Had Hannah stuck with chatting about the movies, all would have been well and she might even have calmed things down as a good-will ambassador, but she’d decided that playing a CIA operative had somehow made her an expert on foreign policy. Poor Hannah didn’t even get to the end of her lecture on how the dictator should behave on the world stage before she’d been arrested. She was still rotting in prison.
“Any chance of getting to her?” I wasn’t risking portalling into an unknown and extremely dangerous environment, but Hannah was the only victim on my list who was still alive besides Gary.
“Unlikely.”
“Maudite marde.” I swore, earning a snort from Pierre at my exaggerated Québécois accent. Once I’d hung up, I turned to Ro. “Want to go see Gary Randall with me?”
“Now?”
“Better than sitting and dwelling on horribleness until Baruch comes back. Besides, with Boris Badenov coming to town, we need something to report on.” I clapped my hands. “Can we have code names? I can be Moose and you can be Squirrel.”
Rohan gathered up the laptop, carefully winding the plug. “You wanna be an ugly beast with knobby knees? Knock yourself out.”
“Moose aren’t ugly. They’re majestic Canadian animals. Anyways, why does it matter to you? You’re Squirrel. The sidekick.”
Ro tipped my chair sideways, knocking me on my ass. “Again with the sidekick designation? If anyone’s the sidekick, it’s the moose. Rocky and Bullwinkle. Squirrel goes first.”
I scrambled to my feet, my arm punch failing to wipe the smirk from his face. It was very important I had higher status in this code name designation. We’d be revisiting this once I’d had a chance to think through my argument. “So, Gary?”
“Are you up to portalling to Tampa with a passenger?” Rohan said.
“No need. He’s still here. Even though his contract was signed, he hadn’t yet flown out to Florida for training camp. Pierre got me his apartment details. If you’ll drive us over, I’ll beam us up.” I nudged his leg with my foot. “You cool with that?”
I’d been with Ro the first time I’d ever portalled. Accidentally. To say it had been a shock was an understatement.
“I’m cool with any magic you’ve got.” His posture was relaxed and his expression sincere.
My stomach unknotted.
“Does he have bodyguards? Nurses?”
I shook my head. “No bodyguard, but a nurse in shifts. We can handle a nurse.”
“Sienna’s a nurse,” Rohan said.
“A Muggle nurse,” I amended. “We got this covered.”
Chapter 12
The nurse in question was a bearded, six-foot-four lumberjack of a man whose biceps were bigger than my thighs. The only reason we got the jump on him when we portalled into the thirtieth-floor suite was that he was busy changing Gary’s morphine drip.
Rohan injected the nurse with Methohexital, a fast-acting sedative with a brief window of action that we’d picked up at Demon Club La La Land on our way over. I’d made Ro go in and get it without me because I wasn’t ready to revisit the scene of the tragedy.
The chemical kicked in, and in seconds, the nurse went limp.
Ro slid him to the bedroom floor and set an alarm. “Five minutes.”
I ran over to the closet, flipping through Gary’s clothing for the jacket he’d worn the night he was injured.
Gary shifted, groggily opening his eyes. “Erik?”
The jacket wasn’t in the bedroom. He might have tossed it, or sent it to be cleaned, but events were so recent that I doubted he’d had a chance to do either.
I stood over the bed. “Not Erik.”
“Are you an angel?” Gary slurred.
Rohan snorted and I stepped on his foot.
“Check the hall closet,” I said quietly, then turned my attention back to Gary. “Yes. I’m an avenging angel.”
I checked Gary’s drip. High was good, tripping balls high was better, since he’d never remember us. OD high, however, if we’d accidentally interfered with something Lumberjack Nurse Erik had been adjusting, was not how I wanted this to play out. His drip didn’t seem to be flowing too fast or have an air bubble and I had to trust the dosage was correct.
Gary nodded, like that made perfect sense. “Kill the person who destroyed my career.”
“That’s right, Gary. I’m going to smite them.”
“Because I was the best hockey player ever.”
“Let’s not go that far,” I said. “You were grandstanding on your breakouts, rarely passing the puck to better positioned players.”
