But Donne had to keep his victims somewhere. So he braced himself for the flashback and knelt in the blood of those unwilling sacrifices, ran his hand over the stain, heard their voices, but he fought back the burn of acid on his skin, the heat of infected wounds. The catch was there. Donne would have just stepped on it, but he’d have known where it was. Evan pressed it, drew his hand away with flecks of dried blood clinging to his fingertips.
As he’d expected, the doors all closed at once, and a stairway opened in front of him. The smell of damp and earth rose from the cellar below, but not the smell of rotted flesh, which was a relief. He found the switch; another string of dim lights illuminated a small staging area and a tunnel leading away from the house. Evan followed it.
There were no paintings here, just a long, straight run through earth and soft rock, mostly dry, with a few damp patches that had calcite crystals forming in the rock. He figured he was well outside the house when the tunnel veered off at an angle and headed up. He came to the end at a narrow flight of stone steps that led to a locked trapdoor. He was outside the house now, though; could move at will and didn’t bother looking for the catch.
The tunnel had let him out in a forest of narrow pines fighting the hardwoods for light. The sun had dropped well into the west, but he still had hours to go before nightfall. Golden threads of dusty light wove their way between the trees, falling on soft needles and rotting leaves.
At his feet, a scatter of small crosses wandered among the knobby roots. He bent down, scraped away the leaf-fall. The earth was darker here, richer. Bodies made good fertilizer.
How many? He couldn’t even count the crosses—couldn’t see them all, scattered on the floor of the woods. A few looked newer, more were weathered and grimed. Some were right on top of each other—new on top of old.
His cell phone didn’t work, blocked by the trees and the mountains, but he thought it might back at the house. It did, and he leaned against the car, thinking 9-1-1 and dialing—
“Philadelphia Police Department. Jaworski speaking.”
And, God, just the sound of a familiar voice—“Mike, I’m in New York State, a private estate owned by the late Grayson Donne. I know it’s not your jurisdiction, but I need—I think there are bodies here, Mike, a lot of them. He’s been killing people for a least half a century and it may be a family enterprise. I don’t know how far back some of these graves go.” The house was, what, 1840s? No later than the 1870s, and the first Donne who lived here had built the house around that room.
“Are you in any danger?” He heard Jaworski scrabbling for a pencil on the other end of the line, but didn’t hear what he said next. The wind had picked up, eddies rising around him, and he didn’t think he was doing it.
“Dad?” he said, though he’d never called his father that, never even thought it until now and Badad of the host of Ariton would not appreciate it, on second thought.
Brad appeared in front of him with a snap of blue fire and a crack of thunder. Lily was right behind him, and Evan figured the neighbors must be hiding under their beds. But he hadn’t felt this glad to see them since they pulled him out of a different back room, full of its own chains and knives and drugs and rape, where he’d prayed more than once that the daemon Omage would let him die.
Chapter 32
“DON’T CALL ME ‘DAD.’ It sounds ridiculous.” Brad didn’t know what had happened. One minute he was gathering Lily for an assault on the planet, ready to destroy everyone and everything, with a special fate for whatever had killed his son. The next, Evan was just there, every connection humming with life. He’d followed it, expecting to find his son damaged in some way, but found him talking into a cell phone next to the BMW as if he hadn’t just been dead to two universes.
For some reason, that made him angry—angry enough that the grass under his feet began to crisp and brown. He’d wanted Evan alive, hadn’t he? Or at least, not randomly dead at the hands of an enemy—that was Ariton’s prerogative. So why was he angry enough to start a small earthquake when he found Evan not only alive, but well?
Although, not so well, if he looked a little closer. Evan hadn’t had that particular look since he’d walked away from the rubble of Ca’ DaCosta in Venice. He’d lost his only human friends that day, killed two people and learned his own capacity for destruction all in the space of an afternoon. He didn’t want to know what had put that look on his son’s face, sharp enough to see through the bruises, but he was pretty sure that Evan was going to tell him anyway.
