“I heard her screaming, but there was nothing I could do.”
Chapter 68
VOICES FILTERED THROUGH THE WOOD-FRAMED screen door, softened by their passage through the house, but daemon senses picked them up easily enough. Kady—who was Kadalon in her own world—bound to a room and a form, driven mad by an alien thing growing inside her. A bad time to intrude, maybe, but Badad was here and they didn’t have much time left.
He considered his options and decided against his daemon form. Only Evan and Paimon’s daemons would know he was there, but his motives became more suspect, more tied to the politics of Princes, a fact he’d rather not advertise. As Kevin Bradley, a partner in the firm Shields had hired, the case gave him a reason to be here. He knocked, while off to his right, against the chime of water against rock, a small child’s laughter rose to a shrill point that he tried not to connect to the story Shields told beyond that door.
No one answered, but he knew Shields was aware of him, felt a thread of curiosity wind through Evan’s focus on the job. He let himself in, passed the stove with a pot simmering on low, into the room where Evan rubbed nervous hands against his battered face. The strongbox sat on a low table in front of an overstuffed sofa. It took a second to figure out what was missing—the screaming had stopped. Human emotions Badad didn’t even recognize hit him then. Evan really hated that box, but he wasn’t focused on freeing Matt Shields from it, at least not right away.
He looked at his watch—five hours before Paimon owned his son—and introduced himself with a bland smile.
“Kevin Bradley, Bradley, Ryan, and Davis.”
“Of course.” Marina Sanchez stood up, offered him a chair, playing hostess as if he couldn’t see her eyes were leaking.
“Do we need a minute?” Evan asked, expecting some emergency, though not the one they had.
Brad—taking back his human persona with the form—shook his head. He could answer that truthfully at least. “It can wait.” Not for long, but Evan, Shields, and the box were all in the same room. He had to figure there was a point to that. “Don’t let me interrupt you.”
He declined the invitation to sit, chose instead to stand in the arch to the kitchen. Evan looked at him for a long minute, trying, it seemed, to see inside his head—just meat there, boy. Get on with the show.
Evan did. “Donne wanted an heir like Simpson’s,” he said. Daemon spawn. And there was a thing. He’d felt the spark, thought it was something of Paimon, which he guessed it was. “Did he get one?” Didn’t need to ask the question, now that he knew, but the humans would expect it. Evan said, “We were just getting to that part,” and signaled Shields to go on.
He didn’t want to, Brad could see that. Had been a fool, got himself and another lord caught for only his own Prince knew how long, stuck in a box and let out for special occasions. If it had been him, Brad would never have shared that story with a lord of a potential enemy. He didn’t know what he would do if that lord owned him, and he briefly wondered how much choice Shields really had in telling the story at all. He didn’t look coerced, but the box still held the power. Evan owned the box, and he’d use it—was using it now—for whatever reasons he thought good enough to break every bond of loyalty to his Prince and the lords who harbored him.
“Donne couldn’t do it,” Evan brought him up to speed. “So he tricked his son. And yeah, it worked.”
Brad knew what that look from Evan meant—please don’t blow up the house. We’re sitting in it. Brad had done that once already, and hadn’t liked the consequences, but he wasn’t going to bring that up in front of strangers. “How long?” he said.
“Not as long as a normal human gestation, I gather,” Shields said, carefully neutral. “But long enough. When he knew Kady was carrying a child, he killed Grey. Grey made it easy for him. He found out what his father had done and insisted they stop it right then. But Donne didn’t need him anymore—he’d have his own half-daemon heir and Van Der Graf was ready to take it on if his heart gave out, make it as crazy as the Simpsons’ heir in their mad notion to invade the spheres.”
Shields carefully didn’t mention Evan in the short list of the bastard children of two universes driven crazy by their own natures and the cabal’s plans for them. “Grey was never going to be any use to him, so Donne caught him at the top of the stairs and fought with him, just words at first, then he pushed him. When the fall didn’t kill him, Donne snapped his neck.”
