“So, she stole both scrolls. But why hide them… oh. Gavriella’s grave was the last place she expected you to ever look, wasn’t it?”
“She was right.”
Nicola was shaking so hard, I was scared that she’d crack her skull against the gun. “Mi dispiace,” she kept saying.
My mother squeezed Nicola’s hand.
As angry as I was at being betrayed, I couldn’t blame Nicola. She’d been afraid, and Isaac had spent a lifetime proving to her that he considered Levi expendable. Faced with that decision, how could she have acted differently? I wasn’t a mother, but I was loyal to my friends. If there had been a way to keep them from being hurt, these people who I cared so much about, I would have taken that too. No wonder she was so relieved when I’d agreed to help her at first.
I could understand, but I still couldn’t forgive her. Not yet.
I planted my hands on my hips. “Is it time for the big villain speech now?”
Montefiore laughed, looking so heart-stoppingly like his son for a second that my breath caught. “Funny girl. Why not? I’ve always enjoyed a good villain monologue.”
My mother snorted. I bit the inside of my cheek while shooting her a “behave, there is a gun” look.
Isaac held out his hand. “But first, the scrolls please.”
I clutched the tube to my chest, the cuffs jangling, and Isaac sighed.
“Fail to hand it over and Hans will shoot the women. Even twitch wrong and, well…” He shrugged, a monster in luxury brands.
Nicola pressed her fist into her mouth.
Talia clamped her lips in a thin line. She’d shifted to keep both Hans and Isaac in her view. If Mom tried something heroically stupid, I’d kill her.
I held out the tube, but he had to tug it out of my hold. For one precious moment, Team Jezebel had possessed all the scrolls. There went my chance to destroy them all.
“Seriously?” I said. “Hans? Because Viktor or Jafar weren’t available? Where do you hire your henchmen? Bad Guys ‘R’ Us?”
“Yes,” Isaac said, grinning. “We handpick them from around the world, giving them names sourced from only the finest of Hollywood clichés.”
Hans exhaled through his nose like this was not the first time he’d encountered people being idiots about his name.
“Now,” Isaac said. “Where to start?”
“How about when you murdered my dad?”
Say it out loud, you bastard.
Talia let out a strangled sob. Fuck. I briefly closed my eyes. I’d never told her the circumstances of Adam’s death.
Isaac was all paternal concern. “How tragic. Was Adam murdered? I had no idea. And here I thought I saw him the other day. Speaking of your father, he is to be commended on how he hid you all this time. In plain sight.” Isaac tucked the metal tube with the scrolls into his deep front pocket. “I didn’t realize you were a Jezebel until the other night when you were outside my house with Levi.”
The night before Nicola had hired me. I winced.
“To be fair, I didn’t immediately realize it then either,” he said, “but then I remembered how Yitzak, a level-five Van Gogh and very loyal to my people, ended up in isolation in a Nefesh cell because of an assault complaint against him. By you. That got me thinking.”
“I’m sure that was a full-time job,” I said, keeping a careful eye on the gun.
“I stayed up all night putting the pieces together. Why did Adam decide to cut and run after Gracie Green supposedly died?” he said. “Why did you suddenly pack in your business after that Jezebel died for good?”
“Let’s not mince words, Isaac. Gavriella didn’t die of old age. You tortured her until her body was so battered that it gave up the fight.”
Gavriella’s body falling into my arms, so light. Bruises covering her body, her arm broken at an odd angle and one single clot of blood caking her left nostril.
I blinked away the vision. “So, you put all of that together, and believing I was the next Jezebel, decided to use me to find the two scrolls that Deepa had hidden.” I paused, but Isaac still didn’t correct me that one of them was fake. Dad’s con held. “Backstabbed by one of your own. That had to hurt.”
“She paid, in the end. Though it wasn’t supposed to go that far.” Isaac frowned at the German. Ah. He’d killed her and made it look like heart failure, despite Isaac wanting her alive.
“Did you kill Misha Ivanov, too?” I asked Hans.
He wrinkled his nose. “Old people. They are so flammable.”
