A Legacy of Daemons

by Camille Bacon-Smith

  In a room at the back, Shields had found a local to relieve of his money. He was studying his shot over a pool table with a bump or two in the worn red felt; his shoulders tensed when Brad walked in behind him, but otherwise he pretended not to notice a daemon lord of a foreign Prince at his back. Allies, after all. Brad took the cue out of the hands of the indignant hipster, his smile pretending an apology that the cold set of his eyes took away again. “He cheats,” he said with a little shrug. “Take your money and bring me a Sam Adams.”

  “Now how am I going to pay for my burger?” Shields looked up, shook his head in mock dismay, but he was smiling, so he’d learned that much about human behavior. He took his shot; the last of the striped balls ricocheted off the cushion and dropped into the corner pocket.

  From the front of the house the clink of glass on glass, the din of clashing conversations punctuated by laughter bounced off the walls and sank into the local after-work crowd again. They had the back room to themselves for now, a second table for play and three for drinks and food still empty, but that wouldn’t last much longer.

  Surprise—the waitress brought him his Sam Adams. She had short hair, purple on one side, and a full-sleeve tattoo crossed by a studded leather bracelet on her right arm. Her piercings made him a little queasy, but Shields smiled like they were old friends and took the Heineken she’d brought him without asking.

  “Anything else?”

  Somebody to watch my client while I play chess with Harry Li, Brad thought, but he said “We’ll take the other table too.”

  “That’ll be twelve dollars for the tables.” She stuck her hand out for the money, drawing her own conclusions about why he wanted privacy in a semi-crowded bar. “We don’t allow sex in the bar. It’s against the health code and could get us closed down.”

  “No sex. Got it.” Brad pulled a hundred out of his wallet, handed it over, and turned to the table before she could ask if he wanted change. He figured for that much they’d have at least ten minutes without an audience. Maybe more if the house didn’t need the tables. He couldn’t count on it, but he heard her say “private party” to someone in the arch between the rooms and then she pulled an accordion door halfway across the space.

  “Do you know what to do with that stick in your hand, or are you just happy to see me?” Shields goaded him. Brad didn’t think he’d ever heard that almost- laugh in his voice before, figured he was about to ruin Shields’ day, and didn’t much care. The void in the universe where Evan had gone missing in that house had raw edges. The agency had never walked away from a contract and Princes did not break trust with each other when alliances were made, but for Matt Shields, he might still make an exception.

  “How hard can it be?”

  “Candy from a baby.” Shields racked the balls and stepped back. “For a burger and fries, and all the beer we can drink?”

  “The money’s in the bank. You can buy your own dinner.”

  “Yeah, but where’s the fun in that? I’ll even let you go first.”

  The bar wasn’t his kind of place, but Evan and Lily came here sometimes, ran a tab and played a few games, not all of them on the table. “Physics and geometry,” Evan said about it. Lily figured that, as a way to observe the limits of the material world in action, it was a lot less painful than driving the car into a tree.

  Brad took off his jacket and laid it carefully over the back of a chair, took a swallow of his beer.

  He sighted down the cue, hit the white ball, and watched the roll and scatter across the table. “Six,” he said, taking solid, and dropped the green into the side pocket. “Where is Donne’s library? Who has it, how did they get it, and why?”

  Chapter 37

  HUNGER DROVE EVAN TO THE KITCHEN. He scarfed down a leftover beignet and wandered through the living room, passed the private study with a mental note to get the damned desk replaced. Maybe he’d call Claire Murphy, see if she could help. Overhead the shower cut on, and he thought, maybe not. Lily hadn’t been home when he arrived, but that sounded like her bathroom.

  Brad was sitting at the desk in the front office, the leather executive desk chair tilted back. “Nothing going on in San Diego,” he started. “The guy looks clean so far.” But something was off with his father.

  “Evan!” The desk chair swiveled left, right, left. “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting to see you.”

  Way off. Evan stepped under the seal worked into the plaster and hoped the repairs worked. “Who are you?”

