Defying Magick: an Urban Fantasy Novel (The Witch Blood Chronicles Book 2)

by Debbie Cassidy

  Murdoch checked the audio connection cable hidden in the upper left-hand corner of the room.

  “The lifts will be disabled upon Shukra’s arrival,” he said. “The emergency doors will be put into lockdown. Once he’s in here with you, if he is our guy, there’ll be no escape.” Murdoch handed me a state of the art earpiece. “Remember, we just need him talking for a few minutes. If you can get him to say the words the witness heard that would be great. Just relax and let him lead the conversation.”

  “Let’s just get this over with.”

  Murdoch left the room.

  “Can you hear me Hunter?” Parker’s voice came in through the tiny mic nestled in my ear.

  “Loud and clear.”

  “We just had another breakthrough. The tech department was examining the rakshasas’ mobile devices, looking for clues, and they found something interesting.”

  “Go on.”

  “Some kind of code imbedded into their mobiles. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, they’re still analyzing it, but when it’s activated a symbol comes up. Guess what it is?”

  “The infinity sign.”

  “You got it.”

  “So we nail him with this and we got him for sure?”

  “Damn straight.” Her voice dropped. “Okay, he’s just exiting the lift now. Murdoch has him and is leading him to the room. The line we need if possible is don’t fight it. Look annoyed. You don’t want to be here, remember?”

  Frown in place, I turned as the door opened and rolled my eyes. “For godsake.”

  Shukra smiled warmly and closed the door behind him. “Miss Hunter. It’s so good to see you again.”

  “Wish I could say the same.”

  He parked his butt on the edge of the nearest desk. “Come now, it’s not so bad, is it? We’re long overdue a chat. You know what I am?”

  “A busy body who likes to dig around inside other people’s heads?”

  He let out a sharp bark of laughter. “Well, I can honestly say I’ve never been described like that before.”

  “Look, I don’t need this. I don’t need you, and I don’t need to be an asura.”

  “You’re doing great,” Parker said into my ear.

  Shukra made a sympathetic face. “Denying who you are isn’t healthy. You’re part of something bigger, united to a divine force that many would kill to join with.”

  I shook my head, attempting a conflicted expression. “I can’t, it’s just too much. It’s suffocating.”

  “Don’t fight it, Miss Hunter. The more you fight, the worse it will be.”

  He’d said the words. Had Urvashi heard them? Was it him?

  “That’s it. Positive ID,” Parker said.

  The door burst open and Murdoch strode in flanked by IEPEU operatives, weapons at the ready.

  “What is this?” Shukra was on his feet, looking from me to the officers.

  “Shukra, you are under arrest for kidnapping and attempted murder, you—”

  “No.” He shook his head violently. “You have it wrong.”

  The operatives moved toward him.

  Shukra rolled up his sleeve, and his tattoos came to life, writhing and glowing. He slammed his hand over the infinity symbol and vanished.

  “What the fuck just happened?” Murdoch said.

  “I think we just found out what that symbol can do.”

  _____

  Did they have him? Why hadn’t Parker called? Surely they’d have him by now.

  Murdoch looked up from his desk. “Sit down Hunter, before you wear a hole in the damn carpet.”

  I parked my butt behind my desk but was back on my feet in less than two seconds. “Why hasn’t she called?”

  Murdoch leaned back in his seat and surveyed me for a long beat. “It will be all right. They’ll find him, and the djinn will get the answers they need, but …”

  “What? But what? Gah, I hate it when people leave their sentences hanging like that.”

  “We’re not in the habit of handing over our citizens to foreign worlds.”

  “Not in the habit? We’ve never been in this position before. He kidnapped djinn, he kidnapped apsara, and he tried to kill me. Who knows what he’s done with the missing djinn. We refuse to hand him over and we’re fucked.”

  Murdoch smiled wryly. “You underestimate our government, Hunter.”

  “Look, we can argue about this once we have the sage in custody.” I glared at my mobile. “Ring damn you.”

