[M__M 03] Misery Loves Company

by Tracey Martin

  “Well, if you told me the circumstances instead of telling me they don’t matter…”

  “But they don’t. That me is dead. The decision would tell you nothing about me now.”

  I frowned, confusion turning to irritation. “It would tell a lot, I think. It would tell me whether you chose to prey on innocent people.”

  “This again? Jess.” He sighed. “Better to be a predator than prey, don’t you think?”

  “So you did choose this?”

  “Is that what I said? What I’m saying is—it doesn’t matter. We’re all predators, every single one of us.” He pointed at my plate with his fork. “Something has to die in order for you to eat. At least as a so-called pred, nobody has to die to feed me. People even enjoy doing it. You were, just a couple minutes ago, if you’ll recall.”

  I said nothing, but suddenly my scallops didn’t smell so appealing. I pushed them around on my plate before deciding on more wine.

  Lucen’s hand landed on mine. “You hate what was done to you because you didn’t have a choice. I get it. But don’t keep hating yourself for what you are.”

  “That’s not it.” I wasn’t sure what was it, but I didn’t think I hated myself.

  “Then don’t hate me for what I am, or because I can’t give you what you want. Whatever I decided or didn’t decide, it was a long time before I met you. And if I could turn off being a satyr to make you happy, I would. But I can’t stop needing to feed any more than you can.”

  I wrapped my fingers around his. “I believe you.”

  “Good.” He gave my hand a squeeze. “Then can we go back to talking about happier things? I’ll tell you my favorite movies and discuss politics, and we can make fun of the other diners, and I’ll whisper the twenty different ways I intend to serve you up as dessert later.”

  “Do any involve whipped cream?”

  “They do if you want them to, although I love the taste of your skin just the way it is.”

  I smiled, concentrating on his touch, letting it burn through the last of my annoyance. “Then tell me about that. Tell me more about this goal of yours.”

  “Happily.” He released my hand, but before he could get out another word, my phone rang.

  It was too loud to ignore, so I got it out, intending to shut it off, but I hesitated when I saw the caller ID. “Shit. It’s Bridget.”

  I shouldn’t have picked up. But like when you’re about to do something stupid, such as touch a hot oven, I watched my finger swipe the screen and answer the call even as I willed it not to.

  Date, interrupted. Since I’d gone ahead and done it, I put the phone to my ear. “Hi, Bridget.”

  “I hope I’m not interrupting you. I thought I’d leave a message if you were busy.”

  I mentally kicked myself. “It’s fine. I’ve got a minute.”

  Across the table Lucen’s expression silently contradicted my words. I mouthed Sorry for all the good it did.

  “Good,” Bridget said. “I wanted to give you a heads-up and let you know I need you in by ten tomorrow morning for a meeting. This case got bigger. There’s lots to discuss.”

  “Bigger? What happened?”

  Lucen looked up sharply.

  “I don’t have all the information yet, but Marshall does not appear to be our only victim. Not any longer. I just got back from meeting with another family who experienced the same thing you did on Sunday. We’ve got a goblin, or possibly goblins, going crazy out there.”

  I swore and reached for my wine. “So this might not have anything to do with Eric trying to break his contract after all?”

  “Too early to say, but it’s definitely something we need to investigate. Hold on.” In the background, I could hear someone talking to Bridget, but not their words. Then she was back. “We’ve got another call. Be here at ten tomorrow.”

  I didn’t want to ask, yet I knew I should. “Do you need me now?”

  Lucen dropped his fork with a clatter. Even if Bridget said yes, his face said no way in hell was he letting me go.

  Luckily, Bridget declined. “No, we should handle this part. I’ll fill you in tomorrow. I’ve got to go.” Then she hung up.

  So did I, and I stuck my phone away, feeling guiltier than before for leaving early, and helpless too. On one hand, another victim might provide another lead. On the other, it might distract the Gryphons from finding the goblin who’d ruined Eric. Especially if, as Bridget suggested, they were two different goblins.

