“It’s not the same thing at all.” Ellen sounded tired. Disappointed too. “The police are here to help him, not to terrorize his family.”
She hadn’t expected the need to defend herself here, and Evan hadn’t meant her. He trusted Ellen Li, trusted Mike Jaworski, and he even trusted Joe Dougherty to mean well, he really did. But somebody had to have noticed when all those people went missing.
“Where were the police when Grayson Donne and Cyril Van Der Graf were filling Donne’s woods with bodies?” He’d meant it as a challenge, but knew he’d lost his professional detachment when Khadijah Flint reached over and patted his hand.
“No one is going to hurt Carlos Sanchez,” she said, and Evan cringed at the softness in her voice. Khadijah Flint didn’t do soft. And she didn’t know Carlos Sanchez, wasn’t thinking about him when she said, “He’s got the best lawyer in town on his case, and a detective agency that would take on the world for him.”
She hadn’t seen the pictures from Donne’s house, but Ellen Li had, maybe recognized his picture on the wall and no, he hadn’t meant, “where were the police when I needed rescue from Donne’s cabal,” but guilt passed fleetingly across her face, so he figured she’d taken it that way. He didn’t know whether to apologize for what he hadn’t meant in the first place or keep his mouth shut before he dug in any deeper. And maybe he did mean it that way, if he was honest with himself.
Brad didn’t say anything, which was worse. Evan knew that look—mayhem simmering behind eyes that had gone completely blank to keep the fire from revealing more than he wanted the police or his lawyer to know. But Evan could see it, just a flicker that could pass for morning light glancing off the blue of his father’s eyes.
“Shields may know where to find him,” he said, because he had to do something to damp the tension building in the room before the rising air pressure cracked the windows. “I’ll talk to him. See what he can tell us.”
Paimon’s lords knew secrets the way Ariton found things. Between them, they’d have Carlos Sanchez in hand before dinner. They could decide what to do with him later.
“Your client missed his appointment with me yesterday.”
“We were tied up.” A little irony there. Ropes were about the only thing missing yesterday. “Will Monday do? It’s the weekend.”
“Too late. Sid wants it, and he’s still in New York. You’ll be hearing from him.” Ellen left it at that, which was a minor miracle. She rose to leave with a smile for his father, but Evan still had a question—the question. “We bought a box at Sotheby’s yesterday—”
“The FBI has it—that and your car. They’ve checked them for evidence, and they’re ready to release them both to the owner.” That would be Evan. “You can pick them up this afternoon in New York. Just bring proof of ownership. But they’ll want to know why you were willing to pay thirty-five million dollars for it before they let the box go.”
Brad filled in smoothly with: “Eccentric client. The fee was very good.”
“The Vatican was bidding against you, then suddenly dropped out. Another bidder, the mother of the priest bidding for the Vatican, combined her bid with yours. I can well believe that the Church would not willingly concede to Cyril Van Der Graf anything it wanted. But that does not explain why they wanted it, or why the Church would defer to you when its resources must be far in excess of your client’s, or why the co-owner would sign over full ownership to your son.
“Our objectives were mutual,” Brad said, “But the agency had a greater likelihood of success.”
Ellen hadn’t asked a lot of questions—mostly seemed to be warning them. “It’s those objectives the FBI will want to hear. I’d like to hear them myself.”
Brad smiled, and Evan knew never to trust that smile. “We just want to unite our client with his property and send him home. It’s as simple as that.” The first part was true. But simple? Not really.
She didn’t confirm chess with his father on Wednesday, so they weren’t in the clear yet—they never were until all the pieces shifted into place.
Time to start shifting pieces.
Chapter 59
EVAN FOUND THEM IN THE BACK ROOM at Charlie’s. The place had opened for lunch but it was still early, only a diehard or two at the bar as he passed—trying not to look at the bottles displayed on the wall—to the pool tables in the back. Lily was taking a shot while Matt Shields watched her ass with appreciation. “That’s Ariton’s,” Evan said, and really didn’t understand the wash of anger and raw challenge that hit him like a tidal surge. He wasn’t jealous. Wasn’t even sure if he meant Lily or the pool table. Lily hadn’t been happy with this case from the start, wanted no part of a contract that tied them to a foreign Prince. She barely tolerated Matt Shields. But this was his place, where he could get a Coke and sink a few balls and flirt with Lily across the felt before they went home to do what they did best any time of day. He didn’t want Matt Shields intruding on his fantasies about what he’d like to do with Lily on all that red felt.
