Darker Angels
( Black Sun's Daughter - 2 )
M. L. N. Hanover
In the battle between good and evil, there's no such thing as a fair fight.
When Jayné Heller's uncle Eric died, she inherited a fortune beyond all her expectations — and a dangerous mission in a world she never knew existed. Reining in demons and supernatural foes is a formidable task, but thankfully Jayné has vast resources and loyal allies to rely on. She'll need both to tackle a bodyswitching serial killer who's taken up residence in New Orleans, a city rich in voodoo lore and dark magic.
Working alongside Karen Black, a highly confident and enigmatic ex-FBI agent, Jayné races to track down the demon's next intended host. But the closer she gets, the more convinced she becomes that nothing in this beautiful, wounded city is exactly as it seems. When shocking secrets come to light, and jealousy and betrayal turn trusted friends into adversaries, Jayné will soon come face-to-face with an enemy that knows her all too well, and won't rest until it has destroyed everything she loves most....
M. L. N. Hanover
Darker Angels
The second book in the Black Sun's Daughter series, 2009
To Anita Blake and Harry Angel
Introduction
“How long has this been going on?”
The teacher sat on the corner of his desk, a pile of ungraded math worksheets shifting under his thigh, and thought about how best to answer. The woman stood, waiting. She was younger than he was by almost a decade. Pale hair, ice-blue eyes, cream linen suit, shoulder holster. She wasn’t how he’d pictured an FBI agent. She was almost small enough to sit at one of the kids’ desks, but it took a while to notice that. She seemed bigger.
How long had this been going on?
“Maybe six months, more or less,” he said, “but it’s not the kind of thing you can be sure. I mean, Daria’s always been smart, and this isn’t a school system that’s been much good with smart kids. Especially smart black kids. She’s always had a struggle to find her place here.”
The woman smiled and nodded, the implicit message being that she understood. He was free to speak, even about issues of race. The teacher relaxed a little.
“What about the hurricane?” she asked. “She was here when Katrina hit, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah, well. There is that,” he said. “Her family tried to ride it out. She made it to the Superdome, with her grandmother and her sister. Her brother and mom… they didn’t make it. I don’t know. Maybe it started back then. But the past few months, it’s gotten worse. She’s late for class half the time, and missing maybe a day every week. Her work’s perfect when she does it. I’ve got the grade book right here. Hundreds and zeros. Nothing but.”
The woman stepped forward, looking at the book in his proffered hand. The classroom windows were dirty, the dust and grit softening the late afternoon light. The woman didn’t step back, and he found himself uncomfortably aware of her body close to his.
“And the stories?” she asked.
“About six months, like I said. I know all the teachers here. I’ve talked to them. She never used to lie. Or, you know what I mean. No more than any kid does. Not like this.”
“I understand,” the woman said, leaning past him to put the grade book back on his desk. Her jacket brushed against his shirt with the soft hushing sound of fabric on fabric. He cleared his throat. The woman strode over to the windows as if lost in thought. He couldn’t tell if she was coming on to him or simply didn’t recognize the effect she was having.
“Mind if I ask why her?” he said.
The woman turned back, a question in her eyes.
“Daria,” he said. “She’s a good kid. I like her. But… Well, I can say this because I work here. There’s a reason we’ve got so many private schools in New Orleans. The kids I see in here, a lot of them don’t always have enough food all the time. Or good clothes. They’ve got daddies in jail or on the street or missing. This is fourth grade, and some of them are already on drugs. I had a nine-year-old girl last year got pulled out because she was messing around with the boys on school property.”
“And you think because Daria’s not fucking the other students, she doesn’t matter?” the woman said. Her voice didn’t give away anything. She might have been amused or offended or curious to see how he reacted to her clear, clean enunciation of the word fuck. He felt a twitch of anger, and crossed his arms.
“I’m saying we’ve got a lot of kids in trouble,” he said.
“Not like her, you don’t,” the woman said.
The slap of small shoes on the tile interrupted them. After classes got out, there were hardly any kids still in the school building. The sound of one child running echoed down the hall, coming closer. The teacher rose. The woman shifted her attention to the doorway, and Daria Glapion skidded through it.
The girl’s breath was rushed, her face flushed. The long, tight braids of her hair glowed. She wore a green skirt and a white blouse that looked more like an adult’s clothes cut small than something a child would wear. If there was fear in the girl’s expression, it was no more than what the teacher expected from a child who’d come late to her appointment. He smiled.
“Daria?” he said. “This is Karen Black. She’s the woman who wanted to talk with you.”
The FBI agent came forward. Daria swallowed once, then nodded to her and smiled theatrically.
“I do hope you’ll forgive my being tardy,” Daria said, with an affected formality. Her voice was so adult, she almost sounded British. “I meant to be here before, but my sister was eaten by a snake.”
He shot a glance at the woman. That’s the kind of thing we hear all the time. But the FBI agent was fixed on Daria, the pale eyes suddenly soft and friendly, the smile warm and gentle. She knelt a little to put herself at Daria’s height. Daria’s smile and posture kept their formality, but he saw the girl’s eyes flicker.
