A Legacy of Daemons

by Camille Bacon-Smith

  Shields called the seven, an easy drop, but his voice sounded clipped, efficient in the call. Professional.

  “How long has Donne held your contract?” Circle around the burning hole in the middle of Shields’ mind. This should have been the more painful question, but it wasn’t.

  Red fell in the pocket. Shields shifted his weight, went after the twelve. “Forty years.” Bad enough, but not the truth. Or, not the right question.

  “Not just this Donne. All of them. How long have you been bound to that box?”

  “The box was new. He made it to bind me there. Later—later, there was company.”

  Six hundred years, then, give or take a decade or two. Brad couldn’t wrap his mind around it, not as a daemon lord and not the meat brain that ticked away the hours at the base of his skull.

  “Did you stay for the killing, or did you just like it in that box?”

  The cue stick in Shields’ hand burst into flame. Nobody was looking, but just one bike messenger waiting for a table had to turn around and they’d have a panic on their hands. Police called.

  Brad suppressed the fire, glared. “Sotheby’s tomorrow, or a jail cell for setting the bar on fire? Your options seem limited until we get the box back. Speaking from the other side of a jail cell, I’d think carefully about my answer.”

  Wrong thing to say—Shields smiled like he’d just won the point. “He put you there, didn’t he?”

  “Which he? Captain Marsh? Lieutenant Ellen Li? It was a misunderstanding. We all got over it.”

  “Evan. The other humans couldn’t make you stay.”

  “That was a misunderstanding too.” He’d get over it eventually. Not today, though. Didn’t want an outsider to see the cracks in their defenses—never give up the tactical advantage—and Shields hadn’t answered the question. So he shrugged it off as if it had meant nothing. “It was a mistake. He paid for it, he got the message. Won’t be doing it again. Were you in it for the rubies or the killing?”

  Shields found another stick, took his shot. “It’s a powerful spell. For a century I fought it, but the magicians were smart. Only the owner can command the spell or destroy the box, and ownership passed from father to son. Donne could trade the box, or sell the box, but none of them ever did.”

  “In 1578 the Donne was murdered by a highwayman who stole the box. Whole generations of Donnes lived and died without knowing it existed, until sometime in the mid seventeenth century the new heir found a description of it in the family records. He summoned me, made me find the box for him. I could have killed him—he didn’t know what he was doing, really. But I would have ended up back in the box, so I brought it to him. He’s the one who founded the society.”

  “Did they all have sons?” It seemed unlikely, but Shields just gave a little shrug. “It was part of the spell. They didn’t all live, though. I think in 1793 Donne ceded the box to his daughter’s son, provided that he took the family name. They were already in England then, and were calling themselves Donne.”

  He stopped. Still hadn’t said who was stuck in the box with him, but Brad figured he could buy the thing with agency money and negotiate ownership once they knew what they were dealing with. It wasn’t clear from Shields’ story whether buying the box from the state would work at all. Brad thought that a spell based on a bloodline should have ended with the last Donne, but there’d been that cousin in Colorado, so there might be more of them out there. But they could at least keep the spell out of anyone else’s hands until they figured out how to break it. Shields sank the ten—last stripe—but he hadn’t quite finished.

  “For a long time, I was crazy. It’s hard to hold onto yourself when there’s no hope at all.”

  The eight ball followed the ten and Brad figured he’d just learned what he had to know. Not who, but the condition of the merchandise, at least. As if the screaming hadn’t told him that already. He remembered the interrogation room at Major Crimes. Bad as it had been, he’d had Khadijah Flint, a human, fighting for him and Lily. And once Lily pointed out the magnitude of his mistake, Evan had let them go, no strings attached even though he thought it was going to kill him.

  He tried to imagine being trapped in a small box, with no one for company but a frantically mad cousin. For centuries. It didn’t bear thinking.