Shields laughed at him, which cranked the heat behind his eyes a notch higher. “Just appreciating the human part of the view,” Shields said, but there was an edge to it. “While I wait for you to turn over Donne’s strongbox, so I can go home.”
Which didn’t stop the simmer, but did add an anvil to Evan’s gut. He had no intention of handing that box over to Matt Shields, not with an insane daemon lord inside. He’d let him go—but he needed the box to do it. And he needed some answers first.
“The police are looking for Carlos Sanchez and his daughter, Marina,” he said. “So am I.”
“That wasn’t part of the deal.”
“It became a part of the deal when he disappeared. The FBI thinks Sanchez killed the Donnes. They think maybe you helped him, maybe killed Sanchez yourself. They won’t stop looking for him. They won’t stop watching us because they think you’re involved.”
“I don’t have a deal with the FBI. Paimon does not have a deal with the FBI. Are you reneging on our agreement, in Ariton’s name? War between Princes may mean nothing to you, but Paimon will kill you, and this planet.”
Evan darted a glance at the doorway, but no one was close enough to hear the argument over the music.
“No, he’s not,” Lily said, but Evan refused to listen.
“Paimon won’t get the chance. Right now, Ariton’s executioner is in my house, playing video games on my laptop.” He’d had enough of them all and he was tired of trying to slip through his own life unnoticed by the forces battling for the right to kill him. “But if nobody murders me this week, I still have to live here. If that means the police looking over my shoulder for the foreseeable future, I damned well want a good reason. So you’ll get your box when I decide what to do about Carlos Sanchez.”
Shields glared with amber flames threatening in his eyes, but he set the cue stick down and brushed the chalk off his hands. “We’ll need a car,” he said, a reminder that the box bound his movement to the material sphere. Evan had already thought of that. “I’ve got a rental. You’ll take me to Carlos Sanchez, then we’ll take the box out somewhere away from breakables, and set you free.”
“The box first,” Shields said. “Then Sanchez.”
It would complicate the pickup. The FBI had doubtless slapped a locator on his car. The rental had a lowjack, but the FBI would have to track it down and he hoped to dump it before they got a good lock on where he’d gone.
“I’ll follow you later,” Lily promised. Evan hadn’t expected her to put up with the hours in a car with a lord of Paimon. She gave him a deep and lingering kiss that swept his tonsils and he gave it back, had wrapped his hands around her thighs to lift her onto the pool table when she broke the kiss, laughing and flushed. “Not now,” she whispered, her breath coming quickly, like she’d been running.
“Sanchez can wait—”
But she slipped away, still laughing, and left him uncomfortable in his own skin and alone with Matt Shields. The rental se
dan was parked outside, so he turned on a heel and went, expecting Matt Shields to follow, and he did. Neither of them said a word until they hit the Jersey Turnpike.
Chapter 60
THE COMPUTER ON THE NEW DESK made noises he’d never heard before when Evan used it. Brad looked up from his book and glared at Caramos, to no effect. His host-cousin grinned madly at the screen and pumped his fist as another faux explosion rattled tinnily from the speakers.
“If you enjoy explosions so much, why don’t you just go blow something up? Cities are off the table—I promised Evan—but there are plenty of underpopulated bits of the globe, and a few planets nobody’s using at all.”
“It’s not the explosions, Cousin. It’s the winning!” Caramos grinned and jabbed a key with a thick index finger. “Can we have lunch now? Something Chinese?”
Brad loved Caramos dearly in his daemon form in the second celestial sphere. A brush with his cousin’s exuberant joy exhilarated him at home. But he found it exhausting on a Saturday afternoon on Spruce Street, when all he wanted was to sit quietly and read a book until Evan turned up with some answers to Ellen Li’s questions.
