Demon Born

by Christine Pope

  He did his best to assume a calm demeanor, then went to the front door of the gallery and let himself in. The building was cool and shadowy, its interior lighting all focused on the art which hung on its walls. He sensed the presence of a human toward the back of the structure, but there didn’t seem to be anyone else inside at the moment.

  As he moved farther into the gallery, he noticed a large, airy space off to his left, one that had some art hanging on the walls, although large gaps still existed, as though they were waiting for other pieces to be displayed there. Two of the pieces caught his eye at once, because he knew they were Catalina’s work. At the same time, a miasma of evil seemed to drift toward him, thick and choking as the fetid air from a swamp.

  Nicholas Toulouse. Loc had sensed that same evil surrounding the house in the Garden District, and he knew without a doubt that the warlock must have come here, had to have taken Cat away. It was the most rational explanation for why she hadn’t come home on time, why he hadn’t been able to detect any trace of her on the roads between her house and this place.

  The sound of someone approaching made him turn, reflexes buzzing. He wished it might be Toulouse, so they could have this out here and now, but Loc knew it wouldn’t be that easy.

  This man was much darker-skinned than Nicholas Toulouse, and older in appearance, with a frosting of gray on his close-cropped curly hair. “Did you need something? This exhibit is still being installed, as you can see.”

  “Cat Castillo,” Loc said, all too aware of the urgent rasp in his voice. “I…was supposed to meet her here, but I can’t find her.”

  The man frowned. “She was here earlier, putting up her pieces.” His attention was caught by something lying on the ground, and he moved into the room, bent, and picked it up. Now Loc could see that it was a small piece of card stock mounted to some kind of backing. “That is strange. She has one of these mounted here, but it appears that she dropped the second one.”

  Most likely it had been in her hand when Nicholas Toulouse kidnapped her, but of course Loc couldn’t offer that explanation. “Possibly she had to take a phone call,” he said, knowing how weak the explanation sounded.

  “Is her car still here?”

  “No.” And how Toulouse had managed that, Loc wasn’t sure. The warlock was strong, but was he truly strong enough to make a large SUV vanish? Realizing the other man was watching him with some concern in his eyes, Loc added, “She probably got a call and had to go take care of something. I’ll check with her brother.”

  “That’s probably a good idea. I’m sorry you couldn’t find her here.”

  “It’s fine.” There wasn’t much else Loc could say, so he mumbled a thank-you and hurried out of the gallery, walking swiftly along Paseo de Peralta so he could turn up Canyon Road and head toward the house that Cat’s brother shared with the Castillo prima. It seemed simpler to do that than to find a sheltered place where he could assume his true form, especially since the distance he had to cover was less than half a mile.

  The day was warm, though, and he found himself perspiring by the time he turned down the side street where the prima’s house was actually located. Loc paused on the corner and brushed a hand across his brow, annoyed with this body’s reaction to the heat even while he understood the physiological reasons behind it.

  Now that he wasn’t dripping with sweat, he let himself in through the gate of the Castillo property and made his way up the front walk to the deep, shadowy porch. This was certainly not the way he had planned to meet with Cat’s brother and sister-in-law, now that his and Cat’s relationship had changed so drastically, but there was little he could do about that. Her safety was paramount. The mere thought of her caught in Nicholas Toulouse’s dark web made his blood boil with anger.

  He knocked on the door, then waited. A few minutes later, it opened, and Miranda Castillo looked out at him in surprise, her big green eyes widening slightly as she realized who her visitor was.

  “Loc!” she exclaimed, then peered past him, as if she expected to see Cat hiding somewhere behind his shoulder. “We weren’t expecting you.”

  “This isn’t a courtesy call,” he said, and something about the tone of his voice must have told her he was serious, because she immediately opened the door wider and stepped out of the way so he could enter.

  “Come in,” she said quickly, then shut the door. “What’s going on? Where’s Cat?”

  He saw no reason to attempt to varnish the truth. “I fear that Cat has been kidnapped by Nicholas Toulouse.”

