Trying not to think about it, he moved to help the EMT who’d been tending him. She was shaken up and still dazed, but appeared to be physically okay. He left the rear of the ambulance to check the driver, who was unconscious. Worse, the driver was wedged in the wreckage and trapped behind the wheel. Since Nick couldn’t get him out, Nick returned to the rear to look for some way to cut the driver’s seatbelt, and pry the wheel away from his body.

While Nick searched, Kody quickly dispatched the demon. As soon as she finished, she returned to his side, but they had no way of freeing the trapped driver, so they took turns maintaining pressure on a tourniquet against the driver’s wound where he’d been injured in the crash. The other EMT kept checking on the ETA for another ambulance.

Kody frowned as she scanned the street while they listened to all the calls on the ambulance’s radio. “I thought Bubba was following us?”

“We must have lost him in the rain.”

Kody used her powers to disguise her sword as an umbrella that she held over him and the two EMTs. “What happened to the zeitjäger?”

“Don’t know. He vanished.”

Crossing her arms over her chest, she shivered. “This is bad, Nick. Real bad.”

“I know, cher. I can feel it.”

She jerked her chin toward the smoldering remains of the demon she’d dispatched. “They’re coming for you, Nick. Harder and stronger than ever before.” She shivered. “Not just Noir. This is … I don’t know. It’s not normal. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever felt before.”

Oh goody. Just what he wanted to hear. That made his day all the brighter.

Nick fell silent as he heard the next call on the radio and the address for it. It was one he knew all too well.

His heart stopped beating in stark cold terror as he met Kody’s shocked expression. “That’s my mom!”

* * *

Laguerre smiled at Grim as she entered his office and found him at his desk. “Our friend just returned home with a gift for us. The king is in check.”

A slow smile spread across his face. “So soon?”

“Easy enough when you have the pieces all in place. I told you, the Malachai trusts our newest ally. He didn’t even see it coming. He has no idea that he’s being tested and that if he fails, he loses everything.”

So it seemed. “Where’s his mother?”

An evil laugh escaped her beautiful lips. “Someplace safe.”

Grim winced at the thought of the last place anyone would look for Cherise Gautier. “Gah, I hate that hole.”

“Most beings do. It’s why it was chosen for her prison. He’ll never find her there.”

Grim saluted her for her cold, calculated choice. “What if our king chooses to sacrifice his queen to the cause?”

“He won’t. She’s his raison d’être. Nick would give us his Arelim love before he’d allow his mother to die. Whoever controls Cherise, controls Nick. You know that.”