T
he temperature plummeted
as I ducked under the police tape and approached the globe of ice. Even wrapped in my element, a shiver trickled down my spine. I fought the urge to look up into the veil, but I felt the power of it washing over me, raising the fine hairs on the back of my neck, calling to my demon. I had no intention of bringing her to this party. I didn’t trust myself.
Up close, the curved wall of ice appeared even more breathtaking. I had no idea how Stefan had done it, but he’d sculpted a perfect sphere of thick ice around himself and the thirty-eight foot tall statue. The globe shone a deep blue. I couldn’t see through it.
I laid my hands lightly on the ice, ignoring the throb of pain in my shoulder. The flash from a camera distracted me briefly. No doubt that picture was already being uploaded somewhere and my name dredged up from public records. Whatever happened here, the world was watching. I focused on the back of my hands and pushed a tide of heat into my flesh. The ice peeled away from my touch. I had no idea how Stefan would react. Softly-softly was the plan of action.
The ice fractured. A crack snapped and twitched up the curve of the globe. Another joined it. The ice hissed and groaned, then splintered and tumbled apart, leaving a jagged hole. The thing had walls two feet thick. Substantial enough to stop a bullet.
I stepped inside. My gaze briefly wandered over the proud bronze statue of George Washington on his marching horse and then fell to Stefan sitting on the ground. He had one knee drawn up. He leaned back against the granite pedestal, head bowed. The fall of his hair obscured his eyes. He would have looked entirely human but for the slight touch of frost glistening in his hair and clothes.
The hole in the ice globe gave an audible sigh. The ice around the breach shimmered with patterned fractals. Geometric pieces of ice slotted together until the hole vanished, and the globe was complete again. Stefan had control of his element the likes of which I could only dream of. But at what cost? He sat as still as ice. The sounds of my breathing seemed too loud in the near perfect silence. Did he even breathe?
His fingers twitched and tapped against his leg. “Did you kill my sister?” He kept his head bowed.
“What? No!” I gasped. “Why would you think that?” I tried to keep my voice level, to hold the emotion back, but I didn’t have the strength to mask it all.
“I don’t know what to think.” He turned his head. His eyes swirled an iridescent blue. My breath caught in my throat. He looked netherworldly, his human only skin deep. His demon glared at me through his eyes. “I saw you with Akil...by the lake house. Before you lie, you should know I learned a few things while away. Your father, Asmodeus? He’s the Prince of Lust. So go on and tell me how it wasn’t what it looked like—how you couldn’t help yourself.”
I sucked in a tight breath. He’d seen me pump Akil full of power, watched me call from the veil and funnel it all into Akil, and then afterward, when Akil had tried to pry Damien’s touch out of me. It would have looked intimate. For a while, it had been. Lust. I hadn’t known my demon-father was the Prince of Lust. Akil had neglected to mention that pertinent fact in the ten years I’d spent with him. The jigsaw puzzle of my mind shifted, and a piece slotted neatly into place, but now was not the time to examine the picture it made. Not that it mattered. Stefan had already tarred me with my father’s heritage.
I smiled. He wouldn’t believe me. He’d made up his mind. “It really isn’t what you think. Akil was hurt, and I needed him to—”
“You injected me with PC-Thirty-Four.” Every word clipped. Electric tension prickled my skin. He trembled with the effort of control and glared at me.
“I had to. It was for your own good.” I knew what I’d done was wrong, but what choice did I have? What was it Nica had said? “Sometimes we do the wrong things for the right reasons.”
“You have no idea...” He choked the words back and tore his gaze away. “You had no right.”
“This isn’t about me.”
He barked a cruel laughter. “This is all about you.”
He jumped to his feet. I tensed and stole a few backward steps, but he didn’t approach. He stood regarding me with a twisted mockery of a smile, head tilted to the side. “You didn’t bring me home.” He sneered. “You brought
him
home. Akil. I just tagged along for the ride, right? Because you couldn’t have one without the other.”
“No. Yes, I mean...” I glared back at him. Why was he twisting everything around? It hadn’t been like that. “Yes, I needed Akil to get you out of there. I needed him to free me of Damien too. I was soul-locked, remember? I didn’t bring either of you back lightly. I get it, Stefan. Dammit, I spent the last six months going over it in my head, wishing I could have changed everything. I know what you did for me, what you sacrificed—”
“No you don’t.” He stumbled back a few steps and reached for the statue. “Nica... I never even...” He winced as though struck. “What the hell was she doing there with that demon...?
