“Vanished.”
“What the hell do you mean, vanished?”
“I believe we are off topic,” Gunnar said. “The Realmfarers could come for the bounty hunter.”
“Let ’em join the party.” Ah, the boldness of drink.
“You do not understand my words, my friend.”
“Bad guys coming. Plenty of bad guys already here. I got it.” I poured the last of the bottle into my glass.
“They say there is no dirt on the ground in the Weald of Centurions,” Gunnar said. “That the trees grow in straw-like stalks because their roots cling to a bed of bone.”
“Lovely.” But I wouldn’t doubt it. The Underworld had been a dreary place, and the Weald was a few tiers of suck beneath that. “So what do you want me to do about it?”
“Fix the problem.”
“I can’t just tell her to fuck off, Gunnar.” I knocked back the rest of my drink and stood up. “We’re trying to stop the world from burning.”
It sounded so noble when I said it like that.
“You will think of a solution.” He looked too contemplative for my liking, which sent a sharp shiver up my spine.
“You’re worried I can’t do it?”
“I am not worried about that, Kalos.”
“What then?”
“I wonder if we will survive the fall.” There was an unsettling pause before Gunnar said, “And whether it will be worth surviving at all.”
11
After taking a shower and a long nap in the back of Lux, I walked out of the club just as the midnight rush streamed through the doors. But I didn’t offer the long lines of people a second glance. My head throbbed and my body ached as questions slammed against the walls of my mind.
Most of them centered around how I could possibly get out of this intact. Everything was like a Jenga tower, only all the moves resulted in certain failure. It wasn’t throwing in the towel—just simple physics.
I considered heading back to the loft, but I didn’t want to see Ruby. She’d caused me too many damn problems today already—and had abandoned me when the chips were down out in the desert.
Instead, I took the keys to Gunnar’s Range Rover and headed toward Austin with my .45 on the seat. He probably would’ve driven me himself, given how desperate he was to deal with this Realmfarer rumor. But I assured him that I could handle it all on my own.
He’d given me plenty of bullets to defend myself, after all.
Too bad I wasn’t addressing that particular issue right then.
The car was mine—and so was the midnight road, empty save for the occasional coyote’s howl streaming through the cracked window. I repeated the mantra one damn thing at a time until I got to the city. If I’d had a passenger, they’d have been driven insane.
But it kept me focused, far away from doing something rash. Like showing up at Marrack’s doorstep toting nothing but a .45 and a fervent desire to put him six feet under.
The clock ticked past two as I turned down a familiar street. The residential neighborhood was unremarkable in its plainness. A few scraggly planter boxes hung from copy-and-pasted homes, with some unsubstantial box-store trees lining the sidewalk. Cracks in the concrete, but not so many that you began to question your safety at night. Just a place where people lived and didn’t leave much of a mark one way or another.
Hey, it wasn’t like I was going to shell out for the goddamn Ritz. I couldn’t find an empty parking space, so I double-parked the SUV near a fire hydrant and hopped out. Hopefully he’d be awake and coherent today.
Those were two very big ifs.
I put on my best I swear, I don’t hate wizards smile, and headed toward the faded blue door. Stepping onto the mangy welcome mat, I took two deep breaths and prepared what I would say. Focus on Nadia—the common ground. Anything else and we were both liable to fly off the handle.
I knocked twice. Instead of an answer, the door cracked open, its unoiled hinges groaning.
“Javy?” I called into the darkness, so as not to startle him. “It’s Kalos. I’m coming in, so, you know, don’t cast any spells.”
He couldn’t really do much any more. Not after the Ambrosia. It’d saved his life, but that wasn’t saying much, given his current state. But Nadia had begged for help, and it was the best I could do after he’d been ripped open by a wendigo’s claws. I’d managed to track his ass down after he’d wandered away from the loft. Given him a place to live.
Calling him alive might have been pushing it.
Still, last time I’d come to visit, he’d had a little fight. Tossed a chair at me without even getting up. Not that he had any reason to hate me. Other than I was a demon, and there was nowhere else to channel his anger.
I slipped inside the dark room, shutting the door behind me. A fetid smell immediately flooded my nostrils, and I gagged.
I was no forensics expert, but it didn’t take long to put the pieces together. Holding my arm over my mouth to block the smell, I made my way up to the second floor. My eyes watered from the stench of bloated flesh.
When I pushed the door open, I wasn’t surprised. There was Javier Santos, his body swollen to about twice its normal size, his face barely recognizable. His salt-and-pepper hair was almost all gray. Greenish skin spilled out from beneath his black wizard robes. The floor and bedspread were strewn with Ambrosia bottles.
The bender to end all benders. But that seemed like the point: to end it all.
I held it down until I got about two steps away from the body. A couple maggots crawling out of his eyes were what did it. I projectile vomited on the wall until my insides hurt.
After a few minutes of recovery—which isn’t easy to do in a room that smells like it will never be clean again—I stood up straight and took in the scene once more. The level of decomp suggested he’d been dead at least a couple weeks. It was barely a person, really—just skin and fluids.