Evan slid his hand over the phone’s pickup. “Don’t go in the house—it’s a seal. I’d still be in there, but I’m mostly human, found the hidden latch and walked out.” And yeah, Matt Shields had said something about that, he knew to stay clear, but a seal didn’t erase the presence of a daemon lord. Muted it some, tangled the sense of it, but didn’t cut it off completely. Evan wasn’t a daemon lord, but his daemon essence was visible to any lord who looked for it.
“It’s been consecrated with blood—lots of it. The sick fuck killed hundreds of people here. He buried them in the woods.”
Clever man, Grayson Donne. Still too bad he was already dead. There was something else, but Evan wasn’t sharing. It had to be about the seal, something that had hidden his existence from his own Prince, because that’s when Evan stopped talking. He’d have to spill it before they went much further, but Brad recognized that look, pushing through shock with nothing but stubbornness to keep him moving.
Brad avoided the house, avoided the gardens that opened up a dead, cold space behind his ribs, and went in search of those graves in the woods. He wondered about Matt Shields—Parmatus—though. Could the room have the same effect on a daemon lord? No reason Ariton would notice the absence of a lord not of his own host—they didn’t have that connection outside the host and had no reason to be looking for it. Matt Shields was bound here, might not know what effect the house might have on the second celestial sphere. But Paimon—Paimon had to know if a lord or two of its own host passed in and out of existence. That was powerful magic.
Paimon had made the deal, but hadn’t told them. So maybe the human side of Evan’s nature hid his presence at the dark heart of the house. Or maybe Paimon was hiding information vital to completing the contract.
He had no power to extract the truth from Paimon, but a carefully balanced combination of fear and emotional blackmail worked better than a summoning spell on Evan. He’d give Lily a shot first, because she had that combination calibrated to a fine point. But he wasn’t going forward until he at least knew what his son was holding back.
Chapter 33
“EVAN. EVAN! ARE YOU THERE?” Jaworski was beginning to sound a little desperate. That much got through. But Evan had the backup he needed now and he pulled himself together, answered, “Yeah, I’m here. Sorry. Got distracted, but I’m okay.” He didn’t mention Lily breathing fire next to him.
“You did the right thing to call me,” Jaworski said. “I’ve got the address and help is on the way—local police should be there in about ten minutes.”
“I’m fine, Mike, really. The bodies are buried in the woods northwest of the main house.” And it struck him then that Carlos Sanchez had to know about those graves.
Mike Jaworski was still talking, and he tried to focus, difficult to do with his assumptions about this case realigning and Lily standing just out of reach.
“The locals have somebody checking the county records for abandoned cemeteries just to be sure, but they are sending a car to check it out in the meantime. Once they confirm—and I believe you, no question—they’ll bring in the FBI. It will take a while to get an investigative team out from the regional office in New York City, but they’ll want to talk to you—can you wait for them?”
Jaworski was using that soothing police voice and—huh—it worked. If he didn’t know better, Evan would have been happy to leave the whole mess in the hands of the nice policeman. The next question slipped in along his own line of though
t, “Your client—Matt Shields, right?—was a victim, wasn’t he? The FBI will want to talk to him too.”
“Yeah.” The police would see it on the wall, no use hiding it now, but Jaworski would call for the shrinks if he told him the truth. “Donne is dead, but he wasn’t working alone.” With any luck, they could send Shields back where he belonged before the FBI caught up with him, but he was on the loose and unprotected back home.
And Lily—flames snapped, her lips drawn back in a snarl with teeth in it and he thought she was about to yell at him, but all he could think about was how he much he wanted to touch her hair.
“I have something to do first, but I’ll be back by the time the FBI arrives. And thanks. I owe you.”
He cut the connection, reaching for Lily. Somewhere between his ear and Lily’s waist he dropped the phone—he’d have to remember that, eventually, but right now the scent of her hair was in his head and the curve of her spine was the road home.
