But although the Guardians and vampires at SI were fascinating, she couldn’t bear to allow them to bombard her. Not anymore. It was all too painful.
From the first day, she’d sensed a tension hanging over the warehouse, related to the Guardians’ missing leader, Michael. They’d been focused, determined. Fear and anxiety lay beneath that determination, but it hadn’t been overwhelming.
Then, three weeks after Ash had arrived at the warehouse, she’d been training with the novices in the gymnasium when a thin, spidery woman had stumbled through the Gate in the hallway—the portal that led to Caelum, but that Ash couldn’t cross through or even sense. Bleeding from her head, the woman had fallen to the floor, her black dress billowing around her.
She’d looked at them, clearly dazed. “The whole of the Boreas shore has just crumbled into the sea. How very odd.”
Her words had sent the novices swarming through the Gate to see. Ash had been left to help the Guardian—Alice—to her feet, and to make certain that she made her way to the main offices without tumbling over.
Since then, reports of falling spires and collapsing arches had been delivered to SI with increasing regularity, and the Guardians’ growing terror and desperation pressed like a knife against Ash’s tongue. She couldn’t feel the desperation herself, but she understood theirs. Two enormous paintings of the realm hung in Lilith’s office, an unimaginably beautiful city of sparkling marble domes and columned temples, set against the bluest sky Ash had ever seen. She also understood that their horror didn’t just stem from the shattering of that beautiful realm, but that the destruction was connected to Michael, too—who was being tortured in the frozen field.
That horrified Ash. And though she’d gladly have given Lilith and Hugh information when they asked how Lucifer had brought her out of the frozen field, she had nothing to tell them. Ash simply didn’t know.
Now, with her mind blocked, she waited for the various scans—temperature, fingerprints, retinal—to finish confirming her identity before forming her wings and heading toward the gym. The offices were busy, as they always were, with voices coming from every side. She’d learned to push them into the background, and typically only noticed when someone spoke her name.
Today, it wasn’t her name that caught her attention, but a thread through the jumble of noise that made her breath stop, her heart pound.
—St. Croix attempted to contact her yesterday—
That was Taylor’s voice, but it wasn’t coming from the direction of the offices. Ash turned down the hallway to the tech room, where Taylor and Lilith stood behind a Guardian sitting at a long table topped by monitors and keyboards. Sir Pup trotted ahead to meet Lilith, who greeted him with a smile and a scratch at his ears.
At the computer, Jake glanced over at Ash. “You came back just in time. Whenever Lilith stands this close to me, I get the feeling that she’s going to start using me as her dog and rub my head, instead.”
“You wish, pup.”
“No, I don’t. I really, really don’t.” He put a protective hand over his shaved hair and edged away. “Sir Pup would probably bite my face off out of jealousy.”
Ash thought the laughing chuff from the hellhound sounded like agreement. Taylor’s lips curved faintly in response, but not enough that Ash considered it a smile. Of late, everything about the woman seemed faint, and though Ash couldn’t see any measurable physical change, the impression of Taylor’s fragility increased with every report of a cracked column and crumbling dome, as if she stood on the verge of collapsing herself.
From what Ash knew of Taylor, it wouldn’t happen. The former detective would continue standing upright through sheer will—and chase down demons while doing it. Hopefully, that demon would soon be the one Ash most wanted to die.
“Was that Madelyn you were speaking about?” When all three lifted their brows in unison, Ash clarified, “I heard Taylor say that Nicholas tried to contact someone. Me? Because if he was, then that wasn’t Nicholas. He wouldn’t risk me like that. It would have to be Madelyn, fishing.”
“It was St. Croix,” Lilith said. “But he was trying to reach Rosalia.”
The disappointment that slid across her chest didn’t make sense. It was best that he didn’t try to contact her. Still, Ash wished to hear the sound of his voice, the rough start of his laugh.
It wasn’t all disappointment, though. There was also relief. “So that means you know where he is, and that he’s okay.”
