A Legacy of Daemons

by Camille Bacon-Smith

  When he found what he wanted, a page with acid burn that deepened at the edges, he set it on the counter. In the top right corner of the page was a set of measurements and a description of the cut, the same description Sanders had just measured for Matt Shields’ ruby. At the center of the page, a brief paragraph described the history of a lost gem.

  “There’s a published index of lost diamonds,” Sanders explained. “For colored stones we keep our own journal. Some of these jewels may never have existed outside of a travelers’ legend, but this one has real history. It originated in the treasury of a prince of Kashmir and made its way to France via the Silk Road. In 1356, a broker sold it to an anonymous buyer, listed only as ‘Donne de Lyon.’ At roughly the same time, the Black Plague broke out in a nearby village. Wiped out everybody and set off a wave of witch trials in the surrounding province.” The story left no doubt about the identity of the stone, or of Grayson Donne, for that matter. But Brad didn’t like the way the math worked out. The Black Plague?

  Sanders’ voice was tight with excitement. “Assuming, just for argument’s sake—and I am giving no opinion on the possibility—that your client could prove this is the lost Lyon ruby? It’s priceless. A sale to maximize your value will take time, but if you need a fast sale, the firm that sold the ruby back in 1356 is still in business. As of 1983, they were interested in reacquiring the jewel. The standing offer then was five million dollars, but that was 1983 dollars. If you can give me a few hours, I’ll find out if they’re still interested. They’ll need evidence, of course, but they’ll send someone of their own to examine the stone.”

  “What do you need?” Lily asked.

  “Photos.” He reached for a digital camera on a shelf behind him and stood up, snapped, snapped again. “Turn it, please?” And Lily did, knowing the poses. Sometimes she actually bought the baubles she collected.

  While she worked, Brad thought about Sanders’ story. How long had Matt Shields lived in that box? And why hadn’t he destroyed it and gone home a long time ago?

  Chapter 14

  “THIS IS SOUTH STREET,” EVAN SAID. When The was a kid he used to come down here at night on the El for a slice of pizza or a cheese steak or just to hang out at the comic book shop on the corner, losing himself in a crowd that didn’t know who he was and didn’t think much past the next drink, which had been fine by Evan. Nobody had looked at him like he was a freak here. Or, not more of a freak than the rest of the skinheads and skaters and day-trippers, just part of the entertainment, now move along—

  Daylight didn’t do it justice. At noon on a weekday the street was still asleep; sidewalks empty, cars off somewhere else. Without the streetlights and marquees pushing back the darkness, the traffic and the gawkers to hide behind, the shops that crowded the pavement looked run down and kind of sad.

  “I don’t come here much, except for lunch, but you might want to try it after dark. Friday’s the big night, but there’s always a crowd in the summer.”

  “Vampires or zombies?” Shields asked, mock serious, and Evan thought about those books they’d left behind on the desk. “Zombies,” he said, and laughed. “Definitely zombies.”

  They were heading east past Garland of Letters, where they’d been selling fairly harmless kitchen magic, crystals, and new age music for thirty years or more—longer than he’d been alive—and he figured somebody in there must take it seriously or they wouldn’t have stayed in business. He avoided the magic thing as much as he could, had gotten over thinking of the daemon side of his nature that way and didn’t need props anyway. When the job required it, he did his business farther up the street at Harry’s, where the tourists never went.

  The street had all its usual smells—exhaust and exhalations from the sewers and a whiff of urine strongest when they crossed an alley. Incense when they passed Garland, but mostly food—cheese steaks and pizza and fries, barbecued ribs and burgers. Greek when they passed South Street Souvlaki, and he almost turned in then, but kept on going because a steak at Jim’s was a rite of passage.

  Matt Shields didn’t seem to mind it. He ambled along, checking out the windows, taking in the outrageous with the just plain shabby. “I like her,” he said, and Evan had to run that one back a minute to figure out who he meant. Claire Murphy.

