Torchlighters

by Megan R Miller

  Ely smiled without it touching her eyes.

  “No,” she said. “You’re supposed to spend time with me and see for yourself. No one is going to think twice about two attractive young people lingering in the same spaces, and I don’t think it’s in your best interests to pretend that isn’t what you wanted in the first place.”

  She lent her voice a seductive undertone; she’d heard people use them before. Callum was a shameless flirt and her parents had never stopped trying to win one another over. It was another facsimile of emotion she had learned to parrot flawlessly. Happiness, shame, hopefulness. Attraction.

  “Well, when you put it that way, how can I say no?” he asked, smirking.

  “I thought you might say that,” she said, and slid her arm into his. She’d won herself an escort for tonight and the foreseeable future, but this product he was peddling was almost guaranteed to be a brilliant success and he wasn’t a bad looking man. At the very least she enjoyed the envious stares of the women in the Ninth Circle.

  She would figure out how to play him better as time went on. Perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  Barghest was sitting in the back of a local diner when Joey Trezza walked in. He was busy. Too busy for this, but he’d thought taking a break to refuel was important. One of the very first things he’d learned doing this job was that if he bottomed out, he wasn’t any good to anyone.

  And here Joey was. Because of course he was. And of course he was coming over to Barghest’s table. For a moment, he considered leaving.

  But no. This could be important.

  “How’s it going?” Joey asked, dropping into the seat across from him. He had that gleam in his eye. The one that said this conversation was going to be anything but casual. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “What do you want, Trezza?” he asked. It came out more tired than angry. “Is this a social call or do you have business? My hands are a little full.”

  “I’ll make it quick then,” Joey said. “It’s about whatever this thing is that’s been going on between you and my wife.”

  The words were like a suckerpunch. Unexpected. It sent his mind running over the last three conversations he’d had with Ophelia and what he might have said that could have been construed as inappropriate. There was nothing.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Barghest said. As long as he was still sitting here, he took a bite of his tuna sandwich. Even if there was irritation swelling in his chest,

  “See,” Joey said, “you do. I’ve heard the two of you talking and what she had to say about it. There’s something, some bad blood there. So what I’m asking you to do, man to man, is use your words and talk to her like an adult. Be friends again. She misses you.”

  There was an obvious moment where Barghest stumbled over the conversation point. He took the opportunity to take another bite of sandwich and used the chewing to consider what Joey had just said.

  “Most men wouldn’t make that request,” Barghest said, finally.

  “Why?” Joey asked. He cocked a brow, his lean frame forming a subdued ‘s’ shape on the far chair with his arms folded. “If this is about the competition I’m pretty sure I already won.”

  Barghest snorted.

  “It’s not like that and you know it,” Barghest said. “It would bring me closer to your business.”

  “We’re both trying to help this city in our own ways,” Joey said. “And you’d have this solved by now if you weren’t so distracted. Talk to her.”

  “We’ll see,” Barghest said.

  “Good enough,” Joey said, and got to his feet with a little grin. “Good doing business with you, Tin Can.”

  “Let’s not make a habit of it,” Barghest replied.

  “No problem,” Joey said. He gave a little wave as he headed for the door.

  Ophelia was sitting in the parlor treating her sword with a whetstone when she heard the scrying mirror begin to hum. She set the stone aside, and laid the sword carefully across the table with both hands before walking out into the hall and approaching the glass. The moment her fingertips brushed the surface, a pale faced, long-fingered demon peered out at her.

  “You have a call from the Hellwatch,” he said. “Will you take it?”

  “If I say no, he’s just going to come here,” she said, straightening. “Yes, I’ll accept the call.”

  The mirror rippled once again like disturbed water and after a moment she found herself face to face with Barghest. She opened her mouth to greet him, but he was talking before she could even start.

  “Ophelia,” he said, “there’s something you should know.”

  He stood straight with his shoulders back, his brow furrowed. He was a model of a perfect military man in that moment, but something about the rigidity of his stance told her volumes of how uncomfortable he must have been in that moment.

  “What is it?” she asked. She braced herself for anything. Another loss. New information about her son’s murder. The arrest of someone else she cared about. Barghest sighed.

  “There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just gonna be out with it,” he said.

  “Then do it, there is nothing you can tell me right now that could possibly be worse than what my mind is tormenting me with,” she said, softly. “Please.”

  “Callum is alive,” he said. “And he’s escaped the station.”

  She felt like she’d been punched in the sternum hard enough to cave her breastplate in.

  “What?” she asked, and in the shadow of the scrying mirror she could see her reflection looked as shocked as she felt. She had gone pale all the way to her fingertips.

  “I had him in the station for questions, and he got away,” Barghest said. “I’m…honestly not sure how.”

  The heat flared in her chest, sudden and intense.

  “You had my son at the station,” Ophelia repeated. “Callum is alive and you brought him in and you didn’t call me immediately? You brought him in and you lost him?”

  “He said he wanted to tell you himself, but he kind of forfeited that,” Barghest said.