  “Tomorrow we’ll have the box,” he said, careful not to make promises. The agency had a contract to buy the box for Matt Shields, but it didn’t give the time frame, or who they had to buy it from. Throwing the agency into the middle of the transaction stretched the contract to the breaking, but the deal with Paimon called for one freed daemon lord, not two, especially one who was more insane than Omage had been and not inclined to leave reminders behind. It always came down to Evan needing a planet to stand on. So they’d see. Tomorrow.

  Until then, somebody had to keep an eye on the client. A new set of players had wandered in—they’d outstayed their money, so he hung up his stick, waited until Shields had done the same, then clapped him on the back. “I don’t know about you, but I could use another beer.”

  “You owe me a burger and fries.”

  “Burger and fries it is.” Or maybe not. Someone had crossed all the protections they’d put in place and had gotten into the house. Brad felt the intrusion, but he didn’t, immediately, sense danger. A host-cousin of Ariton, under no compulsion that he could find, and Lily was there. So maybe he had time for that beer. But, oh, Ariton and all the Princes, it was Caramos, at his most gleefully curious, and Evan was in the house. Brad felt the jolt of fear, followed by amused exasperation, then suddenly Evan was as angry as Brad had ever felt him. Which, in a room with two host-cousins after a narrow decision to take his deal and let him live, was not smart. He considered his options for a discreet exit and decided on the men’s room.

  “Next time,” he said. “We’ve got company. Evan gave you a card, right? You can charge it to the agency—”

  “I know, I know: you’ll put it on the bill.”

  “I owe you a burger, but the beer is on your bill. If you need cash, just draw it off the card. Stop by the agency later; we have to talk about tomorrow.”

  Shields found a stool at the bar, a smile ready for the girl with purple hair, and waved him off—he would have felt it when Caramos arrived, wouldn’t have known where exactly, or who, except that it was Ariton. “Say thanks, for me?” He owed all of Ariton. Still, a deal between Princes didn’t mean peace between their lords. Shields would stay clear until the numbers were more in his favor.

  Brad left him to his burger and went in search of the men’s room.

  Chapter 39

  “NICE ENTRANCE.” Evan looked up from the computer screen to greet his father, who had appeared at the center of the medallion worked into the Aubusson carpet. The light from the window was fading, falling yellow low on the garden wall from the west. So the glinting flames in Brad’s eyes were Ariton, not the sun.

  “When is Lily going to replace the desk in the study?” Not exactly “hello,” but Evan sympathized. They’d set up the office with a few real antiques and an air of cool blue competence to impress their well-heeled clients, but it didn’t encourage lingering. He wanted his chair and his books and the homey clutter too, though he knew his father would never admit to needing the human comforts just down the hall. But Evan needed a desk now, and the printer.

  “She already bought it: delivery’s tomorrow. Mary’s coming for the regular cleaning; she said she’ll show the furniture movers where to go if we’re not home, but this is the last time.”

  “I don’t expect to need another desk,” Brad said, which wasn’t what Mary had meant. She’d worn a big silver cross around her neck since the first time she’d had to clean up their blood and ruin, and she’d put them on notice every time since. Evan had found little sachets of herbs in the odd corner and he’d left them there, figured they could use all the help they could get.

  Brad seemed to relax a little at the news, but he hadn’t made a grand e
ntrance over the furniture. “Where’s Caramos?”

  Ah. “Out with Lily. For ice cream. I’m not sure sex is completely off the table yet, but she’s doing a pretty good job of distracting him. I still don’t understand how he got here—thought you had to be summoned to make it into the material sphere.”

  Brad wandered around the desk and peered over Evan’s shoulder. “Depends. Desire will work if he had a marked path between the spheres. Sched was invoked by prayer. The prayer marked the way and curiosity provided the desire. But there hasn’t been a lot of desire, or much polite asking, since humans crawled out of the mud, more or less. With Caramos, we know what provoked the desire. As for the marked path—”

  “I know. He followed me home, but I don’t want to keep him.”

  “He’ll go home when he gets bored, which he’ll do pretty quickly if he doesn’t get what he wants. In the meantime, I have the name and the address where Shields delivered Donne’s library. The name’s Van Der Graf. Do you know him?”

