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“Huh,” Jill said, peering over my shoulder. “It’s you. You made an impression on Greg.”
“No,” I managed to say. Back at the house, I had one of Greg’s sketches: me, dressed in metal and leather bikini-armor, and holding sword and dagger as I faced down a reyza. The drawing I held now showed me in full space-cowboy attire—flowing brown coat, dark red shirt with leather suspenders, and a pistol in my hand. Leaves swirled at my feet, and two moons hung in the sky behind me, shining down on a spaceship that looked just a bit like a chicken. The whole thing was nothing more than colored pencil and paper, but it was so real I could practically see the movement of the leaves and the coat. Greg’s chain-mail-Kara drawing was awesome and showed the depth of his skill, but it couldn’t hold a candle to this.
Szerain did this. He drew me, I thought, stunned. And not only that, it was a nerdy-geeky picture, the sort of thing Ryan was into. But he wasn’t Ryan anymore. What did it all mean?
I looked up at Jill. “This isn’t Greg’s. It’s Szerain’s.”
“Are you sure?!” She reached to snatch the paper from me but stopped before tearing it from my hand.
“I’m sure,” I said. “We’re in the right place.”
Exultant hope lit her eyes. “Then let’s keep moving. Time to bring all the chicks back to the nest.”
But with every subsequent office we cleared, my uncertainty grew, as did Jill’s tension. And after the last room failed to turn up anything but a nest of mice, I made my way downstairs in a cloud of bafflement. Jill jammed her gun into its holster and stalked behind me.
“Now what do we do?” she asked in a tight and brittle voice then nearly ran into me when I stopped in the center of the common room.
“I don’t understand,” I said, frustrated and perplexed. “I know he’s here. This feels right.” Didn’t it? Maybe I wanted them to be here so badly I’d imagined it?
No, I was missing something. The echo of Szerain I’d felt on the door nagged me with a familiarity I couldn’t place. Perhaps there was a clue there? I closed my eyes, remembered the feel, and sought the connection. The memory of my attempt to touch Szerain’s essence blade from the nexus came to mind, and I sank into it. I’d called to Vsuhl—most likely in the dimensional pocket where it was stored when not in use. Right before Elinor interrupted, I’d felt it, and—
Crap. That was it. The whiff of Szerain had the same quality as Vsuhl in storage.
“I wasn’t wrong.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “They’re here but not here.”
Jill rounded on me. “What the hell does that even mean?” She flung an arm out. “There’s no one here but rats and roaches!”
Before she could retreat or resist, I closed the distance and threw my arms around her. In my periphery, I saw Pellini step discreetly away to give us space. “They’re hiding in a dimensional pocket,” I said and felt a tremble go through her. “It’s where the essence blades go when they’re sent away. They slide into a little pocket of universe that folds around them, and that’s exactly what Zack and Szerain did to make a secure hiding place. They’re safe. I promise.” Only problem was that I had no idea how to reach a person in wherever-it-was. Damn it, I hated this, hated with every fiber of my being that I couldn’t do more, couldn’t reunite her with her daughter now.
Jill’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t even know what color her hair is,” she said softly, but in the next breath she gave a strained laugh. “With Zack’s shapeshifting genes, I guess it’s any color she wants it to be.”
“Darn it, and I was going to give her hair chalk for Christmas.” My attempt at a joke trailed off to a sigh. “I’m so sorry, Jill. I swear I’ll figure out how to get them out of their little bubble.”
She echoed my sigh. “Red. She has red hair like her mom.”
I laughed and gave her a squeeze. “I’m sure I saw red peach fuzz on her little noggin.”
A wan smile touched her mouth then slipped away. “I feel like I’m in a holding pattern. I can’t grieve because she’s not dead. Even though I’ve lost her for now, I haven’t lost her forever.” Her hand trembled as the unspoken I hope hung in the air.
“You can grieve,” I said. “You haven’t lost her forever, but you did lose this time with your baby, and you lost any feeling of security, and you lost the chance to be there for her now. You can grieve and cry and throw things because holy fuck, woman, you’ve certainly earned it.”
She hiccupped a tiny laugh and brushed tears off her cheeks. “I guess I have. And I do believe I’ll get her back. My beautiful, brilliant, special baby girl.” She looked up at me, eyes shimmering with sadness and uncertainty. “What if she’s so . . . so like a demonic lord that she doesn’t want or need her mother?”
“Ashava will always want and need her mother,” I said with such intensity that Jill twitched in surprise. “She’s half human, and that half is irrepressible. That’s an absolute fact. Look at the demonic lords. It’s been three thousand years, but they still grope for that aspect, even though they don’t know why.” The manipulation and mind control of the lords hadn’t stamped out their yearning.
I looped my arm through hers. “Let’s get out of here. I have a few ideas crawling around in my head, and I’m pretty sure they need to be lured out with cookies.”
“Sardine cookies,” she said, managing a faint smile.
I shuddered. “If you kill me, the ideas die, too.”
Chapter 22
Back at the house, Jill returned to the basement to continue her Jontari research while Pellini and I headed for the nexus.
“That whiff I caught at the outreach center of Szerain and the dimensional pocket is still fresh in my senses,” I told him. “I want to take full advantage of it to track down the AWOL four.”
“Pursue every lead,” he said with a sage nod. “It’
