by Tegan Maher
Michael cast him a sideways glance. “It’s pretty far. I’d say at least a quarter-mile. That’s a long way to drag a body. Especially Bernie’s.”
“I guess it depends on where they started from,” I replied. “I wish we had a way to track it, but I’m no good with that sort of thing.”
“Me either,” Callum said.
“Then it looks like we’re going it the old-fashioned way,” Michael replied. “Let’s get a move on.”
We sucked down our sodas and headed back into the heat. Rocky and Lonan were waiting for us, and I gave the raven a quick run-down of what we’d learned.
“You should have called for me when you were in trouble,” he said, his voice thick with censure. “That’s why I came with you, you know.”
I sighed. “I know. And believe me, I’ve already heard it.”
Lonan cast a speculative glance toward Callum. “But you haven’t heard it from me, Kira. Next time, you call for me before you try to do it alone.”
“Careful,” I said, teasing. “Keep that up, and I’ll start thinking you like me or something.”
The raven tutted. “I hardly think. Your Aunt Nevvie would make a boa from me if anything happened to you. It’s a simple matter of self-preservation.”
“Okay,” I said, smiling. “You keep telling me that. Whatever it takes to help you sleep at night.”
“I didn’t know angels had familiars,” Michael said as we walked.
“Excuse me,” Lonan said, whipping his head around in true bird-like fashion. “I am nobody’s medium. I follow Kira because I care about her. I dedicated myself to her family a long time ago for reasons that are none of your concern. I am not tied to her.”
Lonan had come to our family when my aunts had saved him decades ago when they’d gone after a witch’s soul who’d managed to slip away from her body before she was reaped. He was locked in a cage, nearly dead from abuse and starvation. He’d lived with us ever since.
Needless to say, he did not take kindly to being referred to as a medium for exactly that reason.
“Okay,” Michael said, holding up his hands. “I meant no offense. I was just trying to learn.”
Lonan ruffled his feathers, then settled back down on my shoulder. “Perhaps I overreacted a bit. There’s no way you could have known, and it’s an understandable mistake.”
I was a little surprised because Lonan wasn’t typically the type to apologize. That was about the closest I’d ever heard him come, in fact. I supposed if even he was going out of his way to play nice, I probably should, too.
The ME had gotten back with Michael. Bernie did, in fact, have a brand-new hawk tattoo on his right bicep, so the tattoo parlor seemed to be the next logical place to visit, not that we had any other clues to follow.
We walked in silence for a couple of blocks, which gave me time to see more of the city. I was amazed at the diversity of people and shops. Abaddon’s Gate was a true melting pot of people, times, and stations. There were people dressed in fine clothes mixing with urchins. Witches, shifters, brownies, and fairies smiled at each other as they passed on the street, and I was almost positive I spotted a Valkyrie eating at the Italian place we’d passed earlier.
The shops were the same. A jewelry store with a king’s ransom worth of gems shared a building with a tarot reader and a junk shop, and street vendors selling everything from clothing and modern tech to cauldrons and wands lined up beside each other.
I decided I liked the city. Not as much as I loved Celestial City by far, but the two were hardly comparable.
As soon as we crossed the street, that prickly feeling you get when somebody’s staring at you made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I looked around but didn’t see anything out of place. I was used to people looking at me because I wasn’t exactly subtle, but it wasn’t like I was the only one armed and dressed to kick ass on the street, either.
When the feeling persisted, I paused at a vendor’s booth and pretended to be interested in the cheap little dream catchers the seedy little man was selling. They were mass-produced and worthless even though he claimed they were charmed to make your dreams sweet. I raised an eyebrow at that while I continued to scan the crowds.
“I hardly think this is the time to be looking at knock-off souvenirs,” Callum said as I ran my fingers down the feathers of the dream catcher nearest me.
“I’m not looking for souvenirs,” I replied, my gaze still scanning the crowd in search of my admirer.
After a few seconds, a blonde working in a booth across the street caught my eye. A big sign advertising lucky monkey’s paws hung from the front of her cart. I watched her for a few moments and noticed a slight halo around her when she moved, sort of like a double exposure.
“Hey, Michael,” I said, not taking my eyes off the woman, “do you know that person?”
“The blonde?” he asked, following my gaze, and I nodded.
Callum had already locked in on her, too.
“That’s so weird,” Michael said after a minute. “She’s a medium. She usually deals in readings and contacting loved ones. Delivering messages between the living and the dead, that sort of thing. She usually sells tarot cards and stuff. I’ve never seen her hawking monkey’s paws before. As a matter of fact, they’re not even legal. That doesn’t stop people, but she’s not the sort to deal in them.”
Real monkey’s paws are rare. The idea that they could be bought and sold for a few bucks was a hoax made up eons ago by some con man. As far as I knew, the handful of real ones in existence were locked up somewhere by the Global Coven of Witches because the evil little objects had started more than one war and were responsible for innumerable misdeeds done in the name of greed. How they worked was complicated, but in a nutshell, they gave the owner unlimited power by granting their deepest desires. They brought out the worst in even the best of people.
“I see it,” Callum said, casting me a sideways look. “Greed demon?”
