Rose of Jericho (Lilith Adams Series Book 2)

by Jenny Allen

  Peisinoe pulled back after reveling in the faltering smile on Lilith’s face. How could she possibly know about Duncan? Farren may have known about Ashcroft’s death and Gregor’s crimes but how could she have known precisely what happened in that basement? The way she spat out the threat, it was like she had an eyewitness account… Either she forced every single detail out of Gregor, which seemed extremely unlikely, or…Cohen. Could it all have really been an elaborate act? Could he have been working with his grandfather all along? Her gut said no, but could she really trust it?

  “Isadora, boss said not to do any of your mumbo jumbo bullshit on this one. We can’t let anything contaminate the ritual.”

  The voodoo woman, Isadora apparently, stopped chanting and glared at Peisinoe with a huge helping of contempt. Dissension in the ranks. “Femin duol ou, bouzen. Aye makin’ tings aight wit Baron Samedi. He’s none too ‘appy.”

  Peisinoe’s blue eyes rolled dramatically as she tilted her head from side to side. “Blah, blah, blah.” Her eyes focused like a laser on Isadora as she snatched the bird’s wing out of the woman’s hand and shoved it against Isadora’s chest. “Boss said no. You want to chit chat with your crazy ass god, do it with one of the others.”

  One of the others? So there were more people in here, but who? Lilith tried to tilt her head around to look, but she couldn’t see anything between the darkness and the damn straps holding her in place.

  “Mwen pral tranch gòj ke fanm la ak pipi sou nanm li…” Isadora turned away, mumbling in another language, none of which Lilith understood but it certainly didn’t sound like a friendly apology. She picked up her candle and moved out of view, skirts swishing like an angry rolling tide.

  “You forgot your miniature tumbleweed.” Peisinoe closed her finger and thumb on a leaf of the odd little plant and held it up like it was a contaminated piece of garbage.

  Suddenly, Isadora reappeared, quickly grabbing the little round plant away from the siren and cradling it against her chest. “Dis es no tumbewed!” She spit the words sharply like verbal knives to Peisinoe’s face. Lilith definitely understood the sentiment.

  “Dis es a resurrection fern. Tis da Rose of Jericho.” Isadora turned her attention to the little plant, coddling it like a precious living thing. Her voice moved through the air like smoke, whispering and twisting like something sacred or something evil, maybe both. “Gives life ta dose dat ‘ave no soul left in dere husk. Let’s mae sing to dere body.”

  Peisinoe stared at her slack jawed for a moment and then shifted her stance. Lilith could see the goose bumps traveling up the siren’s pale arms. “Yeah, okay. Whatever. Take your creepy little plant and stay away from this one.” Even her voice sounded a little hollow. Guess the walking dead creeped her out too. If only they had torn the little Marilyn Monroe imposter apart at the seams.

  Peisinoe strolled away toward the open door and paused with her hand on the knob. “They will be here soon with the cipher so get your kicks while you can. The ritual will start once they arrive.”

  The siren closed the creaking door as Lilith’s heart fell into her stomach. They had the cipher. She was hoping Peisinoe was just bluffing with her threats, but if they had the cipher, they must have Chance. Was he here? Was he somewhere in the dark?

  “Chance?” She was past the point of caring who was still in the room. “Chance!” She screamed the words and struggled against the restraints, ignoring the blazing pain in her left arm.

  “Wat you callin’ for, you?” Isadora’s deep voice rumbled behind her.

  “Chance Deveraux. Is he here?” She didn’t really expect the woman’s help but what the hell else could she do?

  “Deveraux? Dat sounds like creole name, dat does.”

  “Yes. It is. He’s from New Orleans.” If Lilith could keep her talking, maybe she’d get something. The woman obviously hated Peisinoe, not that she blamed her. Maybe she could use that.

  “Wat dis creole man look like?” Isadora’s dark face loomed into view again and genuine interest sparkled in her dark eyes. Lilith had no idea why she’d be the least bit interested and she couldn’t tell if it made her useful or more dangerous. Still, she couldn’t see the harm in answering her question. Maybe the woman just felt homesick.

  “He’s, uh…tall, brown hair, muscular, light tan…” She couldn’t believe she was giving a missing person’s description to a voodoo queen that raised the dead. It was far too surreal.