“He’s all right,” Jake said. “And we’ve had a rough idea of his whereabouts since he left the cabin.”
“Oh. Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“I didn’t think anyone would know.”
But no, that wasn’t precisely it. After all, the Guardians had found them at the cabin by sending Sir Pup after Nicholas’s scent trail, all the way from Minnesota. Their computer techs had unearthed texts sent to unregistered phones. So, yes, if they wanted to, they could track Nicholas.
Yet now that she thought about it, everyone had carefully avoided any mention of Nicholas at all—so she’d equated their silence on the topic with a lack of information, a sign that they’d had nothing to give. They’d offered everything else so readily, so why not—
Oh. Oh. All right, so her emotions had taken a dive as soon as she’d walked away from Nicholas, and she’d been crying when she’d been teleported away from the cabin. There might have been a bucket of tears. It might have been ugly. But when had Ash given them the impression that she was fragile? Screw that.
“I’d rather you didn’t conceal anything about him from me. I’d much rather know, no matter what it is.” A thought occurred to her, seized her chest. Why had he needed Rosalia? Had they concealed the truth of that from her, too? “Is he hurt?”
“No. He’s been busy.” Amusement sharpened Lilith’s features. “Looking for Madelyn, of course, but where he doesn’t find her, he’s doing a bit of cleaning along the way.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that he’s been searching for Madelyn for a while,” Jake said, “and while he did that, he must have come across other demons. Taking them out would have been pretty damn risky—the wrong bit of evidence, he doesn’t hide a body well enough—so he likely chose to keep on looking for Madelyn rather than heading for jail. Now, he’s going back and essentially tagging them and bagging them.”
Oh, God. “Isn’t that still risky?”
“Not so much when he’s got Rosalia on speed dial. He shoots them full of hellhound venom, calls her up, she comes and takes care of it. Three that way so far, but this last one, he couldn’t get ahold of her. So he finished slaying the demon himself.”
“Beheading,” Lilith said. “Effective. Then he finally got in touch with Rosalia, and she came to take care of it.”
A first kill. Demon or not, that couldn’t be easy. “How was he? All right?”
Taylor turned her back to the table, sat lightly against the edge. “Do you really think he’d let Rosalia know if he wasn’t?”
“No.” Ash would bet that he’d been all Stone Cold St. Croix. Maybe his therapist would hear what his response had been. She doubted anyone else would. “Why is he doing it, do you think? Why not just Madelyn?”
Had it become more important to him, seeing all demons destroyed for what they’d done—to prevent it from happening again? Or was there another reason?
“Why has he become a demon-bagging Batman?” Jake asked. “Speaking as a guy, I can give you three reasons right now. One: your hair. Two: your lips. Three: your tit—”
Too fast even for Ash to track, Sir Pup’s right head shot out and his jaws snapped an inch from Jake’s face. The Guardian’s eyes widened. Smashing his lips together, he glanced at Lilith. A five-dollar bill appeared in his hand.
Lilith took the money with a smile. “I think what Jake means to say is that St. Croix’s obviously crazy about you. Hugh told me all that stuff St. Croix said at the
cabin about protecting you was true.”
Ash didn’t need Hugh to tell her that. “I know.”
“So, this is probably part of it. Maybe’s he’s practicing to take out Madelyn. Maybe he’s making certain that none of these demons come after you, like others have been going after Radha. Maybe he’s just making certain the other demons don’t kill Madelyn first—because if one did and we never found out about it, we’d never know whether we can let you go.”
“He’s a cold bastard—no offense, Ash.” Taylor threw her a quick look before focusing on Lilith again. “But like Joe, he’d be one hell of a useful human here at SI. You should think about recruiting him after we settle this thing with Madelyn.”
“I already plan to. Especially if we can get more out of him than his muscle—and in particular, his money. Which reminds me . . .” Lilith turned to Ash. “Jake tells me that you set up some kind of college investment fund for his granddaughter.”
