A Legacy of Daemons

by Camille Bacon-Smith

  “He was raised with those paintings on the walls, must have played among those crosses and heard the screams of people being murdered in his house.” Evan’s hands trembled on the wheel of the rental, tangled in flashbacks—his own picture on Donne’s wall, his blood on Donne’s floor, on the walls of a back room in the East Village. Lying on a moldy rug in an empty house, listening to his father tell him to pull his sanity together or Lily would kill him, and she didn’t know him then, would have done it and sometimes still regretted that she hadn’t.

  Grey Donne was dead, but Evan was still alive, and he had a job to do if he planned to stay that way. “If he wasn’t a part of it, why did he wait so long?”

  Shields gave a little shrug, more to the tone than the questions. “He was in boarding school for a while, and at Yale. Both had arms of the cabal to watch over him. They’ve been raising their kids to this for centuries. Donne came to it early, eager for the power. People were just so much meat to him—the cabal believe they are a superior order of beings. They’re not, by the way. They die just like everybody else.”

  Evan knew that, but he’d wondered if Matt Shields had. Wasn’t surprised that Grayson Donne hadn’t gotten the memo. “What about Grey?”

  “He resisted, and they gave him a long lead. Kept it to the simpler rituals, lots of sex and liquor and the occasional sacrifice of a little blood until he was out of college. He thought it was a game that his father took one kink too far.”

  Evan remembered the same rituals, taking the sex and the booze and the drugs, listening to a daemon lord whisper in his ear that he was special, not like the others. Then that lord had snapped a silver collar around his throat and proceeded to drive him mad.

  “What changed it for Grey?”

  “His senior year in college, Donne brought him into the circle. He saw me tear apart the crossing guard from the local elementary school. He started plotting his escape right then.”

  “He confided in you after he watched you murder an innocent human being?”

  At first Shields said nothing, just stared at the paper cup in his hand. Then he rolled down the window and tossed it out, watching it fall behind in a splatter like blood on the asphalt.

  “Donne told him it was me, but Grey didn’t believe him at first. He still wanted to free us. I think he loved Kady a little. Not like Marina—more the way he loved thunder-storms in summer. Not something you touched, but you could love it from a distance.”

  Evan did understand that, felt that way right before he plunged his hands into Lily’s hair. So he wasn’t entirely convinced about the innocence of Grey Donne’s attraction.

  “How does Marina Sanchez fit into it?”

  “Oh, he fell in love with Marina when he was fourteen. He was home for a few weeks on vacation, and she was helping her father in the garden. It took her until the next year, but they never wavered after that. I think it was Marina who kept him normal. In a way, I guess that’s what got him killed. Donne didn’t mind when he thought Grey was just taking advantage of the gardener’s daughter, but when he found out they were planning to leave together, he flew into a rage. He didn’t do it right then, but pretty soon after, Grey had a broken neck. Marina dropped out of school for a year, then she went back and finished her degree.”

  There’d been less than a year between the deaths. Evan figured he still didn’t have the whole truth about what had happened. From his side of the investigation, none of it sounded as innocent as Matt Shields pretended, least of all the Sanchezes.

  The rest? Maybe, but the part that the Sanchezes were just innocent bystanders who gave a daemon lord of Paimon a job painting houses? It didn’t make sense. For one thing, Alba Sanchez kept turning up in all the wrong places—at the Lea Library at Penn, reading Treatise on the Names of the Angels the day after Shields had knocked on his door, and then at Cyril Van Der Graf’s Gilded Age mansion, where she happened to be a prisoner during the auction of Donne’s daemons?

  “Whatever hold the Sanchez family has over you, we can fix. But you have to tell me what it is.”

  “They’re just trying to help.” Evan waited for an explanation, but Shields had stopped talking. He could have pushed it. He owned the strongbox and the Donne family had died out, leaving no blood heirs, so he owned Matt Shields. Which made him no better than old Cyril, or Grayson Donne himself.

  The hell with that.

  The sign ahead pointed them to the Lincoln Tunnel. Sharing time was over anyway.