  “How’s your friend? Urvashi, is it?”

  “I sent her to the canteen for coffee. I’m not letting her out of the building until we have Shukra in custody. Flipping heck, with that symbol he could be bouncing around all over the place.”

  The phone rang. Thank god. “Parker? You got him?”

  “No. He didn’t go back to Shaitan Enterprises,” Parker said.

  “Fuck. Wait. He has a residence on the outskirts of Camden. Speak to Kiran, his son. He was there when I was attacked by Yamduth. He tried to save my life. Tell him the truth, and then call me back with the address.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m coming with. If he’s there I’ll hang back, if not I can case the place for clues.”

  “We’ll question Kiran, but this could get back to Vritra, and we haven’t cleared him as an accessory yet.”

  “I trust him,” the words popped out instinctively.

  “You do?”

  “He wouldn’t hurt me. I know it.”

  She blew out a breath. “If you were anyone else, I’d tell you to take a leap. But I know you, Hunter. You have an uncanny instinct for people. I’ll get the address. I just hope we’re in time.”

  “Wait. Don’t forget to call me.”

  “Copy that.” She hung up.

  “Better?” Murdoch said.

  “Not until we have our guy.”

  He studied me. “You’re hoping the Yamduth attacks are somehow linked to him too, aren’t you?”

  “No, I hadn’t even thought of that but yeah, that would be great.” Kill two birds with one stone and all that. “I doubt it though. There’s no motive. He sent the rakshasa after me because he wanted the feather and he couldn’t leave me alive to tattle about his messengers. But the feather is gone, and the IEPEU have detailed descriptions of the creatures, so I’m no longer a threat.”

  Murdoch pouted. “I just can’t shake the feeling that there’s more to this than we’re being presented with.”

  The phone beeped with an address. I grabbed my bag. “You coming?”

  He shook his head. “Nope, this one is all yours.”

  I headed out the door and down the stairwell, fuck waiting for a lift. I had a sage to catch.

  _____

  I arrived to find the IEPEU unit already on the scene. Parker met me at the front door to the detached red-brick house.

  “We were too late,” she said.

  “He got away?”

  “No. He’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Suicide. Slit wrists. He bled out.”

  No. That didn’t make sense. “Why would he kill himself?”

  Parker held up a clear plastic bag containing a note. “He left this.”

  I took it from her carefully and scanned the words—something about guilt and shame, honor and desperation, the need for power, to be divine. My stomach sank. He’d wanted to be a god and was trying to create his own amrit, the ambrosia of the gods. The main ingredient had been djinn souls. He went on to explain how he’d found out about the abandoned Soho guild operations. The equipment had been sourced from an old Kubera lab under Richmond Park. His first apsara abduction, the extraction of protsaahan and the selection of rakshasa to bring him what he needed. It was all explained. Victor had said he had contacts at Shaitan Enterprises; it turned out that rakshasa were also a kind of demigod. Shaitan Enterprises welcomed them, provided jobs and homes if they needed—so it had been easy for Shukra to find his victims, to use protsaahan to persuade th
em to do his bidding. The eternity symbol had been the trigger. It showed up on their phones and they’d drop what they were doing and convene at the Soho lab for instruction. Another call, another flash of that symbol, and they’d snap out of it, until next time. He’d kept them topped up, forcing them to bring him enough apsara to extract enough persuasion to last weeks. Everything was in the note, but it felt all wrong.

  “Parker! Down here!”

  Parker jerked her head to indicate I follow. We walked through the kitchen to a door leading down into a basement. Urgh, this didn’t look good. Flashlight beams bounced around at the bottom of the steps. Melody grabbed her pen light, leading the way.

  “Bulb’s busted,” Drake, her second in command, called out.

  We joined him at the foot of the steps.

  “This way.” He led us to the left, past shelves piled high with crap, to another door in the wall. The rest of her team was inside the brightly lit chamber beyond.

