I fiddled with the fat gold band engraved with a hamsa that I wore, marking me as Rasha. Dr. Gelman had told me that the Brotherhood historically had painted witches as evil. It wasn’t like my own personal experience with the Brotherhood had been that great, so I was inclined to think more kindly of the witches than my fellow Rasha. But still, Gelman’s version of the witch-Brotherhood feud comprised the sum total of my knowledge about the conflict. Rohan had been devastated at the idea that the Brotherhood was modifying demons and sending them after their enemies.
Did I have this all wrong?
A muscle jumped in Ari’s jaw, his eyes flint gray with only a sliver of blue. “If that’s the case, then I’ll personally see that these witches are brought down.”
While Ari’s reaction wasn’t unexpected, it made me realize that more than ever, I needed proof of my suspicions. That was my actual agenda this past month and why I’d gone after Dmitri and Zale to tap into the witch network and contact Gelman. Though after the rabbi’s bombshell, it might be a smart idea to put contact with the witches on hold and find proof on my own until I determined who was behind the rigged demons and the attacks.
Mandelbutt mistook my dismay for well, dismay, but for the wrong reasons. “You are Rasha. Have you nothing to say about this, Nava?”
Don’t get me started. “It’s a lot to take in.”
The rabbi nodded. “Luckily, you have Ari to guide you.”
“Nava is doing great. She’s helped me take down a number of demons over the past few weeks,” Ari said.
Helped? I’d dusted dozens of those suckers without Ari lifting a finger. The strain of keeping my lips clamped together caused a muscle to jump in my jaw.
Rabbi Mandelbaum braced his elbows on the table, speaking directly to my brother. “While I appreciate your commitment to fighting evil since you became Rasha, I’d like to officially present you with your first assignment.”
Was that a thing? Funny, this was the first I’d heard of it.
“Thank you,” Ari said. Had I not spoken with Kane, I might have missed the flash of relief across Ari’s face.
Had my brother bothered to look my way even once while Mandelbaum verbally fingered him, he’d have noticed the too-toothy smile pasted on mine.
The rabbi indicated we should open our folders. “Our internal intelligence found a spike of people dying of supposed heart attacks here in Vancouver.”
“How?” I asked.
For a second I didn’t think he was going to answer me. “We have software that monitors 911 calls in all cities with chapters. Certain keywords trigger a deeper look.”
Very cool. I flipped my yellow folder open and scanned the overview. “Could the heart attacks be just that? Aren’t they one of the leading causes of death?”
“These deaths are suspicious.” Rabbi Mandelbaum pulled out his buzzing phone, glancing at the screen before sliding it back inside his suit jacket. “Look at the ages.”
I checked the file. Twenties to forties. Six victims in under two weeks. A notation indicated that none of them were smokers or overweight. No family history of heart disease, no sign of coronary artery disease, heart defects, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol.
“So the autopsies found no reason for the sudden heart failure,” I said.
“As these deaths fall outside the scope of medical science, they wouldn’t have, would they?”
My grip on my pen tightened in proportion to the blandness of my smile.
“Figure out what’s causing this,” the rabbi said.
“Who do I report to?” Ari asked.
I raised startled eyes to his. “Who do we both report to?” I mean, if we were going to get technical about this, and, why yes we were, I was the one with seniority. I was the one who’d actually participated in missions.
Both the rabbi and my brother shook their heads in identical motions, like I’d said something amusing.
Mandelbaum wasn’t speaking to me when he answered. “Report to the Brotherhood via regular channels, in as much as any CO does. Make us proud.” There were channels? A reporting system?
“I will.” Ari and the rabbi shook hands.
Look at that. More Boys Club by Sausage Fest fogging up the joint.
Since I was nothing if not an awesome team player, and I preferred to lay into my twin with no witnesses, I held out my hand to shake as well. “Put me in, coach.”
Mandelbutt ignored it. Right, I might be menstruating and therefore unclean. Like all religious Jewish men, he wouldn’t ask and he wouldn’t shake and risk contamination. “Dealing with the witches was strike one,” he said to me. “Find the demon responsible for these deaths and perhaps the scoreboard can be reset.”
“You’re too kind,” I said, biting the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood.
He clapped Ari on the shoulder one more time and left.
Ari flipped through the contents of the folder. “Give me a minute to divvy up the victims and then you can amass a list of suspected demons. Type or Uniques, whatever fits.”
“Just because you pushed your way out of Mom first doesn’t actually give you the right to pull rank on this.”
“Someone has to be in charge.”
“So it’s automatically the one with the dick?”
He grabbed a pen out of a box on the table, jotting down some notes on the cover of the folder. “How about it’s the one who trained for this his whole life?”
I took a pen as well, testing its ink with the words “Ari,” “sucks,” “rotten,” “smelly”, and “eggs.” “How about this assignment is an equal partnership?”
“How about guess again because it was given to me?” Ari placed my half of the victims’ list in front of me.
“How about go fuck yourself? I’m the one with actual field experience.”
He drummed the pen on the table. “Explain what Mandelbaum was talking about.”
