“What do you need from him?”
“The FBI wants his personal statement, not just the agency’s official report.”
Sid Valentine, she meant; prime pain in the ass. Sid had taken a special dislike to Bradley, Ryan, and Davis. He still suspected the agency as accomplices in the art museum thefts.
“I’ll let Brad know. And now, I have another appointment—” Another estate case. Evan came around the desk, holding a smile in place. Thirty seconds, he figured, and Khadijah Flint, with her sharp, knowing sympathy, would be out of there.
A soft chime announced the arrival of the new client in the outer office.
“I’m sorry I took so much of your time.” Khadijah Flint closed her briefcase and stood up, but hesitated a moment. She looked a little worried. Brad’s absence might look suspicious to the police, but the alabaster figure wasn’t worth that much, comparatively speaking. If he wanted one, he could afford to buy it. Khadijah Flint had a list of personal motives that fit her client better, starting with Mai Sien Chong, and only half of them were likely to get him arrested.
“I’ll let you know when the results of your DNA tests come in.” And there it was, the point of all the less-than-subtle questions. “Brad should be here as well. He’s assured me that the legal side will not be an issue, whatever the results of the tests. But—”
She was wrong about this part of it, at least. His father hadn’t walked away over a question of paternity. He’d already seen to the DNA match, simple enough for a daemon lord who created a physical body out of the tides of the universe, but he couldn’t tell her that.
“In the meantime, call if you need me. Your father keeps me entertained, but I worry about you, Evan.” She patted his arm, offering comfort as they crossed the elaborate medallion at the center of the pale blue Aubusson carpet and he took it, pretended for a minute just to be human.
“I’m fine.”
He opened the door to their small waiting room. “Fine” might have been premature.
Chapter 2
“YOU’RE UNINVITED,” HE SAID and slammed the door against the thing dressed as human on the other side. Or tried. A steel-toed boot slipped between the jamb and the door, while over his shoulder Khadijah Flint gave him a politely curious raised brow.
“Use the door behind the desk,” he muttered under his breath, hoping the creature with the twisting amber flames in its eyes didn’t hear him. “Go out through the gate in the garden. I’ll call later.” He’d owe her an explanation, but she’d already seen the shambles they’d made of the inner study during the last case. He didn’t want to explain a fight with a daemon lord in the middle of the Aubusson carpet.
Khadijah Flint had her cell phone out and wasn’t moving.
“Don’t call 9-1-1,” he said, trying to limit the collateral damage. “I’ll be fine. Just, go. You don’t have to call the police.”
“I’m not here to hurt you.” The daemon hadn’t tried to break the door, which he might have done. Evan had denied him entry but that wouldn’t have stopped Brad or Lily. He didn’t own the daemon, couldn’t command it. There were protections worked into the floral patterns of the plasterwork in the ceiling, a pentagram in a circle carved into the elaborate design, but Evan was outside of it, and so was his lawyer.
The not-a-man said. “It’s a straight deal. I’ll pay like any other client.” He looked to be in his early thirties, which meant nothing, with hair a nondescript brown brushing the tops of his ears and falling into his eyes—eyes with flames burning at their centers that marked a daemon lord on the material sphere. He wore a pair of paint-spattered jeans and a flannel shirt hanging open over a dusty gray tee that made the part about paying like any other client doubtful. His eyes glinted with amber fire.
“Evan?”
Probably safer to deal with the creature under that ceiling. It was there for a reason, after all. “It’s all right, ’Deej,” he told her, “But you’ve really got to get out of here.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her nod. She was looking at him like he’d taken off a mask, which he figured he had. Didn’t have time to play innocent youth while he dredged through memories of night terrors and battles in a place where humans weren’t supposed to exist at all. Lords of the host of Ariton, like Brad and Lily, manifested in blue eyes a little darker than his own, and the eyes of Azmod, his personal enemy and the sworn foe of Ariton for longer than Earth had existed, burned green. He didn’t know the name of the Prince this one belonged to, or if it was friend or foe to Ariton in the alliances that the hosts of heaven forged for the wars they waged among themselves. He just knew it had tried to kill him once.