I sensed a faint magical energy still present in the room, which eased any suspicions that it might’ve been a murder. The only reasons to kill Javy at this point would’ve been mercy or to steal his essence. He had nothing of value, could no longer perform any magic of substance. But the essence still flowed within his veins.
More to get rid of the body than anything else, I picked up one of the empty bottles. This would probably hold his essence. After washing it out thoroughly in the bathroom, I returned to the bedroom and made a phone call. I made sure to use my own cell and not Dylan Redmond’s burner.
Instead of Argos, Ruby picked up. “Where are you?”
“Put the dog on.”
“We need to regroup, Kalos.” A pause. “Look, I’m sorry about the desert. You have every right to be—”
“Do you always leave your partners behind?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Then tell me what it was like.”
She sighed and said, “I saved my own ass.”
I’d claim the honesty was refreshing, but it just pissed me off. “I should kill you.”
“One of us has to stop them, Kalos. And it’s not going to be Argos.” The dog yipped in the background.
“Just put him on. Now.”
“Might want to reflect on a few Zen koans there before your anger consumes you.”
“I think the Realmfarers might get us all first.” Silence on the other end. “Oh, you thought I wouldn’t find out?”
“Argos wants to talk to you, now.”
“How convenient.”
The line crackled for a few seconds before Argos said, “Kal? You’re alive?”
“About ninety percent, I guess.”
“That’s not good.” The dog understood from my tone what I meant.
“No, it’s not.” I breathed in deep. By now, the aroma didn’t affect me at all. Funny how adaptation worked. “I need some h
elp.”
“Can’t you come back?”
“I got a couple things to do before then, buddy.”
“I can’t believe she left you,” Argos said. Then, in a whisper, “She’s different.”
“Two hundred years is a long time.”
“What’d you need help with?”
“A distillation.” I explained the situation as best I could. It didn’t matter if Ruby was listening—which she surely was. Allies were in short supply, and time was even scarcer.
“Poor Nadia,” Argos said. “I don’t think she’s going to like you very much after all this.”
“I don’t think I like her very much after today.”
“Point taken.” I listened to Argos patter away from the phone, then return dragging a book. “Why’d you visit the wizard anyway?”
“I assumed he could help.”
“With what?”
“I hadn’t really gotten that far.” No one would ever accuse me of being a master planner.
“You have a pen?”
I found one in the nightstand drawer and listened to the dog’s instructions. The list of supplies took about a minute to cover. Nothing exotic, but a little bit of a nuisance given my time constraints. Once Argos had finished, I looked at what I’d need to buy, trying to estimate how long it’d take.
“Kal?”
“A lot more trouble than it’s worth,” I said. But I’d lost the wendigo’s body to who-knew-what. And more magical firepower would help me in the coming storm. “Anything else, buddy?”
“You can do the distillation in the bed, but I’d take him to the bathtub if you want to sell the place.”
“How practical.”
I ended the call and glanced back at the bloated corpse. We were almost like old friends, now.
Adjustment was a hell of a thing. I just needed to make sure that street didn’t head toward full-on demon-dom.
Because when you get used to the wrong things, sometimes you can never find your way back.
*
Austin’s morning news would likely report a rash of break-ins about half a mile away. It wasn’t my fault.
Let me rephrase: I was responsible, but the stores weren’t open. I would’ve paid, but I couldn’t afford to wait around.
After wrapping Javier’s body in a bedsheet and getting him in the tub, I set to work with the ingredients. Ten gallons of vodka. Half a quart of baking soda. Industrial grade bleach. A dozen different soaps.
You’d think all that would help with the smell.
It made things worse.
I wasn’t sure what Argos’s plan for not using the tub would have been. Far as I could tell, the sizzling mess before me wouldn’t have been contained by the mattress. It simply would’ve oozed everywhere.
Through squinted, watering eyes, I found the outlet next to Javier’s moldy toothbrush. I jammed in the generator unit I’d requisitioned from the local garden supply store and heard it whir to life. All sorts of warnings about not operating it in this fashion—in a tight space, near excess water.
All ignored.
I took the jumper cables and snapped the gator clips in my fingers.
“Well, here goes.”
Without anywhere else to really place them, I clipped the leads to the body’s swollen ears. They mashed through the decaying skin with a nasty squish, but managed to hold.
I wasn’t sure if I was creating Frankenstein’s monster or desecrating a corpse. There had to be laws against this sort of thing. My gut, empty from before, started rumbling with reservations. So much for adaptation.
With bated breath, I flicked the generator’s switch. Javier’s body jolted like it’d been seized by a spirit. It was merely an electrical impulse, but the effect was still startling.
I managed to keep my wits by focusing on the spell Argos had recited to me. I’d practiced during my little crime spree. One would probably consider it rather sad that I’d only managed to truly learn six spells in my lengthy lifetime.
They might be right, but magic had never been my thing.
