Marita seemed surprised by this, but Marion was smiling. “Mutual respect,” she muttered.
“What?” Marita asked in agitation, but it went unanswered as Marion swept towards Caia outlining the plan she had in mind. Alfred, Penelope and Vanne thought it was a sound one, and it was with a sigh of relief that she left the suite with Marion in tow.
As the elevator descended, Marion snorted.
“What?” Caia queried wearily.
She shook her head. “Nothing. I just... well I haven’t seen someone use that kind of charm since my grandmother. She was some lady when she was Head of the Coven; had the Council eating out of her hands all of the time. I knew you were likeable, Caia, but I was unaware of the amount of charisma you can unleash when you want to. What are you up to?”
She laughed her off. “I was just being friendly. I think it’s important that the Coven believe in me considering my lineage don’t you? Also... I’m working towards making Marita aware that I have no intention of staying at the Centre.”
“Ah, I see. Subtle. Nice. I’m sure my sister will be pleased to hear that, another piece of good news,” she muttered wryly.
“Marion.” Caia turned to the magik wide-eyed. “What happened with Laila?”
“Oh.” Marion nodded, her eyes wide with anxiety. “Good question. My sister is going nuts. They discovered it was a young boy from the Centre, a Traveller. He must have been working with the girl because he’s gone too. It was the boy who brought her in, in the first place.”
“Oh really?” She gulped, hoping Marion wouldn’t hear her thundering heartbeat. “Any leads?”
Marion shook her head. “That’s the thing. Marita can’t get a hold of his trace.”
What the Hades....?
“What?”
Was this some kind of trick?
“His trace has been cloaked.”
Caia turned to look at her slowly. “And this is a possibility? Why wasn’t I told about this?”
“Because... only a very, very old supernatural has that ability.”
“How old?”
“As old as the war itself.”
“Vilhelm?”
Marion shook her head.“No. The truth is we knew there was a possibility that there were beings that old still kicking around. The Midnight Coven’s prophet is that old. But we thought he was - might - be the only one.”
“I’ve seen him in the trace. I don’t think it’s him.”
“Well... if it’s not, we have a mystery player in our midst.”
Caia’s heart thudded painfully at the thought of yet another problem.
“Not that you should worry about that at the moment, Caia, since you have another task to complete for dear old sis.”
“Yeah. The lab.”
“You didn’t have to offer to do this. You could have just given her the co-ordinates on a map. Anyone could have done the job.”
She nodded absently. No, not anyone. Poor Marion. She would be devastated when she found out that her sister was breaking every one of the supernatural rights laws. But now was not the time to tell her. First Caia needed to get back to the pack and to Vilhelm as quickly as possible, and together they could put her new plan into action. She hated the thought of leaving those children down there, but she couldn’t just charge in. Marita would throw her in prison and then where would they be? No. She needed an army. The most powerful army at her disposal. The political kind.
***
“And you’re sure you don’t want to involve Lucien?” Vanne queried, a frown of worry creasing between his eyebrows.
Caia sighed, glancing around the room. “I told you, he doesn’t need to do this, and he’s with Rose right now seeing her through her recovery.”
Marita glowered at her husband. “The lykan doesn’t need to follow her everywhere, Vanne. Caia is quite capable of taking care of this by herself.”
Yeah, like that was what you wanted.
She nodded anyway, thinking of how annoyed Lucien would be when he found out. She should at least tell him before she left.
It was only a few hours after she’d met with Alfred and Penelope and they were going over the plan to destroy the lab one more time. The lab was situated on the Left Bank in the Latin Quarter, in the basement of a disused jazz bar. It was guarded by only one daemon, but as Caia knew, sometimes one daemon was enough.
“You know, I could do this by myself,” Phoebe suddenly declared, her eyes narrowed on Caia’s now pinched face. “Caia has only just woken up from being unconscious for 24 hours.”
It was nice of her to offer but Caia was not letting anyone do this alone. “No. I’m fine, really.”
Caia felt bad for asking Phoebe to do this with her so soon after their ordeal in Remnant Forest, but she should have anticipated that Phoebe would actually be looking forward to the action. If Marita hadn’t insisted on someone going with her, however, she would have happily gone in alone.
“You’re sure?” Marita hesitated. “Because I can send extra people in with you.”
“No. A group going into an abandoned club would look conspicuous. Phoebe and I can handle this.”
“Are we ready to go then?” Phoebe began striding towards the exit. “Marion has a portal waiting.”
“Wait.”
The Rogue Hunter turned with a look of irritation. “What?”
“You go on ahead to the reception. I have to do something first.”
Marita gave her Rose’s room number with what Caia was sure was a look of a glee.
Leaving to do this without informing Lucien would piss him off, and not least of all because technically as her Pack Leader she had to make him aware of any task of importance she was going to undertake. Slowly, quietly, she walked down the white corridor to Rose’s room, her heart picking up speed despite herself. She wondered just how pissed off he was going to be that he was out of the loop on this one.
“Do you have to leave?”
Rose.
Caia stopped and peered around the corner of the hallway to see Lucien standing in the threshold of Rose’s bedroom.
