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I doubted it, though. Something told me La Cora and Cyrene had a few more secret plans than we’d anticipated.
Chapter Twenty
Mel
The next day, I had plenty of time to kill before I was supposed to go the HQ, so I decided to give the guys some time to themselves. Hudson was in my back-room gym, and I gave him a kiss before I lifted my demon hunter armor from its place in my full-size locker.
“What are you up to, Mel?”
“Just going to go meditate, don’t worry.” I hadn’t told him that I’d sensed my mother’s presence yesterday, but I hoped maybe I could get her to appear today.
“Near the threshold?”
“Far from it, actually, but it never hurts to be prepared.”
Hudson pulled me tight against him for a kiss.
I laughed and pushed him away. “You’re all sweaty.”
“I can get you sweaty too, if you’d like.”
“Maybe later,” I said, giving him another kiss to soothe the sting. “I need to go think.”
Hudson let me go with a look of longing still in his eyes. We’d spent far so many years apart, it seemed a shame to leave him behind today, but if I could talk to my mother’s spirit one last time, it would be worth it.
Tempest silently accompanied me to my usual spot on the containment wall, now distant from the infernal threshold. I knew she was no longer trapped in there, but I hoped the familiar locale might encourage a greater connection.
“Mamá?” I called, but still no luck. This time, I didn’t even feel her presence. Now that she was free, there was no telling if she would even appear to me at Samhain in a few weeks.
“She will return when she is ready,”Tempest’s ethereal voice reassured me as she settled down beside me, banking her heat.
I should have been content, but I felt anything but. Knowing my mother’s spirit was finally at peace gave me a measure of peace as well. But I still felt like I was standing on the edge of a precipice, waiting for a push.
“Why can’t I also find peace?” I mused out loud.
“You know why.”
It wasn’t long before Hudson appeared on the wall next to me. He’d given me some time alone to think, but apparently he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving me for too long. I couldn’t blame him. The magnetic pull between us was difficult to deny for long, and I’d missed him yesterday while I was with Nico and Jax.
“What’s bothering you?” Hudson asked, cutting straight to it.
“We’re not done,” I said, motioning at the far distant threshold. It was so tiny in the distance that it could almost be taken as a strange trick of the horizon.
“Your mother is at peace, at least.”
“I know. And I keep telling myself that, but Ty is still in there, plotting.”
“Without any spirits left to give him strength.”
“Don’t you think it was a little too easy, the way we got all those spirits free?”
He frowned. “Ask the ones who got tortured by those nasty vines.”
“But Ty didn’t send any demons after us or anything. It was like… after the initial attack, he just gave up.”
“Andras won’t surrender so easily,”Tempest disagreed.
Hudson’s eyes fell on my hellfox, proving that he’d heard her words as well. “That just means he has something worse up his sleeve.”
