A Legacy of Daemons

by Camille Bacon-Smith

  “Matt Shields is drinking alone at Charlie’s. We’d better get someone on him, just in case there’s trouble.”

  “I’m on it.” Evan was up and following his father before the words were spoken, but Lily caught him by the tie. “You have seen his mind at home. You know she wouldn’t hurt you, and it would please her very much.”

  Lily wasn’t human, he reminded himself. Sometimes the differences needed working out. But he couldn’t do it today. “You’re wrong on both counts. I’m sorry. I can’t do it.” He kissed her to show that he wasn’t angry, but somehow all the hurt and longing and desire for more than just between her legs were there in the kiss, in his hands finding their grip in her hair, no matter how much he tried to keep it to himself. He didn’t want to frighten her away, didn’t want her to know how much she frightened him, but the desperation was all there anyway. She pushed him back toward the desk and he didn’t resist her.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll feed him ice cream for desert and send him home happy.”

  He thought she meant with the ice cream, but didn’t push his luck.

  But sending Caramos home was harder than it seemed.

  Chapter 40

  SOTHEBY’S WAS ALL MODERN GLASS and cream-colored angles, bright morning sunlight filling the front foyer. Brad picked up a catalog at the front desk and tucked it under his arm. Wouldn’t ever tell Evan that he liked them as material objects in their own right, but he thought Lily had already figured it out. He had a little collection of them on a shelf in the study, beautifully produced reminders of the conservation of luck in human existence. Apparently the universe contained all the good fortune it ever would and passed it from hand to hand, like the flu.

  Upstairs, the Donne auction had started an hour earlier with a few lots of furniture, nineteenth century American and eighteenth century English, mapping the travels of the Donne legacy. Brad had timed their arrival to miss that part of the sale—they had about an hour, more or less, to settle in and scope out the room before their items came up. He followed Lily and took the elevator with the rest of the stragglers to the fifth floor, where he followed a trail of odd- looking modern sculptures exhibited for a sale next week, to the auction room.

  He kept his expression casual, preferring to remain unobserved as he crossed the thick cream carpet. At his side, Lily hadn’t shut it down at all. Heads turned, a few faces brightened with increased blood flow. One poor soul took a step forward, his feet apparently connected to the wrong brain. Brad shot him a warning glare and kept Lily moving. She liked to play with her food, but they didn’t have the time. And he didn’t want to call more attention than their presence did already.

  He supposed if he were Evan he’d care more about the people buried in Donne’s graveyard of sacrifices, but mostly he was annoyed that Evan had called Jaworski when he found them. The bodies had attracted the attention of the FBI. He’d expected to hear about it on the news, to find that the police had halted the sale of Donne’s estate and seized his property as evidence, but there had been nothing. His second guess was agents at the auction and, somewhere in the city, a room full of New York’s version of Sid Valentine tracking the movements of anyone who showed up or placed a bid by phone. For all he knew, they were checking anyone who had viewed the exhibition on the internet. He imagined the vast reach of Interpol, spreading out worldwide to interrogate every granny with a taste for vulgar furniture. The last thought cheered him, but not enough to make up for the fact that once more they’d have the FBI watching them, or for the past hour and a half spent getting here so they’d have something to watch.

  They’d traveled the human way, purchasing train tickets with agency credit cards and chatting with the cab driver about New York traffic and the annoyance of horse-drawn carriages in Central Park, leaving a perfectly ordinary trail for the official investigation to follow. Lily hadn’t seemed to mind. She’d abandoned him for a stockbroker commuting to the city from New Jersey and he hadn’t seen her for most of the trip.

  Madame LeRoux, on the arm of bad-suit boy, approached from a gallery of nineteenth century paintings that would probably sell for less than the odd- looking toilet gracing the pedestal at his elbow. She gave him a nod and a wry half-smile of recognition. He thought they might be spared the presence of Father Michel, but no, he was waiting at the entrance to the sales room and looked ready to detonate when he saw Brad and Lily.

