“I’ve been watching you for years, Mr. Davis. Care for a drink? A little scotch, perhaps? You used to like Bush-mill’s, if I remember correctly, but I expect your tastes have grown since then. A lucrative business, I understand. You will have to tell me how you did it.
“I have a nice selection of single malts.” He gestured to someone Evan couldn’t see, and the sound of ice on glass followed, the splash of liquor on ice.
“No, thank you. I’ve lost the taste for it.” Evan needed a drink now about as bad as he ever had, but he knew suicide when he saw it in a glass and he wasn’t buying. Van Der Graf studied him for a moment but didn’t question the lie, just waved the glass away.
“Grayson said you were a waste of time, but he’s dead now and so is his heir, who turned out to be useless—not even a pretty face. And here you are, still alive, if not as pretty as the last time I saw you. Mac was always careful about your face. Hmmm.”
Van Der Graf poked around in the desk, frowned. “I’m out of cocaine, but that never was your drug of choice. I have a full range of hallucinogens. Heroin, of course, and the usual pills for those little ups and downs. If we don’t have what you want, I can make a call.”
“Actually, the book is enough. Always good to see you, must do it again, I’ll be leaving now—”
“I think you’ll find that difficult. Leaving, that is. Or doing it again, for that matter.”
“He doesn’t want the scotch?”
Evan knew that voice. “Joad?” The bouncer from the Black Masque. They used to talk comics and art in the neighborhood—he’d had his own book, an independent with a black superhero—before they’d ever heard of the Black Masque. Joad had stayed on the door, just making the rent that the book didn’t cover. He hadn’t joined the sick games in Omage’s back room.
And he should have been dead. Brad blew up the bar. Fifty people died—it could have been a lot worse, given his father’s temper, but Evan still felt sick when he thought about it.
Joad shifted a shoulder, almost apologetic, still holding out the glass. “The drugs were free,” he said, as if that explained everything. “I was in the alley shooting up when the place blew. I thought they’d killed you, but then there you were, big businessman in Philly, and Mac was pissed as hell. Then he left, and Cyril needed help. The drugs were still free, so . . .”
“Joad likes cocaine now,” Cyril said, “It helps his creativity. But I have anything else you want.”
“It’ll help,” Joad said, “It always did before. A little something in the booze and you won’t even care.”
“Thanks, but no.” Omage had used paralytics. Hallucinogens on occasion, but mostly paralytics. Evan had felt everything.
“All I need is a name,” Van Der Graf said. “I’m willing to pay—” He held out his hand, palm up, offering a cushion-cut ruby, about five carats. The gem pulsed in Evan’s blood, quickened the beat of his heart and throbbed deeper, in the part of his soul that counted Ariton his father. Hard not to reach for it, and Matt Shields’ collection of them made a lot more sense. Lily had taken a ruby about the same size as payment for Matt Shields’ case. Not so innocent, then, and he’d been a fool to think it.
A deal in blood, daemon’s blood, and he figured if he took that stone he’d die here today, torn to pieces by the contracts at war in his daemon nature. Because he already had a contract with Paimon to free Matt Shields.
“Take it, boy.” The robes were sort of a giveaway. He recognized the speaker waving his scotch for emphasis as a well-known California judge. “It’s not worth your life.”
Except that Evan knew how they called daemons with human blood, how they paid in the flesh and bone of their sacrifices. He didn’t plan on being the first in the new burial ground.
“No deal.”
The judge shook his head. “This could all be so easy,” he said, and Evan wondered for whom.
Van Der Graf sighed dramatically. Withdrew the ruby. “I had hoped we wouldn’t have to go in this direction,” he said, “I thought maybe we could be friends. But I see that you have been turned against me.”
They were all playing a part for his benefit, and doing it badly, as if he hadn’t seen all those crosses in Donne’s make-shift graveyard. Maybe it even worked on the desperate victims they’d trapped before. Evan considered his options.
