She kept her tone calm while she explained and a quiet murmur filtered through the crowd. She waited. She said volunteers. If no one in this warehouse wanted to go, she would go to the next one. If there was no one, she would do it herself. She was confident that eventually, someone would speak up.
“I’ll do it,” a female voice said.
Ophelia’s eyes fell on a girl—because she was a girl. She couldn’t have been much older than Elysia, with a salt-split tangle of black hair and freckles under a peeling sunburn.
“Your name?” Ophelia asked.
“Mirin,” she said.
“Are you aware this is going to be a dangerous situation? One that might turn deadly if you aren’t careful?” Ophelia asked.
“It might turn deadly even if I am,” Mirin said. Now that she was speaking more than a couple of words at once, Ophelia could hear her heritage in her accent. She’d been on the money. “Callum was a dear friend. We used to sit on the dock and point out girls together. I want to see someone answer for this as…”
The girl stopped mid-sentence, suddenly thinking better of whatever it was that was about to come out of her mouth. Ophelia understood. ‘As much as you do’, the words seemed to echo across the warehouse.
“Come here, Mirin,” she said. The girl ducked her head and started up the steps, her posture closed, without looking at Ophelia. When she arrived on the platform, Ophelia placed a hand on her shoulder. “Tell me who you are and what you can do. How confident are you in your ability to take instructions and extrapolate them on the fly?”
“Extrap…” the girl said, furrowing her brow.
“Improvise,” Ophelia said.
“I can do that,” Mirin said. “Callum always had me running errands for him, Ma’am, and that almost never went the way we expected it would. I’ve seen the insides of the Fallen Angel’s drug dens, and been in and out of facilities in Black Cat and Gater territories. I even did some watching on the Watchers back when they were still in business. You know, before the Shadow Court killed them all. I’m ready and I’m willing. Please, let me do this for you, Ma’am.”
“The Watchers?” she asked. “That was more than twenty years ago.”
“I was eight,” Mirin said. “I was working for the Shadow Court, then. They train them young. Do you remember the night you found the blind girl?”
“You were the little girl with the dog.”
Mirin nodded. That was enough for Ophelia.
“You’ll report to me directly,” Ophelia said. She raised her voice then. “Mirin is in charge of organizing this inquisition. She’ll gather groups together, send them out where they need to go, all on a volunteer basis only. If you want to be involved in this, you come to her, and she reports to me. Anything you can find in the Gate Street Player’s part of town that implicates them, great. If it exonerates them, just as well. We are looking for the truth.”
Mirin gave a bow to her and Ophelia looked out over the warehouse again. Joey was leaning against the wall with his arms folded and he caught her eye and nodded her over to him.
“Recruit only volunteers,” Ophelia said. “Let me know how that goes. Come to the house if need be. You’re dismissed for now.”
Her boots dinged off of the metal stairs as she came around to Joey.
“I didn’t expect to see you out here, today,” she said. “You gave your orders, was there something else?”
“It’s…related,” he said. There was something in the hesitance of his voice that Ophelia didn’t like. “This is the family business. And this, especially, is family business. So I think the family should be involved.”
“I’m not sure I like where you’re going with this,” Ophelia said, eying him.
He sighed.
“Look, she’s got a plan. I don’t think it sounds that dangerous. I told her I would run it by you,” he said.
“The only ‘her’ you could be talking about is Ely,” Ophelia said, raising a brow.
He nodded. She clenched her jaw.
“Joey, she’s sixteen,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “But I was doing stuff when I was sixteen. And her birthday is in a week.”
“You had to be doing stuff when you were sixteen,” Ophelia said. “You didn’t have older brothers or parents to take care of it.”
“Look, I know this sounds…like a bit much, and I’m not a huge fan of it either, but she just wants to poke around the archives and try to find some blueprints and stuff,” Joey said. “Without Cal here, we may need her sooner rather than later.”
