Page 46 of Coerced

His laugh was harsh and his face turned to flint, giving me a glimpse of the fearsome warrior he had once been.

“Of course, the William Greenaway who emerged from isolation was a different man altogether. That’s when my friends started to call me Clemency. They thought I needed a reminder to show some on occasion. Heh. I suppose that still holds true today. Even now, I’d sacrifice anyone and anything if it were possible to regain what I lost.”

He turned back to me and his eyes went wide when he saw my tears.

“Oh, don’t do that. It was a long time ago.” He patted my shoulder awkwardly and looked over at Kerry. “Boy, come get your girl.”

Kerry’s strong arms folded around me. He picked me up and settled back on the log, and I sank into the cradle of his body with a soft sigh. I loved being wrapped in his strength.

“Clem, did you ever find out why they targeted her?” John asked. “I mean, that doesn’t sound like it was a random encounter.”

“In all these years, I only ever found one piece of the puzzle. Maybe eighty years after Amanda was petrified, I received a summons from an angel. He wanted to know what happened to her, and I told him what I knew.”

“Then what happened?”

“Well, if you think Kerry’s violent when he loses his temper, you should see it when an angel does!”

“Shut up,” Kerry groused, making me half-smile.

“Which angel was it? And did he say anything else?” Excitement made Travis speak a little faster than normal.

“How wouldIknow which angel? It’s not like they wear name tags, son. All he would say after that was I needed to keep her safe. I told him I planned to.” Clem’s years suddenly seemed to weigh heavily on him.

“First, demons attacked her, then an angel asked about her.” Tara tilted her head. “Maybe she was keeping a secret.”

“Or guarding something,” Maddy suggested.

“Or someone,” John said.

“Wait a minute!” Kerry’s hold on me tightened. “I think I may know something about this. It wasn’t that long ago, either. Gemma, what month was it when you found me?”

“August. Late August.”

“The weather was warm, but not too hot, so maybe May or June? I can’t remember exactly. The demon called it Midsummer.”

“June 21,” Travis supplied. “St. John’s Day. The summer solstice. It’s the longest day and the shortest night of the year. Most cultures have legends about it.”

“Well, I can tell you Diabolical creatures were everywhere after dark. The demon wanted to go to a witches’ gathering at midnight. It was horrible. All I’m gonna tell you about it is that I walked into a shadow. It wasn’t pleasant. The shadow didn’t like it, either. He said that if I wasn’t more careful, I’d need a miracle worker to put me back together, and he’d personally taken care of the last one of those two hundred years ago.”

His laugh was harsher than Clem’s had been, and a sharp shudder ripped through his whole body.

“By then, I think I would havelethim kill me, but he only punished me. Later, the demon wondered why a prince would lower himself enough to deal with one neph, even if it was a miracle worker.”

“Punished you how?” I was suspicious of how casually he’d said that.

“A prince?” Tara asked at the same time.

“The Diabolical world has a food chain, although that’s not the right word for it. The strongest are at the top and the weakest at the bottom.”

He chose to answer Tara because he doesn’t want me to know the gory details,I thought.It must have been bad.

“It’s called a hierarchy of power,” Travis said.

“Hierarchy,” he repeated. “Well, princes are way at the top of it. They don’t dirty their hands with killing. They use others for that because they’re too busy with long-term projects.”

“Wait.” My brain was too mushy to do much thinking, but I’d misunderstood something somewhere. “Where did the prince come from? I thought you said you walked into a shadow.”

“Shadow is slang for an avatar of a demon bound in Hell,” Clem cut right to the chase, which was good for my exhausted self. “The demon is just a shadow of itself, see?”

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