“Don’t you dare. You let them find their way.” I used my best mom voice on him. I could be worse than any ogre.
“I’m joking. You have to let us give each other shit,” he said and then fell silent. “How did Kelsey handle Marcus staying behind? I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to her before she left.”
I had wondered if he felt like she’d left him again just as she’d gotten back. “She wasn’t trying to ignore you. She needed to see Trent.”
“I know that. She asked me to go with her.”
Now it was my turn to be silent. I hadn’t realized she’d asked him. I understood why Evan had gone. Fenrir needed to get to know his mom again and he needed Evan. But it felt wrong to try to take Lee, too.
“Don’t go all jealous on me. I chose to stay with you. I worry about her though. She and Marcus were close for a lot of years, and well, I worry about her because Gray’s different since he started descending. I don’t know how she’ll handle it.”
We kept hiking along, and I could faintly hear the hum of the road above us. “Different how?”
“Darker.” Lee’s voice softened as though he knew we were getting closer to our destination. “He started his descents because he wanted to know what was happening on the Hell plane, and for a few years he was open about it. In the last couple, he’s started missing meetings with Trent. We know he’s alive and walking the plane, but I think it’s been at least eighteen months since Trent’s seen him.”
Kelsey was pregnant with Gray’s baby. What was regularly visiting Hell doing to Grayson Sloane? He was a half demon, and being forced to live on the Hell plane had been something that Gray had feared all his life. “Does Trent have any way to contact him?”
“He has a cell phone when he’s on the Earth plane, but I don’t think he and Trent have talked much lately. I know it’s hurt Trent, though he tries not to show it. It’s been a hard twelve years on that wolf. I worry about how Kelsey’s going to handle it,” Lee replied and then stopped. “There’s the entrance. I’m going to put the cloak on and do recon. I want you to stay here until I make sure the room’s clear.”
It was right there on the tip of my tongue to tell him that he was the son and I was the mom and I would go in, but the truth of the matter was Lee had more experience at this than I did. He was a soldier. He might have some skills when it came to thievery, but over the course of this war, he’d become a soldier and I had to honor that. “All right. Be careful.”
I didn’t want to send him in there. I’d been calm to this point, but as Lee put the cloak on and disappeared in front of me, it hit me that we were walking into the place where I’d lost him before. This was the last place I’d seen him as a child. I’d pulled the covers up around him and promised I would see him in the morning. I’d smoothed back his hair and told him good night.
And then I’d disappeared.
The hood came off and my son looked at me. “Momma, it’s going to be all right. I promise.”
“You’re a floating head. That is never all right.” I reached up and ruffled his hair the way I used to when he was a kid. “I’m sorry. I’m always going to worry about you. Now let’s get this done. I want to get back to your dads. The less time we take the less they have to spend with Myrddin.”
“Got it. Be back in a flash,” Lee promised.
He flipped the hood down and disappeared. I watched as the door opened and then closed again.
There was a pit in my stomach that told me this was a bad idea. A very bad idea.
I took a deep breath and thought seriously about calling the whole thing off. This was why my father never worked with family. He worked with other professionals, and while he might have enjoyed their company, he’d had no real feelings for the people on his crew. Emotion is a dangerous thing to a thief.
I wanted to follow that instinct and take Lee back to Frelsi where he would be safe.
And what if Sarah’s wards fell? I would be handing Myrddin the keys to a kingdom that would suddenly be filled with demons. If they were allowed on the Earth plane, everything changed. A war unlike anything we’d ever seen would break out with humans on one side and demons on the other, and I wasn’t sure they wouldn’t view most of my family as demons. Humans aren’t known for being able to discern who the real enemy is. They would come for all supernaturals. Myrddin was simply thinking he could enslave the humans, could overcome them with his skill and the Hell plane’s armies.