  Miranda’s cheeks went pale. “What?”

  “Where is Rafe?”

  “Right here,” he said, coming into the entryway from the living room. Dark eyes narrowed, he went on, “What did you just say?”

  “Cat went to the gallery to get her works for the art show placed. I waited at her house.” Loc realized he’d almost slipped and said that he’d waited at home, because her gracious vineyard house had already begun to feel like home to him. However, he knew that even hinting at that sort of arrangement would probably start a cascade of questions he had no desire to answer, not when time was so precious. “She was very late coming back, much later than she’d told me she would be, and so I went in search of her. Almost as soon as I entered the gallery, I could sense Toulouse’s evil in the place where she was hanging her tapestries. She was gone, and her vehicle as well.”

  “He took her car to New Orleans?” Miranda asked, brow wrinkling a bit.

  “I doubt it,” Rafe said grimly. “He probably just moved it away from the gallery to make things more confusing. I’ll start having people look for it — I bet it’s not parked too far away.”

  Which would answer one question, but wouldn’t solve the overall problem that Nicholas Toulouse posed. “I am sure he has taken her because he means to use her to barter for the grimoires in your keeping,” Loc said.

  Miranda shot a worried look at her husband. “I’d be happy to give him the damn things, but they’re not even really ours. I have no idea what kind of trouble we’d be stirring up with the de la Paz clan if we gave away their property.”

  “I doubt Toulouse cares about our relationship with the de la Pazes,” Rafe remarked, his voice taut with worry. “Or at least, he’s probably laughing at the bind he’s put us in.”

  “Very likely,” Loc said. In some ways, he thought the title of “Lord of Chaos” fit the dark warlock better than it fit himself. “Considering the circumstances, I believe the most important thing for you to do is to do nothing at all.”

  “Nothing?” Miranda and Rafe said at the same time, in varying tones of consternation.

  “I do not mean that we will do nothing,” Loc told them. “Only that this is a battle I must undertake on my own. Nicholas Toulouse is a very old, very dangerous warlock. Perhaps you, Miranda, could best him, but I doubt any of us want you to put your unborn child at risk in such a confrontation.”

  Almost unconsciously, her hand moved to rest on her belly, which still looked flat enough to Loc, with no sign of the child growing within. “Damn it,” she said, but she offered no other protest, for she obviously understood the dangers involved in fighting those sorts of magical battles.

  Rafe’s hands were knotted into impotent fists where they hung at his side. “I should be able to do something,” he growled, sounding very like the wolf whose shape he sometimes wore.

  “Your powers are no match for his,” Loc pointed out. “I don’t think there is anyone in your clan who is strong enough to take him on. But I am not a human, not an ordinary warlock. He will find his match in me.”

  For a few seconds, Rafe didn’t reply, but only stood where he was, watching Loc closely. “Why would you do that for her? I thought you were trying to find the fastest way out of here.”

  Now it comes. Loc knew he could refuse to answer, or offer an easy lie. But he understood that Catalina’s brother needed to know why their otherworldly guest was so invested in her fate.

  “I no long
er desire to leave this place,” he said quietly. “I love your sister, and so, as the one who loves her, I must be the one to be her champion.”

  “You…what?”

  “He loves her,” Miranda said. Unlike her husband, she didn’t appear displeased by this revelation at all. Instead, she smiled slightly, despite the desperation of their current situation. “I’d wondered…but we can talk about that later, once Cat is home. So what’s your plan?”

  Gone was the concerned sister-in-law; it was the cool green gaze of a prima that Loc met now, and he was grateful for her command of the situation, for realizing that there was no need to waste valuable time on questions about his relationship with Cat.

  “I’m not entirely certain,” he confessed. “For now, it is enough to know that I have your blessing to go and rescue her. Before I force any kind of confrontation with Nicholas Toulouse, I must go to New Orleans and scout the area, assess his property for weaknesses. At least we’re fairly certain there is something he wants from us, rather than him causing mayhem for its own sake.”

