A Legacy of Daemons

by Camille Bacon-Smith

  “I don’t need Jaworski. Matt Shields was a victim.” It was getting hard to sell that line with the graves in Donne’s woods burning a hole in his brain.

  “Sometimes good people try to hide innocent secrets from the police,” Ellen conceded in her soothing police-voice. “And sometimes even victims commit terrible crimes.”

  “Donne was ninety years old. He had a heart attack.”

  “Donne had a heart attack,” Ellen agreed. “But the bodies in those graves did not. And the records of Mr. Shields’ existence before that time do not hold up under close scrutiny. So perhaps your client is an innocent victim, as you say. But the FBI would like to know who he really is, and how he got involved with Grayson Donne in the first place. And we’d all like to know what he can tell us about the bodies in the woods. If you can bring him in around two, we can do the questioning here. He won’t have to go back to New York unless they find something more concrete against him. Of course, if he’d rather deal with his local police, they’ll be happy to do the interview there.”

  “Your office at two.” Not a good idea, but Shields would be gone by then.

  “You have people on your side if you need help,” she said, and it seemed out of the blue, except that she was telling him the client in the room with him might be a killer. Which he was.

  He agreed with her right down the line, but they didn’t have pentagrams on the ceiling at Major Crimes and much as he hated the 1950s bus station vibe of the place, he didn’t want Shields doing any impromptu urban renewal. “I’m fine,” he said, thanked her for the information, and promised yet again to bring Shields in for some questions at 2:00, before he disconnected the call.

  Shields was waiting, the thunderclouds in the east growing more ominous, so not exactly patiently. “Paimon knows secrets,” he said, “including the kind you try to hide on the telephone in the same room. I’m not going anywhere but home by 2:00—you can tell your friends the police anything you want after that.”

  “I figured. But it got her off the phone.”

  He’d confused Shields again, which was just fine. Ellen Li wasn’t his problem right now. Evan knew—he knew that the only thing that worked with daemon lords was self-interest.

  “The people we’re up against aren’t stupid. Van Der Graf knows Donne bound at least one daemon, and he’ll be looking for a way to take over that part of Donne’s estate as well. It’s just a matter of time before he finds your true name in Donne’s notes and figures out what to do with it. If he succeeds, it won’t matter if we’ve freed you from the box. He can summon you whenever he wants and he doesn’t need Donne’s library to do it. A search on the ’net will bring up a dozen workable summoning spells on the first page alone. So we find Donne’s notes now, or we do this all over again next year, or in ten or twenty. Call it job security.”

  Matt Shields had the long gaze past Evan’s shoulder. Nothing but a wall and a bathroom on the other side of it, but he didn’t think Shields was seeing any of that. “I’ve told you all you need to know. You were younger when he first saw you, and bloodier. The combination made an impression on Old Cyril. If he catches you, he’ll want to torture you to death like he did those boys in Donne’s woods. He’s still mad he didn’t get to do it when you were the right age for it. But he’ll figure that he finally won—beat Donne and the Simpsons—so he’ll want to gloat first. That’s when you kill him.”

  “I’m not going to kill anyone.”

  “Has your father mentioned lately that you’re a fool?” Shields pushed out of his chair and paced a twitchy circle around the protections at the center of the office. Evan considered the scotch in the credenza, but the hour hand had barely scraped past eleven. Still morning, and that had never worked out well for him. It told him all he needed to know about his mood, though.

  “It’s an old, leather-bound book in a wooden case.” Shields looked up, grimaced when he found himself under the pentacle after all and neatly stepped outside it before going on. “Getting in won’t be a problem, but you’ll have to walk out. The house isn’t as bad as Donne’s, but Van Der Graf’s no fool, and he’s got stuff like that—” he pointed at the ornate plaster, “—all over the house. So escaping through the second sphere won’t be an easy option. Any one of the seven Princes would likely kill you for it if you brought the book there anyway.”

  “With any luck, I’ll be out of there before anyone notices me.”

  “Luck isn’t your forte,” Shields pointed out. “How do you expect to find it?”

