The Sweetest Burn Page 8

  “Well, even if you run into a nest of demons you’ve never met before, no one else could stand to be mostly naked in these temperatures without catching hypothermia, so they’d still know it was you,” I said, trying to use a quip to conceal how angry I was by this latest revelation.

  “If we’re lucky, we’ll be long gone before more demons arrive,” he replied, sounding far calmer than I felt. “There should be only one here now, judging from the times I watched Demetrius absorb new realms.”

  This was the first time I’d heard him mention Demetrius since the day I’d killed him when I’d used the slingshot to wipe out Adrian’s former realm. I liked to believe that I’d walked through Demetrius’s ashes at some point. The last thing I wanted to do was ask Adrian to elaborate on a memory that involved his evil former foster father, but I had to. “Why only one?”

  Adrian shot me a jaded look. “Because demons are territorial, and none of them want someone else jumping in to claim their new territory after they absorb a realm. Remember, on their end, this place was only a reflection before now, and that made it up for grabs. So, only the demon who did this will be here because he’s the only one who would’ve hitchhiked through on the gravitational field when he caused these two dimensions to collide. The others will come, but for a little while, this place should be demon-and minion-free, except for its creator.”

  That’s right, demon realms started out as nothing more than duplicate reflections of our world. Those reflections were detailed enough to include buildings, cars and other structures, but they weren’t tangible. Not until a demon used enough power to smash the reflective world into the real one, “swallowing” it. If we were mostly demon-free now, we had to make the most of it.

  “Does this thing still run?” I asked, giving the Challenger a critical look. We didn’t need windows to look for Costa and Jasmine, but we could sure use a functional engine.

  “I’ll check after I’ve changed into my new clothes,” Adrian said, and took off his shorts.

  I was so startled to suddenly see him naked that for a few uninhibited moments, I drank in the sight of him. The headlights hid nothing from my view, throwing every chiseled hollow and sinew into stunning relief. If the round, hard globes of his ass and his long, muscled lines weren’t impressive enough, the object framed by the tight gold curls between his legs did the trick. I found the staff, I caught myself thinking. And it is mighty.

  “Ivy.”

  The amusement in Adrian’s tone broke through my near-blasphemous thought. I turned away, feeling a blush burn my cheeks. I was going to die from embarrassment and then go straight to hell. That was my real destiny.

  “Yes, I have warmer clothes,” he went on, his tone turning husky. “I didn’t occur to me to change into them until you weren’t looking, and now, I’m glad I didn’t.”

  Me, too! the shameless part of me replied, but the rest of me was still cringing over being caught gawking at him as if I’d never seen a naked man before. Okay, so I hadn’t in real life, but the movies and the internet had to count for something.

  “Are you dressed yet?” I said, keeping my back turned.

  A rustling sound, then he said, “Enough.”

  I turned around, marveling that my hearing was back to normal. The manna must have healed more than my cuts. Adrian was now by the trunk of the car, and the taillights revealed that he had on pants and calf-high boots. As I watched, he pulled a sweater over his head, then grabbed a large knife and what looked like a bag of dirt from the trunk.

  “What’s with the dirt?” I asked.

  He tucked the knife into his pants. “It’s hallowed.”

  I hadn’t felt anything from it, but with my hallowed sensor being out of shape, that wasn’t surprising. Plus, it was only a bag. Not an entire plot of ground. “Grave dirt?” I guessed.

  He shot me a quick grin. “Not just any. It’s dirt that’s tossed onto caskets as relatives say their final goodbyes. All that emotion plus being blessed soil turns it into a weapon, so to demons, it’s like little grains of dynamite.”

  I gave the bag an admiring look. “Do we have any more?”

  He tossed it at me. “Nope, so if you need to use it, make it count. Now, let’s find our way out of here so we don’t have to use any of it.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE CHALLENGER HAD a flat tire, but Adrian didn’t use manna to fix it. Yes, manna worked on everything. Since we were low on our supply and didn’t know if we’d need more for future injuries, we just drove at a slow pace, the flat wheel causing us to thump-thump-thump our way across the desert playa.

  Adrian kept one hand on the wheel and the other outside the window, feeling the air as if it could provide us with directions. For him, it could. I wanted to look for Jasmine and Costa first, but Adrian said that finding the exit took precedence because without it, we were all stuck here.

  He was right, but I was still worried over whether they’d made it out or not. If they had, we only had ourselves to hustle out of here, and we’d made it out of demon realms under worse circumstances. If Adrian was right and this place was currently empty, we weren’t even in any real danger yet. Well, if you overlooked the fact that we were in a now frozen desert with no water, food or shelter aside from a windowless car, anyway.

  Because I had nothing else to do at the moment, I kept texting Costa to see if he’d respond. It was possible he’d get them since Jasmine’s cell had briefly worked after she’d been pulled into a realm. It was how I learned that she was in trouble all those months ago, when her frantic texts of help and trapped had put me on a collision course with my fate.