That was just… wow.
Talia’s brow was furrowed, her mouth agape, and she kept rubbing her temple like that could restore order and turn the world back into something that once again made sense. I should have tried harder to press the truth on her in tiny drips, instead of drowning her in a torrent.
I kept my expression neutral, refusing to give my enemy more ammunition. “Your Ten is down to how many now?”
The silver SUV with the dented bumper that I’d seen on the highway was parked next to Moriarty. Isaac had been following me. Did he have more people hidden out there or was this a bare-bones intimidation?
Isaac wagged a finger at me. “You don’t get to know everything.”
“Come on, share. I do so love facts. If Deepa stole the scrolls sometime in the past couple of months, how come you only tried to torture the location out of her last week?”
Isaac paused for a long moment, then shrugged. “She was careful. The pilgrimage was our first opportunity to confront her.”
“Even then she didn’t talk.”
“She talked enough,” Hans said. “She gave up the bamah.”
“Big deal. You still needed me to find it for you.” I raised an imaginary glass in cheers. “Quite the stroke of genius for her to bury the scrolls in the one place you’d never think to look. Now that’s good use of Gavriella’s murder. You could say Deepa killed two birds with one stone.”
“Do you harass my son this constantly?” Isaac said.
My smirk fell from my face. “Keep him out of this.”
“Oh, but he’s so very much a part of it, don’t you think?”
“He was,” I said. “Then he chose you.”
Isaac did a double take.
I laughed. Bitterly. “Your mole didn’t report that back to you? My payback plans were too much for the poor boy to stomach.”
“Is this true?” he said to Nicola.
“Yes,” she spat out. “All you’ve ever done is hurt him and deny him any chance at happiness.”
Isaac frowned, tapping his finger against his lips like he was rearranging things in his head.
If he’d done anything to Levi… I flexed my fingers, but no dagger pressed into my palm, only the cold press of metal. I edged closer to my jacket, tossed by the top of the grave. If I could just get to the bobby pin in the jacket pocket…
Hans tutted me, motioning with the gun to stay where I was.
“Have I covered everything to your satisfaction?” Isaac said. “Because now it’s my turn to request something from you.”
“If I’m being honest, there wasn’t a lot there that I didn’t figure out for myself.” I snapped my fingers. “Hey, did you really convince Jackson to accept Nefesh into that youth shelter he supported? You know, to kidnap those teens and tear their magic from them to sell to the highest bidder?”
My mother lunged at Isaac with a snarl I’d never heard come out of her. Even Isaac flinched.
Hans jerked her back.
“You bastard,” she said. “You used our party leader for that?”
I felt far less guilty about dumping that particular truth in her lap than I had about Adam’s murder. I also intended to lie like a motherfucker when I recounted that conversation for Jackson’s benefit. In my version, Isaac gave him up.
Isaac ignored Talia. “My request, Ashira.”
“Go nuts.”
“Bring me the scrolls from the library.”
I cupped a hand to my e
ars. “I didn’t hear a please in there.”
“Hans, shoot the women.”
“No!” I threw my hands up placatingly. “Talia may not mean anything to you, but Nicola is your wife.”
“She represents my old life,” Isaac said. “There is no place for her once I have the Sefer Raziel HaMalakh.”
“You mean, once whoever is left of the Ten partakes of it equally.”
Isaac smiled.
“None of you were ever going to share it with the others, were you?”
“With great power,” he said.
“Comes great responsibility, Spidey?”
“Comes great desires.”
I flicked a glance at Talia’s black eye. “Nicola and my mom in exchange for my scrolls. You have no way into the library and no way of ever achieving your dream of immortality without me, so this is not up for negotiation.”
“You have your deal.” Damn. That was too easy. He’d intended that trade. For how long? Since Nicola had called and asked if I’d found the bamah? “The handover will happen when you give me the rest of the Sefer,” he said. “One hour from now at Lockdown Cybersecurity.”
“You’ve got me in cuffs way the hell out from anyone who can help me. Tone the evil bullshit down a notch and make it two.”
