The Devil's Wolf
Chapter 24

"Elior is going to be so mad," she muttered as they slipped through the window onto the roof. "Not to mention my dad."

"I imagine one or both will administer appropriate discipline when we return," Cael agreed indifferently. "It might be entertaining to watch. You don't have to climb me." He was amused when she wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist.

"I just figured it would be easier for me to hold onto you rather than you hold onto me."

He sighed and put his arms around her, holding her tight to him. She felt him tense against the pain as his wings opened, and the contraction of his muscles as he sprung into the air, the strike of feathers replaceing the current loud as he quickly gained height.

The pack territory below looked pretty, she thought, like an idyllic picture of surburbia in a children's book. A book about Peter Pan, maybe, coming to lead Wendy and her brothers to Never NeverLand.

She looked up at Cael's beautiful face, his golden hair whipped back by the air movement. Her version of Peter was far better, she thought. A man and not a boy, and what a man, she smirked. "You are entirely too pretty," she told him.

"I was just thinking that there are advantages to you clinging in this manner," he replied pressing his hips against her suggestively. "If only you were dressed more appropriately. I dislike trousers on a woman." "That would be a new take on the mile high club," she replied, ignoring his comment about trousers on women.

"The what?"

"There are people who like to f-k in airplanes," she explained. "They use the lavatories normally."

"Seriously?" He contemplated it and shrugged. "I have never been in an airplane."

"Well, there would hardly be any point to you taking a flight, would there? You are a flight."

He caught an updraft of air and she squealed, tightening her grip around him, and pressing her face into his neck, feeling his chest shake with his laughter.

"So, where are we going?"

"Oh, shit," she looked down at the city below them. Height had reduced it to Lego blocks. "I don't suppose if I gave you the street name, it would mean anything to you?"

He arched an eyebrow. "I have spent only a few weeks in this particular city, and that was more than twenty years ago."

"You will need to go lower, so I can see where we are. And besides," she shivered. "It is cold up here."

"I don't feel it." But he held her closely to warm her with his body-heat as he angled into a change of current, drifting them lazily towards the ground.

She rested her lips against his throat, enjoying the scent of his skin and the feel of his pulse beneath her kiss. "Your people hunt you because you come here, don't they?"She remembered the interrupted conversation between him and Elior in the garage of the safe house. She had been so caught up in Elior and her problems, Cael's had slipped her mind.

"Only if I cross between the realms," he was unperturbed. "I am adept at avoiding them."

"So, you still cross between the realms."

"It is necessary, to retain my power, to refresh myself in my home-realm, on occasion. I portal in to an area I know is not heavily populated, spend an hour or two sun-baking, and then portal back, "he explained. "I ensure I do not follow a regular pattern, that way, if they detect my portal, they cannot begin to anticipate when I will next cast it."

"They can detect portals?"

"Yes. It causes a disruption to the magic, and there are those whose role it is to monitor such disruptions. Most, they will dismiss as minor, but too many, too frequently, might indicate that one of the slave realms becomes too strong, and might pose a threat, and so then they will investigate, and perhaps open the realm to the next games."

"There are more than one slave realm?"

"There are many realms."

"More like us? More humans, and Others?"

"Yes."

They were lower to the city now, and she pointed. "That way. It looks so different from up here. There's Vampire Square," she pointed to a block of city skyscrapers. "You can see why it is called that. They own all the buildings for four blocks, in a square."

"That is where you wish to go after?"

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"Yes. Shit," she frowned. "There are a lot of... Are they army? They look like army, cordoning off that entire area."

"Hmm, I think the vampires will be too distracted to be interested in a new slave," he observed.

"There is the shop. You see it?"She pointed out the building.

The glamor that Alatar had cast upon it was inventive in it's lack of invention, she thought with humor, and summed her honorary uncle up in one spell. He had basically cast the image of the shop as it had been in her childhood over how it stood now, the patched and tasteless paint, rusted galvanized bull nose veranda, the graffiti, and the boarded up windows disguising the sleek elegance of the remodeled building below.

"I see it," he arched an eyebrow disdainfully. "It is one step from derelict."

"Alatar's glamour. It is actually really nice. You will see. Land us on the roof."

"Will it hold our weight?" He circled towards it, and just as her head began to spin, they passed through the shimmering edge of the glamour, and she heard him exclaim a moment before he set his feet onto a path amongst a lush jungle of potted plants, closing his wings loosely against his back.

She slid down him, ensuring she rubbed up against him as much as possible, and didn't miss the smirk he gave her.

"I will repay you for that later," he told her, and then reached out to touch a plant. "Impressive. These are not of this realm. Your warlock is a realm-hopper."

"Alatar is adept at portals," she led him through the foliage, past the elegant filigree-d glass-house where Alatar kept his rarest plants, into the rooftop entrance, and down the staircase, the sensor lighting outlining the stairs in the otherwise dark stairwell.

Cael grumbled as he hunched his shoulders, drawing his wings tight to accommodate the narrow passage.

"He might be a bit... sensitive, Cael, if he recognizes you. He lost the love of his life, my aunt Tara, during the battle of Armageddon, and has never recovered from her loss."

"I don't remember a warlock," Cael replied frowning. "But I was only present for a brief time."

"Long enough to snatch my mother out of the battle and try to kill her, hey?" She threw a glance over her shoulder at him unable to resist the dig at him.

"I had just left my home where I had found my mother's body on one side of the room and her head on the other, each of her limbs and her wings removed and scattered," he said it with such a complete control that she felt the pain he wasn't giving voice to as if were her own and stopped on the stairs. "I was, understandably, irate."

"Cael," she turned and stepped up to him, putting her arms around his waist, resting her head against his chest and feeling that the beat of his heart had picked up and that his muscles were tense.

She had upset her devil with her words, reminding him of a pain that was still as fresh to him twenty years later as it had been the day it had occurred. It was no wonder, she thought, if he felt such pain now, that he had snatched her mother up into the sky just moments after the discovery. It must have torn him up inside to have found his family slaughtered, the pain of the discovery must have been agony, and he had been desperate to replace some outlet for it, to replace someone to blame other than himself.

And then he had spent the next twenty years stewing on his pain, alternating between blaming himself, and blaming the descendants of Evelyn, and her mother, who had first accidentally pulled him to her as a child when her life had been in danger.

"I am so very sorry for your loss. I did not mean to cause you pain,"she apologised stroking and soothing him. "I am sorry for that as well. It was thoughtless of me. I can be like that sometimes."

After a moment she felt the tension leave him, and he put his arm around her and lowered his face into her hair, breathing in her scent as if he were a werewolf.

"I am no longer irate. With you, at least," he amended. "When I have the opportunity, I will tear my enemies apart slowly, an organ at a time, and laugh as they die."

"Alright then," she decided that was probably a reasonable vow, considering.

She released him and continued down the last steps to the door.

As she opened it, a knife embedded itself into the door only an inch from her nose. She watched the metal quiver under the force of the impact and turned her eyes in the direction of the warlock. "That's no way to greet family, Uncle Alatar."

"Apologies," the warlock reclaimed the blade and kissed her cheek. "I thought I heard a male voice."

"You did," Cael stepped down into the light. "Ah," he drawled. "Yes, I remember you."

"Well, well," Alatar regarded him, and bared his teeth. "I was premature with my throw. Step away, Ash, I have a bird to pluck."

"What is it about me," Cael was outraged. "That inspires everyone to compare me to a fowl?"