I didn’t head to Buckingham Palace. Rodriguez wouldn’t hesitate to arrest me if I showed up there, especially after what happened last night. I needed to catch Arthur in one of his private residences. From the past I knew that Kensington Palace was one of the places where he had a bit of freedom, so I was pretty sure he would’ve gone there today.
The rain was pouring down from the sky heavily, and I got soaked by the time I got to my destination. I didn’t want to try my chances with the guards and I had a feeling that after everything that happened Arthur would refuse to see me.
So far I had burned my bridges with all the men that showed me any affection. Last night I ran away from Zach. It was pathetic but necessary. Zach needed to understand that we didn’t have any future together. I was broken and he deserved to experience real love.
Arthur’s private residence was riddled with security, so I went around the building and used my demonic abilities to get inside. I knew the ins and out of its surroundings; the protocol hadn’t changed much since the last time I had been here. My clothes were soaked by the time I got into the gardens. One of the guards spotted me, and I tampered with his head. I hated myself for it, but I couldn’t afford to get caught.
It took me a while to find the way inside. I used the staff entrance at the back. Once I started walking through the rooms, I nearly walked into one full of maids. They were having a meeting in a room that led to the other side of the prince’s residence. I was forced to hide in an old massive wardrobe until they were done. I retraced my steps when I heard one of the maids still standing outside. She was talking to one of the guards.
“And that mistress? He had been talking about this other woman in the papers? Maybe she broke his heart and that’s why he is so depressed,” she contemplated, leaning over the pillar on the second floor.
“There has never been a mistress. I once heard a rumour that he was having an affair with his head of security. I don’t remember her name now. Anyhow … she was too tough for him,” the guard pointed out. I wanted to roll my eyes, expecting that some staff knew about what went on in the palace.
I waited until they disappeared in one of the rooms. When the stairs were clear I ran to the second floor, thinking about our intense moments together. That was almost two years ago.
The prince had the whole second floor at his disposal. I figured that some things changed when he got engaged to Natalie. I stood outside his room for a few seconds. Strong nostalgic emotions began sailing through me. We had so many plans, things that we wanted to do together. Nowadays we were like two strangers that passed each other on the streets. Both wounded and lost.
I took a deep breath and opened the door.
“Arthur? Are you there?” I asked, peering inside his open plan living room. Everything looked the same, all the furniture, pictures on the wall and his clothes that lay around the sofa. I inhaled his cologne, closing my eyes for a brief moment and picturing myself in his arms. I remembered standing in the exact same room two years ago when he revealed his true feelings for the first time since I started working for him.
The prince wasn’t home, so I started checking all the rooms just to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything. When I opened the door to his office and glanced at the wall by his desk, the blood rushed to my ears.
Arthur had created a board with pieces of paper, letters pinned with various colours, shape and seizes. There were several pictures of me pinned down in the centre of the board with Summer’s name attached in the middle.
It was obvious that Arthur hadn’t given up and he was still looking for her. The board represented his pain. Something about this whole thing was very unsettling. I felt like I had destroyed whatever was left between us.
Arthur had listed a number of possible locations all around the board. He wasn’t stupid; we both knew that he couldn’t go public with this. At least not straight away. He had the list of adoption agencies, and some other unknown names and addresses. I stared at it for at least ten minutes before the guilt pricked under my skin. Raw emotions circulated and I wished that I had done more than just lie to him.
My eyes filled with tears against the violent tide of pain that I was experiencing in that moment. Okay, I had sacrificed myself, but I’d never considered his feelings.
Seconds passed, maybe minutes. I had no idea how long I stood there, crying over something that I would never be able to fix, when I heard the steps. Panicking, I glanced around, looking for a place to hide. I came here to tell Arthur that I was sorry, but now after seeing what was going on in his head I couldn’t go through with it.
