “I’m inside her head,” Sam said. “You have no idea.”

  “Princess Powderpuff her pretentious elegance lady Lindsay might be the worst,” Samantha said.

  “No, really, you don’t have to hold back with us,” Jason said.

  “She likes the power, not the work. Argo, at least, wants to do the work. She’ll delegate anything she can, make someone else do it. She gets angry when she doesn’t get her way, and her temper is legendary. Just please stay away from her. And everyone with her. She has this network of spies….” She trailed off and Jason wondered what she wasn’t saying. “Peter’s cool. Bane might be my favorite because he’s just easy, but Peter’s a genuinely good guy. Does the right thing. He’s not a mage, but he runs New Orleans, and I don’t know how he does it. Stuff goes bad, that’s where I’d want you to be. He’s strong, he’s smart, and he doesn’t like bullies. Just… don’t let him touch you.”

  “Damn,” Jason said. “What are you into, Sweetheart?”

  “He wants me to take up permanent residence in New Orleans. He’s not above manipulation to do it. He’ll put a spell on you if he thinks that my living there and helping him keep the peace is the right thing to do.”

  “So he does the right thing, but in a morally ambiguous way,” Jason said.

  “Something like that,” Samantha said. “That leaves Spake. Spake is… He’s just Spake. If every dysfunctional family has one creepy uncle and one out-and-out crazy one, Mitch is the creepy one and Spake is the crazy one. He’ll be your best friend for a minute and then he’ll start talking gibberish and stab his own hand. If you’re looking for an ally in the crowd, I’d go Bane, Peter, then Spake. Depending on which Spake shows up.”

  “There’s more than one?”

  “All living in his ginger skull,” Samantha said.

  “Awesome.”

  They pulled into the parking lot and Samantha got out, looking for a long time at the door before nodding and following Jason to the building.

  <><><>

  “It’s her mess. Let her clean it up,” Lindsay said.

  “Why did you let them all out in the first place?” Ian asked. “You should have killed them when you had them all in one place.”

  “Because demons are notorious for hanging out to get slaughtered,” Peter commented, picking at his teeth with a toothpick.

  “We could hunt them, or we could keep them from coming back,” Argo said. “We had to close the gate.”

  “Thing about killing a demon just inside a demon gate,” Mitch said, putting his feet up on a windowsill. “They just come back.”

  “You should not be asking her to hunt demons,” Kelly said.

  “It’s what she does,” Carter said.

  Lindsay made a swishing motion with her hand, and her flock of assistants scattered.

  “Carter, I want to go home. Why are we here?”

  She stood. Jason had to give it to her. She was beautiful. The problem was, she was working too hard at it. Samantha, at her most costumed, looked raw compared to Lindsay with her airbrushed makeup and oiled hair. She walked with an affected swoop to emphasize her hips - and they were great hips, but still - and poked Carter in the chest.

  “We have things we should be doing, and yet you drag us here because she wouldn’t come anywhere else.”

  “Because Bane’s would have been closer for you,” Ian said. She glared daggers at him and Ian grinned.

  “She let one of her minions out of her sight, and he got snatched. Why is this my problem?”

  “This isn’t about the gate, fool,” Argo said. “This is about the demons that came through it.”

  “How many demons?” Carter asked. Argo shrugged muscled shoulders and rolled his lips out.

  “Who knows?”

  “Sam saw between eighty and a hundred, just in the building complex,” Samantha said, standing. “And they’re powerful.”

  Lindsay spun and pointed a finger at Samantha.

  “They’re here because of you. You fix it.”

  “There’s no explanation of why they opened it,” Samantha said. “Or who opened it.” She looked around the room, her expression amused. “Oh, yes, you hadn’t thought about who yet, had you?” She shook her hair out, dark red to the point of black. Jason hadn’t noticed it before, but she was dressed for demon hunting today. “Jason sat in the middle of it, yeah. He’s involved, probably. We don’t know why, and we need to. This isn’t a game of whack-him-back.”

  “We need to hunt the demons,” Argo said.

  “Yeah, we need to hunt them down. But they haven’t increased the population of powerful demons on this side by that much. What we need to know is why those demons. We need information.”

  “Says the Shaman,” Ian said. “Get her to sit down, Carter, while the grownups talk. When we need her to consult a book and give us a fact, we’ll ask.”

  “Do we have any clue where they went?” Mitch asked.

  “Yeah, we put tracking devices on them as they left,” Jason said. There was a moment of stunned silence and Jason stood. Sam wasn’t quick enough to grab him. “You guys are astonishingly stupid for the most powerful people in the country. She’s right. They grabbed me and stuffed me in a box. They didn’t kill me, but they told her I was dead. That doesn’t strike you as weird?”

  “They’re demons,” Spake said. “They dig weird.”

  “Sure, they could do it for fun, but every day for years and years, they ran experiments on me. They tortured me. At the center of a massive hellsgate. If you don’t ask why, you’re an idiot. Some demon having a good time making me miserable, that’s one thing. Setting up something that big - that’s something a lot more important than how I felt about it. It’s big.”

