by Jayne Faith
“He’s an extreme Level III,” I supplied.
“Yeah, I’d say so,” Johnny said.
Sometimes I forgot that Johnny didn’t have any magical aptitude, which meant he wouldn’t have sensed my partner’s abilities. Johnny was so immersed in the supernatural world through his job—and his passion for using technology to “quantify magic,” as he put it—he was practically an honorary supernatural.
I glanced at Stein and then looked harder. His eyes were intent on Johnny, and the look in them was, well . . . appreciative. I filed that away for the moment.
“What about the dog?” I asked.
Johnny pointed to the screen, tracing a purple aura that shimmered around the dog. “See that? Indicates hellspawn.” He snapped a still of the image. The screen froze for a second and then returned to the live picture. “I’ll do some more analysis, but I’d say my original guess was right.”
We all peered at the dog, who lay with his head resting on his paws.
“Is he dangerous?” I asked Johnny.
I watched him scroll down his tablet and then back up before he met my gaze. “If he were driven by hellhound instincts, he definitely wouldn’t be hanging out on your couch like this. He’d be aggressive, calling to his demon master, and herding us. I’d say you’re safe.”
A shiver spread through me as I recalled the baying of hellhounds. I’d never witnessed it personally, but I’d seen footage. Even on video, the sound was bone chilling and terrifying.
Stein reached over and scratched the back of the dog’s neck. His tail thumped, and he rolled over to his side in a submissive posture.
“You know what that means, don’t you?” Stein asked.
I looked at him out of the corners of my eyes. “What?”
A faint smile played on Stein’s face. “He’s yours. Or more properly, you’re his.”
I glanced at Johnny, wondering if he had any idea what Stein meant.
“Hellhounds, full-blooded ones, imprint on their demon masters,” Stein said. “A dog will follow only his demon master, and the hound is loyal to the death.”
“Nah.” I shook my head. I eyed the dog as he shifted again and began licking the back of his paw. The faint maroon glint in his eyes shifted to orange, yellow, and then faded. “That’s just urban legend. Besides, Johnny said he doesn’t have hellhound instincts.”
“I think Damien’s probably right,” Johnny said, looking down at his data again.
Stein had stood and moved over to us to get a closer look at Johnny’s tablet. My partner’s eyes shone like he was a little kid and Johnny held the biggest candy bar Stein had ever seen.
I planted my hands on my hips and looked back and forth between the two guys, suddenly getting the sense that they were ganging up on me and enjoying it way too much.
“Seriously, Ella, I think this dog has claimed you,” Johnny said. “And I don’t think you’re going to hear from an owner. This hella-doodle is sticking around.”
I snorted. Hella-doodle. The next wave in designer dog breeds.
For a moment I allowed myself to consider that the guys were right, that the dog had imprinted on me—but why? Hellhounds were not of this world. Perhaps he recognized that I’d recently spent a bit of time elsewhere, too. People always said that dogs could sense things.
I looked at the dog, who still sat on the sofa. For a moment I could have sworn I saw the flicker of orange flames deep in his eyes. His lips stretched wide, and he panted a little. Then he turned in a couple of tight circles and curled up against one corner of the sofa. He seemed like a good dog. Would it be so bad if he stayed?
I let my arms drop. “I guess we’ll just have to see. How about we focus on Roxanne now?”
“Right,” Johnny said. He took a breath, but then hesitated, glancing at Stein.
“It’s okay,” I said with a small sigh. “He was over there with me today, and we got into trouble with the Sergeant. Stein’s part of this now, so whatever you have to say about the case, he can hear it too.”
Johnny nodded and then pulled out the old blue leather ottoman from its place in front of the matching chair and sat down. I sat between Stein and the hellhound-doodle on the sofa.
While we waited for Johnny to tap and swipe at his screen, I filled Stein in.
“Johnny detected three life forms in the statue,” I said. “Human, presumably Roxanne’s brother, plus a demon and a gargoyle.”