  “Do you have any idea where he’s gone?” Ophelia asked, steel creeping into her tone.

  “Hopefully he’s on his way to you, and not off doing something stupid,” Barghest said.

  “If he isn’t here in an hour, he is almost certainly off doing something stupid,” Ophelia said. “And I am going to find him and put a stop to it, you have my word on that. Thank you so much, Barghest.”

  “I wish I could have done more,” he said.

  “My son is alive,” Ophelia said. There was a soft hitch in her voice that signaled inevitable tears like a dark cloud signaled rain. “How could I ask for more than that?”

  “Well he could be a bit safer than he is,” Barghest said.

  “You are a magnificent commander and a highly effective guard,” Ophelia said, “but even you would have a difficult time protecting that boy from his own idiocy.”

  “I wasn’t gonna be the one to say it,” Barghest said.

  “I appreciate it,” Ophelia said, dryly. “Now please, do not mistake my need to step away right now for ungratefulness, but…”

  “No, I understand. You’ve got a son to find,” he said.

  And a husband to inform, she thought, but she didn’t say it out loud. Not now.

  She made a sound that could have been a laugh if there weren’t such bitterness in it.

  “I suppose I deserve this,” she said, quietly.

  “No one deserves to go through what you’ve gone through,” Barghest said, firmly. And he would know, wouldn’t he? She looked up at him, meeting his eyes once more and nodded.

  “I’ll let you know when we’ve found him,” she said. “Please, do call if you see him again.”

  This time, his only response was a nod. She lifted her fingers to wipe the mirror clean and the hall fell into silence again. She turned, only to find Joey already standing at the bottom of the stairs, one shoulder lea
ning against the wall with his arms folded and a hard look in his hazel eyes.

  “How much did you hear?” Ophelia asked.

  “Every word,” he said.

  She stepped closer to him, meaning to close to a conversational distance, but once she started taking steps she found she could not stop until she had walked into his arms and pulled him into a tight embrace.

  “We’ll find him,” she breathed.

  “I know we will,” Joey said, and in that moment, there was no way she could ever have doubted him.

  She held him there for a couple of beats, long enough to force herself to get air into her lungs, before she took off at a brisk walk up the stairs.

  “Ancients, I’m going to kill that boy,” she muttered, throwing open the door to their bedroom.

  “Not if I find him first,” Joey said, He shut the door behind him and leaned against it, giving her an assessing look.

  “What?” she asked, turning to look at him fully.

  “Are you alright?” he asked.

  “This is karma,” Ophelia said. “It’s karma and karma is a massive bitch.”

  “Karma for what?” he asked.

  “I seem to recall my own disappearing act,” she said. “It involved a dashing crime lord and a renegade rhakshasa.”

  She tried to make light of it, but her heart was hammering. She wanted to be happy. She was happy. Wasn’t she? She couldn’t breathe for the amount of air in her chest. She wanted to smack Callum into next week.

  Joey put his arms around her waist and pulled her in again.

  “That was different,” he said. “You had good reasons for doing what you did.”

  “I bet he thinks he has them too,” she said. “Where has he even been the past few days? Where has he been staying? What has he been doing for food?”

  She pushed away from Joey and started to pace. He stayed where he was and let her.

  “Every safe house I can think of is full of our own people,” she said.

  “Think he might have been supporting himself?” Joey asked.

  “Doing what?” Ophelia asked. “I love Callum but he doesn’t have any work skills to speak of.”

  Joey’s expression melted for a moment into one of confusion before his brow furrowed. He met Ophelia’s eyes and she stopped pacing.

  “What is it, Joey?” she asked.

  “Who did we bury?” he asked. “That body looked an awful lot like him.”

  Ophelia shook her head.

  “We saw him the night before but we never looked in the coffin that night,” she said. “He might have come out.”

  It meant he was working with someone. Augury had told her the wound seemed to be healing, but she and Barghest seemed just as convinced that he was dead as Ophelia had been.

  “I haven’t been in his room since it happened,” Ophelia said. “I thought it would hurt too much so I never walked in…”

  “You think he’s been sneaking in and out of the house?” Joey asked. “And we didn’t notice?”

  “I think it’s a possibility,” she said. “Did you ever walk in there?”

  “No,” he said. “I know Ely did.”

  There was another silence between them, full of implication. Once it entered her mind, it tumbled through everything that had happened so far. Sam talking to himself. The bodies in the alley. Ely’s more erratic behavior.

  “Son of a bitch,” Ophelia said. “They knew.”

  She looked back up at Joey, at the little smirk on his face. Clearly he had come to the same conclusion.

  “You’re a little bit proud of them, aren’t you?” she asked, pursing her lips.

  “Aren’t you?” he asked, grinning a little. She couldn’t help but smile when he did, though hers didn’t quite reach her eyes and she could feel that much.

  “I suppose it shows that they can keep a secret,” she said. “They grew up when we weren’t looking. When did this happen?”

  Joey touched her cheek and he looked to him. He leaned in and kissed her then, gently on the lips, before pressing his forehead to hers. “Same time as everything else.”

