by Jane Kindred
Lucien turned in a slow arc to follow the horseman with his scope. Leo Ström’s origins were what concerned him right now. How had he come to be the leader of the Wild Hunt? And what was the Hunt doing appearing on a lovely spring evening in Sedona, Arizona? Traditionally, it was said to appear around the winter solstice and was better suited to snowier climes.
They’d scented someone now, it seemed, and even from this distance, Lucien thought he heard their victory hoots as the phantom storm that followed them swallowed up their victim and they disappeared into the night, leaving it calm and warm.
He’d have to find out more about this Leo Ström. The man was involved with Theia’s twin, Rhea, which could mean anything in terms of unnatural origin. It might even be Rhea’s own magic animating him. It was unlikely she’d created the revenant herself, since the long dead were nearly impossible to give a convincing living appearance to, no matter how much magic the practitioner had. So perhaps she’d taken possession of a revenant created by some other unnatural power. And Lucien just happened to have access to information on any of a number of unnatural powers.
He stashed his gear and changed into something more appropriate. People might talk if he showed up at Polly’s dressed like a cat burglar.
* * *
Polly was entertaining in her booth when Lucien walked in. Aware of her out of the corner of his eye, he made a point of not glancing in her direction, knowing it would drive her crazy. His ploy worked, and in less than five minutes, she’d ditched her patrons and sauntered over to the bar where he stood waiting for his drink.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in.” She lifted her drawn-on nearly crimson brows with a little smirk as she leaned back against the bar beside him and raised her voice for the bartender’s benefit. “Whatever he’s having, it’s on the house.”
Lucien put down a twenty as the craft beer arrived. “That’s sweet, but I’ve got it covered.”
Polly pushed the bill across the slick wood toward the bartender. “That’s a tip.”
Lucien sipped his beer. “You’re such a control freak.”
“I like to treat my friends well.”
“Oh, we’re friends now?” Lucien turned to mimic her stance, elbows back against the bar.
Polly flipped her cherry-red hair over her shoulder, nails painted a dazzling sapphire blue. “Well, maybe frenemies.”
“Seems fair.”
“So what brings you back to my neck of the woods?”
“Edgar does.” He always used his father’s first name, never calling him Dad or Pop. “Smok Biotech is partnering with Northern Arizona University on a new venture. He sent me to supervise.”
“That doesn’t explain what you’re doing in Sedona. NAU is in Flagstaff.”
“I know where it is.” Lucien took a swig of his beer. “Went to a wedding.”
Polly’s eyes sparkled with interest. “The Diamante wedding? Lucky you. Those invitations were highly coveted.”
Lucien shrugged. “I didn’t say I was invited.”
Polly laughed. “Of course you weren’t. So you crashed the quetzal’s wedding and now you’re slumming at my joint. Who are you after?”
“Who says I’m after anyone?”
Crimson waves swayed as she shook her head. “Darling, don’t grift a grifter.”
He finished his beer and set the bottle on the bar. “What do you know about the Wild Hunt?”
Polly pushed away from the bar and grabbed his hand, drawing him with her through the jostling patrons trying to get the bartender’s attention. The joint was hopping tonight.
She led him to her booth, where the patrons she’d ditched were still waiting. “Meeting’s over, boys. I’ll get back to you when I hear anything.”
The two pale twentysomething men with slicked-back blond hair shrugged and scooted out of the booth.
One of them frowned and hung back as she slid onto the seat. “Don’t make us wait too long. The consequences may be dire.”
“Stop being so dramatic, Kip.”
Lucien sat on the bench. “Kip?”
Polly grinned. “Preppy vampires turned in the ’80s. Eternally embarrassing.” She gestured to one of her staff, presumably ordering a bottle of something. “So why do you want to know about the Hunt?
“Because I saw it tonight. And unless I’ve been doing way too much molly, it’s May, not December.”
“You saw it?”
“Why does that surprise you?”