  “What do you say we should do about it, son?” Bane asked.

  Jason shook his head.

  “That’s what you guys are supposed to be good at, isn’t it? Dealing with demons at this kind of level? We hunt them in ones and twos. But this is big. And you need to get in front of it.”

  “I don’t know what you expect me to do about it,” Lindsay said.

  “If they show up in my range, I’m happy to track them down and send them back, but…” Mitch started.

  “Why should we hunt them, really?” Ian asked. “They aren’t possessing anyone, they haven’t killed anyone…”

  “We kill them because they don’t deserve to breathe our air,” Argo said.

  Jason threw up his hands and crouched on his chair. Spake motioned to Jason. Jason glanced at Samantha. She was trying to have a private conversation with Carter while Ian was trying to convince Carter of something. Jason nudged Sam.

  “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Sam looked over at Spake, then at Samantha again.

  “Be careful,” he said.

  “Yeah, I got it,” Jason said, then went to sit next to Spake.

  “What’s up?” he asked. Spake was, as promised, a flaming redhead, heavily freckled. He had long, thin facial features and a bristly goatee on the end of his pointed chin. He was wearing what looked like a goatskin vest and blond leather studded with tall, thick spikes.

  “What did they do to you?” he asked, working his jaw like he was trying to pull food out of his molars. His eye twitched.

  “Dude, that’s creepy,” Jason said.

  Spake shook his head, a fast little motion.

  “No, no, no. What they did. It’s important. Tell me what they did.”

  Spake chewed his fingernails, blinking quickly.

  “Mostly they left me tied to a chair in the dark,” Jason said.

  “In the dark,” Spake said. “What did you eat?”

  “Uh… Food…”

  “Could you see it?”

  “It was… dark…”

  Spake nodded, another fast little motion as he spat bits of finger nail on the carpet.<
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  “So they could have been giving you anything to eat. You drank water?”

  Jason was beginning to feel a little ill.

  “Yeah.”

  “You see it?”

  “No.”

  Spake tapped his teeth with his fingers, then sat up, like a gopher.

  “I wonder if they have deviled eggs.”

  Spake wandered off down the table of breakfast foods, and Jason frowned and went back to sit next to Sam.

  “Are we winning?” he asked.

  “What did he want?” Sam asked him.

  “Wanted to know what I ate.”

  Sam glanced at him.

  “What did you eat?”

  “Food.”

  “Mmm.”

  “She isn’t even one of us,” Ian was saying.

  “No, Carter claimed her,” Mitch said.

  “What about them?” Ian said. “Has she marked them?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Peter said. “We all know that.”

  “She marked me,” Sam said. There was a pause as most of the room turned to look at him. Lindsay and Argo continued screaming at each other in a corner as their respective attendants, including Lange, tried to keep them at arm’s length from each other. There were scuffles where the Lindsay-people got too close to the Argo-people.

  “What did you say?” Bane asked.

  “I said she marked me,” Sam said. “She bonded me, she marked me, and she’s training Jason. We may not be you, but no one can say that we’re outsiders, either.”

  Jason looked at Sam, stunned. He saw Samantha smirk, then turn away with what might have been guilt.

  “Where did that come from?” Jason asked.

  “This is stupid,” Sam said. “You’re right.”

  “So what do you say we should do?”

  “Go track demons,” Sam said. “We’re good at it, Sam and me. With the three of us, we can take out anything.”

  There was yelling, but Jason was distracted.

  “How would you find them?”

  “Same way we find all of them. We might have to go back to Houston to do it, but…” Sam shrugged. “This isn’t that hard. I don’t know why they need to be involved.”

  An arm jerked Jason out of his seat and Jason blinked, more annoyed than startled. Ian threw him back into an open space in the room as a fist fight broke out by Lindsay and Argo. Mitch put his feet up on another chair and Peter stood, head up, but not stepping in. Kelly had a sword out, but he was watching the fight between Lindsay’s people and Argo’s people. All Jason could see of Spake was his legs laying across the food table.

  “I want to see what this loser is good for,” Ian said. “Give him a sword like that, he’s just begging someone to take it from him. It ought to be one of us.”

  Jason pushed him back and settled his shirt over his shoulders again.

  “You don’t want to do this, man,” he said. “I’m happy to put you down, but there’s stuff going on here.”

  “Stuff you caused,” Ian said. “I want to know if you’re worth standing up for.”

  “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it,” Jason said. Ian drew a pair of long knives from behind his back and Jason sighed, drawing Anadidd’na. The shear of metal against metal stilled most of the room, making the scuffle at the back of the room seem muted.

  Ian sprung at him with wicked speed, and Jason bent time, watching emotionlessly as the man’s body came on in a slow flurry of blades and loose clothing. He was in position to block easily with the extra reach Anadidd’na gave him. He was coal-fire angry, deep down. The demons in Houston had been satisfying, but Ian, a Brandt-styled pretentious jerk, this was something he had been subconsciously eager for since the day he’d broken out. He’d left in a hurried, panicked rush, looking over his shoulder, heart racing. Afraid.

