Hell, In a Troy (Lopez Time Book 2)

by Phillip S. Power

  “She’ll speak to any who wishes to hear. It would not be outside of what she might have ordered them to do. Baphomet is not an easy being to serve. The others either, though they hold back from us more, most of the time. It could also have been their own plan. They didn’t tell me what they intended. Not even where they were going. No one was more surprised than I, to find them and my son, dead. No one called. I found out yesterday morning when I turned on the news.”

  Troy nodded. It was a likely story, even if not true.

  It fit perfectly what most people would expect. She didn’t, being close to free of sadness. Her friends and child all died but she was fine. Ready to flirt and get pregnant again. Which, he had to think, wasn’t a mistake on her part.

  “So, Baphomet uses you as a brood mare? How interesting. Our files have you down as the leader of your cult. It’s different than that, slightly, isn’t it?” Troy didn't have anything at all to go on but that the face of the woman was essentially human. That meant he could tell a few things. One of them was that, while she wasn’t planning to stab him with a steak knife, the lady was a bit upset over the questions.

  Not about the deaths of her friends or her kid. That Troy had suggested she might just be a tool for an ancient god. At least she hadn’t seemed upset about those other things in any real way. Her face hadn’t even been flat. Just mildly interested in the conversation at those points. There was a pulsing in her energy field. After a moment, her face went back to politely interested, instead of worked up.

  “I see. You’re using magic to control your emotions. Well, that’s better than it seemed.” He was just being mean, he realized. Mainly because Detective Tran pushed his arm from across the table.

  “Manners, Officer Lopez. This is a grieving mother. How she chooses to cope with her pain isn’t our business. Not if no laws are being broken. Still, we’d love to talk to you at greater length, if you have time in the next few days? Let me get you our numbers. We could get yours, as well?”

  The words were polite, and after a moment, Troy understood that she was being totally correct to the situation. If they took Cheyenne in by force, the woman would probably fight. Possibly to the death, like her friends. Pushing too hard was, possibly, going to end up at the same point. Someone had placed a spell on the soldiers and news crew but, even telling them to attack Morgan hadn’t been illegal.

  There was simply no provision under the law for things like that. It couldn’t be proven at all, which meant that all they could really do was ask her questions. Of course, if it came to it, he was going to make the woman vanish into the desert. It might not make a difference.

  Not if a god was behind her actions for real. Even one locked in a cage might have powers that mere people couldn’t hope to beat.

  He bowed his head a bit, feeling oddly calm, thanks to the focus he was holding over Tran, himself and Rosa, who had cleverly left the room and not let anyone else come in. Even if it was losing the place cash.

  “There is truth to that. I forgot my manners for a moment. I truly am sorry for your loss. Yes, though, it would be good if we could talk? You said things that make me wonder if we’ve misunderstood things in this case. Even if not, it would be better for us to know what is going on than not, even if there isn’t a lot we can do about it, legally.” It was a way out, as if he couldn’t just punch her in the head at a few thousand miles per hour.

  Oh, he wasn’t Bey, or even Eve but he could, in a pinch, protect his friends. His people. This was his city. He was a police officer there, and until the moment he quit, it was his duty to keep the peace. For a moment, it became very hard not to kill the woman at the next table. Thankfully, Tran distracted him by standing up. She even moved in and touched the cult leader on the hand gently. It seemed nearly real. Like she honestly felt sorry for her.

  Maybe she did. They were both mothers. That Troy wasn’t going to get that kind of thing on a deep level wasn’t some kind of novel idea. He’d never gotten that kind of a bond. Even his own mother hadn’t been that close to him. At least he’d never felt it going the other way. His mother had been distant. Not evil or anything but demanding and harsh more than was probably needed. She wasn’t a horror that had kids that she either sacrificed or who were fated to do that. That was the cult leader’s claim, if she could be trusted. He didn’t see any reason to think that was real.

