My heart thumped hard inside of my chest; it wasn’t a persistent beat, just one hard thud that made me almost lose my balance. “Wait a second, mail? What mail?”
“A letter came for you today… is that weird?”
“Uh, yeah… no one knows I’m here.”
CHAPTER TWO
As I headed downstairs, my mind ran circles around all the possibilities of who could have sent me any mail. The answer, no matter how I looked at it, was no one. I hadn’t spoken to my mom in years, had no idea where she was or who she was with. Same deal with my dad. I had no siblings, no cousins I knew of; definitely none that would know where I was right now.
Dante and Aiden were already waiting in the foyer, standing side by side, having a conversation which halted when they saw me. Both men were very similar in stature, if not in the way they were dressed. Aiden was tall and imposing, with broad shoulders and a powerful build that the leather jacket and t-shirt he was wearing did little to hide. Dante was only a little shorter, and leaner, but looked just as capable; his strength, however, was hidden beneath the fine Hugo Boss suits he wore. If Aiden was a lion, proud and strong, possessed of a thick mane of hair, roaring at everything in the savannah, then Dante was a panther, sleek, dark, and silent. A quiet predator, smaller, yet no less deadly.
They looked at each other as I made my way down the stairs with my suitcase in tow, then turned their eyes on me again. Was that a knowing look? Could they sense what had just taken place in my bedroom? Had they heard me? This wasn’t impossible, the mansion was massive, but I had been unashamedly loud.
“Hi,” I said, letting my backpack slide off my shoulder and settle next to my suitcase.
“Lilith,” Dante said, nodding.
Aiden smirked, and nodded, but said nothing.
My eyes now fell upon the envelope sitting on one of the small tables nearby. Plain, brown, and unimpressive; too thin to be a package—it was more likely an actual letter, containing no more than a few sheets of paper. No return addresses. It simply had my name and what I assumed was this mansion’s address written on the front. All done by hand, in a fine, delicate, cursive script.
“Do you know who it’s from?” Dante asked, the smell of his expensive cologne hitting me at once.
I shook my head. “No. Nobody knew I was coming here.”
“I don’t know either. It isn’t unusual for us to receive mail here. Vikram and Raphael both have family who know where they are, but this does seem out of the ordinary.”
“Who found it?”
“I did,” the Keeper said, as he emerged out of the hallway connecting the foyer and the library. He had Leo beside him, and both men were trailing a fine, yellow mist—like smoke, only barely perceptible. This was the first time I had seen their emotions manifested in the physical, but before I could try and figure out what the hell it was they were feeling, the mist was gone; swallowed up by some invisible suction machine.
The Keeper walked up to me ahead of Leo, running his fingers over his neatly kept, grey goatee. He had crystal clear blue eyes, much like Liam’s, and a kind face; the face of an artist, or someone else’s successful, charismatic father. Leo, on the other hand, had all of the strong features of a wolf in his prime; incisive eyes, a chiseled jaw, and a magnificent stride. Leo was the bad cop to the Keeper’s good cop.
“Could be the IRS,” I joked.
The Keeper laughed. “Maybe—they haven’t found me yet, but you’re still in the books.”
“Probably best to see what’s inside, huh?”
“Be my guest.”
I stared at the envelope, ripped the top open, then reached inside to pull out whatever was in there, when my fingers touched something that wasn’t paper at all. In fact, this thing I was touching was cold, a little wet, and way too thick for—the thing inside the envelope squirmed, then slithered up along my arm and hurled itself out of the envelope and toward my face.
I screamed, tossed the envelope aside, and by the skin of my teeth avoided the fangs of the large snake that had launched itself at me through the air. There was a collective gasp of horror from the men assembled around me as the snake sailed through the room, hitting the floor with a loud thud. The thing was huge, easily as thick as my arm, and mossy green. It turned, coiled around, and stared at me from the ground, its amber eyes bulging, and almost glowing.