  Chapter 62

  SID VALENTINE WAS WAITING in a room with a window looking out onto the hallway. Sid’s case—he’d opened the file. The room held two chairs with a desk covered in walnut-grained laminate between them. It could have been any office, except for a mirror with one-way glass across from the window. Sid waited in the chair facing the door, with Donne’s strongbox on the desk in front of him.

  Evan had left Matt Shields with the rental. Didn’t want him near the FBI if he could help it; didn’t want him in the room with the screaming strongbox while somebody trained to spot serial killers watched through the one-way glass. Sid couldn’t hear the screaming, of course. He wouldn’t understand why Evan winced when he walked through the door, but he noticed.

  “You should be in the hospital. Doesn’t your agency give sick leave?” Sarcasm. Great. Evan had an answer to that—used it up on the last case—but he didn’t want to remind Sid of Mai Sien Chong or the alabaster child still missing from the art museum’s collection.

  Fortunately, Sid’s attention had moved on, to the doorway behind him.

  “I thought maybe Miss Ryan would be with you. Isn’t she usually your keeper?” Okay, not so fortunately.

  Evan reached out a mental feeler, got a ping. “She’s downstairs, signing out the car.” She had the dealer with her, to take it away. Brad had been adamant; they were getting rid of the car. He’d picked a new model—it was probably in their garage already. Lily would find her own way home. “If you have the paperwork, I’ll take the strongbox.”

  “Not so fast.” Sid shifted his belt buckle but didn’t bother to straighten the shirt that belled above it. “We have some questions. Mr. Van Der Graf admitted that his staff might keep illegal drugs in the house. He said that he suspected one of his bodyguards of using performance enhancing chemicals but that he did not know the nature of the substances. He also said you knew this particular bodyguard and invaded his home—Mr. Van Der Graf’s home—looking for drugs and that you were semiconscious when he found you in his library. He would have called the police himself, but at that very moment he was losing a contest with your father over the purchase of this antique strongbox. Bad judgment overtook him, and he decided, since you had landed on his doorstep, so to speak, to trade you for your father’s purchase. A momentary lapse, and he swears, through lawyers who will probably cost him the price of that box, that he would neither have harmed you nor gone through with the highly illegal exchange, involving as it would, unlawful imprisonment, extortion, and grand theft. And murder, of course. The wire picked up his confession to murder, which his lawyers characterize as a wrongheaded attempt to claim the killings he’s seen on the news as his own in order to frighten Miss Ryan into relinquishing the strongbox.”

  A part of that was true. Van Der Graf wouldn’t have gone through with the exchange. But Evan had no doubt about the murders. Van Der Graf had hoped to keep the box, trap Brad and Lily, and sacrifice Evan himself to the monstrous side of Matt Shields.

  “What did Alba Sanchez say?” He sounded like he was fishing for an alibi, probably made him look guilty of something to the eyes behind the glass. But he figured if Sid was giving out information, he’d take what he could get until the well ran dry.

  “Oh, Ms. Sanchez supports your story. She insisted that she was Van Der Graf’s prisoner as well—a regular collector, Cyril Van Der Graf.” Which was true enough to make Evan wince again, thinking of the graves in Grayson Donne’s woods, but didn’t necessarily include Alba Sanchez.


  “She said you were under guard when they brought her into the room, that they used her as a distraction while Van Der Graf injected the drugs against your will. Who gave you the drugs seems up for grabs, but several of the guards backed up the basic story, including one, a user himself, who said you almost ODed because Van Der Graf didn’t know you were clean. You couldn’t call any of them a disinterested witness, and nobody was telling the whole truth, but we do have Van Der Graf’s own words on the wire, and your blood pretty much everywhere. And, yes, the forensic pathologists working the case have found several distinctive patterns in the murders, including a smaller group of adolescent boys murdered during the past fifteen years that fit the pattern of a sexual predator and serial killer.”

  Evan’s hand went to his neck, where one of the cuts he’d left for evidence rubbed against his collar. Sid followed the movement as if it proved something, and not just about Van Der Graf.

