by Dima Zales
With effort, I tamp down on the inappropriate fantasy forming in my mind and say in as even of a tone as I can manage, “Nice to meet you in person, Valerian. Are you on this Council?”
“I’m not.” The way he says it, though, makes it sound like he omitted the word yet.
I blink up at him. “Then how did you manage to get into the castle? For that matter, how were you invisible?”
“He was invisible?” Felix asks. “How—”
“Same answer to both.” Valerian’s sensual lips curve again. “As you know, I’m an illusionist. While you talked to Kain, I gave both of you the illusion of being alone in the room. Same when I came to the castle. I made it so nobody could see me. Oh, and I carry a device that turns off any cameras around me.”
My earpiece fills with grumbling. “So that’s why I can’t see anything. Let’s hope the camera comes back on when he leaves.”
Ignoring Felix, I process what Valerian has said. When Hekima did his illusionist thing, he shot those energy arcs at everyone’s heads. Apparently, that’s not the only way that power is used. The reality is much scarier: You may have no idea when an illusionist is working his mojo.
Then something very disappointing occurs to me. Given Valerian’s powers, he might not actually look like a sex god. I bet no one looks like this, and certainly not this Valerian guy.
How sad.
The weird part is that he seems equally fascinated with me, his eyes scanning my face as if he plans to draw me later. “I know this will sound like a pickup line,” he murmurs, stepping closer, “but I can’t shake the feeling that you look familiar. Have we met?”
I catch a pleasant whiff of warm male skin and pine, and my mind fills with images of sunlit forest meadows and long, lazy kisses on a picnic blanket. I swallow to combat the sudden dryness in my throat. “I don’t think so, but you look familiar to me, too. Have you ever visited Tranquility? The rehab facility on Gomorrah?” Or did you make yourself look like a celebrity? is what I don’t ask.
His hypnotic eyes gleam with amusement. “Afraid not. I keep my vices under control.”
I’m suddenly dying to know all about those vices, but I force myself to focus. “Based on the jobs you’ve given me, you’re into VR. Maybe you took some video game design classes here on Earth? Or on Gomorrah?”
“I’m self-taught.” He looks at his watch, then at the door. “We don’t have much time, so I’d like to get to the point.”
“Sure.” I conceal my irrational disappointment. “What point is that?”
All hints of amusement disappear from his face. “The last job I gave you is very important.”
Job, right. That’s why he’s talking to me. “You’re paying a lot for it, so I figured as much,” I say, matching his businesslike tone. “Unfortunately, as you can see, I’m in a bit of a predicament right now.”
He nods, his gaze somber. “If said predicament interferes with your ability to complete my job, I’d be happy to use my powers to lead you out of this castle.”
“Wow,” Felix whispers. “He can actually save you.”
“I can’t leave,” I say to them both. “The Council gave me an opportunity I can’t pass up.”
Valerian cocks his head. “What if I match whatever they offered you?”
“I doubt you can. Besides, they have my DNA, which means they can track me anywhere you take me. I don’t really want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder for vampires.”
“I see.” He frowns, and even that expression looks good on his chiseled face. “So you’re saying you’re giving up on Bernard?”
“No, I already did the heavy lifting with Bernard. I established a dream link. When night falls, I’ll find time to slip inside his dream and finish what I started.”
The frown is instantly gone, and I decide I like his face much more without it. “Thank you,” he says. “Are you sure you don’t want to escape? I’m going to Gomorrah for a couple of days, so I won’t be reachable if you change your mind.”
“I’m sure. Oh, and there is a way I can reach you, even on another world.” I try to make my next question sound as casual as possible. “How do you feel about taking a nap right now?”
He grins, flashing even white teeth. “Nice try, but I don’t think I’m ready to let you loose inside my subconscious. We’ve only just met.”
I do my best to ignore the butterflies filling my stomach. “Your call. It could’ve been fun to be in a dream together.” Especially for me. I almost lick my lips at the thought.
