So I gave her the finger, waving it high in the air as I turned on my heel and headed to my import dirt bike. The ocean stretched on in the distance, perfectly tranquil. Too bad I couldn’t just swim to the horizon and keep paddling until I reached the end of the world. The binding agreements that chained me to this island would stop my heart cold before I got a mile out.
It must’ve been nice to be able to fly off at a moment’s notice.
But I had a feeling the phoenix wasn’t free, either.
“You’d better find a good lead, Hunter!” Rayna called over the roar of my bike’s engine.
Already on it.
I fired off a text to Dante Cross, and he answered in seconds.
Someone really wanted their treasure map.
Which meant maybe that leverage would finally come in handy.
6
It took an hour to navigate the bike back to the service road near my villa. The roads on the eastern half of the island were what one might generously call unmaintained, and the potholes and cracks had slowed my trip. But Atheas was also a big island, spanning seventy-six miles across at its widest point. The southeastern and southwestern tips weren’t the broadest point, but they were still on opposite ends of a jungle wilderness.
Dante Cross was leaning against his white Porsche Boxster convertible, his gold-flecked brown eyes coolly assessing me as I killed the bike’s engine beneath a banana tree. The sea-salt infused breeze tousled his sun-bleached, messy brown hair. No trace of worry graced his stubbly jaw.
“Stunning as ever, Eden,” he said, his British voice as smooth as top-shelf liquor. “I knew you missed me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” I covered the bike with jungle foliage. A clammy sweat clung to my dirty arms. Mid-autumn on Atheas remained a balmy seventy—during a cold spell.
The well-tanned treasure hunter didn’t move, playing everything with effortless cool. I could taste his soul lingering in the crisp, pleasant air—a swirl of blood, cannon shot, and gold, shaken with an undercurrent of regretful darkness that raced through it all like a red mark across a page.
He winked at me as I leaned against the car next to him. My clothes left streaks of red dust on the perfect paint.
“It’s not often a woman doesn’t return my calls.” Cross smiled. His languid charm bordered on irritating. “I was almost getting worried.”
“You’re a bad liar.” For being over four hundred years old, he should’ve been better.
“That wasn’t a lie.” He leaned over, his shimmering eyes inches from mine. “You look a little dirty, Eden.”
My heart skipped a quarter beat—much to my eternal annoyance—but I slid away before his slick act could distract me from my task.
“Yeah, yeah, Casanova, whatever.” I snapped my fingers to get his attention. “I need your help with something.” His eyes lit up. “Not the treasure map.”
“I’m assuming this has to do with your hands.” His expression didn’t change.
I glanced at Anya’s blood, which had faded to a light pink from gripping the throttle. Since he was game, I decided to get right to the point. “Who’s Tamara?”
The name hit Cross like a livewire. His posture stiffened, and a vein throbbed in his lean neck. I sensed an immediate change in his soul. The darkness devoured everything like a kraken snatching a ship from the sea.
“Who told you that name?”
“Answer the question.”
Instead of answering, Cross hopped into the sports car and revved the engine. I reached past him and slammed the ignition button to prevent him from driving away. “Not so fast, buddy. I just want to know who Tamara is.”
“Don’t say her name.” Each word came through clenched teeth, his expression venomous.
“There’s a deal to be made here, Cross.”
Instead of responding, he clenched his fist and bashed it into the steering column. Bone audibly splintered. He unleashed another blow, and another, until blood splattered the interior like a grisly crime scene.
When he reared back for another blow, I caught his wrist. His pulse throbbed to a deranged beat and his pinky hung askew. Even though the wounds would knit shortly—since he was immortal—this still qualified as certifiably insane behavior.
“I didn’t know she was a sore subject,” I said quietly, surprised anything could rattle him—let alone the name of a woman.
“Don’t play dumb, Eden,” he said through angry gasps, his manic gaze focused on the verdant jungle, “it doesn’t suit you.”
