I nodded toward a clutch of dried purple flowers. “I see you have wolf’s bane,” I said. “Do you ever treat clients infected with the lycanthropic virus?”
“From time to time, yes.”
“Ever encountered a werewolf-vampire hybrid?”
“Once.”
“An infant, right?” I said. “About eighteen years ago?”
Now Lady Bastet’s eyes did widen slightly. “May I ask how you know this?”
I glanced over at Vega, who had one hand turned up as though to say, Were you ever going to tell me you’d figured something out? But the pieces had snapped together in the last moment. Sonny the vampire. The creature we had encountered in the storm line. The remnants of a spell I had sensed in Alexandra’s old dormitory. Lady Bastet’s reaction to the photo.
Alexandra hadn’t worked for Sonny. Her mother had.
“Someone brought an infant to you,” I said. “A young woman, I’m guessing. She was worried about her little girl’s … makeup. She asked you to cast a spell to fix her, to make her human.”
“But I could not,” Lady Bastet said, picking up the story. “She had not been infected by a werewolf, nor had she been turned into a vampire. Those elements belonged to her by birth. As such, I could only suppress her vampire and werewolf natures, keep them from maturing.”
“Through a powerful binding spell,” I said.
“May I see the photo again? Yes,” Lady Bastet said after Vega had handed it to her. “I remember the eyes. So intelligent.” She sighed sadly. “Am I to presume the spell has been broken?”
“About two months ago,” I said. “Alexandra took a powerful street drug. Detective Vega and I happened to visit the room in which she ingested it, and I detected the remnants of the binding spell.”
“It probably occurred on or near the full moon,” Lady Bastet said. “This Alexandra would have gone into the wilds at night, fed on the blood of animals, and then slept in the daytime to avoid the most intense light.” I nodded, remembering what her roommate had told us. “Eventually, she would have developed a craving for human blood. It would have been irresistible to her. Are you trying to find her?”
“Yes,” Vega said.
“No,” I said over her. “Well, not right now. We’re trying to find the mother.” Something still told me that was what Arnaud was after. “Do you remember her name? Anything about her?”
“She did not give me a name. She was young and frightened, though she hid both well. I noticed she had no wedding band. She looked a lot like this young woman.” Lady Bastet tapped the photo with a fingernail.
I turned to Vega. “Do you remember Sonny’s reaction to the photo? How he said it reminded him of an employee from decades earlier.”
“He knew the mother,” Vega said.
“Intimately,” I added. “Because he’s Alexandra’s father.”
Vega’s head tilted. “That son of a bitch,” she whispered.
I turned back to Lady Bastet. “Did you treat the mother, too?”
“She did not ask me to. Perhaps because she was not a full-blooded werewolf.”
“What did you charge the mother to help her infant?” I asked.
“Her hair.”
“Her hair?” Vega said.
“She had very powerful hair, the color of wild honey, all the way to her waist. Her wolf nature gave it added potency. Some of my most powerful enchantment spells came from that hair.”
“Do you have any left?” With even a single strand, I could cast a hunting spell.
“I am afraid not. Word spread quickly. The supply could not keep up with the demand.”
Crap.
“Can you, I don’t know, divine anything about her whereabouts?” Vega asked.
“Do you have something that might connect me to her?” Lady Bastet asked.
“We have no idea who she even is,” Vega said.
“Then I’m sorry.”
“Wait.” I reached into the inner pocket of my coat and withdrew the long strand of Alexandra’s hair. “This belonged to her daughter.”
Lady Bastet accepted the hair and drew it between her finger and thumb. “A cellular as well as an emotional connection.” Lady Bastet’s lips turned up at the corners. “Most powerful.”
“Will it work?” Vega asked.
“That depends on what you are prepared to give.”
“What do you charge?” Vega asked, already pulling out her wallet.