Surprise registered on Stein’s face. When Johnny set his tablet on the coffee table, it displayed a chart with a bunch of numbers. Stein reached down to unzip his backpack, which sat at his feet, and pulled out his notebook. He flipped to a blank page and started scribbling some numbers.
“I ran a deeper analysis on the scan I took.” Johnny pointed at a column of numbers on the tablet, but before I could discern what they meant, he swiped to a different screen.
I gave up on trying to decipher the numbers and peered at Johnny. “What does it say?”
“Looks like the demon possessed both of the other life forms.” Stein said. He glanced at Johnny for confirmation.
Johnny nodded once. “Yep.”
Stein was clearly struggling to wrap his brain around the news. “So, the scenario with the statue . . . a demon possessed Roxanne’s brother, and what, then the gargoyle ate him and also became possessed?”
Johnny tilted his head. “Maybe.”
“The statue is stamped Gregori property,” Stein said. “Gregori must have captured some gargoyles in the wild and then started breeding them.”
“Poor things.” Johnny shook his head. “Gargoyles are shy creatures and have never been known to harm humans unless people are threatening their nests. They need space, large habitats to hunt and roost.”
“Is it even legal to keep them in captivity?” I asked.
“Probably not, but compared to the other things that go on behind the walls of Gregori Industries, this is nothing,” Johnny said. He grimaced. “Lucky for the gargoyles that Phillip Zarella isn’t around anymore.”
The mention of the madman sent a chill winding up my spine. As long as I could remember, there’d been rumors that it was actually Zarella who’d caused the Rip. He was one of the most brilliant scientists of the 21st century, but his experiments on supernaturals—including docile vampires—made the Nazis look like choirboys. If Gregori Industries thumbed its nose at the law, Zarella put it on a chopping block and gleefully sawed off its head. Zarella and Gregori had never been officially linked, but the madman’s lab had been located near the original Gregori headquarters in New York. To add to his creep factor, he was one of the world’s few necromancers—able to take command of and steer death-touched creatures, including vampires, zombies, and demons.
Zarella had finally been tried and convicted for his long list of atrocities when I was a teenager and had sat in prison while his team of lawyers went through appeals of his death sentence. Until last year, when in an escape attempt he’d been gunned down.
“Lucky for the world in general that the bastard is dead,” I said.
We had a moment of silent mutual agreement.
“Gregori has literally stamped its ownership on the creature,” Stein said. “Knowing Jacob Gregori, he’s probably found a way to patent his gargoyles.”
His mention of Jacob reminded me of my earlier resolution to make one last-ditch effort on behalf of Roxanne. My stomach flipped over with a nauseating lurch. I rubbed my damp palms across the tops of my thighs.
Johnny pulled a hand down the side of his face and then slumped against the back of the sofa. “What the hell are we going to do?”
“I, uh . . .” I cleared my throat and started again. “I’m going to, uh, try to talk to Jacob Gregori.”
Johnny squinted at me. “Huh? That’s a nice idea, but you can’t exactly go knock on his door. Even if you could get in touch with him, he’s refused meetings with the president.”
“I sort of . . . know him.” Ugh, I so did not want to be having
this conversation.
“Ella,” Johnny said my name slowly, the pitch of his voice rising at the end, as if he’d just caught me stealing a dollar from his wallet. “What do you mean, you know Jacob Gregori?”
I closed my eyes and let out a long breath. When I raised my eyelids, I looked at Johnny and Stein in turn. “What I’m about to tell you cannot ever leave this room. I’m absolutely dead serious.”
“Okay.” Johnny was looking at me with concern, his brows raised. “You have my word.”
“Mine, too,” Stein said.
I moistened my dry lips. “I have personal ties to Jacob Gregori. Trust me, he’ll take my call.”
Chapter 8
FOR SEVERAL SECONDS the only sound in the room was the faint whuff of the dog’s measured breathing.
Johnny’s mouth had dropped open. Stein’s face was frozen in a wide-eyed stare.
