WHEN NORTHERN STRANGERS SEE A DEMON
Southern Alberta, Canada — May 1983
The highway south of Calgary cut through open foothills country, the land rolling dark on both sides under a low, starless sky. Sidney had both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road and had not said more than a dozen words since they'd landed.
Nobody had.
Connor sat in the passenger seat with his temple against the cold window glass, eyes closed, tracking. His jaw was tight. His breathing was controlled in the careful way of someone managing something that had no other outlet. In the back, Nathan sat forward with his elbows on his knees and stared at the floor. Erik sat beside him with his arms folded and said nothing. Ricky was on the other side, knee bouncing, unable to stop it.
They had all been there when it happened back at the rehearsal space. Connor first, a full-body impact that had dropped him to his knees on the rehearsal room floor, both hands pressed flat against the concrete, gasping like a man who had taken a blade to the chest. Nathan a half-second behind him, not the crushing wave Connor absorbed but something just as real: a sudden snap in the thread, a void opening where Jace had been, a wrongness that hit him in the sternum and left him braced against the wall breathing hard.
Ricky and Erik had seen it happen and understood none of it. They had looked at each other across the rehearsal room, Connor on his knees, Nathan against the wall, both of them white-faced and shaking, and neither of them had felt anything except the fear of watching two of their brothers react to something invisible.
Sidney had watched all four of them from the doorway. He had not moved. He had not spoken. He had simply stood very still with his hands at his sides and his expression unreadable and let what he was seeing settle into him like something he had been waiting a very long time to confirm.
Six generations of Brotherhood had carried the prophecy. Six Guardians, six Visionaries, six Conjurers, and not one of them had ever manifested the bond the old words described. Sidney's father had told him about it. His father's predecessor had told him. All the way back through every trainer in the lineage, passed down like a held breath, generation after generation waiting to see if this would be the one.
It had never been.
Until now.
Sidney had booked the flights before anyone spoke. Connor had given him the direction before they'd left the parking lot. Calgary. South from there. Go.
That had been hours ago. Now they were south of the city, closing in, and Connor's jaw was getting tighter with every mile.
"He's still moving," Connor said without opening his eyes. "South of us. Not far now."
Sidney adjusted his grip on the wheel. His foot pressed slightly harder on the accelerator.
In the back, Ricky's knee kept bouncing. Erik stared out the window at the dark and said nothing. Neither of them understood how Connor knew where Jace was. Neither of them understood what had happened on that rehearsal room floor. They only knew that two of their brothers had felt something they hadn't, and that Jace was out there somewhere alone, and that they were going to find him.
They drove. The highway unreeled in the headlights.
* * *
The Spotted Fawn Saloon sat hunched at the edge of Pincher Creek like a tired old animal, a squat log building with a rusting tin roof, dim lanterns strung along a porch railing, and a parking lot full of mud-caked trucks. The wooden sign creaked in the wind.
Jace pulled into the lot on his scraped-up motorcycle, engine rattling, headlight flickering weakly after the fall hundreds of miles back. The bike sputtered to a stop. He sat there, breath fogging in the late-night air.
His whole body still hurt. His joints pulsed with the echo of his previous death. His ribs throbbed where the pavement had bitten into him. The white tank top beneath his black motorcycle vest was torn and stiff with dried blood from the highway crash, the fabric ground through in places where the asphalt had taken its toll. The bruising from the fall had deepened during the ride, dark, spreading marks across his shoulder and ribs that the amulet had not fully resolved. But more than anything, he was empty.
He swung off the bike and walked toward the bar with a stiff, limping gait. The neon "OPEN" sign glowed dimly against the window, buzzing like an insect.
The moment he pushed through the door, heat and noise broke over him: country-rock on the jukebox, laughter, clinking bottles, a dozen conversations happening at once. Smoke hung thick in the air, curling around the overhead lights.
Every head turned his way. Not because he made an entrance. But because he didn't belong.
