A Legacy of Daemons

by Camille Bacon-Smith

  “Yes.” Parmatus sighed, and the tension drained away, dropping the flames with it and leaving him limp on the smoldering carpet. “Take whatever you need from the stones. I don’t want them—only asked for them because they were hard for Donne to get.”

  “Deal,” Evan agreed, before Badad could ask what stones.

  The doorbell sounded while Badad was dragging Parmatus to his feet. Evan looked startled, but only for a minute. “Pizza,” he said, and then made introductions all round. “Lily Ryan, Kevin Bradley—I call him Brad, and the pizza guy knows that, so don’t look surprised. And this,” he said for Brad and Lily, “is Matt Shields. Lunch, anyone?”

  Chapter 6

  IN THAT FROZEN INSTANT, with the sound of graceful chimes still fading on the sooty air, Evan considered pretending no one was home. Then he pulled two twenties out of his wallet. He figured he could keep the delivery guy in the outer office and give everybody a chance to regroup before they sat down with a questionable ally to cement an alliance he’d made in a place where he had no standing. If things went badly, he objected on principle to starting a war on an empty stomach. He kept his client face on while he was doing his thinking, but Lily wasn’t fooled. She didn’t like this case, or the mess it had made of their office—he could tell that and didn’t really blame her. But him? She was laughing at him.

  Shields, on the other hand, looked like he just might live another day if he could get to the pizzas on the other side of that door, which made no sense in a daemon lord. Some effect of the strongbox in the Sotheby’s catalog, he guessed, and found that he really hated the guy who would strip one of his father’s kind of its most basic nature and just leave it trapped that way. He liked his job, but restoring valuables to the careless rich didn’t usually make him feel like a hero. Strange as it seemed, helping Matt Shields—Parmatus, if he’d heard his father correctly—did.

  “This is going on your bill,” he said, before he started hearing anthem rock in his head, and opened the door.

  Detective Mike Jaworski, Philadelphia Major Crimes Unit, hadn’t waited on the steps outside. “Anchovies, Evan? I thought you hated anchovies. I, on the other hand, love them, so you are going to have to share. ”

  He was taller than Evan, barrel-chested, and he’d been in the Marines. “You’re uninvited” wouldn’t work on him any more than it had on Matt Shields. Tempting to try, though. During the Empress case, Jaworski had turned out to be a good friend, but he was a better cop and the smoldering carpet wasn’t exactly a subtle clue. He walked into the office with two pizza boxes and a bag of paper plates and napkins balanced on the palm of his left hand. His right hand rested casually on the butt of his gun. The flap on his holster was unsecured.

  “Where do you want these?” He looked around for somewhere to put the boxes that wasn’t an antique Hepplewhite desktop, and took in the damage. His eyes caught on Lily—kept going. Didn’t look real surprised until he noticed Brad. “I thought you were on vacation.”

  “Couldn’t stay away,” Brad answered dryly. Evan winced and hoped he’d kept it on the inside. Since Lily couldn’t decide whether to laugh or glare at him, he figured not.

  Jaworski nodded, acknowledging that he’d heard but not necessarily that he believed the answer, and completed his examination of the perfect circle—charred wool carpet on the floor and smoke-grayed medallion on the ceiling—that had contained the fire. “Did you ever get the office in the house cleaned up? Your repair bills for this place must be astounding.”

  “I can pay in work,” Shields interrupted. “Paint, cleanup, minor repairs. I have references if you want them.” Which was just so wrong that Evan couldn’t wrap his head around it. It had shaken Brad and Lily as well. His father pushed Shields down, onto one of the two guest chairs for clients, and let go of his arm with a muttered, “Son of a bitch.”

  Mike Jaworski was watching it all, and not missing anything. Whatever he saw brought him off high alert, though. He slipped the pizza boxes onto the remaining spindle-backed guest chair and turned for the door. “I’ll get some more chairs from the waiting room,” he said, ignoring the fragile antique in the corner, and added over his shoulder, “And I’ll stand-down the guys outside.”

  “Khadijah Flint called you, didn’t she?”

  “Not me. She called the lieutenant. The lieutenant sent me.”

