Nava Katz Box Set 2

by Deborah Wilde

  Breathe. Logic this out.

  The car was still moving and there were no screams, screeching brakes, or crashing metal, so Rohan was fine. I cast deep inside to examine the box, still leaking that black light along the hairline fracture.

  Since I couldn’t seal the box back up, I sent healing magic into my eyes with a steely focus.

  The world cleared but I’d been too pre-occupied to notice we’d stopped and were now parked in front of a cute olive green adobe house with a bright red door and cool rock and cacti garden running under the front window.

  Rohan watched me intently; he’d shredded his poor seat belt with his extended blades. “Lilith?”

  I nodded, dropping my head in my hands. “She blinded me.”

  “You need to stop drawing on her magic.” He tilted my chin up. “Nava, promise me.”

  “What if it’s too late for that promise to matter?” I whispered. “What if this is the beginning of the end?”

  He held up a hand, his expression thunderous. “It’s not.”

  There was that arrogant absolute certainty about something he couldn’t single-handedly dictate.

  I clung to it with everything I had.

  Rohan reached into the back seat and grabbed a large, cellophane-wrapped gift basket with a bright gold bow. “Baskerville is out of chances. Text him and say you want to meet around five and to bring the Bullseye. That’s enough time for the funeral. Tell him if he doesn’t, he loses that warehouse he’s so fond of.”

  “What warehouse?”

  He slammed his car door. “I investigated the slippery fuck after we first met. He’s got a sweet stockpile of artwork presumed missing. Caravaggio, van Gogh, a Rembrandt. The Irish Crown Jewels and the Faberge egg in his possession are priceless.”

  “Why didn’t you take it away from him?”

  “Saving it for when we needed it most.”

  The threat did the trick. Baskerville responded in seconds with: Olvera Street. 5PM sharp.

  Rohan rapped on Helen’s door.

  She opened it, took one look at us, and tossed the oven mitt she held at Rohan’s head. “Last time you showed up with a gift basket I had to spend three days on the phone with the Executive convincing them you and Drio had nothing to do with Rabbi Moishe’s rental car being hung off the roof of DSI when he visited.”

  “I was fifteen.”

  “With Rabbi Moishe asleep in it.”

  “See? We didn’t even wake him.” He waggled the basket overflowing with items from Lush Cosmetics. “Can we come in?”

  “You’re a pain in my ass.”

  She led us through small bright rooms in warm colors to the kitchen. Cheerful hand-painted tiles backed a massive gas stove with a copper vent, pans hung from a rack in the ceiling, and garlic braids and a carved spice rack hung on one wall.

  My stomach heaved at the moist, rich scent rising off the carrot muffins cooling on the stove. If Lilith’s magic made me queasy, I’d be so pissed. A Nava who couldn’t eat was a Nava no one wanted to experience.

  “About the Executive–” Rohan began.

  “Hi, Helen. How are you doing today? I know it’s Rabbi Wahl’s funeral and you’re probably pretty upset,” she said.

  Rohan ducked his head, placing the basket on the counter. “Sorry. It’s just… This is about Ethan.”

  “We’re really sorry to bother you about this. Especially today.” I actually had no idea what “this” was, since Ro hadn’t told me, but barging in here like that had been rude.

  Helen scooped a fat pug off one of the kitchen chairs and motioned for us to sit down. “Good. Teach him some manners.”

  She insisted on serving us coffee and muffins before we discussed business. Normally, I’d have been all over that, but the one tiny crumb of muffin I tried under her encouraging smile sat like lead in my gut and the smell of the coffee made me want to puke.

  She pulled her apron over her head and tossed it on a chair. “What do you want?”

  “Remember a few months ago how a couple of the Executive rabbis showed up and were all over your ass about something?” Rohan said.

  “If Rabbi Wahl hadn’t gone to bat for me, I would have been fired.”

  “What happened?”

  She wagged a finger at him. “You know I can’t tell you.”

  Rohan pushed the gift basket closer to her. “I bought all four of your favorite soaps.”

