Shields lagged behind. Lily was an expert at this part, so Brad left her to it and fell in step beside him. “What?” he said.
They were passing an alcove, and Shields nudged him toward the men’s room. Brad fought the insistent tug on his sleeve, but he’d asked the question, gave in rather than create more of a scene than they already had. The auction agent was smirking, but he had to deal with Shields, even if it wasn’t the way the auction agent thought.
“You can’t give Van Der Graf the box,” Shields said when the door closed on the empty room. “You don’t know what he’d do to her. To me.” The last was said too softly for a human to have heard him, but Brad wasn’t human, and in fact, he could guess. Van Der Graf liked fifteen-year-old boys. He liked sex with them, and then he liked to murder them in slow and painful ways. With a bound daemon lord or two, he could do both as often as he wanted. No bodies to dispose of, no dangerous forays out to find fresh meat. He could feel the rage building in Shields already. It almost matched his own.
“It won’t come to that,” he said, clipped, because he had work to do and Matt Shields was in the way of it. “Go—”
“No!” Shields eyes blazed with amber fire before he settled with a low clap of thunder. Toe-to-toe with Brad.
“We still need the planet.” A gentle reminder, but he’d made his point. Shields took a step back.
“Please.” Not quite supplication, but close enough. “Don’t send me away. Please. This is my fight as much as yours.”
A daemon lord was screaming in that box, and Caramos had said the two lords had more than the loyalty of the host between them. Shields wasn’t free yet either. Couldn’t send him home permanently until the papers were signed, and probably couldn’t have made an order stick now if Shields didn’t want to go.
He wondered if this job could get any worse, and realized it could. Evan was still alive, but that didn’t mean he’d stay that way. He felt a lot like Lily did about that. Nobody broke his toys but him. But they’d been gone too long, with too many factions watching.
Brad expected the knock on the door, barred the FBI agent with an apologetic smile as Shields slipped out behind him. “They should really do something about the plumbing,” he said. The agent pushed the door open, but there wasn’t any blood, just the faint odor of sulfur. Let him wonder. Brad went to find Lily and the strongbox that didn’t belong to Grayson Donne anymore.
Chapter 49
“MR. BRADLEY?”A young woman in a flowered dress and really ugly hiking sandals waited to show them the way. Brad sensed Lily three floors up and to the right, but their escort wouldn’t know that. They left the FBI behind, still checking out the men’s room. Had the elevator to themselves, which was fortunate. The woman’s excitement and Matt Shields’ agitation didn’t leave much room for anything else. He was ready to get out and walk.
The presence of a stranger at least meant he didn’t have to talk to Shields. Sharing an enclosed space with a daemon lord not of Ariton made his skin itch. Didn’t last long. The doors opened and their escort marched them briskly down a cream- colored hallway to a door that said, “vice president.” Bad-suit boy stood next to the door, arms crossed over his chest and back to the wall. Their escort opened the door for them but didn’t follow them in.
Lily and Bertrande LeRoux had taken the only guest chairs in the room. Father Michel stood behind his mother with that pursed-up “I knew they were criminals” look that didn’t take a translator to figure out. Behind the rosewood waterfall desk, Mike Jaworski toyed impatiently with an art deco penholder. The paperwork for Donne’s strongbox lay on the gleaming desktop, the signature lines glaringly blank.
Closing his eyes didn’t help. Jaworski was still there when he opened them again. “Aren’t you out of your jurisdiction?”
“The lieutenant gave me a surveillance order. I go where he goes.”
“Surveillance on whom?” Brad asked, then wished he could take back the question. There were no good answers, and they had an audience. That didn’t stop Jaworski.
“Who do you think? The FBI hasn’t cleared your client yet, and Evan’s tendency to turn up unconscious at crime scenes has Ellen a little worried.”
A glare over Brad’s shoulder, and Jaworski’s hand drifted under his jacket, fell back at his side.
Beside him, Matt Shields took a step back, palms up, and hit the closed door behind him. “Hey, not me.”
