by T. Frohock
Following a narrow alley to the servants’ entrance, Diago reached into the pocket of his threadbare coat and withdrew a tarot card—the High Priestess. The card served as insurance. Had Diago not been able to keep the appointment, the drawing incorporated sigils known only to the daimon-born nefilim. In this way, Christina and her retinue would recognize the messenger came from Diago.
Not that he ever intended to send anyone else into this scorpion’s nest. He gave the door two sharp raps and mentally prepared himself for his role.
A daimon-born nefil opened the door. Thick-bodied and dressed in a pin-striped suit, he looked like a gangster from an American film and exuded the same arrogance.
Swell. Francisco. Christina had dragged him into her ranks from the port of Santander, where Francisco had been a dockworker. In better days, a goon like him would have hardly been worthy of her attention, but they’d all lost loyal nefilim during the Spanish Civil War. Still, she scraped the bottom of the barrel for this one.
Unintimidated by the bigger man’s physique, Diago lifted the card.
Francisco grunted and snatched it from his hand. He made a great show of examining the sigils. Diago half expected his lips to move as he worked through the meaning of the glyphs.
Finally he looked up and grinned. Diago had time to notice that the brute was missing two more teeth since his last visit.
Probably walked into someone’s fist.
“Wait here. I’ll see if you’re expected.” Francisco started to close the door.
Diago’s palm stopped it midswing. “My cousin needs a smarter doorman.”
Francisco’s grin disappeared. “Wait here.”
Diago snatched a shadow and formed a ward in the blink of an eye. He tossed the scorpion at Francisco’s face. The younger nefil shaped his protective glyph too slowly. He took the scorpion in his eye.
Unlike the soft shadow Diago had flung at the mortal couple, he created this one to sting. Francisco bellowed and clawed at his face.
Diago walked into the short hall and followed it to the main entryway. He almost ran into the Vizconde Edur Santxez, Christina’s lover and second-in-command, who’d come to see what all the commotion was about.
Edur looked down the hall. “What the hell did you do to him?”
“I taught him to respect his elders.” Diago removed his hat but not his coat.
Another large nefil in a suit barreled past them to go to his comrade’s aid.
Edur’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t admonish Diago. The daimon-born didn’t abide weakness. Poking Francisco in the eye would be frowned upon; letting him get away with his intimidation tactics would make Diago look weak—not the kind of reputation he could afford with his family.
Edur obviously decided to let the incident go. “What took you so long to get here?”
“Your doorman.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“They’re watching me closely. It was a week before I could slip away and check for messages.” No lie there. “We’re going to have to arrange a new place for Christina’s sigils.”
“That may not be necessary.”
That doesn’t sound good. Nonetheless, Diago held Edur’s gaze and merely raised an eyebrow at the statement. “What do you mean?”
Edur lowered his voice. “Christina might believe in your charade, but I’m still not entirely convinced that you’ve switched sides.”
“Is that what this meeting is about?” Because if it was, Diago wanted to know now while the exit was relatively close at hand.
“No. Christina believes you. I’m merely expressing my suspicions.”
To throw me off my game, or to keep me on my toes? It didn’t matter. The message was loud and clear. Diago had a long way to go before he won their complete trust. “A little suspicion is healthy. Just remember: that blade cuts both ways.”
Edur acknowledged the comment with a tilt of his head. He gestured to the entrance hall. A ruby cuff link the color of blood caught the light. “Please. We shouldn’t keep the condesa waiting.”
“Of course.” Diago followed him past burnished wood panels and doors with frosted patterns etched on the glass.
From deep within the house, someone played a piano, striking the keys with more force than necessary. Diago recognized one of Nico’s original compositions. It had been the last song the doomed nefil had played just before the Gestapo arrested him in the studio.
How could they possibly know that? Had there been a recording? Or have they somehow obtained the sheet music Nico used? And, as they usually were, all his questions were followed by the most damning one of all: Did I somehow slip around my cousin and accidentally betray Nico?