A tall, muscular Native man with long dark brown hair, blood drying on his cheek, a torn white tank top visible beneath a black vest, moving like someone who'd been hit by a truck.
He felt their stares like needles. He wished, for just a second, that he had the Guardian's strength, or clarity. But he didn't. He had the ache in his bones and a storm in his head.
He forced himself toward the bar, catching the concern of the bartender, a stocky man in his mid-fifties with gray in his beard. He squinted as Jace approached.
"Jesus, kid," he muttered. "You look like you crawled out of a wreck."
Jace swallowed, throat dry and raw.
"I fell off my bike. Can I just... get a few shots?"
The bartender didn't look convinced, but he nodded and poured whiskey.
Jace downed the first one so fast it burned all the way down. The second went the same way. A third followed. He stared at the bar and tried not to feel anything. A fourth. Then a fifth, ordered before he could talk himself out of it. He was a big man, six foot four, two hundred and thirty pounds of muscle, and it took more than most to slow him down. But the whiskey was in him now, softening his edges, dragging his reactions a half-beat behind where they needed to be. He noticed it the way a fighter notices a bruised hand, not debilitating, just wrong.
At a nearby table, three men watched him. Already half-drunk, cheeks flushed, eyes glassy, voices rough. One elbowed the others.
"Hey. Lookit that. Another longhair."
Another man snorted. "Looks like one o' them L.A. pretty boys. Or worse."
"Bet he thinks he's hot shit."
Jace ignored them. But the men got louder. One stood up, swaggering toward him with the lazy confidence of someone who'd never had a real fight in his life.
"Hey!" the man barked. Jace kept staring at the bar.
"You deaf, boy?"
Jace exhaled slowly.
"Not looking for trouble."
"Oh yeah?" The man leaned beside him on the bar. "Then what the hell you doin' in here bleedin' all over the bar, boy?"
Jace turned his head slightly. "I said I'm not looking for trouble."
"Well, you found some anyway."
The man grabbed Jace's hair and yanked his head back. And that was the spark.
Jace's elbow snapped back and caught him across the nose with a crack that silenced the corner of the bar. He put two more men down before the whiskey caught up with him, dulling his hands, and the numbers did the rest.
But there were too many. And the whiskey had taken the precision out of his hands. His broken ribs, still knitting from the highway, screamed every time he threw a punch or absorbed one. He couldn't use the amulet. Didn't know how. And even if he had, five shots of whiskey and the Guardian's power were not going to cooperate.
They swarmed him. He kept fighting, put two more men on the floor, sent one into the jukebox hard enough to crack the casing, but the numbers closed in and the floor tilted and eventually the weight of them bore him down.
The amulet at his chest flickered, instinctual, desperate, and a pulse of Guardian-force discharged without his intent, shocking the nearest man hard enough to send him stumbling backward with a scream.
"WHAT THE HELL?!" he yelped, holding his wrist like it had been burned.
The bar went silent. Then it erupted.
"HE'S A DAMN FREAK!"
"DID YOU SEE THAT LIGHT?!"
"HE'S ON DRUGS OR SOMETHIN'!"
"What is he?! Some kinda demon?!"
The inebriated paranoia spread like fire. Jace backed up, trying to reason with them, but the mob mentality was already set.
"I didn't... I wasn't... just stay away..."
"You don't come into OUR town with that devil shit!" one shouted.
"He's dangerous!" another barked. "Grab him!"
Someone threw a bottle. It shattered against his shoulder, glass slicing through the vest into his skin.
The bartender shouted for them to stop, but he was drowned out. He knew this crowd well enough to know that this young man, whoever or whatever he was, was about to be murdered.
They came at him again. Jace threw two more men off him, one into a table, one into the wall, but his ribs were on fire and the whiskey had cost him too much. For every man he put down two more grabbed him. They got his arms. Got his legs. Dragged him toward the back of the bar while he kicked and twisted and snarled and made them work for every inch of it.
The bartender screamed, "Leave that kid alone!! He's already injured!! Stop!!"