A cool look passed between them. There was only one way Shields could know the story in that much detail. Donne may have pushed his own son down the stairs, but he hadn’t been strong enough to break a neck with his bare hands. No point in saying it out loud, though. Brad could see that Evan had it figured, and the other humans wouldn’t take it well.
That left Grayson Donne the elder, dead a few months later. Matt Shields could have done it, but Brad didn’t think so. He’d be stuck in that box if he had.
Chapter 69
GREY DONNE HAD BEFRIENDED THE human forms of his father’s daemons, had promised to free them when he came into his father’s power. Then he’d impregnated one of them and gotten himself killed by the other one. Evan figured he should feel more about the dead part, but he had a couple of bodies to his own account in the wars humans waged against his daemon kin and on the whole discovered that he was just glad the Donnes were gone. But that still left Old Donne’s death unaccounted for.
“I didn’t kill him,” Sanchez said, not waiting for the obvious question. “I was there, and I would have done it. He deserved to die—I should have killed him long ago. But I didn’t, God forgive me. He died of a heart attack.”
“Not asleep in his own bed, though,” Evan prodded. A heart attack wasn’t necessarily murder, but it couldn’t have been that hard to push a man Donne’s age past where his heart could sustain the strain.
“He was trying to save me.” Marina patted her father’s hand. She was sitting on the low footstool beside him again, not crying now, just staring down the past like she could see it playing out over the coffee table. “Donne planned to pass the child off as mine, but to do that, I had to disappear. He couldn’t have me trying out for the swim team when I was supposed to be seven months pregnant.
“You found the tunnel that runs under the house, so you must have seen the cell below his ritual room, where he kept his victims.”
Evan nodded—didn’t want to slow her down, but his awareness of his father listening made his skin crawl. Didn’t want the reminders of his own prison, and some things shouldn’t be shared with the other spheres. Humans hurting other humans was human business. His father’s kind had enough reasons to despise them.
“I spent months chained in that hole in the ground, listening to Kady screaming above me, with nothing but the trapdoor in the floor between us. I knew she was wearing my face and my body—Donne showed me. He promised that after it was over Kady would go back in the box and I’d be free to raise Grey’s child as my own—in his house, under his control. He called that free.
“I knew he wouldn’t leave me alive for long. He blamed me for turning Grey against him, but he needed somebody to take care of the baby, and he didn’t trust Kady or Matt—figured they might kill it. By then I’d have done anything to get out of that hole, but I wanted this deal—it was Grey’s child. My reward was a locked room at the top of the house. And then Kady had the baby.”
“There was a terrible storm.” Carlos patted her hand.
Evan said nothing, just gave an encouraging nod that Sanchez, caught in the gathering storm of his own memories, didn’t even see.
“No rain, but lightning, and thunder like the end of the world had come. For hours. And then, it just stopped. I sent Raffi to check on the Donne house, and he came back, said half the roof was gone and that he’d seen Marina in an upstairs window.
“We’d had email from school, that she was going away with some friends to try to get over Grey’s death. We never guessed that it was forged, but we k
new that Marina hated that house, would never willingly go back there. And we knew that Mr. Donne was capable of anything to get what he wanted. So we broke in and found her. We could see that she’d been there a long time. She was distraught. Raffi took Marina out, and I went to confront Mr. Donne. I found him in the round room, holding a newborn child. There was blood everywhere, but no woman. I didn’t know, you understand. I thought—
“I confronted him, threatened him, but he just gloated until he realized that I meant to kill him and take the child. I thought the child was my blood. I could not leave my blood in the hands of such evil. I think, when he knew that all his plans would fail again, just as he had achieved success, his heart no longer had a reason for beating.
“He died in the center of his own evil. I took the child out and left him there, called the police the next day as if I had just found him. They knew some violent crime had happened, but I had no trace of blood anywhere on my person. Donne had died of natural causes and the police in that town were used to looking away from the evil in that house. We all just hoped that meant an end to it.”
“And was it the end?” Evan asked. He meant the three years in between, but Carlos Sanchez gave him an exhausted, ironic smile. “Not then. We had dead to mourn, and a girl—we thought of her that way, you understand—had a child in captivity and disappeared. But the killing stopped. At least, until the State put Mr. Donne’s legacy up for auction. And so, here we are.”