  “He wants something we can’t give him,” Miranda said, even as her husband’s mouth thinned. Clearly, he thought it was worth destroying relations with the de la Paz clan — and handing over some very dangerous books to the last person in the world who should have them — if it meant getting his sister back unharmed.

  “It won’t come to that.” Loc glanced from her to Rafe, who now had his arms crossed, his body practically vibrating with impotent fury. While he understood that fury, this was no time to worry about Rafe’s feelings. “Kidnapping is truly a sign of weakness, because it shows that you have no other means of bargaining. Nicholas Toulouse daren’t hurt Cat — if he does, then he loses his one stake in this game, and knows that the Castillo clan will rain fury down upon his head.”

  “That’s for damn sure,” Rafe muttered.

  “Also,” Loc went on, ignoring the interruption, “Toulouse is a lone wolf, so to speak. He certainly does not have the support of the Dubois clan, and therefore he walks a very dangerous line. There is no one to have his back, so to speak.”

  “Good,” Miranda said. Although she appeared calmer than her husband, her eyes were glittering with anger, like chips of furious emerald. “And when you have Cat back, you’ll make sure he’s taken care of, right? If there’s anything we’ve learned, it’s that these dark warlocks are cockroaches. You can’t leave them free to breed.”

  Considering what she and the rest of the Castillos had suffered at the hands of Joaquin Escobar’s son, Loc could see her point. To tell the truth, he didn’t know whether Nicholas Toulouse was even capable of fathering a child. His age was still unknown, but the spells he cast and the potions he drank to prolong his youth had to take a toll somewhere.

  “He took Cat. His life is already forfeit,” Loc said casually, and Miranda and Rafe shared a single satisfied glance.

  “Good,” Rafe said, but that was all.

  Since there seemed to be little else to discuss, Loc thought it time to go. “The next time you see me, I will have Cat at my side.”

  He disappeared then, leaving the Castillo prima and her husband behind.

  Now all he had to do was make sure those final words to them weren’t a lie.

  She lay somewhere in semidarkness, although Cat realized as soon as she opened her eyes that the dimness of the space around her was due to the heavy curtains that covered the windows, and not because night had fallen. With a little groan, she pushed herself up to a sitting position, then waited for a few moments before the spinning sensation in her head dissipated somewhat. Whatever spell Nicholas Toulouse had used on her, it was a doozy…and she feared he had plenty more like that one in his arsenal.

  To her relief, she was alone. The bed where she’d been placed was narrow, not much more than twin size, but with an enormously tall carved headboard. The rest of the furniture in the room was just as ornate, and faded silk wallpaper in a damask pattern covered the walls. Air whistled faintly in the air conditioning vents, sending the crystal chandelier that hung in the center of the ceiling to sway slightly, its prisms tinkling into the silence.

  Even if Cat hadn’t already known that Toulouse lived in New Orleans, that would have been her first guess, based on her surroundings. This sure didn’t look like anyplace she knew in Santa Fe, or New Mexico itself, for that matter.

  Her limbs felt heavy, as though someone had hung invisible weights on her body. An after-effect of the spell, or some kind of other charm that he’d placed on her to make sure she couldn’t get away? She didn’t know, but she also knew she wasn’t going to sit here calmly and wait for her captor to come check on her. No matter how impaired she seemed right now, she was going to do what she could to get the hell out of here.

  Gritting her teeth, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed, then made herself stand up. Everything felt wobbly, but she took one step, and then another, and as she progressed across the room toward the three tall windows that took up most of one wall, it seemed as though the stiffness slowly began to leave her body. That was a little encouraging. Right now, she figured she could use all the encouragement she could get.

  Cat stopped at the middle window and pushed aside the heavy moss green velvet curtain. The room was obviously on the second floor of the house where she was being held, since she now looked down on a front yard dominated by several tall trees she thought might be elms, trees so thick she could barely see the green grass below them.

