by Devin Hanson
“Ilyena?” I called softly.
Her head snapped around at my voice and her blue eyes glittered at me, catching the sunlight streaming through the window. For a long moment she stared at me, then she tilted her head back and let out a soft howl. She shifted back to her human form and her howl broke down into a groan.
She sagged against the window weakly and I ran across the room to catch her before she fell to the ground. “Hey, it’s okay. Take it easy.” I picked her up like a child and settled her onto the bed. She was panting and her face was drawn and pale.
“Alex,” she mumbled.
“I’m here.” I smoothed her hair back from her forehead. “Relax. I’ve got you.”
“You saw it?” she asked weakly. “The demon?”
“I saw it.”
“And you do not fear it?” Worry clouded her features and she clutched at me. “Alex, that creature is more dangerous than you can imagine!”
“It was my mother,” I said. I sat on the edge of the bed and held Ilyena’s hand.
Her eyes widened. “Caradoc knows this? That she manifests?”
I frowned thoughtfully. “I mentioned it. He didn’t seem worried.”
“There is difference between manifesting in real life, and manifesting only to you, Alex.”
“You’re the first person who has ever noticed her when she’s shown up. Honestly, I was beginning to think she was just in my head.”
“You need to tell Caradoc this.”
I got up and walked over to the window, leaving Ilyena on the bed. The sexual tension in the room was completely gone. Even simply holding her hand felt strange to me. “Why? I don’t owe David anything.”
“He has hired you, hasn’t he?”
“Yeah, to prevent a theft. There was nothing in the deal about my personal life.”
Ilyena struggled to sit up and managed to get her back against the headboard. “The demon’s presence here isn’t a coincidence, Alex.”
“I know that. She’s here because I turned twenty-one. Are you all right?”
“Just pain. It will pass. I believe your birthday has little to do with the demon’s presence.”
“Oh, come on. Why else would she be showing up now?”
She hesitated. “I do not know, for certain.”
“Does it have anything to do with why the two of you went to the cathedral?”
“That was Caradoc’s path, and no business of yours.”
“He told me he doesn’t interfere with the lilin and they show him the same courtesy. Why would Mahlat want to steal from David?” I crossed my arms, irritated at the secrecy.
Ilyena turned her face away, refusing to meet my eyes.
“Whatever. I’m going down to check on Ethan.”
I left her in my room and clattered down the stairs, straightening my hair out and putting it back in a ponytail. Vague irritation with Ilyena and the whole situation sat in my chest. Ethan was frying something on the stove when I got to the kitchen and he turned around to wave at me before going back to his cooking.
I slumped down on one of the island stools and rested my forehead against the cool marble. “Ugh.”
“Trouble?” Ethan asked.
I sat up and sighed. “No, not really.”
“Your, ah… friend. She seems nice.”
I snorted a laugh. “Yeah, well.”
“I didn’t know you were into… um.”
“Girls?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not.”
It was Ethan’s turn to cough out a laugh. “Didn’t seem like that from the doorway. I’m not judging,” he added hastily.
I remembered the way Ilyena’s hand had felt brushing up my stomach and bit my lip. Ethan turned around and caught the look on my face. “Stop smiling,” I glared at him.
“Hey, if it makes you happy, who am I to comment?”
I heard Ilyena’s boots padding down the stairs and I gestured at Ethan to be quiet. Ilyena came into the kitchen and leaned against the island next to me. The weakness and pain seemed to have gone, with only a slight hitch remaining when she lifted her arms to stretch. She had tied her flannel high up and when she stretched I got a view of her whole midriff all the way up to the bottom swell of her breasts. She wasn’t wearing a bra.
“What’s for lunch?” she asked.
“Burgers. Did you decide you were hungry?” Ethan kept his eyes studiously on her face, which impressed me. I didn’t have that kind of self-control.
“Starving.” Ilyena smiled at me and pulled a paper towel off the roll and folded it up. She tucked it into her pocket then turned around to lean her elbows against the island. “I have found a path.”
“How would you like it?” Ethan asked.
“As rare as you can make it.”
Ethan busied himself forming another hamburger patty from the ground meat. “Okay, this will only take a minute, then.”
I looked at her a little suspiciously. “When?”
“Your friend showed it to me when we arrived.” Ilyena said quietly.
“So how did you two meet?” Ethan asked.
“She works for David,” I supplied.
Ethan started getting burger supplies out of the fridge and lining them up on the island. “That’s fast work,” he said with a grin.
“You know how it is,” Ilyena said, her blue eyes locked on mine. “You see something you like and you go for it.”
I felt the color rise in my cheeks. Ethan pulled Ilyena’s burger off the griddle and put it on a plate for her. “One burger, barely done.”
“Perfect, thank you, Ethan.” Ilyena started making her burger, then leaned over and whispered, “Go put some underwear on and pack some extra clothes. You will need it for your path.”
I stared at her and she winked before biting into her burger. Juice flowed down around her chin and dripped onto her plate.
