A Legacy of Daemons

by Camille Bacon-Smith

  Which meant that Evan had been digging deeper than was legal. Sid Valentine might be the least of their problems if Homeland Security caught them tapping into the major data collection centers. Didn’t change the fundamental truth of the case, though.

  “Donne is dead,” Lily sipped her coffee and Brad figured she’d smooth that frown line the next time she passed a mirror. “Parmatus—Matt Shields—is still here. So it didn’t have to be our Donne.”

  “Six hundred years?” Evan asked, “Is that even possible?” He flung himself off the bar stool and paced the kitchen, running his fingers across his scalp like he was looking for the tangle that wasn’t there anymore. “There’s something wrong here, and not just with Donne. Donne’s been dead for three years, apparently with no heirs. If nobody owns the box, why hasn’t Matt Shields found a way to destroy it and go home?”

  “Why isn’t he rich?” Lily asked. “He has a fistful of the most valuable rubies in the world, with proof of ownership—where are the yachts, the houses, the women or the men, or both? I like both!” She grinned brightly at Evan, but he didn’t rise to the bait.

  It didn’t take very long for a hostile binding to drive a daemon lord insane. Franklin Simpson had driven Omage mad in less than twenty years. They all knew it, were just avoiding putting the words in the room, where they’d be real. But they had to ask themselves, was their client insane? And how? Or, more Brad’s concern, was Matt Shield’s personal kind of crazy a danger to them? Not just some frantic self-defense when he thought he’d been caught in a trap—was he running according to some logic that was going to rock this planet on its axis, or hurt Ariton’s interests in the second celestial sphere? Parmatus didn’t seem to be thinking ahead that much, but they didn’t know that for sure.

  “Why did he show up here offering to pay our bill with repairs and pretending he doesn’t know anything about money?” Evan pursued Lily’s question. “He’s been on the outside of that box and living in upstate New York for the past three years, so that’s bullshit.” He hrmmed a little huff through his nose, which was a sure sign he’d come to a conclusion that didn’t make sense to him. “He’s keeping something from us, which is no surprise. But, he’s not real subtle about it for a daemon lord whose special skill is keeping secrets. It’s as if he can’t tell us, but he wants us to uncover it for ourselves.”

  When they started the case, Brad hadn’t considered trying to figure out Matt Shields. They had to sell his ruby and buy a box for him at a fifteen percent commission on both transactions. Money in the bank, end of story. But he was starting to wonder if even that would be enough to send Shields home. “I checked the box last night,” he said. “The symbols in the iron strapping are seals, locks.”

  “At least he’s not lying about that part of the job,” Lily agreed. “Whoever initiated the spell made the box as a prison.”

  Evan stared into the distance for a minute, and Brad had no desire to follow him into whatever memory had caught hold of him. It didn’t take much of a stretch to guess it anyway. His son could heal the scars his own captivity had left on his skin. He had that skill now but refused to use it because it made him something other than human. Which had been the point in the first place.

  Evan brushed off the moment, but his voice shook a little when he said, “That’s not a very big box.”

  “No,” Brad agreed. “And it’s not happy. I could hear it screaming.”

  “An alarm?” Lily asked.

  “No one came,” He said. “It sounded like a voice, rose in volume and pitch when I approached it, but I’m pretty sure no one else heard it. I didn’t touch it.”

  “So the box isn’t empty after all,” Evan breathed.

  “I’d say not.”

  “Shit.” Hand across his close-cropped head again. Evan didn’t take the news well.

  Lily grinned. “I think we should revisit Mr. Shields’ bill.” But her teeth seemed particularly sharp when she bit into her beignet, and blue fire burned steadily in her eyes. Brad thought Mr. Grayson Donne was a very lucky man, because he was already dead.

  “I’ll take a look at the house.” Evan grabbed his coffee mug on his next swing past the breakfast bar; trying to pretend everything was normal just made him twitchy. “See if they left any clues when they cleaned the place out for the estate sale.”

  “See if you can find the books while you’re looking. Donne had a lot of bookcases, but none of the books are up for auction.” It wasn’t what he wanted to say, but last night Ariton had agreed to a bargain with Paimon that had taken “walk away” off the table.