“Please don’t shoot my client,” Brad snapped, because Jaworski wouldn’t shoot Matt Shields, but he still might start a war neither Ariton nor Paimon wanted and they didn’t have Evan back yet. “What made you think you’d find Evan here?”
“I went to the house to give him some information on the case—a warning about Sanchez and your client. Some guy who said he was your cousin Ray told me Evan had gone to New York. We knew where you had gone and took a chance. But Evan isn’t here, is he?”
At the mention of Cousin Ray, Bertrande LeRoux’s brows went up and her son’s went down. Brad hoped they weren’t keeping count.
“Evan is fine.” He had a long history of lying well and didn’t know why the skill chose now to fail him. “Can this wait until we complete our purchase?”
“No, it can’t. You’ve got about thirty seconds before Sid Valentine shows up and takes over this dog and pony show.” Jaworski pulled a cell phone out of his pocket. “Funny thing about these things. You can pick a conversation right out of the air if you know to look, and the FBI was looking already.”
Sid would have been sitting in a room full of electronics monitoring the key players in the sale. They wouldn’t have understood it all, but some of it had been pretty obvious.
“Let’s stop playing games, shall we? He’s not fine.” Jaworski tapped the phone to emphasize his point. “He’s pretty sure he’s going to die in that house, and given the number of bodies we’ve found so far, it’s not a bad assumption. True or not, how long do you want him to think it?”
“He would not have wanted you to hear that.” He couldn’t kill them all, not and get Evan back. They hadn’t signed those papers yet.
“I don’t think less of him. Won’t. But, Jesus, Bradley, he’s in a shitload of trouble right now. Would it kill you to just take the help that’s offered?”
“You’re in over your head here, officer.”
“They call that ‘life.’ What am I supposed to do? Let him die because you’re too stubborn to understand that somebody else gives a damn?”
He wasn’t about to explain trust to a human. And they’d used up their thirty seconds anyway. The cell phone on the desk rang and Jaworski answered it, said, “Thanks,” and hung up.
“Sid’s downstairs. Do you want to stop these guys or not?”
“I do.” Matt Shields finally took a step forward. “Evan’s not my problem, but Cyril Van Der Graf is.”
Lily smiled too broadly. “Sched told Evan to make friends. Apparently he did. So I vote ‘yes’ too.”
Giving up gracefully wasn’t in his makeup. He’d expected Lily to stand with him, but she had picked up the pen at least, signed the transfer of ownership with a flourish as the door half-opened, hitting Matt Shields in the back.
“Bradley!”
Jaworski shrugged apologetically. “You’re his person of interest. He opened the folder on you weeks ago. At the moment he is considered the expert on your case.”
Sid Valentine tried the door again, smacked Matt Shields in the back again. “Bradley! We can play games here or we can get your kid back! What’s it going to be?”
“Right now, Evan is waiting to die,” Jaworski reminded him.
Probably not. By now he’d be nursing a drug hangover and waiting to find out what the plan was. But the police complicated things. Brad wanted the bastard Van Der Graf dead.
“By the book,” Jaworski said. “We don’t let him get away. We don’t make Evan celebrate Fathers’ Day in the visitors’ room of a federal prison.” He was looking at Lily when he said it, appealin
g to her to make Brad see sense.
Shields took his silence as agreement and opened the door.
Valentine gave them all an equal glare. “If you’re done singing ‘Kumbaya’ in here, we’ve got an appointment with a serial killer.” From one hand, he dangled a thin wire ending in a gum patch “Open your shirt, Bradley.”
“I’m taking this one.” Lily started undoing buttons. “Can’t let Brad sit in jail, now, can we?” Which was a pointed reminder of the hours he’d spent handcuffed to an interview room at Major Crimes, and a warning that gave Brad’s anger a target. She wasn’t worried that he’d kill Van Der Graf—Lily was as likely as anyone to turn the man into a smudge on his own carpet. No, Lily was afraid he’d trade the strongbox for Evan’s life, and she wasn’t taking that chance.
“I’m not that stupid.”
“Of course not.” But she didn’t give him the wire.
“I’m going where the box goes,” Shields stuck his hands in his pockets, stuck out his chin with a daemon lord’s stubbornness.