  What the heck? It was a lab of some sort, but the two things that caught my attention were the huge furnace and the glowing orb suspended in a cradle on the lab counter. The inside swirled like a lava lamp, pulsing enticingly.

  “What is it?” Parker asked.

  Another operative was flicking through a notepad on the counter. “Djinn souls. He burned the bodies in the furnace. That’s all that’s left.”

  “So we have a dead sage, a confession, and all the evidence we need to tie this up in a big red bow and hand it over to your friend Paimon.”

  “Yeah.” I drew out the syllable.

  Parker locked gazes with me. “It feels almost too neat, doesn’t it?

  “Convenient. I mean, who stops to write an essay when they have the IEPEU on their tail?”

  Drake joined us. “You think it’s a set up?”

  “He said we had it wrong. Back at headquarters, when Murdoch barreled in, he said we had it wrong.” I walked over to the orb—the glowing sphere which contained the main ingredient to Shukra’s homemade amrit. “Where are the notes on synthesizing the amrit?”

  The operative studying the papers shook his head. “Nothing in here about amrit.”

  Made no sense, and there was something else niggling at me, an important clue staring me right in the face.

  Boots clattered down the stairs.

  “Hey, you can’t be in here!” Drake said.

  My dragon felt his presence a split second before he entered the room.

  “Where is he? Where’s Shukra?” Vritra demanded.

  Parker stepped forward. “His body is upstairs in the master bedroom, you can’t—”

  But he was already off, back up the stairs to find his friend.

  My heart lurched for him. Shukra had been his confidant. This had to hurt like a bitch.

  I walked toward the stairs. “I best make sure he’s okay.”

  Melody nodded.

  I found Vritra in the bedroom doorway, his hand over his mouth as he stared at Shukra’s dead body.

  “I’m sorry.” I reached for him.

  “You should have come to me.” His tone was brittle.

  “What?”

  He turned to me, his anger a primal, tangible force pressing against me. “You are asura. You are one of us. You should have come to me and told me what you suspected.”

  “I’m also IEPEU and I was following protocol.”

  “Your protocol got him killed!”

  His words were a slap in the face, and for the first time since she’d awoken inside me, my dragon bared her teeth at him. “Maybe you should read his damned confession, take a look at the evidence in his lab, and check out the ashes of the dead djinn whose souls he extracted before you point fingers. Your friend killed those innocent creatures. He almost killed me, and all because he was sick of being your ancient sidekick. He wanted power. He wanted to be a god. He killed himself because he was ashamed—because he got caught. Maybe you just didn’t know him as well as you thought you did.”

  Vritra’s expression shuttered, his anger retracting like a set of lethal claws. “You should have come to me,” he said calmly. “I would have helped you contain him. If he was guilty I would have helped you discover that, and maybe … maybe he would still be alive to receive his punishment. Your actions backed him into a corner. This is your fault. You were one of us …”

  He stormed past me and down the stairs, leaving me with the sightless body of the sage and a twisting vortex of guilt in my chest.

  17

  Ice-cream was good. Ice-cream and chicken was a winning combination. My phone rang for the kazzilionth time and I hit silent.

  This was my time. No death, no lies, no mysteries. Yeah, there were yamduth out to get me for whatever reason. Yeah, Paimon was shacking up with someone else. Yep, Vritra hated me and blamed me for the death of his friend. But right now, none of that mattered. All that mattered was the ice-cream, the bucket of chicken, and re-runs of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

  The cuff glared at me from the coffee table, daring me to put it back on. I’d found it there when I’d gotten back from the office. Paimon had even left a note which said, Thank you, and, if you need me. So I guessed he had his orb with the djinn souls and the answers he needed. It was truly over. I played with the chain around my neck. Should I put the cuff back on? Was I being unreasonable cutting all ties with him? Gah, it was just me making excuses to see him again. No. They cuff stayed off. For now.

  A rap sounded at the door.

  “Go away!”

  “Open the damn door, before I break it down,” Henna said.

  Urgh. The daughter of my new enemy. “Have you come to kill me? Because if you have, you need to come back later, I’m in the middle of wallowing.”