“You’re a mean angel.” Gary frowned.
Rohan entered the bedroom, jacket in hand. He unscrewed a mason jar with a mix of Snowdonia Hawkweed, salts, and water that we’d doctored up.
“Three minutes.” He painted the mixture on Gary’s jacket in order to do the magic signature spell.
“The best hockey player ever,” I repeated with forced enthusiasm. “Back to the night you got hit–”
“Where are your wings?” Gary flapped his arms in slow-motion.
“I left them at home. Stay with me here. On the video, you spoke to a woman. Right before you tripped off the curb. Who was she?”
He crossed his arms. Missed and whacked himself in the chest. “No wings. You’re not an angel.”
I blinked, suddenly backlit by a harsh white light. “Seriously?”
Ro shrugged, the flashlight of his phone trained on me. “Try speaking in a more Heavenly voice.”
He held the jacket up to me, now pulsing blue. Demon magic. Gary’s fall hadn’t been an accident.
“You’re loving this, aren’t you?” I said, squinting.
“Who are you speaking to?” Gary said. Ro was in the shadows and Gary couldn’t see him.
“God,” Ro boomed out.
I mimed gagging.
“Ohhh.” Gary’s eyes bugged out. He also drooled a bit.
“Gary Randall, you must cooperate,” Ro said in that same stupid voice.
Much as I wish Ro’s egomania had spectacularly backfired, it did the trick because Gary nodded at me eagerly. As eager as possible given he was moving slower than molasses. “I’ll help you smite them, angel. What’s your name?”
“Angelika,” I said at the same time that Ro said, “Charlie.”
“Hi, Charlie.”
“You’re not helping,” I hissed at my dumb boyfriend, who was silently snickering and holding up two fingers. Great. “Hi, Gary. Who was the woman? What was her name?”
Even if we got an alias, it might be traceable.
“Tia. She was so excited for me.” His head lolled back.
We were losing him to the drugs. I slapped his cheek. “Stay with me, dude. Can you describe Tia? How’d you meet her?”
“Met that night. Headed to different bars so texted later to meet up.”
“One minute,” Ro murmured.
“Do you still have the texts? Or a photo?”
His eyes fluttered shut.
“Thirty seconds,” Ro said.
Gary grabbed my arms and I jumped. “Angel, make me better. Miracle me to play again.” There was such sorrow in his voice.
I’d been so focused on what a douche he’d been in his hockey career that it hadn’t hit me that his dreams were dead. And as awful as that was, I couldn’t lie and pretend I could fix this. It would be too cruel when he realized that nothing had changed.
“I’m sorry,” I said gently. “I can’t.”
The alarm beeped, but Lumberjack Nurse Erik didn’t stir.
Gary sighed, his shoulders slumping. Then he perked up. “S’okay. Once I get through rehab, I’m gonna act. I’m hot.”
My sympathy leeched away.
“Good for you, buddy,” Rohan pronounced.
I grabbed Gary’s phone off the nightstand. “Give me your password.”
Erik rustled at Ro’s feet.
Ro crouched down, ready to administer a carotid sleeping hold to buy us a
few extra seconds if necessary. “Hurry.”
Four times I asked for and was given a wrong numeric code for Gary’s phone. Apparently, he changed it a lot. It wasn’t his birthday, wasn’t his home address, wasn’t some part of his phone number.
Two more tries before the phone was disabled. “Focus, Gary.”
His reply? A loud snore.
What could it be? What did I know about him? He was arrogant and the code was six digits. “What day was he signed to Tampa?” I said. “Do you remember?” Luckily, Rohan did. I typed the day, month, and year in. “Fuck.”
“Your Canadian is showing,” Ro said. “Gary’s American. Month then day.”
I typed it in and was rewarded with his home screen. No photos but there was a text chain. I fired off a quick text wanting to chat. It was delivered, proving the number was still in play.
Erik snorted back into consciousness, slowly blinking up at us. “Who are you?”
“God,” Ro boomed, shining the light in the nurse’s eyes. “We are the glory you are not fit to gaze upon.”
