Wrath of the Goddess

by Lauren Dane

  If she just thought of this new hacker as a temp to fill a job it was easier than accepting that anyone else could fill Carey’s shoes. Later she’d have to face it, but for the time being, Rowan had enough to juggle and process without adding the emotional weight of having to see anyone else in Carey’s job on her team.

  Rowan made calls of her own because the genesis database wasn’t the only place she might be able to use to track Lyr down.

  An hour later Rowan had an address not too very far from the hotel where the local magical black market was.

  “Are we waiting for Clive for this?” David asked her.

  “No, he’s got two more hours of this meeting thingy with whatsherface and I can’t be sitting here all night long waiting for him. And he’s an old ass Vampire. They’d see his power eight miles away. And also? This is my job. Plus we’ll be back in time because it’s only a few miles from here and we can take surface streets.”

  “And also together with plus is an awful lot in a paragraph, deesse.” David winked at her, jarring a laugh from her belly.

  “I’m a grammar criminal, kid. Accept it. Now let’s go scare some witches.”

  * * *

  Mainly they skulked around to see who and what was happening but the way people’s eyes bugged out when she showed them the symbol or asked about Lyr meant she’d gotten a lot closer to her goal.

  “Mainly stuff for getting a hard dick and love spells. I don’t care about that. I’m alarmed by the number of spells purporting to make one irresistible to their heart’s desire. Anything that takes away someone’s ability to consent needs to be stopped.” Rowan had taken surreptitious pictures of the witches offering such services and texted them to Genevieve with a strongly worded suggestion that something so blatantly violating the Treaty be shut down immediately.

  Rowan would give the witch a day to handle it or she’d do it herself.

  They headed back to the hotel and beat Clive by twenty minutes. By that time, Genevieve texted that her meetings were over for the night and she was on her way and would fill them in when she arrived.

  “How was your meeting with Rita?” Rowan asked Clive as they settled around the low table in the living room of the suite a few hours later. Everyone else had gone off to do their own business so it was just the two of them for the time being.

  He handed her a plate and tipped his chin at the food that’d just been delivered from a Nation owned Greek restaurant not too very far away. Rowan dug in.

  “They’re more disciplined than I’d first thought. I’m sending her some assistance and those Vampires should help a great deal with training. Naturally my predecessor didn’t pay any attention unless it cost him money. So they’ve been trying but they don’t have the skills yet to succeed. Or the staff to observe the clubs that pop up and keep them in line when it comes to feeding and interacting with humans.”

  “Which is solvable and so much better than being on the take and ignoring gunfights in the street like your totally dead predecessor did. At least they want to learn and be better.”

  “It’s also my mistake and I need to learn to be better. When I took over North America all my focus was on burning out the rot. There was a lot—as you know—and it took more time than it should have to get this territory running efficiently. My cities need attention now. Training. Better staffing. Control over a lot of outlaw Making. Just looking at the percentages of the Vampires in that club last night, less than ten percent had genesis records and were Made legally. The rest were unsanctioned.”

  “That’s a lot of Vampires with way more power than control out there mixing with humans. Now that I’m taking over all of the United States, I have to do the same as you. Set up chapterhouses. Get the Hunters appropriate support and training so we can push back against Vampires and witches who are violating the Treaty at a shockingly frequent level.”

  “I’m trying, Rowan. Give me a bloody minute to get this handled.”

  “Don’t you dare get that Scion attitude with me.” Rowan pointed her forkful of moussaka his way. “I could have legally staked that entire club last night. And I didn’t. I could have killed every last witch at that black market today too. But I didn’t. I’m giving you and Genevieve a chance to get this cleaned up but the clock is ticking. I’m dealing with my own emergencies with Vampires and witches murdering their way through my territory. Including my friends and loved ones. You both have superpowers, humans don’t.”

  “I’ve noticed you’ve shifted from saying things like us humans to just humans,” Clive said.

  Rowan didn’t say anything as she thought that over. She wasn’t human. Never had been. Not totally. Rowan had accepted she was far more than human. Even then, she’d considered humans to be her family on some level. Her charges to protect. Somewhere along the line that had shifted. She still believed them to be her charges to protect because they were far weaker than those supernatural beings they unknowingly shared their cities and towns with. It was about balance. She could keep that balance because it was the right thing to do.

  She was still working out all the rest and that was a moment to moment struggle. It was a good thing she was usually too busy to dwell overmuch on that.

  Genevieve came in bearing a pink bakery box full of pan dulce Rowan planned to eat with a lovely cup of coffee when she woke up later that day.

  “How were your meetings?” Rowan asked.

  “They’re going to argue about how to argue for the next day or two. I hate this part. But we managed to get more information from teacher girlfriend Julie. It appears she engineered the first meeting between her and dead boyfriend Bob.”

  “Really now? Why?”

  “Dead boyfriend Bob runs security at a private hospital in Santa Monica as we knew. As it happens, it’s also a good place for supernatural beings to get medical help. One of the witches who’d gone in for dialysis was their first victim. They drained her and said she’d died of cancer.”

