“That’s Simona Van Lucia.” A familiar voice spoke softly, and I whirled to my left. The blonde witch from earlier stood in the shadows, a smile playing across her face as she leaned a hand on one of the arm chairs. “Our founder.”
“Wait, what?” I leveled my gun at her, trying to ignore the way it trembled in my hand. “You’re dead. I killed you!”
Blondie laughed, a tinkling sound that was completely at odds with the way she was behaving. “You killed most of us, I’ll give you that,” she said, taking a step toward me. “But I recharged enough that I was able to shield myself from the worst of your magic. An extraordinary talent you have,” she added, her gaze crawling over me. “It’s hardly any wonder that the Master wants you.”
“What are you talking about?” I snapped, forcing myself not to back away as she closed the distance between us. “Who is your Master?”
“Dinnae talk to her,” a hoarse voice ordered, and suddenly the shadows toward the back of the room lightened, revealing Maddock.
He was kneeling on the ground, his hands and feet bound by strange, glowing coils that I was willing to bet were made of pure energy. They seemed to be causing him extreme pain. Two witches flanked him on either side—Blondie’s companions from the Main Hall—and the cruel, satisfied smiles told me all I needed to know.
“Maddock!” I lunged for him, but Blondie shoved me back, heedless of the gun in my hand.
“Now, now,” she said lightly as I stumbled backward. “You see those restraints on Lord Tremaine’s wrists? They have the ability to cause unimaginable pain. Even death. And my sisters are all too eager to put them to the test.”
“If you hurt him, I’ll kill you,” I promised, my voice trembling with rage as I leveled the gun at Blondie’s head. “I’ll kill you, and then I’ll feed you to the horde of prisoners stampeding through this godforsaken house right now. By the time they’re done, there won’t be enough left of you to bury in a box.”
“Such violence!” Blondie exclaimed in mock-horror, pressing a hand to her buxom chest. “It’s really not necessary, Detective Chandler. All you need to do is listen to what I have to say.”
“And what is that?” I demanded.
She turned her attention back to the painting. “This portrait of Simona was painted nearly four-hundred years ago, just one year after the Onyx Order was founded. The crucifix around her neck was added later on, to remind us when we look upon her why we do what we do.”
“And just why is it that you do what you do?” I sneered.
Blondie stepped back, a feline smile curving her lips as she gestured toward the painting again. “Why don’t you find out for yourself?”
“No!” Maddock shouted again. “Brooke, don’t.”
There was more emotion in that single last word than I’d heard from Maddock combined in all the time I’d known him. But as I looked upon the golden cross resting against Simona’s chest, I was instantly drawn to it. Unable to heed his warning. I lifted a hand, brushing my fingers against the painted crucifix, and as I half-expected, a vision hit me.
Except it wasn’t a vision, because I was watching myself standing in front of the same painting, in the same room, in the exact position that I stood now. The only difference was, a tall, sandy-haired man stood directly behind me.
As I looked at him through the perspective of the painting, the vision seemed to blur his face. That hardly mattered, though, because I instantly recognized the slight cant of his head, the way he stood with his weight shifted slightly onto his right leg—a quirk he’d developed to cope with an old knee injury—and those long, almost elegant fingers as they reached up to grab my shoulders.
“Tom?”
CHAPTER 27
I gasped as the vision broke, and the hand curling around my shoulder tightened. It was real.
I spun around, joy and disbelief warring for dominance in my heart as I looked up into his face. He was so familiar. So exactly the way I remembered him, with grey-green eyes that stared out of a long face with high, broad cheekbones and a prominent chin. Full lips that could curl into a sneer when interrogating a suspect or facing down a vampire, or curve into a smile, as they did now.
“Is it really you?” I asked, my voice a hushed, almost reverent whisper.
“It’s really me,” he said softly, his hands settling on my waist.