“I swear.” I tried to catch his gaze. But he refused to even look at me.
A long silence stretched on for minutes. I watched his bones slowly heal—first, the pinky snapped back into place, then his index finger’s flattened knuckle inflated like a balloon.
The benefits of the platinum immortality package.
Finally, Cross turned toward me, his eyes filled with hurt, his expression filled with loathing—for both himself and for me. “I’ve lived too long to be fooled.”
I almost called bullshit, but his expression was so sad that I only said, “Just tell me who she is.”
“I’ll give you one thing, Eden.” Cross pushed the ignition button with a slight grimace and settled into the black leather seat. The powerful engine started again with a throaty growl. “You’re the best liar I’ve ever seen.”
“Thanks?”
His somber expression suggested it wasn’t a compliment. “I almost believe that you don’t know.”
“Know what?”
“Don’t make me say it.” His jaw tightened into a pained grimace. “Don’t you dare make me say it.”
I said anyway, “What don’t I know?”
Hatred poured from his golden-flecked eyes for the words from him. “That I killed Tamara over four hundred years ago.”
If there had been any dust on the service road, the Porsche would have peeled out in a black, plumy cloud. Instead, all that lingered in the humid air was the scent of burnt rubber and an even more burning question.
Why the hell had Cross killed this woman?
7
I squinted down the shadowy jungle road where Cross’s convertible had just vanished. No answer to my question presented itself—at least not immediately.
But, as I sorted through my conversations with the treasure hunter, a theory slowly formed into fact. Tamara had been the only woman he’d ever loved—the one he’d killed in exchange for his immortality.
Platinum immortality came with a steep cost: the full soul of a loved one or family member.
Tamara had been the unlucky sacrifice.
That didn’t explain how she’d returned to the land of the living, though. Most people winked out of existence without their souls. The unfortunate soulless “lucky” enough to experience the Elysian Fields became demons. Who fed upon souls to fill the infinite void within their own chests.
From the phoenix’s description, she didn’t sound like a demon.
Not any type of demon I’d ever met, anyway.
I’d just have to see for myself when I tracked her down. From what I could tell, Cross hadn’t known Tamara was back from the dead. And that meant he had no damn clue where she might be hiding. If I was going to have this woman read into the guardian’s soul and describe Anya’s final day alive, I’d have to find her another way.
At least the case had just gotten interesting. But as someone with other pressing obligations—like fulfilling my weekly quota for Aldric—I would have accepted something a little more open-and-shut. As matters stood, the island’s ferryman to the afterlife was guardian-less, the island itself was phoenix-less, and I was suspect-less.
No rest for the wicked, as they say.
After a quick pitstop at the villa—where I stored Anya’s soul in my wall safe—I returned to the service road and hopped on the bike. Even though Cross had been less than helpful, that hardly left me without options. Surviving as a Reaper made certain things imperative—cultivating a laby
rinthine network of immoral or outright skin-crawling acquaintances being one of them.
And so it was, after a twenty-minute ride, that I found myself in front of the bland, uninviting façade of the Atheas Acres Funeral Parlor. I parked the four-stroke on the sidewalk, then headed up the three stone steps. A glass door reflected the dying glare of the afternoon sun.
Somber classical music filtered through the empty waiting area as cold air blasted my sticky skin. I headed past the worn seats and collection of faded magazines, toward the faded velvet curtain leading to the showroom.
Low voices trickled forth as I pulled the curtain aside. A viewing was in session. It brought me back to when I was fifteen, looking at Dad in his chintzy coffin. Right when things started going downhill, but before they hit bottom.
There’s always a bottom you don’t see. Believing things can’t get worse only bites you in the ass when they do.
I wound my way past a center table overflowing with fake flowers and glanced in the room to my right. A man was giving a eulogy next to an open casket.
He glanced over, recognition flashing in his eyes.
I recognized him, too: James Anderson. He’d tried to frame me for murder two months ago. The one his old man had committed.
