Page 67 of Demon Loved
Her shoulders hitched the second they left the apartment and descended the stairs, expecting some kind of supernatural attack, even though Bill — Belshegar — was right behind her and she knew he would do whatever he could to ward off another assault.
Not that he’d done such a great job earlier this evening.
Which she knew wasn’t an entirely fair thing to think. There was no way in the world either of them could have anticipated that they’d be attacked by one of the Collector’s minions on the way home from dinner.
Was that entirely true, though? Although Belshegar hadn’t provided a lot of details, she had to believe the warlock — or whatever the Collector turned out to be — who was trying to scoop up all those magical trinkets probably hadn’t been too thrilled that the person he’d blackmailed into doing his dirty work was instead playing footsie with a local witch. It didn’t seem too out of bounds to think he might lose his patience in such a scenario.
Well, that was neither here nor there. She couldn’t start doubting Belshegar now, not when he’d come clean and even told her that he loved her.
Just a few hours ago, she would have been thrilled to hear him say such a thing. And all right, she was still sort of thrilled…and had told him she loved him too, since that was the simple truth…but she’d also realized that her worries about hooking up with a civilian from out of town now seemed downright quaint when you compared them to the reality of the situation.
Deep breaths, she told herself as she guided Sally up the hill toward Paradise Lane. Belshegar sat quietly in the passenger seat, as though he knew she was worried about traveling even that short distance.
And she was. Sure, she could have driven this route blindfolded, but she still white-knuckled it all the way to her parents’ house and didn’t begin to relax even the slightest bit until she’d pulled into the driveway.
All the lights were on, both inside the house and glowing from either side of the garage and the front door, as if her father had known she would want the place as brightly illuminated as possible. The various fixtures weren’t utterly obnoxious, since they’d been designed to abide by “dark sky” rules and not shed all sorts of unwanted glare upward to interfere with the patterns of the night sky, but still, it was more than enough to guide her and Belshegar safely to the front door.
She’d barely lifted her hand to knock when her father opened the door. “We’re all waiting in the living room,” he said, and ushered her and Belshegar inside. “What happened?”
“A lot,” she replied briefly. Yes, she was going to have to tell everyone what had gone down only a half hour earlier, but damn it, she wasn’t going to do it more than once.
Her father seemed to understand, even though she could tell he’d already guessed that her relationship with Belshegar had undergone a seismic change. Otherwise, she would never have brought him to a meeting that included not just the clan elders but the prima and her consort was well.
When Brianna entered the living room — which, as in most older houses, was separate from the foyer — she saw that everyone had already assembled there, including her mother. Maybe Hayley wasn’t strictly an elder, but Bree had a feeling she’d put her foot down when she realized that whatever was going on, it had affected her daughter directly.
One of the couches was unoccupied, and she guessed they’d left it that way so she and Belshegar could take a seat there without having to share with anyone else. She headed over to the empty sofa and sat down, and a few seconds later, he settled himself beside her.
“I felt something earlier,” Levi said quietly. “I didn’t know exactly what it was, but it felt…wrong.”
Bree knew she probably shouldn’t have been surprised that her father was the one who’d sensed the attack. While the others were strong witches, they weren’t beings whose essence had originated in an entirely different dimension. He would have felt those shockwaves, even if he might not have known anything about where they’d originated.
“One of the Collector’s lackeys attacked us when we were walking back from the Haunted Hamburger,” she said bluntly, and Connor and Angela exchanged a worried glance, even as her mother let out a gasp and Tricia and Allegra both turned quiet and tense.
But Angela wasn’t so shocked that she still wasn’t the first to respond. “How do you know this person was working with the Collector?”
“We don’t,” Belshegar replied. “Or at least, we don’t have any concrete proof. But he claimed he was from the Council, and since we’ve already all decided that it’s much more likely there is no Council involvement in the situation at all and that the Collector was only using them as a convenient cover story, it seems much more plausible that the Collector was displaying his displeasure.”
“Toward you for not getting him the prizes he wanted,” Levi said, and Belshegar nodded.
“Are you both all right?” Hayley asked, and Brianna sent her mother a smile she hoped was reassuring.
“We’re fine. We were able to fight him off.”
Next to her, Belshegar shifted, and Bree guessed he wasn’t too happy about the deliberate obfuscation in her reply.
“More to the point, Brianna fought him off,” he said, and everyone else in the room stared at her as if she’d just grown two heads.
“Bree?” Allegra said, her tone doubtful. “She has some useful gifts, I suppose, but none of them could ever be described as defensive in nature.”
“That’s the thing,” Belshegar responded. He gave Bree a very small sideways glance, as if asking permission to go on, and she shrugged. The truth was going to come out at some point, and maybe it would be better if he was the one to describe what had happened.
After all, the encounter had moved pretty quickly, and a lot of it now felt like a total blur. Also, he was the one who knew about other dimensions and the ways to move between them and tap into their energies. She’d done something, she knew, but trying to describe it to other people sounded hopelessly difficult right then.
“She fought him off,” Belshegar went on. “All those small gifts of hers — they were only manifestations of her true power, which is being able to get the frequencies of different realities to resonate together. Something about the encounter woke up that gift, made it so she was able to fight back effectively and dispel the intruder. It was…rather astonishing.”
Bree supposed that was one word for it. Afterward, she’d been tired and more than a little freaked out, but she’d still felt like herself. She had no idea where that gift had come from…or whether she’d ever be able to use it again.
If it only awakened during times of duress, then maybe she could pretend that it didn’t exist.