  “Just keep that thought in your pants, or you’ll be babysitting your half-breed monsters for the next hundred years,” Evan pointed out. The shop windows were full of wrought iron crosses and stone gargoyles, and he wondered about that. Figured he ought to be glad he looked human at least but couldn’t quite work himself up to a “thank you” for it.

  “They wouldn’t be monsters if they were mine.” Matt Shields sounded halfway serious, which scared the bejesus out of Evan.

  “You might want to ask my father about that.” And that was a conversation he never wanted to hear. Couldn’t imagine Matt Shields initiating it either, so they were all probably safe, at least from the birds-and-the-bees talk. He kept walking. “The auction is in three days. You’ll be free to go home.”

  “Yeah.” Matt Shields grinned at that. “She liked you best anyway,” but that was just trash talk, and where he’d learned that easy give and take was a big hole in his story. He stopped, stared past a pair of open iron gates to the shop window beyond. “Is that a condom shop?”

  “Says so on the door.” Evan kept on going. “I’ve never actually been in most of these places.”

  “Huh.” Matt Shields matched him step for step past two bars and a pizza joint with a spray-painted sign offering tattoos and piercings on the second floor, but he’d gone quiet and Evan had a feeling that wasn’t a good thing.

  “So. Lily.” There it was. Not really a question, and Evan wasn’t answering it anyway. He hadn’t thought it was that obvious, but Lily was Lily, and Evan was human—partly at least, and that part couldn’t have said “no” to her if the fate of the known universe depended on it, which it sometimes did. On days when he was thinking with his daemon side, he couldn’t imagine a reason why he would try.

  Shields took his silence for all the answer he needed. “Lily wouldn’t like condoms,” he said.

  No, she wouldn’t, but he had no intention of discussing his sex life with a daemon lord of a foreign Prince—not with anybody, really. He was saved by a Duck, an amphibious landing craft full of tourists who honked their duck callers at them and passed on down the street while the driver blared, “and those are the famous South Street gum trees,” through a loudspeaker. And that, thankfully, gave Matt Shields something to think about besides Evan and Lily getting naked.

  “What is that?” Matt Shields looked first at the nearest tree, then down a row of them lining the sidewalk.

  “It’s gum.”

  “Chewing gum. I thought he meant a kind of tree!”

  “Nope.” Evan studied the tree, its trunk covered in bright, pointillist dots of used chewing gum, with a combination of pride and distaste. “This is Philly’s Bourbon Street,” he said, with a twitch of his hand that took in the crush of bars and shops, “which means most of its traditions start with too much alcohol. It’s sort of disgusting, but on the other hand, it keeps the gum off the bottom of your shoe.

  “This is it.” He stopped in front of a low building that looked like an art deco diner and tugged the door open. “Jim’s Steaks. Don’t let anybody tell you Pat’s are better!

  Shields looked from the chrome- framed windows to the gum tree and back again. “I think I lost my appetite.”

  Evan pushed him through the doorway. “Ask for wiz and fried onions. You’ll find it again.”

  Chapter 15

  EVAN CAME HOME TO A DARK AND EMPTY house. He’d dropped Matt Shields at Rush’s Bed and Breakfast—Greg Rush had greeted him with a big smile and a bigger “to do” list of minor repairs—and headed out for a few appointments he’d moved because of the workmen in the office. He didn’t think he was avoiding the apologies he knew were due. But the sunlight had gone while Evan found another r
eason not to go home, and another, until here he was, alone at the desk in the agency’s office, listening to voice messages in the dark. First up, Sid Valentine stumbled through a threat to have Brad picked up off the street if he didn’t come in and provide a statement voluntarily.

  The police had officially cleared the agency, Brad included, and the authorities in three countries were fighting over the right to put the Chongs in jail. China had first dibs, with executions in mind. That didn’t mean Brad had gone back to chess on Wednesdays with Lieutenant Ellen Li. At least, not yet. But the FBI had nothing and Evan had learned his lesson. Brad could do whatever he damned well pleased about Sid Valentine. Evan wasn’t going to stop him.

