When he turned away, Raphael and Shade were standing there staring at him. More bloody gawping. Smashing. “What?”
“Sophia’s on the way,” Shade said. “Do we need Wrath?”
“I’m not certain.” This situation was beyond anything he’d handled before. “But Emma is a powerful witch, and whoever took her mother is going to want her as well. I’m relying on you to prevent that from happening.”
“Fuck.” Shade stared after Emma and Ethan. “If it’s that bad, you best tell us everything.”
Chapter Ten
Bianca felt the weight of Eddie’s hostile stare all down the right side of her body. There was nothing to be gained by putting this off any longer. She met Eddie’s scowl. “I owe you an explanation.”
“Yes, you fucking do.” Eddie jerked her head. “Lucifer can fill them in about the children. You and I are going to talk.”
Why didn’t that sentence ever mean the good kind of talk?
Eddie led Bianca into her bedroom and shut the door.
A hard thud sounded against the door.
Sighing, Eddie opened it again, and Xerxes and Cronus ambled in. One of them—she couldn’t tell who was who—drew level with her and growled a warning.
He’d have to take a number. Eddie had first dibs on tearing a shred off her.
“You manipulated the board into doing Macbeth?” Eddie took a seat on the bed, and the hounds crowded close to her.
“Yes, I did.” And she’d hated not being able to be honest with Eddie at the time. But she hadn’t known Eddie that well, certainly not well enough to tell her all of it. Maybe if Dee had been around, she would have come clean. She’d already admitted to Dee about knowing about the hell gate and a bunch of other stuff. Eddie had been an unknown and had no idea herself at that time that she was Nephilim or any of the other mind fuckery that had happened in the past months. “I didn’t feel like I had a choice.”
Eddie folded her arms. “Why?”
“I needed to activate the hell gate.” If she was ever going to have a relationship with Eddie in the future, she couldn’t withhold facts. “The witches in my coven were going missing. I needed the witch’s curse in Macbeth to activate the hell gate so I could summon a hell prince.”
“Why?” Eddie’s expression sat firmly between grim and hostile.
“You’ve already worked out that I’m a witch.” Her eventful night was catching up to her and Bianca wanted to sit but didn’t dare getting closer to Eddie. “I belong to a local coven, and if you don’t know by now, so does Patty.”
Eddie gaped at her. “Patty? Our Patty is a witch?”
“Yup.” Maybe if everyone had been more amenable to sharing information, things might not have gotten this desperate. “She’s been our representative keeping an eye on the hell gate.”
“Patty.” Eddie shook her head. “I can’t believe it.”
“Really?” Bianca found that difficult to believe. Patty was hardly your run of the mill senior citizen.
Eddie grimaced. “Okay, maybe I can see it. I just put her eccentricities down to typical theatre people stuff.”
That tracked, and Bianca moved on. “Like I said, our witches have been disappearing, and we can’t find any trace of them. Even if we did, we didn’t know what we were facing. We wanted a hell prince to help.”
“You didn’t think of trying the police instead?” Eddie scoffed, but she was looking slightly less pissed, and the hounds had lowered their heads and blinked at her sleepily.
Or maybe that was their hungry look. “You ever tried explaining magic and witches to the police?”
Eddie flushed. “Good point.”
“We summoned Shade first.” Bianca needed to get this all off her chest. “But you got to him first. To be honest, we didn’t anticipate the hounds.”
Eddie smiled and stroked the massive heads on either side of her. “Me neither.”
“Then when we found out what happened to you and Wrath with the amulets, we—”
“How did you find that out?” Eddie bristled.
Both hounds’ eyes snapped open.
Bianca felt a momentary flicker of guilt as she dropped Patty in the crap, but the time for hiding was over for all of them if they were going to stand a chance of finding their witches. It was all about cooperation now, and she was sure Patty would agree. Maybe after poking her with a knitting needle. “Patty is very good at listening and not being seen.”
Eddie’s eyebrows rose. “You mean spying.”
“Yes, spying.” There wasn’t a way to pretty up that particular truth. Best to move away from that detail. “You see, our coven has learned how to make those amulets.”
Anger tightened Eddie’s features.
Bianca hurried on before she could get the wrong idea. “Not for how they’re being used now and never for anyone other than ourselves.” She held her hand up, hoping to forestall the tirade she could see brewing in Eddie. “We use them to store our own power. Like a sort of extra battery.” Eddie seemed to simmer down, but not by much, so best she get to the point. “We now believe that whoever took our witches, is using them to make the amulets.” Her legs wanted to give up, and she edged closer to Eddie’s bed. “And that’s a far bigger enemy than we can tackle, so we went for another summoning. This time, we went for Lucifer.”
Eddie sat in a thoughtful silence before she said, “Is that what happened to the children’s mother?”
“Leona. Yes, we believe so.” What the hell. She was so tired it might be a relief if the hounds actually ate her. She took a seat beside Eddie. “But Emma is even more powerful than her mother. We are afraid they’ll come for her next. Lucifer thought this was the best place to keep her safe.” She made it sound like she’d had any option. “Actually, Lucifer pretty much insisted we bring them here.”
Eddie frowned. “If they took her mother, then why didn’t they take her?”
“Leona bound her magic to keep her safe.” Bianca didn’t want to think about what it meant that Leona’s binding had failed. “With Leona gone, so is her binding spell.
Lucifer was rapidly losing patience with the raging argument in the greenroom. By the seven fucking seals, sometimes this group argued strictly for the sake of arguing. None of these beings had any concept of time and how precious that commodity could be. Instead of working to protect two young humans, suddenly they all wanted to die on the hill of what to do with those humans.
Chris Fellows and his merry men were trying to insist the children be handed over to the guardians and taken to a safe house. Guardians were still human but their close contact with heaven and hell often prolonged their life spans and increased their abilities.
“They’re human.” Chris glared at the gathering. “We are the best choice to take care of their needs, because we actually understand their needs.”
Bianca stirred at this side. “But they don’t know you. After the trauma they’ve been through, I’m not going to hand them over to strangers.”
He had insisted Bianca be part of this meeting.
“Lucifer is a stranger to them,” Fellows said with the exaggerated patience of a man trying not to bellow.
“But Emma has bonded with him.” Bianca stuck to her guns. “And she trusts him.”
“He’s not human,” Chris snapped.