I rolled my eyes and portalled us out of there.
Seated in the Shelby once more, I emailed Pierre the phone number I’d texted, asking if he could track the phone’s location since no one had responded to my text.
We drove back to Casa Mitra in silence. I rolled the Shelby’s windows down, drinking in the city at night. I preferred L.A. this way with all her lit-up signs competing for attention and telling her story.
Back at the bungalow, we made a fresh pot of coffee and rolled up our metaphoric sleeves. Rohan propped a pillow under his head and stretched out on the couch with a laptop balanced on his chest.
Curled up in the comfy plush chair I’d pulled up beside him, I yawned, taking a swig of my lukewarm java. “Look at that.” I yawned again. “Sorry. It’s Hybris’ Roman name.”
“Petulantia. Tia. Nicely done, witch girl.”
“Imagine how amazing I’d be with sleep.”
Pierre texted that Tia’s phone had been located in a dumpster in Burbank. Dead end.
Rohan paged through Gary’s file. “Let’s check his friends’ social media accounts. Maybe one of them got a photo of her.”
Gary had been with two buddies that night, also players from his Junior hockey team. One of them had no social media presence other than a pretty sparse Twitter account with some game results, but the other one’s Instagram was a shrine to his own shirtlessness combined with snaps of himself with every girl he’d ever wanted to bang. Or, in many cases, given the follow-up pix of them in bed, had.
“A douche, but a predicable douche, which works for us.” Rohan showed me the photo he’d found. Captioned #wingman, it was a photo of this friend, Gary, and Tia, recognizable in the same clothes as from the video footage.
Tia was about five-foot-ten, willowy, with long, black hair.
“Celebration selfie,” I said, smushing my cheek up to Rohan’s.
Right as I snapped it, he kissed me. The phone tumbled from my hand and hit the carpet with a gentle thump. My arms snaked around his neck and my world fell away under the taste of him, like every bad thing had been erased, like it was just us, forever.
There was a knock on the door.
“Hello?” Baruch called out.
Ro mimed shooting himself in the head. “To be continued. Coming, man.”
Ro let Baruch in while I posted some more smug bullshit. Come and get me, Tia.
“Greetings and salutations, Tree Trunk. Whoa. You look terrible.” I’d never seen him with bags under his eyes, a stoop to his shoulders, and smelling a bit rank in clothes he’d obviously slept in. At least they weren’t the same ones he’d fought Ethan in.
“This is the first time I’ve left the chapter since the attack,” he said.
Ro arranged for a late supper, which Baruch gratefully accepted. He unwrapped the foil from the plate Billie had brought him, thanking her for the steak and potatoes and picked up his knife, sawing away at the slab of meat.
“Witches. Tell me everything you know about them.”
“We use elimination and infusion magic but Rasha only got the bit pertinent to killing demons.”
“Elimination magic is negative?” Baruch said.
“Not at all. There’s no value judgment either way.” I squirted ketchup onto the French fries that Ro had thoughtfully procured for me. “Portalling is elimination magic. So is healing if it’s killing disease. A lot of witches work in medical research.” I explained about how there was one magic pile and the more Rasha drew from it, the weaker the witches were. That was why they couldn’t just magically cure AIDS or cancer, but they could look for magic-infused chemical cures.
“Sienna was a nurse,” he said.
“Could that be relevant to her agenda?” Rohan said.
“Which one?” Baruch said. “Attacking Rasha or binding demons?”
“Sienna being a nurse is relevant because by all accounts, she was dedicated and great at her job. Everyone at the hospital adored her.” I munched a fry. “It’s hard to reconcile that person with someone who would unleash demons.”
Baruch swallowed the half a steak that passed for a bite in his reality. “Table it until her motives are clearer. Infusion magic. Examples?”
“Witches infuse the earth. Heal toxic land, repair blighted crops. A lot of us work in agriculture, medicine, engineering, geology, all types of sciences geared toward keeping the earth and her inhabitants as healthy as possible.” I dragged a fry through the ketchup. “I keep circling back to Tessa. That whatever the reason Sienna did this, it’s tied to Tessa.”
