The Temptation of Four

by Eva Chase

  He laughed again, more hesitantly. “Sounds wonderful. Not tonight. But… maybe some other time.”

  “I’ll leave you to it, then,” I said. “Your Firecracker wishes you good night.”

  I hung up and picked up my pace. He’d always said the nickname he’d given me with a mix of awe and apprehension, as if he appreciated my gutsiness but was wary of how far I’d take it. Let him think about that, about the intrepid police prodigy he’d thought I was, while I did… this.

  I scooped up a polished quartz stone from the base of someone’s yard. Just around the corner from Novak’s house, I spotted a Mercedes that was guaranteed to have an alarm system. I flung the stone onto the hood.

  The alarm blared. I slipped behind a neighbor’s shed as Garrett intrepidly loped around the corner. The moment his attention focused in on the source of the noise, I crossed the yard and made for the Novaks’ house, slapping a patch on my button-up shirt as I went and pulling a clipboard from my purse.

  I rang the doorbell and pasted a smile on my face, trying not to think about the number of seconds it might take for Garrett to decide the possible intruder a few homes away had nothing to do with his mission.

  Mr. Novak was out, as he was most evenings—this was literature and academics night at his favorite auction house just outside of town. He went as much to scope out potential scores to send his minions after as to bid on items, I’d bet. It was his wife, nearly twenty years his junior, who answered the door.

  “Hello?” she said in Croatian, her brow furrowing.

  “Hello, Mrs… Novak?” I said with the most precise accent I could summon, and handed her the card I’d made up a few days ago for this purpose. “So sorry to disturb your evening. I’m with Grand Pest Control, on behalf of the city. It appears there’s been an infestation in this part of your neighborhood, and we’ve been asked to check the surrounding buildings to ensure it doesn’t spread farther.”

  The woman’s delicate wan face tensed. “Infestation?”

  I nodded briskly. “It shouldn’t take more than ten, fifteen minutes to give the house a quick examination. I’ll be out of your way in no time, I promise.”

  “I guess you’d better come in then.”

  She stepped back, and just like that, I was walking into the house invited.

  I paused in the hall with its ornate rug and knocked on the wall beside me. Mrs. Novak went even more rigid. I glanced at her apologetically.

  “If the pests have spread this far, sometimes they come right out of the woodwork while I’m searching. They don’t like tile, though. If you want to make sure they don’t come near you, you’ll be safest in the kitchen or perhaps a bathroom.”

  She nodded with a quick jerk and vanished into a room farther down the hall.

  I made a show of working my way through the first floor, murmuring to myself and knocking here and there loud enough that the wife would hear my progress. Despite the modern trappings on the outside of the house, which I supposed was meant to impress the neighbors more than follow Novak’s sensibilities, he’d designed the interior with fine hardwood and old-fashioned moldings like a place from earlier times.

  I knocked on up to the second floor, where my real goal lay. A solid oak door there led to Mr. Novak’s study. I pulled out a couple of lock picks and made short work of the deadbolt, with a couple knocks for good measure along the way.

  The smell of aged leather permeated the dark room. I switched on the lamp near the door. Its light glowed across built-in shelves on every wall and a couple of armchairs facing a round wooden table in the center. Every piece of furniture was stacked with old books, even one of the chairs. Here and there between the rare volumes lay other curiosities of the supposedly supernatural variety: an oddly shaped animal skull, a jar of viscous liquid, and a bundle of partly charred twigs tied with a silk ribbon.

  Novak was one of the many who helped keep the cult of the shrouded ones in business. He didn’t have a clue who they were or what they stood for; he just purchased their objects of pseudo-power through the back channels where they peddled them with enough gravitas to convince an amateur dabbler in the dark arts. I doubted a single item they distributed had a scrap of actual significance.

  The books Novak had amassed were another story. The cult wouldn’t have liked any outsider having even the small amount of information contained in the text I was looking for.

  Several boxes stood in a stack at the back of the room. He hadn’t unpacked yet. I hurried over and started sorting through their contents.

  My fingers leapt over the spines. It wasn’t in this box. No, nothing in this one either. My heart was pounding by the time I set my hand on the title I was looking for in the fifth box I’d checked. I yanked it out.

  Pages fifty-six to fifty-eight. I’d committed the numbers to memory. It was possible the treatise on Croatian folklore held a few other useful tidbits mixed in with the rest, but my life would be easier if Novak never realized he’d been robbed.

  I tore the two pages from their binding with a wince, stuffed the book back into its spot, and folded the papers so I could tuck them into my purse.

  I was just setting the boxes back into their stack when the creak of the stairs reached my ears. Shit.

  I dashed out of the study, snapping off the light and jerking the door shut behind me. When Mrs. Novak reached the upstairs hall, I was knocking on the wall a couple doors down.

  “Are you almost done?” she asked, with a nervous glance that darted along the baseboards. “Do we have any?”

  “It’s looking clear,” I said with a smile. “I’ve just finished up.”

  She led the way back down the stairs.

  “You call the number on that card if you notice any worrisome signs in the next few weeks,” I told her, and looked around. “Do you have a back fence? I should take a look at that too before I move on.”