I framed his face with my own hands and kissed him long and hard, relief coursing through me so violently that I went weak in the knees. I kissed him so that I could block out every lip-lock I’d shared with Maddock over the past few days, and overwrite them with the man who truly deserved them. The man I loved.
“H-how are you here?” I whispered, pulling back.
I was acutely aware of eyes boring into me from across the room, and I even heard titters from the witches. I don’t know what they thought was so funny about all this, and I didn’t give a fuck. Tom was back—I knew it was him, because my second-sight wasn’t going off. The man standing before me was flesh and blood, with no hint of illusion like the phoukas who had ambushed me in Maddock’s home.
“I’ll explain everything later.” Tom gripped my shoulders and spun me around to face the painting again. “Right now, you need to go through that door and rescue your friend’s son. He’s being held there, on the other side.”
“Door?” I asked, bewildered as I stared at the painting. Was this some kind of secret passageway?
But then I remembered we weren’t alone, and I swung around to glare at Blondie. “Why are you just standing there? Why are you letting him help me?” Then I turned back to Tom. “How do you know about Shelley’s son?” An alarm bell shrilled in my mind—something about this whole situation was very off. But there was so much going on right now that I couldn’t zero in on what it was.
“Brooke,” Maddock choked out, his voice alarmingly feeble. My stomach dropped as I looked over at him—his hair hung limp around his face, and his normally tanned skin was nearly as pale as a vampire’s. “Ye cannae trust him. Dinnae go through.”
“It’s the fae you can’t trust,” Tom said, derision dripping from his voice. “He knew that I was alive, and yet he had no problem kissing you.”
On the contrary, Maddock had all kinds of problems kissing me, but my mind had latched onto a different part of Tom’s statement.
“You knew Tom was alive!” I shouted at Maddock, heat rushing into my face. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“It wasn’t the right time.” Maddock somehow managed to sound haughty despite being on the verge of death. “The deal was that I would help you find your fiancé if you helped me find the missing fae. A mutual goal that seems to have been met.” He raked a scathing glare over Tom. “Now that we’re all here, I suppose this is as good a time as any to tell ye—”
The witch on Maddock’s right snapped her fingers, and an electrical charge crackled through him. Maddock’s powerful neck snapped back beneath the force of it; his jaw worked, as if he were holding back a scream, but to his credit, he made no sound.
“Enough talk,” Blondie snapped, her eyes cold. “It is time.” She slapped her hand against the edge of the painting, and a mechanism engaged, gears and cogs creaking. A loud series of clicks followed, and the painting unhinged from the wall, revealing a flicker of torchlight from whatever lay beyond. “Go on.”
Shaking my head, I held my ground, mind reeling as I tried to put the pieces of this impossible puzzle together. Why was Tom here? Why hadn’t the witches killed him? If he’d been kept prisoner, why did he look so clean and unharmed? If he wasn’t a prisoner, then where had he been all this time? Why hadn’t he contacted me? My mind spat out possibilities, but none of them made any sense, and they all jumbled together incoherently.
“Brooke, you have to do this.” Tom’s voice was hard. “If you don’t, Jason will die.”
Jason will die.
The words echoed in my head, over and over, and I nodded. That was why I’d come here tonight, wasn’t it? Not t
o rescue Tom—I’d thought he was dead—but to find Jason and return him safely to his mother. I’d promised, and no matter what else happened tonight, I had to keep that promise.
Resolved, I curled my fingers around the edge of the painting and pulled it aside. It swung forward, revealing the windowless room I’d seen earlier when I’d found Blondie’s “borrowed” silver earring in the woods.
The single light bulb hung directly above the steel table, but the phoukas was crumpled in a corner of the room, and Jason was chained to the table instead. He’d been stripped down to a pair of red boxers with black bats on them, and anger lanced me as I took in the bruises and lacerations covering his pale skin.
He lifted his head, eyes stark with fear as they locked onto mine. His gaze was empty and detached, his lips dry as little more than a wheeze passed between them.
“H-help me...”