“I need your help. There isn’t anyone else I can ask.”
Evan heard the soft thump against the door. A head, he figured, leaning for support, and to hide the fact that his last hope was leaking away. Evan had felt that, was having a hard time remembering this thing was a monster and not necessarily friendly to his own preferred brand of same. Shit.
“Please, ’Deej. I’ll call you later. Right now, my client needs a little privacy.”
She gave him a long, calculating glare, but finally let him go. “Apparently, so does mine. But I will call later.”
“Thank you.” He waited until she had gone through the side door that led her away through the house, and then he opened the door. “Matt Shields, I presume? You couldn’t show up in a suit and tie?”
The daemon followed him past the sideboard with Brad’s bottle of scotch in it that they used for a credenza, onto the carpet and under the circle carved in the plaster overhead. Funny thing about those circles—they could keep an enemy out, or hold one in. Evan felt the wind at his back when Shields realized he couldn’t close the distance to the desk. “You are starting a war you won’t live to see,” it said. By then Evan had reached the other side. It was a lousy way to start a business relationship, but he didn’t see much choice. In his whole life he’d never met a daemon who hadn’t tried to kill him—including the one he slept with on a fairly regular basis.
“It’s just a precaution, until we resolve why you are here—preferably without starting any more wars. Ariton is pissed off at me already. Have a seat.” Pointing at that uncomfortable spindle-back guest chair that hadn’t stopped Khadijah Flint, he gave the daemon his best effort at the new-client smile—comforting, he reminded himself—and sat behind his desk. “We’ll start with who you are.”
“I’ll never tell you that.” Amber flame licked the chair. The daemon curled his lip in a white snarl, pressed as close to the antique desk as the pentagram in the ceiling would allow him. “And my ‘never’ is a lot longer than yours.”
“Look, the last time I met a Prince the color of your eyes, it tried to kill me. I thought that was done with, then you show up at my door. Maybe you are willing to sit in that chair until Badad of the host of Ariton comes home and takes care of the situation his way, but I’m not stuck in there, you are. So unless you came here to start a war with Ariton, you are going to answer some questions.”
“Good to know that I’ll be doing my Prince a favor when I kill you. Nice look, by the way. Did we do that? Or was it Ariton, freak-boy?”
The bruises. Evan had known this was a bad idea from the start. No part of this argument felt new. Daemons were touchy, including his own relations. He knew better than to escalate an argument with one of his father’s kind. Planets could die because his anger at his father colored every word he said to this thing. Or, his own world might survive because he was cautious about his bargains.
He tried to think of the thing in the chair as a man. At the door, Shields hadn’t looked angry—he’d looked desperate, trying to bluff through how much he had on the line here. Evan really didn’t want to think about what it would take to make a daemon desperate enough to ask for help outside his own host, but he was going to have to, if he wanted a world to stand on at the end of the conversation. Smoke was already rising from a circle of charred carpet around the creature. He wondered
if he could add the price of a new one to the bill.
“Okay. Let’s start over. I’m Evan Davis.” He stood up and reached a hand across the desk. Dangerous, if the daemon meant to harm him, but a risk he had to take if he wanted to get this conversation back on track.
“What?” The daemon looked at Evan’s outstretched hand like he was trying to calculate the danger from his side of the desk.
“Do over,” Evan explained. “I’m Evan Davis, you’re Matt Shields. Your real name, up there, is off the table. I get it.”
“It’s not up,” the new client grumbled, but he took the hand Evan offered and shook it, letting go quickly, like he was afraid of catching something. “Matt Shields. Do I get out of the circle now?”
