Fischer
Laxmi leaned in the door of the office, staring at me. Again.
“What?”
“How are you?”
I answered her with a chipper voice, “Fucked in the head. How are you?”
“Well, my fucked-in-the-head-ness happened a few months ago at this point, so I’m doing pretty good. Made a pork roast in the Instant Pot last night. Pretty good. Had to vanquish a cerdil in Cooper River Park last night, but managed to rescue a cat.”
I stared at her, wordlessly.
She shrugged and moved to sit in a chair. “You asked.”
“Because killing demons is just par for the course right now.”
Shaking her head. “I guess it is. There’s a leak somewhere, and these bastards are getting in. Ellie’s really not old enough to help, so it’s me and Miriam. I wish we did have more help, but we can’t find any.”
I stared at her. “Are you the only versilange?”
“I don’t like to think we are,” she said. “But I’m so much younger than Miriam and I’m completely new to all this.”
“Tell me about it.”
Laxmi snorted, then had the good grace to look mortified that she had. “Doctor Skillman, if what you saw in the vision was true, you’re a metric fuck ton of millennia older than I am.”
“Nope. I’m thirty-four.”
“Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.”
I ran a hand down my face. We’d all been trying to absorb what had been thrust into our brains that day. It was a lot, and both Lincoln and I had been mulling it over.
And that the very same time, I realized how much goddamn sense it made. Why the three of us felt like there should be more to us, why we could see sins. Why Miriam and Laxmi had felt a pull toward each other, and to Wren.
“It’s not denial, Laxi. It’s a coping mechanism. There’s a difference, and I need to learn to cope with this. So, for now, I’m thirty-four, and in a polyamorous relationship with my thirty-two year old girlfriend and her thirty-five year old boyfriend. Don’t you think that’s enough to deal with for now?”
She chuckled. “That is quite a handful for three immortals in denial. Toot toot.”
“Fuck you, Doctor Rana.”
We both broke down in laughter. I needed that. Even though I was good at not thinking about this whole After and immortality thing, it was hard to ignore it completely. Denial, like Laxmi said. We’d tried talking about it, but it just became so bizarre we had to drop it.
And the only thing that we knew was what the sword had told us. None of us remembered anything at all about it. It really could have been a mass hallucination for the three of us.
But the twins remembered the dark man, and Lincoln was still in a cast. It had to be real. At least, partly anyway.
The phone on my desk buzzed and I quickly punched the connect button. “Yes?”
“There’s a Mrs. Domingues here to see you. She said it’s urgent.”
“Paige?” I asked. “Never mind, let her in. She knows where my office is.”
The door banged open seconds after I disconnected. Paige stood there looking like a wild woman. She was normally prim and neat, so this was…out of character.
“I found him,” she breathed. “Ifoundhim Ifoundhim.”
Laxmi and I stood.
“What?” she snapped.
“Benjamin Sheehan. I found him. I know who has him. He was bought at the auction before Mister Passyunk was killed. Mister Sansom has him. He bought him from Frankford.”
“Sansom. Do we know who Sansom is yet?” Laxmi asked.
I held up my hand. “Wait. Paige, how did you find this out? Do we need to put you in hiding?”
She shook her head. “I’ve had my suspicions about a few of the approved families that I was being sent from DFS. The kids were having a lot of adjustment issues to them. I went back and looked through a metric ton of notes I had on them, and I realized that four of these families had been hosting children who were lost by the DFS. Meaning that they don’t appear in the databases after a certain amount of time.
“So, I’ve been tracing these families, trying to find the kids, and almost uniformly, these families haven’t ever even heard of the kids. I worked on getting to other kids who had been placed with the missing ones, and they don’t remember them. That’s not likely. Most foster kids remember all the kids they stay with in houses because they are either friend or enemy.