“I’m so glad you’ve finally arrived, Brooke.” A man stepped forward from the shadows, and I gasped.
Father James?
And yet, it wasn’t. The kindly, even genial, expression remained on his softened features, but he’d traded his pastor’s outfit for a black, hooded robe. One that looked remarkably familiar.
“You!” I jabbed an accusing finger at him. “It was you who set fire to the motel room!”
He nodded approvingly. “Very good. Perhaps you aren’t as stupid as I initially thought.” He gestured with a silver blade in his hand toward Jason. “Although, the fact that you came here to rescue this stupid boy with only a single fae for backup doesn’t exactly convince me of your intelligence, either.”
I gritted my teeth. “You’ve been lying to me all along. Who the hell are you?”
“My true name is Vincent Van Lucia,” he said as the witches filed in, dragging Maddock with them. “I’m a warlock—a direct descendent of Simona, and the current head of the Onyx Order. Yes, Father James Baxter is a lie, but an excellently fabricated one, wouldn’t you agree?”
“A warlock?” I took a step back, my head spinning as I tried to reconcile this new piece of information with what I already knew. “Does that mean Detective Baxter is a warlock, too?”
“Guy?” Father James—no, Vincent— let out a scornful laugh. “I am his ancestor, as his line comes from my uncle, but the magic died out in his bloodline for some reason. It was simple enough for me to come into his life and addle his brain. After that, all it took was the right amount of paperwork to make him think I was his brother.”
Addle his brain. Oh God.
“That’s why he doesn’t remember Tom,” I said, more to myself. Even though everyone else in the precinct does.
Vincent nodded. “It was regrettable, but I had to erase all memory of Tom from Guy’s mind. He had seen too much, and I couldn’t kill him. The whole point of having him around was so I could have someone on the inside that my partner could use to get things done.”
“But…but why?” I tried to piece the clues together, and kept coming up with explanations that couldn’t be true. “Why would you erase Tom from Baxter’s memory?”
“Because he would have exposed the truth—a truth you weren’t ready to know yet.”
“What truth?”
Father James—I just couldn’t think of him as Vincent—sighed, as if this conversation was so tedious he could hardly bear it. “You know, I thought that our mutual hatred of vampires would make it easier for me to like you, but you’re so insufferable that if I didn’t need you, I would have killed you already.”
“Is that why there were so many vampires trapped downstairs?” I asked. “Because you’ve got it in for them?”
“More than you can imagine.” Father James’s eyes blazed with such potent fury I nearly took a step back. “Many years ago, long before you were born into your current lifetime, vampires attacked me when I was driving home with my wife. I managed to survive, but they murdered her. The light of my life…so impossibly vibrant one moment, then gone the next.” His eyes were downcast now, his voice reduced to a whisper, and if he didn’t have Jason strapped to the table and Maddock bound up, I would have felt sorry for him.
“After that day,” he continued, voice stronger now, “I gathered my brethren, and we traveled across the world, doing everything we could to extinguish the vermin who took my wife’s life. But due to their filthy magic, vampires breed much faster than we could hope to extinguish them, so I realized we needed to come up with a better plan.
“I thought long and hard about this, seeking out supernaturals who were more powerful than I to gain glimpses into both past and future.” His eyes lifted to mine, and a cruel smile curved his lips. “And that’s how I discovered I needed you.”
“Me?” The detective in me couldn’t seem to stop asking questions, especially as Father James seemed to want me to know what was going on. Maybe if I got enough info from him, I could find a way out of this. “Why me? How the hell am I the key to wiping out vampires if I can’t kill them any faster than you?”
“You’re a shadow,” Father James said simply. “A being born both witch and fae. Your ability to walk both worlds and hide your true nature in the shadows is one of the things that define you, and you, my dear, are one of the best. So much so, in fact, that even I had my doubts as to whether you were truly a shadow at all.”
I shook my head vehemently, denying what he was saying with every fiber of my being even though a treacherous voice in my mind was nodding at how the explanation cleared up so many things. “I’m not a shadow—I’m not anything. There was nothing supernatural about my parents.”