Joad wasn’t the only guard on Van Der Graf’s door, but there were other ways out. He could make an exit through the second celestial sphere, leave his audience gaping and come back later for the book. But Van Der Graf was already close. If he found Matt Shields’ true name in there, Evan would have only bad choices: breaking a deal between Princes or committing cold-blooded, premeditated murder. If he destroyed the book first—
He could do this. He thought fire and beneath his hand the book warmed.
“Bring her in,” Van Der Graf ordered the guards in the hall, and someone thrust a girl into the room. She had long dark hair and wide dark eyes behind glasses that made her eyes look wider still. He’d seen her before, and recently; couldn’t quite—
“Help me!” She ran to him, clung trembling, and he remembered her voice, giving bad directions to the men’s room at the Lea Library at Penn. Too young to be in there between semesters. She’d been reading Treatise on the Names of the Angels, so he didn’t trust the victim act. But it slowed him down for a minute.
“I’m not sure what you think you know about me,” he said to Van Der Graf over the girl’s head, “But the last person who tried to control me with a girl is dead. And I liked that girl. I don’t even know this one.”
“I had hoped she would make you more tractable, yes,” Van Der Graf conceded, “But I’m not a fool.”
Evan felt the prick of the needle and pulled away, but not fast enough. He felt the drug enter his bloodstream, recognized the effect. Shit, shit, shit. Burned like a son of a bitch. Down. The girl had already moved away, so nothing broke his fall. He lay on Van Der Graf’s Turkish carpet, eyes wide—they’d stay that way until he cleared the paralytics out of his system—arms and legs useless. So was his mouth, so he knew this had nothing to do with information.
“I did what you asked. Can I go now?” he heard the girl say, and Van Der Graf answered, “Sit down and shut up before I decide you’re as useless as the rest.”
Joad passed the hypodermic to Van Der Graf. He looked sorrowfully into Evan’s too-wide eyes but didn’t offer to close them, just hefted from the shoulders while someone Evan couldn’t see had his feet, lifted and dumped him on the library table. The book was still there, digging into his hip.
“You should have said yes to the skag.” Joad said, and moved away.
“But I’m glad you didn’t.” Van Der Graf frowned down at him. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you yet. I may still need you.”
“The box is up next,” A voice at the door said. “We have the auction house on the phone.” Van Der Graf patted Evan’s cheek. “This won’t take long. Then we’ll all have a little fun.”
Chapter 44
EVAN WAS IN TROUBLE. AGAIN. Panic, sharp and clear, settled a sick knot in Brad’s stomach. Lily felt it too, looked over nervously at him with a little movement of a shoulder. Shields had warned them not to go into Van Der Graf’s house, so Evan would have to handle his end of things on his own. They’d gotten out of the habit of rushing to the rescue anyway, and bidding had started on the iron-bound strongbox.
“Ten thousand.” The auctioneer called. Three paddles went up. Brad waited, scoping out the competition.
“Eleven,” and the same three paddles. Gray men in gray suits. Fifteen, twenty. Then one of the telephone reps jotted something on a slip of paper and passed it to the auctioneer.
“One hundred thousand,” the auctioneer said, reading the slip. “I have a bid of one hundred thousand on the telephones. Do I hear two?”
The same three paddles went up. They weren’t part of the art world he usually traveled, so he didn’t know them, but he figured them
for the faces beneath the hoods, slitting throats and feeding children to the worst aspect of a tortured daemon lord in the paintings Jaworski had shown him.
The one on the far right was sweating already, dropped out at five hundred thousand to the phone, and Brad raised a finger. One.
“One million to the gentleman in the back.”
The appraisal set the value at a fraction of that. The room had gone silent with that electric stillness of nervous systems tuning to the same frequency. Even the low mutter of the telephones stopped for a moment. Brad felt exposed, and it made him dangerous. Nobody made a move.
Then the phone rep raised two fingers before the next call, took the attention off him, which made everyone safer, though the tension didn’t go out of the air as they bounced up millions for a few bids. They lost the last of the gray men at five. The three of them left the sales room with hurried glances at each other.
