Page 4 of Infernal

I highly doubted that. I wasn’t sure there was anything that could help me now.

“Please.”

Lifting my head, I took the bottle from his hand and twisted off the cap, but the bottle never made it to my lips. My eyes magnetized back to my mother and remained there, as though unable to look away. For the first time in my life, I found myself longing for her—for that safe place from the storm that only a mother could provide.

“Why haven’t you reanimated her?” I asked him, my voice teetering along the edge of breaking into a million pieces.

She was slumped back in the chair as wisps of her dark hair cascaded across her face. She looked as though she were fast asleep in a peaceful slumber. Well, minus the ash color of her skin and the stake protruding from her chest, that is.

The stake I planted…

I slapped the horrifying memory away from my consciousness. It was just another painful reminder of how I’d played right into the Roderick sister’s bloody hands.

“I thought it was best to wait for Tessa to get here,” he answered, his tone soft but cautious.

“Why?” I asked as he ran a hand through his short dark hair and leveled his eyes at me.

“She should be here for this.”

“She should be here for a lot of things,” I retorted without bothering to hide the bitterness from my words.

“Jemma—”

“Forget it,” I said, cutting him off. “I don’t want to hear it.” I wasn’t in the mood to hear the Tessa-is-so-great speech. The one about how everything she does is for me. And that she’s just trying to keep me safe. Honestly, if that was really the case, she was doing a piss poor job of it so far.

“I just thought it was best for the two of you to decide this together. As afamily.”

I huffed out a humorless laugh as the world’s worst family reunion flashed through my mind.

And still, as hard as it was for me to digest the very concept of afamily, the notion of it still tugged on something inside of me, because deep down in the gallows of my truth, I still longed for exactly that. Family. Love. Normalcy. All the things that were destined to never be mine.

I looked up at Gabriel as a hollow, hopeless feeling pressed down inside of me. The Hellgate had been opened, and I still had no idea what that meant for all of us. “How do we find him?” I asked, hoping he had some kind of plan, because I sure as shit didn’t.

“I’m not sure we can. Not unless he wants to be found.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” That was so not the answer I wanted to hear. “So, what the hell do we do in the meantime?”

“We wait.”

I gawked at him like he’d sprung a second head. “You can’t seriously expect me to sit around here and do nothing. We should be out there looking for him. For all we know, he’s hurt, and he needs our help.”

“Jemma, he’s Lucifer’s vessel,” he stated somberly, as though that should end all future discussions on the matter.

Like hell it would.

“How do we know for sure? It’s not like we stuck around to interview him.” Okay, so I was grasping at straws again, but who could blame me? I had nothing else to hold onto but the hope that Trace was okay—that the transference of Lucifer’s energy didn’t take. And I would hold onto it until the Devil himself told me otherwise.

“I have to find him, Gabriel. I have to at least try.”

“We don’t know where he is or what they have planned,” he pointed out. “Going after them without any information would be suicide. Besides,” he added gravelly, “You need to rest. You may have accelerated healing, but those stitches aren’t going to stay put unless you do.”

“Stitches?” The memory of being stabbed in the stomach wafted back in. I pulled up the hem of my shirt to reveal a neat row of stitches about an inch long across my abdomen. Great, just what I needed. Something else to slow me down.

“It’s healing nicely,” he added as I padded my finger along the suture.

“Very nice indeed,” said a honeyed voice from the doorway.

My gaze somersaulted to Dominic. He was leaning against the threshold with his arms crossed over his chest and the semblance of a tickled grin on his face. Leave it to him to find something amusing about this.

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