by Liz Schulte
By the end I could barely open my eyes, but when I did I saw the limp bodies of the fifteen jinn piled on the floor around me, but still in their circle. “You killed them,” I said though my mouth was dry and my throat felt like it had sand poured down it.
The angel picked up my arm and inspected it closely. “Shhh,” was all she said as she pressed her finger to my lips and the darkness took me.
All we had to do was find the secret pathway from Hell and a Seal that had been lost for a millennia. Sure, no problem. While I was at it, I might as well find out who shot JFK and go back in time to catch Jack the Ripper.
“You know what we need?” Femi asked, clamping a hand on my shoulder. “A drink.” She grinned. “And I know just the place.”
“Sure. Why not? Might as well wet our whistles.”
I crumpled the paper we’d conversed on and lit it on fire when we were out of the warehouse. I’d like to see the angel put that back together. Femi took me to the Office.
“Back again?” Sy asked with a frown.
Femi waved him off. “Two orders of clams, fries, and a beer,” she called out. “What do you want?”
“Whiskey and a burger, rare,” I told him.
He nodded and I followed her to the furthest corner of the room. She eased into her chair. “I can’t do it.”
“Don’t tease me, kitten,” I said and gestured for her to stop talking.
She shook her head. “Nothing can penetrate the Office, isn’t that right?” Her head snapped over to Sy, who was approaching with our drinks in hand. I hadn’t even heard him get close.
“Not that I know of.” He took the seat on the other side of her. “Who’s trying to listen to you?”
“Much like the rest of this, that’s none of your business.” She took her drink, letting her fingers linger over his for just a moment longer than necessary. “We’ve got this covered. Thanks for the drinks.”
He chuckled as he straightened back up, but didn’t exactly look amused. “If you need me…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She motioned him away. “Now, back to business. Corbin made a deal with me. He will tell us where the opening is, if we give him the vampire.”
“Done,” I said. I didn’t even need to think about it. That vampire was a no good bum.
Femi frowned. When she looked back at me she nodded. “I know it’s what we should do. I even took the proof of life picture, but I can’t send it.”
“Why?”
She licked her lips then clicked her teeth. I’d never seen her so unsure of anything. “He saved me once.”
That’s right. She knew him. I never made the time to ask how. “I thought there was no love lost between the two of you.”
“Well, we aren’t on each other’s Christmas card lists or anything, but…” She shrugged a shoulder and chased a drop of water down the glass with her fingernail. “I guess I’m feeling nostalgic.”
“Fem—”
“I know.” Her hands flew up in the air and her voice rose. “I know,” she said more quietly. “It pisses me off too, but there you have it.”
I rested my elbows on the table and leaned toward her. “I can’t help unless you talk to me, kitten.”
“He sucks and he lies and he betrayed me and…and I can’t kill him. Corbin will give him to Paolo and Paolo will murder him. Hell, he deserves whatever he gets, I know that. I just can’t be the one who brings it about.”
“Is there another way to find the opening?”
She held up a finger as a little goblin appeared with our orders. When he was gone again, she plopped a clam in her mouth. “Thomas says he knows, but he also lies.”
This whole situation was completely unlike Femi. I didn’t want her to have to make this concession and go against her instincts, but we didn’t have time to waste.
“So what should I do? Answer that as my friend, not as Holden’s sidekick or Maggie’s boyfriend. Answer like Olivia would.”
Those two things were becoming increasingly hard to remove from my identity, but I tried. I took a deep breath, letting it whistle out. “Let him go.”
“What?” She looked up with wide eyes.
“If he isn’t here then he isn’t an option. Let him go and we’ll find another way.”
She shook her head. “But what if we don’t and my weakness leads to world destruction?”
I drummed my fingers on the table. Normally what she said would be dramatic, but in this case it was true. If we lost this lead, how could we fight against the demons who were miles ahead of us already? “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have a clean conscience and save the day. Not this time. If he means this much to you, let him go. As your friend, I’d never ask you to betray yourself.”
Her pupils contracted vertically before she turned her head from me. “It’s weakness.”
I shrugged. “If you can trade him for information and still live with yourself, by all means let’s do that. This is your call. It doesn’t matter what Holden wants, what the angel wants, or even what I want. I’ll support whatever you decide.”
She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “Thanks, Baker.”
“Now shake a tail feather. We got things to do.” I winked at her. “Let’s just table the opening for now. We have bigger problems to worry about. Mostly the Seal.” I whispered the last part because even if the Office was impervious to outside eavesdropping, there were still people in here and the Seal of Solomon was likely to perk up interested ears.
“Yeah. So what’s the deal with that?”
“When it’s possessed, the owner will have a controlling influence over jinn and demons. It’s a game changer. If it truly is in play and Hell gets it first, our whole uprising is a bug on the windshield of life. If the angel gets it first, buckle up ‘cause we aren’t getting off this crazy train.”
“What’s our other option?” she asked, finishing the last of her clams.
