Chester shrugs one shoulder. Doesn’t look up. “I didn’t have to. She answered all my questions. That happens more often than you’d think, especially with neophyte demons. They don’t have any secrets to protect.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“Yeah, well.” Suddenly, there’s an edge to Chester’s voice. “After I was done with her, they probably would’ve sent her to the purebred-only wing. And I don’t know what they do with them there.”
Chester is more talkative than usual right now. Probably still in shock from the events of the past hour. Obie tries not to feel too bad for taking advantage of that. “Why do they want to know about the gods?”
Chester lets out his breath in a hiss. “No idea. They’ve always had us ask, but I thought they were just easy questions to get the demonstalking. Nowadays, though, the Council actually seems interested in the answers.” His eyebrows furrow. “How’d you even get into the interrogation room before? I thought you were waiting outside.”
“I was,” Obie says, wringing out his sponge again. “I rifted inside.”
“You shouldn’t be able to do that.” Chester sounds more bewildered than angry. “The prison is filled with anti-rifting spell work. Hell, it’s filled with anti-magicspell work—even our spellcasters have trouble with it sometimes.”
Obie’s stomach twists. “Apparently, it works against humans and demons,” he says quietly. “Not so much against gods.”
He’s furious with himself for not figuring that out before today. It took him less than ten minutes—ten minutes—of poking at the Sanctum’s spell work to find multiple workarounds for every spell imaginable, from rifts to glamours to offensive spells.
If he had just thought to test his god powers sooner, then maybe they could’ve rescued Cass quickly enough back in March that he wouldn’t have gotten hurt at all, much less had his soul ripped to shreds. But Obie will just have to content himself with using those abilities in his future jailbreaks.
Chester nods slowly. “So that’s why you decided to cause the blackout and free Laila?”
Obie considers him. “Honestly?”
Chester pauses, his gaze flickering over to Obie. “Sure.”
“The blackout was an accident,” Obie says. “I was experimenting with how far I could push past the anti-magic spell work, and I pushed too hard. Short-circuited the electrical system. Once I did that, I… panicked. I wasn’t sure what else I’d done, so my first instinct—myonlyinstinct—was to get Laila out of there before something else went wrong.” He meets Chester’s wide eyes. “I wouldn’t have interfered otherwise. You didn’t give me a reason to. You didn’t hurt her.”
Chester lets out a shaky breath. “Oh.”
“That was a good call with the knife, by the way,” Obie adds. “I’m sorry you had to clean up my mess.”
Chester looks away, gesturing at the spotless patch of tile floor between them. “Well, we’re—we’re both cleaning it up now. So I guess that works.”
Obie’s lips twitch. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“Just…” Chester’s eyes dart back to Obie. “Please don’t do it again? Even if Nasir doesn’t want me back on interrogation duty, I still might have to handle some overflow cases. We’ve been getting a lot of neophyte demons transferred to us for some reason.”
Obie’s heart does something unsteady. He quickly weighs his options and decides on the truth. “I don’t know why you’re getting transfers, but you’ve been getting a lot of neophytes in general because the Chain has been sending them directly to the Sanctum. I told you that they’re working together, remember?”
He instantly knows he miscalculated when Chester’s face shuts down. “Really? This bullshit again?” he bites out. “That may have worked on JJ and Roma, Smith, but it’s not going to work on me.”
Obie’s hackles rise. “Locke—Chester,look at me,”he snaps, and Chester gives him a startled glance. “You can think that I’m wrong all you want, but I’m not trying to manipulate you. We’ve never manipulated JJ or Roma, either. All the evidence points to the Chain and the Sanctum working together, and it points to them working together worldwide. Whether you choose to believe us is on you.”
Chester’s jaw works. “Yeah, whatever,” he says, going back to scrubbing.
And Chester?—
He might be a belligerent asshole most of the time, but he’s definitely a lot less heartless than Obie initially expected. Honestly, he cansee why JJ and Roma are so fond of him—and so determined to get him out of here.
Obie might even agree with them. Just a little bit.
It’s an uncomfortable realization. Pushing the thought from his mind, he dips his sponge back into the blood-tinged water, squeezes it out, and silently helps Chester until the interrogation room is spotless.
Chester fumbles his bow and arrow for the fourth time in three minutes and curses under his breath. “How do you make this look so simple, Nehemiah?”
“Easy. Like this,” Bryant says, and she fluidly pulls an arrow out of her quiver, aims at the target across the training grounds, and lets it fly. It whizzes over the sixty yards like a homing missile before hitting yet another perfect bullseye. “See? Nothing to it.”
Chester scowls, pulling back his own bowstring and squinting across the field. When he lets his arrow go, it arcs through the air and just barely lodges itself in the outermost ring of his target.
