Torchlighters

by Megan R Miller

  Listen up. We have a list of them. Go to any church and ask the pastor for a copy of the texts and they will be glad to tell you all about it.

  For Daelan’s sake, you’re standing on one right now. That’s right, if you follow the old lore the continent you’re standing on right now is the body of a dead ancient.

  Mistriev raised the sea and broke the old world into pieces when he fell. They say that’s where the islands came from. They say he was the ancient in charge of life, once upon a time, too.

  It kind of makes you wonder how Lazrael felt taking his soul, right?

  …is it rude to assume they’re related? Rude and probably sacrilegious, right? Anyway Lazrael is in charge of collecting and processing the souls of the dead. Senjivaan guards the flow of dreams and subconscious spaces; to any of you smoking that whisperweed out there, watch out for those two because you’re closer to them than you’d be comfortable knowing about if you had any idea what that meant.

  Cordeliasa is fate and fortune. If you’ve ever heard of Lady Luck, she’s who they’re talking about. Meanwhile Kiriya is in charge of the flow of time.

  There are dozens, and each one has a particular job for keeping order in the cosmos. But people know their names. It’s not a secret because you can’t call these things down like you can an angel or a demon. And I guess that’s why so many folks out there just assume they don’t exist.

  Well if you ask me that’s a load of hogwash. Angels and demons are different beings from different planes, after all, how arrogant do you have to be to assume that’s all that’s out there?”

  The Hellwatch Station was full, but the bustle stopped cold when Joey Trezza threw open the doors. Sam walked alongside him, keeping his head down. His throat was dry. Never mind that he’d actually watched Callum kill the men he was being brought in to talk about, but dealing with the Hellwatch was a completely different situation than anything in the streets had been. There were no judgmental eyes on the streets, just ones that wanted to kill you.

  The station itself was more or less exactly what Sam had expected it would be. The floor was polished stonework and wooden work desks dotted the no man’s land of the lobby. There was a line of chairs beside the door where a few people waited to speak with officers either because of grievances or because they’d been brought in and were trusted not to just leave.

  A few Hellwatch operatives craned their necks at Sam and his father as they walked through. On the far side of the room, a secretary sat, dictating notes to a long tailed imp perched on the lamp next to him.

  The imp held a long ream of paper that was beginning to gather on the floor over his clawed fingers as he grumbled and scrawled every single word the secretary said. Sam cocked his head to get a look; there were a lot of extraneous details in there, including every time the man had said ‘um’.

  Joey Trezza leaned on the counter and after a couple of words with the secretary that sounded hundreds of miles away to Sam, they were led into a spartan office with a massive man behind the desk. Barghest had always seemed large to him, but in the little room in a chair that was sized for a normal person he seemed positively gargantuan. The shine of the floor and the ostentatious woodwork stopped where the office began, transforming the bustle of the police station to a tightly regimented and sterile environment.

  “Joey Trezza,” Barghest said. “An unexpected surprise.”

  “One of my sons is dead, you accuse the other of murder and you didn’t think I was gonna show up?” Joey asked. He managed to make it sound casual but Sam had known his father his whole life and had learned how to tell when he was biting back fury.

  “First, Sam is an adult and can speak for himself,” Barghest said, “and second, if he’s innocent, why did you feel the need to come along?”

  “If it wasn’t me it’d have been Ophelia,” Joey said. “Or was it that you were hoping she would so you could put her through the ringer again?”

  “I have questions,” Barghest said, “like I do any time there’s a dead body. How would you like to have a seat, Mr. Trezza?”

  Joey didn’t break eye contact with the Hellwatch captain. He hooked a boot around one of the two chairs on this side of the desk and it scraped against the tile floor as he yanked it back, then dropped hard into the seat to punctuate the gesture. Sam, on the other hand, sat quietly and looked between the pair of them.

  As nervous as he was, and as much as he wanted to take his father’s side, Barghest had a point.

  “You needed a word with me,” Sam said, breaking the awkward beat of silence. He did his best to sound reasonable around the quaver in his voice. “I’m here. So let’s talk.”

  “Where were you two evenings ago? The night of the fifth?” Barghest asked.

  “I went to see a girl,” Sam said. The words sounded hollow, even to him. In the back of his mind, he was seeing Corvin’s dark hair, dark eyes, and the trembling gun in his hand.

  “Is this girl available to corroborate your story?” Barghest asked.

  Sam started to turn to look to Joey, uncertain.

  “You’re talking to me,” Barghest said. Sam’s eyes returned to him in a snap. “It’s an easy question. Can you get the girl you went to see to confirm?”

  “I’m not sure,” Sam said, sinking into his chair. “I don’t want to drag her into this, I’m already causing her enough trouble.”

  “This girl have a name?” Barghest asked.

  “Obviously,” Joey said.

  “I don’t remember asking you,” Barghest said.

  “She told me it was Charity,” Sam said, cutting in before they could start again. “I don’t know her last name, I barely know her at all.”

  He wriggled farther into his seat, but he had a line to follow now. A reason for his discomfort that wasn’t having watched his supposedly deceased brother drive a knife into one man’s windpipe and a second one’s eye socket. An explanation that wasn’t ‘I’m lying to your face’.

