20
{ Daemon }
As the last Luxen dropped to the floor in a messy pile, I whipped around to where I’d last seen Kat and Dee. There was a massive hole in the plaster, exposing the wooden frame inside the wall, and that had also taken a hell of a beating.
They’d gone through the wall.
“Good God.” My stomach dropped as I stepped over the dead Luxen and darted toward the open doorway that led into the other room.
I kept telling myself they had to be alive—both of them—because I would’ve felt it if either of them suffered a mortal wound. It did nothing to slow my racing heart or to ease the sick feeling curdling in my stomach.
Archer was standing just outside the den, his shoulders rising and falling in deep breaths. He didn’t say anything as I pushed past him, stumbling to an abrupt stop. The room was absolutely destroyed—the couch broken, TV smashed, and vases shattered on the floor. Piles of dirt and shredded petals were embedded in the carpet.
My desperate gaze zeroed in on the middle of the room, and damn if my knees didn’t almost give out on me.
They were on a smashed coffee table, Kat on top of my sister. They weren’t fighting, but both seemed frozen. I was frozen. Then I heard it. The deep, destroyed sounds of a person breaking wide open.
Kat, her hair half in the ponytail and half out, lifted her head and shuddered, then rolled off my sister and slowly rose to her feet. She backed away, running shaky hands over her messy hair. She looked over at me with wide eyes. Blood trickled from her nose and mouth, and each breath she expelled seemed to wheeze out of her.
I started toward her, but stopped. My gaze swung back to my sister. When Kat had climbed off her, she’d rolled onto her side, curled up into a tiny ball. The sounds—the sounds were coming from her.
“Dee?” My voice cracked.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her arms folded over her head. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” And that was all she kept saying, over and over again between the sobs.
Glass crunched under my feet as I walked to where she lay, and when I reached her side, my knees did give out. I landed next to her and gently placed a hand on her shaking shoulder. “Is it really you, Dee?”
Her sobs grew more ragged, and there was a stream of words from her bouncing around in my skull. Most of it incoherent, one giant run-on thought, but there was no mistaking what it meant.
Somehow the connection to the rest of the Luxen had been broken. I didn’t know how, but it didn’t matter.
I gathered her off the ruined table and glass and sat back, pulling her against me, and she scrambled closer, like she used to do when she was small and was afraid of everything. As I held her close, I carefully picked out the pieces of glass stuck in her hair, in her clothes.
“God, Dee . . .” I tucked her against my shoulder. “You about killed me, you know?”
She was shaking as her fingers gripped my arms. “I don’t know what happened. They came, and what they wanted was all I could think about.”
“I know.” I closed my eyes, smoothing my hand up her back. “It’s okay now. Everything is okay now.”
Dee didn’t seem to hear me. “You don’t know the things I did or what I was thinking, what I was okay with them doing to people.”
But I did. At least some of it from the short period of time I’d been around her while she’d been connected to them. The things I’d seen and heard her do were things I forced myself not to acknowledge, because they hadn’t been her fault.
And so I told her, over and over, that none of it mattered and none of it was her fault. She started spouting crazy shit, like her being evil, and the crap broke my heart. Tore me right up.
“What you did was their fault. Not yours. If you ever believe anything I’ve told you, you believe that.” I folded my hand over the back of her head, willing her to accept my words. “You don’t have an evil bone in your body. Never have, Dee. Never.”
The trembling eased a little as I held her, and I don’t know how long we sat in the wreckage, but when I opened my eyes finally, the room was a little blurry.
“It was Kat,” she said, her breath coming not as fast as it had been before. “She did it. I wanted to kill her. Oh God, Daemon, I really wanted to kill her, but . . .”
“But what?”
“As we were fighting, she kept talking to me, forcing me to remember what it was like . . . before they came.” Dee pulled back, her lashes thick with tears. “And it was about Adam.” Her breath caught on his name. “She was talking about him, and I remembered more than just the pain and the anger. I don’t know, but it just snapped, and suddenly I was looking at her and I wasn’t hearing any of them anymore. My thoughts . . . they were my own.”