  “Discede ab hoc famulo Dei,” Brad said conversationally. Depart from this servant of God . . . It itched a bit under the skin when he said the words, but they couldn’t hurt him. The body was his. Not permanent, but he wasn’t renting from a human. Unfortunately, they didn’t work on the priest either. Father Michel glowered and planted his feet deep in the thick pile of the cream carpet, blocking their access to the auction. Lily prickled all over and he wondered if Sotheby’s allowed panthers in their showrooms, and if she would make the whole issue moot by ripping out Michel LeRoux’s throat. The FBI agent in the corner, with the poorly hidden earbud, was looking at them and talking to someone off in a command center somewhere, never a good sign. So much for a low profile. It put official attention on Father Michel as well, which might be useful. But he’d had enough of the priest’s dogged hostility.

  He braced himself to nudge his way past, but was intercepted again, this time by LeRoux’s mother. “Now, now. Pretend the picture that nice policeman is taking with his cell phone will appear in the society pages. All old friends here. Money always is.” Madame LeRoux relinquished her hold on bad-suit boy and landed a hand firmly on Lily’s arm. She smiled warmly as if she had in fact met her dearest friend by happy chance.

  “Men will be men,” she said. “The collar makes no difference. Mr. Bradley won’t do anything precipitous, will he? Can we safely leave them to bristle and hiss at each other? I am ready to sit for a while.”

  “I’m the one Michel has to worry about.” Lily wasn’t kidding, and the priest might still not survive the encounter, but Madame LeRoux patted her arm, nudged her forward a step.

  “I know you are, child. Come, help me to a chair.”

  “I am older than you can possibly imagine.” Lily’s tone frosted the air, but Ariton fire shone in her eyes. Father Michel couldn’t see it, but Brad held his breath, waiting for the explosion.

  “I know that too.” Madame LeRoux slipped her arm around Lily’s waist but kept them walking. Father Michel turned on his heel and took a few quick steps to catch up, dismayed with his mother’s choice of company. Brad followed because he couldn’t think of anything else to do that didn’t involve piles of rubble and screaming sirens, which seemed overkill for a change.

  “It is a terrible thing, to be far from home. If you needed my help, could you tell me?” Madame LeRoux was giving Lily a look that he’d seen Evan’s mother sometimes use on Evan, and Brad was at a loss to explain it here.

  A bank of paneled telephone stations, where bidders from around the world called in their bids, wrapped the left side of the room and a bit of the front as well, with two sections of folding chairs filling the middle of the room. The podium stood off to the corner, so the auctioneer had a good view of the phones as well as the room without drawing attention from the center screen where each lot came up for sale. Madame LeRoux turned left and Lily went with her, rounding the section closest to the telephones.

  “If I needed help, no, I could not tell you. But if I needed help, why would I trust you to give it?” Lily’s smile was very cold. She pulled away, but not outside the circle of that arm. Up close, Lily could kill the old woman without making a fuss, perhaps, but a dead body always complicated a sale.

  “It would be foolish of you, wouldn’t it? I suggest that you put no faith in me at all. But men like my husband have no right to do the things they did, no right at all. I would make amends if I could. I will help, if you let me.”

  “If you could be trusted, you wouldn’t be here.” Lily did break away then, slid into the back row of folding
chairs. It gave the best view of the action, and Brad took the aisle seat next to her. Madame LeRoux went no farther than the next row forward. Father Michel argued with small gestures toward the other side of the room, but his mother folded her hands in her lap and tilted her head to watch the screen at the front of the room. Stone-faced, he sat beside her, which put him in front of Brad, his shoulders tense as if he expected a knife between them at any moment. Wasn’t a bad idea, but it would spoil the carpet, and at least one FBI agent had come in behind them.

  They had a job to do, and Brad kind of liked auctions anyway, so Michel LeRoux would have to wait. The screen at the front showed a photograph of an eighteenth century desk with the current bid translated into seven different currencies. A few representative pieces from the collection were on display beneath the screen. One of them was Matt Shields’ strongbox.

  Good photographs for the FBI, he remembered. He opened his catalog with an air of quiet interest and pretended he didn’t hear the screaming coming from the front of the room. Lily paled, but she maintained an air of professional calm, at least for the moment, while she scoped out the competition.

