by Steve McHugh
“Can you tell us more about her?” I asked.
The reaper shook his head. “Other than she enjoyed herself, no. If this woman is the one you seek, she is very dangerous. I would advise caution.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I think we’ve already met.”
“Then you should be very happy that you’re still alive,” the reaper said. And with that he nodded to Sky and walked back toward the lift as Hades made his way over toward us.
“Well, now I have extra motivation to find her,” I said.
“You will have to be very careful,” Hades told me. “These people appear to be playing a game. One that we do not yet know the rules of. Nor do we know the point they’re trying to make.”
I took the hotel card from my pocket and turned it over in my hand. One side just showed the hotel name with the picture of a golden scepter behind it. The scepter shimmered slightly as the light caught it. The rear listed the address, which was on Lexington Avenue, along with the hotel’s website.
I typed in the address on my phone’s web browser and was greeted with some stunning photos of the hotel during the night and day. I flicked through the pictures, which were of both the outside and interior, and quickly came to the conclusion that Sky had been right, it was a very upmarket place. If the people who did this were staying there, then they had some serious money.
I passed Sky my phone and gave her a moment to flick through the photos. “It could be a trap,” she said.
“Quite possibly. But it would be rude not to go see what they want.”
“I’ll join you,” Sky said. “Quite frankly, you could use backup considering they seem to want you involved.”
I nodded a thank you in Sky’s direction.
“And what will you do if you find them?” Hades asked. “Like I said, you don’t yet know the game they’re playing.”
“That’s okay, Hades,” I said. “I plan on cheating anyway.”
Sky and I left the hospital after promising Hades that I would do nothing stupid and that anything we found out, we’d let him know first. He then gave me the keys to his Range Rover Evoque, a deep-blue beast of an SUV. Unfortunately, Sky hadn’t shut up complaining about it from the second the keys had fallen into my hand.
“Why do you get to drive?” she asked for the fifth time since we’d set off on the road.
I’d stayed silent the previous times, because doing anything other than agreeing with her when she was annoyed was a recipe for an argument, but my willpower had officially run out. “Because you are not a good driver,” I said honestly.
“The hell I’m not!”
“Number of cars written off by me, less than ten. Number written off by you…Can you even remember?”
“Look, they’re not my fault.”
“All of them? Really? Because I once saw you pull the hand break in a car doing nearly a hundred miles an hour. How many times did that one flip over?”
“I don’t remember,” Sky said coolly. “Someone was trying to kill me at the time.”
“Because I was in the car behind you and it looked like something out of a Hollywood movie. It just kept flipping.”
Even though I wasn’t looking at Sky, I could tell that she was staring a hole through me. “You blew up a Nissan GT-R.”
“Technically, yes, but—”
“No buts, you blew up a Nissan GT-R to get rid of a gargoyle.”
“It wasn’t moving at the time, and it wasn’t like I had a lot of options. Also, remind me to thank Tommy for telling you that.”
Sky was silent for a moment, then she started to laugh. “I’m driving on the way back.”
“Okay, if you promise not to crash the car.”
“I promise nothing of the sort. It depends on how much you piss me off.”
I chuckled and was immediately grateful for Sky’s company. She had the ability to take people’s mind off whatever horrific thing they were dealing with. Even if she did it by starting an argument.
“Any idea why these people clearly wanted you at that house?” Sky asked after a few minutes silence.
“No,” I said. “But they were there when Bill called me.”
“How can you be sure?”
“The number of people who have my mobile number barely reaches double digits. So he either got the number from one of them, or—”
“Or they gave him the number.”
“Exactly. Which does bring up one big question.”
“How did they get your number? You think someone in our organization gave it to them?”
“There are people in the UK with it, but I very much doubt Bill’s murderers contacted any of them. I’d have been called about five seconds after they’d finished on the phone. And there’s no way you, Hades, Persephone, or any of your family handed it over. Which means, you have a leak.”
“Fucking hell. Dad’s going to crucify someone if that’s true.”
I was pretty certain that wasn’t a figure of speech.
Sky’s phone rang and she answered the text message. “They couldn’t get a track,” Sky said after replacing her phone in her pocket.
“What?”
“The werewolves that Dad sent to the house, they couldn’t get a track on the woman. By the time they arrived, the winds were too strong and the scent had been muddled with about fifty other people. Apparently the only scent they could pick up was one of a cave troll. Was she a cave troll?”
“No,” I said. “She spoke in clear sentences and she wasn’t the size of a truck. Not a cave troll.”
“Could she have used a troll to mask her scent?”
That made me pause. “Maybe, although would you want to ask a cave troll if you could use their scent?”
“It’s a mystery then. But no other scents were in that wood except for what belonged to the troll.”
“Why would a cave troll be this far from any caves?”