  To both of their faces.

  “Let me get this straight,” Barghest said. “You mean to tell me you went to see this girl the night after your brother’s funeral and you don’t know her well enough to know her last name?”

  There was a beat of pause before Barghest ran the palm of his hand over his face.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “You’re looking for a murderer,” Sam said, speaking quickly now. “I know what she’s doing isn’t explicitly legal. I know it has its own set of complications and I might be getting myself into further trouble here, but I’m not going to throw her on the gears for you. As a man there are lines I’m not willing to cross.”

  By the time he was finished, he nearly believed the words himself and there was a little rush that came with selling the rouse. This must be how Elysia felt most of the time. For a flicker of a moment, he felt like he might actually belong in the family business.

  “Alright, Sammy, I don’t think he wants all the details,” Joey said, then he turned his gaze on Barghest, quirked a brow and asked, “Do you?”

  “Well, since your family is so well known for your good behavior, I think I can let you off with a warning this time,” Barghest said. “Just, uh, try to stay away from the night guards.”

  Sam didn’t have to fake his blush.

  “It’s not easy to find love in the city, is it, Captain?” Joey asked.

  “Get the hell out of my office,” Barghest said in a deadpan. Joey got to his feet with a lazy mock salute and Sam ducked his head as he slipped through the door. Neither of them spoke until they were almost a block away from the station.

  “A prostitute, huh?” Joey asked.

  “That one kind of came to me on the spur of the moment,” Sam said.

  “Charity? You may as well have named her Cinnamon,” Joey said.

  “It isn’t easy to think under pressure,” Sam said. “That man is like four times my size.”

  “You did well enough. Despite what I think, I know he’s not that much of a pushover,
” Joey said.

  “Well, he trained Mom,” Sam said, shoving his hands in to his pockets. They walked a couple more paces before Sam glanced up at his father and spoke again, almost hesitantly. “Is that why he hates you so much?”

  Joey snorted.

  “It’s probably part of it, but I’d say ‘Crime Lord’ is a bigger part,” he said.

  “But she was Hellwatch, wouldn’t she have had a problem with you, too, once?” Sam asked.

  “Honestly, it may have been part of the appeal,” Joey said.

  “May have been?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah, isn’t there just a bit of appeal in knowing you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing?” Joey asked.

  A series of images flashed through Sam’s mind. Every moment he’d had with Callum recently, and then, unbidden, Corvin Verida’s narrowed calculating eyes.

  “I take it that’s what it was for you?” Sam asked. “You liked her because she was a hellhound?”

  Joey sighed.

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” he said.

  “It’s a long walk home,” Sam said.

  Joey pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “I had plans,” Joey said. “Falling in love with your mother wasn’t a part of them.”

  “So what, it just kind of happened?” Sam asked. He kicked a rock and sent it skittering a few feet down the brick road.

  “Wish I had a better explanation than that,” Joey said.

  “When did you know?” Sam asked. “Like, how did you figure it out?”

  Joey turned on his feet so that he was walking backwards, and gave Sam an appraising look.

  “Closer to this Charity than you were letting on?” Joey asked.

  “Come on, Dad,” Sam said.

  With one last sigh, he nodded.

  “Let me just start from the beginning,” he said. “Like a lot of good stories in Daelan City, this one starts with a renegade demon.”

  Joey turned back around to walk and Sam skipped a step to keep up as he listened.

  “One of my guys had gotten into illegal summoning. He wasn’t trained proper, he called up something that was a little too spicy for him and the damn thing crumpled him like a piece of old paper. The Hellwatch got called in. Surprise, your mother was one of the officers on the case.

  “When she cornered the rakshasa, she was alone. They’d split up to search the area and she happened to come across the demon first. I watched them fight. She was…hell, Sammy, she was magnificent. In that armor, with those wings, and that angel’s fire. She shoved it back through the hole it crawled out of and by the time my boys came out to ask her to meet with me, she was exhausted and in no shape to turn them down.”

  “It almost sounds like you kidnapped her,” Sam said, raising a brow.

  “Yeah,” Joey said, “I’m pretty sure that’s what Barghest thinks, too, but it wasn’t like that. Not really. Well. Maybe that first night it was, but I wasn’t planning on anything carnal at the time. I asked her to help me figure out where the leak was coming from. Which one of my guys was behind all the illegal summonings.

  “By the time I’d explained the situation, that this was the third time it had happened and that we could stop it once and for all, she agreed to help me and after a while I started to realize that even exhausted as she was that first night there was no way in all the hells I’d have kept her if she didn’t want to stay.

  “Your mother has a will of iron, Sammy. She was hard and determined and more than capable of kicking my ass if she needed to. And while we were looking into all that, we saw some pretty fucked up things. She never lost her head, no matter how bad it got.”

  Sam kept his eyes on the bricks as they walked.

  “I have to imagine not everyone approved?” Sam asked.

  “Hell no,” Joey said. “That didn’t matter. I knew she was everything I needed. She had what it took to keep the boys in line, myself included, and by then she had my heart in her pocket. They could complain all they wanted, I wasn’t about to give her up. Now you tell me why you’re asking because I’m starting to suspect there actually is a girl.”

