The Brightest Embers - Jeaniene Frost

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As if she knew she was being abandoned, her baby started to wail again. The sound made that burning in her chest worse, and she turned and ran back toward her car. If she didn’t leave now, this second, she wouldn’t be able to at all.

      She tore up the brush from how fast she spun the tires when she peeled out of her former hiding spot. When she made it onto the highway, she cut across all the lanes in a dangerously reckless move that nevertheless put her ahead of the jackknifed tractor-trailer and the cars piled up behind it. Once she was clear of the accident, she looked back, craning her neck to see, since her rearview mirror was gone.

      A blond-haired woman rushed out of her car, heading toward the small, precious bundle she’d left alongside the road. The last thing she saw was the fair-haired stranger bending down to pick up her daughter, then tears stole her vision away...

      I woke up with my heart pounding. I’d had this dream before, too many times to count, yet never so vividly. The other times, I could only see what the pretty Latina woman had been doing. I hadn’t known what she’d been thinking, let alone feeling, and the intensity of her emotions had me fighting back tears.

      It would be silly to be so affected, except I had it on good authority that this was no ordinary dream. Zach, the Archon who at turns both helped us and hindered us, had told me my recurring dream was an actual account of what happened when my birth mother abandoned me. I’d always thought she’d done so because she’d been one of the undocumented immigrants who’d fled the scene after the accident, and I’d understood that making a run for it with a baby would have been impossible.

      Yet the day I’d met him, Zach had said I was wrong and my birth mother hadn’t wanted to leave me. If this far-more-detailed dream was true, he was right. I fought another shiver as I remembered the strange voice telling the woman—my mother?—that she had to do it or I wouldn’t survive. Was that true?

      I only knew one thing about my birth mother: that she was dead. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be the last Davidian. Yet this new, possible insight left me with a thousand questions I hadn’t allowed myself to wonder before. Had she been hunted by demons, too? If the dream was real, the lack of a rearview mirror would indicate that, as would her choice to stay on hallowed ground. And who—or what—was the voice in her head? Delusion? Angelic interference? Something else?

      “Hey, sleepyhead,” Adrian murmured.

      “Hey,” I said almost distractedly. He was sitting on the small berth across from mine, and I blinked at the curtains behind him. They looked much darker than when I’d seen them before, and it took me a second to realize why. The sun was no longer shining through them. I must have slept the day away.

      “Why didn’t you wake me?” I asked in surprise.

      He smiled. “Why? You’re so beautiful when you sleep.”

      Liar, I thought, but smiled back. Then my smile faded as I glanced again at the darkened windows. Somewhere out there, demons were still prowling around. We were safe now, but eventually, we’d get off, and we couldn’t just park ourselves on hallowed ground forever.

      Thoughts of hallowed ground brought me back to the dream, which wasn’t hard. I still ached inside due to the loss she’d felt. For years, I’d tried never to think about my biological mother because it hurt me too much. Now I was feeling all of her pain, and it left mine in the dust.

      But I couldn’t focus on that right now. There were other, more important things than the past to dwell on.

      “Adrian, why didn’t you tell me some demons could’ve stayed behind in our world after the realm gateways were sealed off?”

       CHAPTER NINE

      HE STARED AT ME, and I realized the emotions the dream had brought up had sharpened my tone, until my question was more accusation than query. I faked a cough to lessen the tension.

      “Granted, that should have occurred to me because I met the demon you held captive on cursed earth beneath the church, but for some reason, it didn’t. You had to have noticed that, yet you never corrected me about it. Why?”

      He sighed, getting up and pulling down one of our suitcases from a small, overhead bin. I hadn’t seen him put them up there, but from his change of clothes and freshly showered, damp hair, he’d been awake and getting stuff done while I slumbered.

      “I didn’t think it would be a problem,” he said, setting the suitcase on the end of the futon. It was mine, and yes, I would need it soon so I could change, but I wasn’t putting off this conversation any longer. Adrian had a very disturbing tendency not to tell me important things if he thought I couldn’t handle them, and that had to stop. Now.

      “How could you not think that?” Demons being loose in our world was always a problem, and I had the entirety of human history as my Exhibit A on that point.

      He sighed again. “Only very powerful demons would have access to relics strong enough to curse large patches of earth, and what were the chances of lots of them being on this side of the realms when the gateways closed? Yeah, I knew a few might, but I thought they’d be stuck in a small spot, unable to move or be a threat, like Blinky when I had him trapped. I certainly didn’t expect Obsidiana to rally minions to attack you, or to use mirrors to come after you herself.”

      Mirrors might not be the same as the now-closed demon realm gateways, since they didn’t act as a bridge from one realm to another, but with demons still in our world, they were dangerous. No wonder Adrian still smashed the mirrors in our hotel rooms. I’d thought he’d done it solely out of habit.

      “I hadn’t expected that, either,” I said. “And you should have told me it was possible.”

      “I’m sorry,” he said softly, closing the distance between us. “If I’d thought for a second that you would get hurt—”

      “You got hurt,” I interrupted, the memory of him nearly bleeding to death hardening my voice. “And Jasmine and Costa almost did, too. It’s always made things worse when you keep things to yourself. You know that, so why did you do it again?”

      He looked away in obvious guilt. “Not that the attacks were your fault,” I hastily added. “Whether you had told us or not, we still would have gone looking for the spearhead. I just hate that you’re still keeping secrets. I might have had a hard time dealing with things when we first met, but I’m not that same girl anymore.”

      A muscle ticked in his jaw, and it took several seconds before he met my eyes again. When he did, his jaw was set in granite, yet flashes of pain skipped over his expression.

      “Fine. Then there’s something else you need to know, and you’re not going to like it.”

      “Tell me,” I breathed, my breath hitching. This had to be the unspoken issue I’d been feeling between us. It wasn’t just paranoia—he had been holding something back!

      Adrian stared at me, his fists clenching and unclenching as if he were fighting a terrible inner battle.

      “The truth is...” He stopped, took a deep breath, then said the next part in a rush. “You can’t beat the demons, Ivy, no matter what. You closed their realms off for now, but demons don’t age or die of natural causes, so they’ll just wait until the realm walls eventually weaken and the gateways reopen. When that happens, they’ll go back to enslaving humans and making more minions, so even if you find and wield the spearhead, they still win.”

      I stared at him, my jaw feeling like it had dropped into my chest. “You can’t believe that.”

      His gaze hardened until his eyes resembled silver-encrusted sapphires. “I lived with demons for over a hundred years. Yeah, some want to kill you because you murdered hundreds of their kind, but most demons aren’t sentimental. Hunting you puts them at risk, since you have a weapon that can kill them. But leaving you alone only costs them their current slaves if you succeed with the spearhead, and none of them think you

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