by Karen Lynch
I swallowed the bitterness that welled up inside me. My dad had loved Madeline until the day he died, had kept her picture on his dresser and his wedding ring in his nightstand. She hadn’t even bothered to tell her best friend his name.
Adele went to a sideboard and poured herself a glass of wine. She offered us a drink and we declined.
“Madeline was different after that, quieter. Sometimes she got a sad look in her eyes, but when I questioned her she never wanted to talk about it. I figured she still cared for her human ex-husband and I left it at that. She continued to travel and return here three or four times a year, until about ten years ago. I barely see her these days.”
“What did she tell you about the Master she was running from?” I asked.
Adele’s fingers tightened almost imperceptibly on her wine glass. “Madeline told me she’d had a run-in with a Master, but she didn’t say more than that.”
I turned to Orias. “Were you selling Madeline glamours to hide her from the vampires?”
He nodded arrogantly. “My glamours are the best – only Fae magic is better.”
Nikolas crossed his arms over his chest. “Our sources tell us that Madeline was on her way here to Los Angeles in December, around the time Sara paid you a visit.”
“She came to see me at my home that same night,” Adele admitted. “I told her there was a faerie youngling asking after her on behalf of her daughter, and she asked me if I was joking. She left the next morning, and I haven’t seen or heard from her since.”
She was lying. I was tempted to go over and force the truth out of her, but I stayed where I was. She and Orias thought I was full Mohiri and I wanted to keep it that way. There was no telling what either of them would do with the information if they discovered what I really was.
Adele set her glass down on the coffee table. “This has been lovely, but I’m afraid I must beg you to excuse me. I have a lot of work to do before the club opens in a few hours.”
She knew a lot more than she was saying, and I didn’t want to leave until I knew what it was. Before I could say anything, Nikolas thanked her for her help and steered me toward the door.
“What are you doing?” I protested after the door shut behind us. “She knows exactly where Madeline is.”
“Yes, and we are the last people she is going to tell. It’s clear she and Madeline are very close, and she is not going to betray her friend.”
“But she’s our only connection to Madeline.”
Nikolas gave me an infuriatingly enigmatic smile as we descended the stairs. “I didn’t say we were giving up.”
We emerged from the club into the cool evening air and I sighed in frustration. “Adele’s probably on the phone with Madeline right now, warning her about us.”
“And that is exactly what we want her to do,” Nikolas said as we approached one of the three SUVs sitting across the street. The other two held Elijah’s team, who were along as backup. Nikolas opened the SUV door for me. Once we were all inside he said, “Are we good, Chris?”
Chris pulled a smart phone from his pocket and turned it on. A smile spread across his face. “We’re in.”
I looked over his shoulder at the phone screen where some kind of app was displaying signal bars lit up in green. At the top right corner of the screen, a blue dot appeared followed by a red one. “What is that?”
“That is the signal from the transmitter I left in Adele’s office,” he answered smugly.
Jordan frowned. “Wait. Didn’t you guys say you couldn’t bug her place because she uses warlock magic to detect them and short them out?”
Nikolas started the vehicle. “These aren’t normal transmitters. Raj loaned us one of his prototypes to test out.” He looked at the phone in Chris’s hands. “So far it appears to be working.”
I leaned in closer to Chris. “How do you know?”
Chris pointed to the signal bars. “Green means the transmitter is working and the signal is good.”
“What do the dots mean?”
“That blue dot tells us that someone is using the land line in Adele’s office. The red dot means that my receiver is recording it.”
I sucked in a sharp breath. “Recording it?”
Chris grinned and waved the phone at me. “Why don’t we see who the lovely Adele was in such a hurry to call?”
Chapter 20
“You are a genius!” I threw my arms around the headrest to hug Chris.
“I have my moments.” He pressed a button on the phone and Adele’s voice came over the speaker.
“Orias, would you be a dear and make sure our Mohiri friends didn’t leave a little gift for me?”
“Your wards should take care of that.”
She chuckled softly. “It never hurts to be thorough.”
Static filled the line and I held my breath. A few seconds later it cleared and Orias’s voice came to us as clear as day. “If they did leave something, it’s no longer working.”
We heard the sound of a receiver lifting and someone dialing a number. “Darling, you will never believe who just left my office,” Adele gushed. “Nikolas Danshov. And your daughter.”
There was a short pause. “Yes, your daughter, Sara. Why did you never tell me you had a child?”
Another pause. “I understand wanting to leave the past behind, but you could have told your oldest friend. God knows we’ve shared everything else.”
Madeline said something I couldn’t hear and Adele laughed. “She doesn’t look like you, but she certainly has your fire. And she is an inquisitive little thing. She wanted to know all about my friendship with you.” Adele sighed. “I didn’t have much choice. She showed up with pictures of us from that summer in San Diego. I could hardly lie about them.” Pause. “Of course, I didn’t tell them about that. How can you even ask?”
Tell us about what? What did Adele know about Madeline that she wasn’t telling us?
“No, I think you should stay where you are for now. No one knows I own that place, and they’d never expect you to go there.”
“Where?” I wanted to yell at the phone.
