I relaxed slightly. I couldn’t have handled another loss. Even Tabitha’s.
“That doesn’t change the fact you’re not welcome here.”
“I’ve surmised as much by the quality of your sauce.” He looked down at his glass with a slight grimace. “But that is beside the point for now. Have you forgotten our blood deal?”
“Blood deal?”
“I said that if the arrangement concluded to everyone’s satisfaction, I might have some information concerning your mother.”
I stiffened. The deal had gotten buried beneath the desperateness of the night, one emergency after another—and the idiotic gamble I had made with Vega’s son. I studied Arnaud’s waxen face. Did he know something about my mother, or was this just another one of his games? I lowered myself onto the couch opposite him, knowing better than to appear too interested.
“I don’t deal with scumbags who kidnap children for leverage,” I said.
“Yes, but one cannot argue with the results, Mr. Croft. Besides, didn’t you agree to the terms?”
Shame burned over my face. Instead of acknowledging his question, I asked one of my own. “What results?”
“Why don’t you tell me? Let’s see how much the weekend has taught you.” He grinned as he sipped the whiskey.
“Mayor Lowder hired you to protect his stepdaughter,” I said in a tired monotone, like a child reciting a catechism. “Which is why you deployed your blood slaves to the crime scene and ordered Vega and me to stay away from Ferguson Towers. Penny Lowder wanted her daughter dead so as not to jeopardize her husband’s reelection and her own grip on power.”
“Very good, Mr. Croft. And kudos for restoring dear Alexandra to her sentient form. Though you failed to follow my instructions to the letter at various junctures, I awarded you and the detective make-up points for saving the child. I understand she was placed in someone’s stewardship?” He flashed a teasing smile.
I squinted at him. How would he know that? Unless Lady Bastet had made a gross error in divination.
“Alexandra was placed in your care?”
“You seem concerned.”
“Well, gee, excuse me. I mean, why should I care that she was handed over to a cold-blooded killer?”
“Cold-blooded toward your kind, perhaps.”
“But warm and cuddly toward a half-vampire?”
“Or a half-Thorne.”
The fight fell out of me as I stammered silently. “She’s yours?”
Arnaud watched me above his glass as he took another sip of whiskey.
“I thought Sonny Shoat was the father.”
“The despicable Sonny Shoat was Penny’s employer,” Arnaud said. “And the vampire fancied her, yes, but she was looking for someone more powerful. When the opportunity presented itself, she exercised her seductions on me—which I could hardly blame her for—but vampires and werewolves have an embattled history, as you likely know. It could never have worked. When her bid for my protection failed, Penny turned to the mortal world.”
I remembered what Lady Bastet had said about two men of significance in Penny’s life: one weak, the other strong. Mayor Lowder had been the man of weakness, Arnaud Thorne the man of strength.
“So where money fortifies you,” I said, “politics now fortifies her.”
“Precisely,” Arnaud hissed.
“And that’s what you wanted us to find out?”
“For decades, your cognitive scientists have clamored that the surest way to assimilate new information is through direct experience. While the detective correctly deduced that I was bound by an agreement, had I told you all you ultimately learned, it might have gone in one ear and out the other. And besides, it would only have been my word.”
“Why, though? What does Penny pulling the mayor’s strings have to do with anything?”
“As I said, the best investors cover all sides of a trade.”
“Mayor Lowder promised you something in exchange for protecting his stepdaughter...” If not money, then what? I wondered. I thought about what vampires valued most. “Protection,” I said.
“We’d come to a certain agreement,” Arnaud confirmed.
“Protection from what, though?”
“From who, Mr. Croft. And I believe you can answer that for yourself.”
“His wife?”
“Our kinds don’t get along, but in rejecting her I made that enmity personal. I would have liked very much for you to have destroyed her. As I understand it, you came close. I don’t know that it would have mattered, though,” he added, as though to himself. “Wheels are already in motion.”
“Wheels? What wheels?”
“Look around yourself, Everson. An election year, a close race, and more and more New Yorkers becoming aware that not only is their city crumbling, it’s being overrun by undesirables.”
I remembered the ghouls I’d seen in the East Village, digging through the garbage in the light of dusk. “So, what, the mayor’s going to announce some sort of plan to combat the supernaturals?”
“In Europe they called it a purge.”
“But Penny’s one of them,” I said.
“Which is precisely why she fought so hard to expunge her past.”
“The deal you made with the mayor—it was that you’d be exempted from the purge, wasn’t it?”
“I think you now appreciate how fragile that agreement is,” he said.
Yeah, I thought with a tired snort, probably about as fragile as the deal Vega and I struck with the mayor. “But I thought you controlled the city’s purse strings. Why not leverage your financial power?”
He smiled bitterly. “It seems the mood of the nation is shifting. There is talk of the U.S. government bailing the city out of its debt. The country is hardly solvent itself, but more and more politicians are becoming uncomfortable with the power institutions like mine wield.”
“And if the bailout goes through, City Hall won’t need your money.”
“You’re a quick study, Mr. Croft.”
“So that’s what this whole thing was about, wasn’t it?” I said, anger shaking my voice. “To make me an enemy of City Hall, too. That way you’d have an ally should Mayor Lowder renege and come after you.”
