Page 28 of Discord
“Felix is right,” Gabriel groaned. “We don’t need to be worried about Balthazar’s makeup right now. Silvaria has a demon helping her. We can’t rule out the possibility of them attacking the library, either. She’s going to want Reyson more than ever. She’s going to think he can get her out of all this.”
“She raised the wrong god for that!” Reyson boomed. “She needs Dolos, or one of the tricksters for manipulation on that scale. I can influence what’s already there. Everyone is capable of chaos, but brains tend to melt when I try to force things that aren’t there.Thatwas quite a lesson I learned the first time I attempted it.”
I was glad she’d chosen Reyson, but the more he revealed about himself, the less sense it made. I had just assumed one trickster went by many names, but apparently, that wasn’t the case. Yeah, Reyson was older than all of them, but that made him even worse of a choice. If I were going to try to get a god to do my bidding, I’d go with the youngest trickster around.
Hopefully, the demon in the back of this SUV would be grateful enough for the help that he would not only free Bram, but would also gave us insight into who was helping Silvaria and Dorian and why they thought they had any hope of controlling Reyson.
20
Ripley
Bram was massive, but Reyson got him out of the SUV like he weighed nothing. Talvath was an older demon, and pretty slight. I was pretty tall and slim. Every man the library brought to me was bigger than me in every way possible, except Talvath. I was several inches taller than him, even if I took off my fuck me boots and he was reed-thin.
He had been wearing some sort of vintage pinstripe suit when Silvaria trapped him. It was dirty and bloody now, but it fit. He wore his hair a little long and had this goatee. Arzareth was my go-to demon when I needed information because she only wanted cherry Coke. She never dressed up.
I could count on Arzareth to appear in yoga pants and a sweatshirt with food stains on it. The first things out of her mouth would be a complaint about being summoned, and that I’d better have an ice-cold cherry Coke ready to pass her.
I kind of dug it that Talvath dressed up to kill Dorian.
Reyson wasn’t struggling with Bram at all, but my apartment was on the top floor. They’d built the library during a different time, and no one on the board over the years ever wanted to knock walls down to put an elevator in.
I didn’t mind the stairs, and I could carry things up and down magically. Supernatural delivery services were either staffed by shifters, vampires, or witches. They had their own abilities to get things like my massive sectional and flat-screen television up to my apartment.
We all knew full well that Reyson could carry a Hellhound up there, and Balthazar could handle a demon of Talvath’s size without one of us having to use magic. Reyson seemed to have endless patience with me and his so far unsuccessfully attempts at convincing me to marry him, but even he had his limits. I think we were all fed up with Silvaria and Dorian at this point.
Bram disappeared in a pop of light. Reyson stalked over and touched Talvath, and he was gone next. I shoved that big, ugly painting in the back of the SUV. It wasn’t like the one in the vault. The painting in my vault looked like it was a corrupted soul. The one we pulled from the shipping container looked like a landscape Hitler painted when he was trying to get into art school before becoming a mass-murdering psychopath.
It gave me the fucking creeps.
Reyson touched it, and it disappeared too.
“I put that in the vault. There’s no soul in that painting, but it’s got some nasty magic in there.”
What the fuck? After all that, westilldidn’t have Dorian’s painting! How many decoys did that fucker con a witch into making for him? Some of the sentient books in the vaults were angry bastards who liked to bite, no matter how much I kissed their asses, but I could respect the fact that they were ancient and existed for a reason.
It took powerful magic to create books like that. Some of those tomes might irritate the shit out of me with their shrieking and biting, but they did that for a reason. Those books contained powerful and dangerous magic.
And so help me, if that shitty landscape did anything to my books, Dorian Gray would have more significant problems than Talvath and Bram wanting his soul.
Then again, I had some big ass problems of my own. There was a demon passed out upstairs inmyfucking library, and I didn’t know if he even belonged there. I mean, yeah, we needed him to kill Dorian and find out who was giving demon secrets to Silvaria, but the spirits might have opinions about him being there.
I was a bitch about the rules, but even I thought it was going a little far, taking blood from an unconscious demon who had been held hostage and weakened for who knows how long… at least, sort of. The only reason I didn’t have Reyson magic his ass to my desk long enough to get a little blood was that Bram seemed to care for him. I liked Bram, and I wanted him to stay. I wasn’t about to drive him back to Hell just because I stole some blood.
I was not above a bit of blood stealing to make sure my library was safe in any other circumstance, though.
After all that shit, I just wanted to check on Bram and get Gabriel to bed. I could put aside the library for five minutes. I’d get my blood as soon as Talvath was awake, but for now, two of my men had gotten hurt in that shit show.
Everyone wanted to kill Silvaria for various reasons, and she just got herself bumped up even higher on my list of people I wanted to murder.
Felix was still helping Gabriel. I slipped myself under his other arm and started guiding him towards the front door. We’d started out early, because Felix and Balthazar didn’t want to be there after dark. Getting through all the traps took a long time, and so did the drive home. I never went to bed this early, but I could go for having some really unhealthy fast food delivered and passing the fuck out.
“Do you still need me?” Ravyn asked.
Yeah, I did. I’d always need her. She was my twin sister. But we didn’t need to be joined at the hip. I needed to sleep, and I already knew what she was planning. My twin was going to dress in comfy pajamas and put on the news. She was going to watch the raid on that storage facility. Ravyn was going to order takeout from that little Greek place she loved and just wait for the phone call that she’d be getting new things for her museum from those shipping containers.
I knew my sister, and I couldn’t say I wasn’t also excited about the possibility of getting some new books out of all this.
“Go eat your hummus and wait for the call.”