  Clive sat straighter. “That’s what I kept seeing. Hospital hallways. I thought because he worked there that’s why it was imprinted in his memories.”

  “How long has this been going on?” Rowan demanded.

  “Eighteen months.”

  “All this time I’d been thinking he was the instigator but it’s teacher girlfriend. She’s the one who brought Bob in. She’s the link to Lyr.” Rowan explained what they now knew about the sigil and Lyr.

  “Let me finish about Julie and then we’ll talk of what I know of Lyr,” Genevieve said with a scary frown.

  “It looks like over the last year and a half they’ve been experimenting to see what spells work best to drain power and have it sent to whoever is at the top of this food chain. Julie doesn’t know who the big boss is. She did know Vampires were involved and she did know about the Blood Front.”

  “We need to track down the Blood Front Vampires. Before, in Europe, they had what, like clubs to sit and drink bloodwine and complain about the humans. I doubt they’d give that up. Vampires like to complain about humans and be in swanky private clubs while doing it. It’s going to be in a large city. One that a Vampire would feel was appropriate to live in. They don’t congregate in barns or at the local community center. They’ll need leather and oak and walnut and humans scurrying around in uniforms that mark them as inferior.”

  Clive sighed and it made her laugh. He couldn’t disagree with her, but he wanted to just for argument’s sake.

  “Before we go off on a tangent, let’s get back to the point. I’ve got my people on it. Alice is running that so you know it’s being handled well.”

  “We’re searching too. Given the power of the lattice spellwork on Rowan’s old apartment and the trap to drain and direct energy back to whoever is in charge, it’s got to be somewhere between here and Las Vegas. Yes, the spells are very powerful, but even great power has limits when it comes to distance,”
Genevieve said.

  “Are all the missing witches from here in Southern California? Has there been trouble in Las Vegas?” Rowan asked as she pulled a map up on her laptop and examined it.

  “So far we’ve only had reports here in California.”

  “Big city wise it’s here in Southern California because San Francisco is much farther from Las Vegas. Maybe Phoenix?”

  “The witches in the southwest are far more militant and very tight-knit. If any of them had gone missing we’d have heard about it.”

  “Vampires hate Phoenix anyway. They don’t consider it cosmopolitan and as Genevieve points out, the witches in the state would rise up to battle if they felt attacked.”

  “Next step is to find the remains of the Blood Front and from there, Lyr,” Rowan told them. “I think we’re going to find him in Orange County. There are the Hollywood Hills and the rich parts of Los Angeles. Maybe there. But Vampires are freaked out by fire and they try to avoid hills and places with wildfires. I’m going to say Orange County. View of the ocean but not ocean front.”

  “Saltwater isn’t our cup of tea, so to speak. Some of us are deathly allergic. Many of us suffer some sort of side effects like skin irritation.” What Clive didn’t say was that he wasn’t bothered by it at all. Rowan didn’t think she needed to broadcast his strengths and weaknesses out loud. It wasn’t anything Genevieve needed to know in this situation.

  “I’ll have Vanessa, that’s our new hacker type person, start to sift through property records to see what we can find. It’s needle in a haystack big, but I think we can narrow things down with some specifics. Vampires often use a very specific sort of trust when they buy property to keep it in their line even though they’re so long lived.”

  Clive gave her side-eye. He really had no idea how much Rowan knew about their world. He thought he did, but there were times like this that he got surprised and had to remember just what she came from. Not that she necessarily wanted him thinking all the time about how her job was to kill Vampires when they broke the Treaty.

  David sprung into action to get Vanessa on the job and Genevieve got on the phone with whoever she was working with at witch central. Clive was on his phone, texting, so she figured he was giving orders to Alice.

  They were like the best superfriends ever.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Rowan woke up after eight hours of sleep she’d desperately needed. Her schedule had been turned upside down over the last several months. She wasn’t sleeping enough and she’d begun to feel it. It would slow her reaction time. Her thinking would get sluggish.

  It was amazing what eight solid, uninterrupted hours of sleep could do for you, body and soul.

  Which was good because she needed to be at her best. This looming confrontation with Lyr and the Blood Front would be hard enough to win but if she was weak in any way, it could be the end of her. Vampire blood could only do so much when one fought a centuries old Vampire with magic powers.

  She’d begun to warm up and get a good run in on the treadmill in the workout room when her phone rang. A quick glance at the screen showed it was Jack Elroy calling. She really didn’t want to answer, but it had to be done.

  “Yes?” she said by way of answering.

  “You left town. I told you not to leave town,” Jack barked at her.

  “You have no authority to keep me in town. I’m not a suspect in an arson at my best friend’s house so don’t insult me. What do you want?”

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Not home.”

  He sighed. “We’ve closed the investigation. Determined it was arson. Mistaken identity they say.”

  Rowan sucked in a breath as she stepped off the treadmill. “Thank you for telling me.”

  “I went by your place to tell you in person but you weren’t there.”