  I stabbed a scallop, also feeling guilty for not enjoying my expensive dinner as well as it deserved.

  “What was that about?” Lucen asked.

  “That case I’ve been helping out with.” I chewed slowly, trying to remember how much I’d told Lucen about it. “It blew up.”

  “Blew up how?”

  The scallop landed in my stomach like lead. “How much did I tell you?”

  “That Steph’s cousin was magically attacked. You were rather vague on the details.”

  “Right.” Shoving my plate away, I gave Lucen a rundown of the specifics. “Bridget was calling because someone else got drained the same way. Maybe more than one someone. Something came up that caused her to hang up on me quickly.”

  I expected Lucen to shrug it off or tell me to leave it alone and let the goblins police themselves, but instead he stared thoughtfully at his empty wineglass. “Two people? That’s odd, and yet I’d bet it’s two different goblins. It’s unlikely whoever did that to Steph’s cousin could have used up his soul so quickly. Then again, it seems odd that Gunthra would have two goblins acting so strangely. And so nasty.”

  Lucen’s voice was laced with disapproval, and it surprised me. “What do you mean by nasty?”

  “Just that. I know you think all of us are cruel, horrible people—”

  “I do not.”

  “Fine, most of us.” I started to protest, but it was true enough, and I wanted him to get out his information so I let it go. “But this is not good. It’s not the sort of behavior any decent person would approve of.”

  “Any decent pred, you mean?”

  He frowned. Lucen hated being called a pred as much as any pred did, but it was an easy way to distinguish them from humans. Nonhuman was too broad a term because it could include the magi, as well. “Yes, any decent pred does not approve of creating ghouls for obvious reasons. And for sucking someone dry like that—the magic that would have to go in to storing that soul, it wouldn’t be pretty.”

  “You’re speaking in riddles to those of us uneducated in the ways of magic. From everything I’ve seen, magic is never pretty. What’s so much worse about this?”

  “Degrees of badness. I can’t give you the specifics because I don’t know myself exactly how you’d make a container to store that much power. I’m only basing this on what I’ve heard.”

  “And what you’ve heard is?”

  Lucen ran his hands through his hair. “You know that to create a spell requires using ingredients that relate to the spell’s purpose.”

  “Like how a love charm requires pieces of satyr?”

  “Exactly. A charmed container, like the sort you’d need to store a human soul, would therefore require some human magic. And like how the soul would have to be taken by force, the spell ingredients would have to be too.”

  And spell ingredients were rarely pretty. They weren’t things that would be easy to take by force or otherwise. “But something taken by force could be anything, maybe nothing more than snipping off a strand of a Gryphon’s hair?” I doubted it, but I made the suggestion anyway for my own sake.

  “Could be. Or it could require Gryphon blood. I don’t know. I can just tell you, based on how magic works, that something like that must be involved. Chances are, this isn’t the sort of spell that most people are going to be able to work on their own. It would be extremely tri
cky.”

  The scent of my remaining dinner was making me sick. I had to get out of this restaurant soon before the seafood aromas made me hurl. But Lucen had just given me an idea too. “If it’s tricky and something most people couldn’t do on their own, they’d have to buy it. Right?”

  “I’d think, although this isn’t the sort of thing your average charm maker is going to sell. Like I said, it’s a nasty business in many ways. We’re not all evil. A decent charm maker wouldn’t sell such a thing because it has no good purpose.”

  Maybe, maybe not. One reason humans risked bargaining with preds for magic was because they wanted items that were illegal or simply too immoral for the magi to create. Usually that meant curses, but evil objects made from evilly obtained ingredients didn’t sound all that different to me.

  Lucen’s eyes bore into me though, so I refrained from asking if he could think of any likely suspects. Odds were, he couldn’t unless they were a satyr, and I’d get nowhere with him if that were the case. And if it were the case, Lucen would bring up the matter with Dezzi, and they’d talk to the satyr in question themselves. The only way I’d find out about it is if I were a member of Dezzi’s council.

