Jess deftly avoided running into someone, without dropping the tray he was carrying. Her apology he acknowledged with a quick smile, as he stepped around her to deliver the plates on the tray.
“One hot chicken sandwich, one lasagne. Give me a yell if you need anything else.”
The female elf and male human thanked him, and Jess spun away to another table.
At the bar waiting for drinks from Tomas, he was joined by Nick, who passed on his own order.
“Not bad for a Saturday,” the witch laughed. “Feel like coming over for a couple of hours after we get off?”
Jess hesitated. “Shaine...”
“Will wake up when he wakes up, and whether you're sitting with him worrying or not isn't going to make a difference. Liam thinks the sleep's best for him.”
“Well... okay. You've got Dungeons and Dragons in mind?”
“Mmhmm. I think Eva has evil new ideas for us. She was reading the Monster Manual and chortling to herself.”
“Sounds fun.”
“It'd be interesting to see what you'd come up with in a campaign.”
“Hey, slow down, I haven't been playing that long. Wait until I'm sure I've got a grip on the rules, would you?”
“No hurry.”
Tomas set the required drinks on the bar, left them to take the ones each needed while he went to deal with someone else.
“Back to work,” Jess sighed, flashing Nick a smile.
The kitchen closed at eleven, so although Tomas would keep the bar open until one, Jess and Nick and Sonja were free to leave at midnight.
They stopped on the porch to decide what they were doing.
“Stop and grab munchies?” Sonja suggested.
“Good idea,” Nick said. “I bet Liam ate all the popcorn again. Don't know what we're going to do with that boy.”
“Love me?” Liam said innocently, from behind them.
He looked distinctly satisfied that he made all three jump and whip around; grinning, he got up off the bench. Evaline bounced to her feet, tail waving and ears forward—laughing.
“Gotcha,” Liam chortled.
“What are you doing?” Sonja demanded.
“Waiting to surprise you. It worked, too. Munchies would be a good idea, but no, I did not eat all the popcorn. Just most of it.”
Nick rolled his eyes. “So let's move already, time is passing that we could be using to get our hands on that bloody Ice Diamond talisman.”
They turned towards the all-night convenience store, some two blocks away, four discussing strategies, Evaline frisking around them laughing to herself visibly.
Jess paused, losing track of Liam's idea, checking the breeze for scents. Something was tickling the back of his mind with danger... He caught the scent clearly, finally, and something inside came awake, demanding that he do something about it.
He stopped where he stood, and tried to identify which direction. He didn't know what that scent was, but it was maddening...
“Jess, what...” Sonja began in confusion.
“I don't know. Something smells wrong. Not a predator, I know that smell. Eva?”
Evaline left off her playing, came to hover close to her coven-mates, but she expressed her confusion, she smelled nothing out of place.
“This is not a fucking acid flashback, all right? Something is wrong!”
“Calm down,” Liam said. “No one said we don't believe you. I'm not picking up anything. Nick? Sonja?”
Sonja shook her head. “But I'm pretty low-sense at the moment.”
“Jesse's right,” Nick said distractedly. “Something's not balanced... Oh, damn, it just felt me searching...”
Something tall and inhumanly skinny, with a long heavy tail, stalked menacingly out of the shadows between two buildings.
“That's a demon,” Liam whispered. “It has to be. Oh, gods.”
The demon bared finger-long teeth in a grin. “Meat. Coven of wolf and witch and healer and gifted. My meat.”
Evaline snarled, ears back and tail low, crouching defensively between the demon and her horrified coven.
Jess stepped around her, to place himself between the demon and his friends. He heard Sonja cry out, and heard Liam say softly, “Wait. Let him go.”
His heart felt like it was pounding three times its normal speed, the adrenaline rush was powerful enough to make him light-headed, but on some level he knew with crystal clarity what to do.
The demon laughed shrilly. “More meat, wolf meat, tastiest kind.”