  He erased the message, and the earlier one from Shields. The Liberty Bell was still cracked, and he was starting to figure out that Matt Shields had a weird sense of humor. Claire Murphy’s bill lay on the desk, with a note scrawled across it—“Fixed the crack.” It wasn’t often a civilian put him on the side of the angels. He laughed a little remembering that the character reference of a daemon lord had tipped that scale, and realized he wanted to live up to the faith she’d put in him with those three mundane words. He was considering knocking a hole in the wall just to hire her back to fix it when he felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

  “Lily?” He made it a question, though he knew her touch in all her forms, even the whisper of a breeze in his ear that raised gooseflesh on his arms and other things in his pants.

  Soft blue flame enfolded him, licked at lips, at his lashes.

  “Lirion,” he said, because sometimes he needed her to know that he loved her for what she was, not just for the body she wore in his world. He couldn’t tell her those absurd but true things—that he loved her fiercely, beyond all reason. That losing her was unthinkable, would be unsurvivable. Men had said them to her before, made a prison of the words and died for it. He didn’t think she’d kill him for saying it, but she wouldn’t believe he meant it as anything but the same old prison either.

  He knew she didn’t feel love the way humans did. Tolerant affection for his human side—she did that. She liked the sex, he could tell that much, but she just didn’t get that fierce roil of emotions he felt when he thought about her, or the deeper tie, steady and absolute beneath the turmoil. She knew him body and soul in his world, and in hers where his mind was as open as a bleeding wound, and she didn’t walk away. Didn’t strike him dead for that matter, but sometimes, the thought that she might just made him want her more. And how screwed up did that make him?

  His whole body ached to get his arms around her. But he didn’t think that was going to happen until . . .

  “I’m sorry,” he said to the flame that lifted his hair, and licked a bead of sweat from his lip. “It’s just a stone. I’d trade a hundred of them for the light in your eyes.”

  “Wow, Evan.” Suddenly, his lap was full of Lily, solid and laughing, her arms wrapped around his neck. Her dark hair tickled when she leaned in to press a quick kiss to the tip of his nose. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say. It’s not just a stone, it’s a perfect 85-carat ruby. There probably aren’t five of that quality on the whole planet. You just have no sense of humor.”

  It wasn’t his sense of humor in question, and Evan knew it. Trust was always on the table.

  “I may not be a lord of Ariton,” he said, “But I’m close enough. If the ruby’d been lost, I’d have found it.” He knew it was true—he’d always had the knack, even as a kid. It made him good at the job. He hadn’t trusted it as part of his nature, though, hadn’t put that together with the side of himself he never looked at too closely. Lords of Paimon carried secrets—he’d done the research, wondered what secrets Matt Shields had carried for Grayson Donne. Ariton found the lost and hidden things.

  But that question always lay between them, woven into the trust thing like the medallion burned to char on the Aubusson carpet—was he Ariton, or was he human?

  “Come on,” she said, and slid from his lap. He groaned, reached out to bring her back, but she took hold of his hand, tugged him out of his chair.

  “God, Lily, I’m not going to make it up the stairs!” he complained.

  She laughed, turning into flame, and then she was away, drawing him with her into the second celestial sphere, his body falling back into his chair, and that seemed to be the way she wanted it for now.

  Lily filled Evan’s mind with the strangeness of her thoughts—countless ages in the eternal now of her kind, freedom that held the whole radiant universe in its grasp. He’d been here before, sensed those things from a distance, been terrified of them, and later, learned to navigate them, find his way home. More often than not now, sex wound up here. It was the one thing he could give Lily that none of her other human lovers had—the daemon side of his nature meant he could move with her when she wanted more than a shell of flesh could give her. Best of both worlds, he liked to think, which made her laugh. But there were usually orgasms involved, and lots of touching, as improper as either of them could make it. He’d been hoping for some of that improper touching now, but that didn’t seem to be where this was going.

  Others of her kind had gathered, knots of flame in the darkness that he felt rather than saw, because he had no eyes in this place. Ariton, his own Prince, didn’t like him much. Evan reached out, looking for his father because he needed all the allies he could get. But Badad wasn’t there.