“Are you coming on to this guy?” Felix hisses.
Crap, I totally forgot we have a third wheel.
Valerian’s grin turns wicked. “We don’t need your powers to have fun,” he says in a voice like heated molasses as the room around us shimmers and becomes a lush bedroom with an enormous bed swathed in silk sheets and scattered with rose petals.
My pulse spikes as the butterflies start a gunfight in my belly. Is this really happening? Am I about to—
“Alas, we can’t today,” Valerian says, and to my huge disappointment, both the bed and his gorgeous self disappear.
“Wait!” I look around the empty room. “Why do you even need me? For the Bernard job, I mean? As you just demonstrated, your powers are very similar to mine.”
His disembodied voice comes from near the doorframe. “I’m under the Mandate. That heavily limits what I can and can’t do with humans. Besides, your way is going to be much better. Dream inspiration is a classic, after all.”
“Uh-huh. Are you sure you don’t just want someone else to take the risk?”
He doesn’t reply. Must’ve already left.
I sigh, feeling strangely deflated. The idea of “having fun” with Valerian was more than a little appealing, and not just because we’d be able to do it via his powers of illusion or my ability to dreamwalk—and therefore without any exchange of bodily fluids. No, it’s him. Something about the guy almost makes me forget the dangers of viruses and bacteria.
Speaking of which—I slather my hands again with sanitizer. What’s wrong with me? I talk to a hot guy for two minutes, and I’m ready to risk syphilis? He might not even look the way he appeared to me.
Must be my lack of a sex life catching up with me. I have a complex relationship with my libido. In other people’s dreams, I’ve experienced thousands of orgasmic encounters, both from their memories and their fantasies. In my own dreams, too, I’ve done whatever I wanted with anyone who took my fancy. Sometimes with many of them at once. In the waking world, however, I’ve never actually been intimate with anyone.
Despite an entire harem of partners in the dream world, I’m a twenty-six-year-old virgin who’s never even kissed a guy.
Hey, that gives me a crazy idea. What if the Brotherhood monks were behind my being snatched by the Enforcers? Maybe whatever deity they worship needs a virgin sacrifice.
Nah. Too convoluted a plan for something like that.
Felix crackles in my ear. “The camera just started working again.”
Before I can so much as reply with a thumbs-up, Kain strides back into the room with a thick folder in his hand. “Let’s go to your quarters so we can review all this.” He waves the folder and turns on his heel.
I have quarters?
I follow, panting to keep up—though for a vampire, he’s practically crawling.
We hustle across half the castle to what at one point must’ve been the dungeon where prisoners were kept before being tortured or worse.
“How dreary,” Felix mutters.
That’s putting it mildly.
Kain leads me down a corridor that even the rats must find too depressing to frequent. The place smells faintly like fermented sewage, and I have to fight my gag reflex. With a determined expression on his face, Kain makes a sharp right and stops next to a large cell with an iron ring welded to the wall—always a nice little touch. He makes a gentlemanly gesture, ushering me inside.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I mu
tter as I step in.
These are my quarters? Instead of a solid door, there are iron bars, exactly like in a prison cell, and there isn’t even a modern toilet. There’s just a hole in the floor with murky muck a few feet down, which looks suspiciously like the liquid that was slushing in the moat around the castle. Major eww.
The only thing that makes this place feel like anything other than a prison cell is a new bed, table, and chair. And the fact that the door isn’t locked with the rusty padlock that’s hanging on the outside. Instead, it actually has a bolt on the inside.
Hekima appears in the corridor behind Kain and peers through the bars disapprovingly. “Are these the best accommodations we can provide? Bailey is our guest, after all.”
Kain sets the folder on the table. “You may have a point. This is where we were going to put her if she was found guilty, but she wasn’t. I’ll see if we can scrounge up something better.”
“Please do,” Hekima says. “Meanwhile, do you mind if I change the scenery?”
Kain and I shrug.
