Demon Bound

softly.
    “—and tonight, you sit there like something’s crawled up your ass and died there. Don’t take that shit out on us.”
    Jake stood, placed his hands flat on the table. “Golly gee, Becca—what do you want me to say? That it’s pretty out there? That it’s easy?”
    “Pretty? Easy?” She sat back, shaking her head. Her anger disappeared as if she’d clicked it off. Jake wished he could do the same. “You’re out there, being a Guardian. Saving people, helping them. Doing what we’re supposed to do. Pretty and easy isn’t the point, retard.”
    Jake stared at her. Being a Guardian . It wasn’t that simple. Nothing was that simple, but it cleared a path for him. Unwound some of the tension in his gut. “I love you, Becca.”
    She rolled her eyes. “Duh.”
    He grinned, and pushed away from the table. “I’m out.”
    Behind him, he heard Mackenzie grumbling, Becca’s sarcastic attempt to soothe the vampire, and the scrape of a chair. A second later, Pim caught up, her short legs working overtime.
    “So when you’re a guy, you want to be tall,” Jake said. “But as a chick, you’re just high enough to—”
    “You don’t want to finish that.”
    She had a point—he’d already lost too much money that night. And a glance at her face told him that even though she’d said that with humor, she was nervous, too. He stopped walking.
    “What?”
    Pim gave him a tight smile, and pulled him into one of the empty offices.
    I need a favor, she signed. Her fingers clenched before she rushed through the rest. I want to know how my brother is doing. But I don’t know how to access anything but Google, and he’s not showing up in any of the searches I do.
    Whoa, boy. Jake slid his hand over his head, the sick feeling rushing back in. Different, but tearing him up just as much.
    The custom of training in Caelum for a century wasn’t just about obtaining enough skills to fight demons. It forced them to leave human relationships behind. After a hundred years, family members, friends . . . most of them would be dead.
    But she, Jake, and the other novices had come back early. And instead of finding out how their families lived and died through historical records, they had to accept knowing their loved ones were out there—and still living.
    Maybe.
    Jake let out a long breath, then signed, Are you sure?
    Yes. I don’t need to see him. I just want to know he’s okay.
    And if he’s not?
    Lie to me. Her round face was serious.
    Jake nodded. I need everything you can give me about him. He smiled when a paper immediately appeared in her hand.
    She passed it to him. “Have you looked up yours?”
    “No.”
    “Do you think about it?”
    The image of a farmhouse in Kansas flashed in front of his eyes. “Every day.”
    “And you chicken out?”
    “Nope.” He vanished her brother’s information into his hammerspace, and thought of an attic in Manchester. Teqon had called Alice “Mrs. Grey”—and Jake knew she’d been transformed about the same time as Drifter. “I just always find something that needs to come first.”

    For almost two days, she’d been on the verge of screaming. Alice could feel it in the back of her throat, balanced on the cusp of her determination. Only her will, she thought, kept it from tumbling over into despair, and producing a howl that might have terrified a hellhound.
    Her will, and a healthy measure of distraction. The new site she’d discovered wasn’t as carefully constructed or as exquisitely decorated as some of the others—but it was different .
    A burial chamber. She was almost certain of it.
    By the light of the halogen lantern she’d set on the dais in the center of the room, Alice carefully scraped paint and stucco from the chamber wall into a sterile beaker. She’d been down on the stone floor so long, her knees had actually begun to ache. All she needed was for her back to pain her, to cover herself with dust and perspiration, to be surrounded by the murmurings and discussions of the diggers, and she might have been young again, crawling around the temples at el-Amarna, making rubbings of the hieroglyphs and figures carved nearest the floor.
    But it was cold, clean, and silent here. There was only the rasp of her scalpel, and the sandy trickle of stucco into plastic. The slow beat of her heart. And . . .
    Alice stilled her hand, listening. There it was again—another heartbeat, almost directly behind her.
    She vanished the scalpel, instantly