I threw my hands up. “You’re not even going to pretend to consider my viewpoint?” Screw the sob story Kane had given me about Ari being freaked out about his Rasha status. This was not supposed to be bros over Navas. Our twinship meant Nava über alles.
Ari sat there, waiting.
I squeezed the pen, its faceted edges digging into my skin. “You got me. With you already not inducted, I went to a whole bunch of trouble to get a magic amulet just in case anyone else bothered to find a way to make you Rasha so I could then undermine it. Mwah ha ha.”
“Not the Vashar. Don’t be an idiot. I know why you went to Dr. Gelman.”
“Then what?”
“The gogota. You already knew about the modified demon. How?”
I tried to protest but he stared me down. “One attacked me in Prague.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” Ari pursed his lips. “Interesting.”
“What is?” I pulled the pen away from where I’d been gauging it into the table.
“From the moment my induction went wrong, you made all the decisions about me. Deciding what I could and couldn’t handle.”
My fingers twitched as I fought the urge to jam the pen in his eye. That condescending tone of his masquerading as rational got under my skin. It always made me lose it, which always let Ari win any argument. At least my parents weren’t around to tell me not to be so sensitive. “Is that how you see it?”
“You don’t?” Ari waved it off as if that point was unimportant. He was so our lawyer father’s son. “But now I find out that even knowing what the witches were up to, you still used one of their rituals on me.”
I slammed my hand on the table. “They weren’t up to anything.”
That earned me a look of pity. “Even you can’t believe that.”
I jutted my chin out. “Can’t I?”
“What possible reason would the Brotherhood have to modify demons?”
“The spine made the gogota harder to kill.”
“No harder than a lot of other kill spots,” he said. “You’re grasping.”
I jabbed a finger at him. “Maybe the Brotherhood is sending demons after anyone who opposes their goals? You can’t tell me that people high up in the shadowiest corners of government don’t know about us. Some either aren’t going to fall in line with what we do, or want to do things their way. You think the Brotherhood wouldn’t go after them?”
I’d learned a few things from Dad, too. Like how to present a counterargument.
“They might,” Ari said. “But not with demons. Demons don’t work for humans.”
“Not willingly. But they can be summoned and bound to do a person’s bidding.”
Ari rolled his eyes. “Stories, not fact. There is no way to bind a demon to your will. They might choose to work with another demon but they never, ever take orders from a human.”
“What about Montague and the jax?” Jacob Montague, a Rasha, had engaged in a sexual encounter with a jax demon.
“That wasn’t coercion. The jax needed that release to survive. Whatever prompted those gogota attacks stemmed from some demon agenda. Not a human one and definitely not a Brotherhood one.”
“What reason would a gogota have to attack both me and Dr. Gelman? No, the Brotherhood is behind this. I just have to find the spine that was left behind after my attack and prove it.”
I wished I’d examined that spine, but the metal had been so mangled and scorched that it hadn’t looked like much. Then again, I was half-blind with gogota slime and rocking an après-battle shock, so I could have missed something. I’d magnetized the spine onto a lamp post with so much force even Rohan hadn’t been able to pry it off. So there we’d left it.
Even though I’d emailed the restaurant next to where the attack had occurred to ask about it, by that time, the “art installation” was gone. I doubted some enthusiastic Czech sanitation worker had taken it. That meant it was either in the possession of the Brotherhood or the witches. Either way, finding it was my number one priority.
Followed closely by finding a way to test it for any traces of magic indicating the demon had been bound.
“Even if witches can’t force a demon to do their bidding,” Ari said, “doesn’t mean they’re not doctoring them in hopes of being able to use them for some other end.”
“So witches are stupid and bad?”
Ari waved a hand at me. “Come on, Nava. The Brotherhood is a centuries-old organization dedicated to destroying evil and you think they’re the potential villains here? Not some bunch of power-hungry women?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Looked at my twin and at the features as familiar to me as my own–the way his mouth pulled down slightly when he was annoyed, the two freckles high on his left cheek, the scar on his right forearm that he got when he broke my fall out of a tree–and for the first time in my life, I saw a stranger.
My choices were “all evidence to the contrary” versus my gut-level certainty and personal experience of misogyny that the Brotherhood was to blame. Sure, I had my doubts.
But he had none at all.
The low hum of the heat kicking in was the only sound in the room.
I scooped up my folder. “I better get to it, then.”
Ari shot me an unsparing look. “Good.”
Two hours later, hunkered down in the library, neither of us had apologized. An unwelcome first.
We worked in silence to compile a massive list of potential demons. Any demon who conformed to any aspect of the crimes, no matter how tenuous a connection went on it.
I’d cross-referenced the shit out of these crimes, giving 200% to the task, and refusing to give Ari any more real estate for his moral high ground. “Both genders. Different vocations,” I said. “Different races, religions, times, and locations of deaths. Even one Jane Doe. A lot of possibilities.”
I tapped my pen, perusing the list of victims: Ellen Chen, 40, mystery author, found at home, Davide Garza, 21, a student at Simon Fraser University also found at home, Max Bader, 30, a stockbroker, at a club, Jakayla Malhotra, 35, a mature student, found in her teaching assistant office, Reuben Epstein, 29, discovered after-hours at the restaurant where he worked as a pastry chef, and a Jane Doe about 23 or 24, in a low rent hotel, found yesterday morning. “You wouldn’t happen to know the T.A., would you? Malhotra? She goes to UBC.”