"We're just teachin' magic man here a lesson!" one called back. The bartender grabbed the phone and dialed. He only hoped help would make it in time.
They threw him into the dirt behind the building. The cold air hit him like a slap.
Boots and fists came next. He got his knees under him once, almost made it upright, before a kick to his already-broken ribs took the fight out of him in a single breathless instant. He curled instinctively, arms over his head. A blow split his lip. A kick to the back forced the air out of him in a hoarse cry.
"Hold him!"
"Get the rope!"
Someone grabbed him by the hair and his arms were forced behind his back. A rope bit into his wrists, rough and tight. A gag was forced between his teeth and tied behind his head so tight it cut into the corners of his mouth. He cried out at the pain, the gag muffling it. His vision blurred.
The men circled him like wolves.
"Demon," one snarled.
"Monster," said another.
"Kill 'im," growled a third.
The first man picked up a rusted metal pipe.
Jace tried to speak, but the gag muffled the sound into a broken whimper.
The pipe swung.
It caught him across the back of the skull with a sickening crack.
White exploded across his vision.
He collapsed sideways, body twitching.
His heart stumbled.
His lungs seized.
The world went distant, muffled, fading.
The last thing he felt was the cold dirt under him.
And the amulet screaming light against his skin.
Soon enough, he succumbed to darkness. Silence. Death again.
* * *
Connor's head came off the window with a sharp cry, both hands slamming flat against the dashboard. In the back, Nathan made a low, involuntary sound and drove a fist hard against his sternum, eyes squeezing shut, the thread snapping taut and then gone, the void opening again, familiar now and no less terrible for it.
Ricky grabbed Nathan's arm. "Nathan... what..."
Erik leaned forward. "Connor."
Neither Connor nor Nathan answered. They couldn't. Not yet.
In the driver's seat, Sidney's eyes moved to the rearview mirror. He looked at Nathan. Then at Connor. He watched the way they came back from it: the same recovery pattern, the same sequence, the dominant bond and the secondary bond resolving in the same order they always would. His expression did not change. He said nothing.
He had everything he needed.
Connor's breath came back in a ragged rush and his voice, when it came, was not the hollow flatness of before. It was fury, low and absolute.
"Someone killed him."
The van went silent for exactly one second.
Then Erik asked, very quietly, "How far?"
"Close," Connor said, jaw tight. "Very close."
Sidney's hands tightened on the wheel. His jaw set like stone. He did not speak. His foot went to the floor and the van surged forward into the dark and that was all the answer any of them were going to get from him.
In the back, Nathan lifted his head. His eyes were bright and his voice was flat in the way that meant he was holding everything at a controlled distance so he could function.
"He came back," Nathan said. "I can feel it. He's back."
"He's back," Connor confirmed. "For now."
Nobody said anything else. The highway disappeared beneath them.
* * *
The world returned in fire. Not warmth or comfort. Fire.
Jace's body shuddered violently as the amulet flared to life beneath his torn tank top, white light searing through the darkness behind the saloon. His lungs spasmed. His back arched off the ground. A hoarse, strangled gasp ripped from his throat, forcing air back into lungs that had already accepted death.
His heart slammed back into motion. His vision snapped open in a shock of white and black, stars streaking across the edges. The gag still cut into the corners of his mouth, the fabric soaked dark and heavy with blood that had pooled behind it and now seeped through at the edges. The rope still bound his wrists behind him. Blood ran hot down the back of his neck from the pipe blow, matting into his hair, pooling at his collar. A thin trickle traced from his left ear down his jaw. The blow to his skull had done something serious inside. His nose ran freely, blood dripping from his chin onto the dirt. He blinked, dazed, breathing in wet, ragged pulls around the gag, every nerve screaming.
The men who'd beaten him were already stumbling back, cursing and scrambling as if he'd risen from hell itself.
"WHAT THE..."
"He's... he's movin'..."
"Shit, he was DEAD!"
"That boy ain't human!"
