I laugh and shake my head as I look around at the four of them. Jerif gives me one more bruising squeeze before he sets me back down on my feet, but he does it slowly, like he doesn’t really want to let me go. My heartbeat is racing so hard that it sounds like horse’s hooves pounding on a track. His fiery eyes are filled with the same relief I’m wearing, and I get lost in them for a second. This...this is the intensity I always knew was in Jerif, but instead of the asshole side, all of that intensity is filling me with molten heat that has nothing to do with anger.
“Are you really here? Are you dead?” I demand, terrified that they’ll confirm that they are, in fact, dead, and this reunion will only be short-lived.
“We’re not dead,” Echo tells me, but I can’t quite believe it. I have a stranglehold on hope, because if they disappear, it will ruin me.
“Where are we?” Iceman asks, and all of them finally look away from me and take in our surroundings.
“Ho-ly shit.” Crux’s wide green eyes land on the group of Abdicated, and he drops to his knee and does this weird hand-over-heart, head-bowing thing.
One by one, Echo, Iceman, and Jerif all drop into the same bow. I watch them with confusion before noticing I dropped my scythe before I tackle-hugged the guys.
“Bow,” Iceman tells me out of the corner of his dark blue lips.
“Huh?”
“Bow,” he murmurs again, like he’s nervous at the fact I’m still standing.
I cast a look at Tazreel, who’s watching me with his arms crossed in front of his chest, a smug expression on his face. “I’m not bowing to that asshole,” I say.
In a blink, Echo is on his feet beside me, his pale hand slapped over my mouth. “Babe, you can’t call the Abdicated an asshole,” he hisses in my ear. His shadowed tattoos dance off his fingers and slither against my lips, like they missed me and want a little kiss.
I pull his hand away from my mouth, noticing that all four guys have closed ranks around me. “Relax, guys. He’s not going to do anything. Lucifer forbade it,” I say as I smirk over at Taz, my turn to look smug.
Iceman’s eyes go as wide as icy saucers, and his hand comes up protectively to settle on the small of my back. “Lucifer...you met Lucifer?”
“Yeah. I—”
“I assume by your familiarity and obnoxious display of affection that these are, in fact, the Guardians who were with you in the Vestibule battle?” Tazreel says, interrupting me.
Obnoxious?
I send him a peeved look but give him a clipped, “Yes.”
Tazreel and the others have formed a line like a wall of Abdicated, staring down my demons. “Where did you find my daughter?” Tazreel asks.
Every single one of my demons tenses up. I can feel Iceman’s cold skin seeping through his button-down shirt on my left, while Jerif’s heat soaks into me on my right.
“Daughter?” Crux breathes, and I can feel the shock permeate through them like mist rising from the ground.
“Yeah. I fell through the Nihil Ring, and I guess it brought me here because...he’s my sperm donor.”
“Sire,” Tazreel corrects.
Crux turns, grinning like a loon and raises his hands in victory. “Ha! I told you guys! I totally called it that she was a Nihil. It’s impossible,” he mock-argues, sounding like a mix of Iceman and Jerif. “But it wasn’t, I fucking called it!”
“Quiet,” Tazreel demands, instantly making Crux’s tanned, surfer boy face go pale. When Taz is satisfied that he has their full attention, he goes on. “Is it true you found my daughter in the Mortal Realm and she had no idea what she was?”
“Yes,” they all answer, and I know instantly that he’s using that same truth mumbo jumbo magic on them that he used on me.
“You took her to the Vestibule and were attacked. How did you get away?”
Jerif’s eyes meet mine, and I can’t look away. For just a second, we share a private look, but I’m suddenly seeing him from before—when he had Outer Ringers piled all over him, stabbing into his broken body again and again while he told me to run—to save myself. I blink my eyes hard at the memory, trying to shove it away because it hurts too bad. The pain is too fresh.
A blanket of comforting heat slips against my palm, and I look down, tears springing in my eyes when I see Jerif’s fingers threading through mine. He holds my hand firmly, his hot thumb melting those shattered pieces of my heart so they can be molded back together again.
Iceman answers Taz’s question. “One second, we were completely surrounded. Overtaken. Dying. I knew it was over,” he says, and it’s so hard to hear, but I take in Iceman’s words because I need to know how this is possible. “But then, they all suddenly retreated. Just like that, all at once. They poured back into the Outer Rings.”
“They didn’t even attempt to break through your Gate while you were down?” Taz asks, head cocked.
“No, they just left,” Echo says, with a shrug that communicates he’s just as much at a loss as the rest. “It took us...a long time to heal enough to move,” he adds, darting his pitch-black eyes my way as his shadows coalesce around his skin. “Jerif was in bad shape.”
“I healed,” he says gruffly, giving my trembling hand a squeeze.
I know he’s playing it off for my sake, trying to downplay how bad it was. But I know. I know he was an inch from death. It’s right there, in his flaming eyes and the way his dark skin spreads with a chill.
“We thought they took her,” Crux adds, looking at me as he runs his hands through his shaggy blond hair. “We went to our Rings to heal faster, and we had a plan set in motion to go search