The snake licked the air, then it circled around itself, settled against the floor, and melted into it, burning its impression into the hardwood floor, leaving the swampy smell of wet reptile mixed with burning wood in the air. Everybody seemed to calm down a step, myself especially; my heart was beating so fast, my entire body was shaking.
“Everyone alright?” Dante asked.
A chorus of acknowledgement followed, and I nodded too, holding my hand to my chest. What the hell kind of magic had that been? I knelt to the ground and examined it a little more closely. Leo too squatted next to the scorch-mark. It was easily a few yards in diameter, and not unsubtle in the slightest. The smell of burned wood still lingered around it, though it was getting fainter as the minutes passed. I tilted my head, and noticed something about the image that stood out to me, but that no one else seemed to have noticed.
The snake had a head for a tail, and both of its heads were meeting in the middle, but not touching.
“I don’t know what kind of magic this is,” Leo said, “But it’s not demonic.”
“Or arcane,” Vik said, “I’d have detected it the moment the envelope came through our wards.”
“Yeah, why didn’t we detect it?” Aiden asked, “Aren’t those wards meant to be impenetrable?”
“They are, generally speaking, but they’re not foolproof.”
“It’s them,” I said, “The cult.”
“How do you know that?” the Keeper asked.
“The snake. One of the pieces of jewelry I was given looked just like this, and I carried those things into the house and no one knew what was up with them. It has to be the cult.”
“Assuming that’s the case,” Vik said, “Which seems likely, given what we know about their capabilities; what do you think this means?”
I shook my head. “Fucked if I know.”
“It’s a warning,” the Keeper said, “It has to be. They’re warning us about something.”
“Maybe they’re pissed that we killed one of their number,” Dante said, clearly directing the comment at Leo.
Leo perked up. “I don’t think it’s a warning,” he said, ignoring Dante’s comment. “I think they’re trying to scare us, but I don’t think they have the power to actually hurt us. Not directly.”
“They can make a lot of things happen to us indirectly,” the Keeper said, “We’re all about to get on a plane, remember?”
“And you think this is them warning us not to do that? You really think this cult is going to try something while all of us are on a plane?”
“They might.”
“Number one,” Leo said, counting his thumb, “It doesn’t fit their modus operandi. So far, everything they’ve done has been subtle. I highly doubt they’re going to hijack a plane. Number two, they’d need to know we’re on our way to London to begin with, which they don’t. How can they? And number three, hijacking a plane isn’t guaranteed to kill us anyway.”
I noticed, in the time Leo had been speaking, that the mark was starting to fade. Before it could disappear, I took a snap of it on my phone. If this was their mark, then why had they shown it to me? Didn’t that mean they’d just identified themselves? Either there was more to this mark than I thought, or this cult was dumber than it looked.
Either that, or I wasn’t smart enough to see the real picture.
“Not us; just her,” the Keeper pointed at me. “If we leave, we may be putting her in more danger than she’s already in. At least here we’re protected.”
“So, that’s the answer? Sit here and hide like little —” Leo started to object.
“Wait a second,”
I said, interrupting, “Just the other day you were Mister Lockdown. Mister, nobody leaves this mansion. Now, suddenly, you want us to fly to London? What the fuck’s changed?”
“What hasn’t changed is the fact that I need to get to London. I was going to make this a short trip, just the Keeper, you and I, but you’ve insisted on every one going, so now we have to make a whole big deal out of this. And as much as I understand this letter prank has shaken us all up, I highly doubt this cult has the power to hit us all at once while we’re on the move. The stunt you people pulled last night pissed me the hell off, but the intel you brought back has made me much more confident in our ability to fend them off. This just proves I’m right.”
“Right about what?”
“They’re scared, and they’re trying to flip that around on us. They weren’t expecting us to go after them the way we did.”
“Not us,” I said, “You weren’t involved, remember?”
Leo rolled his eyes. “Whatever. My point is, we should go. I feel like we’ll be fine.”