One man crossed himself. Another lifted the pipe again, arm shaking.
Jace tried to roll away, but his limbs barely worked. His legs trembled violently. His head spun. His breath rasped around the gag. He couldn't even get his knees under him. He was alive... but completely helpless.
The biggest of the group, a thickset man in a hunting jacket, swallowed hard, fear twisting his face into something meaner.
"No," he growled. "No, we ain't lettin' something like that walk outta here. We finish it. Now."
"He's a demon," another echoed. "Or somethin' possessed."
"He ain't dyin' normal."
"Then we make it stick."
Two of them grabbed Jace's arms, yanking him upright. His shoulders screamed where bruises and broken ribs pulled. He staggered between them, legs buckling.
The first man raised the pipe again, this time aiming for his face. The amulet pulsed, bright, angry, instinctive, casting white light across the alley. The men hesitated, shielding their eyes.
"What is that?!"
"Cut it off him!"
One man lunged forward and grabbed the amulet with both hands, yanking hard. The reaction was instantaneous. A blast of white force erupted from the stone and hurled the man backward through the air. He hit the alley wall with a sickening crack and slid to the ground, gasping, arms shaking, staring at his own hands as if they'd been burned.
"WHAT IN GOD'S NAME..."
"IT AIN'T NATURAL!"
"HE'S POSSESSED!"
Jace shook his head desperately, eyes wide. He wasn't doing it. He wasn't doing any of it. The amulet was acting on its own, protecting itself, protecting him, and every time it did the men around him became more convinced that what stood in front of them was not human.
The flare faded, but slowly. The glow around the amulet throbbed like a heartbeat.
The men looked at each other. Then one spat, "Hit 'im again. HARDER."
The pipe swung.
This time the blow landed on his collarbone instead of his skull. Bone crunched. White pain exploded. He collapsed to his knees, gag muffling a scream so raw it tore his throat. Another man kicked him in the stomach. Another slammed a fist into his jaw.
He wanted to disappear. Wanted to shut down. Wanted to stop feeling any of it. But the amulet kept him conscious, forcing him to stay alive, to endure, to face reality, to suffer one death after another because the Guardian didn't get to die for real.
"Hold him!" a voice said. "I have my knife."
Jace's eyes flew open at the word knife.
He tried to twist away, body acting on instinct alone. But the men grabbed him harder, yanking his arms back, forcing him face-first into the dirt. Boots pressed against his spine. Someone grabbed his hair, jerking his head back. The knife glinted in the dim light.
"Throat'll do it," the man muttered. "No comin' back from that."
Jace's heart ran wild. His breath broke. The knife hovered. And the world began to blur with the edges of another death.
Without warning, Jace felt a sudden spike. A mental spike. A presence.
A flash of emerald energy brushing against his mind, desperate, reaching, calling his name:
JACE!!
He didn't know how he felt it. But he did. Connor was close. Close enough to feel the terror and the knife at his throat. For the first time since leaving Nevada, Jace felt something crack inside him that wasn't anger or despair. It was hope. Fragile, but real.
"Do it!"
The man raised the knife to Jace's throat. Jace's breath hitched behind the gag, chest heaving against the weight holding him down. He squeezed his eyes shut. The amulet pulsed one last time.
Connor and Erik came around the corner together, roaring.
For a half-second, that was all it was: two men crashing into a knot of drunk, murderous strangers, fury and grief coming off them so loud it didn't need the light to be terrifying. Then the light came anyway. Both amulets ignited at once, green and sapphire flaring in the dark, and every man who'd had Jace pinned to the dirt froze mid-motion, staring.
Connor's hands came up glowing, emerald bright, and he pressed them flat against the sides of one man's head.
"Rith, nó maraifidh mé thú!" he hissed. (Run, or I will kill you!)
The man didn't understand a word of it. He didn't need to. Whatever was in Connor's voice went through him like ice water, and he turned and ran without looking back.
