I turned to face Tom and Louis as they raised their eyebrows at me, ignoring Corb. “Look, some very bad people took Eric, and they’re going to kill him tonight in order to open a gateway so they can bring in a big, bad demon. We have to save him.”

Tom didn’t close off his expression quickly enough, and I saw the horror there before he could keep it from me. “That’s bad.”

“How bad?” Eammon asked. “Opening a gateway is never good.”

“Tonight, the stars align with Venus and Mercury. It’s the first . . . well, it’s the start of a lot of things. If a sacrifice is done tonight, especially of something like a bigfoot, it will set us up for any number of potential problems. Zombies. A new plague of yellow fever. Power shifting from one person to another. That gateway could mean a great deal of darkness.” Tom’s eyes closed as he spoke.

All of that sounded bad, but I felt in my gut he was holding something back. Not that it mattered, did it? If we saved Eric, then we were good to go. No zombies. No gateways. “Then we need to go now.”

“I will stay with the boy,” Louis said. “He will need someone here when he wakes.”

That made sense. Luke had always been nervous around Sarge—how was he going to handle being just like him? Sarge. Shoot, was he still waiting for us up top? I turned toward the stairs and made my feet move.

“Where are they doing the ceremony, do you know?” Tom said.

“Bonaventure.” I led the way up the stairs, adrenaline fading until I reached the top and saw the human form of a very naked, unmoving Sarge, flat on his face.

Eammon pushed me from behind. “Why did you stop? Lass . . . oh. Did you do this?” He made his way around me to Sarge’s body. “He’s still alive, but barely. You need to pull your weapon out. It’s draining him.”

I forced my feet over to Sarge and pulled my knife. It came out with a sucking pop that made my stomach roll. I wiped the blade on the grass and tucked it away in my other thigh sheath. The blades had saved me more than once now.

Darv came up the stairs, Corb fighting to walk ahead of him, with his still-bound hands and feet. It made for a rather awkward bunny hop move that he had to do up eighteen steps. I couldn’t have bunny hopped up two of them. Darv made a motion at Sarge’s body, as if he were massaging the air, and a coil of what could only be magic, blue and red lines, whipped out from his fingers and then spooled out and around the werewolf’s body, lifting him just above the grass, still face down. “I’ll take them both. They’ll be at the fort. You won’t have to worry about them any longer.”