“Find it and destroy it before anyone else can use it.”
Femi nodded thoughtfully. “And when the angel finds out, what will she do?”
“Nothing good. And since we’re diving into impossible tasks, we also need to find a way to neutralize her.”
“Nothing is impossible. What do you know about the Seal? Where do we start?”
I gave her a rundown of the history I knew, which wasn’t a lot. Femi clicked her nails on the scarred surface of the table as she listened.
“So that it?” she asked and I nodded. “Doesn’t give us much to go on, does it?”
“That’s all have. Not really a fountain of information on this subject. I could probably find out more, but not without clueing other potentially interested parties in to what we’re doing.”
She leaned back in her seat, balancing it on two legs. “Maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. Perhaps Hell already knows of the Seal’s existence and they are the ones who set Olivia on this course.”
“Seems like a leap.”
“Well, she didn’t really have much of a plan except to destroy every demon one at a time until we took out that last cell. Now she’s not interested in watching cells or finding them. In fact, she hasn’t said anything about it at all. Her course definitely changed. What if she saw something in there that we didn’t? What if they already have the Seal? I mean they wouldn’t have kept the kid around if they weren’t hiding something.”
“If they had the Seal for as long as they had the kid, why didn’t they use it? Why just hold on to it?”
She plucked at the ends of her hair as she thought. “Well, what good would it do them? Sure they could have taken Holden back, but that’s really the only game. Hell already controls the jinn and demons. Their interest lies purely with preserving their control.”
I nodded. “By keeping tabs on the biggest weapon that could be used against them.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay, let’s say you’re right and they kept the kid to block whatever energy the Seal puts out into the world. We have
her now and nothing’s changed.”
She folded her hands together. “Last time I checked neither of us were equipped to feel a disturbance like that. I bet, though, that the angel felt it—and that she has a pretty good idea where to get the Seal when she wants it.”
“If that’s true, what’s she waiting for?” As soon as I asked the question, the answer came to me. “She’s waiting to free them all. If she controls them but Hell still possesses their souls then she wouldn’t be the only one with power over them.”
“So once she has all the jinn freed, she’ll take possession of the Seal.”
Femi flipped her ponytail over her shoulder. “What are we waiting for? Let’s do this.”
“Do what?” Even if everything we came up with was true, something I doubted, it didn’t matter. We still had no clue where to start.
“We’re going back to the demon lair. Now that we know what we’re looking for, maybe we’ll find something to point us in the right direction. Maybe there’s something we missed… .”
“What about the angel?”
Femi shrugged. “She needs the Seal too. She can’t be pissed we’re looking for it.”
I followed her out the door, then ducked into an alley to refresh my appearance. I opted for an older, distinguished man of the cloth. An aging priest probably wouldn’t go unnoticed, but also probably wouldn’t inspire a call to the police. We hotfooted it over to the house where the demons had been. The neighborhood was quiet and the house seemed empty, but Femi did a quick recon to make sure before she waved me in.
I walked up to the porch slowly and knocked on the door. No answer. Femi jimmied the lock and we were in. Easy enough. Now for the hard part, finding a clue. We’d scoured the area before, but we set out to do it again. I went upstairs, leaving the first floor for Femi because I suspected if we were going to find anything it would be in the attic. It was where the kid had been and was the only place none of us thoroughly went through. The room below was scattered with wallboard dust and chunks of debris from where Femi fell through. Between the dust, filth, and musk it was hard to breathe. I stepped onto the chair and hoisted myself up, squatting down on the cross beams to let my eyes adjust to the room. The conditions the kid grew up in broke my heart. They were more befitting of a wild animal than a child. I shook the sympathy off. I couldn’t be blinded by the squalor. The few items up here needed to be studied objectively. Most of what was trash. The shackles weren’t made of anything special and they bore no markings.
I studied the crude drawings on the wall. Mostly they looked like scribbles, but something caught my eye. It was hard to see at a glance, but the longer I looked the more prominent it grew. “Now we’re on the trolley,” I muttered.
“Baker?” Femi called.
“Up here,” I said, but didn’t budge or take my eyes off the spot in front of me.
“There’s nothing up there but rotten food and shit. I looked.”
“I think I have something. Be right down.” I pulled out my cell and snapped several pictures.
“What’d you find?” she asked, when I’d lowered myself back into the room.
I showed her the best of the pictures. “What do you see?”
“Feces smeared on the wall. Why would you take a picture of that?”
I used my finger to trace what I saw in the picture. A right side up triangle with an upside down triangle meeting it about halfway formed a star. Six dots surrounded it.
“So…”
“So? This proves your theory is the real McCoy, kitten. It’s crude and not exactly right and maybe I don’t know nothing from nothing, but that sure looks like the symbol of the Seal. At least part of it.”