  Evan shrugged, swiveled in his chair to keep Shields in his sights. “That’s what Ariton does. I thought that’s why you hired us.”

  Shields remembered where the scotch was on his own. Got out a bottle and a glass, filled and downed it without asking if Evan wanted one. “You’re not Ariton. You’re a jumped-up human with delusions of lordship.” So, he might look like a handyman, but he sneered just like a daemon lord of the second celestial sphere. No surprise, and Evan was used to that.

  “Half-human,” he snapped. “The other half comes with the delusions preinstalled. Have you been to Atlantic City yet? Lights, noise, gambling 24-7, and an ocean if you get bored? Consider yourself on vacation. Just don’t go near New York City until I have Donne’s notebook.” Shields couldn’t get past the front office—the deal didn’t give him access to the house—so Evan didn’t stick around to find out what he planned to do. The floor plan shaped itself in his mind. He focused on the third floor, front, the word “library” in neat print on the drawing. And then he went there.

  Chapter 42

  OUTSIDE OF HIS OWN CIRCLE, Donne had kept a low profile in his mountains, and furniture didn’t bring out the glitter people. Just a scattering of buyers filled a chair here and there at the center of Sotheby’s sales room—tourists in sneakers and tennis shorts and a few dealers in golf shirts looking for bargains. Brad figured the three guys in gray hair and suits for Donne’s cronies. They sat well apart from each other, expressions closed off and a little bored.

  No one else seemed to have noticed the entry of Brad’s strange little party, but those three had turned and looked, ignored him, and Lily, except for a brief, speculative glance. But they knew Bertrande LeRoux, seemed to add things up when they saw her, which cast serious doubt on the truth of anything she’d told them. She hadn’t told them much, so that was okay. Brad hadn’t trusted her anyway, and knew Lily didn’t trust anything with a beating heart.

  The room was quiet except for the occasional rustle of a page turning and the auctioneer calling the bidding war in the telephone stations that took the desk on the screen to half a million, US dollars. It wasn’t a bad desk and, if he hadn’t known the provenance, Brad might have bid on it himself. As it was, he made a note of the buyer number but let it go to the telephones well within the valuation range printed in the catalog.

  A few lots passed with minimal interest, a table, some chairs that went for the low end of their appraised value, and a set of bookcases that no one seemed to want. Then the chalice and curved silver knife appeared on the screen. The catalog appraised the items like Donne’s furniture, at its historic value—the description didn’t mention traces of human blood in the bowl or add to the expected price centuries of murder in its prior use dragging daemon lords out of their home. Didn’t have to. One of the gray men opened the bidding, which quickly went to $20,000, then $50,000. Lily had the agency’s paddle, but she’d set their limit for the cup at $100,000, a courtesy bid, she’d told him. This was Brad’s folly; Shields’ contract didn’t require clear title to the cup. They could just as easily steal it from whoever won the bid and save the money, or go after it by less subtle routes and destroy it in the rubble if they preferred.

  Which would have been fine if the gray men hadn’t fallen out of the bidding against Madame LeRoux’s son. LeRoux was easy. The Church, a little more complicated. They still had to buy Shields’ box for him, so Brad walked away before he brought down the building.

  M
ichel LeRoux caught up with him at the toilet on the pedestal, kept pace to the windows, where Brad turned on him, fire licking at his eyes. LeRoux might have taken it for the afternoon light, but he took a step back, with a tight grip on the silver cross hanging from a thick chain around his neck.

  “Your FBI is watching,” he warned, as if that would matter to the creature he thought Brad was—the creature Matt Shields had been for Grayson Donne.

  “Not mine,” Brad pointed out. On the street below, traffic ebbed and flowed with the turning of the light. Red, green. Stop, go under the trees that lined the sidewalk on 72nd Street. Brad had stopped. Go was still an option. Evan needed a planet, but he didn’t need this block of it. “My patience is on a short leash. Why did you follow me?”

  “Tell your master that he will never own Donne’s cup.”

  “Again, you are mistaken.”

  “The boy you call ‘son,’ who dragged you out of hell to do his bidding. The Church forgives all sinners who repent, but stands unyielding against him while he holds the leash, as you put it.”