I nodded. “Lower-level, though, probably.”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Possession isn’t exactly easy.”
“It wouldn’t be so hard with her,” Michael replied. “She’s a medium, and she’s also super low-key. Kind of a pushover. She’s a nice person, but she’s a total space case.”
“That’s typical of mediums, in my experience,” Callum said. “They live with one foot on either side of the veil, so it’s not always easy for them to dedicate all of their focus to either side.”
After feeling helpless for most of the day, I grinned, looking forward to some action.
I dropped the mini dreamcatcher I was holding and took a step toward the corner of the cart so I could cross the street. Michael laid a hand on my arm to stop me, and hot anger flashed through me.
“If you want to keep that, I suggest you remove it from my arm,” I growled, glancing down at his hand.
“Whoa,” Callum said, putting his hands up. “He’s just stopping you from doing something stupid.”
I turned my glare to him. “Excuse me?”
Michael’s wolf had moved to his side and was growling at me, his ears flat against his head and his hackles up. Lonan half-spread his wings and hissed from his spot on my shoulder.
“Everybody take a breath,” Callum said, his tone soft. “Let’s step over here for a minute and get on the same page.”
I shrugged Michael’s hand off and tried to swallow my temper. I was, after all, in his territory. That didn’t mean I liked him standing in the way of me doing my job.
“My page,” I said, lowering my voice so that only they could hear me, “says I’m going over there and capturing that soul.”
“And if you do that in broad daylight, you’ll start a free-for-all on my streets and people will get hurt,” Michael said. “People know her and like her; they won’t take kindly to you attacking her.”
“I won’t be attacking her,” I replied, exasperated. “I’ll be saving her.”
“That’s not what
it will look like,” he snapped. “Now I see why people say your family is brash.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “What people?”
Michael rolled his. “Every person I’ve ever talked to that knows you or knows of you.”
Callum cleared his throat, and the irritation on his face when he looked at me confused me. He was supposed to be on my side.
“He’s right, Kira. We can’t just run up to her and knock the soul out of her. This is Abaddon’s Gate, for crying out loud. Not only does she probably have friends, but can’t you feel the tension lying under the thin veil of civility? Doing something like that would be like tossing a match in a tinderbox.”
“Then how do you propose we go about it?” I hated to admit it, but he was right. I hadn’t thought past taking the first of many steps to get my wings back. Maybe Adam had been onto something when he paired us up.
“There’s an alley right behind her if you look,” Michael said. We can go around and approach from the rear so she doesn’t see us, then I’ll draw her into the alley and you two can do whatever it is you do.”
“What if she gets away while we’re sneaking around?” I asked. The idea of losing one when we were this close made me crazy.
“She won’t,” Michael replied, then glanced down at his wolf. “Will you stay here and keep an eye on her, Rocky?”
The wolf cast me one last glare, but then blinked and dipped his head.
‘See?” Callum said, his brow drawn down. “A plan. We should always have one, just for future reference. Some of these aren’t going to be a joke, and if you rush in like a bull in a china shop, you’re gonna get us killed.”
I pulled in a deep breath and puffed it out through my cheeks. He was right, though I didn’t want to admit it. “Fine.”
We meandered on down the street as if we didn’t have a care in the world in order to give the woman, or demon, or whatever, time to relax and think we hadn’t caught on.
“Is there a way to communicate with it after you catch it?” Michael asked as we pretended to be interested in some jewelry. “Maybe you can interrogate it and find out what it knows.”
That wasn’t a terrible idea, except I had no idea how to separate it from the host body and still ask it questions.
“No,” Callum replied. “Or at least I don’t think there is. Once it’s in the box, it’s trapped.”
“What if you interrogate it before you separate it from her? While it still has a body?” Michael glanced back and forth between us, waiting for an answer.
“I don’t want to risk it fleeing the body,” I said, liking the idea but having no idea how to pull it off. “And I don’t know how to trap it in there. I don’t know if we even can. At least not if we want to save her.”
“I know how to do it,” Callum said. “It’s one of my specialties, actually. My mentor was obsessed with possession for some reason, and he taught me all about how to trap and separate an entity from a body. He did a lot of spirit work. Astral projection, that sort of thing.”
“You can astral project?” I asked, impressed despite myself. “I don’t know anybody who can do that.”
“Well, it’s not exactly an angel thing, so I don’t suppose you would,” he replied, smiling. “I’m a mage. We’re students of the universe, so it’s a fairly common skill among us.”
Michael cleared his throat. “That’s all well and good, though I’d have thought you two would know all this about each other already. But we have a demon to catch, and frankly, I’d rather not leave it in her body any longer than we have to.”
“Do you see something you like?” the shopkeeper, a rotund brownie, asked as we stepped back toward his cart. “I can wrap it for you if you’d like to make it a gift.”
“No thanks,” I said, feeling a little bad at his crestfallen expression. If I had a chance, I’d come back and buy something from him later. I settled the necklace I’d been pretending to look at back among the bed of decorative spiderwebs and smiled at him before turning away.
“She’s not even looking at us anymore,” Callum noted as we crossed the street.
