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Movement brought Khan’s attention around. An angel walked toward the gate. He moved slowly, as if in a dream, sickness and terror in a dirty cloud around him. The angel stretched out his hand toward the handle, fingers reaching. The gate had him in its thrall.
“Bran!” Custo barked.
The angel stalled, confused. Looked around.
And then he was dragged back by two other angels. He went limp, his gaze filled with horror and longing as they moved him out.
No one was impervious to the gate’s draw.
Custo turned. “What can I do?”
Khan picked up the black flower and shoved it, bare-handed, into the glowing coals of the fire. Heat the metal, bang it down.
“You can take your friends and get out of here.”
“The Order will not leave you alone with the gate.” Custo shook his head. “Not with your Layla in the balance.”
“Fine. Just you then. The rest are to wait outside.”
Khan stared at the hammer, taking in its shape and the small line of shadow along the inside of its head and shaft cast by the glow of the fire. He summoned old darkness from the depths of the cave and gathered the cold, wet stuff to him for strength.
He reached for the hammer. His hand passed right through.
Taking a deep breath, he tried for it again. And clutched at nothing.
Shadow billowed off his shoulders in great cracking waves, but still he couldn’t grasp the shaft.
“Shit,” Custo said under his breath.
Khan could sense the confidence shifting within the angels in the cavern. They would all have to learn patience. Either that, or prepare for war.
“After you gave me the hammer, it took hours to lift again for myself.” Hours of acute frustration. Each time he’d had to set it down during the creation of the gate, he’d known it would be a trial to pick back up. “And I did not have a choir of angels breathing down my neck.”
“Right.” Custo turned to the angels gathered around. “Everybody out.”
“He’s not to be trusted,” said Ballard.
“If Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Custo returned, “a gate to Hell can’t be destroyed in five minutes. Get out or I’ll help you out.”
An angel lifted his voice to argue, “He can’t even pick—”
“Yet he managed to build the gate,” Custo shot back. “Get out.”
Khan poured his attention into the hammer while the cavern was vacated. The tool was not meant for fae hands and defied his attempts. The power to wield it had come from something else, deep, deep inside him. He searched for that space of quiet, for the time he’d spent with Kathleen. He thought of the red-gold fall of her hair, the shift of her features when she smiled, the natural pink to her lips.
He grasped for the hammer again. His Shadow hand passed through the tool, and he wasn’t surprised. It was the wrong tack; he’d try another.
Layla.
He’d held her in his arms, her skin smooth and silky under his hands. Her body, warm like the earth, arching for him. Shuddering in pleasure. He recalled the salt of her sweat, the flash of her eyes. He drew from her dream, the child Layla, his glimpse into her life, her young gaze full of loneliness. Layla who’d needed a protector, yet had overcome her fears to brave wraith nests and Shadow. Layla, Layla . . .
“Layla,” he said in an invocation and reached.
The wooden shaft was smooth in his grip.
Rose hid her bad hand in her lap when she came to a stop at the security entrance to The Segue Institute. The deformation had extended to her thickening wrist. Corded sinew ran down from her elbow across her forearm. She’d attempted to paint her striated and . . . rather pointy fingernails a pretty pink, which made her bad hand look a little less disturbing, but a glove would be better still. Definitely before she reunited with Mickey.
She rolled down the window of her stolen delivery truck as two soldiers approached, one on either side. She had half a mind to floor the gas and bust through—Find her! the gate said in Rose’s head—but the enclosure surrounding the place was made up of thick concrete and metal barriers. At full speed, the truck would crumple like a soda can.
Well, fudge.
“Ma’am? May I see your driver’s license?” But the soldier thought, Trouble. He looked at the other soldier, who touched something around his throat and mumbled a series of numbers Rose couldn’t quite make out. It must have been some kind of code for trouble, because his next thought was that it would take ninety seconds for backup to arrive. Survive, he thought. She had no idea what he meant by wraith.
What was a wraith? It did not sound polite, particularly directed at her.
“If you’ll just open the gate.” Rose tilted her head, smiled, did a double bat of her eyes. She mentally nudged him with the command. If she pushed too hard, his mind might break like that of the poor fool who’d refused to give up the truck, and then he’d be a drooling baby and no good to her at all.