“Great-granddaughter,” Jake corrected, grinning. “Because she’s pretty flippin’ great.”
“I did,” Ash said. “He brought in her piggy bank. I’ll make sure she can go to Harvard, if that’s what she wants—and her children, too.”
“So you’re good with money? I know Rachel was, but are you?”
“Yes. Probably better. Looking at her personal portfolio, it’s obvious that she had a few pet causes, and that she often invested for nostalgic reasons. I think she really liked Barbies and Disney, especially the fairy tale movies. And she invested in an abnormally high number of companies that had unicorns in their name or logo. I won’t have any of that baggage.”
Taylor pressed her fingers to her lips, shoulders shaking. After a moment, she looked up and wiped her eyes. “Maybe we can get Khavi to help out, too.”
Ash had heard that name before: a Guardian who could see into the future. She frowned. “What would be the fun in that?”
“With Khavi’s help, you’d be surprised. Really, you would,” Taylor said. “Not always in a good way.”
“With Khavi’s help, the quickest way to make a small fortune would be to start with a large one,” Lilith said, and looked at Ash. “Which is what I want from you. You’ll still be training, so it’d have to be during your off-hours, but I want Special Investigations monetarily self-sufficient within ten years. Right now, we’re operating on government cash, and so far, they’ve only asked for stupid little things, like telling us to ship a nosferatu to one of their research facilities rather than slaying it. Or asking us to register the names and addresses of vampires we know. I’ve been able to put them off or ignore them—and if the requests stem from concerns about public safety, I give them what I can. But at some point, there’s going to be something that we can’t put off and can’t ignore, and that won’t necessarily be about safety, but about forwarding some other agenda. When that day comes, we need to be able to disappear off their radar, but still be functional.”
Excitement had already begun sparking through Ash’s veins. Now that was one hell of a challenge. “All right. I need your current budget, so that I know what I’m aiming for.”
“You’ll have it,” Lilith said. “A few Guardians have pulled antiquities out of their collections, and those are going up for auction soon. We expect that you’ll be starting with four to five hundred million dollars.”
Ash suppressed her shudder of ecstasy. God. She was pretty sure she hadn’t had a shiver like that since Nicholas had licked her fangs. “I can work with that.”
“And spread it out. Don’t become some visible megalith. We just want to quietly turn an asston of money into a fuckload.”
She would. “Any limits? Anything I shouldn’t invest in?”
Lilith pursed her lips. After a few moments, she came up with, “Sex trafficking.”
Ash nodded. Yes, that would be bad.
“And I’ll have a few more to add to that list,” Taylor said dryly. Her focus shifted beyond Ash’s shoulder, and her gaze flattened. “Hey, there are you are now. Nice of you to finally show up.”
“Yes. Well, the sign said ‘all-you-can-eat,’ but they still kicked me out. So where else did I have to go?” The harmonious voice froze Ash’s heart for two beats—so much like Lucifer’s, like a Michael-possessed Taylor’s—but the fear slowly let her go as the woman continued, “Plus I need to show the markings on this vase to Alice, so I hoped she’d be here. So now I ask Jake: Where’s your wife?”
“Where’s my wife?” Jake’s jaw clenched. “Well, Khavi. Last week, she asked me to teleport all of her spiders back to Earth. You’ve seen some of these things, haven’t you? How big they are? And you know I have to touch something to teleport it, right? I had my shirt off and those things all over me, so that she could focus on the Archives.”
Taylor shuddered. “You really do love her.”
“You think?” Though Jake snapped the reply at her, he still focused on Khavi. “So if you’re looking for Alice, you’ll find her and about six novices in the library, cataloguing all of the Scrolls, and putting them into indestructible, floating containers, just in case the goddamn building falls around their heads and the whole place sinks.”
“Why is she doing that?”
Khavi sounded baffled. Not an emotion Ash expected to hear from someone who could see the future.
“Because we can’t carry the Scrolls through the Gates, and because no one but Michael can vanish them into their cache.”
“Taylor can.”