“Two then, but not a second later.” Isaac looped his arm through his wife’s as if he was escorting her out for the night and not dragging her, begging and pleading, to the SUV.
Hans grabbed Talia.
“Ash.” She reached back for me.
Don’t be scared. I’ll come for you. I love you. “Mom,” I croaked out.
“That was a really expensive dress, Ashira.” She shook her head. “It’s ruined now.”
Hans jammed the gun into her back, forcing her to the car.
Laughter burbled out of me. Oh, Mom. Her Talia-ness calmed me. Maybe that had been her intention all along. She knew which buttons of mine she pushed.
I didn’t follow since I couldn’t risk anyone being shot. Also, Hans had Transporter magic so I literally couldn’t get the jump on him. I dove for the bobby pin in my leather jacket, desperate to get the cuffs off, watching my mom get farther and farther away.
I bent the metal into shape with my teeth and shoved it into the cuff’s lock, but it wouldn’t click. Yes, I was rushing it, but how could I slow down when I had seconds before Talia would be put inside the vehicle?
Isaac opened the driver’s side door and got into the SUV. “Don’t be late,” he called out.
The bobby pin bent double.
Jaw clenched, eyes narrowed, I pulled the pin out, straightened it, and reinserted it once more, forcing myself to find the rhythm of the lock.
This time the bobby pin caught and the cuffs fell off me. I was sprinting toward the SUV before they hit the ground. Magic rushed up under my skin, my blood armor locking into place.
Gunfire cracked and a bullet bounced off me.
“Hans,” Isaac snapped through the open window.
His minion kept the gun pointed at me a moment longer, before lowering it slowly and climbing into the car. They roared off, the taillights fading away as they turned left out of the gates and were lost to view.
Two hours. That was all the time I had to come up with a plan and tell Levi that his worst fear had come to pass about his mother.
I dropped my armor and reached for the wooden ring. We were down, but we weren’t out. Nicola was not going to die. My mom was not going to die. Isaac was not going to win.
I was not a mark.
Did that still mean killing Isaac? I’d absolved the congregation after they’d tried to bonfire me. Even Lux had been forgiven for what she’d done. Isaac had murdered my father though, and he’d never face justice for that. He didn’t deserve mercy. Except… wasn’t that precisely the time to show it? Who, in the end, was mercy for?
In the case of the Church, it was for Eve. Isaac wasn’t an innocent.
I slid on my ring. My time in the shadows may have been short, but it had indelibly marked me. Isaac would learn that the hard way.
Chapter 26
“You—no—” Rafael threw himself between me and the stone pillars in the library.
“You want Nicola or my mom to die?”
He hesitated. “It wouldn’t be the first time that we’ve made sacrifices…”
“Rafael!”
“Of course not, but you cannot simply hand the scrolls over. It would be one thing if you had your magic, but there’s every chance they’ll bring a null. You could be a sitting duck.”
“Put the scrolls in the tube. The team is waiting for us at my house. We need a strategy meeting.”
He didn’t move.
I sighed. “Look, if there is a null, this team meeting is even more important to solve that problem. All the scrolls in one place, Attendant. We end this tonight.”
“Or we watch Isaac become a god on earth. Unstoppable.”
“That was always the risk.” I tossed him the tube. “Be a good sport.”
“Oh, I’ll be a cracking good sport.” Rafael slammed his hand down on the first illuminated pillar and I used the dark wooden ring to get out of there before the magic affected me.
Arkady, Levi, and Priya sat in my living room, unsure of why Miles had told them all to assemble here. I’d phoned the Head of Security on my way back from the cemetery to put the grave back to rights and I’d had to tell him what happened, but I didn’t want to repeat myself on multiple phone calls. Once Miles had stopped cursing me out, he’d agreed to call the others.
“What did you say to Mimi, pickle?” Arkady said, changing track mid-sentence from telling Priya about one of the House operatives being pregnant. “I could hear his teeth gnashing through the phone. That’s not good for him. He already has to wear a mouthguard at night so he doesn’t grind his molars into little stubs.”