“A good point. You okay here?”
“They killed my friends and tried to blow me up. No, I’m not okay.”
Sky placed a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll find them.” Her words were spoken with such conviction that it was hard not to believe them.
Sky went to sleep soon after, only waking to wave her ID at the border, which allowed us to go through without delay. Once in New York State, she went straight back to sleep.
We stopped in Syracuse for something to eat, and then I let Sky drive the rest of the way, even managing to relax enough to get a few hours sleep myself. It took in total over eight hours of driving, and probably would have been quicker to fly, but by the time we’d arranged for a jet, we would have only saved a few minutes at most.
We pulled up in front of the hotel and Sky threw the keys to the valet before we walked inside. The foyer was huge and very impressive, with some interesting artwork on the walls and massive windows that let in an extraordinary amount of light. Sky left me to look around while she walked over to the reception desk. Her ID would do little good in New York; neutral territory was just that. There was a time when the most powerful creatures on earth fought over the state, including Hades, but Avalon had eventually managed to calm everyone with a proposal that suited no one. New York was off limits to the influence of any of the major powers. It was one of only five states in America that could say they were neutral territory; Illinois, California, Louisiana, and Texas made up the rest. A number of cities also fall under the ‘neutral’ banner, although apart from Washington D.C, most of them are only neutral in the broadest sense of the word.
Sky had been talking to a young man behind the counter for a few minutes when she made her way back to me as I flicked through one of the hotel brochures.
“Any luck?” I asked.
“That black card, it’s only available on the top three floors.” She reached over and picked up a white card from t
he table beside me. “Everyone else gets these.”
“Why would they bother?”
“Apparently it’s been proven to make those who pay the extra dollars feel more exclusive. All of the cards and menus up there are different colors from those of the floors below. It’s a marketing idea.”
“Okay, so where do we go from here?”
“I slipped him a few hundred bucks and he said the third floor from the top hasn’t been used for a few weeks. Remodeling.”
“That’s out then.”
“The second floor is occupied at the moment by some Wall Street types. They’ve taken the two suites there to use for some sort of bonding retreat.”
“And the penthouse?”
“In use for the last three weeks. All paid in cash, two men and two women. Apparently they scare the shit out of the staff.”
“You got a lot for only a few hundred bucks.”
“I’m very persuasive, and I also gave him my phone number.”
I chuckled. “Penthouse it is then.”
The lifts, which were just as opulent as every other thing I’d seen in the hotel, were quiet and no one else got on as we rode it to the penthouse on the twenty-second floor.
The polished lift doors opened to show a corridor filled with natural light from the huge windows that ran down one side. Arrays of colorful flowers had been placed on small tables and, apart from a door marked stairwell and the lift doors, there was only one other door on the floor.
“You going to use magic to open it?” Sky asked me.
Over the years I’d learned how to use my air magic to open locked doors, but it’s time-consuming and difficult to do. It’s also impossible to do with a lock that requires a card. “You fancy kicking it down?”
Sky smiled—it was sly and full of mischief. I stepped aside so she could use the keycard that appeared in her hand.
“Your phone number got you the door key card?”
“I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, Nate, but I’m incredibly hot.” Sky swiped the card through the door lock and then pushed the door open.
Whatever playful banter we had before the door opened ceased the second the living room was revealed. The expensive decor, and stunning views, did little to sway me as we searched the suite together. We started with the left side of the room, which contained the bedroom and an en suite bathroom, both of which were clean and tidy, with no clothes or toiletries around to suggest that anyone was staying here. We moved back into the living room and made our way through it to the second bedroom, which was also empty.
I pushed opened the frosted glass door to the second bathroom and paused to take in the scene before me. A man was lying in the bathtub; he was completely naked and covered, almost head to toe, in blood. The deep gouge across his throat, along with the huge number of cuts and gashes on his body, told me that it was his own. The back of his head rested on the rear of the bathtub, his eyes open, staring at the wall behind him. His body had clearly been staged.
“Holy shit,” Sky said as she stood beside me. “I know this guy.”
That was a bit of a surprise. “Who is he?”
“His name is—sorry was—Jerry Brown. He was a cop in Toronto. He also worked for my father.”
It was a regular thing that people in positions of power within a community also worked for the more powerful members of the nonhuman world. Mostly they just fed back relevant information, but on occasion they would be required to spy on someone, or push forward legislation that would benefit their employer.
“Any ideas why he was here?”
She shook his head. “Dad didn’t mention anything about any of his people vanishing in the last few days.”
I glanced up at the wall, which contained another message. Like before, it was written in blood. House of Silent Screams.
I immediately knew who had written the message and why I was involved. And a shiver went down my spine.
CHAPTER 3
Portland, Maine. 1977.