  Which you could be. I pushed the thought away.

  “I think I’m ready to go,” I told Lucen.

  “I hope this hasn’t ruined your appetite for dessert, little siren.”

  “Honestly, I’m feeling a bit queasy at the moment, but maybe some fresh air and a car ride home will help.”

  “They’d better, or I’m going to have even more reasons to hate the Gryphons. They ruin dates too.”

  He was smiling, so I neglected to mention that it wasn’t the Gryphons going around sucking people’s souls dry. Then again, it wasn’t a satyr either.

  Probably.

  Lucen was right—not all preds were the same, and it wasn’t fair to hate him for what he was. I just wished he’d had been more forthcoming about what he was before he was a satyr.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Three more,” Bridget said the next day.

  We were gathered in the meeting room. Besides Brian and Wes, seven other Gryphons spread out around the table. Two had been part of the group that went to Gunthra’s with us. The other five were unfamiliar, and no one introduced me to them.

  That was fine. The people here weren’t important. The three Bridget had just mentioned however—that was a different story. Three more people turned into ghouls? In one night? Shit.

  Bridget directed a laser pointer at the photos hanging on the wall. Eric’s photo was there, along with more unfamiliar faces. “They all were drained within hours of each other.” She named off the victims as well as their locations.

  “And those might not be the only ones,” Brian interjected. “We know about their attacks because other people were with them when it happened and called us. The police could have an epidemic of missing person reports coming in soon as addicts who were alone at the time of the attack never arrive home, or never show up to work, or what have you. We won’t know for a while. We might never know.”

  One of the unfamiliar Gryphons cleared her throat. “Of the three we do know about, what about their masters? Any way to find out if it was the same goblin?”

  Bridget took a sip from her tea before responding. “We’re not that lucky. Their masters weren’t even all goblins. We haven’t figured out who Chen’s master was yet, but O’Connor and Klees were vanity addicts.” She circled the two photographs in the center with her laser.

  Great. Vanity addicts—sylphs. I felt the collective groan of unhappiness that went around the table.

  “The good news,” Bridget continued, ignoring the muttering and swearing, “is that the sylphs involved were less devious than the goblins. They left us a paper trail. We have the contracts and we know who they are.”

  Brian pushed back his chair and stood. “Which means you’re all going to pay them visits today. Agent Nelson will lead one group, Agent Riley will lead the second. Gear up and head out ASAP.”

  Someone flicked on the lights. Amid the squeaking chairs and jumble of voices, I snagged Bridget’s attention. “You want me to go too?”

  “Only if you want to be a part of it. It could be dangerous.”

  “I’m in.”

  “Good. Let’s get you a weapon.”

  I rubbed my hands together with fake glee. “Oh, I knew there was a reason I wanted to go.”

  Not ten minutes later we were suited up and ready to leave. For me, that meant putting on my Gryphon jacket and taking the knife Bridget offered. For the others, it meant adding charms to their uniforms, as well as swords.

  We left in four cars. Two for us and two for Riley’s team. Dumped in the backseat of one of them, I sat on my hands to keep from fidgeting. All the nervous energy my companions were attempting to hide from each other was impossible to hide from me. The citrusy, minty flavor of fear and anxiety was irritating.

  It was also seeping into me. I hadn’t had any qualms about coming along when Bridget asked, but as we pulled out of the Gryphon’s private lot, my mood shifted. I was fairly certain the sylphs hated me on general principle, yet they’d been keeping their distance because of what I’d done to the furies last month. But after this, they’d start hating me with good reasons and possibly stop with that distance-keeping business.

  I knew it was a bad idea to choose an apartment above a sylph’s barbershop.

  With my luck, one of the sylphs we were after was the barber. I’d checked the two names on Bridget’s list, but neither was familiar. My involvement in their arrests, though, would be recognized, and no doubt it would be spread throughout Shadowtown. I wondered what Dezzi would think of that.