  “I’ve seen his picture in the paper.” Evan pulled up a browser and plugged in Van Der Graf’s name.

  “Cyril,” Brad added over his shoulder, and Evan added that, limiting the search. It didn’t take any fancy footwork—the story appeared on the first page of links, and Van Der Graf’s picture was in it. “He bought a Braque at auction last year, paid something like twenty-five million for it, but I’ve never seen his face before. He didn’t hang out at the Black Masque, but there were pictures all over Donne’s house.” He kept his memory to himself. They’d all worn robes with hoods pulled down over their faces anyway. “I don’t know what he knows.”

  “Can you check him out tomorrow? Lily and I can handle the auction.”

  “I can do it.” He hadn’t been to New York City more than once or twice since his father had pulled him out of the Black Masque, physically broken and mostly insane. But he wasn’t that guy anymore. Refused to be that guy. “I’ll take a look around, see what I can find out.”

  He made a note of the address and closed the window, watched his father’s eyes narrow as he read the document on the screen under it.

  “Is that the contract we talked about?”

  “Yeah.” Evan shifted the laptop so that his father could read more easily and paged down to the highlighted sections of their usual client contract. “You can walk away whenever you want. I hold the contract for life, or until you cancel the agreement, if earlier. If I die before you walk away, your contract passes to Ariton, a Family Partnership, and you can still walk away from the contract.” He wasn’t going to leave them like Matt Shields, bound to a broken contract. Grayson Donne’s twisted circle of friends tortured and murdered their victims—they’d given Evan to a daemon lord of an enemy house who had tortured him for almost a year, had come damned close to killing him before his father and Lily had shown up to pull him out of there.

  Evan knew he was no hero. If he’d known her then, he’d have given up Lily to make it stop. He’d have given up his father. God help him, but he might have traded his mother if it had gotten him out of Omage’s back room. He wasn’t proud of it, but he was going to make sure that nothing he said or did could put his father or Lily in their hands. “It should be pretty much leak-proof, but I thought I’d send a copy to Khadijah Flint—she can take a look for loopholes I didn’t anticipate.” He didn’t think there were any, except the big one, that let one side cancel the contract with no penalty.

  “She won’t like it.” His father reached over his shoulder and hit “print.”

  It took Evan a minute to sort out who “she” was. Khadijah Flint. The contract worked well enough with clients who paid by the hour, but raised questions when you were talking about a partnership. Their lawyer would call him ten kinds of fool and try to build an out for him that he couldn’t afford.

  “But it should work.” He gave the printed sheet a last quick pass and handed it over.

  Brad nodded, reading the page. It didn’t seem to hurt him to hold it, or to read it, which was a good start. “There’s only one way to know if it works. I don’t have to sign this in blood or anything, do I?”

  It was a joke. Evan was sure it was a joke, but it still sent a tremor through him. “No blood,” he said, “just ink.” If it didn’t work, he’d try again—they had until tomorrow to get it right. The fading light from the garden window failed completely. Evan turned on the desk lamp and signed at the bottom of the page, slid the contract sideways on the desk.

  Brad looked at the pen for a moment before he took it. Probably thinking about what had happened to Matt Shields, but nothing else bound his father. Not anymore. So the deal shouldn’t hurt—not like it had Matt Shields and not like the last time Evan had bound his relations to protect them. They hadn’t had a walk-away clause then, and it turned out that he’d been the one they needed protection from. He’d learned that lesson.

  Still, it was all theory until they had a signed contract. He held his breath while the pen scratched out a few quick strokes. Not Badad, the secret name, but Kevin Bradley, the full name his father used in the material world. It had been enough to almost tear Matt Shields to pieces, so he figured it would work.

  Waited. Let his breath out when nothing happened.

  Brad rubbed at the corner of his brow, like he had a headache, and Evan figured maybe he did. Better than screaming in agony on the carpet, but—

  “It doesn’t feel any different.”

