by K. N. Banet
Bet you some stupid ass human drank demon blood, and that was the end of that. Not my problem, though.
Mygi was finding humans with demonic heritage and making them into full cambions. They were bringing a species to life that had always only been rumored. A terrifying thought, really. It made me wonder if other legends were hidden and ready to be brought to life. It was a supernatural case of bad scientists playing god, like that one movie franchise with the dinosaurs. Not only was Mygi finding these poor people, but they were also taking them and locking them away for whatever reason.
How did one end up in that fucking basement? Mygi is obsessed with getting Raphael back. I’m lucky they haven’t blown up my fucking house. How did Saleem end up in a fucking basement?
I was pissed as I finished writing. This was wrong. It was all wrong. Raphael was beating himself up over being a cambion now, a demon, and the poor guy was a Catholic. I was beginning to go off the deep end and felt damn near helpless to stop it.
Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath. I needed to update my board for Raphael’s case, which was in the other office, and I needed to be somewhat composed in case he saw me. I stayed there, trying to meditate for what felt like forever. When I felt comfortable to move again, I got back to work.
One step at a time. That’s all I have. Every new piece of information, even if it seems useless, takes me one step closer to the truth and finishing this. That’s all I can do. One step at a time.
I didn’t see him as I moved into my other office and pinned the new information to the board, using string to connect the pins where it was needed. I wrote more notes and printed more pictures, even copying the old cambion information, using a red marker to write WRONG on those. I even wrote Saleem’s name down, putting it with Raphael, and added the other names he had told me. Sammy, Nathan, and Maude. There were more. I knew there were. He said a dozen or so.
I made a label for them. VICTIMS.
That’s what they are, and I’m going to help them. Every single one of them. This has to stop.
I never got personally attached to cases. As an Executioner, it wasn’t my place to be personally invested, but Raphael was different. He was mine, even if I didn’t want him but did want him, at the same time. My fate was sealed the moment I saw him. This was as much my battle as it was his, and he had no idea. He had no idea his cambions were now as much my people as the nagas were. He didn’t need to know, either.
Once I was done, I texted Cassius that I had new information from a trusted source. I didn’t want to give up Hisao over a text. We needed to have a meeting tomorrow, first light, and get back to work.
Raphael never came to me in the office. When I finally headed for bed, he wasn’t there. I checked his room silently and saw him lying in his own bed. I didn’t have the chance to say anything. He revealed he was awake on his own.
“Good night,” he called softly.
“Cassius is going to be here at dawn. Just wanted to let you know. Good night,” I said in return, closing the door.
16
Chapter Sixteen
I was ready when Cassius showed up, not a hard feat since I didn’t rest well.
“Hey…” I greeted, letting them in. “Come with me. I have some things to show you.”
“I couldn’t find anything useful last night,” he said as we gave each other a once over to make sure everyone was alive and uninjured as they had been the night before. Sorcha was behind him, holding a mug and quiet. Her eyes were attentive, but she seemed tired.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Tired,” she said with a small smile. “I stayed up later than he did.” She shook her head. “I didn’t find anything either.”
“Well, let’s go to my office, and we’ll talk. Raphael should be up soon.” As we passed Raphael’s door, I knocked on it and heard him say something. “We’ll be in my office,” I explained through the door. “Find us when you’re ready.”
We were quiet as I showed them where they could sit, and Sorcha threw a glance back down the hallway.
“How was he last night?” she asked this time.
“He had new memories come back. I think that’s why he was so quiet last night,” I explained. “I’m not going to force him to share those memories or share them without his permission, so you’ll have to wait on him to offer.”
“That’s okay,” Cassius said, not sitting down. He looked at my work board. “You made a second one.”
“Yeah. I needed to clear my thoughts, and this helps me weed out useless information and gets me to the parts that matter. I can see the entire situation unfold right in front of me.”
“Where did you learn some of this?” I could hear the frown in his voice as he leaned close to the Board where I wrote down much of what Hisao told me.
“We’ll get to that,” I promised.
When Raphael walked into the office, I didn’t say anything. He had woken me up twice the night before, screaming in his sleep from nightmares. His new memories must have given him a fresh new hell to relive. He fell into my seat behind the desk as though he owned it, also staring at the board. I watched him frown like Cassius and get back up.
“Where did this come from?” he asked, pointing at my section labeled Cambions, everything I now knew about his kind.
“Last night, I talked to an old friend. He’s close to Hasan and knows him very well. He offered me some information. Everything there is something Hasan told him. Or…the Politician or General might have told him.”
“You spoke to the Assassin,” Cassius said simply, turning to me, folding his arms behind his back. “How was it talking to your old master?”
“He was forthcoming about what he knew.”
“The Assassin…the werecat who trained you,” Raphael clarified, and I could hear the hope that he was right. “Hisao.”
“Let’s not say his name for safety reasons,” I said quickly. “There’s a reason Hasan’s children have nicknames, and we’re going to use them today because I’m not supposed to know this information. He’s not going to tell his family he told me any of this. He’s trusting me to reveal my information to the Tribunal and his father when the time is right. He understood my concerns about the Tribunal learning about this too early. So, the Assassin offered this.” I pointed to the section of notes pinned to the board.