Before I could say anything, the bastard ran at me. A fight-or-flight reflex registered deep in my brain, and I sidestepped right as he was about to barrel into me.
Just not in time. He clipped me in the hip, sending me spinning into a row of expensive urns. I caught myself against the wall, but the urns were less fortunate. They shattered on the carpet, breaking the funereal tranquility.
James bounced off a nearby casket and collapsed to the carpet, his slickly gelled brown hair flopping over his eyes.
“Bitch.” He clutched his bruised arm, panting like a wounded animal.
“Lompoc not treating Mick well?” I asked.
“You killed him.”
News to me. Can’t say I was too broken up about the old bastard eating it, even if I was a bit surprised. From what I’d heard, the ink master had gotten life in prison instead of the needle.
My hip smarted from the ambush as I trotted across the worn carpet. Concerned murmurs drifted from the viewing area.
“Thought you were in jail,” I said, now standing over him.
“Ever heard of bail?” James wiped his puffy lip, which he’d cut open on the casket. It upturned into a sneer. Then he winced. “Don’t act like you showin’ up here is just a coincidence.”
What was it with everyone today? First Cross, now this. I didn’t have enough hours in the day to piss them away yanking people’s chains.
James struggled to his feet, wobbly as a newborn foal.
I didn’t offer to help.
He stumbled forward, arm cocked back. His eyes were clouded by the glassy sheen of drunkenness. Nothing better than giving a eulogy three sheets to the wind. Mom had done that, too.
Suffice to say, it hadn’t been a stellar performance. Ironic for someone so obsessed with being proper.
When James got a little close for comfort, I snapped out the Reaper’s Switch. The showroom’s dim lights glinted softly off the blade.
“Not another step, asshole.”
“You come to my old man’s funeral, and you threaten me? Me?” A leering smile crossed his face. “Come to take his soul? That it? His eye and his life weren’t enough for you?”
“He can keep that piece of shit.” Wherever Mick was headed in the afterlife, it wasn’t a good place. Taking his soul and thusly sparing him an eternity of suffering would be a kindness. He’d murdered Roan in cold blood right outside my villa, and then tried to pin it on me.
All because I’d cut up his face four years ago.
The saying was an eye for an eye, not an eye for your goddamn ex-boyfriend’s life and your life, too, when the Feds inevitably give you the chair.
“You must be lovin’ all this.” James limped toward the viewing room, pausing in the narrow archway. “You got the mayor. You got Moreland. And my old man got himself. And I’m headed back to the can.”
“Point being?” I asked, even if it was likely he was just drunk and shooting off his mouth.
“Better hope you got all the loose ends.” James snapped the dividing curtain shut.
I reflected on his threat, then dismissed it as empty—although I had half a mind to storm through the curtain and jam the Reaper’s Switch in his back. That was against the rules, though. Trials, Lucille called them. No weapons, no killing. I’d already broken them once. Lucille wouldn’t grant me amnesty twice.
Lingering near the curtain, I listened to James’s slurred eulogy for a couple minutes. Mick had decided suicide was a better road to travel than life in prison. That wouldn’t get any tears of sympathy from me.
The low voices and classical music faded behind me as I headed into the back, down the narrow hallway. I took a deep breath and reached for the doorknob to the embalming room.
Hopefully my extended network was about to pay off.
Because if anyone knew where to find a once-dead woman, it was a funeral director.
8
“You certainly know how to make an entrance, Eden.” Edgar peered over his plastic face-shield as I came down the basement steps. There was a security monitor in the corner of the concrete room so he could keep an eye on the upstairs while he was working.
The hair on my arms stood on end from the cold. “Why the hell would you have that asshole’s service here?”
Too bad I knew the answer already. Just to confirm, Edgar rubbed his pudgy latex-gloved fingers together over his bloody scalpel.
Money.
