The Stars Never Rise (The Midnight Defenders Book 2)

by Joey Ruff

  “Land of the Sidhe,” I said. “Keep to the point.”

  “Huxley says it remembers you. He says that anger is power, and that the rage the troll feels for you may serve as an anchor to this time period.”

  “Great,” I said. “So I’m gonna bloody see it again?”

  “He thinks so. In fact, he would bet on it.”

  “So what’s the point?”

  “The point?”

  “He said that if the spell didn’t work, there was a point.”

  “A purpose,” she said. “Everything has a purpose.”

  “Fan-fucking-tastic,” I said. “Maybe its purpose is to send me home to Anna.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” she said, and her eyes flickered slower.

  “How do I get rid of it?”

  “Take away its hate. It will disconnect it from this time period, and it will move on to some when else.”

  “Fine,” I said. “How?”

  “It’s an emotion,” she said. “Replace it.”

  “I’m supposed to make fucking friends with this thing?” I laughed – I couldn’t help it. “Get me my Scrabble game.”

  “Jono.”

  “No, it’s fine. I’ll figure something out.”

  She sat up in her bed, her eyes opened and alert. “Jono,” she said, and her voice sounded pleading. “Don’t just get rid of it.”

  “Is this Huxley talking still, or you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “A little. His words come with a tactical advantage. You’re the one who likes to keep volatile pets sedated in the shed.”

  “Point,” she said. “But I’m not saying that this time.”

  “Then what are you saying, love?”

  “Kill it.”

  “What?”

  “Kill it. Right now, it’s your problem. If it moves on, it becomes someone else’s. Maybe that someone isn’t as equipped to deal with the Midnight. If you just let it go, who knows how many lives it could destroy. And throughout history. Think of all the tragedies that this thing might’ve caused. The Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake, the sinking of the Lusitania. Think of the loss you can prevent.”

  “You wanna throw the Titanic in there, too?” She didn’t find that as funny as I did. “Nad, you forget something. Those things have already happened. I’m not sure if we’re playing by Doc Brown’s time travel rules or someone else’s, but if time’s already happened, it can’t be changed.”

  “But you never know what’s still to come.”

  “Do you know how ridiculous it is to kill a troll?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Me either,” I said. “But your dad, as batshit crazy as he was sometimes, found it easier to unstick this bloody wanker in time than to whack him like a mole.”

  “Jono…”

  “Look. I can’t promise anything. But if I find an out to take this thing down, I’ll do it. Alright?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay, then.” I smiled at her, and she smiled back, but hers was more half-hearted. “I’ll let you go back to sleep now. Thanks for the…whatever that was.”

  “Sure,” she said and pulled her blankets up around her shoulders and sank back into her pillow.

  As I moved to put out the candles, I saw the tome again and said, “Since when do you read Latin?”

  “Huh?” She sat up again and looked at me. “Oh. That. Yeah. It’s a…a grimoire.”

  “Another amulet thing?”

  She shrugged. “After the bonnacon fight, I got to thinking and remembered the story you told me about Huxley in the desert.”

  “About how he made it rain?”

  “Yeah. We got lucky that the fire sprinklers came on and shooed it outside, but what if that’s not an option next time. So, I started doing some research. I…found the book on a whim, and at first I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but the more I stared at the page…”

  “So Huxley’s teaching you to read Latin?”

  “It’s not Latin. It’s…I’m not really sure. Something older. Babylonian, maybe?”

  Without picking up the book, I flipped open to the marked page and looked at the words. “It all looks the same to me.” I closed the book and said, “Any luck?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Making it rain?”

  She shook her head. “It’s only been a day, but I did…” She yawned. “Sorry. I did manage to make it stop raining earlier.” She looked up at me. “At least, I think I did…”

  I smiled at her. What I wanted to say was something like, “You really are growing up” or “I’m proud of you.” Instead, what came out was, “You’re tired. Go to bed.”

  She nodded and rolled back over as I put out the candles and moved for the door. Before I could close the door behind me, she said, “Jono?”

  “Yeah, Nad?”

  “Did…did you think about what we talked about earlier? At the restaurant?”

  “Little bit.”

  “And…?”

  I sighed. “It’s late. Been a big day. Can we not…can we do this later?”

  She didn’t say anything, and I wondered if she fell back asleep. I waited a few heartbeats, just in case, and then I slipped out, closing the door behind me.

  As I made my way back downstairs, my thoughts returned to the troll. I wasn’t entirely sure how I was supposed to get rid of the damn thing. Killing it might not even be an option.

  I found the kitchen virtually the way I left it. Kinnara stood near the door while Ape and DeNobb sat at the table drinking coffee. Kinnara caught my eye when I entered and smiled at me.

  I moved to her. “How do you kill a troll?”

  “By being stronger than it.”

  “And how many things are stronger than a troll?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe a gorgon.”

  “Would Victor help?”

  “Probably not,” she said. “But we could ask.”

  I sighed. The thought of seeing him again wasn’t exactly a happy one. I looked at Ape. “Anything in your herb garden that might help with this?”