  Chapter 16

  BADAD MOVED THROUGH THE SPHERES with a quiet rage. Ariton had barred his presence from the gathering of the host. Something blew up behind him—maybe not so quiet—but it wasn’t where he was going, so he didn’t look back. He thought about where he wanted to be, considered his current mood, and rejected the house on Spruce Street. They’d just gotten the place patched up and Lily would be seriously unhappy if he accidentally blew it up before they paid the bill for the last time.

  He was still surprised at the things he’d put up with for his misbegotten son. More surprised at what Evan would risk for a daemon lord who’d fathered him as someone else’s revenge, and who’d left him half-mad and alone among humans for most of his life.

  Lily would take care of him. He thought she could sway the daemon lords who would challenge Evan, could protect him enough to bring him home whole. But if the lords of Ariton merged, became their Prince, Lily would lose her singular purpose to the group mind. He didn’t think Evan would survive another meeting with Ariton. He just had to trust that Lily wouldn’t let that happen. In the meantime, he needed a distraction.

  There was pleasure to be had in a luxury suite looking out over the China Sea, and he would doubtless visit Mai Sien Chong again sometime, for chess and other contests. But she was not Ariton, and he could not feel for her the things that Lily felt for Evan. So, not Singapore.

  New York, he decided. Sotheby’s had Donne’s estate on exhibit in their galleries for a week before the sale. He wanted to get a look at the box that Parmatus—Matt Shields—wanted so badly. Brad found the place easily enough; Shields wasn’t the first client to want anonymity when he bought expensive toys. The auction house was dark, but that didn’t matter, any more than the security. He knew his way around the galleries and didn’t need the light anyway.

  The Donne estate was large, and Brad passed from room to room, not quite corporeal, taking the measure of the dead man by the objects he’d left behind. Without a will, which seemed shortsighted for a man of Donne’s obvious wealth, a man who’d managed to devise a trap to hold a daemon lord even after he was dead. He passed a room that held bits of furniture, chose instead a small alcove with a fourteenth-century silver chalice, French, and a curved silver knife, not French, probably Moroccan, resting on a velvet-draped pedestal. The knife looked decorative, except that Brad sensed blood and darkness when he drew too close.

  Three years ago, Evan had bound his father and his lover to protect them from a nasty piece of work named Franklin Simpson. They’d agreed on the need, bu
t Brad’s innate rage against the violation might have killed a human purely of the material sphere. Evan hadn’t even had the sense to stay in his own circle. But he was more than human and had drawn on Ariton as much as the relatively benign spell to stay alive and bind not one but two daemon lords.

  Grayson Donne had neither a daemon heritage nor permission, and there had been nothing benign about his spell. Someone had cleaned the chalice before sending it to auction, but there was blood mixed with the silver. Brad took a moment to identify the lot number. He’d take personal pleasure in making sure no one ever used those pieces to summon a daemon lord out of its home again.

  It wasn’t his reason for this after-hours visit, however.

  The next room held Donne’s library furniture: glassed cases and small antique tables. No books, though. He hadn’t seen any books in the catalog either. So where were the books that used to sit in those cases?

  The strongbox sat on a pedestal next to a small seventeenth-century desk that had its own lot number, but Brad was only interested in the box. The symbols worked into the iron bands made him uneasy even from a distance. The nearer he got, the more the box filled him with dread. He would have sworn it was screaming, except that Matt Shields was tucked up in an antique bed under the eaves at Greg Rush’s Bed and Breakfast, as bound to that body, and the need of flesh for rest, as he was bound to the box.

  By the time he’d got close enough to recognize the symbols, he was having trouble focusing at all. He recognized some of the marks—locks, every one. The screaming didn’t stop, just rose in pitch until he thought it must have woken the entire city. He expected the police at any moment, but this time nothing bound him to stay.

  He couldn’t make his escape through the second celestial sphere yet, but he didn’t have to hold a human form. Within limits, he had some flexibility of movement. Singapore was out of reach, but Philadelphia was just an hour down the road by train. He latched on, a low-burning flame, and let it carry him home.