It exhaled slowly, and I thought the ground moved. Its eyes went black. Black. Black, black, then blacker still. Oh, shit.
"I'll find the way to make a strong enough bond with you through the lines," it intoned. "And I'll pull you through, soul intact. You walk this side of the lines on borrowed time."
"I've been a dead witch walking before," I said. "And my name is Rachel Mariana Morgan. Use it. And take one of these marks off of me or you forfeit everything."
I'm going to get away with it. I outsmarted a demon. The knowledge was heady, but I was too frightened for it to mean much.
Algaliarept gave me a chilling look. Its gaze dropped to Ceri, then it vanished.
I cried out as my wrist flamed, but I welcomed the pain, hunched as I held my demon-marked wrist with my other hand. It hurt—it hurt as if the dogs of hell were chewing on it—but when my blurred vision cleared, there was one scared line crossing the welted circle, not two.
Panting through the last of the pain, I slumped, my entire body collapsing in on itself. I pulled my head up and took a clean breath, trying to unknot my stomach. It couldn't use me if we were on opposite sides of the ley lines. I was still myself, though I was coated with Algaliarept's aura. Slowly my second sight faded and the red smear of the ley line vanished. Algaliarept's aura was getting easier to bear, slipping almost into an unnoticed sensation now that the demon was gone.
Ceri let go of me. Reminded of her, I bent to offer her a hand up. She looked at it in wonder, watching herself as she put a thin pale hand in mine. Still at my feet, she kissed the top of it in a formal gesture of thanks.
"No, don't," I said, turning my hand to grip hers and pull her upright and out of the snow.
Ceri's eyes filled and spilled over as she silently wept for her freedom, the well-dressed, abused woman beautiful in her tearful, silent joy. I put my arm around her, giving her what comfort I could. Ceri hunched over and shook all the harder.
Leaving everything where it was and the candles to go out on their own, I stumbled to the church. My gaze was fixed to the snow, and as Ceri and I made two trails of footprints over the one leading out here, I wondered what on earth I was going to do with her.
Two
We were halfway to the church before I realized Ceri was walking barefoot in the snow. "Ceri," I said, appalled. "Where are your shoes?"
The crying woman made a rough hiccup. Wiping her eyes, she glanced down. A red blur of ever-after swirled about her toes, and a pair of burnt embroidered slippers appeared on her tiny feet. Surprise cascaded over her delicate features, clear in the porch light.
"They're burned," I said as she shook them off. Bits of char stuck to her, looking like black sores. "Maybe Big Al is having a tantrum and burning your things."
Ceri silently nodded, a hint of a smile quirking her blueing lips at the insulting nickname I used so I wouldn't say the demon's name before those who didn't already know it.
I pushed us back into motion. "Well, I've got a pair of slippers you can wear. And how about some coffee? I'm frozen through." Coffee? We just escaped a demon, and I'm offering her coffee?
She said nothing, her eyes going to the wooden porch that led to the living quarters at the back of the church. Her eyes traveled to the sanctuary behind it and the steeple with its belfry. "Priest?" she whispered, her voice matching the iced-over garden, crystalline and pure.
"No," I said as I tried not to slip on the steps. "I just live here. It's not a real church anymore." Ceri blinked, and I added, "It's kinda hard to explain. Come on in."
I opened the back door, going in first since Ceri dropped her head and wouldn't. The warmth of the living room was like a blessed wave on my cold cheeks. Ceri stopped dead in the threshold when a handful of pixy girls flew shrieking from the mantel above the empty fireplace, fleeing the cold. Two adolescent pixy boys gave Ceri a telling glance before following at a more sedate pace.
"Pixies?" I prompted, remembering she was over a thousand years old. If she wasn't an Inderlander, she wouldn't have ever seen them before, believing they were, ah, fairy tales. "You know about pixies?" I asked, stomping the snow from my boots.
She nodded, closing the door behind her, and I felt better. The adjustment to modern life would be easier if she didn't have to come to grips with witches, Weres, pixies, vampires, and the like being real on top of TVs and cell phones, but as her eyes ranged over Ivy's expensive electronic equipment with only a mild interest, I was willing to bet that things on the other side of the ley lines were as technologically advanced as they were here.
"Jenks!" I shouted to the front of the church where he and his family were living out the duration of the cold months. "Can I see you for a minute?"
There was the tight hum of dragonfly wings faint over the warm air. "Hey, Rache," the small pixy said as he buzzed in. "What's this my kids are saying about an angel?" He jerked to a hovering halt, his eyes wide and his short blond hair swinging as he looked behind me.
Angel, huh? I thought as I turned to Ceri to introduce her. "Oh God, no," I said, pulling her back upright. She had been picking up the snow I had knocked off my boots, holding it in her hand. The sight of her diminutive form dressed in that exquisite gown cleaning my mess was too much. "Please, Ceri," I said, taking the snow from her and dropping it on the carpet. "Don't."
A wash of self-annoyance crossed the small woman's smooth brow. Sighing, she made an apologetic face. I don't think she had even realized what she was doing until I stopped her.
I turned back to Jenks, seeing his wings had taken on a faint red tint as his circulation increased. "What the hell?" he muttered, gaze dropping to her feet. Pixy dust sifted from him in his surprise to make a glittering spot of sun on the gray carpet. He was dressed in his casual gardening clothes of tight-fitting green silk and looked like a miniature Peter Pan minus the hat.
"Jenks," I said as I put a hand on Ceri's shoulder and pulled her forward. "This is Ceri. She's going to be staying with us for a while. Ceri, this is Jenks, my partner."
Jenks zipped forward, then back in agitation. An amazed look came over Ceri, and she glanced from me to him. "Partner?" she said, her attention going to my left hand.
Understanding crashed over me and I warmed. "My business partner," I reiterated, realizing she thought we were married. How on earth could you marry a pixy? Why on earth would you want to? "We work together as runners." Taking my hat off, I tossed the red wool to the hearth where it could dry on the stone and fluffed the pressure marks from my hair. I had left my coat outside, but I wasn't going out to get it now.
She bit her lip in confusion. The warmth of the room had turned them red, and color was starting to come back into her cheeks.
In a dry clatter, Jenks flitted close so that my curls shifted in the breeze from his wings. "Not too bright, is she," he pointed out, and when I waved him away in bother, he put his hands on his hips. Hovering before Ceri, he said loudly and slowly as if she were hard of hearing, "We—are—good—guys. We—stop—bad—guys."
"Warriors," Ceri said, not looking at him as her eyes touched on Ivy's leather curtains, plush suede chairs, and sofa. The room was a salute to comfort, all of it from Ivy's pocketbook and not mine.
Jenks laughed, sounding like wind chimes. "Warriors," he said, grinning. "Yeah. We're warriors. I'll be right back. I gotta tell that one to Matalina."
He zipped out of the room at head height, and my shoulders eased. "Sorry about that," I apologized. "I asked Jenks to move his family in for the winter after he admitted he usually lost two children to hibernation sickness every spring. They're driving Ivy and me insane, but I'd rather have no privacy for four months than Jenks starting his spring with tiny coffins."