  Bad news. “I’ll try again. I must have missed something—”

  “It worked. I don’t think you let go completely the last time.”

  Which didn’t carry quite the kick that a monitor to the head had, but it came close. “You’re my father. I never let go of that. But—”

  “I didn’t let go either. Sched isn’t the only fool of Ariton.”

  “Lily?”

  “Is going to be really pissed.”

  Evan thought about that a minute. Shrugged. At least it didn’t hurt. “That’s why they call it family. What are we going to do about Caramos?”

  “Send him home.” Brad thought about his answer, amended it. “Tell Lily to send him home. I’ll be playing chess with Harry.”

  “I don’t want to go home. I’m having fun.” Caramos appeared on the outside of the plaster pentagram and skirted it carefully before settling in the antique chair in the corner with a sigh. He looked too much like Brad and acted too differently for Evan’s comfort. The resemblance felt like an intrusion, the differences a betrayal, which was stupid and beside the point.

  “It’s going to be dangerous.” No point in bothering to repeat any of the conversation, since Caramos appeared to have been listening anyway. “There are traps, and if they find out your name, you could wind up stuck in a box like Matt Shields’ friend.”

  “More than a friend, I’d say.” Caramos wiped the fudge sauce from the corner of his mouth and licked it thoughtfully off his finger. “From what Lily says, I gather he has a closer bond with the lord in that box. In fact, it may not be the box holding him here at all.”

  “Daemon lords fall in love?” It seemed so unlikely that Evan couldn’t wrap his brain around it. When he did, he wondered, “Brad and Lily?”

  “Don’t be a fool,” his father snapped, “We are host-cousins, no more than that.”

  But Caramos was watching Brad with something that could almost be sympathy, except that was a foreign notion to his daemon kin as well. “Not Lily. I didn’t think they even liked each other. But—”

  “That’s enough. It’s too dangerous for you to be here. Donne is dead, but he had confederates, and Matt Shields would cheerfully trade you for the contents of that box if he knew you were available for the offer. We can protect ourselves to some extent, but we can’t protect you.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. Lily promised me dinner.”

  “Where is Lily?” Evan listened for footsteps in the hall, but heard nothing.

  “She’s finding me a dress. I thought that might wo
rk better.”

  Brad set down the pen and appraised his host-cousin with a raised eyebrow. “Not a good look for you,” he said, “and it will limit your options for dinner.”

  Lily appeared in a red silk, narrow to show the curve of her hip and short enough to show off miles of leg. She carried a little black dress on a hanger. “He’s decided to be a woman tonight.”

  Caramos grinned as if he’d done something clever. Already the bone structure in his face had grown more delicate, his hands smaller. “Lily said that Evan prefers women. She herself sometimes prefers them, so they must be the superior species.” He didn’t waste any more time with a slow transformation.

  Evan had seen his relations change their material forms before, and it always disoriented him, but never like seeing Caramos turn into a petite blue-eyed blonde with a bit more breast than she could comfortably balance.

  “And then after dinner, when everyone is feeling relaxed and comfortable, I thought we could have some sex.”

  “Women are the same species,” Evan corrected, “and I have already told you, I will not have sex with you.”

  Caramos pouted, which was a disconcertingly good look on—her. “Don’t you think I’m pretty? Tell me what you like. I know you like sex. I read your mind, remember?”

  His father saved him from answering, or perhaps, from angering a powerful lord of his own host. “Sex is complicated with humans,” he explained. “Evan is useless to you, because he is only interested in Lily.”

  “But I saw another woman in his mind!”

  “I was just looking,” Evan explained. “We look; it’s what we do. Then we make choices. I chose Lily.”

  Brad took that for confirmation of his point. “You see? And Lily is useless to you because she is only interested in Lily too.”

  “That’s true,” Lily smiled brightly, as if he’d just said something clever. “I am!”

  “And I am useless to you because I am playing chess with Harry tonight.” He had already started toward the door and Evan saw his last hope of salvation leaving with him. But Brad had one more comment, for which he would doubtless owe him later.