Finally, my shoulders dropped slightly. Why would Lucifer pick now to start playing mind-games on me again? I hadn't done any divination for a week or so, but even when I had, there had been no whisper of demons in my cards.
Then again, last time there hadn't been any warning either. And the letter, with its fat blood-red seal…
Don't think like that, Danny. You're going to get paranoid, and paranoid is exactly what you do not need. Paranoid people don't think clearly.
Despite the fact that paranoid people usually survived better than the foolhardy, I told myself sardonically. Besides, if Lucifer thought he could use me again, he was going to have another thing coming. A long, hard thing, preferably a painful one.
"Danny, I think I have something," Jace called.
I swallowed, my throat clicking. Turned away.
The phone rang again. Twice. Three times.
No. My hands shook.
"Danny?" Scrape of a chair, Jace was getting to his feet.
I scooped the phone up, pale crimson fury spilling through the trademark sparkles of a Necromance in my aura. "Look, you son of a bitch—" I began, the cupboards chattering open and closed, a mug falling from a rack and hitting the wooden floor with a tinkling crash.
"Danny?" It was Gabe. "What the hell? Are you okay?"
I swallowed. Jace skidded into the room, his guns out. "I'm fine," I said to both of them. My throat was full of scorching sand. "What's up, Spooky?"
"Saddle up, I've got another body." Gabe was trying to sound flip and hard, but her voice shook. I could almost see her pale cheeks, the trembling around her mouth.
"Where?" I shook my head at Jace, whose hands blurred, spinning the guns back into their holsters. He scanned the room, then stared at me, the question evident in his blue eyes.
"Corner of Fourth and Trivisidero, the brick house with the holly hedges." No wonder Gabe sounded uncomfortable—that was precious close to her own home. "Get here quick, we're holding the scene for you."
"I'll be there in ten." I dropped the phone back into its cradle. "Let's go, Jace."
"You might want to take a look at this first. Are you all right?" His eyes dropped from me to the shattered mug on the floor. Shards of ceramic dust—my anger and fear had shattered the mug, ground into it, compounding injury with insult. It was the blue Baustoh mug.
The one Jace liked, the one Japhrimel had chosen for his use the only time he'd drunk coffee in my house.
Anubis et'her ka. I didn't want to think about it.
"What have you got?" I rubbed delicately at my throat with my fingertips, my nails pricking, claws threatening to spring free. My right hand actually itched for my sword-hilt, and the sensation was so eerie I almost couldn't feel relieved that it wasn't cramping.
"It occurred to me to look at the last yearbook that listed Mirovitch as Headmaster, the year he died. Guess who was on the Student Yearbook Committee?" Jace looked up from the glossy blue shards of ceramic, and the question in his eyes remained unspoken. I was grateful for that, more grateful than I ever thought I would be to him.
"Who?"
"Christabel Moorcock."
Chapter Twenty-two
I suppose we had to give the reporters something; besides, it was too hard to talk while on slicboards with the wind rattling and howling around us. So we took the hovercar. The flashes from pictures being snapped bathed the underside of the hover. I glanced out the window, my lip curling, glad of the privacy tinting. Jace drove while I looked through the yearbook from my eighth year at school. "Check page fifty-six," he said, and I flipped through the heavy vellum pages. "Now look at Moorcock's picture."
Christabel Moorcock, known as "Skinny." She grinned out of the page of holovid stills, a tenth-year student with long dark hair and wide dark eyes. She was pretty but alarmingly thin; her cheekbones standing out and her heart-shaped face a touch too long. The cupid's-bow of her mouth was plump and perfect, her eyebrows winged out. The picture was a headshot, it showed only the very top edge of her collar.
Below were the usual lists of interests, including Faerie Ceremonial magick—and a small black mark shaped like a spade in a deck of playing cards. I rubbed at it, thinking it an ink blot, but it didn't blur. "The black mark?"
"Now try page fifty-eight. Steven Sebastiano." Jace's fingers danced over the touchpad, and the AI pilot took over inserting us into hovertraffic. I felt the familiar unsettling pull of gravity against my stomach, swallowed hard. Can it be you have not resurrected him? Lucifer's soft, beautiful voice teased at my brain.