The answer could be six of one or a half dozen of the other. The daimon-born had infiltrated the Nazi regime just as the angel-born had done. Anything was possible.
Regardless of how they came by the composition, Diago reexperienced the same mix of terror and rage that had consumed him in the restaurant in July. And if the pianist decides to segue into Mozart’s Requiem, does that mean Christina has discovered I am a spy?
His cousin would delight in a morbid joke such as that. A new level of anxiety ate into his stomach. From the corner of his eye, he saw Edur lick his lips. The other nefil’s gaze softened with pleasure.
He’s feeding on my uncertainty and fear. Diago mentally kicked himself. He should have known they would pull some stunt like this.
While the daimon-born usually satisfied themselves with the mortals’ emotions, a nefil’s panic was an elixir to them. It was the difference between grape juice and a fine wine: one satisfied a thirst, the other produced intoxication.
Diago clamped down on his emotions. As he’d done when he was a child, he imagined a wall around his heart. No one could see past it. No one could get in. He focused his mind by counting the stones of that wall backward . . . 501, 500, 499 . . .
By the time Edur brought them into an immense room with a marble staircase, Diago had regained control of his fear. He continued his internal countdown as they climbed the stairs.
The music still grated his nerves, but not as violently. At least no longer to the point that Edur could feed.
Good. Let him starve.
At the second level, they ascended to the gallery that looked down over the hall. Nefilim moved among the rooms, boxing items and spreading white sheets over the furniture. Pistol grips occasionally poked free of the servants’ pockets, and Diago had no doubt they were all armed. Christina left nothing to chance.
The guns worried him less than the nefilim’s activities. And where is Christina off to, I wonder? He didn’t ask. The move might be the reason for her abrupt summons.
Edur halted before a pair of glass doors. Inside the room, Christina stood before a packing crate. A framed painting leaned against the wall.
She held a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Her hair, as dark and shiny as her cigarette holder, was fashionably styled and adorned with pearls. The forest-green tea dress accentuated her full figure, with the flared hem ending just above her high heels. Stockings, which must have cost a fortune due to the wartime shortages, covered her shapely legs.
The sitting room’s elegant furniture was arrayed to showcase the grand piano and the handsome woman at the keyboard. She was none other than Christina’s favorite bodyguard, Iria Mejia. Her short platinum-blond hair was combed back behind her ears. She wore a crepe and chiffon evening gown. The white skirt fluttered around her ankles as she pumped the pedals with bare feet.
Diago went to the piano and slammed the fallboard over the keys, barely missing Iria’s fingers. He matched her glare for glare and spat the words in her face. “You play that tune to mock me, but you forget the Machiavelli line was a source of information to the daimon-born, as well. My loss is everyone’s loss.”
Iria opened her mouth to retort, but as she did, she glanced around Diago and then closed her lips.
Probably some
sign from Christina. Before he could straighten, he felt his cousin’s hand on his shoulder.
“Come, now, Diago,” Christina’s smoky voice purred behind him. “She was only having fun. Where is your sense of humor?”
“I left it in Spain.” He turned to face his cousin.
She pursed her lips and stroked his cheek. “You look awful, and that suit hasn’t been in style since the pronunciamento.”
He took her hand and brushed his lips across her knuckles, but he didn’t release her. “It’s dangerous enough that you summoned me directly to your house, worse if I’m remembered by any mortals and word somehow travels back to Guillermo. The suit is part of the disguise. I can’t stay long.”
She tugged her hand free. “Does Guillermo suspect anything?”
“He’s taken to keeping his plans from me. That’s not a good sign.” Lowering his voice, he hissed, “And if you, through an indiscretion, blow my cover, there will be consequences—in this incarnation and all to come.”
She tapped the ashes from her cigarette into a tray and feigned indifference, but he could tell by the way her gaze slid from his that he had struck a chord. “I’m afraid I wasn’t able to use a more discreet message. We’ve been summoned to Paris on an urgent matter.”
