As she slowly regained control of herself, he shouted further instructions. He already had another location for his captives in mind, and he’d lead them there. The oracles would carry whatever they intended to bring to their new prison. The guards would accompany them and ensure no one slipped away in all the hubbub.
Gwen obediently tucked everyone’s toothbrushes and the communal toothpaste into her pajama pockets. Then she scurried to her cubicle, wrapped her blanket around her thin cot, and gathered both in her arms, preparing to follow Josiah. All the while, her brain had become an old-fashioned pinball machine, bouncing possibilities back and forth with dizzying speed, never letting any of them linger in one spot very long.
For everything to turn out well, Hugh had to agree to speak to Dottie, believe the elderly werewolf’s implausible tale, and defy both his nature and his upbringing to create and execute a plan to spring the oracles from their prison before the next sunrise. But even if he did manage to teleport into the Realm Below in time, with enough demon backup to transport all the captives—very unlikely, according to Eloise—the oracles wouldn’t actually be in the spot where he’d been told to expect them. So he mightnot actually find the encampment before getting caught and killed by Realm security. Also, if he asked for help from either his mother or his mentor, both of whom he trusted, everyone was doomed.
If Hughdidn’tstage his own rescue attempt, Eloise would go to her supervisor instead. Which was unbelievably generous of her—but it might also bring her eternal suffering, and if she waited too long, Gwen and several others would almost certainly die in the meantime.
In short: Because of Eloise, Gwen did, in fact, have a new thread of hope, but that thread was both thin and worryingly frayed. There were so many ways a rescue attempt could go wrong and such a small chance of its success.
And that meant Gwen knew what she needed to do tonight. No matter what did or didn’t happen next, she wouldn’t sit by and let the captive oracles meet their unfortunate fates meekly. As a group, they’d have to form their own escape plan.
With that urgent thought in mind, she followed Josiah and her fellow prisoners out the door, toward an unknowable fate.
29
Josiah must have chosen a less remote area of the Realm Below for the next encampment. While the room containing the new cubicle farm also appeared empty at present, it had clearly seen regular use in the past, judging by the scuffed desks inside the taupe cubicles. Not to mention all the abandoned PCs with boxy monitors—and the various motivational posters on the walls.
Those posters differed in notable ways from the human versions she’d grown up with. No one was exhorting the desperate-looking kitten clinging to a branch toHang in there, baby. Instead, the text read:Do you want this adorable cat shifter to accidentally get sent to a hellscape dimension when it falls and dies? No? Then stop hanging out by the water cooler, BRENDA, and do your damn job.
The TEAMWORK poster read:Either cooperate with each other or meet your inevitable fates a lot sooner than previously intended. Talking to you, BOB and DENISE.
Gwen couldn’t say she felt particularly motivated by the posters—but the room itself was doing the trick in their stead. Now that she and the other captives had access to those old-fashioned monitors, they also had makeshift weapons to heave at the two guards in front of the door. And because the space was much smaller than their previous prison, those guards wouldn’t get nearly as much warning of an attack or as much time to fire upon an advancing horde of determined oracles.
The group had held a hasty whispered conference earlier that night, and they’d unanimously agreed: An hour before dawn, they’d make their move.
Not all of them would survive the attempt. Maybe none of them would. But they’d all prefer to die on their own terms rather than at the hands of a supercilious asshole like Josiah, so it was happening regardless.
Gwen had chosen the cubicle closest to the guards, within their direct line of sight, to allow the others a bit more privacy. Dread and anticipation had left her unable to sleep, even after at least an hour of trying, so she gave up and peeked through her lashes at the masked, armed males standing between her and freedom.
“I can’t believe Bree drowned her would-be attacker, then used her assailant’s glamour to fake her own death and investigate the academy’s secret sorority’s murderous cult.” The guy on the left shook his head. “We probably should’ve been suspicious when she insisted on banging Olivier in that hot tub of melted Camembert.”
The right guard sighed. “Mimi always said her best friend had a weakness for the French classics.”
Gwen squint-glared at them both, infuriated. They werealready holding her captive, and now they’d ruined the suspense of her favorite streaming show?Motherfucker.
Wait. Was the door behind the guards…opening? Slowly?
The two males didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. Their discussion didn’t falter, even for a moment. Were they expecting someone? Or were they too involved in their spoiler-riddled conversation, too intent on stymieing a possible oracle escape attempt, to notice a threat fromoutsidethe room?
Maybe she was imagining things. The lights in this room were dimmer than in the captives’ previous prison, so the shadows could be playing tricks on—
Without a sound, a bearded male who looked very much like rule-bound, stiffly diplomatic Councilor Hugh Blacke, Esquire, slipped through the gap and suddenly, violently, cracked the two guards’ heads together. Their unconscious bodies dropped to the floor with muffledthumps, and he closed the door behind himself and knelt at their sides.
When Gwen gasped, the smell of brimstone filled her lungs. As she gaped in shock, the slim, black-clad demon patted down the guards, removing their guns and daggers and placing the weapons on the marble floor. His face tightened, the temperature of the room spiked, and suddenly the guns had transformed into melted puddles of metal. A moment later, the daggers became red-hot handcuffs that he shaped around the guards’ wrists without regard for the hiss and stench of their burning flesh.
That kind of easy violence, the unflinching infliction of pain, seemed very unlike Hugh. No matter what her eyes might be telling her.
The other oracles had begun to stir. To murmur to one another as they tried to figure out what was happening.
“Gwen?” Matilda softly called out, but Gwen had no answers for her yet.
The demon’s blunted horns reflected the overhead lights as he strode across the room and squatted next to her. Every fiber of her being wanted to reach for him, but…
She held up a hand, and he halted before touching her.
“Gods, Gwen, are you o—” he began to say, molten-amber eyes stricken.
“How do I know you’re Hugh?” she interrupted in a whisper, because she and everyone else had been catastrophically fooled by Josiah. “Prove yourself.”