Marina Sanchez stood up, both hands rubbing down the thighs of her jeans. “I’ve left dinner alone on the stove too long,” she said, signaling the end to the conversation. Evan followed her to his feet with a sharp nod for Matt Shields, because it was his problem.
“We’ll fix it,” he said, and hoped it was true. He thought he had the box figured, but he didn’t know how far Cyril Van Der Graf’s reach went, whether he had the power, without Donne’s daemon lords, to escape a long prison sentence. Wasn’t sure, for that matter, how far Van Der Graf’s reach went in this house, but he had to find out.
“Mr. Sanchez said that Marina dropped you off at the bus station to come to Philadelphia.”
“That is what happened,” Sanchez agreed, and Shields didn’t contradict him.
“But I saw Alba at the Lea Library at Penn the next day. Why didn’t you come together?”
The air went out of the room—not a metaphor—and Evan cut a sharp glare at Shields. But Shields was looking toward the kitchen, where Alba Sanchez had gathered up a half-human child to catch minnows in a stream.
Chapter 70
“WHAT’S THE LEA LIBRARY?”Shields asked, wary, but breath was moving in and out of human lungs again.
Brad had been reading human reactions since the Sun King, and he’d bet the agency that Marina Sanchez hadn’t known. Her father knew something. Not that, though he covered fast. “Research,” he said, and Evan answered, “Witchcraft. Esoterica. She was reading The Names of the Angels.”
“To find a way to put an end to all this, if you couldn’t get Donne’s strongbox,” Sanchez explained. “Mr. Van Der Graf’s people kidnapped her when she went to New York to follow up on her research.”
Part of that was true, Brad figured. Research made sense. But Carlos Sanchez hadn’t said a thing about the graveyard in Donne’s wood, and his daughters had an unfortunate habit of turning up in the houses of Donne’s cabal.
Shields was looking to Evan for salvation, but Evan’s attention had shifted to the other side of the door.
The child was coming back. Brad sensed the spark of Paimon in motion when he looked for it, knew Evan sensed it as well. Shields hadn’t put together what that meant yet, stuck on the realization that the Sanchezes were lying. But soon enough even the humans in the room could hear the high- pitched chatter on the path from the stream. Heads turned; they’d forgotten and the voices surprised them, revealing varying levels of guilt and shock as the two missing members of the party—one obviously innocent, the other less so, closed in on the house.
The little girl was laughing, naming the minnows in her pail while Alba Sanchez warned her gravely that Oscar had to stay in the water, but she could tell Mr. Evan that she would take care of his minnow for him. The clack of the screen door obscured Katey’s answer, but the little girl appeared fishless in the living room.
“Tia Alba says dinner is ready, but we have to wash our hands!” she held up her own hands, still pink from the cold of the creek, to demonstrate. Then she noticed Brad and hid behind Matt Shields’ legs. “Bad man!” she whispered.
He didn’t touch her. Figured he could save himself five hours if he wanted to start a war with Paimon over the half-human bastards of the second celestial sphere right here, but declined. Instead he squatted down until she could see him almost eye-to-eye. She made a better first impression than Evan had—no open wounds or desperate madness. She smelled a little damp from sunshine and the water running in the stream, but like breezes through trees and milk and cookies too.
He kept the fire out of his eyes and just smiled when amber twisted in hers. “I would never hurt a little girl,” he said. “I want to help.”
Chapter 71
INTERESTING. EVEN AT THREE, KATEY—Sanchez?—had an instinct for recognizing her own Prince and the daemon lords of a possible enemy house. Evan hadn’t felt the difference until his father had got him sane and started to teach him how to control his nature. He’d learned to distinguish between threats, but still hadn’t figured Ariton for an ally the way Katey clung to Matt Shields.
