A Legacy of Daemons

by Camille Bacon-Smith

  Lily and Evan were still gone. He wasn’t worried, just bored, when he called Harry Li. The coffeemaker was set to brew and he turned it on while he waited for Harry to pick up.

  “Brad?” Harry’s voice was foggy, thick with sleep. “Is something wrong?”

  “Not really, just wondered if you were up for a game of chess.”

  Harry didn’t answer right away. When he did, Brad couldn’t quite sort the exasperation from the concern. “So I gather your vacation was not in this time zone. Do you know what time it is?”

  “Time?”

  “One o’clock in the morning, my friend. An odd hour for the first time you’ve ever called for a game of chess. It’s not even Wednesday.” Another pause, then, “Where’s Evan?”

  “Evan and Lily are out. Working.” He didn’t mention the screaming box.

  “Ah.” He could hear Ellen in the background, Harry’s answer to her muffled by a hand over the phone, then the sound of movement. “Undercover? I didn’t know the agency did that kind of work.” Brad didn’t correct him, and the exasperation was still there, but understanding too. “I know how you feel. Ellen gave me a few sleepless nights before the department promoted her to a desk. But they’re both good at their jobs. They’ll be fine.

  “Look, try to get some sleep—they’ll be mad as hell if you’re waiting up for them like they were a couple of teenagers on their first date. In the morning, get Sid Valentine’s interview out of the way. Then meet us for chess at seven. Winner pays for dinner.”

  “I thought it was loser pays?” Brad accepted the offer, even though it came with a tacit promise to answer Sid Valentine’s questions.

  Harry laughed softly. “Only when I have a chance of winning,” he explained. “Go to sleep, Brad. They’ll be home in the morning.”

  “I know. Tomorrow, then.” Brad hung up, but he didn’t go to sleep. He took his coffee into the study, turned on the lamp behind his tapestried wing-back chair, and stared at the empty space where the desk used to sit. Have to replace that, he thought, and settled in to wait.

  Chapter 17

  EVAN FIGURED HE WASN’T GETTING LAID IN either universe today. Okay, take that back. The celestial family reunion didn’t matter.

  Lily was part of him, merged with his mind as she might with a daemon lord of her own host, and he felt her pleasure as somewhere nearby suns exploded in the nexus of their own energy. Waves of power rushed through him, filling him everywhere, and he filled the universe, felt its movement in the beating of a heart he no longer had as he tried to make sense of an experience he wasn’t built to survive. A human thought clung for a moment, hope that it hadn’t been his own sun dying, then the rush swept even that thought away.

  He spread the stuff of his daemon nature as wide as he could make it, catching the sensations of the universe in chaotic motion. Later, when he managed to pull a coherent though together, maybe he’d remember to feel guilty that the death of stars felt this damned good. Right now, he was wondering if he could make it happen again. Which, okay, right there? Time to back away and ask himself a question. Until now, Lily had protected him from the full effect of this. Brad had. Something had changed, and it wasn’t just his death wish.

  “Someone wants to meet you,” Lily said, from inside his mind, so he knew she’d seen everything. If this was a test, he thought he might be failing because he couldn’t rein in thought or feeling, knew he was sending his own obliterating responses back out into the universe and gathering a crowd. Blue, though, and he thought that was okay. He might be embarrassing the relatives, but he hadn’t started a war yet which, for him, was a good day.

  He wasn’t exactly afraid that he’d wind up in the middle of the daemon Prince that formed when enough of its lords merged into a unified being. Ariton didn’t like him, and he figured the gathered lords would make sure that didn’t happen. But there were a lot of them. Flames passed through his mind, not cautious what they took. The closest he’d come to this feeling before, he’d been laid out on the floor at the Black Masque, strangers touching him, crooning worship into his ear, incense and the smell of blood and Omage’s smile, colder than the marble beneath him, all of it heightened by the drugs Omage had fed him. That was before they’d snapped on the chains and ridden him into insanity.