  “Yes, of course,” Mrs. Novak said, all hasty relief. I knocked on a few spots on the fence, declared it pest-free too, and gave the woman my thanks as I headed out the back gate, far from Garrett’s watching eyes.

  My awareness of my prize tingled through me, but I forced myself to wait until I was tucked in the back of a cab before I drew out the pages. My gaze skimmed over the yellowed paper until I found the lines I was looking for.

  One of the most obscure legends of this sort I’ve encountered is that of the shrouded dagger. The few references I’ve come across claim this magical weapon was a gift from the fae realm into this one, to solidify the association between those beings and their human allies. It is said to imbue the powers of a fae on any person who brandishes it under the right circumstances.

  Fae. Ha. If he’d ever met an actual shrouded one, he wouldn’t have placed them in the same category as Tinkerbell.

  This all fell in line with what I’d already heard. If the dagger could give me the power of a shrouded one, then I could hope it would allow me to sever the pact I’d made with Bog, just as consenting to that deal with him had freed me from my more general bond to the cult and his kind. But what were the “right” damned circumstances?

  The author rambled on for a few paragraphs about how much was unknown about this specific “faerie” people and the humans who associated with them, including why the dagger was referred to as “shrouded,” before he finally got to the point. My fingers tightened around the paper, my pulse lurching with a bump of the cab’s tires over a pothole.

  The best understanding I’ve arrived at is that adherents believed this faerie people derived their power in our world from sunlight. Thus, a human wielder of the shrouded dagger could only take on full fae potential when the powers of the real fae were muted. A couple of references suggest that night or a place in shadow might be enough to evoke the dagger’s supposed magic, but this seems overly simplistic considering how easily one could test the possibility.

  One account, though brief, strikes me as having the most validity. It claims that tapping into the power can only happen
in the moment the sun is abruptly yet fully interrupted by a solar eclipse. This idea has the ring of proper legend to it.

  A giddy rush washed over me. Yes. That felt right, down to the core of my being where I’d been shaped by the shrouded folk across the first fourteen years of my life. I dug out my phone and tapped out a search for the next full solar eclipse.

  It was just a few weeks away, the full effect visible from certain parts of South America. And there wouldn’t be another until next year.

  The giddiness faded, replaced by a more uneasy sense of anticipation. If I was ready in time, I could sever the contract between Bog and me in less than a month. If I didn’t find all the pieces quickly enough… either the cuff around my leg or the shrouded one I’d bound myself to would destroy me before I got another chance to save myself.

  Chapter Ten

  Bash

  I was sitting with a book on the bench outside the hotel when two of my targets emerged from the elevator. Adjusting my position just slightly, I pushed a button on the little receiver in my pocket.

  John Watson and Garrett Lestrade made an even odder match without Sherlock between them to balance things out. As they headed to the front desk, the doctor’s sweep of blond hair hovered nearly half a foot higher than the detective’s close-cropped brown, the former’s frame as broad as the latter’s was wiry. If Watson had stood directly in front of Lestrade, you wouldn’t have caught a glimpse of the smaller guy. But even though he was bigger, there was a softness to the way Watson carried himself that matched what Jemma had told me about his personality.

  Neither of them looked like a very formidable foe, even taking into account walking stick combat skills.

  My earphones crackled as the clerk at the front desk shuffled a few papers. Watson and Lestrade came to a stop there, and the bug I’d planted transmitted the clerk’s thin voice into my ear, just a little louder than the growl of the passing traffic.

  “How can I help you this morning?”

  Watson was looking at something on his phone. Lestrade spoke first, a little too loud, a little too forceful for the situation—the tone of a guy with too much to prove. “We need a couple of taxis.”

  That was my cue. I left the receiver on as I got up from the bench and crossed the street to the spot where I’d stashed my mocked-up cab.

  “Maybe just one,” Watson said in his lighter voice. “It looks like the station is on the way to the hospital. We might as well share.”

  “Well, you’ll be the one who ends up paying then.”

  “I’ll have one around for you in just a few minutes,” the clerk said.

  I had quite a good stash of disguise options in the trunk, many brought with me, a few obtained here in Zagreb. For this… I tugged a stark white prayer cap over my head and fixed a thick beard that was as much gray as black to my jaw. The coarse hair itched at my skin, but the chances Watson would connect me to the bowl-haired man he’d seen briefly talking to Jemma were essentially nil.

  The engine sputtered as I reversed out of the tight, secluded nook. It wasn’t the finest car I’d ever driven. Jemma would have given me more cash if I’d asked, but a posh new model would have stood out more than I wanted.

  I pulled my fake taxi up in front of the hotel less than two minutes after my targets had requested it and got out to beckon them over. “Mr. Watson and Mr. Lestrade?” I asked, putting on a thick Bosnian accent.

  I opened the back, and they got in without more than a glance at me. It was almost too easy. I smiled to myself as I got back into the driver’s seat.

  “We’ve got two stops,” Lestrade said. “The central police station first.”

  “Not a problem,” I said, and gunned the engine before the taxi that had actually been called could arrive.

  “It’s really not that far,” Watson said to his companion.