  “Not quite,” Sam said. A shaking hand, a lowering gun, the scent of piney aftershave. His mother had been Hellwatch.

  Being Gate Street wasn’t exactly the same thing.

  Callum almost felt bad that his conversation with Sam had been cut so short. It hadn’t been hard to convince him to let it go for now; Sam had other things to do. Other things that had been Callum’s fault.

  Ah, well…this was important, after all.

  Tess was standing on the corner beside the radio station when Callum arrived. She had her hands folded in front of her. Her black curls were pinned behind her head with a silver dragonfly clip to keep them out of her eyes, and she wore a dark blue skirt with off white lace.

  Short skirts were more fashionable, but hers fell to her heel. There were certain things that were considered to be unacceptable for an aristocratic lady. She glanced up at him sidelong.

  “Why do you wear that mask?” she asked.

  “Well, I don’t want you to see my face,” he said, smirking.

  “I can still see your eyes,” she said, reaching up and brushing her fingers over the cheek just beneath the eye hole of his mask. Tess smirked back at him. “You know that isn’t what I meant.”

  “I’m afraid if I told you it would defeat the purpose,” he said.

  “Then you have no need to answer me at all,” Tess said, and turned to walk. She kept speaking to him over her shoulder. “My contact here is a clever man but he’s very private.”

  “Which explains why he broadcasts his voice over the radio,” Callum said, folding his arms and following.

  “It’s not the same as showing his face,” Tess said. “There’s a difference.”

  “Not that that would matter to some people,” Callum mumbled. There was a little quirk of a smile on her lips.

  She nudged the door open and he followed. It was a shorter building than he had expected, one story with a large metal broadcast tower spiraling up above the rest of the city, even higher than the tram system. He could see something glinting up there, but it was impossible to tell what it was from all the way down here.

  The interior, however, was more expected. There was a thick brown carpet along the floor and dark green wallpaper in the lobby. No one sat at the lobby desk. In fact, now that he glanced back over his shoulder he could see that the ‘open’ label of the sign was facing inward.

  “This way,” she said, and nodded down a hallway. She kept walking until she reached a door. There was a small window and a light above it with a thin coating of red paint and a wisp darting around inside as it tried to escape.

  The interior room had the same brown shag carpet along the walls that the rest of the building had on the floors.

  Callum could see through the window that the man sitting at the desk was some kind of cambion. There was a tint to this glass, as well, that made it difficult to tell what kind.

  He spoke into a rounded disc with what looked like a summoning circle cut out of it. Callum leaned in to get a better look when an impact hit the window and he staggered back, staring into the twisted, mocking face of an imp.

  Tess covered her mouth as she silently laughed at him.

  “Tixi works here,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  “You mean Tixi was summoned here?” Cal asked, looking back at her with a raised brow he knew she couldn’t see.

  “Well yes,” Tess said, “but she also works here. She likes caramel squares and every time Rhys tries to summon a new imp she shows up instead.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything like that,” Callum admitted.

  “It happens more often than you think,” Tess said. “A lot of the time that’s how you get cambion, but to be fair it usually isn’t with imps.”

  “Often enough to make them one of the big seven demons,” Callum said.

  “It’s ki
nd of a misnomer,” Tess said. “The Big Seven are just the demons and angels that can interbreed with humans, not the ones that do it most often. Some species just can’t cross with humans, our genetics aren’t compatible in the same way angelic and demonic genetics aren’t.”

  “Did you forget why I’m here?” Cal asked, a note of irritation creeping into his voice.

  “No,” Tess said. “You’re investigating Cambion Callum Trezza’s murder.”

  She looked up at him with a cool expression. Something in her tone told him she knew what was up. Something in the steel of her gaze told him it didn’t amuse her at all.

  “And his mother is a nephil,” Callum said, carefully. He had to sound like he was talking about someone else. He couldn’t take this too personally.

  “And yet,” Tess said, “all of her children with his father are one or the other and not both. The bloodlines can’t coexist, and she’s the reason why we know that.”

  “Ophelia Trezza isn’t a summoner,” he insisted, folding his arms.

  “She was once,” Tess said, “before she joined the Hellwatch.”

  His mother knew how to summon. At least, she knew how to summon and probably wasn’t licensed to do it or else she would have been doing it for the Torchlighters this entire time. Right?

  It was so hard to imagine her as being one of those aristocrats with imps riding on their shoulders looking down her nose at everyone around her. His mother never acted that privileged. He heard what Tess was saying but he just wasn’t sure he could believe her.

  “I know it can be difficult to find out someone you thought you knew well isn’t entirely the person you suspected them to be,” Tess said. It was a double edged comment.

  “What would you know about it?” Cal asked. He hesitated, but he knew he had to say it if he was going to keep his secret from her. “She’s nothing to me.”

  “Is she?” Tess asked. “Then perhaps I have you wrong, but I don’t think so.”

  “What does that mean?” Callum asked.

  “Some people are better at reading voices than others, weren’t you just saying that?” she asked. But before he could answer, the door to the room opened and the cambion from inside slipped back out.