Chapter 215: The price
SÉVERINE
The wellness clinic’s address burned itself into my memory the second I registered where the locator on my cracked phone had settled.
Ophelia’s Wellness.
I filed it away with the precision of someone who understood that information gathered now was information spent later, and turned my attention to the pile of clothes Grigori had apparently liberated from some unfortunate guest down the hall. They fit well enough. He always had an eye for that sort of thing, some leftover instinct from centuries of watching people and learning what they wore and how they wore it.
I dressed quickly, shaking off the last clinging traces of the hotel bathroom’s chill, and once I was decent again, I moved to the door and began tracing the warding sigils I needed against demon entry. My fingers found the shapes without effort, and I pressed each one into the frame with quiet, deliberate care.
I felt Grigori watching me the entire time.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"Doesn’t mean I’ll answer it." I didn’t look away from the doorframe. "But shoot."
"What happened?"
I paused at that, just for a beat, then kept working.
"All my memories are fuzzy," he said. "It’s clear something happened here. The wards I put up against intruders are down, and I can’t remember much beyond that. It’s killing me."
I finished the last sigil and turned to face him properly.
"Does it matter?"
"Of course it matters." His jaw tightened, something raw moving underneath the usual composure he wore like a second skin.
"Sometimes what’s taken away is a blessing, Grigori."
"I’m your familiar." He said it like it needed defending, like the words themselves carried weight I was supposed to feel. "I’m supposed to protect you. But twice now, I can tell where something is supposed to be in my head, and there’s just nothing there. Nothing at all." His hands curled at his sides. "I’m not one of your little experiments. I’m not some human you fuck around with for entertainment. Are you doing something to my head?"
I actually laughed at that, though there wasn’t much humor in it.
"I doubt I’m that talented yet with how much information you withhold from me." I crossed the small distance between us and studied his face, the genuine confusion sitting underneath the anger. "But no. I didn’t do shit to your memories. Another demon did."
"What?"
"Yeah." I watched the information land, watched him try to fit it somewhere it clearly didn’t want to go. "All that talk I had with you about primordials. Where did you think that came from?"
His brow furrowed deeper.
"You’re connected to my primordial," he said slowly, working through it out loud. "What other primordial would even be coming to—" He stopped himself, shook his head like he could physically dislodge the thought. "No. That doesn’t track."
"The primordial isn’t after me," I said. "It’s after Margaux. Given what she is."
"The whisperer."
"The whisperer," I confirmed.
Grigori looked like he was developing the beginning of a headache, the kind that came from information arriving faster than a person could sort through it.
"You never get involved with an untethered primordial," he said, and there was an edge of something close to fear buried under the lecture. "If it wants out of Gehenna badly enough, there’s nothing it won’t do to get free. Nothing."
"Well, I know exactly how desperate it is now." I moved past him, toward the window, watching the parking lot below settle into the ordinary business of an ordinary afternoon while everything about my life had stopped being ordinary weeks ago. "It’s terrified she’s going to gain knowledge it doesn’t want her having. Honestly, I half expected it to burst in here the second it realized I hadn’t intercepted the girl the way it wanted me to." I turned back to him. "Maybe something else caught its attention instead. Wouldn’t that be convenient."
"Forget the timing of it." He crossed his arms. "What does it even matter to you? You keep circling around the demon’s angle like that’s the important part."
"Forget all of that," I said. "The moment Margaux leaves that wellness center, we go get her. Before that happens, you need to prepare to seal off that pesky spirit that wants me dead. Just in case things go sideways faster than I’d like."
"What do you even want the girl for?" he asked. "Really. Not the version you keep feeding me in pieces."
"I intend to do some destiny swapping. Nothing new."
The silence that followed lasted long enough that I almost enjoyed it, the particular flavor of watching someone recalculate everything they thought they understood about the conversation they were having.
"That’s the most dangerous thing a person can attempt," he said finally, his voice dropping into something low and careful. "Foolish, too. You should know better than that, Séverine."
"Should I?"
"And how will you even attempt it? Or will you force it out of me," he said, "since I gave you my name?"
I reached up and squeezed his cheeks between my fingers, the way you’d handle a sulking child who needed reminding who was in charge of the room.
"There’s no need for that."
He didn’t pull away, though every muscle in his face said he wanted to.
"That other demon put the knowledge in my head," I said. "His understanding of it is probably considerably better than yours, if we’re being honest about our relative levels of expertise here."
"Séverine." He said my name like it cost him something. "I know you’ve never once listened to me on matters that should actually concern you. I’ve made my peace with that, mostly." A muscle worked in his jaw. "But on this, you need to listen. Why would you trust a primordial with its own agenda? An agenda that has absolutely nothing to do with keeping you alive or whole?"
"He thinks he can use me," I said, "despite being currently powerless in this realm. That’s precisely why I’m going to beat him at his own game." I stepped back, straightening the collar of the stolen shirt I now wore. "You’re worried about nothing."
I walked back to the broken phone resting on the nightstand and looked at the screen, the cracked glass fracturing the little glowing dot into a dozen distorted reflections of itself.
It had started to move.
I smiled.
"They’ve started moving," I said. "Let’s go."
Grigori came to stand beside me, and something in the way he moved told me he hadn’t let go of the argument, only shelved it for the moment.
"Are you really sure destiny swapping is what you want?" he asked, quieter now, almost gentle in a way that made something twist uncomfortably behind my ribs, though I refused to examine that too closely.
"I want everything Margaux has," I said. "And I want to lose the stain that’s currently attached to my name. All of it. Every last piece of it that people whisper about when they think I can’t hear them."
"Do you know the price of it?"
"There’s nothing I wouldn’t pay."
I held out my hand.
"Now fucking teleport us."
He looked at me for a long moment, something sad settling into the shape of his mouth, an expression I didn’t have the patience to interrogate right now, not with the locator still crawling steadily across the broken screen and the clock working against me in ways I refused to admit out loud.
Then he took my hand anyway.
The world around us shifted, folding in on itself the way it always did when he moved us through space rather than across it, reality rippling like water disturbed by something dropped into its center. I grabbed the phone off the ground a half second before the hotel room dissolved entirely, before the walls and the window and the neatly made bed all bled away into something that wasn’t quite darkness and wasn’t quite light.
The locator stayed clutched in my fist the whole way through.
I intended to make sure it stayed that way until I had exactly what I came for.
Margaux.