There was a small library that Arthur had rarely used, so I hid in there, trying to understand what the hell was wrong with me. I sensed him even before he walked into the room. The door was not completely closed, leaving a small slit which allowed me to see what was going on in the office. My chest cracked open. Even Zachary couldn’t shut down these emotions that I experienced when Arthur was near me.
“Arthur, you know that what you’re asking me to do is almost impossible.”
Natalie was there with him and she had her palm on his arm. Of course, he was heartbroken and she had always been there for him.
“I don’t know what else to do. I’m the father. Do you realise how much it hurts knowing that she never even considered telling me?”
He told her—Arthur had told Natalie that I gave birth to our child. Suddenly I felt lightheaded and sick. Through that small opening I could clearly see her face. She wasn’t smiling; she felt genuinely sorry for him. Well, I couldn’t be angry. After all, she was in love with him.
“She still has feelings for you, but I think she is only trying to protect you. Imagine what would happen if your grandmother found out,” Natalie said.
“Fuck her, this is my life and it’s now ruined!” Arthur shouted, then stormed out of the room. Natalie sighed and looked after him. The emotions on her face were staggering. That girl loved him so much, unconditionally, even when it turned out that he had a child with some other random woman.
This wasn’t something that she was supposed to just accept. I didn’t have to worry about her spilling my dirty secret. Natalie had a pure soul. Arthur must have gone out, wanting to be away from her. She stared at the board for a bit longer, with the saddest expression on her face that I’d ever seen. Her emotions were hitting me hard, stabbing me in the gut. I hated myself, hated that I caused so much pain to other people.
When she finally left I was drained. It took me a while to crawl out of the hiding spot. By the time I sneaked back downstairs, I knew that I had to share with Arthur the whole truth.
I owed him at least that much. He needed to understand what I was, even if that was against faction order or rules. Either way, I wasn’t going to stay on this earth for long and Arthur deserved to know the truth.
Chapter 14
“Then, broadening out, we found an empty road. A thousand paces bore us on (and more), each of us silent, each contemplative.” ―Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
My phone was buzzing in my pocket as I walked back to Ricky’s apartment in the middle of the afternoon. I wanted to tell Arthur everything, but I had no idea where to start.
“Gee, Arthur, I meant to tell you that I was half demon, but you know this never came up. Oh and our daughter has been taken by a psychopathic bitch that wants to slice her body in order to heal herself.”
Yeah right, he would most probably throw me straight into a mental hospital if I came up with lines like that. I needed to find some kind of balance between the truth and the lies that I had been filling him with in the past few months. Arthur was a good man, and he cared about people, like his tragically dead mother. Our relationship had never gotten off to a good start, but that was not the point. What mattered the most was the life of our daughter.
I put my hoody up and carried on walking through the gloomy streets, pushing myself to stay positive.
Somewhere outside the underground station I stopp
ed and looked up the sky, watching the dark clouds gathering over the city. I let the rain slap down on my face. Guilt returned, building inside my chest again, thumping in my ears me like a loud orchestra.
The moment I got to the tube station I felt worse. Somewhere in Chelsea, I walked inside a convenience store and bought a bottle of vodka. Paul had more liquid magic in his basement, but after what happened in the pub yesterday, I couldn’t bring myself to go to him again.
There was a reason he kept giving me this stuff. That way he knew that I would always come back for more. I didn’t want to believe that Paul could take advantage of my addiction, but in some ways he controlled me. After so many years he was still just Paul, the owner of my local pub. The fact that he’d been a messenger sent by God from heaven blew me away.
Getting high on liquid magic was out of the question; besides, I was so broken magic couldn’t numb my pain this time. I squeezed the bottle of vodka right down near my chest when I entered the lift, getting back to Ricky’s place.
My partner in crime would have known what to do. He would have given me great advice, but the truth was that he wasn’t here. He and my daughter both needed me and I felt like I was going backwards, not making any progress.
I didn’t get to his apartment; instead I rode on to the top floor. There I sneaked through the maintenance door to the rooftop that overlooked the city. As soon as my lungs inhaled the fresh air, I felt slightly better.