“So, I went to the house with the most recent disappeared foster kid—and by the way, this is the shit I’m up against all the time with the foster agencies. All the time. They lose kids all the fucking time.” Paige shook her head. “Anyway, I went to the last address and the people living there didn’t have a foster kid at all. So I had Lily do a general background check and boink! Up pops a complaint to the Postmaster General—someone had been stealing their mail.
“I had a friend come with me and Lily to the house, and lo and behold, there was a splice in the phone wires. Someone was using the physical location of the house to mask their actual location. We followed the wire back and down the street to another house.
“Holy shit, that house…it was pure squalor. There were rats and roaches and it was just disgusting. But there was a pile of fresh clean mail inside the door that had the address up the street on it. Most of it was crap. Lily had to go, she got called out on something, but Marco and I stayed and picked through it. And there was a fucking catalog.”
My jaw unhinged. “One of the auction catalogs!”
She nodded. “I got Detective Haden to send someone to pick it up, but not before I put on my latex gloves to screen shot every page.”
She held out her phone, and swiped it open. There, on the screen was a picture of Benjamin Sheehan in the cotton briefs and T-shirt that all of the children had been cataloged in.
And right next to that, in Sharpie, were the words SANSOM and $75K, transfer to Frnkfd. Benjamin Sheehan had been sold to Mister Frankford for $75,000.
Paige flicked the image and there were two postal cancelations on there. “One for the day before and one for the day after,” she explained. “The whole pile was in descending chronological order.”
“This was the auction the week before the twins,” I said. “Didn’t Lincoln go to that one?”
“He went to an auction,” Paige said. “Not this auction. The one he was at was up in Reading. This one was down in Dover.”
“They have more than one…” Laxmi breathed. “Holy shit. How big is this Pipeline?”
“They were clearing inventory,” I said. “That’s what Lincoln mentioned before he went all catatonic. They were having more auctions than normal because after Passyunk died, they lost their way and lost direction. God, how many double auctions did they pull?”
“They could still be pulling them for all we know.” Paige sighed. “I was happy to find this, but the implications of what’s gone on is shocking. More kids we have to find.”
“You realize that you probably found the auction master’s copy, right?” Laxmi said.
“I…” Her eyebrows went up. “I didn’t. But you’re right. If it had names and numbers in it probably was.” The full implication of what she found shot through her. “Holy crap. Could we actually think about taking this down?”
“Curtail, maybe,” I answered. “I don’t think that we can ever take it down fully, but we should be able to kill a lot of it off.” I rubbed a hand over my face. “We have to figure out who Sansom is and where he’s got the kid. That’s going to be the hard part. It’s not like they wear badges.”
“Lincoln might recognize Sansom,” Laxmi said. “He’s been to a few auctions.”
“But how do we start with that? These guys are usually wealthy and won’t have criminal records, and won’t have mug shots.”
It was quiet a moment. Lincoln was our connection. He’d seen Sansom, but he didn’t know him. He knew Race and Arch, and a few of the minor players.
“What if we t
alked to Doctor Mederos?” Paige asked.
“What would Sebastian have to do with this?”
She pursed her lips. “Fuck.”
“Paige!” Laxmi gasped. The woman never cursed to that degree.
“Okay, it violates HIPAA rules, and forget that I brought it up,” she said.
“Nope.” I shook my head. “Nope. If it means the potential to rescue my daughter’s brother, then I don’t care.” I walked over to the door and locked it, leaning against it. “Talk.”
Paige was quiet, pursing her lips and clearly having a hard time with sharing what she knew. Even with the door closed and it being just the three of us. “Haden is the only one who knows this, aside from me, because we rescued the kid from the trafficker on the tip. Mederos has a patient who is a member of the Pipeline.”
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
“Mederos has lost his freaking mind over this, from what Haden said,” Paige continued. “He’s been a long-time patient and something made the doctor look at this guy differently after he lost his wife and kids. Mederos realized he’s a sociopath and has been playing him for a long time. Haden hasn’t arrested him because he’s our connection. He knows who Juniata is.”