  I scratched at my arms under the table, marveling at his unmitigated manipulation.

  “You don’t have clearance,” she said.

  “And bath bombs.”

  She peered through the cellophane. “I can’t.”

  Rohan pulled out his rock fuck grin. “I also got a cute bunny-shaped sponge.”

  “Shame on you, Rohan. That smile hasn’t worked on me since the last gift basket.”

  “Helen, you are a rare and precious woman.” I fanned my shirt. Was it hot in here? “But we need your help. This might help us figure out why Ethan did what he did and give some peace and closure to the tragedy of losing Rabbi Wahl.”

  “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

  I smirked at Rohan.

  “I’m keeping this.” Helen placed the basket on the ground beside her chair.

  The pug waddled over to sniff it then grunted and toddled off.

  “The Brotherhood discovered that a number of sensitive documents in the archives, as well as some powerful artifacts in lock-up had gone missing,” she said.

  “Why would they suspect you?” I said. “Did you have a key to them or something?”

  “No. They were located in different places around the world. That’s why it took them a while to realize the thefts were connected.” She picked at a corner of the cellophane. “All scanners require handprints, you know that.”

  “And they had a record of yours?” Rohan said.

  “In every place the theft had happened. If Rabbi Wahl hadn’t sworn I’d been here the entire time, I shudder to think what would have happened. He really cared about us all.” Eyes damp, she took a Kleenex and blew her nose. “Sorry, I get overcome.”

  She hurried out of the room.

  I made a quick call.

  “Well?” Rohan asked when I’d hung up. “Is it possible?”

  “Raquel said she couldn’t do it, but a witch with dark magic could. All Ethan had to do was get Tessa into Helen’s office and give her access to the scanner. The residual oils from Helen’s skin would have left a print that Tessa could use to infuse over top of her own. Abracadabra, she’d have Helen’s handprint and be able to walk in the front door of any chapter. Retrieve any document that Helen had clearance for. Any magic artifact. If Tessa had her own agenda to bring down the Brotherhood, it was a pretty good place to start.”

  “And Ethan was helping her.” Rohan kicked one of the chairs, then caught it before it toppled and carefully set it to rights. “But why?”

  21

  The answers to that question took us the next forty minutes and a minor B&E into Ethan’s apartment. His place was bare–like one plate, one mug, and a mattress on the floor, bare.

  “Did he just move in?” I said.

  “No. I was here six months ago. He had furniture.” Rohan roamed from room to room, but there was nothing to see.

  I pulled out the trash can from under the sink, but the bag was empty and the junk drawer only held stained take-out menus.

  My joints ached. The sooner Lilith was out of me, the better. I raided the medicine cabinet and helped myself to a couple of extra-strength Ibuprofen from the bottle next to the half-empty tube of shaving cream and a bag of disposable razors. My last search was the bed itself. A handful of poker chips had fallen between the mattress and the wall.

  “Ro?” I headed back into the living room with the chips.

  Rohan looked up, a smear of gray dust on his cheek. He’d sliced open the wall above the baseboard in the corner with one of his blades. “Fresh drywall.”

  He pulled
out a metal box from between the joists and flipped the lid open. It was stuffed with bundled bank notes and poker chips.

  I tossed him the chip I’d found. “Gambling addiction?”

  “Ethan liked poker, but I had no idea. Tessa’s money must have been keeping him afloat.”

  “Until the Brotherhood killed Helen’s clearance everywhere outside the L.A. chapter and Tessa stopped paying him?” I guessed.

  “If this cash didn’t come from Tessa, where did it come from?” Rohan said.

  “Finder’s fee for connecting Mandelbaum to Tessa?”

  Rohan counted the money. “Depends if he willingly sold her out or Mandelbaum smoothed over Ethan’s dried-up extra income with a bonus to keep him loyal.”

  “He’d already sold Tessa out, how loyal could Mandelbaum have thought he was?”

  “There’s ten grand here. If Ethan had blown the money from Tessa, the rabbi was pretty confident he’d bought his man.” Rohan put the money back in the box and slammed the lid shut.

