As the light of the room startled me, I rose from my sleep to see Camille sitting on the opposite side of the room, waiting for me to wake up. I was on the edge of the bed, about to lurch across the room when the reality of where and who I was once again crashed down on me. As I shook the cobwebs from my head, it suddenly dawned on me that her face was wet, her eyes luminous with tears, and she looked like she wanted to be anywhere but sitting there.
“What’s going on?” I looked around for my clothes. But something made me hesitate.
Tears streamed down Camille’s face and she didn’t answer.
My stomach lurched as I realized that something had gone horribly, drastically awry. Then—oh shit, the demons! It had to be the demons.
“Did the Degath Squad put in an appearance?”
She slowly stood. “Menolly, I have to tell you something. I asked the others to let me be the one to do it. They’re ready to go out hunting. You need to get dressed so you can come with us. But first we have to stop by the FH-CSI. We need to go to the hospital.”
Hospital? Hunting? The butterflies churning in my stomach turned into metal-jawed leeches. I eased myself down on the vanity bench. “What happened, Camille? Did something happen to Nerissa?”
She handed me a pair of jeans and a sweater that was hanging over my clothes tree at the end of the bed. “Get dressed.”
I grabbed them out of her hands and yanked off my sleep shirt, hustling the jeans up over my hips. “Please, just tell me. How bad is she hurt?”
“There’s no good way to say this.” Camille shook her head. “Menolly, Nerissa isn’t the one in the hospital. It’s Chase. He was trying to protect her. The Degath Squad kidnapped her, and he tried to fight them off. We don’t know where they took her. Chase is in serious condition. He’ll live, but he got hit by a nasty dose of the Shelakig’s poison. Without the Nectar of Life in his veins, he would have died.”
As the impact of her words hit me, a creeping panic began to rise. Nerissa had been kidnapped. My wife had been abducted.
I yanked on my boots, my hands shaking so badly that I couldn’t zip them. Camille knelt by my side, brushing my hand away.
“You can’t panic, Menolly. You can’t let your fear take over. You know that’s only going to complicate matters. You have to stick with me, hon. You have to get a grip. We’ll find her and we’ll save her, but we need you in control of yourself.”
“What if we don’t find her, though? What if they kill her first?” Every instinct in my body urged me to let out my predator, to run wild until I found them, but Camille was right. I had to get a grip on myself. I counted to ten, then counted again, slowly, whispering each number until I managed to bring myself back from the edge.
She zipped up my boots, then stood and brushed my braids back from my face. “First off, we’ve dealt with this before. Remember Karvanak and Chase? We have something they want, and we know what it is. They want the spirit seals. They won’t kill her—they’ll keep her alive. She’s their hostage, their ticket to power and they know if they hurt her, we’ll do everything in the world we can to destroy them. They realize that if they harm her, they’ll never see the spirit seals.” Pressing her lips to my forehead, she whispered, “I promise you, we will find her.”
“Can you do a Locate spell?” I was grasping at straws. Sometimes her Moon magic worked, sometimes it didn’t, but I was willing to chance any possible backlash.
She took my hand. “Already on it. Come upstairs with me. We’ve been working on this since we found out what happened. Delilah’s over at the hospital. She called about ten minutes ago to say Chase was coming around. He might be able to tell us something. Meanwhile, I’ve been doing my best to locate her via a spell, but I can’t get a read on her. Not her, and most importantly, not her body. With Morio’s help, I should be able to tell if she’s dead, but nothing’s showing up, so the good news is she’s most likely alive. Vanzir took off to the Demon Underground, and he phoned a few minutes ago that he’s on his way home. Roz is over at Carter’s. We’re doing everything we can think of.”
Her words hit like tiny little sledgehammers, pounding into me one after another.
I stood, motioning to the stairs. “I think I’m ready. When did this happen?”
“Around two thirty, Chase called Nerissa. He said there was some sort of altercation and he needed her for victim support. He dropped by to pick her up—he was already on the way—and they headed off together. The next thing we know, forty-five minutes later, Yugi called us to say that Chase was in the hospital, violently ill.”