The strands of the greedy vampire’s soul ran across my tongue. Sour, like a cheap vodka tonic with too much lime and too cheap liquor.
I sighed. It wasn’t like I could expect loyalty from him, anyway. Our relationship was purely capitalistic: Bodies showed up in his cold lockers; I paid to reap their souls. Occasionally, he’d tell me about a big score, or where I could find a recently deceased corpse on the island.
Simple and uncomplicated. But a tiny, naïve hope must’ve persisted that all my blood money afforded me a little more status than the average client.
Edgar made an incision at the base of the corpse’s neck. Dark blood languidly pooled around the sharp cut. In the bright, industrial-strength light, I could see that it was an older man. His organs were on full display thanks to Edgar’s autopsy. The room’s other metal slab was empty.
I trotted across the cool floor, stopping a couple feet from the table. Bodies didn’t bother me.
Staring at the body’s salt-and-pepper hair and beaten-to-a-pulp face, I felt the faint stir of recognition. “I might know this guy.”
“Him?” Edgar peered at the dead man. “How?”
It took a second to register. I groaned. “Did that body come from the Golden Rabbit?”
“What’s the Golden Rabbit?” Then Edgar winked, like it was a clever joke. “Dropped it off about an hour ago.”
“Danny did that?”
“Who’s Danny?” Edgar asked.
“Never mind.” Must’ve been a guy from another shift. Rayna’s bureaucratic delays had cost me a soul.
Well, maybe not. I said, “How much?”
But Edgar just shook his head. “Not this one, Eden.”
That struck me as odd, but I shrugged it off. Technically speaking, this whole setup was odd. In addition to his normal activities—funerals, cremation, and such—Edgar would also pick up bodies that needed to disappear.
And, on the other side of the equation, he also worked for law enforcement. Funeral directors didn’t usually store bodies because of chain-of-custody issues. They didn’t perform autopsies or forensic analysis, either—at least not without strict oversight.
But Atheas was a small place, with limited resources and even more limited rules. The local cops were more crooked than the switch-backing steppes. The more work they could offload, the bett
er.
And the greedy vampire was all too happy to offer his services. To the highest bidder, of course. Either the bad guys could pay him for crimes to disappear, or the slightly-less-bad guys would make them pay in jail time.
Nice racket, all things considered.
“I need info.” I watched the dark blood seep from the postmortem wound. “If my money’s still good here.”
“I’m hurt by your implied accusations, Eden.” He tossed the bloody scalpel into a steel tray. “I cannot sell this man’s soul to you. You are not my only customer.”
“Only your best one.” I shot the funeral director a bitter smirk. “But water under the bridge, right?”
“Exactly.” His formless jowls melted into a scheming grin. “What information do you seek?”
I took out my phone and pulled up the image of the small welt on Anya’s thigh. Holding the screen out so the vampire could see it, I said, “She’s a phoenix’s guardian. Has to be strong magic.”
“As in the big burning bird?” Edgar tugged at his shirt collar. His gloves left behind a red stain on the blue scrubs. “Are you investigating this death with him?”
That a phoenix resided on the island was clearly not news to Edgar. I guess it made sense. There was substantial overlap between their professions.
I said, “He flew off, so right now it’s just me.”
Edgar looked like he’d swallowed a handful of razor blades. Strange behavior, since his usual concerns were money and—well, that was really it. But he composed himself enough to take another look at the photo.
“Deicide arcana.” Edgar nodded, his formless cheeks rippling. “God-killing magic.”
“I’m aware of what it is,” I said, although I hadn’t recognized the welt as such. “See a lot of that come through here?”
“All the time.” The vampire drummed his fingers against the corpse’s exposed rib cage. “By which I mean never.”
“Just garden variety heart attacks and murders, huh?”
“Sorry to disappoint.” Edgar picked up a small circular saw from the table. “If that’s all, I have a busy day.”
Soul Fire (The Eden Hunter Trilogy Book 2) Page 4