Learning a new spell was a shaky business. This one hadn’t really taken and remained slippery, like an eel evading my grasp. The jerking body wasn’t doing any favors for my concentration, either.
“Essence puras.” The words were easy—it was directing my own magical energy that was difficult. I felt a little piece of my soul flake off. Miniscule, but I couldn’t afford much, poor in spirit as I currently was. To that, I added a pinch of the tabby cat’s.
Yes, the “recipe” called for a sliver of a cat’s soul. And for it to be in the vicinity. I had no idea why. This wasn’t the way Argos and I had always done it, but I suspected this was like the MacGyver of distillation: making due with suboptimal materials.
The cat mewed from the bedroom, no worse for wear. It’d licked my face when I’d broken it loose from the pound. It could spare a little something in return.
The bathroom’s aura shifted as the magical elements coalesced. Like a storm cloud suddenly making rain, everything within began to change. The rotting corpse dissolved before my eyes, like burnt paper crumbling in the wind.
I watched as the liquid concoction absorbed the components of the body, combining to form a viscous liquid in the tub. Argos told me the process would take a few hours. Beyond the initial supervision and setup, my presence wasn’t needed.
The reaction had begun, and now nothing would stop it.
This allowed me time to search the two-story home for whatever the hell it was I’d come here for. I must’ve been at least a little buzzed, still, when I’d decided to make the trip. Maybe I’d wanted to talk about Nadia. Or just tell Javy about her kidnapping.
No. That wasn’t it. The cat rubbed against my legs as I went down the stairs.
“Argos isn’t going to like this.”
The tabby purred and arched its back. I gave it a few scratches once I hit the ground floor, then got on my way. The house I’d bought for Javier was modest. Barely lived-in, if you only took the first floor into account. A faded yellow couch sat near the street-side window, next to a fold-out chair.
Then there was a coffee table devoid of any objects. That was it for the living room. Nothing on the shelves, except for a couple pictures. One grabbed my attention: Nadia, Javier and a youngish woman.
In the photograph, taken in a park, Nadia couldn’t have been more than five years old. But what drew my attention—other than the fact that Javier’s perpetually grouchy ass was smiling—were the woman’s features.
Clearly this was her murdered mother. They had the same smile, and the Carmine Chain sparkled around her neck.
But peeking out behind the brown hair—just barely—were the tips of her ears.
Pointy ears.
“That explains a lot.” I took the picture out of its cheap frame and looked at the back. No date, but the caption read, N, Javy and Me (Sofia!). I flipped the photograph over and stared at the happy family once more.
Elves were rather rare—a noble and aristocratic species that populated the Sol Council’s government. They were rare for a very specific reason: there was no way to hide their damn ears. Which made them easy targets for the Order and easier targets for the Crimson Conclave.
Charon had killed Sofia Santos as a political statement—the kind that wins you points with your higher-ups. But none of that helped me now. It was all merely history, morbid footnotes to a family’s tragic story.
I tossed the picture back on the shelf and did a sweep of the first floor. Other than a couple skunked beers in the fridge, I found little else that suggested a person once lived here.
The cat, for his money, was having a lot of fun with a bent spoon. I left him to his devices and returned upstairs to rummage through the bedroom. An hour later, I’d turned up some rags that might’ve been clothes, an
d a few dog-eared paperbacks.
In frustration, I hurled one against the wall. A couple of the pages fluttered out. None of them contained secret notes or clues. Dawn was beginning to peek through the shaded blinds. I went to check on the status of my essence distillery to find the process complete.
A thick, viscous fluid coated the bottom of the tub. No chemical odor remained, nor did the scent of decay emanate from the contents. It looked like essence.
I flung open the cabinet beneath the sink to search for a scoop or a bucket.
Which is when I found something much better.
Javier’s diary.
12
Sunlight darted off the broad, flat-top peak of El Capitan as I pulled into Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Five hours driving west in the darkness had afforded me plenty of time to reflect on the current state of affairs.
I wasn’t sure this was the right move.
But no manual existed for the tangled morass I now found myself wading through.
How had I gotten all the way out here, just an hour’s dart from the border? No, I hadn’t drank all the essence and gone out of my damned mind. It—and the tabby—were seated safely in the back of Gunnar’s SUV. Javier’s tattered leather diary was propped open on the passenger seat.
An early entry had been my candle in the darkness.
I’d been right: Sofia Santos had once been a vital cog in the Sol Council’s machine. She was their head of mercenary services. Javier had helped her maintain the records—hence the diary. Hell, maybe at some point he’d even joined the cause.
And what cause was that? When the Council needed a job done off the books—the messy, nasty kind that a creature of light wouldn’t want to be linked to—they relied on Sofia to hire the right individual of questionable moral fiber.
It had been charming—and slightly alarming—to find my name and former addresses scrawled in the margins. Then again, there were hundreds of entries. Ruby Callaway was in here, albeit listed with a red skull and crossbones.
Moon Burn (The Half-Demon Rogue Trilogy Book 3) Page 6