Beside him, Erik's fist connected with a second man's jaw, and the man left his feet entirely, hitting the dirt hard enough that he didn't get up again. The two lights together, more than anyone in that alley had bargained for after already watching one glowing stone drag a dead man back to life, broke what remained of the crowd. Most of them didn't wait to see what came next. They ran for the tavern's rear door, shoving each other out of the way to get there.
Not everyone ran.
Ricky was already there, dropped into the middle of it through a shimmer in the air before his own mind had caught up with his body. He hit the ground snarling and put the pipe-wielder down hard. Then Nathan shouted from somewhere behind him, a warning more than words, and Ricky spun and caught a second man coming at his back before the man had finished raising his arm.
Nathan didn't stop to fight at all. He went straight for Jace and Connor, already reading the damage with his eyes before his knees hit the ground, and that was when he felt it. Intent, sudden and absolute, arriving in him the same instant it arrived in Connor. A man was walking toward the three of them with a knife, and he meant to use it.
"You're from hell..." he snarled, "I'll send you back where you came from...EVERY ONE OF YA!"
Fire balled up in Nathan's fists before he'd told his hands to do anything. He didn't try to stop it.
Connor moved first.
The man left the ground, twelve feet up, boots dangling, and for one long second, he hung there taking in exactly what was in front of him: Nathan's hands burning behind Connor's shoulder, Connor himself wrapped head to foot in green light, eyes and palms glowing, the amulet blazing emerald at his throat. The demon they had tried to kill before, with the white stone glowing dully.
"PUT ME DOWN, DAMN YOU!" he bellowed, pointing at Jace, "I shoulda gutted your magic redskin...I'll finish what I started!"
Connor's eyes narrowed, glowing furiously now.
"No..." he said icily, "You won't."
He clenched his fist tightly.
The sound that came out of the man wasn't a scream anymore by the end of it, just agony, short and terrible. Connor threw his hand down, and the man hit the dirt already dead. Eyes open in shock, now dull. Connor stared at him now, disbelief on his features as the emerald glow began to subside from his body. His eyes returned to their normal deep green color.
For a moment nobody moved. The alley held that stillness the way a struck bell holds its ring, the sound already gone but the air still shaking with it. Jace saw all of it, clear and unbroken, the last thing his eyes held onto before the night started slipping sideways again.
Then Nathan turned, unhurried now that the greater threat was down, and let the fire in his hands go toward a second man mid-stride, who'd broken for Erik's blind side while everyone was watching Connor. It hit the man square in the ass and ignited. He sputtered and cursed, staggering, and swatting at himself like his own hands could put it out. He also decided to run away, which only made matters worse.
"Stop, drop, and roll, genius!" Ricky called after him, already moving toward Jace and not stopping to watch him go.
Sidney had seen all of it. The kill, the fire, everything. He said nothing about any of it. Instead, he crossed to the tavern's side door and let himself in, and a few minutes later, the elixir was doing its work through the heating vents, drifting into every corner of that smoke-thick room, twenty drops carried on the air itself instead of dropped into a dozen separate drinks. Ten or fifteen witnesses couldn't be handled one at a time. This could handle all of them at once.
Nathan watched him go in. Curiosity first, and then, when Sidney didn't come back out right away, something closer to worry. He kept half his attention on that door even while his hands worked over Jace.
Ricky reached the dead man first, but he didn't linger over him. He checked, quick and clinical, hands moving with the flat efficiency of a soldier confirming a threat was down and nothing more, and only once he was sure of it did the rest of what had just happened catch up to him. Connor had killed a man. He'd needed to. Ricky had felt why, the same way Erik had, close enough behind Connor to feel the intent radiating off the knife-wielder even without the bond Nathan and Jace shared. It still landed heavy and strange.
He left the body where it lay and went to Jace.
Connor already had him settled across his lap, Jace's head turned into his chest, blood running steady and dark from the loosened right corner of the gag and soaking down into Connor's shirt.
Then Connor turned all of his attention back to Jace.
In his mind he heard Jace's voice:
"I'm...so...sorry...Connor..."
