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“Exactly what I’m worried about,” I said.
Yet there was a missing puzzle piece somewhere. Something I didn’t quite understand. It made me stir crazy. I wanted to go back in there and challenge Ty. I wanted to show his parasite that he couldn’t possess me the way he’d taken Ty, who’d been all too willing to sell his soul to the devil. I wanted to punish them both for all the spirits they’d tortured, including my mother’s.
How different would things have been if Ty had just come to me with the vision he’d foreseen? Would I have done anything differently if he’d been turned and I’d known about his vision beforehand?
Maybe not.
“Are you coming with me to HQ later tonight?” I asked.
“Of course. Where one of us goes, we all go. Besides, we all should give our statements about La Cora and Cyrene at once.”
“Should be easy for the three of you.”
Hudson chuckled. “Especially Nico. He didn’t even remember their names.”
That was the other thing that was bothering me. Preta had taken over so easily, and yet he still wasn’t the hero we needed. “The DHA’s stance on vampires still hasn’t changed.”
Until it did, the four of us would never truly be safe here. And Hudson and Jax’s cousins, Jiro and Ichiro, would never be able to come visit us again. Even though only Jiro was the vampire, I knew that if anyone tried to detain his brother, things would spiral quickly. Even in the short time I’d known them, Ichiro and Jiro had seemed as inseparable as Jax and Hudson.
“You know the new chief better than I do. What’s holding him back?”
“The regs,” I said. “Demetri told me it’s a sticky political situation. The reg authorities installed La Cora and Cyrene back in the Year of Rending, and they’ve expected the DHA to keep them safe ever since. The DHA can’t be seen releasing a ton of vamps back into the wild.”
“Then they’re just playing politics, waiting for the OIB to put pressure on the regs,” Hudson mused. “That way it looks like the OIB made them do it.”
“Will you tell your handler that? Maybe it’ll speed things along.”
“She’s smart enough to figure it out on her own, but I’ll shoot her a message just in case.”
We lapsed into comfortable silence after that.
Staring across miles and miles of blackened earth, I wondered if Charlotte would ever rebuild here again. Was the ground here forever changed from being exposed to the infernal realm? Or would it recover, like the earth after a forest fire? Maybe it was more like after a bomb, I mused.
What would it be like to cross the threshold now that the overlapping area — the periphery, Tempest had called it — had receded so much? Would we cross, only to stand directly before the fiery trench leading into the infernal realm itself? And if we couldn’t survive crossing that dark moat, how could we ever hope to defeat Ty?
If he didn’t come out, we were at a stalemate. He didn’t seem to be able to completely leave and come into our world, and we couldn’t cross into his. Sure, the DHA had been working on reproducing more infernal antidotes — the DHA wanted to send five covens with us next time — but would they stand up to the true infernal realm?
“Tempest,” I said, and her little head perked up, her spikes lifting. “Vampires can already cross the threshold without wearing infernal antidotes. But what if we wore them anyway? Could we cross the moat into the infernal realm then?”
“I wouldn’t chance your life on it.”
I jumped up and began pacing. “We need to draw out Ty, then. Killing him is the only way to close the portal, right?”
“Killing a realm’s ruler would have disastrous consequences on that realm, yes,”Tempest said, but she sounded uncertain.
I suddenly realized that maybe she was worried about what would happen to her if we closed the portal. “Will you be able to stay?” I asked. “Can you survive if we do that?”
“I should. Just as vampires are tainted by biters’ venom, which allows you to survive the periphery, I believe that taking your blood will allow me to survive here indefinitely.”
“Even if the portal closes and you can never return home?”
“Home.”She let out a high-pitched yelp that I took to be something of a laugh.“I’m not sure I know the concept.”Her cloudy tail unfurled as she looked up at me.“You are my home.”
My heart melted at her words, and I leaned down to pet her head. “Is it weird that I pet you?”
She tilted her chin up, and I scratched underneath.
“You could do it more often.”