  “Like a ward?” he asked. “For a troll?” He thought about it and then shook his head. “Not that I know. Does anything work on a troll?”

  “Gryphon eggs,” I said. “It’s, uh, like a lure.”

  “Okay,” Ape said. “I’m almost…yup, I’m sure. We don’t have any Gryphon eggs. Sorry.” He flashed me a cheeky grin.

  I turned to Kinnara, remembering how she said she’d followed me from Rino’s. I looked at Ape. “Did you find anything out about that ghost?”

  “Well, the chain was silver.”

  “Why is that important?” DeNobb asked.

  “Silver’s the moon’s metal,” Ape said. “It works on nearly everything with an ounce of supernatural energy. It’s used to bind or kill.”

  “Like silver bullets and werewolves?”

  “Like that,” I said. “There’s also this ancient belief that ties silver to Christ. The moon’s halfway between earth and heaven. Like Jesus, silver’s the intermediary.”

  “Part terrestrial and part divine,” Ape said. “And used to bind the divine to the terrestrial.” He looked solemnly at me. “Whatever was chained there was supernatural. If it died in its chains…”

  “Then its supernatural energy could still be bound in that cave.”

  “Yeah,” Ape said. “And it very well might be a ghost, after all.”

  “But it ain’t human,” I said. “So, what? We just have to get close enough to set it

  free?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “There is a ritual to dispel the energy,” Kinnara said.

  Ape stared at her for a moment then turned back to me. “Like she said, there are a few more steps. It would really help to know what was chained there.”

  “And why,” I added. “What would be worth imprisoning?”

  “Maybe it was a guardian,” Kinnara said.

  “Yeah,” DeNobb e
choed. “Like a guard dog in a junkyard.”

  I looked at Ape. I didn’t know how much he was considering that advice coming from Kinnara, but it seemed to slowly sink in. “We don’t know what’s behind that rockslide,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “It could be treasure. Who owned the house before? It could be mob gold.”

  “I’ll look into it in the morning,” he said. “I need to sleep now.” Ape stood from the table and moved towards the dining room, setting his empty coffee mug in the sink.

  “You wanna show DeNobb to a room?” I asked.

  He looked back at the table and the weatherman who was falling asleep sitting up. Poor bastard. I actually felt bad for the guy. He’d been through a lot in two days.

  “Come on, Jamie,” Ape said, and the weatherman put a small smile on his face, stood from the table, and walked over to Ape. “She’s not staying here, is she?”

  “No,” I said. I looked at Kinnara, then back at Ape. “We’re gonna head over to the Song, see if we can’t talk to Victor.”

  “It’s gonna be dawn in a few hours.”

  “Which is precisely why we should go now. There’s no telling when that troll might show up again.”

  “You ever hear that saying, Nothing good happens after midnight?”

  I thought about it a minute. “That’s good. You should get a shirt made.” I smiled to him and turned to Kinnara. “Don’t wait up, mate.”

  As we ventured out into the night, she seemed to loosen up a little more. “Your partner does not care for me,” she said.

  “He doesn’t care for many people. That’s why he stays single. He doesn’t trust people because of the way he looks. Or, rather, because of the way he’s been treated by people for the way he looks.” I thought about it a minute. “Does that make sense?”

  She nodded.

  I opened my car door. “Don’t be hard on him, love. He doesn’t know you. It’s not strictly personal.”

  “I heard what you said earlier, Jono,” she said, opening her door. “You think someone might be trying to kill you.”

  I nodded. “It crossed my mind.”

  We got in the car, and I took the long, winding drive to the road. She watched the foo statues again. “You really like those, don’t you?”

  “The foo lions? I am watching only to see how they perceive me.”

  The answer caught me off-guard a little. “Not sure what that means,” I said. “They’re just statues.”

  “Really, Jono,” she said. “For one as well-versed as you, you are really quite simple. There is so much you do not see, even when it is right before your eyes. Is that what it truly means to be human?”

  I watched her in the soft, green glow of the instrument panel and the radio lights. She looked like the dawn. “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” I smiled. “Thoreau.” She just watched me. “We’re selfish, love. And we’re so self-absorbed we don’t even see the shit that happens all around us every fucking day. And if we do, we don’t believe it. We don’t need a fucking glamour or mystic fog to veil our eyes to the supernatural. Most of us just don’t want to see it.” I smiled weakly. “No one would believe you were anything but a pretty face.” And a fantastic pair of tits, and legs, but I didn’t add that part. She smiled a little at that, but she just kept watching me. Looking at her, I couldn’t even believe there was anything inhuman about her. Even though I’d seen her fiercer side, all I saw of her then was just a person. “It’s easy to fool ourselves,” I said quietly. “Most of us do it without even trying.”

  We fell silent for a minute, and as I hit the highway as the first of the raindrops started coming down, I said, “So are you going to tell me about those statues?”

  “The foo are guardian spirits. They have guarded temples and holy places since the beginning of time. The fact they appear as statues means they have not detected any threats.”

  “Really?” I said. “So if the troll showed up in my fucking backyard…”

  “The foo would take it down,” she said simply.

  As we neared the city, it started to rain harder, and before long it was coming down so thick I took to the slower roads and navigated through downtown just to be able to see.