Resurrect a demon? It's not possible. But then again, I'd been researching only to try and find out how Japhrimel had altered me. I had never thought that… It wasn't possible that I could bring him back, was it?
Was it?
I want him back. That was a child's plaint. I wanted each dead person back. I wanted every person I'd ever loved back.
And I, of all people, should understand the finality of Death.
"Danny?"
I shook myself back into the present, closed the yearbook with a snap, not bothering to check Sebastiano's picture. "You're a sneaky bastard." I tried to sound admiring. "Good work, Jace. I wouldn't have thought of that. Have you looked to see—"
"I haven't made a list yet. But I thought it was worth looking into, seeing as how that's the only link between Christabel and Polyamour I can find in the yearbook."
The year Mirovitch died, Christabel was on the yearbook committee. Why would she leave a mark? If she did leave a mark, that is. It would be stupid. On the other hand, Mirovitch was dead by the time they finalized the yearbook, it came out at the end of the year, after the inquest. It's probably nothing, some primary-school bullshit. Still, it's the only clue we've got. "I wonder who lives on Trivisidero." I looked out the window, seeing the city roll by underneath, its daylight geography gray with concrete and splashes of reactive paint marking hover bounce pads, the towers of high-density apartment buildings scrolling down Lossernach Street. If I focused, I could see the strings of Power underlying every street and building, the green glow of any trees and gardens that managed to survive. And underneath it all lay the pulsing radioactive smolder of the city's heart, seething in a white-cold mass of Power.
"Gabe does." The hover dropped out of the traffic pattern into a lazy spiral.
"Gabe didn't go to Rigger Hall." I reopened the yearbook, scanned the pages, looking for more black marks. "We're going to have to make a list."
"Here we are," he said. "Danny? Who was it on the phone?"
It was the goddamn Devil, Jace. "Nobody," I muttered, my right hand reaching up to massage my burning left shoulder through my shirt. "Gods."
Can it be you have not resurrected him?
" 'Kay." We were keyed through the police security net. Jace piloted the hover down to land in the driveway of an immaculate brick house. I remembered the place from walking to Gabe's so many times. The holly bushes outside were green and healthy and the walls behind them covered with the strangely geometric shielding of a Ceremonial. There were other police hovers there, including a squat black coroner's hover.
"Great." I triggered the door lock. "Well, what do you know. Digging that coffin up wasn't useless after all."
I hopped out, the hover's hum diminishing as Jace turned off the drive. The springs groaned a little as the hover settled.
The house was three stories high and immaculate, the gardens largely ornamental. I saw several rosebushes and a monkey puzzle tree. The roof was new, plasilica made to look like slate, gleaming wetly from last night's rain and the afternoon sunlight. There were officers milling all over the front driveway, a wide circular field of crushed white stone. At the top of wide granite steps there was a police guard at the massive wooden front door, two Saint City blues; I saw Gabe's familiar figure come out blinking into the sunlight. She lifted a hand, I saw one of the blues at the door flinch.
My nostrils flared. I smelled fear and blood, and death. And the sharp stink of h
uman vomit.
It must be bad. I stuffed the yearbook in my bag and curled my left hand around my sword, then struck out for the front door, my boots crunching on the rocks. A strand of long black hair fell into my face. I blew it back, irritably. "Yo, Spooky!" I called, as soon as I got to the bottom of the stairs. "I should be home in bed."
"So should I." Her shields flushed purple-red. My own shielding reverberated, answering hers; she stopped and looked down at me as the emerald on her cheek sparked a greeting. "You look different, Danny."
"Must be exhaustion and digging up old bodies." I paced up the stairs, aware that Jace was right behind me. His staff tapped on the granite. My cheek burned, the twisted-caduceus tat shifting its inked lines against my flesh. "What do we have here?"
"Ceremonial." She ushered me past the blues, who both recoiled slightly. I guess my reputation preceded me. It was one time I was glad of it—at least if they were recoiling they weren't staring at me.