  He didn’t think that would happen here. He trusted Lily, really. But—oh, God—he thought he would die of the overload and reached for his father. Still not there. In all that gathering mass of daemon lords, he could not find his father, and he was pretty sure no one else would protect him here, now. He’d thought Lily, but she was withdrawing from that open connection they’d formed between them. He still felt her presence—still there, but not interfering while daemon lords pulled his mind apart like the seams of a cheap suit, unraveling the threads of him into the universe. Carlo will be furious, he thought, but his tailor couldn’t help him here. He would never gather the pieces of himself up again—he would die, his body cooling in his office on Spruce Street while his mind scattered itself among the energy waves of dying stars.

  Then something pulled his attention, one lord in particular who poked around where Evan really wished he wouldn’t, except that he needed the focus right now. Definitely a he, sort of, though Evan had never figured out how he knew, or what difference it made in an existence with no body, no young. “Caramos,” this one introduced itself. “Tell me about sex.”

  Caramos tugged on a memory, and Evan thought, “Ungh.”

  The daemon lord didn’t take that for an answer, but rummaged around in Evan’s memories, pulling out kisses, his mouth holding onto Lily’s breast like he would die of thirst without it, Lily’s hip, her thigh, Evan’s hand between her legs, his mouth there, and Evan inside of her, feeling the softness surrounding him, sweat and slide and arms tangling, her heels dug in—

  Another mind slipped into his, and another, and he felt—a density that was not physical, not his body, but something he knew he couldn’t hold. He was human, not Ariton, but Caramos laughed, growing breasts and learning kisses. If Evan had a body, he would have blushed, but he didn’t, and Caramos plundered all his memories of pleasure, and one laying close to the surface, speculation.

  “Who’s Claire Murphy?” Lily tickled his mind with the question. “Does she like girls too?” Evan hadn’t gotten that far—didn’t know if she liked guys yet, let alone him. He wanted to hide those thoughts from her, because he knew his attraction there was just a carrier signal for his regrets. Not human, not daemon. What was he?

  Another, who called herself Sched, poked at years of terror brooding below the surface of the new life he’d built. She plucked out memories of Omage, a lord of Azmod, who had tortured Evan into insanity, and Pathet, of that same host, who had murdered Evan’s only friend in his own kitchen.

  “Make more friends,” she told him, and plucked at the memory of Claire Murphy looking up at his ceiling. “Make babies.” No sympathy in her, but terrible understanding that she held apart from him a little, the only grace he’d been given in this place. He could sense its presence, knowledge as dangerous as she was herself. She knew humans intimately, profoundly, read him more clearly than Caramos had, realized where his feelings led. He didn’t think he’d survive her knowledge. She read that in him too, and didn’t deny it.

  “Find a human woman,” she said, “The heavens are not for you.”

  Evan wanted to hide his thoughts from Lily, who slipped in and out of flesh and its inconveniences at will. He was a monster and would never have children, refused to bring another monster into the world to suffer the confusion and terror he’d suffered as a child.

  “Our monster,” Sched said. Evan lifted an image from her mind and knew it, had seen it carved in stone a hundred times or more—wide hips, pendulous breasts—behind the glass of a museum shelf. Ancient fertility goddess, the legends on the cards below the carvings always said. She answered the thought. “Armies of our children have walked your world, but that was a very long time ago,
as humans and stones measure such things. Now they are stories and a whisper of power between women. But no one really believes in us anymore, not even the evil old men with their spells and bindings.”

  “I believe in you.”

  “I suppose you would, under the circumstances,” she reminded him. Hard not to believe when his body was cooling without him in some other universe. He wanted Lily with his whole heart and soul. But he wanted home more.

  “I can’t do this,” he said. Ariton was a part of him, and he hoped that the daemon lords, host-cousins, saw their Prince in him, knew host-loyalty tied him as much as a half-human monster could feel it. But he couldn’t live here. Didn’t want to, and would die if he tried. And he needed the solitude of his own mind. Without Sched’s questions to focus him, the cacophony of cousins overwhelmed him.

