by DB Reynolds
“Kato Amadi,” he interjected, in that deep, growling voice of his.
“—my boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend?” Gabler repeated in such surprise that Grace was insulted. What? He didn’t think she could snag a boyfriend?
“You were together this morning?” Harding asked, still studying Kato.
“And last night, as well,” Kato lied smoothly. Except it wasn’t really a lie, was it? They had been together. So what if he’d been a fucking statue, and then come to life to fight off a rampaging demon? “We rose early this morning—”
“Are you from around here, Mr. Amadi?” the detective persisted, clearly more interested in Kato than in Grace, even though she’d been the one with access to the office, the one who’d worked there every damn night.
Kato smiled easily, meeting the detective’s hundred-yard stare with a friendly one of his own. “I’m a transplant,” he said, surprising Grace. Colloquialisms were the hardest aspect to learn of a new language, and he’d had less than a day. “From a small village you’ve probably never heard of.”
Harding studied him a moment longer, and then shifted his penetrating gaze to Grace. “Dr. Gabler tells me you typically work nights.”
“That’s true, but last night was Friday, and we had early plans this morning.”
“When did you leave the office?”
Grace frowned as if trying to recall. What she was really trying to remember was when everyone else had left, so there’d be no one to gainsay her alibi. Of course, there should’ve been an electronic record of who came and went, and when. But the system had mysteriously failed last night. Or not so mysteriously. More of Kato’s magic. She and the big warrior were going to sit down in the very near future and discuss exactly what was going on. But not right now.
“It must have been close to eight when I left,” she said finally. “Maybe a little after.” It suddenly occurred to her that the good detective might ask for IDs from both of them. In fact, she was surprised he hadn’t already. Probably because Gabler had clearly recognized her. Not that identification would be a problem for her, anyway, but she somehow doubted Kato’s magic included the sudden appearance of a photo ID. Hell, he didn’t even have a local address, except for her condo. Talk about fast courtships. They’d just met last night, and he was living with her already. She would have grinned at the idea, but this was too serious. They needed a distraction, so she made a big deal out of leaning over to look around the two men, as if anxious to see her work space. Which wasn’t far from the truth. She really was worried that Gabler, or one of the other researchers, might have attempted to secure or inventory her files for her.
Bracing her hand on Kato’s arm, she . . . good God, the man’s muscles were like stone. She winced inwardly. Another bad analogy. Yeesh. She really had to stop that. But damn, Kato’s rock-hard arm held her perfectly steady as she raised onto her toes and tried to see over Gabler’s rather sloped shoulders.
“Is that . . . I need to check my desk, my files. Has anyone done an inventory yet, Dr. Gabler?”
Gabler’s phone rang at that moment. He gave her a distracted look and picked up the receiver, then said something sharp to the caller and tucked the instrument against his shoulder so she couldn’t snoop. She managed not to roll her eyes. Like she cared who called him.
“Can I go down there?” she asked, shifting her gaze between Gabler and Harding, not sure whose permission was necessary.
“This is a crime s—” Harding started to protest, but Gabler interrupted.
“The documents we deal with are quite unique,” he said pompously. “And each researcher has their own projects. Grace is the only one who will know if something is missing from her station.”
Harding frowned, clearly not liking it, but he nodded his permission. “Don’t remove anything from the scene. If you notice something missing, advise me at once, and . . .” His lips flattened unhappily. “Obviously there will be damage. But if you could record—”
“I understand,” she assured him. “But . . . is it okay if I straighten things up a little? It will help me take inventory.”
He thought about that, then nodded. “Go ahead. Just . . . maintain a record.”
Grace smiled. “That’s pretty much all we do here, Detective. I’ll be careful.”
Sliding her hand from Kato’s forearm, she twisted her fingers with his and started past the two men, but Harding stopped her. “I don’t think Mr. Amadi needs to be there.”