“What?!” I swiveled my head to look directly at him. “Miles does what?”
Arkady grinned. “Oh, he is so stressed and it is adorable.”
Rafael popped into the room and nodded at me. Ashen-faced and somber, he leaned on the wall by the window, checking the street below.
Levi leaned back in his chair, his fingers steepled and his expression unreadable.
“What’s going on?” Priya said, glancing from Rafael to me. “And why do you look like Laura Ingalls Wilder crawled out of her grave?” She fanned the air in front of her face. “You sort of smell that way as well.”
“Sorry. You’re not that wrong.” I sat down, snapping my fingers to call Mrs. Hudson over. Picking her up, I stroked her fur for fortification.
She sniffed me, sneezed, then butted me in the stomach with her damp nose.
“The bamah didn’t refer to the amulet,” I said. “It was a high place. Closed, too. Gavriella’s grave. Inside her coffin were two scrolls: the fake one Adam had made and Chariot’s real one. Deepa Anand, who was one of the Ten, suffered a crisis of conscience after the death of her daughter and decided no one in Chariot deserved immortality. So she hid both their real scroll and the fake, believing them to both be authentic, in the one place that the rest of the Ten would never look.”
“That’s kind of brilliant,” Priya said.
That was the easy part to share.
“And?” Levi said, in a deceptively calm voice.
I dragged my fingers through the puppy’s fur, seeking comfort in her warmth. “Nicola didn’t hire me to find them. Isaac did. He played me and now he’s got their two scrolls, and both our moms. The German assassin is with him and I have approximately ninety minutes to trade our pieces of the Sefer for Talia and Nicola.”
Blood seeped out of our walls in long gashes. Rafael jumped away.
“Fuck!” Priya pressed back against the sofa cushions, one hand thrown up over her face.
Levi reacted to bad news with illusions. I’d made a note to that effect on my palm in pen, but it didn’t stop me from pulling my feet off the floor and away from the blood oo
zing out from the planks like a ghosthunter’s wet dream.
“Levi,” I said with a calm I didn’t feel. “Stop.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. The air turned fetid and a low growl rumbled from wall to wall.
Mrs. Hudson raised her head and growled back at each wall in turn.
The room shook, everyone except Levi clutching furniture, terrified. Levi. Right. I checked my note, hoping it was correct.
“Please shut this down,” I said.
Levi’s nostrils flared, his chest rising and falling in harsh rasps, but the illusion vanished.
Arkady glanced around once as if to assure himself he was safe. “Where’s the tradeoff happening?”
“Lockdown Cybersecurity,” I said.
“Oh.” Priya cracked her knuckles and opened her laptop. “There’s got to be some weak spot we can exploit there. Professional cybersecurity, my ass.”
“Right.” Arkady flashed her a thumbs up. “And Levi could illusion us to—”
“Assume Isaac will bring a null.” Rafael’s voice cut across Priya and Arkady’s brainstorming, silencing them.
Pri’s hands stilled on her laptop, mid-type. “You can’t go up against them without magic.”
Levi prowled the perimeter of the room. “Two women at gunpoint, an assassin, a null, my father’s possible immortality, and fifteen years finally coming to a head.” Stormy blue eyes met my brown ones. “Did I miss anything?”
Time spun out between us, a million variations of Levi’s reactions happening in an instant. He left, he stayed, he comforted me, he cursed me. What story was this about to be?
“That about covers it,” I said.
He nodded. “So how do you want to tackle this?”
I blinked rapidly at the moisture in my eyes, lowering my head, until I was back to my kickass in-control self. “The main problem is how to take out the null. I’ll be frisked before I get anywhere close to Isaac, so I can’t bring in anything suspicious. Once magic is back in play, our chances of success shoot up.” I injected a light-hearted note into my voice. “Until I throw my Attendant back into a coma because someone has torn the Kiss of Death from his inert body to use on me.”
Revenge & Rapture: A Snarky Urban Fantasy Detective Series (The Jezebel Files Book 4) Page 25