  After well over an hour of driving, Adrian turned, and a paved road was revealed in our headlights. We must now be clear of Racetrack Playa. We’d left the bus parked near the Grandstands off this road because no one was supposed to drive onto the Playa. Adrian had ignored that when he took me on our ride, but Costa had followed the rules. Minutes later, I held my breath as we drove by the Grandstand area. So far, no familiar tour bus, but headlights from other vehicles lit up the parking lot, and when I saw large shapes moving around, I was horrified.

  “There are people here!”

  Adrian kept driving after casting a single, grim look at the Grandstand area. “Tourists. They would’ve gotten dragged along like we did when this area was sucked into the realm.”

  Horns began to sound behind us, and I thought I heard shouts. “We have to turn around,” I stated. “Those people have no idea what just happened. They must be terrified!”

  “And you think telling them they’ve been pulled into a demon realm will help?” he asked sardonically. “Even if they did believe you, that would only make them more hysterical. Only finding the exit will help them, Ivy. If the gateway’s gravitational fields haven’t settled yet, it might even be weak enough that they’ll be able to cross through on their own without me needing to pull them through.”

  What he said made total sense, yet I was still bothered by the way he said it. I looked behind us, not able to see the cars’ headlights anymore even though we hadn’t driven that far. That was how complete the darkness was. It swallowed everything—and everyone—within it permanently.

  And Adrian sounded as if he didn’t care about the people we drove away from. Was that by practicality since there was nothing we could do? Or was it another indicator of the coldness that resided in him from spending the first hundred-plus years of his life as a demon prince? He cared about me, sure. And he cared about Costa, I believed. But when push came to shove, did anyone else matter to him? At all?

  “You’re right,” I said at last, depressed by the thought. “It still feels wrong, though. They don’t know where they are, what’s going on, or what’s coming for them.”

  That was the worst part, because I did know what was coming for them, if we couldn’t get them out
. Then again, if we didn’t find the gateway, we’d be worse off than any of them. We’d been number one on the demon’s most-wanted list for months, and how ironic if they ended up nabbing us after something as random as a new land grab...

  “Wait, why would demons want to absorb a desert?” I asked abruptly. “They use their realm absorbing for showing off, but there’s nothing out here except sand, more sand and rocks.”

  Adrian gave me a thoughtful sideways glance. “They might not want the repercussions of swallowing a populated area. They’ve gotten away with that for millennia, but it’s the information age now. Thousands of people suddenly disappearing would make worldwide headlines and cause mass panic. Still...”

  “Demons don’t much care about freaking people out?” I supplied. “In fact, it’d probably amuse them to see governments scrambling to come up with an explanation as to why entire cities became ghost towns in a blink. Plus, if demons get their way and the realm walls crumble, then everyone will be able to see those dark, icy realms spill out into our world, and then they’d know for sure that demons exist.”

  Adrian began to slow the car. “Then, the only other reason they’d use their power to absorb a hunk of desert is if they thought there might be more here than just sand.”

  “The staff,” I whispered, the pieces falling into place. “You said yourself that they’ve been looking for it so they can use it to tear down all the realm walls, but they can’t feel it. Only I can, so what if their new tactic is to absorb places with natural phenomena to force me to look for it on their territory, just like I had to do with the slingshot?”

  He parked the car and got out, taking the manna with him. When he came back, the bag was empty but when we started driving, the thump-thump-thump from the flat tire was gone.

  “Then they’ll be coming for this realm sooner than I expected,” he finally answered, his tone hardening. “In fact, they might already be here.”

  * * *

  OF ALL THE things I least expected to see in the middle of a desert, a castle had to top that list. Yet there it was, sprawling across a couple acres, with a watchtower that loomed majestically over one corner. The fact that I could see it at all meant the castle had battery-powered emergency lights, and they showed off white walls, Spanish-style tile roofs and multiple curved archways. With its size and opulence, it would be the first place that demons picked to set up their headquarters. Say what you will about evil fallen angels; they weren’t a pitchfork-and-brimstone crowd. Instead, they liked to live in style, and the fancier, the better.

  Which begged the question, “Why are we here?” I asked.

  Adrian killed his headlights, using the faint illumination from the castle to drive off-road. The sand was much softer here, with the peaks and valleys you’d expect from a normal desert. It was slow going, and I thought we’d get stuck a few times. It took almost twenty minutes to go a hundred yards, but Adrian finally parked the car beneath a Joshua tree jutting out from the hill. We’d be invisible here, unless you went trekking through the sand, which must be what we were about to do.

  “The gateway’s here,” Adrian replied. “Makes sense. Whoever absorbed this realm would want it by the castle so they could keep pulling in tourists from the other side.”

  Anger burned through me. That’s similar to what had happened with Jasmine. She and her boyfriend had stayed at a bed-and-breakfast that had a realm gateway in the innkeeper’s office; a place no guest would feel wary about entering, and one they’d rigged so that select guests wouldn’t be able to leave.

  I chased the memory away as we got out of the car, closing our doors quietly. We’d seen other cars parked in front of the castle, but who knew if they all belonged to innocent tourists? One of them might be from the same demon that had dropped this realm onto this place. He or she had to be here somewhere. It took incredible power to make a realm, Adrian had told me, and that power couldn’t be harnessed from long distance.