  Lily had gone from his mind. He couldn’t find her, and that terrified him more than anything since he’d arrived without his body. She wouldn’t abandon him, and she’d helped teach him how to find his own way home anyway. But, “I can’t . . .”

  He reached into the material sphere as Brad and Lily had taught him, turned for home, and wrapped his body around him like a new suit. He had a bed and he found it, fell facefirst into the pillows, and let a million thoughts that were not his own bleed away into the darkness. Five years ago, he’d have been reaching for the gun he’d kept under his mattress for just such an occasion. The gun stayed locked in a safe in the study now; he hadn’t touched it since they’d put it there, years now, and he had no desire to go looking for it. Figured, on the edge of sleep, that he’d have to pick up a few new skills for dealing with the cousins, because he wasn’t having Caramos rummaging through his sex life again.

  Chapter 18

  LILY WAS BESIDE HIM WHEN HE WOKE a few hours later. Her eyes gleamed in the darkness, and he reached out, found her breasts with his fingertips, reading her nipples like Braille. “So we have a pervy uncle,” he said.

  “Caramos is just curious.” She grinned. “Very curious. But he’s a good friend, and has no malice in him, which makes him unique among us, I think.”

  “Be nice to Uncle Caramos. I can do that. As long as he doesn’t ask for lessons.”

  She turned to give him better access to her breast, wrapped long, tapered fingers around the back of his head and pulled him in—it was where he wanted to go anyway—he felt the slow glide of her skin against his, felt the breath catch in his throat the way it always did when she touched him. He couldn’t talk with a mouth full of Lily, and didn’t want to, certainly not about Caramos.

  “You have a deal,” she said, her voice breathy. “Ariton will accept Paimon’s debt.”

  Tomorrow he would care about that, but now he just wanted to hear her make that noise—there, that one—and pull his head up to kiss him slow and deep. She didn’t grin at him like she usually did, but he recognized the glitter in her eyes, pleased that he’d put it there.

  “Don’t do it again.” Lily told him, and held his head away so that he would pay attention to what she was saying. Since the rest of his body was pressed as close to hers as it could get in this reality, it didn’t stop the shutdown of his higher brain functions. But he was still sensible enough to take her at her word when she said, “If you try something like that again, Ariton will kill you. Your explanations will die with you, unspoken.”

  “Got it. Won’t. Do it. Again.” Between tiny kisses, he dropped the words like promises on her breasts. He didn’t ask where his father had been. Instinct told him he didn’t want to know right now, didn’t want to spoil the mood. He’d think about it tomorrow, when she didn’t have her warm soft body wrapped around him.

  Sometimes sex between them was wild, almost a battle, and sometimes playful. Tonight he was counting up his losses. “Make babies,” Sched had told him, but he never would, had known that since he was a half- mad kid and didn’t mourn something that was never meant for him in the first place. He took his consolation in the curve of her hip, the feel of her waist circled by his hands, the arch of her back as he traced the body he held.

  “I love you,” he whispered into the low swell of her belly. She wouldn’t hear him, but he needed to say it, to the inside of her thigh and the back of her knee and the soft flesh at her ankle. Then he followed the curve of her leg home. They would stay where they were tonight. Evan felt the pull of Earth, or maybe he was hiding from her world, and she seemed to think that was a good idea right now. But it was enough.

  When he woke up, she was still there. Not for long, though. “Daddy’s called a meeting,” she said, and nipped at his chin to cut through the fog in his brain.

  The sun had risen, but his room didn’t get the eastern light the way Lily’s did, so no patterns of light shifted across her skin. It was bright enough to know he’d slept late, though.

  “Is he all right?”

  “Pissed off, but not at you, for a change.”

  “Then—”

  “Ariton,” she answered, before he had worked out a diplomatic way to ask where his father had been last night, given no life-or-death appointments elsewhere.

  “If Ariton had decided to kill you, your father could not be trusted to allow it.”

  “Oh.” Evan thought about that. The lords of his own host believed that his father might put the life of his son above the will of his Prince. He’d figured that Brad would prefer him alive to dead, all things being equal. The equal or not part came as a comforting surprise.

