Ask and Answer

by Clara Coulson

  “One second, I was scrolling through Samuel Radigan’s financial records. The next, all my security cams blacked out at once and loud footsteps came storming down the hall. I barely made it into the panic room before the door flew off its hinges and that crazy lady started trashing the place.”

  Liam frowned. “What crazy lady?”

  “I snapped a picture of her using one of my webcams—before she broke it—and the pic was uploaded to the cloud. So I’ll show it to you as soon as I log into my…” Nick sat up on his knees, finally getting a good look at his ruined apartment. “Oh hell. My insurance is never going to cover all this.”

  Liam patted his shoulder. “You’re alive. You can figure out the rest later.”

  Nick hung his head. “Yeah, I guess, but…”

  “I’ve about done all I can,” Kat cut in. “And it sounds like the fire trucks are almost here.”

  Sure enough, when Liam inclined his head toward the window, the blaring sirens of several fire trucks broke through the din of the rushing water and the crackling of the diminished fire. A glance at the pile of melted computers revealed that the bulk of the fire was out, and that Kat had thoroughly doused the ceiling and the floor to make sure the fire couldn’t quickly resurge.

  “Okay, time to leave.” Liam grasped Nick by his shirt collar and pulled him toward Kat. “Grab her wrist, and don’t let go until we come to a complete stop.”

  Nick stared at him blankly. “What now?”

  “Just do what I say.”

  After reclaiming his laptop from Gabby, Nick did as he was told. Kat didn’t look thrilled at Nick touching her with his bare hand, which was coated in powdered cheese dust. But she accepted the contact as an act of sympathy, since the man’s apartment had just been burned to a crisp.

  Once Liam and Gabby were also in place, Kat said, “Back to the storage unit?”

  “Yeah,” Liam replied. “But let’s drop in just outside the door. The interior is so small that the displacement force of our arrival might knock stuff over or throw somebody to the floor.”

  “Got it.” Kat concentrated for a moment, and her green energy wafted off her skin, encompassing the entire group.

  “Uh, Crown…?” Nick whispered nervously.

  Liam took hold of Nick’s upper arm and said, “Don’t let go.”

  “Okay, okay. I won’t.”

  Kat spoke the incantation, and as soon as the teleportation spell went off, Liam dropped his air spell, finally taking the load off his soul. The thick smoke rushed in to choke them, but it was far slower than Kat’s magic.

  With a green flash, the world warped around them, shapes and colors losing their boundaries and collapsing into indistinct blurs. The gut-wrenching transit felt like it lasted an hour and yet no time at all. They blinked out of existence in the ruined apartment, and reappeared about five feet away from the closed rolling door of Hunt’s storage unit.

  Their arrival set off an alarm ward on the door. It immediately rolled up with a dull roar, revealing Hunt, shotgun in hand, with the others clustered tightly behind him. (Save for Yun, who was still napping on the cot.)

  Hunt’s eyes tagged everyone in the group, lingering for a moment longer on Nick, and then he relaxed slightly. “You all smell like smoke. Did you get into a fight?”

  “Yeah, a firefight,” Liam drawled. “Somebody broke into Nick’s place and set all his computers alight.”

  “Not all,” Nick said, reverently rubbing the cover of his laptop. “I saved one.”

  “And with it, you’re going to show us that picture you took.” Liam pushed him into the storage unit. “Preferably without somehow alerting the bad guys to your snooping.”

  Nick gulped. “I honestly don’t know how that happened. No one’s ever caught me in their system before.”

  “Magic is how it happened,” Hunt said gruffly. “We need to find out who’s behind that magic, preferably tonight.”

  Nick squinted at Hunt. “I’m sorry, who’re you?”

  “A retired Circle Enforcer who is very unhappy that a demon is prowling around the city.”

  What little color existed in Nick’s complexion drained away. “Demon? What demon?” He spun to face Liam. “You didn’t say anything about a demon.”

  “Because I didn’t want to drag you too far into this mess.” Liam brushed the soot off his coat sleeves. “And you didn’t want me to either, remember? First time I came to you for a job, you said you didn’t want to know more than the bare minimum, because limiting your knowledge would allow you to exercise ‘plausible deniability’ if you were ever arrested.”

  “I know I said that, but…” Nick tugged on his greasy hair. “I didn’t mean you should neglect to tell me when a goddamn demon was liable to break down my door and set my apartment on fire.”

  “I didn’t realize that was liable to happen until twenty minutes ago.” Liam pushed him again, this time toward the table. “But if you want to be more fully informed in the future, tell me so, and I’ll give you all the gory details of every case.”

  Nick chewed on his lip. “How gory are we talking?”

  “Well, this particular case involves copious amounts of blood—”

  “Never mind.” Nick shook his head several times, like he was trying to knock bad images out of his brain. “Spare me the details. Just give me a solid idea of the danger level, including a list of sups that might decide to put me on their hit list.”

  “Do you need an overview for this case?”

  “No.” He sank into a chair and set his laptop on the table. “I now have a pretty good grasp of what I’m dealing with this time.” His eyes scanned each person in the unit. “Although, it would be nice to know who the heck all you people are.”