Tears stung Connor's eyes. "Don't do this to yourself, Jace. Just stay with us, okay?"
Tears spilled down Jace's face, cutting through the blood on his cheeks.
"We've got to get him out of here now!" Connor called out.
Nathan knelt at Jace's other side, near his back, hands moving with the same focus he brought to anything that frightened him badly enough to need controlling. Erik came up on Connor's right and went still there, one broad hand hovering like he didn't trust himself not to break something just by touching it.
"It's okay, Jace," Connor murmured against the top of his head. "I'm not letting go of you, man."
Jace's hand found Connor's face, blood-dark fingers trembling against his jaw, and Connor suppressed a sob, placing his own hand over Jace's and saying, "I got you, Jason. Hold on..."
Sidney came back through the door a few minutes later. Nathan gave him the readout before he'd finished crouching down.
"Broken ribs. Deep bruising across the abdomen. Rope abrasions. He's in shock." Nathan's voice stayed level by will alone. "And there's blood from his ear."
Sidney's face didn't change, but something behind it did.
"Possible skull fracture," he said quietly. "He's critical. He needs a doctor now, not in an hour."
"What did you do in there?" Nathan asked.
"Removed the memory," Sidney said. "All of them, at once. In an hour they won't remember any of it. If anyone tries to tell this story, it'll sound like a bar full of drunk idiots swapping tall tales."
Connor looked up at him. "Like he did for Celia."
He said it quietly, already knowing the answer, understanding exactly what Sidney had done and why: to protect Jace, to protect all of them, to keep Aelin from becoming a story told in a drunk tank in Pincher Creek.
"Is there even a hospital in this one-horse town?" Ricky asked.
"He shouldn't be moved," Sidney said. "But I don't think we have a choice. We get him out of this town and onto an emergency flight out of Calgary."
Ricky let out a breath that was almost a laugh, wrecked and disbelieving. "That's going to be a fun conversation with the gate attendants. Sorry, this guy just died. Twice."
Jace flinched at the word, murmuring something none of them could make out. Connor's arms tightened around him instantly.
"What emergency flight?" Erik asked.
"The one I already called about," Sidney said. "We have an operative at Calgary International. They'll be waiting."
"You sure the memory thing's going to hold?" Ricky asked.
"It always does," Sidney said. "He'll keep healing from this, slowly, the amulet will see to that, but he needs real medical care besides. I've already reached someone who knows how to treat a man with power like his."
"Next step, Sid?" Nathan asked.
Sidney looked at each of them in turn, battered and bloodied and shaking and alive, and said, "We get him to the van. All of us. Together. Now."
Erik moved first. He crouched beside Jace and got his arms beneath him, one under his knees and one behind his back, lifting him with the steady, careful strength of a man who understood exactly how fragile the person in his arms was right now. Jace made a low, pained sound as he left the ground. His head lolled against Erik's chest. Erik went completely still, one hand steady beneath Jace's knees, and pressed his cheek briefly to Jace's hair. Said nothing. Just held him.
"I've got you," Erik said, very quietly. "I've got you, brother."
They moved toward the van. Ricky pulled open the rear hatch. Connor climbed in first, settling into the back cargo area, and Erik carefully transferred Jace into his arms, lowering him until Jace lay across Connor's lap. Connor wrapped both arms around him and held on. Ricky crawled in beside them, pressing close to support them both, and pulled the hatch shut.
Jace's hand found Ricky almost immediately, the same slow, confused reach. Ricky caught it in both of his and held on, Jace's blood transferring onto his hands and jacket without him giving it a single thought.
"We're here, man," Ricky said, voice tight. "All of us. We're right here."
Nathan got into the back seat and did not buckle in. He turned immediately, rising up on his knees to watch over the back of the seat, eyes on Jace, on Connor, on Ricky, tracking every breath. Erik took the passenger seat. Sidney got behind the wheel.
The engine turned over. The van pulled out of the lot and headed north.