Hekima shoots his showy arc of energy at our heads, and the cell becomes a fresh-smelling, sunlit meeting room. Only the furniture looks the same.
“Right, then.” Kain opens the folder. “Let’s get to the murders.”
Chapter Thirteen
Inside the folder, on the top, is a photo of a striking woman.
“She looks like Lara Croft,” Felix whispers. “Or looked. Past tense.”
“That’s Tatum,” Kain says somberly. “The first victim.”
He flips the page, and I see Tatum’s body lying on the roof of one of the castle’s towers, an arrow in her heart.
“Why don’t I show you what we think happened?” Hekima offers.
More illusions. Why not?
I agree, and an arc of illusionist energy hits my head.
I find myself at the scene of the crime, standing in front of a living Tatum. She smells amazing, which gives me an inkling of her Cognizant type. She takes a joint from her pocket and is beginning to light up when—with a sharp whoosh—an arrow pierces her chest.
“Let me slow that last part down,” Hekima says after she collapses.
This time, I can see the arrow’s flight path. It seems to come from the ground below—an impossible shot.
“When was this?” I ask as the arrow crawls toward the chest of the poor woman.
“Six days ago,” comes Kain’s disembodied voice. “At four p.m.”
“And what can you tell me about her?”
“She was a succubus. The most powerful I’d ever met.”
Just as I thought. That yummy smell is unmistakable. “Do you have any idea who would want her dead?”
The arrow begins to penetrate Tatum’s breast.
“No one,” Hekima says. “Everyone loved her.”
“A bit too literally,” Kain says. “As you can imagine, she had many lovers.”
Right. When one of her kind wants someone, they use their power to make themselves sexually irresistible. This is why I stay as far away from succubi and incubi as possible; they no doubt have countless germs from all those partners, plus they can drain energy from their lovers during intimacy—something that can even lead to death, if they wish it.
No, thanks. I’ll take my dream lovers any day of the week.
I turn away before I can get splattered with illusory blood. “Could a lover have killed her? Murders are often committed by people close to the victim. Maybe someone got jealous.”
The room becomes normal again—that is, it goes back to its guise as a meeting room.
“As I said, she had many lovers,” Kain says. “The pool of suspects is too large.”
I examine the photo of her corpse again. “That arrow. Are you sure your recreation of her death is accurate?”
“We consulted experts,” Hekima says. “I’m sure.”
“But who could make such a shot? There are no elves on this world, so—”
I stop as Kain and Hekima exchange a glance.
“Some elves get plastic surgery to make themselves look more human in order to settle here,” Hekima says.
Huh. I didn’t know that. “Is there such an elf on the Council?” I ask.
“There is, for sure,” Felix whispers excitedly in my ear. “He helped us in a recent conflict.”
I’m about to ask some questions, but Kain flips a few pages in his folder and shows me a picture of a thin man.
“Yeah, that’s who I meant,” Felix says. “Doesn’t he look like Tingle from Zelda?”
Kain flips the page again to a photo of a broken body sprawled over some rocks—a body that had to be the same individual as in the previous image.
“Oh, crap,” Felix whispers. “He’s another victim.”
“We found Ryan dead just a few hours after we found Tatum,” Kain says. “And before you ask, he was the only elf on the Council, and he wasn’t merely Tatum’s lover. He was her husband.”
I rub my temples. I’m only on the second murder victim, and my head already hurts. To focus on something this brain-intensive, I’d need a full night’s worth of sleep, something I haven’t had in four months. “Is it possible the elf killed the succubus out of jealousy and then killed himself in grief?” I ask. “Humans commit this sort of murder-suicide all the time, don’t they?”
“That’s what we thought,” Kain says, “until the next murder.”
“Right,” I say, remembering that there were four. I picture the broken body on the rocks. “So you think someone pushed the elf?”
“It seems so,” Hekima says.
“Except that makes no sense,” Kain says. “Ryan was extremely paranoid. I don’t think he’d let an enemy ambush him like that.”