  The candle flame bobbed across the room and Lilith followed it with intent eyes. She whispered to herself over and over, ‘please don’t be Chance.’

  “Dis one?” Isadora gripped a handful of brown hair and jerked the head back as Lilith’s heart beat furiously, trying to see who it was. As soon as the light hit his face Lilith released a sigh of pure relief for more than one reason.

  “No. That’s not him.”

  Isadora shrugged her thin shoulders, the dreadlocks bouncing with the movement. “He es de only brown hair.” She released Timothy’s head, letting it slump down between his shoulders again. He was alive, but unconscious. The bite on his arm was wrapped in heavy bandages and a thick metal collar glinted around his neck. Just like Duncan, she thought. One less corpse to weigh on her conscience, at least for now. The night was still early.

  So either they had Chance somewhere else or he wasn’t here. The guard at Goditha said Chance got away and drove off. What if he lost the cipher before that? She didn’t want to think about the alternative.

  “Your accent is much thicker than his. Where are you from?” Under normal circumstances, Lilith never would have considered having a polite conversation with the woman who raised the corpse of her partner and tried to kill her with it, but, well, these weren’t normal circumstance. If she could keep her talking it would at least keep her mind from running in damn circles trying to answer questions she couldn’t even form.

  “Aye com from de aye-land, me. Haiti. Aye yam Isadora Heno, chylde to Baron Samedi. Dey tell mae you are vanpir. Dat troo?” Her bittersweet chocolate face returned with the candle, her dark eyes looking Lilith over skeptically. “You no look like no loogaroo, you.” She waited expectantly for an answer, but her thick accent was really difficult to understand at times.

  “I don’t know what a vanpir or a loogaroo is. Could you tell me?” Lilith flashed a hesitant, nervous smile, hoping she didn’t offend the deadly woman.

  “Vanpir. You steal da blud, drink it.” Her eyes narrowed as if just by asking it meant Lilith couldn’t possibly be what they claimed.

  “Vampire. Yes.” Before Lilith could say anything else, the woman pressed her dark fingers against Lilith’s top lip, shoving it up, and held the candle closer.

  “Aye mae. Lies.” Her dark face scrunched into a snarl. “Aye no fool.” There was an intense hatred in her eyes that, quite honestly, scared the crap out of Lilith. She pushed her fingers against Lilith’s face, turning her head away, before walking away from the table. “Dey tell mae aye crazy. Now dey play tricks and laugh at Baron Samedi.”

  “Wait. I can prove it.” Lilith opened her mouth wide and Isadora reluctantly peeked inside, holding the candle so close that Lilith could feel the heat burning at her skin. After an agonizing second of performance anxiety, her little cartilage fangs clicked down into place and Isadora jerked back.

  “Dis troo!” She looked at Lilith in a mixture of shock and fright. “Loogaroo! De devil canno have mae blud!” Isadora backed away a step as the venom slowly seeped into her words. The voodoo queen was scared of a vampire? Damn. Maybe that wasn’t the smartest move.

  “I don’t know what any of that means, but I don’t deal with devils.” Lilith replied half-heartedly as a headache started to drone on in the back of her head. She stretched her head from side to side, trying to ignore the crazy woman’s panic attack. Lilith was now firmly on Isadora’s bad side just because some Haitian superstition made her racist. Great.

  “Lie wit you devil tongue, you.” In the blink of an eye, Isadora snat
ched a scalpel from the table and held it against Lilith’s throat. Her heart skipped a beat before pounding furiously in her chest again. “No sweet talkin’, loogaroo.”

  Lilith kept perfectly still, not even daring to breathe. She could feel the sharp blade biting at her skin, a drop of blood tickling down her neck. “Farren won’t like it if you kill me.” She chanced the words, speaking slow and careful, trying not to slice her own throat.

  Isadora snorted with a twisted smile. “Farren? Wat name dat be? Your devil god?”

  Lilith couldn’t keep the confused frown off her face. “Farren. The man you and Peisinoe work for.”

  A cackling laughter split Isadora’s face as she tossed the scalpel on the tray. “Stoo’ped loogaroo. Aye no work for no Farren, me.”