The woman she’d signaled arrived with a bottle of wine and poured them each a glass, despite Lucien shaking his head.
“Generally, only someone who’s a target of the Hunt is treated to that sight.” Polly sipped her wine with a curious lift of her brow. “Have you been very naughty, Lucien?”
“No naughtier than usual. Why is the Hunt still in town at this time of year?”
“What makes you think I’d know?”
Lucien played with the rim of his glass. “Pols. You make it your business to know everything of interest—everything paranormal—that happens in the entire Southwest. Information is your business. Are you really going to make me pay for it? After what we’ve meant to each other?”
Polly laughed, her eyes twinkling in the wavering light of the candle on the table. “Don’t push it, Hellboy.”
“Ouch. Below the belt.”
Beneath the table, the pointed toe of her shoe stroked the side of his leg. “Best location.”
He moved his leg, and she uncrossed hers and crossed them the other way.
“But in the interest of our continued frenmity, I’ll tell you what I’ve heard.” She paused to top off her glass. “Last winter, the Hunt blew into town to deal with some riffraff, and the leader of the Hunt struck some kind of a deal that let him remain in the mortal realm indefinitely. Word is, it’s because of—”
“Rhea Carlisle.”
Polly tipped her glass toward him. “The quetzal’s sister-in-law, yes. And today you crashed the quetzal’s wedding. I take it Leo Ström is the reason.”
“One of a couple of reasons.” Lucien swirled the wine in his glass, thinking about Theia’s large eyes. And the way she’d held on to his arms after he’d saved her from choking.
“And would another of those reasons be Rhea Carlisle’s identical twin?”
Lucien glanced up, caught off guard. “Why in the world would you say that? I just met her today.”
Polly shook her head knowingly. “Those Carlisle women have a way of getting under a man’s skin. I’d be careful of that one if I were you. She’s deceptively humdrum.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s very normal.” Polly said the word as though it were a terrible insult. “Very sweet. People think of her as the least talented of the bunch, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near her with a secret I didn’t want found out.”
It was a warning he’d be wise to pay heed to.
“As for Ström, he used to come in here with a redhead years ago. A real redhead.” She grinned and flipped her hair. “Not like me.”
“And?”
“And apparently she’s a rogue Valkyrie. A couple of regulars knew her—also Valkyries—and didn’t care much for her.”
That was the missing piece. The Valkyrie must have been the one to create the revenant. And somehow she’d made a deal with Rhea Carlisle.
* * *
Full of mango lassi and sweet Kashmiri naan, Rhea wasn’t interested in reading an old man’s treatises about the history of the Covent written in longhand. Which suited Theia just fine. Alone, she wouldn’t have to hide what she was looking for. She drove Rhea back to her car before heading to Phoebe’s place with Rafael Diamante Sr.’s archives.
Puddleglum, Phoebe’s Siamese tabby, curled up with her in the guest bed while she pored over the mate
rials, looking for anything about the Smok family. As she turned the pages, she noticed a peculiar effect when she lingered on an entry: the text on the page began to shift beneath her touch. Rafe hadn’t mentioned anything about magically enhanced pages, but here it was. Like clicking a magical hyperlink to load a page of related content, touching a reference in the text made the copy on the page transform into the detailed document to which Diamante referred. When she lifted her finger off the page, it returned to the original journal entry.
Fascinated, Theia thumbed through an entry on the Smok family’s history. But it wasn’t about the Diamantes at all. It was an accounting of Madeleine Marchant’s belongings, given to the nobleman who had been her benefactor—none other than one Philippe Smok, Vicomte de Briançon. And among those “belongings” were Madeleine’s children: seven daughters, in fact. Seven sisters.
The Lilith blood allele—a hypothesis Theia had formulated when she and Rhea had first traced their genealogy—was passed down through recessive genes, only resulting in the Lilith phenotype when daughters were born to two carriers of the gene in Madeleine’s direct line. And this always seemed to result in the birth of seven sisters with the gifts. But she hadn’t realized that the first set of sisters were Madeleine’s own daughters.