  Short introductions were made. Nick gawked at Gabby and Casey, as he wasn’t acquainted with any shifters, and his eyes practically bulged out of his head when Liam told him Yun’s identity. He knew of Yun, but he’d never seen her in person before. And even though she was snoozing in the corner, he was intimidated just being in the same room as a deity.

  Franc earned a look of suspicion when she flashed her police badge, but as Liam was a former cop, Nick didn’t worry too much about her. It was Hunt who seemed to give Nick the most pause. The Circle was an opaque group with a lot of political clout, and their Enforcers were the subject of many nasty rumors.

  After Nick spent a few minutes processing the strange makeup of the group, he booted up his laptop and logged into his cloud storage account. At the very top of the file list was the image taken by his webcam.

  Nick double-clicked the picture, and an image-viewing program opened, revealing the only record of the person who was almost certainly the latest host of Glasya-Labolas. The image was blurry, taken shortly after the woman started throwing all the computers to the floor, but it was clear enough to display the woman’s face in detail.

  Liam’s heart skipped a beat. “Holy hell. It can’t be.”

  Kat leaned over Liam’s shoulder, her breath warm against his neck. “You know her?”

  The drum beat of Liam’s pulse filled his ears as he replied, “Yeah, I met her earlier today. Her name is Linda, and she’s Luther Cunningham’s wife.”

  13

  Kat

  Kat gasped. “His wife is the demon’s new host?”

  According to the friendly colleague at the precinct who was keeping Franc up to date on the case via text while she was “off” for the night after getting hit a couple times while working crowd control at the Avery house, Cunningham’s headless body had been identified using his monogrammed socks, followed by a positive fingerprint comparison.

  Cunningham’s wife had been informed of her husband’s demise shortly thereafter, and by all accounts, she’d been inconsolable. She’d cried. She’d screamed. She’d demanded that the cops get the hell out of her house.

  Since there was no evidence tyi
ng her to any of the crimes “Cunningham” had committed, the cops had left her to grieve for the night. And then she’d turned around and consented to be possessed by the demon?

  That couldn’t possibly be right.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Cortez said. “She hired Liam to search for her husband. If she was involved in the murder plot, even peripherally, why would she have hired a magician PI? A regular PI, maybe, just to throw off any suspicion by the cops that she wasn’t genuinely distraught about her husband’s disappearance. But a magician? She had to know that decision would substantially raise the risk of the truth coming out.”

  “Which implies she knew absolutely nothing,” Liam muttered, “but somehow wound up becoming the demon’s host all the same.”

  Hunt leaned back against the wall, arms crossed. “Depending on how Cunningham was ‘convinced’ to become the demon’s first host, his wife might not have had a choice in the matter.”

  Kat drew her brows together. “What do you mean? I thought you said demons of Glasya-Labolas’s class can’t possess a person without consent.”

  “Generally, that is the case.” Hunt frowned. “But there are certain situations where the consent isn’t explicit but rather implied through other agreements. Marriage being one of them.”

  “Marriage?” Cortez pressed her palms against the table. “How can marriage force someone to become a demon’s host?”

  Liam sucked in a sharp breath. “The vows.”

  Hunt nodded. “Precisely.”

  Ruthlessly tugging the knots out of her tangled, sooty locks, Kat attempted to figure out how marriage vows could in any way compromise someone’s ability to consent when it came to demonic possession. Her brain came up with zero answers. “I’m sorry. You guys totally lost me.”

  “Me too,” Cortez admitted.

  “Traditional Christian marriage vows,” Liam explained, “contain a line that says the wife will ‘obey’ the husband.”

  Cortez’s eyebrows shot up. “I’m still not following.”

  Hunt rapped the toe of his boot against the floor in a slow cadence. “Vows have power, even among the mundanes. Especially when the ceremony during which the vows are spoken is performed in a place of power, like a church. Vows form a spiritual connection between two or more souls, and while that connection might be weak among those with no magic, it can still be exploited by those with magic. While such connections can be dissolved through divorce or death, any magic performed via that connection during its existence can continue to impact one or more of the involved parties in perpetuity.”

  A thick, viscous dread flooded Kat’s gut. “Hold on. Are you saying that because Cunningham’s wife vowed that she would obey her husband during their marriage ceremony that…he was able to consent to demonic possession for his wife? And she was compelled to follow through with it because she couldn’t violate her vow once it was influenced by magic?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m saying,” Hunt answered glumly.

  Cortez balked. “That’s unbelievable.”

  “That’s why vows are not to be taken lightly.” Liam shifted his weight from foot to foot, uncomfortable. “However Luther Cunningham was convinced to consent to the possession, the agreement struck between him and Glasya-Labolas must’ve been structured in such a way that allowed the demon to use Linda Cunningham as a replacement host if an applicable situation arose. When Hunt blew Luther Cunningham’s head off, that contingency came into play, and Linda Cunningham was forcibly possessed as soon as the magician got his hands on her.”

  A grim silence filled the storage unit.

  It ended when Giannopoulos closed his laptop with a soft click. “So, I’ll be the first to admit I know jack shit about magic, but that sounds all kinds of fucked up.”

