“So these supernatural internment camps,” I said as I scanned over the tilted shelves. “You think they’ll keep this up?”
“You were around during the Inquisition,” Ruby said, trailing behind. “You tell me.”
No further discourse necessary. Things would continue on a downward spiral. Mortals and creatures of essence would not sing campfire songs and smoke joints in peaceful harmony.
“They’ve been coming after me pretty hard?”
“Remember Al Capone? Escobar?”
“Sure.”
“Raise the heat level a couple exponents and yeah, maybe you’re in the ballpark.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be.” Ruby pulled a can off the shelf and then tossed it on the floor in disgust. “They’re gonna string you up by your nuts.”
“We all need something to look forward to, I guess.”
Ruby grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back. In a whisper she said, “Hear that?”
“No.”
“There’s someone down here.”
I glanced at my useless .45 before cutting the light. The room immediately plunged into almost perfect darkness, save from the faint gray light streaming down the stairs. Not moving, I said, “How many?”
“It sounds like they’re hurt.”
“You could’ve led with that.” I shook loose from her grip and turned the light back on. But I still let Ruby take lead, since she was the only one with a working gun.
Following her around the stock shelves, I swept the light over a water-warped plywood door.
Ruby raised the shotgun. “Keep it steady.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Rolling her eyes, she launched a sharp kick into the wood. It was an unnecessary level of force; the weakened material buckled without much protest. From inside the dark room, I heard muffled whimpers of panic.
As I raised the light and stepped inside, Ruby said, “You’re not supposed to be here.”
I thought she meant me, until I focused on the person huddled in the corner, thin arms raised in a plea for mercy.
“Nadia?”
I ran forward to catch her as she collapsed, mind wondering one thing.
What the hell was going on?
49
That thing on Main Street wasn’t Nadia.
Berkson had told me, but I hadn’t listened.
Which left a lot of open questions.
I wouldn’t get answers any time soon. Nadia, dehydrated and exhausted, didn’t wake as we hauled her up the stairs and into the backseat of the convertible.
We were well onto the open road before either of us felt ready to broach the subject.
“So much for her being a god,” I said.
“Maybe they don’t make them like they used to.”
But neither of us smiled. In the face of the impossible, it was difficult to be glib. Particularly when your discovery changed the dynamics of your task considerably. There was something to be said about knowing your enemy.
I hadn’t shared my plan for dealing with Nadia, because it went a little something like this: talk her down from the ledge. Use our shared history to convince her that she didn’t want to dominate the world.
We rode in silence, Nadia momentarily groaning when we passed over poorly maintained stretches of road. From the looks of the area, Ruby’s new hideout was about an hour outside Inonda. Close enough to keep an eye on the circus, far enough not to be caught up in its halo.
Soon enough, though, there would be nowhere for any of us to hide—wanted or not.
I drove through rows of pre-fab houses, all built during the real estate boom and since abandoned.
Ruby said, “Stop here.”
We were on a curve in a nice little cul-de-sac overgrown with weeds. Plastic sheeting flapped in the breeze from the unfinished homes like kites lost in a sandstorm.
“Nice place.”
“I thought you’d like it,” Ruby said.
I didn’t know what the hell that meant, but I suspected it had something my taste in living spaces. The loft had been inherited. Everything else—from the office to my last apartment—skewed toward unadorned functionality.
Although this home, with its fourth floor left unfinished and exposed to the elements, took that ethos to a new level.
I lifted Nadia out of the back seat, finding that she weighed barely anything at all. Her emerald eyes fluttered open briefly, lips moving slightly.
“It’s okay.” That might have been a lie, but I wasn’t making any promises.
“Kalos…” Then she fell back asleep, sinking into my arms.
I hurried up the steps, entering the open door behind Ruby. Paws furiously pattered down the steps. At first I thought Argos was coming to greet me. But instead, the black-and-white border collie took one look at me as he reached the bottom, gave me a cursory nod, and then hauled ass down the first floor hallway.
A second later, I saw why: the tabby cat that I’d used to distill Javier Santos’s essence was racing down the stairs, back arched in a predatory stance.
Maybe taking part of that thing’s soul was a bad call.
I walked down the hall, finding Argos perched on a teetering side table, the cat swiping from below.
“Kal.” His voice was whiny, brown eyes wide as he stared at his tormentor.
The cat, for his part, looked like he was enjoying this way too much.
I walked over, ready to save my immortal dog from a cat less than half his size. When I reached the center of the room, Nadia still in tow, Argos’s eyes lit up in recognition. With a tremendous, room shaking bark that surprised me, he leapt off the table.
His long snout curled, exposing all his teeth. Now it was the cat’s turn to be terrified. The tabby pissed on the floor and sprinted away, short legs churning as fast as possible.
Wondering what I had just witnessed, I gave the dog a strange look.
“That’s Nadia,” Argos said, by way of explanation. Curiosity must’ve temporarily short-circuited his anxiety.