He chuckled. “I’ll be back in five. I just need to order some food. You guys don’t get it delivered to these parts.”
“Show off, with your fancy room and fancy room service.”
She sounded as exhausted as Caia felt. Caia shook her head; Rose should never have been in that fight.
“Yeah, well tomorrow I go back to the pack so the special treatment ends.”
“Lucien... I…”
“What is it?” He moved back inside, leaving the door open. Caia crept forward. She could see through the crack between the wall and where the door was hinged to it. Lucien bent over Rose as she sat propped up in bed, her hand in his, concern for her clearly shining in his eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“I was... thinking... maybe... maybe I could come back with you.”
He bent forward and pressed a soft kiss on the corner of her mouth, an action that sent Caia stumbling back down the corridor. She fled towards the elevator, an image of what she had just seen and heard filtering down from her mind to land like ash on her tongue.
Hitting the right button, Caia refused to let go to more tears. She stiffened and gazed into the mirror in the elevator, her eyes drinking in the sight of her fragile paleness. The time for heartache had to end. How many times did she have to keep admonishing herself before that sunk in? She had a witch and a war to obliterate.
Alone.
“Caia!” Phoebe called to her impatiently, and she hurried over to the lykan as she waited by a portal. By now the sickening travel of a portal was something she was getting used to and they stepped out into the Parisian night with a little more ease. Caia exhaled as she straightened up from behind the wall they had come out at, and gazed up and over it to the steps that led up to Notre Dame.
“Oh my goddess,” she breathed, the smells and sights of the city tingling her senses.
“Caia?”
Ignoring the hunter,
she began walking towards the gothic cathedral that rose up out of the Left Bank as surreal as the Centre she had just departed from. Her lykan eyes danced over the misshapen gargoyles that perched upon the side of the cathedral, their presence there only adding more drama to the enigmatic atmosphere of the place itself.
“I can’t believe this,” she heard Phoebe mutter, and then she was taking a hold of Caia’s wrist in a painful grip. “We’re not here to sightsee, Caia.”
“But I’ve never been to Paris before, aren’t you amazed?”
Phoebe snorted and began dragging her away towards the streets of the Latin Quarter.“I’ve killed two lykans here in the past three years; I’ve seen all of Paris I’ll ever want to see.”
With that wonderful dose of harsh reality, Caia forgot about not having the opportunity to see Paris as a tourist and began leading the way towards the jazz club. They were silent together as they strode through the narrow streets, passed excited tourists, and ignored obviously suggestive looks and gestures from men, young and old. Caia realised, as they approached the club, that she and Phoebe were comfortable in each other’s company precisely because neither of them had a penchant for talking.
“Is this it?” Phoebe nodded towards the ground floor of a block of what, with their little windows and potted flowers sitting on ledges edged with quaint wrought-iron railings, had to be apartments. The opening came out on to the street like black wings, with the words Jazz Club written on them vertically, in French and English. The double doors that were built in off the street were boarded over with a large padlock thrown on for good measure.
“Anyone watching?” Caia asked softly, approaching the padlock and boards.
After a moment, Phoebe gave her the go ahead and she pressed her hand against the padlock, her magik seeping out of her skin to engulf it. In a second it quietly popped and dissolved into water. With her lykan strength the boards snapped away from the door with ease. A moment later Phoebe followed and pulled the doors shut behind her without a noise.
Both of them could see through the shadows of the darkened room, passed the little round tables and the bar up ahead, and passed the stage off centre to the left.
“Behind there,” Caia whispered, pointing to the right side of the bar where they could see a dark opening. “There’s a hallway there that leads to the door to the storeroom. In there is the door to the basement. Mr Daemon is in the storeroom covering the basement trapdoor.”
Not saying a word, merely offering a resolute nod, Phoebe removed her clothing quickly, neatly folding it up as she went.
“Wait,” caia whispered urgently.
“What now?”
“I’m going to put a shield up to cloak the sounds of your change.”
Phoebe’s eyes widened, “Good idea,” she whispered back.
It felt like forever, waiting for her change to be complete, the knowledge that the daemon hadn’t heard them not lessening her anxiety.
She didn’t like daemons.
Caia found it prudent to keep the shield up around Phoebe as they moved through the club, afraid that her claws would make a loud clicking noise against the concrete floor and ruin ‘the element of surprise’ part of their plan that was kind of crucial to it going smoothly.
Together they stood outside the door to the storeroom and Caia could feel the thing on the other side, standing vigilant upon the trap door in the floor that opened up to the basement.
Phoebe turned to look up at her, her huge wolf eyes telling her she was ready. Caia nodded and pulled back with her energy, before pushing it back out and blasting the door off its hinges. Phoebe took off before the door was even gone and lunged at the daemon before it even knew what was happening. She knocked it off its feet and managed to cling on to its dirt red skin, even as its ungraceful fall sent crates of bottles smashing down and around them. Caia shot in after her and blasted out a tube of water as it punched at Phoebe’s sides, desperate to unclamp her jaws from his neck. As the hunter held him distracted, Caia forced the tube down his throat and held it there until he fell unconscious. Phoebe wasn’t taking any chances; she chewed and masticated until his head rolled away from his body. She backed up off of him, making a hacking sound from the back of her throat that reminded Caia of her own daemon take down and how she had retched from decapitating him. Once Phoebe was clear of his body, she thought of the daemon who had wounded her that night in the mall lot, and more usefully she dragged up the memory of Sebastian dying in her arms. Just like that the white heat began building inside of her; taking a hold of its reins she focused it on the daemons body and watched as it obliterated it into ash, leaving just a dusty trace of it ever having been there. Phoebe made a sound from the back of her throat and Caia turned around to see the wolf watching her, and even in her lykan form her expression seemed to say, “You’re kind of scary, you know that.”
