The LeRouxs had stopped talking at least. But then Madame LeRoux tapped Lily’s hand, curled her fingers around a Blackberry. Brad tried to calculate all the possible outcomes while the auctioneer called, “Going once.”
Lily glanced briefly at the screen, showed him the figure. He looked up at Madame LeRoux for confirmation, got it in a single nod. Father Michel looked pale, in that witch-burning way, but he didn’t object when Lily punched in the account number.
“Thirty,” Brad said.
Matt Shields tapped his shoulder. Short-sleeved broad-cloth shirt and a pair of dockers, so he’d had the minimal sense to dress for the occasion. Except for the paint-spattered steel-toes he refused to give up. Lily moved down a seat, Brad did the same. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”
“Didn’t have a choice,” Shields whispered. He took the seat next to Brad and listened politely while the auctioneer called for the phone’s bid. “He doesn’t have the money. The box has owners now, and that complicates things.”
Shields was right—the phone was silent as the auctioneer called thirty-five, then thirty-one to the phones.
“If you don’t give a command, I’m going to wind up inside it when the hammer falls.”
“Well, don’t.”
“Gone for thirty million dollars to the gentleman in the back.”
It seemed to work. Matt Shields hadn’t disappeared in a screaming burst of flame, at least.
Now that it was over, the auctioneer seemed stunned. Brad was conscious on some level that the room still hadn’t started breathing. The next item up was an ornate ormolu clock. The phone rep hung up, signaling a return to business as usual, and the woman in the suit pulled away from the corner by the row of phones. A buzz of hushed voices erupted, and the auctioneer persisted in the clock, trying to break the kind of spell that everyday humans could weave over each other. But the staff was well-trained, and the crowd at the entrance cleared bit by bit. Brad stood up, suddenly understanding the human need for air in a room chock-full of the stuff. The agency was now part owner of a box of daemon lords who did not belong to the host of his Prince.
He’d have to work out the part-ownership deal with Madame LeRoux, and the consequences to both hosts. If there was a later. Van Der Graf still had Evan.
Right on schedule, Madame LeRoux’s cell phone rang. She answered, frowned, and handed him the phone. “It’s Cyril,” she said, very chummy, and he wondered what he’d gotten them into with a priest and the wife of a dead member of Donne’s cabal. “He asked for you.”
Brad never used cell phones. The microwaves gave him a headache. But Van Der Graf had something that belonged to Ariton. He took the phone, headed for a quiet space by the windows, out of the path of traffic.
“I want to talk to Evan.”
Chapter 47
“EVAN CAN’T COME TO THE PHONE RIGHT Enow. He’s indisposed. But I assure you he’s alive. For the moment. He may even stay that way if we can come to an agreement about the object you’ve recently acquired.”
Evan listened to Van Der Graf’s side of the conversation. After a short pause, Van Der Graf went to the desk and found a vial, handed it to one of the guards. “Keep him down, I just want him able to speak.”
He’d missed the mark there. Evan felt his face relax right on cue, but he could wiggle his toes as well, and liked it. He could do that some more if he just grabbed hold of that molecule and pushed . . .
“Open your eyes.” Evan blinked his eyes open, but the light hurt and he closed them again.
“I said, open.” Van Der Graf slapped him, left a hand-sized burn of pain on the side of his head. Held the phone closer to Evan’s ear. “Summon your daemon,” he said. “Tell it to bring the box.” Then he hit “speaker.”
“Evan?” The disembodied voice of his father filled the room.
“Dad?” Evan giggled, remembered a time when he lay like this on the floor of Omage’s back room, helpless and tormented and insane. Remembered that he didn’t like it. “Dad!”
Remembered then that his father hated it when he called him “dad.” Too human for a daemon lord, and Evan tried again, “My lord?” But his father wasn’t paying attention to forms of address today.
“I can’t give him what he wants, Evan. You made a deal we cannot break.”