“I’ll be right back,” I told Ethan then hurried up the stairs to my room. I shut the door and after a moment’s hesitation locked it behind me. I wanted to get a pair of underwear on, not have Ilyena barge in on me while I was naked. I didn’t have a lot of clothes, but I had a change at least, and a brand-new pair of underwear to put on.
I made it back downstairs as Ilyena was eating the last of her burger. From what I could see as she popped the last piece into her mouth, Ethan had charred the outside of the patty but barely cooked the inside. He might as well have just slapped a handful of raw hamburger inside a bun for all his brief cooking had done.
“All set?” she asked.
I nodded. “Sorry to eat and run, Ethan. We were only stopping by for a few minutes.”
“Oh.” He looked disappointed but shrugged. “You found something to lead to Elaida?”
“After a fashion.”
“What was it?”
“We, uh—”
“Elaida works for other auction houses besides Sotheby’s,” Ilyena interrupted my fumbling attempt at lying. “We found a receipt for an auction that happened last week at a smaller house. We’re heading that way to question the establishment.”
“Elaida bought something from an auction house?”
Ilyena produced a scrap of paper that had some fine print on it. “An old, carved skull, from the Habsburg family,” she read.
“Habsburg, isn’t that Austrian?”
“The royal line,” Ilyena agreed.
“Well!” Ethan wiped his hands on a paper towel. “It’s good you found that receipt then. I wonder what she could have wanted with an old skull.”
Ilyena shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it’s valuable to the right mother.” She slipped her arm through mine. “It’s been a pleasure, Mr. Bishop. Thank you for the lunch.”
“Of course. Let me walk you to the door.”
Once outside, I waved to Ethan and let Ilyena drag me down the drive to where I had parked my scooter. At the curb, I pulled Ilyena to a halt.
“Where did you find a receipt?”
She pulle
d the slip of paper from her pocket and handed it over. It was a receipt from the motorcycle store where we had purchased Ilyena’s helmet and jacket.
“But… then Elaida didn’t buy a skull?”
“Oh no, she did. Come on, we have a long way to go.”
“Wait. Wait, Ilyena. Go where? How did you know Elaida bought a skull?”
She sighed. “I know because I saw it in the path. We have to go to Beverly Hills. There’s going to be traffic on the way.”
“Are we in a rush? There’s an apartment only a few minutes away that I want to look at.”
Ilyena hesitated then nodded. “Sure. But we need to be in Beverly Hills before five thirty.”
Chapter Sixteen
The second apartment on Lei’s list was a five-minute drive from Ethan’s house. I parked perpendicular to the curb between two cars and climbed off the scooter. If I had been driving a car, I probably wouldn’t have found parking for several blocks.
I didn’t bother locking my helmet to the scooter as I didn’t plan on sticking around for more than a few minutes. “You coming?” I asked Ilyena.
“I must stay by your side,” she said with a shrug.
“Ah. Right. Hey, my path say anything about this apartment?”
Ilyena turned about, looking up and down the street then at the apartment we had parked in front of. “No. What is this place?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out.”
From the outside, the only thing unusual about the apartment was it had a room for rent. With the housing market the way it was in Los Angeles, you practically had to marry into a third-generation family in order to find a place to live.
We walked up the short flight of steps and into a courtyard. It was Tuesday after the lunch hour and the place was all but deserted. From an open window on the second floor I could hear the canned laugh track from a daytime television show. The faint scent of marijuana smoke drifted through the air.
“Are you looking for a place to stay?” Ilyena asked doubtfully. “If so, David could help you find a better place. This is a hovel.”
“You see the manager’s office?” I asked, ignoring her question. I did a slow turn, looking at the doors on the first floor. “Actually, never mind.” I pointed at apartment number three. “That’s where we’re going.”
The door to apartment three had been broken in half then scabbed together with two by fours and plywood scraps. Through the window facing onto the courtyard, I could make out a familiar scene. The apartment had been destroyed with the same thoroughness and attention to detail as my own had been.
“Wow,” Ilyena said, looking over my shoulder. “That looks personal. I think the manager’s office is apartment one.”
“Why does it look personal?” I asked. I couldn’t help a little of my exasperation coming through. Why did everyone think it was something I did that made it deserved?
“It is very complete.” Ilyena pointed through the window. “Every couch cushion is ripped. One or two is understandable, but to make sure every cushion is wrecked takes effort. You don’t go through that effort without a personal reason.
I sighed. “Let’s see if the manager is in. I’d like to find out who lived here.”
Apartment one was the source of the marijuana smell. I knocked on the door before going to peer through the window. What I could see through the blinds was hazy with smoke. After a minute the door cracked open and caught on the security chain.
“Who’s there?”
“Police,” I said, holding up my cellphone case before tucking it away in my pocket again. “Open up, we have some questions for you.”
“I have a medical permit,” the man protested guiltily. “I have a bad kidney, peeing is like pulling double-strand barbed wire through my dick.”
That was an image I didn’t need. I grimaced and shot a glance at Ilyena, who looked fascinated. “It’s not about the pot. We want to know about the tenant who skipped out on you.”
“Why, he in trouble with the law?”
“You filed a complaint, didn’t you?” I asked on a hunch. “We’re just following up.”