  As for where Ethan had met Tessa, the answer was Switzerland.

  Ro found a photo of Ethan visiting his mom at their family home, taken when she’d been recovering from a bout of pneumonia. The date on the back lined up with shortly before the payments had started. Ethan had told Ro about his mom getting rid of everything, believing her stuff was harboring dangerous bacteria that had contributed to her brush with death. She’d cleansed her space and purged the bad vibes out. He’d joked about her calling in the professionals.

  Tessa.

  Ro was grim on the drive over to the funeral, hating that he had to tell his friends what he’d discovered. “I can’t believe I never knew.”

  There was nothing I could say to make him feel better. Ethan had been undermining the Brotherhood for Tessa, sold Tessa out for the Brotherhood, and then paid for his actions by killing his friends and dying.

  Was that justice?

  We were definitely in the right mood for a funeral, but this was Hollywood. Even the cemeteries here were epic on a whole other level. The Jewish cemetery back home was located in a suburb and overlooked by a Skytrain line. This place was more like a museum than a final resting place.

  There was artwork. Artwork! Everything from a massive Heritage Mosaic mural to fountains and sculptures, not to mention beautiful gardens.

  Rabbi Wahl’s funeral was much better attended than Zander’s had been. The place was packed to overflowing. All the Rasha were sitting together on the left side of the chapel. Except Kane, who sat on the other side.

  I slid in next to Ari. “Really?”

  “His choice.” He did a double take. “You okay? You look kind of sweaty.”

  Ever since my temporary blindness, my body had been aching with the desire to get a magic bump. I don’t know if my decision not to use her power was somehow contributing to these amped up detoxing symptoms or not, but I grit my teeth, popped another couple painkillers, and hoped my natural accelerated healing abilities would kick in soon.

  In addition to all of us that had been at the restaurant holding the memorial yesterday, Rabbi Mandelbaum’s posse was in attendance–minus Ilya–as well as Rabbi Wahl’s family and friends. He’d had a large social circle and everyone was devastated to have lost him in a security attack from a disgruntled client.

  The rabbi conducting the service spoke warmly about his friend, and there was a long line of extended family and close friends wanting to eulogize him.

  It made sense for Rasha to say they worked for an international security firm, but I’d never understood how rabbis got away with it. Baruch whispered to me that even non-Brotherhood rabbis worked as security consultants for secular firms.

  DSI may have been Wahl’s cover story, but by the way that Rabbi Mandelbaum greeted the widow and surviving children it was clear they knew the truth about Rabbi Wahl’s job. The chapter head truth, not the hit squad one.

  Other than the giant lie surrounding the circumstances of his death, it played out like every other Jewish funeral I’d been to.

  The widow and Wahl’s children all tore their shirts over their heart to symbolize their loss. Then the pallbearers carried the plain wooden casket from the chapel out to the freshly dug gravesite. Since there were more than ten Jewish men present, the minimum number required to form a minyan, they said Kaddish at the grave, and as a final way to honor the departed, people were asked to shovel dirt onto the casket. Every single Rasha came forward.

  Even Benjy was at this service. Ro explained that they didn’t shield the initiates from the hard truths of being in the Brotherhood, no matter how young.

  After the service, I gave Rohan space to tell his friends about Ethan, and ambushed Oskar, the German who had been in Mandelbaum’s room. So, you know, most likely Ilya’s killer.

  “Where’s your friend Ilya?” I still harbored a stupid hope that Ilya had been chastised and sent away, but Oskar hesitated a fraction of a second too long before replying that Ilya had left the country on DSI business.

  I clasped my sparking hands behind my back and gave him a faint smile and a non-committal “oh.”

  Oskar went to confer with Rabbi Mandelbaum, who gave me another assessing look.

  The sheen of sweat on my face was edging into gross territory so I locked myself in the women’s washroom and splashed cold water on my face and hair, blotting myself dry with one of the folded hand towels laid out in a rectangular basket for my convenience. My eyes were clear, and aside from a splotch of heightened color on my cheeks, I looked normal.