“Not on your life.” Valentine was talking to Shields, but he didn’t take his eyes off Lily’s breasts. “Sanchez has disappeared, and so have his daughters. But we got some background sound off that phone call. There’s a woman in the room. Doesn’t sound too happy at the moment, but hey, murder can’t be all fun and games, can it? I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
“The box is heavy. Someone will have to carry it. Van Der Graf won’t let a stranger in the front door, but he knows me.” Lily could carry the box without touching it. She could probably manage it even if she were human. But Shields was starting to look desperate. He didn’t deny that Sanchez was involved, which made sense. You can’t plant that many bodies without the gardener figuring it out. Complicated things, though. “You’ll be listening on the wire. Where can I go?”
That was going to depend on Evan, but Brad wasn’t going to tell Sid that.
Sid waited until Lily had exposed a swath of breast and pale silk. Then he said, “Doesn’t matter. We’re not sending in a woman. Bradley will do it. If he kills the guy, no skin off my ass. A serial killer will be dead, and I get to put him away. All good however you look at it. And by the way? I didn’t say that. You get that, Jaworski?”
But Lily had already snagged the wire and pasted it so that it lay against her breast, well away from her heart. “I’d rather not have Shields there myself,” she said, “But he’s probably right about Van Der Graf. He won’t let one of your people past the door.”
Jaworski had listened without interrupting, but he picked up the penholder again. No talking stick in this room, Bradley thought bitterly, spit it out or go home.
“The phone call gives us cause. We can go in and pull Evan out before things go south.”
“Weren’t you listening, Detective? Van Der Graf’s a murderer and all we’ve got on him so far is giving drugs to a paranoid with a history of using. You do the math because I ran out of fingers.”
Check and mate. Brad had a grudging respect for Mike Jaworski and no liking at all for Sid Valentine. But they needed to get into that house.
Chapter 50
OFF SOMEWHERE DUE SOUTH of the table they’d laid him out on, Alba Sanchez was crying softly, her sobs muffled by the arm of one of the leather club chairs scattered in the library. Van Der Graf told her to shut up and went to the door. Evan couldn’t see much in her direction past Alfredo’s nose painted on the ceiling, but he had a clear view of Van Der Graf, heard his low-voiced mutter giving instructions to the guards in the hallway.
With Van Der Graf’s attention off him for the moment, he tried to think past the drugs. Brad would have a plan. He had faith in that much and he couldn’t be lying around bleeding out when his father needed him. So he focused on the cuts Van Der Graf had made at his throat and closed them, one, then the next, and the next. Left a couple that had already clotted so the EMTs would have an explanation for the blood. His whole body screamed at him to hang on to the drugs, but he didn’t have the time. Whatever his father wanted him to do, he had to be ready.
The chemical signature felt like an old friend already. He found it, pushed outward until the sweat bloomed, and let it go—bon voyage.
First downside to sober? They’d laid him out on a damned uncomfortable table and Donne’s book was leaving a permanent dent in his hip. His father had better have a plan.
Van Der Graf’s mansion was just a few blocks from the auction house. He was still shaking the drugs when the doorbell chimed. It took no effort at all to sense Lily at the door, and Matt Shields—what was he doing here? They had Donne’s strongbox with them. Evan heard it screaming even before the sound of footsteps on the stairs told him they were coming. But where was his father?
Oh. There. A breeze with sparks in it drifted across his faded bruises, moved on. Safe. He was safe. Absurd to think it with his whole life at risk under that ceiling. But they’d come for him. They’d come. For just a moment he let his eyes drift shut, hiding while he settled that fear at least, that he’d been wrong to put his trust in them, that they’d leave him here with Van Der Graf pumping drugs into him until he died of it and they could go home. He hadn’t realized he still carried that fear, wasn’t straight enough, not steady enough yet, to cope with the relief. Tears gathered in his lashes. Don’t fall, don’t make me look like a fool in front of my father. But they slid from the corners of his eyes anyway.
Lily came through the door, and—even through the blur of drug-induced tears—she took his breath away. Or maybe it was the adrenaline that rushed in to fill the spaces where the drugs had muted good sense. She smiled at old Cyril like a long lost lover, but Evan could see the tension at the corners of her eyes. No flames yet, but she was in a dangerous mood.