“I know. Me or the planet.” Maybe next time, he’d just say the hell with it, go for the planet. Should have been a sobering thought, but the drugs took care of that. He couldn’t stop laughing, and he thought it must be annoying his father, so he tried, really hard, to get it under control. “Tell Lily that Alfredo’s on the ceiling,” he said, because his mind kept skittering away. “I’m looking up his nose. Tell her I’m sorry I screwed up.” Which was a complete downer.
“You haven’t screwed up yet,” Brad said through the telephone, “But you’re working on it. Why don’t you just get out of there?”
“Drugs.” Sober for more than four years and he couldn’t wait to get off the phone so he could beg old Cyril for another hit. He was sooooo fucked.
He started to cry. Kept it out of his voice, he thought, but tears were running down his stuffy nose, right in front of Cyril Van Der Graf, who’d stalked him and wanted to kill him for the pleasure of it. “I’m a mess.”
“You’d think I hadn’t taught you a thing.”
Evan wanted to protest, he hadn’t gone out looking for drugs. He was a prisoner. But his father didn’t sound disgusted with him. He sounded . . . like he was talking in code. And, yeah, Evan had already cleared the paralytics once today. Could do it again, only he knew he was going to feel like hell this time. Of course, he’d feel like hell if he didn’t, also—old Cyril would make sure of that.
At a gesture from Van Der Graf, two of the robed men left the circle around the table and went to a small cabinet next to the desk. One brought out a glass art deco bowl, the other a long silver knife and carried them ceremoniously to kneel at the table. A third brought a set of robes and held them while Van Der Graf slipped on first one sleeve, then the other, and settled the heavy fabric around him. Evan knew how this worked, felt his heart speed up.
“Don’t tell Lily I love her, okay? Especially if I die.” He knew Van Der Graf and his cronies could hear him, but this was more important. He didn’t know why, it just was.
“You’re not going to die, Evan.” His father sounded sure, but Evan knew better.
“Yeah, I think this time I am.”
“We’ll be there.” Brad hung up, left Evan alone with Van Der Graf and his glass bowl and the drugs coursing through his body. But his father had said they were coming.
It would take work, and he was stuck with the drug that had already hit the receptors in his brain, but he could clear the rest. He just had to do it faster. One of the hooded men offered up the knife. Heavy black sleeves fell back from his wrists as Van Der Graf took it, held it up on fingertips and examined the blade for sharpness. “I need his throat.”
Joad grabbed Evan’s shoulders, pulled until his head hung off the table. “Don’t fight. It only makes it worse,” he whispered. “He’s not going to kill you, just wants to draw a little blood.”
“He’s right.” Van Der Graf leaned over him and traced the fading bruise on his cheek with the tip of the knife. “I would enjoy killing you. Very much. But I’ll restrain myself. You have a lord to placate.”
He didn’t usually have a calming effect on the daemons of his acquaintance, but Van Der Graf didn’t give him time to explain that. Evan felt the knife open a vein in his neck, felt the blood flow, heard it splash into the glass bowl. Van Der Graf’s breathing sped up. Sweat glistened on his upper lip when he traced a finger through the blood at Evan’s throat, licked it with a little moan. “Evan, Evan,” he whispered, “You used to be so beautiful, such a perfect sacrifice. I would have loved you then. Why did you have to spoil everything by getting old?” He made another cut, and the blood ran again. Again.
“Don’t kill him,” the robed figure
who held the bowl reminded him softly. Evan thought it was the judge, and wondered who was being killed. He ought to be up and to the rescue.
“His daemons will want to do that.”
Oh. Him. It wasn’t true, though. Evan had finally come to understand that. But it was enough to stop Van Der Graf for the moment.
Chapter 48
“VANDER GRAF HAS EVAN.He wants the box.” Lily had followed him to the windows, but so had the humans. He held together his human shape because he didn’t think he’d get what he wanted from Madame LeRoux if he went up in flames in front of her. But it was a close call.
He snapped the cell phone shut, returned it, and shook out his hand. Blisters had formed on his fingertips and he healed them without thinking, raised an eyebrow when Madame LeRoux drew back a little, her gaze darting between the cell phone and his hand. Father Michel had come up behind her and crossed himself.
