“Later,” she gasped, imperious as a lord. “I need more now.” She never said please, but the hard glitter in her eyes told him everything he needed to know. He kissed her, deep as he could get in his world, his hips moved, and he was home, sinking his hands deep in her hair while she raked hot pink fingernails up his arms, down his back, latched onto his ass tight enough to leave little red half-moons in his flesh.
He thought he could do this forever, but he couldn’t, though he managed to hold on until Lily gasped and bit his ear, a little keening sound escaping the almost- clench of her teeth. She’d leave marks, a line of scratches where her nails had slid up his ass, taking skin with them, but he didn’t think he’d need an earring.
She rolled over, taking him onto his back, letting him know with one leg wrapped around his thigh that she wasn’t done with him yet. Evening was turning indigo in his window. In the corner, Lily laughed at him out of a canvas, half painted and wholly naked. He could feel those lines in his hand, wanted to paint them, wanted to mark her as his own, and smiled.
“Just a minute.” He slipped out of bed, found what he wanted—jars, brushes. Paint. It had settled a bit so he mixed the colors with the handle of the brush, then filled the bristles and began to paint. There, on her breast, the swirl of a dark blue leaf, another on her belly, joined by a trailing vine of white paint. She lay still, sighing at the lap of the paint on her flesh, the sweep of the brush, sable, for her—that sound she made when he touched the tip of her nipple with blue was worth every brush he had. A stroke from the base of her breastbone to her navel. The intricate design, like lace, worked from hip to hip across the softness of her belly, brought up her knees, but he couldn’t touch, didn’t want to smear the paint. Not yet, not until he’d covered every inch of her with abstract flowers, vines and leaves and tendrils, stroke by stroke by stroke, following with kisses carefully placed in the pink and cream between the lines. Aleph, he worked in, and Rho, then obliterated that memory in a tangle of painted flowers while she moaned softly and the sweat bloomed between her legs. Looking at it, his mouth went dry, and so he licked it up, and wanted more, and she was digging her toes into his ass, but not touching him with her arms, left them where he had placed them, stretched out on the bed as if the trailing vines had grown out of the rumpled covers and bound her to the bed.
“Evan,” she sighed his name, and her eyes slid shut, focusing inward on the sensations he was giving her. “I did that,” he thought. The paint glistened wet on her skin.
He couldn’t wait, wanted the liquid slide, slow and easy, because she’d gone soft and languid on the bed and they moved together as if the day had never happened, obliterating the lace he’d made on her skin, sharing paint with the spit and the sweat and all the other things they stained the sheets with. White streaks of paint worked their way into her hair and his heart clenched, knowing he’d never see her hair grow white. She’d outlive him by a billion years and might lose interest tomorrow anyway.
But he had her now, her arms coming up to leave smears of blue and white on his back. He’d gotten paint on his face and shared it with Lily, who laughed at him and wiped a dab off his nose before she put a kiss there—didn’t want to know where else that paint was going, but he wasn’t going to let her go to find out. They were slippery and wet and the bed was a mess—he’d never get the sheets clean, figured they’d be his favorites after today. Lily managed to get on top, laughed at how difficult it was not to slide right off each other. But she knew what she wanted and he was ready for her, fingers gripping her, counting ribs, thumbs nestled under the slope of her breasts. He was exhausted by the time she was done with him, too tired even to think about clients or graves in the woods or a house with his face on the wall and his blood on the floor.
Before he’d finished debating with himself the value of a shower, he’d fallen asleep.
Chapter 35
MATT SHIELDS HAD LEFT A NOTE ON THE desk: “I locked up before I left. Are we set for the auction?”
Shields took playing human to new levels of ordinary. Brad didn’t trust any part of it, but figured that the faster they were done with this case the faster he could stop worrying about deals with Princes not his own. The laptop was open, so he tapped through the labyrinth of passwords Evan had set and checked the agency’s account for Shields’ transactions.