“What’s in the woods?” she asked, her mouth against his lips. Her fingers scraped lightly over his skull, reminder, caress, captivity. “Evan!”
“Nothing.” She wasn’t buying that. “Graves,” he said, “I told you. Just graves.” Nothing human moved in his awareness this side of the road—no magicians lurking in the woods to stuff his father in a box. “Nothing that can hurt him.”
The reminder of Donne’s human sacrifices sent him shivering back into her arms. “Oh, God, Lily, he murdered hundreds of them.” He could have been one of them.
“And now he’s dead.” She didn’t say, “He can’t hurt you.” Dead or not, Donne was still hurting Matt Shields and had somebody locked in a box at Sotheby’s. But her arms drew him in, possession and the illusion of safety
She took his mouth. He leaned back against the BMW and let her, just held on tight for the ride because now that they’d gotten started, he wasn’t in any shape to lead this dance.
But his father would be coming back from the woods, and he didn’t want to be rolling around naked on Grayson Donne’s lawn when the police showed up. So he pulled away from her kiss and gasped, “Not here—”
Then kissed her anyway, because he needed the feel of her, needed Lily’s breasts and Lily’s hands and Lily’s long, strong legs wrapped around him—everything she was in the flesh or in bright blue flame meant home to him. Lily. He didn’t let the words escape. knew she’d laugh at him if she caught him muttering her name under his breath. He was losing buttons—Carlo would sew on new ones, he always did—but Lily was more focused than he was. He couldn’t decide whether to go for the zipper on her slacks or the buttons on her shirt, clenched his throat around a frustrated whimper he would not let her hear, because to get to skin at all he’d have to drag his hands back out of her hair, dark as the second celestial sphere and soft like the whisper of her name. God, he loved her hair. But her breasts were right there—he needed to be inside of her, now, in all the human ways and some that weren’t—needed her mind in his mind, needed to be a part of her, sharing every molecule. Or something.
“Home,” she whispered, and they went, into the darkness.
He couldn’t stay here long, not with his body and he wasn’t letting that go, shouldn’t be here at all. He loved her here and couldn’t hide the thought any more than he could hide the way her name was ricocheting off the walls of his mind. She saw his fear, and he saw hers, saw a war just averted when he reappeared and one that might be brewing, because Paimon must have known something and hadn’t warned them and she’d thought he was dead. Took that for all the declaration he would ever have. Which, all things considered, was a pretty damned huge declaration of something.
They were attracting a crowd. He flinched as blue flame engulfed him in the darkness. It didn’t burn, not like fire, but every nerve buzzed with the electric presence of daemon lords moving through him, taking his mind apart looking for answers he just didn’t have. Ariton had agreed to a war over losing him and here he was, as safe as he could get in a place he had no right to exist. He felt the anger of the host, its curiosity. It overwhelmed him, plundering his thoughts to find out where he had gone and what he’d been doing. He knew the questions because he’d already seen them in Lily’s mind, in his father’s closed-down expression now that he knew to look.
He’d learned to live with nosy relatives—even, apparently, when they wanted to kill him. So he let them in, clamped down hard against the onslaught of violent outrage and showed them a little of what they were looking for, because he could read their thoughts too—“Trap,” he showed them, and, “prison.”
He hadn’t known how completely he’d vanished, and it scared him, the power that meant.
“I didn’t know! Daemon flame pried bloodstains from his mind, Grayson Donne’s floor wet with sacrificial blood—his own, daemon blood. It fueled the power that lingered in the house long after Donne was dead.
That scared the relatives too, and he’d brought that danger into the spheres. So Anader still wanted war against Paimon, but he also wanted to blast Earth and Evan with it, so it could never happen again.
Evan wanted to live. He wanted his home to live. And Ariton—the host, gathered in quorum, that became its Prince—had made his deal with Paimon to free Matt Shields from Donne’s strongbox. So he wanted Matt Shields to live too. But Grayson Donne’s box didn’t really hold him and slagging the planet wouldn’t free him. He let the host see that the seals were just the physical signs of a powerful spell that had to be taken apart piece by piece. He didn’t know what would happen if the whole thing went up in a molten ball of lava, but he was pretty sure Matt Shields would be screwed.