Puddleglum plopped down in the middle of the journal to announce that Theia was done reading. She hadn’t realized how late it had gotten. Lying back on the bed and staring at the ceiling, she tried to work out what Lucien Smok’s game might be. There was no way his appearance at Phoebe’s wedding was a coincidence. Rafe was right. She should keep her distance. But if his family had a connection not just to the Covent but to Madeleine herself, then Lucien surely knew it and had sought them out deliberately. Theia had to find out what he was up to. Particularly with regard to Smok Biotech.
The arrival of the vision was the first indication that she’d actually fallen asleep.
It flew out of the night like a carrion bird, circling overhead, waiting for death, casting a heavy shadow on the creatures below: the crow. The wolf. The dragon. The flying thing drew closer, and now she was looking up at it, standing with her sisters. It was both a vulture and a reptile, a prehistoric lizard with wings—a pterodactyl, perhaps—its head birdlike, with glowing red eyes, bat-like wings stretching out from the lizard body.
In the distance, a rooster crowed, and the sound became a screech in the thing’s beak, a scream of laughter as it dived, talons outstretched.
The rooster crowed again. Light blazed through a crack in the blinds. Dawn light. The rooster was somewhere outside. Nice. Phoebe hadn’t mentioned the built-in neighborhood alarm clock. Theia pulled the pillow over her head and rolled onto her side.
Before the cock crows twice. What was that from? Something in the Bible, she thought. New Testament. She hadn’t been to church in years, but she remembered it now: Peter’s denial of Christ. The cock outside had crowed twice. Not that unusual, probably. But why was that sticking in her head? Cock, not rooster. Theia giggled, knowing what Rhea would have to say about it.
Cock crows twice. The vision came back to her in a rush. It wasn’t the Bible phrase she was thinking of, after all. The flying thing—it hadn’t been a pterodactyl like she’d speculated in the dream. It was a cockatrice. And it was coming for them.
In middle school, she’d once gone with a friend to her church, an evangelical one. The preacher had spoken of some mad theory about human-animal hybrids and the evil plot of godless scientists who wanted to bring back such things as griffins, harpies and cockatrices. His theory claimed such creatures had roamed the earth before the Great Flood because of the sins of unnatural men who’d bred them, and God had wiped them out.
Theia had barely been able to contain her laughter, and her friend had been furious. Even at twelve, Theia understood enough science to know how idiotic such a theory was. Nobody was trying to splice genes across species to create monster hybrids, and even if they did try, it wouldn’t work.
Except... Lucien Smok had said Smok Biotech’s research at NAU was both scientific and supernatural. And what was more supernatural than mythical creatures that turned out to be real?
She certainly hadn’t believed dragons were real until recently, when she’d seen two of them with her own eyes. Dev Gideon shared his form with the dragon Kur, and Rafe was a scion of Quetzalcoatl who sprouted iridescent feathered wings and snake flesh and commanded the dead. And she hadn’t seen Leo shift, but according to Rhea’s account of their time battling another ancient dragon in the Viking underworld, he could transform into a serpentine creature with the destructive energy of the mythological Jörmungandr—who maybe wasn’t so mythological after all.
What if the Smok family’s “magical-adjacent” connection was that they were bioengineering other such creatures?
Theia unhooked her arms from the pillow, and her eyes focused on the crimson business card on the nightstand. If she wanted to get to the bottom of this, she was going to have to take Lucien up on his offer.
Chapter 4
Lucien’s phone vibrated in his jacket pocket. He’d been out on a job all day and had turned his ringer off. He took it out and glanced at it, surprised to see a voice mail notification from Theia Dawn. And annoyed that it seemed to make his heart beat faster.
Theia’s message was brief: “We should talk.”
