Chester’s stomach drops. There’s a figure standing to the side of Laila’s interrogation table, facing away from Chester, its silhouette just barely visible in the darkness, but?—
But it’s not a silhouette that Chester knows. Even if he recognizes the voice, the form is shockingly unhuman, with ram horns curving up from its skull and bat wings spreading out to each side andtentaclescoiling out of its spine and?—
“Obie?” Chester stammers.
But Obie was standing outside the interrogation room. Even with the sudden blackout, Chester would’ve noticed the door opening.
Did he somehow manage to rift into here? Past the prison’s anti-rifting spell work?
Laila doesn’t share Chester’s hesitation.“Nostringvadha,”she breathes, her eyes widening in awe. “Nostringvadha, my god, you’ve come for me! You’ve?—”
Delicately, the figure smooths Laila’s hair back from her forehead.As Chester’s vision adjusts, he can see what look like human eyes blinking from its forearms. “I’m sorry it took me so long to get here,” Nostringvadha murmurs. “But you’ve done so well, and I’m here to set you free.”
There’s a wide smile spread across Laila’s face. It makes her look startlingly human. “Nostringvadha, my faithful lord, I am forever in your debt.”
“No debt is required,” he says, leaning down to press a kiss to Laila’s forehead. “Simply be well, sister.”
Unexpectedly, Laila’s entire body jerks against her restraints. As Chester watches, frozen in place, a fine mist of purple-gold swirls up from her chest, coiling once in midair before drifting away and slipping underneath the door.
And then Laila goes limp, still and silent with lifeless eyes and that same smile on her face.
Slowly, the silhouette turns around to face Chester. Eyes on his forearms, extra mouths peppering his torso, patches of scales and fur and feathers covering every inch of him, purple eyes that gleam in the darkness?—
At the same time, though, it’s still unmistakably Obadiah Smith. Just brought up from his false humanity and embracing his godhood.
Chester barely resists the sudden impulse to drop to his knees and beg for forgiveness. “Nostringvadha,” he whispers.
For a long moment, Obie studies him, his face expressionless.
And then he blinks back out of existence like he was never there in the first place, leaving Chester breathless and shaking as the emergency generators finally whirr to life around him.
9
Councilwoman Tabitha Nasir’s office is just as cold and foreboding as Obie imagined it would be. Considering the hunters she’d descended from, he’s not surprised. “So you failed.”
Chester flinches, his eyes fixed on his sneakers. Obie stands invisible just off to the side, watching the exchange cautiously. The past twenty minutes have been an absolute blur, between sparking the power outage and freeing Laila and frying the memory card for the interrogation room’s video camera and?—
And watching Chester scramble to fabricate an explanation for why he had a dead demon strapped to his interrogation table.
Obie wishes he could be a little more satisfied about getting Chester into such deep trouble, but honestly, he isn’t. In fact, he feels more guilty than anything else.
Especially because Chester didn’t so much as raise a hand to harm Laila. All he did was ask questions and patiently wait for her answers.
That’s not what Obie expected from an interrogation with Chester Locke.
“Tell meexactlywhat happened,” Nasir orders now, her eyes narrowed. “You know how important our testing program is, Chester. Killing a neophyte is a waste of valuable resources.”
Obie grits his teeth at her referring to one of his people as a “resource,” but Chester just keeps looking at the floor. “The demon was refusing to answer some of my questions about the gods’ inner realm. I put a blade to her—I mean, toitsneck to try and persuade it to talk, but when the power went out—” He winces. “I was startled. My hand slipped.”
“And you cut its throat.” The councilwoman’s voice is hard and unyielding.
“I—I nicked its carotid artery,” Chester stammers, his shoulders hunching. “Accidentally. And then I couldn’t find anything to staunch the bleeding in the dark, so?—”
“You’ve gone through twelve years of training specifically to prevent situations like this, Chester,” Nasir snaps. “Our interrogators don’t make mistakes. Not the ones we value, anyway.”
For a split second, Chester’s face crumples. Just as quickly, though, his contrite mask slides back into place. “I understand, ma’am.”
Obie’s heart hurts. That was the only time Chester even showed the slightest hint of violence towards Laila: once her body was already a lifeless shell and he needed a cover story. Obie knew that the remains of her human façade couldn’t feel pain, but he still cringed when Chester brought the knife to her throat.