“Orias’s glamour is good for another month at least. Here, talk to him yourself.”
There was a rustling sound and the warlock spoke. “Madeline, stop worrying. None but a faerie could see through my magic.”
Jordan and I exchanged glances, and she smirked at me.
“Haven’t my glamours kept you hidden all these years?” He listened to something she said, and I wished we could hear her. “As I’ve told you many times, no one’s magic is strong enough to undo that. I’m the strongest warlock I know, and I’ve been trying for years. No, I’m not giving up. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything.”
There were more background noises and the sound of a door closing. Adele spoke again. “Stop worrying, darling. Orias and I have your back as always. Now I have to go and open the club. I’ll catch up with you in a few days. Night.”
Adele hung up the phone and there was a minute of silence before she sighed heavily. She picked up the phone again and dialed. “Roc, make sure we have enough Glaen in stock. We almost ran out last night and the faeries won’t drink anything else.”
When she started to talk about liquor inventory, Chris turned off the recording and looked at Nikolas. “What do you think?”
Nikolas put the SUV in drive and pulled away from the club. “I think we need to take a closer look into Adele’s real estate holdings.”
I chewed my lip as I replayed Adele’s conversation in my head. There had to be a clue there somewhere. Would it have killed her to say the name of the city at least? “Why would Adele say that no one would expect Madeline to be wherever she is? Is there a place Madeline would not want to go?”
“Wherever the Master is would be my first guess,” Jordan said.
Chris stuck the phone in his coat pocket. “Madeline wouldn’t be foolish enough to hide near the Master. She’s evaded him this long by being smarter than that.”
“She doesn’t want us to find her either, so maybe she’s hiding near one of our strongholds,” Jordan suggested. “Hell, maybe she’s in Boise.”
Nikolas nodded. “That is a possibility. We should narrow our search to places near our compounds; see if Adele has property in any of them.”
Chris pulled out a different cell phone and called Raoul. I half listened to his conversation because I was still going over what we’d heard. When Chris hung up, I took out my phone and called David. Jordan gave me a questioning look, and I held up a finger as David answered.
“Sara? Everything okay?”
“So far, so good.” We caught up for a minute before I got to the reason for my call. “Listen, how much did you and Kelvan dig up on Adele? Do you know if she owns any property outside of LA?”
“Yeah, we found a couple, actually.”
My pulse quickened. “Really? Where?”
“Let’s see.” He tapped his keyboard. “There are three that we know of. She owns a night club in New York, another one in San Diego, and a warehouse in Miami.”
“What about houses?”
“Yes, she has a large house in San Diego.”
I repeated what he’d told me to the others. “Anything else?”
“No, that’s it. Why the sudden interest in her holdings?”
“We think Madeline is hiding out in one of Adele’s places, and it’s a property no one knows about.”
David sighed. “That doesn’t give us much to go on.”
“Would it help if I said I have absolute faith in your abilities?”
This time he laughed. “I work for peanuts and flattery. Let me check with Kelvan and call you back.”
“Okay. Talk to you soon.”
I hung up and told them what David was doing. We had two very resourceful groups searching for Madeline, and I allowed myself to hope that one of them would turn up a solid lead. My loyalty was with the Mohiri, but if I’d had to bet, I would have put my money on David and Kelvan.
Chris tapped his fingers on the center console. “Something else I’d like to know is what Orias has been trying to undo for years for Madeline.”
“I’d like to know that myself,” Nikolas replied. “Orias is a powerful warlock. If he can’t undo something, it must be very strong magic.” He looked at me. “By the way, what was he talking about back there when he said you put a gag on him? And what did you do to his demon?”
“Oh, that.” I gnawed on my lower lip. “I might have made him take a binding oath that prevented him from telling anyone we were there.”
“What kind of oath?”
“You ever hear of the White Oath?”
Nikolas and Chris shook their heads, and I explained the oath to them. “It’s something I learned from Remy.”
Both of them looked at me with new respect, and Nikolas said, “And what did you do to upset his demon?”
Jordan scoffed. “That bastard had the rest of us tied up, so Sara took his demon hostage until he let us go.”
Chris turned in his seat. “You took an upper demon hostage? This I have to hear.”
“It wasn’t like I actually saw the demon. Orias already had it trapped in a lamp. I took the lamp and shook it up a little. Demons really don’t like Fae magic.”
“No, I would guess not.” Nikolas kept his eyes on the road, so it was hard to tell what he was thinking.
“How do you fit a demon in a lamp anyway?” Jordan asked. It was something I had wondered myself.
“It takes a spell cast by a very crafty and powerful warlock,” Nikolas told her.
“If Madeline is using his glamours, how was Sara’s friend David able to get that picture of her in Vancouver?” Chris said almost to himself.
“Orias told us his spells only last a month because they are so strong. Maybe we were able to catch her as one was wearing off.” That also explained how Madeline kept disappearing and they’d lose her trail for a few weeks.
Chris nodded. “Makes sense. Let’s hope she is between glamours when we find her or we’ll never be able to recognize her.”
“No problem. I can see through his magic.”
Nikolas looked over his shoulder at me. “You can?”