“Can I ask you a question, Daria?” the woman said.
“But of course.”
“The snake. The one that ate your sister? What color was it?”
The shock on Daria’s face was startling. The false air of sophistication vanished; her eyes went round and her skin ashen. The teacher stepped forward with the sense that something dangerous had happened, but didn’t know who he should protect or from what. The FBI agent’s expression was soft and reassuring and maternal. Her pale eyes had the hint of a smile at the corners.
“It’s okay,” the woman said. “You’re okay. You can tell me.”
“It was shiny,” Daria said. She sounded terribly young.
The woman nodded, as if the two of them had said aloud something they both already knew. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, the sound of it loud enough to carry. It was a trick, breathing like that, he thought. She’s trying to keep the girl from panicking.
“Okay,” the woman said. “I need to ask you something else, honey. And it’s very very important that you tell me the truth, all right? It’s okay. No one’s going to hurt you. It’s okay to tell me the truth. You understand?”
There was a pause. He could see Daria’s pulse racing in the hollow of her neck. She nodded.
“Do you believe me?” the woman asked gently.
Daria nodded again. The woman reached out and took the girl’s small, dark hand in both of her pale ones. Daria’s breath was fast, her face bloodless. He almost spoke to break the unbearable tension in the air, but something held him back.
“These things that you’re telling me,” the woman said. “Have they happened yet?”
The teacher leaned forward.
“No,” Daria whispered.
The woman rose to her feet, her expression closed and tight. Where a mom
ent before she had been soft and gentle and welcoming, now she was solid and businesslike. Daria took a step backward, biting her lip as if she could take the word back.
“I have to go,” the woman said.
“What—” the teacher began.
“I have to go right now.”
ONE
“Hey,” my dead uncle said. “You’ve got a call.”
I rolled over in bed, disoriented. A dream about meeting Leonard Cohen in a perfume factory was still about as immediate as reality. My previous day’s clothes were piled in the corner of the tile floor along with the leather backpack I used as a purse. The pack’s side pocket was open and glowing. My uncle Eric’s voice came again.
“Hey. You’ve got a call.”
I untangled myself from the sheets and stumbled over, promising myself for the thousandth time that I would change the ringtone. The bedroom was still unfamiliar. The cell phone flashed a number I didn’t recognize, but there was a name—Karen Black—associated with it, so she must have been in his contacts list someplace. I accepted the call.
“Unh?” I grunted into the receiver.
“Eric, it’s Karen. I’ve found it!” a woman said. “It’s in New Orleans, and I know where it’s going next. There’s a little girl with Sight, and she says her sister is the next target. I don’t know how long I’ve got. I need you.”
It was a lot to take in. I hesitated, and the woman misinterpreted my silence.
“Okay, what’s it going to take?” she demanded. “Name your price, Heller.”
“Actually,” I said. “That’s complicated. I’m Jayné. Eric’s niece. He’s… um… he passed on last year.”
It was Karen Black’s turn to be silent. I gave her a moment to let it sink in. I skipped the parts about how he’d been murdered by an evil wizard and how several of Eric’s old friends, along with a policeman who owed me a favor and a vampire with a grudge against the same wizard, had teamed up to mete out summary roadside justice. I could get back to that later if I needed to.
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah. He left me pretty much everything. Including the cell phone. So… hi. Jayné here. Anything I can do to help out?”
The pause was longer this time. I could guess pretty well at the debate she was going through. I gave her a hand.
“This is about riders, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “So you know about them?”
“Abstract spiritual parasites. Come in from Next Door or the Pleroma or whatever you want to call it,” I said as I walked carefully back to the bed. “Take over people’s bodies. Have weird-ass magical powers, kind of like the magic humans can do, but way more effective. Yeah, I’ve got the For Dummies book, at least.”
“All right,” she said. “Did Eric… did he even mention me?”
“No,” I said. “Sorry.”
The woman on the other end of the line took a breath as I got back under the covers and pulled the pillow behind my back. I heard Aubrey cough from one of the bedrooms down the hall.
“All right,” she said. “My name is Karen Black. I used to be a special agent for the FBI. About ten years ago, I started tracking down what I thought was a fairly standard serial killer. It turned out to be a rider. We caught the horse, a man named Joseph Mfume, but the rider switched bodies.”
“So not so easy to track,” I said.
“No,” she agreed. “My supervisors wanted me to stop. They didn’t believe there was anything to it. And… well, X-Files was still popular back then. There were jokes. I was referred for psychiatric counseling and taken off active duty. I resigned and went on with the investigation myself. Eric and I crossed paths a few times over the years, and I was impressed with his efficiency. I’ve found where the rider is going to strike next, and I need help to stop it. I thought of Eric.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Can you help me?”
I rubbed my eyes with my free hand until little ghosts of false light danced in my vision.
“Hell if I know,” I said. “Let me talk to my guys and call you back.”
“Your guys?”
“I kind of have a staff,” I said. “Experts.”