“Oh, wipe that sourpuss look from your face, Mr. Croft. It wouldn’t be the first time the interests of vampires and wizards coincided. Your grandfather certainly wasn’t above joining forces when the need arose. Indeed, you’re sitting here today because of it.”
The foul fumes of resentment clouded over my exhaustion, leaving me feeling faint and sick. “Tell me whatever you know about my mother and get out.”
“Ah, about that. I’ve decided to give you a choice.” He reached into a coat pocket and held up the ring his blood slave had ripped from my finger the night before. The rearing dragon flashed dully in the faint light. “You can have the information on your mother, or you can have your grandfather’s ring.”
I automatically reached for the ring, then hesitated and pulled back.
“Very good.” Arnaud’s eyes sparkled as he pocketed the ring again. “About twenty years before his death, your grandfather came to see me.”
“He did?”
“Yes, it was just as unexpected for me. Following our campaign in Europe, we drifted apart, pursued our own interests. While I built my empire in lower Manhattan, your grandfather worked an assortment of odd jobs, at one point as a common magician, before choosing the insurance trade. It puzzled me. I had seen him on the battlefield, and believe me when I tell you he was exceptionally powerful. On the night he came to see me, however, he was exceptionally inebriated. The poor man could barely hold himself up. His coat and hat were waterlogged, and the state of his shoes told me he’d been kicking around the filthy streets for hours. He asked for another drink, and I obliged him. ‘They killed her,’ he murmured into his glass. ‘My God, they killed her.’”
I straightened. “My mother?”
“I can only presume. Her death annou
ncement appeared in the paper the following day. Sudden illness.”
That was what I had been told as well. “Who’s they? Who killed her?”
“Your grandfather never said. He left shortly after his arrival.”
“So why tell you?”
Arnaud gave a small shrug. “Who can say? Perhaps his drunkenness exaggerated whatever kinship he may have felt from our shared past. Or perhaps he had no one else to confide in.”
I studied the tips of my own filthy shoes, feeling cold and small. I thought back to Grandpa’s fury when I snuck into his locked study at thirteen. I remembered the flash of his sword, his stern admonition: You must not be foolish, Everson. Things heard cannot be unheard. Things seen unseen. Things spoken unspoken. And it is this last that is most important for those of our blood.
There was so much he hadn’t wanted me to know—about him, about myself. That had become clear to me over the years. But was it because of what had happened to his daughter, my mother?
“Well, then,” Arnaud said abruptly, placing the empty glass on an end table and pushing himself to his feet. “It seems all agreements have been satisfied. Until we meet again, remember what you’ve learned these last days. The city will be changing, and not for the better, I’m afraid. Not where our kind are concerned. Be alert for the signs, Mr. Croft. The changes may come quick and violent.”
His black cape floated up as he paced to the door, opened it, and then shut it behind him.
I remained on the couch, not sure whether to finish healing my injuries and take a badly needed shower or to curl into a fetal position, close my eyes, and wish the rest of the world away.
They killed her. My God, they killed her.
41
I decided to save the fetal position for another time. I willed myself to the shower, where hot water soon dissolved the dirt and dried blood and sent them swirling down the drain. I treated my injuries. I fed Tabitha, forced down a bowl of cereal, and climbed into bed. The last thirty hours collapsed against my buzzing consciousness, dropping me into a dreamless abyss.
I was awakened by knocking. I opened my eyes to a night-dark apartment. I had slept through the day.
The knocking resumed. I rolled onto my other side, away from the front door, but when the knocking returned a third time, I sat up.
What now?
After a stop in the bathroom to scoop water against my face and swish some mouthwash, I cinched my robe and, cane in grip, squinted through the peephole. I quickly twisted the bolts and opened the door.
“Caroline?” I stammered, turning on the floodlights. “What are you doing here?”
“May I?” she asked, stepping past me.
I locked the door behind her and took her coat, hanging my cane beside it on the rack. Though fae power moved around her, she wore mortal attire: a white blouse and long khaki skirt, leather boots.
She turned toward me, a heaviness in her eyes.
“What is it?” I asked.
She stepped forward until it only seemed natural for me to hold her. She slipped her arms beneath mine and around my back and nestled her head against my shoulder. She rocked me slowly, her warmth pulsating against me.
“My father’s cancer is in remission,” she said.
I nodded over her. “I’m glad to hear that. I really am.”
“Everson…” She paused and held me tighter. “I’m still getting used to this, to being fae, but I can feel things I couldn’t before. I never knew the depths of your emotions around, you know, us. I should have seen it.”
“Or maybe I should have just told you.”
She leaned back and studied my face. I wasn’t sure what she saw, but I didn’t try to hide anything. I was too spent. She kissed each of my cheeks, her lips soft against my whiskers. Healing energy whispered through me. When she looked at me again, I sensed her reluctance to pull away.
I couldn’t watch her leave a second time.
Inhaling the perfume of her magic, I leaned down and pressed my lips to hers. The kiss deepened, and we moved in a dizzying slow dance. Across the living room, into my bedroom, across the bed.
