Lily shaped the air in the palm of her hand and flung it. Van Der Graf’s knife thunked on the carpeted floor. He gripped his wrist, pain twisting his face as blood spurted between his clasped fingers.
“What are you doing on that table?” she asked, and Evan decided that maybe she planned to rescue him after all.
“Waiting for my ride.” No point in playing dead anymore. He sat up and casually, almost accidentally, dropped a hand on Donne’s notes at his side. His head floated in the wrong direction when he moved, but the sensation was clearing fast. The drugs were almost gone, adrenaline holding off the payback.
Van Der Graf’s cronies scattered like cockroaches, but the judge picked up the silver knife, which just pissed Evan off. He knocked the knife away with a quick burst of twisting air that blew the judge back off his feet but didn’t break his wrist. Didn’t have that kind of focus or aim yet. Didn’t have the presence of mind to consider what he’d just done it in front of Donne’s cabal and Matt Shields’ human girlfriend either. Van Der Graf took a step closer, pupils dilated. He seemed almost to have forgotten his broken wrist.
“You’ve grown into your powers well,” he said. “If only you’d come to me younger.”
He turned to Matt Shields. “Take this sacrifice, my beast. I own you now; let his blood freely offered seal this contract!”
Matt Shields gave him a wide innocent blink. “If you’re trying for an insanity plea, it won’t work.” He patted the strongbox on the table, gave it a little nudge so that it bumped into Evan’s hip. “This belongs to you, by the way.”
Okay. So. “Your plan stinks.”
“Try telling your father that. Or Bertrande LeRoux for that matter.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, they’ve got a hostage. How do you suggest we get her out of here?”
“Oh, that part’s easy.”
Shields looked at Lily, shared a rueful smile.
Something crashed into the front door on the floor below.
“We didn’t tell you the whole plan.”
Chapter 51
LILY PUT A FINGER TO HER LIPS. Brad waited, a damped flame, while she reached into the open vee of her shirt collar and brought out a length of wire “There,” she said, as she zapped the tiny microphone with a fingertip. “You can talk now.”
Brad took that as his signal to step out of the shadows. “Are we done here?”
Matt Shields looked up from herding the cabal into a corner where they cowered in their robes against the shelves of Grayson Donne’s books.
“Don’t let it kill us,” one said, and Van Der Graf snarled at him over the broken wrist. “They can’t hurt you, fool. What do you think that ceiling does? The boy made a stupid mistake. The messengers are inside the circle and we are outside it now.”
Time for a quick lesson in the limitations of cabalistic magic, Brad thought. Really quick, because—“That’s Sid at the door.” A reminder for the rest of them, maybe, but they hadn’t gotten around to telling Evan. “The FBI was eavesdropping when you called. They should be through the front door in another bash or two. So if we’ve got work to do here, we’ve got less than a minute.”
He caught Evan’s eye, met fog. The sudden hitch in his breathing meant nothing. Lords of Ariton never showed fear. He could walk away from Evan’s contract—it was written that way.
Alfredo Da’Costa looked down from between the arms of a pentagram. He considered the consequences of breaking his contract, of trusting his son. But Evan had learned that lesson—the graphic demonstration still colored his face.
“I don’t need the formula for cold fusion,” he prodded, “but there’s only one way we’re getting out of here.” Brad finally got a lock on his Evan’s attention.
“Yeah, sorry.” Evan wiped a hand across his face. “The usual conditions apply,” he said. “Go where you want. Do what you want. Just, and this is a personal favor, not an order. Try not to complicate my life any more than it already is, please?” Which, all in all, was a lot better than the last time they’d been in this kind of situation.
“You don’t make that easy, but I’ll see what I can do.” Brad stepped outside the circle just to show the cabal that he could, while Lily gave Evan a “clever boy” kiss. But Evan wasn’t done yet.
“The box is mine?”
“Until we sign it over,” Brad confirmed. Wasn’t sure why it mattered, unless Evan planned to increase his collection by two, which didn’t bear thinking about. “Madame LeRoux put her share in your name, personally. As part of the agreement, so did we. The agency took full possession as your agent.”