  There had been one thing that he’d known from his days back at the night club. Liars were plentiful in the world. Good liars were rare but existed. They’d make things up about anything, if it would serve them at the moment. Not that vampires were incapable of telling untruths. That was so far from true as to be silly for him to even put forward in his own head. It was in their very nature to deceive.

  That didn't mean he loved the idea of it being done to him. What he could do, was keep his face calm and in check. It was probably a bit blank seeming. That would mean he seemed like he was close to attacking, if the mage knew anything about vampires. His focus was all on the bit of hiding he might be able to hold over them all.

  Taking him by the arm, gently, Denise got him out of the building. It felt odd, leaving an obvious criminal free like that. It was part of the job though. You had to have proof and a legal right to arrest people. True, they could have taken her in for questioning, even against her will. Which might have ended in death. The only one he was willing to risk at the moment was Cheyenne Stodermier. Even Rosa was too important to him for the time being.

  It meant that, even after they were driving away, he tried to keep them all hidden from magic. The big difference was that he switched things up, not being in the room with a mage. He added power to the whole thing. That would help lock it into place. Making them glossy to other magic, when it came to locating them. Rosa was done first, still being in the room with the creature.

  Then Tran.

  If anyone was going to be at risk, it was going to be him. The one that didn’t sleep. It made him harder to sneak up on, if nothing else.

  After a while, Denise smiled, looking straight ahead.

  “We can work with that. Especially if she fucks up enough to talk to us again. I wouldn’t. Even if I were me and not her. Talking to the cops is a great way to end up arrested. How smart do you think she is?” The words were a bit sarcastic near the end.

  “Brighter than I like in my enemies. We need to write her story down though. Everything. Even if it’s wrong, it might give us insight into her mind. How she thinks and all that. We kind of have to take it as a story, unless there’s evidence it might be real. What she was saying doesn’t totally mesh with what Leslie and Nevi said. Forest either. Then, they didn't have a lot of reason to trust us at the time, did they?”

  “Nope. On the good side, they’re available, right? At your place? I don’t know how we get there. What’s the drive like from here to Vancouver?” From her face, she was kind of determined.

  “Long. Now, if I do it right, I might be able to make a bridge between here and there. Then it will take less than an hour. We could use the phone as well. Magical things, telephones, don’t you think?”

  He meant it, he realized. The darned things were annoying at times but still… Mystical. Otherworldly, when he thought about it. You tapped a few buttons, then could speak to people all the way across the globe. It was important to notice things like that. Otherwise a person might just become a jaded individual, indeed.

  Tran sighed then.

  “Sure, sure. No wonderful cross-country tour for me tonight then. You’re making this really hard, you know that, Lopez? Vacations in exotic locales… I mean, sure it wasn’t in the brochure for the job but… C’mon.” She was smiling as she said it and didn't sound serious at all.

  “And cut into your gym time? Never. In fact, I can write up our little escapade while you do that? You get a lunch hour anyway. Take a long one and do a set for me?” Of what he didn’t know. It had been a while since he’d done anything in the gym. At the academy, to be exact. It had done
nothing for him at all but been mandatory.

  “Nah. Not until noon, anyway. That was pure luck back there. I wouldn’t have figured on looking for her at the funeral. Then… I hadn’t heard about that at all. Have the bodies even been released? I need to call and find out about that. I have a friend at the city morgue. You know…”

  Troy didn’t. He was friendless that way.

  “You give him blowjobs in exchange for information on dead bodies? That’s a great plan.”

  “Her.”

  Troy nodded, as if that would change how she got the data.

  “So, boxes of chocolates?”

  There was a smile then and a head shake.

  “Not exactly. Cinnabon. It’s a trade secret, so don’t go spreading that around. If you use it… Make sure to get the extra tub of frosting. I mean, don’t cheap out on the bribes, right?”