It was still raining heavily, but I was hurting so it didn’t matter. That guilt wouldn’t go away, couldn’t be washed away by the cold rain. I hadn’t gotten drunk for a very long time and now I just had to numb myself for at least few hours. Morpheus would show up later, and we would be talking about the task, but now I couldn’t stand the burning guilt that was spreading through me like a virus.
I unscrewed the top and poured the fiery liquid into my throat. It tasted disgusting, but I kept going. Any other person would probably think that I had lost it, sitting on the rooftop and getting drunk in the pouring rain, but it was what I needed.
Minutes went by, maybe even hours—I didn’t care about the time. I was so shattered that I finally hit the rock bottom of my misery, and nothing else mattered. Summer, my daughter. She was somewhere out there and I didn’t know how to help her.
Numbness didn’t come like I expected. I was drunk, completely zoned off but still felt everything I had been feeling before. I smashed the bottle and picked up a piece of glass from the floor. I stared at it for ages, not able figure out it if I needed one or two pieces to end this all.
I’d thought that I would never love this child, but I was wrong. She was perfect and I loved her more than I could imagine.
“How long are you planning to do this to yourself?” asked the voice nearby. I lifted my eyes, seeing Morpheus. He was standing close, watching as the sun was slowly disappearing behind the horizon. I hadn’t even realised that it stopped raining sometime ago. Morpheus looked good, wearing an elegant black suit. His dark eyes were shimmering with red sparks, or my mind let me see things that weren’t there.
“Go away, you can’t help me. Everything is falling apart,” I mumbled, sounding and feeling pathetic. Even when I finished with Arthur I was functioning. Right now the numbness was taking my oxygen, my last hope of being me.
“You’re a daughter of a demon and you want to give up so easily?”
“Arthur hates me, and that bitch has my daughter. I have failed,” I said, trying to get up, but I was going to be sick at any second. His statement about my father wasn’t going to lift me up. He abandoned me, left me alone, so why would I care?
Morpheus shook his head, and for a brief moment I thought that I saw warmth and understanding in his always concealed expression, but then it was gone. A second later he took a few steps backwards and I hoped that he would leave. Even he thought that I didn’t deserve any sympathy.
The sunset was beautiful: red and orange flames appeared in the sky, masking the grey landscape. I didn’t want to get up and deal with being an adult. A second later Morpheus created a large bucket of water right in front of me. He grabbed my neck and pushed me right into it. My voice died when my head dived deep into ice-cold water. I tried to pull away but he was holding me tightly, slowly drowning me. I had no energy to fight back, to stop this nightmare. My mind shut down, and I waited for darkness to summon me forever. Seconds rolled in, and I felt that my heartbeat was slowing down.
When moments later I inhaled the oxygen I realised that he pulled me away. Taking long pulls of air reminded me that I had reasons to be alive. Giving up wasn’t an option, but I nearly had tossed it all away.
“Are you feeling sober now?” Morpheus asked, standing next to me. The water was dripping down my face, and my teeth were chattering. I noticed a bucket right in front of me, filled with yellow water. It took me a long moment to realise that I wasn’t intoxicated anymore. There was probably a zero trace of alcohol in my body.
“Ronan used a spell to make me lucid. You didn’t have to soak me like that,” I snapped, feeling annoyed that I couldn’t even get drunk these days without being judged. “And what’s with the suit? Are you going to a party or something?”
“No, Maxine, we are going to a party in hell together. I thought that you were strong enough to deal with Alexis, but it looks like I made a mistake,” he said, and I exhaled sharply, forcing myself not to lose my temper. Of course I was strong enough to deal with evil, but that bitch had an advantage over me. Someone else was helping her.
There was something familiar in the way he carried himself, in the way he stared into the distance. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that I was seeing in him. The bottom line was that he worked for the dark lord himself and he was going to take away my soul.