I could hear her turning that over too. I wondered how much she’d known about Eric’s financial situation. For a man with enough money to buy a small third-world nation, he hadn’t flaunted it; I hadn’t even known until he left me the whole thing. My guess was Karen hadn’t expected Eric to have a staff.
“I don’t know how much time I have,” she said.
“I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Promise. We’re in Athens right now, so it may take me a few days to get to New Orleans.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s not that long a flight,” Karen said, impatience in her tone. “You could drive it in eight hours or so.”
It took me a second to process that.
“Not Georgia Athens,” I said. “Athens Athens. Cradle of civilization.”
“Oh,” she said, and then, “Oh fuck. What time is it there?”
I snuggled down under my covers and looked at the bedside clock.
“One in the morning,” I said.
“I woke you up,” she said. “I am so sorry…”
Amid a flurry of apologies and promises to return calls, Karen and I let each other go. I dropped the phone next to the clock and stared at the ceiling.
The last six months had offered me a wide variety of bedroom ceilings. The first at Eric’s house in Denver when I was first thrown into the world of riders and possession and magic. Then the dark wood and vigas of an old ranch outside Santa Fe, then a place in New Haven with honest-to-God mirrors over the bed and red silk sheets, followed by a gray-green retro-seventies number in a rentcontrolled apartment building in Manhattan that was so small I got hotel rooms for the guys. There had been a much more civilized beige with a little unprofessional plaster repair near the corner in a townhouse in London, and now the bare white with deep blue notes that said this Greek villa had been a full-on tourist trap rental before Eric bought it.
The guys had been with me the whole time, apart from a couple weeks when Aubrey had gone back to his former job at the University of Colorado to tie up some loose ends on his research. In the long, complex process of inventorying the property and resources Eric had left behind, we hadn’t stayed anyplace more than two months running, and most considerably less. None of it seemed like home to me, and from experience, I knew I could stare at the dim white above me for hours and still not sleep.
With a sigh, I got up, pulled on my robe, and made my way downstairs to the kitchen. A newspaper on the cheap yellow Formica table yelled out headlines in an alphabet I didn’t understand. I poured myself a bowl of cereal with little bits of dried fruit and added milk that tasted subtly different from the 2% I’d grown up with.
I heard the door of one of the other bedrooms open and soft footsteps come down the stairs. After so many months together, I could differentiate Aubrey from Ex from Chogyi Jake without looking.
“Why do you think it is,” I asked, “that someone can on the one hand be talking you into a fight against evil spirits and semi-demonic serial killers, but then on the other get embarrassed when they figure out they woke you up to do it?”
“I don’t know,” Aubrey said as he sat down across from me. “Maybe he just didn’t want to be rude.”
“She didn’t want to be rude,” I said. “Sexist.”
Aubrey smiled and shrugged. Aubrey was beautiful the way a familiar leather jacket is beautiful. He wasn’t all muscles and vanity, he didn’t spend hours on his wardrobe and hair. His smile looked lived-in, and his body was comfortable and reassuring and solid. He always reminded me of Sunday mornings and tangled sheets.
We’d been lovers once for about a day before I found out that—point one—he was married and—point two—I have a real hangup about sleeping with married men. I still had uncomfortably pleasant erotic dreams about him sometimes. I also had divor
ce paperwork in my backpack, filled out by his wife with her signature and everything. I hadn’t told him about that. It was one of those things that was so important and central to my life that putting it off had been very easy. Every time a chance came up to talk about it, I’d been able to find a reason not to.
“What’s the issue?” he asked, and I startled a little, my still-exhausted mind interpreting the question as being about the divorce papers. I pulled myself together.
“There’s an ex-FBI agent in New Orleans. She’s on the trail of a rider that’s a serial killer,” I said, and yawned. “Are there a lot of those?”
“Depends on who you ask,” he said. “There are a lot of serial killers who claim to be demons or victims of demonic possession. You remember the BTK killer? His pastor said right through the end that the voice coming out of the guy wasn’t the man he knew. There are some people who think that all serial killers are possessed. Serial arsonists, too. Is that the last of the milk?”
“No, there’s another whole bottle in the fridge,” I said around my spoon. “So is it true? Are they all riders?”
“Probably not,” Aubrey said. “I mean some serial killers blame porn or bad parenting or whatever. And you can be mentally ill without there being a rider in your head. But by the same token, I’d bet that some are.”
“You’d buy it? This FBI lady has been tracking down a body-hopping serial killer, she’s managed to get one step ahead of it, and needs help. Sounds plausible?”
“We’ve all seen weirder,” Aubrey said as he measured out enough coffee for three of us. Chogyi Jake always opted for tea. “Do you have any reason to think it’s not on the level?”
“You mean is it the bad guys setting a trap? I don’t have any reason to think so,” I said. “Also no reason not to, though. I could get a background check on her, I guess.”
“Might be wise.”
I didn’t hear Ex coming. He just breezed in from the hallway. Even the T-shirt and sweats he slept in were black. His hair was loose, a pale blond flow that softened his features. Usually he wore it back.
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