“Discede ab hoc famulo Dei,” he said, to remind the priest. Not human, but not that either. “If you don’t want us here, stop dragging us into your world.”
Madame LeRoux dropped her head. “We are trying to make amends,” she said. But it just made her son angry.
“A waste of time,” Father Michel gritted out between clenched teeth. “My father tried to tame a devil and it ripped his heart out and took it with him for a keepsake. Evil must be rooted out, destroyed or banished to the depths of hell.”
“And how long did your father bind this ‘devil’ to his prison, after he had torn it from its home?” Lily asked, calmly enough if you didn’t look into her eyes. She stared out the window, at the street below, so Father Michel wouldn’t see the fire twisting there. He wouldn’t have recognized the memories of her own binding flaring hot and bright with her anger anyway. “What crimes did your father force a lord of the heavens to commit? Understand this, priest: our kind know nothing of death. We learn murder from you.”
Brad didn’t need this argument right now. He needed the co-owner of the box to trust him when common sense and his own intentions would dictate otherwise. Lily usually did this part of the case, but Evan was his liability. And Lily hated priests.
“Think of us as friendly aliens who don’t need a space-ship,” he tried. Not that friendly, and not any version of Father Michel’s universe, but, by Ariton, he would not be one of Madame LeRoux’s angels, fallen or otherwise.
It seemed to snap the priest out of his trancelike fixation with the blue flames of Lily’s eyes reflected in the window. Maybe got him thinking down a different path for a change.
Lily rewarded him with a wry smile. He’d pay for the alien thing later, but it took her mind off murder, which was a good start if he wanted Madame LeRoux’s trust.
With the dying of that argument, she had time to ask out loud the question he’d been asking himself since Van Der Graf called.
“Why didn’t he just leave when Van Der Graf found him?” Evan was Brad’s responsibility but Lily’s toy. She wasn’t pleased when someone else broke him—not with Evan or the person who did the breaking.
“He’s drugged. Don’t ask how he let anyone close enough to do it—I don’t know.”
“The house is full of traps,” Matt Shields said. He’d forgotten Matt Shields. How had he done that? But he was there, making it a party and darting covert murderous glances at Father Michel.
“Evan knew that.” And Brad didn’t need the reminder that he was playing out a family drama in front of a priest and a lord of a foreign Prince that he’d bound to Ariton against all sense and the nature of Princes. Contracts made obligations, not allies and the LeRoux family had been up to its eyebrows in the cabal from the day Donne’s ancestor used Matt Shields to wipe out a village. Bertrande LeRoux’s decision to switch sides came six hundred years too late to change any of that. The less she knew the better—humans were notorious for changing their minds.
“He said Alfredo was on the ceiling.”
LeRoux mere and fils looked puzzled. “Alfredo?” Madame LeRoux asked, but did not wait for an answer. “They must have your young man in the library. It’s the only room with figures on the ceiling—it’s a copy of the secret apartments of Pope Alexander VI.
Pope Alexander’d had a copy of Alfredo Da’Costa’s ceiling in his secret apartments. Brad wondered what the Pope had known about Alfredo.
“Know the house well, do you?” he asked, not quite hostile yet. According to Evan, Van Der Graf had recently renovated the house. So, not as far from the cabal as she’d said.
“I didn’t know what any of it meant then, but yes,” she said, “Thirty years ago, with my husband. I returned to the house three years ago, when Cyril threw a party to celebrate completion of the renovations. Reconnaissance.” She smiled ruefully. “We were trying to undo as much of the damage as possible. The ceiling had been preserved and he’d moved Grayson’s library into the room. It’s on the second floor. The seals and protections are all in the rooms and grand galleries. You can reach it from the kitchen stair without being seen if you are careful. But you still have to deal with whatever defenses the ceiling represents.”