  Brad wasn’t afraid, he really wasn’t. Nothing to be afraid of anyway. Donne was dead, no heirs. And he trusted Evan completely, if that meant to do something stupid again and maybe get himself killed over it this time. But if Evan hadn’t owned them, bound with a spell he shouldn’t have been able to pull off at all, Franklin Simpson would have had them. He’d be a prisoner still, driven as mad as his nemesis.

  Evan had kept his promise for the most part, not to use the binding against them. He’d screwed up there at the end, but he’d fixed it, and anyway, Brad had gotten used to being rich and pretty much free, didn’t think he’d handle well six hundred years as a handyman. They had an agency contract that spelled out the business shares in money, but it didn’t cover eventualities like Grayson Donne. He thought they ought to fix that, and he figured they could do it so that Evan didn’t have the option to screw it up this time.

  “Before you go, we should probably add a rider to our own contract.”

  “No.” Evan’s coffee mug hit the floor, bits of dark blue pottery skittering across the pristine white tiles. It looked, for a minute, like he was going to join them, little bits of broken Evan everywhere, but he pulled himself together. “That didn’t work out very well the last time.”

  The doorbell chimed, but no one moved to answer it.

  “Apparently insanity is contagious.” Lily set her own mug more carefully on the breakfast bar. “You can go, Evan. I’ll change his mind while you’re—somewhere else.”

  “It wouldn’t be like last time.” Brad was pretty sure of that. “A one-way contract, like the one you offered Matt Shields. For as long as we mutually agree.”

  “If you recall, that didn’t really work out well either. I tore it up.”

  “That’s because he’s already bound to something else.”

  Another chime of the doorbell. “I won’t do it,” Lily said, and Brad answered, “You don’t have to. It’s a one-way contract. Walk away at any time. Or you can take your chances with six hundred years in a box. It’s up to you.”

  Evan’s eyes had rolled back the way they always did when he was treating his brain like a badly organized computer, shuffling through folders in his head. “It could work,” He finally agreed. But they were too late to answer the door.

  “Hello! Is anybody there?” Mike Jaworski wandered into the kitchen.

  Chapter 20

  DETECTIVE MIKE JAWORSKI HAD A TALENT for interrupting at exactly the wrong moment, but Brad did not stoop to the level of exasperated sighs like the one his son delivered. Lily smiled like she’d just beaten him at chess, and held out the plate of beignets.

  “Where do you get these? Jaworski asked around a bite that left powdered sugar on his tie. “They’re fantastic.”

  “We have them flown in from New Orleans once in a while.” Evan poured him a mug of coffee, handed it over when the beignet had disappeared. “Wanna go private?” Shards of blue pottery still littered the floor. Evan didn’t move to pick them up. Jaworski pretended not to notice.

  “Ask me again when I have my twenty years,” Jaworski said, pretending to think about it. Then, “On second thought, don’t. I’m not willing to trade my salary for your bruises. Which reminds me—don’t you people ever lock your doors? Big city, house broken into regularly: what part of security don’t you get?”

  The gate had a warding spell, locked to everyone but the half dozen or so
people they’d allowed access, and with a suggestion that the random canvasser or burglar didn’t really want this house after all. They didn’t need burglars—they wreaked their own personal havoc from the inside.

  Jaworski didn’t know that, of course. Easier to blame the Chongs for a tossed study than explain that Evan had bound his father to a tiled box at Major Crimes and his father hadn’t liked it. The handcuffs still burned when he thought about them, though he’d healed the flesh a week ago. Brad felt the air pressure building, controlled the impulse before he did something spectacularly stupid and turned Ellen Li’s policeman into a really unhappy true believer. Safer to let skeptics lie, especially when they carried guns. A bullet in the head didn’t do any damage he couldn’t repair, but it hurt like hell on entry.

  “Detective. Did Lieutenant Li send you again, or are you here on your own?”

  Jaworski smiled, fake as Brad’s own polite air. They didn’t, when it came down to it, trust each other—smart on both their parts. “I’m just here for the donuts,” he said. “But since I was dropping by anyway, Ellen thought you might like a ride to Sid’s office—a familiar face and all.” He was talking to Brad, but studying Evan for signs of more damage.