“So maybe it was a friend,” I say. “Did he have many?”
“One,” Kain replies with a scowl.
“Leal?” Hekima asks. “But he—”
“It’s feasible he could’ve done the deed before,” Kain says.
Hekima raises his arms. “Do you want me to play out that theory?”
“Please,” I say, and Kain nods.
Hekima shoots us with his mojo again, and we find ourselves on top of a cliff with the elf’s back to us. A man with wild gray hair dressed in a white lab coat approaches the elf from behind. The elf spins around and aims a drawn bow at the newcomer.
“Leal,” he says with a hint of a smile. “You startled me, old friend.” He lowers the bow and turns his back to the newcomer. “I come here when I feel unsettled. It’s almost—”
The gray-haired dude pushes him over the cliff, and we’re back in the meeting room before the elf strikes the rocks.
Kain looks thoughtful. “I don’t know about this. Why would Leal kill his closest ally?”
Why indeed? “Maybe I could go into his dream to find out?”
Kain sighs and turns a few pages in his folder. There’s a picture of a balding man in a white coat, a dove sitting on his shoulder as if he were a pirate and there were a parrot shortage.
“I don’t mean to disrespect the dead,” Felix says, “but he totally looks like Dr. Wily from the Mega Man games.”
Or any mad scientist, for that matter.
“The next image is disturbing,” Kain says. “Take a deep breath.”
I do as he suggests, and he turns the page.
Puck. The slab of meat in the photo is barely recognizable as a man.
Felix makes a strange wheezing sound. Did he just faint?
I drag my gaze away from the horrible image. “What could do that?” I ask Kain.
“The doves,” he says.
I blink at him uncomprehendingly.
“I think he means like in the Alfred Hitchcock movie,” Felix says in a thin voice. I guess he didn’t faint, after all. “You know, The Birds?”
Kain turns to Hekima. “Can you show her a simulation?”
Before I can say thanks but no thanks, I see an intact Leal standing in a lab filled with cages of white bir
ds. Without warning, the doves become agitated. One manages to break through the cage, followed by another and another.
Leal looks at the freed birds with no fear. “What spooked you, dears?” he asks in a raspy voice.
This is when a dove dives and pecks him in the eye.
He screams, clutching his eye, but another bird is already diving for his face again. More doves leave their cages and join the attacking horde (or dule, as a group of doves is called). Some of them hurt themselves in the process, but that doesn’t seem to stop them.
“Enough!” I snap. “I get it.”
Instantly, the blood and gore are replaced by the meeting room.
“Sorry,” Hekima says, “I didn’t—”
“It’s fine.” I force a smile, ignoring the nausea twisting my stomach. “I did need to know what happened.”
Kain and Hekima wait as I even out my breathing. And hey, a benefit of not having eaten in a day is that I can’t puke—one of my least favorite activities.
“Is there someone on the Council who can control animals?” I ask when my voice is steady enough. “On Gomorrah, we call people who can do that—”
“Gemma.” Kain flips a page in the folder.
A long-haired beauty stares at me from the photo. She’s dressed in all leather and stands on high heels.
“This one looks like Bayonetta,” Felix says, his voice back to normal. “She’s this kickass video game witch who—”
Kain flips to the next page, and Felix makes a gagging sound. My stomach roils too. Though arguably not as bad as the prior image, it’s still pretty gruesome.
Someone or something literally ripped this woman in half.
“I don’t want to see a recreation of this,” I tell Hekima before he can do his thing. “It’s self-explanatory. Someone very strong pulled her in two different directions.”
“Indeed,” Kain says. “Gemma’s kind are fragile, so unfortunately, we have many Cognizant on the Council with enough strength to do that.”
Well, this is going to be fun. “Do you have any idea how any of this ties together?” I ask. Maybe if they—
Kain slams the folder shut. “That’s what you’re here to find out.”
Right, okay. Lucky me. “Did the bird guy—”