  Now he stood before a man with a pair of curly steak knives, wielding Anadidd’na, and he could feel the power of her through his blood, like an electrical circuit pulsing with his heart. Any other time, he and Ian would have stood eye-to-eye, but in this moment, he felt head and shoulders taller than his opponent. Ian spun and stabbed, careless to the bloodless rules of engagement, but Jason danced easily on solid feet, not only taller, but heavier, stronger, faster, and smarter than Ian. Sam had told him once about being able to see the world from outside of his body in a vision; this felt like a spiritual version of that. His self took a step out of his mind and his body, seeing through his own eyes, but experiencing the conflict with a much broader sense of awareness.

  He was angry.

  He disarmed Ian easily, when he chose to, mass against mass simply too much for Ian to overcome, and he set Anadidd’na point-down in the carpet watching as the second blade clattered to the floor. The room was dead silent.

  Ian looked up.

  Jason’s gaze slowly rose to look at the other man, the anger burning lower.

  This was who he was. Not that frightened man, not the frustrated student, not even the Ranger, he realized. He folded one hand over the other on the pommel of his sword, the enigmatic eyes of the dragon head covered by his palm. He had those eyes. His breathing was even, unhurried. Ian was enraged. A stream of scorching hellspeak rolled out of him, and Jason answered it sharply. Ian stood straighter in surprise, then he started over in angeltongue.

  “Enough,” Samantha yelled. She drew Lahn from behind her back and threw the blade with full force into a wall as she charged Ian. Ian turned, surprised, to find the angriest woman Jason had ever seen only feet away from him. He put up his hands to defend himself, and screaming erupted from the far side of the room as the fight there resumed.

  “Enough,” Carter roared. His face was red and his eyebrows knit deep over his eyes. Jason swallowed. “We go to war. You are either with me or you are against me, and if you are against me, I swear by the souls I have imprisoned in the pits of Hell you will not leave this room alive.”

  Spittle flew from his lips as he spoke, and his complexion grew darker. He kicked a chair into the writhing pile in the corner, momentarily frozen. Someone yelped, and the two sides split, leaving a bloodied blond angel in the middle. The blood was dark.

  “That. Is. All,” Carter said, looking around the room in challenge, his elbows behind him and his arms bent. He was terrifying.

  Samantha turned and dropped a knee onto the carpet.

  “Once and always,” she said, standing with her head lowered but her eyes up. Abby appeared from a corner to stand next to Carter. Jason wondered how he had missed her all this time. One by one, each of the figureheads turned to Carter and signed respect and compliance. Carter’s face slowly dropped back to its normal shade. He shook his head.

  “I swear I’m going to have to slaughter all of you and start over,” he said.

  “Not me, right?” Spake called from his chair atop the food table. Carter smiled.

  “No, not you Spake.”

  After that, staying seemed pointless. Jason didn’t understand what they had accomplished, but everyone seemed satisfied. Samantha pulled Lahn out of the wall and rubbed her thumb over the gash in the plaster, restoring it.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  “That’s it?” Jason asked as they got into the car.

  “That’s it,” she said. He shook his head, starting the engine.

  “And you acted like it was going to be some kind of big deal.”

  Sam looked around.

  “Where’s Kelly?”

  Samantha laughed.

  “He had his first score against a demon. Let him enjoy the win. He’ll make it home when he gets there.”

  “Did you see him?” Sam asked. “He was a crazy man.”

  “No,” Samantha said. “I was watching Jason.”

  He felt her looking at the back of his head. Something had changed. He was going to have to figure out what it was.

  He really was.

  <><><>

  “So what really happened back there?” Sam asked.
>
  “He got buy-in,” Samantha said. “That’s what he needed. Everyone agreed that we need to act. From here, he’ll send everyone home, and just call them in when he needs them. Like a game of chess.”

  She was making a list. Facts, unknowns, goals. It calmed her to see it written down. She scratched her head with the pen. “Believe it or not, for everything that he is and isn’t, this is what he’s the best at.”

  Kelly glitched into the room.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, bowing to Samantha.

  “For what?” she asked without looking up.

  “I forgot myself and abandoned my primary responsibility.”

  Sam shifted on the couch.

  “She wasn’t in any danger,” he said. “And you were impressive.”

  “You shouldn’t do that again,” Samantha said. “But I’m glad you did it.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  She looked up now.

  “I don’t think you understand me. With that crowd, wanton violence is par for the course. You shouldn’t tangle with demons just because you don’t like them, though. Some of them are on my side.”

  The angel’s face contorted as he tried to control himself.

  “I think that is unwise,” he said, each word hesitant.

  “I know you do,” Samantha said. “In a strictly alliance-driven sense, though, I am a member of the gray. I advocate hard on the side of heaven, but I fight on the side of freewill. Demons are a part of that balance.”

  “What if they find out what you carry?” Kelly asked.

  “You mean what happens when they find out,” Samantha answered. “I’ll figure that out on a case-by-case basis.” She paused. “Kelly, I take it seriously. I promise. Even if I didn’t have a love for the angels, I know how powerful angeldust is. I know it doesn’t belong here. But it can’t be the only thing I think about.”