She hurried downstairs to the club’s second floor and poked her head in the War Room. Empty. Frowning, she turned and headed down the hall to the media room. No one around here seemed to watch much TV, but maybe someone was catching up on the news?
That room was empty as well. Come to think of it, the entire floor sounded eerily quiet.
Hesitantly Abby walked down the steps to the club’s main floor where most of the members and guests spent their visits. Even that seemed quiet. Of course, her watch told her it was only a few minutes after noon, and even the non-nocturnal members of the club tended to stop by only after nightfall.
She didn’t open any of the closed doors, not wanting to interrupt a club member’s private meeting, but she was starting to feel a little uneasy. Frowning, she turned toward the main entrance and the office Graham kept nearby.
A footman met her in the hall. “Miss Baker?”
Abby turned. “Yes?”
She still couldn’t get used to the idea of the club having footmen, but calling them waiters didn’t fit, considering they spent very little of their time serving food or drinks.
“Mr. Rule asked me to give you a message,” the young man said. He had the look of a college student, someone studying the sciences or maybe engineering. “He said to tell you that Mrs. De Santos’s informants had some information for him and he’s gone to speak with them. He won’t be long, and you are to stay in the club.” At least the kid had the grace to look apologetic. “He, uh, he also told me to tell you that, uh, he’s not trying to handle everything without you but that if you try to leave the club on your own to follow him, he’ll . . .” He cleared his throat. “He’ll, uh, paddle you so hard you won’t sit for a week.”
Abby just stared at him.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. He made me say it.”
She gritted her teeth. “It’s all right. Not your fault. I’d give you a message of my own to pass on to him, but I don’t want to rob myself of the pleasure of kneeing him in the balls personally.”
The footman just went pale and hurried into another room, presumably before it occurred to Abby to kill the messenger. Or demonstrate her own message. Plotting dire revenge, she turned to stalk back up the stairs but stopped when someone called her name.
“Hey, Abby!”
She turned and saw a woman standing in the hallway leading toward the club’s rear entrance. “Carly?”
The Lupine nodded and grinned. She wore the same paramedic’s jumpsuit Abby had first seen her in. “How’ve you been? I hear the warden in this joint can be pretty strict.”
Abby laughed. “You have no idea. Are you on duty?”
“Of course,” Carly ran a hand through habitually tousled hair. “I’ve been pulling doubles the entire week. That’s why I haven’t been able to stop by before now. At the moment, though, I’m on a lunch break. A long one.”
“Cool. The chicken salad here is killer, if you’re in the mood for something other than steak.” She gestured to the stairs. “In fact, I’m ready for food myself. Come upstairs and eat with me. One of the benefits of being under club arrest is I get great service.”
Carly laughed. “Actually, Samantha and I thought you might want to go out for lunch. Just to the deli down the street,” she said, grinning at Abby’s look of shock. “We know better than to take you out of shouting distance, but the deli has killer Reubens, and we thought with a double werewolf escort you’d be safe enough. She’s waiting out back. What do you say?”
Rule’s threat, delivered in the stammering voice of a freshman physics major, made the decision for Abby. Threaten to spank her, would he?
“Wait right here. I’m just going to grab a jacket.”
Abby bounced up the stairs and returned a minute later with the denim jacket she’d worn on her last, ill-fated excursion into the great outdoors. She was actually looking forward to fighting with Rule about this later, especially since his objections would be completely unreasonable given she would be under double guard the entire time she was away.
“Lead on,” she instructed, waving Carly toward the back door. “I’m in the mood for extra sauerkraut.”
“Ooh, you do like to live dangerously,” Carly teased. “In fact, from what Sam told me earlier, it sounds like you’re thinking of making the danger zone a permanent state of residence?”
Abby blushed and shrugged. “It’s a little soon to be saying that.”
“Oh? From what I hear, Sam and Tess are practically picking out their bridesmaids’ dresses.”