Someone on the phones had alerted the offices. The room had gained an audience, including a man with dark-rimmed glasses who furiously took notes and a woman in a trim black suit who stood off to the side, watching with a proprietary eye. Most of the observers crowded at the back, just outside the wide entrance to the sales room, watching silently while the gray men argued in low and angry tones, out of sight among the moderns. The crowd parted to let them through, huddling together with a bid for ten.
The phone raised to fifteen. Brad calculated the house’s fee, figured the woman in the corner was doing the same with a great deal more satisfaction, and raised to twenty million—twenty-three with fees. They were well into agency money now; Shields was going to owe them the rest of his rubies. Evan’s panic at the back of his mind had subsided, but he was replacing that with some panic of his own. He figured Van Der Graf for the telephone, and even he didn’t have limitless resources. But Brad had just made his last bid. The agency could scrape up another few million, but not in time.
Chapter 45
VAN DER GRAF HAD GONE, taking his cronies with him. He’d left the girl sobbing in a leather club chair and Joad on the door. Irony there. Evan wasn’t going anywhere. He could deal with the drugs, but he still had to destroy Donne’s notes. And he didn’t rule out Van Der Graf outbidding the agency. He didn’t know what he’d do if Van Der Graf suddenly came into possession of two daemon lords, one of whom was his client. But he’d have to do something.
He’d have a lot better chance of that if he could move, and he blessed old Cyril’s kinky heart for withholding drugs that would dull the pain of his games. Paralytics didn’t cloud his mind. So he ignored the girl, ignored Joad and the jab in his hip from Donne’s book, and turned inward on the drugs flowing through muscle and vein. He’d done this sort of thing before—opened a wound on the palm of his hand and closed it again with the daemon side of his nature. Saw the essence of that daemon nature integrally a part of him, not foreign or unnatural but necessary to the living, breathing person he was. The drugs had suppressed his breathing—black spots danced across his vision—but he saw the chemical mark of it, sterile and insidious, and followed it. Pushed.
He started to sweat, bright beads of salt and drugs standing out on his brow and across his cheekbones. His shirt was soaked and his pants weren’t feeling all that great either, but he thought he could move his right index finger. His heart sped up and he realized that he’d gone from barely breathing to hyperventilating while he’d been concentrating on moving his left big toe. Slowed it down, but Joad had noticed, shuffled hesitantly over to stare down into his eyes. Evan slowed his breathing with an effort—don’t blink, don’t blink.
Joad brushed a thick finger across his forehead, frowned at the moisture he’d collected before wiping it on the leg of his black slacks. “You’re OD’ing,” he said, and patted Evan’s shoulder in an awkward attempt at comfort. “I’ll get Mr. Van Der Graf. He’ll know what to do.”
Cyril’s first aid would probably involve speeding up the pain part before Evan could die of the drugs, but it would get Joad out of the room. He held still, ignored the itch fizzing in his sinuses. Couldn’t sneeze, not when he was so close—
Joad patted him on the shoulder again, sighed. “You should have stuck around,” he said. “Mr. Van Der Graf’s not a bad boss.”
Which might be true until the moment he decided to kill you. But Joad was heading toward the door, closed it behind him. Evan heard him walking away down the hall and couldn’t hold it in any more. He sneezed. Held his breath. Maybe the girl didn’t know how the paralytics were supposed to work.
“I know you can move,” she said. “I saw you move your finger before Joad came over.
She was standing over him, less sympathetic than Joad, but then she’d caught him at flushing the drugs and Joad hadn’t. She had tear tracks on her face, but she look more like she was pissed at him than falling apart.
“Can you sit up?”
Turned out he still didn’t have control of his vocal cords, but he managed to turn his head to the side—no. And, shit, he’d better get it together before Cyril got back.
“God.” She looked down at him with hope shining in her eyes. “He called you Mr. Davis. Evan Davis? Did you take an antagonist before you came in? Matt said you’d help us. You’re not doing a very good job of rescuing me— are there more of you outside? Cyril left Joad on guard because you couldn’t move, but he’s got a lot more guards and they are sharper and faster than Joad.”
Joad used to be sharp and fast. Joad used to be funny and creative and he used to care about his art and his industry. But he’d been taking drugs from Mac too. Shit.