“Didn’t know you were a big fan.”
“She doesn’t look like a god.”
“No,” I said. “I guess our new god impersonated her.”
“Oh.”
“Pretty much.” I placed Nadia on the couch. She wore the same clothes as the day she’d come to my apartment. Six months hadn’t been kind to the fabric, or the smell. They were little but rags, now. I grabbed a blanket from the corner and spread it over her.
She shivered in response, not waking up.
Argos and I stared at her for a few minutes, trying to come up with plausible explanations.
Finally I said, “So Ruby told me you guys made no progress.”
His ears flattened. “I’m sorry, Kal.”
“It’s a hard problem,” I said, which sounded like a weak excuse. This was my destiny, right? It was my job to solve hard problems—or at least consort with people who could.
But we were all coming up empty at this point.
Then again, maybe it was a lack of information. Where one of us had the key to the puzzle, but the others simply didn’t know it.
I called up to Ruby. A few minutes later she appeared, followed by Pearl.
They waited at the room’s entrance.
“Let’s run through this, step by step,” I said.
They nodded, out of other ideas. Over the course of the next hour, as the sun rose, I went through everything I’d encountered since we’d parted ways in Agonia. Any detail or theory, no matter how ridiculous.
At least I found my audience rapt. By the time I finished my monologue, Ruby and Pearl had sat down on the couch and were leaning forward. The dog, for his part, was perched on my lap.
The first thing anyone said was, “He’s really dead.”
>
I glanced at Ruby, then Pearl. “Your boss didn’t tell you?”
“I guess not,” Ruby said, glaring at the wild-haired woman sitting beside her.
“It would’ve been a distraction,” Pearl said.
“Fuck that,” Ruby said, her voice a growl. “I’m going to bury the son of a bitch who killed Galleron.”
Argos cleared his throat, and everyone stopped to look at him. He stepped down from my lap and shook himself off.
“I have an idea.” He paced about the tan hardwood, toenails clicking. “I think Kal is wrong.”
“This should be good,” I said, slightly annoyed that my theories had been shot down so quickly.
“In the desert, near the Sol Council’s headquarters,” Argos said. “When Ruby—”
“Abandoned me?”
Argos shook his head in annoyance at my interruption. “What did the daystriders’ auras feel like then?”
I racked my brain, but the battle had unfolded too fast for me to focus. “I don’t know.”
But Ruby said, “Dark.”
“Corrupted by outside influence?”
I couldn’t remember, the memory fuzzy with demonic rage. But Ruby said, “Yeah. No question.”
Argos nodded. “I think Isabella played you.”
“That’s not possible,” I said.
“Because Isabella was hurt then, right?” Argos sat down, looking at me expectantly. “Limping like an invalid and incapable of casting magic.”
“Yes, exactly—”
“And then, she manages to curse me with the blood less than a day later.”
Everything clicked together and my mouth dropped open. Argos’s lips turned upward into a triumphant doggie smile.
“You’re saying Isabella is fully recovered,” Ruby said.
“No,” I said. “It’s much worse than that.”
Everyone turned to look at me.
“He’s saying that, Isabella Kronos has attained the power of a god.” I let that sink in for a moment before delivering the final piece. “And that she’s the vessel.”
No one said anything.
But their expressions all told me two things.
Argos was definitely right.
And we were definitely fucked.
50
I tossed and turned on the floor, trying to get in a few hours of sleep before Ruby and I headed out to assess Charon’s collection. At least I’d gotten a shower and fresh change of clothes. His lawyer, Remington Landry, lived on a spread in the Texas prairies. An honest-to-goodness ranch, from what Google Maps could ascertain from the address.
In desperate need of rest, my mind refused to stop running in circles. Most of my hunches had proven wrong: Delphine wasn’t involved, nor was Nadia. It made sense, now. Isabella had desperately wanted my essence, no doubt to max out the gauge. I’d even considered her as the source of the mind-control curse, but dismissed it out of hand due to her cane.
That had been a nice prop.
But all this didn’t explain the situation on Main Street. The Order had highly advanced scanners and tech. Dampeners out the ass. Maintaining a high level of magic in the face of that setup was some scary shit.
Throat dry, I rose to my feet. Nadia still slept, occasionally murmuring like a wounded animal. It was obvious that at least one part of the story had been true: the Order had ambushed her SUV, killed her men and kidnapped her.
But from there, things got fuzzy.
Stumbling up the stairs, I found Argos in the kitchen—or what passed for one. None of the appliances were installed, and half the wiring was exposed, making it look like someone had been interrupted in the middle of setting up a Home Depot floor display.
The dog perched on a bar stool, poring over a tablet with his glasses perched on his long snout.
“Never gets old,” I said with a smile, circling around the other end of the counter.
He glanced up, looking indignant. “I am an old creature, Kal.”
“Cut the shit. That’s not how immortality works.” But I said it in a friendly tone.
“Jealous, are we?”