Shields picked her up, said, “Not a bad man. He’s a very good friend. An ally.” He took a step toward Brad, and Evan almost laughed as his father took an equal step backward before holding his ground. “This is Mr. Bradley. He helps people. If you are ever in really bad trouble and you can’t find me, you go to Mr. Bradley. Not to anybody else. Hear me?”
Brad wasn’t happy about that, but he didn’t say “No.”
Katey agreed with a vigorous nod that bounced the little ponytails pulled up above her ears. “And Mr. Evan?” she asked, and pressed a finger against her lips—keeping their secret.
“Mr. Evan too.” Shields dared him to walk away in the look he shot over her head, then he put her back on her feet. “Now wash your hands before Tia Alba eats all your dinner!”
She laughed at him, but ran off through the sunshine that dappled the floor, down a hall that led to the back of the house. Evan watched her go, considering the most pressing threats to that laughter. Alba Sanchez was what, eighteen? Shields had said she was starting SUNY in the fall. Eighteen was a little old for Van Der Graf’s taste, and he didn’t like girls anyway. But Evan hadn’t been much older when Mac—Omage of the host of Azmod—had sucked him into the hell of his back room at the Black Masque.
Alba Sanchez didn’t have the spark of a daemon lord in her, but neither had Mac’s followers at the Black Masque. Completely human, they’d chained him to the marble floor of the back room and opened his veins to fill Mac’s alabaster cup. The symbols they’d painted with his blood on the wall merged in Evan’s mind with the symbols on the ceiling in Van Der Graf’s mansion, the floor of Donne’s inner room. When he sent Paimon’s daemon lords home, would Alba Sanchez open the veins of Paimon’s half-daemon child? Would she gather Katey’s blood in another insane bid to storm the second celestial sphere?
Not his child, not his Prince, not his problem.
Except that he absolutely would not let Donne’s cabal make a victim of one more half-daemon child. Especially not this one—the first since Sched’s giants to have a chance at a sane life. He’d fight his own Prince for her if he had to.
“Alba’s set extra places. You’re welcome to stay for dinner.” Marina made the offer with her arms in their defensive cross, tucked up over her lime camp shirt like she was holding her sides together, but Evan had no intention of intruding. At least, not on dinner. He wanted out of that house.
“No, thank you.”
She relaxed a little; so
she wanted him gone as badly as he wanted to go. He had just one more thing to do before he could make them both happy by his absence.
“How far are we here from the closest neighbor?”
“About a quarter mile down the road,” Carlos Sanchez said, the first thing he admitted to knowing since he’d lied about his daughter Alba. “The beach is a half mile farther on.”
Evan considered that possibility. Probably the safest place if things went wrong—plenty of water, and nothing much to burn—but dismissed it quickly. Too many houses with an ocean view, and they didn’t need an audience.
Sanchez seemed to follow the thought. “There are neighbors on the road, but the house backs onto the state park. The stream’s part of that—no one for miles back there.”
Good as anyplace, then. Evan filled them in on their part of the plan. “We’ll wait until after dark, let the hikers clear out.” In June it seemed to stay light forever. It was already after seven and he was going to need batteries for the flashlight.
“Say, eleven thirty? Matt, you’ll bring the box. We’ll bring Katey along, in case.” In case the spell required Donne’s blood relative. He didn’t want to consider that she wasn’t a male relative and this might not work at all. “I’ll make sure she gets home. The rest of you will stay here, but be ready to evacuate if things don’t go as planned.”
He could tell Brad didn’t like that idea, and neither did the Sanchezes.
“I’ll come,” Carlos rose from his rocking chair, the set of his jaw made him look more like the man Evan had met at Donne’s estate.
“She’ll be safe with me,” Evan said, because he wasn’t leaving the kid to chance and he couldn’t trust any one of them to protect her. He frankly didn’t think Carlos or Marina Sanchez were involved with Donne’s cabal, except in the way the town had been, turning its back on the butchery going on at Grayson Donne’s estate. The humans couldn’t protect a half-daemon child if the second celestial sphere wanted her dead. He was the best shot she had of living through the night, which maybe gave too much credit to his own influence in the second celestial sphere.
A Legacy of Daemons Page 28