“If you’re not going to be honest with me, then you can take your offer and shove it up your ass,” I said as we both stood on the roof of the Mill. The bar had seen a pretty heated discussion between Galahad and myself when he’d told me what he wanted, and I’d needed some air before I did or said something stupid.
Galahad sighed.
“Don’t fucking sigh,” I snapped. “You tell me you need me to find someone. You won’t tell me why or what’s going on. So my answer is no.” I turned to look at my friend. I wasn’t used to him being less than completely open. Maybe being king had changed him in more ways than I cared to think.
“How many times have you kept things from me?” Galahad asked, his voice containing more than a little anger. My secretive activities for Merlin had long been a thorn in the side of our friendship.
“This is different, and you know it. You want me to search the state for one guy who has wronged you. I get that he killed the daughter of Roberto’s friend, but I don’t get what you want out of it.”
“Is it not enough that you’ll be stopping a killer?”
“Don’t do that. Don’t you dare use someone’s murder to get me interested. Merlin did that, and you left Avalon to get away from him, not become him.” I hadn’t really meant what I said. I doubted that Galahad would ever cross the lines that Merlin was willing to cross. But I was angry, and I knew how much Merlin boiled Galahad’s blood, so I lashed out.
Galahad punched me in the mouth.
I fell to the ground and touched my blooded lip, but before I could get back to my feet, the bar’s manager, Rebecca, was standing in a defensive position between Galahad and me, a dagger in one hand.
“You will not harm my king,” she said.
I spat blood onto the floor and stared at the woman. “In case you didn’t notice, he punched me first.”
“You will not—”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time.” I got to my feet and rubbed my mouth again. “You feel better?”
Galahad had turned away and was staring out across the streets below us. “Rebecca, leave us for a moment.”
“But—”
“I will be fine.”
Rebecca gave me one last glare, but did as she was asked and left the roof via the stairwell door.
“I’m sorry,” Galahad said. “I should not have struck you.”
“I pissed you off, you hit me, let’s call it even,” I told him. “You feel like telling me what’s going on?”
“I can’t.”
It was my turn to sigh. “Can you at least tell me who this Simon guy is? Apart from killing students, why do you need him found?”
“I can tell you this. Simon Olson is a very dangerous man. He’s aligned himself with several equally dangerous people, and they’re committing murders. I can’t tell you anything about Simon other than the fact that he’s an alchemist.”
“So, let me get this right: the king of Shadow Falls, a place full of alchemists, is asking me to track down and apprehend another alchemist? Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“No, but if you’d just read the file about him instead of telling me to fuck off, you would have known that he has no affiliation with Shadow Falls.”
“So, why can’t you go after him yourself ? And if you feed me a bullshit answer, I’m going to walk.”
Galahad looked up at the sky and sighed again. “This doesn’t leave this roof. Simon used to work for the old king of Shadow Falls, Charles Whitehorn.”
“Well that puts an interesting spin on things. You’re worried that he still is working for him? That whatever Simon is doing, Whitehorn is involved.”
Galahad nodded. “If I send my people up there, Simon will figure out that I’m sniffing around and disappear. We won’t get justice for the people he’s killed until he resurfaces, and I have no idea when th
at might be. If Simon goes, any link to Whitehorn will go.”
There was something else, something I was certain he was holding back. I filed the information away for future reference. “So what does that really have to do with Sally-Ann?”
“Simon is killing people for a reason, but no one is able to figure it out. Until Roberto came to me with information about her murder, we didn’t even know she’d existed.”
“So, what would you have done if she hadn’t been found? Would you still have involved me? Do you see my problem? There’s something that happened that made you want my involvement. Political bullshit aside, which I understand, why me?”
“Because I asked them to involve you,” Roberto said as he arrived on the roof. “I came to King Galahad with information about Sally-Ann’s murder. He said he would look into it. I didn’t trust him enough not to brush it under the rug when he was done. So I asked for a neutral party we were both happy with. You have no standing with Avalon, you hold no rank with them or anyone in a position of power. You are, for all intents and purposes, a Ronin. Your reputation for what you used to do for Merlin and others affords you a lot of privilege in our world. People know of your name and reputation, either through fear or respect. But you hold no allegiance. You’re perfect to look into cases like this.”
“Why would he sweep it under the rug?” I asked.
“Because, apart from being a very talented artist, Sally-Ann was an alchemist,” Roberto said. “Her mother was an alchemist. But she died when she was very young. Sally-Ann had only just started coming into her abilities.”
“Her grandparents, were they alchemists as well?” I asked.
“Human, on her father’s side. Sally-Ann and her father were in Maine visiting her grandparents when he died. After her father’s death, Sally-Ann stayed in Maine until she went to college.
“So, I’m here because you think that Galahad and his people will deal with this in-house and you’ll never really find out what happened?”