  “I’m your father—the Bradley part of Bradley, Ryan, and Davis? Who else would I be?” Brad’s lids dropped over blue sparks. So—family.

  “That’s a good question.” Evan relaxed a little. Not too much. Whoever he was, he knew Brad’s earthly identity and his relationship with Evan, that they got along reasonably well most of the time, so it wasn’t a stranger who’d been stuck in a box like Matt Shields. But there were still lords of his own Prince who wanted him dead.

  “You’re usually not that suspicious, Evan. I was just here, and I thought, maybe we could have a little sex, you know, to pass the time until Parmatus . . .” The eyes were open again, full of reckless fun and giddy hope.

  Parmatus. Matt Shields in the second celestial sphere? But deals between Princes weren’t the point of this visit.

  “Lily! We’ve got company!” No panic, just a wave of profound exasperation. “Hello, Caramos. What are you doing here? Wait!” He raised both hands in front of him, to put a stop to that giddy hope. “I am not going to have sex with you. Not now, not ever. How did you get here anyway? I thought only lords who had been summoned at some point could find their own way back.”

  “I followed you. Got a little lost, but then I just looked for Lily. And here I am.”

  Help—more or less—arrived. Lily wandered in, still naked from her shower, her hair wrapped in a towel. Neither was necessary. She reshaped the body when she moved through the spheres and only took the shower because she liked the feel of the falling water. And she had plenty of clothes in her closets. “Evan doesn’t sleep with his father—Brad asked, Evan said ‘no,’—so that body won’t work.” She kissed him on the chin, gave it a little nip that didn’t reassure him.

  “Why not? I thought—we’re both Ariton and Brad is family, a familiar body. I thought it would be fun.”

  Caramos’ explanation wasn’t entirely unexpected. But it wasn’t exactly welcome either, and Evan found himself at a loss. Didn’t want to upset the relatives when they could take out the block over an unintended insult, but he didn’t want to have sex with whoever turned up jonesing for some daemon-on-human action either.

  Lily just thought he was funny. “Evan has it all muddled up with two-headed babies, something to do with human genetics,” She raised her arms to massage her head with the towel, which brought her breasts up, presented like a gift.

  Evan dropped into one of the guest chairs, closed his eyes while he pulled himself together, which was difficult under the circumstances. Lily sat on the desk, still naked, facing Caramos. He could think of better things to do with a naked Lily, but she hadn’t stopped talking.

  “He’s wrong about the two- headed babies, of course. It’s really about power. They have stories, literature, full of fathers and sons struggling for power. Sex is a forbidden weapon, because the sons are supposed to win, eventually . . .”

  “I’m still here! Why are you talking about me as if I left the room?” Evan put a hand over his closed eyes. He didn’t want to have this conversation, didn’t want to hear this conversation.

  “. . . If the fathers use sex against them, the sons lose, pretty much forever.”

  Caramos had stopped swinging his chair. He huffed through his nose in a way that Brad never did. “The boy’s already lost. He’s alive only because his father felt a moment’s curiosity. I like him, I really do, but as soon as Badad gets tired of playing the Brad game, the boy is dead. He knows that, right?”

  Of course he knew. But he’d le
arned more, that Caramos might never understand, about the attachments that even a daemon lord could form when it kept to a human shape in the material sphere. He dropped his hand from his eyes, ready to argue the point, but Lily warned him with a twitch of her head. She wanted him to hear this, so he subsided into his chair, waited while Caramos took a breath to speak, let it out, and tried again.

  “Does Badad know about this?”

  Lily shrugged, but Evan didn’t let the shift of muscle under smooth skin distract him. Not while they were tossing his life between them like a live grenade. “He asked, Evan said no. At the time, he wasn’t all that interested and Evan wasn’t all that sane, so he didn’t pursue it.”

  Caramos had stopped using his name. Lily hadn’t, and Evan clung to that. But Caramos was frowning at something none of them could see—Evan had become a cipher in daemon politics, and not a person at all.

