She looked up suddenly, her gaze finding Wulfe’s. “It’s you.” She smiled, stepping into the foyer suddenly, without hesitation, her gaze glued to Wulfe’s. “It’s you he’s been trying to contact, you he needs to talk to.”
Wulfe’s pulse began to pound. This was his worst nightmare come true. Not only was Satanan getting his claws into him, but now Daemons were starting to come out of the woodwork looking for him. Or slivers of Daemon souls, at any rate. A thought snagged him.
“You . . . is he the one who’s been whispering Daemon in my head?”
“Yes. He was hoping you’d answer and tell him where you were.”
“Call the Shaman,” Lyon ordered. He clamped his hand around the woman’s upper arm. “You won’t be harmed, but neither am I taking any chances. You’ll wait in the prisons until the Shaman can determine what you really are.”
“I think it’s a little late, pal,” Vivian muttered.
Lyon stilled, his face turning hard as granite.
Vivian looked up at him suddenly. “I wasn’t talking to you. Strome told me to leave at once, and I told him it was a little late. Am I wrong?”
“You are not.”
“I didn’t think so. I still answer him out loud most of the time though he seems to be able to read my thoughts well enough. Keep that in mind, please. It might be a difficult habit for me to break.”
As Lyon steered the woman out of the foyer, toward the door to the basement, Wulfe turned to Natalie. “I’m following them. Do you want to come with me or go up to your room?” This might be his worst nightmare, but he wanted to know what in the hell that Daemon knew.
Natalie set the books on the floor. “With you.”
Wulfe took her hand, pleased. He needed her close right now, her calm strength.
Together, they descended the stairs to the foyer, then the longer stairs to the basement, following the others through the gym and into the prisons.
“Is this where I stayed when I was here before?” Natalie asked quietly.
“Yes. Don’t go near the cells,” Wulfe warned her. “I don’t think any of the men will hurt you, but I can’t be certain.” He clasped her hand tighter.
Lyon opened one of the empty cells for Vivian and the woman walked in without complaint, then turned as he locked the door on her.
“How did you know about Wulfe?” Lyon demanded, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Strome sensed him, as I said.” Her confidence didn’t appear to have slipped an ounce despite her imprisonment in the shape-shifters’ dungeon. “He has so many questions, questions I’ve been unable to answer since humans didn’t know that Daemons . . . or shape-shifters, for that matter . . . ever existed.”
She moved to the door of the cage, gripping one of the bars in a casual manner, her gaze finding Wulfe’s. “What happened to the Daemons?”
He felt her intense gaze like an unwanted spotlight, but she didn’t pause long enough for him to answer.
“When Strome first glommed onto me, he sensed no other Daemons at all,” she continued. “That was almost two years ago. I’ve been researching like crazy, trying to find any reference to the people or events of his time, but I’ve found nothing. Then a few months ago, he sensed something, a hint of an old enemy, the Destroyer, he calls him. Satanan. Very faint, like a soul not fully formed.”
“We’re aware of Satanan,” Wulfe snapped.
She nodded. “Then, suddenly, three Abominations flew free into the world but disappeared within days. About the same time, a bright new Daemon light awakened. Yours. Your awakening wasn’t like a birth, exactly. More like a bloodline triggered—one of the old, honorable lines—and he knew he had to find you, to learn what had happened and to warn you.”
Wulfe’s jaw hardened. Though he wanted to hear what she had to say, his muscles tensed with the need to turn and leave. Why did she have to stare at him alone? It was bad enough that he was some kind of Daemon freak. Did she have to flash it like a neon sign over his head?
“Please.” Vivian grasped the bars with both hands, her gaze imploring him. “Strome is desperate to know everything you can tell him. The last thing he remembers was Satanan claiming the souls of his people. Daemon souls. Strome fought as long and hard as he could, so hard that a piece of his soul sheared off and became lost, the piece that I inadvertently recovered and that now shares space inside of me.”