Johnny snapped out of it first, snorting a laugh. “You’re joking. You’re trying to get back at us for telling you you’re stuck with the hellhound-doodle. Which, by the way, I think you’ll find out is the truth.”
I gave him a hard glare. “Do I look like I’m kidding?”
Discomfort and dread did a nauseating tango in my stomach. Terrence and Deb were the only people who knew my secret: Jacob Gregori was my uncle, my father’s brother. My mother and father never married. They met in New York, and I believed they had a relationship for many years. She loved him, she’d always been open with me about that, but considering the controversy around the Gregori name, my mother thought it best not to saddle me with it. She legally changed her own last name to Grey right before I was born, so that’s the one I was given. I think Grey was a kind of homage to my father, a name that was similar to Gregori but generic enough that no one would make the connection.
Johnny’s deep brown eyes were wide and intent on me. He was curious, but I also read concern on his face. “Are you going to elaborate?” he asked softly.
I filled my lungs and held the breath for a moment before letting it out. I appreciated that Johnny and Stein both wanted to help free Roxanne’s brother, but I didn’t feel the need to reveal the entire truth.
“No,” I said. “Sorry.”
“What year were you born?” Johnny asked suddenly.
I hesitated, looking at him. He was trying to deduce my connection with Jacob. He might have already guessed the truth, or something close to it, but I didn’t owe him or anyone else confirmation.
“Two thousand five,” I said. “Four years after the Rip.”
He seemed to consider that for a moment. “Ella, it just doesn’t seem like a good idea.”
“I was just about to say the same thing,” Stein chimed in.
I knew what the guys were thinking. At the time of the Rip, Gregori Industries had been headquartered in the New York area. The company was on the forefront of an emerging area of technology that sat at the cross-section of disciplines like genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and the magic arts, among others. The general public didn’t know about the magic part of Gregori’s dabblings, of course. Not until after the Rip. But even before the Rip, many people protested Gregori’s work. Back then the laws didn’t even acknowledge technologies that utilized magic, let alone try to regulate them, and Gregori had free license to do whatever it pleased. After the Rip, anti-Gregori sentiments exploded and grew into a worldwide movement. New laws were passed, but it was too late—the company had already somehow managed to establish itself in a way that it was practically untouchable.
It was never proved in court that Gregori Industries was responsible for opening the tear between this world and the hellish one of the demons and the outbreak of the VAMP2 and NECR2 viruses, but Gregori Industries was like the O.J. Simpson of the industrial world—everyone knew they did it, but somehow the corporation escaped responsibility.
The thing was, even if Gregori Industries was responsible for the Rip, it was also responsible for the technologies that helped to clean up the aftermath. If the corporation was indeed a villain in human history, it had also positioned itself as a necessary evil.
When I was seven, my mother moved us out here to Boise to be close to her mother. In an odd twist, Gregori Industries followed not long after, moving their headquarters from New York to its campus just outside Boise city limits, a piece of land the company had purchased decades before. I didn’t believe in coincidences, and always suspected that before his death my father had a hand in the decision purchase of the Gregori property in Idaho. Maybe even because of my mother’s ties to the area. The move was obviously part of a larger rebranding plan, an attempt to try to reform the company’s image. Thanks to developments like the vampire implant and a handful of later inventions, it partially worked.
By the time Mom relocated us to Boise, my father was dead, claimed in an accident during an exploratory research trip with Jacob somewhere in Europe. I had a few wispy memories of my father from when Mom and I still lived back East. But after so many years, I couldn’t say if the hazy images were real or partial inventions of a child’s wishful imagination.
“Are you on good terms with Jacob?” Johnny asked.
I wrinkled my nose. “Eh, I’d say neutral terms.”
In truth, Jacob had tried a handful of times to get in touch when I was a kid, but my mother blocked it. She didn’t trust him, and she blamed him for my father’s death. After Mom died he tried again, but Grandma Barbara had the same opinion about him Mom did.