  “He’ll have to do it. He can’t let the boy think he’s got the upper hand with Ariton. I do like him, Lily; I didn’t come here to break your toys. But he has to bend to the will of his Prince. Badad cannot let a human will stand against him.”

  Evan stopped breathing. Inside the circle where he sat, a wind had risen, but neither Caramos nor Lily could feel it outside the circle. He had protections, and he ran through the spells he knew to hold that small foothold against them. Rejected any that involved binding his relations because he would not break another promise, no matter what they did to him. But he knew they were talking about the end of everything they had together. Lily must know that—

  “Badad can’t,” she said. “If he did, we’d lose Evan, and it will all have been for nothing.”

  “It is for nothing,” Caramos pointed out. “Humans die. I’ve seen Sched’s memories. They live brief lives and die brutally and in pain.”

  “Badad can’t. Not against Evan. He’s only just learned the fun of sex. To use it as a weapon would destroy that pleasure for him forever.”

  “Ariton does not bow before such creatures, nor does a daemon lord stand against his own Prince. If he wants to stay alive—”

  Evan had built an image in his mind of this lord as a jolly old uncle, a bit pervy, but harmless if you were firm. He’d gotten careless, forgotten the most basic fact about daemons—at their very best they were capricious and dangerous. Caramos, right now, was mostly dangerous. He didn’t look happy, but that wasn’t going to stop him.

  Not my father. Anything else, but don’t look like my father. He didn’t say it aloud, was afraid that anything he said would flip the switch on the daemon sitting in his office.

  “It’s all right.” Lily reached out, ran fingertips across lips that did not belong to his father, leaned in and followed with a kiss, stroked the daemon lord’s palm before linking her fingers with a hand that was not—was not—his father’s hand. “Badad can’t, but he isn’t the only lord in this house. It’s taken care of. Come on, I’ll show you. We can use Evan’s room. I learned a new trick just last night—do you like blue?”

  Caramos tugged the towel loose, freeing her hair. “It’s just become my favorite color.”

  “It will be fun, I promise.”

  She smiled over her shoulder at him, but Evan couldn’t read the smile. Didn’t want to. His world wasn’t imploding—she’d paraded her lovers in front of him before. Never in his bed, though. But he hadn’t understood why she did it before. Knowing carved a hole in his heart. Wondering whether she enjoyed any of it, or simply did what she had to do to keep him alive, made it bleed.

  “Or, maybe we’ll have ice cream instead. Chocolate ice cream with fudge sauce is better than sex.”

  “Ice cream? I didn’t see ice cream in the human’s mind.” Caramos followed her eagerly, trusting her with his joy.

  “That’s because it’s the greatest secret of the material world.”

  She stopped, smiled innocently, and Evan remembered a ruby lost in the garden. So it had been one of her jokes. But not entirely. He’d been in real danger. Caramos would have hurt him, but it would have damaged his own exuberant joy in the universe to do it. Lily wouldn’t let that happen to a host-cousin. Not to Caramos, at least.

  She’d wanted him to take some lesson from it, but he didn’t want to know, would rather feel like a jilted lover. Didn’t think that Lily was doing the same thing to him as Omage had, and he’d just been too stupid, too much a slave to his own prick to notice he was being screwed over as well as screwed. Which was unfair all the way down the line. He loved her; she found him amusing. If she had other motives, those two things were still true. And Lily never did anything she didn’t want to do. Including, it appeared, sex with Caramos in a bed full of drying paint.

  “You’ll need clothes,” he reminded her weakly. “And Brad is around somewhere. It will confuse the hell out of the neighbors if they see two of him running around.”

  “I didn’t like it much anyway.” Caramos frowned, morphed into something a little softer, a little rounder, but still with a family resemblance, especially around the eyes.

  “Cousin Ray?” Evan asked.

  Caramos grinned. “Cousin Ray. Can I meet your mother?”

  Evan paled at the thought, but Lily was there with a rescue.

  “Chocolate,” she said.

  “Ice cream!” Caramos responded. They disappeared, leaving him to his uncomfortable thoughts.