Your
owner?” Leaning against the statue, he pinned me under his glare, and this time the anger in his eyes burned cold. “If you’d brought me back sooner... If I’d never got involved with you in the first place...” I knew what was coming before he said the words. “She’d still be alive.”
I swallowed the hard lump of emotion choking me. I could tell him everything or at least what I’d gathered from Nica’s last words. She’d summoned Damien because she knew he could control me. I don’t know why. Maybe she thought her father was rewarding me by training me as an Enforcer. On the outside, it might have looked that way. She’d invited Damien inside the Institute, perhaps using one of the entrances she and Stefan had exploited as children. But she had underestimated my owner. Once in, he’d used her as the fastest route to satisfying his sick desires. She probably didn’t know what he was doing with the information he gleaned from her. When I’d mentioned the link between Damien and the Enforcer murders, she’d been surprised and sickened, but by then, it was too late. Damien would never have let her live. If only she’d told me, or anyone, her father even... someone.
I explained quietly, “Damien told her he had information on you. So she let him inside. That was their deal.” The rest of the information, I kept to myself. Stefan didn’t need to know how revenge had driven her to hurt me, revenge for what she saw as Stefan’s death. Also my fault.
Stefan trembled as he held my gaze, and it took all my remaining strength not to look away, the lie —or lack of truth—eating my insides along with Damien’s poison.
Stefan considered my words. I thought he might listen, but his face fractured with grief. He doubled over and fell against the statue, tears freezing on his cheeks. “She was all I had...” He splayed a hand against the stone. Ice bloomed outward. It danced, skipped, and snapped up the statue.
I wanted to go to him, to slip my arms around and hold him close, but given how he’d clearly placed the blame for everything at my feet, my embrace wouldn’t be welcomed. He thought I’d deliberately hurt him. He thought I’d orchestrated all of this for Akil. Stefan had endured what amounted to years in hell, and I’d thrown it all back in his face. As far as he was concerned, I’d brought Akil back, drugged Stefan, and killed his sister with the help of my sociopathic owner. No wonder he wasn’t pleased to see me.
“I broke her heart.” Stefan shook his head. “Nica begged me not to go through the veil. It was the only way to get Akil away from you.” He smiled, but it wasn’t a kindly smile, more the smile you see on a man’s face when he gives up after a long and drawn out fight. “I chose you over my own sister.” The smile twisted. “I thought we were alike, Muse. That time we spent together—I clung onto that moment. As my whole fuckin’ world fell apart on the wrong side of the veil, I held so damn tight to the memory of you. It meant something to me.” His words rang hollow. “And it was a lie. But I see you now. You made me think I was the liar, as though I’d wronged you. You’re your father’s daughter. You use sex as a weapon. You’re barely human. I should have seen it… I wanted to believe you were like me. That you were trapped with Akil.” He laughed bitterly. “I should have known…” His face gathered shadows. His eyes darkened, and his jaw set hard with a snarl. “You and Akil deserve each other.” The venom in his words shivered through my damaged soul.
“Stop it!” I snapped; anger broiling in my veins. “You don’t mean this.”
“The hell I don’t.’”
I wanted to fling insults back at him. How dare he twist the blame around and throw it back at my feet? If he thought those things about me, he didn’t know me at all. But I couldn’t afford to vent my rage at him. He was grieving. Angry. Confused. We were both so emotionally charged. If I gave in to my anger, I was afraid of where it might lead. Outside our snow globe, people were dying. I had to rein him in somehow. Placate him. This really wasn’t playing out as I’d planned.
I lifted my trembling hands defensively. “Okay, look... Stefan, please... I know what you’re going through.” His eyes narrowed, and he shot me a look that could cut diamonds. I bit back my rage. “We’re both screwed up, but just for a second, forget what you think of me. I need you to listen. Boston is three feet deep in snow, and it’s getting worse. You need to stop drawing from the veil. You’ve gotta ease off the power.” He ground his teeth, jaw muscles jumping. “The Institute is out there.” I flung a gesture at the curved wall of ice. “Adam’s out there. He’s going to kill you.”