  My body, however, throbbed in a dull ache. I was cold and I wished I had some ginger chews.

  Rohan was waiting for me when I emerged. He placed his hand on the small of my back. “Walk with me?”

  He looked uncharacteristically solemn, so I accompanied him in silence, reading some of the names on the gravestones as we cut through one section of the cemetery.

  “You holding up okay?” he said, turning us onto a tree-lined path.

  I rubbed my arms. “I feel like I have the flu. Esther will be here tomorrow. We’ll get Lilith out and all will be well.”

  After another few minutes walk, Ro squatted down by one of the graves on the lawn. He pulled a smooth pebble from his pocket and placed the rock on the corner of the gravestone. “Hi, snake.”

  I knelt down as best I could in my pencil skirt.

  Asha Sarah Patel. Beloved daughter and cousin. The inscription, along with the dates of her birth and death were set into a heart in the marble gravestone that lay flush with the ground.

  Rohan sat down on the grass next to the grave and placed his palm in the center of the heart.

  “Hi, Asha.” I sat down beside him. “Why did you call her ‘snake?’”

  “A.S.P. Her initials. It started when I was little and since it annoyed her, I kept it up.”

  “Asp! That’s why the song title. Some of the track names were leaked,” I said.

  He gave me an odd look. “Nava, you don’t have to read my fan boards. If you want to know something, ask me.”

  “I wasn’t sure I had the right.”

  He tucked a curl behind my ear. “Sweetheart, you have the right.”

  I leaned in to his touch, savoring it. “I thought the title was some metaphor about me being the death of you.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Not everything is about you.”

  “But mostly it is, right?” I grinned at him.

  He rolled his eyes then leaned in and stole a quick kiss.

  “The song,” I said. “Is it about a specific memory?”

  He plucked a handful of grass out, systematically shredding the blades. “It’s the last remaining track I have to write and I can’t get it right.”

  “Could you release the album without it?”

  “No. Asp starts my story. It has to be there and Ascending has to be released next month on the twenty-seventh.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Asha’s favorite artist was Prince and he wrote
Purple Rain, her favorite album, when he was twenty-five.”

  “Did he release it on the twenty-seventh?”

  He smiled and tapped the gravestone. “It’s her birthday. Asha made me promise that since she couldn’t write music and release her own album at twenty-five, that I should immortalize her at that age.”

  “I like her logic.”

  “You would.” He lost his smile. “I can’t let her down again.”

  I scratched at my arms. “You’ll get it.”

  Rohan caught my hands. “Tell me how I can help you, but stop hurting yourself.”

  My skin had red nails marks slashed across them. “Distract me. Talk to me about Asha.”

  He laughed softly. “You’ll love this. When we were really young, she’d dress me up in her mom’s clothes because she wanted a little sister.”

  “Did she make you have tea parties?”

  “I wish. She’d make us pretend we were TLC and perform their albums.”

  “That doesn’t seem so bad.”

  “And Destiny’s Child.”

  “Right.”

  He ducked his head. “And Spice Girls.”

  “Tell me you were Scary.”

  “Baby.”

  “Did she put you in a blonde wig?”

  Rohan scrunched up his face and I lost it, howling with laughter. “Shut up.” He nudged me. “I’ve never come here with anyone.”

  I stopped laughing and squeezed his hands in mine.

  “Not even my family since her funeral. It’s too hard to be here with them, so I come by myself.”

  “I’m honored you brought me.”

  He jumped up, pulling me to my feet. “I wanted you to meet.”

  He said it so matter-of-factly, granting me the same importance in his life that she’d had. My bones unstitched and knit back together with the shattering simplicity of a single thought:

  I love him.

  I thought I’d been in love once before with Cole, but that was puppy love. Sweet and young and light and short-lived. My feelings for Rohan were anchored in every atom. We were each other’s best friends, lovers, protectors, and confidants. There was a strength and a surety and a completeness to it. He was the one I wanted to wake up to and fall asleep with, the heart of my heart, my one and only.