  The candle bobbed away and Lilith followed it. Isadora bent down in a corner and held the candle high. Farren was propped up in the corner, a thick metal collar around his neck. His chest rose and fell softly in a very deep sleep, just like Timothy. “Aye work for no man.”

  Lilith’s face fell as all the pieces clicked together into a perfect fit that made her gut go ice cold. She knew who it was even before the metal on metal screech of the door echoed through the room. Lilith stared at the silhouette in the doorway, much slimmer and shorter than Peisinoe’s. There were only two questions running through Lilith’s mind. Why? And how many people were going to die in this room because of it?

  Chapter 31

  “Crin. Sorry to keep you waiting. I swear the traffic in New York gets worse every year.” The small voice echoed through the room with a much softer accent than it had the first time she heard it. The Romanian was now only a soft lilt on her words instead of dominating her broken English. Fucking demons and their play acting. The five foot tall, willowy silhouette stood stoically in the doorway. “Peisinoe, get the light.”

  Harsh fluorescent bulbs flickered to life overhead with a high-pitched hum, drowning the room in unforgiving light. Lilith blinked hard several times, the light stabbing right into her brain like hot pokers. Finally, she creaked them open to see the anonymous white room. It looked like a morgue. Guess that was fitting.

  Lilith looked down at the improvised leather straps securing her to a stainless steel table. She quickly looked at the table across from her where Cohen was similarly strapped down. His eyes were closed, mouth slack, but his chest was rising and falling slowly. Completely unconscious but still alive. She wondered if this was all part of the ploy or if Cohen was really innocent.

  Tiny heels clicked closer, a more hollow sound than Peisinoe’s heavy stilettos. A cool hand smoothed through Lilith’s hair, making the bile rise in her throat. “Crin, do not worry. I do not intend to kill you if I don’t have to. I just need a little something from you.”

  Lilith swung her head around to stare boldly into Luminita’s eyes. “Like I believe a single word that comes out of your twisted mouth!”

  Luminita’s delicate eyebrows raised in surprise, her hand hesitating, hovering in the air like a little lost bird. “You don’t understand.” It wasn’t exactly a statement. It was more like verbalizing a realization. Luminita’s slight shoulders fell in disappointment as she raised the infamous book.

  “I thought, as a woman of science, you would understand the power in this book.” Luminita waited for some epiphany to show on Lilith’s face and when it didn’t she sighed again. “Of course, I suppose you don’t have to understand.” Luminita strolled away, holding a slip of paper against a page in the book, reading.

  How had she known what the cipher was and how to use it? She’d had her hands on Duncan’s book for maybe an hour. Lilith had never voiced her theory of the apparently blank papers to Cohen. So how had she figured it out in record time? Either her research was more thorough than Cohen’s or she’d learned it firsthand somehow.

  “What don’t I understand, Luminita? Why you created a monster that raises the dead to get that damn book for yourself?”

  Luminita’s laugh tinkled through the air like evil jingle bells, bright and tinny. “Created? Oh Crin, you give me far too much credit. I didn’t create Isadora, I merely found her.”

  “Of course…if I had Gregor, we may not have even needed the book.” Her tone was causal, absentminded, as if she was suggesting they could have skipped the rush hour traffic if only they’d left a few minutes early. It grated against Lilith’s nerves to have her father dismissed so entirely as the living, breathing person that he was.

  “Then why have him killed?” Lilith spat the words with every bit of hatred she had.

  The willowy frame came to a stop, the muscles in her back tensing beneath her creamy white blouse. “I did not have your father killed. That was Farren and Farren alone. He killed your father hoping it would render the book useless, but he’s blind and unimaginative.” She turned then and her elven face was contorted in anger as she stared holes into the unconscious man in the far corner. “If he wasn’t such a short-sighted bigot, your father would be alive and things would be so much simpler.”

  “Simpler? What the hell are you talking about?” Lilith frowned in complete confusion. None of it made sense. How could her father help Luminita?

  “Peisinoe, translate the first steps.” She gingerly placed the book in the siren’s hands. “It’s time. Wake Cohen as well, but keep him lucid. We must follow the account of the ritual precisely.”