“Party in hell? This is a joke, right?” I asked. “This isn’t the deal that I agreed to. I don’t have time for a party. I have to rescue Summer before Alexis murders her.”
“That’s why I’m here. Our deal is still on. We both need to head down to hell. Alexis’s sister Bianca will be at the party. Alexis herself is trying to recreate a complex ritual, but she isn’t capable of producing so much power. Besides, she is running out of time too. Her soul is falling apart quicker than she anticipated,” he said, penetrating me with those grey eyes. I rubbed the back of my neck, knowing that I had no other lead. Zachary and Emma weren’t going to help me with this.
“She has Summer, and I know she won’t hesitate to kill her just to save herself.”
“The Warlock put a sleeping spell on the child. Alexis is useless and she is seeking help,” Morpheus insisted. I had no idea how he knew about Matilda’s spell. I was the only one that had seen her vision.
“And Paul? What does he have to do with you and those wings? I need answers. I feel like everyone has been lying to me in the past decade.” I threw it out there, pissed off that Paul had managed to hide such an important fact from me for so long.
“He was a messenger, he broke his code and then went to work for Berith. Paul never had a great track record, so he stayed on earth. Trust me, running that pub suits him. There is nothing else to this story.”
I shook my head, and forced myself not to roll my eyes. Yeah, right. Paul was God’s messenger, and I just had to accept it. On top of that, Morpheus expected me to just leave with him.
“I’m not sure if this party is such a good idea,” I said. “Maybe there is another way?”
“Alexis trusts her sister. Besides, Bianca is a big deal in hell. She’s looking for followers,” Morpheus said, lost in his own thoughts. What he said made sense, but I thought it was a long way. I wanted to find Alexis before it was too late. Morpheus walked back with me to Ricky’s apartment. My phone kept buzzing. I didn’t have to look at my phone to figure out that it was Zach or Emma. It’d been over twenty-four hours and I hadn’t updated them on what was happening.
In the living room, on the sofa I found a package with my name on it. Morpheus was s
taring at Ricky’s photographs, humming under his breath. There was something unsettling about the fact that he was helping me. In the end he was here to bring me down to his master. For a moment I had forgotten that Mum knew him too. In that memory from the past she loved him. He owed me the real truth.
“It’s a dress that I want you to wear, Maxine. Bianca has particular taste. You need to be convincing,” he said, so I tore the package. Well, the dress was beautiful, crimson red, silky and long. I had so many questions about my past. Mum had died and I had no other family. Morpheus knew who my father was, but he insisted on keeping me in the dark.
“And how are you proposing that we get there?” I asked.
“It’s simple. You’re going to open the gates to hell,” he advised and I laughed.
“Me? You must realise that I’m just a mongrel … I can’t just open the gates of hell. Only Watchers are authorised to do it,” I pointed out, feeling uneasy about this whole thing.
“You did it when you met Emma, by saving her from two convicts.”
My jaw dropped. He knew about that, but how?
The hearing was done and dusted. Michaelstone wouldn’t have revealed such a guff.
“I didn’t open any gates. Someone else must have done it. My demonic abilities aren’t that advanced,” I argued, knowing that it was a lie. I had produced magic that other demons could only dream of.
“You opened the gates with your demonic energy, Maxine, so don’t deny it. The anger, exhaustion, sadness. All those emotions contributed. The gates listen to you because you summoned them.”
Ha, he sounded like he believed that the gates of hell were a living being. This was ridiculous, and I refused to believe that my abilities were somehow special. I took the package and walked into to Ricky’s spare bedroom. I massaged my temple thinking rationally about Morpheus’s opposition. Party in hell, it was a risk, but I was willing to do anything in order to find Summer. I put on the dress and high heels that came with it. When I stood in front of the mirror I was amazed with myself. Everything matched perfectly and for the first time in a while I looked decent.
Doomed Cases Series Box Set Page 56