She gave the police detective a distressed look, and thought about the time her mother’s housekeeper had thrown away her favorite stuffed animal. Her father had heroically rescued the poor thing from the trash, but it had been a traumatic few hours. She’d loved that bear. She still had him.
The first tear rolled down her cheek. Harding’s gaze shifted minutely, catching the moisture gathering in her eyes.
“He won’t touch anything,” she said, voice trembling. “And he can help me stand the file cabinets back up.”
The detective looked down to the far end of the room, where all but one of her file cabinets had been tumbled on top of each other. Of course, only the one mattered, but Harding didn’t know that. He scowled and turned back to study Kato’s calm expression. “You don’t move anything else, got it?”
Kato dipped his head. “As you say.”
Harding’s brow dipped at the formal language, but then he stepped back and waved a hand for them to go past. “Remember what we agreed, Ms. Van Allen.”
“I will,” she assured him, clinging to Kato like the traumatized geek she was supposed to be. And she was traumatized, just not for the reasons they thought. Because she knew what had done all of this damage, and it was pretty fucking terrifying.
The long room was brighter than usual, all of the overhead fluorescent lights on full. Typically, only about half were lit, with most of the researchers preferring to use their individual desk or workstation lights, which were more suited to the kind of work they did. But tonight, the damage was starkly evident beneath the fluorescents’ pitiless glow. The demon had popped into existence on top of her desk, but hers wasn’t the only area that had been damaged. Kato’s fight with the creature had ranged up and down the entire room, and it showed.
“Geez,” she whispered, gazing around. “I don’t know where to start.”
“With the originals,” Kato reminded her quietly. “We’re here to further our own investigation, not Detective Harding’s.”
“Right.” She’d gotten caught up in all the mess and forgotten their one, urgent goal. “They’re in that one.” She gestured at the lone standing cabinet, then turned around to stare at the tangle of metal and paper that was her other three cabinets. “But we have to make this look good. If I help you, can you lift those things?”
He grinned down at her. “I’ll try.”
KATO SAW THE same twisted mess that Grace did, but he also saw much more. Or rather, he felt it. He didn’t need her to tell him where the scrolls were. They were tugging at him, as if the sorcery in the scrolls was reaching out to the dark magic in his soul and grabbing hold. Because he was a living repository of the Dark Witch’s magic, no matter that she was long dead. If Kato was alive, so was her magic. These scrolls were ancient, worlds removed from the Dark Witch’s power, for all that it was her magic that had created them. And they were hungry. There wasn’t enough magic in this world to nurture them.
But now there was Kato, and they wanted to be fed.
He rubbed his gut absently. It had been a long time since he’d felt the clawing demand of the Dark Witch. His energy had been denied to her, not only for the millennia he’d spent trapped, but the decades before that, when he’d lived and fought at Nico’s side.
He hadn’t missed her demands, and he sure as hell was not happy to sense their return. That the scrolls were the product of the Dark Witch’s magic was no longer in doubt, if it ever had been. But neither was his determination to destroy them.
Without
another word, he began lifting the heavy cabinets as if they weighed nothing, feeling the contents shift awkwardly as he moved them one by one. He was aware, on some level, that most men wouldn’t have been able to do this, but appearing normal for the sake of Harding and Gabler wasn’t high on his list of priorities right now. He needed to lay hands on the original scrolls, needed to stop their hungry gnawing on his soul that felt like it was being ripped from his body piece by piece.
“Kato?”
He didn’t hear Grace’s voice until she placed a soft hand on his arm. He froze in place, and then set aside the five-foot tall metal cabinet, full of documents and who knew what else, that he’d been lifting as if it weighed nothing. He looked down at her hand, her fingers slender and pale, not able to circle even half the thickness of his arm. He looked up and met her light blue eyes.
