Thirteen (Otherworld 13)

I told her about Aratron's master plan--take my spells and teach me to learn to fight without them. "Lousy timing, it's true, but I guess if he took away my spells when I was just manning the agency reception desk, I'd have no incentive to learn the lesson. And he hasn't let anything catastrophic happen. When I needed to protect Cassandra in L.A., he gave me full power plus."

I hesitated and glanced at Adam. He nodded.

"Tell Mom to hold off," I said to Jaime. "If I need help, I'll ask for it, but for now, I'm going to trust Aratron to let this play out. If he's a eudemon, he's not going to screw me over for a chaos feast." I looked at Adam again. "Right?"

"Right. Historically, the role of eudemons is said to be one of balance. We've rarely seen them get involved, so they've been considered irrelevant. But in this case, it seems Aratron is fulfilling his role--trying to restore balance. We'll trust him until he shows us that we can't."

Upstairs, we found Elena and Clay with Benicio interrogating the man whose neck Karl had broken. It looked like the guy was going to be paralyzed for the rest of his life, which was likely to be very short anyway--I doubted Benicio planned to fund long-term medical care for him. But no one was telling him that.

When we arrived, a doctor was reporting that they could move the man to the Cabal hospital for "further examination and treatment" as soon as Benicio was done questioning him. The doctor said nothing about his condition or prognosis, but his calm tone would suggest to the panicked man that treatment was possible, and that the sooner he answered Benicio's questions, the sooner he'd get treatment. When you're lying on a gurney, paralyzed, you'll take your optimism wherever you can find it.

Brett--that was his name--started with the whole "it's all gone wrong" lament we'd heard from Roni. At least she'd had the sense to turn stool pigeon and alert us to the attacks. Brett was only experiencing his epiphany now that his life was on the line.

In Brett's case, his loyalty had one advantage. Giles seemed to have shut Roni out because he'd questioned her commitment to the cause. With Brett, he'd been more forthcoming.

"He's going to use Hope Adams to summon Lucifer," Brett said. "I'm not exactly sure how."

"Just tell us what you can," Benicio said.

"People started leaving the movement, but they didn't completely break ties. They just stopped checking in regularly. They made up excuses. They needed to get back to work. Someone in their family was sick. Whatever. They're keeping in touch, though."

"Waiting for something to happen," I murmured.

"Exactly. That's what pissed off a lot of us. We're doing the real work, the dangerous stuff, and they're hanging back, waiting to see if we succeed before they'll commit again. Giles promised he'd get them back. He just needed to do something really big."

"Like kidnap Lucifer's daughter."

Brett nodded. "He was keeping it all hush-hush, so it'd be a big surprise. Once he had her, he'd let everyone know. If they didn't return, they'd be kicked out."

Now, if some guy had said to me "Hey, come watch me summon Lucifer and threaten to kill his daughter and his first grandchild," I'd have caught the next plane heading in the opposite direction. But these were regular supernaturals, and they had no more experience with demons than your average human. They didn't know any better.

"When is this demonstration supposed to take place?" Benicio asked.

"As soon as possible. But he has to give people time to get to the compound. He was talking about doing it tomorrow night if they got her tonight." He paused. "Or I guess it's tomorrow already. Tonight, then. After people have had time to arrive."

"And this compound? Where is it?"

That's where Brett--like Roni--was a lot less helpful. Only select members knew the location. The rest only knew that they flew into the Indianapolis airport, were picked up in a van and were driven out into the countryside for a couple of hours.

"We can try contacting Kimerion again," I said. "Or e

ven Asmondai. A demon will be able to find it."

"No, they won't," Brett said. "Giles knew demons and deities would get involved and interfere. He chose a location they can't find. He can summon them there, but they can't locate it on their own."

There was nothing else he knew that might prove useful, so we left him then, to the ministrations of the Cabal medical team.

When we stepped out with Benicio, I asked Adam. "Do you know what kind of locations he's talking about? Ones that demons can't find?"

"I have some ideas--" He stopped. "Demons and deities. That would cover demons and demi-demons, demi-gods, angels and presumably anything higher up the celestial hierarchy. But there are other entities. Lower spirits."

"Which we have no way of communicating with," I said. "I've summoned elemental spirits by accident, but they don't speak."

"Whether they're even sentient is in question," Adam said. "There are older entities that might try to pass on a message, but don't really know how."

"They would be limited to old languages," Benicio said. "Their knowledge of even those might not be sufficient to communicate coherently."

"Hope's message," I said. "Someone was giving us directions."