  Adrian gestured for me to follow as he started up a steep hill. I did, looking around warily. I couldn’t see much, but my eyes were starting to adjust to the dark. Months ago, after journeying to multiple demon realms, I’d been able to see almost as well as Adrian. Repeated use brought out the perks of my lineage. Too bad my hatred of the realms had stopped me from practicing my night vision since then.

  My cell phone rang, the sound shattering the quiet and startling me so much, I almost dropped it. I’d had it in my hand in case Jasmine or Costa responded to my texts, but I hadn’t really believed I’d hear from them on this side of the realm.

  Adrian snatched it, hitting Answer before the next loud ring. “Are you out?” was his single hushed question.

  “We got out,” I heard Costa respond, and the rush of relief I felt was so intense, it weakened my knees. “You?”

  “Still here,” Adrian whispered. “We’re—”

  The light from the phone went dead. As anticipated, the best the signal could manage was a few seconds, but that was enough. We now knew that Jasmine and Costa were safe. Brutus, too, since he’d been hiding from the sun in the tour bus. I was so happy, I could have spun around in giddy circles.

  Adrian gave it back to me after setting the call alert on vibrate. I put it in one of the zippered pouches in my pants. We wouldn’t need it again until we were out of this realm, and hopefully, that would be soon.

  Adrian paused when we reached the low wall that ran around one side of the sprawling Mediterranean-style structure.

  “The gateway’s somewhere inside the house,” he said, once more feeling the air as if it had form. “From the sounds, all the people are on the lower level, so let’s start at the top.”

  I didn’t get a chance to ask how he intended for us to do that. Adrian ran to the corner of what looked like an exterior courtyard, where grapevines twined up to the second floor. He brushed the vines aside, revealing lattice and thin, hollowed-out logs that must have been there for additional support. Adrian grasped one of the thin logs, but instead of vaulting himself up, he gestured to me.

  “You first.”

  I went over to him, intending to fit my feet in the lattice spaces and climb. Before I could do that, Adrian grasped me low around the hips and pushed. Suddenly, I was scrambling to grab the roof tiles so I didn’t slide off the second floor. I knew he was strong, but I was hardly a waif of a girl, and here he’d almost shot-putted me onto the second floor with a single push.

  Then I was scrambling back to get out of his way as he vaulted himself upward next. Good thing the roof only had a mild slope, because the barrel-shaped tiles were slick with the cold. Adrian raised himself into a crouch and grasped my hand, leading me across the roof. I followed, mimicking his low profile, only to stop abruptly when we reached the exterior flue of a chimney. My right arm begun to burn with a sudden, startling pain. Adrian stopped at the same time, touching the stones on the chimney.

  “There,” he said with dark satisfaction. “The gateway is right below this.”

  The pain in my arm grew more intense. I grabbed it with a yelp, and when I pushed up my sleeve, I was shocked to see the slingshot-turned-tattoo change from a dull brown color to a rich, shimmering gold. Pain radiated from each loop of the former rope where it curled around my arm, until the entire marking felt as if it were on fire.

  “What’s wrong?” Adrian said, not seeing the odd golden glow because my hand covered the parts that were visible.

  At first, I could only shake my head in pained confusion. I had no idea why the slingshot tattoo was now burning as though it had been inked onto my flesh with acid. It had never done that before...wait. Yes, it had. Once.

  I glanced at the chimney, then at the tiles beneath us. Somewhere below us was the gateway, according to Adrian. But maybe that wasn’t the only dark object in the house.

  “Adrian,” I whispered, uncovering my right hand so h
e could see the new, golden sheen on my supernatural tattoo. “I think the demon who made this realm might be here.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ADRIAN GLANCED AT my arm and his eyes widened. Without another word, he picked me up and ran across the roof, somehow managing to make his rapid steps almost soundless. When he reached the darkest corner where one of the emergency lights had burned out, he jumped down.

  I stifled my grunt as we landed from that two-story drop with a thud that reverberated in my bones. Before I could tell him to put me down, he began running again, glancing behind himself several times. I did, too, but I didn’t see anything. I couldn’t hear anything, either, except the wind and the now barely perceptible sounds of the people inside. All in all, I took that as a good thing. If I was right and a demon was inside, at least it didn’t seem to have spotted us.

  Adrian ran over to a looming clock tower that was surrounded by an iron fence. He easily scaled it, even with me still clutched to his chest. Once on the other side, he ignored my demand to be let down. He also ignored the door at the base of the tower and went around to the exterior stairs. He ran up those as though being chased, but unless he saw something I didn’t, no one was coming after us.

  About two stories up, we came to another door, and this time, Adrian broke through it with one kick. The softly lit interior showed what appeared to be the mechanical guts of the clock that crowned the top of the tower. Adrian finally let me down inside here, but I had barely formed all the questions in my mind when he found the single emergency light and killed it, plunging the room into near-total darkness.

  “What’s going on?” I whispered, blindly reaching out.

  His hands covered mine moments later. “Shh.”