Caia shrugged. Yeah, she did know that.
“Stay back.” Caia pointed towards the hallway and the lykan grudgingly padded away. She stared at the trap door, thoughts of the marble one in Gaia’s altar determinedly pushing their way to the forefront of her mind. How could Marita justify what she was doing? Marita hated Midnights and everything they were about... and yet wasn’t what Pierre had done exactly the same as her own crime? At the impatient sounds Phoebe was making from the hallway Caia shook the thoughts off. The trap door lifted easily and a set of very unstable looking stairs descended into darkness. The smell flooded her nostrils immediately and she gagged, pressing her shirt to her nose to block its entry. Phoebe whined from the doorway. That smell was enough to make every small move after that one filled with trepidation. There was no mistaking the stench of death – mixed with an obvious array of chemicals. Taking the backpack off Marion had given her, Caia found the torch and dipped its light down into the basement, leaning over to get a better look at what she was going to be walking into. It seemed safe enough.
Safe perhaps physically, but emotionally...?
Swinging the torch from lab post to lab post, her shirt still covering her nose and mouth, Caia willed away the emotional reaction her body was so ready to give into. There were five morgue slabs in the room, each with a decaying lykan sliced open in varying manners upon it. The vile stench was emanating from their exposed innards. Metal chains were still wrapped around their limbs from when they had been alive and chained down. She didn’t even want to think of a lykan being awake and aware during such experiments, such torture. Moving away from them she swung the beam of the torch towards the end of the room where a row of cages sat, some empty, some housing more dead lykans.
Memories of another basement and other cages threatened to overwhelm her.
“I have to find the liquid,” Caia reminded herself softly and made to move back towards the end of the basement behind the stairs. Sure enough, a glass cabinet was placed against the wall, rows upon rows of vials of liquid gold inside.
Now all she needed to do was destroy it.
Silently, making her way back out of the basement, Caia pulled another gift from Marion out of her backpack. To her it appeared to be a large crystal with a gold stopper plugged into the top. She wasn’t quite sure of its mechanics but apparently it was an expensive member of Daylight arsenal.
“Just pull the stopper out and drop the crystal into the basement. The device will go off within five seconds of landing. You’ll hear a soft pop.”
“What does it do?”
“Don’t worry, it can’t hurt living things. It merely cleans up the mess around us.”
Caia did as Marion had instructed, closing the door after it.
“Wait, I wanted to see!” Phoebe hissed as she marched into the storeroom in human form.
As Caia stared into the lykan’s angry face a sound like an ear popping at high altitude could be heard from the other side.
“Sorry, it’s too late.”
“Well, what was down there?”
She could tell her the truth, about the atrocities those
two Midnights had committed with the help of humans; she could describe that reprehensible scene and wave goodbye to a potential ally. If Phoebe had seen it with her own eyes there would have been no way to convince her that not all Midnights were bad. Describing it would just be another nail in the coffin of Caia’s plan.
“But this is a war Caia, and we have to sacrifice a part of our soul to win it.”
“It was just a lab. Chemicals, test tubes... that sort thing.”
I am so going to Hades.
“What about that goddess-awful smell?”
“Sewage,” she lied, “Guessing from the daemon.”
“Ugh, charming.”
Confident that she had convinced the hunter, Caia pulled at the trap door. Together she and Phoebe leaned in as she opened it, their torches illuminating the darkness. There was nothing there.
“What...?”
Eyes wide, she trembled her way down the stairs and swung her light around.
“What do you see?” Phoebe called down to her.
“Nothing.”
It was like none of it had ever happened. Just an empty basement, clean of any activities. Four walls, a ceiling and a floor.
“It’s all gone. No mess,” Caia told her as she climbed back up the stairs. “I have no idea what that thing was that Marion gave me.” She glanced down at her watch. “Come on we better go. Marion is opening the portal in ten minutes.”
They made their way back out of the club, Caia replacing the boards and the padlock whilst Phoebe stood guard. Just as silently as they arrived, they returned to the spot they had come out at, at Notre Dame. She sidled towards the entrance of the cathedral, gazing up at its two towers, wishing she could step inside and disappear behind its arched doorway, to curl up in what promised to be a mystical haven. Could she hide in there, in the arms of another god?
Phoebe tapped her on the shoulder and she half-turned to see the portal begin to open on the dark street.
No. The war would still be out there, taking innocent lives and perpetuating into eternity. There was no hiding for her. She had a job to do.
River Cast: Part Two in the Tale of Lunarmorte Page 20