“Are you okay?” she asked, her eyes full of worry. For him. That was unexpected. The Dark Witch and the others in the village had cared about his well-being, but only insofar as he had value for them. Nico and his other brothers had cared, but they were men. Warriors. Death was part of their lives, and danger had been what they’d lived for. There’d been no sentimental concerns for each other.
But Grace wasn’t worried for him as a thing, a receptacle of magic, and certainly not as a fellow warrior. She was worried for him as a man. That knowledge stirred feelings and emotions in his chest, in his heart, that were something new, something almost painful in their infancy.
“I’m all right, Grace.” He smiled gently and put his hand over hers. “I can be single-minded in my focus sometimes. I didn’t mean to frighten you. Should I slow down?”
Her expression lifted, her eyes warming in relief. “Maybe a little. We don’t want you looking like a superhero.”
A superhero. His smile grew. “No chance of that, amata.”
Her eyes lightened further at his use of the endearment, which was all the super he needed to be.
“These things are totally trashed,” she commented loudly, an observation clearly meant for the other men’s ears. She paused and looked over her shoulder, then continued in a lower voice. “Do you remember which one has the scrolls?”
The filing cabinets were now standing more or less in a row, some of their drawers haphazardly sticking out. He lowered his mouth to Grace’s ear, and was rewarded with her small shiver of response, before he whispered, “They’re in the leftmost cabinet, top drawer, near the back.”
Grace gave him a surprised look. “You can sense them that well?”
He raised his eyebrows in a shrug. “Something like that.”
“Okay. Here.” She slipped him a small key. “I’ll create a distraction and you get the . . . you know. Maybe shove them under your shirt or—”
“I’ll figure out something,” he said dryly. “What will you—?” He jerked back in surprise when she abruptly began screaming about a rat, while stomping on a pile of paper and smashed wood that had once been a bookcase. He saw Gabler and Harding react, and then both men were rushing their way as Grace continued her performance.
Kato’s first impulse was to laugh, but he didn’t want to waste her effort, so he quickly turned and unlocked the file cabinet, then reached into the drawer and grabbed the paper folder with the scrolls in it. The scrolls’ magic rolled up his hand and over his arm like a lover’s caress, and he had to clench his jaw against the sensation. Folding it all loosely, he shoved the entire folder into his waistband under his shirt, where it switched its affection from his arm to the bare skin of his stomach and chest. He shuddered and forced the damn things into a sort of suspended state, then turned and grabbed Grace around the waist, lifting her away from the supposed disturbance in the rubble pile, just as a good boyfriend would do. Or so he assumed. He’d bedded many women, but he’d never had enough of a relationship with anyone to know the rules.
With one arm holding Grace snugly up against his chest, so that her feet weren’t touching the floor, he pretended to study the wreckage. “Do you see anything?” he asked Gabler, who was likewise searching the mess.
Harding had already given up the hunt, muttering under his breath as he stalked back to the entrance where two of his men now waited for him. But Grace’s boss kicked around the rubble a bit longer, before finally clapping his hands together and looking up at Kato.
“Probably just the bits and pieces settling,” he announced. “The museum’s diligent about rodents for obvious reasons. I doubt that’s what she saw.”
Grace played it to the hilt, her fingers digging into Kato’s chest, crushing his shirt in the process. If she pulled a little harder, she was going to expose the hidden scrolls. Not that he’d have permitted Gabler to take them anyway. Hell, the scrolls themselves would probably strike out at anyone who tried. They were immensely content at being so close to his own dark soul.
“We should go,” Grace said, her distress quite convincing. “It’ll take hours to inventory all of this, and I’m not doing that until the floor is cleared. None of the others are working like this,” she added, with an accusing glare at Gabler.
“Can you at least tell if anything’s missing?” he asked, somewhat plaintively.
“I can’t. I mean, nothing stands out, but I can’t swear that they didn’t take anything until I inventory all of my files. Who did this anyway? Do we even know? Were any other offices broken into? Isn’t there video?”