Father James arched an eyebrow. “From what I understand, you have no idea who your parents were.”
I clenched my jaw—he was right, but I wasn’t going to admit that to him. “I still don’t believe you.”
Father James shrugged. “Believe me or not, you’re still here. And I couldn’t have done it without my prodigy.” He smiled over my shoulder.
My heart stopped, and I turned slowly. Last I checked, it’d been Tom standing behind me.
And there he was. The love of my life, standing behind me…pointing a gun at my head.
“No.” My eyes pleaded with him as my heart tore to shreds in my chest. “No, Tom. Please. Put the gun down. Put it down and walk away, and I’ll forget this ever happened.”
“No, you won’t.” Tom’s face was a stony mask as he clicked off the safety. “Neither of us will.”
“He’s a convincing lover, isn’t he?” Father James called from behind me just as my eyes began to well with tears. His scathing voice effectively dried my eyes, and I whirled around, glaring at him with as much hatred as I could possibly muster. “If not, you wouldn’t be here right now. And then where would we be?”
“You sick bastard,” I breathed, curling my trembling hands into fists. The realization was almost too much to bear. “You’ve been fucking with my head for years.”
“All for a good cause, I assure you,” Father James said pleasantly. “The world continues to rip itself apart with the procreation of vampires. Like this boy here.” He flicked the ritual knife back toward Jason, who lay completely still on the table, frozen either by magic or fear. “I don’t know what you kids see in vampires—” He sneered at the teenager. “—but you should be glad that I caught you before you made a mistake.”
“Why should I be glad?” Jason’s voice shook as he spoke for the first time, his dark eyes blazing. “What the fuck do I have to be glad about, when I’m strapped to this freezing table, about to be killed?”
Father James laughed. “Typical teenage boy, thinking the world revolves around you.” He lowered the knife. “I’m not here to take your life, child. It means absolutely nothing to me, and I don’t shed blood without a cause.”
“He’s bait,” I said, feeling numb. “You kidnapped Jason to lure me here.”
Father James scoffed. “Everything I’ve done was to lure you here, Brooke. To bring you to this very moment, so you could have the chance to m
ake things right.” His voice softened, and he took another step toward me. “You’ve always wanted to rid the world of vampires, right? Well, now you can. We can, together. Once and for all. I just had to make sure you were the right one before I brought you here.”
He was crazy. Absolutely bat shit crazy. There was no other explanation.
“And just how the hell did you determine that?” I asked, wondering just how deep that crazy well went.
“By getting you to use magic.” Father James smiled smugly. “That’s why I sent the wraith to you—and it succeeded where Tom failed to do so.”
When my eyebrows pulled together, Father James nearly rolled his eyes. “Must I spell it out for you?” He huffed. “Right. I sent the blasted man to confirm your powers. Normally, I prefer to handle such tasks myself, but you of course planted yourself right in the middle of the most vampire-infested city in the country. I’m sure that was no accident on Oscar’s part.”
My heart skipped a beat at Oscar’s name. Would Father James discovering me make him a target, too? It slammed into me that maybe I’d been selfish about this whole thing. But I bit my tongue, not wanting to interrupt anything Father James said right now. He was my best shot at finding those answers, and I could keep him talking so long as I didn’t send his fragile psychotic mind over the edge.
“So I sent Tom,” Father James continued. “You know, because we can’t have anything happening to me, else who would lead the coven? They would be too busy avenging my death to see the bigger picture. But with Tom there, we would have someone close to you—someone expendable. Someone who could get you to use magic so we could confirm your true nature once and for all.”
For a long moment, we just stared at one another. I wasn’t saying anything. Father James wouldn’t let the conversation die just like that, so if I didn’t speak, he would eventually start up again. And I was noting every fucking detail, piecing it all together. Searching for answers that could lead to stopping him and getting the fuck out of here.
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