Somebody else had talked, obviously. From the tone of her voice, he could tell she was better informed about the Smoks than she’d been yesterday. Lucien lay on his back on the Berber rug on the floor of his penthouse suite while he returned her call.
He grinned when she answered. “I knew you couldn’t resist me.”
“I can resist you just fine. It’s your company I find intriguing.” There was a pause as she apparently realized how her word choice sounded. “Your firm,” she said quickly, followed by an adorable, mortified gasp.
He put her on speaker and crossed his arms behind his head. “So what can my...firm...do for you, Ms. Dawn?”
“I thought we were going to talk about what I can do for your...” She swore softly at herself in the background. It sent a little shiver down his spine to know how flustered she was when he wasn’t even standing in front of her. “About the job. With Smok Biotech,” she hastened to add. He wondered how flushed her skin was right now. With the chocolate-brown hair bobbed sharply at her chin and those little points of cherry red at the ends, it would make her eyes seem even larger.
“You want the job at the lab.” He spoke lazily, imagining her large gray eyes blinking at him.
“If the offer’s still open. And it depends on exactly what the job is.”
“The offer is most definitely still open. Why don’t we meet for dinner tonight to talk over the specifics?”
“Tonight?” Her voice went up slightly at the end, a little squeak of surprise.
Lucien smiled. “Is that a problem?”
“It’s almost eight o’clock.”
“Too close to your bedtime? I’m sure I can accommodate that.”
“No, it’s just—it’s short notice. I wasn’t planning on going out tonight. It would take me a little while to get ready.”
“It’s just a business dinner. You don’t need to impress me.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Her tone was clipped.
He loved getting under her skin. Lucien grinned at the thought. He’d like to get deep under it. Or inside it. In a manner of speaking. Lucien shook himself out of his little daydream. That wasn’t going to do him any good.
“Why don’t we meet at Cress at L’Auberge in an hour? Is that enough time?”
“Are they open that late?”
“They will be for me.”
* * *
The last time he’d seen her, she’d been dressed as a bridesmaid in a bloodred chiffon dress that swung around her hips when she walked. Undeniably flattering
, but he’d suspected it wasn’t the sort of thing she normally wore. Neither was what she had on tonight—a conservative navy blue pencil skirt with a cream-colored blouse buttoned up far too high. It was an interesting look, perhaps something she thought a scientist would wear to a business dinner. The one departure from the conservative style was the pair of red crushed-velvet heels that drew attention to her fantastic legs.
“You really didn’t have to dress up for me,” he said as he pulled out her chair at their al fresco table above the babbling Oak Creek.
Theia sat almost suspiciously, like she wasn’t sure what he was doing. “I didn’t. I mean, this isn’t for you. It just didn’t seem like Cress was really a jeans and Tinker Bell T-shirt kind of place.”
He smiled, picturing her in a Tinker Bell T-shirt. That seemed a lot more her style.
“It’s whatever kind of place you want it to be, darling. Seriously. They know me here, and you may have noticed the place is empty.”
Theia’s eyes narrowed. “This doesn’t impress me, you know.”
“Of that I have absolutely no doubt.” Lucien laid his napkin in his lap. “I hope you don’t mind that I’ve ordered ahead. I should have asked if you had any food allergies, though. Is filet mignon all right?”
“No. I mean, yes, filet mignon is fine. No, I don’t have any food allergies.” She was gripping her water glass tightly.
“You don’t have to be impressed, but there’s no need to be so tense, either. Would it help if we dive straight into business?”
“Yes.” She’d answered almost before the words left his mouth. He was really enjoying how flustered he seemed to make her.
“Okay, so to start, I take it you spoke to your brother-in-law about us.”
Theia took a sip of her water as if trying to buy time. “I got some information from him, yes.”
“So you know what it is we do. Outside the lab, that is.”
A questioning look appeared on her face for a moment before she masked it. “I do.” She didn’t. But she knew something. Something that was making her very nervous.