  A wall surrounded the property, and just past the wall was a narrow street with cars taking up almost all the available curb space. That surprised her; even though she knew Loc had said Toulouse lived in New Orleans, for some reason she hadn’t thought his home would be in such a busy and obviously populated neighborhood.

  Across the street was a walled-off square with a bewildering variety of low stone structures, structures that were so foreign to her eyes, it took her a minute to realize they were all sarcophagi of some sort. Right — she remembered reading somewhere that the water table in New Orleans was very high, and so their cemeteries were full of these above-ground houses for the dead.

  Somehow, it seemed fitting that Toulouse would live right across the street from a graveyard. At least the situation of the property ensured that he wouldn’t have any neighbors facing his house, so maybe it was more private here than she’d thought.

  Had anyone seen him carrying her inside the house? Because she’d blacked out — or been forced to faint by means of some sort of spell — Cat had no idea how she’d gotten here. Maybe Toulouse had the power of teleportation, the way Miranda and her parents did, but it seemed more likely that he’d done something to make her invisible to the naked eye as he and his accomplice carried her out of the gallery. No one else had been around, after all, except Jacques, who’d disappeared into his office at the back of the building to take that phone call. He probably wouldn’t have been close enough to see anything suspicious.

  It did seem later in the day. Cat couldn’t see the sun, but the light outside was sort of hazy and diffuse, the way it got late in the afternoon right before sundown. How far was it from Santa Fe to New Orleans? She’d never really checked, but she knew it had to be more than a thousand miles, not the sort of distance that could be covered by a car in a single day.

  Not that it mattered. Toulouse could’ve knocked her out, taken her to Santa Fe’s small airport, and then flown her across state lines. Not all private planes had the kind of range to cover that sort of distance in a single hop, but there were enough that she figured it would have been fairly easy to find a charter jet for that sort of trip. Hauling a comatose woman aboard might have presented its own problems, but she had no doubt that the dark warlock and his blonde accomplice could have concocted a plausible story…or a not so plausible one, if enough money changed hands.

  All right. She was in the hands of a ruthless warlock who’d obviously realized that Loc had changed his mind about delivering the de la Paz grimoir
es in exchange for a return trip to the world he’d once ruled. Stealing her must have appeared to be the logical next step, because while her own ability to talk to ghosts could be amusing sometimes, there wasn’t anything all that special about her.

  Except that she was the sister-in-law of the clan’s prima…and the woman Loc loved.

  Loc. He must have been frantic with worry by that point, the time she’d promised to return home long since passed by now. Cat tried to reassure herself that Nicholas Toulouse would be the logical suspect in such a disappearance, and so she knew her lover must already be working to find her.

  Lover. The word sounded odd when she thought it, but that was precisely what the two of them were. Lovers. Loc wasn’t exactly the sort of person you could refer to as your “boyfriend.”

  Even if he was already on the case, that didn’t mean she couldn’t do everything in her power to get the hell out of here. Her fingers found the window latch, and she fumbled with it, trying to get it open. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t budge. Cat shifted her position slightly, thinking that maybe her angle of approach was all wrong, but no matter what she did, that latch wasn’t opening.

  She stepped back a pace, fingers throbbing. Obviously, Toulouse must have put some sort of spell on the window to prevent her from exiting that way. No doubt if she tried the other two, she’d meet with the same resistance.

  Her gaze moved upward. Didn’t big old houses like these have attics? Maybe this one did, but she couldn’t see any sign of an access panel in the water-stained plaster. This house had clearly once been beautiful, but it appeared that Nicholas Toulouse wasn’t overly concerned with making sure everything was just so.

  A woman’s voice came to her in the silence. “Looks like you’re in a bit of a pickle.”

  Cat whirled. Standing on the other side of the room, underneath a portrait of a slightly constipated-looking man in a dark Victorian suit, was a girl who didn’t appear to be much more than seventeen or eighteen. Her shining brown hair fell in fat sausage curls past her shoulders, and she wore a blue silk dress with a lace collar and an enormous hooped skirt. As Cat’s gaze focused on this new arrival, she realized the newcomer was floating several inches above the floor.