Lady Bastet’s attention shifted to me. My skin tingled uncomfortably as her kohl-lined eyes roamed my body. At last, her gaze settled on mine, and she smiled again. “His blood.”
“What?” Vega said.
“Not all of it.” Lady Bastet stood and retrieved a clay tube from a shelf. “This much.”
I sized up the tube. She was clever, asking just enough to weaken my powers without it being a deal breaker. But I was more concerned with how she planned to employ my blood. Wizard’s blood could be used in powerful spells. And if those spells took a dark bent, the wizard was on the hook with the Order—especially if said wizard had given his blood willingly.
I glanced over at Vega, who was watching me for my answer, one hand to her bandaged stomach. “It’s a deal,” I said. Before I could reconsider, I pushed up my right coat sleeve and placed my arm on the table.
“Very good.”
I shuddered as Lady Bastet’s fingernails caressed the network of veins on my upturned forearm. She uttered an incantation, and the veins bulged in a painful spasm. Drawing what looked like a wooden needle from her hair, she said, “You’ll feel a small prick.”
She placed the needle against an especially thick vein. A second later, the needle bit into me. A greedy suckling commenced, and I watched blood fill the clay receptacle she held below the needle’s other end.
When the tube was full of dark blood, Lady Bastet pulled the needle free and capped the container. With another incantation, the puncture closed and my veins relaxed. Giving the tube a light shake, she whispered, “Perfect.”
She shooed away a cat perched on a small wooden box on one of the shelves and placed the tube inside among some others. Back at the table, she removed the cloth from the scrying globe. The pad of her first finger caressed the length of Alexandra’s hair as she whispered in old Egyptian.
The marble-like pattern of the globe began to shift and glow.
“The mother is in the city,” Lady Bastet said after a moment. “She is involved with disreputable people, but she cannot disentangle herself from them, like she did Sonny. The years have made her more wily, though. She uses them.”
I glanced over at Vega, who mouthed, “John Smith.” I nodded. Alexandra’s sponsor. He was connected to the mother somehow. And if he had been paying Alexandra’s tuition in cash all these years, he was someone of means. Lady Bastet stared into the globe until I couldn’t help myself.
“Is there a man in her life?” I asked.
“Because the hair is not hers, I see only glimpses of those around her. There are two men of significance, though. One strong, the other weak. Power binds her to both. Not love.” Light seeped from the globe as it stopped shifting.
Lady Bastet raised her eyes. “I have told you all I can see.”
“No name?” Vega asked.
The mystic’s gold hoop earrings rattled when she shook her head.
“There’s Sonny’s files,” I said to Vega as Lady Bastet covered the globe. “Alexandra’s date of birth gives us the year she was conceived, probably when her mother worked for Sonny. Going name by name through the file for that year, Sonny should be able to make the match to the woman he remembered, the one who looked like Alexandra.”
Vega nodded and stood. “Thanks for your help,” she told Lady Bastet.
“Are you sure there is nothing else?”
“Not right now,” I said.
Vega hesitated. “Actually… a friend of Everson’s is missing.”
I looked at her in surprise. Vega tilted her head towar
d Lady Bastet. I pulled out my wallet, digging through the leather sleeves until I found Caroline’s business card from the College. I slid it halfway toward the mystic, then stopped. “What are you asking for this time?”
“We will discuss payment afterwards.” Lady Bastet’s lids fell slightly as she stroked the card. The globe returned to life and glowed against her face.
But after only seconds, the globe dimmed again.
“I am sorry,” Lady Bastet said. “Your friend is no longer in this world.”
My heart stopped for a beat before lurching into a panicked rhythm. “Wh-what do you mean?”
The black cloth the mystic replaced over the globe looked like a funeral shroud.
“That is all I can tell you. And for that, I ask nothing.”
29
“You going to be all right?” Vega asked.
I looked from the dark storefronts skipping past on Seventh Avenue to Detective Vega, who had insisted on driving despite her bullet wound. They were the first words either of us had spoken since leaving Lady Bastet’s.