  “I remember those. I used to love them. Now they’d leave me on the floor in pain for hours. Or maybe not. It wouldn’t be fun though.” He could handle the sun at nearly noon, now. The agony of eating probably wouldn’t be worse than that. It just wouldn’t be worth it.

  Not that he knew of.

  “Good then. Junk food is even legal. Gotta love the law.” He stopped then and nodded, as if to himself, a few times. “I mean that too. You have to love it. It’s the law now. New rules just came in last night.”

  Instead of laughing, since it wasn’t all that funny, his partner acted like it could actually have happened.

  “Thanks for the heads up on that. Now… I’ll still leave the report on this to you. Try to get everything? I have some calls to make. Then we need to get on that picnic of yours.”

  That was kind of true. He’d forgotten all about it, being focused on other things. Like hiding them from a cult of magic using freaks.

  “I have the number for my house.”

  “You have a land line?” She sounded amused by that for some reason.

  “Yep. My old roommate, Zack, put it in. We barely ever used it. Everyone has cell phones but it was all about keeping his grandparents happy. So it’s still there, with an old fashioned receiver hooked up and everything.”

  “All right then. As long as there’s a good reason to pay for a phone no one is there to use. Except, here we are… I wonder if they’ll pick up? Or even know what it is.”

  “I know. It will probably be a shock, I bet. Nevi might get it though. She isn’t as young as she looks.” Not that she looked like a kid. About fifty. It was, he thought, closer to one-twenty or so. Most really old people didn’t look their age.

  He certainly didn’t.

  Then, he was more than old enough to know what a land line was as well.

  It was, on the surface, ridiculous. The thing there had been that Zack had used his own money. For a long time, they hadn’t had much, so when he’d made a special deal for the line to be activated and then paid for, to the tune of twenty years, Troy hadn’t asked a lot about it. It had seemed strange at the time but was his friend’s money. Now it might actually work out for him.

  When they got back to the station, fifteen minutes later, since Tran didn’t bother speeding, he wrote the number down. Then he started the needed reports. The only real difference was that he didn't try to pretend it was about anything except collecting data on his part. Everything that the woman had hinted at made it in. As perfectly recalled as he could manage.

  There were, in hindsight, several things that he hadn’t gotten at the time. One of them was how Denise had touched the hand of the mage they were talking to. It was a bit out of place. The thing there was that he’d seen a lot of other people do that kind of thing.

  All of them greater demons.

  Which was interesting. It could be that one of them had taken the place of his partner. Roy knew her but so did everyone else at the station. That would be hard to pull off. More to the point, it was possible but not worth the effort just to watch him putz around at a job that probably didn't need him doing it at all.

  That would mean he, Troy Lopez, junior investigator, was making up a story to fit the facts, instead of paying attention to what was going on. The truth of the matter was that, as he went on in the new job, he felt less and less satisfied with it. Part of him sort of wanted to go back to line walking. Seeing other worlds and meeting new people that sort of liked him, because of what he could do. Cop Troy wasn’t feeling the love nearly as much.

  He didn’t need to be loved by everyone though. The thing there was that, for one of his people, he’d had about the perfect set up but had pushed it all down a long flight of stairs. Due to the fact that he’d been worried it might not work out. That… Well, it wouldn’t have, in the end. No one stayed together for hundreds or thousands of years.

  The closest to the kind of thing he’d ever seen was Bey and Jasmin. She’d been his maker, as well as wife, thousands of years before. Then they’d gone their own way for nearly a millennium. Now they were dating again. Still married but not living together. They hung out though. It was sweet.

  In a world filled with possible stories like that, he’d never heard of even that happening, to anyone except them. They were good people, and deserved to be happy. He did too, though. So did Barb. It had just sounded so impossible at the time. They’d eventually fight over territory, instead of share.

  That had seemed almost like a thing that had to happen. Like there was no other choice. Except that wasn’t the truth.

