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“How do you know it was Kikia?” I try and fail to keep my voice even.
“What the fuck?” Rachel yells so loud I have to take the phone away from my ear.
I steady my breathing and close my eyes, trying to force calm into my tone. “I’m not questioning you, but if it was another demon, I need to know. It will help me find Felicity.” I feel like I might throw up the eggs I forced down earlier. I should have known my family would do something stupid.
There’s a long pause and I’m starting to think she may have hung up. “It’s the peanut butter.”
“I beg your pardon?” What the fuck is she talking about?
“When your crazy-ass sister was here before, she ate the peanut butter out of the jar. I tossed that jar in the garbage after you left. Felicity must have replaced it. Today, when I used my key to get in, the new jar was on the counter with a spoon sticking out of it. Exactly how your sister left it last time.” She draws an audible breath. “Why would she take her?”
“Tonight is the blood moon. She’s trying to get Felicity to reject me.” My voice catches.
“I thought she already did that.”
I put her on speaker and text my contact at the pier about my boat. “She did, but Kikia doesn’t know that.”
“Why wouldn’t Felicity have just told her?” Rachel asks a fair question.
Hope blooms in my chest like nothing I’ve ever felt before. This must be why humans do good. This amazing feeling of love for another person. “I’ve got to go, Rachel. I’ll find her.”
“You better, demon, or I’m coming after you, and you ain’t never seen me angry.”
I smile at the screen. “I’ll find her. Keep her phone with you.” I disconnect the call and run for a cab to take me to Chelsie Pier.
My boat is ready to go. I jump in and take off. There’s little traffic on the water, as the fall has brought with it cooler weather and rougher seas. The Hudson River is choppy. I head out to the open ocean.
It takes me an hour to make my way to the veiled island of Point Nemo. It’s a quick stop at earth’s demon headquarters for confirmation that it likely was Kikia and not my father or some other high demon or angel.
Back in the boat, I head to the portal in the ocean that will lead me to purgatory. If Kikia was anywhere else, I’d be able to locate her mentally. I feel nothing of my sister or my mate, so they must be in the place between worlds.
The portal leaves me with an unpleasant swirling sensation, but I brush it aside and scan the gray space for my woman. This is not my favorite place to visit since I’ve condemned a lot of shifters to an eternity of nothing. Not that it’s my fault. I’m not in control of my destiny.
Several purgs hiss and curse at me along the path.
“Back off. There are worse places than this.” I feel the pull toward what might be called a lake if this place had normal elements. I continue forward, letting my senses take me closer to my mate.
* * *
Felicity
The sun had barely breached the horizon when Kikia woke me by snapping some kind of magical handcuffs around my wrists. Holding a long glowing sword, she chased me from my bed.
Pleased with herself, she dragged me through a vortex to a place that is both calm and unpleasant. “Where are we?”
“Purgatory.” Holding the chain between my cuffs, she drags me along a path.
The sky is a swirl of grays in every hue. The ground is black with no vegetation and yet, there is a path of a slightly lighter color. We follow the path past forms that are hazy and indistinct.
“Why did you bring me here?” I avoid someone or something that reaches out to touch me.
“Because my brother can’t sense you here.” She giggles. “If the blood moon passes without your bonding, then it will be some time before he can abandon his destiny. Balance must be kept. You are a hindrance to that law.”
“Why not just kill me?” As much as that idea scares me, I want to understand the rules.
We reach a kind of shoreline. The water is as indistinct as everything else, a mass of white that ebbs and flows. Kikia pushes me into a small boat and follows me in.
Without any use of paddles, the boat moves slowly across the water.