  Chapter 41

  “TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOWabout this guy Van Der Graf.” Evan hit “enter,” speed-read the story that popped up on the screen. He had two things going for him: the FBI had kept the story under wraps and they didn’t know about Van Der Graf. And it turned out good things came in threes.

  Van Der Graf’s Park Avenue mansion was a registered historic landmark, all five stories of it. It wasn’t actually on Park Avenue, but around the corner, on 70th. Van Der Graf’s restoration had made a splash in Architectural News. Evan didn’t have to hack anything—the magazine’s website had produced a rough plan of each floor, including the third, where the room marked “library” held Grayson Donne’s books. Five screens of photographs, before- and-afters, followed the plans—lots of marble and carved pillars on the first floor, and a grand staircase with a wrought iron balustrade sweeping an elegant path upward. Donne and his cronies had a thing for staircases.

  So he had a sense of the house, and Van Der Graf’s involvement with Donne told him a lot, but he still didn’t have a good grasp of the situation he’d be walking into. Unfortunately, Matt Shields was being an asshole.

  “Van Der Graf—?” Evan looked up, repeating the question. Shields had dragged a more comfortable chair from the waiting room and sat with his legs stretched in front of him, half in and half out of the protective seal in the office ceiling. Evan thought he did it just to remind himself that he could. It hadn’t made him particularly cooperative.

  “He’s an evil son of a bitch just like the rest of them. What more do you need to know? You, of all people, should stay away from him.”

  “That stopped being an option when we made a deal with Paimon.”

  “Look—” Shields sat up straight in his chair, leaned forward a little. His hair flopped in his eyes, but they caught the sun from the garden window anyway, amber sparks a reminder that Evan had plenty of danger right here.

  “—In about three hours I’ll own Donne’s cursed box and I’ll be gone. You have my bond, and my Prince’s, not to make a mess when I leave. If Van Der Graf hasn’t figured out the secret of Donne’s box in the past three years, he won’t crack it in the next three hours.

  “But this isn’t about Donne’s box for you. It’s about the bodies in Donne’s woods, and they aren’t any part of my bargain with this agency.”

  Maybe Shields was right about that, but it didn’t make Evan wrong. And reading the aggression in the daemon lord’s posture didn’t mean giving in to it. He leaned forward in his own chair, both hands resting on the desk, instincts older than civilization ready to push him to his feet. Fight or flight, and he had no intention of running away.

  “You killed those people.” The effort to stay calm roughened his voice. He knew better than to expect a daemon lord of any Prince to notice its human dead, but he’d never met one before who worked so hard at looking like a good guy, like somebody who might actually give a damn about the hundred or more graves in Donne’s wood. Sometimes it was hard to remember that Matt Shields, in the most terrifying form a daemon wore, had put them there.

  Not today, though. Shields gave him a long stare with blood and torn flesh in it, and no remorse. “Humans die,” he said, answering the accusation, and maybe talking about gambling with Van Der Graf’s life expectancy and Donne’s books too. Nothing friendly about him now. “That’s what they do best, every one of them, eventually. I just helped a few of them along.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that human lives mean nothing to you. I know that.” And Evan was damned tired of hearing it, really. Not worth shit. Got it. Let’s move on. Except that he couldn’t move on. “There were children, kids just starting out in the world, and they died in agony.” So many crosses, the breath stuck in his throat at the thought. “You had no right. No right at all.”

  And God, he must be the poster child for posttraumatic stress, because he wasn’t talking about Shields or Donne or the dead in that wood anymore. He was in Omage’s back room again, in Donne’s Octagon, the touch of a daemon’s hands, his knife, the body he’d used for rape and other torments, inescapable. Worse, Shields knew it, looked out the window with a pointed little smile.

  Being what he was, Shields had to push. “I’m not the only one who filled that graveyard. Fifteen-year-old boys are Cyril’s favorites, but they don’t stay fifteen, do they? You were what, nineteen when they found you? A little old for his tastes, but he wanted you back then, always started to sweat when they talked about you.” Matt Shields was looking straight at him then, mocking.