“Back off. You're not killing anyone.”
It had to look ridiculous, a slender youth in black magesilks, standing calmly before a creature twice his height and so well-armed.
The demon paced back and forth, angrily, but didn't try to get by him. “My meat!”
“Go back to where you belong!”
“No! You are alone, a child, you cannot win.” It made a dash to the right, clearly intending to go around him.
Jesse moved sideways, and it scrambled to keep from hitting him. While it fought for balance, he changed and advanced, hackles raised, growling.
It hesitated, spun towards the four watching frozen.
Jesse gathered himself into a tightly-wound crouch, lunged at its back, and knocked it sprawling on the street. He tore savagely at it, while it twisted around, trying to reciprocate. Claws raked down his side, across the fading scars from the construct-wolves, and they hurt worse than predator claws, but it left its throat open. Relentlessly, Jesse bit down. It struggled and shrieked, thrashed madly, vainly seeking to escape the merciless grip.
He felt the spine crunch, and the demon vanished.
Jesse stumbled, and changed, panting.
“Nobody ever tell you wolves can't fight demons?” Nick asked weakly.
“Guess not. Can somebody check this? It's too far back for me to see.”
Liam immediately came close to examine the freely-bleeding cuts across Jesse's lower back. “They look okay,” he reported. “Three lines, none of them very deep or long.” He laid a hand over them, and the wetness slowed.
“Jess, by rights you should be in small pieces all over the street, and the rest of us with you.” He hadn't seen Evaline shift to human, in her blue and silver magesilks. She hugged him, and he leaned against her, grateful for the support—with the adrenaline rush fading, he wasn't sure he could stay on his feet without help. Gradually, his heart was slowing to its normal rhythm. “How did you do that?”
“I don't know,” he told her. “I smelled it and something in the back of my head told me what to do.” The world tilted sideways, and his stomach turned inside out; the area around the cuts felt so cold it burned, and it was spreading, slowly. “I don't feel so good.”
“I'll go get the van,” Evaline said, and raced off on four feet in the direction of Winter's house, not far outside the village proper. Sonja took Eva's place at Jess' side, helping him stay on his feet. Other voices that felt rather far off but probably weren't, all talking at once, they couldn't have missed that scream; Liam, calmly suggesting that it had simply been a particularly reckless and foolish predator. That wasn't going to last past the wolves catching the scent, Jess thought vaguely, but it seemed to ameliorate some of the chaos for the moment, which was probably good enough, until Evaline returned with the van.
In the safety of the warm bright living room, Sonja coiled herself into a chair, shivering; Nick perched on the arm and hugged her, but whether for her comfort or his was an open question. Nick's new familiar Malta scrambled up onto Sonja's lap so both she and Nick could reassure the frightened young cat—gift from Sam though she was, and likely as uncanny as Alfari, the grey-and-white ball of fur and purrs was still not entirely out of kittenhood.
Jess paid little attention, more intent on the fact that he could curl up on the couch, rest his throbbing head on his arm, and not move anymore. “It's poison... isn't it,” he asked, hearing the words slur.
Liam knelt beside him, and laid a hand just above the cuts. “Looks like,” he agreed after a moment. “Your body's a bit freaked by it, but it's starting to fight back now. Know something, Nick? You wanted proof that Alessandria had a seventh child that was half demon? Proof is lying here getting wolf blood and demon blood all over the couch, and reacting no worse to demon poison than any wolf to predator poison. That's the only explanation I can think of, because otherwise this is not possible.”
“Does that mean if I fall asleep I'll wake up?” Jess wondered.
“Yes.”
“Good, 'cause I'm really really tired... Only if I sleep here I'll be in the way.”
“That's okay,” Evaline said, one hand stroking his hair gently. “You can sleep if you want.”
Gratefully, Jess closed his eyes and surrendered to the exhaustion, not even the slowly-fading pain enough to keep him awake.