  “It is.” Kat swallowed down the bile rising in her throat. She had intimate knowledge of what it was like to have your bodily autonomy violated by people who wanted to use you to hurt the world. She desperately hoped that Linda Cunningham wasn’t conscious, trapped inside her own head while a demon used her body to commit atrocities. “Do you think we can save her?”

  “Depends on how much damage her body takes before the demon is exorcised,” Hunt said. “At first glance, demonic possession appears to beget an advanced healing factor, but in actuality, the demon just uses the host’s own life force to patch any incurred injuries so that the body can keep on going past its natural limit. While life energy does replenish over time, the maximum any individual can possess is finite and unchangeable. If a person’s store of life force runs completely dry, the person dies instantly.”

  “There’s also the direct spiritual damage to consider,” Liam added. “Two souls sharing one body results in serious strain on the weaker soul, and the weaker soul is almost always the human soul. If the strain is too intense, then the soul’s connection to the body can fray…and break. And the result of that is also immediate death.”

  Cortez closed her eyes. “What about psychological damage?”

  “Glasya-Labolas is a cruel demon.” Hunt absently picked at a loose threat on his coat. “But it’s also very task driven. It usually pushes the host’s mind as far away from consciousness as possible, so that it won’t be distracted by the strong emotions produced by human suffering. Linda Cunningham might be aware of her current state in some nebulous manner, but it’s unlikely that she’s actively sensing everything the demon is doing with her body.”

  A tiny pinch of relief blossomed in Kat’s chest. At least she’s not being psychologically tortured.

  “If we want any hope of saving her,” Liam said, “we need to move on Radigan ASAP.”

  Franc bit the end of her thumb, leaving a depression in the nail. She’d been silent for most of the conversation, and Kat knew why. She felt out of her depth, as the only mundane in a room full of sups, as the only person who couldn’t contribute more than a handgun to what was doomed to be a vicious fight to bring down Radigan, the rogue magician, and the powerful demon.

  Franc had been dealing with sups since she joined the police, but this situation was something altogether different. Mundane law could not resolve this in a satisfactory way. It would take the police too long, require them to jump through too many hoops, and more people, perhaps a lot more, would die before they had the chance to slap cuffs on Radigan and his hired magician. Assuming they ever got a chance at all.

  Radigan might be just as untouchable as A9, what with all his wealth and influence.

  Finally, Franc spoke. “How do we approach Radigan though? We can’t just barge into his mansion and start slinging accusations. We do that, and we’ll end up being the ones who get arrested.”

  “What about if you sneak in and snoop around until you find damning evidence of his crimes?” Giannopoulos suggested.

  Cortez pursed her lips. “A nice idea in theory, but Radigan’s property is bound to have a great deal of security. If his home computers are protected by magic, you can bet he has all sorts of wards. We’ll never get in without setting off a dozen alarms.”

  “You will if the wards are deactivated beforehand.” Giannopoulos flipped up the screen on his laptop again and opened a bookmark in his browser window: Radigan’s campaign website. “Before I started diving into Radigan’s home network, I did a cursory search of all news articles posted about the senator and his family over the last month.

  “A lot of times, info about a famous person, especially a politician, that gets released publicly contains subtle clues about what’s going on behind closed doors. So I use the news to guide my initial search parameters when I go snooping around in a target’s computers.”

  He clicked on a page link labeled “Events,” and scrolled down to an entry from last week. “Check out the date on this little shindig.”

  Everyone leaned in to get a better look at the screen. The entry Giannopoulos was pointing to was the announcement for a charity auction a
nd brunch party at the Radigan estate that was set to take place…tomorrow morning.

  “Now, obviously,” Giannopoulos continued, “this event is going to be a private gathering of the city’s elite in order to facilitate dark money contributions to Radigan’s upcoming campaign for reelection. The whole charity auction thing is just a cover to allow the upper crust to congregate and negotiate bribes for political favors without arousing suspicion from the press. So I can’t just pull the simple ‘add a few names to the guest list’ trick to get you guys inside.”

  “I hear a ‘but’ coming,” Liam said.

  “Good ear.” Giannopoulos clicked on the event link, opening a page that contained more details. Using the cursor, he highlighted a single sentence near the bottom of the page. “There. That’s your way in.”

  The line read:

  The brunch will be catered by Arnold’s Good Eats, the city’s premier catering service.

  “Instead of trying to break into Radigan’s computers and manipulate the list of auction attendees,” Giannopoulos finished, “I can break into the catering company’s computers and add you guys to the list of employees scheduled to work the brunch.”

  Kat frowned. “But won’t the actual employees know we don’t work there?”

  “I seriously doubt it.” Giannopoulos smiled broadly. “Thing about Arnold’s is that the owner, Arnold Bertram, is notorious for being a stingy dickhead. As a result, the company has an extremely high turnover rate. Often, they have so few people on the full-time staff that they have to bring in temps to help them work large-scale events.

  “And their scheduling practices are so sloppy due to the frequent turnover that they often don’t finalize the list of who’s working a particular event until the night before. Which means that the security teams who work private events don’t get the list until the morning of.”