I closed my eyes again briefly, promising myself that I’d repay Kat a millionfold as soon as I had the chance.
Once Dee settled down enough that I knew she was okay and wasn’t seriously injured, I looked around the room. I hadn’t realized that Archer and Kat had left. Concern for Kat worried away at me now that I knew Dee was going to be all right.
I helped her stand. “How are you doing?”
Dee wiped the tears and blood—bright red blood that couldn’t belong to her—from her cheeks with the sleeves of her dark sweater. My heart thundered in my chest as she took a deep breath. “I’m okay, but Kat . . . It got pretty rough between us. Oh God, she probably hates me now. Like really—”
“No. She doesn’t hate you. If she did, she wouldn’t have tried to bring you back. Kat loves you like a sister, Dee. In fact, she’s kind of like your sister now.”
That statement pulled Dee out of her troubled thoughts. Her nose wrinkled. “What do you mean? Because that sounds a little . . . weird considering what you and her do and all that.”
I laughed, and damn, it felt good to be standing in front of my sister again and laughing. “Kat and I are married.”
Dee stared at me and then blinked wide eyes. “What?”
“Well, we’re not really, really married, because we did it with our fake IDs when we were in Vegas— Ow!” I stepped back, rubbing my arm right in the spot where Dee had punched me. “What was that for?”
“You two got married and neither of you told me?” She stomped her foot, shimmering eyes on fire. “That’s so wrong! I should’ve been a part of it.” She spun around. “Where is she? I’m seriously going to hit her again.”
“Whoa.” I chuckled as I grabbed her arm. “Can you wait to hit her again until we make sure she’s okay?”
“Oh yeah, probably a good idea.” Then she whirled around and threw herself at me, circling her long arms around my neck, and I stumbled back a step. “You two really did it?”
Dee’s lips trembled into a small smile and not the kind I’d seen on her lately. Not cold. Totally her. “That’s amazing,” she whispered as she pulled free. “I’m happy for you—for her. But I’m still going to punch her. After we make sure she’s okay. Oh God.” Her face fell. “What if she—?”
“It’ll be okay.” I placed a hand on her back, steering her out of the living room.
First person I saw was Archer. Of course. And he wasn’t looking at me at all. Oh no. His face was pale, his eyes wide and pupils dilated. Shaken up. I’d never seen him look quite like that before, and I sure as hell didn’t want to acknowledge why.
“She’s outside,” he murmured, staring at Dee, who was also staring at him, and they were like two people who had never seen another person before. Damn. “She’s okay.”
Dee was staring at Archer, and I bit back a curse. Her voice was low in her throat. “Go.”
At least she’d forgotten about hitting Kat. I resisted the urge to warn Archer to do . . . well, to not do anything, but as I walked toward the doorway to the foyer and stopped to look back at them over my shoulder, what I saw should’ve had me going off like a rocket.
I hadn’t heard either of them move, but they were standing toe to toe, and Archer was touching her cheeks with only the tips of his fingers as he gazed into her eyes. There was something sort of poignant about the moment. Yeah, I sounded like I’d be writing love sonnets by the end of the year, but in a moment of empathy and maturity I really hadn’t realized I was capable of, I didn’t lose my cool.
She needed this—she needed Archer, and who in the hell was I to begrudge her the solace when I had my Kat?
Blowing out a breath, I headed toward the front of the house and cringed when I saw the front door across the room. Oh, Lore and Hunter were gonna be pissed.
Kat was sitting at the top of the steps, curved slightly inward. As I walked around her and down the steps so I was in front of her, she slowly raised her head and her gray eyes met mine, reached right inside me, and squeezed my heart.
“She’s okay.” It wasn’t a question but a statement.
I nodded as I knelt in front of her. “Because of you.”
She shook her head.