  We arrived at our destination as I mused. Bridget parked behind the other SUV, along a mostly residential side street. I took a good look around as I got out. Narrow row houses fronted by tiny yet tidy yards slept in the pre-noon sun. Not a tacky piece of lawn furniture could be found, nor an untended flowerbed or any untrimmed foliage. I’d say it was the result of the very appearance-conscious sylphs, but all of Shadowtown was like this. The only aspect that could possibly be attributed to the sylphs in particular was the bright paint on the shutters and trim. That alone wasn’t enough to throw off the aura of darkness that pervaded Shadowtown and gave it its name, but it was more colorful than anything I was used to seeing.

  Bridget pointed out the house in question, and silently as the street, we split into groups. Two Gryphons crept over the grass, blades drawn, heading for a back door. I tailed behind Bridget and the fourth Gryphon to the front one. Standing several feet down the path so I wouldn’t get in the way, I searched the windows for any sign of movement. Not a drape fluttered nor a shadow moved.

  Bridget knocked twice, two hard thwaps in the stillness. I circled in place, checking for hints of life in the vicinity. Dreadfully early though it was for a pred, someone had to be up and watching us. Even now a sylph was likely to be on the phone, calling their Dom.

  I’d spun all the way around as Bridget knocked again. When nothing happened, she gave a signal to the other Gryphon to force the door open. Swallowing, I removed my hands from my pockets in case I needed them.

  He managed to get the door open quicker than I was anticipating, and the noise rattled me to my bones. Bridget and the Gryphon rushed inside the house. She had her sword drawn. He had a gun. I left my hand on the knife’s hilt and followed a few seconds later, not expecting I’d need it.

  Sure enough, I was right. Nobody was home. I heard the “all clear” signal being given as I entered. Lucen and the satyrs derided the sylphs as being the least intelligent pred race, but this one had the good sense to get the hell out of town after ripping off some poor addict’s soul.

  Of course, if the sylph had been more clever, he might have destroyed his addict’s copy of their contract first so we could
n’t have found him.

  I meandered through a living room so tastefully decorated and bland it could have served for a catalog shoot. Back through a stainless-steel kitchen, Bridget had thrown open a set of sliding doors to a tiny patio. As she checked in with the other team, I climbed the stairs to a balcony-style bedroom and listened in to the conversations below me.

  Up here there was evidence of hurried packing. Several drawers were partially open, and the bathroom had been cleaned out of the usual supplies like a toothbrush or shampoo.

  “Nothing, damn.” Bridget paced below me in the living room, talking to Riley. “Make a thorough search of the place. If there’s any hint of where they got to, we need to find it.”

  She assigned us the same task, but a couple hours later, we emerged from the house with empty hands, no new leads and still four souls in need of recovery.

  Even Bridget was cursing as we left. “Let’s question Assym,” she said as we got in the SUV. “I want to hear his excuses. Jess, you in?”

  Assym was the sylph’s Dom. He had white hair, a pointed nose and a wicked stiletto that he’d once almost slit my throat with. Although he couldn’t touch my soul anymore, I’d just as soon not be in the same room as him.

  “Actually, I think I want to follow up on a conversation I had with a goblin the other day.”

  Bridget was pleased to hear I was working my Shadowtown “contacts”, so I opted not to enlighten her any further about my plan. She offered to drop me off, and I gave her the address of my apartment building.

  I leaned forward in the car so I could talk to her. “I didn’t get a chance to mention it earlier, but I also had a conversation with a satyr last night that could be worth checking out. He was telling me about the containers that would be required for storing all that stolen power.”

  Bridget wasn’t driving, so she twisted around in her seat. “What about them?”

  “He thought the magic involved in creating them would be difficult, and the preds who are using them would probably need to buy them from a master charm maker.”

  “Good to know. We’ll follow up on that. He didn’t say who made them, did he?”