Lyon finally answered her questions since Wulfe had no intention of doing so. “Satanan and his horde nearly destroyed the other races, the humans included. The shifters and the Mage joined forces, and with the help of the Ilinas, managed to incarcerate them in a magical prison, the Daemon Blade.”
“So they’re not dead,” she asked, turning to Lyon. Finally.
“We don’t think so, no. We believe that the current Mage leader, Inir, became possessed by a powerful wisp of Satanan’s consciousness some years ago and began stealing the souls of his own Mage in order to begin a campaign to free the Daemons. They’re very close to accomplishing that.”
“So Satanan isn’t yet free, but he’s becoming very strong within his host. Strome can feel that.” Vivian paused and looked away. “All right, let me try.” Meeting Lyon’s gaze again, she said, “He wants to speak to you directly. I’m not sure how it’s going to work, but I’m going to try to let him borrow my mouth.” She grinned suddenly, a woman’s smile. “Behave, Strome.”
Vivian closed her eyes and took two long, deep breaths, then went still. When her eyes opened, they turned to Lyon, a hardness in their depths that hadn’t been there before.
“If you hurt her . . .” The voice was Vivian’s, yet not. That hard gaze tightened with frustration. “I can do nothing. So I will entreat you . . . do not harm her. She is light and beauty and goodness, and poses no threat to you whatsoever. I will help you defeat Satanan’s rise in any way that I can so long as you vow to protect Vivian Mars. Satanan’s evil knows no bounds. He has destroyed or enslaved more immortal races than you probably knew existed, including his own.”
“If Satanan doesn’t rise, neither do you.” Tighe lifted a single pale eyebrow. “Why would you want to keep that from happening?”
Vivian/Strome turned his way. “Even if the Daemons fly free of the blade, my true self and I cannot be reunited without destroying the vessel in which I reside. Without killing Vivian. That would be a poor way to repay her kindness. And it is unknown if the male I have become is still worthy of this world after being enslaved by Satanan and incarcerated in that blade for . . . how long?”
Lyon answered. “Five thousand years.”
Vivian’s eyes widened. “Five thousand?” Her voice suddenly became her own. “No wonder I couldn’t find a trace of the places or people you knew. They were prehistory in most of the world. Okay, okay, I’ll give you back the mic.” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, Strome was back.
That intense gaze turned to Wulfe. “You are only part Daemon.”
Wulfe glared at him for several seconds before answering. “A fraction. At most.”
“You are a son of Ciroc. I knew him and his shifter mate quite well. She was a beauty and much in love with her Daemon husband, as he was in love with her.”
Wulfe shook his head, one eye narrowing. “We’ve seen Daemons. They’re feeding machines, pure evil. And they sure as hell don’t have the equipment to father children. So how . . . ?”
“You don’t speak of Daemons, shifter, you speak of Abominations. If the Daemons were imprisoned five millennia ago, perhaps you’ve never seen a true Daemon, only the three Abominations I felt fly free.”
“Wraith Daemons,” Lyon said. “That’s what we call them. The Mage managed to free three from the blade a month ago. We killed them.”
“I’ve seen real Daemons,” Kougar said. “I was born before the defeat of Satanan.” He turned to the others. “A true Daemon is much like an Ilina, in that they can become pure energy or take fully corporeal form. Unlike Ilinas, their natural state is corporeal, and they generally look quite human.”
Vivian/Strome frowned. “Satanan created his Abominations to empower him. Through their terrorizing of others, the Abominations feed him the rancid energy that makes him stronger than any other Daemon—than any other creature of any race. It is why we could not stop him.”
“You would claim that not all Daemons crave death and destruction?” Kougar asked tightly.
“I would. I do. The Daemons I knew were not evil. Some of us were warriors, certainly, but ours was a great and varied society. We lived in peace with our human and immortal neighbors. As a race, we were once in perfect synchronicity with the earth’s energies—solar, magnetic, heat—giving as well as taking, in a natural cycle that once stabilized the Earth, that healed and strengthened the living beings in our vicinity, humans included. It’s a cycle that has . . . or had . . . existed for hundreds of millions of years.