  “I know you too well to assume any degree of innocence, but it does seem clear that you weren’t there for the drugs. And frankly, Mr. Davis, you may think I’m a fool—I know your cousin does—but Ms. Ryan was ready to kill Cyril Van Der Graf if she had to, to get you back. And she wouldn’t let your father go in with the wire because he was ready to kill the people in that room without waiting for another option. I don’t trust much about your agency, but I know how your partners act when you are in real trouble. So, no, I don’t believe Van Der Graf’s story. If we hadn’t gotten to you when we did, Cyril Van Der Graf and his cronies would have killed you. He came closer as it was than your father will tolerate, and I suggest you keep your nose clean for a while. Because I’d love to lock up Kevin Bradley for any one of half a dozen felonies he may have committed, but murdering your killer isn’t one of them. I’d just as soon not have to stand in the rain while they bury you.”

  Sid pushed the paperwork across the table. “Sign here, and it’s yours.” Evan signed, stood up and grabbed the handholds on each side. The daemon inside was shrieking, high and desperate, the sound cutting through Evan’s head. He didn’t know how he was going to get the box to wherever he needed to take it without collapsing from the pressure of that desperation, and it was going to be worse for the daemon lords involved. And he still hadn’t figured out how to keep Matt Shields from killing him when he didn’t release the daemon trapped in the strongbox. Not until he’d figured how to keep the planet alive when he did it.

  “Can you at least tell us why anyone would pay thirty-five million for it?” Sid was asking him to throw him a bone for the guys behind the glass. Evan knew he wouldn’t understand it, or believe it, so he told him the truth. “It’s not the box, it’s what’s inside.”

  “It’s empty.”

  Evan shrugged. “Maybe.”

  He could see when the possibility, “poison gas,” passed through Sid’s mind; when he dismissed it. Even Sid knew the box wasn’t airtight, and the FBI had tested it every way it knew without destroying it. But he’d figured out that Evan was telling the truth. “Doesn’t matter that it’s empty. Van Der Graf’s running a cult, and the cult is convinced there’s something in there.” Evan waited while Sid took the next step. “So is the Church.”

  “I don’t know what the Church thinks,” Evan admitted. “But they sure don’t want stuff that inspires murderous power cults in the name of medieval religion traded on the open market.”

  “And the Church trusts you, and your client, not to sell it to the next highest bidder?”

  “The mother of this particular representative of the Church trusts Lily.”

  Which disgusted Sid, and Evan found it pretty damned odd himself. But this conversation could get dangerous fast, so he picked up the box and took the few steps to the door. He had to find Lily, tell her the plan, and then get Matt Shields moving. He wanted Carlos Sanchez by nightfall.

  “Try not to get yourself killed.” Sid didn’t bother getting up. “You father won’t do well in prison.” Evan knew that. Fortunately, this time Brad had a walk-away contract.

  Chapter 63

  MAI SIEN CHONG KNEW MANY WAYS to please him, and demanded that Brad please her in return, an unspoken walk-away contract between a reincarnated empress and a daemon lord whose true name she came close enough to guessing to add spice to the transaction. He liked the sex well enough, but he’d missed the part that had brought them together in the first place.

  Lily didn’t play chess. Evan played like strategy was a foreign concept. Harry and Ellen Li didn’t include him at all when the police had their collective eye on the agency. So he smiled at Mai Sien Chong across the chessboard set up on her coffee table, drank her champagne while the lights of Singapore sparkled on the bay, and ate bits of chicken and beef served on elegant dishes between moves.

  “You’re worried about your son,” she said. She wore a silk robe the color of the champagne that she hadn’t bothered to tie, so that it fell open when she leaned over and took his bishop. “You play defensively, with little imagination, when Evan is in trouble. And I am reduced to flaunting my breasts to hold your attention!”

