Chapter Twenty-Six
The dry hush of sliding coals woke me, and I jerked, clutching to me a black blanket smelling of Brimstone. I didn't sit up since I was warm and comfortable, a hazy lassitude still heavy on me as I lay against the gently curving bench surrounding the central fire in Al's kitchen. I'd fallen asleep here before, but this felt different.
A dim light glowed on a new honey-colored slate table set before the smaller hearth. Al sat before it, his back to me as he chanted. At least I thought it was Al. It didn't look like him, but it didn't look like Pierce, either.
Al had been in my head. He'd made my thoughts real. He'd seen me down to my soul, and I'd seen nothing of his...and he's...humming?
The masculine figure was taller than Al by quite a bit but narrower, lacking the wide shoulders that I was familiar with. Short red hair pretty much covered him in a curly pelt where it showed past a lightweight black shirt and trousers. Muscles were well defined, with a long strength rather than heavy bulk. A shiny ebony hardness just above his ears might have been horns, and by God, I think he had that same prehensile tail I'd seen before when he'd threatened Treble.
"Al?" I croaked, putting a hand to my throat when the sound came out rusty.
The gravelly chantlike words cut off, and he spun, a ley-line doodad clattering until it fell off the table and he caught it with a long-fingered, double-jointed hand. A wash of black ever-after coated him, falling away to reveal the more familiar vision of Al, though he still wore that pair of casual jammies and had a surprised look in his red, goat-slitted eyes. The mirror he'd been looking into he slammed to the table, facedown, covering up the pentagram and glyphs he had scribed on the new slate table.
"You're awake!" he said, and I cowered when his voice seemed to boom inside my head.
"Yeah," I gasped, hands over my ears. I cracked an eyelid, seeing him muttering another curse and a new wash of ever-after falling from him. What is he doing in here while I'm sleeping? "I don't feel so good," I said as I sat up. "What are you doing in here?"
"Trying to remember what I look like," he muttered, his skin turning red from embarrassment, not a curse or a charm. He touched the mirror, and it vanished.
Grimacing, I looked over the candlelit room, missing the sun already. I felt like I'd been working out all day and gone to bed cold. It had to have been from making that construct. I hadn't taken the smut for it, and I wondered who had. Al? "You said I reset your DNA. Can't you just...plug and play?" I asked.
"Plug and play...," Al drawled, his wide back to me as he put the ley-line stuff in a tall cupboard and locked the door with a key, not a spell that could be tampered with. "Such a way with words you have. Yes, my DNA has been reset, but not all the genes a person has are expressed. I have to decide which ones to turn on."
Like the one with curly red hair. "Oh," I said simply, slumping where I sat. Jeez, I was tired, and I stretched my legs out from under the black blanket, feeling everything ache. I was still wearing the short-sleeved shirt and jeans Newt had put me in at the edge of the desert, but at least Al had taken my sneakers off-and only my sneakers.
I was silent, thinking about that curly red fur he had been covered with. And the tail. "I kinda like you the way you are right now," I said, feeling my muscles ache as I swung my feet to the floor and touched my toes to the cold floor. "Where's Pierce?"
"I don't know."
My next words vanished in surprise. He didn't know? The way he said it was more like he didn't care. It wasn't like Al to let profit slip from him, and I wondered what was up. Shifting my aching shoulders, I mumbled, "I don't like you in here when I'm sleeping. It gives me the creeps."
"Yes, well, it was easier for me to work quietly here than to move you to my room." He stood, a handful of ley-line charms in his thick hands. "Now that you're awake, you'll be moving in there."
My arms ached, and I rubbed them. Then I stopped. Moving in there? "Whoa, whoa, whoa," I said, waking up fast. "Okay, I let you in my head and everything, but that doesn't translate into me moving into your bed!" I stood, wobbling, and suddenly he was there, holding my elbow.
"Let go!" I yelled, yanking out of his grip and falling back into the soft warmth of the blanket. My heart pounded, and I felt weak, surprising me. "I may be a demon!" I exclaimed, feeling my eyes start to warm as it all sank in. "But I'm not your girlfriend, wife, or anything. Anything!" I shouted, shaking as I drew my feet up and held my shins to me. "I'm not sharing your room, your bed, or your life. I can sleep just fine right here!"
"Rachel, Rachel, Rachel," he said, very still and unmoving. "Always jumping to the wrong conclusion. You're like a frog, you know." Looking nothing like himself, Al retreated to the smaller hearth. Slowly my knees dropped from my chin, leaving me embarrassed. Sheesh, I'd huddled up like a scared little girl.
"Wrong conclusion," I said bitterly. "What's not to understand? Move into your room? Sounds plain enough to me."
Al spun his chair at the table to face me, his back to the smaller hearth. He sat, looking disheveled and rumpled until he made an effort to sit up straight. "You can't continue to sleep in the kitchen," he said, looking discomfited. "Before you yell at me again," he said as I took a breath, "I'll sleep in the library. You get the bedroom."