  Lieutenant Ellen Li played chess with his father, which had come as a surprise. He wondered if she cheated at that too.

  Jaworski said, “You owe me forty bucks for the pizza.”

  “I guess that means it’s on his bill,” Shields observed. He didn’t wait for an invitation but slid two pieces of anchovy onto a paper plate, picked up the first piece and folded it deftly before taking the first bite. Wherever he’d been for the past three years, they had pizza.

  Jaworski came back a minute later carrying one chair from the outer office, which he sat in before helping himself. “Are you going to introduce us?” he asked brightly, and looked from Matt Shields to Evan with the unspoken question Lieutenant Ellen Li had sent him in to answer.

  “I’m fine. And if you are going to eat the anchovies, you are going to pay your share. I don’t put the police on my clients’ bills. It gives the wrong impression.”

  “So far, I’m down forty, so pony up a twenty and call it even. I’m starving. And, by the way, you’re not fine. You’re covered in bruises and soot, and one side of your pants leg is burned to the ankle. Not a good look on you.”

  “Accident with a cigarette,” Evan answered blandly.

  In response, Mike Jaworski glanced pointedly at the perfect curve that separated crisped black carpet from untroubled blue, that followed exactly the circle defined by carved plaster and soot on the ceiling. No need to mention the absence of a cigarette in all that mess. Jaworski wouldn’t have missed that. He finished his slice, wiped his hands carefully on a paper napkin, and stood up. “Dougherty is an asshole,” he said, all the humor gone. “But he’s not stupid.”

  Evan agreed with the asshole part. Sergeant Joe Dougherty swore that Brad and Lily were criminals who had brainwashed a troubled kid into becoming the innocent dupe in their nefarious schemes. The only thing that had kept him from figuring out the truth was a lack of imagination that had dogged him all through high school. Jaworski, on the other hand . . .

  “I lied about sending the backup away. If you walk out with me now, we can protect you.”

  Shit. Without even thinking about it, Evan moved—not toward Jaworski or his father, or even Lily, who tended to be his gravity in most situations. Two steps toward the desk and he’d taken up guard duty at Matt Shields’ side. Shields looked confused. Lily looked amused. And Brad looked at his watch.

  “I hope I didn’t make things worse for you.” Jaworski raised his hands, palms out in surrender while the puzzle pieces shuffled themselves in his eyes. Still wasn’t seeing the real picture, thank God, but he did not suffer Dougherty’s lack of imagination. “If you turn up dead, I will hunt your killer down. The case will be solid, and we will go for the death penalty.”

  Which wouldn’t matter in the least to any of the possible suspects in the room, but did, for some reason, make him feel better. Jaworski didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll be around,” he said, and let himself out.

  “Wasn’t that special.” Lily wrapped an arm around his neck and used her free hand to wipe the soot from his mouth before planting a kiss. “Evan has a friend.” But she didn’t seem displeased.

  Chapter 7

  BRAD LEANED AGAINST THE DESK, watching Ellen Li’s policeman offer promises of retribution he couldn’t keep. Ellen trusted him not to do anything stupid, and given the provocation, he’d behaved with remarkable restraint. But it was time to end this charade. He looked at his watch. It was the middle of the night where he’d left Mai Sien Chong waiting naked for him on a silk-covered bed, so he wasn’t really interested in pizza and chat. Fortunately, it looked like Jaworski was going to leave now. He might salv
age something of his night after all.

  “I hope I didn’t make things worse for you.”

  There it was—a few threats the stalwart policeman couldn’t act on, not against anything present, at least. If something else killed Evan, there wouldn’t be enough of it left to arrest, so that was all right. Gone. Good. Now, to get rid of Parmatus—Shields, he guessed it would be, in this world.

  “I need coffee,” Lily decided, and vanished, returning almost before she’d gone with a carafe that didn’t look like the one in their kitchen. “Need cups,” she said, “couldn’t carry them.” Evan ran a hand across his buzzed scalp and flinched at the discomfort, but he went.

  “How did you do that?” Shields asked, staring at Lily as if she’d grown a second head.