It was a low blow. He had to have known as soon as he said it that it hit her like a punch to the guts. Her brows furrowed, her expression drawing inward, and she took a moment to steel herself against tears that she could not, and would not shed here in front of their people.
Joey sucked down a breath.
“If it had been one of her brothers, it wouldn’t have been a question,” he said. “If we tell her no, what kind of message does that send?”
“When they were sixteen, Joey?” she demanded. She straightened, pushing the grief down as far as it would go and using it to fuel fury. “You damn well bet it would have been a question. Taking them to an execution is one thing but her brother just died and this is actually dangerous. I can’t lose another one.”
“It’s not like she’s going into enemy territory, she’s going into a school,” he said. Something about those words cut through the fog.
“The Academy Archives?” Ophelia asked.
“Yeah, that was her plan. She thinks that she can maybe figure out where their hidey holes are if she can get hold of the city plans,” Joey said.
“Those plans are decades old at best,” Ophelia said.
Joey shrugged.
“She says as long as she knows how it was built she can do something and try to figure out where they’ve made their modifications,” he said.
“She’s too smart for her own good,” Ophelia said, sighing.
“She takes after her mother,” Joey said. The smirk on his face made her heart skip.
“Flattery, now?” Ophelia asked. “Fine. Fine, she can go. But we’re following her on her way there.”
Joey snorted.
“You think I didn’t plan to, already?” he asked.
She couldn’t help her answering smile.
Callum knew Alric Kessel on sight. He was a big man with broad shoulders, and the kind of cambion who couldn’t hide his heritage no matter how much he wanted to because his skin was about as red as a lobster’s shell. Most imp-blooded people tended to be short, but his human lineage was all massive northerner and it showed both in the way he moved and the sheer size of him.
More importantly, he was Vivi Verida’s concubine, and that meant he had a close ear to pretty much everything the Gaters were doing. He must have been good at what he did because he sure as shit wasn’t pretty.
Perched between a pair of gargoyles on a ledge around the building across the street, Cal watched him shove his way through the lunch crowd to the counter of a bakery in no man’s land and plant his hands flat on the top of it. He leaned in, locking eyes with the man working the till. Callum recognized the boy. He was the baker’s son, Darven. They had gone to school together as kids.
Of course, he wasn’t confident enough to go in and do his dirty work all by himself. Two other men came in after him staying in the empty wake Alric left as he parted the small crowd within. Several of the people toward the back of the bakery started to filter out the door, and one hard look from Alric stopped the rest in their tracks.
Callum couldn’t hear what they were saying, inside. All he knew was that Alric reached out and knocked a glass jar of cookies off of the counter and it shattered on the floor before he jabbed a thick stubby red finger at Darven.
Alric extended his arms and turned around to address the assembled lunch crowd. While his back was turned, Darven took a step back. Callum felt a fire welling in his chest in response to th
e man’s terror as he looked on.
One of the guys Alric had brought with him hopped behind the counter and started pulling pastries out of the glass display and throwing them haphazardly into a paper bag. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been happening to Callum’s people.
‘Put all the cupcakes in the bag,’ Callum thought to himself with a derisive snort.
Callum looked the men over. Alric, he’d known at a glance. The goons he’d brought with them, not so much. They were both male, not that it meant anything to the Gate Street Players. One of them had dark hair, and the other was ginger.
He realized quickly that he didn’t actually know their faces, but he started giving them nicknames in his head to keep them straight longer term.
The dark-haired one throwing pastries into the bag had an upturned nose and Callum instantly awarded him the nickname ‘Piggy’.
The red-head had so many freckles on his face he looked like a star map and Callum quickly labeled him ‘Midnight’.
Callum took a moment to memorize as much of their faces as he could. A child in the bakery was crying and clinging to his father’s pants leg as Alric gestured grandly around the store front. Whatever he was saying, he clearly thought it was important. The asshole.
