“Yes. Which is why you’re staying here.”
I started to say something and then bit my lip, because that had been in his don’t-argue-with-me voice. Which I tended to pay attention to since it only got trotted out when the shit was already on its way to the fan. “You may need to leave fast,” I pointed out, after a second. “I can get you out of there quicker than any weapon.”
He clicked the gun shut. “Not if you’re dead.”
“If we stick together, I won’t be. I’m telling you—”
I suddenly found myself jerked to within inches of a face with a tight jaw and hot green eyes. “No. You tell me nothing, not about this. You do what I say.”
“Damn it, Pritkin!”
The moonlight had washed all the color from his face, leaving it stark black and white. Uncompromising, like the hand on my arm, or the low timbre of his voice. “There are only two choices. You listen to me and we go forward; you refuse and we go back. You asked for my help; you do this my way. I haven’t spent more than a century battling these creatures not to know exactly how dangerous they can be. Do you understand?”
Yeah, I understood fine. The problem was that he didn’t. He thought he was protecting me, but if he ended up dead because I wasn’t there to shift him away, we’d both be screwed. But I couldn’t explain that, without explaining more than was safe for him to know right now.
“How much of a risk are you planning to take?” I whispered.
“No more than need be. I will find and draw off whatever is in there. When you see my signal, run for the house. Shift back here when you’re done and I’ll be waiting. But only move when I signal you. If I do not, you stay put.”
“And if you don’t come back?” I asked angrily.
“Then get out of here. Go back to your time—”
“The hell I will! I won’t just leave—”
“Then I won’t go.”
And the infuriating man crossed his arms, leaned against the tree, and looked at me. Calmly. Pleasantly. Like he had all freaking night.
I glared back. “And here I thought you’d been getting better lately!”
“I’ve been indulging you.”
“Indulg—” I tightened my lips on a torrent of words, none of which I could say. And not just because we needed to be quiet. Because for a second there I was actually rendered speechless.
Indulging me didn’t involve treating me like a Parris Island recruit. It didn’t involve questioning every order I ever gave. And it damned sure didn’t involve trading his life for mine without even asking what I thought of the idea.
Or how I’d feel afterward.
Somehow, in all the crying I’d done over the man in the last week, I’d forgotten what an absolute bastard he could be.
Like when he calmly started to pick at a fingernail.
“Stop that!” I knocked his hand away.
He looked up, bemused.
“You . . . you’ll get a hangnail,” I snapped, because I couldn’t say anything else.
“And that would ruin my evening.”
I stood there for a moment, seriously considering just starting for the trees. He’d have to come along or watch me possibly get eaten by whatever was in there. Only, no. Any other man would have to.
Pritkin would knock me out with something in his arsenal, throw me over his shoulder, and cart me off God knew where. And that would be that. Except that I’d wake up tomorrow no closer to a solution than I was right now.
And I was getting damned tired of dead ends.
I crossed my own arms. “Fine.”
“Fine what?”
“Fine, we’ll do it your way.” Like I had a choice.
Whatever his faults, Pritkin didn’t gloat. “Wait for my signal,” he reminded me. And then he was off, running hard for the tree line. Where, a second later, he disappeared.
And the minute he did, I was sure I’d made a mistake. It would be totally my luck to get the man killed while trying to save him. I peered around the trunk, my hands eating into the rough bark hard enough to send splinters under my fingernails.
Come on, I thought desperately, as the minutes clicked by. Come on, come on, come on.
But nothing happened. There was no sound, no movement, no anything. Just a soft breeze bringing the scent of rain and resin, and a hushed quiet making a mockery of my fears.
Until somebody started screaming.
I was running before I remembered the signal and then fuck the signal, because I’d never heard Pritkin scream. And I was desperately hoping I wasn’t hearing it now. But it sounded human—if a human was being eaten by a bear or roasted over a fire or torn limb from limb or—
I shut my brain down before it shut me down, and put on an extra burst of speed. I should have just shifted, but I couldn’t see clearly and anyway, it was too late now. The ground was growing uneven underfoot, the trees were closing in overhead, and I was slipping and sliding on a bunch of black-rotten leaves down an incline and through a wall of scratchy limbs. Before bursting out the other side and into—
What the fuck?
