“I didn’t. I needed to, uh…” I tapped my head then tapped Sutherland’s. He didn’t seem bothered by it. “I needed to see it through different eyes.”
It took Ingrid a second, but as soon as she realized what I was struggling to say, she went, “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“That was deeply embarrassing,” Harry announced.
“I’m sorry, you were embarrassed by me having an out-of-body experience on the sidewalk? Yeah, I could see how that would have been just awful for you.”
“So many people,” he said. “Looking.”
“Aw, muffin,” I replied sarcastically. “You jump into people’s bodies all the time without their permission but one human does it and suddenly you get squeamish.”
I grabbed my phone from where it had fallen on the sidewalk, and while I wasn’t sure Tyler was even still on the line, I said, “Everything is fine here, boss, don’t you worry.”
Then I hung up.
Chapter Thirty-Two
It seemed fitting to be back in Central Park.
This was where a lot of the most insane adventures of my life had begun, starting the day I rescued an innocent blonde girl from a snarling vampire.
I always ended up back here, even in my dreams.
I stood among the spring-clothed trees surrounding the lawn and squinted into the darkness. With me, I had the last-minute cavalry I’d been able to put together on short notice. Holden had stayed with us, though we had returned Sutherland to his apartment before coming to the park. He had been as helpful as he could. In a real fight he would only serve as a liability.
So I had Holden, Ingrid, Emilio, Harry, and we’d been met at the park gates by Siobhan and Shane.
“We need to be quick about this, if possible,” Siobhan said in her warm, lilting Irish voice. “The sitter charges us extra after midnight.”
“It’s on me,” I said.
It occurred to me that this was a situation of the most dire mortal-danger sort, and I was asking my friends with a baby to come help me when I wasn’t willing to ask my own husband to risk his neck. But I knew them, knew their strengths and what they were capable of, and Shane and Siobhan would have come here even if I hadn’t asked them to.
They were no strangers to taking down roving demons, after all.
Siobhan had more experience hunting and killing demons than the rest of us combined.
“Good news, everyone,” she said sunnily. “Not a virgin among us tonight. We should be well ignored by demons.” Having once been intended to be a virgin sacrifice, this was easily one of Siobhan’s favorite jokes.
“How do you know none of us are virgins?” Harry demanded, scanning the rest of the group like he was interested to know if anyone actually was.
“You pure as the driven snow, demon boy?” she asked.
I’d explained what Harry was, but I suspected she had known the second she laid eyes on him. Just like Sutherland had spotted the wrongness straight away, it was obvious to me that anyone with even the slightest bit of a supernatural touch could see Harry wasn’t quite…right.
As a druid, Siobhan was touched by magic in more ways than one, giving her a better understanding of all things demonic than most of us.
It was that and her d
eadly aim I was hoping to put to use tonight.
Shane I wanted because I had trained him well, and if there was one thing he was good at, it was killing vampires. I’d made sure of that, and he had lived up to and exceeded every expectation I had for him. No longer just a pretty face, he had become a deadly assassin.
Ingrid had gladly accepted a rifle from Emilio’s bag of toys and looked very capable of using it. I had my sword and gun. Emilio had the rest of the bag, and Harry…well, Harry was a demon, so he really didn’t need anything extra, did he?
I’d have given him something if he asked, but this time around he didn’t seem terribly concerned about going in armed. Considering demons could manipulate their human forms in a number of repulsive but sort of impressive ways, I assumed he knew how to handle himself without a gun.