Ari was on summer vacation halfway through his double major of chem and biology at the University of British Columbia where our mom, Shana, taught history and our dad, Dov, taught law. Me and university, on the other hand, were on a time-out to review our relationship.
He polished off his turkey sandwich. “Considering UBC has like fifty thousand students? Nope.”
I rubbed the kinks out of my neck with fingers stiff from typing on my laptop. “There’s no common factor in these deaths.”
“There’s one. The deaths themselves.”
I stood up, pacing long lengths along the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and masculine groupings of furniture. “How? There’s nothing to help us identify how they were killed.”
“Exactly.” Ari pushed our lunch plates aside to fan out photos of the victims showing various angles of their bodies in the positions they were found. I no longer marveled at the information the Brotherhood was able to access. Having been around since King David’s time, they’d entrenched themselves into all kinds of places. “The lack of wounds are the common factor. What demons kill without leaving a trace?”
I narrowed my eyes at him but he was already checking the online database in answer to his question. It hadn’t been a test for me alone. I dropped back into my seat, pulling a fat tome towards me. Even with their database there was no beating the details found in the books the Brotherhood had amassed. “The felan do. If I hadn’t had the antidote, I’d have left a beautiful unblemished corpse in that alley.”
“Except for the patch of back hair you shave,” he said dryly.
“One time when I was twelve.” I jutted my chin up. “I outgrew my Sasquatch soul strip years ago thank you very much, and even if I hadn’t, no shaming the Jewess for minor beauty flaws. Unlike some with their ‘dry hands’ requiring Vaseline kept under the bed.”
“I have sensitive skin,” he said.
The index didn’t yield any entries for my searches related to “lack of a trace when killing” so I ploughed in to the book proper to check the demon entries one-by-one. “Blame circumcision.”
His shuddered “ew” and punch to my arm was our reset to normal. I pushed my anger down with the silent vow that I’d gloat like crazy once I had proof that the witches weren’t to blame for the gogota.
And when I cracked our assignment and destroyed this demonic serial killer first.
“I’d lose the poison demons,” he said. “Or ones that freeze or strangle the life out of their victims.”
“Why?”
He studied the victims’ photos. “The vics look too peaceful. Before you took the antidote, you looked like you were trying to shit boulders.”
“Lovely.” But I deleted those demon types from our list.
Hours passed in which we narrowed down the list further.
I thunked my head on the table, my eyes achy and throbbing from print that now swum before me. Darkness pressed in against the windows and I’d missed a meal somewhere in there. “Have mercy.”
Ari folded a piece of paper into an airplane. “It’s down to soul suckers or energy leeches.” He compared the wing sizes with mathematical precision. “Still leaves more possibilities than I’d like.”
“Something’s bugging me. Rasha are concerned with keeping demons a secret. Demons don’t care. Not that they’re hell-bent on outing themselves, but both soul suckers and energy leech
es could kill a victim in the middle of a packed dance floor with no one the wiser. So why the discretion to isolate these people?” I cross-checked the revised demon list against the overview page. “Even the deaths in public places were done in shadowy corners: an empty office, a closed restaurant with the other staff gone. So what if the demon got caught in the act? Most would just kill whoever caught him as well.”
“Unless the demon is vulnerable in that moment?”
I drummed my fingers on the table, watching the curser pulse. “Like an incubus or succubus? Feeding off sexual energy can kill, but won’t leave a trace. And when those demons climax, they’d be wide open.”
Ari shook his head. “Except we’ve got men and women dead. That would mean an incubus and a succubus working together. Never heard of that happening.”
“Before me, you’d never heard of a female Rasha, either.”
“You were an anomaly.”
“Or the Brotherhood was short-sighted. Like you’re being now. Way to endanger the mission right out of the gate.”
“Don’t like it? I can find someone else to work this with me.”
Rabbi Mandelbaum popped his head in. “Off to a good start?”
My eyes darted to Ari, only half-certain he wouldn’t get me booted.
“We’ve got some promising leads,” he assured the rabbi.
Rabbi Mandelbaum nodded. “Good,” he said, and left.
Ari fired the paper airplane, bonking me on the side of my head. “You’re such an idiot.”
I retrieved the airplane, placing it on the table. “Long day, little sleep. I’m getting testy.”
With pouty lip and faux-concerned voice he asked, “Does Nava need a snack?”
“Like you need a shower, buddy. What’s that cologne? Eau du glory hole?”
He pulled out his phone, waving it at me. “I’m telling Mom you’re not following the ‘if you can’t say something nice’ rule.”
I scratched my cheek with my middle finger.
“If Nava had to follow that rule, people would think she was mute,” a voice said from the doorway.
“Only mostly mute.” Despite my “couldn’t care less” intentions, my head whipped toward the speaker.
The Unlikeable Demon Hunter Collection: Books 1-3 (Nava Katz Box Set) Page 60