Gabler made a disgusted noise. “Not a frame of it,” he nearly spat. “There was supposedly a malfunction, and that can’t be a coincidence. Whoever did this knew enough to disable the system. The museum’s security people are looking into that angle.”
Kato watched bemused as Grace stared at Gabler in disbelief, and then transferred that same look of confusion to him. It was quite a performance. She would have been right at home in the stage plays performed back in his day.
“So it was only this room that was ransacked? But why?’ She seemed to really be getting into the role. “We don’t have—” Her words cut off with a squeak when Kato tightened his hold. She was a terrific actress, but she’d make a terrible thief.
“I’ll take you home,” he said, shifting his hold to one that was more comforting. “It’s been a long day already. You can start fresh tomorrow.”
She nodded. “That sounds good. If that’s all right with you?” She looked at Gabler.
“Of course,” he agreed absently, his attention on Harding and the others near the exit. “Your boyfriend is right. This has been very stressful for all of us. We’ll bring everyone in fresh tomorrow and get this cleaned up in no time.”
“Okay, I’m sorry—” But Kato was already hustling her out of the room and out of the museum, not stopping until they were in the parking lot next to her car.
“Did you do something—?” she asked, but again, Kato stifled her words, urging her into the car, and then going around to climb into the passenger seat.
“Drive,” he told her. “You don’t celebrate until the victory is yours.”
“Whatever that means,” she muttered. But she started the car and backed out of the space, then headed down the twisting road toward busy PCH. The sun had set while they’d been in the museum, and the night was now almost completely dark. “Did you do something to the video?” she asked again.
“I don’t understand your video that well, but magic has a life of its own, especially dominant magic. And my magic is very powerful, even more so during battle when I’m using it at full strength. It’s a defensive instinct. It could very well have disrupted the flow of your electricity and corrupted your museum’s security protocols.”
“Huh. That could come in handy if we ever resort to a life of crime.”
As if he’d ever use his magic to commit crimes. He slanted a look her way, hoping she was jesting.
“Where am I going?” she asked instead.
Kato didn’t answer right away. He was concentrating on the rolled-up scrolls, pulling them out from beneath his shirt, relieved
to have them away from his skin. It had begun to feel as if they were literally burrowing into his flesh, trying to merge with the simmering flame of his magic.
“I’m reluctant to return to your condo,” he told her finally. “The demon who killed your neighbor may still be lingering in the area. If we bring the scrolls within his reach, it will only increase the danger.”
“We can go to my parents’ place in Malibu,” she said immediately. “It’s actually closer than my condo, and only a few people would know to look for me there.”
Kato could have told her it wouldn’t matter whether anyone knew where to look for her, that the dark magic in the scrolls would draw demons like a siren’s song regardless. But they had to go somewhere. Besides, she said this house was close, and if he was able to act quickly enough, he could construct a shield that would contain the scrolls’ magic for a time. Not forever, but hopefully long enough for him to nullify whatever the enemy had planned and to discover who that enemy was. The appearance of the scrolls and Grace’s interaction with them could very well be nothing more than chance. But Kato didn’t believe in chance, not where magic was concerned. Someone had steered those scrolls Grace’s way, sensing her magic and knowing what the result would be if she worked on them. His instincts told him Sotiris was involved, but that was too easy. He didn’t even know if his ancient enemy was still alive.
But whoever it was, they needed a place to rest, and somewhere he could study the scrolls more carefully.
“Have you been to this place since you obtained the scrolls?”
She frowned. “No, I’ve been too busy.”
He nodded. “Your parents’ home it is, then. With a proper place to work, I can gain us some time, which should be enough to seek out and destroy any demons already summoned.”
“Why not just destroy the damn scrolls, and be done with it? Won’t that do the same thing?”
“No,” he said forcefully. “This is the Dark Witch’s magic, something I know well. If you destroy the scrolls before killing any demons already freed, they will become permanent residents of this dimension, and you don’t want that.”