The silence in the room was an uncomfortable one. Not many of us were talking, possibly because no one knew what the hell to say, what to chime in with. But Leo had talked a lot, and I had, too. I had to admit I wasn’t feeling entirely good about leaving. Staying at the mansion, where it was safe, made sense, but getting out of the mansion and going to somewhere like London sounded awesome. Ultimately, the decision came down to the Keeper, so all eyes turned to him.
He looked around the room, then stared at the snake on the ground, and sighed. “Okay,” he said, “We have to leave. We can’t stay here.”
“Good,” Leo said, “I’ll get my car. The rest of you, do the same. We’ll meet in Munich.”
The Keeper watched Leo walk off, then turned around to look at me. “I still don’t think leaving is a good idea, but we don’t have much of a choice.”
A breath of a pause passed between us. “What did Leo mean when he said he needed to go to London? I thought the Keeper wanted to see me, not him.”
The Keeper sighed. “I really can’t say,” he said, “And we need to get moving.”
Dante walked up beside me, carrying my suitcase. “I’ll take you,” he said, “C’mon.”
I hugged the others, then followed Dante out of the house. We were going to London, and that parlor trick wasn’t about to stop us.
CHAPTER THREE
I waited at the front of the house with Aiden, Vikram, and Raphael for the others to bring their cars around. Before long, Liam, Leo, the Keeper, and Dante each pulled up to the front of the house; there were eight of us about to move, so two to a car was the plan for getting us from the mansion to Munich airport safely, about six hours away.
“Wait, won’t the people watching the road notice a convoy of cars heading down the only road out of the ground?”
“That’s where I come in,” Vikram said, taking a deep breath.
“What are you going to do?”
Vikram grinned. “Hasn’t anyone told you that thing about magicians and their secrets?”
“Really? You’re not going to tell me what you’re planning on doing?”
He laughed. “The fantasy of it is cooler than the reality. You won’t see anything.” Vik pointed at the long stretch of road leading away from the grounds. “So, it’s a good bet this cult is watching us, right? Hence why we’re splitting up.”
“Right.”
“And there’s only one road out of here, so they’re going to spot us if they’re watching. One car would be hard to miss driving down that lonely road. Four, they’d have to be blind.”
“Yeah, okay, so, what’s the plan?”
Vikram cracked his knuckles. “I’m going to make us all invisible.”
“Invisible? Get the fuck out.”
“I’m going to create a bubble of invisibility. You won’t notice anything, but neither will the people watching. Then once we’re away from the mansion, I’ll drop the invisibility bubble and we’ll all split up. They’ll never know where we’re going, or that we’re even on the road.”
“That’s kind of amazing.”
“Maybe, but it’s going to take every ounce of magic I have, so, wish me luck.”
I reached up and kissed him lightly on the cheek, letting my lips linger for an instant longer than they should have. His light stubble prickled, but only slightly. I pulled away, feeling like I’d taken something with me—a tingle, a whisper of energy—but also like I’d given him something back, as I’d done with Raphael that night in the hotel after we’d been together in the shower.
“Good luck,” I whispered, and I started pulling my suitcase toward Dante’s car.
“Have a good ride,” Aiden said, walking beside me.
“Yeah, you too. It’s gonna be a long drive.”
“It’ll be alright. In about twelve hours we’ll be on a plane to London. I’m pretty excited.”
“Yeah, I am too.”
He loaded his suitcase into the back of Liam’s car. Dante, meanwhile, came out of his car, took mine, and tucked it into the trunk of his own. I smiled at Aiden, reached for his cheek with my hand, and smoothed his skin with my thumb. “See you soon,” I said.
Unable to help myself, I craned my neck around my left shoulder and shot a glance into the back of the car. No corpse. Of course it wasn’t there, but there had been one, and now I found myself unable to shake the visual; the visceral way Johan had died, right there, by Leo’s hands.
“Everything okay?” Dante asked.
