Page 63 of Till Death

An awkward and terrible silence took over the room and settled especially hard on me.

“Okay, now that we all know, I’m just going to check on Cole—”

A hand on my arm stalled my hasty exit and I glanced up at Simon. Of course, he’d be the one to step in.

“You’re going to have to explain a little more. What do you mean, Hank and Amon are brothers? Isn’t Hank that guy in the Void?” he asked.

“Otherwise known as God, yes.” I nodded. “And apparently Hank is the younger brother. Amon said that Hank has a superiority complex and wants to be the most powerful being in the universe, or something like that.”

I explained to them what Amon had said to me and looked around at more than a few confused faces.

“Demons lie,” Eli put in.

“Seems like a pretty big lie to me.” Sean grunted in disgust. “You believed him?”

“I can’t tell you how I know, but he was telling the truth. And Hank said something about restoring the balance and having the veil mend itself.”

Simon’s lips formed a single stern line. “We’ve already seen evidence of it, in your defeat of the sin demons. I agree with you, Jade. I don’t believe Amon was lying.”

The others all began to speak over one another. Yup, time for me to make my escape. None of them would want to listen to me anyway. Although I felt bad for dropping those bombshells and just walking away.

Still, with Simon and Eli here, they had it handled. Between the two of them there was no one else I trusted to restore order. I took the opportunity to steal a little bit of alone time with Cole and made my way toward the demon trap.

I just wasn’t in the mood for the bad news tempered with good news thing Simon did.

As happy as I felt to see them, I wanted a minute alone.

Well, not exactly alone.

I shut the door behind me to cut us off from the others. Selfish, maybe. I didn’t care. The noise traveled through the small space between the door and the floor but it gave me the illusion of privacy.

“Cole?”

Sean had drawn the demon trap in the back storage room of Divine Magic, the chairs and tables pushed to the side to accommodate. Seeing Cole crouched in the center of the circle with confusion creasing his forehead made me sick.

He didn’t belong here. He didn’t belong in this state. He should be out there with the rest of us, offering up his usual asshole opinions and generally acting like a douchebag.

Forget the half-demon. Maybe you see now that everyone isn’t worth saving.

Eli’s words raked through me with steel claws.

I had a feeling he still didn’t get it. None of them did. Even I only half understood why I hadn’t been able to fulfill the promise I’d made. It was just another thing I couldn’t connect with the others on, and sadly, it was the issue staring me right in the face.

With glowing red eyes. Unfortunate but true.

Standing in front of him, I waited for the recognition I knew might never come. Would probably not come because each passing minute saw him further away from me.

I forced a smile more for my benefit than his. Cole didn’t care if I smiled or not. He didn’t see me. “Here we are, alone at last.” I stared down at my boots. “Seems like we’ve fought so hard to carve out a single second since shit went down and now we’re here and you can’t enjoy it. You’ve fought so hard.”

Glancing over at him, I buttoned my own lip when it began to tremble.

“I don’t understand how you’re able to hold out this long. No one else has. You’ve teetered on the edge, clawed and clung, and here we are. You’re out of Hell and I have no damn idea where to go from here. The balance is supposedly righting itself and I have no clue how we did it besides killing Lust and Pride.”

I dragged a chair over and sat in it backward to rest my arms over the lattice of the back.

“You’d know exactly what to say to get me out of this funk,” I told him.

Cole released a guttural growl that shook me down to my bones. I frowned, shaking my head. “I just don’t know what we’re going to do with you.”

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