“Still processing,” I replied numbly. “But her pronouncement could mean a couple of things besides, you know…” I swallowed.
My best hope now was that Angelus had taken Caroline to the faerie realm.
“If there’s something you need to do, I can probably take it from here.”
I shook my head. “No. I’m the reason we’re in this mess. The priority is getting your son back safely. I’ll look for Caroline afterwards. Anyway, Arnaud insisted we work together.”
“All right. Let’s just take a few minutes to make sure we’re on the same page.” Vega coughed weakly into her fist, wincing at the pain in her stomach. “This mother, who has werewolf blood in her, has a child with Sonny, and they give birth to a—what did you call it?”
“A werewolf-vampire hybrid,” I said.
“The mother takes the hybrid to Lady Bastet, who casts some sort of spell to keep her as human as possible. Then the mother puts her child, Alexandra, in the care of the state. Years pass. The mother’s left Sonny, but she gets involved with some disreputable people.”
“People with the money to pay the tuition at the boarding school.”
“Yeah,” Vega said. “Which tells me ‘John Smith’ is probably the mother.”
I paused to consider the P.O. Box and burner phone. “You’re probably right. Great catch.”
“Alexandra seems to be doing all right at school, but her roommate brings home a street drug. Heroin laced with God knows what. Alexandra takes it and … it breaks up the spell somehow?”
“With the kinds of forces that spell was holding back,” I said, “it might not have taken much. Sort of like a tire that gets nicked on the highway. First little bits of rubber start flicking off, then huge chunks.”
“And she became a werewolf-vampire?”
“Right.”
“But what brought her to the city?”
“Help? Answers? A larger food supply?” I shrugged. “There’s no telling. Not with the information we have.”
“So why is Arnaud protecting her?”
I thought about what the vampire hunters had said right before they kicked me out of their apartment. “Maybe he isn’t protecting her out of self-interest,” I said. “Maybe someone hired him to protect Alexandra.”
“The mother?”
“Seems the most likely candidate. But it still begs the question: Why is Arnaud having us chase leads to find out who the mother is if he already knows? I mean, look at what he’s given us so far: the creature’s identity, the father’s identity, the fact the mother brought the creature to Lady Bastet. He doesn’t need us to connect the dots.”
“Then there’s the question of who hired the vampire hunters to kill the creature.”
“Ah,” I said. “I actually have a lead there. Who did you inform about your trip into the storm lines?”
“So far? No one.”
“Did you write it down anywhere, like in a report?”
Vega shook her head. “There wasn’t time. I was planning to write the report after.”
“So you didn’t tell anyone?”
“No, Croft. Just you and Hoffman.”
“Hoffman,” I groaned.
“Why?”
“When I asked the vampire hunters how they ended up in the storm line, Blade said, ‘We were told the same thing as you. That the creature was using the storm drains.’ Which can only mean someone got that information from Hoffman and then passed it along.”
Vega’s eyes narrowed as she shook her head. “He knows he’s not supposed to share info on an investigation without my authorization.”
“Yeah, well he’s not exactly up for a Meritorious Police Duty award.”
“All right, I’ll call him after we deal with Sonny.” She pulled up curbside near the staircase leading to Sonny’s apartment.
I got out and came around the car to find Vega leaning against her car door, holding her stomach.
“Let me take a look,” I said.
“I’m fine.” She pushed my hand away.
“If you’re bleeding again…”
“I’m not.” She strode toward the staircase.
I followed, watching her closely. I could sense the dose of healing magic I’d applied earlier still moving around inside her. She really needed to be resting for it to work, though.
At the top of the steps, I could see where Sonny had leaned his blown-out door against the frame. The spaces around the door’s edges were dark.
Vega knocked. “Sonny? It’s the NYPD.”
