Page 2 of Premonition of Peace

Pulling her away from my front door, I headed toward the couch.

“Shouldn’t we be concerned about Lucifer too?” Her eyes darted to the door where he had exited the room. “We’re both back from the dead. Seems newsworthy.”

“She’s awfully interested in him,”The Warden noted.

I grimaced as I slid my hands out from under her arms, taking a seat and patting the cushion next to me. “I can only deal with one thing at time, so for now, let’s pretend he’s not.” I gaveher a concerned look as she sat down. “How did you finally make it back?”

Sasha stared for a moment before shrugging apathetically. “It wasn’t that hard once you told me what to look for.”

“Right,” I pushed out a chuckle. “Was Señora’s human Ouija board really what did it?”

“It was,” she answered. “That and the lure. It helped, but it also made things tricky.”

“Tricky?”

She nodded slowly. “Think of the room where my body was being kept as a fence. The lure acted as a hole in that fence, but not a very big hole. And when I was in the veil . . .”

I narrowed my eyes a fraction, leaning forward with rapt interest. “What happened in the veil?”

“I wasn’t alone. Someone, or something, is there too. Hunting.”

The very notion of it rocked my foundation. I swallowed, considering my words. “What do you mean by ‘hunting’? Hunting other souls?”

She lifted a delicate shoulder, her tank top drawing attention to her perfectly smooth skin. It practically glowed beneath the soft lighting of my apartment. “I don’t know,” she answered. “But it made it difficult to work my way past the lure. I needed a long enough gap where they were gone so I could push myself through it.”

I sat back, hands folded over my lap as I took in what she was saying. “Do you think they were trying to prevent you from coming back?”

She thought about it for a moment. “I really don’t know. It’s all a bit of a haze. Like a bad dream that lingers after you wake up. I remember things in fragments.”

That was when I should have comforted her and said it was all okay. That’s what a good friend did. Instead, I skipped over false assurances and said, “You should see Señora.”

“What for?” Sasha asked sharply.

“You’ve basically been to hell and back. I just want her to look you over. Make sure everything’s okay.” I shrugged. All things considering, it wasn’t an odd request.

“I’m fine. It wasn’t that bad.” She waved away my concern.

“I mean, just to be sure?—”

My front door opened, interrupting us. “Sasha?”

Sienna stood in shock with Mist, Piper, Ronan, Anders, and all of the kids in tow. Sasha jumped up from her seat beside me.

My eyes found Ronan as his brow furrowed. “Don’t say anything,”I mentally said to him. His features smoothed and nothing but the hands he placed on Honor and Orson’s shoulders gave him away.

“Sienna,” Sasha said with the most emotion she’d shown since coming to my apartment. Sienna rushed into her twin’s arms, wrapping herself around Sasha and holding her tight—as if she feared she would vanish at any moment.

“I thought you were going to die. I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Sienna said between sobs. Sasha patted her back, shushing her cries, and if I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d question if I’d overthought things only moments ago.

“I missed you too,” Sasha said, wrapping one arm around her sister’s shoulder in a hug.

“I’m glad you made it back from the veil okay,” Piper chimed in, her violet eyes meeting mine. “Did you find the spirits we were looking for?”

“I . . . I can’t remember,” Sasha answered, seeming flustered.

Piper smothered the moment of disappointment with a half-smile that didn’t meet her eyes. “It’s okay, we’ll just have to find another way to contact them.”

I grimaced. Our window for a proper séance had passed with Samhain and there weren't enough of the bodies left for a resurrection.

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