Ariton could not own Paimon’s lords. But Evan had made the bargain, and the second celestial sphere hadn’t figured out what to make of him yet. The Princes might accept him as a temporary compromise, unless he decided to make Matt Shields a permanent member of the firm.
Shields stood between the girl in the chair and the cabal in the corner, watching grim-faced as Ariton made plans around him. Downstairs, wood splintered and someone screamed.
“I’m not tracking well enough for this right now,” Evan muttered under his breath.
“We’re out of time.” He could stop this now. Didn’t know what it would do to Shields or his damned box, but he could snuff Evan’s light like a candle—nothing less complicated than dead. The boy could not wrap his head around contract language to save his life.
Chapter 52
“OKAY.” EVAN STEADIED HIS VOICE.He knew what he had to do. “Matt? We’ll get this done when we’re out of here; it’s in the contract. The part about not complicating my life—”
Shields waved off Evan’s concern. “Heard it already. You’ve gotta live here. The box—”
“Ritual formula,” Evan interrupted, and completed the command. “Go where you want. Do what you want. Don’t complicate my life here.”
“Don’t kill him,” his father added, and Evan said, “Yeah, that too.” Leave it to his father to interpret his way around that one.
“I can’t let her out yet.” He nudged the box—the screaming rubbed nerves left raw and vibrating from the drugs—“But I promise, we’ll find a way to do it.”
Matt Shields nodded, accepting the deal for now. Evan hadn’t left him a lot of choices.
He didn’t feel the familiar echo in his gut the way he did with his father or Lily, which was a relief. No time to think about it now, though. Heavy footsteps pounded up the stairs.
“I can’t be here,” Brad said. “Valentine thinks I am drinking tea with Bertrande LeRoux.”
“Go.” Evan shoved the book at him. “And take this with you. It’s the first Donne’s notes. Maybe it has something in it that can get us out of this in one piece.”
“Got it.” Brad picked up the book as the door crashed off its hinges. One less thing to worry about. He vanished, just ahead of the police pouring through the shattered door.
Chapter 53
THE FIRST WAVE CAME DRESSED IN BLACK, with Kevlar vests labeled“FBI” and very big guns that said “bang” if Evan wasn’t very careful. They ignored Lily and Matt Shields, but one of the guys in black pointed a gun at his heart and kept it there. He blinked lazily at the man, figuring his chances of making it to the second sphere before a bullet hit him. A fog still wrapped his head, though, slowing his reactions. Eyes like ice narrowed at him over the gun. Not the hesitating type. Evan raised his hands slowly. “I’m with her,” he said, and nodded his head slowly in Lily’s direction.
Lily was busy flirting with an agent in a suit who’d followed the assault team, but Sid Valentine had come in behind them as well, looking like he had indigestion. “That one’s mine,” he said, and Evan didn’t realize Sid was talking about him until the gun pinning him to the table dropped, pointing at the floor. The eyes didn’t warm, but he got an acknowledging tilt of the head before the man moved off to join the Kevlar parade leading Donne’s robed cronies away. Van Der Graf’s now, he supposed. Either way, they were going to jail. It wouldn’t be enough to pay for all t
hose graves, but at least they’d stopped it. At last.
He was feeling good about that, and it made him a little light-headed.
“We need a doctor here!” Sid was staring into his eyes. “You are high as a kite, boy. Have you considered finding a different line of work?”
“Lily likes this one.”
Sid shook his head. “Thinking with your dick is going to get you killed, son.”
“Not my dick. She gets into my head.” Evan knew he needed to shut his mouth, now, but Sid rested a comforting hand on his shoulder, invited confidences, and he’d thought that one was pretty obvious.
“Yeah. They do that.” Sid gave him a pat on the shoulder before turning away. “Get an EMT in here. This one needs a hospital—doped to the gills. Remember! He’s the vic. Van Der Graf can wait. I don’t want them in the same ambulance.”
Sid was usually a jerk. He couldn’t solve his way out of a paper bag, and Evan worried that he’d feel up Lily one of these days and get himself killed for his trouble. But this part? He was good at this.