Shields followed her, carrying the box, his teeth gritted against the screaming of the daemon inside it. He looked up, eyes narrowed, and took the step that brought him under Van Der Graf’s ceiling, onto the blood- red Turkish carpet. More than just dye in the color, but Evan tried not to think about that.
At a gesture from Van Der Graf, the robed figures came forward, almost huddled together. There were seven of them in their long black robes now, eight including Van Der Graf. Evan didn’t know when that had happened. He’d lost some time, didn’t know how much. But the robed guys were all bowing to Lily, including the one with the stained glass bowl clasped in his outstretched hands.
“Welcome, my lord.” Van Der Graf said with an exaggerated flourish. “I am honored by your presence. Please, a drink? Our gift.”
The bowl held about a pint of his blood, Evan figured. Not more than he’d give at the blood bank, but Lily’s eyes glittered ominously. “Don’t you have brandy?” She dismissed the bowl and the man with a mildly disgusted wrinkle of her nose and damped the murder simmering in blue flame. “Or scotch.”
“Scotch sounds good,” Matt Shields agreed. “I never really got the whole blood thing.”
“Of course.” The judge scurried to the sideboard, leaving Van Der Graf standing awkwardly with a thickening bowl of blood nobody wanted.
Shields scanned the room, caught on Alba Sanchez burrowed into her leather chair, but let his gaze move on. Stopped at Evan. “Shift it. This thing is heavy.” He didn’t wait, just slipped the box onto the table and moved out of sight.
Evan looked up at Lily, waiting for a signal. She grinned down at him, showing too many teeth over her brandy.
“Is that for me?” She scratched almost absently at a trail of blood drying on his neck, looked for the cut that made it but didn’t find any—“Good boy,”—and kissed him.
“Fair recompense for bringing me Donne’s daemons,” Van Der Graf sounded smugly pleased with himself. “My daemons now.”
Evan tasted her brandy, felt it when she licked the drugs off his lips. “Yum,” she said; he wasn’t sure if she meant him, or the drugs. “I thought I’d mislaid him.”
She looked up at the seal painted overhead, and he remembered, it had
been a trap once, that pattern on a different ceiling. “What should I do with you?” she asked.
Evan knew then. She needed a command. “Save me?” he said, while Van Der Graf made promises, “Once he’s dead, you will be free.”
“Is that an order?” With her question, it seemed that the air went out of the room. He had to do it, but he couldn’t, not after what he’d done to his father—“Only if you want it to be.”
“Foolish boy.” She looked up then. Van Der Graf wouldn’t know to fear that smile, but Evan did.
“You mean you’ll kill Evan for me? And I’ll be free of him then?”
“Yes,” he said, “Yes. At your command, my lord, with my own hand, or at the tooth and claw of my beast.” Behind him, the robed men muttered their assent.
Shields didn’t protest, but he flicked a nervous glance at Alba Sanchez, who knew more than she should, but apparently not that. Evan thought his father might materialize with an appropriately showy display of fireworks—surprise! Rescue!
Nope. He had kind of hoped they’d come up with a plan he actually lived through, but it wasn’t looking good. Lily seemed to be in charge, and she didn’t really grasp the permanence of “dead.”
She licked her lips, made a show of it, not looking at him, but she meant the next question for Van Der Graf. “And how do I know you have the skill?”
“You know about Donne’s boneyard.” Van Der Graf swept his robed arms wide in a gesture that called on his newly acquired disciples to confirm his prowess at murder. “Evan’s not my first sacrifice, though he might have been, once. But I’ve learned a lot since then, practice makes perfect. I can give you countless offerings. The girl, my own men.” He was sweating, the gaze he fixed on Evan glazed over with lust and hatred and fanatical fervor. “Let me serve you the bleeding heart of your captor.”
“A valentine in June. How sweet,” Lily cooed.
Suddenly Van Der Graf’s sleeve fell back to reveal the silver knife in his raised hand, poised over Evan’s heart.
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