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“What are you doing here?” I said. She’d always been exuberant, but I hadn’t expected quite this big a show of affection.
Imogen pulled back, her cheeks colored with an embarrassed flush. “Sorry. I just—I’ve felt so bad since I found out why you had to keep quiet and what you were really protecting me from. I heard something horrible was happening down here, and… I shouldn’t have run away last time. I shouldn’t have let myself get that scared. So I came. I don’t know how much I can help, but I’ll try, however I can.”
I didn’t know how much she’d be able to help either, unconsorted and without the use of her spark. But her words brought a bubbling of hope into my chest where I’d felt so vacant a moment ago.
There were so many of us, and we weren’t giving up without a fight. The enforcer in the van had been right. There had to be some way we could overcome this thing.
And whatever that was, we had to figure it out as soon as we possibly could.
“Come on,” I said, grasping her hand and catching Jin’s eye so he’d follow us. “Let’s find the witches in charge and see what we can still do. We’re not beaten yet.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Gabriel
The first sign we got that something was wrong was a curse ringing down the hall from one of the other offices. Kyler stiffened in his chair at the desk. Damon’s head jerked up where he’d been sitting on the couch for the last half hour, glued to his phone with regular tapping of his thumbs. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he were literally going through with his plan to try to find someone in the state who could deliver weapons of mass destruction on short notice.
“What was that?” Ky asked. I moved to the doorway. A voice talking, harsh and too low for me to make out the words, behind one of the other doors. A couple of officials ducked out of their offices and hustled down the hall away from us. My stomach sank.
“It’s obviously not anythinggood,” Damon said. His tone was flippant but the shadows in his eyes told me he was just as worried as I was.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” I said.
Ky gave me a mock salute, his mouth pressed flat in an anxious line.
A small cluster of Assembly employees was forming at one end of the hall. One woman was jabbing her hand in the air frantically while another seemed to be trying to soothe the group with her soft words. A guy at the edge of the group shifted his weight from foot to foot, looking as if he’d rather be anywhere but there.
“What will we do?”
“They’ve called a meeting. They’re working on a new plan right now.”
“But if all the other plans didn’t work…”
“Hey,” I said in as friendly a voice as I could manage, giving the guy closest to me a gentle tap on the shoulder. “What’s the news? How are our defenses against the demon?”
A couple of the witches shot me looks that were downright icy. The guy rubbed his mouth with a nervous twitch of his hand.
“There are no defenses,” he said. “The demon went on the attack. Eight enforcer casualties reported so far, and twice that many who haven’t been confirmed yet. They’ve pulled out.”
“The demon’shere,” one of the women said, her voice squeaking on the last word. “It’s already in the city.”
Shit. My skin went cold. “What do they want us to do?”
“What areyougoing to be able to do anyway?” another official snapped.
The guy near me grimaced. “We don’t know. No one’s said anything definite. We’re waiting to get word.”
With their gazes turning increasingly hostile, I figured that was as good a time as any to extricate myself. I hurried back to our office to find Damon waiting in the doorway, his gaze even darker than before. He stalked inside when I reached him and swiveled on his heel to face me.
“Well? What did you get out of them?”
Ky was watching from the desk, his body still rigid. My body balked, and I suddenly understood the awkwardness of the people I’d just talked to on an even deeper level. It hadn’t been only dismissiveness of some unsparked guy they didn’t respect. Telling people horrible news felt horrible.
“Whatever they ended up trying to do to stop the demon before it got to the city, it didn’t work,” I said. “It broke through, killed a bunch of people, and as far as anyone knows, it’s making its way into the city now.”
It was Damon’s turn to swear, much more creatively and emphatically than the voice we’d heard from down the hall. He paced back and forth on a five foot strip of the carpet, his hands clenching.
“What about Rose? Is Rose okay? Seth? Jin? They went out there too, messing some more with that stupid cage, didn’t they?”