An EMT slapped a medical kit down and pulled out a pinlight, flashed an unwelcome beam in Evan’s eyes. “When was your last hit?” he asked, and Evan said, “About an hour ago.”
“Before that.”
“Four years.” The EMT kept his expression neutral while he pulled a blood pressure cuff from his medical kit, but Evan knew he didn’t believe it.
Evan tried to slide around him. “I don‘t need a hospital.” “Yes, he does.” And what was Mike Jaworski doing there, closing off his escape route? “You’ll go in the ambulance and do what they tell you. God knows what they gave you.”
“I’m fine.”
The EMT had finished with his blood pressure, and they both stood up, Evan with a great deal less success. Jaworski grabbed his arm before he fell, but he had it figured now, found his feet and knew what was upright.
Jaworski didn’t let go. “I’ll make sure he gets to the ambulance.” He waited until the EMT moved out of earshot, then he asked, “How stoned are you, for real?” He was studying Evan’s face for truth, and Evan said, “I’m fine. Almost fine. I don’t need a hospital.”
The fog that had clouded his mind and slowed his body was clearing, and Jaworski seemed to recognize the difference, though Evan didn’t like the conclusions he was drawing from it. “I’m not using,” he insisted. “Not four years ago either. It was never like that.” Which maybe wasn’t a hundred percent true, but mostly. “Donne’s cronies have been after me since I was nineteen. Maybe earlier, I don’t know. But they reeled me in when I was about twenty, fed me a line with the booze and the drugs. When I wanted out, Mac used chains mostly, and paralytics for rituals. If my father hadn’t found me, I’d be dead. I haven’t touched any of that shit since.”
Jaworski flinched. He’d seen the photographs from Donne’s house, his graveyard, and would have figured a little of what Evan had done, if not how or why. Evan braced himself for Jaworksi to turn away in disgust. But he managed to just be Mike, a little frustrated, maybe a little angry, but taking it in and not quite believing all of it because they’d had the “I’m an alcoholic” part of this conversation three weeks ago over his refrigerator.
“I have a problem with booze. It hasn’t been the whole four years, but I didn’t take a drink today.” The judge had left his scotch on Van Der Graf’s desk. Once Evan noticed it, he couldn’t bring himself to look away.
Jaworski saw the glass, stepped into the line of sight. “You’re brooding.” He snapped his fingers in Evan’s face to get his attention. “You’re probably too stoned to hear this right now, but maybe your defenses are down far enough to let it sink in. The things those bastards did to you are not your fault. Not then, not now. So get your head out of your ass. We’ve got them. Not even fucking Sid would let it happen again.”
It wasn’t exactly a twenty- five-year-old scotch, but Evan let his shoulders sag a little, for the moment letting go of the burden, that he’d been too weak to resist the seduction of Mac’s booze and his drugs and his promises.
“Nobody came for Matt.” Didn’t know why, but he needed Jaworski to understand about Matt Shields too, who was not kin but shared a kindred scar.
“Yeah. Figured that. Let’s get you to a hospital.”
Evan took a breath, ready to object, but Jaworski stopped him before he said a word. “Home is not an option. We clear you with the medics and find Lily and your father. You tell Sid everything you know about what happened today and why anybody would pay thirty-five million dollars for an old box, let alone kidnap someone to exchange for it when they lost the bid, and then maybe I’ll drive you home, because your car is still in impound.”
Jaworski reached for the strongbox, but Evan stopped him. “Thirty-five million dollars.”
“And butt-ugly it is, but in your condition you’ll never make it down the steps with it.”
Which might not be true anymore, but Evan let him take it. Jaworski didn’t hear the screaming, which made it a lot easier for him, and Evan wasn’t letting the box out of his sight, regardless. “Give it to Lily or Brad, not Matt Shields—he still owes us a hell of a lot of money that we’ve already spent on this thing. Tell them—I know this sounds stupid, but the words are really important—just tell them to hold it for me. Make it clear that I am not giving them the box.” And, because it was the only part of the deal that Jaworski would understand, he added, “Lily says that was the agreement with Bertrande LeRoux. If we screw up on this, she’ll take the box back to France with her, and Matt Shields will own the agency outright.”
