Page 24 of Laundering Down the Legions
Seph snarled, "Someone was breaking him down, making him a berserker. They want him dangerous and unpredictable instead of bonded and strong. A berserker can't be commandedor trusted. They're basically a weapon you point at your enemies and pray you can aim away from your own people."
Someone wanted Trux broken and wanted us fractured and snapping at each other while the real threat moved underneath, patient and untouchable.
"Except Trux isn't the only one, is he?" Zandia didn't wait for a response. She turned and left, her presence just ceasing to fill the space, except the weight of what she'd dropped stayed in the air, pressing on all of us.
I looked at Ryker. His eyes were on that middle-distance point, but I could see the understanding moving behind them. Whatever distance he'd been building, whatever careful gap he'd kept between himself and the bond, just got rendered useless by knowing they were running out of time on purpose. That someone intentionally blocked him instead of the bond rejecting him.
Trux had gone very still, Seph's hand still on his shoulder but the anchor weakening against the realization that his decline wasn't bad luck. Every loss of control, every flash of wrong behind his eyes, had been somebody's design.
"We need to move fast." Seph's voice had the edge it got when she moved from understanding into action. "If someone's pushing the deterioration, there will be other attempts to block us."
"The bonds." Ryker's voice came out rough. "We complete them now."
He wasn't looking at me, but the words landed square in my heart. The change in him from avoidant to absolute, the moment bonding stopped being an option and became the only road forward. Whatever fear had kept him at that distance, had just gotten a lot smaller.
Trux made a sound that might've been a laugh or might've been something breaking. "I'm fine," he said, the biggest lieanyone had told all morning. "But if preventing the bonds are the play, we must be strategic about it. We have no idea what they'll do to block us."
"It'll work," Seph said, flat certainty. "It has to. Because the alternative is letting whoever set this up win."
I knew what she meant. The alternative was Trux fully consumed with no human left to bring back. Then I'd have to watch the same change consume Seph, Rhiot, and Grayson. The alternative was somebody else's plan running exactly as designed.
Mephistral crept back and picked up his bacon strip, examining it. "For what it's worth," he announced, "this plan is stupid. Bonding during active sabotage is never a good time. However, the sabotage is definitely happening, which means your option to choose better timing has expired."
Nobody argued. There was nothing to argue. Someone was breaking Trux down on purpose, keeping the bonds open on purpose, playing a long game against our desperation. Now we had to make a choice.
"There's never a bad time for a threesome." Mephistral grinned as he comically raised his eyebrows.
Seph threw a biscuit that smacked Mephistral right in the face, melting butter ran down the imp's face. "Seriously?"
He shrugged as he grabbed the biscuit and placed the piece of bacon on top. "What? I'm a demon. Chaos is my love language." Then he took a huge bite of the biscuit.
I finished my coffee, the cold caramel sliding down, and understood Zandia had been right that Ryker wouldn't be hesitant anymore. The deliberate cruelty of it had clarified exactly what mattered. If the price was moving faster than anyone wanted, making commitments before anyone was ready, then that was the price.
CHAPTER 13
The war table in the planning room had turned into a map of my mother's secrets, and I was only now learning to read the legend. The grimoire lay open in the center, the photograph sitting beside it. We'd found a few more photographs of Ro and Eloise, but they all had an echo, just of varying distortions.
Grayson stood across from me with his hands flat on the table, reading the photograph with the focus of someone fitting pieces into a pattern only he could see. Kearan had set himself at the far end with a notebook, transcribing dates and marginal notes. Rhiot was there too, arms crossed, breathing heavily and grumbling to himself. Even Trux had made it to a chair against the wall, holding himself very still, the Hesolga a low hum under everything.
"That's from 1997," Kearan said, not looking up. Flat, clinical, the way he got when he was processing something. "The margin note. Eloise wrote it after this photograph was taken."
I didn't ask how he could tell. He'd been studying the grimoire's timeline for days, and I'd learned not to argue with his read on my mother's handwriting, the way her scriptshifted when something scared her worse than usual. He'd said something about the energy being different based on emotions.
"The photograph's older," Grayson said. His attention had gone inward, the removed quality of a man relying on something other than his eyes. "The original one with the psychic echo on it. Faint, but there. It feels so wrong."
"How wrong?" Rhiot's voice cut across the silence. He was looking at me, not Grayson.
Grayson set the photograph down, careful. "The kind of wrong where a man's psychic signature splits into two, and one of them doesn't belong to him at all."
"Possession," Kearan said, finally looking up. The word just sat there. "Something has been inside him since before Parker was born."
It hit hard, and the pieces I'd been refusing to put together snapped into place. Grayson had said this recently. So had Zandia. I hadn't wanted to believe Ro was possessed. It made me so unsure of everything. I'd known Grayson was right, but I was in denial.
Every time I thought I had a hold of what was going on in my life… I ended up being so very wrong and totally a delusion.
"At least since then," Grayson corrected, gentle in a way that made it worse. "The echo isn't fresh. It's settled. This has been sitting in him for decades."
I pulled the grimoire closer, flipping to the page Kearan had marked. March 1997, my mother's careful hand. The annotations crowded the borders, behavioral markers and observations that read like symptoms for something medical until you got to the specifics.
