Chapter 10

Chapter Ten

PIPER

The medical center was a boxy gray structure, four stories tall, squashed between a dry goods shop and a shabby apartment building. The glow of its windows was harsh and bright in the fading evening light, illuminating two armed prefects standing guard outside. A handful of miserable-looking civilians loitered nearby, either waiting for someone inside or waiting for permission to enter.

Prefect guards were standard for medical centers, which had life-saving medications—and not-so-critical drugs—stashed inside. But it made infiltrating the building a lot more difficult.

Piper stood behind a dumpster across the street, Ash beside her. His attention was on Lyre, who was walking up the sidewalk toward the prefects, arm pressed to his face in a very convincing coughing fit. The main entrance of the center was closed for the night—a metal security shutter drawn down over it—and the only way in was through a single metal door.

Piper bit the inside of her cheek as Lyre neared the guards. He half lowered his arm, said something she couldn’t hear, then stepped back as another coughing fit overtook him.

Looking grossed out, a prefect waved him inside. He disappeared through the door, and Piper let out the breath she’d been holding.

“Come on,” Ash said as he reversed direction, moving deeper into the alley.

Piper followed as the draconian led her in a wide circle around the medical center, keeping out of sight of the guards. When she’d suggested they find her uncle, she’d been prepared to beg and plead for Ash’s help. She was equal parts relieved and troubled that he’d agreed so easily. Did he want to clear his name before the rest of the daemon community found out he supposedly had the Sahar? Or was he hoping for a chance to make the artifact his?

She surreptitiously pressed her hand to the front of her shirt. The ring box dug into her skin. At this rate, she would have a permanent dent in her boobs, but she wasn’t removing it from her bra for anything short of imminent death. It had been frightening enough to wake up from a quick nap in the back of their stolen car to find the ring box half out of her shirt. Maybe she should duct-tape it in place.

A few minutes later, she and Ash were lurking in another alley, watching the rear door of the medical center—a solid steel barrier with no exterior handle.

Turning her head slightly, she brought Ash into her peripheral vision. Something about the way he always seemed to be in shadow was unnatural. His inscrutable expression was even more unnerving. Aside from a general air of menace, he was impossible to read. She couldn’t tell if he was apprehensive, angry, mildly annoyed, or moments away from killing her.

Refocusing on the door, she chewed her lower lip. How long should they wait? Lyre was an incubus with supernatural skills in persuasion, but that didn’t mean he could get past prefect guards, sweet talk his way through multiple security doors, sneak away from any witnesses, and make it all the way to?—

The metal door cracked open, and Lyre’s blond head appeared. He glanced around the alley expectantly.

Ash strode forward to meet the incubus, and Piper hurried to catch up, trying not to look too disbelieving. As they reached the door, Ash’s dragonet swooped out of the darkness and landed on her master’s shoulder.

“Any trouble?” Ash murmured as he and Piper stepped into the eye-watering fluorescent lights of an otherwise empty hallway. Though no one else was in sight, a muffled cacophony of voices, beeping, clattering, and footfalls warned of nearby throngs of people.

“One of the nurses got overly handsy with me.” Lyre tsked. “Hardly professional. But I did find out that the consul with burns brought in last night is on the third floor.”

Piper squinted at Lyre. How had he had time to find that out while also navigating all the way through the building without arousing suspicion?

“Do you know where the stairs are?” Ash asked Lyre, already striding down the hall.

“I saw a sign near the?—”

Lyre broke off as a pair of women in scrubs hastened around the corner just ahead, both looking harried and exhausted.

“What are you three doing back here?” the older one demanded, wariness tightening her face.

Piper opened her mouth, but before she could begin to come up with a plausible explanation that wouldn’t have them screaming for a prefect, Lyre swept ahead of her.

“A beautiful apparition,” he purred. “Tell me you’re here to save me from this maze of hallways.”

The women’s eyes widened as he swooped down on them, their cheeks instantly reddening. His voice lowered, his words no longer audible, but the notes of thrumming seduction were undeniable. The women looked ready to save him from literally anything as long as he kept talking.

Piper stared at his back, unable to look away, as though he were exuding a magnetic force. A slow flush spread through her body, making her fingers and toes tingle. A warm, heavy longing settled in her lower belly like smoldering coals that needed a single breath to burst into flame.

Cool fingers closed around her hand. Piper jolted. Ash towed her in the opposite direction, and she stumbled after him before getting her legs moving. Embarrassment burned in her cheeks.