I pushed everything else away. My fallout with Vega, my mother’s death, Arnaud’s warning about a coming purge, Caroline’s marriage to a fae. I shoved them clear from the thrumming now.
When we came up for air, I looked down on her. With her golden hair fanning against the white bedspread and over the shoulders of her open blouse, her blue-green eyes gleamed up at me. I saw in them fear and at the same time a determination to hold onto her old world.
I smoothed each slender eyebrow with a finger and kissed her forehead.
“I do love you,” I said. “But are you sure about this?”
She nodded and pulled me back to her.
“I’m sure,” she breathed.
Purge City
Book 3
1
“Svelare.” The word vibrated from my mouth, dispelling the magical veil over my floor-to-ceiling bookcase.
I paced the length of the shelves as encyclopedias and academic texts rippled and became magical tomes and grimoires. At a flaking, leather-bound tome, I stopped and pulled it from its slot. A book of Final Passage.
I flipped it open to a marked page and set the book on a stand on my iron table. My gaze roamed across the ornate script to an old and sacred ritual that ensured swift passage for the deceased by calling forth a gatekeeper.
I took a resolute breath and nodded. I was going for it.
For the past week I’d studied the ritual, weighing the pros and cons of actually enacting it. But it wasn’t like the Order had left me a choice. After several inquiries into my mother’s death, the first sent four months ago, I hadn’t received a single response. Not even a boilerplate: “We appreciate your correspondence. Please be patient as we look into the matter.”
So, yeah, the Order could bite me.
I consulted the book and some notes I’d jotted into the margins as I pulled spell items from my storage bins. Before long, the table top was arrayed with candles, an urn of graveyard dirt, a funeral veil soaked with a copal resin, a bloodstone, and a manhole-sized standing mirror. On the table’s far end was the porcelain hair brush that had belonged to my mother when she was a girl, two strands of her light-brown hair caught in its bristles.
Two chances to get this right, I thought.
I walked in a circle, sprinkling the graveyard dirt into a symbol of the dead. I then placed five candles around the circle’s perimeter and, chanting, lit them in a star-shaped sequence. As the flames rose and thinned, the room seemed to dim and cool by several degrees.
At the center of the circle, I propped the mirror on its stand and then placed the bloodstone and a strand of hair drawn from my mother’s brush before it, covering both with the funeral veil.
“And now for my insurance…”
Focusing on the coin pendant that hung from a chain around my neck, I incanted softly, lips, tongue, and tone imbuing the family symbol with energy. The coin began to hum over my sternum. I switched chants, encasing the coin in a small shield.
If I calculated correctly, the energy building up in the coin would overwhelm the shield spell in about five minutes. A time bomb for if things went sideways.
“Gatekeeper,” I whispered in an ancient tongue as I stood from the circle and drew my sword from my cane. “You who grant passage to the dead and the dying, who safeguard the In Between. I beseech you to carry our beloved to the world beyond, to spirit her soul with all haste.” Wincing, I drew the sword’s blade across my palm. I held the wounded hand forward, allowing the blood to drip over the artifacts in the center of the circle.
“Take her,” I said.
The charcoal smell of the copal thickened, and the room dimmed further. A sound like distant thunder rumbled in. Black clouds filled the mirror and began twisting into a deep vortex.
“She is ready to pass, and time is short,” I said, the spell elements amplifying the power of my mother’s h
air, wrapping it in a potent aura of fresh death. “Take her!” I repeated, fog issuing from my breath now.
The rumbling deepened and a powerful entity, more shadow than form, emerged into the circle and drifted over the blood-spattered objects.
Aiming my staff at the circle, I cried, “Cerrare!”
The portal behind the mirror slammed shut. The gatekeeper jerked up and then circled several times, as though sensing its confined state. When the entity stopped, empty sockets, impossibly deep, stared back at me. A whispering voice spoke, raking me with chills.
“She is already claimed.”
I went mute as I studied the being as ancient as humankind. Left to its work, a gatekeeper was harmless. When tricked and trapped, not so much. But I needed to know what had happened to my mother, and a gatekeeper could tell me.
“Yes, I know,” I responded between grunts. Though I’d closed the portal, I could feel a force beyond, like a riptide, pulling back toward the In Between. Even at my full strength, I wouldn’t be able to withstand the pull for long. Beings from that plane didn’t belong here.
“I need to know how she died,” I said.
The room rattled around me. “Release me, mortal.”
“I will once you tell me.”
“Release me or I will claim you.”
I planted my feet and leaned away from the riptide until I was nearly sitting, but the force only strengthened. My right foot stuttered through the graveyard dirt. The containment broken, a frigid hand emerged from the circle and seized my ankle. The cold bit into me like blades slicing into bone. I let out a ragged cry, but I was determined to get an answer.
“Tell me … what happened … to my mother!”
A second hand seized my knee and pulled me toward the portal. This wasn’t going to work. I had to abort the summoning.
“Liberare!” I shouted.
The portal blew open like an emergency hatch on an airplane. The gatekeeper disappeared into the mirror, sucked back to its realm. But its ice-cold hands hadn’t released me.
The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Page 53