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Chapter Eleven
“How are you feeling?”
I took a deep breath and fought the urge to scream. I’d been asked this question five hundred times since I’d been released from the clinic the day before. I’d been told to rest for the night and while I would have ignored that advice, Trent was suddenly interested in following the nurse’s orders.
“I’m good, babe,” I managed to say between clenched teeth and what I was absolutely certain was a forced smile.
Because I was the one forcing it.
Trent sat next to me in bed, wearing not a stitch of clothing. He stretched that magnificent body and yawned. “I’m glad to hear it. Eddie’s been in the kitchen all morning.”
I still wasn’t entirely sure why I’d been forced to rest after my encounter with Liv. The vampire blood had done the trick and my wound had healed, but the nurse had mentioned my blood pressure was slightly high and then all the men had freaked out.
I’d had to send Evan to question several of the people I’d been scheduled to interview the night before because Trent had carried me down to our rooms and then watched over me like a damn hawk. “I didn’t need to take the night off.”
He leaned over and kiss my forehead. “Says the woman who slept for twelve hours.”
I frowned. “Seriously? I’ve been asleep for twelve hours? What time is it?”
He kissed his way down to my nose. “Nine. Ish. In the morning. We can sleep far longer. No one is really awake down here until after noon. The primals have only been asleep for a few hours.”
So I was going to throw my sleep schedule way off, but then it was crap anyway. Jet lag is a real thing, and when your jet lag comes from traveling through a time portal…well, it’s bad. Throw in early pregnancy symptoms and it wasn’t such a huge surprise that I’d slept.
Trent settled back down and cuddled me close. “Evan left notes from all of her interviews. I can’t thank you enough for trusting her. Evan needs some way to contribute. It’s been difficult to be the only girl. All of her role models were stories rather than people. I think watching you in action will be good for her.”
“Well, all she could do last night was watch me sleep. She’s going to think I’m a lazy Nex Apparatus.” I knew I should get up and start in on those notes, but the truth was it felt good to lay in his arms. I only wished Gray was with us. I was used to him being gone. He was often working, but this was different. Now I had to think about where he was. “How long do you think he’ll be gone?”
He was quiet for a moment, his hand stroking over my back. “Not long here. A long time for him. We could get lucky and have some crazy thing happen that he’s supposed to witness. His prophecy instincts can break Lucifer’s hold.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sometimes Gray gets pulled to a place,” Trent explained. “The first time it happened was roughly five years after you disappeared. We had recently established Frelsi. The kids, Sasha, and I at this point were still out on the planes, but we came back to Earth from time to time to meet with our allies and check on Gray. We were there at the time, but Gray wasn’t in Frelsi and we didn’t expect him. I’m fairly certain he was on the Hell plane when it happened.”
“When what happened?”
“When a strange girl showed up outside the city,” Trent continued. “She shouldn’t have known where we were. No one should have. I can tell you her showing up the way she did caused many meetings. We were torn about what to do. We left her outside for days. The general consensus was that she was someone Myrddin had sent. And then suddenly Gray was beside me. He was in full-on prophet mode. I asked him why he was there and he told me he needed to witness something important.”
“Was it Shahidi?” Evan had told me about the young woman who held her grandfather’s soul. Shy came from a family of psychics. Myrddin had killed most of the well-known families with supernatural powers. Shy had been spared because she’d slept over at a friend’s house the night Myrddin had killed her whole family. But without her mother and grandmother to guide her, when she’d come into her powers she couldn’t handle them. At some point the queen’s father had been killed and his spirit had found Shy. She’d given him a space in her soul and he’d guided her and taught her how to navigate out of the mental health facility she’d been kept in and into the supernatural world that should have been hers. “She can talk to the dead, right? Gray was there to see Harry Wharton reunite with his grandchildren?”
“I don’t think so. I did in the beginning, but now I wonder. When Gray comes to witness a prophecy being fulfilled, he tends to disappear after what he’s there to see happens. Gray didn’t leave that day. He stayed until a moment that happened the next morning. Shy was scared when Harry wasn’t in control. He had to rest at times. Shy hadn’t seen the supernatural world. Not much of it. The Fae creatures kind of freaked her out until Rhys took her hand and promised to show her around. He made some flowers grow, and she smiled for the first time. And then Gray was gone.”
“That was the important moment?” If that was important enough to pull Gray from Hell, it had to mean there was a prophecy about it.
“I suspect, though all he would be able to tell us was that yes it was important. Not why.”
“So Shy is important. Not Harry. Shy and Rhys.” My mind was playing around with everything I’d learned. Something tickled at the back of my mind. I hadn’t spent much time with them. Less than a day, and I’d slept a lot of it. “She still holds Harry Wharton’s soul, right?”
“Yes. I have no idea what we would have done without Harry the last few years. He’s taught us all about how to steal stuff we need,” Trent admitted. “More than that, he still has spectacular connections and knows who we can and can’t trust. I’m glad he gets to see his daughter again, but you should know I don’t think he’ll be around for long.”
That had me sitting up. “Why? I thought this was something that worked for both of them.”
Trent seemed to think about how to explain. “I think he’s been holding on until Zoey, Daniel, and Dev returned. In the beginning, he did bolster Shy. He found her in a mental hospital. He explained things to her that her mother would have handled had she lived.”
“About her powers.”
“Yes. Imagine being eight and you see your first ghost. Even if you’ve been told it will happen, it has to be terrifying. She was at the mercy of the human health system, and they did not understand how to help her. Harry did. And they’ve needed each other for years, but he thinks he’s holding her back now.”
“Holding her back from…” It hit me. “She and Rhys are a couple.”