“Oh, hell,” Laxmi whispered.
“We have to let Mederos work on this,” Paige said. “This patient needs Sebastian to brag to. The more they brag, the more ammunition we have. Especially now that he knows the patient is bragging and lying, and is an actual sociopath. It won’t take long. Haden confided a few things in me—” She held up her hand. “Please don’t ask. Please. I’ve said too much already, even to other doctors. But there’s a plan in place and we have to trust the two of them. We will be able to get a lot of these kids out of the Pipeline, as long as we let it be for now.”
She looked between us. “I just wanted to give you the news that we found out who has Ben. And I am not going to fail again to get that child back, to you, and to Ellie.”
Wren
“You’re still holding it wrong.” Lily sighed.
“I’m holding it exactly the way you showed me,” I grumbled.
“Yes, except you seem to think you’re Hercules and you’re choking a snake to death in your crib. Relax your hand. There’s no way to make the motion smooth if you’re gripping it like that.”
“I’ve already dropped the damn thing four times!” I barked, holding up the sword.
“Mom, relax,” Ellie said, walking over. She grabbed the crossguard on the handle, and shook the sword hard. It almost slipped out of my hand again. “No, relax your grip. The tighter you hold it, the easier it is to knock out of your hand. Okay, do you remember doing rubber pencil in school?”
“Rubber pencil?”
“Yeah, you’d hold the pencil between your thumb and your index finger and shake it, and it would look like the pencil was made of rubber.”
“Crap, kids still do that?” Miriam asked.
“Duh, we’re kids?” Ellie answered.
“Okay, so yes, I remember that.”
“Same idea,” Lily said. “You’re still holding it firmly, but loose enough you can make it move.”
My hand was reluctant to let a deadly sword that could actually kill my daughter and my two best friends stay loose in my grip, but I could understand what they were saying. I forced my hand to relax just a bit, and realized how cramped my fingers were.
“See?” Ellie said. “Too tight.”
“Okay, Master Jedi… You’ve had a sword for how many weeks now?”
Ellie shook her head and walked back from where I was standing and facing Laxmi again. I shook my head. “Okay, come—ah!”
Laxmi didn’t wait for me to be ready. She attacked with the flameblade as fast as she could, driving directly at my heart. I smacked the blade to my left with my own sword and spun into the cross of the swords to hold her there. By the time I finished my spin in, she had her sword free from the cross and was bringing it back up. I turned my wrist, brought the sword up across my chest and caught the blade on mine. I pushed her back with the sword, and dropped into a lunge position with my feet as I brought the sword up again for a defensive high parry.
I waited for her there.
Laxmi smiled and held her sword at waist height. She leapt forward and I dropped my blade on hers and drove the point into the dirt, the handle popping out of her hand. The momentum had me spinning away to my right, pulling myself up straight, and the sword loose at my side.
“Yes!” Lily crowed, clapping. “Rubber pencil! Well done!”
I relaxed as Laxmi pulled her sword out of the ground. “I did not expect you to disarm me. That was awesome. Well done.”
Miriam gave me a golf clap, then hopped off the picnic table. “Laxmi, we have to go.”
“Yup,” she agreed, and spun the sword into the non-existence where it stayed most of the time. “Fundraiser for…where this time?”
“Deborah Heart,” Miriam said. “Let’s go. Showering and such still needs to happen.”
“Thank you!” I called as Miri and Laxmi walked away from us into the parking lot. They waved and disappeared behind some trees.
Lily had her head cocked as I spun the sword and shoved it up into the scabbard she’d secured on my back. It snapped in with a faint click, but I pulled the strap over the hilt and snapped that into place. Just to be safe.
Didn’t want some demon forged sword falling out as I walked around.
“What?” I asked when I realized she was still staring at me.
“It’s just…a relief to see you with that sword again.”