  On the other hand, Lily had been there.

  “It was a good deal.” She slid out of bed, not bothering with clothes. “I thought we had a pretty good chance that the host would agree. And Caramos was predisposed to like you. But there was always a possibility that things would go the other way. Since no one wanted to deal with the consequences of a rebellion, Ariton banished him to Earth until the lords had made their decision.”

  She stopped in the doorway, a last thought. “I told them they were wrong about Badad, but they didn’t want to take the chance.”

  He was still working that around in his head when he heard the hiss of the shower in the next room.

  Chapter 19

  BRAD DIDN’T HAVE TO WAIT LONG. Lily had stopped at the Café du Monde on her way down to breakfast and dropped a bag of beignets on the breakfast bar. Evan had detoured through the study and wandered in a moment later with his computer tucked under his arm. “There was a message from Bill Sanders on the phone. Said the buyer he had in mind for the ruby is in New York on business.” He slid the computer onto the counter and picked up the coffeepot but Brad had used the morning coffee set up last night. His nose twitched in distaste at the stale grounds but he cleaned them out and started a fresh pot while he finished the message. “Her name’s LeRoux. She’s interested, but wants to meet in person, around 3:00 this afternoon if you’re available. Let Bill know before noon if you’re not.” Evan slouched onto a stool while they waited for the coffee to finish dripping like any morning, give or take a donut or two, kitchen or study.

  Three o’clock would do. Evan was mad about something, but the fact he was alive at all meant Ariton had agreed to the deal, which had been the only logical outcome. Logic didn’t always rule business between Princes, but Evan’s contract left Ariton in a good position and didn’t cost anything. Except, they had to free Matt Shields, which had looked like a simple job until yesterday.

  Waiting through the night in the shadowy light of the single reading lamp, Brad hadn’t made notes—not that much to remember, and he wasn’t likely to forget it anyway. Evan did have notes, though, and pulled them up on the computer while they waited for the coffee.

  “I’m sorry I got you into this,” he said, and Brad noticed that he didn’t apologize for his own involvement in the case. “I was thinking about the advantage if we succeeded. It hadn’t crossed my mind that we might not.” He lifted one shoulder in half a shrug.

  Brad knew how to read that gesture now: a little embarrassed, but still preo
ccupied with the stuff in his own head. So he wasn’t surprised when Evan said, “I started to put it together yesterday at the library, then Lily had new information about the ruby.”

  “And?” Brad pulled thick blue mugs from the cabinet over the coffeemaker and filled them because Evan had his nose stuck in the laptop.

  “The catalog says the strongbox is fourteenth-century French. The three iron straps in each direction are consistent with early modern instructions for binding spells—thread, anything, but wrapped three times. I can’t say definitely that the instructions go back as far as the box, but Agrippa wrote about it in the sixteenth Century, said it’s earlier knowledge.”

  Brad waited while Evan absently sipped at his coffee, took a long draw of his own, savoring the hit of it going down. Not as good as scotch, or a good brandy, but like the best of human things, it was an acquired taste with a bitter edge, reminders of mortality.

  “Rubies are the fire stone, iron is the fire metal.” Evan had that faraway sound in his voice, which, oddly, meant that he was talking to himself, had pretty much forgotten his audience. “Matt Shields had the one in his pocket and the other wrapped around the box he wants us to buy on his behalf. And Lily says the ruby disappeared in the fourteenth century, in France. So. . .”

  “Grayson Donne is not immortal,” Brad stopped him there, gestured at the computer with the thick pottery mug over the breakfast bar. He pretty much agreed with where Evan was going, but Donne had died an old man at ninety.

  “He was a recluse as an adult,” Evan read off his screen, “but his birth certificate is on record. He graduated from Yale. After that, not much. Lived quietly on his family money until his heart gave out from what anyone can tell.

  “There’s some chatter on the feeds about the auction, but it all sounds like speculation. I’ve been watching for keywords related to the box and Matt Shields. So far, nothing. If anybody knows what Donne was up to, they’re not talking—not publicly, not privately.”