  “There’s this little dive on Second. Food’s awful, but I like their coffee, and the stuff in the kitchen is from this morning.” She shrugged like all of that should be obvious, but Matt Shields was looking at the ashen circle in the center of the ceiling. Shields wouldn’t be sitting there calmly with a plate of pizza in his hand if he didn’t have a way out—the crispy fried rug attested to that much—but he could leave only in one direction, if Evan was the smart boy Brad knew. Lily was moving in and out of the circle like it didn’t exist.

  “It’s our house,” Brad explained. “We own it, and everything in it, including the protections. It has no hold over us.” Which wasn’t entirely true. Evan’s human will had opened all his traps for them, but he still had his moments. And the house itself, it turned out, created its own connections. The Princes had backed off their earliest limitations on where they could keep Evan, but the house held them here anyway, with promises of comfort it generally kept, and safety that it hadn’t, really, with a volatile Evan Davis in residence. All of which were human things he’d gladly abandon for home when Evan was dead, but he’d grown to appreciate them in the now.

  Evan returned with cups and sugar, no cream. None of them took it—if Shields didn’t like it, too bad. But Shields took two sugars, and gladly. Brad turned down a cup. He still had hopes for the rest of the night, and some of that included sleeping. “It’s getting late. I don’t think we can do anything else today. Find a room or something, and we’ll figure this out tomorrow.”

  Shields stared off into a distance that, apparently, included calculating the contents of his wallet. “Fourteen dollars, thirty-five cents,” he said, “One washer, and an allen wrench. Do you know anyplace I can stay for that?”

  For the first time all afternoon, Lily looked upset. “Is that before or after our retainer?”

  “A temporary shortage of liquid assets,” Evan explained, and added, “show them.”

  Shields did. Shiny. Lily always liked shiny. “I’ll take this one,” she said, and plucked a five-carat stone from the palm of Matt Shields’ hand. “I’ll have it appraised in the morning and deducted from your bill. You do own it?”

  “Yeah,” he answered, “until now.”

  “While you’re at the appraiser’s, see what he has to say about this one,” Evan suggested, and Shields dutifully dug out the thumb-sized ruby. “We need to sell it to fund a purchase at the Grayson Donne auction at Sotheby’s next week.”

  Lily took it and gave him her “clever boy” smile. “Give the nice client Greg’s card. We can put him up at the B B for now.”

  Evan reached around the desk and pulled the card from the top drawer. He gave it to Matt Shields, along with the forty dollars he’d gotten out for the pizza and dug in his wallet for a credit card. “Greg Rush runs a Bed and Breakfast a block from here, on Eighth. The address is on the card. Tell him to put your room on our account. Do you have anything else to wear with you?”

  Shields shook his head. Of course not. He just wandered the city with odd change and hardware in his pocket, along with a ransom in rubies. Evan gave him the credit card. “Get some clothes,” he said. “There’s a Macy’s on Chestnut Street, and Greg can give you a list of other places. You’re an anonymous buyer for the strongbox, so you don’t need to appear at the auction. Buy whatever makes you comfortable.”

  Brad felt comfortable in a suit hand tailored for him by Carlo Pimi in Milan, but didn’t offer Shields that option. He wasn’t Ariton, and Brad still didn’t trust him—he had an uneasy feeling about that strongbox.

  “Why didn’t you come to us sooner?” he asked, and could tell from the way Evan’s eyes widened before he brought his reaction under control that he’d thought of the question, certainly, but hadn’t asked it for some reason. Lies, maybe.

  “The box has a radius. I tried to walk away, but once I reach a certain distance—roughly ninety miles—I found myself back where I started. Yesterday, the estate agents moved the box to New York City.”

  Not a lie. But not the whole truth. He wouldn’t work with Paimon’s lord, would not allow his human offspring to bind Ariton to a host-debt, without the truth. “Can’t you use a telephone?”

  Brad saw the moment when he almost said “no”— almost told the lie that would put him on the street, agreement void, all promises off. Then he slumped in his chair, defenses down for the moment.

  “I felt it when he bound you, and then, for a long time, nothing. That made no sense. Why do something as dangerous as a binding spell, and then ask for nothing? After the first day, you didn’t fight the binding, not either of you. I didn’t trust it, and then last week I felt the terror and fury of a binding command filling this world. I knew the feelings, had them myself each time Donne sent me to perform some task for him. No more than I’d expected all along but, hey, not my Prince, not my problem. I was stuck in New York anyway.