“That’s way too soon.” Abby reached for the handle and yanked on the heavy metal door. Thankfully, she didn’t need to disarm the security system to leave, since she didn’t know the code. Samantha and Carly both did, though, so they could punch them back in after lunch. “First we need to deal with this whole fiend issue, then we can decide if we can keep from killing each other for the entirety of a long-term relationship.”
Carly followed Abby outside and tugged the door shut behind them. The electronic lock beeped as it engaged. “I don’t think that’s something you need to worry about. After all, you’ll be dead in just a few hours, so why borrow trouble?”
Aw, fuck.
Abby’s reeling mind registered the empty alley, the change in Carly’s tone of voice, and the shrieking of her self-preservation instincts all at the same time, about the time that Lou lapsed into profanity. Heart pounding, she turned just in time to see an unnatural glow burning behind the Lupine’s brown eyes. Abby opened her mouth to scream, but the blow landed before she made a sound, and then all she registered was darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Rule sat beside Tess in the back room of her shop, awkwardly cradling a steaming mug between his hands. He hadn’t wanted the tea, but it had seemed rude to refuse it when she’d been passing out cups. Besides, having something in his hands seemed to set the older women in the room more at ease. When they’d first arrived and seen him, they had looked as if they expected him to pounce on them immediately and crunch their bones for his afternoon snack.
As if. All three were well past their prime, and two of them looked positively stringy.
He sighed. He should have let Tess handle this interview and gone with Noah to check out the scene of a recent fiend sighting.
“—tend to concentrate more on objects, you know. Wedding rings, wills, important legal documents, that kind of thing,” one of the thin ones was saying. Rule thought her name was something like Daisy. “It was really Heather’s suggestion that we branch out into missing persons. Children, mostly. It turned out to be a great success. And so rewarding, you know, to be able to see the little ones safely home.”
The other two nodded. One of them, presumably, was Heather. Rule was going to go with the second stringy one. The plump one he thought had been introduced as Claire.
“Of course, those are the good days,” Heather added. “Sometimes all we can provide is a sense of closure, and we have to be content with that.”
Rule fought the urge to roll his eyes. If these were what witches were normally like, he needed to remind Rafe what a lucky man he was to have found a sane one to mate with.
“So, really, since then we’ve looked on branching out our services as something of a challenge,” Daisy continued. “I have to admit, though, your request did strike us as a bit unusual.”
Heather nodded and made a face. “Fairly unpleasant, too. I have to tell you, Tess, this isn’t the sort of energy we would normally expose ourselves to. Very violent. Very unclean.”
“The word you’re looking for,” Claire said from over the rim of her teacup just as Rule was beginning to wonder if she ever spoke, “is ‘evil.’ ”
Heather glared at her. “You know I don’t like that word, Claire. It’s so . . . unforgiving.”
Claire snorted. “Hard to be all that forgiving of something that wants to chew on your entrails.”
Rule took back his uncharitable thoughts. Daisy and Heather might be fluffy-bunny
idiot witches, but that Claire had a good head on her shoulders, even if it was long gone gray.
“In any event, we appreciate you helping us out,” Tess said, almost as diplomatically as her husband. Had she been taking lessons? “We haven’t had any luck finding it on our own, so of course I immediately thought of you three. You have such a gift with location spells.”
Daisy preened. “We all have our talents, dear. Take your potions, for instance. Why, I couldn’t brew a decent cup of willow bark if my life depended on it!”
Rule fought the urge to tell the woman that her life did depend on getting to the point and telling him what they had learned about Uzkiel.
“It’s nothing.” Tess waved away the compliment. “I’m fascinated by what you ladies do, though. Why don’t you explain the process to me?”
Was she out of her mind? If they answered that question, it would take these three old biddies forever to get to the point. Rule glared at Tess, who pointedly ignored him.
“Well, of course, dear.” Daisy set aside her teacup and folded her hands in her lap. “Usually we start with something that belonged to the missing soul. With children, we like stuffed animals. They absorb so much energy, and well, it’s just pleasant to hold on to one for a couple of hours, isn’t it?” She laughed.