  “I’m not worried.” He’d sacrificed the bishop and made his own move—defensive, she was right about that, but he was doing some distracting of his own. He’d taken on most of his human form again, except for a fine glimmer of blue scales that he’d kept for her pleasure. He’d rid himself of the fangs and the claws—couldn’t get hold of the chess pieces with claws, and they shredded the carpet as well as the sheets—but he’d left the nubs of horns peeking out of his hair. She liked to honor them with little licks of her tongue, and he found he liked that too, very much. The last thing he wanted to think about was Evan on the road with a lord of a foreign Prince. He wasn’t in trouble—angry, but not in trouble. But Mai Sien was right about the worry. Something . . .

  She left her chair and came to him, stood between his knees and stroked the fine blue scales across his shoulders, down his back, offering her breasts for his mouth as she kissed first one and then the other of the nubs of his horns. She couldn’t read his mind, but she knew all the tells he let her see. Her breasts certainly worked as a distraction, though he’d planned his moves well before she’d made her play. But this game wasn’t going to end with her robe in tatters.

  “You’re leaving, aren’t you?” she asked, and he sighed.

  “I have to go home.” He let her think he meant the house on Spruce Street. But that feeling of something wrong had grown, and it didn’t come from Philadelphia.

  So he went, pulled off course by the will of his Prince before he had fully abandoned the material sphere.

  Chapter 64

  IN WORDLESS FURY, MATT SHIELDS POINTED out the turn. Flames danced in his hair, raised it at the back of his neck and twisted in his eyes. A thin trail of smoke rose from the upholstery.

  Evan tried to ignore it—took the exit, made the next turn. The sign at the crossing read, “Toms River, 5 miles.” They went the other way, going deeper into more damned woods, pine trees pressing against the sandy verge on either side of the narrow, two-lane highway. He rolled down the window because oxygen was getting short in the car, but it didn’t help. Vision tightened down to a narrow tunnel with black spots clotted at the periphery.

  “If I die, the box goes to the Church.” Bertrande LeRoux, actually, in exchange for a hefty contribution to the purchase price, but they all knew where it would end up. Her son would make sure of that. The threat was enough. Shields pulled a little further into himself and Evan felt the oxygen leak back into his lungs.

  Not Matt Shields, a regular guy with a problem, he reminded himself. He was driving through the New Jersey Pine Barrens with an enraged daemon lord held this side of devastation by the limits of a binding Evan hadn’t asked for but couldn’t let go of. Yet.

  “We’ll take care of this. Nobody’s backing out of the deal, but it has to be safe for all of us,” he reminded Shields. Parmatus. He’d picked that name up in the second celestial sphere, had found it easier to ignore t
he knowledge until he’d carried the strongbox out to the rental. Shields had said, “Now,” and Evan had said, “No.” Shields—Parmatus—hadn’t liked the answer.

  They turned onto a narrow dirt road with more forest on both sides. Spiky, fast-growing pines with narrow trunks were packed dense and tangled in the needle-strewn sand. A few spindly oaks fought it out until the next fire took them down. The Pines always burned.

  Couldn’t be far now. The air smelled like brine and marsh grass. A few more miles and they’d hit water. Shields still hadn’t said more than, “Turn here,” but Evan had to figure there was something at the end of this road, probably the Sanchezes, which went a long way toward explaining why the police hadn’t found them in New York. “I thought these people were your friends.”

  Shields—Parmatus—glared, but said nothing. Not even the usual “humans are worth shit” line he usually got. “You might want to pull in the fangs before we get there,” he suggested. “Your disguise is slipping.”

  “I don’t have fangs.” But Shields got the point, smothered the flames, and smoothed the rage out of his face. The blank screen that replaced it wasn’t much better, but Evan figured it would be easier to paste a smile on. The last turn was a driveway that stopped at a low white house set up on blocks, with asphalt shingles on the roof and a sagging screened porch, front or back, he couldn’t tell. Evan got out of the car, propped an arm on the top of the door. Shields let his own door slam behind him.

  For a moment, the only sound was the wind in the trees and off to his right a stream, water splashing over rocks. From inside the house, he heard running feet, light quick steps with firmer ones following right behind. A woman’s voice called, “Katey!” Then the screen door slammed back against the porch and bounced on its hinges.