  “I brought tequila.”

  “So, no stabby, stabby?”

  “Not tonight.”

  I hopped off the sofa and let her in.

  She held up a carrier bag. “Got lime and salt too.”

  “I have salt.”

  She shrugged. “Grab a couple of glasses girl. We need to chat.”

  Five minutes and two shots later, Henna sat back with a drumstick. “You asked me why I killed the asura dad wanted to mate with.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, I think it’s time I told you why.” She topped up her glass and drained it, forgoing the lime and salt. “My mother was an awesome woman. An asura, but not a dragon like Vritra, because there hadn’t been anyone like him for a long time. Not till you. Anyway, he mated with her and they were happy. Or at least I thought they were, but there were times I caught my mother looking sad, and when I asked why, she’d always make some bollocks excuse. Obviously I didn’t realize her excuses were bollocks at the time, being a child and all, I didn’t even realize they were excuses, not until she got real sick. She was a seer and she always said she’d seen something sad, and not to worry as it didn’t concern us.”

  “I didn’t know demi-gods could get sick.”

  Henna snorted. “Not the usual ailments no. We didn’t have those on the celestial plains, but demi-gods sometimes sicken and waste from afflictions of the heart or mind.”

  “And what was it with your mother? Heart or mind?”

  She smiled wryly. “My mother died of a broken heart. I was old enough to understand by the time she was close to passing. She called me to her bedchamber and she told me that she’d foreseen this day. She’d known she would die like this, but she’d chosen to love my father anyway, knowing full well that she would never hold all his heart. She made me swear an oath to guard my father’s heart until a woman who could capture it whole entered his life. She told me that woman would have a dragon in her heart.” She sat forward, poured another drink, and downed it. “I killed the asura woman to keep my oath.” Her eyes misted. “I asked her to decline the mating offer, and she refused. I tried to change dad’s mind, but he’s a stubborn fool and wouldn’t listen. He thought I needed a mother. He was about to tie himself to a woman who he would never love compl
etely, and that woman, the fool that she was, was making the same mistake my mother had.”

  “So you killed her.”

  “Yeah. I did.” She poured another drink and tipped that back too. “I’m not a monster, Carmella, but it helped that people saw me as such. It kept them at bay, until you came along. You were on dad’s radar and I almost killed you twice.” She smiled. “Thank god I didn’t succeed.”

  “Because I have a dragon inside me? You think I’m the woman your mother foretold?”

  “I know it.”

  “No. I’m not your woman.”

  “No. You’re his. I know my father and he’s never been this fixated on anyone before. If he had his way, he’d kidnap you and lock you in his penthouse suite where it’s safe. You think it’s easy for him, letting you roam free when there are yamduth after you? The first time you were attacked, at the Yaksha gathering, it took five of us to hold down his dragon, to prevent it coming for you.”

  “He shifted?”

  “Nah, shifting is gradual, a fluid action. What he did was not shifting. He kinda burst into a dragon. We had to lock him up until he changed back.”

  “He came to see me the next day.”

  “Yeah, I was ready to slit your throat about that.”

  “Why didn’t you come for me?”

  “I was curious. And I was right to be. You found your dragon, or the dragon found you. What I’m trying to say in a roundabout way is that you have my blessing.”

  She thought I belonged with Vritra, and there was no denying the attraction, but it wasn’t enough. Paimon’s face flashed before my eyes, and my heart did its pitter-patter ache thing. Paimon may be gone, but my heart wasn’t my own just yet.

  “Thanks but no thanks.”

  She frowned. “I know he’s angry right now, but he will see sense. What happened wasn’t your fault. He knows that, he’s just hurting. Shukra was a close friend and one of the only people that really knew Vritra. The dragon that sired Vritra died a long time ago. All that’s left of him are his bones, and Vritra refuses to part with those. I think, sometimes, when he’s feeling particularly low or conflicted, he goes into the vault to speak to those bones.”