  “I’m fine, Mike, really.” The laugh wasn’t convincing, but Evan didn’t sound worried. Regretful, maybe—Brad had heard that one before. Couldn’t figure out why now. But ridding his kitchen of Ellen Li’s policeman was his top priority.

  “I called my lawyer; she’ll be all the familiar face I need, thank you.”

  It answered the question Jaworski had bothered to ask out loud. He didn’t much care about the ones conveyed with meaningful glances. He didn’t get the whole silent communication thing, but Evan would doubtless enlighten him later, earnestly and at maudlin length.

  “Okay.” Jaworski took a swipe at the powdered sugar on his tie, made a face when it smeared. “I’ll tell the lieutenant that you’re good. Can I drop you anywhere, Evan?”

  “I’m fine. Clumsy, but fine.” Evan waved at the floor, finally acknowledging the mess. Jaworski nodded, accepting that for now.

  The doorbell chimed again, at the front. “That’s my lawyer.” Brad started moving, crowding Jaworski toward the doorway. “Nice to see you again, but I have to go. Sid Valentine is waiting.”

  He headed for the hallway that led to the front office, herding Mike Jaworski a step ahead of him. Neither of them spoke until they reached the front office, where Evan couldn’t hear them. Then, Jaworski stopped and turned, dropped a hand on his shoulder.

  Brad considered his options. He wasn’t sure chess with Ellen was worth putting up with her policeman, but killing him would interfere with the business at hand. Since it had now become Ariton’s business, he waited with a show of long-suffering patience for whatever the man had to say.

  “I read the file Joe Dougherty put together on this agency,” he said, and was diplomatic enough not to say, “on you,” the way Sergeant Dougherty had. “Evan says you couldn’t have committed any of the crimes in there, that you’d have to be in two places at once, thousands of miles apart, to have managed it. That logic is hard to beat. But you’re his father—nobody who’s seen the two of you in action has a single doubt about that, no matter what Dougherty says. Have you ever considered taking jobs that don’t come quite so close to getting him killed once in a while?”

  He’d expected threats of some sort, not—whatever this was. Evan didn’t have friends, or hadn’t until they’d gone hunting the Empress Crystal. Just like him to start with Ellen’s policemen. If there was a way to complicate their lives, Evan always found it.

  Jaworski took the hand back, but Brad stayed put. Hell of it was, he had a point.

  “They don’t usually start out that way. He has a knack.” He sounded like Evan—so rueful even to himself that he just shook his head.

  A knock on the inner door started him moving again. Khadijah Flint waited in reception, briefcase in one hand, fist raised to knock again with the other. “I was about to go around to the back,” she said, “Oh, Detective. Should I be sitting in on this conversation?”

  “This one is personal,” Jaworski answered, and turned for a last word. “Get him over it, will you?”

  “I thought you knew Evan!”

  Jaworski actually laughed. “Yeah, well. Tell him it looks bad on his permanent record. And Joe Dougherty is still checking it.” He ducked out the door, not waiting for an answer.

  Khadijah Flint watched him go with a wry smile. “Evan has needed a friend for a long time,” she said. “And speaking of friends, Sid Valentine is waiting, and there will be no chess for you until you get this over with.”

  The Lis were not friends. Daemon lords did not build relationships with humans. They played chess, and sometimes did favors to smooth the way to Wednesdays. The scales were badly balanced in his favor already, but Ellen saw this interview as a part of the most recent favor, so he went. But he’d have to give Mike Jaworski more thought.

  Chapter 21

  WE NEED THE OXYGEN. Driving through miles of dense forest, trusting the painted white line there’d be road on the other side of the next hairpin curve, Evan tried to think good thoughts about the trees crowding him on either side. He was born and raised in the city, went to school in the city. As a kid, he’d never spent more than a field trip or two in the woods. He hadn’t missed it and couldn’t figure out why every evil son of a bitch they ever tangled with lived in fucking nowhere.