The emerald on my cheek burned as I stepped over the threshold, a deep drilling warning. "The shielding's torn." I looked up. "From inside."
Gabe nodded. "Just like the other three. It's Aran Helm."
I remembered him. He'd gone to Rigger Hall too, in my class. He'd been a tall blond babyfaced Ceremonial, with blue eyes and a habit of sucking on his lower lip; I'd had him in a Philosophy of Religion class and a few other electives.
Jace swore. "This is Helm's place?" He smacked the butt end of his staff against the marble flooring, one sharp crack echoing through the foyer. "Godsdammit."
"You know him?" I asked, looking up. Apparently Helm's taste had gone for high ceilings, a coat of antiquated mail on a stand, and a tall grandfather clock that chimed as we walked in. A long, overdone staircase went up to the right. I followed Gabe, my fingers trailing the balustrade. The feel of defenses wedded to every stair crackled against my skin, humming uneasily. I smelled beeswax, and a frowsty scent that told me only one human lived here. Apparently Aran Helm lived alone; in a huge house full of silence and loneliness.
"Ran with him for a while, when I was dating you," Jace replied easily enough. "Worked with him on a couple jobs—did some wetwork together. Never met at his house though. Dodgy."
"Wetwork." Assassination. A long time ago I would have been willing to swear there was nothing I didn't know about Jace, but here I was finding out something new. I had balked at doing assassinations, though he'd said it was good money. I hadn't asked what his own jobs entailed; I'd trusted him blindly. "How was he?"
"Good," Jace said. "Cold. Not overly troubled with hesitation." His aura touched mine. I shivered.
Not like me; the only time you mentioned assassination to me I almost bit your head off. How many wetwork jobs did you come home from and climb into bed with me? Did you ever want to tell me, Jace, or did you think I'd never find out? I swallowed the anger. It was ancient history. I didn't have to think about it, did I? Not right now with a killer to catch and the Prince of Hell calling me again.
It was a relief to find something unpleasant I didn't have to think about.
"He's up in the bedroom." Gabe's shoulders were tense under her long dark synthwool coat. "It's… well, you'll see. Have you got anything so far, Danny? Anything at all?"
It wasn't like her to sound desperate. "I'm going to see Polyamour as soon as possible. It seems Steve Sebastiano was part of the conspiracy that got Mirovitch." I laid it out in a few clipped sentences, including the marks in the yearbook, which were probably nothing but the closest we had to a link. At the top of the stairs Gabe led us down a hall past another two blues standing guard, and I didn't need her to tell me which room Aran was in. The hacked-open door and thick cloying smell of blood spoke for itself. After you've smelled death for a while, the smell of blood stops bothering you much… at least, consciously.
The lingering traces of other smells in the air were more interesting. I inhaled deeply—protections, even more protections, laid thick and tight over every inch of wall and floor. A marble bust of Adrien Ferriman, legislative creator of the Parapsychic Act, stood on a blackstone plinth, his familiar jowled scowl apparently directed down the hall.
Laid over that was the raw, new smell of human from the blues, Gabe, and Jace. I sniffed deeply, closing my eyes. Human blood, human sweat, protection magick, and…
I filled my lungs. There it is. I smelled offal, magick, and the reek of aftershave. I rilled my lungs, closing everything else out, even the throbbing burn in my shoulder.
I knew that smell. Dust, offal, magick, aftershave, chalk, and leather.
The smell of the Office. The Headmaster's Office.
I shivered, the shudder going from my heels all the way up to the crown of my scalp. Nerve-strings tight and taut, singing their siren song of bloodlust and the path of the hunt laid in front of my feet. But laid over that shudder was fear, nose-stinging and skin-chilling fear. The fear of a child locked in a room without light.
Be careful, Japhrimel's voice whispered at the very back of my brain. He cannot hurt you now, hedaira. You are beyond his reach. I felt a warm hand touch my face, an intimate trailing down my cheek, pausing at the pulse in my throat, then sliding down to the curve of my breast.