The money was there, and he shut down again, ignored the phone that rang on the desk. He had to talk to Shields about the trap in Grayson Donne’s house—the one he hadn’t bothered to mention before it caught Evan—and he wanted to know who was screaming in the box they were supposed to buy. But right now? He wanted coffee and, in the absence of anyone else to do it, wandered back into the kitchen to make a pot.
Evan had left the coffeemaker ready, so he turned it on, pulled down a plain white mug while it gurgled to life. Tried to ignore the agency line ringing through on the kitchen phone and that seemed successful for a minute. Then it started again. Different tone now—the private line.
Brad checked caller ID. He didn’t recognize the number, but the exchange was the same as Ellen Li’s official cell phone, so he picked up. Didn’t say anything, just waited because he hated telephones even more than he hated computers and never gave away the tactical advantage.
“Evan? Is that you? Evan?” Mike Jaworski, half threatening, half cajoling. “Are you hurt?” Scared. It cheered Brad to hear that tone for some reason.
Evan was pumping out residual panic along with about a dozen other emotions that Brad didn’t much care to sift through, but he didn’t seem hurt. Brad hung up the phone, poured himself a mug of coffee and wandered toward the study to find a book. He had to pass through the living room to get there, and Mike Jaworski was standing in the middle of it, gun drawn.
“I should have known it was you.” Jaworski slid the gun into its holster. He had an earpiece on and it all looked rather television to Brad. Jaworski said “Stand down” into the plastic arm that swept his cheek. “Bradley’s here. Send in the file.” He pulled off the earpiece and turned an exasperated glare on Brad. “Normal people say ‘hello’ when they answer the phone. ‘Fuck you’ will do in a pinch, if you don’t want the police barreling into your house.”
Brad glared back. “When did failing to talk on the telephone become a felony?”
“It’s not an arrest—it’s a rescue. Have you heard from Evan?”
“Evan’s fine. What are you doing here anyway?”
“Rescue,” Jaworski repeated, “Ellen set a watch on the house. I called from the corner. Came in through the side gate.” He cocked his head, receiving some message from the plastic in his ear. Then he frowned, not angry, but puzzled. “The gate? It’s the big iron thing in the middle of the brick wall.” A pause, then, “Wait there. I’ll be right out.” He jabbed a finger at Brad, didn’t make contact but still infused it with all the threat that a human with a conscience could muster. “Don’t move. We have to talk.”
Brad’s coffee was getting cold, so he went back to the kitchen, dumped it in the sink and poured another. Mike Jaworski found him there and slapped a file on the breakfast bar.
“Have you seen Evan? Are you sure he’s all right? He called, reported graves in the woods at Donne’s estate. He was supposed to wait and talk to the local police, but he wasn’t there when they arrived. His car was parked in front of the house and the police found his cell phone in the grass beside it, so the working assumption is that whoever was working with Donne took Evan.”
“He seemed fine when I talked to him a few minutes ago.” It was only partly a lie. Evan was in the house, with Lily, but he wouldn’t appreciate an interruption. An image of Mai Sien Chong, naked on a sea of green silk, completely blanked his mind for a moment and in that time Jaworski found himself a blue pottery mug and poured himself a cup of coffee. It unnerved Brad that Jaworski knew where the mugs were, and that he’d picked the blue. Evan had broken one that morning, over a conversation they still had to finish. Jaworski had see
n the broken pieces and made his own calculations.
Entirely too familiar. Brad considered modifying the wards on the gate, but that would make Ellen Li suspicious, and he was supposed to be playing chess with her husband tonight.
Jaworski set down the mug and opened the file, spread police photos on the breakfast bar. “He was right about the graves. Those people were torn to pieces by some animal and partially eaten, then ritualistically buried in shallow graves.” He sorted through the photos, picked out two that showed distinct evidence that something had gnawed on the bones.
Brad’s eyes slid shut, but he couldn’t hide from the images in his head. Rage. Overpowering rage, rage to destroy worlds. Donne had caged that fury, turned a daemon lord of the second celestial sphere into a ravening mindless beast. He remembered the rage from his own binding but had no cage of human words to stop him now. . .
“I know it’s bad, but I think you need to see this.” Jaworski’s voice gentled, and Brad wanted to kill him for it.