“Good,” Michael said. “We’re not going to be able to see her again until we’re in the alley. Do you think it’s best to lure her in there, or can you bind it to her body with her out in public?”
“If you can do it without giving it a heads up, that would be great,” I said. “Once it leaves the body, we have no choice but to capture it in the soul collector, right?”
He nodded. “I know how to keep it in there, but I don’t know how to put it back if it gets away. I’ll have to try to do it from behind.”
Once we were off the main drag, the crowd thinned to practically nothing. Most of the businesses on the side streets were professional rather than direct sales. Attorneys, accountants, hair studios, etc. Businesses that didn’t depend much on foot traffic. That made our walk much shorter than our stroll down Main Street had been, and within just a couple minutes, we were at the mouth to the alley that would lead us to the medium’s cart.
We slowed about halfway up the alley and stopped speaking at all. Once we were there, Michael and I stayed pressed against the wall so that she wouldn’t see us. Callum, though, had to have visual contact in order to do the spell. He closed his eyes and took a few cleansing breaths, then opened them again and rubbed his hands together.
“Okay, then,” he said, and I wondered if he was talking to himself or us. “Let’s do this.”
He stepped just far enough to the center of the alley that he could see her and began a spell in Latin using a soft, rhythmic chant. Most of my basic spells were in English, while many of my more complicated ones were in French. That’s mostly because Adam’s native language, if an angel has such a thing, was French and that’s how he’d taught me. Some old-school ones were Latin, though, because that’s how my mom and aunts had taught me. I guess I was a melting pot.
His hands began to glow, and I kept a close eye out for any passers-by that might take too much of an interest in him. Then it occurred to me that I had the power to make sure that didn’t happen. I started to cast a spell to cause people to look away, but Michael tapped me on the arm and shook his head.
“Not while he’s casting,” he leaned over and whispered. “I know what you’re thinking because I considered it too, but what if our magic somehow blocks his?”
I huffed out a breath, kicking myself. He was right, and I’d almost made a thoughtless mistake that could have cost us our mark.
After a few moments, I chanced a peek around the corner to see what was happening. The woman was twitching and jerking, almost like she was having some sort of seizure or spasm.
Callum’s chant stopped, and he blew out a breath. “Done. We need to capture her now, though, because unless I miss my guess, things are about to get ugly.”
“I can help with that,” Michael said. He stepped out of the alley and headed toward the woman. He said something to her, and after a couple moments, her eyes glazed over, and she followed him meekly back towards us.
“It’s only temporary,” he said, “but she’ll be compliant long enough to get her to the bureau. Can you lock down her shop so that nobody steals her stuff? There’s a portal two streets over that will take us directly to headquarters. Once she’s there, she won’t be going anywhere until we turn her loose.”
“Sure thing,” Callum replied, but I put my hand up.
“That was some heavy magic you just did,” I said. “I think I can manage a few security wards.”
I turned to the booth and did my thing, then we followed Michael toward the portal, hopeful for the first time since I’d lost my wings.
11
“I want a deal,” the blonde woman claimed in a voice that was a bit deeper than what you’d expect. Unless, of course, you knew she was possessed. “I want a century shaved from my sentence and a guarantee I’ll get to move on once it’s served. And not to an even worse place than the valley.”
We’d been
in an underground holding facility at the PCIB headquarters for the last half an hour. It had taken that long to secure a room and add additional wards just in case Callum’s binding spell didn’t hold. I’d taken that time to go through the book Nevvie had given me and was fairly certain I knew which soul we had. There was only one greed demon with enough power to possess a woman but not enough to manifest himself. His name was Gregorius.
“And I want to wring your neck for taking advantage of Maisie Stackpole,” Michael said, arms crossed as he scowled at the demon. “Too bad neither of us is in luck.”
“How about this?” I asked, rubbing my temples. Even though we’d only started with the interrogation, I could already tell “good cop/bad cop” wasn’t going to work. “How about you tell us where to find the fear demon, and I don’t just incinerate your soul right now.”
Gregorius lifted a shoulder and made a show of studying Maisie’s fingernails. “Go ahead. But if you incinerate mine, you kill her, too.”
“You know very well I can pop you out of there and eviscerate you in about ten seconds flat, right?” I said, growing impatient. The thing was, I couldn’t. Sure, I could pop him out, but I didn’t have the authority to snuff him out once I did, or the knowledge either, for that matter. For that matter, I didn’t even know if it was possible. He didn’t know that, though.
“C’mon,” Gregorius said, leaning forward on Maisie’s elbows and narrowing its eyes. The fuzziness that appeared around her when she moved made my head hurt. “Don’t you wanna know who killed those people and where to find them?”
I leaned back in my chair. I wasn’t sure I even had the power to agree to his terms, and I sure wasn’t willing to shave a full century off even if I could.
“How much longer do you have left on your sentence?” I asked, knowing full well he still had four centuries. In the scheme of things, that was practically nothing, but I wanted to confirm for sure that I was dealing with Gregorius rather than a bigger bad guy who just hadn’t built up the strength to manifest.
“Three-hundred ninety-two years, two-hundred and seventy-six days,” he replied.