Taylor’s brows shot up. “I can?”
“Of course you can. They are written in his blood—and part of you is written in his blood, too. You can vanish the Scrolls or carry them through the Gates.”
Jake wasn’t mollified by that new info. “Oh, so now we know. Would have been nice earlier. Where the hell have you been the past two months?”
“Eating. Like I said.” The woman was frowning. With her black hair in neat rows of braids that marched back into an uncontrolled tangle and an air of leashed ferocity, Khavi was as slightly built as Taylor but possessed none of the other woman’s fragility. Her gaze touched Ash for a brief moment, before she asked, “So Caelum’s already falling apart? Where’s Lyta?”
“With Alice,” Jake told her. “Apparently chasing her own tail with one head, and slobbering all over the Scrolls with the others.”
“I’ll get her, then, and return shortly.”
“Oh, no. Nononono.” Suddenly tense, Lilith looked down at Sir Pup, who stood at attention, ears pricked. “You can’t bring her here. You can’t bring her to Earth. He’ll run around the world, sniffing her out.”
The hellhound’s big body quivered, and he emitted a chorus of pleading whines.
“You can’t,” Lilith told him. “You’ll kill her. You ate your way out of your mother, remember? So if it results in babies, you can’t do it.”
Sir Pup’s heads drooped. With a sympathetic sigh, Lilith crouched and began scratching his ears.
“I’ll find a place for her first, then—” Khavi broke off, glanced at Ash again. Her eyes widened. “You.”
“Whoa.” Jake sat forward, as if ready to teleport between them. “Oh, yeah. Khavi, here’s Ash. She’s a good demon.”
“And she can bring Michael out of the field,” Khavi said.
The warehouse seemed to fall silent. Then deafening again, as hearts began to pound—with Taylor the most silent and the loudest of them all.
Ash touched the tattoo on her face. “With this spell?”
That seemed rather careless of Lucifer, didn’t it?
“No.” Khavi began to circle her. “That is to open the Gate. The key to the frozen field is hidden somewhere else.”
Ash looked to Lilith. “Did you see it?”
“I might have. But reading the symbols and knowing how Lucifer makes spells of them are two completely different things. Sometimes it’s clear, like the spell on your face, where open and Gate overlap—yet even that spell is crowded with many more symbols that I can read
, but I have no idea why they are arranged as they are.”
“It is all arrangement and intention,” Khavi said. “And I need to see the symbols to know what he has done. Take off your clothes.”
Ash vanished them.
Jake choked. His face fiery, he edged toward the door. “Ah, okay. Alice probably wouldn’t care that you’re here, all naked like that. But I do. So I’ll see you.”
He disappeared. Nobody left in the room seemed to notice.
Khavi stopped circling, touched a series of symbols along Ash’s ribs. “Here. This is how he unlocked the field, brought you out of it in exchange for another.”
“He brought Rachel out,” Ash said. She had never gotten out. Not all of the way. A part of her memory still lay frozen there, tortured, and leaving her sick with fear at the mere mention of the field. “What kind of exchange?”
“Probably a traitor. Someone who’d broken his vow to follow Lucifer. There are many tortured in the Pit or in his throne tower. It would have been nothing to sacrifice one.” In a long, sweeping motion, Khavi’s cool fingers traced one of the vermillion tattoos. “But it is not just the symbols—the power of that spell is still in you, your release from the field written into your blood, embedded as deeply as your name. That is why we can take him out.”
Lips compressed, Taylor paced away from the desk, making a tight circle around Lilith and Sir Pup before turning back. “All right. You know, I want him out more than anyone, but we can’t forget that he’s down there for a reason: to strengthen the frozen field, so that Lucifer can’t just can’t slip through the barrier to the Chaos realm, and then open up a passage to Earth. Oh, and bring a few dragons with him. If we do this, we might as well just cast that spell on Ash’s face now. At least Lucifer won’t be bringing in dragons from Hell through a Gate.”
Demon Marked Page 25