Jaworski didn’t ask why they’d made a deal like that in the first place, just swung the strongbox up by its handles, oblivious to the screaming soul of a daemon lord inside it, and carried it down the broad marble staircase ahead of Evan, the EMT right behind them.
When they reached the street, he looked for Lily and found her smiling brightly at Sid Valentine. They were facing off under a tree that shaded the pavement in front of the imposing brick-and-sandstone facade of Cyril Van Der Graf’s townhouse mansion. 70th Street was narrow and crowded. At the top of the block, two police cars in front of a mid-rise apartment building held back half a dozen news trucks with their dishes extended while their lacquered reporters and not so lacquered camera people jockeyed for position and the best view of the crime scene. At the bottom of the block, a single car guarded a pair of sawhorses that closed off the street. There were more news trucks on standby, but nothing much for them to see.
Overhead, the sound of helicopters racketed off brick and stone and concrete, with chaos below them on the street. The police must have gotten some of the neighbors out before they closed off the block because there were gaps in the line of civilian cars bumped up close to the curb that held patrol cars now, with red lights flashing lazily under the trees. Two black vans blocked the middle of the street, the doors hanging wide while the strike team milled around them, stowing weapons. Van Der Graf’s cronies were already gone, but more official vehicles had filled in the close space. On either side of the strike force vans, ambulances with their own flashing lights faced in opposite directions down the one-way street.
He was pretty clear, but not enough for the onslaught of lights and noise. Evan stumbled, reached a hand out for balance, and someone grabbed his arm to steady him. Sid Valentine swore softly under his breath and pulled Evan behind one of the black vans, out of sight of the reporters. “Where’s Jaworski?”
“I thought you were with Lily—”
“Now I’m with you.” Valentine shook his head like Evan had done something stupid, which he hadn’t, really. It wasn’t his fault that Architectural News had the floor plan wrong. Not his fault Van Der Graf had a hostage to use against him either. He was crap with hostages, had been since the time he’d been one, and didn’t want to connect those dots.
“Jaworski,” Valentine repeated.
“He was right here,” the EMT said before Evan could answer, “I’ve go
t this one.”
“Well, get him out of here before he collapses on the street.”
“I need the detective, sir.”
Jaworski was talking to Lily, handing over the box, but Sid glared and the EMT didn’t wait.
“This way.” He took Evan’s arm and steadied him when the flashing lights blew his sense of up and down. Mike Jaworski caught up and climbed in the ambulance after him. Then they took off, quietly heading the wrong way down the street while the second ambulance went the other direction with lights and sirens, pulling the news vans after it.
Evan gave it some thought but couldn’t remember any clients on this block. After today, he figured it was going to stay that way.
Chapter 54
DONNE’S BOOK DID NOT TRAVEL WELL. Some material objects, with no intention attached to them, might pass through the second celestial sphere without creating a ripple in the waves of energy that filled the great dark. But magical objects designed to rip daemon lords out of their natural home and pull them into the material sphere created tidal disturbances in the flow of all the universes. Brad moved through that flow in less than the time it took to draw breath in the material sphere, but the book still created eddies in the currents of his own universe. The material sphere would feel those rips and eddies as the bursting to life of a new star cluster, the death of a galaxy far enough away that Evan’s world remained secure—he’d made sure of that. The mountains of Earth would be gone to dust when the effects of those actions touched it as starlight and its absence.
The book’s presence touched Ariton rather more quickly. Anger crowded him in the streams of darkness, threats against himself, his Prince; mostly against his son, who had caused enough trouble and should have died in the cradle. If Ariton couldn’t handle the simple death of a mortal human, then Magot would do it, or Astarot, both allies of Azmod in the gathering of Princes. Amaimon remained silent, but Oriens would have destroyed the planet to be done with it, and Paimon could not speak at all, being torn by the words in the book, two of its own lords held captive by it and only Ariton able to free them. Ariton that would have killed the mortal boy as well, and left Paimon to its own devices, except that contracts had been made. But Badad must go, and take the cursed book with him, destroy it on the human sphere so that it never intruded on the business of Princes again.
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