“In the kitchen,” he said. “Local menus in the drawer by the telephone. Evan marked the ones that do lunch. If you have Hong Kong in mind, you’ll have to wait for Lily.”
As if he’d conjured her by speaking her name, Lily appeared in a gust of wind that swirled a sheaf of loose papers off the corner of the new desk. She took their place, perched next to the computer, and snapped the lid down. Caramos snatched his fingers away and looked up at her with shallow dismay glittering in his eyes. “I was winning!” he said.
“Evan called you Ariton’s executioner. He said you’re here to kill him,” she said.
So. Not the usual family argument then. Brad looked up, waited for an answer.
“Not exactly.” Caramos tried to open the computer again.
Lily laid a hand on the cover, held it shut. “How ‘not exactly’?”
“I’m here to guarantee the deal. If he doesn’t succeed, Paimon will want his life. It’s a small price for a broken contract between Princes, but Ariton can’t allow Paimon the privilege—the boy belongs to us, after all. It’s Ariton’s prerogative, so Ariton will do it, details to be worked out between the parties.
“I think, based on my observations, that only one thing will matter to Evan if it comes to that. He believes that killing him will hurt you, and he will not want to cause either of you pain. Ariton agreed and granted him that boon. If it needs to be done, I will do it. No promises for quick and painless—though Ariton will not surrender those bargaining chips easily. But I’ll do what I can to make it as easy as possible for him. And you won’t have to be involved.”
Lily reached for him, grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled him closer, so that his lips almost touched hers. “First,” she said, “if it comes to that, the only thing that will matter to Evan is staying alive. If you think he will allow you to kill him without a struggle that may bring down universes simply to protect my feelings, you have seriously underestimated him. Second, if anyone is going to break my toys, it will be me. You do not get to play. Do you understand me?”
“But Evan—” Caramos looked to Brad for help.
Brad slipped a finger between the pages of his book to mark his place. “Evan knows your name,” he said, and smiled as benignly as he could under the circumstances. “He knows all our names, and all the spells of summoning and binding that our enemies have used against us for centuries, and he will want to stay alive, as Lily says. So maybe you can kill him, or maybe not. Personally, if I needed him dead, I would go with Lily, because he might hesitate with her. He might not realize until too late what she intended. If you try to kill him, you’ll probably wind up in a box like Matt Shields.”
Caramos paled. “I promised him, on the word of Ariton.”
Lily kissed him lightly and released his shirt, teasing with sharp fingernails as she smoothed it back into place. “Perhaps he’ll succeed. He usually does. If he doesn’t, leave him to me. Because you’re right about one thing. He won’t want to hurt me. Paimon may have to settle for quick, but I’ll have that edge, and I’ll get it done.”
“It’s ridiculous to worry about it,” Brad pointed out, annoyed at the interruption. “He owns the box; it’s just a matter of working out the details.” He opened his book again, found his place. He’d seen the signs in Lily and wasn’t surprised, not when Caramos said, “Then I suppose we can have lunch,” or when Lily kissed him again, said, “Later. Take me to bed now. Be Evan for me.”
Caramos’ eyes lit up, blue flame dancing joyfully in their depths. “Sex!” he said, and produced a passable version of Evan before they disappeared in a scatter of windblown papers. He didn’t move or think like Evan, but she’d satisfy his curiosity and send him home happy. And he’d satisfy—whatever it was Lily needed when she dressed her lovers up in Evan’s body.
It would be safer for all of them when Evan wasn’t watching for murder at every bend in the case. Brad considered Singapore. Mai Sien Chong would be sleeping, but she wouldn’t mind if he woke her, and he wondered which of his many forms she might prefer. He had once appeared to her as a tiger, which pleased her, but her guardian had shot him in the head, which hadn’t worked out quite as he’d intended. He decided to keep the shape he had, because it was comfortable and worked well in her bed.
As it turned out, Mai Sien was not sleeping. She was, however, very happy to see him. When he lost control, erupting in blue scales, with horny claws growing from his hands and feet, shredding the silk on the bed, she stroked him knowingly and called him by his Chinese name—Chu-Jung, god of the south wind—and assured him that she had more sheets.