“Satanan, alone, fed on human suffering. And he, alone, possessed the powerful ability to tap into the life force of others, stealing our strength. An ability we learned of too late. Once he’d weakened us, he began to control us until we were unable to do anything but what he commanded. I watched it happen to my friends and brothers as they fell under his control. I fought the same fate. And lost.”
“What’s going to happen if the Mage free Satanan from that blade?” Lyon demanded.
“I don’t know. Those imprisoned with him will likely be free as well, but it’s impossible to say what state they’ll be in or whether he’ll still control them after all this time.”
Vivian shook her head, her voice slipping through. “Five thousand years.”
Tighe stepped forward. “How many Abominations did he make, Strome? How many are in that blade with him?”
Strome was back in an instant. “By the time I was enslaved, he had created hundreds. Since I do not know how much time passed between my enslavement and Satanan’s defeat, I cannot begin to guess. Nor do I know how many were captured by the blade.”
“More than seven thousand Abominations . . . wraith Daemons . . . were captured in that blade with Satanan,” Wulfe told them, “Along with the captured souls of fourteen other races, including Satanan’s own Daemons.” Why did he keep opening his mouth and letting this crap come out?
His brothers stared at him as if he’d grown a second head.
Vivian/Strome watched him with interest, then slowly nodded.
“How many Daemons left part of their consciousness behind like you and Satanan?” Lyon asked.
“I don’t know. From the moment I broke away until Vivian found me, I was lost, inert. I came awake inside her and will live until she dies. If other wisps of consciousness survived as I did, they are likely long gone by now.”
Vivian/Strome’s gaze turned back to Wulfe. “Why have you endangered your effort to keep Satanan from escaping?”
Wulfe frowned, his muscles tensing, the need to do battle leaping inside of him. “What do you mean?”
“Why did you make a channel key?”
Wulfe frowned, then slowly turned to granite. “I didn’t.”
“You did.” Vivian/Strome’s gaze turned to Natalie. “Her.”
Chapter Thirteen
“What?” Wulfe stared at Vivian and the Daemon consciousness shining from her eyes, then gripped Natalie’s hand tighter. Fuck that. He curved his arm around her shoulder and hauled her tight against him, the fierce need to protect her barreling through him. “I did not make Natalie a channel key.”
“Is that why I’m glowing?” Natalie asked quietly.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. Wulfe’s head began to pound. “I couldn’t have made her a channel key. I don’t even know how!”
Delaney had been made into a channel key by Tighe’s evil clone and . . . goddess . . . he’d infected her with Daemon essence, then carved a pentagram into her chest that would have killed her if not for Tighe’s intervention and the miracle that Tighe’s animal spirit orchestrated, making her immortal in the process.
He had not done that to Natalie. He hadn’t. But inside, his wolf began to howl.
Vivian/Strome watched him steadily, sympathy in hard eyes. “It can only happen in one way. A connection must have been opened between the two of you, and dark energy, primal energy, allowed to fill it.”
“I didn’t . . . I would never . . .” But he had. With a slam of understanding, he knew what had happened. “She was cut by a wraith Daemon. I took her wound for my own.”
Vivian/Strome began to nod slowly. “That might do it. How long ago was this?”
“A month.”
Hard eyes narrowed. “About the time I sensed your awakening. In making her your channel key, you must have triggered your own dormant Daemon blood. What’s more, I now understand the source of the energy that is strengthening Satanan. He’s empowering himself through your connection to your channel key, pulling primal energy through both of you, probably without your even feeling it.”
This just got worse and worse.
“How do we stop him?” Lyon demanded.
Wulfe’s neck muscles felt twisted like a rope. He pulled Natalie in front of him and wrapped both arms around her, the need to protect her screaming through him even as the scent of her, the feel of her warm body against his, calmed him, if only a fraction.
“How do I unmake a channel key?” Because he had to undo this. He had to make it right.