Actually, the last time he’d reached out was shortly after Grandma Barbara died. Before Evan disappeared. He’d offered help for Evan, which I’d declined, believing I had things under control. In retrospect, I realized that Evan wouldn’t have accepted it anyway. He carried Mom’s suspicion of Jacob, as well as the soul-deep anger at having been abandoned by our father. He knew that Dad had died in an accident, but that didn’t keep Evan from having some serious abandonment issues. The familiar cramping ache of guilt around my heart began to form, but before its darkness could consume me, I firmly pushed away thoughts of that time.
I dropped my palms onto the tops of my thighs with a soft whap. “Anyway, enough about me. Let’s go check on Roxanne. I’m sure she could use some cheering up.” I stood.
The guys followed my lead, seeming to get my cue that I was done answering questions on the topic of my link to Jacob Gregori. I sent Roxanne a text, telling her we were heading over.
The dog jumped up, too, and followed us to the front door. He looked up at me expectantly.
“Stay here, boy, I’ll be back soon,” I said.
The dog whined and started circling me, bumping Stein and Johnny aside as he moved.
“You’ll be fine.” I tried to speak in a soothing tone. It didn’t work. The dog added some yips to the whining.
I grabbed and held his collar, trying to get him to settle. “You guys go ahead, I’ll be right out.”
I exited and closed the door behind me, and the yips turned to barks and scratching noises against the door.
“Shit,” I muttered. I couldn’t leave him if he was going to bark up a storm and shred the door with his nails. He’d seemed like such a well-behaved dog before, but maybe I’d made my assessment too quickly
I looked at Stein and Johnny, who were waiting on the sidewalk. I gave them a wide-eyed exaggerated shrug.
“Bring him,” Johnny said. “Kids like dogs, right?”
Grumbling, I opened the door and went back in. The dog bounded around me in delight as I went to the kitchen to grab the leash from the counter. I hooked it to his collar. “Okay, you win.”
I got him situated in the back of my truck while Stein and Johnny started their cars and pulled away.
At Crystal Ball Lane, I took hold of the dog’s leash and gave him a stern look. “Best behavior, big guy,” I said. “Don’t scare the girl.”
We went up to Roxanne’s apartment, where she’d already let in Stein and Johnny.
Her face brightened at the sight of
the dog, and she came over to pet him. I looked across at Johnny, and he gave me a little told-you-so grin.
“What’s his name?” Roxanne looked up at me.
“Uh . . . Loki,” I said. “After the Norse god of fire and mischief.”
Stein gave an appreciative laugh.
“Hi, Loki. Are you still working?” she asked, glancing at my uniform. “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“Nah, I’m off duty now, I just didn’t have time to change.” I looked toward the window. “No more demons or visitors or other . . . strange stuff?”
She straightened and shook her head.
“Everything went okay last night, and your neighbor kept you company?”
“Yeah.” She looked so forlorn, I felt like a total ass even thinking about leaving her alone here again.
“How about if you pack some things and come with us back to my place?” I said, managing a smile. I didn’t want to host a party, and I hated houseguests, but I forced myself to keep saying words. “We’ll order pizza, and then you can stay the night with me.”
The corners of her mouth started to lift, but then a conflicted look took over. “But what if Nathan comes home and I’m not here?”
“Let’s leave him a note in a place he’ll see it, and also let your neighbor know where you’ll be.”
“Ummm . . . okay.” She gave me a wavering smile.
Roxanne went into her room to get her things together.
I gave the guys a rueful look. “You up for pizza and beer?” I asked with zero enthusiasm.
“Gee, how could I turn down such an enticing invitation,” Johnny said sarcastically, and Stein snorted a laugh, but Johnny’s eyes sparked with warmth.
“Sorry.” I wrinkled my nose. “The thought of so many people in my place makes me twitchy.”
“I’ll pick up pizza and meet you back there,” Stein volunteered.
I gave him a look that was equal parts relief and gratitude. “Awesome, thank you.”
He left, and I turned to Johnny. “Would you mind waiting for her and bringing her back with you? I need to run a quick errand. It will make her week to get to ride alone with you,” I added in a whisper.