A piercing pain shot through his head—Harumbrub, with no subtlety at all, looking for something, and he hadn’t credited the lord with that level of interest. Not personal, though.
“Kill him,” he said. “His loyalties are divided. He’s no different from the others—flesh is not to be trusted.”
Daemon lords could have one loyalty—to the host, and through the host, its Prince. Minor loyalties always fell within the host. Evan’s loyalty to Earth, to all the things he loved that fell outside Ariton, made him insane by their reckoning. “He’ll always be a danger—and he knows our names.”
“He’s loyal to Ariton,” Lirion showed them that part of him—it hadn’t changed since the last time—and Sched touched his mind, more gently than Harumbrub. “To Lirion, and to Badad,” she agreed. “To Ariton the Prince, but not to the host, which is an impossible thought. But also to his world, to his ties of flesh.”
“Not divided.” His reaction was too immediate to be anything but real, and they could read his mind anyway. “Two parts. One whole.” And he thought that it was even true. He’d didn’t feel like a jumble of bits and pieces anymore. It was all just Evan, and he could love his mother and his father, feel the same fierce loyalty to Ariton as he did for his home on Earth. He even understood why the host would fight the Prince of a foreign lord who took his life but then want to kill him themselves.
Was he dangerous? Of course. He was Ariton and human—a danger to both and, as he’d been told often enough, the loose end that could bring down all the spheres if he’d a mind or the blind ignorance to do it. But his loyalty was unshakable. His mother was the face in his mirror, but his father was the storm he shaped like clay and flung into the sky. No self-interest could trump either of those things.
Lily was tugging at his mind, though he didn’t need the reminder. “Mine.” She claimed his body and he needed her eternity after Grayson Donne’s trap, needed to wrap himself in the curves of her legs and feel her life between his hands after seeing all those crosses, all Donne’s murdered sacrifices. Ariton might go to war or kill him because of his own blood spilled there, but he wasn’t letting go of Lily until he was dead.
Could a daemon bind a human? She saw the thought, curled around it like a hungry cat. “Silk scarves or handcuffs?”
“Silk scarf? What do you do—? Oh!” Caramos would have w
aged war for Evan when it seemed the house had killed him, still would as soon as they figured out who the enemy was. Sched would not, but had regretted his loss a little. She still wanted Evan to find a real girl and leave Lily the hell alone. He liked her anyway, but he didn’t want to share his thoughts with every gathered lord of Ariton.
Lily’s fire was snapping at his nose. War could wait. He needed the comfort of their own house, the illusion that nothing could touch them His bed shaped itself in his mind and he let the image carry them there. Lily didn’t protest, just took the opportunity to shed an outer layer of clothes.
Chapter 34
HIS ROOM WAS A MESS—unmade bed, paints and brushes everywhere—but he didn’t care, because she was pushing him down, her palms planted on his shoulders, her back arched, dark hair closing around them.
His mouth found her breast and latched on, familiar taste of Lily and silk. She dragged her fingernails down his neck, pushed his shirt off his shoulders. He kept his mouth where it was but helped her strip off his shirt and managed his own zipper because she couldn’t reach. He tipped her over and nestled between her legs, the scent of her mingling with the smell of damp silk, the taste of it, and he gripped her hips and slid the scrap of midnight blue down, followed it, tracing the curve of her leg, the landscape of thigh and knee and ankle. Her toes distracted him, brightly, pinkly, polished nails. Like candy, so he had to give them a lick, and then she laughed, threatened him with dire consequences, and offered other tasty bits, but her calf curved just so. He had to stop and lick it too. She smelled like Lily right there behind her knee and he tasted that as well, salt and sweet and Lily—she tugged him up by his ears because his hair was gone.
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