Desi bounces happily on his shoulders. “Yay! And can we watch moreWyvern Academy?”
“Sure. And have you ever had food before? I think you might like tacos.”
“Tacos!” she cheers. “Can we hang out all the time, JJ? We can play together and watch movies together and?—”
JJ’s heart twinges. “Notallthe time, unfortunately. I have a job at the Sanctum—we all do. We hunt?—”
And then he hastily cuts himself off, because the easiest way to sum up the Sanctum’s mission statement is “we hunt demons.” Somehow, he doesn’t think that’s the most tactful thing to say to the demon toddler who’s currently sitting on his shoulders and doingsomethingto his locs.
“What are you doing up there?” he asks, partly to change the subject and partly out of honest curiosity.
“Braiding your hair!” she says brightly.
“Oh, no,” he says, and he reaches up to grab her wrists. “Oh, no, you don’t.”
“But Iwanna!”she whines, and she bursts into giggles as JJ wrestles her off his shoulders, holding her aloft in the air in front of him. JJ’s heart melts a little. “Put me down!”
“Okay.” Gently, he places her on the ground. The roots and brambles are finally thinning out enough that JJ thinks she can manage to walk alongside him, even with her shorter legs. As authoritatively as possible, he wiggles his fingers. “Hand, please.”
She obligingly slips her hand into his, skipping along next to him as she launches back into her animated commentary onWyvern Academy.JJ keeps one eye on her as they head back towards civilization, trying to gauge if she’s too cold. She isn’t dressed anywhere near warm enough for the first day of January—just a little-girl dress and stockings—and he keeps wanting to shuck off his jacket and drape it over her like a cape.
Unfortunately, that’s not the safest option right now. After JJ offed the spellcaster who summoned Desi, she quickly went from attacking him to jumping on him like an overenthusiastic puppy. He futilely tried to explain that it was dangerous—specifically, that one of the Sanctum enchantments thrumming through his veins makes his skin physically corrosive to demons, leaving them with ugly burns even after the most fleeting of touches.
In her determined quest to climb all over him like a shiny new toy, she didn’t really seem to understand what he was saying. Eventually, he resolved to make sure his jacket and gloves stayed firmly in place, leaving as little of his skin exposed as possible.
The underbrush slowly starts transitioning into an actual trail, one of the many surrounding Redwater. Relieved, JJ guides Desi onto it. After nearly three days of hiking, they’re finally getting closer to town, closer to Roma and Bryant?—
Closer to the Sanctum.
JJ bites back a grimace at the thought. He still doesn’t know how he’s going to explain this to his strike team, much less to the Sanctum’s Council. Obviously, telling them the truth—namely, that he’s already mentally adopted this tiny demon and is planning on protecting her at all costs—is out of the question. He’ll have to think of another reason why they can’t send her down to the prison for testing, and?—
All at once, JJ feels a prickling on the back of his neck. It’s less a sense of being watched and more a sense of being traced, of being searched for?—
Of being found. The familiar sensation of a soul-tracking spell, the type that he, Roma, and Bryant have used to locate each other dozens of times over long distances, even past the harshest of anti-tracking spells. He’s felt that same prickling several times over the past few days—probably Roma trying to narrow down his location—but before now, the sensation was faint. Mild.
Far away.
This time, though, the prickling is a lot stronger. And this time, the usually comforting feeling of knowing that his strike team is nearby is suddenly overwhelmed by fear taking up a stranglehold around his ribcage.
He can’t let them know about Desi. Hecan’t.“Desi,” he whispers, pitching his voice as low as he can. “Do you know how to make yourself invisible? Have you learned that spell yet?”
Desi cuts herself off mid-sentence, blinking up at him. “Uh-huh. Why?”
“Do it now,” he says, and he lets go of her hand. “Just—just stay close to me, okay? And don’t make a sound. It’s really important.”
Desi looks bewildered, but she nods anyway. “Okay,” she says, and in the blink of an eye, she’s gone. Part of JJ—the part that the Sanctum drilled into him—can still faintly sense her presence next to him, but he’s desperately hoping that Roma and Bryant won’t be nearly so observant.
Not until he figures out what to tell them, at least.
And, true to form, it’s only a few minutes before he hears a sound in the distance—human footsteps padding along the trail. “JJ?” a familiar voice calls.
Relief and anxiety wash over him in equal measures. “Roma, over here!”
Within seconds, Roma appears around a bend in the trail, jogging towards him. JJ reluctantly speeds up to meet her halfway, praying that Desi can keep up. “I’ve been looking for you fordays,”Roma says, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “Stupid spellcaster blasted me halfway across the state. We really need a better defense against banishing spells, because they areseriouslyirritating.”
“Easy,” JJ says. “Learn to duck.”
Roma punches his arm. “I meant amagicaldefense, smartass. Maybe a shield spell? They don’t usually work against banishing spells, but if I combined it with a standard counterspell, then maybe it could?—”