  “Then he let you go. He didn’t have to do it. You didn’t trick or threaten him. He had to know you were likely to kill him, but he set you free. And you let him live. It still didn’t make sense, and I didn’t know if your agency would perform a service for a lord of Paimon, neither Ariton nor an ally. But I thought, finally, there was someone in this universe I might trust with my story. Then, I walked into this—” he gestured at the smoky circle. “So maybe I’ve made my worst mistake since that bastard trapped me here. But I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

  “You’re lucky Evan had the desk today.” Brad conceded very little, unwilling to offer consolation to a creature not of his own Prince and a bit put off by the whole case. Shields should have been raging at his own captivity, haughty in need and powerful in his resistance. A daemon lord was, of all things, proud. Parmatus—Matt Shields—disgusted him a little. But Evan was determined, and Lily wanted the ruby. Paimon would owe Ariton a host-debt if they pulled this off, which would raise his own status with his Prince. All in all, it could be worse.

  “Go—rest, shop, whatever.” He waved a hand in the general direction of the door to the outer office and the street. “There’s nothing more we can do today, and I have an appointment elsewhere.”

  He didn’t wait to see what happened next. Mai Sien had fallen asleep, but she was still naked, and the sheets were almost as perfect as her skin.

  Chapter 8

  “DID YOU GET THE NETSUKE?” Evan was alone with Lily, Jaworski gone to report to Ellen Li, which might be trouble later but not tonight, he thought. Matt Shields had wandered off to find Greg Rush’s BB and a fresh set of underwear, and Brad—Evan skittered away from that thought.

  He didn’t think she had room even for something as small as the little carved lion in those clothes, though he’d be happy to help her look and made the offer. Lily went with tradition for breaking and entering. She wore a sleek black warm-up jacket and snug black pants though she could move in and out of any vault undetected. The clothes suited her, matched the black of her hair that she wore pinned up for a little BE, so the blue of her eyes hit him like an electric shock.

  “You’re not going to find it there.” She slapped his hands away from the zipper on her jacket and plucked a stick out of her hair. He’d been right about the clothes. Lily had threaded the carving onto the stick
by the holes bored into it for the sash strings. She set it on the desk to free both hands and shook out her hair.

  Oh, God, he loved her hair, leaned in to smell it and touch—

  They’d lost the sun, so the office lay in cool shadows. Nothing lurking there but the spiraling ash that used to be a wool carpet.

  “You really made a mess here.”

  Lily pulled away, just a movement of her neck that kept her body close enough to share heat, and swung her hair back into order, Ariton fire sparking her eyes. She cut a disapproving glance at the ceiling, her mouth pursed like a kiss. “It’s coming out of your share.”

  “It always does.” Matt Shields can fix it, he thought, he even has references. But he didn’t say it, didn’t want to spoil the teasing mood she’d set. To reward him, she flicked a spot of nonexistent dust off the jacket she wore, drawing his attention to the curve of her shoulder, the vee where the zipper on her jacket had slid down, not enough to expose her breasts, which was a shame. He reached out, carefully, and gave the zipper a nudge.

  “Not here,” she said, and grabbed him by the tie. “Bring the rubies.” Then she was leading him by a Windsorknotted leash through the house, past the study. The service had cleaned up the worst of the mess, tight- lipped and wearing silver crosses around their necks, but they hadn’t had time for repairs since . . . another thought he skittered away from. Lily had done that, and his father, trying to kill him. They’d changed their minds about the killing part, but not before he was unconscious. He’d imprisoned his father with a word, though, and was lucky to be alive after that. He couldn’t do worse and didn’t plan to do it again, so he figured he was safe for now. And Lily—just thinking about her made him sweat. Hell of a family.

  Through the open living room with its vaulted ceiling and the sofa that looked like Jackson Pollock had used it for a drop cloth. She didn’t turn for the floating staircase to the bedrooms at the front of the house, but slid the doors open to the garden, where the late afternoon sun cast yellow light against the brick of the garden wall. In the back corner a fountain trickled with a sound like jewels falling into his palm.