He fought a laugh before letting it bubble from his lips. “My father can’t stop me.” An aura rippled around him before vanishing again. Had I been looking with demon eyes, I suspected I’d see a very different Stefan than the man glaring back at me.
Maybe Adam would have been the better negotiator. Exhausted, wounded, and damaged, on the verge of a mental collapse, I had no idea how I was supposed to talk Stefan down. “You can walk away from this, Stefan. Close the veil, back down...”
From the incredulous snarl he gave me, he knew it was bullshit. His life as an Enforcer was over. It probably had been the second he stepped through the veil six months ago. The Institute was never going to trust him again, not now that they’d seen what he was capable of. They’d drug him up to the eyeballs and keep him that way. He’d been there before. I knew the look he gave me now because I’d seen the same deep-seated determination in my own reflection. He’d rather die than go back.
Who was I to judge? I’d probably do the same in his shoes. He had nothing left to lose, and the demon was whispering in his ear, promising him the sweet release of chaos. The fact that he could control the power enough to stand and talk with me without giving into his demon’s desires was a damned miracle. But the fact remained: he’d called the power, and if he didn’t release it, the volume of chaotic energy would tear him apart both mentally and physically. You don’t call the power unless you intend to use it, or you’ve got a death wish.
That last thought stalled me. Maybe he didn’t intend to use it at all. Was this display of power just his way of delaying a final act that was already in motion? “Stefan...” In the muffled quiet surrounding us, I didn’t need to raise my voice. A whisper was sufficient. “You do intend to survive this. Don’t you?”
The smile on his face wavered, as did the determination in his eyes. I misread it as a sign of resignation and only realized my mistake when a force like a battering ram punched into my stomach and sent me flying. I hit the thick wall of the snow globe and crumpled to the ground. Instinct took over. My demon came crashing through my control in a blast of heat. The warmth from the earth below flowed through my hands and wound its way up my arms. Boston was cold, the city suffocating, but there were pools of heat within reach of my mental summons.
Flicking my head up, my focus sharpened. I saw Stefan in his true demon form. His clothes were gone, and electric blue veins of power flowed through his flesh. His crystalline wings bowed against the curved top of the ice globe, their tips razor sharp. Patterned fractals slid beneath his skin, across his cheek, and down his sculpted chest. The geometric patterns constantly shifted beneath his skin as though alive. He was quite simply terrifying. At the same time, he was beautiful in the same way all predators at the top of the food chain are. Ruthless efficiency, designed for one purpose. The Institute had reared him to hunt, to kill. Was it any wonder they were about to be on the receiving end of his lack of control?
Stefan made a dismissing gesture with his right hand, and the vast snow globe collapsed. Fragments of ice rained over me. The sounds, lights, and smells of the city rushed in. I caught a collective gasp from the crowd. Stefan regarded them with a casual glance. The power from the veil pulsed through him. Most people hadn’t seen a demon before, let alone one who looked heaven sent. They would sense the power strumming through him, might even see his entire demon guise. He’d captured enough energy from the veil that he glowed like a divine being.
He assessed the crowd. I’d seen that expression before. My brother had mastered it. Cold indifference. I realized he had no intention of keeping the power to himself. He—the demon who cohabited inside him—was going to let it loose. People would die. The Institute couldn’t stop him. I wasn’t even sure I could. But he and I, we were the same.
The flash from a photographer’s camera jolted Stefan’s boreal glare in their direction. I whispered a few words of encouragement to my demon, and then called to the heat of the netherworld beyond the veil. It came easily, too easily. The wound in the veil had been open too long. It made me wonder what else could come through.
“Back down, Stefan.” My voice caught somewhere between human and demon.
He slid his gaze back to me, summoned a sword of ice into his right hand, and flung up a shield in his left. The Institute had seen enough. Gunfire cracked the relative quiet. Stefan and I both bolstered our defenses, drawing from the veil. I thrust enough heat through my veins to blaze my demon body white hot. Stefan had sculpted himself a set of battle armor that clamped itself to his body. He flung out a dozen or so daggers of ice. That casual glance hadn’t been casual at all. The rapid gunfire slowed. Whether he’d hit some of the shooters or they’d just decided to run for cover, I couldn’t know. I prayed, for his sake, it was the latter.