What looked like jerking red afterimages filled my vision, half blinding me, even though I hadn’t been staring at any bright lights. Just like I wasn’t out of breath, but the whole area pulsed in and out, like a marathoner’s vision. It looked like a demon disco and felt like standing in the middle of a tumbling kaleidoscope, while that unearthly scream went on and on and—
Stopped as abruptly as it had begun.
It took the lights along with it, which would have been great. If it hadn’t left me reeling in utter darkness, my heart pounding, my pulse racing, and my mind gibbering somewhere in terror. But as usual, my mouth was doing okay.
“Pritkin!” I called thickly. “Goddamnit, where—”
“Over here.”
The voice was surprisingly calm. Or maybe my ears, which were still ringing from the howling, weren’t able to discern subtleties. Like my legs didn’t seem to be able to walk a straight line anymore. Not that they could have anyway with the slip-’n-slide going on under my feet. And my knees. And my butt as I stumbled and fell and recovered and then hit a particularly nasty patch of leaves and slid the rest of the way to the bottom.
Where Pritkin was kneeling in the muck, in the middle of a space with slightly fewer trees. The thicker cover around the sides formed a natural wall, which the misty drizzle would have faded to the same wet gray as everything else, if not for the otherworldly light show going on. But he seemed perfectly whole and unbothered.
At least he did until he looked up at me. And frowned. “What are you doing here?”
“I . . . what?” I asked unevenly, because the clearing was still spinning. And because that had been a damned stupid question.
“You were told to wait for the signal.”
“You were screaming!”
“Which is usually a sign to stay away,” he said, frown intensifying. “It also wasn’t me.”
“Then who—”
“Not who. What,” he said, and tried to hand me something.
Since it strongly resembled a slime-covered snake, I shied back. “What the—”
“Didn’t that vampire you lived with ever take you to a toy store?”
I stared. “What?”
“For a special occasion, a birthday . . . ?”
“Tony believed in getting presents, not giving them,” I said, bending to peer at the creepy thing he held. It was long and black and lifeless, and still looked like either a short snake or a long slug. “Are you telling me that’s a toy?”
“Was. The enchantment’s played out.”
Thank God.
“You mean that wasn’t some kind of battle spell?” I demanded, gesturing around indignantly, and almost falling over in the process. Okay, that was getting old. “And what the hell’s wrong with me?”
“A prank,” Pritkin said, lips quirking in his version of a smile. “The magical equivalent of a whoopee cushion. But instead of embarrassment, the visual component of the spell causes havoc with the optic nerves. It’s best not to look at it.”
Now he told me.
“Careful. There’s likely more of them,” he said as I started to take a step.
“How do you know?”
“They wouldn’t be much use as an alarm, otherwise.” He held up a finger with a slender cord draped over the top. He gave a gentle tug, and a long line of it rose from the muck, with a “snake” dangling down every six feet. It looked like a banner for an Addams Family birthday, with all the balloons predeflated.
“An alarm—okay, that’s just stupid,” I pointed out.
A blond eyebrow rose. “If it looks stupid but it works . . . then it’s not stupid.” He indicated a small silver thing near the top of the nearest snake. “Removing the cap sets them off. Luckily, I stepped on this one instead of tripping over the line and pulling out all the caps at once. That much noise would wake the dead.”
“Wake the—oh, crap,” I said, staring around.
“It’s not a bad system,” he commented, carefully laying the slimy thing back in the gunk. “Crude, but effective, and uses too little magic to be easily detectable. Of course, it presupposes an intruder would come through here. But given the thickness of the trees on either side, that’s not too much of a stretch.” He looked at me with narrowed green eyes. “The question is, why does someone with a demon army need a child’s plaything for security?”
“That’s a good question,” I agreed, and tried to grab him.
But he was already on his feet and backing out of range. “Don’t you think it’s time you told me what’s going on?”
“What’s going on is that we’re about to have company!” The demons around here might be deaf, but I knew some people who damned well weren’t.
“Try again,” Pritkin said. “I doubt there ever were any demons here.”