“Who are you?” he said. Had his voice back, sort of, and he thought he could sit up now, but Van Der Graf would be coming through that door soon and it was still more effort than he could summon at the moment. Considered summoning something else, but this was his part of the job and he’d get it done. In just another minute.
“Alba Sanchez,” she said, answering his question. “Matt’s friend. He works for my father—well, Rafael now. We found your agency on-line. You were supposed to help us!”
Carlos Sanchez’s younger daughter, starting SUNY in the fall. Rafael must be the son, and he’d think about that later. Sanchez’s involvement seemed a lot less innocent suddenly, but the dead bodies in Donne’s woods now took second place in his scary scenarios involving the Sanchez family.
“You’re not sleeping with Matt Shields!” He thought he’d already hit his limit for adrenaline rush, but he’d been wrong. He would not, absolutely would not, play big brother to the half-daemon babies of a foreign prince. Which was a sufficiently not- human thought that it made him queasy. He had some daemon in him, but his mind, his self was fully human.
Okay, even he didn’t believe that, quite.
But Alba Sanchez was answering, “No!” in an indignant whisper. “I’m not sleeping with anybody, and neither is my sister anymore. She was in love with Grey before he died, but neither of us sleep with Matt!” Grey Donne had died, and his father had followed him less than a year later. He didn’t think she could have done it, but she’d been hanging out with daemons and looking through books she shouldn’t know existed to find the words that would bind them. So he couldn’t be sure.
They were running out of time for this conversation. Somebody’d be coming back to check on Joad’s story any minute, and he was better off playing dead until he could do more than stagger to his feet.
Right on cue he heard footsteps coming down the hall. “Van Der Graf,” he said.
Alba Sanchez dashed back to her club chair, curled into it and sniffed convincingly, if he didn’t know better.
The door opened then, and Van Der Graf appeared, a telephone pressed to his ear and the four men in robes following him, their hoods drawn up now. They formed a semicircle around the table where Evan lay, but their heads turned to watch Van Der Graf. Two guards followed, and the girl was right. They didn’t have a history with him, and he doubted their drugs of choice involved any of the stash in th
at desk drawer. Joad came last and closed the door behind him.
“Fifteen,” Van Der Graf said into the phone. He cut a glance at Alba Sanchez weeping in her club chair but seemed satisfied with what he saw.
Evan had stilled, but he’d stopped sweating.
“Are you in there, Evan?” Van Der Graf found the nerves at his elbow and pressed, hard, watched the muscles clench along his arm. Damn.
Van Der Graf couldn’t ask for what he wanted while he was on the phone, but he mimed pressing the plunger in a hypodermic, and one of the guards went to the desk, found the drug. Evan saw a hand, not Joad’s, pass the hypo across him, then felt the prick of the needle, the burn of the drug moving through his body. He knew the chemical now, knew how to override it, break it down, get rid of it. Which he’d better do right now or it would kill him. Cyril hadn’t been careful about the dosage, and he’d mixed something with it this time. Evan could do this. He really could. If he remembered what he was supposed to do.
“Twenty-five,” Van Der Graf said to the phone.
Evan knew that was bad, but he was floating now, light as the wind, and he didn’t really care.
Chapter 46
THE PHONE TOOK IT TO TWENTY-FIVE. The price of a Braque, and Brad was pretty sure that was Van Der Graf’s last bid as well, but it didn’t matter. The house fees took it over thirty and that was six million more than he could hand the cashier.
Brad was thinking furiously. He could kill Van Der Graf. The man had heirs somewhere, but pretty far down the family tree. He’d have time to liquidate some assets. Lily could diddle the banks if they had to, but that might be dangerous—ownership would be less clear.
“Twenty-five, to the gentleman in the back. Do I hear thirty?”
In front of them, Madame LeRoux was whispering furiously to her son, and he wished she would just stop talking. The hum of it was a distraction when he needed to think. Van Der Graf had Evan—the panic had faded to a muzzy blur, but Van Der Graf was still at the center of it—so he couldn’t flatten the house. Not without warning his son first. And he didn’t know what he was going to tell Parmatus—Matt Shields.
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