“Can I? Yes.” Smith leans forward, his eyes narrowed. “Am Igoingto? No. Considering how perversely interested the Sanctum seems to be in the Deep lately, I’m keeping their most loyal attack dog away from that intel.”
Chester stiffens. “How do you know about the Sanctum researching the Deep? You shouldn’t?—”
And then, all at once, he remembers.
Have either of you ever heard of Operation Thirteen? Nasir mentioned it had something to do with the Deep.
Chester feels like he just got punched in the gut. That conversation with Roma and Bryant out on the training grounds was less than a month ago, but it already feels like a different lifetime. He knew Roma was struggling back then—she’d failed her mission to trap Smith’s crew just the week before—but he never would’ve dreamed she was about to defect a few short days later.
And leaving Chester and Bryant behind is one thing, but telling Smith and his ilk about sensitive Sanctum secrets is another. None of them are supposed to know about Operation Thirteen, not even Bryant—hell, Chester and Roma only heard the name via eavesdropping.
The fact that Roma told her new demon friends about it so quickly sends bitterness snaking through him. “Oh. Roma.”
Smith’s jaw works, but he doesn’t deny it. “In any case, that option is out. And if you’re going to be difficult and not give me access to your memories, then we’re officially at an impasse. We can try making a point-by-point counterspell from the original incantation, but without knowing how the pre-casting process changed the spell, I doubt it’ll work. It—it might take me a few days to come up with another plan.”
“Seriously?” Chester says, exasperated. “Just request the stupidspell from the Deep. My spellcasting is clearly mediocre at best, so it’s not like I’d be able to replicate the process.”
Smith’s eyes flash. “Not happening, hunter. I’d rather deal with your bullshit for a few more days than risk giving the Sanctum anything they could use against us.”
Chester laughs. The sound comes out hollower than he expected. “What, not in a rush to break the binding spell and kill me anymore?”
For the first time, Smith looks honestly confused. “What?”
“Oh, come on.” The knot of tension in Chester’s stomach twists even tighter. “We’re on the same page, all right? I hate you, and you hate me. And you tried to murder me in cold blood right after I activated that spell last night. Snapping my neck is probably the first thing on your to-do list once we’re not attached at the hip anymore.”
For a long moment, Smith considers Chester.
And then he smiles.
It’s not a nice smile, though. In fact, “smile” might be the wrong word altogether. The expression shows his teeth and curves his lips up in the corners, but instead of being kind or playful or even mocking, it’s just sharp edges and hard lines and a feral vindictiveness that sends Chester’s fight-or-flight response into overdrive.
It’s the smile of something that’s not even pretending to be human anymore. “No,” Smith says. “I’m not going to kill you. When we break this binding spell, the very first thing I’m going to do is reach out to your old friends JJ and Roma, explain to them exactly what you tried to do to me, and tell them that you’re. Not. Worth. Saving.” He leans forward. “I hope you rot here, Locke. I hope you suffer in this prison that you’re so desperate to protect for the rest of your miserable life.”
The words roil through Chester. He swallows hard, pinned to the spot by Smith’s dark, ageless eyes. The rest of the world seems to shudder and close in around him, nothing real except for the fearclamping around his lungs and that unsettlingly inhuman smile, and then?—
Without another word, Smith vanishes from sight again. “Let’s move. You have a job to do, and I need to figure out how to fix your mess. Go on.”
And, feeling depressingly like a dog with its tail between its legs, Chester pulls open the door and stumbles back into the prison.
6
So shadowing a professional torturer for the past four days has been a lot more boring than Obie expected.
He follows a few steps behind Chester as the hunter wheels a cart of biohazard bins across the prison, resisting the urge to drum his fingers against his leg with impatience. They’re finally approaching the last fifteen minutes of Chester’s twelve-hour shift, and Obie is itching to get out of here and get back to researching how to break this ridiculous binding spell.
Again.
Part of the problem, he thinks bitterly, is that his baseline spellcasting skills aren’t as robust as they really should be after fifteen thousand years. Sure, he’s picked up a lot of knowledge over the millennia, but he’s never taken much time to translate it into practice.
Namely because he doesn’t need to. When demons are first summoned from Tamaros, they retain most of their innate magic abilities from that dimension, negating the need for formal spellcasting training for their first few months on Earth—in fact, Desi is just nowhitting the point where her instinctive magic is starting to fade, and she was summoned almost eight months ago.
For Obie, though, those intrinsic magic skills never disappeared. Perks of being a god. He can and does use regular spellcasting most of the time to avoid suspicion, but if he needs something done particularly quickly and effectively, he’ll tap into his god powers and hope no one asks too many questions.
He’s tried using those powers to analyze and break this stupid binding spell, but he hasn’t had any luck. He can feel the shape of it connected to him—just like he can still feel the curse the other gods cast on him all those years ago—but he can’t chip away at it.
That leaves him with the altogether depressing solution of poring over old spell books while Chester works. But he finished rereading his current tome from cover to cover around the ninth hour of Chester’s shift, and since the prison is covered with anti-rifting spell work, he can’t grab another book from his myriad pocket dimensions—or even return the one he currently has tucked under one arm.
At this point, there’s really nothing to do except trail along in Chester’s wake while he buzzes around like a busy little murder hornet, sharpening knives and cleaning interrogation rooms and handling all the administrative work that Obie never really considered before recently. But the nightmare of being forced to stand by and watch Chester cut open one of Obie’s brethren for fun and profit still hasn’t materialized, so he’ll accept the mind-numbing tedium for now.