My held breath exploded out of me. Huh?
Al sent his gaze over the shadowy workroom. "It's not safe for you here. Too many things might get out." His goat-slitted eyes met mine, and I shivered, my skin prickling as I remembered the tapestry that seemed to move on its own and had bled and cried. Or the bottle of soul that had almost taken me over, just sitting on a shelf waiting to fall over and break.
"Or in," he added with a little shoulder lift, his eyes on the ceiling, and I held my blanket closer, my thoughts going to the dark spot on his pantry floor that seemed to pull at me every time I went down there alone-and only alone. "You don't have enough smut on your soul to hide you, and you're like a light, attracting things."
"Like moths?"
Al's eyes dropped from the ceiling, chilling me. "No. Ugly things in the dark attracted to power, and I'm not just talking about my associates. It didn't matter before, but..." Al winced. "I knew you were special, Rachel. And don't take this as me going soft or sentimental-"
"You didn't think I could do it." My heart was pounding, and I felt sick. I was a demon. Crap on toast, I was a demon, and there was no going back. Stuff had been turned on in my head, and it couldn't be turned off.
Head lowered, Al looked at his bare hands, folded in his lap. "I knew you could, otherwise I wouldn't have let you get into that position. But now everyone else knows it, too. I wasn't expecting how vulnerable you would be, and word gets around. It is too easy for..." He hesitated. "You're so damn helpless...," he tried again, his words cutting off once more. "How am I supposed to keep them off you now that they know?"
My stomach cramped, and I felt my expression go blank. Other demons. I had gone from a curiosity to a real demon. They might want to take by stealth what they couldn't buy now that I was one of them and not just a maybe. And Al didn't know if he could prevent it?
"Never mind," he growled, seeing my fear. "The bedroom has safeguards that you can't get here."
"Al?" I questioned, and he stood, showing me his back as he faced the fire.
"I'll stay in the library," he said, and I shifted uncomfortably. "I would have moved you to my room immediately, but I didn't want you waking up in a strange place." He turned, his eyebrows raised in familiar, mocking amusement. "Jumping to conclusions. Yelling at me. Breaking my things..."
I shivered, pulling my knees to my chin again and not caring if it made me look scared. I was. Vulnerable. He'd called me vulnerable. I had proved myself stronger, and therefore somehow become weaker. "You were in my head," I whispered, remembering how it had hurt-my soul stretched over the entire collective until he lifted me from it. "You separated the tulpa from my thoughts. Thank you."
He was back at the table before the fireplace, wiping out both the circle and the laundry list in Latin beside it with a red cloth. "You're welcome."
His reponse was guarded, and my tension rose. "You saw my thoughts. More than usual."
"Yes." Scrubbing, still scrubbing.
"I couldn't see yours."
Smiling, he turned, his eyes looking almost normal in the dim light. His teeth glinted. "That's the nature of it, yes."
Uneasy, I counted the dirty dishes scattered around, making it look like a frat boy's dorm. It appeared as if he'd been here for days. Maybe he'd been hungry. I knew I was. "What did you see?" I asked, nervous.
The rag he'd used to clean the table went into the fire behind him. "I saw what you are," he said, "and I was ashamed. I saw what you expect from a person, and I'd call you a bitch except you demand it from yourself as well. I saw how you see me," he explained. "It wasn't anything I didn't already know, but it made me wonder at what I lack, what isn't there."
"Al," I interrupted, remembering that forced kiss and how it had felt.
But Al was shaking his head, looking ill. "I am not going to be the person who completes you," he said, glancing at me and turning away. "You are one messed-up bitch."
"Gee, thanks," I muttered as I held my cold toes, glad that he wasn't going to try to change our relationship now that I was stuck here.
Al's expression shifted, became ugly, angry with himself. "I saw what we had become. Soft, ineffective, laughable," he said, his hand forming a fist.
"You still scare the hell out of me," I interrupted.
"Accepting our exile and making it comfortable instead of finding a way to go home. We are a joke."
Oh, that. I rubbed my feet, trying to warm them. "Sorry."
Al shook out a silver scarf that hadn't been there a moment ago and turned back to the table, running it lightly over the new slate as if erasing any electronic charge left behind. "I don't need your pity."
No, you need a good psychiatrist. My eyes went to his feet as they scuffed. Slippers? "Where's Ku'Sox?" I asked, wishing I could wake up again and start over. Having swum in my soul might have given Al the feeling that he could be casual with me, but it made me nervous. I had no idea what he was going to do next.
His shoulders moving slow and steady, Al wiped down the table again until even the last hints of what he'd written were gone. "Don't worry about Ku'Sox. You proved yourself." Becoming still, he looked at me, the candle and firelight making his eyes glow. "You have a place here."
Perhaps, but I didn't want it. I had things to do. I had to ask Trent what I'd done wrong with that curse. Then I had to find Ku'Sox to give it to him so I could at least go home without being summoned. Home... "What time is it?" I asked, depressed.