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“You be quiet with your logic, sir.”
Holden smiled, and then after a beat said, “I miss you. Miss you being here.”
“Between you and Desmond I’m pretty sure you could start a two-man band singing the song ‘Secret, Come Back to New York’. It would be a huge hit.”
“Never thought the dog and I would agree on much, but it seems you are still the one point where we find ourselves standing on the same ground.”
He wasn’t exactly flirting with me. There were a lot of modern things Holden was bad at, like understanding pop culture and euphemisms, but he was no slouch at the flirting game. When he was hitting on you, you knew he was hitting on you. Mostly because your lady parts suddenly went haywire and your brain stopped forming rational thoughts.
But this wasn’t that. This was subtle and confusing, and it made me feel good and bad in equal measure, which was no fun at all.
“We can talk about that later. Right now we need to find Sig before there’s no New York left for me to move home to, okay?”
“I suppose that’s the best I’m going to get. Sutherland, you ready to go see the goddess?” Holden was staring right at me as he spoke, and we shared a look at had a bittersweet quality.
We had once meant so much to each other, and though that love still existed in some form, it was now tucked deep into the past.
“Let’s do it,” Sutherland said, moving towards the café’s door like a man on a mission, with my request fresh in his mind.
Holden gave me one last look, and then the pair of them stepped over the threshold and vanished.
Which left four of us standing in front of Starbucks with nothing to do but wait. It was agony, not being present for what was happening between worlds right then. I would have given almost anything to be the one who had gone through instead of my father. Not just because I missed seeing Cal, which I did, but I knew I would understand Cal’s often cryptic messages better than Sutherland could.
I was grateful Holden was with him, because he’d be able to relay her words to me more clearly.
I paced nervously in front of the store, and my anxiety must have been palpable because several people who seemed to be headed towards the Starbucks changed their course at the last minute and moved away from us. There wasn’t much I could do to curb my uneasiness, unfortunately. Somewhere beyond that door the answers I needed might be waiting, and they were dangling mere inches—but metaphysical miles—out of my reach.
I was counting on a madman and my ex-boyfriend to come through for me.
And for Sig.
My phone rang as I paced, bringing my focus back to the real world with a start. I scrambled for my pocket and answered quickly when I saw Tyler’s face on the display. The photo I’d taken of him was one where he had not been paying attention until the last second, so his call picture was him glaring at my camera unhappily. It was a great representation, and normally made me chuckle every time I saw it.
“Tyler, what’s up?”
“You aren’t going to like this,” he said almost breathlessly.
“I mean, if we’re being honest here, when was the last time you called me with good news?”
A beat. “Point taken.”
“So what’s the disaster now? Distract me.”
When he spoke again, his voice was leaden with suspicion. “Distract you from what?”
“I’m waiting for my dad to get out of an interdimensional waiting room to tell me where to find my master-vampire-slash-demon-bait former boss before a cult can open a new portal to Hell. You know, the usual.” A woman walking past me gave me a strange look and I shrugged as if what I was saying was perfectly normal sidewalk conversation.
Tyler coughed lightly to cover what I imagine was a much less polite response. “Well, that actually explains a lot about why I’m calling. We’ve been tracking Belphegor over the last two days, and based on the occurrences of demonic activity we’ve had popping up across the country, we have reason to believe he’s headed right for you.”
Ugh.
It was one thing to know a portal might open soon to let a bunch of new demons out to play, but quite another to find out that a demon who was already here on Earth—one who had tried to kill an entire unit of FBI specialists—was on his way to crash the party.
The demon cult was going to be super pumped.
I, on the other hand, could have done without the special surprise guest.
“How sure are you?”
