Page 3 of Anarchy
She’d probably be able to talk Bram through convincing Talvath not to bring an army of demons here over text. Ripley could handle any threat to her library. Fuck, she was managing Reyson and Balthazar just fine.
It was Ravyn and Bram that I couldn’t help her with. Ripley was just as snarky as I was, but I knew she gave a shit about the people she cared about. I wasn’t Ravyn’s familiar, but I knew her well. Ravyn was smart as fuck and a badass in her own right, but Valentine had always been her weakness. I didn’t want to see her get hurt.
Bram was another story. It wasn’t just Ripley that wanted him here. It wasn’t just that we all thought he should be free. He belonged here with us. Bram just clicked. He was a part of our coven.
It was natural for Ripley, Gabriel, and me to accept him for his strengths and personality. Reyson and Balthazar weren’t witches, but they felt the same. Something told me when most gods had decided on a wife, they didn’t want to share. Vampires were generally solitary until they found their one true love, though Balthazar seemed to love everyone.
We all had a vested interest in bringing Bram into this with us, though most of our reasons differed totally from Reyson’s. Reyson was still super curious about shifter dick.
Bram still hadn’t answered Ripley’s text, and I was stressing just as much as she was. Was he okay? I chatted with Bram and got to know him. By all accounts, Talvath treated him well and never abused him. They had given Bram an education and everything he could possibly want. He didn’t have to come back right away if he was on Earth collecting a soul.
Still, that was before. Talvath had gone through some horrific shit in that shipping container. We trusted nothing from Hell until Bram told us their side of things. I still didn’t, even if I trusted Bram. Hell probably didn’t trust us either. We made deals with them, and we constantly tried to get out of it. Demons probably heard us ask for all kinds of terrible shit.
Would he hold it against Bram that he worked with us? Talvath wouldn’t have made it out of that shipping container if it weren’t for us, but did he know that? Or did he think we befriended Bram and broke him out because we were worse than Silvaria and Dorian?
“They could be getting medical treatment,” Gabriel said. “If Ripley hadn’t cooked me that food, I’d still be in bed with almost no energy. We don’t know enough about those sigils. Just being away from them might not be enough. They might be seeing a healer.”
That was also a possibility. Every witch or warlock in this room had depleted their magic before and had to recover. Balthazar could get knocked on his ass if he fed on a hardcore drug user. I was sure Reyson had some weakness, but he wasn’t about to tell any of us what it was.
“I talked to Bram a lot,” Balthazar said. “Hewantedto stay here with us, but he really cared for Talvath and thought he should help him. Bram was weak but awake before he disappeared. I think even if he were in a demon hospital or caring for Talvath, he would have kept his phone on him just in case.”
“Maybe not,” Reyson said. “These cellular devices are intriguing, but I’ve never seen Bram glued to his like Balthazar is. If Ripley had never messaged him before, he might have forgotten her number was in his phone. He might think he has no way of contacting us. Think about it. Bram belongs to Talvath. I doubt he uses it to contact many people. He might not be checking his phone because he’s with Talvath and has forgotten Ripley’s number is in his phone.”
That was also logical. Reyson and I were the only ones in our group without cell phones. I had a feeling Reyson was going to get one and go totally miserable with social media fame. He was a god, and we certainly weren’t kissing his ass. He was going to have to get that from somewhere. He said he did that cooking segment to write a cookbook for the library to impress Ripley, and maybe that was true. He had Balthazar film him shirtless for the adoration.
I didn’t want one. I didn’t intend on leaving Ripley’s side to message her from a distance. If I had something to say, I’d just say it to her.
“I hate to break up the party, but I just got a text from Kaine. Silvaria and Dorian just booked tickets back to the US. They noticed the money I stole. He’s pissed we lost Talvath. The revenant alone was enough to arrest Silvaria with no hope of buying her way out of it, but he’s got nothing to arrest Dorian. He was hoping to get that from Talvath. He doesn’t think Silvaria is going to turn on Dorian.”
“She won’t,” Ripley said. “I think he planned it that way. I’m fairly certain that the painting we stole was his and not hers. This has always been Dorian’s plot. He roped Silvaria into it. I’m sure he always intended for her to go down for it if something went wrong.”
This was shit. When supernaturals went bad, we all stepped in and dealt with it because it had to be hidden from humans. Even when one of us got stupid, no one ever did something that would risk exposure and another massacre like the site of all the Profane buildings.
Humans did stupidity and evil on a massive scale. Dorianshould neverhave been given immortality. He shouldn’t have been celebrated for finding a witch dumb enough to summon a demon for him. Keeping our secret has always been vital to our survival. Profane wasn’t the first time they had slaughtered us. They killed their own because they thought they were like us.
We’d killed plenty of humans to keep our existence a secret. Unfortunately, Dorian wasn’t given that same treatment and now look at what happened! He manipulated another witch into doing his bidding. They’d pissed off a demon, and now there might be an army of them headed our way.
We didn’t use guns. We didn’t need them. We were all taught to fight with our various gifts or our fists. I was pretty sure it was the same for demons, or Talvath would have shot someone when they tried to kidnap him. Bram shifted and ran straight into that shipping container.
If a supernatural war broke out between Hell and us, humans weren’t going to find what it was about and whose side they needed to take. They were going to arm up and start shooting us. They were going to declare war, and now they had way more weapons than back in my day. Humans weren’t going to burn us or drown us this time.
They were going to drone bomb us into oblivion.
“Is Kaine even going to arrest Dorian?” I asked.
“That’s where things get sticky,” Balthazar said. “The Paranormal Investigation Bureau stays out of human affairs. Dorian blurs that line. He’s immortal, but he’s still human. He’s been around long enough to know how things work. All he has to do is lawyer up, and he’ll be released because of a jurisdictional error. We could bring Hettie’s coven in and have them testify he had Hettie bring a corpse to the library for some necromancy, but they don’t have the full story, and Hettie is dead. Even if it involves raising a god, necromancy is only a crime if you fuck it up and make a revenant.”
“They know we have Talvath,” Gabriel said. “They were recruiting people with videos of him in that shipping container. Dorian probably knows someone will be after Silvaria when she gets back to the states. So he wouldn’t be flying back himself unless he thought he was safe and planning to make his next move.”
And that meant Reyson. Reyson was his ace in the hole that he was promising all these people he could pull this off with. I liked Reyson. He’d come in handy in plenty of situations so far. I thought he was good for Ripley, too.
Reyson knew his powers better than any of us. If he said no magic on Earth could control him, I believed him. I couldn’t even get him to put the dodgeball game on if I was really fucking polite about it if he was watching something. I was going to get him hooked on dodgeball because I was tired of missing games because he was into competition cooking shows.
Still, Dorian had something up his sleeve. He wouldn’t have brought the fucking God of Chaos back unless he had something good.
And that was the part that made me nervous.
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