  “Okay.” Rowan wasn’t going to tell him anything about her current location or where they lived in Las Vegas either. He wasn’t so self-destructive he’d violate the oath he made to Clive to keep his mouth shut about the existence of Vampires. And Clive would know it the moment it happened because he’d taken blood—given willingly—from Jack a few years back when he’d made the promise to start with.

  But he was petty and juvenile and bitter. It used to make Rowan sad but now she was annoyed.

  “You can’t get away with anything you want to,” he said at last.

  “Okay,” Rowan said again.

  He hung up and she snickered before getting back on the treadmill to finish her run. David joined her about fifteen minutes in and they set up a nice rhythm as she pieced together all they had figured out up to that point and then thought over her next steps.

  It helped to do that. Visualize and prioritize. Plan. Control what she could because otherwise all she’d do was think about how much they didn’t know yet and how many people might get hurt between then and whenever they finally put a stake through Lyr’s fucking heart.

  “Detective Elroy called and aside from being a dick as usual, he said arson was the cause of death at Thena and Martin’s and the authorities were sure it was mistaken identity,” she told David once they were back in the hotel suite.

  “One less thing to worry about,” David said. “I got a text from Vanessa. She says she’s narrowing things down and has a list of a few hundred properties that might be housing our bad guy. She hopes to have it narrowed down to a hundred or less by five.”

  “We’ve got three hours to get back out to the new building to meet with the security crew. Pru is bringing by several of the Hunters from this area so I can meet the ones I don’t know personally yet. I trained two of them, so that’s nice.”

  “Who’s doing the security?” he asked once they got on the road.

  “Butch is a crusty old crank, which you discovered yesterday when we went to his house, but he knows his shit when it comes to security. He makes armored cars for prominent people—humans and paranormals alike—and also does panic rooms and other security spaces of that type. I asked him if he could transform the building into a fortress with multiple panic rooms and weapons caches and he nearly smiled. So, he’s sending his son to look the place over. Don’t worry, his son is way less weird.” Rowan changed lanes. “Call Genevieve and see how she’s doing,” Rowan said, giving him something to do while she puzzled through things around traffic.

  * * *

  Clive awoke to a quiet hotel suite. The note on the table next to the bed said she’d left for a few hours to work but to let her know when he was up.

  He headed for the shower and then after that, he called her, got voicemail, told her he was awake and would be working at the hotel for the next few hours. He nipped out quickly to feed and was back in less than half an hour.

  Unexpectedly, Nadir called.

  “I hear you’re looking for information on Lyr,” the official Voice of The First said to him as he answered.

  Clive didn’t bother asking how she knew this. Most likely Rowan had reached out. “Yes, Rowan and I are looking for him.”

  “You think he’s done something wrong?”

  Clive told her exactly what he thought Lyr was up to. After a long silence she said, “He was sentenced to two centuries of being cast out for sedition against The First. I’ve been keeping tabs on him on and off over the years. The last time I did, he was in Costa Mesa.”

  In a house with a view of the ocean but not oceanfront, Rowan had said and he bet she was right.

  “You may have saved us another few days’ work. I appreciate this very much,” he told Nadir.

  “He has a powerful hate for humans. And for rules that stop him from doing whatever he wishes with them. The First took his incisors.”

  Clive couldn’t stop his gasp. Such a thing was rare. The worst sort of punishment because it would be public. It wasn’t as if a Vampire needed their teeth to feed, bl
ood could be let in all sorts of ways. But without those incisors he’d look human and most likely hate them even more for it. It was a very heavy beatdown by their leader.

  “Yes. So I’m not entirely surprised to hear he’s part of the Blood Front. Do you know who Made him?”

  “His genesis record was sealed. A lot of the oldest ones are, I know.” Record keeping was their strong suit, but with beings who were born or Made more than five or six hundred years ago, it could be difficult to find certain facts. Usually it was lost to time and the Vampire either made up their own backstory or told the truth. It didn’t matter because a seven hundred year old Vampire was a threat no matter how they came to be.

  “Enyo,” she said very softly.

  “I saw her mark. When I was interrogating prisoners I saw her mark. I thought it was merely a coincidence because she was Blood Front too.” And now he understood what that familiarity had been when he’d scented the blood magic.

  “I’ll give you a report when all is said and done so that we may keep The First apprised of the situation,” he said, knowing she’d understand the subtext and keep this quiet until they’d handled it. Keep him steady and on this side of sanity. “Thank you, Nadir. Your assistance in this matter is very much appreciated.”

  “He has magic, as Enyo had magic. Do not underestimate him.”

  Clive planned to take Lyr on with Rowan and Genevieve at his side because he knew very much just how dangerous a Vampire with magic could be.

  She hung up and just minutes later, Rowan and David returned.

  Rowan might still be under the weight of her grief, but she was in her element when she was on a hunt. Clive couldn’t help but admire the gleam in her eyes as she dumped her things off before joining him.

  “Productive daylight hours today?” he asked.

  “Totally. Worked out. Bought a building. Met with bounty hunters and other dodgy characters. Spoke with Jack, that was the sucky part. But they ruled the deaths arson and a case of mistaken identity so there’s that.”