Demon Bound

yes, Mom thought he was crazy. So many who came back were. You didn’t hear much about it here, but in the cities . . . and that was where he’d come from. So she tried to get him to leave, but he stayed until he told it all. Until he told us about the white light, and the man with wings who took you with him.”
    Jake rubbed the bridge of his nose. So Pinter had seen his transformation. He remembered that light, how it had surrounded him, blazed through him.
    “They never sent your body home. And it’s always been in the back of my mind, so when Lindsey tells me that you’ve slain the monsters under her bed, and suddenly she knows who made her blue quilt, and an antique chair appears in her room that she says is from France, even though she has no idea what France is ... I start thinking, ‘Maybe.’ ” Her eyes were direct. “Now I’m wondering if our family should be afraid of those things Pinter talked about.”
    “Nosferatu? Probably not.” He called in a card with SI’s phone number, and then wrote his own cell and e-mail address on the back. “But you can always contact me if there’s something you’re unsure of, or if something threatens you. And demons . . . well, you probably won’t know what they are. Mostly, you just don’t let them tell you you’re less than what you are, or that you aren’t worth anything, or make you believe something that you feel in your gut isn’t true.”
    He pushed the card across the table, then sat stock-still when she pressed her fingers to her eyes. They were callused, he saw. A few tiny scars lined her fingers. She wasn’t a stranger to working with her hands. “What’d I say?”
    She did that waving thing in front of her eyes again, flapping the envelope like a fan. “Just . . . You told me exactly the same thing in this letter. About never letting anyone put me down. So I never have.”
    “Good.” His throat was thick as hell. “Listen, do you need anything? I can’t be your dad, but—”
    “Yes.” She was already nodding. “Yes. There is one thing.”

    There was no reason to delay her flight to the Archives. Jake could find her anywhere; it didn’t matter if she was in her quarters. But Alice waited for several hours, finding tasks to occupy her, reading an erotic manual and picturing herself and Jake in every sketch, until she simply had to accept the obvious.
    He wasn’t returning.
    And didn’t that sound so very dire? She amended her conclusion as she strode into the Archives and toward the rear corner that she liked to think of as her own.
    It wasn’t that he wouldn’t return. Something was keeping him away.
    Or perhaps not. Alice drew to a halt, her lungs feeling very tight.
    Jake was here . He sat at her worktable, sifting through photographs.
    She couldn’t return the smile he sent over his shoulder. She wondered why he attempted that welcoming expression at all; it was too false, strained.
    And why had he not come to find her? “Have you been here long?”
    “A little while.”
    “I see.” She did not look at him as she picked up an unfamiliar aerial photograph. She couldn’t focus, but she recalled that they intended to look for Anaria. “The Dardanelles?”
    “Yep. I’m hoping these and the topographical data will give us a head start, a few possible locations. I’ll have satellite images by tomorrow.”
    “Then shall we begin?” Dear God, let them begin. She needed desperately to leave this place, to fill her mind with something other than: he hadn’t returned.
    “Nope. The sun doesn’t set for another six hours. We’ll need to be flying around as we’re looking.”
    And they couldn’t risk humans glancing up to see them. Or, she supposed, teleporting in and out to specific sites. Stiffly, she moved around the table. “Very well.”
    “You’ll have to carry me tonight. My wings won’t be ready.”
    She gave a short nod, but he wasn’t looking at her.
    It was very odd, but he was still examining the same photograph he’d had when she’d come in. When had he become so slow?
    And his breathing, she thought, was too steady. His face too still, his voice too even.
    She had asked the wrong question. This was not about how long he had been here, but why he hadn’t returned to her quarters.
    It only now occurred to her that she wasn’t the reason.
    “Jake,” she said softly. “Where did you go?”
    “Kansas. Then SI. Then I took Pim to Malaysia to see her brother. Then back to SI. Then Baghdad. Then