I pursed my lips. “Lily, I wish I remembered any of this, but all I know is what I saw.”
“We’ll get there.” She grinned. “I know we will.”
Letting the silence that settled be for a few minutes, the three of us started to walk through the park. The area we used for practice was a small open field in Tyler State Park, ringed by tall bushes and off the regular trails. People thought we were cosplay fans just getting in some practice if they saw us at all—not that those were two real swords that could kill them instantly with the wrong blow. Not even necessarily what was normally considered a fatal blow.
This sword was scary as fuck.
But Lily and Lucifer—holy shit the devil—had asked someone to make it for me. So, I felt a certain possessiveness toward it. And I did want to learn how to use it, especially since I had the feeling that we were going to be dealing with more and more of these rejects from Hell.
I finally blurted out the words that had been circling my brain for days, “I want to meet him.”
Lily tripped and Ellie barely caught her from smashing her face into the ground. She stared at me with wide eyes and swallowed. “What?”
“I want to meet him. I want to meet my brother.”
Ellie’s eyes were wide and surprised as well. “Dude, you just asked to meet Satan.”
“That’s not his name,” Lily said quietly. “Satan is someone else. Sataniel. Fucking troublemaker. Your uncle’s name is Lucifer.”
“Uncle,” Ellie choked on the word. “Goddamn this is so out of my league.”
“I want to meet him.” I wasn’t going to be deterred.
Lily let out a breath. “I don’t know if that’s possible yet. There’s…complications. Problems. And it’s not that he doesn’t want to see you, Wren. Believe me—I had to back him down when I found you. But you said it yourself, you don’t remember him. You only know him from the visions.”
“Couldn’t meeting him jog my memory?”
“I don’t know what’s going to jog your memory yet, quilikrozh. I’m trying to figure that out.”
Ellie gasped. “Little Star,” she whispered.
“Her brother’s nickname for her. And since I adored—adore her the same, it was easy to pick it up. I also had to literally bite my tongue a few times when I was talking to you. To not tell you any of this.”
I kicked a rock. “But why? Why couldn’t you tell me? Wh
y is everything so complicated?”
Lily shook her head. “It’s complicated and that’s not me copping out on explaining. It’s actually complicated and it’s dangerous for you to know now. Hence the sword. I’m keeping you in the dark on purpose. We don’t want it known that you’ve been found, but you can’t keep Lucifer’s twin sister a secret for long.” She smiled. “Especially since I took the sword back. Heph has been holding onto it for me, for you.”
“Hephaestus is really your brother?”
“Yes, my older brother. Much older.”
“Is he really…”
“Lame? Yes. He refused to make an anjir blade for someone, and they slashed him with a flameblade he’d grabbed from the nearby working table. Cut the back of his knee, severed two major tendons. He’s never been able to regain all the strength in that leg.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Ellie mumbled. “Is Zeus a real thing?”
“Zeus, Jupiter, El, they’re all the same,” Lily said.
Ellie huffed out a breath. “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
Lily patted her shoulder. “You’re in for it, kiddo. This is all part of your history too.”
“Ugh. All I want is to go to the dance and figure out if I like guys or girls more,” she said.
“You can like both.” I winked. “I know I do, despite the two guys in my bed.”
“We are not even going to talk about the shit that goes down in your bed, Mom.” She laughed. “Noise canceling headphones are a gift from God.”
“Buy a pair for the twins.” Ellie laughed, and Lily chuckled. I pointed at Lily. “You’re not off the hook. I want to see my brother.”
She nodded. “I’ll see what I can do about it. Soon, but be patient. There’s a lot going on, and I really am a detective in the Philadelphia police department.”
Ellie clung to me, staring at the picture on the table. A photocopy of the catalog that Paige had uncovered.
Finally, she nodded. “It’s Ben. It’s my baby brother.” She snapped her head up and stared at Lily and Paige. “Where is he? Can we get him?”
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