Heather nodded. “We take it into our circle with us and call on the Goddess to open our minds to the child’s mind. Once we’ve tapped into the little one’s energy through the toy, it’s much easier to locate that energy somewhere else. Wherever it’s gone missing to.”
“Of course, we didn’t want to do that in this case.” Daisy frowned in distaste. “Not only did we not have a personal object from the fiend, but allowing its mind to join with ours . . .” She shuddered. “Well, that would have just been dangerous.”
“Very. You did give us the fiend’s proper name, though,” Heather said. “And that meant a lot. Not that we normally dabble in summoning, you know—nasty work, that—but we do pride ourselves on knowing a little bit about most of the major forms of magic. And when it comes to summoning magic, the most important tool you can have is the name of the demon.”
Rule growled. “The fiend.”
Daisy and Heather jumped a little in their seats and eyed him suspiciously, as if they’d forgotten he was there and now that they remembered, he’d be feeling all noshy.
Tess sent him another glare and he subsided back into his chair. “So with its name, you were able to call on it?” she prompted the women.
“Oh no. That would be the equivalent of a summoning, and we certainly didn’t want a creature like that popping up inside our temple room,” Daisy said, aghast. “We’d never get the taint out.”
Not to mention the bloodstains that would be left behind when Uzkiel tore the three of them limb from little old limb, Rule thought uncharitably.
“No, we wanted to sneak up on the creature, so to speak,” Heather agreed. “To find out what it was up to without it doing the reverse. That type of snooping requires quite a bit of stealth.”
Rule closed his eyes. In that case, his hopes for getting any useful information out of them were doomed.
“Oh, for the Lady’s sake,” Claire snapped, setting her cup down on the table with a thump. “These children don’t want a blow-by-blow account of your highly innovative method for psychic spying, Heather. They want to know what we found out.”
Rule could have kissed Claire. In fact, he’d talk to Abby about naming their first daughter after her.
She turned to face Rule and Tess and continued. “We can’t give you an address. Our magic doesn’t work that way. In fact, I can’t think of a single kind that does. But we can tell you that it’s some kind of old warehouse or factory and that it’s located on the river.”
His heart sank. Manhattan was surrounded by water on four sides, and most of the waterfront areas had been commercial property at one time or another. All this information had done was eliminate the interior of the island.
“Now don’t look so stricken, boy,” Claire said, shaking a finger at him. “That’s not all we saw. If you look out straight over the water, you can see the sun going down behind the Statue of Liberty.”
Tess looked at him. “It’s got to be Battery Park City.”
Claire nodded. “That’s what I said. But there’s one more piece of information you two should have. The building this fiend is hiding in, it’s not just using it because it’s abandoned. It’s got a bigger reason than that. First off, the place has a basement. It’s wet as a well-digger’s arse down there, but it keeps out the light, and the fiend likes that.”
Rule nodded, but he was already sorting through possibilities in his head. He didn’t know Manhattan that well, but Tess had grown up here, and even if she couldn’t name the building, they could probably get blueprints from the Planning Authority. Not many of the places on the water had full basements. Like Claire said, they tended to leak.
“You listen to me, boy.” Claire grabbed Rule’s hand, interrupting his thoughts and dragging him back to the present. “I wasn’t finished with my story. The other reason that fiend has set up shop in this building is the energy in the place. It’s as foul as he is. I don’t know the history, and I tell you here, I don’t care to. Not after feeling it for myself. But I’m telling you, something nasty happened in that place, and happened more than once, I can tell you. Enough misery and pain in that building that it’s sunk into the brick, and that fiend is only adding to it. You ask me, when you’re done, you should tear that place down to rubble and salt the land good. Maybe after the earth gets wiped clean, something decent can spring up in its place. But for now . . .” She shook her head. “If a place can be called evil, that one is. Mark my words.”