That was the trick question, all right. Evan had thought about it from the moment they’d added the words “cases involving the occult handled with discretion” to the agency’s ad in the yellow pages. Pentagrams were useless against humans, but they’d stop the supernatural if you were strong enough to hold your lines together. In or out, didn’t matter. With daemons, it was always about the intention and being on the other side of any line you held.
So, the ad had changed—they didn’t go looking for occult cases anymore—but not the answer to Matt Shields’ question. “You can leave by the front door any time you want. All you have to do is swear not to harm this house or the people who live in it, or their connections freely given. And to take no retribution on this world or the universe it resides in. Your own enemies are your business. Anything more is by mutual agreement, but some things I have to know if we are going to work together. Not your name, but your Prince, to start with. I won’t cross Ariton, or cause harm to Ariton’s alliances, or aid Ariton’s enemies. It’s a family thing.” He gave a little shrug, knew he sounded pompous, but daemons were legalistic by their nature and he’d been sitting with his lawyer all afternoon.
Matt Shields considered the questions for so long that Evan thought he might refuse. Then he held out his hand. “Paimon,” he said, “Not an ally of Ariton, but not an enemy either. We pick our side based on the fight. And yeah. I agree to the terms of leaving the circle.”
Evan accepted the hand, an idea starting to take shape. Risky. He usually kept out of politics between the Princes. It was sort of like juggling the orbits of planets—he probably could if he tried hard enough, but that didn’t mean it was a healthy thing to do. Which had never stopped Evan before.
“How about some pizza? Negotiating the fate of the known universe always makes me hungry.” He wasn’t really, but the daemon, Matt Shields, looked like he could use something to defuse the tension. And, stranger yet, he looked like he hadn’t been eating regularly. Which—daemons didn’t have to eat. The body was a construct. Something was really wrong here. Evan made the call—“no anchovies” changed to “one with and one without,”—and pulled a tablet and a file folder with Matt Shields’ name on it out of the side drawer in the desk. While they waited for the delivery, he brought up a standard contract on the screen of his laptop. This was going to be anything but standard, but they had to start somewhere.
“When you called, you said you wanted Bradley, Ryan, and Davis to agent the acquisition of an art object at the Grayson Donne estate sale.”
“That’s not exactly what I said.”
“That’s contract talk for ‘Grayson Donne’s estate is being sold off and I need somebody to buy a box at the auction. ’ Given that you pick your side based on the fight, and that you appear to be stuck on this ball of rock I like to call ‘home,’ I think you understand about contract language.”
Matt Shields glared at him from under the flop of bangs that obscured the amber flames in his eyes. “Assuming we come to an agreement on terms, I want Bradley, Ryan, and Davis to agent the acquisition of a piece of art at Grayson Donne’s estate sale. Now it’s contract language. Pending terms, of course.”
“Of course.” Evan remembered the precision with which his father had confirmed the one command he’d ever given. It had almost killed him, but he did understand about daemons and contracts, had to stop slipping between what he knew about the creature in the chair and the contradiction of the clothes, the slump of shoulders. “What exactly do you want us to acquire?”
“A box.”
Chapter 3
“A PARTICULAR BOX, OR WILL ANY BOX DO?”
Matt Shields frowned like he’d never heard sarcasm before, and took a breath, then stopped, a question in his eyes that cleared suddenly. A little twist of smile turned the corner of his mouth. “Ariton always did have a lousy sense of humor.” But the tension in his shoulders shifted into new patterns, at once less desperate and more alert.
“This box,” he said, and hunted around in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt until he came up with a picture, much folded, torn out of a catalog. A bit of the trailing page at the bottom said “Sotheby’s.”
The photograph showed a wooden box bound in a metal too tarnished to identify, with the legend, “14th c. French strongbox, 27 in. x 18 in. x 27 in. high, oak panels with iron strapping, elaborately decorated. Locked but empty. No key. $10,000-$35,000.”