“You don’t know anything at all, Mr. Jaworski.”
“I’m sorry.” Jaworski didn’t offer any false comfort, just pushed his coffee at him. Brad stared at him for a moment but read concern in Jaworski’s furrowed brow. For him, not Evan, this time. For the human shell, the human father of a human friend. He didn’t think Jaworski would handle a demonstration of his true nature nearly as well. Wouldn’t understand that Brad felt for the daemon lord who had been driven to do those things, not the humans who had died. Matt Shields, he thought. Donne had paid in more than rubies.
“Evan is in danger. Donne was into some freaky stuff, and he wasn’t working alone. According to the FBI pro-filer, we’re looking at a cult that uses torture and murder in its rituals. We know what they did to their victims. If they have him—”
“They don’t.” Brad was sure of that. But his temper was starting to create static on the line.
“But they did.” Jaworski slid another photograph from the file. “I didn’t want to show you this, but the FBI found his fingerprints nearby, so they’re pretty sure he saw it.”
Just paint this time. Brad recognized Evan in the picture, of course. At some point he’d been held in that house. The horned monster raping him had green scales, so it was probably Omage. Brad had been there, seen that. Another place and time, but Evan had belonged to Franklin Simpson, not Grayson Donne, and Evan never would have taken the case if Paimon’s lord had done that to him. They’d be well into the war that the Princes had put on hold.
“We think they wore costumes as part of their sick rituals, and to protect their identities.”
The robes were costumes. Omage’s material form in the painting was just a bad rendering. He didn’t think Jaworski would appreciate the critique.
“ . . . Evan may have seen or heard a name, something, that can help us stop them. The FBI wants to talk to him about what was going on there, how he got away.”
“Evan didn’t escape.” Old story. Brad was tired of revisiting it. “Lily and I got him out. But it was a different place, different people who held him and they are as dead as Grayson Donne, so I don’t know what help he can be.” The pictures gave Evan a motive for murdering Simpson and tied them to the Black Masque. Brad wondered how much money they had stashed in their own offshore account.
Jaworski rubbed at his eyes, buying time while he added it up in his head and came to the same answer Joe Dougherty had. Then he shook it off—probably remembered how they died and figured that a collapsing house made an unlikely murder weapon. But he wasn’t finished.
“Knowing what he’d been through, how could you take this case?”
“Evan took the case,” Brad pointed out. “I objected. But we didn’t know they were connected.” Matt Shields must have known, though, and he hadn’t said anything.
“Yeah, well. The FBI also wants to talk to your client.”
Jaworski shuffled the photographs back into a neat stack, the one with Evan in it tucked into the center, hidden as much as he could make it, and tapped the rim of his coffee cup, reminding Brad of the broken pieces scattered on the floor that morning. He wasn’t an expert on the material sphere, but he figured nothing that started this badly ever ended well.
“He may need—you may want to talk to him when he gets back. You really do know where he is, don’t you?”
“He’s with Lily. They’re both safe.” Which was a lie in ways that Jaworski might even appreciate.
And there it was. A sly smile sneaked across his face. “That’s one way to handle it.” The smile disappeared as fast as it had come. “A roll in the hay may not be enough this time.”
Brad didn’t know what hay had to do with anything, but Jaworski didn’t explain, just pulled a couple of business cards out of his breast pocket. “These people work with victims. They can help.”
Counseling the half-human children of daemons was beyond the scope of any help Jaworski had in his pocket. Brad couldn’t quite sort out how much of the conversation was police questioning and how much was the concern of someone Evan was starting to think of as a friend, but that was Evan’s problem, not his. He took the card anyway—anything to get the policeman moving and out of his house.
“The FBI’s New York office has the car.” Jaworski was talking again, settled into the stool at the breakfast bar and not going anywhere. “At the moment they’re treating it like evidence of a kidnapping, but they’ll release it when Evan confirms that there’s been no crime.” He looked down at the folder of photographs neatly squared on the granite counter, then backed up and tried again. “At least not this time. He can pick the car up at the impound yard.”