Rule nodded and turned to Tess, trying to ignore the uneasy feeling the old witch’s words had caused.
“The Council library will have records we can go through,” Tess said. “It had to have been a pretty high-profile case to have been as bad as Claire says. I’ll call a friend on the Witches’ Council and ask her to start digging.” She grimaced. “I know it’s not as fast as we would have liked, but at least now we have someplace to start.”
Rule nodded.
“Thank you, ladies.” He rose and pulled back his chair. “You’ve been very helpful.”
Claire struggled to her feet, waving away the hand Tess offered to assist her. When she had steadied herself on the handle of a carved wooden cane, she lifted her pale blue eyes to Rule and pursed her lips. “I’m going to help you just a little more,” she said, nodding as if to herself. “I’m going to tell you that if you move fast and trust her good sense, it will all work out in the end. Mark my words.”
The jingle of the cheery little bell Tess had mounted over the door of the shop told them someone had entered, but it was the pounding of heavy footsteps that alerted Rule that something was wrong.
Noah shoved his way past Tess’s assistant and into the back room. From the way he was sucking in air, it almost looked like he’d run all the way from the Upper East Side.
“Abby,” he gasped, leaning over and bracing his hands on his thighs as he struggled for air.
Rule felt the world shift on its access and suddenly stop spinning. He shook his head, as if he could deny what he knew was coming. His heart froze in his chest, and his stomach clenched before he even heard Noah’s next words.
“Abby’s missing.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
How Tess got Rule back to Vircolac, he never knew, but she managed it with almost frightening efficiency. Noah helped, too, primarily by restraining Rule from tearing the entire city apart brick by brick to find his missing woman. Between the two of them—ably assisted by Bette, Tess’s shop manager, who herded the curious covenmates out the back door and out of the way—they got him into a cab and unloaded him into the front hall of the club in less than fifteen minutes.
If their cabbie didn’t quit his job and join the NASCAR circuit, he was wasting his l
ife.
Rafe was waiting for them in the hallway, along with a distinctly unhappy Tobias Walker, the head of Vircolac’s security.
“What happened?” Rule demanded, almost before his feet hit the hallway tile. “What do you know?”
“We’re working on it,” the Felix said, holding up his hands in a useless calming gesture. “As far as we know, she is unharmed. There is no sign of a struggle, and we’ve already interviewed the last employee who spoke to her. According to him, she was alive and well, although a little miffed at you, at around noon.”
Rule glanced at the ornate clock on the hall table. “That was almost an hour ago. No one has seen her since then?”
The Felix shook his head.
“No, but we have security cameras covering almost every inch of this club,” Tobias said, stepping forward, his expression grim. “I’ve already pulled the tapes, and I have my entire staff combing through them. Trust me, Rule, we’ll find her.”
Rule had met Tobias the last time he’d been Above, and he knew the Lupine to be both reliable and very good at his job. But that didn’t mean Rule didn’t want to tear someone—anyone—into little bloody pieces just then.
“She was supposed to be under twenty-four-hour surveillance. She wasn’t supposed to go near a window unsupervised! Who the hell fell down on the job?”
Tobias gritted his teeth. “No one fell down, Rule. The club is under twenty-four-hour surveillance, and it’s completely inaccessible to anyone who isn’t either a member or part of the staff. There were guards, footmen, and waitstaff on every floor. Abby wasn’t left alone. We did our jobs. And we’ll keep doing them until we find out what happened to her.”
“Find out now.”
Rafe stepped between the two men. Later Rule might be grateful for that, but now he just wanted to get his hands on someone, and Tobias was convenient. Plus, the Lupine was tough. He’d put up a nice bloody struggle.
“We are working on it,” the Felix said. “Not just Tobias’s staff, but mine as well. We will find her, I promise you. Even Fiona has gotten involved. She has called in some favors of her own and sent a small army of changelings out into the city to look for her. Abby will be all right.”
The Demon You Know Page 22