  Okay. So, okay. He’d never had any illusions about who was in charge in his relationship with Lily. If that meant Ariton was satisfied that its human monster was properly humbled, so be it. Better than not having her at all. And as an alternative to being dead, well, he’d cope—and when the relatives dropped by to make sure Lily was torturing him enough with all that sex, he’d try to keep the smirk off his face.

  It did make him think, though, about relationships and obligations, including that rider to the partnership papers that Brad wanted. He sat down at the desk, opened the computer to their standard contract template for clients, and started to type.

  Chapter 38

  “WHERE IS DONNE’S LIBRARY?Who has it, Whow did they get it, and why?”

  Shields frowned, not angry but confused. “I don’t want the books. I just need the box.”

  “If Donne wrote down what he was doing, whoever has his books may want the box too.” He didn’t mention Michel LeRoux, the priest who’d come calling, or the priest’s mother, who knew more than she was telling. “Two, side.” He missed his shot, deliberately, stepped back to give Shields access to the table—figuring angles might distract him enough to let the truth slip.

  “Cyril Van Der Graf has most of the books.” Shields studied the table. “He has a house off Park Avenue. He lined up his shot. “Thirteen.” Bridged the stick, pale knuckles on felt the color of fresh blood. Over his shoulder a slate board nailed to the cheap paneling gave the beers on special, said, “Take the fighting outside.”

  “I delivered the library before Donne died, because he commanded it and paid a price in rubies to have his will obeyed. That’s the way it worked.”

  Van Der Graf. Brad knew the name. He had a reputation for being a recluse, and for his collection of modern art. Shields’ orange stripe dropped obligingly into the pocket.

  “Why send the books to Van Der Graf?”

  “Evan’s been to Donne’s house.” Shields spared him a quick glance, “get a clue” in his eyes. “He’s seen what passed for art there, So you know Donne wasn’t working alone. Not all the time, at least.” He took his shot quickly this time, nine in the side, his next moves all planned. Brad had figured it as well, knew where a little intervention would put him back in the game, but not yet. Shields was still talking.

  “Donne was getting old. After his son died, he was under pressure to appoint a successor. He still had hopes of producing another heir, but he was ninety years old, and I’d already done all he commanded to keep him alive. It wasn’t going to be enough. So he knew he wouldn’t live long enough to raise it, figured the group would probably kill
it when he died. “Fifteen, side pocket.” Shields turned back to the table, took his shot. Waited while the ball rolled, red stripe appearing and disappearing again, until it came to rest at the lip of the cup.

  The bar out front was heating up, voices rising to a dull roar. The waitress dropped off a second round, the clink of glass on glass a warning. Brad passed her another twenty, but they didn’t have more than a few minutes back here. When she’d taken a few steps out of hearing range, Shields picked up his story.

  “Van Der Graf didn’t have kids. Didn’t want any. Liked them well enough, but not in a good way. He was powerful enough in the group to have a chance of keeping the kid alive, though, so Donne made a deal—raise the kid, make it his heir, and he’d name Van Der Graf his successor. Transferring the library was a good faith gesture. But he never did make that heir, and he never actually named Van Der Graf his successor either. So the rest is up for grabs.”

  Something in his story sounded false at its core. Brad was pretty sure all the words were true—it was the missing bits that worried him. Donne had died of a heart attack, or it had looked like a heart attack. Natural causes at ninety. Wouldn’t have had an autopsy. Brad could have done that, easy.

  He called the two, taking the shot he’d missed last time. Sank it and prowled the perimeter choosing his next shot. Pretended not to look at Matt Shields when he asked the question. “Did you kill him?”

  “Van Der Graf? As far as I know, he’s still alive.”

  “Donne.” Brad flicked him the “don’t be an idiot” look he’d perfected on Evan and took his shot.

  “He had a heart attack. I would have done it, had a chance once or twice, but I’d still have been stuck with the fucking box.”

  “And to whatever’s inside. I heard it scream.” Brad looked up then, wanted to see the effect he’d had. Shields wasn’t showing much. Brad missed his next shot.