“Who knows,” I said with a shrug, “maybe I’ll have better luck with women now.”
“We can only hope.”
“Appreciate the support.”
The dog nudged the tablet over toward me. “The same problem’s bothering you, right?”
“I just need to know how she pulled it off.” I shook my head, looking at the tiny text. It was a scan of some book or another, with the writing in Latin. “The Life of a Thousand Cuts, it’s—”
“Irreversible, as far I know.” Argos cleared his throat, looking serious. “Or knew.”
And yet Isabella had not only reversed our potion’s deleterious effects, but gained powers far beyond her already substantive original abilities. Mind controlling every creature in the Conclave was no mere brute force maneuver. It required power, nuance and art.
The scanned book explained why: if you were insane enough to risk killing yourself, a massive overload of essence was the cure. I suspected the risk of dying was a small price to pay for the opportunity of fixing her ailing body.
But the dose outlined didn’t explain her current powers. Which meant she’d found an extra, massive boost somewhere.
The more I thought about it, the easier it was to imagine her infiltrating the Order’s hideout. After she had the power, it was just a matter of adding to it and practicing the corresponding spells. Shifting into a human was almost impossible for a natural shapeshifter, but get enough essence flowing, and it became a sheer matter of magical energy.
Then what? Teleportation? Probably not. A little too Star Trek. But hypnosis and suggestion—walking straight through the Order’s door, making the people at the Main Street facility forget all about where the real Nadia was?
“When did the shift in the mind control’s reach start?”
“Right after the Sol Council HQ.”
So something had happened to massively increase Isabella’s power between our altercation in the bunker and me finding the list of vessel candidates the day after.
Which led me to one more question.
“If Isabella is the vessel, why are they still kidnapping potential candidates?”
Perhaps these candidates had unusual properties that made their essence more beneficial. Or maybe they just had surprising amounts of essence coursing through them.
“Stockpiling to help recovery?” Argos said.
“I think we’re well beyond recovery at this point.”
Even transmuting hundreds of vessel candidates would be like little top-off snacks for someone as powerful as her.
“Shit,” I said. “We’re basically back to square one.”
“Well, we know she’s powerful.”
Neither of us wanted to mention the word goddess. At least she could only mind control her own minions stupid enough to pledge fealty to the Conclave.
See? There was a silver lining.
“Gotta be a smoke screen,” I said. “A shell game.”
“For what?”
“Same reason she kept the cane around. For the benefit of those watching. For people like me.”
That was the simplest answer. Why else stage “Nadia’s” betrayal, if not to grab my attention? Or send me into a demonic furor. Either way, it was a good start to the humiliation she had always so desperately wanted to grace me with.
Another thought occurred to me: that she was scared of me. Her methods ensured my distraction. Fighting paper tigers while the real one slunk up in the darkness and devoured the world. Maybe I was harder to kill than I thought.
That gave me hope.
“Then how do we fix it?” argos asked.
“We have two options,” I said. “We kill them both. Guns blazi
ng.”
“Satisfying,” Argos said, nodding sagely. “But difficult.”
“Or maybe we build a goddess of our own.”
His brown eyes narrowed for a moment before he said, “Nadia?”
“She was on Blaise’s list.”
“I don’t know, Kal, you saw her…”
“Just think about it, buddy.” I gave him a pat as I went downstairs.
Sleep was finally willing to come, and I wasn’t going to beat it off with a stick.
Today could be the last day of my life.
Damned if I’d experience it with my eyes half shut.
51
“You’ll get all the payment you can handle,” I said into the receiver. I coughed slightly, gagging on a potion that Argos had whipped up for me. He claimed that it would—at least temporarily—heighten my senses. I didn’t know if the daystriders still lurked out in the plains, but an enemy I couldn’t see would make quick work of me. “In addition to the essence required for the spell.”
Delphine, who was very much not under Marrack’s control, laughed, her sonorous voice rich even as cell reception dropped. “I’m flattered and disappointed.”
“How so?”
“Flattered that you think my powers could control a thousand creatures at once.”
“Don’t sell yourself short.”
“Disappointed that you think that megalomaniacal fool Marrack could ever capture me.”
“He’s about to burn the world to the ground,” I said. “Don’t feel too disappointed.”
“I can cut through her mind control for perhaps ten minutes.”
“That’s fine.” I checked the clock, running numbers in my head. “Midnight.”
“Do you even know where she and Marrack are?”
“I don’t suppose you do.”
“Good luck, Kalos,” Delphine said with a sigh. “I am afraid you will need it.”
“Destiny, remember?”
There was a sad, resigned laugh, and then the call ended. At the very least, Delphine would have the distinct honor—if you could call it that—of seeing both my beginning and end. I had initially come to her to cure my demon bloodlust, at Charon’s behest; now, seven thousand years on, she would help me cure the world of Marrack.
Moon Burn (The Half-Demon Rogue Trilogy Book 3) Page 21