Brad didn’t care about the car, but he’d had enough of the FBI. “Tell them to keep it. We’ll get a new one.”
That brought Jaworski’s head up with wary surprise. “What did they do to him? I can protect him, but not if you don’t tell me what happened to him.” Earnest concern, right in Brad’s face and he had to take a step back or do something that would complicate all their lives. The damned car.
“He’s fine. Nothing happened.” The coffeepot was steps away and not a retreat at all. “The FBI won’t find anything useful. Nothing has ever happened in that car.”
Jaworski huffed, but couldn’t quite mask the laugh. “If they find bodily fluids, I assume you don’t want to know?”
“Unlikely. Lily likes her comforts.”
“Lily likes her Evan. I can’t see a stick shift stopping her. But we’ll keep that confidential. And I get it, really. ‘Grand gestures are us.’ The FBI will let you know when you can pick it up.” Jaworski took his folder and headed for the door. “I’ve seen how bad it can get carrying memories like Evan’s around. If he needs somebody just to talk to, tell him to give me a call, off the record.”
Brad thought “thank you” might be in order, but he did not put himself in the debt of humans. Jaworski shook his head, but kept moving. “You’re a stubborn bastard,” he said, “But you’re welcome anyway.”
Brad watched the gate behind him and added a new car to the “to do” list. The BMW was getting old anyway. He wasn’t worried. Evan hadn’t been kidnapped this time. Caught in a trap set for daemons and found his own way out. Clever boy. And Lily brought him home. She always did. But Jaworski had unsettled him, so he followed the sense of his son to the third-floor studio.
They were in bed together, covered in swirls and smears of blue and white and each other, not quite done with what they’d started. Evan didn’t notice him, a human trait he’d once said: to shut out anything but a perceived threat. Lily never lost the awareness of cousins in the room. Perhaps she had a better understanding of danger.
She stretched and smiled, kissed Evan in places that stirred a few new memories of his own. Rolled him over and went with him, a kaleidoscope of blue and white, so that Evan was on his back and Lily was riding him, laughing. Playing like host-cousins in human form. Except that Evan looked at her in a way that set warnings clamoring. Lily’s a
ttention span was short, and Evan had already stretched it farther than Brad had thought it would go.
He hadn’t come here to watch his son play, and seeing them, he wondered why he had come. He had more pressing concerns, and Matt Shields was top of the list. But it was late, and Mai Sien would be waking up soon, which seemed as good an idea as any.
Chapter 36
BRAD HATED PAPERWORK AND AVOIDED it whenever possible. Occasionally it wasn’t possible, so he spent half the next afternoon at the computer in the formal office because they still hadn’t replaced the desk in the study. He asked himself again why he didn’t just fry this little ball of wax and go home. Knew the answer—the IRS would rise from the ashes to find him and he’d still have to do the paperwork. But he was done for the quarter, closed the computer and stretched at the desk. Evan was in San Diego, taking a quick look at the real estate holdings of a senior executive for one of their regular clients, money in the bank. Lily had gone back to Hokkaido for reasons that Evan was better off not knowing, which meant that no one was watching Matt Shields.
They’d left him on his own too long when he’d merited more watching than Evan. Evan was a smart boy and he made good use of his dual nature. Matt Shields had handed them a case like a bright shiny object to chase, and they hadn’t questioned his motives beyond the obvious. But the strongbox in Sotheby’s galleries screamed when he approached it, and that hadn’t been in Shields’ story. Not all of Grayson Donne’s effects had made it to auction either. You didn’t bind daemons without a lot of research—where were the books? And what else had already passed into the hands of the robed figures in Mike Jaworski’s photographs?
Brad was restless and he’d been looking for a war, felt cheated when he didn’t get one. He thought maybe he’d found one at a pool table on Third. Matt Shields was at Charlie’s, a little joint off the beaten track for the club scene, but the front booths and the long, polished bar were already filling up with the local beer-and-a-burger crowd. Brad shrugged his way past the bar, where a bar-tender in black jeans and tee with a shaved head and a plug in his earlobe looked up but didn’t stop wiping down glasses.
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