  Which wasn’t what Brad had meant. Until two weeks ago, he would have laughed at that description. Then Evan had said “no,” and abandoned him to an interrogation room at Major Crimes. That was over now: Evan had a few stitches in his head and Brad had a walk-away contract. And that had all come later anyway.

  “No one dragged me out of hell.” He didn’t think Father Michel would appreciate the news that he’d been sent, so he kept that to himself. “Evan doesn’t even know about the cup.”

  “Then why—”

  “To keep it out of the hands of people like you.” Glass. Inside, the building was plaster and steel, but the skin was made of glass. The problem with having a body was that it felt its thoughts in muscle and bone. He wanted Father Michel to go away, to leave him his unquiet peace, but he didn’t know how to make that happen without bringing the FBI down on him or scattering splinters of glass in all directions. Sunlight flashed off Father Michel’s silver cross. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  “You mean like them. The men like my father, who followed Grayson Donne. I am not like them. I have devoted my life to God’s work, undoing the damage they have done.”

  “Are still doing. Some of the graves at Grayson Donne’s estate were fresh.” Brad didn’t mention the box screaming at the front of the sales room. He still didn’t know who was in it.

  “Put there by monsters out of hell, a hell to which I am determined to return you all.”

  Brad almost laughed. “It’s not exactly hell,” he said, “but oddly enough, I’m trying to do the same thing.”

  “Then you will not mind if I banish you to the depths your black soul deserves!” Father Michel kept his voice low, but fervor drove each word.

  “Not the depths, and not today,” Brad observed coolly. “If you are not following in your father’s footsteps, why do you want the chalice?”

  “Each of the cabal has his own vessel to draw the blood of their offerings. As you well know, it is how they call their demons from hell. One was destroyed in this very city. Another, my father’s, now rests in the vaults of the Church, where it can cause no further harm. This cup will join it, like the ruby that paid for Satan’s services. It is a tragic part of our own family history, but one we will neither shirk nor forget.”

  “Your Church created Donne and his cult of thugs. You gave them the tools. They nearly killed my son. You watched and did nothing, and now you accuse him of his captor’s crimes. So I don’t trust your vaults, or your good intentions.”

  “And what would the devil have me do!” Michel LeRoux had his back to the sales room. He didn’t see his mother approaching or hear her halting steps on the plush carpet. So he jumped a little when she said, over his shoulder, “How can I have raised a son who believes so firmly in devils, but denies God’s angels?

  “Fallen angels, Mother, shorn of their wings.”

  “They make it hard to ride the subway,” Brad pointed out, though he’d never considered wings when shaping his material form. LeRoux mere and fils ignored him.

  “It is the angels here who cry for justice. And how did you answer? By watching as their sacred children die? How many times will you stand in the way of the avenging angel and live to tell of it? Give him the cup, and hope your God does not inspire him to strike you down where you stand!”

  Brad coughed at the thought of Evan as a sacred child of God. The things he did with Lily were, all in all, pretty profane. He’d become a spectator in his own drama, however. In spite of her cane and her faltering step, Madame LeRoux stood very straight, her chin set and her eyes ablaze with a purely human fire. So this was righteous wrath. He’d read about it, thought the author had exaggerated, but apparently not.

  And she was right about the avenging angel. Well, the avenging part, at least. Father Michel was skating the thin edge of disaster, and his mother seemed to know it. Good for her. Especially if it got him that cursed cup.

  “You’re going to destroy it, aren’t you?” she asked him. He took her free hand and lifted it to his lips, kissed it softly. “Oui, Madame. J’en ai l’intention.”

  “Bien.” He felt the brush of her lips on the crown of his head, then she was taking a step away, and Father Michel was making disgusted noises low in his throat.

  “We’ll have it sent to your office by special messenger. You will have it tonight. The Church will need its money back—”

  “The Church has no need of the devil’s money.”

  “Make the check out to LeRoux Compagnie. I will repay the Church out of private funds, and everyone is happy.” Father Michel was definitely not happy, but she took his arm and led him back to the auction. The strongbox was due up soon, so he went as well. But he wasn’t following Madame LeRoux. No, he wasn’t.