“Sienna used dark magic to kill three people,” Rohan said. “She’s out for revenge.”
“I’m not excusing that, but it was three specifically targeted people who are probably guilty of something. DSI was full of employees–if she wasn’t being careful, she could have easily taken out a dozen people. She didn’t. Nor did she hurt the witches that went looking for her in Jerusalem. She’s incredibly dangerous, but not bloodthirsty.”
Baruch snorted. “That remains to be seen.”
“Binding demons is dark magic, but it’s still elimination magic,” Rohan said, snagging a couple of fries. “Taking away free will. That’s what Sienna did to Ethan with this attack, which means we’re all vulnerable. It would be a point in favor of telling Mandelbaum what we know, except it’s countered by the hell-no negative that he’ll then do whatever it takes to find her.”
“Could you contain a witch with dark magic?” Baruch said. “I couldn’t. From the sounds of it, I would have trouble taking down a regular witch.”
I threw a couple air punches at him. He swallowed both my fists with one of his and pushed my hands down.
“A witch in full possession of her powers,” Baruch said. “The rabbi will fail.”
“The good rabbi is hardly going to be that logical about it,” Ro said dryly.
“How’s your moral flexibility, Tree Trunk?”
He pushed his empty plate away. “Is this a trick question?”
“Sadly, no,” Rohan said. I elbowed him and he threw up his hands.
“What if you told Mandelbutt the wards had been tampered with and you’ve determined that Ethan was compelled by a demon? We’ll pick a plausible type. It’s not far off the truth and he still comes out as another victim in all this. Then you could issue a warning for all Rasha. Put everyone on high alert and let them know you suspect this isn’t an isolated attack.”
Baruch placed his left palm face up. “We tell Mandelbaum about Sienna, it doesn’t stop the attacks, he knows there is another witch capable of carrying out his plans, and perhaps more Rasha die attempting to find her.” He placed his right one up. “Don’t tell him? Rasha die because they don’t know the real danger to watch for.”
“Doesn’t matter if they know about her. They won’t see her coming,” I said. “But at least we could get them on their guard without handing Sienna to Mandelbaum.”
“Moral flexibility wins,” Rohan said.
I pressed my hands against my heart. “The words I’ve longed to hear you say.”
Rohan shook his head. “Really need to think before I speak around you.”
“Don’t forget that the witches are actively looking for Sienna as well,” I said.
Baruch stood and cracked his neck. “I have to sleep on all this.” He wished us goodnight and left.
Ro stretched out on the couch. “It occurs to me that there’s another point to be made about infusion and elimination.”
“Yeah? What?” I cleared the dishes. Not a big hardship since all I had to do was put everything back on the cart it had been wheeled in on and place it outside the bungalow like room service.
“You and Mandelbaum.”
Leaning against the doorframe, I breathed in the night-blooming jasmine scattering its heady, fragrant scent. It was after midnight and still warm. Crickets chirped away in a call and answer song and a beetle buried into the cool earth at my feet. I stared up at the hazy light pollution in the night sky. “Meaning?”
“The rabbi could very well destroy us, but you? You’ve infused new life into the Brotherhood. For better or for worse,” he added with a cheeky grin that I caught over my shoulder. “Forcing a new balance between Rasha and witches.”
“I’m the new hope.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said.
“I’m basically Princess Leia and Han rolled into one.” I shrieked as Ro grabbed me around the waist, swinging me around.
“Not anywhere in the galaxy.”
I stuck my tongue out at him, then stopped and slid to the ground. “Ro? Did we speed the clock? The prophecy?”
As prophecies went, it was frustratingly short and vague. Tick tock goes the clock, blood to rule the might. Tick tock, speed the clock, the lovers reunite.
“We reunited and Sienna launched that attack,” I said. “Are we responsible?”
I wanted so badly for Rohan to laugh and tell me I was crazy, but from the troubled look on his face, he was wondering the same thing.
Chapter 13
The Unlikeable Demon Hunter Collection: Books 1-6: A Complete Paranormal Romantic Comedy Series Page 126
