A Legacy of Daemons
Page 32
The house was a festering wound eating at the back of his mind. “I’ll be there.”
Matt Shields was waiting at dusk in the clearing in front of the house. He had the little girl in his arms, but was otherwise alone. Didn’t say anything at first and Evan respected the distance. The contract was closed; they had nothing in common but an uneasy truce between their Princes and a shared focus for old pain. Best to leave it at that. They’d told the Sanchezes they were coming back for one last look before the place changed hands.
Katey squealed and reached out to him, her pigtails bouncing against the tiny silver crosses in her ears. Not his kid, not his place, but it was hard to turn away. Matt Shields huffed an exasperated snort through his nose and gave the cast a pointed stare. “She’s getting heavy,” he said, but held her out anyway, and Evan didn’t have much choice. He tucked her against his side with his good arm, trying not to flash back to the night they’d run through a burning forest like this. He figured it was going to get worse before it got better. They were alone at the edge of Donne’s woods, the town locked down tight as storms rolled over the hills and crashed over their heads.
Matt Shields held the rain to the west, but storm clouds rumbled overhead. “I hate this house,” he said, and Evan nodded, had his own reasons to want it gone. The wind whipped up and lightning flashed. Katey wanted her papi, and Evan was glad to let her go, waited until he had cradled her face against his shoulder, then gave an abrupt nod. Shields drew the storm down on them, and Evan added wind to the rain and the lightning. The roof bristled with lightning rods, but he listened for the sound of a freight train, nudged it, felt the tearing in his chest as the air pressure dipped. Hail fell around them, and lightning flashed in clouds turned green and purple. Evan pushed.
Together they watched the roof go, the windows blow. The door flew past, a post from the porch, and the house was down. Vulnerable. Shields reached out, became flame and thunder with Katey wrapped up safe at its center, brought down flames. Not lightning. The ground was saturated; a lightning strike would kill Evan and maybe Katey, which would end a lot of conflicts in the second celestial sphere, but he wasn’t feeling sacrificial today and Paimon’s lord retained an interest in the child.
They watched until the house had crumbled and sirens wailed, growing nearer, then headed for their respective cars. Shields had a four-wheel-drive something now. They were quiet until he’d settled Katey to a few wounded sniffles.
“She didn’t leave you, you know.” Lily. And not Paimon’s business.
“Whatever. She left.” Evan didn’t want to die a crispy critter, so he didn’t remind Shields that he’d been living in a box for six hundred years, so his advice on the sex lives of daemons and half- human hybrids was maybe not the most relevant. But that didn’t stop him.
“It wasn’t about you, Evan.” And that was sharper, and he wondered what was going on in Shields’ head, what was going to happen to Katey if he’d tired of playing human already. Evan had been grown when he found his father and Lily. He’d needed some training, some assurance that he was sane, but he could manage on his own. Katey was stronger and still had puberty ahead of her. But that wasn’t where Shields was going.
“If she were a human girl, would it be a deal breaker for you if she wanted to live in her hometown instead of yours?”
“But she’s not human.” And he couldn’t live in her hometown.
“Well, that’s your problem, isn’t it?” And maybe that was part of it.
Shields left him to his own thoughts until they had reached the cars, but there was something else on his mind.
“What is it?”
“There’s a guy, name of Da’Costa, that’s been nosing around. Do you know him?”
No daemon lord should look that comfortable putting a toddler in a car seat, but Evan didn’t let that distract him from the question. He’d been pretty well sick of Alfredo Da’Costa since the first time he’d laid eyes on him. “Yeah. Is he giving you a problem?”
“He likes to make threats. I’m just not sure whether he’s another crazy or something to be really worried about.”
The crazies had been worth the worry, but Evan figured he knew what Shields meant. Da’Costa’s threats usually involved the deaths of universes, and always the death of Evan. If he was threatening Katey, well. “He’s dangerous. Keep Katey away from him—he really doesn’t like our kind. But I’ll talk to him.”
He found Alfredo Da’Costa in a garden in Paris. Not one of the usual ones you’d find in a tourist guide, but high above the city, tiers of paths paved in cut stone blocks and plazas carved into a hillside among the beds of grass and flowers beneath the trees. The neighborhood was slightly shabby, fading into age with moderate grace, but Paris spread like a banquet in front of them: Sacre Coeur floated above the city in the distance, and the Eiffel Tower almost disappeared in the evening haze beyond the maze of slate roofs and chimney pots.
Evan joined him at the stone railing, pretended to an appreciation of the view that another day would have captured his imagination with angles and light and the lone figure juggling in front of a fountain a level below them in the park. A ball fell, and Evan figured he wasn’t going to let that happen to him.
“About the girl,” he said
Da’Costa raised a patrician eyebrow. “Which one?” he asked. “Paris has so many.” But his dark and ageless eyes studied Evan as if he were a puzzle he’d grown tired of.
Evan was done with games. “Katey. Don’t hurt her. Don’t interfere.”
“The humans can’t teach her what she needs to know. What will you do when Matt Shields gets tired of playing happy houses and goes home? Bring her back to Spruce Street? Neither of your partners would allow it—she is not of your Prince.”
“Lily’s gone.” And, God, bad enough she left—he could have handled that she just got tired of him and wandered away in time. He’d expected it of her, knew Brad was surprised every time she dragged him off to bed. But she’d vanished the moment the Princes had let her go, and that made him doubt every assumption he’d made about the past four years.
“And because your masculinity has been offended, you would stand against Ariton? Against your father?”
Da’Costa turned back to the city and Evan figured he was supposed to take a lesson from that—he could lose this too. But the Guardian really never had understood Evan. This wasn’t about Lily, or Ariton, or even humans. He was tired of lessons that ended with all of creation better off if his kind weren’t in it. His kind—neither daemon nor human but distinctly themselves. The last time he’d fought for one of “his kind” had been a disaster. But Katey Sanchez wasn’t like that. She was happy and sane, and gave Evan more hope than he had any right to consider.
“What makes you think I care about a universe that can exist only if my kind doesn’t?”
“If she were Ariton—”
But Evan wasn’t listening. “If you hurt her, I’ll bring it all down. A universe that would destroy us just for living doesn’t deserve to exist.”
Da’Costa had tried to kill him before, and Evan braced for a fight, figured it for the last one, but Da’Costa just gave a slow nod. “We’ll talk again,” he said. “But today, we’re in Paris. Are you hungry?”
Da’Costa was alone here too—a Guardian and the only one of his kind on the planet. He didn’t like to think that they had anything in common, but Da’Costa did understand at least that much about him.
“I could use a bite,” he agreed. “There’s this great little Moroccan place—”
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