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Pellini hollered, “Alpha Squad’s a good twenty minutes out!”
Great. Looked like we were going to be on our own for the worst incursion ever. Everyone here was armed to the teeth, but Pellini and I were the only ones with relevant experience. Maybe I could somehow use the nexus as a shieldbuster?
Bryce stood tense and motionless, eyes riveted on the lord. Seretis took a stumbling step away from the rift, gaze settling on his bond-brother. “This is for the best.” He gave Bryce a flickering smile, then returned his attention to me. “I hope.”
My apprehension skyrocketed. In the entire history of the universe, This is for the best almost always went hand in hand with, This really hurts. “Seretis, what have you done?”
He lifted his shoulders in a despondent shrug, demeanor an odd mix of weariness and sanguine anticipation. “Struck a bargain.”
“With an imperator?” I asked in disbelief. “For what? Why?” Whatever the reason, it looked like he’d gotten the short end of the deal.
Seretis gave me a barely perceptible head shake then glanced at Bryce. As I watched, Bryce’s face went from still as stone to alight with comprehension. They were communicating through the essence bond, I realized. Most likely relaying whatever Seretis didn’t want to say aloud.
Dekkak wouldn’t know about their bond, I thought and crossed mental fingers that Seretis was taking full advantage of Dekkak’s ignorance.
“Desperate measures in desperate times, Kara Gillian,” Seretis said. “You cannot blame me.”
My lips pressed thin. “I’ll decide who to blame when I have all the details.”
Bryce’s voice crackled brisk and urgent in my earpiece. “After you left the demon realm, Seretis started picking up some of my thoughts. He doesn’t know why it started happening again. He got the drift of our plans that way and found out that the Jontari have the master gimkrah.”
Seretis flinched as the rift burped a gout of magenta. “She is coming.”
Wait. She? Dekkak was a . . . girl demon?
Bryce cut through my momentary stupefaction. “Jesral met secretly with Rayst.”
Yikes. Poor Seretis. His life partner was hobnobbing with the smarmy head honcho of the Mraztur. And he had no Lannist for support.
/> “Seretis saw the writing on the wall,” Bryce went on, “what with that crap on his homefront, his ptarl gone, our plans in motion, and the transfer of the gimkrah. So he messaged Dekkak with a proposal.” Bryce paused. “One he hopes you’ll turn in our favor, but if not, he’s . . . sorry. That’s all I know.”
I kept my expression blank, but inside I moaned fuuuuck. Okay, so Seretis had been faced with dire circumstances and took action. Except he wasn’t like Mzatal, who saw move upon move in advance. He was underestimated, sure. More empathetic than the other lords, yeah. But a strategic mastermind? Probably not.
The only possible upside was that, if Seretis thought there was a chance to turn whatever his proposal was in our favor, it meant Dekkak might not be in instant kill mode when he—she—arrived. Unless Seretis was playing us, but I found that tough to believe. Even though I couldn’t be absolutely sure of his intentions, I had faith in the sanctity of his essence bond with Bryce.
Either way, I was stuck without a rule book in the middle of a game to decide the fate of two worlds. And, more urgently, the fate of me and everyone I cared about.
I briefly considered banishing Yulz then decided against it. One SkeeterCheater wasn’t going to make a difference, and there was a chance I could use him as a bargaining chip. A very slim chance, but at this point I was simply trying to keep from sliding off a tilting chessboard.
Huge clawed hands reached upward from the rift and grasped its lip. Every joint of the scaly, blood-red fingers sported a gold ring etched with blocky symbols.
Heeeeeeere’s Dekkak, I thought with just the right amount of hysteria.
With an agile move as if shrugging off the earth itself, Dekkak pulled herself up through the rift. She was bigger than Yulz—close to the two-story height of Big Turd and equally broad. Moonlight glinted off rugged scales that began at the top of her head and swept down to cover her back and shoulders. As far as I could tell, the scales were the only obvious physical feature that differed from a male, yet there existed an intangible quality about her that proclaimed her as powerfully female.
“Hold your fire,” I murmured into the headset. “For now.” She hadn’t ripped anyone in half yet, and there was no guarantee we could take her down even if we dumped our entire arsenal on her at once. We needed to pacify her, cleverly work whatever bargain Seretis had cooked up, until Alpha Squad got here. Then we stood a fighting chance. Maybe.
Fucking hell, but this bitch was intimidating.
There was no hint of the rakkuhr flame-shielding, but potency radiated from her—different, but no less impressive than the aura of a lord. It penetrated me, setting my bones buzzing and my teeth on edge. Gold glittered on her hands and horns, but otherwise, she wore no adornments except . . .
Shit. On her left ear, a Beretta 92 dangled from a slim iron hoop.
Dekkak was scary enough with claws and teeth and size, but it was that relatively subtle detail that described the scope of what we were up against here. Whether that gun was a trophy from the Dirty Thirty—the DIRT team who’d gone through a rift to take the fight to the demons—or merely an amusing-to-her trinket, the gun-turned-bauble symbolized the vast power gap between Dekkak and my people.
Though my heart hammered, I willed my face to stone. I’d learned long ago to never reveal my internal battles during a summoning, even for the weakest of the relatively tame lord-bound demons. Mr. Poker Face Mzatal was the ultimate example of the impassive exterior, whether fighting for his life or deciding between tea and tunjen. I strove now to emulate him.
Dekkak’s nostrils flared, and in a tiny corner of my mind I knew she smelled my fear. Yet her gaze swept over me and halted on the netted Yulz. Sucked to be him, but I was more than happy to be the unnoticed insect. Every second she spent focused on Netboy meant no one here died, and Alpha Squad was a second closer.
