“I don’t want to be like them,” Warren said. “They’re my enemies, too. If I were with them, I would wait on them. I wouldn’t have told you they were coming.”
“It’s a trick,” someone else declared. “He just wants to bring his dead things among us to slit our throats when we let our guard down.”
“Fools,” Lilith snarled. “Leave them here to die.”
Warren wavered uncertainly. He didn’t want to face the imps.
Naomi looked at him and knew his thoughts. Her dark eyes held his.
“We can’t just leave them,” she said.
“Of course you can,” Lilith argued.
“They don’t want us here,” Warren pointed out.
Naomi took his arm, his flesh and blood arm, and held it. “If we leave them here, they’re going to die.”
“They’ll die anyway,” Lilith said. “If not tonight, then another day. They’re too weak to live in this world.”
“They’ll die anyway,” Warren said.
“Do you think the demons will quit pursuing us after they slaughter these people?” Naomi asked.
Warren didn’t answer.
“Because they won’t,” Naomi said. “The demons will kill these people, and then continue following us wherever it is you’re taking us.”
Anxiety spread through Warren.
“Those demons aren’t out here for these people,” Naomi said. “They came looking for something, and my guess is that they’re looking for you.”
“She doesn’t know that,” Lilith said.
“You don’t know that,” Warren stated.
“Merihim could have sent them.”
Fear quivered through Warren. “I’m nothing to Merihim. Not since he reclaimed his hand.”
“You shared the demon’s mind,” Naomi told him. “Maybe he fears what you might have learned.”
Thinking about how powerful Merihim was, Warren couldn’t believe that. He glanced back the way they’d traveled and tried to figure out what to do. His life had never been this hard before. Not even when he was being reared by his magic-obsessed mother and abusive stepfather. Choices in those days had seemed simpler.
But they were the same, weren’t they? Warren asked himself. Survive or not survive? The stakes haven’t changed. The game has only gotten harder.
TWELVE
When Merihim took his hand back from you,” Naomi said, “he didn’t expect you to live. It was a miracle that you survived. I saw you.”
You left me, Warren couldn’t help thinking.
“She abandoned you,” Lilith said. “Only I saw to your needs. I gave you back a hand. Don’t be swayed by her at this point. She thinks only of herself.”
Warren looked at Lilith. And who do you think of? But he knew who she was most concerned with. He couldn’t fault her for that, though. He thought mostly of himself as well.
“Merihim didn’t expect you to live,” Naomi said. “He didn’t expect you to become powerful again. You may be a threat to him at this point.”
Both of those things, Warren knew, were facts. In the distance, the group of imps stepped over a hill. They stood out darkly against the snowy background under the silver moonlight.
“She has a point,” Lilith reluctantly admitted. “As powerful as I am, I couldn’t have shielded you completely from Merihim. He may be looking for you as well.”
“If Merihim wanted to find me,” Warren said, “he’d find me easily enough. And he wouldn’t send imps to do it for him.”
“Wouldn’t he?” Lilith asked. “You’re not that important yet, Warren. Merihim doesn’t yet know what I’m going to do for you. He doesn’t know how powerful I’m going to make you.”
Warren clung to the woman’s words. If he was going to survive in the world as it now was, he needed to be powerful enough to do so. There was no other way around that. Even with all his innate ability, with the powers he’d already known, he wasn’t strong enough to do that and he knew it.
“Merihim could have sent these imps,” Naomi argued. “You can’t take the chance that he didn’t. If you’re wrong, they’re going to keep following us into the marsh and kill us.”
“I know.”
“We need to win these people over. Somehow convince them that we’re stronger together than we are apart.”
Warren fed off his fear, made it so big and so strong that he couldn’t contain it. He’d done the same thing when he’d been a boy living in his mother’s house. Once he was numb, he turned toward the group of armed men.
“I’m not the one you should be afraid of,” he told them. “Our enemies are there.” He flung an arm toward the advancing group of imps.
“He’s one of them,” someone said.
“He’s just trying to fool us,” another added.
Warren tapped into the power that constantly coursed through him. Now that he knew what it was, he’d realized that the power had always been within him. He’d had it even when he was a child. The power had allowed him to save himself the night his stepfather killed his mother and tried to kill him.
That night, with his mother lying dead only a few feet away and a bullet that had already ripped through his own body, Warren had seized control of his stepfather’s mind. Despite the man’s intentions to kill him, Warren had forced his stepfather to turn his pistol on himself.
“I wish you were dead,” Warren had told him.
He still remembered the incredulous look in his stepfather’s eyes as he’d turned the pistol from Warren to his own temple. Martin DeYoung, his stepfather, had been a small-time drug dealer who hadn’t been able to control his own habit or Warren’s mother’s need to believe in the arcane. That night, while under the influence of the drugs he sold, his will hadn’t been particularly strong. He’d been angry, not afraid. Fear was much stronger than anger. Warren understood that because he couldn’t remember a time when fear hadn’t been part of his life.
His stepfather had screamed out in fear that night, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself. “No! Don’t make me do this! No! Stop! Please!”
But Martin DeYoung had held the pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger. The police investigation had ruled the shooting as a homicide/suicide. Warren had barely survived.
Warren gathered