She knew better than to look at an incubus on the hunt. Supernatural good looks weren’t Lyre’s only weapon. All incubi packed a magical seduction punch, aptly called “aphrodesia,” that could turn any woman into a helpless puddle of desire. It didn’t matter how unlikely his attention, how exaggerated his compliments, or how farfetched his promises. No girl was immune.

All daemons had unique abilities inherent to their castes. There were hundreds of castes—which were less like ethnic variations and more like different species on the same “daemon” branch of the evolutionary tree—and hundreds of caste abilities. And many castes weren’t all that keen on sharing details of their powers.

Draconians like Ash, as an example. All she knew was they were considered one of the most powerful castes in the Underworld.

Still pulling her by the hand as though she might bolt back toward Lyre, Ash navigated past a series of storage rooms before rounding a corner into chaos.

Stretchers and wheeled beds lined one wall. Exam rooms with curtains filled the hallway’s other side. Nurses and doctors were either bent over patients or zipping from one location to another, half of them pushing small rolling carts of medical supplies with them.

Ash plunged straight in, and since he walked like he knew where he was going and was in a hurry to get there, no one stopped him or Piper. With a slight start, she realized his dragonet had vanished from his shoulders at some point.

Passing two rooms with crying children and a stretcher with a man shouting profanity at a nurse, Ash swerved toward a door with a staircase symbol on it. Piper breathed a sigh of relief as the door clanked shut behind them, reducing the volume of hallway noise by half.

Keeping right behind Ash, Piper jogged up two flights. At the heavy fire door, Ash paused to listen before cracking it open to look into the hallway.

His shoulders went rigid. He didn’t move, tension radiating off him.

“What’s wrong?” Piper hissed. “Ash? Hello?”

He didn’t react for another long moment, then withdrew and silently shut the door. His jaw was tight, eyes shadowed and that intangible feeling of danger saturating the air around him again.

“Ash?” she whispered cautiously.

He finally glanced at her. “There’s a man in the hallway.”

“Okay,” she said slowly. “A prefect?”

“A doctor.”

She narrowed her eyes. They’d passed multiple doctors on the main floor with no issues. “So what’s the problem?”

“He’s a daemon. He’ll recognize me if he sees me.”

“What do we do, then?”

“Wait.”

Wait? How long were they supposed to stand here?

As Piper shifted impatiently, a slight motion near her head made her turn. A coin-sized spider was creeping along the wall two feet from her face. She sucked in a breath and held it, her stare locked on the creepy crawler.

“What are you doing?” Ash growled.

Startled by the closeness of his voice, Piper realized she’d backed into him to get away from the spider. She was pressed against his side, and he had a hand braced on the stairwell door to keep himself upright.

She jerked away from him. “Uh—what are we waiting for?”

“Zwi is distracting the daemon.”

“Zwi?”

“My dragonet.”

Oh, so that was her name. It was unexpectedly cute, and Piper was tempted to ask if Ash had chosen it.

“Where are my keys?” a male voice asked, sounding as though it were right on the other side of the door. “They were in my pocket a minute ago.”

A muffled voice responded, and then the man said, “I must have left them in my office.”

Ash waited a few more seconds before pulling the door open and stepping into a sterile white hall with a worn linoleum floor. A man in green scrubs with dark hair in a low, short ponytail and a brunette in purple scrubs were just disappearing around a corner at the other end.

With a quiet trilling sound, Zwi landed on Ash’s shoulder, a ring of keys hanging from her mouth. She dropped them into Ash’s hand before flying off down the hall after the doctor/nurse pair.

Ash pocketed the stolen keys, and Piper let him take the lead again. She wasn’t normally a follow-the-leader type, but she didn’t like Ash behind her. Her experiences with daemons had always been within the rule-bound confines of the Consulate. Out here, she had no idea what to expect.

This floor was quiet compared to the unbridled madhouse that was the main level. Piper and Ash were able to avoid the staff as they zipped down the halls, checking the names on the folders clipped to each door.

At room 344, Ash stopped. He detached the folder and passed it to Piper. “Calder Griffiths” was written at the top.

With her heart in her throat, Piper flipped it open and skimmed the first page. “Burns… damage to left eye… broken ribs… oh no. It says his throat was damaged.” She looked up at Ash. “What if Uncle Calder can’t talk?”

Ash didn’t reply. His gaze swept along the hall, and his nostrils flared as he inhaled.

Trepidation danced along Piper’s spine. It was too quiet. Wouldn’t the prefects have stationed a guard in front of Calder’s room, knowing Piper might try to see him? Why was there no one here? Was her uncle even in the room?

Needing to know, she stepped past Ash and reached for the doorknob.

The door swung open before she could touch the handle.