When no one answered, I lifted the door, walked it a few feet into the living room, and set it against a wall of risqué Seductions calendars. Vega slipped past me, her sidearm gripped in both hands. She cleared the living room and turned toward the hallway.
“Sonny?” she called again.
As I drew my cane apart, my gaze dipped to Vega’s stomach. A small point of blood had struck through the sweatshirt. She’d lied, dammit. She was bleeding through the dressing. Before I could say anything, she disappeared down the hallway. I poked my head behind the kitchen counter. In the sink, I glimpsed Sonny’s dinner plate, the pig parts sucked dry.
A light flicked on in a back room. “Croft,” Vega called.
I followed her voice to a bedroom of purple walls and thick black drapes. She nodded at the king-sized bed. Sonny lay spread-eagle in its center, a blade-shaped hole puncturing his crusty chest. With the death blow, centuries of aging had collapsed back into his body, claiming him in an instant. He looked like a mummy.
“Any idea who would want him dead?” Vega asked.
I circled the bed, remembering what Arnaud had told me on the pier: Sonny has been involved with many people. And for some, that’s a problem. “The question is why someone would want him dead now.”
“Maybe someone observed our earlier visits,” Vega said.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.”
I leaned over Sonny’s body. Several small perforations pocked his face. I reached into my coat, pulled out my notepad, and drew the pencil from the spiral binding. With the pencil’s sharpened tip, I probed a perforation on his cheek until I encountered something hard.
“What the hell are you doing?” Vega asked.
I pried a small shot free and placed it in my palm for Vega to see. “Silver ammo,” I said. “I’ll bet you anything it’s the same ammo that did damage to Blondie earlier tonight.”
“The vampire hunters?”
I nodded, thinking of Bullet’s pump-action shotgun. “Did Hoffman know we interviewed Sonny?”
“He knew about our first interview, yeah. I told him before he went off in search of the plans for Ferguson Towers.” Vega’s eyebrows crushed down as she made the connection. “That means he turned around and informed the person who hired the vampire hunters.”
“The client must have thrown in a bonus for Sonny.”
“Kill the hybrid, kill its origin stor
y,” Vega said.
“Tells me someone wants to bury the matter in the worst way.” A disturbing thought came to me. “Did Hoffman know about our trip to the boarding school or to Lady Bastet?”
“I didn’t tell anyone about those.”
“Good. Let’s keep it that way.” The world wasn’t going to miss Sonny, but I didn’t want innocents becoming targets. “Let’s head down to Sonny’s office. I want to check out those files.”
“Why? All he has down there are names and tax IDs. They won’t mean anything to us. The whole point of coming here was to get him to identify her.” She shot Sonny’s corpse an exasperated look that seemed to blame him for his own death.
“Well, we won’t know unless we look.”
“What do you know?” I said, stooped in front of the file cabinet drawer labeled 2001.
“What?” Vega came up behind me.
“The entire second half of the year is missing.”
“Probably when Alexandra’s mother started here,” Vega said. “The mysterious client had the vampire hunters grab six months’ worth of hires to bury the name he or she was trying to hide.”
I lifted out the files for the first half of the year.
“What are you doing?” Vega asked.
“Here.” I handed half of the files to her. “Look for any unusual last names. Dancers who would be easy to track down. If they were hired before Alexandra’s mother, they might still have been here when she came on board. They might be able to give us a name. We can show them the photo of Alexandra. Seems she inherited her mother’s good looks. She sure doesn’t resemble Sonny.”
“A blessing for her,” Vega muttered.
We carried the files to Sonny’s desk and set up on either side.
I was halfway through the March hires when a name jumped out at me.
“Hey,” I said. “That dancer who came into the office earlier today. What did Sonny call her?”
Vega grimaced. “You mean besides ‘sugar’? Casey.”
“There’s a Casey right here. And didn’t Sonny say she’d been with him for almost twenty years?”
Blood Deal (Prof Croft Book 2) Page 16