Piggy, who had moved from the baked goods to the register while Alric had been talking, leapt back over the counter and Alric leaned across to pat Darven on the cheek. Even from here, Cal couldn’t have missed the hate in the eyes of the baker’s son. He was wise enough, though, to keep his mouth shut. Good man. That would be fine, Cal had plans to make sure the rest of them paid.
The glass door opened, and he thought he heard the soft ‘ding’ of the bell hung above the door, but he couldn’t be sure. It might have just been the expectation of the sound. It didn’t matter. Piggy shoved Midnight as they stepped out into the brick road and the two jostled for a moment before Alric forcibly separated them.
“You think they’ll play nice?” Midnight asked. His arms were folded. Now that Callum could see his face, he could see the big hooked nose the man had.
“They will if they know what’s good for them,” Alric said. “We’re pushing out, gents, and this place is smack in the middle of our new scrap of territory.”
“Yeah,” Piggy said. He grabbed a pastry out of the first bag and ate it loudly, talking with his mouth full. “The Torchlighters are gonna love this.”
Callum made a note of which bag had the cash in it.
“They’re a mess right now,” Alric said. “You know their angel boy is useless. Trezza just lost his heir apparent, if you think he’s going to have it in him to push back at us you’ve got a screw loose.”
Samael wasn’t useless. Callum wasn’t dead. Even if he had been, Sam would have stepped up. He felt a heat growing in his veins as he crept across the roof and followed them.
“I guess,” Piggy said. Midnight reached over and took the bag, grabbing a pastry out of it. Piggy gave him a resentful look but didn’t grab to get it back.
“They might just be pissed,” Midnight said, shrugging one shoulder. “I’d be pissed. Whoever offed the Trezza boy kicked the hornet’s nest.”
That part brought him up short. He paused between two gargoyles and cocked his head. Maybe the underlings just didn’t know. Alric certainly didn’t look confused, but that didn’t mean anything. You school your expression in front of people.
“And you can kill bees with poison,” Alric said. “Vivi thinks this is an opportunity, so we’re going to take it as an opportunity. She’s still the boss until she dies or says otherwise.”
“She’s getting senile,” Piggy muttered. Alric moved like a flash of lightning, shoving him into the brick wall right under Cal, who had to shift his weight back to keep his balance at the tremor of the impact.
“Vivi makes solid decisions,” Alric said. “You’ll keep that tongue from wagging if you don’t want to lose it, boy.”
Piggy kept his mouth shut. Alric released him and kept walking. Callum waited where he was for a couple of breathless seconds to make sure no one had spotted him before he continued to crawl across the ledge and follow the men below.
That was when they turned a corner. The buildings in Daelan City were all cramped right on top of one another. Most streets were narrow enough that if he thrust his arms out he could touch the walls on either side with his fingertips. Leaping the gap between this ledge and the lip of the roof of the building across from him would be easy, the trick was doing it so no one saw. Even up above, a swift movement like that would draw attention.
He ended up waiting until the knot of men was halfway down the next alley before he made his jump. There was a soft thud as his boots hit the ledge and he caught himself on a flag pole to keep his balance. There was another breathless moment as he watched them go, but none of them turned around.
By the time he caught up to them again, Alric was heading in another direction. Piggy and Midnight stood together in the alley. Callum waited until he could no longer hear Alric’s boots, and took that time to size the situation up.
There were two of them, yes. They were fully grown men, yes. So was he, he thought, at twenty. They also didn’t expect him and he was a seasoned knife fighter. And a cambion who could call down fire if things got too hairy for him, though he was trying not to do that too much if he could avoid it so as to keep his identity under wraps. On the other hand, he came here for information and it would be hard to fight both of them without killing at least one and that was counter-productive if there ever was such a thing.
He could hear Sam’s voice in the back of his head counseling him to be patient. That voice crept into his mind a lot. Most of the time he ignored it. When he thought of what Ely would say, though, it was the same thing, so this one time, he exercised some patience.
