“Yes. It would… probably be best.” He finally looked up again, meeting my eyes. “But if I was going to break my vows, it would be for her.”
Another thing I didn’t need or want to know. “Just remember, your biggest worry isn’t me telling Bridge. It’s me telling Mira.”
Truthfully, I’d already told Mira all about Brother Lies-a-Lot and his order of backstabbing assholes, but what Cameron didn’t know could terrify him. Really, after the hoodoo she’d walked him through with Zane, I wasn’t going to be able to pass him off as just an amateur caster anyway. Much to my disappointment, she wasn’t nearly as pissed off about the whole situation as I’d expected her to be.
“But he’s lying to Bridget. He’s using her.”
Mira just shook her head at me, giving me that amused “I know more than you” smile. “I don’t think he’s lying to her about the important parts.”
Still, I hoped he would just walk out of our lives. Yeah, Dr. Bridget would be heartbroken, but Mira could do that girl-bonding thing that women do when one of them gets dumped, and things would go back to normal- ish.
Speaking of normal-ish… Somehow, I expected Axel to waltz back into my life like he hadn’t been gone the past six months. I left the chess set out on the back patio, thinking we could play again, or that it would at least give us an excuse to open up talks. He didn’t show.
Often, when I came outside for my morning katas, I found the pieces moved. For a month, I played against a nonexistent opponent, attacking, feinting, countering, but the demon never showed himself.
But then, I suppose he was busy. No matter how things had turned out for me up on that mountain, stuff around the world wasn’t any different. Winter was coming on, and the droughts had turned to blizzards. The wildfires had given way to mudslides, and the riots had become terrorist actions. Seemed like the entire human race was pissed off about anything and everything. Signs of the conflict seeping over into our world, I guess.
Halloween was looming on the horizon and I was out back bagging up pumpkin guts from our jack-o’-lantern frenzy, when Axel finally appeared. There was no fanfare, no flashing lights. He didn’t even bother to hide inside a squirrel or other domestic pest. He was just there, at the edge of my water garden, when I looked up.
“Axel.” I set the trash bag aside and wiped my hands on my jeans as I walked across the grass.
“Jesse.” He offered a bit of a smile, but there was weariness to it.
“Kinda expected you sooner than this.”
“Yeah, well… busy social calendar. You know how it is.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets. If the chilly autumn air bothered him in his light T-shirt, it didn’t show. “You’ve been well?”
“I’m still here. What’s up with you?”
He shook his Mohawked head. “I can’t stay long, Jesse. Don’t waste your questions.”
I nodded a little. I’d expected as much. “Fine. How about I start with telling you what I know, and you just say hot or cold, hm?”
After a moment, he nodded. “That could work.”
“There’s some kind of split Down There. Y’all are feuding amongst yourselves.”
That earned me a nod and a “Hot.”
“One side wants us champions out of the picture, for some reason.”
“Hot.”
“One side… wants us to stay?”
He frowned, mouth twisting as he tried to find an answer he could give me. “Warm.”
“How warm?”
“Lukewarm.”
This was getting us nowhere fast. “Look, are we still in danger? Are they going to come again?”
The demon kept frowning, and added pacing to his repertoire. “It’s complicated, Jesse. Yes, someone, sometime, is going to come again. But you have to realize that you’re dealing with creatures that have no sense of time. They could come tomorrow. They could come two centuries from now. And it would make absolutely no difference to them.”
“Makes a helluva lot of difference to me,” I muttered, and he smirked. “So what do we do?”
“What have you been doing for the last month?” He shrugged. “You go on.”
“We go on, and just wait to see if some big fight that isn’t even ours comes running over our head like a freight train?”
“Sounds like a plan.” He scuffed the toe of his boots through my shaggy lawn, finding something on the ground suddenly fascinating. “There have been lines drawn over this, Jesse. Sides chosen. Things you didn’t even see or know were happening. It’s going to get much worse before it gets better.”
“And whose side are you on, Axel?”
“Mine, of course. That was a foolish question.” He smiled a little, never raising his eyes to meet mine.
Of course. It had been a foolish question. I’d known the answer before I ever asked it, and I expected nothing less of him.
The weird thing was, in all the years I’d known him, I couldn’t think of a single time Axel had ever lied to me. Ever since he made that comment on that dark road, I’d tried to think back, wracked my brain to find a single instance. He omitted, yes. He evaded. But he’d never told me a straight-up bald-faced lie. And I had no idea what that meant.
“Hey, Jesse? Hold still while I try something, okay?”
Against my better judgment, I held still.
With a puzzled tilt to his head, Axel reached out and pinched my biceps hard.
“Ow!” I yelped, and reflexively socked him in the chest, hard enough to make him grunt. Then we both kind of stared at each other.
It was the first rule, the one inviolable rule that governed what we, as champions, did. A demon could not harm a human without that human’s permission. That was the whole point of the contracts, of the bartering souls. It was the thin line of civility that protected us, the humans, against them, the demons.
But my arm hurt, and was going to bruise. He’d hurt me. And I’d hit him back with no mystical repercussions. “What does that mean, Axel?”
“I… don’t know yet. But I’m going to find out.” The fact that even Axel was flummoxed bothered me more than anything else. Before he faded out of view, he reminded me, “You owe me a favor, champion. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.”
Yeah. That. I had to wonder just how that was gonna come back and bite me in the ass later.
Cameron hadn’t left town, of course. Big jerk. And as far as I knew, he was still dating Dr. Bridget, which was pretty high on my “not happy” meter. Still, it was handy to be able to ask him to dig through the Order’s Library of Books Not Accessible to Mere Mortals. (I slay me, seriously.)
He found no trace of anyone named “Architect.” No demon, no spirit. No angel either. Whatever Axel was, he hadn’t been documented. Which meant he was either nothing notable at all… or he was some serious badass shit. I was starting to suspect it was the latter.
I couldn’t help but think about what Axel had said. I had known the Yeti’s name, and for whatever reason, that was threat enough for him to try to kill me. How many other names were swimming around in my brain? In my four, almost five years as a champion, I’d had fourteen challenges. More than any other champion in the same time period. Granted, two of them were with the Yeti, but that still left twelve other demons with some kind of special grudge against me. I needed to find out about this whole name thing, and fast.
I also knew that Handless was still out there. I suppose it was possible that she hobbled off into a hole and died, but… deep down, I knew better. She was out there, and she was something I’d have to deal with eventually. I entered everything I could remember about the Yeti’s minions into Grapevine, so that any other champion who might run into them would have a fighting chance. I told them about Handless. I wouldn’t be the only one looking for her now.
Ultimately, I could only take Axel’s advice, scary as that was. I went on. Esteban kept taking lessons with me, sparring in the rain and the early-autumn snow. Mira renewed the protective spells on the house, and on all of our friends whether they wanted it or not. When my neighbor’s mastiff had another litter, I took one of the puppies for Annabelle. Marty’s Duke had proven invaluable against the Yeti and his minions. I wanted that kind of protection for my daughter.