  Three and a half hours on the road didn’t help. He’d asked Shields if he wanted to come along, but Shields had declined. Planned to spend the day at the art museum, he’d said, but he’d call Carlos to let him in. Which was fine, really. Evan had wanted to interview Carlos Sanchez since Matt Shields put his name on the table. But he hadn’t seen a real town since he’d turned left at Newburgh, heading into the Catskills

  His GPS was running out of map, and the gas gauge sat on empty. Evan stopped for gas and directions at a strip of narrow storefronts huddled around a supermarket with a quaint brick exterior and a pump out front about a mile from “here there be dragons” on the GPS. He tried a few questions, but the kids behind the counter at the Dairy Queen just shrugged—didn’t know Grayson Donne, didn’t care. He used their bathroom and bought a coffee anyway. The woman at the dry cleaner was older and about as helpful as the kids, at first. She gave him a funny look when he walked in and he remembered his fading bruises. “Accident.” He told the lie easily. “I stopped on red, the other guy didn’t.”

  “Ouch.” She offered sympathy back. But she’d known of Donne, filled in the directions where his GPS sputtered out once he’d spun her a story about buying the old house.

  “Don’t miss the entrance, or you’ll be in Albany before you know it,” she said, drawing a stick-map on a piece of scrap paper. “Though you’d be better off if you kept on going.” She hadn’t said much more—refused to speak ill of the dead—but gave him a warning, “Funny things went on in that house. It gives a place a bad feeling.”

  Evan knew what she meant, but pretended he didn’t. He thanked her for the directions and got back on the road. It was a genuine clue, and it should have cheered him, but it didn’t. It wasn’t the place or the drive that bothered him. Evan knew that. How could his father drop a bombshell like that on them and just walk out?

  All right, they had to get the FBI off their tails so Brad could get back to his no-longer-secret life playing chess with the police. But they needed to talk about this. Or not talk. Just. Shit. He couldn’t shake the memory of Matt Shields screaming and burning in the middle of the agency’s office, but he figured he would, eventually. The burns on his father’s wrist, where Joe Dougherty had snapped on handcuffs, were going to stay with him forever. That’s what came of a binding spell. Unforgivable, inexcusable, and he couldn’t believe that his father had suggested that he bind them again.

  Except, of course, his father was suggesting something else. Trust, in his goodwill if not good sens
e. Ariton thought a daemon of its own host had a divided loyalty. Lily, not so much, which didn’t surprise him. He knew beyond thought, in the place in his gut where “family” and “lover” tied him in knots, that she would protect him against any external threat. But she wouldn’t cross her own Prince for him, and she would retaliate if he pissed her off too much. Alone in the BMW and miles from home, he could laugh at himself for pushing that line, over and over again.

  But his father—Not human feelings. Evan knew better than that. Badad of the host of Ariton had no loyalties to humans, though apparently he enjoyed the company of a few. He could no more stand against Ariton than a human could cut off his own head and go on breathing. Which could only mean that his father had accepted him as Ariton, not a daemon lord, but still a part of the host that made up their Prince. That was something to digest. Something to treat with care. And the threat was gone—Grayson Donne was dead.

  It hadn’t freed Matt Shields, though, or whatever else Donne had locked in that box with him. Old Magic, from when it was new, but some of those rubies had laser IDs. So Donne had held the key until he died. Evan wondered about that—an actual physical key? How were they going to find it? Did Shields even want them too, or would he be happy to leave whatever it was trapped inside the box forever, as long as he got himself free of the material world?

  Ariton found things. It was the special talent of his Prince’s daemon lords, but Brad hadn’t recognized a key in the lots on display at Sotheby’s. Maybe it was still in the house, maybe gone forever, but he’d find out soon enough. Donne’s estate had to be here somewhere. Special talent and all. . .

  The two piled stone pillars that marked the entrance to the private road appeared on his right. He made the turn, barely—almost hit the far pillar but righted the wheel before he put the beemer in the drainage ditch. Another half mile and the forest opened up to a broad lawn that sloped gently toward the house, a Victorian monstrosity of stone and clapboards that sat atop a rise with the shoulders of the Catskills hunched low on the horizon. Gardens with tightly constrained yew hedges flanked the house. It looked more like a reformatory for wayward girls than a country estate; Evan pulled up in front next to a white Prius and got out of the car, tilted his head far back to take in all the dark and turreted glory at the center of Grayson Donne’s web. Maybe a walk-away contract wasn’t such a bad idea after all.