Edur moved to the dry bar and poured himself a drink. “In the middle of winter, no less. Can you imagine anything more dreadful?”
Diago could have regaled Edur for hours with a litany of horrors viler than winter travel, but he’d already excited Christina’s lover enough for one day. Let him get his kicks somewhere else. Turning back to his cousin, Diago asked, “What’s going on?”
She answered by motioning to the painting. “It arrived this morning.”
Diago looked down, first to the packing crate. The label indicated a route heavy with inspection stamps. From Poland through Italy, and then from a north Italian port to France. Interesting. My cousin has a Polish admirer.
He shifted his attention to the painting. At first, all he saw were the dark sounds of the dead—the frequencies of those mortals and nefilim who died violent deaths—writhing across the canvas in shades of black and gray.
How much blood was spilled to create this? He had no idea, nor did he want to know.
As he watched, the colors took shape and became a grotto submerged beneath a red fog. The figures took on the intense surrealistic tones of Goya’s Black Paintings.
Shadowy faces with thick streams of black running from their eyes peered at a child, who walked a path set between braziers. No more than six years old, the boy was dwarfed by the hulking shapes around him. A single angel’s wing, denoting an angelic mother, overshadowed the child’s left shoulder and rose upward into the fog.
At first he thought the figure was a likeness of his son, but the boy’s hair was straight, not curly. Rather than Rafael’s dusky skin, this child’s flesh was paler, olive-colored.
With a mild shock, Diago realized, That’s me. He quickly shifted his attention to the other figures.
Standing beside one of the braziers was his father, Alvaro. His strong features bespoke a Berber lineage diluted by Visigoth blood, but there any similarities to a nefil ended. The artist had painted him in his new form, with his pupils and irises the color of smoke and nickel—white eyes, as if he had no eyes at all.
Swirling all around him were Moloch’s colors of puce and gray. The daimon’s wizened features were superimposed over Alvaro’s face to signify the joining of their souls within Alvaro’s body.
Sidling closer to Diago, Christina watched his face. “It’s your Gloaming.”
The Gloaming was the rite of passage for daimon-born children. At age six, they were brought before the Scorpion Court’s Council of Nine, which was composed of elders chosen by the nine branches of the family. The Nine, as they were known, determined which nefilim were trained for the higher courts and which served as slaves to the daimon-born families.
Diago felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. “What is this? Another sick joke? I had no Gloaming,” he snapped at her. His father had abandoned him, and she damn well knew it.
“You did have the ceremony,” Christina whispered. “You just don’t remember it.”
Nor did he want to. Although that might be this evening’s horror show of a dream. “It’s odd that some nefil decided to send you a portrait of my Gloaming.”
She puffed blue smoke at the painting. “It was sent by someone who calls himself Herr Teufel. Alvaro has asked me to transport the painting to Paris.”
“Teufel?” He didn’t have to feign his ignorance. The name meant nothing to him. “Do you think it’s a code name?”
“I have no idea.”
He searched her gaze for any sign of deception. She didn’t look down and to the left as she normally did when she dodged the truth. No, she wasn’t lying. In fact, she seemed to be examining him in precisely the same manner to see if he withheld information from her.
Her lip quirked to become a smile that wasn’t quite a smile. “Alvaro has summoned the court to Paris. He intends to finally hold the vote for Moloch’s high priest.”
Diago tried not to sound hopeful. “Is Alvaro sick?”
“No. He is looking to the Scorpion Court’s future.” She took a long drag from her cigarette, that strange half smile teasing her lips.
She knows more. Before he could devise a question that might draw the information from her, Edur distracted him.
The vizconde poured himself another drink and examined Diago over the rim of the glass. “We have word from our agents in Toulouse that Guillermo’s daughter is visting several university libraries. Do you know what she is after? Or why she has gone to Paris? Or why we had to hear this information from someone other than you?”