I came back to myself with a jolt. What the hell? I didn't smell this at Christabel's. That damn lilac perfume of hers, maybe. Or maybe the scent had faded. "I can smell it."
"Danny?" Gabe paused before the doorway. "You okay?"
No, I wasn't. I was hallucinating my dead demon lover's voice. But it didn't matter. Getting the smell of the quarry is important in any hunt. And if imagining Japhrimel's voice helped me get through this, I was all for it no matter what price I would have to pay afterward, when the hunt was over and I had to face the fact that he was truly gone.
"I'm fine," I rasped. A pattern was starting to appear under the shape of events. "Let's take a look at Mr. Helm." I stepped past Gabe and looked into the room. "He certainly did believe in protection, didn't he?"
"Either that or he was afraid of something," Jace said grimly. "Chango…" It was a long breath of wondering disgust.
I agreed. Past the hacked and battered door was an orgy of blood and bits of what had once been a human body. The chalk marks on the floor were familiar but hurried, scrawled instead of done neatly. The circle was sloppily and hastily finished. Had the killer been interrupted? "Who found the body?" My nose wrinkled. The only thing worse than the effluvia of dying cells around living humans was the stench of rotting ones.
You think that as if you're not human, Danny. I shivered again.
"Housekeeper," Gabe said. "Apparently was paid a good deal to come in and work ten hours a day cleaning this pile. And to keep her mouth shut. The body's a few days old, she wasn't supposed to come into this part of the house very often. Once she found the body, she didn't know whether she should call the police. She brought the question to one of her cousins, who's a low-level retainer for the Owens Family and a stooge for the Saint City PD. He brought it to us. If the shields hadn't already been cracked we would have called you in to crack them."
"Gods." Jace looked definitely green, yet another new and amazing thing. I felt a little green myself. "There's only pieces."
Check that. I wasn't just feeling a little green. I felt green as a new crop of chemalgae. Nausea rose, twisted hot under my breastbone. I forced it down. I'd seen a lot of murder and mayhem in my time, but this… the smell of blood wasn't bothering me, but the visuals were beginning to become nightmare-worthy.
I should know, I've had my share of wonderful nightmares.
I looked into the bedroom. This was evidently where Aran Helm truly lived. Scattered papers and dirty clothes strewn about, a huge four-poster bed with wildly mussed covers now spattered with blood and other fluids, and burned-out candles in many holders. Between this and Christabel's careful obsessive order, I wasn't sure which I preferred.
I stepped delicately inside the room, wishing once again that I could shut my nostrils down, an
d saw something.
A human hand, severed at the wrist, clutching a bit of consecrated chalk.
A few more bits of the pattern fell together. "Sekhmet sa'es, Gabe. We've got it all wrong. The marks weren't made by the killer."
"What?" Gabe stopped at the door. "What are you talking about?"
"Look." I pointed at the hand. "The victims made the marks. I need a laseprint of these. If I can figure out what they were trying to defend against—"
"You don't think it's human?" Hope and dawning comprehension lit her face.
"I wouldn't say that," I answered slowly. "I can't tell. But if the marks are defensive, I've been going about this all wrong." I whirled. "If Jace gives you a list, can you find out who on the list is still in Saint City? And who's still alive?"
"All things should be so easy." Gabe's eyes lit up. She looked a few years younger. "You're sure, Danny?"
"Not sure." I gave the room one last look. "But it's better than any other theory I had. There's something else, too."
"What?" She almost twitched with impatience, and I suppressed the desire to giggle nervously. Couldn't she see? Why did she need me to tell her?
"This door's hacked in." I looked back at them, saw Jace was watching me, his blue eyes bright against the shadow of the hall. A deeper shadow slid over his face, and I would have recoiled if my feet weren't nailed in place. When I looked again, the shadow was gone, and I had to chalk it up to nerves.
I was chalking a lot up to my nerves lately. It was a bad habit to get into.
"What?" Gabe's tone wasn't overly patient. I had drifted into silence, staring at Jace, my forehead furrowed.
I shook myself and met her dark worried eyes. "I don't think the attack started here."
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