  “Donne wouldn’t let him have you. Simpson claimed a nearly grown half-breed heir. Donne wanted one of those as well. That wasn’t working out for him, but he had the box and a human son. Van Der Graf had nothing, and Simpson needed the practice. So you are well past your sell-by date for old Cyril, but he’ll take you anyway, because he hates to lose at anything. Looks like he’ll have to find a new place to put you, now that the FBI is tramping all over their dumping ground.”

  Banks of angry clouds had cut off the sun, leaving the room in sickly green shadows. Evan’s ears popped with the change in pressure. He thought maybe he’d brought it on, but Shields was a lot more upset than he was pretending, so it might have been him. Evan couldn’t always tell, not when he was having flashbacks to Omage’s back room. One thing for sure, though: a hell of a storm was coming.

  He couldn’t afford to play this game. But he wasn’t a helpless kid anymore, wouldn’t be that. Old Cyril didn’t really scare him anyway. Maybe once, but he didn’t have much to fear from humans anymore. His nightmares all had a daemon lord at their center. And Shields’ nightmares had Grayson Donne, who’d wanted a half-daemon heir but had no blood relation to carry one for him.

  Carlos Sanchez had said there’d been a girl named Kady with chocolate skin, who’d been a prisoner like Shields. And something was still trapped inside the box that had been Matt Shields’ prison.

  Oh, God. Lily.

  Breathe. The old pervert was dead and he’d never even met Lily. Had never hurt her, and Evan wasn’t anything like Grayson Donne. He wouldn’t let anything like that happen to Lily. But it made him wonder again if loving her was just another iron-bound box. He needed space, some privacy from a daemon lord who was not a natural ally. Figured he’d pencil in some meltdown time next week, but he didn’t have room in his schedule right now. His father was trusting him to take care of Grayson Donne’s library.

  Shields was looking at him strangely when he pulled it together again.

  “You don’t even know her.” He frowned, like Evan had presented him a new puzzle. Shields wasn’t a puzzle kind of guy.

  “I know Lily. And just so you know, if she wanted to go home, I wouldn’t stop her.”

  “I’m pretty sure she’d have to kill you.”

  “Not my first choice. But, yeah. I get that.�
��

  Shields looked at the bruises fading at Evan’s brow, thinking hard. “I guess you do,” he said, but the fight went out of him.

  “When Donne died, I was stuck here. I didn’t know how to fit into this world, I just knew I didn’t want to be what he’d made me—why would I? I hated him.

  “Carlos offered something different, and I took it. So I don’t have fancy houses in the city, or yachts, or tickets to the opera. I paint houses and repair leaky faucets, and I eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. I haven’t been snacking on preschoolers. But I didn’t know Carlos back then. Donne called a monster, and that’s what he got. Don’t expect me to be sorry for any of them, because I won’t.”

  Six hundred years—how many dead, torn to pieces, and buried in gardens across Europe and America? No one had ever put a stop to it.

  The desk phone rang then—Shields jerked in his chair, looking for an exit before they both realized what the noise was. Evan’s breathing had kicked up a notch as well. They watched it as if they expected it to explode. It didn’t, of course. The service would answer if he waited, but each ring shredded nerves a little deeper under the skin, so he picked it up.

  “Evan Davis.” Tried to keep it civil. Didn’t want to frighten the other clients. Or Ellen Li, for that matter, who answered, “How are you, Evan? Harry mentioned that he saw you this week.” He could hear the suppressed laughter, remembered Harry walking into the garden. He’d been pretty close to naked at the time, and Lily’d been all the way there. Which he wasn’t going to discuss with Lieutenant Ellen Li of Major Crimes, especially in front of Matt Shields. “I’m with a client right now. Can I call you back?”

  “Shields?” she asked, and the laughter was gone.

  The agency did not share that information without a warrant and she knew that. But she didn’t stop to give him a chance to remind her.

  “I’m sending Jaworski. The FBI talked to Carlos Sanchez about those bodies you found. Sid passed along the word that he didn’t pass the polygraph, said the guy got twitchy whenever Shields’ name came up.”