  “Is this the thunderbird?”

  “Could be,” she said, but there was something in her tone that suggested otherwise.

  “What else could it be?”

  “Or who…?”

  In the next block, I couldn’t see three feet in front of the car, and we sat parked for a few minutes at a traffic light because I couldn’t see the other side of the intersection.

  “How are we supposed to get anywhere in this?” I asked. “If only we had a place to wait it out.” I paused, thinking. “You wanna get some coffee? We could probably find a greasy diner open…”

  “Pull over here.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes. Pull in here and park.”

  Somehow I found myself at the gate to a parking garage, not unlike the one at DeNobb’s apartment. It seemed familiar, somehow, but I couldn’t place it. Maybe if I could see…

  She gave me a code to type in, and the gate went up. I found a parking space amid a fleet of Porsches and Spiders and Lamborghinis. It looked like Ape’s sodding carport.

  “Where are we?”

  “Come on.” She got out of the car and led me to the elevator. Everything about it seemed surreal, familiar somehow. Déjà vu, all over again.

  We took the elevator up to the top floor, and as we stepped out into the hallway, I knew. There was only one door down a small, elaborately decorated hallway, and she pulled a key and unlocked it.

  “This is Lorelei’s penthouse,” I said as we entered.

  Kinnara flipped a switch on the wall, and a fireplace kindled to life before us. It stood in the center of the room, an island in a hardwood sea, and all around it sat purple leather sectionals and chairs that were too expensive and designer to be comfortable. Fancy art hung on the walls, original paintings from Van Gogh, Picasso, and Renoir. The colors were earthy and rich like fine wine, and the entire place had a sanitized, unlived-in feel to it. Had it not been dark and storming, the view would have been gorgeous from the twenty-foot picture windows that went up to the vaulted ceilings and overlooked the city.

  I kicked my shoes off and moved to the sectional, feeling myself sticking to the leather almost immediately. Staring off at the rain-spattered glass before me, seeing it coming down harder than ever now, I said, “There are worse places to pass the time.”

  Kinnara moved behind me. “Since we have the time, I will take a shower.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “I might see if she keeps any beer.”

  “Would you like to join me?”

  I looked back at her over my shoulder. She stood completely nude in the doorway, and she couldn’t have been more beautiful, more a work of art, if her name had been Venus de Milo.

  I don’t remember getting up, but remember exactly the way she tasted as I pressed myself to her: like cinnamon and rainwater. She pulled off my shirt slowly as my hands explored her body. As she kissed me softly, she begged me to slow down, but I was nearly in a frenzy, needing her. Her hands wandered across my chest. Her nails scratched down my arms, tracing lines in the curves of my biceps that only she could see. She whispered in my ear as her hands fought against my belt, and I could smell her sex like a drug, pushing me nearly to the edge.

  We were oil and water, but I burned for her touch, couldn’t get enough of it, and as she slid my trousers low to expose my naked arse, I knew we were dancing on a volcano.

  I didn’t care. She touched me in ways and in places I’d yearned to be touched for so long, and I came alive in her hands.

  She wrapped her legs around my waist, threw her arms around my neck and kissed me madly while I carried her towards the bedroom.

  20

  By the time the sun rose, I’d only dozed for maybe twenty minut
es. The storm had passed hours ago, and the light that broke over the horizon and stole past the clouds was as naked and intense as the harpy that slept half-astride me, interwoven in a web of Egyptian cotton.

  It was the light that woke me. The curtains stood open on the large picture windows, and the bedroom faced east to greet the rising sun that shone in on me like a spotlight, like the bright eye of God, always watching.

  I laid there and listened to Kinnara’s rhythmic breathing, felt her heart beat, strong and fierce. I yawned and, as I moved to adjust myself, felt her hand drift slowly across my chest to my stomach. I turned to look at her, and she was smiling at me brighter than the sun. The way her eyes sparkled was dangerous.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Hey,” I said. My voice was uneven, uneasy, tense.

  “I know your thoughts must be strange,” she said. “Put it out of your mind for now. We have other matters to tend.”

  My hand had been moving absently over her shoulder and down her arm. At her words, my hand traced over her hip and over the soft fabric…Lorelei’s soft fabric.

  “But even that can wait a short while.”

  My body tensed as her hand closed around me and began stroking. “Jono,” she said softly. “All is as it should be.”

  “Don’t…”

  But then she started to kiss my neck. My body responded to her touch, and it didn’t matter what my words said. All thoughts became muted and dull, and for a moment, I had an imperfect clarity that knew exactly what was important.

  I pulled her on top of me, and we moved together. It didn’t take long before she screamed in climax. She collapsed over me and laid there for several, long heartbeats before she stood at the edge of the bed. “I never took a shower,” she said with a wink and then walked into the bathroom. I watched her move, watched the way her every muscle flexed and shifted, each step so light she didn’t even make an impression in the rug. Then she disappeared around the corner, and I heard her hum something beautiful before the shower turned on and the sound of the water drowned out her melody.

  I sat up and turned to the bathroom door, feeling the sun against my back burning like an infection.