“Vampires are demonic in origin, which would explain Sinclair’s reaction to Raphael’s blood. Easy. Not the most helpful right now, but good to know. Next, he’s actually met someone with a known demon parent, and that person wasn’t a cambion. My guess is the abilities are recessive or subdued by something and need to be activated in some way.”
“Which is what Mygi must have done to Raphael.” Cassius was nodding appreciatively. “The stories seem to line up.”
“That’s what we thought last night on the call,” I agreed. “He can’t help us. There’s apparently a Law about it.” I wanted to roll my eyes. Hisao would have been a great asset.
“Yeah…” Cassius sighed. “Hasan’s family was targeted during the writing of the Law. I was there, helping my father. Hasan’s mate had to give up her seat, which I bet will sit empty for eternity because there’s no female werecat willing to take it from her. The Politician can’t take it for some reason, either, or she’s being respectful of her mother. The General is no longer allowed to position himself in a place of power among humans or otherwise. If it gives him command of forces, it’s not allowed. The Assassin is only allowed to use his skills on humans and werecats, but there are conflicting reports on if he abides by that rule. No one can prove anything. When Executioners were established, they banned him from it. It goes on, of course.”
“Does everyone hate that family?” Sorcha huffed. “Wow.”
“No, everyone fears them,” Cassius said softly. “A family of seven…a family of eight werecats who are close and rule. They’re an army unto themselves. Half of them are ancient in comparison to their rivals, the werewolves. All of
them are powerful. Even my father feared them at times. He loved werecats, but he had a healthy respect for the family Hasan built. Let’s stay on topic, though. For Raphael.”
Sorcha smiled and nodded. “My apologies.” Raphael waved a hand, dismissing it as if he wasn’t offended or annoyed.
I jumped back in, pointing to the information Hisao gave me.
“None of this is very useful, but it does give us some insight and will be great for the moment we take this to the Tribunal. What will really help us now is…” I glanced at Raphael. “Your memories. I won’t force them from you, but…”
“I remember more of their faces. The doctors. A couple of names I heard. I remember…all the other cambions. I still can’t tell you where we were.”
“What were the other cambions like?” Cassius asked, sitting.
“Scared. I was one of the newest, but they welcomed me and gave me advice about how to endure the torture and experiments.” He closed his eyes. “Sammy was one of the oldest. She told me she was picked up when she was twelve in 1964. She looked like she was thirty. I remember being amazed.”
“So cambions don’t age. Good to know.” I wrote that down and pinned it to the information section of my board. “That means you’ve probably stopped aging by now, but we haven’t had the time to notice it. Welcome to immortality, Raphael.”
His dark chuckle was pained, but that didn’t stop it from sounding sexy.
“Thanks. I wish I could remember all of it, but I need more. Just remembering the others like me is a big thing. I…It’s like I know things in the back of my mind, but I can’t get the details, and when I try to grab them, they slip away.” He wiggled his fingers at the back of his head. “I don’t know. I know some things happened, but it’s faded, doesn’t feel real.”
“Like?” Cassius was the one bold enough to ask.
“I was forced to have sex in the lab,” he admitted, looking away from me.
I gritted my teeth as my stomach flipped, and fury lit my veins on fire.
“But I don’t remember with who or how many times. It wasn’t consensual for either of us. That I remember.”
I looked at the ground, trying to keep my rage from exploding.
Monsters. All of them are fucking monsters. I’m going to kill every single one of them. They don’t know what I can do to them.
“And when I try to remember her face, it’s…” He threw his arm up. “Gone. It’s getting easier to bring up the thought, but it still escapes me.”
“The memory magic done on you is getting weaker every time you remember something. That’s good. It’ll be a bad day for you when you remember everything, but it’ll come,” Cassius said evenly. “Until then, we keep going with what we have.”
“Was there anything from yesterday you need to talk about?” I asked him, looking up when I finally felt in control again.
“Yeah, a couple of things. I should have mentioned them earlier, but…” He gave me a stare.
“Yeah.” I looked down again.
“One, our guy was definitely a frequent visitor at that house, and someone kept it clean. There wasn’t any dust. I don’t think a family lived there, but it was maintained, and someone had been there within at least a few days of us. Someone is going to know we burned it down, and soon. That’s good and bad for us, depending on how you feel about them coming after us. They probably will.”
Good.
“Two, the cambion in the basement—”
“Saleem. His name was Saleem,” Raphael cut in.
“Saleem,” Cassius said gently. “Kaliya, when you discovered it, Saleem didn’t attack you.”
“I didn’t walk in. I opened the door, saw what was inside, then closed and locked the door again,” I clarified for him. He nodded and continued with his explanation.
“When I walked in and left you at the door, I looked at the wall beside us because I knew you wouldn’t have visibility of it. Saleem came out of the shadows. He was the shadows. He was humanoid and amorphous at the same time, as though he could barely hold his shape. I told you to run, then shadow-stepped. It probably wasn’t the smartest decision, but I knew he was going to jump for me. We fought him, and…we killed him. After that, I went back to the basement. You did the right thing closing and locking the door that first time. It had a seal on the back of it. Saleem could have never left if the door was closed, even if he was strong enough to pull it. I bet if we had put Raphael in that room, he would have had the same problem.”