Chapter 61
ONCE THEY WERE ON THE NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE, it was straight going and mindnumbingly boring, except for the daemon lord of Paimon in the passenger seat. The silence in the rental stretched as far as Trenton, but Evan hated going into anything blind, and he wasn’t going into this until Matt Shields gave up some of his secrets.
“There’s a rest stop ahead—do you want anything?” Shields looked over as if he didn’t understand the question. He was back in flannel and steel-toes, putting on the identity he had lived with for the past three years. Evan couldn’t tell if he was returning to the camouflage Carlos Sanchez knew or just letting go of human comforts before heading home. He didn’t want to think about the possibility Shields was taking back the human comforts he knew.
“Coffee?” Evan prodded.
“I’m good, but stop if you want.”
He did, got them each a cup. He wanted Shields distracted with something ordinary. However long he’d been stuck in that box before, he’d lived in the material world for three years and understood about coffee. Traffic was light at midday on a Saturday, and Evan merged, took a sip of Starbucks over the wheel.
“So,” he said. “Who did kill Grayson Donne?”
“Which one?” Shields looked at him over the plastic lid, not particularly surprised at the question.
“Take your pick.”
“Mr. Donne killed Grey. You know Grey was seeing Marina, and that his father had other plans for him. Mr. Donne hated it when anyone crossed him, but especially Grey. They had a fight.”
“Was it an accident?”
“No.” Shields took a sip, grimaced a little—buying time, Evan figured, though he must have known the questions would come eventually.
“Grey defied him. Mr. Donne manipulated the argument to make it look like an accident, but he murdered his own son.”
The way Shields said “his own son” was a big clue-light shining on something. The rental protested the sudden jolt of acceleration with a whine and a rattle and he eased up on the gas. Shields had made his feelings about humans clear and he’d said he hadn’t produced any half-daemon offspring. Evan had to take him at his word, because the New Jersey Turnpike didn’t give him many options for dealing with a daemon’s lie
. “Didn’t he need his son to produce an heir? You said he wasn’t having any luck himself.”
The sound of the wind and the steady burr of the tires eating up the road filled his head but couldn’t blot out the memory of the daemon screaming in the box. No luck, no luck, no luck, the tires rolled, and the wind screamed a daemon’s terror around the windows.
“He was going to leave. Had already found a place in the city, and he’d promised to talk to the police when he got there. He knew the locals would do nothing.”
Promised who? Evan wondered. Not the sort of thing he could ask outright and know he had the truth, so he angled toward the question with another one.
“Why then? He’d been living in that house, had to know what was going on—if he wasn’t a part of it, why did he wait so long?”
Shields said nothing for a long time, just looked out the windshield at the flat New Jersey landscape flying by at eighty miles per, his mouth set in a grim, hard line. Evan was about to try another question when Shields’ breath hitched.
“When he was a child, he used to sit with us in the garden. His father told him we were his legacy, his property. His monsters. When Grey got older, he would own us, and he had to learn to control us the way he learned to ride a horse.
“He was afraid of his father, but he defied him anyway, even when he was a kid. Used to bring coats and blankets to cover us, because he said it wasn’t civilized to walk around undressed. Donne never gave us anything to wear, of course, and Grey always promised we’d have clothes when his father died—dresses for Kady, and a shirt and trousers for me. Blue jeans for both of us, because that’s how people dressed out in the world. He said we’d need to know that when he set us free. But we weren’t his monsters. He didn’t have the power, and he didn’t know what being a monster meant until his father brought him into the circle.”
Shields wasn’t looking at him. Evan hadn’t commanded the truth, but he didn’t think Shields was lying, exactly. A daemon lord couldn’t lie to its own host. The host shared consciousness, so there was nothing to tell and nowhere to hide a truth, except not to know it. They lied to humans easily enough but didn’t usually bother unless there was something to gain from it. Evan didn’t see the gain here, but nothing so far explained the regret that poured off Shields in waves. Regret that, really, made no sense.
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