Page 36 of Avenger of Sins

Couldn’t consign himself, either. To helplessness. To despair. Not when he had the power to act.

John took a deep breath. “I don’t want this. But none of this is about what I want. I’ll do it. I’ll summon demons into both of us.”

Ryan recoiled, letting go of John’s hand. “What? No! That’s not what I’m asking.”

“I know.” Now it was John’s turn for calm. Decision made, there was nothing left to do but move forward. “But if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it right. Everything is on the line here. You, me, Gray, Caleb, Night. We can’t half-ass this.”

“But you don’t need the boost,” Ryan objected.

“I will after I summon a pair of NHEs without a circle. And…you forget what my job is. I know all the reasons people summon demons, and you’d be surprised how often a physical advantage is behind it. It will be too early in possession to truly exploit all the NHE’s powers, but it will still be an edge we can’t afford to pass up.”

Ryan stared at him for a long moment. Then he wiped his eyes. “Fuck, Jonny. I’m so sorry I controlled you. I thought I didn’t have a choice. I thought you’d come around to my point of view, thought I just needed to give you a little nudge. I was so desperate to reclaim ‘us,’ you and me and Jo, I lost sight of everything else. It was so fucking easy to convince myself I had to do it, that you’d eventually understand, that we’d have justice and somehow still be together…”

John’s heart ached. Their bond had been forged in terrible circumstances, but was all the stronger for it. Even before he’d gotten his memories back, he’d felt it. “I wish everything had been different,” he said. “At least, that we’d met again some other way. Or…I don’t know.”

“Do you regret knowing? If you’d never found out the truth…”

“No.” John didn’t even have to think about it. “This has been terrible, I won’t lie. But it’s real. No matter how painful it is, it’s the truth.”

“And the truth will set you free?” Ryan asked with an arch of the brow.

“Something like that.” John opened his arms. “Come here.”

They hugged for what felt like a long time, but was probably less than a minute. With his restored memories, everything about Ryan was achingly familiar. Tears stung John’s eyes, and he let them flow without shame, felt Ryan’s tears sinking through his shirt in turn.

Whatever happened next, it wouldn’t end well for Ryan.

They clapped one another on the back and parted. “Are you ready?” John asked.

Ryan nodded. “Yeah. I’m ready.”

John took a series of deep breaths, stilling his mind. In the old days, doing an exorcism, he would have relied on candles, Florida water, and his silver athame to channel his intent.

Now, thanks to Gray, his sense for etheric energy required only the latter. The veil was right there, solid and real even though there was no physical way to interact with it.

He was used to pulling demons from this side and pushing them into a bottle, or else letting Gray feed on them. But sensing them on the other side was an entirely different prospect.

Or so it felt intellectually. But as his mind focused, he found it felt very much the same. Etheric energy crackled, close and yet far away.

All of his SPECTR training claimed that, while it was possible to summon specific classes of NHEs, the easiest summonings were simply to call on any entity that matched the energy of the faust. Loneliness and despair resonated with ghouls, and rage to lycanthropes. Just as humans were endlessly complex, so were NHEs. Or perhaps it was just those who had been corrupted by mortal needs.

Ryan’s rage spread through the etheric, like the flames of a campfire seen in a dark forest. John sharpened his will, felt the attention of a lycanthrope pressing against the veil, hungry to feel the very emotions that had driven it mad in the first place.

Maybe NHEs were more like people than he’d ever imagined. Drawn irresistibly back to the things that had broken them in the first place.

His will sharpened into the spiked hook he used to yank NHEs free from their hosts. But this time, he cast it toward the veil, felt the etheric barrier puncture and tear.

The lycanthrope took the hook with an eagerness that turned his stomach. He was used to fighting them, dragging them from their hosts, and the reverse felt so unnatural he was almost unable to bring himself to continue.

Almost.

He pulled on the lycanthrope, even as Ryan leaned back on his heels, arms spread. Opening himself, trying to make the process easier.

The NHE slithered inside. For a moment, John’s instincts screamed to yank it back out. Instead, he gently retracted the hook, making sure to leave the NHE behind in Ryan.

It was against all of his training. And what he was about to do was against all his instincts.

He reached out once again to the etheric plane, but this time he held nothing back. All of his grief, his fury, was on full display, a beacon crying out to the demons whose own pain resonated with his.

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