  What the hell were they doing? What ritual were they talking about and why the hell did they need Cohen for it? If there was some magic formula in Duncan’s book surely it would have come up by now. Hell, as far as she knew that entire book was his research on Ashcroft’s kind, the story of little Mary, Gregor’s revenge…That’s when it clicked with a sense of dread that made Lilith’s gut go cold as ice.

  “Oh my god! You’re trying to recreate Ashcroft aren’t you?” Panic lit up Lilith’s nerves like a 4th of July fireworks display, in D.C., on the bicentennial. “You’re trying to turn Cohen into that…thing?” If it didn’t work, it meant an agonizing death for him, if it did work… “Does he even know what you’re planning to do to him?”

  Luminita swung around with a deep frown. “He is the only one I trust not to turn on me if it works. I don’t expect you to understand our relationship. I don’t need your permission, just your blood.” That’s why Luminita wanted Gregor alive. Not only was he a firsthand witness, but his blood had already been successful once.

  “Luminita, you cannot do this! You weren’t there! You didn’t see what Ashcroft was! He was a monster. He drew his power from the excruciating agony of others. He tortured people for days and days just to feed. For fuck’s sake, he tortured Duncan’s daughter right in front of him. Do you really want Cohen to become that?”

  The small woman stormed around the table to tower over Lilith, as much as she could anyway. The polite conversation was over. Frustration pinched her soft face into something much older, emphasizing ever tiny wrinkle. “I know precisely what Ashcroft Orrick was! Do you really think I am that stupid?” Her eyes hardened when she saw the answer to her question plain as day on Lilith’s face.

  Luminita stood taller, straightening her white blouse in a motion so similar to Farren’s that it made the bile rise in Lilith’s throat again. Her eyes narrowed and glinted as her lips curled into a grin. She was gloating. Shit. Whatever came next, Lilith knew she wasn’t gonna like it.

  “Who do you think sent Ashcroft after Duncan in the first place? Forced the county to sell Phipps Bend so he’d have a safe place to work?” Lilith’s eyes went wide as her words sunk in. Dear god. “We nearly had everything we needed. Duncan spilled everything, eventually... Then you showed up.”

  We? God, that meant Luminita had been there when Ashcroft tortured Miriah. She’d been there to learn Duncan’s secrets. The only thing that had stopped her from getting what she wanted then was Lilith and Chance showing up at Duncan’s place in Madisonville. She’d interrupted Ashcroft before he could find the tin, injured him with her UV lig
ht before he could kill her.

  “All was going to plan, but you…you were too great a temptation for his stupid vendetta. Once he saw you in Madisonville he was obsessed! Fool got himself killed, lost the cipher and turned Duncan into a mindless, drooling animal. Useless!” She slammed her hand against the table in anger before returning her sharp blue eyes to Lilith.

  It was all Luminita’s fault. Everything that happened, all the people that died. It was all because of Luminita’s power-hungry, psychotic, short-woman inferiority complex.

  “He was never following your plan, Luminita. He was a monster that only wanted pain, death and destruction. His own lackey, Spencer, called my father. He reported Duncan missing. That’s why I went down there. He lured me there and then lured Gregor. He didn’t give a shit about your plan and neither will Cohen if you do this to him.”

  “No.” She dismissed everything Lilith said with that one, clipped word. She was firmly planted in the world of denial. “Ashcroft was an evil man before he was turned.” She turned to Cohen, running her fingers over his short blonde hair. Her voice became soft, even loving, as she continued. “Cohen is a good man. He will not follow the same path. He will form a new race… a better race.”

  “Said every person with a Napoleon complex and a little power ever. That’s the mantra of the truly psychotic, Luminita. Do you even hear yourself?”

  The willowy woman waved a dismissive hand and chuckled softly, completely unfazed. “All visionaries were painted as lunatics by their peers.”

  Lilith stared up at the ceiling with a looming sense of hopelessness. Luminita was completely insane. She actually thought she was doing the right thing. “Why not try it on yourself if you’re so sure it will work? You’re obviously crazy and power hungry enough to do it, so why Cohen?”

  Luminita wouldn’t even turn around much less respond. Lilith relaxed against the table, laughing darkly. “Yeah, you are so noble, such a visionary. Want to start some master race of demons but too cowardly to do it yourself. Instead you’re going to risk Cohen’s hide, make him suffer for your crazy dream.”