“I didn’t file nothin’.”
“Then it must have been the apartment owner. Are you going to open the door?”
The door shut and I heard the chain rattle. When it swung open fully, I got a blast of smoke in my face that made my eyes smart. The manager was a greasy, overweight man sporting a handlebar mustache and a bald spot the size of a dinner plate. What hair he had left was wildly unkempt and patchy. His eyes were beet red.
“You sure this isn’t about the pot? You have to answer truthfully or its entrapment.”
“This is California,” I informed him seriously. “You could have a whole farm in here and the only thing I could ask is if you were paying your taxes.”
I didn’t know if that was true or not. I had no interest in getting high and had only been on the periphery of discussions about the changing laws.
“Unless you’re dealing?” Ilyena asked. “You aren’t dealing are you?”
“No—nope.”
“Great. What can you tell me about what happened in apartment three?”
He shifted nervously then went to the door, peered out and shut it. He slid the safety chain in place and threw the deadbolt. “I don’t want any trouble,” he mumbled.
“You saw what happened?” Ilyena asked.
“No. Well, some. A big guy came through, looked like a juicer, you know?”
“Juicer?”
“Someone who does steroids,” I told Ilyena.
“Yeah. Big meathead. He walked right up, kicked the door in. I called the cops,” he looked away nervously, “but you know how it is. Unless someone’s been shot, they don’t care.”
More likely he had been blasted out of his gourd and didn’t call the cops for fear of being busted for possession of narcotics. “Then what happened?”
“A big racket. He was smashing everything in the place in a big hurry. Came out with a computer case under one arm. Couldn’t have been in there more than a few minutes. I went to check on the apartment after he had left. Everything was destroyed, he even flattened the spoons. Who does that?”
On a hunch I got my phone out and flipped through my photo gallery until I found the picture I had snapped of Dimitri the marid. “This the guy?”
The manager squinted at the phone and shrugged. “Could be. Didn’t really see his face. Looks the right size though. How many big guys like that could be around?”
Well, well. It wasn’t confirmation that Dimitri had been the one who had trashed my apartment, but it was nice to hear my guess about a marid being responsible was on the money. “You might be surprised. What happened to your tenant?”
“He came back from work, took one look at the place and split.”
“He just left, huh?” I shared a speculative look with Ilyena. “Can we take a look around the apartment?”
“You have a warrant?”
“No, that’s why we’re asking permission.” I tried not to roll my eyes. God damn armchair lawyers.
“No warrant, I can’t let you in.”
“You want us to come back with a warrant?” Ilyena demanded. “You hiding something you’d be afraid of us seeing?”
We almost had him. I think the threat must have ruined his buzz, because he lost the fogged look and squinted at us. “Aren’t you two a bit young to be policemen? Let me see your badge again.”
“You could have made it easy,” I sighed. “The judge isn’t going to like you holding out on us. We’ll be back.”
I unlocked the door and hustled Ilyena out.
“Why’d we leave?” she asked. “He was close to breaking.”
I shook my head. “He didn’t have anything to hide, he was just being paranoid. And this is America. Impersonating a policeman is a felony crime here.”
She was silent until we climbed onto my scooter and got our helmets on. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
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I twisted around a bit until I could see her face. “I’m not sure what I was looking for. At least I know now that I wasn’t alone.”
Something flickered over her face and was gone before I could put my finger on it. “Oh. You were robbed too?”
“Just my laptop. Everything else I owned was completely destroyed though. Just like in that apartment.”
I got the scooter going and pulled away from the curb. I wasn’t too terribly worried about the manager reporting us for impersonating an officer. Besides, he didn’t have our names and I doubted he would even remember us when his high wore off.
“So where in Beverly Hills are we going?” I called back.
“Christie’s Auction House. Take Santa Monica Boulevard to Bedford Drive.”
I wasn’t super familiar with the ride down to Beverly Hills, but I didn’t think it was more than a few miles. Ilyena had said we needed to be there before five thirty, and it was barely two. We had plenty of time. How bad could it be?
There were times I hated Los Angeles. Not just a background irritation or occasional spikes of frustration; I’m talking full-blown psychosis, pulling at my hair, throwing things, screaming at the top of my lungs. Traffic rarely got me truly angry. I was a lifelong LA native and knew traffic and bad drivers were a fact of life. If you got on the freeway, you were guaranteed to have at least one idiot almost kill you.
I have never experienced road rage like driving from Hollywood to Beverly Hills on a weekday afternoon. It was three miles! Three! There were even two lanes going both directions. How was it possible for so many people to act so selfish?
To make things worse, there was an accident in the middle of an intersection at San Vicente Boulevard and two accidents on Burton Way a quarter mile to the south. Traffic in the whole city had ground to a stop. And, as typical among Los Angeles drivers, every other person on the road thought if they leaned on their horn, traffic would magically clear.
It didn’t. If anything, the constant cacophony drove blood pressure even higher and desperation to just, get, moving, caused normally sane people to lose their shit. It wasn’t your normal day of asshole drivers and myopic mergers. This was biblical.