Femi opened her mouth to speak—but the sound of the front door closing echoed through the empty house. We looked at each other and silently agreed to check it out. It was too soon for anyone to know the house was abandoned, so if someone was letting himself in it was probably a demon. Femi headed for the window and silently scaled her way down to the back yard. I went to the stairs, gun in hand (a bullet wouldn’t kill a demon, true, but a good shot would slow one down). I took a couple shallow breaths at the bottom of the stairs, listening for our visitor, but there was nothing.
Taking the corner wide, I scanned the living room. Again nothing. Empty.
“I know you’re here,” a French woman’s voice rang out. It was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.
“You here to bump me off?”
Her throaty laugh drifted into the room and caressed my skin. “Are people trying kill you?”
I pressed my lips together and put my finger on the trigger. There was no way I was beating my gums at a damn succubus.
The screen on the back porch creaked as I eased it open. I waited a few beats then turned the handle on the door. Unlocked.
A woman’s laughter suffused the air and made everything a bit hazy. Succubus without a doubt. I picked up a relatively unused napkin and tore off two pieces to go in my ears. Not that they would help if she touched me, but at least they would muffle her voice and make it easier to focus. Sliding a couple knives from my boots, I slipped through the kitchen into the hallway. Empty. Where in the hell was Baker?
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she said in a singsong voice. “I can’t promise it won’t hurt, but I can promise you’ll enjoy it.” Even muffled, her voice was enticing.
“Come and get me,” Baker said.
The house was too empty. The echo made it impossible to tell where the voices were coming from, though Baker sounded closer to me than she did. Easing into the living room, I caught a quick movement in my peripheral vision. A gun whipped in my direction. I caught my knife, however, before it flew from my hand. It was only Baker. He aimed his weapon at the floor.
“Where is she?” he mouthed.
I pointed at the only two other possibilities: the dining room or the study.
He nodded and motioned for me to go left while he went right. “As much as I love hide-and-go seek, you’re starting to bore me, doll.”
The succubus laughed again. “Now we can’t have that, can we?”
I made my way through the dining room, but there was no quiet way to open the pocket door into the study.
“Ah, there you are.”
“The last time I saw you, you were extra crispy,” Baker said conversationally. “Olivia should have killed you when she had the chance.”
If I couldn’t get in silently, then I would go big. I shoved the door to the side as hard and fast as I could and leaped into the room.
The succubus laughed with delight, sitting completely relaxed in an old chair in the corner. “Oh another little birdie. As much as I would love to capture and gobble you both up, I believe our interests are aligned at the moment.” She winked at me. “I think this might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
I let one of my knives fly from my hand, burying deep in her shoulder. Forgive and forget wasn’t my strong suit. She tried to kill us once. I had no doubt, given the opportunity, she would do so again.
The smiled melted from her face and she gave me a withering look. “And here I thought we were going to have a nice conversation.” She plucked the knife from her arm and twirled it in her fingers as it dripped with blood.
“Oops,” I said, winking back. Bitch.
Baker sighed. “What do you propose?”
I shot him a look. There was no way we were striking a deal with her.
He shrugged. “Sometimes you gotta roll in shit before you can get clean.”
Her eyes narrowed and she stood. “I do believe Holden asks too much.” She started for the door.
“Wait.” Baker stopped her before she could leave. “You’ve spoken with Holden?”
“Oui. We have an arrangement.” She snapped the knife back at me, embedding it in the wall, inches from my head.
“What sort of—”
Baker cut me off, shaking his head. Right. The nosy angel was listening.
I gestured at him. We needed to know what she and Holden had cooked up, and we couldn’t take her to the Office. There were too many people there she could enthrall and attack us with.
Baker texted Holden and moments later the phone chimed back at him. He nodded to me. So she wasn’t lying. “Boss says he has no idea what you’re talking about,” Baker said to her.
Her fists clenched and her mouth opened. She looked like an angry pinup dressed like a gypsy. I pressed my finger to my lips then tapped my ear. Slowly the red drained from her face. She scanned the room, and when she didn’t see anything she raised an eyebrow. Baker tried to sign a message to her with hand gestures, but his attempt looked like he was saying that the butterflies were listening.
I shook my head. “The angel eavesdrops,” I told her. I had never walked on eggshells for anyone. I wasn’t going to start now. This was bullshit.
She nodded slowly. “I see.”
“Great. Then why are you here?” I asked.
“You’re looking for the entrance to Hell?” We nodded. “My sources say there are maps here. Very particular maps.”
“Ley lines?” Baker asked.
“Oui.”
“They aren’t here anymore, but we can get them. Can you read them?”
“I believe so.”
Baker fished a scrap of paper off the floor. “We’ll get them. Meet us here in an hour.” He scrawled an address on the paper and handed it to her.
Outside, I elbowed Baker. “What makes you think she isn’t going to double cross us?”
“If you don’t want to give up Thomas, Sybil’s our solution. Besides Holden trusted her enough to go to her.”
“Holden can read the maps. If they’re the key, he’ll figure it out.”
“He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, kitten. Aphrodite in there does.”
Aphrodite my ass. “Why would Holden bring her in?”