He didn’t, actually, but she didn’t have to know that. He’d been called under the real thing a few years ago and Evan had sent him away again. Prior contract—the most powerful seals in the universe couldn’t hold him if Evan said, “Go,” and he’d done just that. Would again if he had to, Brad figured, though this time the contract had better terms. He tried not to think about his options if Evan broke his end of the deal. He could walk away from the contract—that’s the way they’d written it—but he’d be left standing in Van Der Graf’s trap if he took that out.
Evan was Ariton, had proved that over and over. Had offered his life for his Prince on more than one occasion. No gamble at all, except that thinking had banished him from the debate over Evan’s deal. The host was wrong. He hadn’t grown too human in his thinking. Maybe Evan wasn’t that much Ariton either. But maybe he was.
Ariton had taken the deal; now there was only one way to find out. “I want to be seen. I’m taking the box to Van Der Graf.”
Father Michel spoke first, not angrier than Matt Shields, but faster to express it. “If you were going to give him the box anyway, why did you spend thirty-five million dollars—fifteen of which did not belong to you!—to buy it? We have a part in this decision!”
The carpet under Matt Shield’s feet had begun to smolder, and a wind stirred the air that had nothing to do with the air-conditioning. LeRoux hadn’t recognized him for a daemon lord, too caught up in his own anger to notice the change in air pressure, but Lily glared at Shields until he settled uneasily.
“There will be consequences,” he said, but the box had an owner—owners—now, and he couldn’t do much of anything without an order.
“Stand down,” Brad said, made it that order, and in the absence of another command, Shields had no choice. It might mean war at home, but he did it.
“I’m not giving the box to Van Der Graf.”
“A ruse,” Madame LeRoux guessed. “Which may go very wrong.”
“He has my son.” Which was not what he’d planned to say.
Father Michel just gave him a disgusted huff, but Madame LeRoux laughed, low and with no joy.
“Children,” she said. “We would sacrifice the world for them.”
That wasn’t it at all, but Matt Shields was looking at her like he actually understood, which was scaring Brad right down to the core of Ariton in him. He didn’t have time to pursue it, though. Madame LeRoux gestured at the window. “My car is waiting at the door,” she said, “Take it, please. My driver knows this area well.”
Lily had started them moving toward the elevators. The gallery had cleared, except for two FBI agents pretending to inspect a piece constructed of fractured glass and wooden clothes hangers at one end and, on her way past the toilet on a pedestal at the other end, a tall and purposeful woman in a trim black suit approaching their unlikely party on a collision course. He’d seen her at
the auction, watching from a corner by the phone banks, and she recognized them as well, at least to the extent it involved the auction house.
The box had gone for a shocking amount of money, if you didn’t know what was inside. Brad figured she was counting up the millions in buyer’s premium to the house in her head and worrying that buyer’s remorse—sanity—might set in before she closed the deal. Walking away was not an option, of course, but she didn’t know that.
Lily smiled and held out her hand. “Lily Ryan, Bradley, Ryan, and Davis,” she said, “Buyer’s agent. And Bertrande LeRoux. She will be joining us if you don’t mind.”
“Jeri Hunt,” the auction representative returned the handshake. “We haven’t worked together before but I’ve heard of the company. I’m very glad to finally meet you. And of course, Madame LeRoux. I was once fortunate enough to handle a telephone bid for you. It’s a pleasure to meet you in person as well.” She turned and headed back toward the elevators. “Your purchase has been moved downstairs. I’ve come to offer any assistance you may need. If you’d like, we can go to my office . . .”
“Of course.” Lily smiled just enough. Madame LeRoux had once again taken her arm and they followed a step behind the auction agent. “Will a wire transfer do?”
“A wire transfer is fine. Once we’ve taken care of the details, I can have your purchase shipped for you, if you’d like.”
“That won’t be necessary.” Lily assured her. “We’ll be taking it with us if everything is satisfactory.”
“Of course. I’ll have it packed and taken to the loading dock—”
“No packaging, please.”
The woman paled a bit. “It might become damaged in transit.”
“We’ll be careful.” Lily smiled too brightly. “We’re making a special presentation here in the city.”
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