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Cujo was waiting for Logan when he got home. The moment he and Eva stepped out of the warehouse that housed the Harrowgate, Cujo tackled Logan to the ground. Pinned beneath the beast’s massive paws, Logan could barely breathe as Cujo slapped drooly kisses on his face and head.
“Hey, buddy.” Laughing, he made a futile attempt to push the mutt’s snout away. “It’s good to see you too.” He managed to wriggle out from under the canine and, like he used to do as a toddler, wrapped his arms around Cujo’s neck and clung to him as the beast lifted him to his feet. “You wanna say hi to Eva?”
Averting her gaze the way he’d told her to, Eva took a hesitant step forward but froze at Cujo’s low, throaty growl. Crouching, Cujo eased up to her, sniffed her foot, snarled, and phased out.
Weird. Cujo rarely eased up to people like that. He was more of an in-your-face or watch-from-a-distance-and-then-pounce kind of animal.
“Well, he didn’t bite you or piss on you, so we’ll call that a win.”
Her eyes shot wide. “Piss on me?”
“Yeah.” He laughed as they walked toward the house. “Mace brought home a chick a few weeks ago for a barbecue. Cute, red hair, three horns. Anyway, I was tossing Cujo some steak off the grill, and he saw her, ran over, and took a huge, steaming piss on her. And you can smell that stuff for a week on your skin.” He took them into the house. “Mace did not get laid that night.” He rethought that. “Well, not by her, anyway.”
Before they even got to the living room, Crux met them with a box in his skinny arms.
“Logan! You’re never gonna believe—”
“I know. It’s from Stryke.”
The kid nodded and thrust the box at him like a Christmas gift. After everything that had gone down, Crux still hoped Stryke would come around. No one was more affected by Chaos’s death than Crux, yet he somehow maintained a childlike innocence about the whole thing. Rade insisted that Crux hadn’t dealt with the loss of his twin yet, and he wasn’t the only one who had those ideas. Eidolon cautioned that Crux’s transition would be difficult without his brother, and that he might not be the same when he came out on the other side of it.
But for now, Crux was a kid who knew how the world worked but wasn’t ready to join it.
More power to him.
Logan tossed the weapon his dad gave him onto the table. “Where’s everyone?”
“Do I look like a babysitter?” Crux grabbed the box back from him and plopped it onto the dining room table they never used. “I think Mace and Blade are looking for Draven. Sabre’s doing lab shit, probably. And last I heard, Rade was interrogating some bad guy for…I dunno, some government.”
Crux held up a pair of scissors he must have had up his ass because Logan hadn’t seen them lying around anywhere.
Eva’s hand came down on his lower back, a gentle reminder that she was there for him, as he cut the tape on the box. Once all four flaps were open, a three-foot-high holovid popped up from inside.
“Hey, asshole.” Stryke, wearing a lab coat over a T-shirt with a middle finger printed on the chest, held up what looked like a video game controller. “You can thank me for saving Cujo later. In the box is this device. It’s going to send a…spell, of sorts, out to find Draven. I used a combination of physics, herbs, and blood, and some tech shit you won’t understand to develop it. I’m sure you’re asking why we can’t use this same kind of device to find enemies like Lilith, and it’s because this technology only works on demons whose body chemistry is in the midst of a major change. I originally designed it to track down Seminus demons going throughs’genesiswho will become evil. When I learned about Draven, I reprogrammed it to seek out his DNA. And yeah, I have his DNA. I have everyone’s DNA. Fuck off with your judgmental shit.”
Fucking Stryke. The guy was insufferable.
Stryke placed the device in a box. “The A button activates the pilot’s comms chip. The B button activates the spell. The joystick guides the spell, but you’ll need to use the B and C buttons simultaneously to— Hey, you there?” He knocked on the air as if rapping on a door, being a total giant dickwad. “Have I lost you yet? Thought so. Look, just give the controller to your girlfriend and tell her to press the A button to get started.”
Stryke snorted, obviously anticipating Logan’s surprise. The bastard.
“Yeah, I researched the fuck out of her,” he continued. “Duh. It’s like you don’t know me at all. So, give it to her, and the instructions will download into her chip implant. She can pilot it. You’ll just fuck it up. Crux might be able to handle it too, but only if Eva got smart and told you to fuck off or something. Like I said, Crux, press the A button.” He folded the box flaps. “Oh, and one more thing. This is an untested prototype. Use it at your own risk, and don’t blame me for whatever shit goes wrong. Because it will. It always does.”
The video clicked off.
“Wow,” Eva said. “He sounds like a fun guy.”
“He’s been sad for a long time.” Crux stared into the space where his older brother had been standing. “And he’s having an episode.”
Eva shot Logan a look. “An episode? Like Amber?”
He shook his head. “Amber has visions of sorts. Stryke has moments where his brain gets hyperactive. He’ll go for days without eating or sleeping—”
“Or sex,” Crux said, and Logan nodded.
“He gets so focused he just…loses himself in work. It’s like he’s trapped inside his head.”
She frowned. “But he’s a Seminus demon. How can he go without sex?”