It was the better part of two hours, both guys bitching about their lives and families, occasionally shoving one another. For a long time, they were just guys hanging out. Two guys hanging out while one of them had a bag full of stolen money. It was almost sundown by the time they finally parted ways and Callum was left with a choice.
Piggy was obnoxious and probably deserved it the most. Callum couldn’t deny he would enjoy beating the crap out of that bastard, and given he was in the front with Alric, he probably knew plenty. He was also the one holding the bag of stolen sigils.
Midnight was a toss up. He was sullen but he didn’t look inexperienced. Still, Alric didn’t seem to trust him any more than he did the others.
When he laid it out like that, it didn’t feel like much of a question. Callum followed Piggy down a side street. A couple of kids on bicycles passed on either side of him, worryingly close, without sparing him a glance. Piggy flinched. He was wearing a Gater yellow vest and they had long since crossed into Gater territory. That was the effect he must have been going for.
One more turn into a quiet alley, and Callum dropped onto Piggy’s shoulders. He punched him four times in the back of the head before Piggy slammed him into the brick wall behind them and Callum bailed right, rolling to his feet.
“Who the fuck are you?” Piggy roared. He was bleeding a little from a cut just under his hairline. That would turn into bleeding a lot, Callum knew. Head wounds always bled more than they looked like they should. He thought a silent prayer to the ancients that it would get in the man’s eyes.
Callum was wearing his mask, still. It wasn’t worth the risk taking it off, especially if he knew he was going to be seen right now. Especially if he was going to try to let this one live.
“Call me a concerned citizen,” he said. “What do you know about glyphed daggers?”
“Not a fucking thing, you maniac,” Piggy said. He went for his knife and Callum rushed in, shoving him into the wall. In the same gesture, he drew his knife out from his back pocket. He pushed down on his blade and severed Piggy’s belt with a single hard blow. Piggy’s cry of pain wasn’t lost on him and a trickle of blood started to bloom outward from whe
re he’d cut the man on accident. The bag of sigils hit the ground with a papery ‘thud’.
“Wrong answer,” Callum said. “What are the Gaters working on at the moment? I see you’re expanding territory. Why?”
“I’m not fucking scared of you more than I’m scared of what Vivi will do to me if I tell you shit like that,” Piggy said. He was still struggling to get his knife clear of its sheath. He wore it in the open and it was the only thing holding his belt where it was. Stupid choice. Callum shifted his grip on his own blade so that he could pull Piggy’s knife free of its sheathe and toss it down the alleyway. It landed with a skittering clank.
“She doesn’t need to know it was you who squealed, Piggy,” Callum said.
“Fuck you,” Piggy spat back. Tough. Stupid.
Callum tightened his grip on his knife, used the handle as a fist pack and drove his knuckles right between Piggy’s eyes.
“Why are you expanding territory?” he asked.
Piggy’s eyes had flooded with tears. There was going to be a bruise.
“Ashfair’s fucking tits! We do what the boss says, do I look like I get paid enough to know that kind of shit?” he asked. He rammed his forehead into Callum’s. That was not how someone was supposed to headbutt, Callum knew. The point was to drive the hard plate of your forehead into the softer tissue of the nasal cavity and hopefully break the person’s nose. Fortunately for him, Piggy didn’t know that, but it was still dazing.
It would be dazing for Piggy, too.
Callum’s grip only tightened, and now he held the point of his dagger to Piggy’s chin.
“One more question,” he said. “Give me an answer to save your sorry hide. And you’d better give me the answer I want this time.”
There was no response, just a cold glare in Piggy’s brown eyes.
“What’s the name of the baker’s son?” Callum asked.
“What?” Piggy asked.
“The baker’s son, the man you were just racketing,” Callum said. “Do you know his name?”
Piggy’s eyes widened. Callum waited. He could see the entire process his face went through, realizing he didn’t know, searching his brain for the answer that could save him.
Torchlighters Page 7
