Rome
Later that night, Chance handed me a small leather messenger bag.
“In case of emergency,” he said.
I opened it up and found two water bottles and a plastic squirt gun.
“It’s not ideal, because it takes too long to get the stopper out of the bottle and get the liquid poured into the gun.You can’t store it in the squirt gun, though. It’ll leak out. But if Kerry’s in crisis, you’re not going to be able to touch him.” Chance pointed to the squirt gun. “That gives you a few feet to work with.”
“Nice.” I held up one of the bottles and watched gold power swirl though clear liquid. “Calm and heal?”
“Calm andcoma. In case of extreme emergency. Coma’ll knock him out for an hour or so, but I don’t know what he’ll be like when he wakes up. At least it would give you time to get things under control or for Gigi to ’port him or whatever.”
“Thanks. I wouldn’t have thought of this.” I raised an eyebrow. “I’m surprised you whipped these up after he insulted you over Chessie.”
“Nah. He was being protective. Plus, I’d like to keep the rest of you alive. If he explodes, you’d all be collateral damage. Between Jax’s ability to hold him and those,” he nodded at the bottles, “maybe the odds will be in your favor.”
“Wow. For you, that’s pessimistic.”
“You don’t understand. What’s inside him is— All it’s going to take is a single misstep andka-boom.” He met my eyes for a moment, then reached over and tapped a finger on the bigger bottle with the blue lid. “This one’s calm. The red is coma. Start with two trigger squeezes of any of them. If you need more, increase by one trigger squeeze at a time.”
“I’ll remember.”
“Without me there to give him his daily fix, he’s going to be a little wild tomorrow. Keep your eye on him and use the calm. You’ve got plenty of it.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair as he yawned. “I wish I would have thought of it sooner. I could have made you a heal one, too. I can try in the morning. Might be able to eke out a tablespoon or so, anyway.”
“Don’t worry about it. We can find a healer at the outpost here if we need one. This is a lot of concentrated power. Did you drain yourself?”
“I’m good.” He smiled a little, but his white face and the black rings under his eyes drove home how exhausted he was. “Listen, I know we both believe in positive thinking. However, if she dies, andespeciallyif he sees it happen, you need to have a plan.”
“I know.”
“I can only see two options: Take him down or ’port him somewhere he can self-detonate. How you’ll do either of those, though, I don’t know.”
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while.” And I was no closer to a solution now than I was that day in the motel when he’d lit up blue and melted a comb in his hands. “He really loves her that much?”
“Lovesher?” Chance snorted. “Love’s not a strong enough word. Headoresher. And if he loses her because she was the bait in a trap he set for his enemies? Well, devastation isn’t a strong enough word, either.”
I sighed, and he laid one hand on my shoulder.
“You do have a plan, don’t you?”
“Short of asking Hank to check a sniper kit out of the Armory, I’ve got nothing.”
“Dude, that is not good.”
“I’m amazed he hasn’t lost it yet.”
“His control is better than you’d think. All those years spent fighting to control a demon, I guess. He grumps and growls to take the edge off, but keeps the rest locked down tight.”
Mira had said something similar to me earlier. She’d compared Kerry to a pressure relief valve and pointed out that he needed to bleed off a little steam once in a while so he didn’t explode.
“He knows all about keeping control in a bad situation,” she’d told me. “He’ll hold it together so long as everything else stays tolerable. We just need to make sure everything else stays tolerable.”
Then she’d given me a cheeky grin that made me want to pull her close and—
“Too bad you don’t have one of those blankets the demons wrapped us up during the ambush,” Chance said now. “They shut our power down like a switch flipping off.”
“I wonder if Hank or Gina could smuggle me one. Then again, even without power, Kerry would still be a tiger.”
