The Witch With No Name (The Hollows #13)(63)
Author: Kim Harrison

Great. Just great. Depressed, I unkinked my hands from around my knees and put my feet on the floor. “Damn it, Trent,” I complained. “I never would have played dead if I had thought they could actually do it!”

“But they can’t!” Trent’s gaze was fixed on the TV, his shock obvious.

Tired, I rubbed my forehead. “Maybe that’s what I felt. What we both felt,” I added, even though he hadn’t said anything about an elf-born curse ripping through his soul.

He jerked straight, and I could almost see the thoughts aligning. “I didn’t feel an attack. I felt a call to arms.” Hand rubbing over his face, he leaned back into the cushions, his brow lowering and his expression getting darker.

Subdued, I took the remote and set it on the table before it fell between the cushions. Elven magic had attacked me. It had passed over him and struck me—even if it hadn’t found what it needed to fully invoke. I had a bad feeling that whatever it had been, it had been aimed at the demons, not just the surface demons.

“You’re a demon,” Trent said softly, and I nodded, taking his hand in mine. “You’re in the collective.”

I’d felt an outcry, one so violent and explosive it had reached me even without a scrying mirror, knocking me flat on my ass. Depressed, I watched a group of people on a bus try to catch a surface demon only to have to beat it off a woman when it turned the tables on them.

“How did they manage it?” Trent said, distraught. “It can’t be done.”

But they did it. “Try the regular news now,” I said, and Trent let go of my hand to stretch for the remote.

“. . . new phenomena of what spellogists are calling a spontaneous release of surface demons from the ever-after. Elven Sa’hans are telling us these are actually the material manifestation of the souls of the undead and to leave them alone as they search for their bodies.”

Trent grimaced. “They are not Sa’hans. They’re frauds.”

Frauds or not, they’d managed to get the surface demons into reality. I was starting to think again, and my shoulders scrunched up almost to my ears. Something had happened in the ever-after, something bad. Uneasy, I looked over my shoulder to my mom’s unseen spelling room. I’d been through most of the cupboards, and there’d been no scrying mirror. I could probably summon Al without it, but he was pissed at me.

Unless he’s trapped somewhere. He won’t kill me if I rescue him, will he?

“The ghostly, frightening images with half substance are showing up in most major East Coast cities,” the newscaster was saying, “the vampiric souls appearing in a steady progression west with the setting sun.”

Trent crossed one ankle over his knee. I’d never seen him look so confused. “I don’t get it,” he said, gesturing. “There isn’t a way to move them to reality.”

I glanced at the clock on the cable box. It was very close to sunset in Cincinnati. Stretching, I took the remote and clicked over to CNN. Sure enough, an excited, somewhat nervous man was standing at Fountain Square, the sky still holding the pink from the sun. I had figured they’d be either there or in Detroit. It was too early for Chicago. Behind the reporter were clusters of living vampires. The atmosphere was one of breathless anxiety.

“Sunset . . . ,” Trent whispered, and the newscaster spun, voice rising as he described the sudden appearance of nearly twenty surface demons. My expression twisted as the cameras zoomed in on them, their ragged auras and gaunt limbs standing out against the sunset-red sky, making it look like the ever-after. People squealed, and most of the surface demons ran for the street, looking for somewhere to hide.

Two, though, hesitated, hunched and furtive as they hissed at the vampires coaxing them closer. Trent said nothing, and I clicked back to New York. The undead there had probably figured it out and were likely in the streets looking for their souls.

“Mmmm,” Trent grunted, easing closer to the TV as a news reporter tried to stay in the limited streetlight as she nervously explained what was going on behind her. The sun had been down for a while. It was dark enough for the undead.

My lips parted as the camera swung and steadied to show a surface demon melting into a rapturous vampire. He wasn’t a master vampire. He was hardly a vampire at all, actually, one of New York’s homeless vamps living under the streets and existing on addicts until someone bigger took him out. But he’d found his soul—and it was trying to bind to him.

“My God, Landon did it . . . ,” Trent breathed, but I wasn’t so sure this was going to have a happy ending. You couldn’t see an aura through a TV, but it still didn’t look like a repeat of what had happened up in Luke and Marsha’s apartment, even if the vampire was sobbing, holding on to the corner of the building as the guilt and shame of his soulless existence crashed down upon him.

Spontaneous joining? I wasn’t buying it. “What’s to keep it from spontaneously leaving?” I asked. We’d had to burn the gateway through which Felix’s soul had entered him to keep it from simply going back out.

Someone had stopped to help the vampire, now weeping inconsolably. The newscaster looked uncomfortable as she told people to stay off the streets and out of the way as the vampires found their souls.

“I guess they think we’re dead,” I said, not feeling at all good. I wanted to call Ivy and see how Felix was doing. “The surface demons will be showing up here in about three hours,” I said as I looked at the bright golden light.

His eyes on the TV, Trent got to his feet. “They seem to be staying in the main population centers.”

So far, I thought glumly. “You really think they’re free? For good?” If they were, then that soul bottle I’d made was going to be more than useless.

Trent hesitated, watching the TV as if it might have the answers. “I’ve no idea. Maybe their release was what you felt on the stairs.”

Or the attack in my mom’s spell room, I mused, an ugly thought trickling through me. If it had almost taken me, then maybe it had hit the demons, too.

I jumped as he spun, almost running to the stairs. “Where are you going?”

“To get Bis!” he shouted.

Fidgety, I looked out the big windows at the bright sun. “Trent? He won’t be awake,” I called, then gestured as if to say “I told you so” when Trent came back with Bis perched on his arm like a huge sleeping owl. My bag was over his other arm, looking funny against him.