  “You’re not allowed to tell them you’re proud of any of this,” Ophelia said, but her relief was winning out and she couldn’t seem to force the smile off of her face.

  “Of course not,” he said. “We can’t let them think this was okay or risk them doing it again, after all.”

  “But,” she said, “at the same time I don’t think we should be too hard on him.”

  “Oh?” he asked, raising a brow.

  “When he comes back, that’s what we want him to do,” Ophelia said. “We’re going to have words. Of course we are. But I don’t want to make him feel like we’re punishing him for coming home.”

  “We’ll talk about it,” Joey said. He wrapped his arms around her and she folded into him, resting her head against his shoulder. “Let’s bring him home first.”

  She nodded. She was still going to have to find him. She was going to have to get out there and look, because whatever was going on here it was more than they knew.

  The mirror in the staff room went dark and Barghest turned from it, running a hand through his salt and pepper hair. Ophelia in that sort of distress was something he never wanted to get used to. This case was just a line of one thing after another.

  First Callum, then the other cambion in the city, then nephilim, and now it turns out they’re missing their afrite after all, which was just a whole other set of people to worry about.

  That brought him up short.

  “They’re missing their afrite,” he muttered to himself through clenched teeth, and whipped right back around to the mirror.

  He drew the sigil that connected it to Augury’s house with his index finger and waited. After a long pause the pale long-fingered demon appeared in the glass.

  “The contact point you’re attempting to reach appears to be shattered,” the mirror demon said.

  “Like hell it is, try again,” Barghest said.

  The demon disappeared again but even as he waited this time, he knew the truth of it. They were missing their afrite. That was why someone had tried to break in. Had broken in from the sound of it. When the demon appeared again, Barghest broke in before it could speak.

  “Thank you for trying, go on ahead with whatever it is you do when you’re off duty,” he said, and swiped his hand across the glass to cleanse it. He took off at a brisk walk that drew the stares of most of his staff, and that walk became a jog and then a full tilt run as soon as he got out the door.

  He knew where her apartment was. He’d never been inside it but he’d walked her there a couple of times. It wasn’t so excessively far from the station that he thought it was worth taking the tram; he’d spent his entire life working out, running like hell from demons and towards them by turns depending on what the situation called for. The job had aged him beyond his years, but he was fit, and he was there before the hour turned.

  The door was broken off its hinges and the entire inside of the apartment had been ransacked. No amount of living mess could have caused this much of a disaster area, but he could see the signs of her general messiness underneath it all.

  The little sofa had scorch marks all along one side of it, and a pair of shears stabbed point down into the other arm. There were blackened shapes on the ceiling where flames had licked at it. There was blood on the carpet. Her scrying mirror had been shattered, just like the demon said, and glass littered the floor.

  The radio sitting next to the window appeared to be in one piece, the sigils still glowing faintly along the encasement. A shelf had been overturned and books had spilled out into the general mess of the rest of the room as well.

  He recognized a few texts on summoning immediately, and along with them several pulp novels, some of which were sitting with their pages splayed and the spines bent at odd angles. Something in his mind stilled and allowed him to think, in that moment. For some reason it was that detail that did it.

>   This was a good sign. In every other case there had been a body. If she were dead, there would have been a body.

  “Augury?” he called out. There was no answer. If he knew her name, he might have been able to get someone to locate her for him. As it was, he couldn’t even be sure that blood on the carpet was hers.

  If it belonged to her attacker, however, there was a good chance they would be in the same place. He grabbed the pair of shears from the arm of the sofa and leaned down to trim some of the blood-soaked carpet fibers. There were people he could take these to, people who would be able to track her down.

  Callum paced in the alley, forcing himself to breathe. He ran both hands through his black-red hair. A few turns and he was sure he’d buried himself so far in the alleys of the labyrinth that there was no chance the Hellwatch would find him here, at least not for a little while.

  Tixi curled her tail around the back of his neck.

  “Are you going to go find your mother now?” Tixi asked. She had her little clawed fingers curled around one of the bags of caramels they’d stopped to buy on the way here. It felt crazy, in retrospect, but brilliant in other ways; Barghest wouldn’t have thought to look for him in a candy shop.

  “Wait a minute,” Callum said, out of breath. “Let me get myself together, he’s going to call her.”

  “Most people would consider that better than the alternative,” Tixi said in a singsong voice. The sound of footsteps at the other end of the alley made Callum tense. Tixi sighed and scaled the wall beside him with both feet and one hand as the other clutched her bag of candy, to sit on an outcropping of stone instead as Lena came into view.

  “Does trouble follow you everywhere you go?” she asked, a smile touching her lips. Her arms were folded, her cerulean hair falling around her shoulders in loose curls. Her dress barely fell below the knee, beaded fringe clacking softly with every step.

  She had a long cigarette holder perched between her fingers and she took a drag from it, stopping three paces from Callum. She turned her head to release the smoke and it curled through the air rising around Tixi. In his peripheral vision he could see the imp’s eyes were narrowed.