“I can see through all glamours. I thought you knew that.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “You forgot to share that piece of information with us.”
Oops.
Jordan leaned forward. “She saw right through the glamour Orias had on his place in New Mexico. The rest of us couldn’t see a thing, and we thought she was nuts when she said there was a building there.”
Nikolas shook his head. “Sara, when we get home, we’re going to have a long talk about all the things you’ve forgotten to mention.”
Jordan and I shared a look. She smirked at me and mouthed the words pillow talk, which made us both laugh. Up front I heard Chris say, “Don’t look at me. You’re the one who told Tristan it was okay for the two of them to stay together.”
We were still laughing when my phone rang.
“Tell me you have something.”
“It might not be anything,” David replied. “Kelvan’s doing some more digging.”
“And it might be everything.” I looked at the others who were watching me. “David, can I put you on speaker? It’s just the four of us here.”
He hesitated for a moment. “Uh, okay. So here is what we found. In the last year, Adele has flown to Las Vegas twice by private charter. She stayed there for three days on one trip and five on another.”
“Maybe she just likes to gamble,” Jordan said.
“Maybe,” he agreed. “What I do know is she didn’t stay at any of the big hotels during her trips, and she doesn’t strike me as a person who would charter a jet only to stay in a cheap hotel.”
“She’s not.” I tried to contain my excitement. “Where do you think she stayed?”
“We think she has a residence there. If anyone can find it, Kelvan can. You can’t hide much from him once he’s on your trail.”
Chris spoke up. “How long do you think it will take?”
David let out a whoop. “I think this is a new record for him.”
I could barely breathe. “He found something?”
David spent the next ten seconds typing before he answered. “Adele owns a luxury condo in Las Vegas, overlooking the Strip. She bought it three years ago under the name Elizabeth Cummings.”
“What makes you think this woman and Adele are the same person?” Nikolas asked.
“Elizabeth Cummings is one of the identities Adele used before she took her current one. Succubi have to create a new identity every few decades, especially if they are a businesswoman like Adele. She went by Elizabeth Cummings back in the forties.”
“How the hell did you find that?” Chris cut in. “Even our records on her don’t go back that far.”
David chuckled. “Yours don’t, but demons have their own archives.”
“You guys are scary sometimes, you know that?” I said. “I’m really glad you’re on my side.”
I could tell David was grinning when he replied. “We decided it was more fun to use our power for good instead of evil.”
Jordan was practically jumping on her seat. “So, are we going to Vegas?”
Nikolas and Chris looked at each other, and some kind of silent communication passed between them. Chris shrugged and Nikolas sighed. He adjusted the rearview mirror so he could see me.
“Sara, if I asked you to stay at the faerie’s place while we check this out, would you?”
He could not be serious. “What do you think?”
He scowled at me, and I smiled back. At least I was honest about it.
“Chris, call and get the jet to pick us up at LAX,” Nikolas said in a not-so-happy voice.
“We could drive to Vegas before the jet gets here.” Now that we had a solid lead on Madeline, I didn’t want to sit around waiting.
“There is no way I am taking you to Las Vegas wit
hout an easy means of escape.” Nikolas’s tone brooked no argument. But he wasn’t beating his chest and ordering me to stay behind, which was progress for us.
David’s voice came out of my phone speaker. “Now that you have that settled, I’ll be off. I’ll text you the address for the condo.”
“Thanks, David. You’re the best.”
“Yeah, I hear that a lot,” he joked before he said goodbye and hung up.
* * *
Four hours later, we flew into Las Vegas, and my mouth fell open when I got my first look at the sea of lights below us. “It’s so bright.”
Nikolas leaned in to peer out the window over my shoulder, and a little tremor ran through me. Ever since last night at the gazebo, butterflies had taken up residence in my stomach. All it took was the slightest touch from him to set them off.
“And dangerous,” he said in a low voice, his warm breath caressing my cheek. “I must be out of my mind for agreeing to bring you here.”
I turned my face and met his eyes inches from mine. On impulse, I gave him a quick kiss on the lips. “Thank you for not trying to make me stay behind.”
His eyes turned that smoky gray color that always melted my insides. At least I wasn’t the only one affected by our nearness.
“Okay, you lovebirds, no making out in the jet,” Jordan said from across the aisle. “We’ve got work to do and all you two can do is make eyes at each other.”
The pilot came over the intercom and told us to prepare for landing. My stomach dipped, but it had nothing to do with Nikolas or the plane’s descent. After months of searching and almost giving up hope, I was finally going to confront Madeline and get the answers I was looking for. After she told us who the Master was, the Council would send their forces after him. That vampire had wrought so much pain and grief in my life, and a part of me wanted to be there to see his fall. But a larger part of me had no wish to ever lay eyes on him. I just wanted him gone from our lives forever.
We landed at McCarran Airport and taxied up to a private hangar where several large SUVs waited for us. When we disembarked, a black Mohiri male with a shaved head came over to greet us. His name was Geoffrey and his unit was one of two that had been here for the past year. Apparently, there was enough vampire activity in Vegas to warrant a larger Mohiri presence. Maybe that was what Adele had meant when she said no one would expect Madeleine to be there.