“So, pentagrams work the same way on cambions as they do on demons,” I said. “Makes sense.”
“There was one thing I noticed about him,” Cassius said softly. “His body itself. It was emaciated. He was starved. Even though he still had muscle mass, he wasn’t healthy. It couldn’t be accounted to him being dead. I think he was trapped down there and left to starve for a purpose. If I’m right, that means he attacked us from a survival state. We were a meal, and he was desperate. That could help us with the Tribunal.”
“When we’re ready to tell them any of this. Good observation. I missed it.”
Cassius shrugged. He knew I should have caught it, but he understood my issues at that moment. I was learning my mate was a creature who could turn into a demon, demons who were generally hated by everything and normally described as monstrous, otherworldly creatures who only left death and destruction in their wake.
“What do we do now?” Raphael asked. “Give me something to do, please. I’m tired of being the useless one here. I need to help them.” He pointed to the list I wrote for him on the board, and at the same time, his eyes turned red and black, and the veins began to grow. He was stressed. “I left them there, and while all of this information is amazing, it doesn’t get us closer to helping them.”
“We’ve had to catch up and make sure everyone knows everything,” I said carefully, reaching for his arm. I didn’t want to pull him away from the board, but I hoped to offer him some comfort. He grabbed my arm and pulled me closer.
“Your people are murdered and butchered. You have to know how this feels. I might not like what I am, but for five years, they were all I had to help me survive that place.”
“I know,” I said, trying to get him to understand I understood his urgency. “I swear, Raphael, I’ll do anything to free them and to finally finish this. I swear it.”
He let me go, the black veins receding, but his eyes stayed in their demonic form. Now I knew what his scent was—the unique scent of a cambion between forms. The demon-Saleem had smelled like sulfur, which wasn’t a surprise. From my knowledge, all demons smelled like sulfur. When he was human, he smelled human. If he turned into a demon, he would smell like a demon. But at that moment, he smelled like a cambion—something new. Here, in this unique middle place, he was just a cambion, and there were no scents I could compare it to. There was certainly no way for me to explain it to others.
He leaned on the closest clear wall he could probably find and rub his eyes. He never looked up at us or said anything, so I turned back to Cassius.
“Should we start looking through his notebooks and shit? Maybe a clue to his location will be there,” I pointed out.
“Just what I was thinking. All of our things are still in the SUV. I kept it secure last night. Once we’re done with it, I’m going to dispose of it. It’s covered in demon blood.”
“Yeah…” I knew it.
Raphael moved again when we walked out to Cassius’ SUV. Together, we got everything inside to my living room and started reading.
We learned more than I thought we would. For most of the day, we were silent, reading and notating different passages for their useful information. This man had been prolific. He was looking for ways to boost the power of witches by using the powers of other species.
“He’s a fanatic,” Cassius whispered around lunch. “He believes witches are the natural supernatural species of the realm, and the others need to be killed off or banished. He left Mygi…four years ago when
they discovered he was working on his own projects with their resources and…patients.”
“He’s done enough to warrant the death penalty five times over,” I replied, turning the page on the journal in my hands. “You would just need to send in a report to the Tribunal. I would send in evidence of his death, and they wouldn’t be able to stop us.”
“We need his information first.”
“Hm.” That was easy enough to get once I had my hands on him.
“He writes here that cambions can be demons from any religion,” Raphael mumbled.
“Meaning several religions knew of demons from their plane, and those occurrences were written into their mythology,” I said softly. “Religion doesn’t make the mythos. Truth makes the mythos, and a religion is formed. Usually.”
“Or so most supernatural historians believe,” Cassius added.
Silence came back after that. It was nearing dinner time when Sorcha jumped up.
“I found it!” she yelled, looking around at us wildly. “Here. He stole Saleem and kept him bound in the basement for his blood. He was using Saleem to boost his own power, the same way a typical sorcerer would but without having to make a dangerous deal. He could control Saleem better than Mygi…Mygi could control real demons, demons they summoned to…” She trailed off and dropped the book. “By Oberon…”
I reached out and grabbed it before Raphael could.
“Mygi taught him to summon demons, then to create more cambions for their own reasons,” I said softly. “But he doesn’t mention why they wanted cambions.”
“I have that,” Cassius said quietly. “The journal before Sorcha’s while he was still working directly for Mygi. They wanted to utilize the cambion healing factor for other means. They wanted to know if cambions, being of demons and therefore powerful, could be used to cure other issues. They knew about the vampire interaction already, so cambions became useless for curing vampire bloodlust. All of their theories failed, cambions being ‘useless’ to help anyone. After that, they just continued to study without a real cause, or so he thought. He decided to invest his time and energy into his own ideas and studies.” Cassius looked at the book in my hand. “The timeline…he worked rogue for two years in the facility before they caught him. He barely escaped with his life by promising one of the cambions he could be free. Now we know how Saleem got out and ended up in the basement.”