Time to obfuscate. “I didn’t want to say anything until I had something concrete to pass along to you. I don’t know what she is after. Not yet. But—”
Edur thumped his glass on the table. “Not yet, not yet, not yet! Christ, Diago, you’ve got nothing but excuses for us. Do you intend to find out?”
“I told you! Guillermo is keeping his plans from me. I have to move carefully. If he finds I’ve betrayed him again, the angel-born will judge me. They might very well give me the second death.” The death from which no nefil could reincarnate. Diago didn’t believe he was overplaying his hand. The threat was credible.
Edur didn’t seem impressed with the explanation. “Your kin might do the same if you don’t become useful to us.”
The colors of the painting swirled violently as if picking up on the nefilim’s sudden hostility. In the back of his mind, Diago heard an authoritative voice shout the word Abomination!
He flinched, knowing the denunciation was aimed at him. The memory was there and gone before he fully grasped why it terrified him so.
“Edur!” Christina admonished her lover. “Don’t say such things.”
Diago glared at the other nefil with a bravado designed to conceal his fear. “The only reason I’m here right now is because Christina told me to come. Do you believe I’d put myself in such jeopardy if I wasn’t loyal to her?”
Christina came to his side and stroked his arm. “And I appreciate your service, cousin. You know I do. Forget the Ramírez girl for now.” She tossed Edur a warning glare. “We have more important concerns. Jordi Abelló is in Paris. He’s taken over Die Nephilim.”
Diago’s mouth dropped open. “What?”
She drifted past him and joined Edur at the bar. One bright-red-lacquered fingernail tapped the cigarette holder with three hard clicks. The ashes spilled into an art deco ashtray, which depicted two angels facing each other. The angels’ heads had been removed and their wings broken. “It’s true. He sent Jaeger into her next incarnation with a poisoned syringe. Now he wears her signet and has petitioned the Thrones for their blessing.”
A pit of coldness settled in Diago’s stomach. That was the worst possible news. With his murder of Ilsa Jaeger, Abelló commanded t
he power of Jaeger’s signet. He could make his move against Guillermo any day now.
Christina continued. “Abelló has taken over Rousseau’s former estate in the Fontainebleau Forest as his base of operations.”
Fontainebleau . . . Paris’s backyard. And Ysa? Has she avoided her uncle? Christ, he hoped so. Keep them talking. “Then we’ve got to do something. His lieutenant, Espina, rules Spain in Jordi’s name. If Jordi takes France and Germany, our court will be forced to merge with another.”
“That is a matter best left to the elders and ranking members of the court.” Christina held out her hand to him. “I need you to concentrate on advancing my agenda. I want you to carry a message to Guillermo.”
After a wary glance at Edur, Diago approached his cousin.
She took his arm and walked him to the sitting room’s door. “Tell him about Jordi. That will shift his eye from the Scorpion Court’s gathering in Paris. He’ll be so focused on his brother, he won’t notice us. Make him believe the daimon-born insist that he remain king, and Rousseau must return to France to reclaim Les Néphilim. They both have their faults, but they abide by the treaties written in our blood and in our songs.
“Give him this message: Guillermo can rely on the daimon-born nefilim under my command to fight against his brother, just as we fought beside Los Nefilim during the Spanish Civil War. This time we will win.”
“If I’m not to mention the Scorpion Court, how do I explain your little trip to Paris?”
“Reconnaissance. I’m going to personally coordinate a fifth column to assist the Allied invasion. Oh, don’t look so surprised. We all know it’s coming, it’s merely a matter of where and when.”
“What if I need to contact you again?”
“Send a postcard to the Théâtre de Rêves, thirteen rue de la Ville Neuve.”
Theater of Dreams. He memorized the address.
Edur gestured to Iria. “Please see Monsieur Alvarez to the door.”
Christina’s words followed him into the hall. “I will watch for you.”
The promise wasn’t said with the same endearing tones that Diago shared with his angel-born comrades, but she offered him no malice, either.