Evan made a few notes on the tablet in front of him, mostly because it reassured the client. Medieval objects had never been his specialty. They weren’t particularly fashionable, and never had been with Bradley, Ryan, and Davis’ usual clients, so he’d spent only as much time on them as it took to get out of grad school. But something didn’t make sense. He didn’t do medieval furnishings, but he had worked with Sotheby’s before. They were as thorough as it gets.
“Why didn’t they open it? Wouldn’t that be usual?”
Shields twitched an I-don’t-know shoulder, but Evan couldn’t tell whether he meant that he didn’t know auctions or didn’t know about the lock. Either way, he expected the lie and waited it out.
“The key is missing. They had a locksmith look at it, but he couldn’t open the lock without destroying the mechanism. The auction house had some tests done, and they say it’s empty, so they are selling it as is.”
Closer. Evan made another note. He’d have to see more than the picture from the catalog to be sure, but it looked like Kabalic symbols worked into the metal. Which maybe helped explain why Shields wanted it, but not how much he’d pay to get it. The ad had a valuation that Evan didn’t trust at all. He could have priced out a painting of the period for himself with a little research and not much trouble. An empty strongbox? Not so much. “How much interest in the box are you expecting? How much are you willing to pay for it?”
Shields gave him a closed-off shrug obscured by the inward curl of his shoulders. “There’ll be interest because it was Donne’s, but for the box in particular, I don’t know. As for the other, I’ll do whatever it takes to own that box.”
“Not sharing much here, are you?” Evan rubbed his hands over his face, remembered why he wasn’t supposed to do that. “Okay, first—money. Do you have any? Because unless you are the eccentric branch of the family, you don’t look like you can afford the catalog at Sotheby’s, let alone the opening bid on this box. And then there’s a matter of our fee. We’re expensive, and you don’t get the friends and family discount. Friends don’t get the friends and family discount, and you don’t come close to qualifying as a friend.”
“Money?” Wrinkled brow, like he’d never heard of money. Lily never lied to Evan—early on, she’d explained in that off-hand way that he wasn’t worth the trouble. But their kind did lie, frequently. Matt Shields was lying now.
“No, but I have these.” Another mining expedition, this time into the front right pocket of his jeans. Evan was ready to ask if he wanted some privacy for that when he pulled out a soft leather pouch and dropped it on the lined tablet at the center of the antique desk.
The pouch settled with a little clink. Evan tore off the page where he’d been writing notes and scattered just a few of the gems on the blank tablet. Cut rubies. All sizes, including one as big as Evan’s
thumb. Okay. Maybe. The smallest ones weren’t worth much, in the scheme of Sotheby’s auctions and Bradley, Ryan, and Davis’ fees. But the largest one, if it was real, was worth millions. The office sat a block from Jewelers’ Row. With a little help at agency prices, Shields could have it appraised and sold in a private auction by morning, if they were pressed and didn’t mind selling at emergency prices. If it was real. If, if, if . . .
“Where did you get them? Are they natural, or did you take a little corundum, a little chromium, and squeeze?”
“They’re mine. I bargained with Donne for a single perfect ruby as payment for each task he required of me. I’ve been collecting them ever since. I have the original documentation for each of them, but Grayson Donne had them all appraised and collected on one certificate of ownership about twenty years ago. He was particular about keeping the paperwork in order.”
Evan took the photocopy, which was in the condition he’d expect given the pocket it came out of, and scanned the page and a half of identifications. Weight, color, grade, estimated value—most of the gems came from the Mogok Mines, in Burma. A few had names and histories. Donne was this particular about his paperwork, but didn’t have a will? Shields may not have killed him, but Evan didn’t ask the obvious next question. Didn’t want to know something he’d have to give the police when the agency’s part of it ought to be simple, fast, and lucrative. Except that making a deal with a Prince of the second celestial sphere who was not Ariton’s ally was not in the least bit simple and might still get him killed.
A Legacy of Daemons Page 2