  Through the rearview mirror, I watched Lestrade lean over, presumably to check the other man’s phone. He let out a huff of breath. “I could have walked that.”

  “Maybe it was better to take a taxi anyway. It’ll be harder for her to have anyone follow us in a vehicle than on foot.”

  “True.”

  I held back a full smirk. They thought they were pretty smart, didn’t they? You’d think they’d have realized by now that Jemma would always be at least two steps ahead of them.

  She’d started to find the three of them intriguing while she’d conned them in London. Now that she didn’t have to play along with their restrictive ideas about morality, it must be so obvious to her that she could outpace them in an instant. Nothing to admire there. She and I controlled the playing field, and they were just dupes fumbling their way across it. Foolish knights that she brought in one night, Shakespeare might have said. He’d have had a field day with this bunch.

  “She’s certainly holding her cards close,” Watson went on. “Sherlock didn’t get much out of her the other night.”

  Lestrade made a snorting sound. “It depends on what he was looking to get. You know he slept with her, don’t you?”

  My fingers tightened around the steering wheel.

  Watson raised his eyebrows at the other man. “What makes you say that?”

  “I saw him right after, when he got back to the hotel. He had this energy to him—it wasn’t how a man looks when he’s just been foiled in a simple conversation, I can tell you that much.”

  “I suppose it doesn’t really matter.”

  Lestrade slumped down his seat. “No. I just can’t help noticing it was you she came on to and me who suggested using that angle while he dismissed the possibility, and somehow he’s the one who ended up in her bed.”

  He was trying to keep his voice nonchalant, but a ripple of jealousy ran through it. I’d have been more amused if a similar prickling hadn’t shot up inside me.

  It wasn’t any of my business how Jemma conducted her personal affairs. She’d gotten plenty of mileage out of her seductive charms in the past. It was all part of the game.

  Did it bother me that she’d gone after them at all or that she hadn’t mentioned either incident to me—making a move on Watson, hooking up with Holmes? It wasn’t as if she normally gave me a detailed account of her every maneuver… but I suspected she’d made a conscious decision to keep this to herself. I could even understand why. Things hadn’t been quite as steady between the two of us since the night we’d shared together in London.

  It was harder to tamp down desires after they’d had a little room to breathe and grow.

  Jemma had made the boundaries of our partnership clear. Any trouble I had with maintaining that distance was on me.

  I forced my hands to relax on the wheel. Lestrade was flipping through a notepad.

  “You know, we haven’t seen any more of those strange light effects around her this time around. What do you make of that?”

  Watson cocked his head. “We did conclude they had to be coming from someone other than her. That someone probably stayed in London. Maybe it really was some conference-goer who was envious of the time she was spending with us—nothing to do with her personally at all.”

  “Maybe,” Lestrade said with a frown. I’d have liked to see the look on their faces if they’d had to deal with the actual monsters Jemma was taking on. Maybe the things would eat the two of them, and Holmes too, and save us any more hassle.

  The police station came into view up ahead. “Here we are,” I said.

  “Good luck with the lab coats,” Lestrade said to Watson flippantly. The detective inspector climbed out.

  Watson leaned forward. “I need to get to the university hospital now.”

  “Of course.”

  I pulled back into traffic, needing a few seconds to work out the best route based on my memory of the city maps. The police station had made sense. What information did the Londoners think they were going to get out of the city’s main hospital that would help them figure out Jemma’s plans?

  I’d just have to find out. That was what she neede
d from me. These three would outlive their usefulness soon enough, and then we could move on completely.

  “Are you sick?” I asked. “I have lived here a long time. If there’s something specific you need, I might be able to suggest a place not so busy as the hospital.”

  “That’s all right, but thank you,” Watson said. “I’m not going for treatment, just to look at some records. I understand the hospital is associated with the Ministry of Health.”

  “Ah, I see, indeed,” I said with an agreeable bob of my head. “Well, if there is anything else you’re looking to know—even about areas farther abroad. Before I settled down here, I lived many places around the country.”

  Watson stayed quiet for long enough that I thought I hadn’t hooked him. But he was obviously a little desperate for information. I could only imagine what they’d made of the odd story Jemma had slyly laid out for them.

  “Have you always lived in cities?” he asked. “Did you ever spend much time in the countryside—near the mountains, maybe?”

  “Oh, yes. In my younger days I liked to adventure. I’ve been many places, talked to many people.”

  He worried at his lower lip for a moment. “Did you ever hear any strange stories—about things happening on or near any of the mountains?”

  “Hmm.” I sucked in a breath slowly as if thinking it over. I couldn’t point him in the right direction since I didn’t know what that was. Jemma and I were counting on his bunch figuring that out. I could at least give him an encouraging nudge that there was something to find.

  “There was one place, years ago, people in town talked about things disappearing now and then,” I said. “They didn’t know why. The custom was to say the fae folk from the mountain took it. Silly tales. Not what you’re looking for.”

  “There might be something to it,” Watson said, eagerly enough that I had to suppress another smile. “Which town was that?”

  “I can’t remember for sure. I moved around so much back then. It was very close to the foot of the mountain—that much I can picture.”