I settled into my seat. “Yeah,” I said, “Just got the chills for a second.”
“Never seen a dead body before?”
“It’s not that. It’s just… the way Johan died, that was… brutal. And horrifying. I’d never seen anything like it.”
“Demonic magic is dark, and vicious. It doesn’t have time for mercy.”
“I guess I still have a lot to learn in that department. I can almost still see the guy, though, y’know? The way the blood was coming out of his eyes…”
“Try not to think about it. It’ll be easier for you if you push the thought away. The corpse is in the morgue, and we’re alright.” He gave Vikram, who was still standing in front of the mansion, a thumb’s up. Vik then started to check the other cars, making sure they were ready, and when he was satisfied that they were, he slowly began bringing his hands up to about chest-height, then he turned his palms inward and set them facing each other. An instant later, a crackling ball of light appeared between his hands. Vik squeezed the ball until it became a radiant orb of energy so bright it made his hands and arms disappear.
He then pulled his hands apart in a quick, jerking motion, and the orb of light expanded to become a brilliant dome of falling stardust; motes of light that flickered, then disappeared into the natural, ambient light. Nothing immediately looked or felt different, that was at least until I looked over at the mansion. It seemed to shimmer in the light, almost as if it were a mirage.
“Looks like it worked,” Dante said, then he peeled out when everyone was ready to go. I had no way of knowing if the invisibility bubble was still around us, but I was sure if something had gone wrong, Vik would know. The drive out of the mansion was tense, but once we were out of the throat of road connecting the mansion to the outside world, I let the purr of the car’s engine relax me.
It didn’t take long before we were on the highway, each car now separated from each other and masked not by magic, but by the crowd of vehicles moving alongside us.
“So,” I said, “We’ve plenty of time ahead of us, if traffic is good; too much time if traffic is bad. What do you wanna do?”
Dante shrugged. “I don’t think I can help you make that decision.”
“I think you can.”
He gave me a sidelong glance. “How?”
“I want to talk about what Leo said the other night.”
He turned his eyes to the road again. “Why?”
“Because it shook you up, and
I’ve never known you to get shaken up by or about anything.”
“I don’t think talking about this is a good idea.”
“Do you think I won’t be able to take whatever it is you have to tell me?”
He shook his head, but said nothing.
I bit my lower lip. “Okay, how about I tell you something you didn’t know about me? Will you then tell me what Leo really meant when he said the things he said?”
Again, Dante didn’t reply. His silence was starting to piss me off, but he hadn’t told me to shut up, hadn’t warned me to drop it, so I took his silence to mean he agreed with my terms, and thought hard about what I was going to say to him; what skeleton from my past I was about to unearth and throw at his lap. Really, all I had to do was open the closet door and pick from one of the cabaret of dancing skeletons apt to pop out and greet me.
But Dante spared me by going first, just as I opened my mouth to speak. “It isn’t something I want to talk about,” he said, “With anyone. Ever. I don’t want you repeating what I’m about to tell you, and I want you to listen closely because I’m not going to say it again. Is that clear?”
I nodded. “Crystal.”
Dante firmed his grip on the steering wheel, his hands tightening around the leather. “I came close to dying once. I was new, and stupid, and cocky. Freshly come into my power, my burden of responsibility.”
“Burden?”
“Don’t ask questions,” he said, making a firm sweeping gesture with his hand.
I nodded.
“My father is—was—an oil tycoon. I’ve always had more money than I knew what to do with it. I spent the majority of my adolescence in one of the most exclusive boarding schools in France, then when I moved back to the US for college, I went to Colombia where I studied business. When I wasn’t studying, I was using my father’s money to get whatever it was I wanted, whenever I wanted it. But then my father died, heart attack, and control of the company went to my uncle, who was quick to cut me out of it and everything else. I fought to grab hold of my father’s will, hoping I’d be able to keep something for myself, but my father hadn’t named me as his successor; he’d named my uncle.”
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