  The issue there seemed simpler now. He was living away from her. By a good way. With their powers, they could visit a lot, though. Daily, if they wanted. It wasn’t a fix for anything but could help, until they found one. The only issue there was that he’d broken up with her. Asking her to come back was kind of a dorky move, after that. Expecting anything from her except some choice name calling was being silly.

  The reports wouldn’t write themselves, which was a clear failure in the system but it didn’t take him long to get it all down. The whole event had taken place in mere minutes. About seven, from beginning to end. He did put in the file that he’d tried to protect himself, Tran and Rosa from being found later. Troy also put in that he doubted it would work. Not if she really wanted to take him down.

  For one thing, it was not hard to figure out where he worked.

  The rest of the day was surprisingly quiet.

  Honestly, it would have been boring, except that he had a file from the Vatican to go over. That… It was interesting but true or false, the story that he’d gotten from Stodermier was different than what the church had in their files. The thing was, a lot of it still fit together. Cheyenne had given birth to an unholy number of children over the years. Thirteen at least but possibly more. All of them had died or were missing. Except for her two youngest. Used in sacrifices.

  There was nothing saying they were tied down and screaming for that part. He’d just been assuming that had been the case. It was what it would have taken to get him to do it. Carlos hadn’t been forced at all, however.

  It had been strange at the time as well. Frankly, it couldn’t have worked the way that it had gone. One boy, even a mage, simply didn’t have enough life energy to even make a dimple in space like that. Not without specific training. He’d just slammed in to the idea into being with brute force, and it had worked well enough to save them all.

  The idea that the kid could have been working with another being to get things done hadn’t even come to his mind before that moment. Forest might have been calling out for help, not just asserting his will. That idea was far more disturbing, somehow. It was one thing to kill yourself, trying to do a specific thing. What if he’d just been praying? What Troy didn't know about Baphomet could fill a thousand books, at a bet.

  If the kid’s mother had been truthful, then even her own people might have been working under different orders from the ones that she had. Not that she’d proven she wasn’t a killer.

  That was a totally different problem as well. The would-be attack on Morgan wasn’
t exactly a date with a super beast made of conceptual energy that would remove him from existence without a trace. It was six guys with sticks. If Cheyenne or someone else, had known where Morgan was, then they probably had a clue that other people were there was well and would save him.

  If that was the case, then the whole thing was likely some kind of trick or trap. A way to get him, Tran or maybe even Morgan or one of the others there, to move in a specific fashion. It felt like the kind of thing that he’d set up, if he were a secret god, or possibly just a Machiavellian fiend.

  “I just wish I knew what this was about.”

  Tran jerked her head up then, still talking on the phone.

  “We’ll be by in an hour or so? I think I can get Troy to do that thing you mentioned, again. Kay. See you then, Leslie.”

  When she hung up, there was a triumphant look in her eyes.

  “They want to see you. I think it’s about nothing much, to be honest. Just a visit, because you’re the big protector of the moment. They want to get in good with you, to prove that you still love them enough to make sure they don’t buy the farm. So, what do you say? Free trip time? Come on… Show me the magic, baby.”

  It was a lot to ask but he had hours to work on it, before he was needed back at the station that evening.

  “Sure? Why not.”

  It wasn’t like he didn’t need the practice.

  Chapter nine

  The talk with Nevi and Leslie was not all that fruitful. Troy didn’t want to hammer them too hard or anything, given they weren’t on trial but it was hard to not ask about what Cheyenne had said earlier. Interestingly, while Leslie seemed a bit upset by what was being asked, Nevi just nodded.

  The older woman seemed to be thinking about her answers instead of only responding.

  “She told us that, as well. That her children were god touched and fated to sacrifice themselves. It’s possible. It’s just as likely that she set that in motion using magic. Then…” There was a slow but shaking inhalation. “I’ve been in contact with Baphomet, directly. It… She isn’t… A kind god. What she asks doesn’t always make sense. Not at first. The others are different. Some are even kind, but… Baphomet is the one that Cheyenne chose.”