  Chapter 43

  SO THE FLOOR PLAN HAD LIED. The third-floor front room had a round table with a bowl of flowers on it, half a dozen antique armchairs with ribbon stripes and tiny roses on cream upholstery, and four built-in cases with a dozen or so books artfully scattered among the expensive bric-a-brac. Two tall windows filled the room with bright sunshine through sheer curtains. Too bright, too open for a collection of antique books and manuscripts. Didn’t look like it got much use, though, so that was good. At least Old Cyril hadn’t been waiting when he appeared in the middle of that pale marble floor.

  “If I were a library, where would I be?” Evan wondered under his breath. The fifth floor was supposed to be a warren of small rooms for the live-in staff. The fourth had bedrooms and baths, with “after” photos in Architectural News. But the floor plan had been a little vague about a space at the center of the house on the second floor. So somewhere on this floor or the second. Evan listened at the door, an old habit. Finding human presence wasn’t the problem here—people crowded his senses, on the street, in the house. It had been easier at Donne’s, where he’d had to reach for a mile or more to find a handful of human lives. With the dense press of humanity in the city it was almost impossible to sort out where any of them were beyond “here.” But none of them were looking for him yet, and none of them were on the other side of that door, so he relaxed a little. Opened the door.

  An empty hall with more doors on the right. Bathroom, bedroom, bedroom. No cultish paintings on the walls, just the stray modern. Not the Braque, though. A couple of Chagall, no Klee. Cyril reserved his playful side for wearing funny costumes while he murdered fifteen-year-old boys.

  He found the back stair and took it, down a level, closer now. Voices behind a door. He opened the next one. It reminded him of home—no windows, lots of books, a desk, a few leather club chairs, and a bar, bigger and better stocked than they bothered with at home.

  The books smelled of dust and age, cracked leather and greed. Your garden variety avarice didn’t rise to a level he could sense in the wind—the lust that had acquired these books left a trace, tainted sweat that lingered from the countless hands that had stroked those pages.
He could almost hear the whisper of the words of binding, imprinted in the air that settled, unmoving, at the center of the room. A library table on a rich Turkish carpet at the center of the room held a single book, leather-bound, in a wooden case. Old Cyril was making it easy.

  He looked up and silenced a huff of laughter. The ceiling was a copy of the sixteenth-century paintings from Ca Da’Costa, Alfredo Da’Costa’s Venice palazzo. Not well done, but Da’Costa’s hawklike face still looked down on him, even if it had lost the piercing gaze of a god that the original had.

  The Simpsons had held him prisoner under that ceiling. They hadn’t survived the encounter. Unfortunately, neither had CaDa’Costa. The last time he’d seen it, the palazzo had lain in shambles with the Simpsons under the wreckage. You’d have thought Van Der Graf would take a lesson from that.

  Apparently not.

  “Evan Davis. How exciting to finally meet you. I’m glad you’re enjoying the library.”

  Van Der Graf, and Matt Shields was right. If he’d had a mustache, he’d have been twirling it. Evan dropped a hand casually on the book that held Donne’s notes. “I go for the bestsellers myself. Wouldn’t mind borrowing this one, though. I’ll bring it back next time I visit.”

  “Ironically, he used to be that much a fool,” Van Der Graf said to someone in the doorway. Four more figures moved into the room, wearing the robes Evan had seen in the paintings on Donne’s walls. They stopped at the bar, poured amber liquor into crystal glasses and settled into leather club chairs—didn’t bother with masks, so no one expected him to survive the afternoon.

  Van Der Graf frowned at Evan, examined the fading damages with his fingertips. “A shame about your face. You used to be so pretty. Ah well, I suppose it would have healed, given time.” Van Der Graf didn’t plan on giving him any time at all, but he wouldn’t be the first to make that mistake.

  Evan took a step back, glanced up at the ceiling where Alfredo Da’Costa looked down his hawklike nose at him, a reminder. Evan had learned a lot since Venice, about what he was and what he could do. Control, Da’Costa had said, and Evan had control up the wazoo. Or whatever. What he didn’t have, yet, was the book.